“We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe . . . we will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands, we will speak our minds.” Thus Ralph W. Emerson in his oration before the Phi Beta Kappa Society in 1831. For a long time the United States was a colonial country fighting for its independence and freedom to realize its own patria, fulfill the utopian goals the Pilgrim Fathers had foreseen for it, and create its own culture. Within its struggles to confirm the right to a national worth of its own, assimilation to the White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant creeds and language has been imposed onto all other U.S. citizens, on pain of being, otherwise, debarred from any sense of belonging to the same civil status.

Latinos, in particular, seem to be particularly marginalized in the United States. Notwithstanding the historical experience they shared with the Anglos—of conquest and of shaping  new existences in the New World—they  are, more than other minorities, seen as a menace to the “American nation” (Huntington).

Considering their works first from the postcolonial point of view of subjugation to the mainstream WASP culture, our aim is to proceed to a postnationalist perspective, in the context both of the American hemisphere, and of a broader overcoming of 18^th century European conceptions of the nation-state supremacy over inter-national views.