Stavans brings to this thoughtful, probing, often lyrical analysis of the history, culture, and identity of Latinos in the U.S. the perspective of his own experience of "life in the hyphen." As a middle-class Jew raised amid poverty in Mexico City, as a white Mexican student moving into the multicolored, multiethnic Latino communities of New York City, Stavan views each of his subjects--the ethnic groups that compose the U.S. Latino population, U.S. Latinos as a group, U.S. Anglo culture and politics, and the Americas as a region--as both insider and outsider. Exploring history and literature to understand backgrounds (in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Mexico) and attitudes (on race, machismo, and homosexuality, for instance) of ethnic groups, The Hispanic Condition insists that the focus of attention should not be Latinos as yet another immigrant group in the long succession of U.S. immigrant groups but "the hyphen" itself: the centuries-long, hemispheric "encounter between Anglos and Hispanics," an interaction in which assimilation and change flow in both directions. A provocative, often enlightening analysis. Mary Carroll --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
--Henry Louis Gates, Jr.A
"Savvy and engaging. Stavans is an inventive interpreter of the contemporary cultures of the Americas."
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