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When willie met gatsby: The critical implications of Ernesto Quiñonez's bodega dreams

2003; Routledge; Volume: 14; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10436920306616

1545-5866

June Dwyer,

Latin American and Latino Studies

I first heard about Ernesto Quinonez's Bodega Dreams through a stu- dent, an interesting reversal of the entrenched academic hierarchy wherein we professors are the ones who tell our students about good literature. This reversal is also very much in keeping with what interests me in this article, for my subject is the postmodern appro- priation by Ernesto Quinonez of a modernist classic—F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. And with this appropriation comes the questioning—perhaps even the disabling—of certain modernist hier- archies. The student who recommended Bodega Dreams did not say, ''This book reminds me of The Great Gatsby''; indeed, he probably had not read Gatsby since high school. But he loved the book and wanted to share it. To him it was a good book about a Latino American dreamer. But to anyone who has recently read Fitzgerald's classic, there is no mistaking the fact that Ernesto Quinonez is consciously rethinking it. In this article I would like to analyze Bodega Dreams as a commentary on the transformation of the American dream in postmodern America and, at the same time, to theorize Quinonez's position as a con- temporary Latino writer confronting the American literary canon. To refresh the memories of those who have not read Gatsby for a while, it is in many ways a classic American modernist text. 1 The protagonist, Jay Gatsby, in aspiring to move from one class to another, is at home in neither. Isolated, but following his own moral compass, he seeks to win success and status in the America of the 1920s, embodied in the person of the rich and beautiful Daisy Buchanan. Having been rebuffed by her family when he is a young army officer because of his lack of money, he makes a huge fortune through bootlegging and then buys a showy mansion in West Egg, across the