Introduction
Following the release of her novel Olga Dies Dreaming (2022), Mexican Puerto Rican Xochitl González reflects on the intergenerational gap between her “parents’ generation – the boomers who became Black and Brown Power Activists,” and her generation, “the X’ers who were more concerned with getting into Puffy’s White Party in the Hamptons and accumulating designer goods.”Footnote 1 Gonzalez admits that her titular character Olga’s constant dismay at her own mother’s violent tactics to fight displacement and colonialism – influenced by her time as a Young Lord – are inspired by Gonzalez’s own reaction to the ethos of the civil rights movement.Footnote 2 Nonetheless, Gonzalez still feels pessimistic about what she recalls as a sign of assimilation. Gonzalez argues,
My parents, and many activists, often made mistakes in their personal lives, but they had a strong sense of wanting equity and I felt, certainly in my 20s and 30s, less that than a sense of wanting to “win.” And that felt very “American,” in a sad way, to me.Footnote 3
Published in 2022, Olga Dies Dreaming portrays individual success, access to higher education, and wealth accumulation as symbols of upward mobility for contemporary Caribbean diasporas that subsequentially conform to what Catherine Ramirez describes as the model-minority myth.Footnote 4 On the other hand, Gonzalez places Olga’s difficult relationship with her former Young Lord mother at the core of the plot in order to discuss explicitly the intergenerational frictions between this new modern minority positionality and that of the civil rights movement.Footnote 5 Moreover, Gonzalez has become the epitome of a string of Caribbean novelists such as Naima Coster, Lilliam Rivera, and Ibi Zoboi who in the last decade have become interested in commercial genres such as the romance novel to discuss political themes such as racial discrimination and urban displacement in New York City.
In this article, I analyze González’s novel Olga Dies Dreaming and Neruda on the Park (2022) by Dominican writer Cleyvis Natera. Both authors were raised in New York City and hold MFAs in creative writing. Their work shows a particular concern for their rapidly gentrifying childhood neighborhoods, such as Washington Heights and Sunset Park, following a trend in contemporary Latinx literature. However, their novels share a generational situatedness in a globalized New York that looks back to the 1960s class-based visions of neighborhood empowerment inherited from the previous generation. In my analysis, I confront the literary representations of the model-minority myth with those of the civil rights movement in the contemporary Caribbean romance novel, since the model-minority myth specifically ignores and dismisses the activism deployed by Puerto Rican, African American, and other marginalized groups.Footnote 6 Recent scholarship has paid attention to the increased importance of post-civil rights engagement and the growing diversity of genres within LatinxFootnote 7 literature to approach political themes.Footnote 8 While recognizing that post-1960s Latinx literature has engaged with broad markets following its growing mainstream success, Raphael Dalleo and Elena Machado Sáez invite readers to discuss the often overlooked political claims in the work of a new generation of Latinx authors labeled “mainstream,” such as Junot Díaz and Julia Álvarez. In their volume The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of Post-sixties Literature, Dalleo and Machado argue that a new generation of authors that includes Ernesto Quiñonez deconstructs ghetto fiction as the proper literary genre to articulate a critical and resistant political project. Interestingly, Dalleo and Machado’s analysis transcends cultural criticism’s lament about the commercialization of ghetto fiction in order to show readers how authors such as Quiñonez and Abrahan Rodríguez undertook the task of rethinking its meaning.Footnote 9
For this purpose, I take up Dalleo’s and Machado’s invitation to reimagine the possibilities of the popular, disputing the assumption that contemporary writing is not living up to the political demands of the civil rights generation. I argue that these authors use these love stories to illustrate a form of political resistance to urban development and for-profit privatization, which dismisses the Caribbean communities in which these heroines were born and raised. Likewise, this article explores the potential of the romance novel genre to show how model-minority strategies can co-live with class-based visions of neighborhood empowerment to fight urban displacement. Moreover, it explores new sites of power and vulnerability in the context of urban displacement in New York City, one in which upwardly mobile Puerto Ricans experience increasing signs of assimilation. This debate about assimilation and literary forms becomes particularly intriguing when placed in the context of displacement in New York City and other major cities in the United States during the 2000s and 2010s. As anthropologist Arlene Dávila argues, for many Puerto Rican leaders, dissociating Puerto Rican neighborhoods such as El Barrio (Spanish Harlem) from their marginal history during the 1960s and 1970s is seen as a pivotal step in their middle-class dream of empowerment.Footnote 10 This upwardly mobile twenty-first-century vision of El Barrio equates nonprofit private homeownership with the promise of mobility and leaves behind class-based visions of neighborhood empowerment, following a decline in federal and state housing assistance.Footnote 11 Unsurprisingly, these upwardly mobile class aspirations of community leaders and activists are conveniently aligned with development enthusiasts operating in El Barrio, Dávila argues. As a result, the former become actively conducive to gentrification and privatization ideologies that fulfil the for-profit aspirations of the latter.Footnote 12 I assert that these model-minority characters operate in these novels as what Susan Koshy defines as complicitous racial subjects and still represent a tension between a civil rights movement ethos nurtured by these class-based visions of neighborhood empowerment and a promise of upward mobility in the debate of urban displacement.Footnote 13 Thus I examine the affordance of the romance novel to grapple with this tension between confrontational struggle and assimilation in the contemporary fight against urban displacement in the global city.Footnote 14
Taking the novels Olga Dies Dreaming and Neruda on the Park as works which participate in these debates, I examine two narrative elements that they borrow from those that Pamela Regis identifies in the romance novel.Footnote 15 The first is the presence of a biological mother or mentor of the titular character, whom I define as the Activist Mother, which these novels associate with a class-based vision of neighborhoodFootnote 16 empowerment, and the heroine’s familiar childhood realm. The figure of the Activist Mother is partially inflicted by and sometimes operates in these novels as a senex iratus (angry old man),Footnote 17 namely a barrier between the hero and the heroine, one of the narrative elements that a romance novel must contain. While the senex iratus is explicitly defined as a barrier between the heroine and the hero in the Gothic romance narrative, and the barriers they raise are usually physical – given their power over the heroine in a patriarchal hierarchy – the heroines in these love stories surface as economically independent women, ultimately freed from any patriarchal economical structure. Therefore the Activist Mothers in these novels are unable to build physical or explicit barriers within these love stories. In turn, they show their disapproval of their daughter’s relationships in the form of advice or dissensus with the hero’s political views, and extend their criticism into activism to fight these heroes in the urban development arena, once the heroes turn out to be developers and entrepreneurs who seek to displace their communities.Footnote 18 Consequentially, the explicit barriers in these novels are represented as a heroine’s internal dilemma in which the Activist Mother’s vision of neighborhood empowerment becomes the opposite pole to the fruition of a potential betrothal of the heroine with the hero. As a result, the frictions between these heroines and their Activist Mothers operate as a representation of the dissensus of these twenty-first-century diasporas with the confrontational struggle rooted in distrust of the state and institutions inherited from civil rights strategies.
