Latino literature of the United States is best known as a twentieth

     Latino literature of the United States is best known as a twentieth-century phenomenon; beginning in the 1960s, Chicano and Puerto Rican authors, then Cuban Americans and more recent Latino arrivals, have produced a substantial and impressive body of writing. While writers in Latin America were establishing what has been called the "boom" of Latin American narrative, their U.S. counterparts were forging a distinct tradition in poetry, drama, and fiction in their own voices. It is important, however, to recognize the long history of which this movement was a part. The spectacular flowering of U.S. Latino letters from the 1960s onward grew from seeds carefully and painstakingly sown by earlier writers. Their efforts often went unrecognized by non-Latino critics as well as by younger Latino authors, who were frequently unaware of their existence.

     A case in point is The Rebel by Leonor Villegas de Magnan. The work is based on the author's fascinating experiences as the founder of a nursing corps that attended to and aided the revolutionary forces in the Texas-Mexico border region during the Mexican Revolution. Frustrated in her attempts to have this memoir published in Spanish in the 1920s, Villegas de Magn6n later wrote a version in English in the 1940s, but it met a similar fate. Thanks to the efforts of contemporary scholars and the foresight of editors dedicated to promoting Latino literature, the book was finally published in 1994. It stands as another challenge to the stereotypical misconceptions regarding Mexican Americans, particularly women, of that era. Similarly, for decades, the poet William Carlos Williams, though recognized as a major American poet, was not included in the sphere of U.S. Latino culture due to the lack of appreciation of his profound Puerto Rican and Spanish American roots. Recent scholarly research, however, including Julio Marian's groundbreaking study The Spanish American Roots of William Carlos Williams (1994), has demonstrated that this important pioneer of modern American poetry is truly worthy of the distinction; Marzan has provided evidence that Williams's poetic sensibilities reflect a more hemispheric—New World application of the term "American."

1. Which of the following most accurately describes the two books that the passage mentions as having been published in 1994?

A. A prose narrative and a commentary on the works of a poet
B. A sociological study of a literary movement and a translation of a book of poetry
C. A biography of a poet and an anthology of translations of works of fiction
D. A historical treatment of a literary movement and a collection of poems
E. A work of fiction and a biography of a fiction writer


2. The passage most strongly supports the inference that Marzán’s views regarding Williams were

A. at odds with Williams’s own views regarding his work
B. intended to corroborate claims made by scholars in the 1940s but not widely discussed until the 1990s
C. controversial and widely rejected in the mid and late 1990s
D. a crucial factor in a line of scholarly inquiry
E. instrumental in securing publication for The Rebel


3. The passage most strongly suggests that The Rebel

A. is one of at least several long works of fiction by Villegas de Magnón
B. was published first in Spanish and then years later in an English-language version
C. contains descriptions of real-life events
D. was written in Mexico before 1920 and later published in the U.S.
E. was published in 1994 in a version that was heavily revised from the 1940s version


4. The highlighted word "similarly" is most likely intended to indicate that the author of the passage holds that both Williams and Villegas de Magnón

A. initially found the ethnic nature of their writings to be a barrier to publication
B. were important contributors to the development of U.S. Latino writing but were only belatedly recognized as such
C. were for some time misclassified by scholars who were unaware of these two writers’ Latino origins
D. became more widely recognized as a result of scholarly research by Marzán
E. created writings that were at least partly intended to challenge stereotypical misconceptions about Mexican Americans