Esmeralda Santiago in the marketplace of identity politics

Esmeralda Santiag o s América s Dream, with its ahistorical subjectivism and idealization of an agrarian past, offers a Latino docile Puerto Rican as the nov e l s central protagonist. This article explores the following: the marketability of Latinos, Puerto Rican literary history, and identity formation. Santiago s nostalgia positions her ideologically within 1930s 1950s Puerto Rican writing. Santiag o s te r ru o presents a narrative model (exclusively working class characters, binary gender roles, an agrarian setting, a disconnection from contemporary culture) that reinvents the ste r e o t ype of the docile Puerto Rican. América s Dream offers no interplay of hybridity one of the defining characteristics of Latino, and Puerto Rican identities.