Book Review On Latinidad: US Latino Literature and the Construction of Ethnicity Marta Caminero-Santangelo University of Florida Press, Gainesville, FL, 2007 296pp., $59.95 Cloth ISBN 978-0-8130-3083-8 The most obvious but also the most im- portant question for a field or a journal called Latino Studies is: how best to use the term Latino? Asking this question means considering the ways in which thinking in terms of such a category is both problematic and productive, as well as reflecting on exactly what the use of this label achieves. Marta Caminero-Santangelo’s book On Latinidad speaks to this issue in two fascinating, interlinked ways: first, she examines the identity ‘‘Latino/a’’ and the larger community that term is meant to describe, arguing as her point of departure that it exists only as an imaginary idea, and yet exerts enormous pressure on how people think about themselves and are thought of by others; and second, she considers the role that literature plays in constructing the content and boundaries of that identity. Books such as Suzanne Oboler’s Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives or Juan Flores’ From Bomba to Hip Hop have previously explored how categories like Latino/a are socially constructed but still able to create meaning; this is thus not a new subject, although Caminero-Santangelo does an especially elegant job of framing these issues. The book’s major contribution comes from the way that its literary perspective allows Caminero-Santangelo to attend to the role that storytelling and fiction-making play in how individual identities as well as national, transnational, ethnic and panethnic commu- nities are imagined. Caminero-Santangelo makes a compelling case for why reading literature matters, and what kinds of insights close readings of literary texts can offer the field of Latino/a studies. The introduction to On Latinidad pro- vides a thorough and nuanced exploration of the different models of ethnicity and the implications of each of these ways of thinking about identity. Certainly, any course that takes a panethnic approach to Latino/as would benefit from including such a critical and self-reflective exposition of what it means to talk about Latino/a literature or Latino/a performance, and an ‘‘Introduction to Ethnic Studies’’ course could use this essay as an excellent overview of how ethnicity is both imaginary and real. Caminero-Santan- gelo begins by taking on what she describes as some of the ways that essentialist con- structions of ethnicity remain ingrained in thinking about Latino/as, even while the category itself resists notions of similarity based on biology or blood: anyone who has heard well-meaning students (sometimes Anglo, sometimes Latino/a) mention in a class discussion ‘‘how important family is to Latinos’’ knows how rooted these modes of thought can be. At the same time, the introduction calls attention to how models that purport to criticize essentialism can fall back on language or a common historical experience as what defines Latinidad. Latino Studies 2008, 6, (486–489)  c 2008 Palgrave Macmillan 1476-3435/08 www.palgrave-journals.com/lst/