Latinidad at the Crossroads: Insights into Latinx Identity in the Twenty-First Century 9789004460362, 9789004460430

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Latinidad at the Crossroads

Critical Approaches to Ethnic American Literature General Editors Jesús Benito Sánchez (Universidad de Valladolid) Ana María Manzanas (Universidad de Salamanca) Editorial Board Babs Boter (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) Ewa Antoszek (Maria Curie-​Sklodowska University) Mary Pat Brady (Cornell University) Isabel Caldeira (University of Coimbra) Nathalie Cochoy (Université Toulouse) Cristina Garrigós (National University of Distance Education) Markus Heide (Uppsala University) Dalia Kandiyoti (The City University of New York) Paul Lauter (Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut) Shirley Lim (University of California, Santa Barbara) Judith Madera (Wake Forest University) Angel Mateos (University of Castilla-​La Mancha) José David Saldivar (Stanford University) Silvia Schultermandl (University of Graz) Assistant Editors Amanda Gerke (Universidad de Salamanca) Paula Barba Guerrero (Universidad de Salamanca) Mónica Fernández (Universidad de Valladolid)

volume 8

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/​aeal

Latinidad at the Crossroads Insights into Latinx Identity in the Twenty-​First Century

Edited by

Amanda Ellen Gerke Luisa María González Rodríguez

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: © Carlos Fortes García. Printed with permission of the author. The Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data is available online at http://​catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://​lccn.loc.gov/2021007385​

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/​brill-​typeface. issn 1871-​6 067 isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​4 6036-​2 (hardback) isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​4 6043-​0 (e-​book) Copyright 2021 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-​use and/​or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill nv via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-​free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Amanda dedicates this book to Patrick Luisa dedicates this book to Carlos, Irene and Daniel

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Contents Acknowledgments ix Notes on Contributors x Puerto Rican Discovery #3: Not Neither xii Introduction Revisiting Latinidad in the 21st Century 1 Amanda Ellen Gerke and Luisa María González Rodríguez Seismic Shifts in Chicano/​a Literature Leading into the Twenty-​First Century Are Latinos/​as Now Coasting Or Still Breaking New Ground? 24 Francisco A. Lomelí Digging through the Past to Reconcile Race and Latinx Identity in Dominican-​American Women’s Memoirs 46 Luisa María González Rodríguez Dominicans and the Political Realm of Latinidad in New York City 66 Fernando Aquino Identity, De-​colonization and Cosmopolitanism in (Afro)Latina Artists’ Spoken Word Performances 84 Esther Álvarez López Encarnaciones Cubanas Elías Miguel Muñoz and Queering of the Latina/​o Canon 108 Ylce Irizarry Revisiting La Frontera Consuelo Jiménez Underwood and Ana Teresa Fernández 135 Ewa Antoszek Borders and Immigration Revisiting Canonical Chicano Literature under Trump’s Regime 152 José Antonio Gurpegui

viii Contents  Conclusions 171 Amanda Ellen Gerke and Luisa María González Rodríguez  Index 179

Acknowledgments This book was made possible by many individuals, groups, and organizations, to whom we owe our deepest thanks. First and foremost, we would like to thank the series editors, Ana María Manzanas Calvo and Jesús Benito Sánchez. Their time, patience, editing, advice and support have (always) been invaluable. We are also deeply grateful for their friendship, mentorship, and encouragement in all of our endeavors. We also wish to thank all of the contributors for their patience and enthusiasm for a project that will offer new insights into the notion of latinidad. We also thank Paula Barba for her assistance in this publication as well as Gwyn Fox, who is a master copy-​editor and has a unique talent of creating a unified voice among many authors. Amanda would like to thank Clara Keating and Isabel Caldeira at the University of Coimbra for allowing space, time, and encouragement to write in peace, and for their warm welcome to beautiful Portugal. She would also like to thank Kristie Knockleby who accompanied her to Coimbra and took care of her infant twins while she was writing and editing. She also thanks her three children, Laszlo, Gabriel, and Nicolás who bring her joy, hope, and the deepest love. Without them, her life would not be complete. And most importantly, she would also like to thank her husband, Patrick, who has always supported her personally and in her career. He sacrifices so much for her and for their family, and her dreams and success would not be possible without his love and support. Luisa would like to give special recognition to Viorica Patea, a dearest friend and colleague, for her continuous support and intellectual guidance throughout her academic journey. She would also like to thank her husband, Carlos, and her children, Irene and Daniel, for their patience, support and unconditional love. This work has been supported by the Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation through the research project “Critical History of Ethnic American Literature: An Intercultural Approach” Ref. PID2019-​108754GB-​ 100, and the Erasmus+ project “Hospitality in European Film” Ref. No. 2017-​1-​ES01-​KA203-​038181.

Notes on Contributors Esther Álvarez López Ph.D. (1989), is Associate Professor in American Literature at the University of Oviedo (Spain). She has published on ethnic literatures, gender and intersectionality, including Diasporic Women’s Writing of the Black Atlantic. (En) Gendering Literature and Performance (co-​editor, Routledge, 2015). Ewa Antoszek Ph.D. (2010), is Assistant Professor at Maria-​Curie Skłodowska University (Poland). Her current research examines Latinx authors and artists (re)writing the border. She is the author of Out of the Margins: Identity Formation in Contemporary Chicana Writings (Peter Lang, 2012). Fernando Aquino is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the cuny Graduate Center. He teaches courses on American Government, The Immigrant Experience and Civil Rights at Lehman College, cuny. His publications include “Immigrants and Transnational Citizenship” (2017) in Metro politics.eu. Amanda Ellen Gerke Ph.D. (2016), is Assistant Professor at the University of Salamanca. She has published articles, chapters and edited volumes on on discourse analysis, sociolinguistic approaches to discourse and literature, semiotic theory, and cultural studies, including The Poetics and Politics of Hospitality (Brill, 2020). Luisa María González Rodríguez Ph.D. (2005) is Associate Professor at the University of Salamanca, where she combines research on literature and linguistics. She has published on the politics and aesthetics of postmodern short fiction and on ethnic literatures, including the chapter “Latino Immigrants at the Threshold: A Sociolinguistic Approach to Hospitality in US Barriocentric Narratives” (Brill, 2020). José Antonio Gurpegui Ph.D. (1958), Universidad de Alcalá (Spain), is a Professor of American Studies. He was Visiting Scholar at Harvard University and is the President of HispaUSA (Association for the Dialogue and Study of Hispanics Cultures in the United States).

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Ylce Irizarry Ph.D., is the author of Chicana/​o and Latina/​o Fiction: The New Memory of Latinidad (2016), which won awards from naccs (2018) and mla (2017). Her work appears in Antípodas, centro, Chiricú, Comparative American Studies, Contemporary Literature, and Symbolism. Francisco A. Lomelí Ph.D. (1978), is Professor Emeritus at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He has published various books, monographs, articles, and chapters, on Chicano/​a and Latin American literatures, and has produced numerous reference books, anthologies and special volumes.

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Puerto Rican Discovery #3: Not Neither Sandra María Esteves Being Puertorriqueña-​Dominicana1 Borinqueña-​Quisqueyana Taino-​Africana Born in the Bronx Not really jíbara Not really hablando bien But yet, not gringa either Pero ni portorra Pero sí, portorra too Pero ni qué what am I? Y qué soy? Pero con what voice do my lips move? Rhythms of rosa wood feet dancing bomba Not even here. But here. Y conga Yet not being. Pero soy And not really. Y somos Y como somos-​bueno, Eso sí es algo lindo. Algo muy lindo. We defy translation Ni tengo nombre. Nameless We are a whole culture once removed Lolita alive for twenty-​five years Ni soy, pero soy Puertorriqueña cómo ella Giving blood to the independent star Daily transfusions into the river of la sangre viva. 1 © 1984 Sandra María Esteves from Tropical Rain: A Bilingual Downpour, New York: African Caribbean Poetry Theater. Reprinted with permission from the author.

Introduction

Revisiting Latinidad in the 21st Century Amanda Ellen Gerke and Luisa María González Rodríguez In 2018, nbc news published an article titled “A Chicano Renaissance? A New Mexican-​American generation embraces the term” by Dennis Romero that centers on those young, 20-​something Chicanos/​as1 and Latinos/​as in the U.S. pushing for a resurgence of Chicano/​a identity, a term once used by older generations, but that has found new life amongst the young. According to Romero, the “recharged movement is a metaphorical safe space for young Mexican-​Americans and Latinos/​as who feel battered not only by President Donald Trump’s policies and discourse regarding south-​of-​the-​border immigrants, but also by a far right emboldened by his rhetoric” (2018). The article also chronicles the history of the term “Chicano” and the “Chicano Movement,” tracing its roots from its inception in the 1960s as a tool and identity marker among activists. The use hit a low point in the 80s and 90s when “many people with Mexican roots adopted the terms Hispanic and Latino” (Romero, 2018). However, recently, the attitude towards homogeneous affiliation markers such as Hispanic and Latino, now applied as an assimilation strategy, has been upturned in an attempt to delineate origin nationalities. Now we have what William A. Nericcio, director of the Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences program at San Diego State University, has termed “neo-​Chicanismo” which recreates the foundational activism of the original term. Referring to Chicano fashion and what it represents, one of those interviewed stated “you can’t just wear Chicanismo on your sleeve. It comes with a call to intellectual arms” (Romero, 2018). Nowadays, Chicanismo is mostly about ethnic pride, cultural expression and the defense of immigrants. Embracing freedom and equality and moving beyond Mexican descent, this movement echoes Ed Morales’ search for a more encompassing concept that reflects the many ways

1 The contributors to this volume attempt to use inclusive terminology when appropriate, including Latino/​a, Latinos/​as, Chicano/​a, Chicanos/​as and Latinx. Generally, the inclusive form is used, when referring to identities. However, when referring to a movement, canon, or literature, it will stand alone as an adjective (i.e. Latino literature). As a variety of the labels are used by Latinas/​os themselves across different contexts to enact their identities, the editors of the volume have decided to avoid imposing any particular label to contributors in order to show the different ways of being Latina/​o within the U.S.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004460430_002

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in which latinness is expressed. By using the term Latinx, Morales attempts “like the mostly young folks that are embracing this label, to engage with several threads of thinking about identity and naming” (2018a, p. 3). In recognizing the label’s “elasticity and ability to evade categorization” (p. 3), the cultural narrative allows the past and present movers of the term to be able to take on a multiplicity of identities that we claim transcends time, space, borders and involves a revisiting of origin stories and narratives. The abovementioned article highlights the move beyond “Chicanos” to include other Latinos/​as, thus collapsing differences in the upsurge of activism against the current political climate and alt-​right groups in the U.S. The call for action is seen across all the sub-​groups of the Latino community. The origin story of Chicanismo along with the breakdown (or breakup) of the movement to include a more homogeneous label (Hispanic and Latino/​a), and the subsequent upsurge that delineated the desire of community members to re-establish national origins, can be seen not only in public demonstrations, but also in literature, arts, media, and politics. As Ed Morales contends in his book Latinx. The New Force in American Politics and Culture (2018a), “a new kind of nationalism, crafted around identifications with racial difference,” has “helped create hybrid cultural and political practices that once tried to strip away the racism of Latin American mestizaje” (p. 14). Other scholars, such as Claudia Milian (2019), are also interested in theorizing the “epistemological workings” and “modes of inquiry” that underlie and inform Latinx preoccupations and Latinx studies for the twentieth century. These recent identitarian movements within the Latino community, which oscillate between collective and country-​of-​origin labeling, clearly evince the fickle nature of identity construction, and the subsequent influential social and political factors that come into play in shaping identity constructs. It seems that latinidad is, and is not, a collective rubric; it is both inclusive and exclusive, delineating and distorting, yet its past and current trends suggest deeper dimensions. As Francisco A. Lomelí states in this volume, latinidad is about self-​representation against efforts from exclusive politics and social actions that marginalize Latinos/​as. Being himself a member of this community, he claims that “[w]‌e intimated something more earth-​shattering through self-​definition […] with daring descriptions and portrayals of a poetics that defiantly contested the colonizing status quo” (p. 27). Identity construction is a coming “to grips with a past of marginalization while seeking to reconcile [a] true identity along with the maneuver to redress […] disenfranchisement as well as the politics of exclusion” (p. 27). The movement and identity markers originated in, and continue to be, a fight against others that attempt to define the group from the assumed dominance of an outsider’s perspective of

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ethnicity. As Ana María Manzanas aptly points out, “[t]he need for ethnicity in order to define the self contrastively takes us back to its artificialness as a social construct which varies from one society to another, and which changes with time and place” (1999, p. 29). It is frequently the dominant groups which determine the categorization of minority groups, without taking into consideration their self-​prescribed identity and auto-​representation. Assigning an identity from the out-​group may be simple and rely on sterotypes as well as motives of dominance that easily keep others in a prescribed position. However, when the alleged minority refutes that identity, and assumes the right to describe themselves, identity becomes complex and problematic. The authors’ intention in this volume is to focus on identity conflict, from outside and within, and on the various processes of identity-​construction and reconstruction. Contemporary sociologists and sociolinguists are well aware that identities are multifaceted and in constant flux; they are both assigned and self-​ determined. In their description of the ever-​changing realities of those same processes, Blommaert and Verschueren (1992) describe the dogma that, although controversial, seeps into today’s national ideologies: “the ideal model of society is mono-​lingual, mono-​ethnic, mono-​religious, mono-​ideological. Nationalism, interpreted as the struggle to keep groups ‘pure’ and homogeneous as possible, is considered to be a positive attitude within the dogma of homogeneism” (p. 362). The Latino communities are breaking away from this nationalistic view to assert their own position, both from below and from above. In contrast to these mono-​societies, communities of the in-​between, or what Caglar describes as “hyphenated identities,” or cultures in contact, highlight the common but inadequate assumption that culture and identity are “self-​contained” (1997, pp. 169, 362). Within this framework, this volume encompasses an interdisciplinary perspective on the complex range of latinidades that confronts stereotypical connotations, and simultaneously advocates a more flexible (re)definition that may overcome static collective representations of identity, ethnicity and belonging. Concepts of latinidad are multiple and complex, and represent that sociological phenomenon of identity-​construction which is affected by outside influences but, at the same time, is a powerful linguistic, cultural and ideological contributor to that society. This collection draws from the centrifugal aspirations of many Latinos/​as to move away from the paralyzing and homogeneous portrayal of diverse cultural typologies which emerged from a U.S.–​ centric gaze on latinidad towards a more dynamic exploration of how Latinos/​ as are remapping latinidad “out of a dynamic negotiation of a blurred otherness from within, rooted in a daily socio-​cultural triangulation, i.e. between U.S. cultural standards, Latino panethnicity, and their own Latin American

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Heritage” (Barbot, 2012). The essays explore latinidad through its past, present and future connotations, and its position in twenty-​first century America. The contributors assume the premise that Latino/​a writers, artists, and community members feel the necessity to challenge stereotypes imposed by the Anglo-​dominant society and to provide a heterogeneous perspective of their latinidad. Pan-​ethnicity, although a political neologism, fulfills both the sociological need to deconstruct applied labels, and the individual need and right to affiliate with and reject similarities or differences. The chapters treat latinidad as versatile and fluctuating and highlight its dependence on the new emerging communities. The new latinidad of the twenty-​first century is rooted in spatial and temporal concepts of culture that bring forth an exponential movement in various directions, which, though apparently chaotic, forms a cohesive identity. The contributors present these themes through a kaleidoscope of approaches from a wide array of academic backgrounds including Latino/​a and Chicano studies, English studies, Linguistics, Political Science, and Comparative Literature. 1

(Re)Mapping Latinidad

Although we attempt to build a framework to better understand reworkings of the notion of latinidad, the editors and contributors also recognize its problematic and multifaceted components. If we agree that representations inform social consciousness on a broad level, how are these representations formed? Who decides who forms the in-​group and who is the Other? At what point does group identity change, and is that change individual or collective? How is latinidad defined and redefined in our current social, linguistic, and political landscape? Where does it start and end? How can one (auto)conceptualize the trajectory of latinidad, from its origins until now, and how do those within reconcile how they are characterized from outside? Sandra María Esteves’ poem “Puerto Rican Discovery #3: Not Neither” (1984), featured as an epigraph to this collection, addresses many of the issues related to racial and ethnic identity, broken memory, history, cultural expressions and transnational bonds that are widely present in the Latino sociopolitical agenda of the twenty-​first century. As a Puerto Rican-​Dominican born and raised in the Bronx, and an outstanding figure in the Nuyorican poetry movement, Esteves uses her poetry to shed light into the polyhedric Latino/​a experience in New York and describe the in-​between spaces this group navigates. The poem epitomizes Latino/​a identity as a mixture of racial and ethnic heritages articulated around a common culture, history, politics, language and music. As she interrogates herself about

Introduction

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her identity, “pero ni qué what am I? Y qué soy?,” Esteves contests a monolithic view of her identity, presenting herself as an enriching mosaic of contradictions that pull her in different directions. She emphasizes not only her ancestors’ national origin and ethnicity, by identifying herself as “Puertorriqueña-​ Dominicana/​Borinqueña-​Quisqueyana” and acknowledging her Taino and jíbaro roots, but she also integrates racial identification when she chooses to claim her Afro-​latinidad as a crucial dimension of her self-​representation. By refusing to choose which side of the hyphen she identifies with, she embraces a transnational, hybrid identity that challenges the traditional Latino/​a hyphenated self. The poem exhibits a perfect example of code-​switching, which vividly visualizes the author’s refusal to make choices between two languages crucial in shaping her identity. In fact, the poem is an invitation to consider Latino/​a identity in much more open terms, and to understand that latinidad is made up of multiple superposed layers and of subtle threads connecting different stories and experiences, both individual and collective. Thus, in line with Esteves’ poem, this volume presents polychromatic perspectives to Latino/​a identities, with the intention of unveiling the variety, subtleties and latent contradictions underlying the embracing and homogenizing concept of latinidad. This poem is at the same time an individual and collective search for identity since it is not only a personal story of self-​exploration, but an inquiry into the complex categories of identity and community of trans-​diasporic Latinos/​ as. While the first stanza is more self-​centered, the second is more focused on the collective identity of Puerto Ricans in the U.S. as it addresses issues related to Puerto Rico’s ambiguous political status, to their fragmented memory, and to the necessity of re-establishing the bonds with their homeland. As Esteves claims, “[w]‌e are a whole culture once removed,” which underlines the problematics of breaking the collective cultural continuity with ancestral homelands. The notion of broken memory, formulated by Arcadio Díez-​Quiñones in 1993, is crucial in present-​day Latino/​a preoccupations since young generations are becoming perfectly aware that the discontinuity in memory has resulted in the mutilation of collective consciousness and self-​identification. Steering the flow of identity and belonging from the self to the collective becomes an alliance-​building strategy by which Latinos/​as can bind past history to memory. By perceiving memory as a subversive tool to unveil their suppressed history and identity, these young Latinas/​os are trying to build a sense of collective continuity with the Latina/​o community both within the U.S. and their ancestors’ home countries. We include here several chapters that articulate Latinas/​os’ desire for self-​definition through collective memory and community-​building. As Esther Álvarez López (this volume) aptly points out, self-​affirmation, collective memory and community are important

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constituents of “current definitions of latinidad and are likewise embedded in Latina/​o discourses and artistic practices today” (p. 85). Luisa María González Rodríguez (Chapter Three) also explores the function of memory to build a sense of collective ethnic community and restore broken links with their historical and ethno-​racial roots in order to forge their individualized sense of belonging. The importance of cultural traditions and music as crucial identity markers is also emphasized by Sandra María Esteves in the line “Rhythms of rosa wood feet dancing bomba,” for bomba is a dance and musical style whose origins are deeply rooted in the history of Puerto Rico and the result of the cultural blend of Spanish, African and Taino elements. Esteves mentions “bomba” and conga, a drum used in Afro-​Cuban music that also gives its name to a music genre, in a clear desire to bring the notion of blackness into the debate on latinidad. As new generations of Afro-​Latinos/​as, following the path initiated by writers such as Piri Thomas in Down These Mean Streets (1967) or scholars like Láo-​Montes (2005), are responding to the need to give visibility to Latinos/​as of African descent, they are also challenging the notion of latinidad as a monolithic construct. These ideas are further developed in Chapter Three, where Luisa María González explores the works of two Afro-​Dominican writers who represent different ways of negotiating their latinidad by portraying the tensions inherent in the binary opposition between Latinos/​as and Blacks and bringing into focus their need to feel comfortable on both sides of their Black and Latino/​a identity. Afro-​Latina artists, as Esther Álvarez López contends in her chapter, are also contributing to this debate by using their aesthetic practices to counteract invisibility, discrimination and U.S. mainstream discourses. When Esteves in her poem claims that “[w]‌e defy translation,” she is clearly challenging homogenizing labels that hide a transnational, multicultural and mixed-​race identity. Instead, a “nameless” mestizo identity is suggested, one that is capable of dealing with internal contradictions while allowing trans-​ racial border-​crossings which evince not only the different processes through which Mexicans, Cubans, Dominicans and other Latinos/​as have become individual ethnic communities within the U.S., but also how they “have come to articulate a collective identity […] within the insecure space of the diaspora” (Torres-​Sailant, 2008, p. 48). There is a crucial oscillation between sameness and difference in today’s discourse for Latinos/​as who want to explore the inherent traits of their latinness and their individuality not only as members of a specific ethnic community but also through categories such as race and gender. According to Laó-​Montes, “latinidad is shaped and defined by racial discourses, processes of racialization, and racisms” (2001, p. 9) since the concept

Introduction

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of la raza latina not only “articulates this racial discourse of latinidad through different means,” but also “signifies community and brings to light national and transnational constructions of latinidad” (p. 10). This means that the multiracial Latino aggregate cannot be understood without exploring the connections between the history and culture of their home countries and the personal and collective experiences of Latinas/​os in the United States. In the Spanish Caribbean colonies interracial marriage was approved in 1514, when Fernando ii, the Catholic monarch, issued a charter that laid the foundation for mestizaje and cultural symbiosis in the New World. However, while mixed-​ race culture became widely accepted in Latin America, due to a long history of hybridization, in the United States the debate on hybridity and mestizaje has been suppressed or relegated to the margins. Starting in the 1970s, Nuyorican and other Black Puerto Rican poets, such as Sandra María Esteves and Piri Thomas, vindicated their blackness as an inherent part of their Puerto Rican identity. Following their path, many younger Afro-​Latinos are starting to explore what it means to be black and to confront discrimination by U.S. society as well as by other Latinas/​os. They are struggling to incorporate the racial dimension into the Latino experience since they do not fully identify with Afro-​Americans or non-​Black Latinas/​ os. Immersed as they are in a society where African American and Latino/​a cultures are presumed to be mutually exclusive, Afro-​Latinas/​os usually find themselves forced to choose identification with one of the groups and, therefore, are denied visibility and voice as multiracial and multicultural individuals. Thus, new generations of Afro-​Latinos/​as have decided to investigate their cross-​cultural identity by tracing back the history of Afro-​latinidad as rooted in multiracial origins of African, Indigenous and Spanish descent. Collaborations between Afro-​Latinas/​os and Afro-​Americans in the field of culture, music and arts have been very fruitful, which attests to their strong awareness of a common ancestry, history and culture. Esther Álvarez López in Chapter Five explores how Latina spoken word poets use their aesthetic practices to forge “their complex ethnic identities –​the product of transnational, transcultural encounters at the same time that they have integrated other categories of identity, such as Afro-​latinidades, that have oftentimes been invisibilized, when not completely ignored, even by the Latino community” (p. 103). The Afro-​Latina/​ o label indeed reminds us of the importance of race and ethnicity in the Latina community and of the need to acknowledge “the existence of a population whose very cultural heritage is both African and Latin American in an organic way” (Jiménez & Flores, 2010, p. 13). If racial components figure prominently in redefining latinidad, the concept cannot be completely understood without explicit reference to the role of

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women and queer Latinx authors and critics since they have fought to narrate their experiences so as to bring to the fore the relevance of gender and sexuality within Latino studies. From the 1970s onwards Latina writers, scholars and activists have been concerned with challenging the representation of women and the female roles in Latina/​o communities by suggesting that women are usually subject to intersecting forms of oppression and exclusion in their quest for self-​definition. Ewa Antoszek in Chapter Seven (this volume) addresses the question of the “multiple borders Latinas have to cross on a daily basis” and contributes to the debate of how women are searching for new definitions of their latinidad within the shadowy space of the border. In other chapters of this volume, Esther Álvarez López and Luisa María González Rodríguez explore the role of Afro-​Latinas in negotiating their latinidad by unveiling the blackness and indigenousness consubstantial to their identity. As these contributors remark, young Latinas propose a more open and transgressive perspective on latinidad as a domain where racially-​mixed women can cross gender and racial boundaries and create their own counternarratives. Less discussed but equally important in this volume is the question of gender among queer Latinas/​os. Ylce Irizarry in Chapter Six focuses on Elías Muñoz’s queering of latinidad and brings to the fore important issues concerning sexuality and gender construction among queer Latinas/​os. 2

Panethnicity in Context

The idea of latinidad as a panethnic concept was mainly developed as an expression of solidarity among U.S. immigrants with a common ancestry, history and language, and comes from a deep-​rooted consciousness that it must be kept alive through “[d]‌aily transfusions/​Into the river/​Of la sangre viva,” as Esteves’ poem, included in the epigraph of this chapter, concludes. In fact, as discussed by Fernando Aquino in Chapter Four, it is an all-​embracing idea that works as a label in opposition to hegemonic, mainstream, non-​Latina/​o U.S. society, and it is in that sense that the term is embraced by those Latinas/​ os who would otherwise (and in other contexts) maintain their country-​of-​ origin identity. There is a crossing of planes, and an intersection of identities that form a new, pan-​ethnic, and pan-​national matrix to nourish the present and future of this collective. The new latinidad is a convergence of people, spaces, languages, consciousness, and semiotic signs. The term was first coined in the late 80s by sociologist Felix Padilla in a study of Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans in Chicago. Since then, scholars have used the term to describe the myriad of Latino/​a communities inside and outside the Latin American

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context and from a number of approaches. One of the first contributions to the conversation surrounding this new term, and the debate over ethnic and gender identity in Latino/​a fiction is Karen Christian’s Show and Tell: Identity as Performance in U.S. Latino Fiction (1997) in which she argues that identity is a continuous process and provides a critical framework for understanding the fluid nature of categories within this context. Currently, the social construction of identity formation is widely accepted, and scholars such as Caminero-​ Santangelo, in On Latinidad: U.S. Literature and the Construction of Ethnic Identity (2007) are part of a developing group that sees the Latino/​a categorization as a useful tool, particularly when engaging in a comparative study of those under this label. Caminero-​Santangelo follows Padilla’s argument that the category can be deployed for strategic purposes and that it may build a sense of community among those who adopt this term, later falling under the overarching understanding of latinidad. Moreover, as Fernando Aquino (this volume) contends, “while each group maintains its own nationality of origin identity, the notion of latinidad expands the top down label of Latino/​a to encompass their shared experiences and the value of aggregating in solidarity” (p. 68). According to Laó-​Montes (2001), the concept of latinidad must be understood as a homogenizing label in opposition to a non-​Latina/​o United States: latinidad could be used as a meaningful category of social analysis and political organization because being Latina/​o is now a criterion for individual and collective identification that defines a domain of cultural production, influences the division and allocation of social wealth and power, and motivates the organization of social movements and institutions. (p. 8) Latinidad is the antithesis of uniformity and a living symbol of an intercultural and linguistic dialogue, involving a blending of cultures that recreate similar, yet distinct identities, often put aside in a perpetual reconstruction of identity. Allatson (2016) agrees with Caminero-​Santangelo (2007) that the notion of latinidad may be understood as an elastic set of phenomena proposing numerous possible identifications, “none of which may be in conceptual alignment or agreement” (p. 130). This notion of latinidad as a crucial element of identity construction and as a cultural strongpoint reminds us of Hoops’ conceptualization of culture as a site of multiple meanings and differences that are loci of power struggles and contestations amidst daily practices and power structures.

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Culture is a site of mixing and fusions across borders as groups struggling for power attempt to restrict meanings, categories, and practices. Identity and its categories, such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, etc., have multiple and shifting meanings that are nevertheless contingently fixed within structures supporting domination of some groups. Concepts such as diaspora, hybridity, and intersectionality address indeterminancy of belonging. (2017, p. 1) Culture, self-​identity, and the dynamics of what makes up latinidad both transcend and fuse borders, spaces, places, and ideologies. This notion of pan-​ ethnicity, or in this case, pan-​Latino identity is often fostered by people and institutions of power who fuel intellectual discussions of the Latino/​a self. Both the media and state play a strong hand in highlighting issues surrounding the community. However, as de Casanova (2012) argues, “[t]‌he problem with these constructions of Latinness […] is that they overlook the tremendous diversity of the ‘Latino’ group in terms of class, national origin, gender sexual orientation, language and phenotype” (p. 421). So how do Latinos/​as identify themselves, and what are the criteria? Ricourt and Danta (2003, p. 1) suggest that among many groups, latinidad is a mere additive, that their primary identification is nation-​origin based, and that their Latino/​a identity in the U.S. is of a necessary solidarity, in instances of discrimination and/​or immigration policy. That is, the Latino/​a identity is secondary to their national-​origin-​fueled identity, but it is socially constructed and negotiated in times of need and solidarity. Or, as Morales (2018b) argues in his article titled “Why I embrace the term Latinx,” echoing the tendencies described in the opening article, [t]‌here’s also a growing debate about whether those of Latin American descent should even identify as a monolithic group at all. Both Hispanic and Latino are terms used by media giants like Univision and major advertisers who have for decades tried to concoct a flattened, deracialized identity to create a loyal pool of voters and consumers, […] usually part of our national conversation, it points to a future America that might be. (n.p.) We can conclude from Morales’ remark that socially constructed identities are situational in that they are interactively based (much like language), and the negotiation process yields differing outcomes at different times and within different groups. At times, it seems, the concept of latinidad is embraced, and at other times rejected, at once fulfilling social, political, cultural and individual needs.

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Such is the wide canvas that Latinidad at the Crossroads seeks to address, as it advocates a more flexible redefinition of latinness that may overcome static collective representations of identity, ethnicity, and belonging. The project draws from the centrifugal aspirations of many Latinas/​os to move away from the paralyzing and homogeneous portrayal of their diverse cultural typologies which has emerged from a U.S.-​centric gaze on latinidad towards a more dynamic enactment of their hyphenated, multilayered identities. In order to explore how Latinas/​os are trying to remap the Latino imagery “out of a dynamic negotiation of a blurred ‘otherness’ from within, rooted in a daily socio-​cultural triangulation, i.e. between U.S. cultural standards, Latino panethnicity, and their own Latin American heritage” (Barbot, 2012), this volume provides an extensive bibliography and history of the foundational literature that has pioneered the myriad of contexts in which latinidad is formed, expressed, addressed, and pondered. Latino literature is as complex as the notion itself; it describes what happens before a border, at the border, and after. It is both national and transnational; it happens in the countries of origin and in the diaspora, and the platform holds true to its foundation yet is continuously changing with the new generations. Delgadillo, in her reflection on the shifting trends in Latino/​a literature through the various generations of writers, remarks that “while Latino literature has always been marked by its transnational interests, writers in this new millennium expand, extend and deepen […] concern[s]‌in new ways, frequently linking the fates and destinies of Latin Americans and Latinos or of the US and the places where it wages war” (2011, p. 601). It closes breaches and builds bridges and, according to Pérez Torres, explores “the discontinuities of history and power” (in Delgadillo, 2011, p. 601). Delgadillo also adds that the seeming linearity of Latino/​a fiction is not always so; it backtracks and shifts through time, it recalls the past and also opens spaces for the future: “In this way, although Latino fiction might be more linear in the new century, it is also less so” (p. 603). As Latino/​a literature has been a powerful tool of representation within these communities, it has also provided a tangible outlook beyond literary analysis, as it contains a palpable body of language, language use, terms, code-​switching, and other rhetorical devices that lead to an overarching macrostructure of discourse, which necessarily leads to a meaning-​making system steeped in social schemata and language users. There is an exclusive inclusivity in cultural identity, and in latinness. This is seen across literature, political and social movements, and in linguistic choices. As Claudia Milian states in the epilogue for Latining America: Black-​Brown Passages and the Coloring of Latino/​a Studies (2013), the decisions made at a diacritical level speak not only to the conceptualization of the way in which we represent latinidad on paper, but also how this translates to the dynamic

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conceptualization of the people themselves. In reference to the meaning of the slash “the o/​a-​ness” or the @ or “-​“hyphenated identity,” Milian reflects on the space of latinidad, and what the language of latinness yields, this is both self-​assigned and reflects great things about the field [Chicano studies] […] but at the same time, it creates an otherness. So who does this? How does this show how identity is complicated and multifaceted? Where is the @ “at” that this author describes? Is it at the border, is it post-​ migration? What’s the new Latinidad? (p. 156) These markers denote space, identity, and their reciprocal relationship. As Morales (2018a) contends when choosing the label Latinx, this tag describes the “in-​between space in which Latinos/​as live, which allows us to cross racial boundaries more easily and construct identities, or self images that include a wide variety of racial, national, and even gender-​based identifications” (pp. 4–​ 5), and builds upon the past to create a new, multifaceted identity, which is inclusive and exclusive, dichotomous and homogeneous. Discourse, language, literature, text and talk bring to the foreground the inherent interactive nature of language. Interaction brings forth change as it establishes and challenges ideologies. The language used to auto-​represent is both informed by the communities that employ it and, at the same time, (in)forms those same communities. Ana María Manzanas Calvo and Jesús Benito Sánchez in Narratives of Resistance (1999) reflect on this, stating that “[t]‌exts become complex sites of cultural interaction which constantly absorb and rearticulate the multiple crossings which take place in society” (p. 24). These discourses produce a “cultural matrix, the metaphor for the juncture […] giving way to new social and personal identities in the process” (p. 24). They also ponder the x of Chicanx and state that the interaction of the x marks a powerful intersection representing both a moving away and a coming together. The visualization of the x, and the semiotic baggage that it holds acts as a complex ideogram of latinidad that enables us to cross racial, national and gender borders. It is a signature that encompasses a discursive orientation towards semiotic categories that imply movement, fluidity, and the intersection of micro-​hegemonies within the community. 3

The Space(s) of Latinidad

The idea of space has played a significant role in the construction of Latina/​ o identities in the U.S. for, as Stuart Hall contends in relation to marginality,

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[w]‌ithin culture, marginality, though it remains peripheral to the broader mainstream, has never been such a productive space as it is now. And that is not simply the opening within the dominant of spaces that those outside it can occupy. It is also the result of the cultural politics of difference, of the struggles around difference, of the production of new identities, of the appearance of new subjects on the political and cultural stage. (1993, p. 51) How does marginality yield productivity, and how can one define that productivity? The marginal space is not often seen in a positive light, and rightfully so. Marginalized spaces are tumultuous, contentious, and unsavory, often delineated by political, geographical, or simply imagined borders. We cannot talk of latinidad without talking of borders and boundaries, for they make up the space of marginality in the first place. However, as borders make up a frequently undesirable space, it cannot be forgotten that the space is also productive. As Manzanas Calvo (2017) reflects, borders are “sites where political systems fortify the notions of nationality and national identity,” and “speak volumes about the country’s or the continent’s values” (p. 42). When addressing space and borders on a national level, or even on a pan-​national level as some of the chapters of this volume seek to do, it is imperative to recognize what and who occupies the space between borders, as well as the space of the border itself. Who are those who grant and deny access, and who are those who may freely pass in and between these points? Some of these questions are addressed by Ewa Antoszek (Chapter Seven) as she analyzes the work of two Latina artists to bring to the fore the contribution of border artivism, such as border graffiti and murals, to the debate of the “role of the border in the construction of Latinx identities” (p. 140) and “to separate two spaces and keep off potential border crossers” (p. 142). The politics (and policies) affecting Latinos/​as also reflect the space of borders, and seems to occupy a space of its own. These policies not only address border politics, but also include the inner-​political space of Latino/​a expatriates and immigrants in the various auxiliary communities they have formed in U.S. cities. There is an upsurge of Latino/​a politicians and an ever-​growing Latino/​a voting population that, in effect, are changing the political landscape of the U.S. on a broader level. The recent election of Alexandria Ocasio-​Cortez, the youngest woman in history to be elected into Congress, is not only influential for her age and gender, but for her impact on the Latino/​a population, as well as the larger American populace, promoting radical changes that affect the entire nation. The way in which Latinos/​as have formed inner-​political thought has created a powerful interplay of factors that have enabled Latino/​a

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policies to come to the forefront of American politics while overcoming socio-​ economic and other obstacles. Their politics have had a ripple effect across political realms, and as a consequence, this has altered the communal and social consciousness resulting in agency and influence in their (host) country. As José Antonio Gurpegui (this volume) contends, the victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 elections changed the political landscape of the U.S. and created a double-​space of Hispanic presence at the border and beyond. It is not only these border and political spaces that illuminate the multi-​ sided concept of latinidad set out in this collection, but also the more abstract locus of expression, memory, and culture. In fact, these spaces are not fully compartmentalized, and intersect at a point which reveals a collective matrix of social consciousness that both comprises and informs identity. The culture of memory is frequently girdled to concrete spaces, images, gestures, and cultural artifacts. Memories represent an integral part of cultural content and grant meaning to cultural objects, including literature, poetry, spoken word performances and other artistic production articulated around the notion of latinidad. These objects, according to Stanković also affect the content of memory: “what gets to be preserved, how long it is stored for, and how it is organized” (2014, p. 88). According to her, the spaces or places of memory are also significant triggers of remembrance; if they are not contained, the visual and verbal documents of a culture “become ‘silent witnesses’ of the past when the stories, or vivid memories, that were once related to them, disappear” (p. 88). The cultural arena of memory is dense in that it employs deep-​seated social schemata of a community that rely on said community’s experience and belief system. Memory is inherently communal, and understandings of our present rely on our past’s temporal and spatial circumstances. Tradition, language, heritage, and cultural memory are pertinent to the construction of any identity; whether personal or communal. These memories, and the space that they occupy, are conducive to the formulation of what is latinidad today. Modes of communication –​literature, film, poetry, spoken-​word, theater, etc.—​realize a self-​driven expression of an emerging identity rooted in the past. What is achieved in this space of memory is sociocultural and sociolinguistic evidence of a successful counter-​hegemonic and trans-​national representation of identity. 4

