Críticas Magazine

Adriana V. Lopez

Writer's Digest Does Latino Lit
June 28, 2008

On the cover of this month's issue of Writer's Digest is the stripper, memoirist and Juno's Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody ready to share her most intimate writings tips. But if you flip through the pages you'll also find an an article about Latino literature, dubbed an "emerging genre." Hm. Nonetheless, here's a excerpt of the article that was featured on Marcela Landres' newsletter which I highly recommend subscribing to if you want to stay on top of the latest Latino/Hispanic literary events, contests and writing opportunities by reading this former Simon & Schuster editor’s site. I can't reprint the entire article  for you (nor can their website), but here's a sampling of how it sounds.

On the Edge: Latino Lit by Michael J. Vaughn

Major-house imprints and a new marketing approach are opening up opportunities for this emerging genre

"For American publishers, 1989 was the year of the Ethnic Explosion,
featuring not one by two mega-sellers geared toward minority cultures:
Amy Tan's Chinese-American The Joy Luck Club and Laura Esquivel's
Mexican-centered Like Water for Chocolate. Tan's achievement was
extraordinary enough, but Esquivel's book, translated from Spanish,
tapped into America's largest minority market, a market that currently
makes up 15 percent of the U.S. population and offers 45 million
potential readers. Publishers began referring to this Latino market as
"The Sleeping Giant," and it wasn't just Esquivel's recipes that were
making them salivate. The industry pursuit that followed was largely a
failure, for lots of tricky and multifaceted reasons. A good person to
offer an explanation is Marcela Landres, daughter of Ecuadorian
immigrants and former Simon & Schuster editor, who now works as a
career consultant specializing in Latino authors. Landres bases her
view not on Tan or Esquivel, but on African-American author Terry
McMillan and her 1992 breakthrough novel, Waiting to Exhale."

Posted by Adriana V. Lopez on June 28, 2008 | Comments (0)