Wow, my head is spinning! Thanks, everyone. I did some more research after getting a suggestion from an LJ friend, and I think I've settled on Across A Hundred Mountains by Reyna Grande.

So...I think this is my final list after some tweaking. I'm still going to show them a movie version of Hamlet and plan to show them the whole darned series of Slings & Arrows over the course of the year, so they won't be Shakespeare-deprived.

The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
Angels in America, Tony Kushner
Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller
Kindred, Octavia Butler
Across A Hundred Mountains, Reyna Grande
Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress, Susan Gilman

That gives them a mix of novels, plays, fiction, and non-fiction and yet all connects to identity in America. (The course's title is technically "The Fractured American Dream," so this still works.) I like!

Forgive the pedantry, but that should be "Garcia Marquez". You file his work under the Gs. And why not go with Love In The Time of Cholera if you're worried about One Hundred Years of Solitude?

Also recommended on your theme: The Yellow Wallpaper, Bartleby The Scrivener (both for your students with shorter attention spans, I suppose), The Awakening, Invisible Man, The Moviegoer, Housekeeping, Never Let Me Go, Jim Crace's The Gift Of Stones, or (and I'm sorta kidding with this) Lolita.

Edit - whoops! Late days and short dollars.

I'd prefer Butterflies, as there is the whole political clash layered/driving with the everything, and that is definitely a Thing for me, and it isn't quite as front and center in GG (theirs is more social conflict.) Before We Were Free exists in the same frame of events as Butterflies. (You may know that, I didn't and I was reading along and hit the mention of butterflies and was all OMG. And I had to go make myself all puffy and rednosed reading Butterflies again.)

Actually, we teach Lolita, The Awakening, and both short stories you mention already.

The only thing I'm still wavering on is whether to switch Kindred with The Handmaid's Tale (since I will already be discussing race through Bluest Eye and HT will allow us to focus on gender).

There was a story going around the University of Alabama's English department while I was a student that Atwood had written A Handmaid's Tale while serving as a visiting professor there. Since my rabbit eared-TV could only get the local Fox affiliate and several local-access all-preacher, all-the-time channels, I could believe it.

I think Chronicle of a Death Foretold is the most accessible of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's works, in my opinion. I read it in high school. I like Allende better though.

Well, you can certainly tie a lot of stuff in Handmaid's Tale to reality in many places all over the world that were happening both when she wrote it and today, which is always creepy and interesting...and depressing...

I'll go on record that I don't much care for Allende and love Garcia Marquez. I'm hit-or-miss on Fuentes. I like Borges, but find diminishing marginal returns on revisiting his work. Thus ends my knowledge of Latin American literature.

No, wait. I wrote that and realized that I've read something by Vargas Llosa , Octavio Paz, and Jorge Amado, too. But I'll be damned if I can remember much about them. Amado's book was about drunkards in Bahia, maybe? Hmmm.

I remember reading an interview with Atwood a few years after HT came out, in which she talked about going on the book tour on a few different continents. When she'd be in Europe/UK, readers would come up to her and say, "This'll never happen here." When she'd go to Canada, they'd say, "Do you think this could happen here?" When she'd go to the US, they'd come up to her and say, "When will this happen here?"

I read both Allende and Garcia Marquez when I was in high school and liked them both, but Garcia Marquez made much more of an impression on me. I didn't understand it all, of course (still don't!), but at the very least he's got a terrific sense of humor and I think kids relate to that.

I also had a teacher who was big into Raymond Carver so we read a lot of his short stories and I think they were great for High Schoolers because they're so tied to actual real life.