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On Activist Mothers and Gentrifying Lovers: From the Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement to the Model-Minority Myth in the Caribbean Romance Novel
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 August 2025
Abstract
This article explores a new generation of Caribbean writers in the early twenty-first century who wrestle with self-representations, when the model-minority myth and strategies such as wealth accumulation and property acquisition became the only forms of resistance to urban displacement possible, once the equity structures that were hard won by the civil rights movement were dismantled. Specifically, I explore the affordance of the romance novel genre in Olga Dies Dreaming (2022) and Neruda on the Park (2022) to discuss this dilemma between confrontational struggle and assimilation. Ultimately, this article illustrates a shift in Latinx literature toward historically commercial genres that have become key cultural spaces to discuss pressing contemporary political themes.
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- © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press in association with British Association for American Studies.
References
1 Rebecca Speas, “An Indies Introduce Q&A with Xochitl Gonzalez,” 4 Jan. 2022, at www.bookweb.org/news/indies-introduce-qa-xochitl-gonzalez-1627206.
2 By using the term “civil rights movement,” I refer to the struggle for justice and equality for African Americans and other communities of color that took place mainly in the 1950s and 1960s. In particular, I focus on the legacy of the Young Lords, a civil and human rights organization that aimed to fight for neighborhood empowerment mainly in Chicago and New York City and self-determination for Puerto Rico between 1968 and 1976.
3 Xochitl Gonzalez in Speas.
4 William Petersen, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, invented the figure of the model minority in 1966. He first used the label in his article “Success Story, Japanese-American Style.” Model minority is not full-citizen and serves a disciplinary function by helping justify the social, economic, and political status quo. According to its logic, if the docile, patient, hardworking, and self-reliant model minority can achieve material success, then the failed citizen and problem minority should be able to do so as well without protest or advantage. Catherine Ramírez, Assimilation: An Alternative History (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020), 88–92.
5 In fact, Gonzalez wittingly draws the title of the novel from former Young Lord and Nuyorican poet Pedro Pietri. “Olga” is indeed among the many Puerto Ricans who “died” without achieving their American “dream” in Pietri’s celebrated poem “Puerto Rican Obituary” (1973). Interestingly, in this and other poems, Pietri already discusses issues such as urban displacement, racial discrimination, and labor exploitation targeting the Puerto Rican community. Pedro Pietri, “Puerto Rican Obituary,” in Pietri, Selected Poetry (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2015), 3–12.
6 Ramírez, 92.
7 I use the term “Latinx” in line with Ed Morales and Alan Pelaez Lopez, who consider the X a space of possibility that includes previously erased groups such as those not aligning with gender binaries, as well as Blackness and Indigeneity. Ed Morales, “Why I Embrace the Term Latinx,” The Guardian, 8 Jan. 2018, at www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/08/why-i-embrace-the-term-latinx. Pelaez Lopez, “The X in Latinx Is a Wound, Not a Trend,” ColorBloq: The Story of Us, Sept. 2018.
8 This article adds to the burgeoning conversation of cultural expressions of Latinx middle class and assimilation as explored by Ralph Rodríguez and Tace Hedrick. In particular, Hedrick analyzes the representations of middle-class Latina characters by self-proclaimed assimilated US Latinx authors who express conservative remarks and places this trend as an aftermath of the “Latino explosion” of the mid- to late 1990s. Tace Hedrick, Chica Lit: Popular Latina Fiction and Americanization in the Twenty-First Century (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), 1–26. Ralph Rodríguez, Latinx Literature Unbound: Undoing Ethnic Expectation (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 1–20.
9 Raphael Dalleo and Elena Machado, The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of Post-sixties Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 17–106.
10 According to Ed Morales, the convergence of the tragedy of Puerto Rican settlement in large US cities and the influence of the civil rights movement allowed for the creation of El Barrio as a populist, self-aware crucible for the Nuyorican. Ed Morales, “Latino Core Communities in Transition: The Erasing of an Imaginary Nation,” in Sherrie Baver, Angelo Falcón, and Gabriel Haslip-Viera, eds., Latinos in New York: Communities in Transition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017), 333-337, 335.
