Race and Upward Mobility examines class dynamics in Mexican American and African American literature, television, and film from the 1940s-2000s. Analyzing a wide-range of texts, it explains why particular narratives are employed to capture the conflicts in a stratified society and why the two largest racialized ethnic groups in the U.S. share or differ in their narrative strategies. Specifically, Race and Upward Mobility explores how these two groups depict the effects of capitalism and white supremacy through one of the most popular American narrative arcs—the upward mobility narrative. This is a narrative genre that includes sincere portrayals of desires for financial solvency and social incorporation, satiric critiques of or ambivalence toward material accumulation in a society with a severe racial wealth gap, and varied interpretations of how to address social and economic inequities. Analyzing novels by authors such as Oscar Zeta Acosta and Helena María Viramontes, Gloria Naylor and Percival Everett; sitcoms such as The Jeffersons and the George Lopez show; and films such as Machete and The Pursuit of Happyness, Race and Upward Mobility demonstrates how cultural texts help shape the way we think about socioeconomic hierarchies and group boundaries.
About the Author: Elda María Román
Elda María Román is an Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Southern California. As a scholar in literary and cultural studies, she researches the effects of race and class across groups, disciplines, and genres. In addition to authoring the book Race and Upward Mobility, she has published articles on Latinx and African American cultural production. A first-generation Mexican American, she grew up in Providence, RI and received her B.A. from Brown University and her Ph.D. from Stanford University. At USC, she teaches classes on ethnic literature and media.
"Race and Upward Mobility teaches us to look for big issues and ideas in seemingly small and ordinary places. A tour de force of intersectional critique and cultural studies analysis, innovative, imaginative, and an infinitely generative book." —George Lipsitz, author of How Racism Takes Place "Admirable for its clarity, Race and Upward Mobility should be immediate, essential reading for anyone interested in seriously engaging the class dynamics of African American and Chicana/o cultural production. Elda María Román not only provides bravura analyses of an impressive number of texts, but also creates a new lexicon—mortgaged status, gatekeepers, status panic, mediators—for talking about those liminal figures that trouble so many of our most important conversations about race and class." —John Alba Cutler, Northwestern University "Elda María Román's Race and Upward Mobility provides the reader with critical insight into the psychic and social toll of upward mobility on African American and Chicanx assimilated intellectuals with elegant analysis of literature and film from the 1940s through the present. Rather than cast assimilation as mere aspiration or betrayal, Román treats it with the critical attention it richly deserves. Román demonstrates its creative potential not only for pointed class or race critique, but also as a powerful positionality of mediation and negotiation for those intellectuals who move between hegemonic and minority communities. Without romanticism, and with the aid of postcolonial studies, women-of-color feminism, and critical race studies, Román lays bare the contours of the assimilated intellectual's consciousness in this deeply comparative analysis. Race and Upward Mobility provides an essential guide for Ethnic and American studies in 'post-racial' times." —María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, New York University "In clear, concise, and eloquent language, [Román] brings together the formal with the familiar to open a dialogue about the complicated nature of the social experience of mobility. If the sign of a good book is that it makes one think of the ways in which it can be used and extended to better understand the social world, then Race and Upward Mobility is outstanding." —Marisela Martinez-Cola, Humanity and Society