Culminating Notions

This collection of essays concentrates on the ways individual and collective groups negotiate place, belonging, identity-​construction and division in the U.S., and highlights how these aspects contribute to the ever-​changing dynamic

Introduction

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that fuels latinidad in the twenty-​first century. The running contention of this volume is that latinidad in the twenty-​first century is rooted in a historical epistemic community that, although it has evolved and fractioned over time, molds the extant justifications and rationalities of beliefs that directly influence the contemporary knowledge system of today’s Latino/​as in the U.S. This leads to a dynamic and fluid identity that reveals the symbiotic relationships found in the speech and epistemic communities—​also intrinsically intertwined—​ among Latino/​as and in the blurred spaces between the cultures in contact with these groups. In order to address this premise, this volume situates issues of space and place, collective memory, language and spoken word, in, at, and across the border. The goal is that the ideas argued here will form a reconsideration of issues of identity and categorization, while recognizing that this very elastic act of identity building may also contribute to the deconstruction of categorization, labeling, and the destabilizing of destructive narratives. This volume is divided into eight chapters and includes various interdisciplinary theoretical foundations, as well as literature and politics. Chapter Two, by Francisco A. Lomelí, a founding scholar of Chicano studies, takes a personal approach as a direct contributor to the Chicano movement. “Seismic Shifts in Chicano Literature Leading into the Twenty-​first Century: Are Latinos/​as Now Coasting or Still Breaking New Ground?” leads the essays by providing the history and origins of Chicano (Latino) literature through an extensive and comprehensive review of the bibliographic and historical trajectory of the movement, and an emotive account of Chicanoism from a personal perspective. Although this chapter addresses the history of Chicano literature, it directly speaks to the ways in which the movement inevitably is tied to the broader implications of latinidad and the literature that comprises it. Lomelí assigns the literary and cultural progressions the metaphor of an earthquake, calling attention to the undeniable literary presence that Latino/​a writers have claimed in the American canon, and makes connections to the ripple effect this has had on Latino/​a culture in more general terms. Lomelí portrays the ways in which Chicano literature has systematically been pushed forward by its myriad directions and modalities, and how this has led to a wider array of views and concerns about the human experience. This chapter outlines critical assessments from the Chicano Renaissance—​in its majority, male dominated—​to what Lomelí calls the “Chicano Postmodern Generation,” spurred by a new wave of women writers who changed the face and substance of the literature forever. The chapter traces “seismic shifts” at different times of the movement’s history and discusses how more recent works either respond to or supersede what the previous literature attempted to accomplish. Lomelí’s conclusion is that Chicano literature is still highly innovative with a large cadre of new voices

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and imaginative literary lenses, and that new waves of Chicano/​Latino literary movements necessarily will arise. This chapter provides a panoramic view of the movement(s), working from the past to the future, but also provides a conceptual scope for the rest of the volume. Throughout the chapter Lomelí makes a case that this particularly American literary movement is founded on a cogency of self-​definition, and continues to be. This theme of the desire and right to self-​define establishes the framework for the rest of the chapters that illustrate the ways in which the aspiration is manifested and portrayed through literary, political, and artitistic practices. While this chapter serves as a foundation, it also demonstrates the ways in which the future of latinidad is based on phases of change and re-​definition. Here, this concept of re-​definition centers on a shift from the opposing powers from outside Latino/​a groups, and draws inward to the social practices and conflicts within latinidad. Although Chapter Three maintains the past/​present/​future dichotomy ever present in issues of self-​definition within concepts of latinidad, it contrasts Chapter Two’s chronological methods of expression. This chapter takes a turn towards self-​definition and temporal aspects through memory and kinship. Cultural memory is an integral part of identity-​construction, as the social schemata of any given community necessarily draw on the experience, information, ideology and baggage of the past. Memory is not just a private experience, as it involves a collective steeped in past understandings and knowledge systems. Ideas surrounding collective and cultural memory rest on the notions that the present molds our understanding of the past, and also that the present is directly informed by the past, but these two notions are not mutually exclusive. It is also pertinent to approach memory, not only as a temporal circumstance, but with an understanding that it is also a spatial phenomenon. As Paul Connerton in How Societies Remember (1989) argues, the body is a container of memory of both the social actions of inscribing and incorporating, and this embodied remembrance is a physical, cognitive, and cultural phenomenon that translates to the way in which we address our present, in view of the past we carry within our corporal systems. Chapter Three, Luisa María González Rodríguez’s “Digging Through the Past to Reconcile Latino/​a Identity in Dominican-​American Women’s Memoirs,” is an appropriate and poignant approach to identity-​formation through addressing themes of memory, race and gender, as well as familiar ties. The result of this demonstrates the ways in which the characters analyzed transcend their personal autobiographies to depict the diverse and dynamic selves of the Latinos/​as growing up in the United States. González Rodríguez explores how two young Afro-​Dominican writers, Raquel Cepeda and Jasminne Méndez, articulate their memoirs around diverse and changing experiences and stories

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that help (re)construct the Latino imaginary. By evoking memories from the past, these writers provide glimpses of the traumatic experiences suffered by Dominican-​Americans in the U.S. and try to overcome racialized constructions of identity while delineating new spaces for enacting their polyhedral identities. The authors explored in this chapter demonstrate that by proposing more sophisticated ways of expressing Latino/​a identity, they can move towards a more open notion of latinidad that enables them both display multifaceted selves and reconstruct/​renegotiate their fractured modes of belonging across a variety of contexts. By delving into issues of race, gender, and memory, González Rodríguez’s chapter sets the stage for the particular notions and formation of pan-​ethnicities discussed in this volume and brings to the fore the notion of intersectional latinidad. Where Chapter Two described the ways in which Latinos/​as came together under a desire to self-​define in a defiance of the majority that seemed to define them, this chapter demonstrates the ways in which sub-​groups also take claim of their own identity and reject homogenization by alternating identities in chameleonic fashion. The Dominican perspective is particularly telling of the identity-​formation process, as its multifaceted history—​especially in terms of colonization—​ projects a myriad of power-​struggles unique to the group, yet also representative of Latino/​a groups as a whole. The breakaway from country-​of-​origin labeling to a panethnic perspective of latinidad broadens the scope of this volume to include not just a multi-​perspectival selfhood, but also to examine the ways in which groups divide and re-​organize according to their needs, and to claim agency in areas previously denied to them. Chapter Four may, at first, seem to be a dramatic shift from the humanities to politics, but we contend that this shift is rather a reinforcement of the social realities and practices that make up the discourse of current concepts of latinidad. Here we will see a negotiation of terms that blur and oscillate according to the political context and concern. This chapter also depicts the political realm where all the aesthetic and cultural practices articulated around the notion of latinidad emerge and illustrates the idea that politics is usually in constant conversation with cultural production. In “Dominicans and the Political Realm of Latinidad in New York City,” Fernando Aquino examines the political progress and incorporation of Dominicans into the political circles of New York City since 1991, the year marking the election of the first Dominican to the New York City Council. It is a direct and serious engagement with latinidad in the context of Dominican Identity and electoral politics. This chapter investigates the impact of demographic reshuffling, transnationalism, individual leadership, communal and civic organization, and institutional support or rejection, including the impact of what is left of the so-​called “political machines” in New York

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City. Using the Dominican situation as a case study, the analysis takes place within the larger Latino/​a political context, revealing that a blurred boundary between pan-​ethnic identity and group identity exists, with communities and individual actors changing hats between the perceived Latino agenda and their own specific community agenda. In Chapter Five, “Identity, De-​colonization and Cosmopolitanism in Latina Artists’ Spoken Word Performances,” Esther Álvarez López fuses the concepts of identity formation, discourse communities, and multimodal expression. In this chapter, the concept of latinidad is understood as a multiplicity of intersecting discourses that enable different subjects and identities, and deploys specific kinds of knowledge and power relations (Laó-​Montes, 2001). The aim is to address how discourses of latinidad are produced and performed by means of aesthetic and cultural practices that Latina/​o artists engage in as tactics of self-​definition and self-​representation. Latina and Afro-​Latina poets-​performers such as Mayda del Valle, Elizabeth Acevedo, Ariana Brown or Amalia Ortiz, among others, deal with the intersections of the politics of identity and what sociologist Aníbal Quijano (1989) theorized as “the coloniality of power”. This juncture of coloniality and subjectivity is at the core of Latina artists’ spoken word, an art form and practice that these contemporary bards use to articulate their ethnic and multicultural identities. Furthermore, this chapter explores how in formulating oppositional interpretations, in complicating and decolonizing ways of thinking about race, identity, difference, and power, their works become sites of contestation and social resistance that critically question dominant hegemonic views and talk back against colonization, acculturation, exclusion and inequities. Although Latina poets-​performers focus on the workings of xenophobia, racism, gendering and othering in their poems, they implicitly suggest the need for alternative processes of interaction and conviviality, of a decolonial mindset leading to a non-​EuroAmerican-​ centered pluriversality. This chapter reminds us of the sociolinguistic and sociocultural resources that push forward the running argument that the space in which something is said is intrinsically connected to the power that the discourse holds. Text and talk are manifested in a myriad of media, whether on a stage, on a political platform, at a border, on a canvas, or on the silver screen, and the space of diffusion is a place of negotiation that lends agency to the speaker and also requires the participation of the listener. These multimodal symbol-​making practices give new life to traditional understandings of rhetoric, opening the platform for notions of non-​discursive rhetoric, or image-​based language. Álvarez López develops the notion of performance as a tool, but also as a form of identity within itself. Performance, heritage, tradition, memory and space

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are important notions concerning the construction of personal and group identity. The concept of memory as a spatial concept also runs into Chapter Six, “Elías Miguel Muñoz and the New Memory of Cubanidad,” by Ylce Irizarry. This chapter is an extension of an ongoing investigation into what Irizarry assesses as a need to extend the scope of contemporary literary scholarship and offers readers the opportunity to remember the past that is true to the Latino community, and not just one assigned to them by those who subjugate them. In this chapter, the notion of arrival in the literary and cultural world is negated. At one point, identity in Latino literature was often depicted as characters feeling bound to one side of the hyphen. They either needed to shed identity and aspects of their culture, or fail to arrive. However, in order to challenge this rhetoric of arrival, Latino literature began to reject the idea of nostalgia connected to this forced choosing, as the concepts did not reflect the experience within these communities and were used to homogenize the Latino community instead of allowing a choice. However, if nostalgia has been rejected for inaccurate representation, the notion of a new memory can replace it as an agency for identity-​building. The new memory has evidence of the past, is visible in the present, and opens possibilities for the future. Through an analysis of the works of Elías Miguel Muñoz, the chapter centers on the problems that arise with self-​empowerment within ethnic communities and develops notions of (new) memory, literature and intra-​ethnic dialogue. If in previous chapters, memory was a space for (self)identity-​construction, the new memory in this chapter further opens that space to explore new perspectives that are rooted in the past, but represent a convergence of experience, space, and time. The collective consciousness that takes place, and occupies space, reminds us that the metaphorical or intangible places link back to the tangible and the intersection is a convergence of all of the contributing factors to identity-​ building. In order to have a hyphen, there must be two parties, an us and an Other. In order to arrive at the hyphen, and either choose or refuse sides, or to multiply the hyphen to include parallel and intersecting identities, there must be a threshold to cross. There must be a place of convergence. The tangible space addressed in the final two chapters is that of the border. In these chapters the border is established both as a physical and metaphorical place of conflict and identity-​building. In Chapter Seven, “New Perspectives on La Frontera: Consuelo Jiménez Underwood and Ana Teresa Fernández,” Ewa Antoszek approaches the intersections of politics, identity, and the space of meaning-​making. The focus is unique to this volume as its analysis centers on visual arts, although it remains congruent with the notions of multimodality expressed here in that the visual arts are a powerful form of discourse and reveal extra-​linguistic forms of communication that directly inform and reveal

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the identity-​formation process as well as the contribution of space to that process. This chapter argues that space has always been important for Latinos/​as due to their history of displacement and dislocation. The theory of space and place of the border is represented in the multimodal works of these two artists and defines the border’s nature, as well as breaks its hold over those who are affected by it. Space has always been important for Latinos/​as due to their history of displacement and dislocation. The chapter examines the ways in which Jiménez Underwood and Fernández portray the history of the U.S.-​Mexico border and how contemporary understandings of la frontera persuade the formation of Chicano/​a and Latino/​a identities. As the space of communication in border graffiti and murals is often a hybrid of text, image, and performance, the works of these artists directly contribute to the identity-​construction process in a creative and poetic way. Antoszek’s analysis contends that the re-​visions of the border necessarily contribute to the new understandings of latinidad as the complexity of space addresses the transformations in the overarching discourse on the border and beyond. For Latinas/​os the frontier has remained a conflicted space that reminds them of the many physical and metaphorical borders they need to cross and of their complex status within American society. The concept of the border correlates highly with the notion of hyphenated identities and a sense on non-​belonging that impels Latinas/​os to a constant quest for self-​definition. The space of the border has been crucial in shaping Latina/​o identity and has played a pivotal role in the cultural, political and artistic practices through wihich Latinas/​os have enacted their sense of selfhood. More specifically, it has been a metaphor present in most Latino literature as their authors have been forced to overcome the barriers and struggled to be included in the cannon. Chapter Eight concludes this volume by bringing the Chicano canon back into focus and by reformulating the understanding of it at the border and also through the recent lens of the Trump administration. José Antonio Gurpegui’s “Chicano Literature and the Trump Era” demonstrates how these politics seep into the literature of the community. He argues that the victory of Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential elections of 2016 has not only caused upheaval in the political, economic and social landscape of the United States, but also throughout the world. He highlights the targeting of various ethnic groups in the United States, but particularly those of the Hispanic population, who are made protagonists of Trump’s policies. Gurpegui also situates the Hispanic presence in the new social context of the United States and then revisits three canonical authors (Rivera, Barrios and Morales) in light of the new sociological, political, and cultural moment. In this chapter, the cultural and theoretical conceptions that are birthed at the border permit

Introduction

21

a deeper understanding of postmodernity and interculturalism and create new realities, spaces, intersections, and perspectives of self-​representation, self-​identification, and pluralism. The same elements that contribute to current developments in latinidad, whether they are cultural, political, visual, individual, or communal, are seen from the inception of the canon to its current state. Latinidad at the Crossroads opened with an extensive history of Chicano-​ Latino literature arguing that the driving force behind creativity and expression was founded on the desire to denounce outside imposition and instead restore ownership of identity. The volume also closes on this note, but through the perspective of current political realities, and narrows the perspective to the border space. The chapters of this book are just flashing glimpses into the ways in which Latinas/​os struggle to forge their multiracial and multicultural identities within their own communities and in mainstream U.S. society. As they demonstrate, latinidad is an unstable construct articulated around overlapping ideologies of race, nationality and ethnicity. The interrelationship of these three categories of the Latina/​o identity are explored by contributors as they unveil the multiplicity of ways in which latinidad is enacted through cultural, artistic and socio-​political expressions. Thus, latinidad may be said to build upon centripetal and centrifugal forces that act depending on how Latinas/​os themselves tend to define their identity in terms of their nationhood, race, and ethnicity as homogenizing categories or as distinctive traits shaping their self-​identification. By constantly shifting from the Latinx identity meltdown to the kaleidoscopic refraction of the multiple categories involved in individualized processes of self-​identification, Latinas/​os bring to the fore the need for constructing cultural cohesion and memory as well as for building sites of cultural contestation that give visibility to suppressed categories of identification.

References

Allatson, P. (2016). From “latinidad” to “latinid@des”: Imagining the twenty-​first century. In J. Morán González (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to Latina/​o American literature (pp. 128–​144). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barbot, K. (2012, July 10). Latinidades 3.0, renewed aesthetic of transculturalism. Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://​www .nica-​institute.com/​Latinidades-​3-​0-​renewed-​aesthetics-​of-​transculturalism/​. Blommaert, J., & Verschueren, J. (1992). The role of language in European nationalist ideologies. Pragmatics, 2(3), 355–​375.

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Caglar, A. S. (1997). Hyphenated identities and the limits of ‘culture’. In T. Modood & P. Werbner (Eds.), The politics of multiculturalism in the new Europe: Racism, identity and community (pp. 169–​185). London and New York: Zed Books. Casanova de, E. M. (2012). Organizing identities: Immigrant New Yorkers negotiating latinidad. Sociological Forum, 27(2), 419–​440. Caminero-​Santangelo, M. (2007). On latinidad: US Latino literature and the constrution of ethnicity. Gainseville: University Press of Florida. Christian, K. (1997). Show and tell: Identity as performance in US Latina/​o fiction. Alburquerque: university of Mexico Press. Connerton, P. (1989). How societies remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Delgadillo, T. (2011). The criticality of Latino/​a fiction in the twenty-​first century. American literary history, 23(3), 600–​624. Esteves, S. M. (1984). Tropical Rain: A Bilingual Downpour. New York: African Caribbean Poetry Theater. Hall, S. (1993). What is this “Black” in Black popular culture? Social Justice 20(1/​2), 51–​52. Hoops, J. F., & Drzewiecka, J. A. (2017). Critical perspectives toward cultural and communication research. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. Retrieved from https://​www.researchgate.net/​publication/​318883465_​Critical_​Perspectives _​Toward_​Cultural_​and_​Communication_​Research. Jiménez Román, M., & Flores, J. (Eds.) (2010). Introduction. In The Afro-​Latin@ reader. History and culture in the United States (pp. 1–​15). Durham and London: Duke University Press. Laó-​Montes, A. (2001). Introduction. In Laó-​Montes, A. & Dávila, A. (Eds.), Mambo montage. The Latinization of New York (pp. 1–​53). New York: Columbia University Press. Laó-​Montes. A. (2005). Afro-​latinidades and the diasporic imaginary. Iberoamericana, 5(17), 117–​130. Manzanas Calvo, A. M. (2017). The line and limit of Britishness: The construction of Gibraltarian identity in MG Sanchez’s Writing. ES Review Spanish Journal of English Studies, 38, 27–​45. Manzanas Calvo, A. M. (1999). Ethnicity, mestizaje, and writing. In A. M. Manzanas Calvo and J. Benito Sánchez (Eds.) Narratives of resistance: Literature and ethnicity in the United States and the Caribbean. Ciudad Real: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-​La Mancha. Manzanas Calvo, A. M. and Benito Sánchez, J. (eds.) (1999). Narratives of resistance: Literature and ethnicity in the United States and the Caribbean. Ciudad Real: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-​La Mancha. Milian, C. (2013). Latining America: Black-​Brown passages and the coloring of Latino/​a studies. Athens GA: University of Georga Press.

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Milian, C. (2019). Introduction. Latinx studies: Variations and velocities. Cultural Dynamics, 31(1–​2), 3–​15. Morales, E. (2018a). Latinx: The new force in American politics and culture. London and New York: Verso. Morales, E. (2018b, January 8). Why I embrace the term Latinx. The Guardian. Retrieved from: https://​edmorales.net/​2018/​06/​30/​why-​i-​embrace-​the-​term-​latinx/​. Quijano, A. (1992). Colonialidad y modernidad/​racionalidad. In H. Bonilla (Ed.), Los conquistados. 1492 y la población indígena de las Américas (pp. 437–​448). Ecuador: Libri Mundi, Tercer Mundo Editores. Ricourt, M. & Danta, R. (2003). Hispanas de Queens: Latino panethnicity in New York City meighborhood. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Romero, D. (2018, July 15). A Chicano renaissance? A new Mexican-​American generation embraces the term. ABC News. Retrieved from https://​www.nbcnews.com/​ news/​latino/​chicano-​renaissance-​new-​mexican-​american-​generation-​embraces -​term-​n869846. Stanković, I. (2014). Spaces of memory—​“The presence of absence” cultural memory and oblivion mechanisms. Култура/​Culture, 8, 87–​94. Thomas, P. (1967). Down these mean streets. New York: Vintage. Torres-​Sailant, S. (2008). Problematic paradigms: Racial diversity and corporate identity in the Latino community. Review of International American Studies, 3(1–​2), 45–​61. Torres-​Sailant, S. (2010). Introduction to Dominican Blackness. CUNY Academic Works. Retrieved from https://​academicworks.cuny.edu/​dsi_​pubs/​3.

Seismic Shifts in Chicano/​a Literature Leading into the Twenty-​First Century Are Latinos/​as Now Coasting or Still Breaking New Ground? Francisco A. Lomelí Abstract This chapter addresses the history of Chicano literature and directly speaks to the ways in which the movement inevitably is tied to the broader implications of latinidad and the literature that comprises it. Calling attention to the undeniable literary presence that Latino/​a writers have claimed in the American canon, this essay makes connections to the ripple effect this has had on Latino/​a culture in more general terms. Moreover, it portrays the ways in which Chicano literature has systematically been pushed forward by its myriad directions and modalities and how this has led to a wider array of views and concerns about the human experience. This chapter outlines critical assessments from the Chicano Renaissance—​in its majority, male dominated—​to the “Chicano Postmodern Generation,” spurred by a new wave of women writers who have changed the face and substance of Chicano and Latino literature forever.

Keywords Chicano literature –​rasquachismo –​post-​movement –​teatro campesino –​transnationalism –​barriocentric

Written works are spaces where foreign languages and cultures meet in the same terrain. You can think of it as an imaginary construction of [a]‌nation-​state. ​i nês forjaz de lacerda

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© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004460430_003

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Shockwaves and Ripple Effects: Chicano/​a Literature Re-​emerges

Chicano/​a literature has undergone a series of transformations and developments since 1965 when its Renaissance period came into being. As part of a uniquely American form of latinidad, the 45 million persons of Mexican descent, out of some 58 million U.S. Latinos/​as today, stand out for their indisputable national presence and leadership in the field of literary production. Obviously, a few scattered works before 1965 were known up to that point as has been patently documented by the Recovery Project of Hispanic U.S. Literary Heritage1 and other sources, but we first needed to face the urgencies of the present, given that the past appeared nebulous and unpredictable. We later realized that 1965 marked the tip of the iceberg of a long-​standing literary tradition that had somehow become either lost or faded. That signaled the beginning of a renewed self-​affirmation and a call to embrace a new identity in order to redefine our social-​historical trajectory. In the process, we encountered numerous changes and metamorphoses that competed for relevance. One viable way of unpacking this literary reality is by couching it in terms of seismic shifts that shook the very foundations, first, of our own potential as legitimate producers of literature and, second, how we impacted the mainstream academy, which received the ripple effects of our unorthodox voices. Either way, both parties underwent considerable internal convulsions. Such clashes, both external and internal, have permitted Chicano/​a literature to become vibrant, genuine and thought-​provoking by revealing alternative stories and vistas that major society had oftentimes obscured, dismissed and/​ or simply ignored. Our literature is intentionally picante precisely because it emerged from the underbelly and shadows of American indifference, thus contributing to Latinos/​as’ revitalized role and place in the U.S. It had to create waves, defy and resist by producing its own movements and traditions by yearning for self-​representation, and the construction of its own metaphors and meanings. In this sense, our literature discovered not only its corpus and symbolic contours, pero, sobre todo, its own epicentro, its core, and what made it tick.

1 Such a project, led by Nicolás Kanellos at the University of Houston, since 1990 has uncovered more than 20,000 archival items that include books in every possible genre, giving credence that Hispanic peoples in the U.S. have produced a steady stream of writings fluctuating through the Colonial period, the Mexican Period and after the U.S. conquest of what became the American Southwest. In 1965 aspiring Chicano/​a critics and writers could not have imagined the existence of such a rich background of literary activity which we can now point to.

26 Lomelí Literary history has always intrigued me, even before I met and worked with Don Luis Leal, the most accomplished literary historian in our field, thanks, in great part, to his wealth of knowledge about Mexican literature back to its indigenous origins as well as its colonial backdrop. I was enthralled by what seemed to be isolated cases of writers’ conviction to leave aesthetic imprints of inventive moments through self-​created manifestations where we could measure fissures, changes, developments, new directions, techniques, and most of all crafty experimentations. Authors’ names were important, but even more so, how together they formed a body and account or history of stories or confabulations that reflected the continuum of a community’s imagination. I am particularly keen on genealogies and influences, cutting-​edge trends, even anomalies, conglomerations of thought, artful stratagems, skillful artifices, unique undercurrents and ingenious technical devices. When these crystallize through a dialectic interplay of diverse factors, they seem to provoke seismic shifts of newness by opening up new ground of literary content that unlocks new possibilities in terms of themes, unforgettable characters or notable situations. Out with the old, and in with the new, or at least a semblance of such. It is exactly 50 years since I first came in contact with Chicano literature, thanks in great part to Alurista’s neo-​indigenist manifesto of bilingual poetry, or what we might now call Spanglish, in a presentation on the mythic homeland of Aztlán in my Spanish for Native Speakers class at San Diego State University in 1968. He, in effect, proclaimed a new bilingual sensibility—​later labeled as “bisensitivity” by Tino Villanueva or “interlingualism” by Juan Bruce-​ Novoa2—​and I immediately knew he was onto something, a definite breakthrough or rupture, partly targeting convention, style and focus, but principally fixed on the kind of language Chicanos used on a daily basis. It suddenly felt like a veil was removed: for the first time, we could openly be linguistically ambidextrous and relish the rich mixed cadences instead of having to choose one language over the other. Alurista’s neo-​indigenist symbolism resonated in my search to figure out what a Chicano was in relation to my Mexican background. In 1968 I sought hybridity and heterogeneity and he answered the call by tearing down barriers and erecting a new ars poetica to capture our social-​historical-​linguistic realities. Strongly barrio-​centric, he offered a seismic shift by breaking the shackles of normative expression where monolingualism reigned in either Spanish or English. Shades of meaning, inflection and nuance took on a fresh significance, anticipating an unparalleled freedom 2 See Tino Villanueva’s Chicanos: Antología histórica y literaria (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1980) and Juan Bruce-​Novoa’s Chicano Poetry: A Response to Chaos (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982).

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in creating a renovated language of multiple registers within and between two cultures (popular, standard, slangs (both caló and Black English), and of course code-​switching), and a revamped symbolic system which together carved out a nascent worldview. I witnessed a burgeoning transformation where culture and politics freely commingled within literature as we faced the challenges of carving out an identity as Chicanos, which we now considered more appropriate to confront Anglo-​American hegemony. Much like Quetzalcóatl, we aimed to shed our skin and prepare for a dignified place in American society that had either marginalized us as inadequate, or worse, stigmatized us as invisible. We were tired of being second-​class citizens, oftentimes perceived as an ahistorical people with no agency and as poor procreators of civilization and culture despite Mexico’s monumental achievements from the Toltecs, Mayans and Aztecs. We intimated something more earth-​shattering through self-​definition. Chicanos/​as definitely shook the literary establishment—​even surprising ourselves—​with daring descriptions and portrayals of a poetics that defiantly contested the colonizing status quo by serving as a mirror of its demise as something caduco and outdated. Chicanos came to grips with a past of marginalization while seeking to reconcile their true identity along with the maneuver to redress their disenfranchisement as well as the politics of exclusion to which they had been subjected for so long. Of course, other Latinos, such as Puerto Ricans and Cuban-​Americans possessed other cultural referents that were in general less indigenous than Chicanos, but instead, more Caribbean in terms of the perspective on the experience of coming from islands. 2

Relegated No More: Breaking Our Relative Silence

In analogous geological terms, this Renaissance period can be described as a major earthquake that stirred the foundation and soul of Chicanos—​and, by extension, other Latinos/​as—​through the clash of cultural tectonic plates that would forever be altered. We broke through a sound barrier of oppressive forces that had subjugated us for decades by confronting the demons of American domination. The epicenter of our concern encompassed both the labor fields and our barrios, where together perhaps 90% of Chicanos/​as lived at the time. Earthquakes can occur as sidewinders, shake-​and-​bake, waves, tremors, jolts and in general disorienting movements that confuse and perplex, even befuddle. Our lives in American society paralleled such fissures that impacted our very existence on a daily basis as experienced in a variety of institutions, including education, the workplace, in public life, and often in the

28 Lomelí privacy of our homes. Literature, then, by Chicanos/​as provoked a new awareness about our place in American society, producing analogous reactions of discomfort because we emerged out of the shadows with verve and affirmation (some condemnation), compromiso y concientización, authenticity y ganas in reshaping the future we thought we deserved and envisioned. A Richter scale of high magnitude allowed us to take apart a systemic and fallacious cultural conditioning that had plagued us as socially obscure, sometimes labeled as backward while questioning our contributions to Southwest history. We could sense an emancipatory urgency on the horizon while a literary movement was in full force through its own momentum and force. The middle/​late 1960s was the first seismic shift I encountered in the modern era which coincided—​unbeknownst to me then—​with Luis Valdez’s Teatro Campesino in 1965 and Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales’ I Am Joaquίn /​Yo Soy Joaquín in 1967 and the emergence of the Quinto Sol Generation with the journal El Grito: A Journal of Mexican American Thought, also in 1967. Something was happening as the ground shook under our feet. A new consciousness of advocacy was emerging as we defied how our past had been caricaturized via unfair fabrications or simply disregarded by Anglo America. We were on the move much like César Chávez’s labor movement was marching with the conviction of history on our side. We sensed vindication and a reckoning with redemption. A messianic and revolutionary spirit filled our ethos as we attempted to re-​shape our destiny as strangers in our own land beyond the confines of the parochial. We sought a name, a language and a place, and we found them in Chicano, Spanglish and Aztlán, respectively. Fractured and splintered like Humpty Dumpty, we had finally put ourselves together again by distilling our long-​overdue epic of discovering the richness and pride in our culture and history. We had come of age, and our literature was trying to catch up through the revolutionary act of auto-​representación, a deliberate tactic of generating our own voices: a literature of, by and for Chicanos/​as. Much has transpired since those embryonic moments where poetry blossomed through flor y canto (or in xóchitl in cuícatl), where an explosion of voices emerged to recapture our rightful place in American society. In the process, the novel also came of age with examples such as, “… Y no se lo tragó la tierra” (1971) by Tomás Rivera, Bless Me, Ultima (1972) by Rudolfo A. Anaya, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972) by Oscar Zeta Acosta, Peregrinos de Aztlán (1974) by Miguel Méndez, and Estampas del Valle y otras obras /​ Sketches of the Valley and Other Works (1973) by Rolando Hinojosa-​Smith; and along with theater (Teatro Campesino, Teatro de la Esperanza, among others) evolved into a world-​class, syncretic form of myth, body movements and unique dramatic representations and characters. A new aesthetic burst onto

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the scene through the 1970s while treading new ground and also testing the American academy’s disinterest in diversity and multiculturalism. Oftentimes, Spanish and English departments looked the other way, snubbing our attempts to penetrate their inner circles. In 1975 a smaller cluster of writers, which I have called the Isolated Generation, inserted themselves onto Chicano literary circles from a variety of outside directions and vantage points with new literary projects with the intent to go beyond the easily identifiable cultural nationalist interests: “Instead of treating glossy overviews of collective suffering, the focus now involved a magnifying glass approach to discerning the inner qualities, often with an emphasis on the contradictions of raw reality”(Lomelí, 1993, p. 97). In great part, they did not subscribe to an extra-​literary yearning. That is, such writers as Alejandro Morales in Caras viejas y vino nuevo (1975), Ron Arias in The Road to Tamazunchale (1975), Isabella Ríos in Victuum (1976), Phil Sánchez in Don Phil-​O-​Meno sí la mancha (1977), Berta Ornelas in Come Down from the Mound (1975), Estela Portillo-​Trambley in Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings (1975),3 Bernice Zamora and José Antonio Burciaga in Restless Serpents (1976), and others offered craft over subject matter, a vertical view of Chicano/​a experience instead of the previous epic representations, including the opening up of presenting female characters or subtle folklore as the basis of exploring new areas of Chicano/​a life. Another important shift occurred during the decade of the 1980s which was branded the “Decade of the Hispanic”—​that later evolved into what the 1990s should have been termed the “Decade of the 1990s—​, purportedly bountiful in opportunities to both depict and publish Chicano/​a voices. That, however, turned into a fleeting mirage with inconsequential results except for beer sales and guacamole. The premise involved Chicanos/​as becoming part of a larger ethnic grouping among “Hispanics,” a term that emerged out of the U.S. government’s desire in Washington D.C. to place all “Hispanics” in the same sack—​partly fueled by Cuban-​Americans on the East Coast who sought to underscore their cultural affinities with Spain. Chicanos/​as overall resisted the “Hispanic” label except in New Mexico but nonetheless took the “Decade of the Hispanic” in stride because we saw a considerable aperture of prospective support in producing literature. If such efforts contributed in part toward 3 Portillo-​Trambley is one who crosses over between the Quinto Sol Generation and the Isolated Generation in that she initially made a name for herself with her famous play The Day of the Swallows, first published in El Grito: Journal of Contemporary Mexican American Thought 3.4 (1970), pp. 32–​40. In addition, with her novel Trini (1986) she again made an impact in the Chicana Postmodern Generation by contributing another facet of a Chicana immigration experience.

30 Lomelí a national awareness of “Hispanics,” it was the term “Latino/​a” in the 1990s that truly coalesced into a broader cultural coalition that concentrated on commonalities and similar experiences more than differences of region, language, customs and historical background. Either way, Latinos made a major advancement in terms of seeing themselves as part of a larger minority beyond the specific labels—​some regional—​as Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Cuban-​ Americans, etc. 3

Chicana Postmodern Generation: A Second Renaissance

In the midst of this volatile environment of the 1980s, a third significant seismic shift—​some consider it an unprecedented “boom”—​of substantial gravity surfaced in 1985 as a formidable upsurge when Chicanas burst onto the scene as a group of individuals, now flourishing, prospering and becoming central characters of their own creation while at the same time defying male literary constructions and conventions that had become formulaic and predictable. They advocated from a new gender positionality which can be couched within the concept of herstory, overtly focusing on what Norma Alarcón called “women as theoretical subjects” (1991)4 which was considered a highly innovative and/​ or revolutionary aesthetics at the time. This was strategic to place women at the center of their narratives or at least as empowered voices with which to be reckoned. Chicana writers were also more inclined to openly explore sexuality as a topic like never before in addition to indulging in the infinitely fertile dimension of psychic inwardness of women’s experiences. Consequently, they offered greater experimentations with genre as a vehicle and a form by defying the straitjacket conventional limitations or the more orthodox male-​ constructed sense of genres, therefore boldly creating publishing houses run by and for women (i.e. Third Woman Press). They advanced a vision of explicitly genderized texts as viable tools for understanding female characters and their particular issues. If literature by Chicanas5 before this period was sometimes considered an appendage of male writing during the cultural

4 See Norma Alarcón. (1991). The Theoretical Subjects of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-​ American Feminism. In H. Calderón and J. D. Saldívar (Eds.). Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture and Ideology (pp. 28-​39). Durham and London: Duke University Press 5 We should mention that some Chicana critics and writers opined that such a literature was in fact another form of literature separate from male production, which some have considered independent and almost autonomous.

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nationalism period, their new sense of agency and protagonism became, if not autonomous, at least quite independent in terms of motivation and artistry, forming the Chicana Postmodern Generation, a highly creative and diverse group of women writers who depended on their own wits and sophistication, oftentimes embracing ambiguity as a technique but, more so, resorting to the overt and calculated representation of gender as a code of arms, thereby complementing and even challenging representations by male authors. Although 19856 is the focal point of an unrelenting Chicana aesthetics, it is that year, and shortly thereafter, that a number of Chicana writers came together to create a movement like never before, oftentimes collaborating across ethnic lines with other Latinas in light of sharing common values and goals. Such writers as Sandra Cisneros in The House on Mango Street (1985), Ana Castillo in The Mixquiahuala Letters (1985), Pat Mora in Borders (1985), Cherríe Moraga in Giving Up the Ghost: Teatro in Two Acts (1986), Gloria Anzaldúa in Borderlands /​La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), Helena María Viramontes in The Moths and Other Stories (1985), Cecile Pineda in Face (1985), Estela Portillo-​ Trambley in Trini (1986), Margarita Cota-​Cárdenas in Puppet: A Chicano Novella (1985), Denise Chávez in The Last of the Menu Girls (1986), and others, helped form an influential seismic shift that would fundamentally redefine Chicana/​ o literature, carrying over into the 1990s and ultimately into the twenty-​first century. The tsunami effect had an immediate impact in terms of gaining a wider readership and solicitations from mainstream publishers nationally and internationally, arrasando con premios literarios y representaciones autóctonas de la condición de la mujer, and by extension, they broadened the depictions of culture while uncovering a larger and more illustrative portrait of the family unit. They uncovered aspects and subtleties males were unable to grapple with in their previous quests for the epic by enacting and refashioning, for example, traditional genres and social roles. Ana Castillo professed “genre jumping,”7 others “genre bending,” and still others simply made a point of writing beyond the strictures of traditional genres or mixing them unapologetically. Chicanas, moreover, offered more an internal epic—​if we can call it that–​of experiential perspectives encompassing universal wants and desires that focused on women as a phenomenon from within, a vertical introspection into womanhood and her psyche, shaped and conditioned by their unique experiences 6 Some of the writers mentioned had produced isolated works prior to 1985 in journals and anthologies, but their reputations soared shortly after that year as part of a sizable emergent group who contributed to the Chicana feminist movement. 7 The idea emerged in a public presentation by Ana Castillo titled “Ana Castillo: An Evening with the Writer” on May 6, 2004 at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

32 Lomelí vis-​à-​vis or in contrast to men’s pursuit of epic and historical representations. That was when gender caught up with race and surpassed it as a valuable and worthwhile literary topic, trope and/​or device. 4

Post-​Movement Production and Globalization

The 1990s witnessed a deepening into a far-​reaching spectrum of topics and concerns, mushrooming into significant touchstones, sometimes fueled by common concerns with other Latinos/​as, such as: the dilemmas and problematics of immigration in Helena María Viramontes’ Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) and Víctor Villaseñor’s Rain of Gold (1991); the complexities of creating a Chicana identity in Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek (1991); the paradoxes of cultural beliefs in Graciela Limón’s The Memories of Ana Calderón (1994); sexuality as defined by the individual in Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Sor Juana’s Second Dream: A Novel (1999); girlhood and the sense of an internalized border in Norma Cantú’s Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera (1995); gender prerogatives vs. family in Ana Castillo’s So Far from God (1993); detective fiction as a refashioned subgenre thanks to Rudolfo A. Anaya’s Alburquerque (1992) and Lucha Corpi’s Eulogy of a Brown Angel: A Mystery Novel (1992);8 the conflation of history as past and future in Alejandro Morales’ The Rag Doll Plagues (1992); discovering a female/​feminist bond in Josefina López’s Real Women Have Curves (1996), and a new wave of young adult literature which has blossomed into the twenty-​first century.9 The literature exhibited confidence in concentrating on la petite histoire instead of the broad horizontal overview sought by previous epic constructions; now, what mattered was the personal examination into the individual as a mundo unto itself. Having to prove they were Chicanos/​as was no longer the central or burning issue of why they wrote; rather, our writers were motivated to expand into new

8 These two authors have played a central role in the promotion of such a subgenre, which has been subsequently cultivated by other authors, such as Manuel Ramos in The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz (1993) and Michael Nava in The Hidden Law (1992) in the l990s, and later Alicia Gaspar de Alba in Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders (2006) and Sergio Troncoso in The Nature of Truth (2003) in the twenty-​first century. 9 Here the more likely candidates might be Gary Soto’s prolific production, such as Baseball in April and Other Stories (1990) and Summer on Wheels (1995), in addition to Víctor Martínez’s A Parrot in the Oven: Mi Vida (1996) and Gloria Velásquez’s Juanita Fights the School Board (1994), and many others. However, some critics do not focus on young adult literature and often omit it from the general canon.