11 According to Dávila, this process occurs at two levels. The first includes a shift at the federal level from direct subsidies for the construction of new affordable housing and toward fading measures such as the politically vulnerable tenant vouchers and subsidies. The second is a shift toward privatization at state level that includes “transfers of the city’s housing stock to private and nonprofit developers.” Arlene Dávila, Barrio Dreams: Puerto Ricans, Latinos, and the Neoliberal City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 28.
12 Ibid., 28–30.
13 By confrontational struggle I refer to the direct nonviolent, repetitive, sustained use of nonviolent pressure to bring about social change. In particular, I refer to strategies already in place prior to the rise of the civil rights movement, such as mutual aid and self-help, but also other initiatives deployed by organizations such as Young Lords or the Black Panther Party, like hands-on community service, occupations, protests, and self-defense that in occasionally led to a controversial armed turn. I also follow Susan Koshy’s insights on the complicitous racial subject in literature as described in her essay “Manifest Diversity and the Empire of Finance,” Post45, 20 Sept. 2022, at https://post45.org/2022/09/manifest-diversity-and-the-empire-of-finance.
14 I bring Sassen’s insights of the global city as a point of departure of my analysis due to the central role of high-skilled jobs in this context and the opportunity they offer to the migrant populations to achieve upward mobility. In her volume Saskia Sassen warns about an “increased asymmetry” in global cities and argues “the new conditions of growth have contributed to elements of a new class alignment in global cities.” Sassen describes the rise of a “high-income stratum and a low-income stratum of workers.” This low-income stratum of workers concentrates on “jobs needed to service the new high-income workers, both at work and at home, as well as the needs of the expanded low-wage work force.” Moreover, Sassen places migrant communities at the core of this stratum of workers as she contends that “the economic restructuring associated with the current phase of capital mobility has generated a large supply of jobs and casual labor markets that facilitate the employment of disadvantaged foreign workers.” The access of the Caribbean model minority to these high-skilled jobs through higher education represents a crucial shift in the self-representations of urban displacement in Caribbean fiction. These speculations with the inclusion of the new Caribbean diasporas in the advanced sectors of global capital complicate the race and class binary established by Sassen. Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 13, 32.
15 According to Regis, all romance novels should contain eight narrative elements that I further explore, including betrothal. However, none of these novels ends in betrothal on purpose as a form of rejection of political whitewashing, as I explore in the last part of this article. Despite that missing element, these novels still borrow their forms from the romance novel genre. Pamela Regis, A Natural History of the Romance Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 14.
16 Sometimes these mentors have actual ties to civil rights organizations.
17 The figure of the senex iratus (Latin “angry old man”) appears in the Gothic narrative as a mirror of the romance paradigm and operates as one of the obstacles (often a father) who prevents the fruition of the hero’s desires of marrying the heroine (often the senex iratus’s daughter). Northrop Frye and Robert Denham, eds., Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 182.
18 There are some occasions on which Eusebia (Luz’s mother in Neruda on the Park) and Blanca (Olga’s mother in Olgia Dies Dreaming) show their disapproval of the relationships between their daughters and their heroes in the form of disagreement with the heroes’ political views. While Eusebia and Luz’s lover Hudson rarely cross paths in the plot, Eusebia shows her anger and dismay once they run into each other in Nothar Park and finds out her daughter is dating “the gentrifier” and “developer.” Likewise, Blanca tries to convince Olga to stop dating the Puerto Rican rapper Reggie King, Olga’s first boyfriend. In a letter Blanca sends to Olga in the year 2002, Blanca shows her concerns about her daughter becoming “seduced by the money and the life that this guy represents.” Paradoxically, Blanca asks Olga to meet her ex-lover (the entrepreneur Richard Eikenborn) to ask him for a favor once she finds out that Richard owns the resources that will tremendously help Blanca’s political cause at the end of the plot. Cleyvis Natera, Neruda on the Park (New York: Ballantine Books, 2022), 165–67. Xochitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming (New York: Flatiron Books, 2022), 135–38.
