Latina/o Studies

This critical essay describes and demonstrates the uses and unique contributions of performative writing as a form of inquiry into the materialities and mobilities of sociocultural communicative phenom- ena. Embracing an Anzaldu an approach, the author utilizes Mesoamerican Aztec and Chicanx history, iconography, and mythos to argue for an ontological reimaging of where research should begin and end. As a methodological intervention, this article chal- lenges traditional impulses regarding where knowledge generation occurs, which knowledges are valid, and who counts as a valuable knowledge producer. By shifting genres, breaking grammatical rules, and creatively constructing poetics and rhythm (flor y canto), this “flight of the imagination” focuses on what Chicana, Latina, and indi- genous scholars have termed “fleshing the spirit” or “spiriting the flesh.” By embracing the soul work and spirituality of writing, this piece offers an art-based approach to methodological inquiry that functions as a sharp critique of the White capitalist cisheteropatriar- chal structure of higher education that maintains status quo under- standings of knowledge. When rerouting our methodological impulses toward a critical and decolonial telos and embracing the soul and spirit of performative writing, I argue that our first move must be to make an ontological shift in how we see the world and our place in it—we must begin and end with “theories in the flesh.”

US Central Americans are destabilizing, reconceiving, and revitalizing the US Latina/o canon, and in doing so, they are forcing us to reconsider hegemonic ideas about Latinidad. The cultural production of Latinos/as of Central American descent has engaged in a critical denunciation of the violence that characterizes not only the history, but also the current situation, of the Central American isthmus. This essay examines the strategies used by US Central American poet William Archila and visual artist Alma Leiva to (re)construct the past and memorialize the victims of violence across Central America. I argue that Archila’s poetry collection The Art of Exile and Alma Leiva’s installation-photography series Celdas are examples of the “art of witness.” As such, their works play a key role in the reconstruction of Central American collective memory from the diaspora.

Our scholarship on aids must be located at the crossroads of art and politics, life and art, and life and death.-Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez, "Response to the Repre sen ta tion of aids" Activism is an engagement with the hauntings of history, a dialogue between the memories of the past and the imaginings of the future manifested through the acts of our own pre sent yearnings. aids has surrounded us with the living memory of familiar ghosts, faces that haunt our intimate realities of being infected/not yet infected, sick/not yet sick, alive but not yet dead. As we wait for passage to the other side, we plan our revenge and chart strategies of re sis tance to head off the silence. Identity politics, as an organ izing tool and po liti cal ideology, has historically had specific investments for marginal-ized groups in this country. Po liti cal groupings based on identity categories, however, have become highly contested sites, splintering ever further into more specialized and discrete social and po liti cal units, based on more precise yet still problematic categories of identification and concomitant modes of definition. As a lived practice, strategic essentialism (and the policing of identity) that often defines it has become a messy and contentious organizing strategy that ultimately reveals the limits and problematic assumptions of identity politics. Identity politics formed in re sis tance to state power thus remains implicated in the perpetuation of the narratives upon which it is founded, specifically the conflation of identity, ideology, and po liti cal practices and the lived ramifications of the constructed and problematic duality of insider/outsider. Yet for many, it becomes impossible to conceive of po-liti cal organ izing without explicative narratives or definitive social positions.

With a foreword by renowned novelist Rolando Hinojosa-Smith and comprised of personal essays about the impact of drug violence on life and culture along the U.S.-Mexico border, the anthology combines writings by residents of both countries. Mexican authors Liliana Blum, Lolita Bosch, and Diego Osorno write riveting, first-hand accounts about the clashes between the drug cartels and citizens' attempts to resist the criminals. American authors, including José Antonio Rodríguez and José Skinner, focus on how the corruption and bloodshed have affected the bi-national and bi-cultural existence of families and individuals. Maria Cristina Cigarroa shares her poignant memories of life in her grandparents’ home now abandoned in Nuevo Laredo.