A second thread that these novels have in common is a romantic relationship between the Caribbean heroine and the above-mentioned wealthy developer who arrives in the neighborhood looking for better business opportunities – whom I define as the Gentrifying Lover – and threatens to displace the communities in which the heroine was born and raised. The figure of the Gentrifying Lover and the love story are intertwined with what Regis describes as the “meeting between the heroine and hero and an account of their attraction for each other,” another element a romance novel must contain.Footnote 19 However, I illustrate how these authors use these stories as a literary device in which these Caribbean diasporas grapple with the same difficulties as accomplices of urban developers and discuss the urban displacement targeting their communities, alongside racial self-hatred. Consequently, these romantic relationships with Gentrifying Lovers represent a fantasy of racial complicity and upward mobility in the heroine’s search for her new positionality with regard to urban displacement.
Puerto Rican Ecuadorian Ernesto Quiñonez’s novels Bodega Dreams (2000) and Chango’s Fire (2004) constitute groundbreaking novels when it comes to the Activist Mother and the Gentrifying Lover. Both narrate the struggles of the young Julio to resist urban displacement in El Barrio (Spanish Harlem).Footnote 20 Bodega Dreams narrates Julio’s speculations with the promises of former Young Lord – and current drug lord – Willie Bodega and his fantasies of building a Puerto Rican nonprofit parallel state within Harlem to fight urban displacement. In Chango’s Fire, Julio falls in love with Helen, a white gallery owner who has just moved to El Barrio. These two figures echo in the literary production of the following decade. Olga Dies Dreaming, by the above-mentioned Xochitl González, portrays Olga Acevedo’s lovers, businessmen Richard and Matteo, who share common traits with Hudson, a building developer who falls in love with Luz, the titular character of Cleyvis Natera’s Neruda on the Park. Olga’s mother and former Young Lord Blanca brings together a paramilitary organization to take the island of Puerto Rico in the same way as Luz’s mother Eusebia leans on urban terrorism to wage her own war against urban displacement in Nothar Park – a fictional Washington Heights.
The failure of the self-help strategies deployed by these Activist Mothers reflects a new positionality in which these authors leave behind the civil rights movement confrontational ethos. On the other hand, none of these novels provides a happy ending, in defiance of romance genre expectations. The unhappy endings of these love stories illustrate the journey of Olga and Luz toward a new positionality that ultimately rejects complicity with the developers who seek to displace their own communities in New York City. However, these novels demonstrate a growing trust in institutions fueled by access to university, accumulation of wealth, or the upsurge in the nonprofit purchase of property, with individual funds as a form of fighting urban displacement. All of this unfolds in a context in which the structures of equity that organizations such as the Young Lords demanded have been dismantled.Footnote 21
In the study that follows, I explore the demonization of the legacy of civil rights in favor of new literary representations such as the complicitous racial subject and the model-minority myth.Footnote 22 Second, I analyze the relevance of the romance novel to represent this dilemma in an editorial context in which Caribbean literature has been absorbed to target large audiences, while analyzing the frictions between the gendered figure of the Activist Mother and representations of the legacy of the civil rights in the contemporary fight against urban displacement.Footnote 23 In the last part of this article, I analyze the love story with the Gentrifying Lover as a literary device in these novels to discuss the simultaneous commitment to and critique of upward mobility and the corrosive effects of racial self-hatred.Footnote 24
From the civil rights movement to the model-minority myth
The confrontational strategies of the civil rights movement have informed twentieth-century Caribbean literature about New York since the 1960s. According to recent scholarship, there is an ongoing dialogue between Caribbean literature on urban displacement in New York during the latter half of the century and the issues and forms of resistance that shaped the policies of organizations like the Black Panthers and the Young Lords. Authors such as Piri Thomas in Down These Mean Streets (1967) provided a testimonial account of the deprivation of Puerto Ricans’ right to the city in Spanish Harlem.Footnote 25 Likewise, former Young Lord and poet Pedro Pietri offers another representation of the Caribbean diaspora from the countercultural vanguard of the Nuyorican movement in the 1970s and 1980s, portraying it as a subject confined to the peripheries and deprived of higher education within the context of a postindustrial cityFootnote 26 where the American Dream turns into a nightmare.Footnote 27
However, a late-century string of novels gave voice to a new generation of the Caribbean diaspora who, while settled in New York City, were nonetheless grappling with higher education and the model-minority myth. While this latter term has been associated in the past with Japanese Americans, Catherine Ramírez defines model minority as those migrant subjects absorbed as good citizens because of their ability to conform to core national values associated with the American Dream, but who still retain their racial uniform, as opposed to European immigrants who eventually merge with white Americans via a process known as assimilation.Footnote 28 I am not suggesting that acquisition of higher education is necessarily complicitous with political whitewashing. For example, the Young Lords organization and their politics were informed by the first generation of Puerto Ricans who accessed the public university through programs such as College Discovery.Footnote 29 Rather, I wish to explore the role of higher education in celebratory representations of Latinx individual success and the model-minority myth, following the work of Arlene Dávila and Catherine Ramírez. In particular, I focus on a new generation of the Caribbean diaspora that has reached Ivy League universities, although they are still underrepresented in these private institutions.Footnote 30 This new generation of Caribbean writers warns about the paradox/dilemma of solidarity with their still-discriminated communities, and the promise of assimilation into the American Dream while exploring this identity dilemma in relation to the assimilation of second-generation Latinx diaspora in New York.Footnote 31 Poets like Willie Perdomo reflect this new reality by expressing their fear of becoming part of the system as cultural producers in a gentrified city where poetry sells,Footnote 32 like everything else.Footnote 33
