On Activist Mothers and Gentrifying Lovers: From the Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement to the Model-Minority Myth in the Caribbean Romance Novel

In this article Martín Coloma draws on popular romance scholarship, and in particular the work of Pamela Regis. However, I'm not sure that the two works which are the focus of the article both fit within the definition of a popular romance novel which I'm using for this database since

At the end of Neruda on the Park, Luz openly acknowledges the conclusion of her journey and the pain she suffers on her path to adult identity. Taking “a new course” requires rejecting Hudson’s proposal.

I take this to mean that there is no happy ending for the central romantic relationship in this novel. With regards to Olga Dies Dreaming, the heroine appears to have two romantic relationships and I'm unsure how central the first one is, but

As Olga formalizes her breakup with Dick, she deepens her romantic and emotional relationship with former financial broker and Afro-American real-estate agent Matteo Jones. 

This seems more likely to fit the definition and, given the use of Regis and references to other works of romance scholarship, I decided to include this article.

Here's the abstract:

This article explores a new generation of Caribbean writers in the early twenty-first century who wrestle with self-representations, when the model-minority myth and strategies such as wealth accumulation and property acquisition became the only forms of resistance to urban displacement possible, once the equity structures that were hard won by the civil rights movement were dismantled. Specifically, I explore the affordance of the romance novel genre in Olga Dies Dreaming (2022) and Neruda on the Park (2022) to discuss this dilemma between confrontational struggle and assimilation. Ultimately, this article illustrates a shift in Latinx literature toward historically commercial genres that have become key cultural spaces to discuss pressing contemporary political themes.

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In this article, I analyze [Xochitl] González’s novel Olga Dies Dreaming and Neruda on the Park (2022) by Dominican writer Cleyvis Natera. Both authors were raised in New York City and hold MFAs in creative writing. Their work shows a particular concern for their rapidly gentrifying childhood neighborhoods, such as Washington Heights and Sunset Park, following a trend in contemporary Latinx literature. However, their novels share a generational situatedness in a globalized New York that looks back to the 1960s class-based visions of neighborhood empowerment inherited from the previous generation. In my analysis, I confront the literary representations of the model-minority myth with those of the civil rights movement in the contemporary Caribbean romance novel, since the model-minority myth specifically ignores and dismisses the activism deployed by Puerto Rican, African American, and other marginalized groups.

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I argue that these authors use these love stories to illustrate a form of political resistance to urban development and for-profit privatization, which dismisses the Caribbean communities in which these heroines were born and raised. Likewise, this article explores the potential of the romance novel genre to show how model-minority strategies can co-live with class-based visions of neighborhood empowerment to fight urban displacement. Moreover, it explores new sites of power and vulnerability in the context of urban displacement in New York City, one in which upwardly mobile Puerto Ricans experience increasing signs of assimilation.