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By haunting the cultural sphere of the past, do we depolítícíze the possibility for a viable Latino future? Or, even better, Why have we allowed the very futures of Latinidad to be colonized through an insistence on the narrative renderings of our stories, our lives, our Latinidades, in the preterite and imperfect tense of the historical imagination? Exile, diaspora, loss, memory, trauma, history, U.S. military campaigns in our countries, language barriers and borders, all emblematic of the Latino experience in the U.S. and carved into niche marketing strategies for publishers, only tell, retell, and package part of historical desire. What those stories can't imagine is the possibility of making our relationship to the state anything other than historical... One of the fundamental questions of Latino studies, then, should be: How do we decolonize the future?
-Lázaro Lima
N HIS CALL FOR A LATINO FUTURITY, LÁZARO LIMA SPEAKS SPECIFICALLY to issues within the Latina/Latino literary community. Chastising Latina/o authors for continually writing novels dealing with Latina/o history in order to appeal to publishers, Lima argues that what is needed is writing that looks towards future possibilities for Latina/o culture. Lima's call represents an important trend in Latina/o literature of authors and critics asking what a future for Latina/o culture could look like. One way that Latina/o authors have begun to address the need for more texts depicting Latina/o futurity is through a resurgence of interest in the science fiction and fantasy genres (sf/f). Although Latina/o cultures have a rich history of writing texts with fantastic elements, these texts are more apt to be labeled magical realism1 than sf/f. Latina/o authors are often overlooked in the sf/f categories, even when their texts utilize sf/f references or themes.2 However, Lima's comment demonstrates an important way that sf/f can contribute to Latina/o writing; since science fiction most often deals with depicting the future, a space defined by new ideas, cultures, and technologies, and fantasy creates worlds that have never existed, Latina/o authors can utilize these genres to circumvent the cultural expectations of Latina/o literary traditions.
One example of a Latina/o text that utilizes a connection to the sf/f genres is Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a hybrid-genre text that references sf/f to escape the cultural...