In their introduction, editors Sarah Cortez and Sergio Troncoso write that this anthology was “born of a vision to bear witness to how this violence has shattered life on the border, to remember the past, but also to point to the possibilities of a better future.” The personal essays in this collection humanize the news stories and are a must-read for anyone interested in how this fragile way of life between two cultures, languages and countries has been undermined by the drug trade and the crime that accompanies it, with ramifications far beyond the border region.

In 1988, Michelle Fine explored the ways in which damaging patriarchal discourses about sexuality affect adolescent girls, and hinder their development of sexual desire, subjectivities, and responsibility. In this article, I emphasize the durability and pliability of those discourses three decades later. While they have endured, they shift depending on context and the intersections of girls' race, class, and gender identities. Calling on ethnographic research, I analyze the intersectional nuances in these sexual lessons for Latina girls in one (New) Latinx Diaspora town.

Background/Context: Previous research has focused on the importance of a social justice leadership approach to improve schools that serve marginalized students, but less attention has been focused on potential dilemmas associated with social justice leadership and the ways in which principals prioritize when dilemmas or challenges arise. Principals may be frequently confronting challenges and dilemmas when they lead for social justice, especially considering the pressures and unintended consequences of high-stakes accountability, dwindling school budgets, and increased teacher turnover rates. By examining the nature of social justice leadership in a high-poverty elementary school located along the U.S./Texas–Mexico border, this study explores how certain facets of social justice generate contradictions, tradeoffs, and dilemmas that have implications for marginalized student groups and communities.

In the spring of 2006, millions of Latinos across the country participated in the largest civil rights demonstrations in American history. In this timely and highly anticipated book, Chris Zepeda-Millán analyzes the background, course, and impacts of this unprecedented wave of protests, highlighting their unique local, national, and demographic dynamics. He finds that because of the particular ways the issue of immigrant illegality was racialized, federally proposed anti-immigrant legislation (H.R. 4437) helped transform Latinos' sense of latent group membership into the racial group consciousness that incited their engagement in large-scale collective action. Zepeda-Millán shows how nativist policy threats against disenfranchised undocumented immigrants can provoke a political backlash - on the streets and at the ballot box - from not only 'people without papers', but also naturalized and US-born citizens. Latino Mass Mobilization is an important intervention into contemporary debates regarding immigration policy, the immigrant rights movement, and racial politics in the United States.

This paper considers Sergio Troncoso's _From This Wicked Patch of Dust_ as a resistance novel. I argue that Troncoso relies on form, language, and indigenous myths and symbols to resist dominant American linguistic authority and popular imagination and to embrace his mestizo and Chicano heritage. Yet, he does not call for a complete return to old Mexico, which is itself plagued by problems of androcentrism. Instead, he calls for a Chicano identity that is defined by hybridity, ambiguity and fluidity.

This is an oral history of a Chicana who migrated as a child to the state of Washington. Her lived experience provides insight to the Chicana experience in the Northwest. The oral interview is also analyzed to provide additional insight and awareness of the gendered experience.

A vocabulary of Latina/o studies. Keywords for Latina/o Studies is a generative text that enhances the ongoing dialogue within a rapidly growing and changing field. The keywords included in this collection represent established and emergent terms, categories, and concepts that undergird Latina/o studies; they delineate the shifting contours of a field best thought of as an intellectual imaginary and experiential project of social and cultural identities within the U.S. academy. Bringing together sixty-three essays, from humanists, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, among others, each focused on a single term, the volume reveals the broad range of the field while also illuminating the tensions and contestations surrounding issues of language, politics, and histories of colonization, specific to this area of study. From "borderlands" to " migration," from "citizenship" to "mestizaje," this accessible volume will be informative for those who are new to Latina/o studies, providing them with a mapping of the current debates and a trajectory of the development of the field, as well as being a valuable resource for scholars to expand their knowledge and critical engagement with the dynamic transformations in the field.