19 Regis, 14.
20 Currently under siege by gentrification and urban displacement, Spanish Harlem, also known as “El Barrio,” emerges in Manhattan as a consequence of the civil rights movement and the formation of a Puerto Rican and Latino consciousness. Described by Ed Morales as a “populist, self-aware multi-cultural community,” El Barrio has become representational space for the Nuyorican nation. Morales, “Latino Core Communities in Transition, 335.
21 Dávila, Barrio Dreams, 28.
22 As explored by Arlene Dávila, Catherine Ramírez, and Susan Koshy.
23 Following the insights of Denise Oliver-Velez, Johanna Fernández, and Cristina Beltrán.
24 As explored by Audre Lorde.
25 Raúl Homero Villa, “Urban Spaces,” in Suzanne Bost and Frances R. Aparicio, eds., The Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature (New York: Routledge, 2013), 45–63, 48.
26 Urayoán Noel, In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 1.
27 As argued by Homero Villa on the imagery present in the Nuyorican Poetry (1974) anthology. Homero Villa, 49.
28 Ramírez, Assimilation, 67, 84.
29 Johanna Fernández, The Young Lords: A Radical History (Chapell Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 51.
30 Interestingly, both Gonzalez and Natera are Ivy League graduates and hold MFAs. While González is a Brown University graduate and staff writer at The Atlantic, Natera is a New York University graduate and teaches at Barnard College at Columbia University.
31 Specifically, the novels Dreaming in Cuban (1992) by Cristina García, When I Was Puerto Rican (1993) by Esmeralda Santiago, and Soledad (2002) by Angie Cruz set good examples of these narratives.
32 Willie Pérdomo, Smoking Lovely (New York: Rattapallax Press, 2003), 13–29.
33 Noel, 133.
34 Juan Flores, “Nueva York – Diaspora City: U.S. Latinos Between and Beyond,” NACLA, 25 Sept. 2007, at https://nacla.org/article/nueva-york-diaspora-city-us-latinos-between-and-beyond.
35 Sassen, The Global City, 17–22. Dávila, Barrio Dreams, 1–15. Manuel Castells, The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring and the Urban–Regional Process (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 227.
36 In City of Quartz, Mike Davis argues that there is a fight for the territory towards the urban center and the periphery. Moreover, scholars such as Neil Smith, David Harvey, and Ed Morales have explored the return of global elites to the urban centers and peripheries such as the Lower East Side, Spanish Harlem, Williamsburg, Bushwick, or Washington Heights from the 1990s until today. Mike Davis, City of Quartz (London: Verso, 1990); Morales, “Latino Core Communities in Transition, 334–37. David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (London: Verso, 2013), 3–26. Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (London: Routledge, 2005), 4–28, 54.
37 Dávila, Barrio Dreams, 28–29.
38 Ibid., 114.
39 Ibid., 1.
40 Morales, “Latino Core Communities in Transition, 345–46.
41 Julian Brash, Bloomberg’s New York: Class and Governance in the Luxury City (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 7.
42 As explored by Arlene Dávila in Latino Spin: Public Image and the Whitewashing of Race (New York: New York University Press), 1–31.
43 Hedrick, Chica Lit, 1–26.
44 In the words of Dávila, Latino Spin, 31.
45 Ed Morales, Latinx (London: Verso, 2018), 287.
46 Ramírez, Assimilation, 51, 85–89.
47 Lázaro Lima, Being Brown: Sonia Sotomayor and the Latino Question (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019), 82–83.
48 Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vasquez, Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020), 134.
49 A “Great Society” in Bodega’s own terms. Ernesto Quiñonez, Bodega Dreams (New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 2000), 31.
50 Figueroa-Vasquez, 135.
51 Koshy, “Manifest Diversity and the Empire of Finance.”
52 In her novel When We Make It (2021), Bushwick-based author Elisabet Velasquez seeks to debunk a narrative that demonizes pregnancy and a refusal of higher education as the so-called “culture-of-poverty” choices for Puerto Rican and other Latinx communities in New York City.
