21.Passage 1
With her magical first novel, Garcia joins a growing chorus of talented Latino writers whosevoices are suddenly reaching a far wider, more diverse audience. Unlike Latin American writerssuch as Colombia′s Gabriel Garcia Marquee of Peru′s Mario Vargas Llosa--whose translatedworks became popular here in the 1970s--these authors are writing in English and drawing theirthemes from two cultures. Their stories, from "Dreaming in Cuban" to Julia Alvarez′s "How theGarcia Girls Lost Their Accent" and Victor Villasenor′s "Rain of Gold", offer insight into themixture of economic opportunity and discrimination that Latinos encounter in the United States.
"Garcia Girls" for example, is the story of four sisters weathering their transition from wealthyDominicans to ragtag immigrants, "We didn′ t feel we had the beat the United States had to offer,"one of the girls says, "We had only second-hand stuff, rental houses in one redneck Catholicneighborhood after another, clothes at Round Robin, a black and white TV afflicted with wavylines." Alvarez, a Middlebury College professor Who emigrated from Santo Domingo when she was10, says being an immigrant has given her a special vantage point: "We travel on that borderbetween two worlds and we can see both points of view."
With few exceptions, such as Chicano writer Rudolfo Anaya, many Hispanic-Americans havebeen writing in virtual obscurity for years, nurtured only by small presses like Houston′s ArtePublico or the Bilingual Press in Tempe, Ariz. Only with the recent success of Sandra Cisneros′s "Woman Hollering Creek" and Oscar Hijuelos′s prize-winning novel, "The Mambo Kings PlaySongs of Love," have mainstream publishers begun opening door to other Latinos. Julie Grau,Cisneros′s editor at Turtle Bay, says, "Editors may now be looking more carefully at a book thatbefore they would have deemed too exotic for the general readership."
But if Villasenor′s experience is any indication, some editors are st