"Showcasing an impressive breadth of concepts and theories, Keywords for Latina/o Studies is like no other book out there. Including accessible essays from contributors of unquestionable expertise and a solid engagement with the many delineations of the field, this book is an essential resource for students and scholars alike." —Isabel Molina-Guzmán, author of Dangerous Curves: Latina Bodies in the Media

National borders are often taken for granted as normal and necessary for a peaceful and orderly global civil society. Roberto D. Hernández here advances a provocative argument that borders—and border violence—are geospatial manifestations of long histories of racialized and gendered colonial violence.

In Coloniality of the U-S///Mexico Border, Hernández offers an exemplary case and lens for understanding what he terms the “epistemic and cartographic prison of modernity/coloniality.” He adopts “coloniality of power” as a central analytical category and framework to consider multiple forms of real and symbolic violence (territorial, corporeal, cultural, and epistemic) and analyzes the varied responses by diverse actors, including local residents, government officials, and cultural producers.

Based on more than twenty years of border activism in San Diego–Tijuana and El Paso–Ciudad Juárez, this book is an interdisciplinary examination that considers the 1984 McDonald’s massacre, Minutemen vigilantism, border urbanism, the ongoing murder of women in Ciudad Juárez, and anti-border music.

Hernández’s approach is at once historical, ethnographic, and theoretically driven, yet it is grounded in analyses and debates that cut across political theory, border studies, and cultural studies. The volume concludes with a theoretical discussion of the future of violence at—and because of—­national territorial borders, offering a call for epistemic and cartographic disobedience.

https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/coloniality-of-the-us-mexico-border

A new book from Frederick Luis "Fede" Aldama and William "Memo" Nericcio--two devious, cultural studies infected/inflected minds, born of Tejas and Califas, combine their imaginations for this novel book filled with dialogue, full color images, memory, cultural criticism, y mucho mas more!

Coming December 2019 from the Ohio State University Press--preorder here: http://bit.ly/browntv

The long, sordid, twisted tale of a book becoming a website becoming a gallery exhibition becoming a TV documentary series #mextasy #textmex #miraclesdohappen

For the final version of the essay--the pdf here on academia.edu is a corrected galley--go to Latinos and Narrative Media: Participation and Portrayal, edited by Frederick Aldama:  http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137366450

Please contact me for a copy of this chapter if one is not available through your library.

Disney and Pixar’s 2017 film Coco was the first full-length Disney animated film to incorporate codeswitching in its original and in several of the translations. Furthermore, it featured a fully Latinx cast of voice actors and consultants were contracted to ensure that the film was culturally accurate. Many praised the film for its inclusivity and for allowing US Latinx children to see themselves and their culture on the silver screen. However, whereas the diaspora and transnational culture of the US Latinx communities were visible through codeswitching in the English source that was preserved in the French (France) and Brazilian Portuguese translations, the Spanish-language translation removed all hints of transnationalism from the film. This paper explores the repercussions of erasing the codeswitching from the Spanish translation and describes some of the ways in which this alters the cultural, and perhaps political, messages that are transmitted to the distinct audiences.

Since the 1990s literary production in Spanglish, the so-called “hybrid” language that mixes English and Spanish, has been increasing. With increasing publication has come a demand for translations of these texts. Some authors readily choose to translate their work. Others feel that having to translate for the benefit of the English speaker while requiring no effort on the part of the English speaker to adapt perpetuates the delegitimization of Spanglish as a mode of expression. This hesitation to accommodate English speakers fails to consider that approximately 2/3 of them are non-native speakers. Consequently, the role that English can play in South-to-South translation is not negligible and “having” to translate because of the existing English hegemony in the US Latinx context is not the same as choosing to translate for any of a number of other motivating factors. Both are equally legitimate options, but this begs the question, is there a way to translate Spanglish so that English readers can access it without “accommodating” the English hegemony? In this paper I will explore nontranslation and intralingual translation as tools to expand the readership of these texts while not fully assimilating them into the traditional English publication norms

Looking at several related texts, the author explores how the testimonios (or testimonial writing) of queer Spanish speakers across the Americas attest to the social complexities embedded in alternative and dominant formulations of familial experiences. In this study, the author examines the writing of three writers who collect testimonios - Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, Norma Mogrovejo, and Mariana Romo-Carmona. Through discussing these writers' collections, this project considers how collections of queer testimonios from the early 2000s have the effect of decentering and reconfiguring the conventional family sphere in ways that benefit vulnerable populations. Instead of maintaining dominant familial paradigms, editors and participants involved in such collections (re)conceptualize familial experiences by breaking domestic silences around queer desires.