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realms of social experience, effectively illustrating that our social conditioning intersected with much of American society as never before. Parallel to the significant wave of aforementioned authors who reached new literary heights in the 1990s up to contemporary times are those who focused principally on the seismic shift of gay, lesbian or queer writings, consequently challenging hetero-​sexual norms among Latinos/​as in general.10 Writers and/​or critics such as Benjamín Alire Sáenz in Dark and Perfect Angels (1995), Michael Nava in The Death of Friends (1996), Carla Trujillo in Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About (1991), Alicia Gaspar de Alba in Sor Juana’s Second Dream: A Novel (1999), Emma Pérez in The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (1999), and numerous others have been critical in establishing this cutting-​edge perspective regarding sexuality that uncovers hidden sentiments and valuable vivencias into a formidable critical stance. Representing sexuality became a central driving force of literary expression that has uniquely shaped a new topical articulation, carving out a distinctive niche within American literature. Besides, re-​visiting border and feminism gained greater momentum with such works as Sonia Saldívar-​Hull’s Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature (1997). But something else significant occurred in the globalizing 1990s: critics who focused on Chicana/​o literature–​sometimes in conjunction with other Latinos/​ as–​pushed the boundaries to finally gain legitimacy within the American academy and suddenly English, Spanish, Comparative Literature and American Studies departments began to take notice by hiring and promoting critics with that particular expertise. At this point, it felt like a third renaissance was starting to gain momentum among both Chicanos/​as and also Latinos/​as nationwide. The decade peaked with the publication of key reference books and the recovery of works prior to 1965, thanks principally to the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project headquartered at the University of Houston that eventually collected works and citations of some 25,000 and counting. The past became a long-​standing present while the literature’s availability expanded exponentially nationally and abroad. International conferences became a common staple in Spain and the U.S. and others took place in Mexico, France and Germany. In addition, the barrio acquired new contours and texture, including revamped thematics with transfictional connotations, thanks to Ixta Maya Murray’s Locas (1997) and Luis R. Rodríguez’s Always Running: La Vida Loca; Gang Days in L.A. (1993). Among some of the prominent reference 10

Of course we must acknowledge the pioneer writers such as John Rechy in his famous City of Night (New York: Ballantine Book, 1963) and later Arturo Islas’ The Rain God: A Desert Tale (Palo Alto: Alexandrian Press, 1984).

34 Lomelí books are the following: the four award-​winning volumes of the Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the United States (Kanellos & Esteva-​Fabregat, 1993); the various key anthologies, such as Kanellos’ Hispanic American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology (1995) and Tatum’s Mexican American Literature (1990); and the three volumes of the Dictionary of Literary Biography: Chicano Writers edited by Lomelí & Shirley (1989, 1992 and 1999). One key critical work was Ramón Saldívar’s Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (1990) which placed the art of novel writing within the domain of postmodernism as this world-​wide movement was developing. Ultimately, what defined this decade was the recovery and revival of important texts that contributed toward enlarging and re-​contextualizing literary productions by people of Mexican descent from the colonial period, the nineteenth century and the twentieth century up to 1965. Here some of the outstanding additions to this background with their original dates of publication or composition (most represent newly reprinted works): The Squatter and the Don (1992/​1885) by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Las aventuras de Don Chipote, o cuando los pericos mamen (1985/​ 1928) by Daniel Venegas, Dew on the Thorn (1997) by Jovita González Mireles, The Rebel by Leonor Villegas de Magnón (1994), George Washington Gómez (1990) by Américo Paredes, Telling Identities: The California Testimonios (1995) by Rosaura Sánchez, El Coyote, the Rebel: A Nonfiction Novel by Luis Pérez (1947/​ 2000), and Mexican Village (1945) by Josefina Niggli, just to mention a few. 5

Twenty-​First Century: Neoteric Currents and Multiple Directions

The twenty-​first century has indeed generated a gamut of innovative fissures in how they represent ever-​changing social-​cultural climates, for example, with a healthy dose of self-​criticism or self-​reflection while we can also find acts of poking fun or laughing at ourselves. A broad rainbow of expressions now characterizes the new century precisely because Chicano literature, very much couched within an overall Latino/​a aesthetics, possesses a well-​defined background at the same time that it counts on a backdrop, a legacy and especially a deeper sense of genealogy than ever before. Rumblings of recent developments have been spreading in the wake of new discoveries and quests of renewal. Recent works continue to focus on many of our modern social circumstances—​some which continue to be nagging and persistent—​, but we don’t see ourselves existing in only one channel of forbearance y aguante because we have transcended many of the barriers that previously held us back or at least served as temporary obstacles. Social ethics still dominate our embedded critical perspectives beyond politics and intellectual theories

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in order to again highlight the more personal, intimate yet still piercing territory of the long-​standing positions of advocacy and pursuit of justice. Some works may appear to be either somewhat frivolous or tongue-​in-​cheek compositions with the luxury to fantasize or freely explore non-​social topics, but this happens in any literature when it reaches a full state of maturity. Chicano literature should not be measured by any different criteria, as was the case in the l970s when many critics and readers expected, even demanded, that the literature adhere to Marxist precepts of confronting economic inequities, thanks to a materialist approach to history and theory which implied that political practice was the end goal of all works. On the surface, some of our literature now may seem to have strayed a bit from its core values of contestation and outright resistance, but I venture to say that much of its original stamp of opposition, resistance and struggle–​and even subversion–​continues with regenerated vigor in counteracting, even redressing, issues whenever appropriate. The tactics and strategies may be different within the markets of literary acceptability and sales, which are greatly influenced by the pressures from corporate publishing houses, but the targets continue to be some of the same with rehabilitated critical twists, methods and approaches. José David Saldívar was instrumental in Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (2000) by raising greater questions about transnationalism and how Latinos inflected the area of Cultural Studies in unprecedented and innovative ways. Either way, Latinos/​as have made major strides in the areas of production, dissemination and acknowledgment, gaining greater suitability as a marketable product for general consumption in high schools and universities. Some of the aforementioned perspectives can be confirmed by casually cataloging a number of the principal voices from before the new century that made a major splash in the previous decades. Together, they provided an important transition by affording continuity and in particular a background which newer authors in the twenty-​first century could rely on as reference points. Here I am referring to such works as Alurista’s modern codex in As Our Barrio Turns … Who the Yoke B On? (2000), Graciela Limon’s view of Central America in Erased Faces (2001), Alma Luz Villanueva’s retro-​hippie version in Luna’s California Poppies (2002), Lucha Corpi’s refined mystery novel in Crimson Moon (2004), Luis Valdez’s return to his Yaqui background in Mummified Deer and Other Plays (2005), Juan Felipe Herrera’s incursion into pastiche in Cinnamon Girl: Letters Found Inside a Cereal Box (2005), Rudolfo Anaya’s folkloric sci-​fi rendition in Curse of the Chupacabra (2006),11 Helena 11

Anaya was one of the first to experiment successfully with science fiction, creating in the process a subgenre within Chicano/​a literature that others have taken to heart, such as

36 Lomelí María Viramontes’ view on the history of East Los Angeles in Their Dogs Came with Them (2007), Josefina Lopez’s self-​exile in Hungry Woman in Paris (2009), Jimmy Santiago Baca’s discussion of immigration in A Glass of Water (2009), Tino Villanueva’s classical portrayal of a heroine in So Spoke Penelope (2013), and Alejandro Morales’ revisionist history of Los Angeles in River of Angels (2014). In certain ways, these authors as established and proven voices continued to enrich the literature with renewed treatments of old thematics, further detecting the mastery of their subjects in the midst of promoting their works that further strengthen and enhance the field. They write with confidence and considerable authority, thus reaffirming much of what Chicano literature has been through contemporary times: a literature that managed to carve out its own niche within American literature. Another significant seismic shift in the form of small but significant aftershocks almost went unnoticed because the majority of critics were busy emphasizing established authors, their works and what they considered the “canon” that defined a contemporary Chicano/​a literary tradition. For example, certain works opened up new spaces and others overhauled well-​recognized literary currents, modes and modalities in multiple directions in subject matter or point of view. While surpassing past production of “classics” between the l970s and l990s may have seemed improbable in the early 2000s, the string of recent works, quantitatively and qualitatively, has, in fact, witnessed an unheralded abundance, particularly in terms of sheer sophistication, complexity and substance. Literature produced by Chicanos/​as is on a definite upswing and unparalleled revitalization because opportunities abound in terms of readers and interested publishing houses due to widespread dissemination and distribution. It must also be stated with great confidence that it no longer resembles something anomalous, strange or exotic, gaining tremendous acceptability in academia, schools and sales outlets. A definite trend has emerged: readers welcome some of the established authors while awaiting new voices that can reinvigorate an understanding of Chicano/​a experiences. It is now commonplace to find works that make a major splash or shock waves—​by established writers or not—​, marking reified experimentations that represent new and original iterations while often revisiting issues related to (im)migration and transnationalism. Among some of the more appealing examples for their insatiable quest for diversity and variation are, for instance, a plethora of works that either

Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita in Lunar Braceros: 212–​2148 (2009) and Marta Acosta’s Casa Dracula Series in Happy Hour at Casa Dracula (2006).

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amalgamate points of view or open new realms of thematic explorations, thus expanding what the literature has to offer in terms of experiential insights and technical innovations. The following list offers a mixture of established writers alongside emerging voices that complement each other well in pushing fresh avenues of expression in Chicano/​a literature: Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper (2005), a regrettably ignored but highly delightful meta-​ novelistic incursion into Chicano magical realism that spoofs the act of writing without sacrificing social content; Lalo Alcaraz’s La Cucaracha (2004), a vanguard graphic novel of subversive, self-​deprecating decolonial humor; Sandra Cisneros’ Caramelo: Or, Puro Cuento (2002), a narrative of transnational movement couched within a tour de force mixture of testimonio and narrativity with a biting view of cultural values (i.e. machismo) and the family unit; Miguel Méndez’s El circo que se perdió en el desierto de Sonora (2002), a further examination into a Chicano-​styled magical realism; Emma Pérez’s Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory (2009), a lesbian cowgirl’s revisionism of Texas history in the 1830s; Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders (2005), a thrilling mystery novel about femicidio en la frontera; Luis Alberto Urrea’s Into the Beautiful North (2007), a quasi-​absurd yet amusing tongue-​in-​cheek journey of colorful characters who together spoof immigration of a transnational community while transcending stereotypes, and also The Hummingbird’s Daughter (2005), a delightful historical tale of a healer and mystic; Mario Alberto Zambrano’s Lotería: A Novel (2013), a playful narrative that manipulates form and folklore;12 Reyna Grande’s two works Across a Hundred Mountains (2006), a moving account on abandonment and family disintegration and The Distance Between Us: A Memoir (2012), a soul-​searching look into family conditions via immigration and separation that impact children; Graciela Limón’s The River Flows North (2009), a riveting story that humanizes the multiple processes and perspectives of immigration; Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita’s Lunar Braceros 2125–​2148 (2009), a ground-​breaking science-​fiction novel of futuristic bondage in outer space; Sandra Cisneros’ A House of My Own: Stories from My Life (2015), a rendering account of a writer’s inner world of values and motivations; Mario Acevedo’s Jailbait Zombie (2009) and Werewolf Smackdown (2010),

12

The case could also be made for Juan Felipe Herrera and Artemio Rodríguez’s Lotería Cards and Fortune Poems: A Book of Lives (1999) for coincidentally preceding Zambrano by using the Mexican bingo or lotería game as a vehicle and, again, breaking narrative boundaries via the construction of new possibilities. There is also the case of Ben Olguín’s and Cathryn Josefina Merla-​Watson’s Altermundos: Latin@ Speculative Literature, Film, and Popular Culture (2017) whose collection on speculative literature has received recent critical attention.

38 Lomelí two works that introduce and interject an unorthodox detective vampire or zombie sci-​fi series; and, finally, including Juan Felipe Herrera’s two works Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems (2008) and 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border: Undocuments, 1971–​2007 (2007), both consisting of a profound yet sardonically introspective meta-​epic into the Chicana/​o psyche within ultra-​moderns times, ultimately leading to his nomination in 2012 as the first Chicano to be appointed California Poet Laureate, followed up in 2015 with the highest and historical distinction as the first Chicano to be named U.S. Poet Laureate, having served for an unprecedented two consecutive terms. As is made evident, the achievements by the above-​mentioned cluster of trendsetters and trailblazers—​some towering figures and other neophytes—​ are indeed notable as the literary endeavors are expanding at an unforeseen rate. The only factor that remains to make a major breakthrough is in the form of coveted international recognition, and eventually a Nobel Prize winner! Many Latinos/​as have already received virtually every prestigious literary award and recognition within the United States, including the American Book Award, the pen Award, the Before Columbus Foundation Award, the MacArthur Foundation Scholarship, the Premio Aztlán in Fiction Award, the Lannan Literary Award, the Grolier Established Poets Award, and many others, including Juan Felipe Herrera’s appointment as the U.S. Poet Laureate in 2015 and 2016. Chicanas/​os are reshaping the American literary map with interesting incursions into an array of vivencias, experimental formats and representations at the same time that Rasquachismo has evolved into new creative dimensions without losing its permanent populist centrality in the various critical stances adopted by the writers. A Rasquache perspective embodies a sensibility toward the funky, even the tacky, at times irreverent, and underdog world view, serving as an affirmation and search for an alternative trifling aesthetics in contraposition to mainstream notions of art and writing.13 Rasquachismo, in one form or another, continues to inspire the viewpoint of Chicano popular culture and folklore which are often configured by the commingling of so-​called “low art” with “high art” in a dialectical relationship that defies easy classification but clearly returns to its popular roots. Take

13

Tomás Ybarra-​Frausto and Amalia Mesa-​Bains are the best theoreticians of such a concept. Consult Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility. In R. Griswold del Castillo, T. McKenna and Y. Yarbro-​Bejarano (Eds.), cara: Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965–​1985 (pp. 155-​162). Los Angeles: University of California Regents, Wight Art Gallery, ucla. See also Amalia Mesa-​Bains’ article Domesticana: The Sensibility of Chicana Rasquachismo. In J. A. González, C. Ondine Chavoya, C. Noriega, & T. Romo (Eds.), Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology. Durham, NC: Duke University.

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for example, many poems in Juan Felipe Herrera’s 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border: Undocuments, 1971–​2007 (2007), Lalo Alcaraz’s unique humor in La Cucaracha (2004) and Sandra Cisneros’ meta-​biography in Caramelo: Or, Puro Cuento (2002), three works that clearly weave and combine popular elements with sophisticated techniques of unveiling a series of stories. The diversification in subject and themes is reaching extraordinary magnitudes, having overcome part of its uni-​dimensionality of the 1960s and 1970s, now offering something for a larger readership while still continuing to instill a sense of urgency in maintaining a consciousness of social conditions in a constantly changing global world where Chicanos/​as have had to face continuous challenges. A certain earthiness and down-​to-​earth depiction still prevail while anchoring many of their tales in real-​life circumstances with regard to immigration, gender issues and formulaic representations. The aftershocks in the twenty-​first century are signs of numerous developments, no matter the size or magnitude. Chicano literature is well rooted and carving out a unique niche within American letters. In addition, it is worth mentioning in passing that literary criticism on the literature has also demonstrated considerable advancements as of late by precisely enlarging its critical lens and delving deeper than ever into subjects of interest. It now definitively encompasses a wider variety of topics and theoretical approaches, as exemplified by Rafael Pérez-​Torres’ book Mestizaje: Critical Use of Race in Chicano Culture (2006), Nicolás Kanellos’ Hispanic Immigrant Literature: El Sueño del Retorno (2011), Frederick L. Aldama’s Postethnic Narrative Criticism: Magicorealism in Oscar “Zeta” Acosta, Ana Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman Rushdie (2003), Graphic Borders: Latino Comic Books Past, Present and Future (González, 2016), and his The Routledge Concise History of Latino/​a Literature (2013), plus The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (Stavans, 2011), Suzanne Bost and Frances R. Aparicio’s The Routledge Companion to Latino/​a Literature (2013), and Manuel Martín Rodríguez’s Cantas a Marte y das batalla a Apolo (2014). Aldama exhibits the greatest volume and critical breadth in a series of books that place him at the apex of Chicano/​a criticism quantitatively and qualitatively; much of his cutting-​edge evaluations illustrate a polished and unmatched thematically broad-​ranging record. He is arguably the most prolific Chicano critic in contemporary times by sustaining an unmatched activity into a wide variety of subjects and sub-​genres with works such as, Graphic Borders: Latino Comic Books Past, Present and Future (2016) and Long Stories Cut Short: Fictions from the Borderlands (2017), and including works on film and humor. Moreover, Martín Rodríguez, perhaps more than anyone, offers a masterful model and template of archival persistence and awe-​striking discoveries as they relate to the colonial period, while collecting and re-​interpreting

40 Lomelí information and key documents, como hormiga, in order to more authoritatively re-​introduce the seventeenth century poet’s background in Gaspar de Villagrá: legista, soldado y poeta (2009) followed by original ground-​breaking interpretations of Villagrá in his Cantas a marte y das batalla a Apolo: cinco estudios sobre Gaspar de Villagrá in conjunction with an invaluable critical edition of Villagrá’s 1610 epic poem Historia de la Nueva México (2010), which celebrates the poem’s 400th anniversary. We can no longer afford to ignore such an early colonial writer as Genaro Padilla’s claims, making a compelling case in The Daring Flight of My Pen: Cultural Politics and Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá’s ‘Historia de la Nueva México’, 1610 (2010). There is also the case of resurrecting an eighteenth-​century New Mexican poet in Defying the Inquisition in Colonial New Mexico: Miguel de Quintana’s Life and Writings (2006) by Francisco A. Lomelí and Clark A. Colahan. These mark significant shifts and reverberations that will have long-​lasting effects in our field in focus and methodology. Luis Leal, the most authoritative literary historian in Chicano literature, first mentioned Villagrá in his seminal article from 1973 titled “Mexican American Literature: A Historical Approach,” and critics such as Manuel Martín-​Rodríguez, Genaro Padilla, María Herrera-​Sobek, Francisco A. Lomelí and others have taken Leal’s direct suggestion to heart in developing a wealth of critical materials and studies for us to ponder in our efforts to better capture the social-​literary content of the Colonial Period, which still remains to a great degree, under-​studied. Our literature in the twenty-​first century then has categorically been enhanced by the multiple directions, paths and modalities it has spread into by covering a wider gamut of views, concerns and human experiences. And it must be stated without hesitation: there exists a more democratic pantheon of writers emerging among Latinos/​as than ever before, opening new ground and proving that the literature is bearing fruit in sheer numbers and in terms of quality and reception. It is no longer a minor phenomenon we have to justify, rationalize and validate: it can stand on its own with authors who are garnering state, national and international awards too numerous to mention, including numerous nominations as state poet laureates. We have come a long way from the Quinto Sol awards or the attempts by partial critics to bolster its legitimacy and existence. Even our criticism has become less dogmatic and more scientific by exploring a wide spectrum of theoretical paradigms by bringing into play postcolonial, transnational or other hypothetical approaches. More recently, thematic representations have encroached into sometimes reinforcing some of the previous texts, but also defying them. We are now in the midst of significant encyclopedic collections, literary dictionaries, special compilations and, again, anthologies. This brief list helps make the point: 2-​volume

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Latino and Latina Writers (West-​Durán et al., 2004), the 3-​volume Greenwood Encyclopedia of Latino Literature (Kanellos, 2008), Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States (Kanellos, 2002), The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (Stavans et al., 2011), and the Historical Dictionary of U.S. Latino Literature (Urioste, Lomelí & Villaseñor, 2017). 6

Fissures Coming Together to Form a New Literary Order

Chicano/​a literature as part of an overall Latino/​a literary phenomenon has reached the pinnacle of respectability from both readers and critics at the same time that a constellation of both writers and critical reference books now abound for students or scholars from the U.S. and abroad. Chicano/​a voices have indeed arrived—​to answer Tomás Rivera’s enigmatic title in his chapter/​short story “Cuando lleguemos” from his iconic novel “… Y no se lo tragó la tierra”—​after scratching our way through obstacles, knocking down barriers, crashing glass ceilings, pushing the envelope, causing commotion, and shaking the foundations of the academy. In the process, our literature has managed to instigate seismic shifts and multiple aftershocks of novelty and innovation along the way by, in great part, overcoming our humble Renaissance Period of the 1960s that set the stage to launch a series of daring steps to explore our own imagination, identity, and sense of activism and social ethics while challenging the status quo of American aesthetics. In other words, we succeeded in overcoming our previous invisibility. The positive signs abound: Chicanos/​as, along with other Latinos/​as, have created their own literary agency independently of mainstream American literary institutions and the canon establishment by exploring and manifesting an untethered inventive spirit of possibilities and ground-​breaking creations. There is no doubt that the literature has broadened its scope as well as expanded its landscape by re-​inventing itself in multiple stages and manifestations, while exploring multiple areas that had been ignored before. As readers we can now pick and choose and there is something for everyone, but let’s not get too comfortable because there’s likely to emerge another generation that will rattle your sense of comfort with a renewed heartfelt advocacy forging fresh ideas that will transcend what we have come to know as Chicana/​ o literature as of late. Prepárense for another future shift and rumblings and don’t say you haven’t been warned. Thus far, we have witnessed since 1965 fundamental shifts, major shakeups and crucial changes that have developed in a wide variety of stages through thematics, style, manner of advocacy and subject matter every ten to fifteen years and there is no reason why we should

42 Lomelí expect anything less in the imminent future. We have rarely stated this in such categorical terms, but we now feel obliged to declare it with unequivocal confidence in regards to this overarching fenómeno Latino: Chicano/​a literature has now attained the stature and level of a world literature while reaching out to a more global readership in far-​ranging places, such as Spain, Ireland, France, Germany, Romania, China, Mexico, Italy, Holland, Russia, Korea and other countries of Latin America. Latinos/​as have indeed come of age and Chicanos/​ as, specifically, have managed to create significant seismic shifts in our literature’s makeup and constitution which have now been felt around the world by playing a critical role in its interactions with other literary traditions to raise a consciousness about cultural validation of minority peoples in contemporary times.

References

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Castillo, A. (2004, May 6). Ana Castillo: An Evening with the Writer. Public talk at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Retrieved from https://​www.ciis.edu/​ciis -​news-​and-​events/​campus-​calendar/​evening-​with-​ana-​castillo. Castillo, A. (1993). So far from God. New York: W.W. Norton. Cisneros, S. (2002). Caramelo: Or, Puro Cuento 2002. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Cisneros, S. (2015). A house of my own: Stories from My Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Cisneros, S. (1991). Woman Hollering Creek and other stories. New York: Vintage Books. Corpi, L. (2004). Crimson moon. Houston: Arte Público Press. Corpi, L. (1992). Eulogy of a brown angel: A mystery novel. Houston: Arte Público. Gonzales, R. (1972). I Am Joaquín /​Yo soy Joaquín. New York: Bantam Pathfinder Editions. Grande, R. (2006). Across a hundred mountains. New York: Washington Square Press. Grande, R. (2012). The distance between us: A memoir. New York: Atria Books. Herrera, J. F. (2005). Cinnamon girl: Letters found inside a cereal box. New York: Joanna Cotler Books. Herrera J. F. (2008). Half of the world in light: New and selected poems. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Herrera, J. F. (2007). 187 Reasons Mexicanos can’t cross the border: Undocuments, 1971–​ 2007. San Francisco: City Lights. Herrera, J. F., & Rodríguez, A. (1999). Lotería cards and fortune poems: A book of lives. San Francisco: City Lights Books. Islas, A. (1984). The rain god: A desert tale. Palo Alto, CA: Alexandrian Press. Kanellos, N. (Ed.). (2002). Herencia: The anthology of Hispanic literature of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press. Kanellos, N. (Ed.). (2008). The greenwood encyclopedia of Latino literature. Volumes 1–​3. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Kanellos, N. (1995). Hispanic American literature: A brief introduction and anthology. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. Leal, L. (1973). Mexican American literature: A historical approach. Revista Chicano-​ Riqueña, 1(1), 18–​32. Limón, G. (2009). The river flows north. Houston: Arte Público Press. Lomelí, F. A. (1993). Contemporary Chicano literature, 1959–​1990: From oblivion to affirmation to the forefront. In F. A. Lomelí (Ed.), Handbook of Hispanic cultures in the United States: Literature and art (pp. 86–​108). Houston: Arte Público Press. Lomelí, F. A., & Shirley, C. R. (Eds.). (1989, 1992, 1999). Dictionary of literary biography; Chicano writers. Vols. 82, 122, 209. Detroit: Gale Research Inc. Lomelí, F. A. & Colahan, C. A. (2006). Defying the inquisition in colonial New Mexico: Miguel de Quintana’s life and writings. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. López, J. (2009). Hungry woman in Paris. New York: Grand Central Publishers.

44 Lomelí López, J. (1996). Real women have curves: A comedy. Woodstock, IL: The Dramatic Publishing Company. Martín Rodríguez, M. (2014). Cantas a Marte y das batalla a Apolo: Cinco estudios sobre Gaspar de Villagrá. New York: Colección Plural Espejo/​Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española. Martín Rodríguez, M. (2009). Gaspar de Villagrá: legista, soldado y poeta. León, Spain: Universidad de León. Martín Rodríguez, M. (Ed.). (2010). Historia de la nueva México. Alcalá de Henares: Franklin Institute, Universidad de Alcalá de Henares. Martín Rodríguez, M. (Ed.). (2012). Special issue on historia de la nueva México de Gaspar de Villagrá. Camino Real: Estudios de las Hispanidades Norteamericanas, Universidad de Alcalá de Henares-​Instituto Franklin, 4(6). Méndez, M. (2002). El circo que se perdió en el desierto de Sonora. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Merla-​Watson, C. J. & Olguín, B. (Eds.). (2017). Altermundos: Latin@ speculative literature, film and popular culture. Los Angeles: ucla Chicano Studies Research Centeer. Mesa-​Bains, A. (2019). Domesticana: The sensibility of Chicana rasquachismo. In J. A. González, C. Ondine Chavoya, C. Noriega, T. Romo (Eds.), Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology (pp. 91–​99). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Morales, A. D. (1992). The rag doll plagues. Houston: Arte Público. Morales, A. D. (2014). River of angels. Houston: Arte Público Press. Padilla, G. (2010). The daring flight of my pen: Cultural politics and Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá’s ‘Historia de la Nueva México’, 1610. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Pérez, E. (1999). The decolonial imaginary: Writings Chicanas into history. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Pérez, E. (2009). Forgetting the Alamo, or, blood memory. Austin: University of Texas Press. Plascencia, S. (2005). The people of paper. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, Inc. Portillo-​Trambley, E. (1970). The day of the swallows. El Grito: Journal of Contemporary Mexican American Thought, 3(4), 32–​40. Rechy, J. (1963). City of night. New York: Ballantine Book. Saldívar, J. D. (1997). Border matters: Remapping American cultural studies. Berkeley: University of California Press. Saldívar, R. (1990). Chicano narrative: The dialectics of difference. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Saldívar-​Hull, S. (2000). Feminism on the border: Chicana gender politics and Literature. Berkeley: University of California. Sánchez, R. & Pita, B. (2009). Lunar braceros: 212–​2148. National City, CA: Calaca Press.

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Stavans, I., et al. (Eds.). (2011). The Norton anthology of Latino literature. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Urioste, D. W., Lomelí, F. A. & Villaseñor, M. J. (2017). Historical dictionary of U.S. Latino literature. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Urrea, L. A. (2005). The hummingbird’s daughter. New York: Little, Brown, and Co. Urrea, L. A. (2009). Into the beautiful north. New York: Back Bay Books/​Little, Brown and Company. Valdez, L. (2005). Mummified deer and other plays. Houston: Arte Público Press. Villanueva, A. L. (2002). Luna’s California poppies. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press/​Editorial Bilingüe. Villanueva, T. (1980). Chicanos: Antología histórica y literaria. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Villanueva, T. (2013). So spoke Penelope. Cambridge, MA: Grolier Poetry Press. Villaseñor, V. (1991). Rain of gold. Houston: Arte Público Press. Viramontes, H. M. (2007). Their dogs came with them. New York: Atria. Viramontes, H. M. (1995). Under the feet of Jesus. New York: Dutton. West-​Durán, A. (Ed.). (2004). Latino and Latina writers. Vols. 1 & 2. New York: Scribners’ Sons, Gale Group. Ybarra-​Frausto, T. & Mesa-​Bains, A. (1991). Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility. In R. Griswold del Castillo, T. McKenna, & Y. Yarbro-​Bejarano (Eds.), CARA: Chicano art: Resistance and affirmation, 1965–​1985 (pp. 155–​162). Los Angeles: University of California Regents, Wight Art Gallery, ucla. Zambrano, M. A. (2013). Lotería: A novel. New York: Harper Collin.

Digging through the Past to Reconcile Race and Latinx Identity in Dominican-​American Women’s Memoirs Luisa María González Rodríguez Abstract This chapter explores how two young Afro-​Dominican writers, Raquel Cepeda and Jasminne Méndez, articulate their memoirs around diverse and changing experiences and stories that help (re)construct the Latino imaginary. By evoking memories from the past, these writers provide glimpses of the traumatic experiences suffered by Dominican-​Americans in the U.S. and try to overcome racialized constructions of identity while delineating new spaces for enacting their polyhedral identities. The authors analyzed in this essay demonstrate that by proposing more sophisticated ways of expressing their Latino/​a identity, they can move towards a more open notion of latinidad that enables them both display multifaceted selves and reconstruct/​renegotiate their fractured modes of belonging across a variety of contexts. By delving into issues of race, gender, and memory, this chapter sets the stage for the particular notions and formation of pan-​ethnicities discussed in this volume and brings to the fore the notion of intersectional latinidad.

Keywords Afro-​latinidades –​broken memory –​Latino imaginary –​Afro-​Dominican –​collective memory –​ intra-​history

Latina/​o ethnic consciousness, as some scholars contend, developed as a result of the inhospitable policies of the U.S. government towards Spanish-​speaking immigrants (Padilla, 1985; Irizarry, 2016).1 Thus, the concept of latinidad may be understood as a pan-​ethnic term generated to build group solidarity around 1 This work has been supported by the Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation through the research project “Critical History of Ethnic American Literature: An Intercultural Approach” Ref. PID2019-​108754GB-​100, and the Erasmus+ project “Hospitality in European Film” Ref. No. 2017-​1-​ES01-​KA203-​038181.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004460430_004

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shared oppression, adversity and to improve harsh socio-​economic conditions. Considerable controversy exists between those so-​called Latinos who conceive the concept as a political construct to generate a generic identity and push social boundaries, and those who perceive the term as one imposed on them by the host country to racialize and criminalize them as a cultural collective (Noriega, 1993). For those who reject the essentialism and reductionism of a Latinx identity, the construct brings the idiosyncrasies of all groups into one identity, and contributes to perpetuating negative stereotypes of the whole Latina/​o community. Younger generations of Latinx writers call for new interpretations of the idea of latinidad and demand a more dynamic way of expressing their fluid, hybrid, and polyhedral identities. Seeking more sophisticated expressions of Latinx identity, they shift the focus from latinidad to latinidades (Alamo-​Pastrana & Cepeda, 2009; Allatson, 2016; Torres-​Sailant, 2008) in an attempt to create opportunities to display multifaceted selves and reconstruct or renegotiate their fractured modes of belonging and identification. This chapter discusses two contemporary Dominican-​American women writers who explore their family stories to address questions of race and identity; they transcend their autobiographies to depict the diversity of Latinos/​as growing up in the United States. Raquel Cepeda and Jasminne Mendez provide vivid testimonies of the exclusion and marginalization of ethno-​racialized minorities in twenty-​first century America. Their memoirs, constructed as counter-​narratives to colonizing hegemonic discourses, explore the impact of cultural memory and consciousness on the construction of a new Latinx narrative, thus shaping a collective identity. For this young female generation, individual and cultural memory is a subversive weapon, used to challenge the stereotyping and criminalization of Latinx by the dominant culture in U.S. society. They, therefore, vindicate their ancestors’ silenced and marginalized cultural and historical narratives, expressing the necessity to understand their roots to enable reconstruction of a multilayered Latinx identity. I contend that young-​generation Latinx writers want to explore identitarian issues not only to restore collective memory, but also to building understand of their transcultural identities and to challenge the idea that all Latinx are alike. 1

Memory and the Construction of Identity and Community

The concept of Latina/​o identity in the United States compels the so-​called Latinx to extirpate the socio-​cultural or ethnic differences among them and to cultivate binding myths of common ancestry into a single category. Young Latina writers feel the necessity to challenge the stereotypes imposed by the

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Anglo dominant society and to provide a subtler, heterogeneous perspective of their latinidad. They are conscious that “[o]‌ften erased from America’s founding narrative, Latinx –​in all our previous guises–​have always been present as a crucial counter-​narrative, a people that live in a world of many worlds, possessing an identity of multiple identities” (Morales, 2018, p. 3). In this context the function of memory is to forge a sense of collective ethnic community, restore binding links, and explore an individualized sense of belonging. In Bird of Paradise: How I Became a Latina (2013) Raquel Cepeda investigates her ancestors’ origins to overcome racialized constructions of identity, delineating new spaces for enacting her sense of self. For years Cepeda ignored her past, but has decided “to start piecing together the puzzle of our history that had eluded me all these years: our ancestral origins” (p. 148). Like “H.G Well’s narrator in The Time Machine,” she is determined to travel “through time and space” to make “a direct link to our own history with our own saints and sinners” (p. 149). Her memoir becomes an act of resilience that contributes to reinforcing her links to her community, and to gaining self-​esteem. Personal and collective memories merge in this narrative to question stereotypical concepts of ethnicity and to enliven a sense of collective continuity of the Latino community. After living with her grandparents in Paraíso, a neighborhood of Santo Domingo, surrounded by affection and love, Raquel feels she is invisible in New York. This feeling of invisibility and Cepeda’s lack of affection for her father, who constantly smacks her, creates in her a sense of nonbelonging, fostering a desire to explore her homeland culture and forge a Latina identity. Thus, while her father wants to forget his Latino roots and to assimilate her into American culture by making her take piano lessons and play tennis, Raquel has chosen to identify herself as a Dominican and part of the Spanish-​ speaking community. Cepeda’s contact with Maria, her boyfriend’s mother, enables her to establish social connections with other Latinas/​os and create attachments that prove crucial for constructing an insider’s perspective of her own Dominican identity. María provides an identity-​related social bond with the Latino/​a community lacking in Cepeda’s family and this triggers Raquel’s role exploration. At Maria’s place she feels wanted for the first time since living with her grandparents in Santo Domingo and there she can overcome her sense of hyphenation and nonbelonging. During her infancy and adolescence she has been judged negatively by people who have tried to impose different identity schemata on her, contributing to her sense of nonbelonging: “I hate being called a ‘spic bitch’ by white kids on my way back from school as much as I hate being called a ‘wannabe white girl’ by Latino kids for playing tennis and living west of Broadway” (p. 66). Maria’s place reproduces the lost paradise of her memories, epitomized by Santo Domingo and her grandparents’ love. Both

