Overview

For more than four generations, Salvadorans have made themselves at home in the greater Washington, D.C. metropolitan area and have transformed the region, contributing their labor, ingenuity, and culture to the making of a thriving but highly neglected and overlooked community. In Avocado Dreams, Ana Patricia Rodríguez draws from her own positionality as a Salvadoran transplant to examine the construction of the unique Salvadoran cultural imaginary made in the greater D.C. area. Through a careful reading of the creative works of local writers, performers, artists, and artivists, Rodríguez demonstrates how the people have remade themselves in relation to the cultural, ethnoracial, and sociolinguistic diversity of the area. She discusses how Salvadoran people have developed unique, intergenerational Salvadoreñ idades, manifested in particular speech and symbolic acts, ethnoracial embodiments, and local identity formations in relation to the diverse communities, most notably Black Washingtonians, who co-inhabit the region. This timely and relevant work not only enriches our understanding of Salvadoran diasporic experiences but also contributes significantly to broader discussions on migration, identity, and cultural production in the United States.

Full Product Details

9780816546435

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Reviews

""In Avocado Dreams, Ana Patricia Rodrí guez offers a needed perspective on Salvadoran invisibility, identity, and place-making in Washington, D.C. As such, her book fruitfully complicates existing paradigms within Central American studies rooted in the diasporic experiences of predominantly mestizo Salvadoran/Central American populations in California and/or the Southwest."" - Yajaira M. Padilla, author of Changing Women, Changing Nation: Female Agency, Nationhood, and Identity in Trans-Salvadoran Narratives ""The theorization of the aguacatero/a as a racial sign is brilliant and sophisticated and appropriately responds to the problematics of a Black/white binary as well as to the enduring limitations of the concept of mestizaje. The book enacts a geographical shift, contributing to a necessary examination of cultural production from a translocal perspective, centering on the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. Throughout her study, Rodríguez excels at necessarily engaging with the history and politics that inform the works she studies and enacting an impressively multidisciplinary analysis that considers linguistic, agricultural, and etymological movement and migration at the same time, the book remains focused on the art and artists themselves."" - Ariana E. Vigil, author of Public Negotiations: Gender and Journalism in Contemporary US Latina/o Literature

Author Information

Ana Patricia Rodríguez is an associate professor of U.S. Latina/o and Central American literatures at the University of Maryland, College Park, and past president of the Latino/a Studies Association (2017-2019).

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