This book is an examination of a niche market in contemporary US women’s popular fiction called “chica lit.” It is a growing niche—since the publication ofDirty Girls, publisher’s imprints such as St. Martin’s Griffin, HarperCollins’s series Avon Trade, Penguin’s Berkley Books, Grand Central Station, and others have put out an increasing number of chica lit fictions. As writing about Latina characters by Latina authors, it would seem that chica lit should be included within the parameters of US Latina/o literature. However, chica lit deliberately follows a good many of the “beach read” conventions of the hugely successful, commercially...

As I have noted, the formulae of women’s genre fiction—that is, the accepted and, most importantly, familiar plot patterns and conventions—particularly of the romance novel and contemporary chick lit, act as processes or “doings,” as Frederick Aldama and Ramón Saldívar note, for constructing as well as working through answers to questions about women’s cultural and economic options.¹ Yet the delineations of specific genres are always blurred, as scholars of popular genre such as Catherine Gledhill attest: they are “not discrete systems, consisting of a fixed number of listable items” (64). As we will see, the formulaic boundaries of...

The plots of chica lit fiction often assume, as both background and foil to its chica heroines’ material and romantic successes, that among poor and even working-class Latinos/as or Mexican Americans there exists a “culture of poverty.” This notion was made famous by the anthropologist Oscar Lewis, first in a sociological study of Mexicans in 1961 calledFive Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Povertyand continued in other works, including his best-known study,La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan and New York, of 1966. Lewis was in fact on the...

In the United States, the notion that ethnicity is not natural goes against what many people imagine as almost genetically inherent “ethnic” markers, such as certain behaviors, the love for certain foods, and even the expression of values. In this sense, Valdes offers an unbeatable answer to her critics: her characters are not stereotypes because they are descriptions of actual, ethnic people who, presumably, act in actual ethnic ways. Because the popularity of chica lit titles is heavily author-dependent—that is, readers become extremely loyal to specific authors—it is important to take into consideration authors’ own beliefs about the...

As we have begun to see, several scholars, in their readings of Valdes’sDirty Girlsnovels, have made clear the ways in which this chica lit series has posited Chicana, or, even worse, “Mexican” as an abject subjectivity related, as Usnavys puts it above, to the unutterably wretched third-world environs of Mexico itself. As Amanda Maria Morrison puts it, “Keying in on both race and social class and the ways in which the two are inextricably linked, Valdes-Rodriguez attempts in her first two novels to render Latinas and Latinidad palatable to mainstream consumers, who she claims ‘tend to be young,...