Raúl Coronado: Latino Identity and Literature

University of Chicago professor Raúl Coronado studies the history of Latino literature and identity. Literature, in his research, is not constrained to the written word. He explains the four things that literature does:

1. It entertains. It is moving and fascinating.

2. It gives us a model of sociability: the way we should engage with others.

3. It gives us a model of interiority: the way we can think about ourselves.

4. It tries to capture the divine: the sense of being moved by aesthetics and insight.

Coronado describes two different racial models (Latino and Hispanic) we have in the United States and how the experience of racialization (and racism) varies. The history of race in the United States is contrasted to the history of race in Latin and Spanish America.

Raúl Coronado is an Assistant Professor in English Language & Literature at the University of Chicago. His teaching and research interests are in Latina/o literary and cultural history, from the colonial period to the 1940s, with an emphasis on rethinking the literature of the Americas in a transnational, hemispheric framework. His teaching focuses on the historical specificities of the U.S.-Mexico border, while simultaneously providing new insights into the literary and cultural legacies of modernity and colonialism in the Americas. In the next several years, his teaching will focus on the development of a U.S. Latina/o public sphere; how 19th and early 20th century Latinas/os engaged with and theorized the development of a modernity in the U.S. Southwest, New Orleans, and the east coast.