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Maria’s neighborhood and the Latinas/​os living there prove to be crucial for reinforcing the Latino imaginary, which, according to Juan Flores, is the binding factor of a heterogeneous group represented “for itself” and defined as “a unity fashioned creatively on the basis of shared memory and desire, congruent histories of misery and struggle, and intertwining utopias” (2000, p. 198). For Raquel and the other Latinas/​os, Maria’s neighborhood becomes a site of memory that helps them keep alive their traditions, language, and religious or social rituals. Maria becomes a bridge providing a link to this community and opportunities to experience first-​hand some of the stereotypical Latino/​a roles, behaviors and identity schemata. Raquel enjoys the typical Dominican dishes Maria and Casimiro cook and accompanying Maria to funerals or to the welfare office where she translates for other Latinas. She also likes talking about their traditions with Casimiro, Maria’s man and a Santeria practitioner, who has become a father figure for her, but also serves to initiate her enculturation within the Latina/​o community. From him she learns the importance of intuition, understood as “these heavy feelings” that are “our indigenous and African spiritual guides intervening, warning us of danger” (p. 104). In one of their dialogues Casimiro tells her that one of his ancestors, with whom he has communicated through Santeria, has told him that Raquel is destined to become “the one to carry on our tradition, who will communicate with others who we really are to the world” (p. 93). This is one of the objectives of her autobiographical memoir; by evoking memories from her past, Cepeda provides enlightening glimpses of the traumatic experiences suffered by Dominican-​ Americans that increase their visibility within the U.S. Cepeda’s negative childhood and adolescent experiences are interwoven with the collective experiences of Maria, her family and neighbors. In her chapter entitled “Mean Streets” she describes the harsh conditions her mother faced when she moved to New York: “[a]‌nd my mother, still cleaning rich people’s apartments downtown, has stopped daydreaming about a life of literature and philosophy” (p. 21). When she meets Maria, she realizes that this seems to be the fate of Latina immigrants: “[n]one of Maria’s sons understands how fucked up and degrading her job really is […] Here, at the funeral home, she is free to cry without guilt or judgment” (p. 95). Raquel Cepeda describes the hardships she has experienced as a Latina and by so doing she narrates the intrahistory of her Dominican community and the history of all Latina/​o immigrants who share similar experiences. For, as she acknowledges, “[m]any Marias have found themselves in New York City, working in factories assembling hats and sewing buttons on shirts, as maids and home-​care attendants, doing whatever to provide their families here and back home with the bit of money they scrape together every other week” (p.89). Thus, this autobiography

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wishes to foreground the specific cultural and personal stories of marginalized Dominicans that have been erased under the homogenizing portrayals of Latino pan-​ethnicity. Conscious that “Latino pan-​ethnicity has been fostered by a climate of xenophobia” and that “the regional and cultural history of all people of LatinAmerican descent has been erased” (Beltrán, 2010: 7), Cepeda’s memoir tries to counteract this criminalization of Dominican-​Americans and Latinos/​ as by telling the history of those who have been silenced throughout years of oppression. Thus, when she hears people from her neighborhood complaining about “there being too many Dominicans and other Spanish-​speaking people flooding on this side of the block” (p. 46), she ironically describes some of the stereotypes confronted by her community: They already made a mess of the building directly across the street from Mami’s old place by playing dominoes and music through the night, and talking too loudly for the sensitive ears of the block’s white settlers. These new people are invading the area like they do the trains, walls, and parks when night falls. Every morning they leave evidence in the form of elaborate murals that stretch ten feet high and more across, painted on the concrete barricade wrapped around large sections of the park’s baseball field. (p. 46) The author also gives testimony of the way in which Latinas/​os are criminalized and relegated to the bottom strata of American society for she is convinced that “everybody in the city, not just Papi, feels that Black and Latino kids are no better than subway tunnel rats. Around our way, the resentment we feel encourages kids who may not have otherwise fucked with each other to form alliances. Hip-​hop, this thing we love that loves us back, is our lingua franca” (p. 62). However, she also considers that sharing oppression has helped them build group solidarity and resort to Hip-​hop as a way of expressing their feelings. Her reflections show that racist and exclusionary discourses are strengthening bonds among Latino/​a groups and reveal Raquel’s strong adherence to the Latina/​o community. In one of her heated arguments with her father, “in response to a Telemundo news report […] about another Latino getting jumped for no other reason than because he looked Latino, whatever the hell that meant” (p. 147), he takes the side of the American mainstream attitude by admitting that he believes “in mass depo’dation” and that “Dey shou’ take them all out o’ here” (p. 147). Cepeda uses this conversation to contribute to the debate over the homogeneric Latino label imposed on them, openly rejecting the term Latino as perpetuating a monolithic view of the idea of latinidad

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when she asks her father: “don’t you think it’s hypocritical that Americans, both Black and White, call Mexicans ‘illegal,’ although they were here first?” or “Don’t you feel any outrage at all for how ‘they,’ who will spill over into the collective ‘us,’ are treated?” (p. 147). The author considers herself part of this collective and rejects the essentialism of a label that stereotypes and criminalizes the Latino/​a community as a whole: [a]‌s a group, many American-​born Latinos exist in a kind of liminal state. For one, although different Spanish-​speaking groups have been migrating here since at least the 1800s –​the exception being Mexicans who were here well before the first European arrived–​we are still being treated like personae non gratae in our own home. The thing is, mainstream society isn’t sure who they’re discriminating against –​are we all the way white, Black, or Native-​American? (p. 138) Jasminne Mendez is another young Afro-​Dominican writer who blatantly challenges the reductionism of the Latina/​o label. Island of Dreams (2013) is a multi-​genre memoir of self-​discovery and belonging where Latinx identity is created out of a panoply of fragmented memories. She intersperses poems and short stories, personal memory and reflection, to convey the intrahistory of her community and to reveal the oppressive side of the American Dream. Unlike Raquel Cepeda, Mendez has a close-​knit family with whom she identifies and for that reason she portrays vivid memories where “the smell and taste of my family, togetherness, love, and tradition remind me that I didn’t achieve all this on my own” (p. 21). She has a big family, where grandmothers, aunts and cousins have become “the best role models a young Latina could ask for” (p. 4); however, the wide generational gap between Latina mothers and daughters forces young Latinas to reflect on their hyphenated identities in order to reinvent themselves as members of this community within the U.S. Mendez feels deeply attached to her cousins and acknowledges that, in spite of their different lives and stories, they all need to find ways to reconcile their in-​between identities: “We want to make our families proud without sacrificing ourselves. And every day, we know that we must choose between the American dreams that live within us and the island dreams of our mothers” (p. 57). In order to do so she delves into the contradictions and complexities of the Dominican culture and identity and tries to establish connections with her broader sense of identity. Particularly important to understand how young generations’ notions of latinidad have changed is the concept of displacement and their disconnection from the collective memory of their community. Mendez narrates

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the ruptures and discontinuities characteristic of diasporic communities and their traumatic sense of homelessness: “I realized how fortunate I was in some ways and impoverished in others. I had everything I physically needed and more in the states but I was missing the sense of peace you get from knowing ‘where you are from’ ” (p.102). These reflections emphasize the dualities of belonging associated with living in another country while missing one’s homeland. All second-​generation Latinas/​os know about their homeland, their culture and values is what their families have told them and, while these stories have contributed to creating mental mappings of time and place, they feel the need to reexamine their imagining belongingness away from homeland and explore their ambivalent identities in their present realities. Mendez’s memoir is articulated to demonstrate her latinidad and Dominicanness by attempting to reshape the image of Latinas/​os in the United States. In a poem titled “Hollywood Dreams,” Mendez criticizes the stereotypes of Latina women conveyed through tv and movies. The author completely agrees with Torres-​Sailant (2008) when he denounces that “the white-​supremacist value system that governs the way mass-​media corporations promote the collective visage of the Latino community” and points out a “racial misconduct” of tv executives who “resist allowing black and Indian faces to appear before the cameras” (p. 51). In this poem she complains that Latino ethnicity is constructed externally by the dominant U.S. culture: How come no one looks like me on TV? Because they’re from different Latin American countries No one has my skin color No one my accent They all sound Spanish And look made of plastic […] No class No style Just light-​skinned versions Of Latinas gone wild

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When I turn on the set I try to forget That my Hollywood dream Isn’t as hard as it seems I just want to be on TV So other girls can look up at me. (pp. 58–​59) In this poem the writer resists a stereotyped Latina identity and the image of a homogeneous collective. As an Afro-​Dominican, she seeks to raise visibility of the Latino differences and fissures. She herself acknowledges that she does not fit into the stereotype since, from an outsider’s perception, “[m]‌y hair was not smooth, my nose was too wide, and my butt too small for a Latina. My body defied me. I was no one’s stereotype […] a pseudo Latina black girl from nowhere who spoke Spanish and had frizzy hair” (p. 79). Mendez’s awareness of outsiders’ essentialist representations of Latinas/​os becomes crucial for her developing a sense of self and identity as a member of the Dominican and Latina/​o community. As a diasporic individual she feels the need to assert her subjectivity by exploring historical or individual memory and tracing the foundations of her identity as a Dominican. The poem entitled “Foundation” enables her to construct a Dominican imaginary on her own terms. She describes her homeland as “much more than a third-​world country/​on the verge of cultural assimilation/​and dissipation” (p. 63) where, although people “[r]emain seated on the seesaw of/​ignorance and independence” (p. 66), still can resist U.S. colonization and assimilation as “[i]t can survive without five star resorts,/​foreign tourists and the colonization of/​Mickie D’s, kfc’s, and suv’s” (p. 64). Her Dominicanness is expressed through material aspects of her culture, such as food and music, which are deeply connected to her sense of identity and belonging. In her imaginary, her homeland “is drum beats keeping rhythm with heartbeats./​It is a three-​stringed guitar playing/​old-​school Bachata/​ Es una güira adding flavor to a two-​step Salsa” (pp. 63–​4) or a place that “can thrive on the fresh mangos falling from trees/​Los plátanos verdes deep fried in grease./​And the sweet, strong taste of Mama Juana” (p. 64). Dominicans in Mendez’s imaginary are represented as a layering of diverse racial heritages with “the heat of the sun burning and tainting/​their Spanish-​ colored flesh/​into Haitian, Jamaican, African soul” (p. 63). However, her vindication of a Dominican identity does not mean that she rejects being included as part as the Latina/​o collective. For, as Caminero-​ Santangelo (2007) aptly remarks, “identifying as Latina or Latino also allows us to express, to ourselves and to others, our commitment to attending to the

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historical and present differences among Latinos, as well as to the sometimes overlapping or analogous histories and current structural problems –​which is another way of saying our commitment to solidarity” (p. 219). Conscious as Mendez is of the ties that bind Latina/​o people, she feels the necessity to explore the ethnic and cultural differences among them: Over the last few years, however, my culture has begun to bleed through my eyes. I am not like my white friends. I don’t dance like my black friends. The Puerto Ricans don’t roll their “r’s” like I do, and the Mexicans call their habichuelas, “frijoles.” Which is something I will never get used to. I see now, however, that my experience matters, that my Dominicanness is a story with a few well-​earned scars. (pp. 79–​80) These similarities and differences of Latinas/​os are proof that there is not just one Latina/​o identity, rather latinidad is enacted depending on cultural, social and ethnic divergence. Rejecting essentialist definitions of Latinas/​os compels Mendez to interrogate her identity in order to pursue new ways of forging her role as a Latina. Problems associated with defining her ambivalent identity are addressed in the poem “Disorder,” where Mendez describes her “Multiple Personality Disorder” as “Multiple Dissociative Personality Identity Cultural Disorder” (p. 22). For this transcultural author, latent traumas of dislocation and the problematic negotiation of her identity as a hyphenated individual in the U.S. have resulted in a failure to integrate the different facets of her identity and self-​consciousness into a multidimensional self. Mendez’s disorder is characterized by a splintering of her identity into distinct personality states or conditions that are narrated in the subsequent eight poems. Thus from “Condition I” to “Condition viii” she tries to explore different aspects of her identity that affect her feeling, thinking and behavior in an attempt to define her polyhedric identity. In the poem titled “Condition I” Mendez construes herself as a “Dominicana, Dominican./​You can call me Latina, Hispanic,/​Caribbean or just strange” (p. 22). She is a bilingual individual who likes “fried plantains,/​ Arroz con pollo,/​And Juan Luis Guerra playing on through the night” (p. 22) and code-​switches naturally. The author is aware that her mestizo cultural and ethnic identity is not clear to American society and that from an outsider’s perspective she “will be labeled black, mixed, Puerto Rican, spic./​Everything but what I really am, /​A Dominican” (p. 23). In “Condition ii” she defines herself as a diasporic individual lacking stability and craving for mobility, while in “Condition iii” she reclaims her Blackness and complains that others “categorize” her “into another statistical minority” (p. 24). Although she projects her Dominicanness as a fundamental pillar of her identity, she also embraces her

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Americanness in “Condition iv” by admitting that she does the typical things American youths usually do. Moreover, when stating, in “Condition viii,” that she is “a reflection of her mother” (p. 27), the writer takes on the commitment to vindicate not only her Latinx identity in its multiple manifestations, but also that of other Latinas. For, as some scholars claim, “what Latinx can claim is the ability to imagine multiple others within one awareness, allowing otherness to fade as it becomes part of an internal conversation” (Morales, 2018, p. 307). Thus, Jasminne Mendez tries to challenge monolithic definitions of the notion of latinidad by rejecting stereotypical labels and suggesting that there are many ways of displaying their collage-​like identities. While the concept is understood as a domain of difference it will be open to constant negotiation and transformation in order to construct and display a plurality of Latinx identities or latinidades. 2

Afro-​latinidades as a Domain of Difference

These two Dominican-​American writers call for a more inclusive notion of latinidad so that their silenced African origins can be recovered and Afro-​Latinx can fit into current multiple latinidades. Both Cepeda and Mendez are aware that the present-​day debate on latinidad is deeply rooted in the politics of race and ethnicity and use memory as a subversive tool to uncover their suppressed African identity. As Ed Morales contends in Latinx: The New Force In American Politics and Culture, a conscious movement of Latinx and other people of color struggling to define themselves outside of whiteness is emerging. Rather than finding new paths to assimilation, they are discovering the other that exists within themselves, the one previously relegated to unconscious dreams of Iberia, Africa, Aztlán, and the Moors transferred to the New World. They are finding that the “otro yo,” the inner dialogue between indigenous and diasporic utterance and African origins and the media-​reified urban Latino reality, is becoming foregrounded by practices such as hip-​ hop, jazz, and plena, folkloric retellings of syncretic religion, and work songs. These are counter-​narratives that are forms of resistance. (2018, 17) For mainstream society Latinx are considered a separate race and Black Latinas feel that “the ‘misunderstanding’ betrays fundamental assumptions about how race is contingently constructed in U.S. dominant culture. ‘Black’ and ‘Latino/​ a’ are understood as mutually exclusive categories –​simultaneously ethnic […]

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and racial in nature” (Caminero-​Santangelo, 2007, p. 188). The American binary renders racial identity unstable for dark-​skinned Latinas/​os, who are usually assigned to what Bonilla-​Silva (2002) calls “collective black,” referring to those culturally and ethnically different minority groups who are equally discriminated against by the dominant group. While Anglo-​Americans have a binary perspective of race, Afro-​Latinas/​os take a broader view that, by acknowledging more fluid race-​mixing categories, resists the black-​white paradigm. Jasminne Mendez is conscious that her ambiguous phenotypical appearance is shocking for others as it contradicts the black-​white binary mold. Her poem “K-​12th Grade” neatly summarizes the reductionist dichotomy: What?! You speak Spanish?! Yes. But you’re black! I’m Dominican. And they stare at me, Confused. (p. 38) For Mendez confronting fixed connections between phenotype and ethnic identity drives her to explore her mixed-​race heritage. In “Condition iii” the author rejects the mainstream assumptions of uniformity by claiming that she wants “[t]‌o stand up and destroy your ability/​To categorize me/​Into another statistical minority,/​If I were black, I would be proud./​But I’m not/​So I’m just offended” (pp. 23–​4). Although she resists being labeled black, she feels the need to reconcile her African and Latina roots because, as she acknowledges, “[i]t is this strained relationship that I have with myself, with the color of my skin and the texture of my hair that has scarred me the most. I can’t keep tucking my identity away in a drawer like a souvenir” (p. 80). In her chapter “Pelo Malo” Mendez uses the hair metaphor to address some deeper identity issues connected to race and ethnicity which, having being hidden or erased from Latinx narratives, need to be thoroughly debated to really understand the concept of latinidad: “[f]or Dominicanas, there are only two hair types: pelo bueno and pelo malo. Good hair/​pelo bueno: (noun). Hair that is straight, smooth and easy to manage. Hair found on a Gringa. Bad hair/​pelo malo: (noun). Any hair that resembles or reminds us of our African ancestry” (p. 39). Within the Dominican context this distinction entails a rejection of their African identity. Denying their black identity has caused serious identity issues since “[w] hen you grow up hearing your mother, your tías, and every Dominican/​Puerto Rican/​Cuban hairstylist call your hair ‘bad,’ you inevitably start to develop a complex. You develop insecurities. You hate your hair” (p. 40). And, according

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to Mendez, this inherited trait becomes “your arch nemesis. Your hair defies you and defines you. Your hair is never good enough” (p. 40). She has, therefore, decided to counteract historical rejection of their African part of their heritage by letting her hair go natural and accepting her “Taíno and African roots” (p. 41) to reclaim her multiethnic identity. Unearthing her African roots, systematically suppressed under colonial discourses, allows Mendez to disentangle the intricacies in Afro-​Latina/​o subjectivities because, as she aptly remarks, I know now, that if I keep avoiding the Afro-​Latino elephant in the room, I will become a lie in a society that has already been ignoring me for centuries […] So, with my harsh gestures and broken Spanish, I have made everyone listen to the Caribbean and Taíno drums that beat inside me and echo from my pores. (p. 80) By postulating Afro-​Latina/​o identity as a category of divergence, Raquel Cepeda also brings to the foreground long-​silenced Afro-​diasporic discourses, providing a deeper insight into the Latino experience and rescuing Afro-​ Latinas/​os from invisibility. In an attempt to challenge monolithic visions of latinidad and bring the Afro-​Latina/​o diversity into the foreground, she is also highlighting the tensions of heterogeneity and hybridity that have been underplayed or ignored in order to build a pan-​ethnic collective. In the preface of Bird of Paradise she expresses some of her concerns related to the politics of identification faced by Latinas/​os: I’ve always been intrigued by the concept of race, especially in my own community and immediate family, where it’s been a source of contention […] Are Latino-​Americans white? Black? Other? Illegal aliens from Mars? Or are we the very face of America? […] According to the 2010 census, over half of all Latinos here identified as being solely white, and about a third checked ‘Some Other Race.’ I was one of the three million, or 6 percent, who reported being of multiple races. I guess it all depends on whom you ask and when you ask. Race, I’ve learned, is in the eye of the beholder. (p. xiv) Conscious as Cepeda is that normative historical discourses have suppressed the history of African slavery in the Caribbean and have contributed to a rejection of African ancestry among many Latinas/​os, she constructs counter-​ narratives that call attention to the Afro-​Latina/​o experience. According to the author, “[w]‌hat we learn at school can’t possibly foster a sense of pride in our heritage and the parts of ourselves that aren’t visibly European” and

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“if we believe what we’re taught about African history […] then we have to buy a version of the story that omits the complex and rich narrative of the transatlantic slavery experience” (p. 152). Within the broader framework of Afro-​latinidades, Cepeda takes the reader on a journey into the history of colonization and slavery that helps her trace her African self. The chapter titled “Paradise Gone” addresses the history of slavery in the Caribbean from the first Spanish-​speaking negro ladino slaves that were brought in 1502 to the “negros bozales, or slaves directly from the African continent” (p. 246–​47). The writer also relates that “the eastern side of Hispaniola was the first place in the New World to import African slaves to work in sugar mills” (p. 192) because, as she ironically states, “[l]ike their European counterparts, the Spanish […] thought manual labor was beneath them” (p. 193). She is particularly interested in the story of Juan Rodrigues, an Afro-​Dominican merchant who arrived on the island of Manhattan in 1613. Cepeda’s research on Latino migration to New York city, reveals that Rodrigues was “the first non-​native inhabitant of color on the island” (p. 209) and “the first Dominican, and the first person who was racially, ethnically, and culturally similar to modern-​day Latinos” (p. 210). She also avows him as an “exemplary settler,” whose “transcultural skills” (p. 210) allowed him to live peacefully among the Indigenous population. Thus, by vindicating her African origins and searching for the roads that connect the African continent and the Caribbean, Cepeda also posits “Afro-​Latinidades as a domain of difference” in an attempt to “reveal and recognize hidden histories and subalternized knowledges, while unsettling and challenging dominant (essentialist, nationalist, imperial, patriarchal) notions of African-​ness, American-​ness, and Latinidad, along with the forms of power/​knowledge that are embedded in these categories” (Laó-​Montes, 2005, p. 118). In unearthing the hidden parts of her identity Raquel Cepeda decolonizes their history and reclaims her people’s own narratives of the past, even resorting to dna to find the route back to Africa. By pointing out that “the history of Africa in the Americas is a fascinating one, and somewhere along the line, the narrative runs through my veins” (p. 245–​46), she highlights long-​forgotten historical, cultural and biological ties to Africa. Based on genetic evidence, she discovers that, although her father has always denied her Blackness and prohibited her to date Black men, her maternal ancestors are West African, more specifically from Guinea-​Bisseau, and her paternal ancestors are Central-​ African. This evidence helps her father reconcile with his blackness and accept his African ancestry: “I knew you wouldn’t stop until you placed me in Matanga […] I guess it’s true, somos una mescolansa” (p. 264). Tracing her African lineage only serves to reaffirm Cepeda’s spiritual connections to her African roots since, as she acknowledges, when she discovers that her “supreme Matriarch

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is West African, things begin to make perfect sense” (p. 191). She recognizes her African ancestor as “la africana, who in different scenarios has jumped in to save me like a guardian angel” (p. 192) or as “the shadow of the africana I often dreamt about as a child, one of my spiritual guides walking with me” (p. 156). She feels drawn to Africa by intuition and that this country “doesn’t feel far away in my memory” (p.156). Indeed, when she visited Sierra Leona she felt that “this place is so familiar –​the food, the rhythm of life and music, the culture” (p. 152). Now, she can understand her interest in hip-​hop cultural productions or in African religious practices as Santeria, fukú and brujería. For her, hip-​hop counter-​hegemonic narratives help her and other Afro-​Latinas/​os not only “transcend racial checkboxes” (p. 235), but also reinforce their identity and empower them as a collective. By transgressing real and imagined boundaries between categories of identification, Afro-​Latinas/​os will be able to negotiate their identities and position themselves as a category of difference. 3

Re-establishing Cultural Continuities by Building a Transnational Latinx Identity

Young generations of Latinx want to explore their history and cultural values in order to understand the present and develop social and historical consciousness, as well as to re-establish the connection between their past and their present in shaping their own identity. Cepeda’s and Mendez’s memoirs materialize a spiritual journey in search of stronger bonds with Dominican culture while connecting with a mythical past on which their imaginary has been constructed. Haunted by a sense of loss, these writers reclaim their past, the history and culture of their ancestors, but in doing this they have also constructed an imaginary homeland based on memory and desire. Thus, these writers’ desire to return to their homeland, envisioned as an “island of dreams” by Mendez and as “paradise” by Cepeda, responds to the need to narrate the historical experiences and cultural traditions of their own group both in the Dominican Republic and in the United States. This means the articulation of a transnational imaginary that will help reconceptualize the notion of latinidad as a social construct under constant negotiation and transformation. These autobiographical memoirs should be understood as acts of “imaginative discovery,” which attempt to impose “an imaginary coherence on the experience of dispersal and fragmentation” and recover an “imaginary fullness or plenitude, to set against the broken rubric of our past” (Hall, 1990, pp. 224–​25). As in-​between individuals, these writers try to restore the “broken memory” resulting from migration and create new continuities with their Dominican

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community based on their direct identification with place, people and culture. Jasminne Mendez has forged her own Latino imaginary out of snapshots of childhood memories and her family’s stories, but also “by collecting abandoned pictures,” “[b]‌y spying on the memories of clanky cup Sunday mornings,” and “by reading stolen letters written in a language even/​my mother has forgotten” (p. 90). In the poem “Santo Domingo Smiles” she narrates fragments of her mother’s story and conveys her nostalgia for the “sunny island” (p. 90). Mendez is also aware that the past her mother longs for has turned into a nostalgic memory and that her imagined Santo Domingo “doesn’t exist anymore,/​Only her memories of something else do” (p. 92). By traveling back to her native land with her family, Mendez tries to connect this mythical site of memory to the real place that can strengthen her sense of belonging. For Mendez the possibility of bringing together real and imaginary spaces of memory proves to be crucial for constructing a solid Latina identity. This is clear when she claims: “[m]y history, my family’s past and my identity finally felt real. Santo Domingo wasn’t just an illusion or a faded photograph anymore. It was a real place with real people, and they all looked and sounded like me” (p. 95). These reflections also highlight the impact of space on identity politics. Displacement has shattered Mendez’s and her family’s notions of latinidad; she and her siblings find their home country “was paradise and it was poverty but it finally felt like at least a part of us belonged somewhere” (p. 94). There they met an extended family of uncles, aunts, cousins, great uncles and great aunts who tell them interesting stories about their family and help the author understand different facets of her personality and to feel connected to a place and its culture. Indeed, as she acknowledges, “[t]‌he five of us left the island changed. For better or worse, we either felt a reconnect or a disconnect with a part of ourselves that only we understood” (p. 105). The author also highlights the importance of crossing imagined and real borders in constructing identities as she remarks that they “are not Dominican enough or American enough to call either place home” and “[y]et, between these two worlds exist a place within each of us where we thrive, survive, and find the strength to pursue our own dreams” (p. 106). And it is within these imaginary spaces that Latinx may forge their own modes of belonging as they “allow us to never forget where we come from, so that we can get to where we need to be, together as a family” (p. 106). For Mendez, her geographical journey has overcome fixed approaches to identity formation as connected to real spaces and vindicates the possibility of forging transcultural identities in the interstitial regions of the hyphen. In Bird of Paradise, Cepeda also sets out on a journey, geographic and spiritual, into the history and culture of her ancestors to recover her sense of collective continuity with the Latinx community. As a child her father encouraged

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her to deny her Dominican self, which contributed to a crippling of her sense of cultural identity, rendering her rootless. Indeed, in the preface she narrates that she “sweated hard to mask” her identity, how she “resisted the pressure to bend” and how she “constructed” her “own identity” (p. xv). Moreover, being positioned as the Other within mainstream dominant discourses, reinforces her sense of displacement and triggers her interest in constructing a semblance of connectedness between the homeland and the diasporic community. To establish a sense of continuity Cepeda uses memory as a subversive weapon to unveil the history of the colonized, formerly hidden under hegemonic discourses. In her chapter entitled “Flash of the Spirit” Cepeda uncovers the history of Hispaniola back to pre-​Columbian times in an attempt to reconstruct the history of indigenous people living there before Colón’s arrival. She narrates the first contact between Taínos, the dominant indigenous group, and the Spanish Conquerors and their decimation through decades of occupation. The story of colonization and conquest is shared all over the Caribbean and the Americas and is one of the causes of their lost identities. Therefore, conscious as she is that traditional historical discourses have silenced the stories of the colonized, she proposes a counter-​narrative that retells the history of Latin America from the prism of power relationships so as to deconstruct the colonial imaginary. For, as she remarks, “[i]‌f more studies are done, more pre-​Columbian history –​silenced due to genocide by Academia and European chroniclers–​will reveal a rich and diverse narrative” (p. 221). By vindicating a common historical memory that connects the history of the island and the hard stories experienced by Dominican immigrants, this memoir tries to overcome discontinuities in order to empower the Latinx community. Cepeda’s obsession with her ancestry motivates her to reconstruct the scattered pieces forming her kaleidoscopic identity. As many historical records in the Dominican Republic have been destroyed, she resorts to ancestral dna to trace her indigenous or African ancestry. She travels to Santo Domingo not only to hear the stories of the members of her family living there, but also to obtain dna samples that can help her connect with her roots. She finally discovers that she is the result of a mishmash of races and cultures and wonders “[w]‌hat would Arizona governor Jan Brewer” and other “Republicans say if they learned that many Latinos (me included) are mixed with European Blood” (p. 260). dna allows her to vindicate her mestizo identity constructed of a mixture of Indigenous and European (Spanish) traits and to incorporate the African part of her conceptualization as a Dominican-​American Afro-​ Latina, thus highlighting latent tensions in the concept of latinidad. She, therefore, aptly remarks that “Latinos are prototypical New Americans, the products of European immigration, colonialism, and slavery” (p. 260). Cepeda refuses to

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accept being labeled “illegal” for, as she ironically points out, “I always thought the face of America looked like the original people who settled here [….] they’ve been here since time immemorial. Whichever philosophy we subscribe to, it’s clear that Indigenous-​Americans and Mexicans were here first” (p. 260). By resorting to dna testing, she is able to deconstruct normative historical discourses and construct new narratives of continuity because, as she pointedly remarks, “[w]hat this journey has driven home for me is that being Latino means being from everywhere, and that is exactly what America is supposed to be about” (p. 260). During this retrospective journey she has developed a more comprehensive mestizo, transnational consciousness. Investigating her genetic, cultural and historic origins Cepeda has also realized that she needs to rely on intuition for experiencing a sense of belonging to a particular community. For, as she learns from Jorge Estévez, a Taíno from Dominican Republic working in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Manhattan, “[y]‌ou come to your identity because of the cultural icons, the conversation … the intimate knowledge of the culture. Nobody has to tell you you’re Dominican, but you kind of realize very young and unconsciously that you’re Dominican, and that’s what you are” (p. 262). He also contends that “Taíno is what makes us uniquely Dominican” (p. 263) and that “the connection to the Taíno is linguistic, spiritual, cultural and biological. You could have all four, or you could only have one, but no matter who you are, if you’re from the Caribbean, you’re connected to the Taíno” (p. 264). Having discovered her foundations as a Dominican, Cepeda can forge new connections with the Latinx community by crossing the lines separating the different groups and search for interstitial spaces where they can all imagine and create more inclusive ways of becoming Latinas/​os. In a chapter entitled “Becoming Latina,” Cepeda dismisses the rhetoric of cultural unbelonging and hyphenation by proposing a transnational framework where Latinx maintain their links with the culture and politics of their homelands but they become strongly implicated in the cultural and political agenda of their new land. After flying back to New York from Santo Domingo, she states: “Dominican Republic is my holy land, my Mecca. It’s equal parts archeological site and ancestral shrine, a place where I can go to get centered when I start feeling off-​kilter,” but, although “America will always […] feel foreign for me, New York is my home. This is where I can construct my identity freely and reject labels imposed on me. My foundation may be por allá, but my self is firmly rooted here” (p. 259). This clearly reveals that although hyphenated identities are framed through two interconnected axes represented as continuity and rupture, the sense of displacement, characteristic of the diaspora

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experience, may be overcome by considering a broader Latinx framework that may help repair broken memory by re-establishing the cultural bonds with their homelands. For, as Cepeda acknowledges, “[m]‌y transnational identity may have been formed when I was a child growing up in New York City and Santo Domingo, but it was enhanced because of the synthesis between logos and mythos, science and mysticism” (p. 269). Furthermore, as Flores (2000) aptly remarks, once “a people’s memory and sense of collective continuity is broken” (p. 52), “it is not enough to point to the break and glue the pieces together by mentioning forgotten names and events. The seams and borders of national experience need to be understood not as absences or vacuums but as sites of new meanings and relations” (p. 51). For Cepeda the process of bonding together both sites of memory invites a more comprehensive and creative mode of identity-​construction. 4

Conclusion

Cepeda’s and Mendez’s memoirs reveal the necessity of new generations of Latinas/​os to shape their identities by reclaiming the memories and discourses of their ancestors. These two young Latina writers in their personal narratives distill, reassemble, and rehabilitate past and present Latinx experiences in an attempt to reconstruct the history and intra-​history of the whole collective, thus contributing to restoring their broken memory. However, far from simply reclaiming their past, these Afro-​Latinas construct honest reflections that, by addressing unresolved issues of race, history, and identity, explore the different ways in which Latinas/​os position themselves within the discourses of the past and the cultural practices of the present. Latino/​a identity issues are approached by these authors not just in binary terms of inclusion/​exclusion, insiders/​outsiders, or assimilation/​segregation; rather, the notion of latinidad is understood as a creative social construct under constant revision and negotiation. By interspersing their own commentaries and reflections on questions related to memory, race, history and identity politics, Cepeda and Mendez successfully turn their memoirs into inspiring manifestos describing the life and history of a whole community and contributing to articulating a more flexible and broader perspective of the notion of latinidad as a composite matrix of multi-​racial sensibilities. Thus, the narratives analyzed propose transcultural scenarios in which divergent experiences, national myths and discourses of belonging may forge new cultural repositories out of suppressed and marginalized discourses. Within this wider framework, these Afro-​Latina writers

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propose a transgressive perspective of latinidad as a domain of difference where new racially mixed subjects are able to cross racial boundaries and create their own counternarratives. Moreover, through a poetics of fragmentation, Cepeda and Mendez are not vindicating a coherent self or a cohesive sense of identity; rather, they are trying to depict their own collage-​like identities as Afro-​Latinas by highlighting that latinidad needs to create an interstitial space of ethno-​cultural inclusion that embraces the ways in which Latinx enact and construct their own sense of belonging in the U.S.

References

Alamo-​Pastrana, C. & Cepeda, M. E. (2009). Popular culture and youth latinidades: (Re) Constructing community, from the inside and out. Identities: Global Studies In Culture and Power 16, 511–​512. Allatson, P. (2016). From ‘latinid@d’ to ‘latinid@des’: Imagining the twentieth-​first century. In J. Morán González (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to Latina/​o American literature (pp. 128–​146). New York: Cambridge University Press. Beltrán, C. (2010). The trouble with unity: Latino politics and the creation of identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bonilla-​Silva, E. (2002). We are all Americans!: the Latin Americanization of racial stratification in the USA. Race & Society, 5, 3–​16. Caminero-​Santangelo, M. (2007). On latinidad: U.S. Latino literature and the construction of ethnicity. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Cepeda, R. (2013). Bird of Paradise: How I became Latina. A memoir. New York: Atria Paperback. Flores, J. (2000). From bomba to hip-​hop: Puerto Rican culture and Latino identity. New York: Columbia University Press. Hall, S. (1990). Cultural identity and diaspora. In J. Rutherford (ed.), Identity, community, culture, difference (pp. 222–​237). London: Laurence & Wishart. Irizarry, Y. (2016). Chicana/​o and Latina/​o fiction. The new memory of latinidad. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Laó-​Montes, A. (2005). Afro-​Latinidades and the diasporic imaginary. Iberoamericana, 5 (17), 117–​130. Mendez, J. (2013). Island of Dreams. Moorpark, CA: Floricanto Press. Morales, E. (2018). Latinx: The new force in American politics and culture. London & New York: Verso. Noriega, C. (1993). El hilo Latino: Representation, identity, and national culture. Jump Cut, 38, 45–​50.

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Padilla, F. (1985). Latino ethnic consciousness: The case of Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans in Chicago. Notre Dame, In.: University of Notre Dame Press. Torres-​Sailant, S. (2008). Problematic paradigms: Racial diversity and corporate identity in the Latino community. Review of International American Studies, 3(1–​2), 45–​61.

Dominicans and the Political Realm of Latinidad in New York City Fernando Aquino Abstract This chapter examines the political progress and incorporation of Dominicans into the political circles of New York City since 1991, the year marking the election of the first Dominican to the New York City Council, and addresses the concept of latinidad in the context of Dominican Identity and electoral politics. It also investigates the impact of demographic reshuffling, transnationalism, individual leadership, communal and civic organization, and institutional support or rejection, including the impact of what is left of the so-​called “political machines” in New York City. Using the Dominican situation as a case study, the analysis takes place within the larger Latino/​a political context, revealing that a blurred boundary between pan-​ethnic identity and group identity exists, with communities and individual actors changing hats between the perceived Latino agenda and their own specific community agenda.

