Ana Patricia Rodríguez is Assistant Professor of U.S. Latino/a Literature in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Maryland, College Park. She received a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1998. Her articles include “Refugees of the South: Central Americans in the U.S. Latino Imaginary” in American Literature 73.2 (June 2001); “Encrucijadas: Rubén Blades at the Transnational Crossroads” in Latino/a Popular Culture, ed. Michelle Habell-Pallan and Mary Romero (NYU Press, 2001); “Wasted Opportunities: Conflictive Peacetime Narratives of Central America” in The Globalization of U.S.-Latin American Relations: Democracy, Intervention, and Human Rights, ed. Virginia M. Bouvier (Praeger, 2002); “Latinos: An Overview” and “Central American and Caribbean Immigrants” in the Encyclopedia of American Studies (2001). She is completing a book titled Dividing the Isthmus: Central American Cultural Politics and Literatures, which examines metaphors of economic, symbolic, and human excess across various Central American isthmian and diasporic texts. Her research focuses on U.S. Latino transnational cultures. She was born in El Salvador and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area.