Dance between two cultures : Latino Caribbean literature written in the United States / William Luis.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 315-335) and index.

1. Setting New Roots: Latino Caribbean Literature in the United States -- 2. Puerto Rican American Poetry: Street Rhythms and Voices of the People -- 3. Puerto Ricans in New York: Memoirs of Bernardo Vega and Piri Thomas's Down These Mean Streets -- 4. Cuban American Poetry: The Cuban American Divide -- 5. Master Codes of Cuban American Culture: Oscar Hijuelos's The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love and Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban -- 6. Dominican American Poetry: Culture in the Middest -- 7. A Search for Identity: in Julia Alvarez's How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents -- 8. Postmeditation on Latino, Race, and Identity.

In Dance Between Two Cultures, William Luis analyzes the most salient and representative narrative and poetic works of the newest literary movement to emerge in Spanish American and U.S. literatures. The book is divided into three sections, focused on representative Puerto Rican American, Cuban American, and Dominican American authors.

Luis traces the writers' origins and influences from the nineteenth century to the present, focusing especially on the contemporary works of Oscar Hijuelos, Julia Alvarez, Cristina Garcia, and Piri Thomas, among others. While engaging in close readings of the texts, Luis places them in a broader social, historical, political, and racial perspective to expose the tension between text and context.