If it's a comic book, then it can't be a work of serious scholarship, right? Wrong. Ilan Stavans, a literary scholar and cultural historian, teams up with Chicano artist Lalo Alcaraz to craft an endlessly entertaining but painstakingly researched history of Latinos--also called Latin Americans and Hispanics, and taking in peoples from all over the Spanish-speaking world--in the United States. Stavans's text covers the ground from avocados to zoot suits, touching on such matters as the Puerto Rican independence movement, the Mexican American War, the Marielito flotilla, and the ongoing struggle for civil rights throughout the hemisphere.
Stavans has great fun, it's clear, twitting received wisdom. He observes, for instance, that Mexico's "Niños Heroes" may be an invention of folklore, and wryly remarks that "nationalism turns egotism into an ideology." Alcaraz has just as much fun, subversively borrowing stock figures such as the toucan (a symbol in much Latin American literature) and the skeleton to serve as a kind of ironic Greek chorus. But author and illustrator also fulfill an earnestly undertaken mission: namely, in Stavans's words, to "represent Hispanic civilization as a fiesta of types, archetypes, and stereotypes" and to tell its story from many points of view. In this they succeed admirably, and Latino U.S.A. is required reading for anyone interested in democratic, inclusive historical writing. --Gregory McNamee
