Introduction

Abstract

The stellar novels of Junot Díaz and Sandra Cisneros, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Caramelo, respectively, emerge in an age when Latino ethnicity is often marketed as an exotic commodity. As a result, a paratextual network of the performance of latinidad overlays the writers and their cultural creation. Both novelists interact with this expectation inside and outside the books, inviting readers to pass through multiple paratextual portals as they engage with the texts. Gérard Genette’s analysis of paratexts—the framing elements inside and outside literary texts that shape the reading process—is expanded in this study with a broader conceptualization for the digital age. The interplay of populist and hegemonic multiculturalism undergirds many of the paratextual networks of the two novels.