Keywords Dominican identity –​electoral politics –​pan-​ethnic identity –​Latino agenda –​intergroup solidarity

In order to understand the deployment of latinidad in Dominican political mobilization in the U.S., it is critical to historicize the origins of such negotiations between group and aggregate identity among other Latino/​a groups. Like Puerto Ricans, Mexicans and Cubans before them, Dominicans in New York, and in other cities where they have settled in large numbers, are effectively negotiating a pan-​ethnic identity of latinidad which only exists in the United States, with their nationality of origin identity, Dominicanidad serving as a strategic political tool. Perhaps the most important aspect of this is the way in which each of these previous groups and now the Dominicans, have specifically used cultural and literary production to document hidden or obscured histories of political mobilization as well as political debates around pan ethnic versus national origin identities, in addition to using cultural production

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004460430_002

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to make political mobilization visible and viable as a historical imperative for the integration of each group into the pan ethnic Latino identity. The interplay between politics, identity and cultural production is nuanced but inescapable, especially in terms of the racial division of the United States, which of course exists in Latin America but is more often couched in terms of class, which forces group identities to reconfigure themselves regularly so as to make their own experiences legible. Latinx authors from Jesus Colon in A Puerto Rican in New York (1961) to Oscar Zeta Acosta in The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973) to Angie Cruz in Dominicana (2019) all work with the interplay of cultural and political identity through the cultural production of literary work. In some works it is the plot (Zeta Acosta) and in others it is the quiet background of working class political struggles (Colon) and the challenges of forced migration, integration and transnational political identities (Cruz). This chapter focuses on the political deployment of latinidad by the Dominican community in New York City to contextualize and make visible the political realm where all of this cultural production lands, is born and is continuously challenged and redirected for the acquisition of access to power. The electoral process, and its results of power and access, is in fact in constant conversation with cultural production. The discussion about community names may often begin in political circles to aggregate a group (Hispanic, Latino, Latinx) but quickly become part of a cultural discourse about identity. It is just as important to understand the use of these terms in the political realm as it is to examine them in cultural and literary production so as to get a fuller and more complete picture of what is at stake. The Dominican community’s deployment of, and resistance to, latinidad are recent examples, and offers us insight into how more recently arriving groups navigate a landscape and discourse dominated by others, of which they suddenly form a part through the aggregate identity. Dominican Americans have successfully built a strong electoral presence in the multicultural democracy of New York City, despite the setbacks that researchers have traditionally highlighted as typical obstacles for immigrant communities looking for political representation. Dominicans have extended a kind of political pragmatism, involving levels of civic engagement that includes small businesses, professional associations, and coalition building. There has also been a powerful interplay in interethnic competition, taking advantage of large numbers of Dominicans concentrated in certain areas while expanding the growing salience of political transnationalism. These factors have enabled political aspirants to overcome socio-​economic obstacles and implement successful local political campaigns, deploying both Dominicanidad and latinidad. Although not prescribed as one of the usual obstacles, navigating

68 Aquino latinidad presents its own challenges and rewards that Dominicans are still learning from. Dominicans, in the context of modern ethnic political incorporation, have managed to rapidly obtain electoral positions in the last 30 years, by maximizing national origin political identity in some areas where Dominicans are a sizable/​dominant portion of the electorate, such as in Washington Heights, while successfully utilizing a mix of pan-​ethnic political identity currently contributing to a contemporary identity of latinidad, with national origin identity in diverse boroughs like Queens and Brooklyn. This navigation of a fluid frontier between pan-​ethnic identity and group identity indicates the experience of an aggregate identity serving as both a shield for solidarity and a pressure for compliance from actors within and without the competing groups. Although the concept can be subjected to varied theoretical interpretations, for this chapter latinidad is understood as an ideological consciousness of unity and shared experience that emerges from the interaction between the groups who are assigned a pan-​ethnic identity given to Spanish speaking immigrant groups in the United States originating from Latin American countries. While each group maintains its own nationality of origin identity, the notion of latinidad expands the top down label of Latino/​a to encompass their shared experiences and the value of aggregating in solidarity (Ricourt and Danta, 2003). Concepts of ethnic group conflict/​cooperation and pluralism offer a theoretical framework for explaining the success and challenges of the Dominican community. In Black-​Latino/​a Relations in U.S National Politics (2013), Rodney Hero and Robert Preuhs posit that the American political system is a reflection of groups acting as advocates for their members. Consistent with this approach, F. Chris Garcia and Gabriel R. Sanchez (2016) suggest that the pluralistic system should be viewed as a group political game, arguing that “a pluralist system encourages and rewards those who band together in attempts to influence government” (p. 18). In Newcomers, Outsiders and Insiders: Immigrants and American Racial Politics in the Early Twenty-​first Century (2013), Schmidt, Alex-​ Assensoh, Aoki, and Hero found that the influx of new immigrants has made the ethnoracial democracy in the United States both more complex and more salient, although not yet reducing the continuation of ethnoracial hierarchy in American politics. Latinidad, then, represents both a concept that politicians are eager to galvanize and deploy, and a self-​directed label—​Latinx—​used to navigate the fraught terrain of ethnoracial hierarchy and competition. Groups may either try to impose or challenge this hierarchy, depending on where they find themselves. Citing Flores and Oboler, Masi de Casanova argues that “Socially constructed identities are situational: a person’s acceptance or rejection of pan-​Latino identity may differ depending on the context” (2012, p. 422).

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An example of this is the Latinx group with the most access to political power in New York City, Puerto Ricans, differentiate themselves from other Latinx groups by making sure distinctions are explicit when naming organizations or groups like the Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic & Asian Legislative Caucus in the New York State Assembly. In New York City, where many neighborhoods have a diverse Hispanic community—​Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Ecuadorians, Mexicans, Cubans, Colombians and Central and South American immigrants—​, entering c­ ircles of political power often entails building coalitions and negotiating with other groups (including non-​Latino groups) while simultaneously attempting to maximize the benefits of each community’s own political capital. The concept of latinidad represents, as explained by sociologist Felix M. Padilla in his essay On the Nature of Latino Ethnicity (1984), a form of “situational” consciousness (p. 651). As a result, the label of latinidad, either internally assumed or imposed by outsiders with identifiers like Hispanic, Latina/​o/​Latinx, etc.,1 has a different connotation in a local setting where ethnic or national origin consciousness may take preference. In studying the implications of latinismo for Chicanos and Puerto Ricans in the city of Chicago, Padilla observed that “[t]‌he decision of a Spanish-​speaking group about when to employ its Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban, or the like ethnic identification is situationally determined and based upon that group assessment of its goals and its options to attain those goals” (1984, p. 656). In the local setting, where different groups sharing neighborhoods compete for political power, the cultural and socioeconomic similarities that give Latinx groups a sense of belonging, and facilitates a pan-​ethnic agenda based on latinidad, is determined by common problems like labor issues, educational opportunities, immigration issues, the fight against discrimination, marginalization, or police brutality. However, when it comes to individual groups’ political access to legislative posts at the municipal or state level, pragmatism kicks in with communities strategically reducing their common denominator to nationality of origin at times while playing the Latinx card at other times, all determined by demographics and the structural possibilities for coalition building with other communities. Although they have a long history of migration to the United States, with large scale migration following the assassination of U.S. backed tyrant Rafael Leonidas Trujillo and the U.S. invasion of the island in 1965, massive migration of Dominicans did not happen until the 70s and 80s, reaching 18.7 percent of the overall Latino population by 1990, with 332,713 Dominicans living in 1 I will be using the terms Latino/​a, Hispanic and Latinx interchangeably.

70 Aquino nyc, and currently 720,000 according to the U.S Census. Despite this relatively recent massive presence in the city, the legal and economic obstacles, home country attachments and language barriers that might impede their acquisition of full U.S. citizenship and voting rights, the Dominican community in New York City has made extraordinary progress in winning elections to legislative office in the last three decades. Dominicans have approximately 30 percent of the Latino/​a elected officials representing New York City in Congress, the State Legislature, and the City Council (Falcón, 2017, p. 4). In 2018, of the eleven city Hispanic council members, five were Dominicans, five Puerto Rican, and one Mexican. In other words, the Dominican share of Latino/​a elected officials reached parity with the Dominican share of the Latino/​a voting age population, a remarkable achievement given that the first Dominican only won local office in 1991. In only 25 years, since the Dominican community first successfully entered the arena of electoral competition in New York City, Adriano Espaillat was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Using his Dominican base as a stronghold, Espaillat mounted a successful multi-​ethnic coalition that included Puerto Ricans, African Americans and White Mexicans and Dominicans, all sharing the district previously held by legendary Harlem African American congressman Charlie Rangel. The Espaillat race exemplifies that political strategies need to be recalibrated according to the terrain a community aspires to cover since the political game changes the higher up a group climbs in the system. What works to win a city council seat may not work to win a Congressional District or a borough presidency, much less a city or statewide office, where no Latinx politician has yet found success in New York State. In A Tale of Two Cities, Jesse Hoffnung-​Garskof observes that in the early 70s other New Yorkers saw the newly arrived Dominicans within “the racial category of ‘minorities,’ ” and the pan-​ethnic categories of “Spanish” or “Hispanic” (Hoffnung-​Garskof, 2008). The author highlighted that, through these designations, Dominicans became New Yorkers that would not simply collapse into the African American or Puerto Rican categories, but became instead a group “in its own right,” which was also categorized as “a subset of the broader category of Hispanic (or Latino)” (Hoffnung-​Garskof, 2008, p. 99). As stressed by Hoffnung-​Garskof, it was in the school elections where Dominicans first flexed their political muscle in New York City, sometimes in alliances with the other Latino/​as in the neighborhood, primarily Puerto Ricans. When Dominicans took over control of the board of Public School 132 in Washington Heights in the late 70s, previously controlled by African Americans, their first act was to name the school Juan Pablo Duarte, after the founding father of the Dominican Republic. However, they did it by forming a coalition with the city-​ wide Puerto Rican Community Development Project. Notably, their message

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was “Hermanos Hispanos … vota por los tuyos: Hispanic brothers, vote for your own” (p. 109). This is an example of the emerging community establishing a visible identity as Dominicans in the naming of the school, even as they were working with Puerto Ricans in the coalition to establish a Latino/​a political identity in Washington Heights and on other fronts like cuny. This is an early example of the fluidity involved in navigating political aspects of latinidad. Consistent with these assessments, the study of political psychology suggests that intergroup solidarity/​competition, as we see it when Latinx groups emphasize their national origin background, can be understood under the realistic group conflict theory (rct). According to Henri Tajfel and John C. Turner’s (2004) article “The Social Identity Theory of Intergroup Behavior,”2 “rct states that opposing claims to scarce resources, such as power, prestige, or wealth, generate ethnocentrism and antagonism between groups. Therefore, low status should tend to intensify out-​group hostility in groups that are politically, economically, or socially subordinate” (p. 280). Interestingly, the theory also suggests that this ethnocentric dynamic happens among groups with similarities, which, again, makes sense in the context of the competition/​solidarity we find in latinidad, with groups sharing not only language, but neighborhoods and similar social and cultural characteristics which are often conflated by outside groups under such misnomers as Spanish people or Spanish food. This can easily become a source of tension as the desire to preserve perceived cultural independence and differentiation can be intense, especially under the duress of migration. In referring to the type of conflict we find in intergroup competition, they wrote: “This requires that groups must compare their respective situations. And, according to some views, it is only relatively similar groups that engage in mutual comparisons; therefore, many forms of status differences will reduce perceived similarity” (Tajfel & Turner, 2004, p. 280). The Dominican community arrived in New York City into a Latinx space occupied by the longstanding Puerto Rican community with status differences deeply linked to longevity in the city and citizenship (followed by an influx of other Latin American communities that significantly increased their presence in the city (Haslip-​Viera, 2017). Considering Dominicans have never dominated the Latinx demographic in New York City, as Puerto Ricans had for much of the mid to late 20th century, they offer a unique view of how communities behave politically in an environment in which latinidad is often a strategic concept of political pragmatism. What works for and against Dominican political access in

2 In their article, Tajfel and Turner credited the interpretations of rct as represented by the work of Muzafer Sherif and his associates and as a concept coined by DT Campbell (1967).

72 Aquino the different boroughs of New York City, measured in the attainment of elected representation? A look at how the Latinx communities cope with the challenges of plurality, intra-​and interethnic competition, coalition building with other non-​Latinx communities, as well as institutional obstacles from borough to borough, may help us understand why the conceptualization of latinidad works as a political agent in some boroughs, and national origin emphasis is prevalent in others. An important body of research highlights how poverty, low wages, poor rates of school completion, or even religion or language, may hinder political incorporation for immigrant groups (Fraga et al., 2010; 2012); factors that also shape Latino/​a political beliefs and behaviors (Barreto and Segura, 2014). In the Latino/​a population, poverty and low levels of education, among other obstacles and hardships, are clearly and strongly associated with low levels of political participation (Fraga et al., 2012). Noticeably, these analyses are incomplete if they leave out the selective deployment of latinidad and/​or national origin sentiments as an important factor in political mobilization, which, in fact, challenge the assumption that greater political participation is simply a function of increasing socioeconomic status and revealing instead that it is the result of a variety of factors. The Dominican case in New York City seems to coincide with Lisa Garcia Bedolla’s findings in her study on the Mexican-​American community in Los Angeles. In Fluid Borders: Latino/​a Power, Identity, and Politics in Los Angeles (2005) she argues that communities with lower levels of socioeconomic status may have higher levels of political organization than some middle-​class Latino neighborhoods. She insists that the contextual nature of political communities should be considered before making any deterministic assumptions on the linkage of social economic status and political behavior, given that social capital functions in different ways, for different reasons, among different racial groups (Garcia Bedolla, 2005). The New York City Dominican community corroborates the data found in Bedolla’s study. As her research demonstrates, if socioeconomic status was the key to the question of immigrant community incorporation, we would not expect Dominicans, who have among the lowest socio-​economic position of any group in New York City, to have made much political progress. Yet, they have. In Inheriting the City, Kasinitz, Mollenkopf, Waters, and Holdway (2008) found that young people from Dominican backgrounds have significant disadvantages compared to young adults from Puerto Rican and other New York City immigrant backgrounds, as measured in terms of English language skills, parental education, and household income. The bottom line, in relation to the socioeconomic barriers to political achievement, remains the same, not only for

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the Dominican community, but for all other Latinx communities in New York City, such as the Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Colombians and Ecuadorians. The focus must then shift to why or how this community has nevertheless achieved so much politically despite the presence of these disadvantages to political mobilization. A closer look at the Dominican community’s current political/​ entrepreneurial dynamic in New York City compared to Puerto Ricans and other Latino/​a communities reveals some answers. For an immigrant group, the Dominican community has demonstrated a salient organizational capacity with a very strong repertory of provincial, small business, thematic and sectorial professional organizations, which may be contributing to the overall political mobilization of the community in the different boroughs. Dominicans have organizations for doctors of Dominican descent, lawyers, dentists, taxi drivers and taxi base owners, supermarket owners, bodegas, accountants, and many others. As Kron-​Hansen documented in Making New York Dominican (2010), Dominicans own thousands of small business in New York City, from beauty parlors to supermarkets, and the activism of the associations formed around these small businesses is having (although not scientifically measured yet) an impact in the political incorporation of the community. The entrepreneurial enthusiasm of the Dominican community may be adequately evaluated by looking at the limited access to employment they have compared to more established communities, such as the Puerto Rican or African Americans. These limitations are exacerbated by language difficulties, legal status and lack of political footing in the power structures. For Kron-​Hansen, “the key structural factor in understanding why so many Dominican immigrants in New York have ended up in small business and forms of self-​employment is what has been called the “ ‘United States segmented labor market’ ” (Kron-​Hansen, p. 93). The associations formed around these small businesses, and those formed around careers that can no longer be performed post migration, often serve as a vehicle of reaffirmation of class and professional status to compensate for the loss of status occurring when professionals emigrate, lacking the citizenship, language skills, or the proper licensing to exercise their professional title in a new setting. This entrepreneurial drive is also facilitated by high concentrations of Dominicans in certain areas. Both of these functions help to solidify these organizations as forces for political mobilization that serve to reinforce the national origin identity, but also expand the means by which Dominicans can exercise their consolidated influence on the ever fluid sense of latinidad evolving in the city. Increasing population size is certainly another strong factor for Dominican political success, given that the Puerto Rican population is declining in nyc. The Dominican community is now the largest Latino/​a immigrant group in

74 Aquino New York City (U.S. Census Bureau, 2015 acs), and the high concentration of Dominicans in certain areas of the city is helping this community sustain higher levels of political momentum and activity. In her article “Ethnic and Postethnic Politics in New York City: the Dominican Second Generation” (2004), Nicole Marwell argued that “immigrant groups gain classical political incorporation –​especially the first key step of elected office-​when members come to constitute a sizable plurality of the majority of voters in a specific geographic area” (p. 228). The assumption here is that members of an ethnic group would preferably elect one of their own, even based on national origin identification (Marwell, 2004; Wolfinger, 1965; Barreto & Pedraza, 2009). This is easier when the group has an indisputable dominant presence in a neighborhood, but not so easy when different Latinx nationalities share the same electoral space. In a neighborhood with a diverse electorate, political pragmatism leads to the kind of pan-​ethnic consciousness embraced in new understandings of latinidad and the cross-​ethnic coalition building that includes non-​Latino communities. Their relatively rapid success in obtaining elected positions, establishes that the Dominican community has been able to maximize its political capital within the Latino/​a circles throughout the different boroughs of the city. A closer look at the breakdown of voting age population helps to put this in perspective. In City Council district 10, encompassing Washington Heights and Inwood, and represented by Dominican Ydanis Rodriguez, the Dominican share of the voting age population is 40.2 percent, while the Puerto Rican is 7.3 percent. Across the East River in The Bronx, the 14th district is represented by half Dominican half Puerto Rican, Fernando Cabrera and covers the neighborhoods of Morris Heights, University Heights, Fordham and Kingsbridge, where the percentages of voting age populations are almost identical, with a slight advantage to the Dominican population. Morrisania East Tremont has 30 percent Puerto Rican and 18.8 percent Dominican; Kingsbridge Mosholu has 25.8 Puerto Rican and 26.6 Dominican and University Fordham has 32.9 percent Dominican and 20 percent Puerto Rican (US Census, acs-​p uma 2011–​2015 -​n yc Voting Age Population in Households). It is important to note that the puma data doesn’t exactly match with council districts, but it does provide an observable sample of the ethnic composition within or shared by those districts. The numbers suggest that homogenizing identities as a political tool does not have the same relevance in Washington Heights as it would have in certain portions of The Bronx, Brooklyn or Queens. The election of Dominicans in districts in Brooklyn and Queens must be subjected to a more nuanced analysis, one that goes beyond national origin identification, since Dominicans do not have a dominant presence in terms of

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voters in those boroughs. Two Dominicans have been elected in these areas: in City Council District 37, represented by Councilman Rafael Espinal, covering portions of Ocean Hill and East New York, where Dominicans are only 14.6 of the voting age citizen population and Puerto Ricans are 18.6 percent, and Councilman Antonio Reynoso representing portions of Williamsburg and Bushwick, where Dominican voters are 15 percent, while Puerto Ricans are 35.7 percent (acs-​p uma 2011–​2015). It is essential for candidates in these types of districts to embrace a more pan-​ethnic identity rather than a national origin identity, promoting themselves more strongly as Latino/​a rather than as Dominican, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Colombian or Ecuadorian. Political mobilization in diverse neighborhoods depends on much more than just its mix of ethnic groups, since ethnic consciousness acquires a different dimension in counties in which one group has a dominant electoral force, as is the case for Dominicans in Washington Heights and for Puerto Ricans in The Bronx. Depending on the political circumstances, overarching concepts of lati­ nidad in diverse local settings have a better chance of prevailing than ethnic chauvinism. Queens, the most diverse county in New York City, is another example of how the deployment of group-​affiliation varies from county to county. In Queens, no Latino/​a group has a dominant presence, in relation to the others. According to the Census 5 years estimates (2011–​2015), group populations are as follows: Dominicans 100,000; Ecuadorians 109,000; Colombians 72,000; Puerto Ricans 113,000, and Mexicans 97,000. Over the past two decades, Dominicans succeeded in obtaining several electoral positions, including representatives to the City Council, with Julissa Ferreras, and to the State Legislature with the late Jose Peralta and Ari Espinal, which suggests they have benefited from coalition building with White, African Americans, Asian and other Latinx communities sharing those districts. However, recent city and state elections have produced significant turnover in Queens relevant to the nuance in the political interpretations of latinidad. In 2018, Francisco Moya (of Ecuadorian descent), replaced Julissa Ferreras on the City Council, when she decided not to run for reelection. That same year, Jessica Ramos and Catalina Cruz (of Colombian descent) defeated the late Jose Peralta and Aris Espinal (both of Dominicans descent) in the State Senate and Assembly respectively. These cases illustrate that ethnic politics, and specifically the strategic political instrumentalization of aggregate identity marker, does not escape political circumstances that may supersede ethnic or nationalistic consciousness at the local level. For the Dominican community, the loss of two seats in Queens and one in Manhattan in the 2018 elections, may be attributed in part to circumstances associated with the larger spectrum of state politics, exacerbated with the national election of

76 Aquino Donald Trump. The two Dominican State Senators who lost in that election cycle, Marisol Alcantara in Manhattan and Jose Peralta in Queens, had crossed party lines in the state legislature and aligned themselves with the Republican Conference in what was called the Independent Democratic Conference, or idc, a move that proved lethal, given the timing of their decisions. The idc was created in 2011 by former State Senator Jeff Klein and was operating without any trouble aligning themselves with the Republican Conference and denying the Democrats control of the Senate. All of that changed with the election of the new president and the strong rejection in the city of anything that could be associated with Trump such as the idc, the members of which were pejoratively called “breakaway democrats.” In addition, the surprising election of congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-​Cortez, sparked an unforeseeable political tsunami that knocked out three Dominicans from the state legislature, since she supported challenges to the Latino and non-​Latino members of the idc. Although Ocasio-​Cortez may be now the most famous Latinx elected official in the United States, neither the idea of latinidad nor national origin chauvinism was the determinant factor in her election or the defeat of these Dominican elected officials. In fact, the election of Ocasio-​Cortez, who is of Puerto Rican descent, shows that aggregate group affiliations can become secondary to a generational shift that is rejecting the status quo on everything from economics to the environment. Latino scholar Ed Morales (2018), who referred to Ocasio-​ Cortez as the “intersectional remix of Latino roots with socialist politics” in an article for the Washington Post, wrote that in her challenge to powerful congressman Joseph Crowley she made the connection between racial and ethnic background and bonded strongly with the Mexicans, Central Americans and South Americans in her district. The fluidity of latinidad in politics is on display as Ocasio-​Cortez embraces her Puerto Rican identity, but does not rely on it for her political capital in her ethnically mixed district. According to a 2013 Pew Research study, two thirds of Dominican adults (66 percent) in the United States prefer to identify themselves as Dominicans, compared to national identifications by 54 percent of all U.S. Hispanics. The enactment and understanding of identity changes when people emigrate and may become a tool in the political incorporation arsenal, since it not only depends on what people think about themselves, but also about how they are perceived within the country’s institutional ethnic divisions. It is within this context that national origin groups’ cautiousness may become a tool for survival and advancement. According to Itzigsohn, Giorguli and Vazquez, “[w]‌hen Dominicans migrate to the United States, they move from a society in which they are the dominant group and determine the terms of the national/​racial divide to one in which others dictate the terms of racial classifications and in

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which Dominicans are racialized by their colour and origin” (2005, p. 58). This assumption has many implications; one of them is that immigrant groups like the Dominicans must fight to preserve their own identity, within identities or aggregates created in the United States, such as Hispanic or Latino to identify groups for their social characteristics, the color of their skin or their language background. “Identities in general and racial identities in particular, are not fixed. In different contexts and moments, people choose different forms of self-​ identification. Yet, at the same time, identities are not ‘free-​floating’. People make their identification choices within the boundaries of existing recognized social categories” (2005, p. 52). Nicole Marwell (2004) offers a practical gateway into the challenges of lati­ nidad and ethnic consciousness, when assessing how communities define their political action in terms of residency interest and that such action, even for immigrants of the same national origin, is not uniform because it depends on a variety of political circumstances in the neighborhoods where they live. Her study focuses on the political behavior of the Dominican communities of Washington Heights, Manhattan and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and found that political dynamics differed substantially in the two political contexts. Marwell establishes that numbers are not enough to complete the process of incorporation, which also entails negotiations and accommodations with other groups present in the neighborhoods she studied. She found that age demographics also matter and that new groups are experiencing political incorporation differently than their parents or their grandparents. Ethnic identity and national pride may not be as useful for political gain for Latinx candidates of the newer generations than for those that came before them, particularly in areas in which there is not a clearly dominant ethnic group, although, in terms of cross generational politicization, Dominicans may also be deploying some advantages. A 2010 study by Ramona Hernandez and Utku Sezgin suggests that second generation Dominicans may have inherited transnational political sentiments and “civic awareness” from their “highly politically-​aware” parents (p. 62). Another important factor influencing Dominican political mobilization is transnationalism. The term transnationalism has been theoretically linked to several facets of binational or multinational exchanges. From border crossing multiculturalism, to globalization, international crime and technological exchanges, including the cross-​national attachments of immigrants (Bourne, 1916; Smith and Guarnizo, 1998; Portes and Fernandez-​Kelly, 2015; Levy and Jaworsky, (2007). The focus in the case of the Dominican community is on transnationalism revealed by the cross-​national political, cultural and socioeconomic interaction between Latino/​a immigrants in the United

78 Aquino States, particularly those with a significant presence in New York City, and their sending countries. Contrary to the idea of the generational phase-​out of transnationalism (Fraga et al., 2012), Dominican political transnational activism seems to be having an impact in the community’s electoral actions in New York City. Dual citizenship, high level of remittances, property ownership in the Dominican Republic, frequent traveling back to their country, and the constant activism of Dominican political parties in the city, are all important factors to consider in this regard. As suggested by Smith and Guarnizo (1999), “constructing transnational political spaces should be treated as the result of separate, sometimes parallel, sometimes competing projects” (p. 6). Voting rates can help us understand the political behavior of transnational communities. According to the Dominican Board of Elections (Junta Central Electoral) data, from 2004 to 2016, there has been a consistent increase in the number of registered voters abroad. From 52,440 registered voters in 2004, to 154,789 in 2008; to 328,649 in 2012, getting to 384,522 in 2016, of which 124,556 are in New York. The parallelism that Smith and Guarnizo explore can be observed in Dominican electoral activism which often cuts through transnational boundaries into New York City politics. Adriano Espaillat’s candidacy to Congress, for example, was actively embraced by all major Dominican political parties and political actors, including the president of the Dominican Republic and well-​ known entrepreneurial families like the sugar barons from the Vicini family in the Dominican Republic. Noticeably, this family has also been instrumental in the most significant Dominican voter registration in New York City by funding. Dominicanos usa (dusa), a not for profit civic organization created in 2013 to “empower more Dominican American voters,” which claims to have registered 148,000 voters and contacted more than 400,000 potential registrants. It is not clear how many of those were registered in New York City since the organization operates beyond the city limits. In her Pew article “Dominican-​Americans Seek a Political Say” (2015), Teresa Wiltz wrote that dusa staffers “focus on newly naturalized citizens in specific neighborhoods and use a ranking system to identify which names are likely to belong to Dominicans. Then they hit the streets and start knocking on doors. And come election time, dusa mails fliers to new voters with their polling location and provides free rides to the polls.” Another major transnational factor is the presence and constant activism of political parties of the Dominican Republic in New York City. All major Dominican political parties have offices in New York City and heated political campaigns demonstrating Dominican community are active in both American and Dominican politics and elections. It is not rare to find the same actors, such as Doctor Rafael Lantigua, a distinguished transnational political

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operator, working on both Dominican electoral contests and Dominican political empowerment in New York City. Dr. Lantigua, and others, are often credited with helping elect presidents in the Dominican Republic and getting Dominicans into elected positions in New York City. This is an aspect of Dominican mobilization that operates independently of trends towards embracing latinidad and in fact requires it remain a secondary identity to national origin. Other Latino/​a communities in New York City, such as the Mexicans, Ecuadorians and Colombians, despite having dual citizenship, are not as visibly active in transnational political activities as the Dominican community. The impact of political transnationalism in these communities measured by their voting registration for participation in elections of their respective countries reveal that they are not nearly as involved as Dominicans in these events. For example, according to the Mexican National Electoral Institute (ine), in 2012 only 41,067 Mexican voters living abroad exercised their right to vote, which they obtained in 2006 (Aurora Cepeda, Excelsior, 2016). In contrast, according to the National Office of Statistics (one) of the Dominican Republic, 147,479 living abroad voted in that same year’s elections (Juan Eduardo Thomas, Listin Diario, 2016). Ecuador and Colombia also allow its dual citizens to vote, but participation is not nearly comparable. According to the Ecuadorian Council of Elections, there were 34,270 registered voters in New York in 2017 (El Telégrafo 2017). For Colombians, the number of voters is 55,208, covering the State of New York and Connecticut. The numbers indicate that transnational political engagement for Dominicans may in fact be fortifying political incorporation in New York City as opposed to competing with it. For a long time, New York Dominican politicians and scholars have expressed doubts about the tension between the politics of the Dominican Republic and the Politics of New York, “The Tension of Here and There” as Torres-​Saillant and Ramona Hernandez entitled one of the chapters in their book The Dominican Americans (2000). “Should the participation of U.S. Dominicans in electoral processes of the island become a reality, one can expect a further complication of the political situation of the community” (p. 157). They also added the concerns of then assemblyman Adriano Espaillat who expressed that U.S. Dominicans might import the party rivalries, adversarial factions, and group interests that are associated with the politics of the island. Interestingly, political parties from the Dominican Republic have not brought their rivalries into electoral contests in New York, finding instead a unifying factor in the nationality of origin and allowing their individual members to support whatever candidate they choose. As suggested by the editors of Bringing Outsiders In, multiple theoretical approaches must be considered for examining immigrant political

80 Aquino incorporation, since the process leading from less to more incorporation or vice versa is an “empirical proposition to be tested rather than assuming that it is linear” (Hochschild & Mollenkopf, 2009, p.16). This analysis maintains that incorporation is a process of inclusion and exclusion (Shefter, 1986) involving individuals and groups. Latinx groups include and exclude each other by emphasizing national origin identity where and when individual groups have a sizeable portion of the electorate and choose to group themselves together outside of national origins in electoral processes in which a diversity of communities share the same electoral demarcation. However, the Dominican case allows us to see that latinness is a multiverse where a group does not have to give up its singular identity so as to participate in the aggregate one. Latinidad, as a concept does in fact hold ideals consistent with the American idea of “E pluribus unum”, Out of many, one, imprinted on the Great Seal of the United States and symbolizing the bonding of previously autonomous states by a type of political consciousness. Although belonging to this larger umbrella of political identity does not erase the autonomy of individual components, both the struggles between state and federal rights, as explicitly described in the 10th Amendment of the Constitution, and the inter-​ethnic competition/​cooperation between the groups forming the Latinx constructing new understandings of latinidad, offer a way forward that is an imperfect, yet flexible and evolving way to imagine spacious political futures for Latinx political actors. Our modern political era is making clear that academic disciplines, grass-​roots political movements and widespread cultural production must engage in more meaningful and overlapping exchange so as to better understand and illuminate how latinidad informs participation in a multicultural democracy, as political actors and cultural producers/​consumers, and with what understanding of aggregate identities as contentious spaces.

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Identity, De-​colonization and Cosmopolitanism in (Afro)Latina Artists’ Spoken Word Performances Esther Álvarez López Abstract The aim of this chapter is to address how discourses of latinidad are produced and performed by means of aesthetic and cultural practices that Latinx artists engage in as tactics of self-​definition and self-​representation. Latina and Afro-​Latina poets-​ performers such as Mayda del Valle, Elizabeth Acevedo, Ariana Brown or Amalia Ortiz, among others, deal with the intersections of the politics of identity and what sociologist Aníbal Quijano (1989) theorized as “the coloniality of power.” Although Afro-​Latina poets spoken word artists focus on the workings of xenophobia, racism, gendering and othering in their poems, they implicitly suggest the need for alternative processes of interaction and conviviality, of a decolonial mindset leading to a non-​EuroAmerican-​centered pluriversality. Furthermore, this chapter explores how in formulating oppositional interpretations, in complicating and decolonizing ways of thinking about race, identity, difference, and power, their works become sites of contestation and social resistance that critically question dominant hegemonic views and talk back against colonization, acculturation, exclusion and inequities.

Keywords Afro-​latinidad –​coloniality of power –​broken memory –​artivism –​decolonization –​latinization from below –​cosmopolitanism

In his introduction to Mambo Montage. The Latinization of New York (2001), sociologist Agustín Laó-​Montes explores at length the comprehensive analytical concepts of latinidad and latinization in the context of this metropolis. At the beginning of the twenty-​first century—​when the book was published—​ latinidad had become a keyword in the emerging field of Latino Studies, denoting “a multiplicity of intersecting discourses enabling different types of subjects and identities and deploying specific kinds of knowledge and power relations”

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004460430_006

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(p. 4).1 According to Laó-​Montes, latinidad refers to a category of identification, familiarity and affinity as well as to a subject position (the state of being Latino/​a) in a given discursive space. Latinization, in turn, entails a number of processes: on the one hand, a process of both subjection—​mainly through Anglo strategies of othering and by government, corporative and intellectual discourses—​and of subjectivation or subject formation—​by means of Latino tactics of self-​definition and self-​representation; on the other, multiple processes by which discourses of latinidad are produced, coined and enacted in time and space. In this chapter, I am concerned with the production of Latinx subjectivities through the discursive process that Laó-​Montes calls “latinization from below,” whereby “by means of Latino community institutions and aesthetic practices and social movements” (p. 4), aiming to resist marginality and discrimination, Latinxs defy Anglo discourses produced as part of the organization of hegemony by dominant institutions—​or “latinization from above”—​and articulate “a desire for a definition of self and an affirmative search for collective memory and community” (pp. 17–​18). I argue that self-​affirmation, (collective) memory and community are important constituents of current definitions of latinidad and are likewise deeply embedded in Latinx discourses and artistic practices today. These discourses and practices express how Latinx identities are still conditioned by a historical trajectory of colonization, labor exploitation, systemic social, economic, political and cultural subordination, conditions which Peruvian sociologist and political theorist Aníbal Quijano has encompassed under the term “coloniality of power” (2000). This matrix that operates through structures of power, control, and hegemony was first used to refer to the interrelated practices and legacies of European colonialism in social orders and forms of knowledge in Latin America, but has since expanded beyond the original geopolitical area to also include the diasporic, so-​called postcolonial cities of the United States of America. Coloniality makes reference to the long-​standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism and that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, self-​image and knowledge production; it names the continuities of the systemic social hierarchical relationships of exploitation and domination between Europeans and non-​Europeans (Grosfoguel and Georas, 2001, p. 102), and evinces how social power today is still informed by cultural criteria built over a long period of colonial history (p. 103). 1 This research was supported by the Spanish National R&D Programme, project RTI2018-​ 097186-​B-​I00 “Strangers and Cosmopolitans: Alternative Worlds in Contemporary Literatures,” financed by mciu/​a ei/​f eder, EU, and by the R&D Programme of the Principality of Asturias, through the Research Group Intersections (grupin idi/​2018/​000167).

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Here I shall focus specifically on Latina artists, as to the consequences brought about by the coloniality of power that they share with men they must add those that result from the coloniality of gender as well.2 It is the ‘coloniality of being,’ in Nelson Maldonado-​Torres’ conceptualization (2007),3 namely, the effects of coloniality in all the facets of lived experience, that is at the core of their performed poetry. They utilize spoken word—​an oral-​based art that includes a variety of formats, from slam poetry, jazz poetry, and the television series Def Poetry Jam, hosted by Def Moses on hbo (2002–​2007), to hip hop, comedy routines and prose monologues—​to articulate their identities from the perspective of racial, gender, and colonial (sub)alter(n)ity. In the 1960s and 1970s, poets from the Black Arts Movement and the Nuyorican Movement had turned to the performance of poetry as an effective medium to convey their political messages and reach a wider audience. Since the turn of the present century, there has been an upsurge of this this kind of poetry, both live and recorded, which has become very popular especially in youth culture. This explosion has been “facilitated by expressions of identity, particularly race and class” (Somers-​Willett, 2012, p. 6). Not surprisingly, there has been an increasing number of Latina poet-​performers at a national level that have employed spoken word (often slam poetry) as “an art of self-​proclamation” (Genevieve Van Cleve, as cited in Somers-​Willett 2012, p. 7). In the context of Latina artists, spoken word is a genre of cultural expression that both produces and is in turn produced by discourses of latinidad. As an aesthetic practice, it also author-​ izes the self-​fashioning of subjectivities: it allows poets to deal with political and personal themes, linking poetic expression with the expression of racial, ethnic, and gender identity. With a blend of innovation and tradition, Latina poets of the younger generation, such as Mayda del Valle, Elizabeth Acevedo, Amalia Ortiz, or Ariana Brown, among others, have learned, in the words of

2 I am well aware of both the specificities and differences underpinning terms such as Latina, Afro-​Latina and Chicana. For the purposes of this chapter, however, I will use ‘Latina’ as a general term that will include all of these categories, characterized by various histories and positionings, as well as multiple social and cultural experiences, although I will also refer to Afro-​Latina when the author defines herself as such. Inclusive language has also led to an evolution in the spelling of the word, as shown in the various works cited in this chapter, varying from Latino/​a, or Latin@, to, more recently, the gender-​neutral Latinx, which has gained popularity in social media and lgbt studies, and is widely used by community activists and in academia. I will use these terms interchangeably throughout my analysis. 3 Maldonado-​Torres is indebted to Emmanuel Lévinas and his philosophy and vocation of the human: “instead of the act of thinking or the encounter between human beings and nature, it was ethics and the face-​to-​face (the subject-​Other) encounter” that was the starting point for his philosophy (2007, p. 241).

