TOWARDS A POST-NUYORICAN LITERATURE 121

Notes

' I thank Isabel Velez for generously conversing with me about this particular point,
any remaining inaccuracies or errors are solely my responsibility.
2 Suzanne Oboler's Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives: Identity and the Politics of
(Re)Presentation in the United States (Minneapolis, U Minnesota P, 1995), was
particularly useful to my initial thinking on this issue in the U.S. context, in particular
her citing of David Muga's discussion of the relationship between ethnic attribution
and economic opportunity. Criticizing "academic intellectuals" who suggest that
ethnicity today is increasingly symbolic, Muga points to nativist backlash, racism,
and discrimination, concluding that those who view ethnicity as symbolic "speak for
the middle strata and all those who have achieved material 'success' within a capitalist
society while remaining blind to how ethnicity has been most authentically preserved
among the economically and politically pressed" (89). Oboler also cites the sociologist
Martha Gim6nez, who convincingly states that "middle and upper-middle class
immigrants are more likely to share the values of the dominant classes including
class, racial, and ethnic prejudices" (100). Moreover, Oboler cites Dominican
sociologists Ramona Hernandez and Silvio Torres-Saillant to expand on the dangers
of construing marginalized people "as representative specimens," because "the
tendency to view them as representative units of a collective alterity cancels their
claim to individuality," a privilege the dominant sectors enjoy (172).