53 Ramírez, 96.
54 Koshy refers to the global city as the “financial metropolis.”
55 While Bodega Dreams and Chango’s Fire appeared under relatively independent publishers like Vintage or Rayo, commercial successes like Junot Diaz’s The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead Books, 2007) have sparked interest from major publishing houses in new Caribbean authors. Such is the case with Flatiron Books and Penguin Random House, who are behind the publication of Olga Dies Dreaming and Neruda on the Park respectively.
56 Hedrick, Chica Lit, 1–26.
57 In his volume The Gentrification Plot (2022), Thomas Heise explores how today’s crime writers focus on narrating the death of neighborhoods and ways of life instead of actual murders in the wake of a drop in crime in New York City. Within the realm of Latinx literature, such is the case of the novels Hipster Death Rattle (2019) by Richie Narvaez, The Education of Margot Sanchez (2017) by Lilliam Rivera, The Epic Fail of Arturo Zamora (2017) by Pablo Cartaya, and the Shadowshaper series by Daniel José Older.
58 Francesca Pierini, “Critical Approaches to the Modern and Contemporary Anglophone Romance Novel (From A Room with a View to Fifty Shades of Grey),” Journal of Popular Romance Studies, June 2022, 1–21, 6.
59 Ibid., 9.
60 Ibid., 4. Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 1–30. Regis, A Natural History of the Romance Novel, 1–14, 15–30. Elham Naeej, “Parting the Curtain: The Virgin Heroine and the ‘Westoxified’ Villain in Contemporary Iranian Romance Novels,” Journal of Popular Romance Studies, June 2021, 1–19. Bridget Kies, “Saying ‘I Don’t’: Queer Romance in the Post-Marriage Equality World,” Journal of Popular Romance Studies, March 2024, 1–15. Carolina Fernández Rodríguez, “Chamorro WWII Romances: Combating Erasure with Tales of Survival and Vitality,” Journal of Popular Romance Studies, July 2019, 1–21. Heike Mißler, “A Black Bridget Jones? Candice Carty-Williams’s Queenie (2019): Challenging Discourses of Race and Gender in the Chick-Lit Genre,” Journal of Popular Romance Studies, Feb. 2023, 1–14.
61 This is a trait that these novels share with Harlequin mass market romance novels in the 1980s, according to Reading the Romance (first published 1984), the still-celebrated ethnography of romance novel readers by Janice Radway. Radway describes this trait as part of a “formula” for the “ideal romance” based on her ethnographic study of romance novel readers. Pamela Regis argues that Radway’s “description” of the ideal romance novel is “rather formulaic than generic” and a “formula” or a “sub-set of the genre.” Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 119–20, 123, 134. Regis, 25.
62 Interestingly, the school system is a widely used theme to represent institutional discrimination in Latinx literature. Likewise, this discrimination became one of the foundational experiences that shaped the politics of the Young Lords, with a significant concentration on community control.
63 Natera, Neruda on the Park, 72.
64 Ibid., 151.
65 Ibid., 136–39.
66 González, Olga Dies Dreaming, 5–6, original emphasis.
67 Ibid., 272.
68 Ibid., 246.
69 Natera, 82.
70 González, 48.
71 Bodega Dreams introduces the figure of the activist mentor in the character of Willie Bodega. However, his “Great Society” only admits Puerto Ricans who conform to the model-minority myth and looks up to corporations like IBM or Mobil. This mix of self-help legacy with the corporate-based ambitions illustrates the internal cultural diversity within Puerto Rican communities as described by Beltrán.
72 Beltrán argues that Puerto Ricans were experiencing increasing signs of assimilation, including greater English-language usage, the gradual adoption of US customs and traditions, and an increase in marriages to non-Puerto Ricans. Cristina Beltrán, The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 37.
73 Jaimee A. Swift, “‘Machismo Will Never Be Fucking Revolutionary’: On the Radical Rebelliousness of Denise Oliver-Velez,” Black Women Radicals, March 2020, at www.blackwomenradicals.com/blog-feed/machismo-will-never-be-fucking-revolutionary-on-the-radical-rebelliousness-of-denise-oliver-velez.
74 Ibid.
75 Ibid.
76 González, 67.
77 Ibid., 162.
78 Pablo Yoruba Guzmán quoted in Beltrán, 35.
79 Interestingly, González places in the novel the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) as an inspiration for Blanca to learn everything that her new organization, Pañuelos Negros, needs to succeed as opposed to her failed Young Lords. González, 221.
