This is the first inter-group and gender inclusive collection of scholarship in U.S. Latino literary criticism that begins with the assumption that the literature written by U.S. Latinos is as important an object of scholarship as U.S. Latino/a history, sociology, and culture, fields that have dominated previous inter-group anthologies. Some of the most important and insightful Latino and Latina literary scholars in the field write on authors from the four major Latino/a groups-- Cuban American, Dominican American, Mexican American, and Puerto Rican American. The anthology evaluates the state of U.S. Latino/a literary study and projects a vision of that study for the twenty-first century. This book is divided into four major areas of literary inquiry: analyses of the psychic relations between the Latino/a subject and its mimetic others; explorations of the complexities of race and Afro-Latino/a poetics; studies of the representation of labor in the Latino/a literary imagination; and genealogical and archival assessment of U.S. Latino literature's relationship with American, Caribbean, and Latin American literatures and histories.