Scholarship in Caribbean studies has examined the growing trust of these new generations in higher-education institutions and the success of Latinas such as Jennifer Lopez in the context of the so-called “Latino explosion” in the 1990s. Lopez’s success sets an example of a “Latino fever [that] has been gripping U.S. popular culture at a pitch unprecedented in the protracted history of that continental seduction,” as described by critic Juan Flores. However, Flores warns that this visibility can “camouflage the structured inequality and domination which accounts for their diasporic reality in the first place” while “deflecting public attention from the decidedly unceremonious and unenviable social status of the majority of Latino peoples.”Footnote 34 In fact, Caribbean communities are still victims of urban displacement in a twenty-first-century New York that has become an iconic global city, once the manufacturing jobs have been lost in urban areas. According to Saskia Sassen, Manuel Castells, and Arlene Dávila, global cities have been targeted by elites as locations for high-skills industry and international tourism. From a social perspective, global cities have become increasingly polarized and segregated, dividing residents into two halves. In the one half, there are the highly paid professionals, focused on jobs that rely on highly specialized skills and have often been developed in the new information, research, and business sectors. In the other half, there are the low-income service jobs that support the high-paid professionals, often filled by migrant and racialized populations. The spatial segregation surfaces as an outcome of this dynamic in which the low-income service workers are deprived of the right to the city.Footnote 35 These highly paid professionals who took over Manhattan neighborhoods during the 1990s, like the Lower East Side, expanded into other Latinx enclaves in the 2000s, such as Williamsburg, Bushwick in Brooklyn, and Spanish Harlem or Washington Heights in northern Manhattan.Footnote 36
Anthropologist Arlene Dávila draws from Ernesto Quiñonez’s Bodega Dreams as an example of the strategies based on the property acquisition of its ill-fated patriarch, Willie Bodega, in his fight against urban displacement. Dávila highlights Bodega’s dream as an allegory of a privatization ideology that aligns with the mobility aspirations of Puerto Rican residents in these neighborhoods,Footnote 37 within a context where developers and residents have begun to develop similar ideologies, and property ownership has become the only viable alternative for acquiring lasting power.Footnote 38 One of the contributing factors to this dynamic is the arrival of Mayor Michael Bloomberg in the city administration in 2002. This brought a subsequent shift to recognition of individual success, the imposition of new merit-based funding-allocation criteria,Footnote 39 and an aggressive rezoning policy on a large scale.Footnote 40 In the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center, Bloomberg, a finance mogul, won the mayoral elections contrary to pollsters’ predictions, and defeated candidate Fernando Ferrer’s program, which aimed at combating the growing economic and social inequality in the city. Julian Brash defines the upsurging complicity of New York residents with privatization ideologies as neoliberalization, namely a comprehensive reconstitution of cultural forms that transcends governmental policies and influences the formation of individuals fueled by the Bloomberg administration.Footnote 41 On the other hand, in this aftermath of the so-called “Latino explosion” in the 1990s, there was an upsurge of media emphasis on Latinx upward mobility that resulted in celebratory cultural representations of a Latinx middle class, Arlene Dávila argues.Footnote 42 An interesting outcome of this trend is the mass market book niche “chica-lit.” As explored by critic Tace Hedrick, these representations of middle-class Latina characters by self-proclaimed assimilated US Latinx authors expressed conservative remarks, including “overt class strivings.”Footnote 43 This breed of chick-lit subgenre has become one of the cultural symptoms of the end of the monolithic “imagined Latinx working-class community” at the turn of the century.Footnote 44
Scholars such as Gayatri Spivak and Susan Koshy have argued that the inclusion of the new diasporas into the creative classes and the high-skilled jobs in the global city only occurs after complying with a set of conditions that Ed Morales includes in the so-called “neoliberal multiculturalism.” According to Morales, this inclusion is granted after complicity with a discourse that masks the deprivation of the poor’s rights by framing them as intolerant of the democratic way of life.Footnote 45 Within this same framework with regard to assimilation, Catherine Ramírez differentiates the “failed citizens” or “problem minorities,” those who are not able to follow the “model-minority” life choices, from the “good citizens,” those citizens in dispute who embrace the values historically considered “American,” such as higher education, professional success, or wealth accumulation. Words like “welfare” – once part of the Young Lords’ Thirteen-Point Program – become demonized as foreign to the American identity. Property ownership, contribution to society through a profession, and access to higher education as a form of assimilation became the central pillars of the path to the model-minority myth for the new Caribbean diasporas,Footnote 46 as recognized by President Barack Obama in his appointment of Puerto Rican Sonia Sotomayor as the first Latina Supreme Court Justice in 2009: “With a good education here in America, all things are possible,” Obama asserts. “[Our mother] taught us that the key to success in America is a good education,” stated Sotomayor during her confirmation hearing.Footnote 47
As Yomaira Figueroa argues, Dávila rightly interprets how the patriarch Bodega celebrates a system that rewards privatization, wealth accumulation, and even illicit money from organized crime in the style of the Italian American mafia.Footnote 48 In other words, Bodega replicates a structure already established by those who oppress his own community. His ill-fated project relies in the long term on higher education and the model-minority myth to create a new professional class of Puerto Ricans who would fight urban displacement in Spanish Harlem.Footnote 49 Nonetheless, Julio still rejects the criminal shortcuts that Bodega suggests. Instead, as Figueroa explains, Julio undertakes a series of reparative actions framed within a decolonial logic.Footnote 50 Likewise, Julio relies on public higher-educational institutions for his immediate future and focuses on earning his degree at CUNY. Thus the end of the novel summarizes Julio’s life choices into adulthood. His slow and steady path toward upward mobility abandons any self-help legacies, as he and his partner choose the path of the model minority.
