The best books to understand the writing and marketing of chica lit

This is the book that started the Chica Lit subgenre (about thirty-something Latinas negotiating their lives, romances, and careers). I have many problems with it, but I like her humor and much of her making fun of stereotypes of Latinas is spot on. It also shows us the breadth of Latina lives, from the white, privileged Latina to the Afro-Latina struggling along. It’s the lynchpin of my book, since this is where it all started, for me and for the subgenre. It’s important to understand the messages popular Latinx literature gives us about gender and about Latinidad. 

I also write about this book in my work. I again have problems with it, but it gives a kind of slice-of-life snapshot of Cuban life at that moment (around 2005), and especially about jineteras, or “jockeys,” women who supplement their income by going out with wealthy foreigners. Doing research on that book gave me a look at Cuba that was invaluable. And it is sometimes funny. It serves as a kind of coda to my book in that it reproduces many of the rhetorical moves of other chica lit but in a completely different setting. 

As her title indicates, this book delves into the ways Latino/as are described, shaped, and marketed both to the United States and to themselves. Dávila, a social anthropologist, brilliantly exposes not just the workings of the neoliberal state on this process, but how marketing and demographic research by corporate interests shape the ways Latinas/os are commercialized not just with things like food but even with cities interested in “cleaning up” Latinx neighborhoods. My book looks at the way Latinx fiction does something of the same thing, including shaping the way Latinx poverty is seen as “inevitable” by these different players. 

Radway’s book was invaluable to me as a way to read the structure of Chica Lit, which depends on tropes and language from contemporary romance fiction. Her approach, which included a study of women who read nothing but romance in their time off, made many things clear about the pull of romance and its conventions for women. Her approach to the language and psychology of romance fiction also clarifies what makes these fictions, including Chica Lit, so appealing to women of all ages. This book came out in 1984 but is still for my money the best on romance fiction there is. My book leans on Radway to help describe the conventions of Chica Lit in order to understand its appeal to Latina readers, but also to understand the way patriarchy works in making these books both appealing but also how the “white” conventions sometimes come up against Latinx assumptions and stereotypes. 

Vallejo painstakingly lays out the way some Mexican Americans, usually the poorest of the minorities, struggle to make it into a specifically American middle class. She details how these Latinas/Latinos carefully shape themselves, and in turn are shaped by corporate and state interests, into an ethnicity that is for the most part deracinated and stripped of their more obvious “ethnic” attributes (as a small example, most drop the accent marks in their names). For my book, a look at the middle-class Latinx is a look at the desires and strivings of Latina writers and characters of Chica Lit.