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Black Arts movement poet Larry Neal, “to sing, dance and chant their works, tearing into the substance of their individual and collective experiences,” with the aim of taking their voices to the people and moving them “to a deeper understanding of what this thing is all about” (2007, 656). In formulating oppositional interpretations, in complicating and decolonizing ways of thinking about race, identity, and difference, they seek to confront the persistent racist logic of the colonial system that still undergirds contemporary society, exposed in categorical and discriminatory discourses, economic and symbolic hierarchical orders, racialization, and exclusion. As their predecessors in the 1970s, through the performance of poetry they have explored the political possibilities of identity at different locations that may well fit into the notion of ‘landscapes of latinidad,’ coined by Laó-​Montes to refer to “the emergence of particularly Latino social spaces, expressive cultures, institutions, and organizations” (2001, p. 27). One such location is the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.4 Situated in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the Cafe has been largely responsible for the burgeoning of this aesthetic practice within the Latino community of New York City and beyond. Since its creation in 1973, this institution has powerfully contributed to the promotion and enactment of ‘latinization from below,’ offering a platform for Latinx poets to enact practices of self-​affirmation as well as to counter discrimination, most particularly in the artistic scene. In “Nuyorican Aesthetics,” late poet Miguel Algarín considered “transformation before the public eye as a way of psychic cure,” which, in his understanding, was to be translated and materialized in the “creation of places where people can express themselves—​expressly created for that purpose. People will come and they will bring their writings. And if you, as guide of the place, have generosity of spirit, you will find that you have created a center for the expression of self and for people to transform themselves before the public eye” (1987, p. 163). Founded on these premises by Algarín and Miguel Piñero, along with other poets, playwrights and musicians of color whose work was not accepted by the mainstream academic, entertainment, or publishing industries over the decades, the Cafe has emerged as one of the country’s most highly respected arts organizations and an acclaimed forum for innovative poetry, music, theater and other forms of art. The cosmopolitan, diversity-​oriented outlook of the Cafe from its start was evident in the ethnic composition of some of the founding artists that accompanied Algarín and Piñero in their venture: African American Ntozake Shange

4 Sometimes written Café. Since the website of the place employs Cafe, I will use the word without the stress.

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and Amiri Baraka, Native American Diane Burns, and poets with roots in Cuba, as Raúl Santiago Sebazco, or the Anglophone Caribbean, as Lois Elaine Griffith. Although it originally emerged to provide shelter to New York Puerto Ricans and Puerto Rican poets—​“They were a stateless people […] until the Café became their homeland” (Algarín & Holman, 1994, p. 5)—​, soon there was a transnational expansion of the term “Nuyorican,” which eventually came to refer to “a denizen of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe,” the criterion being presence rather than descent: “It ain’t where you from, it’s where you at,” hence poet-​ activist and slammaster Bob Holman’s slogan, “We are all Nuyoricans” (as cited in Zapf, 2009, p. 121). Since its origin, the Cafe, “the biggest little stage on earth,” as they claim on their website, has become a transnational heterotopia (Zapf, 2009), “the most integrated place on the planet,” in Beat poet Allen Ginsberg’s words (as cited in Nuyorican Poets Café, n. d.). Much like Algarín had envisioned, it still offers artists a strategic venue to showcase their struggles against structural racism and its attendant inequities. Likewise, thanks to the kind of interaction that takes place between the artist and the audience, the artistic expressions (oral, literary, performative, and visual) that are enacted on the Cafe’s stage not only enable the “people to transform themselves before the public eye,” but through the consciousness-​raising character of their poetic performances, artists also seek—​and contribute—​to transform the spectators and potentially effect social change. In “Artistic Strategies and Political Strategies in Art” (2013), philosopher and political theorist Chantal Mouffe examines the radical potential and strategic importance of artistic political activism—​or artivism—​for modern democracy and the counter-​hegemonic struggle. Mouffe discusses here the strategic importance of the cultural and artistic terrain for the counter-​hegemonic struggle, even when there is disagreement concerning the “spaces in which resistances should be deployed and the type of relation to be established with the institutions” (n.p). One approach advocates the strategy of ‘withdrawal,’ as it is assumed that the institutions of the art world cannot provide any more a site for critical artistic practices due to their complicity with the system, which they are bound to reproduce. Another approach is the strategy of ‘engagement,’ which Mouffe considers particularly fruitful as it reveals that different modes of political intervention can be articulated in a multiplicity of places, including institutions inside and outside the traditional world of art. Thus, artistic practices that take place in these “agonistic spaces,” in Mouffe’s terminology—​ in the case of Latinx spoken word art, from local community venues like the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, through more global commercial spaces, like Broadway and beyond, to television series, of the kind Russell Simmons presented in Def Poetry Jam on hbo—​can contribute “to the subversion and destabilization of

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the hegemonic neo-​liberal consensus,” as well as play a decisive role in fomenting contestation and dissent, facilitating the emergence of new subjectivities in the process (2013). In keeping with Mouffe’s idea, the works of many Latinx artists of the spoken word scene may be considered artivist pieces that become sites of cultural contestation and resistance, of social and political protest, while at the same time their poems, narratives and stories serve as a means of cultural cohesion. It is my contention that Latina poets’s artivist texts and performances project forms of latinidad that are grounded in a critical, de-​colonial cosmopolitan perspective in that they rescue, retrieve, and make audible and visible the voices of local histories that have been rendered subaltern and silent, while problematizing binary logic, essentialism and universalism. Like critical cosmopolitanism, latinidad in twenty-​first century spoken word art is characterized by openness to pluralism and difference, flexibility, reflexivity and mobility, in a relational process that promotes an ethical engagement with otherness and with the Other. In Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2007), Kwame Anthony Appiah advocates that cosmopolitanism “shouldn’t be seen as some exalted attainment: it begins with the simple idea that in the human community, as in national communities, we need to develop habits of coexistence: conversation in its older meaning, of living together, association” (p. xvii). As a public practice, performance may well serve as a starting point in that conversation “through which radical democracy might rehearse” (Dolan, 2005, p. 91), since it establishes a dialogic communication between author and audience. As a result of their inter and intra-​cultural dialogue, both artists and audience can envision, and pave the way for, the creation of altered social communities and a more just, equitable world: spectators are interpellated into a critical conversation, invited to listen attentively to the speech of others, and to identify or affiliate with the performance texts. They are then moved into “the theoretical and experiential realm of affect,” so that they are not only witnesses or passive consumers, but active participants (Dolan, 2005, p. 97) through physical as well as emotional connection. By provoking them to empathy, thought, and emotion, these poet-​performers potentially change the way spectators in general—​not just those from the same ethnic subgroup—​view and experience identity politics, ultimately contributing to the reshaping of their identity. Latina spoken word artivists take advantage of that empathy and affective connection and exploit the trans-​formative potential of their performance texts to influence their audience in order to change, or otherwise trouble, their hegemonic positions and ‘truths,’ as well as their egological way of handling and seeing the world, decentering their own vision of it “in order to see flaws

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that include an acute perception of unequal global power relations” (Gunew, 2017, p. 8). The poets’ interaction with the audience seeks to eventually bring about that identity-​in-​difference that may be the first step toward the decolonial process that Madina Tlostanova and Walter D. Mignolo (2012) refer to as ‘learning to unlearn’ in their eponymous work. Poets and spectators may thus engage in a cross-​cultural encounter and dialogue, a performative creation of an-​other paradigm of (non-​Eurocentered) diversality (Mignolo, 2000) or, rather, pluriversality (Mignolo, 2007b), the basis of a critical, dialogical cosmopolitanism aimed at building bridges, not walls.5 According to Walter Mignolo, de-​colonial cosmopolitanism and de-​colonial conversations among actors and institutions of different cultures can relate to the project of dialogue among civilizations (2012, p. 90), to conviviality and a new world-​making. In relation to the potentiality of performance towards building up this dialogue, Jill Dolan (2005) argues that the act of showing up at the theatre proves members of the audience “receptive, converts already to the effectiveness of performance as a public practice” and “signals (hopefully) their willingness to think, to feel, to engage” (p. 98). The performance poet serves as a mediating figure in this conversation, translating between and across cultures, facilitating new relations between them, and showing that a different engagement with the world is possible. This cross-​cultural encounter results in a process of de-​linking (Mignolo, 2007b) that brings to the foreground other principles of knowledge and understanding, and consequently other ethics. Related to de-​colonial cosmopolitanism, de-​linking presupposes “to move toward a geo-​and body politics of knowledge that … denounces the pretended universality of a particular ethnicity (body politics), located in a specific part of the planet (geo-​politics)” (p. 453). This de-​colonial, cosmopolitan move is aimed at putting into question and unsettling the (white) audience’s complacent self-​universalization and single point of view while exposing the structures of racialization and supremacy that define their experience with the (constructed) Other, in what Steve Martinot defines as ‘the machinery of whiteness’ (2010). In “The Coloniality of Power: Notes Toward De-​Colonization” (2004), Martinot suggests that what the hegemonic mind can do to dismantle or decolonize the structure of its hegemonism is “to see itself through the eyes of the other” (n.p.), in an inversion of the DuBoisian notion of double consciousness, so that instead of the racialized having to see themselves always through the eyes of another, for 5 See Amalia Ortiz’s “Scaling Walls with Words.” TEDxMcAllen. 1/​11/​2015. Retrieved from https://​www.bing.com/​videos/​search?q=amalia+ortiz&&view=detail&mid=73162494F6194F9AE08E73162494F6194F9AE08E&&FORM=VRDGAR.

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decolonization, it is the hegemonic mind that must see itself through the eyes of those who see it as hegemonic, to experience precisely “what it looks like to them, and to see what it means to them –​and thereby to confront dominance or hegemony in one’s own person” (n.p.). 1

Contesting (Neo)Colonial Difference: Mayda del Valle’s “Descendancy”

Puerto Rican, Chicago-​born poet, performer and teacher artist Mayda del Valle engages in a de-​colonizing process of this kind in her individual national slam champion poem “Descendancy” (2010), where she speaks from the locus of enunciation of the subaltern, the excluded other, the stranger, and the marginalized, while forcing the audience to see themselves and their hegemonic positions from her eyes. Del Valle competed in Seattle as part of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe team in 2001, becoming the youngest person and first Latina to win the National Slam Poetry title with this affective performance of race and ethnicity that acts out and exposes the conditions of, and the feelings resulting from, colonialism. For her,“[i]‌t is inherited history as well as traditions remixed and invented,” and she affirms that: I create autobiographical narratives that utilize spoken-​word poetry and music, intended for live performance. Rooted in the aesthetics of hip-​hop and the urban Latino experience, my work explores themes of healing, transformation and the recovery of ancestral memory in the modern-​day diaspora. I seek to challenge traditional western approaches to performance by creating a communal participatory space where audiences are invited to journey into their own cultural narratives and mythologies. (del Valle, 2014) In this piece, however, she aims to unsettle spectators, make them uncomfortable in that ‘communal’ space and journey into their cultural narratives, as the history behind them reveals persistent structures of domination and injustice that come ostensibly to light on the page/​stage. Thus, from the outset, she addresses those ‘you’ who boast of a “purebred pedigree descendancy,” as this exclusionist purity condition of whiteness is part of the supremacist system of racialized social categories that produces the ‘impurity’ and inferiorization of others. Against white impositions of definitions and labels, del Valle opposes her own mixed identity, a composite of all the ethnic elements that have amalgamated to create a proud, complex Latina subject who has learnt to navigate the structures of belonging in

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numerous ways. She then puts a mirror up to her audience, challenging them to confront their racialization of others while, paradoxically, they claim an allegedly racial blindness: “The descendancy that doesn’t deny the darker /​shades of skin in me. /​The what in me? /​Yes, the THAT in me /​you claim you can’t see” (del Valle, 2010). The poet has refused the meltdown, the hybridity of her lineage and kaleidoscopic vision working instead as a dynamic force of liberation, resistance and transgression. Del Valle finally asks her audience to, in a clever phonetic word-​play, “descend and see” her for what she is, but also see the society they are a part of for what it is, a society that, as she reflects later on, tried to force her assimilation, caused her to “question [her] creation,” and offered solely exclusionary, homogenizing models of identity that denied her own. In “Becoming-​World,” Rosi Braidotti advocates for a new cosmos-​polis “that rests on critical distance from the universalism of the past and on the acknowledgement of the atrocities as well as the contradictions of colonialism” (2013, p. 12). She argues that a nomadic form of reflexive cosmopolitanism needs to start from “a more sober account of the world-​historical events that show how the concept of ‘difference’ functioned as a term to index discrimination and exclusion” (2013, p. 12). In “Descendancy,” del Valle engages both ‘difference’ as a hierarchical notion and the negative dialectics of otherness by provocatively encouraging spectators to look at their own white positions of privilege and reflect on their implied complicity in allowing the prejudices derived from (neo)colonial difference to exist. The poet likewise demands that they examine the racialized practices, unethical, criminal foundations and supremacist ideologies on which what they call their ‘civilization’ is grounded: ethnocentric, technological and dehumanized, characterized by a racialized and geographically differentiated coloniality of labor and (Eurocentered) global capitalism; in other words, by the exploitation of “underpaid third world women and children,” the negation of human rights, and a lack of responsibility to the Other. The shortcomings and wrongs of such a world of ‘natural’ differences, based on race and ethnicities, and divided into “human beings and infrahumans, the bearers of rights and the righ-​less” (Gilroy, 2013, p. 112), make the poet ironically exclaim, to the cheers of her ethnic listeners, “You calling this shit civilization?” (del Valle, 2010). Here del Valle claims that historical white supremacy—​the dynamics of the ‘machinery of whiteness’—​is accountable for the institutionalization of a global colonial matrix that operates at all levels, across time and space, through control or hegemony over authority, labor and subjectivity.6 In 6 For the workings of supremacy and its relation to Afro-​Latina women, see Ariana Brown’s poem “Supremacy.” https://​www.muzzlemagazine.com/​ariana-​brown.html.

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the performance poem, the Eurocentric, hegemonic mind and its ‘civilization’ are revealed to have been built upon, and to have thrived on, the domination, exploitation, and objectification of racialized others, as well as on the negation of their memory, knowledge and worldviews: “I see /​you’re being blind, not seeing past the kinds of /​fabricated fictional fables, /​assaulted ancestral accounts. /​I should be calling your historical scribes Aesop, /​the way they stopped /​the truth from being illuminated /​misinformation being fed to my generation” (del Valle, 2010). The poet places herself at the heart of a process of de-​colonization, of cultural and political contestation aimed at the construction of alternative futures that should entail self and societal transformation in light of the encounter with the Other. This process clearly includes struggles over the elimination of the colonial structures, logics, and categories that live on even today in order to achieve what Laó-​Montes has defined as a substantive democracy: En contraste con la idea de democracia en el sentido meramente formal—​es decir, solo como una cuestión de discurso, procedimiento reconocimiento de derechos básicos y representación—​, la democracia sustantiva implica […] identificar las desigualdades sociales y sus raíces, elaborar políticas públicas a favor de la equidad a partir de un orden político fundamentado en la libertad y en la ciudadanía sustantiva, y facilitar el proceso de empoderamiento de los sujetos y sectores subalternos y excluidos. Esto supone una correspondencia entre la democracia económica, cultural, racial, sexual y política, y en materia de políticas públicas implica una coordinación entre las políticas económicas, culturales, raciales y educativas. (2013, p. 75) Mayda del Valle points in her poem to the need to change racial politics, which, henceforth, should take a de-​colonial cosmopolitan stance, a form of denaturalization that will enable receptivity to the subaltern’s perspectives, embodied experiences, and understanding of otherness: “LET ME order your new world and paint the White /​House brown coz /​I’M GOING DOWN /​yes I’m goin’ down to the earth searchin’ my roots /​like Halley’s /​and I’m riding comets back to the past /​back to the past that becomes my future that is my present that is my now /​I’m goin’ back to seek /​My Descendancy” (2010). Far from falling—​or descending, to use her own expressive polysemous word—​ into racial despair or victimry, del Valle turns this “I’m going down” into a symbolic ascendancy (i.e., “riding comets”) grounded in old, past roots and new, future routes.

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De-​colonizing Memory and Color: The (Cosmopolitan) Potentiality of Afro-​Latinidad

In her piece “Afro-​Latina,” National Slam Champion, Beltway Grand Slam Champion, and 2016 Women of the World Poetry Slam representative for Washington, D.C., Dominican American Elizabeth Acevedo also employs a de-​ colonizing cosmopolitan approach that contests assimilationist Euro-​ American models of identity, wherewith she critically addresses the ideological frameworks of the coloniality of power manifested in the politics of color, the suppression of embodied forms of knowledge, the obliteration of the subaltern’s history, and the repression of memory. Memory is a constitutive element in any process of identification and a primary component in the struggle for hegemony. Indeed, for Rosi Braidotti, the crucial notions of memory and narratives are linked to the practice of ethical accountability “as a relational, collective activity of undoing power differentials” (2013, p. 16), which to her is necessary to sustain a reflexive form of the cosmopolitical. Not surprisingly, an affirmative search for (collective) memory is one of the processes of Latinx self-​ fashioning within Agustín Laó-​Montes’ concept of ‘latinization from below’ that attempts to counter the system(at)ic forms of forgetting imposed by political nationalism in neocolonial contexts. In the same vein, Juan Flores, leading scholar in Latin American culture, has insisted on the need to appreciate the complexity of a country’s “broken memory,” the fragmentation or erasure of historical memory as a result of continuing “imperial mutilation of social consciousness” (2000, p. 49), which he nevertheless chooses to interpret in a positive rather than in a negative way. For Flores, la memoria rota, a concept he borrows from Arcadio Díaz Quiñones, should be understood as “the site not merely of exclusion and fragmentation but also of new meanings and identity” from the vantage point of those living in between, “in the space of the break itself” (2000, p. 56), and thereby move from the pieces of that broken memory to the creative practice of “breaking memory” (2000, p. 54). Both Mayda del Valle and Elizabeth Acevedo situate themselves at that vantage point of the in-​ between and use memory as an active, creative force to ‘break memory,’ thus bringing to the fore and recording the erased history, language, and cosmovision of their ancestors, at the same time that they inscribe themselves in that history. Acevedo claims that knowledge of the history of her ancestors in the Dominican Republic—​where her parents are from—​, of colonialism, slavery and post-​slavery Latin America was huge in shifting what she thought about herself: “The more I learned, the more I was proud of how each of these facets survived in the United States. How the survival of my parents’ and grandparents’ way of life was an extreme rebellion” (Ramirez, 2016, n.p.). However, the

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road to the de-​colonization of memory and color is usually hard and aching for diasporic Latinx Afro-​descendants, the people of African descent in Latin America and the Caribbean living in the United States. On speaking about social classification and the distribution of power, Aníbal Quijano affirms that skin color, the shape and color of one’s hair and eyes, the shape and size of the nose, etc. do not have any consequence in a person’s biological structure and much less in their historical capacities (2014, p. 317). In spite of the scientific solidity of this statement, biology, all those elements of the human body that Quijano mentions, have undeniably affected—​ and continue to do so—​many individuals in numerous facets of their lived experience—​material, social, cultural and personal, which may explain why Latinx Afro-​descendants, in particular, have often attempted to either erase or at least minimize these visible signs of racial demarcation. In Introduction to Dominican Blackness, Silvio Torres-​Sailant (2010) alludes, for instance, to the “reticence of Dominicans to privilege the African aspect of their heritage in their self-​definition,” to the extent that some commentators would contend “that Dominicans have for the most part denied their blackness” (p. 1), with negrophobia even contained in prevalent conservative definitions of Dominicanness. The paradoxical sociocultural dynamic of Dominicans’ self-​ awareness as a people of African descent—​albeit with a deracialized social consciousness—​on the one hand, and their passive acceptance of the rigid Eurocentrism of the official cultural discourse, on the other, is something that still challenges many scholars and that Torres-​Sailant attempts to shed some light on in his thorough socio-​historical analysis. He argues that the Dominican diaspora, particularly in the United States, have realized, however, that in their new country “race matters tremendously” and “has implications that impinge on their survival” (2010, p. 52).7 Thus, even when on the island Dominicans may not see themselves as Black, in the United States they are viewed and treated as ‘them.’ Living in the United States, where racial categories have historically pigeonholed individuals in distinct hierarchical classifications, has definitely transformed the cultural conceptions of racial identity among Dominicans, many of whom have assumed those administered by their environment. Owing to the rise in Black immigration from the Caribbean and Africa, Latinx identity came to be increasingly defined as non-​Black, and in some ways as anti-​Black. Afro-​Latinxs call attention not only to their struggles in the wider, predominantly white, society, but also to this anti-​Black racism within 7 For an analysis of the African diaspora and blackness, see Agustin Lao-​Montes (2007), “Decolonial Moves. Trans-​ locating African Diaspora Spaces.” Cultural Studies, 21(2–​ 3), pp. 309–​338.

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the Latino communities themselves (Jiménez Román & Flores, 2010; de la Fuente & Andrews, 2018). According to Alejandro de la Fuente and George R. Andrews, “the categories of Latino and black do not meaningfully make space for Afro-​Latino identity formation. Because Latino is largely understood as mestizo, and therefore inclusive of various race mixtures, but emphatically not black—​and black is understood as inclusive of any proportion of African ancestry as only black, changes to the census would continue to exacerbate the purportedly neat division between black and Latino. The category of Afro-​ Latino is productive precisely because it unsettles all that is complex about race, forcing engagement with races as puzzle, rather than a given” (2018, p. 585; emphasis in the original). These racial discrepancies have led Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores to speak of the “inadequacy of the Latin@ concept,” which fails to accommodate the Black component in the already vague definition of Latin@, and to understand that “Latinidad and Blackness are not mutually exclusive” or incompatible identities (2010, p. 10). Building on DuBois’s conception of double consciousness in the United States, some scholars (Hernández, 2003; Flores & Jiménez Román, 2009; Jiménez Román & Flores, 2010;) employ the concept of triple consciousness—​Blackness, latinidad, Americanness—​to refer to Afro-​Latinxs and to the ways that they “and therefore blackness, remain unintelligible within our understanding of mestizo Latinidad, and therefore outside of the Latino imaginary” (de la Fuente and Andrews, 2018, p. 585). Despite the issues of invisibility that surround this group and their unique position in the American racial and social divide, their experience as products of multiple histories suggests the need for a more integral global vision of both Blackness and latinidad. In this regard, Agustín Laó-​Montes argues that Afro-​latinidad can potentially challenge essentialist notions of both identity categories: Afro-​Latinidades as quintessential trans-​diasporic subjects tend to transgress the essentialist conceptions of self, memory, culture, and politics that produce all-​encompassing categories of identity and community such as ‘Blacks’ and ‘Latinos’. Hence, Afro-​Latinidades, in their plurality and diasporicity, demonstrate the limits of categorical definition of both Blackness and Latinidad, at the same time as they reveal the limits of diaspora discourses themselves. (2005, p. 128) I perceive clear connections between Laó Montes’ idea about the potential of Afro-​latinidad to transgress different kinds of essentialisms and unsettle identity categories and some of the conceptions that characterize de-​colonial cosmopolitanism, a proposal from the margins that dwells in the border, in

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dissimilarities (Strand, 2010, p. 106), in multiple trajectories based on pluriversality rather than universality (Mignolo, 2010), in visions of a multiple and heterogeneous rather than a homogenous world. In light of these definitions, and drawing on Afro-​Latinas’ ideas on identity in their spoken word poetry, I argue that Afro-​latinidad can be understood as a metaphor of a condition, a form of consciousness, an emerging paradigm that embraces “the complex aspirations of the hybrid identities of citizens not belonging to any primordial community or nation” (Strand, 2010, p. 106). Afro-​latinidad also has the potential to embody the ideal of conviviality in difference (Afro/​Latinx), of diverse cultures that (ex)change themselves through clashes but also advances in relationality, solidarity and resistance, or, more crucially, re-​existence, which Adolfo Albán Achinte understands as “the redefining and re-​signifying of life in conditions of dignity” (as cited in Mignolo and Walsh, 2018, p, 3). For Mignolo and Walsh, it is the resurgence and insurgence of re-​existence today “that open and engage venues and paths of decolonial conviviality, venues and paths that take us beyond, while at the same time undoing, the singularity and linearity of the West” (p. 3). Elizabeth Acevedo’s “Afro-​Latina” embraces a decolonial conviviality that manifests itself through the coexistence of diverse cultures within the Afro-​ Latinx experience. However, she is also aware of the multiple forms of (neo) coloniality that must still be overcome in order to be able to tread those paths. In the poem, she blends the knowledge of the interface of Latino-​Black mestizaje with the need to ‘break memory’ by visibilizing the geobody histories, the distinct but myriad components that have made up her multi-​racial, multi-​ethnic self, as well as the translocal, transnational relations, struggles, legacies and historical processes that have brought all the singular elements together: “So remind me, remind me that I come from the Taínos of the Río, the Aztecs, the Mayan, los Incas, los españoles […] and the Yoruba africanos que con sus manos built a mundo nunca imaginado. I know I come from stolen gold, from cocoa, from sugar cane, the children of slaves and slave masters, a beautifully tragic mixture of sancocho of erased history” (2016). Acevedo refers here to the tendency of Dominicans to think of themselves as sancocho, one of the Dominican Republic national dishes, a stew made from a variety of meats which owes its delicious flavor to a multiplicity of ingredients. Her identification with sancocho becomes a graphic metaphor that stands for the poet’s rich, even if erased, history, as well as her diverse, hybrid, and beautiful self. In her poem, Acevedo celebrates her once rejected roots and ancestry, thus coming to terms with the ambiguities of the “partially suppressed, sometimes painful, but always liberating sense of negritud” (Duany, 1996, as cited in Torres-​Sailant 2010, p. 55) that has often characterized Afro-​Latinxs’ upbringing. Initially

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written as a group poem with poet Frank Lopez, “Afro-​Latina” went through several revisions, where the poet remixed her original portions because she felt “a need to express that the term ‘Latina’ just didn’t feel specific enough” (Ramirez, 2016). As she asserts, the poem failed to adequately represent “the way I walked through the world as not only someone who first spoke Spanish, but who also strongly identified with the blackness of my ancestry” (n. p.). In this poem, then, she seeks to integrate Afro-​latinidad into one broader understanding of Blackness and latinidad. Like del Valle in “Descendancy,” in the final lines Elizabeth Acevedo embraces her (collective) past and memory, but also the uncharted possibilities of the future of this national origins group: “Our bodies have been bridges /​we are the sons and daughters /​el destino de mi gente /​black, brown, beautiful /​viviremos para siempre /​Afro-​Latinos hasta la muerte!” (2016). 3

De-​colonizing (Afro)Latina Identity: A Survivalist Poetics

In spite of this hopeful, liberating cry at the end of Acevedo’s poem, for Afro-​ Latinas the path that leads to the proud assertion of their blackness is usually long and painful. From experiencing their color as misfortune due to ongoing neocolonial practices and discourses, as they record in their poems, they finally find myriad ways to rejoice in the pluriversity of their complex ethnic and cultural heritage. Since the 1970s, Afro-​Latina poets have repeatedly focused on the problems they have faced when vindicating visible signs of blackness as part of their (embodied) ethnic identity, such as having ‘el pelo grifo,’ or, at other levels of experience, the possibility of dating/​marrying down the color scale. The first anthology of Nuyorican poetry, edited by Algarín and Piñero and published in 1975, included Martita Morales’ “The Sound of Sixth Street,” a poem against Puerto Ricans’ acculturated ideas about color, and about parents’ consequently inculcating and perpetuating these detrimental ideas in their children. The poetic voice “rebels against the fact /​that /​her parents will not let her have a boyfriend /​with an afro /​or con el pelo grifo /​because he looks black /​and black to them is dirty /​but dead and silky blond hair /​with blue eyes /​and white skin /​is supposed to be pure” (Morales, 1975, p. 50). Following Morales’ line of thought, other Afro-​Latina poets have articulated in their poems this colonization and control of their subjectivity through the ongoing effects of the bio-​politics of color and attendant politics of hair, expressing their rebellion against this imposition. María Teresa Fernández, “Mariposa,” conveys these ideas in her “Poem for My Grifa-​Rican Sistah Or Broken Ends Broken Promises” (2015), which centers around ‘bad’

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hair and the effect of oppressive practices, encouraged and carried out by their own families, to diminish when not erase the often undesired ethnic features that set colored/​grifa women’s bodies apart from what passes to be ideal white standards of beauty. “Mariposa” recalls how she and her twin sister Melissa, to whom the poem is dedicated, endured the torturing ritual of hair braiding, which was accompanied by the use of relaxers, activators and creams to subdue, both physically and metaphorically, the “kinky naps /​dying to be free.” She underscores the real pain caused by the burning of the scalp due to the chemicals employed, but above all she vocalizes the emotional pain caused by the feelings of bitterness and shame that she and her sister—​alongside many other women—​experienced, and which are still so deeply embedded in these practices. Rebelling against this oppression of black women’s selves through their bodies, and particularly their hair, she ends the poem proclaiming, “Black hair is beautiful. /​¡Qué viva el pelo libre! ¡Qué viva!”8 The poet has finally come to accept the beauty of her hair’s natural texture and, in the process of symbolically freeing her curls from chemical straightening, she has proudly embraced her own identity and personal freedom. Just like “Mariposa,” in “I, too, am black” (2015), Caridad de la Luz, speaks of the shame she was taught to feel because of her color, although what she saw instead was beauty and strength, which makes her also conclude “I am proud of the fact that /​I, too, am black.” On her part, Marina Ortiz (2015) dedicates her “black: of color pure and true” to Pedro Pietri, Malcolm x and Dr. King, “who inspired me to read that dictionary and to use those foreign words.” Ortiz begins her poem with an etymological study of the word ‘black’ and boldly contradicts the long-​standing prejudices and discriminatory notions attached to this word in dictionaries. She then turns its pejorative meanings upside down and determines that those who are “very dark in color /​and /​or gifted with even one droplet of said ancestral melanin […] might /​have historically enjoyed and emitted more spirit, character, felicity, /​virtue, wisdom, and energy /​than those cunning custodians /​ of webster’s wicked wishes /​could ever aspire to capture and enslave.” The poet disregards the negative connotations that the color black has typically been made to bear in this source of flawed, biased meanings that are some dictionaries—​as well as other repositories of so-​called ‘knowledge’—​and celebrates instead the positive meanings that this word, with its history and its people, signify for her.

8 For an updated, empowering version of this poem, see https://​www.youtube.com/​ watch?v=2pqXttKEukI.

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As shown above, Latina poets critically defy the matrix of control and hegemony that constitutes the coloniality of power, with its consequent acts of divestment, domination and oppression. Likewise, they challenge dominant worldviews and interpretive perspectives by offering alternative discourses on Afro-​latinidad that stem from the memory, knowledge, and cultural practices of those whose experiences have been devalued or excluded by official histories. By declaring that “their experiences are important, salient, and deserving of documentation” (Somers-​Willett, 2012, p. 77), Latina poets invert “their institutionalized negation” (Castello Branco de Oliveira, 2005), at the same time that, as Walter Mignolo would put it, they “disengage from the ‘obligation’ to see the world according to the ethical experiences hidden behind the epistemic universality of the hubris of the zero point” (2007a, p. 159). They neutralize that epistemology based on one particular ethnicity—​white Euro-​ American—​with their own survivalist poetics, or survivance, a term used for the first time in the context of Native American studies by writer and cultural theorist Gerald Vizenor. This portmanteau word that encompasses the concepts of active survival, endurance and resistance describes what these spoken word artists accomplish in their poetic performances as they transform domination and aggression into strength, emancipation and liberation. Survivance is defined clearly in opposition to victimry and in relation to remembrance, traditions and customs. It is “an active sense of presence over absence, deracination, and oblivion,” and the continuance of stories (Vizenor, 2008, p. 1). Stories like the one slam poet, screenplay writer, actor, hip-​hop and reggaeton artist, and social justice activist Caridad de la Luz, aka “La Bruja,” tells in “La Bruja. For Witch It Stands” (2010) are renunciations of dominance, tragedy and victimry, and in that sense, they are survivance stories. This musical poem is also an instance of what Miguel Algarín (1975) labeled as “Dusmic poetry,” a term that he created to define “the process of transforming aggression being directed at you by another person (or, more generally, society) into your strength” (Algarín and Piñero, 1975, p. 129). Here, Caridad de la Luz gives an account of her hard beginnings and eventual success as an artist. From the early years of her life, when her teachers “wouldn’t recognize her as a real writer,” the poetic persona, “a little girl with big dreams down these streets so mean,” overcomes “tragedy and insanity” and finally manages to succeed against all the odds. Despite the general lack of encouragement and support, and the obstacles she found in her way, she never failed to believe in herself or in her destiny, and to achieve her goal she stayed strong: “But deep down inside a magical fire /​Burned and devoured the negative around her. /​The voice from inside her was louder than the doubter. /​So she remained in power, blossomed like a flower […] /​Cause she wouldn’t give up, and now she couldn’t

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be prouder” (2010). La Bruja casts her power in her pen as a writer and in the mic in her hand as a performer, two wands with which she has worked her very personal magic. Unlike stereotypical wicked witches in the popular mind or fairy tales, she is good and claims that her mission is not “superstition or wiccan /​No Spanish inquisition […] No treatin’ no trickin’, it’s just oral tradition/​ I only spell with words, verbal incantations” (2010). For Latinas like Caridad de la Luz, survivance then is a poetics of spiritual activism; it is the strengthening of identity and the building of community through the sheer force and transformative power of words. What transpires from all these poets’ words is the notion that ethnic identity—​in their case a Latina identity—​is not just an expression of the self that the individual partially construes in the present for the future, but is ultimately defined as an individual identity that is in direct relation to a broader social identity and is steadfastly connected to the past. Following Peter Weinreich’s conceptual framework, for these performance poets ethnic identity would be “that part of the totality of one’s self-​construal made up of those dimensions that express the continuity between one’s construal of past ancestry and one’s future aspirations” (1986, p. 308). Thus, a strong affective identification with the ancestors is paramount in order to build a solid ethnic self, as reflected in Chicana poet Ariana Brown’s poem “At the End of the Sword” (2016), in which she highlights the strong bonds that connect her with her family, past and present. In this verbless poem, Brown focuses chiefly on nouns and on one specific pronoun: “my.” By means of the enjambment of this first-​person singular pronoun in every single one of the twelve lines that compose the poem, of its rhythmic repetition almost as a litany, plus its evocative attachment to seemingly unconnected groups of words that express physical traits, personality attributes, cultural props and spiritual affinities, she manages to create a suggestive repertoire of features that succinctly describe but thoroughly define the Afro-​Latina poetic self: My grandmother’s neck, my botany & altars, my kink, my africanness, my father’s hair, my gospel, my wilderness & name, my herbs, my sage & tea, my spice, my good memory, my resistance, my codes & distrust, my loose jaw, my grandmother’s grandmother’s tongue, my grandfather’s grandfather’s burros, my land, my flesh hands, my spirits, my

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poems, my place, my ceremonies, my balance, my reason, my kin, my kin, my sins. Although this familial genealogy and connection with the ancestors is, as I have pointed out above, allegedly the basis for a strong ethnic self, poets may hold ambivalent feelings towards family and home, especially in building their identity as Latina women, insofar as family and home usually stand for the cultural tyranny Gloria Anzaldúa so steadfastly critiques in her Borderlands/​La Frontera (1987). In the section “Movimientos de rebeldía y las culturas que traicionan,” she denounces how androcentric (Mexican) culture cripples its women (1999, p. 43), how it injures them in the name of protecting them (1999, p. 44), and how they have been colonized by their own people. Likewise, she rebels against the role of women as bearers of the values of their culture and as transmitters of male rules and laws, whereby they actively contribute to the imposition of heteropatriarchal codes and attitudes on their own female offspring. In the same vein as Anzaldúa and other Latina writers, Texan Amalia Ortiz’s poems deal with gender and sexuality as one sphere in which the coloniality of power is articulated. She also problematizes how women have been silenced by tradition, objectified by men, and suppressed (even destroyed) by the machismo of the Mexican culture.9 This kind of patriarchal colonial culture where gender is a principle of social organization and a tool of domination (Lugones 2008) is represented by her abuela in her poem “Chocante” (2015). This familial figure proves how the coloniality of gender has coopted not only colonized men to occupy patriarchal roles and debilitate the power of women, but also women to be accomplices in their own subordination: “Abuela taught me to be docile, /​told me girls are born to suffer! /​to cook and clean, not be obscene—​ /​ serve the man first at supper! /​Señorita miss behaving /​Señorita miss speaking /​Señorita chocante, what husband /​will tolerate that shrieking?” However, the poetic persona now revels in this shockingness, vocalness and willfulness as a mode of resistance against domination: “chocante, shocking, strartling, strange /​chocante, scandalous, sin vergüenza –​without shame /​[…] /​Abuela called me chocante so often, I believed her. /​Perhaps, she’s the one to blame” (p. 15). By contrast, in “these hands that have never picked cotton” (2015), Ortiz creates a poem that pays homage to her ancestors and her parents’ first generation experiences with a deep understanding of their struggles,

9 In the section “Madre Valiente y sus Hijas,” with poems such as “The Women of Juárez,” “The Short Skirt Speaks,” “Cat Calls” or “Do Not Go Silent,” to name a few.

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recognizing her debt to them: “these grateful hands write words of hope /​ of remembering and being remembered /​give back this gift /​scratch feeble offerings /​to those who came before” (p. 8). Past and present, memory and language, the bonds of family and ancestors, together with a critical stance against processes of racial inferiorization and gender subordination, all ally to create a strong Afro-​Latina identity, and, in a broader sense, ensure the future of latinidad. Although discourses on latinidad have usually been produced, imposed and disseminated ‘from above,’ “as part of the organization of hegemony by dominant institutions” (Laó-​Montes, 2001, p. 17), they have been actively countered by an array of (sub)altern-​ative discourses in the form of artistic practices, among other strategies, that strive to define latinidad, in the multiple possible variants of the concept, “from below.” Latina spoken word poets have enriched this term and its meanings with specific histories and experiences of oppression, but also of contestation and survivance. Through artivist pieces, presented in community spaces, like the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and upon stages and in media nationwide, Latina spoken word poets have produced, chiseled and performed their complex ethnic identities—​the product of transnational, transcultural encounters—​, at the same time that they have integrated other categories of identity, such as Afro-​latinidades, that have oftentimes been invisibilized, when not completely ignored, even by the Latino community. Following in the footsteps of their predecessors in the political, social and cultural movements of the seventies, they proclaim their self-​affirming latinidad by dismantling Eurocentric structures of knowledge and epistemologies, decolonizing memory, knowledge, subjectivity and the body from below, and actively resisting other racial/​patriarchal assumptions and hierarchies as well. Their pluriversal poetic performances result from a de-​colonial imaginary that “emerges from the colonial wound of people of color in the US” (Mignolo, 2007a) and become exemplary of a dialogical, de-​ colonial cosmopolitan stance marked by a complex engagement with the demands of racial, social, political justice, equality, and a sense of (ethical) responsibility that stems from the belief in one’s capacity to effect meaningful personal and social change. Even though, as Sonja Kuftinec cautions, the inclusive nature of performance does not necessarily erase differences in perceptions and beliefs (as cited in Dolan, 2005, p. 75), as a public practice that generates a relational, inter/​intra-​subjective dialogue with the audience, (Afro)Latina spoken word has the potential to be transformative, enact alternative ways of thinking and being, and imagine new, more equitable forms of social relationships.