The romance novel and the complicitous racial subject
Despite Bodega’s property-acquisition-based strategies and Julio’s decolonial reparation acts as explored by Figueroa and Dávila, Quiñonez’s next novel, Chango’s Fire (2004), grapples with the model-minority myth once again. Moreover, the model-minority myth resonates among a group of Caribbean novelists who address the issue of urban displacement in New York in their work during the following decade. Novels such as Halsey Street (2018) by Dominican American writer Naima Coster, The Education of Margot Sánchez (2017) by Puerto Rican Lilliam Rivera, or Pride by Haitian American Ibi Zoboi, borrow a similar structure from the romance novel to address urban displacement in New York City in neighborhoods such as Bedford–Stuyvesant or the Bronx. Moreover, I focus on the novels Olga Dies Dreaming and Neruda on the Park since their titular characters achieve goals that Julio in Bodega Dreams or Chango’s Fire could only dream of. Olga and Luz become Ivy League graduates through scholarships, followed by job opportunities at prestigious firms and business success as entrepreneurs. In the context of aggravated urban displacement, the opportunity to leave behind confrontational struggle as deployed by their communities to achieve upward mobility lies at the core of their dilemma.
Olga and Luz represent what Susan Koshy has defined in literature as the figure of the complicitous racial subject, or the “sellout.” According to Koshy, the complicitous racial subject becomes an uncomfortable figure that brings to the forefront what is unacceptable during times of transition and is difficult to read due to its lack of political purity or challenge to racial paradigms. The complicitous racial subject will only be invited to become part of the highly paid professional class at the expense of community members who refuse to follow, or cannot follow, the path to a model-minority status.Footnote 51 Olga and Luz are constructed in these novels in opposition to their unfortunate childhood friends like Angélica or Mabel, who are expelled from or abandon higher education to care for their families or deal with unexpected pregnancies.Footnote 52 As a result, their access to higher education is denied and they remain either unemployed or restricted to low-income jobs as part of the disadvantaged half of the global city. Within the public discourse, these failed citizens’ difficulty in escaping poverty is attributed to personal and moral failures.Footnote 53 Thus the figure of the complicitous racial subject is capable of creating a counterarchive of the present and imagining alternative racial futures, Koshy argues. I delve into this new positionality within the context of urban displacement by bringing together the model-minority myth with Koshy’s focus on the role of the global city in the inclusion of formerly marginalized groups.Footnote 54 This process that Koshy defines as manifest diversity dematerializes social difference, privatizes social aspiration, and disrupts solidarity.
Moreover, I contend that these novels borrow from the romance novel genre when approaching this dilemma as a consequence of the historical convergence between the mainstream book industry, Latinx literature, and urban displacement as a political theme. On one hand, the proliferation of a subgenre like the romance novel within contemporary Caribbean fiction coincides with the growing interest of major publishing houses such as Penguin Random House or Flatiron Books in Latinx Literature.Footnote 55 Likewise, critics like Tace Hedrick have illustrated an interest of Latinx authors at the turn of the century in subgenres of the romance novel, such as the above-mentioned “chica-lit,” to address alternative representations of Latinidad.Footnote 56 On the other hand, while the topic of urban displacement is not new in Latinx literature, authors of Caribbean detective fiction, thrillers, or young-adult novels have shown an interest in discussing urban displacement and opening up the discussion to other audiences that include romance readers.Footnote 57
In particular, the form of the romance novel becomes especially adept at discussing racial complicity in the context of urban displacement in New York. While anglophone literary fiction reprised the canonization of its romances until the second half of the twentieth century, the genre has been explored by multiple waves of scholarship and a number of preconceptions and misconceptions.Footnote 58 Likewise, the romance novel and the scholarship on it have been informed by multiple waves of feminism and feminist scholarship, showing its potential to champion ideological purposes.Footnote 59 As Doris Sommer has shown in her celebrated Foundational Fictions, Latin American romance fiction or the so-called sentimental novel teaches how the genre can be manipulated to propel a foundational myth about the new Latin American nation. While popular-romance scholarship has remained at a distance from the literary studies field, last-wave scholars such as the above-mentioned Pamela Regis have shown that the essential rules of the romance novel may be manipulated by authors to discuss contemporary political themes as diverse as patriarchy in Iran, queer post-marriage worlds, Guam literary activism during World War II, or race and gender discourses in Black communities in United Kingdom.Footnote 60
For the purpose of this article, I am borrowing Pamela Regis’s acclaimed definition of “romance novel.” According to Regis, a romance novel is any work of prose fiction that tells the story of the courtship and betrothal of one or more heroines. Moreover, Regis argues that all romance novels should contain eight narrative elements: a definition of a corrupt society that the romance novel will reform, a meeting between the heroine and hero and an account of their attraction to each other, the barrier between them, a point of ritual death alongside the recognition that fells the barrier, the declaration of heroine and hero that they love each other. However, she mentions one last element a romance novel must contain: the betrothal. Yet none of these novels ends in betrothal on purpose as a form of rejecting political whitewashing, as I illustrate in the last part of this article.
