Bringing together for the first time scholars from Mexico, Costa Rica, Italy, Russia, France, Germany, Norway, Spain and the United States U.S. Latino Literatures & Cultures is the first truly transnational critical study on the literature and art of "Latin USA" or "Latino América", "the new nation being born on the last Independence Day of the Millennium" as Newsweek just recently put it. The essays - as well as the primary works by writers like Anaya, Rodríguez, Pineda and Ortiz-Taylor - collected in this volume present far-ranging perspectives & methodologies about this burgeoning field in American Literary and Cultural Studies in Europe, the Américas and worldwide and illustrate its unprecedented impact there. As they speak from various vantage points the individual contributors are concerned with the multiple roles that literary, music, visual, and other textual manifestations of culture play in the symbolic formation of Latino/a identities in different regional settings in the United States and how they can be assessed and studied from abroad.