April 3, 2025: Foolish Texts: This Fool

[For thisyear’s April Fool’s series, I’ll be AmericanStudying cultural works with “fool”in the title. Share your thoughts on foolish texts, with or without the word,for a fool-hearty crowd-sourced weekend post!]

First, abit of inside baseball: I haven’t yet had a chance to check out either of thetexts on which my last two posts in this series will focus. I don’t want to pretendto have specific things to say about them, but I did want to both highlight themand use them as a lens for broader AmericanStudies questions. So in honor of theacclaimed recent sitcomabout cholo young men and their families and communities in LA, some thoughtson three other Latino cultural works that each redefined their respectivegenres (as that sitcom seems to have):

1)     Ruizde Burton’s novels: Between that post for the American Writers Museum blogand posts here like thisone, I’ve said a good bit about María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, one of myfavorite 19th century American authors and a truly unique voice andperspective on our history, community, identity, and more. Here I’ll just addone thing: I wrotein this post about my friend Larry Rosenwald’s excellent book MultilingualAmerica: Language and the Making of American Literature (2008), and whileRuiz de Burton published her novels in English, I’d still say she exemplifies amultilingual literary legacy that can help us radically reframe what Americanliterature itself includes and means.

2)     TheSalt of the Earth (1954): When it comes to this groundbreaking filmabout Latino and labor history, I can’t say it any better than did the great filmhistorian Vaughn Joy in that first hyperlinked post for her Review Roulettenewsletter. In many ways Salt is in conversation with other films aboutlabor history, including one of my personal favorites from my favoritefilmmaker, JohnSayles’ Matewan (1987). But in the mid-1950s, with the horrific OperationWetback in frustratingly full swing, a film about Latino workers representsa truly radical cultural work—and one that likewise embodies an alternative visionof what the era’s “socialproblem films” could be and do.

3)     In the Heights (2005): Aspart of a 2016 series on Puerto Rican stories and histories, I wroteabout West Side Story (1957), which as I noted there started with verydistinct cultural backgrounds for its protagonists before evolving to feature aPuerto Rican heroine (and her even more overtly Puerto Rican friends andcommunity). Given that multilayered evolution, I’d say that the title of “firstLatino Broadway musical” was still up for grabs, and that In the Heightsmight well qualify. But such distinctions are ultimately less important thanwhat cultural works themselves feature and do, and there’s no doubt that thevoices and beats, the identities and communities, put on stage by Lin-ManuelMiranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes added something significant to the genreof the Broadway musical, as each of these texts has in its respective genres.

Lastfoolish text tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Foolish texts you’d share?