Another common thread in these novels is the representation of a heroine as an outstanding member within her community.Footnote 61 In fact, the titular characters in these novels become celebratory expressions of individual success from a very early age. Their exceptional skills are usually recognized within the school system with higher-education scholarships and later codified during adulthood within cultural and economic capital and the expectations of the above-mentioned model-minority myth.Footnote 62 In Neruda on the Park, “Luz discovered she had got into Harvard, [at the same time her childhood friend] Angelica found out she was pregnant,”Footnote 63 and becomes the “people’s lawyer”Footnote 64 when developers start harassing her community.Footnote 65 Xochitl González introduces Olga, who “was better than [her cousin] Mabel,” “had gone to a fancy college,” and “and gone to dinners costlier than one of Mabel’s paychecks,”Footnote 66 following a path designed by her family to “do well in school, excel at a talent,” and “look pretty.”Footnote 67 These life choices create in the novel a distance between Olga and Mabel, who is perceived by her cousin with a mix of gratitude – for her heroic acts – and resentment.Footnote 68
In fact, this construction of the heroine as exceptional in the form of economic and cultural capital sets the context of the first encounter with the Gentrifying Lover – a first attempt to resist the Malinche trope. Hudson approaches Luz after he sees she is wearing a Harvard sweatshirt and realizes they are both Harvard graduates.Footnote 69 Olga meets white entrepreneur Dick through her wedding-planning company, after he becomes her client following the upcoming wedding of Dick’s daughter.Footnote 70 However, this journey into adulthood coincides with the heroine’s destruction of her childhood identity, following the conflicts with her Activist Mother and her internal barrier, as I will explore in the next section.
Activist Mothers and the legacy of the civil rights movement
In this section I interrogate the figure of the Activist Mother as well as the heroine’s rebellion against parental strictures – a common thread in these novels that builds on the heroine’s dilemma and the internal barrier in the love story between her and the hero as described by Pamela Regis. The senex iratus-inflected figure of Activist Mother, her activism, and her vision of neighborhood empowerment become the opposite pole to the fruition of a potential betrothal of the heroine to the hero. The dissensus between these heroines and their mothers is codified as a critique of the confrontational strategies inherited from the civil rights movement and illustrates the internal cultural diversity within Puerto Rican communities where assimilation becomes increasingly prominent, as Beltran has argued.Footnote 71 Subsequently, these frictions bring forward the limitations of civil rights ideologies such as community control and self-help, which failed to take into consideration these shifting dynamics.Footnote 72
Olga Dies Dreaming draws from the epistolary genre to summon Olga’s Activist Mother, Blanca, a former Young Lord who rejected her motherhood and abandoned her children at a young age while Luz’s mother, Eusebia, deploys her guerrilla tactics to fight displacement once her daughter has become an adult. Blanca’s letters are presented in the novel as an anachronistic means of communication, a precautionary measure established by Blanca to protect her own safety while in hiding. Likewise, the letters resist the intention of restoring the relationship between Blanca and her children. Instead, Blanca’s letters aim to instruct her children politically from a place of absence and loss.
The gendered figure of the Activist Mother in Olga Dies Dreaming and Neruda on the Park is deeply entangled in Blanca’s and Eusebia’s sense of motherhood and their access to political self-education as a first step towards rebellion. While Blanca is the only one with an activist past, both she and Eusebia become activists in these novels as soon as they withdraw from their motherhoods. In fact, Blanca’s and Eusebia’s rise to leadership positions in their political work seeks to challenge the relegation that women suffered within some of the organizations that supported the civil rights movement. According to the former Young Lord Denise Oliver-Velez, while the women in the Young Lords undertook similar duties as men at the very beginning of the movement, as the organization grew “a lot of the daily work of running the organization fell down on a lot of the sistas. The leadership of the organization was all male.”Footnote 73 In order to overturn this relegation of women to menial tasks and responsibilities, such as secretarial work and child care, Oliver-Velez and other women members demanded that the Central Committee of the Young Lords give full inclusion to women, leading to the revision of their famous the 13-Point Program from emphasizing “revolutionary machismo” to “Down with machismo and male chauvinism.”Footnote 74
On the other hand, Blanca’s stance in her rejection of her motherhood does not quite align with the Young Lord’s perspective on reproductive rights, since women in the organization claimed that “women should have the right to have as many kids as they want and be able to feed them and be able to have them and to be able to get child care” in the same way as they should have a right to an abortion, as supported by organizations such as SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective. In fact, Blanca’s view of her children as a burden echoes Oliver-Velez’s words about white feminists. “Feminists were anti-abortion and we were so far beyond that,” Oliver-Velez argues, as she admits they “never put people in the extreme feminist position at that time of saying, ‘Oh, you know, children are a burden or whatever.’”Footnote 75
Dating from 1990 to 2016, Blanca’s letters draw from an ideology of community control, critiquing the individualism in Olga’s life decisions, such as attending a university that was built “on the backs of slaves” with no interest in teaching “the history of your people nor in reading books written by your people.”Footnote 76 Moreover, Blanca’s critique of Olga’s wedding-planning business, for “rich white people,”Footnote 77 echoes the words of Young Lord Pablo Yoruba Guzmán regarding the mission of a new generation of Puerto Rican professionals. Yoruba Guzmán critiques the overemphasis on the individual, arguing that his generation was “brought up to be individuals who look out solely for themselves.” He reflects on his commitment to group advancement: “I could be into law, I could be into public relations, a number of fields I could have gone into, right. But that same thing does not hold true for my people.”Footnote 78