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DECOLONIZATION IN AFRO-LATINA ARTISTS’ SPOKEN WORD PERFORMANCES 105 Gilroy, P. (2013). Postcolonialism and cosmopolitanism. Towards a worldly understanding of fascism and Europe’s colonial crimes. In R. Braidotti, P. Hanafin, & B. Blaagaard (Eds.), After cosmopolitanism (pp. 111–​131). New York: Routledge. Grosfoguel, R. & Georas, C. S. (2001). Latino Caribbean diasporas in New York. In A. Laó-​Montes & A. Dávila (Eds.), Mambo montage. The Latinization of New York (pp. 97–​118). New York: Columbia University Press. Gunew, S. (2017). Post-​multicultural writers as neo-​cosmopolitan mediators. London and New York: Anthem Press. Jiménez Román, M., & Flores, J. (2010). Introduction. In M. Jiménez Román & J. Flores (Eds.), The Afro-​Latin@ reader. History and culture in the United States (pp. 1–​15). Durham and London: Duke University Press. Laó-​Montes, A., & Dávila, A. (Eds.) (2001). Mambo montage. The Latinization of New York. New York: Columbia University Press. Laó-​Montes, A. (2001). Introduction. In A. Laó-​Montes. & A. Dávila (Eds.), Mambo montage. The Latinization of New York (pp. 1–​53). New York: Columbia University Press. Laó-​Montes, A. (2005). Afro-​Latinidades and the diasporic imaginary. Iberoamericana, 5(17), 117–​130. Laó-​Montes, A. (2007). Decolonial moves. Trans-​locating African diaspora spaces. Cultural Studies, 21(2–​3), 309–​338. Laó-​Montes, A. (2013). Empoderamiento, descolonización y democracia sustantiva. Afinando principios ético-​políticos para las diásporas afroamericanas. CS, 12, 53–​84. Lugones, María. (2008). Colonialidad y género. Tabula Rasa, 9, 73–​101. Luz, C. De La, “La Bruja.” (2010). For witch it stands. De La Luz Records. Retrieved from https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=7DcozO03epU. Luz, C. De La (2015) I, too, am black. Centro Voices, April 11. Retrieved from https://​ centropr.hunter.cuny.edu/​centrovoices/​letras/​i-​too-​am-​black and https://​www .youtube.com/​watch?v=Cp9EgBvoos4. Maldonado-​Torres, N. (2007). On the coloniality of being. Contributions to the development of a concept. Cultural Studies, 21 (2), 240–​270. Martinot, S. (2004). The coloniality of power: Notes toward de-​colonization. Retrieved from https://​www.ocf.berkeley.edu/​~marto/​coloniality.htm. Martinot, S (2010). The machinery of whiteness. Studies in the structures of racialization. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Kindle edition. Mignolo, W. D. (2000). The many faces of cosmo-​polis: Border thinking and critical cosmopolitanism. Public Culture, 12(3), 721–​748. Mignolo, W. D. (2007a). Introduction. Cultural Studies, 21(2–​3), 155–​167. Mignolo, W. D. (2007b). Delinking. The rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality and the grammar of de-​coloniality. Cultural Studies, 21(2–​3), 449–​514.

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Mignolo, W. D. (2010). Cosmopolitanism and the de-​colonial option. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 29(2), 111–​127. Mignolo, W. D. (2012). De-​colonial cosmopolitanism and dialogues among civilizations. In G. Delanty (Ed.), Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitanism Studies (pp. 85–​ 99). London and New York: Routledge. Mignolo, W. D., and Walsh, C. E. (2018). On Decoloniality. Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham And London: Duke University Press. Morales, M. (1975). The sounds of sixth street. In M. Algarín, and M. Piñero, (Eds.), Nuyorican poetry. An anthology of Puerto Rican words and feeling (pp. 49–​51). New York: William Morrow. Mouffe, C. (2013). Artistic strategies in politics and political strategies in art. E-​ Misférica, 10(2). Disidencia. Retrieved from https://​hemisphericinstitute.org/​en/​ emisferica-​102.html. Neal, L. (2007). And shine swam on. An afterword. In A. Baraka & L. Neal, (Eds.), Black fire: An anthology of Afro-​American writing (1968). (pp. 638-​656). Baltimore: Black Classic Press. Nuyorican Poets Café. (n. d.). Retrieved from https://​www.nuyorican.org/​ Ortiz, A. (2015). Rant, chant, chisme. San Antonio, TX: Wings Press. Ortiz, M. (2015). black: of color pure and true. Centro Voices e-​magazine, April 11. Retrieved from https://​centropr.hunter.cuny.edu/​centrovoices/​letras/​black-​color -​pure-​and-​true. Quijano, A. (2000). Coloniality of power, eurocentrism, and Latin America. Nepantla: Views from the South, 1(3), 533–​580. Quijano, A. (2014). Colonialidad del poder y clasificación social. (2000). In Cuestiones y horizontes: de la dependencia histórico-​estructural a la colonialidad/​descolonialidad del poder (pp. 285–​327). Buenos Aires: clacso. Ramirez, T. L. (2016, May). This powerful spoken word poem celebrates heritage and self-​love. Huffingtonpost. Latino Voices. Retrieved from https://​www.­huffingtonpost .com/​entry/​this-​powerful-​spoken-​word-​poem-​celebrates-​heritage-​and-​self-​love _​us_​56ae40f3e4b0010e80ea72b5. Somers-​Willett, S. B. A. (2012). The cultural politics of slam poetry. Race, identity, and the performance of popular verse in America (2009, 4th ed.). Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Strand, T. (2010). Cosmopolitanism in the making. Stud Philos Edu 29, 103-​109. Tlostanova, M. V. & Mignolo, W. D. (2012). Learning to unlearn: Decolonial reflections from Eurasia and the Americas. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Torres-​Sailant, S. 2010. Introduction to Dominican Blackness. CUNY Academic Works. https://​academicworks.cuny.edu/​dsi_​pubs/​3. Valle, M. Del. (2010). Descendancy. Retrieved from https://​www.youtube.com/​ watch?v=paM03zurPQw.

DECOLONIZATION IN AFRO-LATINA ARTISTS’ SPOKEN WORD PERFORMANCES 107 Vizenor, G. (2008). Aesthetics of survivance. Literary theory and practice. In G. Vizenor (Ed.), Survivance. Narratives of native presence (pp. 1–​23). Lincoln: U of Nebraska Press. Weinreich, P. (1986). The operationalisation of identity theory in racial and ethnic relations. In J. Rex & D. Mason (Eds.), Theories of race and ethnic relations (pp. 299–​320). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Zapf, H. (2009). Slammin’ in transnational heterotopia: Words being spoken at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. In K. Concannon, F. A. Lomelí & M. Priewe (Eds.), Imagined transnationalism: U.S. Latino/​ a literature, culture, and identity (pp. 117–​ 136). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Encarnaciones Cubanas

Elías Miguel Muñoz and Queering of the Latina/​o Canon Ylce Irizarry Abstract This essay discusses two novels written by Cuban American author Elías Miguel Muñoz, who arrived in the United States in May 1969, between the two watershed migrations of Cubans: post-​1959 exiles and 1980 Mariel refugees. The author’s multiple migrations—​ from Cuba to Spain, from Spain to the United States, and within the United States—​ inform his fiction and reflect the reality of latinidades. Moreover, he tells a different story about life in Cuba offering readers new understandings of cubanidad while he foregrounds important issues concerning sexuality and gender construction among queer Latinas/​os. This essay asserts two arguments about the Latinx Canon by, first, stating that Muñoz’s work should be positioned as an early, material “queering” of cubanidad in terms of its complication of the exile narrative and its deconstruction of Cuban heteronormativity and, second, claiming that his work ultimately performs a “queering” of Latinx literature in reversal of tropes of ethnic belonging common in the Latinx Canon.

Keywords Cubanidades –​queering latinidad –​Latinx literature –​new memory

The two friends will glance at the horizon, breathe in the warm air, deeply. And through the lens of their dreams, Gina will finally see a brand new memory. ​e lías miguel muñoz, Brand New Memory (1998)

∵ Latina/​o, Latin@, Latinx, Latine: these terms can describe people living in the United States from a range of African, European, and Indigenous ethnonational

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004460430_007

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origins, whether they were born in the US or immigrated to one of its jurisdictions.1 Debates about which term is more appropriate, who should use it, and whom it should refer to are omnipresent in humanities and social science scholarship. Certain disciplines including within cultural studies, education, ethnic studies, linguistics, and literature have been at the forefront of these debates.2 Because Intersectionality is now recognized as a fundamental aspect of identity discourse within the United States and the latinidad debates have merged with those on sexual orientation and gender fluidity. According to a report by the Pew Research Center (2020), the term Latinx has been in use since 2004, though it has only gained mainstream use more recently. Pew’s 2020 report asserted that most people who might be described by Latinx or a variation of its predecessors, Latino, do not actually self-​identify with these terms.3 Pejorative responses to these data have been used to rationalize the sexism, homophobia, and transphobia escalating fatal violence against women, homosexuals, lesbians, and nonbinary people globally.4 Though 2020 will most likely be remembered for the global pandemic and the political chaos preceding the presidential elections in the United States, 2020 should be remembered for its reinvigoration of civil rights actions and collective activism against police brutality and anti-​LGBQT legislation. 2020 marked the 50th anniversary of the Chicano Moratorium, which closely followed the 1968 student led walkouts that began in California. The name/​term, Chicano was created within this poltical context; as the Civil Rights movements waned, naming discussions persisted within ethnic, cultural, and

1 When discussing identity or cultural production in general, I will use Latinx. When referring to authors’ ethnonational origin or self-​identification, I will be consistent with their usage (Chicano, Latina, Salvadoreña, Dominicano, etc). When referring to events or periods when Hispanic was in wide use, I will use that term. 2 The term “Latinx” has gained popular usage but it is most visible in academic discourse. Journals including Latino Studies (2018) and Cultural Dynamics (2017) published special issues on the term debate. See the following essays for varying disciplinary views on Latinx: Scharrón-​del Río, M. R., & Aja, A. A (2020) “Latinx: Inclusive language as liberation praxis,” Soto Vega, K., & Chávez, K. R. (2018) “Latinx rhetoric and intersectionality in racial rhetorical criticism;” Trujillo-​Pagán, N. (2018) “Crossed out by LatinX: Gender neutrality and genderblind sexism;” Santos, C. E. (2017) “The history, struggles, and potential of the term Latinx;” and Catalina (Kathleen) M. de Onís. (2017) “What’s in an “x”?: An Exchange about the Politics of “Latinx.” 3 See Pew Research Center (2020), “About One-​in-​Four U.S. Hispanics Have Heard of Latinx, but Just 3% Use It.” 4 One such example occurred on the public Facebook site for the Latina/​o Studies Association. A member posted the 2020 Pew article on August 12, 2020; moderators had to remove transphobic, nationalist, and otherwise harassing posts regarding the term.

110 Irizarry literary studies. In the 1990s, scholars and publishers of literature increased the visibility of contemporary Hispanic-​descended authors with origins in the Caribbean Basin such as Cubans, Dominicans, and Puerto Ricans. Scholars and publishers alike established the Latino Canon by collapsing these distinct traditions and privileging the autoethnography of certain Chicano and Chicana writers and other Latino and Latina writers.5 Since the early 2000s, reflection on this “ethnic boom” illustrates how these terms obscured the reality of lati­ nidades, understood as multiple forms of ethnic belonging within Chicanx and Latinx America. This essay focuses attention on the construction of latinidades by discussing two novels written by Cuban American author Elías Miguel Muñoz. Muñoz arrived in the United States in May 1969, between the two watershed migrations of Cubans: post-​1959 exiles and 1980 Mariel refugees. He left Cuba in October of the previous year but spent the next eight months in Spain before immigrating to the United States. The author’s multiple migrations—​from Cuba to Spain, from Spain to the United States, and within the United States—​ inform his fiction. His work offers a fruitful answer to Claudia Milian’s compelling question: “What’s the new Latinidad?” (2013, p. 156) since Muñoz’s writing clearly advocates for the acknowledgement of latinidades. Because Muñoz’s migration experience differs from those of the exiles and the Mariels, he tells a different story about immigration from Cuba and develops a new conception of cubanidad. The zeitgeists of his novels, The Greatest Performance (1991) and Brand New Memory (1998) reflect differences in the migration and acculturation of Cuban émigrés.6 The narratives delineated in The Greatest Performance (1991) and Brand New Memory (1998) explicitly ask if and how practices originating in Cuban culture should be retained after immigration. The Greatest Performance (1991) is set in the mid-​1980s and shifts across time with imprecise time markers. Brand New Memory (1998) begins in 1981, a year after the Mariel Boatlift, and is interrupted by moments of the Iberian conquest. Moreover, the texts question the problems and possibilities of pan-​Latino solidarity. This essay partially draws on my previous discussions of Muñoz’s work.7 Here, however, I discuss these works together to assert these arguments: 1) that Muñoz’s work should be positioned as an early material “queering” of cubanidad in terms of its complication of the exile narrative and its deconstruction of heteronormativity 5 See Dalleo, R. and Macahdo Sáez, E., (2007) for detailed discussion of the Latina/​o Canon. 6 For more examples of nonexilic Cuban American literature, see Villa and Soto in Bost and Aparicio (2013). 7 See Irizarry (2016).

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and 2) that his work ultimately performed a “queering” of the Latinx Canon in reversal of tropes of ethnic belonging.8 1

The US Ethnic ‘Boom’ and the Emergence of Latinidad

Within 1980s and 1990s ethnic literatures used to portray identity through characters feeling forced to choose one side of the “hyphen,” which meant to give up their culture or to fail to arrive.9 Popular conceptions of arrival—​that individuals or ethnic groups could attain social mobility through the assimilation of three generations of immigrants—​simplify the possibilities for arrival in the contemporary era.10 For early twentieth-​century European immigrant groups such as the Irish or Italians, arrival was predicated on the desire to enter the Crèvecoeurian11 melting pot and emerge an American; arrival was signaled by economic success and public recognition of that success (Irizarry, 2016). For mid-​through late-​twentieth-​century Hispanic-​descended immigrants, however, arrival means being recognized not only as American but also as Chicanx or Latinx. Reading these literatures within a neocolonial framework undermines the discourses of authenticity that left-​liberal multicultural curricula use to promote them.12 My study, Chicana/​o and Latina/​o Fiction: The New Memory of Latinidad (2016) starts by asking what happens when arrival loses its centrality as a narrative trope. The study emphasizes the problems and possibilities for empowerment within specific ethnic and geographic communities. The books explored reveal an inward gaze directed at the process of individuals positioning themselves within Chicana/​o and Latina/​o America. To structure these processes within narrative, the book delineates a broad framework of four narrative types: the narratives of loss, reclamation, fracture, and new memory. Each of these narratives showcases ways of telling stories about oneself and one’s community. The narratives of loss and reclamation coincide with the Manifest 8 9 10 11 12

I am drawing on David Williams Foster’s (2006) conception of queering as a critique of heterosexist identity paradigms. Pérez Firmat’s Life on the Hyphen (1995) uses sociologist Rubén Rumbaut’s term, the “1.5 generation,” to distinguish first generation Cuban Americans from their exile parents. For a review of the three-​generation model of assimilation, see Sollors (1986). The melting pot metaphor originates in St. Jean de ‘Crèvecoeur’s 1782 essay, “What is an American?” A notable exception is Hume’s study, American Dream American Nightmare: Fiction since 1960 (2000), which gracefully unites nearly one hundred contemporary American novels in a topical study of issues.

112 Irizarry Destiny and neocolonialism of the nineteenth century, exploring issues of acculturation in relation to Anglo America because, at this time, Mexican and Caribbean peoples experienced the start of US neocolonialism.13 The narratives of fracture and new memory coincide with the rise and decline of Civil Rights movements and groups such as El Movimiento, the Brown Berets, the Young Lords’ Movement, and the mecha14. Texts written since mid-​twentieth century are usefully situated as narratives of fracture and new memory, reflecting literary response to the continuing realities of US neocolonialism. Neocolonialism15 was first used in 1961 to describe the United States’ relationship with the Hispanic Caribbean. The United States has deployed neocolonialism not only in the Hispanic Caribbean but also more generally in the Caribbean Basin (Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Haiti, Panama) and Latin America (Chile and Argentina) and globally, as our conficts in the Gulf Wars have shown.16 Kwame Nkrumah’s conception of neocolonialism as an extension of Imperialism following European “decolonization” of Africa can be fruitfully applied to the United States and its representation in varied ethnic literary traditions. Nineteenth and twentieth century Chicanx and Latinx literature are literary responses to US Neocolonialism.17 Following the Civil Rights era, these literatures assumed space in public education curricula but left-​liberal multiculturalism failed to reflect the diversity of origins and cultural practices of neocolonial communities. As US civil rights movements peaked, Chicanx and Latinx narratives challenged the rhetorics of arrival and nostalgia because these discourses homogenized their historical and cultural differences. If concepts such as arrival and nostalgia no longer accurately represent Chicanx and Latinx experience, how can scholars describe contemporary Chicanx and Latinx literary representations of identity? Chicana/​o and Latina/​o Fiction: The New Memory of Latinidad (Irizarry, 2016) proposes the narrative of new memory.18 Juxtaposed, “new memory” seems an obvious paradox; however, in the context of Chicanx and Latinax fiction, they are mutually inclusive concepts. 13 14 15 16 17 18

For a discussion of novels depicting Iberian colonialism and US Neocolonialism see Irizarry (2006). The Movimiento Estudiantil de Atlán (MECHA) See Johnson, (1961). The Clinton Administration declassified records illustrating the United States’ financial role in several Central American civil wars, including those in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. For detailed analysis of US neocolonialism, see Irizarry (2016). Chicana/​o and Latina/​o Fiction: The New Memory of Latinidad, from which parts of this essay is drawn, does not use Chicanx or Latinx because it had not gained significant usage at the time of publication. I retain the use of a/​o referring to the book title.

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The new memory of Latinidad is a cultural archive for communities narrating their lives both through and outside the rhetoric of US Neocolonialism. 2

Queering Exile: The Greatest Performance (1991)

Much US scholarship on Cuban American literature has focused on exile authors. The primary reason is that first-​wave writers have been in the United States longer than other émigrés; their self-​conception as exiles created a space for interrogation of their displacement beginning in 1959. Authors of the first wave and/​or their parents had access to educational and economic opportunities facilitating artistic expression. Second-​wave Cubans arriving via or after the 1980 Mariel Boatlift had less education and no economic resources.19 María Cristina García’s study, Havana USA is one of few monographs that define strains of Cuban American literature distinct from the first-​wave exilic tradition. García describes Elías Miguel Muñoz as being among those exile authors who “constituted a distinct generation not so much because of this age […] but because of their thematic concerns. Unlike the exile authors who considered themselves Cubans writing outside of Cuba, writers of this new generation saw themselves as both Cuban and American” (García, 1996, p. 169–​170). Both novels discussed here, The Greatest Performance (1991) and Brand New Memory (1998), exemplify texts of this generation because they represent the differences amongst Cubans—​primarily racial and class differences—​that were transported to the United States. Each novel draws on concepts of performance to undermine the construction of these differences as natural. Morover, both novels combine elements of metanarrative and communal consciousness to complicate notions of ethnic belonging. The Greatest Performance illustrates cross gender homosexual collectivity and evokes discursive qualities of the human rights narrative form, testimonio.20 Brand New Memory invokes pre-​Columbian indigenous figures, and carefully elides much of the anti-​Communist narrative present in exilic literature, clearly evoking the need for the revision of the concept of Cuban history. When Fidel Castro opened the Port of Mariel on April 20, 1980, he reintroduced two classes of Cubans that had not been in contact since 1959.21 The 19 20 21

The Refugee Act was modified again in October 1980 to provide Cubans educational assistance (García, 1996). For a discussion of US Latina fiction and testimonio, see Irizarry, Y. (2005). See Alberts (2005), Portes and Stepick (1985), and Skop (2001), for discussions of the 1959 exile and 1980 refugees.

114 Irizarry Cuban elite who left when Castro took power, known as the Miami exiles, now faced what he and they considered to be undesirable elements in Cuban society: the abject poor, the unskilled, the mentally ill, Afro-​Cubans, and homosexuals. As García argues, “[u]‌nlike the earlier refugees, the Marielitos encountered hostility and discrimination wherever they settled” (1996, p. 46).22 This is because Cuba and the United States have maintained the false narrative that ‘Castro opened the jails’ releasing the nation’s criminals.23 Political dissidents and homosexuals comprised the majority of the “criminal” portion of the Mariel population. According to García, due to “Cuba’s ley de peligrosidad, law of dangerousness, Cubans could be incarcerated for such offenses as alcoholism, gambling, drug addiction, homosexuality, prostitution, ‘extravagant behavior,’ vagrancy and dealing on the black market” (1996, p. 64). Less than four percent of the Mariel Cubans were incarcerated for felony or violent crimes. Castro considered homosexuals and the mentally ill threats to Cuba’s “social progress” and thus was happy to reduce their presence when he could no longer feed all Cubans. The general understanding of the term ‘refugee’ is anyone “seeking protection from danger by moving to a safe jurisdiction” (Mullins, 2003, p. 147). Quite problematically, though, “neither US nor international law defines ‘refugee’ so broadly” (Mullins, 2003, p. 147). Only a month prior to the boatlift, in March of 1980, the US Refugee Act changed its definition of refugee; thus, “Mariel marked the first time since the Cold War began that the government denied refugee status to individuals emigrating from a communist state” (García, 1996, p. 69). Despite experiences of surveillance, detention, and reeducation by the Castro regime, gay Mariels were not categorized as refugees or asylum seekers. Mariel immigrants did not receive the same financial, medical, and social aid as their exile predecessors. Furthermore, this shift had devastating consequences for other Caribbean Basin nations. In the US Southwest, this policy directly impacted refuge seekers from Central America. Shortly after the Mariel exodus, in July of 1980, dozens of refugees from the civil war in El Salvador tried to enter the US and seek asylum; thirteen of the refugees died and the survivors were denied asylum. The increasing number of political disappeared and murdered in El Salvador and Guatemala led several churches to declare themselves sanctuary sites and the movement spread throughout Arizona, 22 23

The diminintive term “Marielitos” immediately signals this group as a less productive part of Cuban society than the first wave of Cuban immigrants. See García, M.C., (1996) for a review of government and media construction of Mariels as dangerous felons. For the racial, economic, and criminal statistics of Mariel immigrants, see Aguirre (1994), Fernandez (2007), and Skop (2001).

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New Mexico, and California (McDaniel, 2020). Cuban and Central American refugees who entered the United States without family or potential sponsors were subject to extensive detention and asylum delays that did not guarantee them permanent resident status. It would take a full generation before these refugees and their children developed a body of literature distinct to their changed national belonging. Similarly, the scholarship on Central American migrants began appearing in the second generation of Central Americans.24 In the Introduction to Post-​conflict Central American Literature, Yvette Aparicio links Salvadoran, Nicaraguan, and Costa Rican experience to the trajectory of other Hispanic-​descended migrants. Noting their shared navigation of homeland and home, she notes “homeland as place of origin and, most importantly, of home as belonging, a ‘feeling’ that is palpable yet undefinable; of being part of a flexible, changeable yet constant we” (Aparicio, 2013, p. 7). The image of the ‘tent-​city’ rendered notorious in the 1983 film Scarface (de Palma, 1983) created a lasting impression of refugees as undesirable immigrants who did not belong in Cuban exile Miami. Since the 1990s, such images have been deployed to reinforce steretypes of Latinos arrested for minor crimes as well as to criminalize asylum seekers undergoing processing by racist elected officials such as Sheriff Joseph Arapaio in Arizona.25 Since the Trump administration began, images of refugees, especially unaccompanied children, have been supressed because of the truths they reveal: asylum seekers’ rights are being denied by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ice), thousands of children have disappeared, several children and transgender individuals have died while in ice custody, and most recently, allegations of forced sterilizations in detention centers have prompted the fbi to investigate.26. Set within the post-​Mariel migration, The Greatest Performance (1991) immediately problematizes this vaguely defined exile of the 1980s: the refugee who is not afforded immediate asylum, despite the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, which remained in force until 2017. Rosa emigrates as a child with her parents shortly after Castro takes power; she would have been considered a political exile by the US government and referred to as an émigré. The chronology of the text implies that Mario leaves Cuba via the Mariel Boatlift. The boatlift occured in a year of global economic crisis and famine, so Mario and other Mariels were considered economic migrants, rather than political exiles. The 24 25 26

See notable among early monographs by Arias (2007) and Rodríguez (2009). One of the first literary anthologies of Central American literature also appeared within the last three years: See Linares, Martínez, and Tobar (Eds.), (2017). For discussions of Arapaio’s criminalization of asylum seekers, see Fernández (2017). For discussion of the allegations, see Treisman (2020, September 16).

116 Irizarry difference in Rosa’s and Mario’s immigration experiences challenges readers to see homosexual Mariel Cubans as refugees—​displaced persons who are neither exclusively political exiles nor economic immigrants.27 Unlike many Chicana/​o and Latina/​o novels of its time, The Greatest Performance (1991) fruitfully illuminates the erasure of the sexual refugee. The novel illustrates how the Cuban exile community brought its homophobia, political conservatism, and elitism with it during migration.28 In a parallel to the Mariels’ erasure, little scholarship exists on this novel, reflecting an opportunity to amplify scholarship on queer Chicanx and Latinx literature generally.29 In one of the major Latinx literary reference works, The Routledge Companion to Latino/​o Literature (2012), several entries discuss the shift away from queer theory following the expansion of the ethnic boom, even as queer communities of color were increasing visiblity in politics and in cultural production. Sustained critical work on queer Latinx texts dissipated until about 2011, when several new critical collections were published.30 Certain authors marked as queer and thus excluded from the Chicano or Latino canon, have been increasingly recuperated and their works revisited.31 Muñoz’s queering of latinidad at the start of the ethnic boom is especially powerful since, while publishers and professors were embracing the arrival text, Muñoz was already challenging the left liberal migration narratives privileging ethnic acculturation. The popularity of memoirs, novels and semi-​autobiographical novels, including Esmeralda Santiago’s When I was Puerto Rican (1993), Oscar Hijuelos’ The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989), Julia Alvarez’s, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), and Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban (1993), obscured the work of authors using similar fictional elements to explore questions of sexuality and gender construction.

27 28 29

30 31

For analysis of the novel foregrounding questions of refuge and asylum based on sexual orientation, see Mullins (2003). For information on Castro’s treatment of homosexuals, see Quiroga (2000) and Peña (2007). Few scholars have performed extended analysis of Muñoz’s work; Christian (1996) and Lima (2007) are exceptions. For brief discussions of either Crazy Love (1988) and/​or The Greatest Performance (1991) as queer Cuban texts, see Deaver (1996) and Bejel (2001). Early studies by Aparicio and Chávez-​Silverman, Tropicalizations (1997), Quiroga, Tropics of Desire (2000), created important frameworks. Soto notes that Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader (Hames-​García and Martínez, 2011), “sheds light on the culture of invisibility and deviance associated with Latino gay cultures and reinserts questions of sexuality into Latinos/​as’ struggles for equality” (Soto, 2012, p. 68). See Hames-​Garcia and Martinez (2011). For discussions on author John Rechy, see Foster (2006) and de Guzmán (2019).

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The structure of the novel is a dialogue between two friends who have had to closet themselves from their family and nation, both pre and post-​migration. A hybrid text, the novel meshes formal literary genres with informal modes of writing. The novels’ ekphrastic ruminations on reproductions of drama, photographs, journals, and song lyrics, become sites for the narrative of the new memory. Early within the narrative, Rosa alludes to her and her friend’s childhood performances which allowed them to embody their sexuality without negative repercussions.32 Within the first chapter, though, the narrator Rosa alerts the reader to the construction of this narrative; it is a combination of childhood memory and adult re-​membering33 of her and her friend’s bodies. She announces the convergence of her childhood friend and her current friend, Mario: “In my childhood story you have become that kid, Marito. Or rather, he has become you. And I can no longer remember his real name” (Muñoz, 1991, p. 16). Rosa’s inability to distinguish the stories of her childhood friend and her adult friend’s life suggest the artifice of narrative, especially autobiography, which is a genre the characters perform throughout the novel. The extent to which any of the objects of ekphrasis, including the photographs, are “real” in the fictive world of the novel is less significant than what they document: “The survival of the body as a historical and material entity is directly related to its genre, ethnicity, and class, and although it follows that almost every ‘body’ has a story to tell, not all bodies matter equally to everyone” (Lima, 2007, p. 140). Mario’s body, especially its history, matters terribly to Rosa, because it is a kaleidoscope of her own body, reflecting her changing experience of her sexual orientation. As she narrates her life, Rosa destabilizes the photo as a source of memory, using “happy” photos as signifiers of loss and shame. By changing other photos’ significance from negative to positive, Muñoz queers memory itself. These moments serve as paratextual deconstruction; by asserting there is a story the photo does not capture, he reminds

32

33

Alternative names are used to refer to the male protagonist: Mario and its diminutive, Marito. Unless directly quoting the text or a critical discussion of it, I will use Mario to refer to him. Similarly, the female protagonist and dominant narrator, Rosaura, is referred to as Rosa or Rosita. Unless directly quoting, I will refer to her as Rosa. See Lima, L. (2007), who uses Toni Morrison’s concept of re-​memory to describe the novel’s structure: “This dialogue between Rosita and Marito makes her address not only a re-​memory of Marito’s life but also a virtual construction of her own as she grafts his aprocryphal present onto her childhood memory (p. 149).

118 Irizarry readers that no document, textual or visual, can capture the entirety or even the truth of an event.34 Readers are equally uncertain about the reliability of Mario as a narrator. Most of his childhood narratives are a combination of dream sequences and memories; his voice changes often and quickly, from first person stream-​of-​ consciousness to second-​person direct address and/​or limited third person omniscience. Often it is clear that Mario, himself, is not sure if he is remembering or re-​membering events, dreams, or fantasies. The Greatest Performance (1991) is not a magical realist text in any way. By the novel’s close, readers understand Mario is in the last stage of aids; some of his recollections may be hallucinations. The novel represents a critical intersection of US Latinx and Latin American literature in its resonance with Reinado Arenas’ memoir, Before Night Falls. Published posthumously, Arenas’ memoir appeared first in Spanish as Antes que anochezca (1992). Arenas arrived in the US in 1980; he settled in NY, contracted hiv, and died of aids complications in 1990. José E. Muñoz’s important monograph, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999), created a theoretical framework for reading identity performance. This framework remains foundational for critical work in queer and ethnic studies. He asserts that “disidentification is meant to be descriptive of the survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship” (Muñoz, 1999, p. 5). For Rosa and Mario, the majoritarian public sphere is both the state and their family. Muñoz’s qualification of the term is critical as he considers that “disidentification is not always an adequate strategy of resistance or survival for minority subjects. At times, resistance needs to be pronounced and direct; on other occasions, queers of color and other minority subjects needs to follow a conformist path if they hope to survive a hostile public sphere” (Muñoz, 1999, p. 5). In The Greatest Performance (1991), Elías Miguel Muñoz is concerned not only with violence against homosexuals via heterosexist paradigms, juridical practice, and individual acts of violence; he is deeply concerned about familial and intimate partner violence. To survive the violence, first of their families and later, of both the Cuban state and the American state, Rosa and Mario must choose conformity –​the performance of false identities. The repercussions of enforced gender performance, domestic violence, and pedophilia become the sites for the change in their 34

This concept will be evoked two years later in Dreaming in Cuban; of the Mariel Boatlift, the protagonist Pilar notes, “Nothing can record this, I think. Not words, not paintings, not photographs” (García, 1993, p. 241).

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stories. Both characters’ disidentification—​their refusal to choose heteronormative cubanidad—​is productive, ultimately allowing them to live, not perform their authentic identities. Rosa’s friendship with Mario is what enables her, as an adult, to embrace her sexual orientation and acknowledge its primacy in her self-​identification. Rosa’s comment about the distinct treatments of gays and lesbians begins a powerful critique of homophobia in Cuba, especially in the early years of Castro’s regime. She articulates the narrative voices of a child and adult, with the adult mediating the childhood memories she is simultaneously constructing: “From my sinful hideaway I listened (I imagine now that I listened) to your cries. Things were much worse for you, because you had been born a man. Your crime deserved no forgiveness and no mercy” (Muñoz, 1991, p. 18). Though such conceptions may seem dated because of the developments in queer theory in the late 1990s, Muñoz’s prescient critique is especially important because it linked Cuban cultural and legal discourses about homosexuality prevalent then, and unfortunately, today.35 Mario and Rosa have met as adults in the United States, not as children in Cuba; Rosa narrates Mario into her life story. Her reconstruction of Mario’s life acknowledges the different responses to homosexuality in men and women in Cuban culture. Even though Rosa does not suffer physical violence because of her homosexuality, she is compelled to reject life at home, because her family has made no space for her lesbian body. Rosa describes performing as a heterosexual male, as “the hero,” or as “the rogue” in childhood play. In those moments, she was choosing the conformist path José E. Muñoz discusses. When Rosa casts herself as a heterosexual male and normalizes her sexuality to fit into the rigid gender system of her family and Cuba, she disidentifies with lesbians but achieves a kind of agency she will not experience again until she meets Mario.36 Rosa presents her sexual awakening in a positive manner. She falls in love with a teenage friend who is a few years older than she is, Maritza. Their intimacy is mutual and forms the basis of a positive sexual initiation. Her relationship with Maritza, though, is tied to her topographical sense of Cuba; Rosa is able to meet Maritza secretly in “the country,” while working for the cause at La Cooperativa. One of Castro’s rural labor camps, La Cooperativa is presented as an edenic and safe space for otherwise taboo sexuality. In the city, family and social structures criticize her ‘masculine’ nature and confine Rosa. As 35 36

See “Defiance and Arrests at Cuba’s Gay Pride Parade” (Reuters, 2019) for accounts of recent oppression of gay Cubans. For an analysis of performance as strategy for Latino sexuality, see Muñoz (1999).

120 Irizarry Rosa experiences her first kiss with Maritza, a woman emerges from the dark singing37 about love: “And then I saw that from behind the tree appeared this woman, this woman, who sang, entranced, We are sweethearts, who whispered, because we feel this love, sublime and profound. She hummed, she sang, This love that makes us proud” (Muñoz, 1991, p. 25). This scene has several implications. La Cooperativa has become a safe space for unsanctioned sexuality in an ironic joke on the Communist regime. What is striking, though, is that the woman’s song quickly moves from a pleasant singing to a tearful speaking: “She cried, This love so weary of goodbyes” (Muñoz, 1991, p. 25). Thus, while the girls Rosa and Maritza have begun to awaken sexually, the song lyrics suggest the love will be short lived.38 When the nameless woman says, “This love so weary of goodbyes” (p. 25), she reinforces the idea that the girls’ relationship is defined by their spatial proximity. Rosa’s sexual identity is so closely linked to Cuban topography that the nation loses its ability to comfort her in exile when her first love enters a heterosexual marriage: “Seeing her name printed over a red heart, on that cheap cream-​colored paper and next to the name of a man, MARITZA GARCIA & DAVID PÉREZ, I felt for the first time that Cuba was vanishing from my life” (Muñoz, 1991, p. 16). Rosa’s primary identity is defined by the sexual safety and freedom that she briefly enjoyed in Cuba, not a sense of Cuban ethnonationalism. Castro exercised systematic surveillance and detention of homosexuals; thus, Rosa and Mario witness and experience homophobia from childhood.39 Mullins suggests that in Cuba, “ethnic cohesion is subsumed under Cuban nationalism, which during the 1960s and 1970s called for the creation of a new man: a virile, patriarchal dominant heterosexual man who would create a socialist nation through sexual reproduction and heteronormative family life” (2003 p. 158). Homosexual men and women both faced discrimination; however, as Rosa noted, it was much worse for men. The classification of a man as homosexual indicated he was depraved. Men who perform anal penetration are not subject to the denigrating terms of pato or maricón. These terms are used to describe the recipient of penetration and signal him as being pasivo, as effeminate and thus, deviant. The novel questions this inequity to imply that the distinction between the giver and the receiver is artificial.40 While Mario’s 37 38 39 40

The novel italicizes the song lyrics. The lyrics to this song are repeated when Mario reminisces about a different boy he finds attractive. Mario is rejected, however, by the second boy (Muñoz, 1991, p. 42). For discussions of the treatment of Mariel homosexuals, see Aguirre (1994) and Peña (2007). See Almaguer (1991), who distinguishes European American and Latin American constructs of sexuality. “Pato” literally means “duck,” but it is derogatory slang for a gay man

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first sexual encounter, with a boy of his age, is positive, he spends greater narrative time unraveling the abuse he experienced because he was “obvious.” Mario’s sexual identity develops through his relationship with his father and a sequence of sexual abuse by other men. These men, including his father, represent the state. Mullins’ assertion that “the pinching and poking, forms of sexualized violence, enforce on the boy the stark realities of Cuban patriarchal heteronormativity” is an apt gloss for the father’s treatment of his son (2003, p. 154). Mario’s abusers’ repeated assertions of his “femininity” becomes a site for the boy’s questioning, as a child and as an adult, if his sexuality was natural or created by his father’s lack of affection and/​or the rapes he suffers. Mario never explicitly says that his father molested him, but the reader senses Mario cannot admit that to himself. Even if his father did not molest or rape him, Mario’s bruised and scarred body exposes his father’s inability to differentiate abuse from discipline. Though his father undergoes reeducation because of his capitalist activity, Pipo embodies the state’s view of homosexuality and attempts to beat and clean it out of his son. Rosa asks Mario, “Did you associate your nudity with punishment and pain?” (Muñoz, 1991, p. 20). His response reveals one of many traumatic experiences: “Pipo insisted on both of us using the same shower stall, so he could scrub me hard, the way little boys needed to be scrubbed. Men with long things and boys with tiny ones would pass by and stare, pointing at the father-​and-​son shower spectacle” (Muñoz, 1991, p. 31). The language Mario uses here, “spectacle,” evokes images of Cuban citizens being subjected to “Acts of Repudiation”: public demonstrations of punishment designed to elicit confession of crimes against the state. Pipo is performing the conformity described in Disidentifications (Muñoz, 1999). He is acting as a heterosexual male disciplining his son’s body to support the state; his earlier, private abuses of his son make it clear how much of a performance this cleansing actually is. Mullins suggests that in Cuba, “ethnic cohesion is subsumed under Cuban nationalism, which during the 1960s and 1970s called for the creation of a new man: a virile, patriarchal dominant heterosexual man who would create a socialist nation through sexual reproduction and heteronormative family life” (2003, p. 158). Pipo’s conformity, though, is not without consequence to others; it imposes power over and inflicts pain onto his son.41

41

who receives sexual penetration. “Maricon” is also a derogatory term for a gay man but can be applied to women (“maricona”) and is suggestive of sexual deviance. Foster (2006) examines the portrayal of such abuse in multiple works by Chicano and Latino authors: “This discourse, among its many workings, obliges parents to be vigilants of their children’s sexuality, and to, quite literally? beat them into submissive conformity with the hegemonic compulsive heterosexist standard” (p. 76).

