Pocho -Che and the tropicalization of American poetics

This dissertation examines the subject of Latina/o cultural representation through an interdisciplinary analysis of Pocho-Che: a multicultural literary collective/publishing company based in San Francisco during the 1970s. It treats the cultural production of Pocho-Che as a case study of "tropicalizations": the complex relational processes by which Latina/o cultural identities are imagined, represented, contested, and transformed (Aparicio and Chavez-Silverman 1997). Of particular interest are instances in which authors and artists subversively reappropriate tropical figures from stereotypical discourses. The focus here is on the poetics of Pocho-Che as a literary and artistic community, a multicultural yet mostly Latina/o bohemia. At the heart of this study lies a question: What does it mean that this diverse community represented itself largely with tropical tropes?;A methodology informed by literary and cultural theory, history, ethnic studies, and anthropology is employed to answer this question. In the first chapter various postcolonial and transnational paradigms for the study of American literature and culture are investigated. The second chapter addresses intracultural conflicts over nationalism and internationalism, particularly with respect to gender, and the relationship between Pocho-Che and the writers of the San Francisco Renaissance, especially the Beat Generation. Chapter 3 highlights two oppositional representations of American history and the transnational/transcultural Latina subject. The fourth chapter explores the subversive sound of diasporic African music in the poetry of Pocho-Che writers, arguing that multiple diasporic genres (jazz, blues, salsa) are instrumental in the symbolic reconfiguration of racialized and gendered social spaces. The fifth and final chapter looks at the ways in which the visual artists of Pocho-Che reclaim tropical imagery to create "alternative public spheres" (Negt and Kluge 1988).;Each of these chapters supports the claim that the tropical idiom came out of and reinforced a need among displaced communities to remember their histories and imagine their futures in the decidedly un-tropical urban peninsula of San Francisco. They also demonstrate how tropical figures helped to establish solidarity and foment resistance among the various communities represented within Pocho-Che. Ultimately, though, this dissertation shows how affinities and tensions between and within cultures produce a new American poetics.