Despite a large influx of Guatemalans to cities such as Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., their narrative has largely been subsumed in the traditional Latino/a immigrant narrative. The importance of the historical specificity and traumatic nature of Guatemalan immigration, as a consequence of the Central American revolutions, has only now begun to be studied by scholars such as Arturo Arias and Claudia Milian, though the field of Latino/a studies is still largely focused on immigrants from Mexico, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Thus, through an examination of two novels by Guatemalan-American authors, Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier (1998/2000) and Tanya Maria Barrientos’ Family Resemblance (2003), I compare how each novel differently positions Guatemalan diasporic identity around traumas surrounding the Guatemalan civil war and diaspora. Ultimately, I argue that Tobar establishes Guatemalan diasporic fiction as a kind of refugee literature, while Barrientos attempts to fit the Guatemalan diasporic narrative into a traditional Latino/a immigrant narrative using the genre of chica lit, thus flattening out the unique historical experience of the Guatemalan civil war while also highlighting the constraints of the chica lit genre for Central American-American women writers. / text

This master’s report presents a literary criticism of the novel ¡Caramba! by Nina Marie Martínez that attends to both genre and mass culture theory. The novel, when recognized as a multigenre text consisting of both chick lit and Chicano literature conventions, reveals how informal economies employ methods of cultural appropriation in order to articulate an oppositional voice. In particular, Martinez’s literary intervention of the trademark symbol subverts dominant forms of consumption (and genre) to expose how her protagonists emerge as subjective, discerning consumers in her fictional Californian town. / text