At the end of the plot, Blanca forms a new paramilitary organization called Pañuelos NegrosFootnote 79 and takes control of the island of Puerto Rico.Footnote 80 This revolution, one that the Young Lords never achieved, is fueled by the autonomy of solar energy and the talent of a new generation of Puerto Rican engineers, two resources that were unavailable in the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote 81
Author Cleyvis Natera reflects on her novel’s connection to the self-defense practices inherited from the Black Panther Party and the structure of godmothering as a form of knowledge transmission: “it’d always been women who protected this place.”Footnote 82 In the first pages of Neruda on the Park, the Tongues, a group of three elderly Dominican women, admit they are influenced by the legacy from the African American Watkins sisters from the 1960s. The Watkins sisters took on the mission of replacing the police and conducting neighborhood surveillance at a time when the police were “inventing an excuse to arrest” people of color.Footnote 83 Well after the Watkins sisters left the neighborhood, leaving nothing behind but a Toni Morrison novel,Footnote 84 the Tongues see in Luz’s mother Eusebia the “next one destined to preserve, protect.”Footnote 85 Eusebia’s plan aims to prevent the arrival of new residents by generating insecurity in public opinion about Nothar Park. However, Eusebia quickly loses the trust of her godmothers and her community as her plan spirals into urban terrorism.Footnote 86
A common thread in these three novels is images of street riots and armed violence as a policy of last resort, situating private property and the police in contemporary New York as symbols of an elusive power structure that in the past also excluded African Americans and Puerto Ricans.Footnote 87 Likewise, the Pañuelos Negros revolution deploys riots, “police cars set on fire,” and bombings of infrastructure.Footnote 88 While elaborating on Neruda on the Park following the release of the novel, Cleyvis Natera recalls “how much fear there was” back then, and how she “got this sense that people would pretty much be willing to do anything to save the people they loved and their homes.”Footnote 89 Interestingly, Eusebia’s terrorist strategies are attributed to insanity. An unfortunate fall at the beginning of the novel and its subsequent brain damage justify the rise of La Otra,Footnote 90 an inner voice that capitalizes on Eusebia’s pain about herself and her community.Footnote 91 La Otra asks Eusebia to go further in an organized criminal plan that escalates from petty crimes such as theft to rape and murder.Footnote 92 While some members of the community become accomplices in Eusebia’s scheme,Footnote 93 they also eventually become victims of it in the midst of a construction in Nothar Park that never stops.Footnote 94
However, González and Natera’s novels establish their own critiques of armed violence, echoing the voice of horrified members of the Puerto Rican community following the armed turn that led to the dissensus within the Young Lords and its consequent decline.Footnote 95 While armed struggle became an unpopular stance among the Puerto Rican community during the 1970s, former Young Lord Denise Oliver-Velez placed armed self-defense strategies in the context of slavery during the most violent times of the Ku Kux Klan. “That made a lot of sense to me – armed self-defense – because my family was very militant coming out of slavery. My great-uncles and great-aunts were all armed and they all stood off the Klan.”Footnote 96
Nonetheless, as Blanca’s son discovers the Pañuelos Negros’s arsenal,Footnote 97 the author highlights the incongruity in their discourse in a contemporary setting when the Pañuelos Negros borrow arguments from NRA lobbyists to justify their armed struggle.Footnote 98 As she discovers Eusebia’s plan, Luz stops her mother but narrowly avoids becoming the victim of an attempted murder.Footnote 99 After recovering from her injuries, Luz uses her knowledge as a lawyer to address the damages.Footnote 100 She meticulously documents “the comings and goings of the neighborhood, with some words and some strange hand drawings,” and files the necessary paperwork to designate Nothar Park a heritage site, ultimately halting the construction.Footnote 101 In this Quixotic dilemma, letters triumph over arms, confirming the prediction as stated in Bodega Dream that “a single lawyer can steal more money than a hundred men with guns.”Footnote 102
While Natera excuses Eusebia’s actions, the titular characters in Olga Dies Dreaming are much more critical of their Activist Mothers, labeling them narcissistic and manipulative. Despite Pañuelos Negros’s success, Olga criticizes her mother’s narcissism and attributes her success to the people of Puerto Rico.Footnote 103 Likewise, Eusebia eventually gets medical treatmentFootnote 104 and Blanca’s children resolve that her mail lecturing was a form of “psychological abuse” and “mourn her like the dead.”Footnote 105
The Gentrifying Lover, racial self-hatred, and multicultural New York
“Yeah. I know we were supposed to be dreaming of, you know, world liberation and shit, but you know what I used to think about? Finding somebody to love as much as Papi and Mami loved each other then.”Footnote 106 Olga’s confession to her brother Prieto suggests that it is love and not the legacy of the civil rights movement that she values as a life path. However, the purpose of love stories and the motivations of the characters in these novels do not ignore class advancement or neighborhood empowerment. These love stories surface as a literary device in which these Caribbean diasporas grapple with the same difficulties as accomplices of the highly paid professional class in the global city while seeking to resist the advancement of urban developers in their neighborhoods. In this final section, I analyze the figure of the Gentrifying Lover and these love stories as a form of political engagement, where the heroines of these novels are able to discuss the urban displacement targeting their communities, alongside racial and class asymmetries.
Moreover, I inquire into two specific traits that comprise the meeting and the barrier between the hero and the heroine as described by Pamela Regis.Footnote 107 First, I analyze representations of the hero as aristocratic, followed by the heroine’s antagonistic reaction to his aristocracy and their emotional separation due to racial class differences. Second, I analyze the politicization of these heroines, whose perspectives on urban displacement illustrate their differences from the hero. The resolution of these intermediate differences culminates in the heroine’s rise towards a new positionality in the debate of urban displacement.