80 Ibid., 321.
81 Ibid., 221.
82 Natera, Neruda on the Park, 62.
83 Ibid., 61.
84 Natera, 60.
85 Ibid., 62.
86 Ibid., 182.
87 Fernández, The Young Lords, 72.
88 González, 368.
89 Penguin Random House, “Inside the Book: Cleyvis Natera,” 16 May 2022, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpJa5vweM8U.
90 Natera, 204.
91 Ibid., 275.
92 Ibid., 60.
93 Ibid., 99.
94 Ibid., 179, 203.
95 This armed turn led to profound internal dissent and increased government surveillance in the context of a society increasingly intolerant of the use of weapons to achieve political ends, as argued by Martin Luther King Jr. in 1967. The first public appearance of the Young Lords with weapons happened against the advice of Young Lord leader Felipe Luciano, who claims that the organization, with some minors among its ranks, is heading towards a suicidal mission. Fernández, The Young Lords, 110, 324–25.
96 Swift, “Machismo Will Never Be Fucking Revolutionary.”
97 González, 310.
98 The NRA (National Rifle Association) typically use the Second Amendment (the right of people in the United States to keep and bear arms) to defend the interests of the firearm industry. Likewise, the Pañuelos Negros borrow this argument in the novel to justify their armed struggle. Ibid., 311.
99 Ibid., 287.
100 Luz in the end clarifies neighbor Francesca’s migration status process among other many reparation acts. Ibid., 263.
101 Ibid., 302–4.
102 Quiñonez, Bodega Dreams, 103.
103 González, 369–70.
104 Natera, 301.
105 González, 345, 365.
106 Ibid., 353.
107 Regis, A Natural History of the Romance Novel, 14.
108 Moya draws from Audre Lorde to explore racial self-hatred in Junot Diaz’s work. Paula Moya, “Dismantling the Master’s House: The Decolonial Literary Imaginations of Audre Lorde and Junot Díaz,” in Monica Hanna, Jennifer Harford Vargas, and José David Saldívar, eds., Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 231–55, 231, 243.
109 González, 55. Natera, 231–55, 152–53.
110 Natera, 165.
111 Ibid., 166.
112 Audre Lorde, “Man Child: A Black Lesbian Feminist’s Response,” in Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom, CA: Crossing, 1984), 72–80, 74. Quoted in Moya, 240.
113 Natera, 162.
114 Ibid., 75.
115 As Moya, 242, has explored in Junot Diaz’s short story “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie.” I argue that Olga Dies Dreaming proposes a similar structure by using love stories to discuss race and class politics.
116 Lorde, 74, quoted in Moya, 72-80, 240.
117 González, 50–51, 61, 131.
118 Ibid., 57.
119 Ibid., 50–61.
120 Ibid., 58–59.
121 Natera, 105.
122 Ibid.,104.
123 Ibid., 201.
124 Ibid., 215.
125 Ibid., 207–21.
126 Ibid., 241.
127 Ibid., 241.
128 José Esteban Muñoz, The Sense of Brown, ed. Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong’o (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 36–42.
129 Ibid., 279, 105, 258.
130 González, Olga Dies Dreaming, 17.
131 Ibid., 29.
132 Ibid., 75.
133 According to Ed Morales, candidate Fernando Ferrer used this term during his political campaign, which included combating the growing economic and social inequality in the city. Fernando Ferrer lost the election to the above-mentioned Michael Bloomberg. Morales, “Latino Core Communities in Transition, 345–46.
134 González, 72.
135 Ibid., 184.
136 Ibid., 186.
137 Ibid., 360.
138 Ibid., 279.
139 Natera, Neruda on the Park, 364.
140 Ibid., 304.
141 Ibid., 310.
142 Ibid., 299.
143 Fernández, The Young Lords, 10, 11, 146.
144 Mike Amezcua, Making Mexican Chicago: From Postwar Settlement to the Age of Gentrification (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022) 1–18.
145 For more information, see the Journal of Popular Romance Studies, at www.jprstudies.org.