The Cambridge History of Latina/o American Literature is divided in four chronological parts that extend from the colonial archive (Part 1), to the republican interactions of the eighteenth century (Part 2), the modern period (Part 3), and (Part 4) contemporary developments. In representing a diverse historical Latinidad and its connections with its present expressions, John Morán González and Laura Lomas explore its struggles and its contradictions. The anthology includes essays on migration and colonization, music and culture, and post-identitarian aesthetics to provide an understanding of Latina/o literature marked by Spanish, English, and Portuguese, or by “untranslatable bilingualism,” and to a lesser extent by the suppressed or surviving indigenous Amerindian, African, and Asian languages and cultures.

According to the editors and contributors, Latina/o literature is defined by expressions of transculturation, and “disjointed processes of European colonization, the genocide of indigenous peoples, the uprooting of slavery, the exploitation of migrant labor, and the violent mestizaje introduced by rape and border-crossing, all of which shatter any narrative of incorporation, belonging, or wholeness” (6). Therefore identifiable traits and unique modes of expression are not often traceable in a literary lineage still being recovered due to dislocation, destruction, and occlusion of archives.

The essays in The Cambridge History of Latina/o American Literature are set to achieve common goals: to “offer a sense of a present defined by migration and empire” (xxi); “map transculturation rather than national assimilation” (xxi); foreground “literary comparison, contact with multiple languages and cultures, the effects of shifting political borders and contexts, in and beyond this hemisphere, all of which have pushed the field to recognize its broader implications” (3); and “situate trans-American articulations within texts, writers, communities, and historical moments” (3).

Latina/o literature, which emerged with the need to “name the experience of a mainly working-class, minoritized group that must necessarily creatively engage displacement” (6), incorporates transformative concepts and methodologies that will continue to expand the field's understudied areas. In this regard, editors and contributors propose to move beyond national frameworks and linguistic divisions in favor of the study of racialized and subalternized peoples. Decolonization and diversification of Latinidad will demand more inclusion of indigeneity and migration, as well as the visualization of internal tensions that inform Latinx literature. Similarly, María Josefina Saldaña Portillo's epilogue traces the evolution of Latina/o criticism from “identity formations congruent with the anticolonial and liberation politics” of civil rights movements to current literary criticism “no longer bound by the colonialist geography of the United States.” This current criticism, which includes migrant literatures from multiple nations and traditions, “betrays its own false unity, and moves beyond the limits of its imagined signification by reflecting on its différance” (740–45).

A sixteen-page chronology of dates and events that “have informed Latina/o American literary history” carefully highlights connections among these diverse Latina/o histories (xxi). However, the Spanish Civil War, which highly engaged journalistic and literary responses from Latino/a communities and individuals in the United States, remains obscure. Spanish migrant workers, whose story and culture are being recovered in recent publications, shared similar economic subjugation and transcultural experiences in the United States with other working-class Latina/os. The hemispheric hermeneutic may be insufficient to explore the intersections between identities and communities that united in radical working-class aesthetics, heritage, and print and communal practices. Could Latinidad make visible the contributions of transnational politically radicalized Spanish immigrants who rejected (and were persecuted by) the violence of the state and empire? Antifascist workers in the United States contested inequality, and proposed egalitarian and revolutionary grassroots social activism in cooperation with others. Although recovery work might continue to reshape Latinx studies with new themes and new forms of digital scholarship, this edited collection excellently accounts for the present complexities of the field of Latina/o literature and is an outstanding companion to its study.