A key feature of this event is the heroine’s first encounter with the wealthy white hero, who typically shares a cultural affinity with her. These authors use this figure, which I define as the “Gentrifying Lover,” to grapple with mutually constitutive aspects of identity and highlight the corrosive effects of racial self-hatred in their communities – a legacy of European colonialism in the United States, as explained by Audre Lorde.Footnote 108 Moreover, the heroine’s first encounter with the Gentrifying Lover is met with an antagonistic reaction to his cultural traits and economic capital.Footnote 109
Indeed, this entrepreneur usually moves into the heroine’s neighborhood in search of better business opportunities and is represented in these novels as physically attractive to the eyes of the heroine’s community. Natera unpacks Luz’s feelings in the form of shame in a variety of tones in Neruda on the Park. Following Hudson’s visit to Nothar Park, where he is supervising the construction of a new residential building for high-income tenants – “I work there,” he claimsFootnote 110 – Luz reacts to this invasion of her privacy with anger towards Hudson and disappointment with her family when Luz’s father “Vladimir beamed at the gentrifier. Of course he would.”Footnote 111 Luz’s shame in Neruda on the Park paves the way for an internal dilemma already discussed by Audre Lorde, for the titular character struggles with the disjunction between the decolonizing imperative to perceive nonwhite people as beautiful and the truth that one might prefer people with European-origin features. As Lorde explored, this shame illustrates his discomfort in acknowledging that these preferences were learned from his own parents.Footnote 112 Likewise, Natera codifies Luz’s shame as humor, as Luz engages with her aunt Cuca’s joke about Hudson’s presumed wealth – a guy like that, with so many resources – and his physical and sexual appeal – “has a, umm, rather large art collection?”Footnote 113 However, Luz admits that she has integrated into one’s self-concept of Eurocentric racial values as she compares Hudson from the beginning with a “that of an actor or a model.”Footnote 114 In Olga Dies Dreaming, Xochitl González splits Olga’s love story into a race and class binary comprising the white businessman Dick and the Afro-American community hero Matteo.Footnote 115
Conversely, Olga overcomes the difficulty of recognizing nonwhite people as beautiful,Footnote 116 since her relationship with the white businessman Dick becomes purely instrumental for the growth of her wedding-planning business. She rejects all of her Gentrifying Lover’s propositions to appear together in public or meet her family.Footnote 117 While Olga describes Dick as a “fine white man” during their first encounter on his private jet,Footnote 118 this hero embodies all the negative traits of a ruthless urban developer, as the heroine finds out about his involvement in business ventures that seek to exploit Puerto Rico following the disaster of Hurricane Maria, and Olga’s childhood neighborhood, Sunset Park. In fact, their first sexual encounter represents Olga’s race and class revenge towards a past of discrimination.Footnote 119 Olga describes this encounter as “fucking every son and father who had made it through an entire transaction without ever once making eye contact” during her college days as a shopkeeper, and a reward, as she took “her middle finger and poked it in the eye of every flat-chested, narrow-hipped girlfriend, wife, and mother who never even registered her existence.”Footnote 120 In turn, Olga places all her hopes in her search for love from the beginning in Matteo.
Likewise, the authors of these novels borrow from the conventions of the romance novel in the resolution. The hero and heroine, with their different approaches to urban displacement, offer the reader two diverse perspectives on the subject. These discussions, which elaborate on the future of global cities, in the end politicize the heroine and propel her rise into adulthood at the end of the plot. Subsequently, these heroines question their own love through critical self-analysis that is not merely a conventional love schema but revelations of dreams and fantasies within a multicultural city and a globalized love market. Ultimately, in this last section I interrogate what these antagonistic reactions and emotional approaches between the hero and heroine allow us to understand about the asymmetries of race and class power codified in these love stories.
Although Luz and Hudson presumably share common goals on global issues such as climate change, in the end she finds out that they disagree on their approaches, as Hudson unveils an inconsistent plan to “slow corporations” with more capital.Footnote 121 However, Luz listens to Hudson as he lectures her on adult life choices, including establishing distance from her family – “The people who love you most are the ones who will do their best to control you”Footnote 122 – or holding her former employer accountable for firing her without notice.Footnote 123 As the story progresses, Luz speculates about a future in which “they’d be together forever.”Footnote 124 This ultimately falls apart during a dinner party with Hudson’s friends, marking Luz’s integration into Hudson’s global-elite society.Footnote 125
Luz reacts with contempt to the complaints Hudson’s friends make about their venture in Nothar Park – “We always have to clean up.”Footnote 126 While his real-estate partners assert that they “might lose millions of dollars because a bunch of thugs are angry they can’t afford to buy a nice apartment,” Hudson’s complicit reaction to these demeaning assertions unveils his lack of empathy towards Luz’s pain, particularly in the context of the urban displacement caused by his real-estate venture.Footnote 127 In José Esteban Muñoz words, this experience makes Luz reflect on race and class ties to her neighborhood foregrounded by her childhood experience of feeling devalued.Footnote 128 Luz realizes that she and Hudson will never share the same understanding of pain towards the brown objects who seek to resist the spatial appetite of urban developers. Hudson’s claims that Luz does not “belong in Nothar Park” falls short at the end of the novel as she learns about his final proto-Darwinian real-estate solution to fight climate change in an apocalyptic scenario.Footnote 129
As Olga formalizes her breakup with Dick, she deepens her romantic and emotional relationship with former financial broker and Afro-American real-estate agent Matteo Jones. After their first encounter at Noir, a bar that “lacked the sense of possibility that the newer spots in her rapidly gentrifying corner of Brooklyn conveyed,”Footnote 130 Matteo introduces himself as a complicitous racial subject, leading “a double life” like Olga’s.Footnote 131 Matteo’s decolonial love plays a role in helping Olga deal with her own childhood trauma, guiding her through acts of reparation that help her come to terms with her father’s death from AIDS and her mother’s early departure to join different activist groups in Latin America.Footnote 132 Moreover, Matteo walks Olga through “the Other New York,” namely a collection of brown spaces and objects that have been discarded under the advancement of urban development.Footnote 133 Matteo’s counterarchive of the global city includes the Puerto Rican social club Sylvia’s in WilliamsburgFootnote 134 – presumably a fictional representation of Toñita’s – a museum of old objects that Matteo keeps in his home,Footnote 135 and a collection of vinyl records that allow Olga to fill “the hole that had been left in his heart that required so many objects to fill it.”Footnote 136 At the conclusion of the novel, Olga finds out that Matteo – “why didn’t you tell me that you were a superhero?” – is the owner of a substantial real-estate portfolio that helps to keep “everybody’s rent the same” as well as securing their “stores and their apartments.”Footnote 137 Matteo’s strategies for combating urban displacement through wealth accumulation and nonprofit purchase of property play a crucial role in Olga’s rise towards a new positionality with regard to displacement and neocolonialism at the end of the novel.