Made in L.A. offers a rare and poignant glimpse into this “other” California, where immigrants in many industries toil long hours for sub-minimum wages, fighting for an opportunity in a new country. As an engagement tool, it offers viewers a powerful springboard for dialogue about the challenges facing low-wage immigrant workers, the great hardships and benefits of organizing, the impact of individual consumer purchasing choices, and the complex effects of public policy related to immigration and labor.

FILM SYNOPSIS: Follow the remarkable journey of three Latina immigrants working in L.A.'s garment factories and their long battle to bring a major clothing retailer to the negotiating table.

​*Served as one of the guide producers.

Latino migration to the US South is not a new phenomenon. Claims of a "Nuevo New South " are thus products of the scholarly and popular imaginations rather than the historical record. Indeed, the claim of a rupture with the past has the potential to obscure the fact that contemporary relationships of race and class have their roots in the dilemmas that have confronted white and black Southerners since Emancipation. If the times and places of " the New South " meant something different to African Americans than it did to white observers and boosters, what have the times and places of the " Nuevo " South meant to Latino immigrants? Do those meanings, in fact, originate in a novel globalizing moment at the turn of the twenty-first century? And how can teasing out Latino immigrants' own narratives about the region help social scientists and historians find more appropriate ways of conceptualizing Latino immigration's meaning for the South as a whole?

This essay examines the uneasy relationship that Arturo Islas’s The Rain God has had with narratives of identity, focusing on how the representation of Felix’s sexuality makes him a problematic figure for certain strains of Chicana/o and queer studies. In other writings, Islas criticizes Quinto Sol, the chief publishing house of Chicano literature in the 1970s, for its emphasis on ethnonationalist novels that featured “positive images” of Chicanos, and he suggests that Quinto Sol rejected The Rain God for failing to conform to this mold. I speculate that the simple fact that the novel includes homosexual characters would have been enough for it to be deemed too negative in that era. I argue that Islas’s representations of homosexuality continue to disrupt notions of identity, but now the disjuncture is not that homosexuals are represented but that they are incoherent with the closet paradigm that is predominant in significant strains of queer studies. Drawing on recent scholarship that warns against a fixation on identity as the grounding principle for sexual experience and politics, I read Felix as a character whose transgressive expressions of homosexuality are shaped by a tangled web of power dynamics that are associated with his feelings of ethnic and masculine insecurity. Ultimately, I show that the very qualities that make Felix discomfiting to readers and resistant to narratives of identity are generative points of analysis for Chicano literary studies.

The article takes the debates surrounding the 'politics of autonomy' in Latin America as its point of departure and investigates the transformations of the political notion of autonomy against the background of developments that have characterized the so-called long decade of the new 'progressive governments' in the region. Moving beyond the alternative between 'conflict' and 'cooptation' that has shaped academic and political debates on the topic, the authors analyze the relations between 'social movements' and 'progressive governments' from the angle of the transformations of capitalism in Latin America and of emerging new forms of activism rooted within everyday life (particularly within 'popular economies''). The article critically discusses such notions as neoliberal-ism and neo-extractivism in order to build an analytical framework within which to reconstruct the history of Latin American social movements since the early 2000s and to test the productivity and the limits of the very notion of 'social movement' in the present political conjuncture.

This article centers on the institutional barriers Latinas face in their professional development. An autoethnographic approach is employed to explore common themes faced by Latinas that hinder their success via the lens of culture conflict theory. This study specifically focus on issues related to interactions with students, margin-alization, and institutional racism. A set of individual and institutional-level recommendations that may serve to alleviate the challenges facing Latinas, and faculty of color in general, are discussed.

This booklet describes the history, scholarship, and accomplishments of Latina and Latino students, professors, and student groups at Southern Methodist University from the 1910s-2000s. The social, cultural, and political events and trends that impacted their growth and development are documented, including images and profiles.

Co-authored with Aaron E. Sánchez and Nyddia Hannah.

This short article provides a brief historical overview of some of the people and events that led to the historic Mendez et al. v. Westminster School District of Orange County et al. (1947) decision. This article can be found in: 50 Events that Shaped Latino History: An Encyclopedia of the American Mosaic, vol. 1, edited by Lilia Fernandez (Greenwood Press, March 2018).

This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the contemporary Latina/o Muslim population in the U.S., focusing specifically on the factors that act as pathways to conversion and elements of community cohesion. To develop the paper, and give the reader a keen insight into the Latina/o Muslim community in the U.S., this paper will explicate its methodological approach, provide a brief review of previous literature, offer a glimpse at the demographics of the Latina/o Muslim community in the U.S., and offer a typologically codified and analyzed layout of the prime pathways Latina/o Muslims take in converting to Islam. Connecting this research to broader currents in global religion will reveal that studying Latina/o Muslims offers opportunities for more paradigmatic, and universal, understandings of religion and transnational flows of cultures, ideas, and beliefs in a globalized world. Prior to concluding the paper, some avenues for further research on the topic are presented. This study is a foundational piece for mapping contemporary Latina/o religion and the contours of the Muslim community in the U.S. – especially their minority manifestations – and serves as a supplementary entry into the expanding collection of research on transnational religious phenomena in our current, globalized, and pluralistic context.

Senator Marco Rubio’s (R-FL) presidential prospects have been the subject of media speculation from the moment of his election to the Senate in 2010, and these discussions only intensified when Rubio was considered a potential candidate for vice-president in the 2012 election and then was an actual candidate in 2016. This essay analyzes these discourses—including comparisons between Rubio and Obama, discussion about Rubio’s appeal to Hispanic/Latinx voters, and his potential to be the first Hispanic/Latinx vice-president or president—and the competing and sometimes problematic ways that they figure the representational power of the presidency, ethnic political candidates, and Latinidad and Latinx communities. The study helps to grasp shifts in racial presidentialities in the post-Obama era and to discern some of the ways that Latinidad is deployed in political and electoral discourses.

Researchers across disciplines have analyzed the ethnoracial classification of Latinxs in the US census, as well as the ideological, political, and material underpinnings and effects of such classification. In this article, I advance our understanding of the census’ reproduction of racial identities and racial discourse in two ways. First, I demonstrate that sociolinguistic theory and methods can shed new light on census classification in three distinct areas: (1) the categories and classifications themselves, (2) the negotiation of ethnoracial classification during census interviews, and (3) the language in which censuses are conducted. Second, I demonstrate that census-taking does not consist simply of recording preexisting ethnoracial identities, or of disseminating official discourses from interviewers to respondents. Instead, census interviews involve the intersubjective construction and production of ethnoracial identities, as interviewers and respondents negotiate the meaning of the categories provided and their places within them.

This chapter is a conceptual essay meant to introduce readers to and stimulate discussion about the racialization of Latinxs. The author aims to speak to readers who may question whether or how Latinxs form a racial category. Asserting Latinx is a racial group, the author argues that Latinxs’ racialization is founded on – even bounded by – the Spanish language and Spanish/English bilingualism, even if these are implied and even though she later argues for this definition should be reconceptualized. She problematizes defining Latinidad’s racial boundaries with the constructs of language/bilingualism because this definition erases Spanish colonialism from the racialization of Latinidad. She also touches on the issue of who is included as Latinx. The author concludes by inviting scholars of race and education, Latinx education, and bilingual education to conceptualize Latinxs as a racial group that is defined by multiple colonialisms, including contemporary U.S. imperialism.