Conclusions: a political resistance while still dancing to corporate capital?
At the end of the plot, Olga draws from her repressed legacy of activism and uses her platform as a regular collaborator on the reality television show Good Morning Later to denounce the “systemic destruction of the Puerto Rican people at the hands of the government” following the Hurricane Maria disaster.Footnote 138 However, regarding gentrification in Brooklyn, Olga follows the same model-minority path that Matteo took before her, as she sells her successful wedding-planning business to open an art gallery featuring Black and Latino artists in Gowanus.Footnote 139 Following Luz’s success in getting Nothar Park designated a heritage site, the Tongues admit that the community are “a little bit proud of her,”Footnote 140 and her mother Eusebia recognizes that her daughter’s “own way” makes her “so much stronger than Eusebia had ever been.”Footnote 141
At the end of Neruda on the Park, Luz openly acknowledges the conclusion of her journey and the pain she suffers on her path to adult identity. Taking “a new course” requires rejecting Hudson’s proposal – “one way to say no to the pain” – since “what her mother offered wasn’t the way for her, either.”Footnote 142 As seen in the restoration of these heroines’ adult identities, these novels celebrate the path of the model-minority myth, which emphasizes life decisions such as acquiring higher education and contributing to society through a profession. As these new generations of the Caribbean diaspora increasingly place trust in institutions, they distance themselves from the legacy of the civil rights movement, which relied on strategies such as self-help and community control, in favor of wealth accumulation, the nonprofit acquisition of property, or advising on urban planning and policy making as the primary sources of lasting power in a context of urban displacement still affecting their communities.
This shift in the literary representations of urban displacement illustrates a growing internal cultural diversity in which Caribbean communities experience increasing signs of assimilation. In terms of armed struggle as a policy of last resort, the central characters in these stories take a firm stance against the use of firearms for political purposes, presumably nurtured by a pessimism following the untimely end of historical organizations such as the Young Lords or the Black Panther Party. Nonetheless, these novels maintain a strong concern for issues that propelled the rise of the civil rights movement, such as systemic violence and racial self-hatred. However, the Young Lords’s political campaigns drew from community-based hands-on service and knowledge while enacting a lasting impact on community well-being that resulted in governmental policies that are still in place today – the Patient Bill of Rights, the federal School Breakfast Program, or the prohibition of lead-based paint on buildings are examples of this.Footnote 143 While individual action with regard to housing equity resonates with the history of the settlement of Latinx communities in the US – such is the case of Anita Villareal and Mexican migration during the 1940s and the 1950s in Chicago – the impact of these individual actions might seem dampened in comparison to the legacy of the civil rights movement.Footnote 144
The adoption of strategies such as wealth accumulation, nonprofit property acquisition, and advisement in urban planning or policy making to fight urban displacement in these struggles does not necessarily imply political whitewashing. As I have suggested, these love stories surface as a literary device that grapples with the different sites of power and vulnerability in New York City. Additionally, the construction of desire in these love stories does not represent complicity with urban development. While these plots show a development enthusiasm, these unsatisfactory love stories reveal a form of political resistance to urban renewal and for-profit privatization. Moreover, these love stories must be understood as speculative explorations of what these heroines desire in the face of the threat of urban displacement in the global city. These speculative moments represent ephemeral individual success during uncertain times.
One of the main goals of this article has been to resist the preemptive belief that the writing and distribution of commercial genres like romance novels whitewash political claims in literature. On the contrary, while these novels may target large audiences, the racially complicit subjects in these stories allow us to imagine alternative futures. Strategies such as Matteo’s nonprofit property acquisition with individual funds set an example of how model-minority strategies can co-live with class-based visions of neighborhood empowerment to fight urban displacement. These love stories open new possibilities for strength and independence, complicating race and class binaries in the context of the global city. An additional goal of this article has been to illustrate the growing interest of a new generation of Caribbean women writers in literary genres historically considered minor and “commercial.” While recent scholarship has already demonstrated the importance of romance novels as key spaces to discuss political concern for feminist, BIPOC, LGTBIQ+, and other underrepresented communities, this article has highlighted a renewed relevance of the genre in addressing politically significant issues for the Caribbean diaspora.Footnote 145
Ricardo Martín Coloma earned his PhD in Latin American, Iberian, and Latino cultures from the Graduate Center, CUNY. His research explores questions of territory, authority, and rights in Caribbean and Afro-Portuguese literary narratives centered on the global city, with a particular focus on civil rights movements and urban displacement. His work has been published in academic journals such as Pasados: Recovering Histories, Imagining Latinidad, the Journal of American Studies, and Sx Salon (Small Axe). He also has a background in architectural design and earned an MA in Spanish and Latin American literature from the Universidad de Barcelona. He previously served as a research assistant for the urban research group Terreform One, and he currently teaches Spanish and Latinx cultures at Brooklyn College, City College of New York, and the College of Staten Island, all part of CUNY. He would like to extend particular thanks to Professor Mary Pat Brady and Professor Richard Pérez for their invaluable input during the drafting of this article. Thank you to Prof. Sarah Pollack, Prof. Carlos Riobó, and colleague Miriam Juárez for their excellent feedback. The author is also thankful to the Mellon Foundation for funding research with the Crossing Latinidades Mellon Humanities Pre-doctoral Research Fellowship.