122 Irizarry Pipo’s abuse of Mario included his failure to protect him from Hernando, the family friend who owned a black market plantain business. After meeting Mario, Hernando stalks the boy, lures him to a secluded location, and rapes him. While disgusted by Hernando, Mario blames his father for this rape: “But you were the one, Pipo, who took me to Hernando’s farm. You asked me to go with you” (Muñoz, 1991, p. 35). Before and after the physical rape, Hernando enacts a verbal assault of the boy, articulating common views on homosexuals in Cuba and Latin America in general: “He knew I was a pájaro, a queer, from the very moment he laid eyes on me, the day I came to his farm with my father and I acted like a sissy, refusing to get my feet dirty with mud and complaining about the weight of the plantain bunches” (Muñoz, 1991, p. 36). Hernando performs as activo but Mario undermines this by quoting Hernando’s pleas for sex with Mario. Hernando repeats, “I swear I’ll do anything for you, Marito,” three times (Muñoz, 1991, p.37). Hernando initially presented himself as the dominant male, having identified Mario as the pato; their roles seem to reverse when Hernando begs Mario to give him oral and anal sex. Though clearly Hernando repeatedly rapes Mario, such vacillation between moments of rhetorical dominance and submission evidences the complexity of performance.42 By rejecting Hernando’s blurring of active and passive sex roles, Mario also disidentifies with Cuba’s social narrative of homosexual identity. As an adult, Mario performs both active and pasivo roles during sexual intercourse. This is a textual moment that illustrates essentialist conceptions of queer identity paradigms simply do not function. In lieu of this false narrative, Mario needs a story that reflects his true self. His narrative then shifts to a critical point when his father applies for an exit visa. Pipo is forced to complete labor in the countryside. Mario’s concerns about his father’s sexuality imply his father had indeed molested him, especially when he ponders whether or not Pipo himself would be “safe” at such a camp, where his homosexuality might be “obvious.” Mario’s imaginary of the labor camp starkly contrasts Rosa’s positive description. Children were sent to the camps for indoctrination and adults for re-​education; Mario observes this and asks, “But what about Pipo? They took him to Las Barracas, where all the traitors are being taken to receive their punishment. Faggots are taken there too, because the Revolution says they are sick and need reforming, treatment” (Muñoz, 1991, p. 42). Nonetheless, he views the labor camps as dangerous, if not tempting, spaces for all: “Pipo may have to sleep next to a pájaro” (Muñoz, 1991, p. 42). The next sentence

42

Lima suggests Mario’s agency occurs through Rosa’s narration of revenge against Hernando (2007, p. 143).

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illustrates Mario’s uncertainty about his father’s sexuality: “Pipo may be doing it to him. Could he? No. Pipo has no prick, nothing to do it with. The Pipo I love has no sex; like the blonde angel who stole my pacifier, he has nothing to put inside a boy’s ass. So he’s safe” (Muñoz, 1991, p.43). Muñoz’s language play is kaleidoscopic: the reader wonders if Mario’s use of “safe” means that Pipo is safe from being caught for homosexuality or if he is safe in relation to other prisoners and little boys because he will not rape them. Of course, “safe” evokes the concept of a “safeword” used in consensual sexual acts, specific to bondage and/​or sadomasochism. Any of these interpretations lead readers to the conclusion queer Latinidad has more than one meaning, just as José E. Muñoz’s anti-​essentialist position of queer Latinidad makes clear. Mario narrates his being thrown out of the house, his subsequent change into a jinetero who cruises in Havana, and his years as a sex worker in the United States.43 At exactly mid-​novel, Mario recalls a conversation among several gay men. One of them is a doctor, who recounts his experiences in medical residency in San Francisco. The doctor describes how the “Gay Rap” men initially joke but are ultimately terrified by the lack of knowledge about aids: “ ‘They say you get it from butt-​fucking.’ ‘Get what?’ ‘The plague’ ” (Muñoz, 1991, p. 75). One of the men gathered asks, “ ‘What does the late-​blooming doctor have to say about this so-​called Gay Plague?’ ” and the doctor responds, “ ‘We don’t know enough about it yet … ’ ” (Muñoz, 1991, p. 76). The conversation places the events of the novel in the early 1980s, especially the last line quoted above, which was repeated in news conferences as aids cases of prominent Americans, such as Rock Hudson (d.1985), were revealed. The medical community had no definitive information about the origin or transmittal of the disease; however, the homosexual community had become synonymous with aids because gay men were increasingly testing hiv positive and being rhetorically constructed as the source of the virus. Placing this conversation mid-​ novel centralizes one space—​perhaps the only one—​of sameness gay men have experienced in this era. Due to his lack of economic resources, Mario will experience other displacements; he will move from Miami, to New York, to California, performing as a sex worker in each state. Lima suggests the exhaustion of performance: “If the ‘performance’ is tiring, the excess violence against the john’s body politicizes the varieties of possible queer pleasure as well as its cost on the ‘performer’s’ body” (2007, p.150). This exhaustive violence is painfully inscribed on Mario’s body by his acquisition of aids. 43

This term refers to anyone who tries to obtain money from tourists through sex work, theft, or deception.

124 Irizarry While Mario provides physical descriptions of his johns and his romantic partners, Mario’s lack of self-​description is a compelling disidentification with a specifically ethnic, or Cuban, queerness. For Mario, ethnopolitical ideology has the potential to prevent him from acceptance within the US gay community. Mario’s initial fears about his relationship with Jimmy, for example, illustrate some of the conflicts amongst queer Latinos: “Does he really not mind the fact that I’m a Cuban worm, a traitor to the Revolution? (Muñoz, 1991, p. 99–​100). Jimmy is a teacher; he espouses Marxism and decries the condition of Puerto Ricans in New York. Mario fears his lack of politics will keep him from identifying with Jimmy sexually, not racially: “Does he not mind that I don’t give a fuck about politics?” (Muñoz, 1991, p. 99–​100). Because Mario and other Cubans have been repeatedly violated by the state under Communism’s guise of social progress, political differences are significant, often irreconcilable, ideological challenges to queer intimacy and solidarity. By examining the underlying beliefs that inscribe homonormative values, the text enriches our understanding of the differences within queer latinidades. Rosa proactively begins her narrative of new memory when she chooses to disidentify with the false binary of ethnicity and sexuality: “I had said to myself, Niña, your native island is Lesbos, not Cuba. Now what are you gonna do about it?” (Muñoz, 1991, p. 92). Rosa’s decision to move out of her home and to prioritize Lesbos over Cuba suggests conceptualizations of a singular, authentic cubanidad can no longer exist because such authenticity never existed. Rosa has not rejected Cuba; she has disidentified with the essentializing cubanidad that erases her queer body. Rosa offers readers a final sense of performance powerfully juxtaposed by Mario’s inevitable death from aids. Lima’s emphasis on Rosa’s narration reflects the importance of collaborative agency: “In her difficult re-​membering, aids becomes the catalyst for her tapestry of care and compassion. If he could not act in life in his body, Marito will live re-​membered as a body that mattered” (2007, p.151). Outside of the narrative time of Rosa’s new memory, Mario exercised agency. His own narration of his childhood abuses and his complication of essentialist notions of ethnic and sexual identity made him a body that mattered to Rosa, to Jimmy, and to others whose voices we may not have heard as often in the novel. 3

Queering Cubanidad: Brand New Memory (1998)

The epigraph that begins this chapter comes from the close of Brand New Memory (1998), where a Cuban American teenager, Gina Domingo, attempts

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to create her own memory of Cuba because she has never traveled there or had contact with anyone living there. One of Muñoz’s English language novels, Brand New Memory (1998) draws on the stories central to Chicanx and Latinx literature and culminates in the narrative of new memory.44 The narrative of new memory combines experience, imagination, and agency to tell a new story of one’s identity, culture, or other community defining her, his, or their belonging. Published in 1998, the year of the hundredth anniversary of the Cuban Spanish American War and on the eve of the new millennium, the novel tells us a story that moves beyond exilic nostalgia and condemnation of Castro.45 As Ruth Behar notes in the “Introduction” to the literary anthology, Bridges to Cuba/​Puentes a Cuba (1995), “Cuba since the revolution has been imagined as either a utopia or a backward police state” (p. 2). Brand New Memory (1998) opens with what Cristina García describes as “the big B.C. and A.D.” of Cuban Americans’ lives; however, the focus on the revolution and anticommunism in exile families, the revolution itself, and living under a Communist government was not the only reason to flee Cuba (Irizarry, 2007, p. 178). Muñoz rejects this official narrative; as Gina searches for understanding of her parents’ experience of Cuba, she dismembers the Cuba of her parents’ false, or falsely told, story of Cuba. Muñoz eliminates Fidel Castro as the defining figure in the Cuban American imaginary. In this critical way, Elías Miguel Muñoz’s writing performs a material queering of cubanidad, so long defined as embodying anti-​Communism. From the very start of Brand New Memory (1998), readers learn Benito and Elisa Domingo left Cuba in 1966. The novel begins as their only daughter, Gina, approaches her quinceañera and reflects upon her parent’s nostalgia for Cuba. The text is narrated in third person omniscient voice, as well as via first person streams of consciousness, signaling its focus on visual and aural performance. Like The Greatest Performance, this later novel draws on visual process and metaphor. A textual symbol that resembles the Spanish language tilde (~~~~) separates every few scenes, functioning as individual cells in a filmstrip.46 Gina’s use of technology plays on recurring visual tropes in ethnic literatures in general: photographs as incomplete and static memory and windows and mirrors as reflection and containment. The extensive references to images, 44 45 46

Muñoz is a prolific bilingual writer.His English language novels include Crazy Love (1988), The Greatest Performance (1991), Brand New Memory (1998) and Diary of Fire (2016). An excerpt of the novel titled “The Moviemaker” first appeared in Bridges to Cuba (Muñoz in Behar, 1995). The book cover has an image of three film cells with brown edging; each cell contains an image. One image is of a white rose; another of a blue bird; the last of a tree with red flowers or fruit.

126 Irizarry letters, songs, albums, and films illustrate Benedict Anderson’s discussion of photographs and documentary evidence: “The photograph, fine child of the age of mechanical production, is only the peremptory of a huge modern accumulation of documentary evidence (birth certificate, diaries, report cards, letters, medical records, and the like), which simultaneously records certain apparent continuity and emphasizes its loss from memory” (1983, p. 204). In Latinx literary studies, scholars such as Maya Socolovsky (2002) and Victoria Chevalier (2007) have illustrated how photographs particularly haunt Cuban American contemporary fiction. 47 Ultimately, Muñoz uses documentary evidence to frame Cuba and Cuban immigrants in the present, splicing and suturing their memories from a single frame black and white unmoving camera still of pre-​migration into a multiple framed technicolor video of pre and post-​migration. While the crisis of Brand New Memory (1998) is rooted in the Domingo family’s loss of Cuba, an understanding of the rise of Communism is grossly insufficient to understand the text’s narrative of new memory. Muñoz queers the exile narrative by spending no narrative time reclaiming pre-​Communist Cuba. Gina’s parents have never actually told their daughter why they left: “The truth that looms over their home is that Gina’s parents went through hell in Cuba. But what does that mean?” (Muñoz, 1998, p. 3). Stuart Hall’s work on identity is another frame for understanding Muñoz’s project. Hall (1996) argues that cultural identity is “always constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth. Cultural identities are the points of identification, the unstable points of identification or suture, which are made within the discourses of history and culture. Not an essence but a positioning” (1996, p. 111). In Brand New Memory (1998), as in many other Latinx narratives, there are few documents available to create personal histories. Thus, Gina’s documentary is an effort to both record her present history and to recover her parents’ histories through visual assembly. Her project is a positioning as she narrates herself into Cuban history. As author, Muñoz queers the 1980s and 1990s narrative of cubanidad by creating an anti-​arrival text from the perspective of a migrant who wants to return to Cuba.48

47

48

See Socolovsky’s (2002) “The Homelessness of Immigrant American Ghosts: Hauntings and Photographic Narrative in Oscar Hijuelos’s The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien, Chevalier’s (2007) “Alternative Visions and the Souvenir Collectible in Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints” and Rohrleitner (2009) for further discussions on the topic. For examples, see Hijuelos’ Our House in the Last World (1982); García’s Dreaming in Cuban (1993), Engle’s Singing to Cuba (1993) and Súarez’s Going Under (1996).

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The island travels to Gina in this narrative of new memory.49 She discovers a box full of letters her mother had hidden; her grandmother, Abuela Estela, had been writing to Gina for years. In a distinct contrast to the exile story in Dreaming in Cuban (1993), where the granddaughter has access to memory and longs for reunion with her grandmother, Gina does not feel anything for her abuela: “The Cuban woman was a bunch of words on paper, unskilled writing, hard-​to-​read-​Spanish sentences. You don’t start loving a person in the blink of an eye, even if that person happens to be your father’s mother” (Muñoz, 1998, p. 64). The narrator’s description of the next phase of Gina’s journey foreshadows a rocky displacement to the Cuba de ayer. Muñoz writes, “She’s contaminated by nostalgia for a land she never saw. The pain of exile is hers too. (A pain her parents have repressed.) Her grandma’s lot, a lifetime of struggles, Gina claims it all […] Her inescapable fate: soon to become one of the aliens” (Muñoz, 1998, p. 150). Passages such as this reveal a critical aspect of Muñoz’s narrative of new memory where Americans become Cuban rather than Cubans becoming American. Benito represents the exilic wave and its persistent nostalgia. His national allegiance to Cuba is suggested by the fact that he never attempts to be naturalized. Benito wants to understand American culture but he never says he wants to be American (Muñoz, 1998, p. 12). Gina’s grandmother, Abuela Estela, serves as a mediating voice. Her stream of consciousness offers the novel’s readers a view of Cuba inflected by its culture, not its Communism. Abuela does not deny Cuba’s struggles with Communism, but she does not mourn Cuba as if it were a relic or a petrified rock, long dead: “No she wouldn’t paint that sad picture of her life, of her country, for those plastic women. She wouldn’t give Elisa that pleasure. Gina needed to hear a few good things, not just the misery. That, Estela realized now, was the main reason she had come to the North: to give history a balance and the past a fair chance” (Muñoz, 1998, p. 151). To tell their stories, each uses the medium of their respective generations: Abuela Estela draws on oral storytelling traditions and Gina is equipped with the most current technology of her time, the portable video camera. Ready to film her Abuela, Gina is writer, director, and camera operator at once: “Benito is pacing by the gate; Elisa is seated, reading poetry. I’m filming the whole scene (panning shot with lots of zoom-​ins for close-​ups, my favorite) while a hot salsa tune plays in my head. Sounds better than the Sixties original!”

49

See López (2015) for a discussion of the return to Cuba as a common trope in Cuban American fiction, especially in works published in the 1980s and 1990s.

128 Irizarry (Muñoz, 1998, p. 101).50 In framing the revision as better than the original, Gina is performing a Bakhtinian simulacrum. Muñoz uses this sort of metafictional critique throughout the novel, ultimately suggesting the artifice and utility of all media in queering cubanidad. Abuela Estela’s resistance to being videotaped makes Gina consider the function of recorded memory: “Abuela dislikes the camera and discourages Gina from filming her. She hates seeing herself duplicada, she says, viewing that image of someone who talks and looks just like her, a person who is Estela and yet who isn’t” (Muñoz, 1998, p. 117). Abuela’s fear of her doppleganger echoes the false story of Cuba: that there is one truth of the nation—​that communism is effective governance for it. Her ability as a storyteller, however, thwarts Gina’s efforts to document the Domingo family story and make the same tragic mistake—​to think there is a single story about Cuba. Abuela’s narratives are compelling enough to get Gina to stop filming. The collaborative nature of their storytelling, of their creating brand new memories, is provocative: “She spoke to Gina of these intimate imaginings and the girl shared visions of her own with Abuela […] So vivid were their memories, invented memories of a factual place, that they spoke of Varadero Beach as though they’d been there, together. As though they’d conquered time and space to meet on the Caribbean shore” (Muñoz, 1998, p. 125). Grandmother and granddaughter exchange worlds. Estela’s stories map Cuba’s cultural and geographic topography, and Gina drags Abuela to gaudy theme parks and the pop culture maze known as “the mall.” With every adventure, Gina grows closer to this “lady from Cuba” she thought she might never love. She does so because Abuela Estela animates Gina’s father, as well. Gina was always closer to him than to her mother, but Abuela Estela allows Gina to create a new memory of her father in Cuba: “The past, which has become an open book. These people—​so alive, so three dimensional—​who weave for her an elaborate tapestry of yore, of a world which Estela as protagonist, and Nitín as the dwarf prince of childhood adventures” (Muñoz, 1998, p. 157). The author’s use of metafiction functions as a voiceover in a movie, causing the reader to wonder if the narrative action is real or not, even in the fictive world of the novel/​movie: “Gina longs to find the puzzle’s missing piece, the gaps in her family’s history. Answers. And her subconscious life could be traced like a map leading to some of the answers, like a blueprint of the character’s self.

50

Readers should note the repetition of songs in Muñoz’s Crazy Love (1988), The Greatest Performance (1991), and Brand New Memory (1998). Most songs are from the 1950s and 1960s were characterized by narration; thus, the songs were ballads.

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A sort of fiction” (Muñoz, 1998, p. 5). Here, Muñoz does seem to be playing with both the concept of the novel of la gran familia as well as postmodern conceptions of fiction. So, what are readers supposed to understand about Cuba in reading this novel or any text characterized generally as a protrayal of cubanidad as are the other works discussed in the collection, or more specifically as I argue, as a narrative of new memory of latinidad? Neither the vague sentiments Gina’s parents express nor Gina’s naïve attempts to quickly become Cuban actually facilitate their cubanidad. As the novel moves toward its close, the omniscient narrator intrudes, “Gina Domingo has been thrown into a situation for which no one has prepared her (not even her grandmother) into a living text (whose language she not yet learned how to read)” (Muñoz, 1998, p. 139). Gina will learn Cuban customs and meet family she has never known. Her friendships with her grandmother and her cousins develop new memories of her latinidad that are more real because they occur in physical space and time. Rather than relying on faded photographs, old letters, and secondhand stories, Gina’s trip also functions as a new memory for Abuela Estela, who will become part of Gina’s connection to Cuba. 4

Conclusions

The Greatest Performance (1991) is a conversation between two people without a shared past who create a shared future. Rosa defines the beginning of their collaborative life as a disidentification with their biographies: “You have never gone hungry. When things got rough, you didn’t put your body up for sale. You never hustled. And I, I never found myself alone and violated in a cold, dark Spain” (Muñoz, 1991, p. 150). She erases the narratives that have tried to erase her and Mario’s embodied existences: “We never heard of Castro. (Not even Castro Street). Nobody hides, waving a dagger in the air, behind the mask of God. A plague hasn’t broken out” (Muñoz, 1991, p. 151). Rosa’s narration removes individuality from their narrative of new memory: “There, on that solitary prairie overflowing with light, that’s where we met. I was resting on the grass. You came close and said that you had lost your way. I offered you a warm place by my side, you held my hand. Then we whispered a song to each other, ‘We are sweethearts’ ” (Muñoz, 1991, p. 151). The novel’s closing offers the most powerful example of the way Elías Miguel Muñoz queers cubanidad. Rosa and Mario’s friendship allows them to choose not to perform as expected but as they choose or not at all. The novel’s dialogic structure discourages reading it as advocating or illustrating performativity

130 Irizarry as individual enterprise. Rather, collectivity—​even if the collective is two people—​is required to dismantle the structures of homophobia embedded within Caribbean, US Latinx and Latin American culture. Readers understand where Mario’s life might have begun and see that his friendship with Rosa has created a new memory of both of their lives. The novel’s end alerts readers to the novel’s full context when they find out that Rosa has been telling Mario stories, old and new, as he dies of aids complications: “Yes, I will create this place where you can be who you’ve always wanted to be Marito. Where You and I have become the same person. This moment of greatness, I will create it. When the performance ends. And life begins” (Muñoz, 1991, p. 151). The narrative of new memory she creates for them will be the last story he will ever hear. It is brand new and beautiful. Perhaps inspired by the easing of restrictions in travel to Cuba and the third wave of Cuban immigration via the Freedom Flotilla in 1994, the hope portrayed in Brand New Memory (1998) has been somewhat realized. Following Cuba’s Special Period until approximately 2015, nearly an entire generation of Cubans witnessed slowly improving relations between Cuba and the United States. This meant ordinary Cuban Americans, could, in fact, travel to Cuba for relief visits and Cubans could immigrate to the United States in somewhat less dangerous migrations. Muñoz was prophesying a near future where Cubans and Cuban Americans will have an entirely new understanding of one another—​one crafted by their communication and physical interaction. Unfortunately, the cost of relaxed restrictions became apparent in 2017, when President Barak H. Obama repealed the Cuban Adjustment Act as one of his final acts in office. By the novel’s end, rather than attempting to continuously assemble images to document a story she does not know, Gina absorbs her grandmother’s stories and her father’s memories. She reflects on practices necessary to keep hearing about Cuba: “Coffee was the building block of storytelling, guardian of conversations […] She’d partake in the ritual the way one takes a disgusting medication or eats a gross vegetable. Because it’s good for you, because you need it to be strong and healthy. And, in this case, more Cuban” (Muñoz, 1998, p. 171). Muñoz has been successful in queering cubanidad; he has reversed the weight of the cultural hyphen, which in most 1.5 and second-​generation Cuban American literature of the 1990s, leaned toward America. Brand New Memory accomplishes more, though, because Muñoz plays with and against the metaphor of the hyphen. The filmic squiggle used throughout the text illustrates how Cubanidad is neither static nor straight but dynamic and fluid; as such it demands recognition of its kaleidoscopic nature.

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132 Irizarry Deaver, W.O, Jr. (1996). The prodigal son in the structure of Raining Backwards, Crazy Love, and Latin Jazz. The Americas Review, 24(3–​4), 179–​190.De Guzmán, M. (2019). Understanding John Rechy. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. De Guzmán, M. (2019). Understanding John Rechy. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. de Palma, B. (Director). 1983. Scarface [Film]. Universal Pictures. Engle, M. (1993). Singing to Cuba. Houston, TX: Arte Público Press. Fernandez, G. A. (2007). Race, gender, and class in the persistence of the Mariel stigma twenty years after the exodus from Cuba. International Migration Review, 41(3), 602–​622. Fernández, V. 2017, August 21. “Arizona’s concentration camp: why was Tent City kept open for 24 years?” The Guardian. Retrieved from https://​www.­theguardian .com/​ c ities/​ 2 017/​ a ug/​ 2 1/​ a rizona-​ p hoenix-​ c oncentration- ​ c amp- ​ tent- ​ c ity- ​ j ail -​joe-​arpaio-​immigration Foster, D. W. (2006). El ambiente nuestro: Chicano/​Latino homoerotic writing. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press/​Editorial Bilingüe. García, C. (1993). Dreaming in Cuban. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf. García, M. C. (1996). Havana USA: Cuban exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959–​1994. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Hall, S. (1996). Cultural Identity and Diaspora. In M. Padmini (Ed.), Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (pp. 110–​121). London: Arnold, p. 110–​121. Hames-​García, M., & Martínez, E. J. (2011). Gay Latino studies: A critical reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hijuelos, O. (1983). Our house in the last world: A novel. New York, NY: Persea Books. Hume, K. (2000). American dream, American nightmare: Fiction since 1960. Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Irizarry, Y. (2005). The ethics of writing the Caribbean: Latina narrative as testimonio. Literature Interpretation Theory, 16(3), 263–​284. Irizarry, Y. (2006). Doubly troubling narratives: Writing ‘the oppression of possibility’ in Puerto Rico and Cuba. Comparative American Studies 4(2), 197–​217. Irizarry, Y. (2016). Chicana/​o and Latina/​o fiction: The new memory of Latinidad: Champaign and Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Irizarry, Y., & García, C. (2007). An Interview with Cristina Garcia. Contemporary Literature, 48(2), p. 175–​194. Johnson, P. (1961 January 20). The Crisis in Central America.” The New Statesman. p. 82–​83. Lima, L. (2007). The Latino body: Crisis identities in American literary and cultural memory. New York, NY: New York University Press. Linares, H., R. Martínez Leticia, And H. Tobar (eds.). 2017. The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States. Sylmar, CA: Tía Chucha Press.

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López, I. H. (2015). Impossible returns: Narratives of the Cuban diaspora. Miami, FL: University Press of Florida. Milian, Claudia. (2013). Latining America: Black-​Brown Passages and the Coloring of Latino/​a Studies. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Mullins, G.A. (2003). Seeking asylum: Literary reflections on sexuality, ethnicity, and human rights. MELUS: Journal of the Society for the Study of Multiethnic Literatures in the United States, 28(1), p. 145–​171. Muñoz, E. M. (1988). Crazy love. Houston, TX: Arte Publico Press. Muñoz, E. M. (1991). The greatest performance, Houston, TX: Arte Público Press. Muñoz, E. M. (1998). Brand new memory (1998). Houston, TX: Arte Público Press. Muñoz, E. M. (2016). Diary of fire. Maple Shade, NJ: Lethe Press. Muñoz, J. E. (1999). Disidentifications: Queers of color and the performance of politics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Peña, S. (2007). `Obvious gays’ and the state gaze: Cuban gay visibility and U.S. immigration policy during the 1980 Mariel boatlift. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 16(3), 482–​514. Pérez Firmat, G. (1995). Life on the hyphen: The Cuban-​American way. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Portes, A. L., & Jensen, L. (1989). The enclave and the entrants: Patterns of ethnic enterprise in Miami before and after Mariel. American Sociological Review, 54(6), 929–​949. Portes, A., & Stepick, A. (1985). Unwelcome immigrants: The labor market experiences of 1980 (Mariel) Cuban and Haitian refugees in South Florida. American Sociological Review, 50(4), 493–​514. Quiroga, J. A. (2000). Tropics of desire: Interventions from queer Latino America. New York, NY: New York University Press. Reuters. Defiance and arrest at Cuba’s gay pride parade. (2019, May 12). New York Times. Americas section. Retrived from https://​www.nytimes.com/​2019/​05/​12/​world/​ americas/​cuba-​gay-​pride-​parade.html. Rodríguez, A. P. (2009). Dividing the Isthmus: Central American Transnational Histories, Literatures, and Cultures. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Rumbaut, R. G., & Ima, K. (1988). The adaptation of Southeast Asian refugee youth: A comparative study. Final Report to the Office of Resettlement. San Diego, CA: San Diego State University. Salinas, C. Jr, & Lozano, A. (2019). Mapping and recontextualizing the evolution of the term Latinx: An environmental scanning in higher education. Journal of Latinos and Education, 18(4), 302–​315. Santiago, E. (1993) When I was Puerto Rican. Boston, MA: Addison-​Wesley. Santos, C. E. (2017). The history, struggles, and potential of the term Latinx. Latina/​o Psychology Today, 4(2), 7–​14.

134 Irizarry Scharrón-​Del Río, M. R., & Aja, A. A. (2020). Latinx: Inclusive language as liberation praxis. Journal of Latinx Psychology, 8(1), 7–​20. Socolovsky, M. (2002). The Homelessness of Immigrant American Ghosts: Hauntings and Photographic Narrative in Oscar Hijuelos’s The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien. PMLA, 117(2), 252–​264. Skop, E. H. (2001). Race and place in the adaptation of Mariel exiles. International Migration Review, 35(2), 449–​471. Sollors, W. (1989). The invention of ethnicity. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Soto, S. (2012). Queerness. In S. Bost & F. R. Aparicio(Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Latino/​a Literature (pp.75–​83. New York, NY: Routledge. Soto Vega, K., & Chávez, K. R. (2018). Latinx rhetoric and intersectionality in racial rhetorical criticism. Communication and Critical/​Cultural Studies, 15(4), 319–​325. Suárez, V. (1996). Going under: A novel. Houston, TX: Arte Publico Press. Treisman, R. (2020, September 16). Whistleblower alleges ‘medical neglect,’ Questionable hysterecomies of ICE detainees. Retrieved from https://​www.npr .org/​2020/​09/​16/​913398383/​whistleblower-​alleges-​medical-​neglect- ​questionable -​­hysterectomies-​of-​ice-​detaine?t=1603549365549. Trujillo-​Pagán, N. (2018). Crossed out by LatinX: Gender neutrality and genderblind sexism. Latino Studies, 16(3), 396–​406. Villa, R. H. (2013). Urban Spaces. In S. Bost & F. R. Aparicio, (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Latino/​a literature (pp. 46–​54). New York, NY: Routledge.

Revisiting La Frontera

Consuelo Jiménez Underwood and Ana Teresa Fernández Ewa Antoszek Abstract As the transformations of the concept of latinidad have all been enacted in space, it is expedient to analyze how the spatial marker of the U.S.–​Mexico border has been influencing the construction of Latinx identities and as such remapping latinidad(es). The importance of the U.S.–​Mexico border for the creation of Latinx identities has been recognized by Latinx authors and artists who have also underscored a multivalent character of this space via its multiple and versatile literary and cultural representations. Consuelo Jiménez Underwood and Ana Teresa Fernández are among the artists whose works address various iterations of la frontera and its impact on the construction of Latinx identities. The purpose of this chapter is to analyze this interrelation and to examine its representations in the works of the two artists as well as to contribute to the debate of how women are searching for new definitions of their latinidad within the shadowy space of the border.

Keywords latinidades –​ la frontera –​U.S.–​Mexico border –​artivism –​Latinx identity

The first chapters of this volume discuss transformations of diverse character that have contributed to the redefinitions of latinidad. As the authors of those analyses also note, those transformations have been influenced by multiple variables; nevertheless, they have all been enacted in space and consequently, land/​tierra has played a significant role in the formulation of Latinx identities in the U.S. Space has always been important for Latinos/​as living in the U.S., due to the history of displacement and dislocation of those groups, but also owing to the imperial policy of the U.S., and to the history of American interventionism in Central America. The border is the spatial marker that has been critical in the shaping of the histories of respective members in the heterogeneous group embraced under the collective umbrella term Latinx, thus influencing the process of constructing both individual and collective identities

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004460430_008

136 Antoszek and remapping latinidad(es). The purpose of my analysis is to examine how the history of the U.S.–​Mexico border and the new perspectives on la frontera influence the formation of Chicanx and, intermediately, Latinx identities, and how the new interpretations of the border are presented in selected works by two Latinx artists –​Consuelo Jiménez Underwood and Ana Teresa Fernández. A particular import of the U.S.–Mexico border for the construction of Latinx identities is rooted in its complex character, tenuous history, and the power to simultaneously divide and unify. An example of Deleuze’s striated space, the U.S.–Mexico border as a spatial construct is one of the marginal spaces mentioned in the volume –​space that is paradoxically at the same time peripheral (due to its geographical location in the nation-​state) and central (owing to its importance), as all the edges are,1 and as such it has always influenced identity construction of the borderers of Mexican descent and shaped redefinitions of latinidad. Its complexity stems from the multifaceted character of the construct, which is both a geographical location, a political line (underscored by physical markers) and a metaphorical concept. Even though the border seems to affect some Latinx groups, like Chicanos/​as, more directly and profoundly, its impact and role have been recognized by other Latinos/​as as well. Its expanding potential is reflected in the recent immigration crises involving migrants from Central America and consequent administrative decisions and legislation targeting migration from The Northern Triangle. Although for each 1 Both the margin and the border belong, as Edward Casey and Mary Watkins (2014) argue, “to the broad family of things we call ‘edges’ ” (p. 13), which “mark the place where things lose their dense consistency and land relinquishes its spread-​out character” (p. 13). At the same time, the authors continue, “edges are where energies of many kinds –​personal and political, demographic, geographic and historical –​collect and become concentrated” (Casey and Watkins, 2014, p.13). Their postulates echo voices of bell hooks, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha or Trinh T. Minh-​ha who speak about margins in the 20th century. All of these critics deconstruct the space of the margin and reconstruct it from a new perspective that emphasizes the potential of this margin, particularly when this location is chosen purposefully. Aiming at the rejection of the margin-​center dichotomy, the critics reiterate important properties of this space as a site of resistance and empowerment. Paul Ganster makes an analogical observation in his analysis of a specific margin/​edge, namely the U.S.–​Mexico border. Enumerating characteristics of borders and border regions, he admits that due to their distance from the centers, borders and border regions become in a way neglected by authorities or institutions. He states that “border peoples are frequently economically and politically marginalized from the life of the nations of which they are citizens” (Ganster, 2016, p. xxi) and the “imposed national policies often have unintended consequences for border residents” (Ganster, 2016, p. xxi). Nevertheless, at the same time it means that it is often difficult, if not impossible, to actually impose those policies in the border regions and such a marginalization of borderers is often countered by various strategies of resistance implemented by them to challenge the discrimination resulting from their location.

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group of migrants the border experience is somewhat different –​even push and pull factors may vary to a large extent, depending on an individual’s country of origin in Central America –​it is at the same time unifying in terms of alienation, othering, hostility or violence the borderers and migrants suffer through this experience. Moreover, the power of this space is perceivable not only in the very vicinity of the political line separating Mexico from the U.S. and various physical iterations of the borderline such as fences, coils of barbed wire or fragments of the infamous wall. The U.S.–Mexico border determines the lives both in borderlands and in the regions located thousands of miles away from the physical border to the north and to the south. Its utmost re-​creation, or the example of how it repeats itself in different locations, is what Mike Davis (2008) dubs “the third border” (p. 71) which regulates “the interface between affluent Anglo majorities and growing blue-​collar Latino populations” (p. 71) and “polices daily intercourse between two citizen communities: its outrageousness is redoubled by the hypocrisy and cant used to justify its existence” (p. 71). As Davis (2008) concludes, “[i]‌nvisible to Anglos, it slaps Latinos across the face” (p. 71), leading to the continuous segregation of Latinos/​as in the U.S. and as such it is not of metaphorical character only, but it often results in physical separation of Latinx communities and neighborhoods thus impacting largely the formulation of collective and individual Latinx identities. Monika Kaup also recognizes this identity-​forming potential of the border and attributes it to the history of this space. In the opening chapters of Rewriting North American Borders in Chicano and Chicana Narrative Kaup (2001) first states her main argument that “[i]‌n borderlands, space has long mattered as much as history” (p. 29) and “geopolitical position matters, since it is a site from which significations of displacement emerge” (p. 16). In the case of Chicanos/​as it is the space of the border that will have a particular influence on the identity formation. Kaup (2001) observes that Chicanos and Chicanas should gravitate towards the border as a key “theme” of their textual [and cultural] production is no accident. The border in Chicano literature represents the location of Chicano identity “in the world”: it is a theme chosen to put a fictional construction on what Mexican American culture in relation to the US and Mexico, is about –​a negotiation of multiple and conflicting social positions, connected to a real and specific geopolitical site, the border. (p. 5) Moreover, the space of the U.S.–Mexico border has a formative role in the process of identity formation since, as Kaup (2001) notes, it evokes the issue

138 Antoszek of “how to handle the conflict between nationalist and transnational notions of community and cultural identity” (p. 19). Those conflicting approaches are exemplified by a series of questions Kaup (2001) poses: “How are we to conceive of the Mexican American residents of the borderlands? Do Mexican origins and the proximity of the border define them as a Mexican diaspora, or have the conditions of residence in the U.S. fused Mexican-​ descent people into a new national unity?” (p. 19). She at least partially endeavors to answer these questions, quoting Homi Bhabha, who refers to literature and maintains that it is “transnational histories of migrants, the colonized, or political refugees –​these border and frontier conditions” that may become “the terrains of world literature” (as cited in Kaup 2001, p. 19). In this way Kaup seems to support transnational approach to Chicanx identity formation and the space of the border that simultaneously divides and connects plays a crucial role in this process, leading to new interpretations of latinidad. In the 21st century, transnational histories and identities pose a threat to many –​especially politicians –​who demand the borders to become the walls and to function as fixed political lines of division that prevent the Other from crossing the border, on the pretext of safeguarding the illusive integrity of the nation-​state. Such demands are dubious in many cases, but they are particularly equivocal in the case of the U.S.–Mexico border, since Chicanx are both natives to the Southwest and immigrants in the U.S. As Patricia Limerick (1987) noted already in 1987: The most enduring issue of the frontier is the question of legitimacy. Is today’s Mexican immigrant an illegitimate intruder into territory that was for two and a half centuries a part of Mexico, before conquest made it American? In the 1960s and 1970s, reviewing the losses and injuries of the preceding century, angry Chicanos could call the Southwest “Occupied America” –​a land that was legitimately and authentically Hispanic, and only by coercion American. But beginning the story of Occupied America in 1836, with the Texas Revolution, or in 1848, with the treaty, fudged a vital fact: the Hispanic presence in the Southwest was itself a product of conquest, just as much as the American presence was. The Pueblo Indians found themselves living in Occupied America long before the Hispanics did. Moreover, Hispanic culture and society in the borderlands was not an unchanging, pure monolith. In New Mexico, Texas, California, and Arizona, Hispanic ways had been changed by distinctive circumstances, and the resulting way of life was neither solely American –​but Mexican-​American. (as cited in Kaup, 2001, p. 18)

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Emma Pérez (2007) in turn, when analyzing works of Yreina D. Cervántez, argues for “the history of travel and cultural exchange in the Casas Grandes area of the Southwest, which extends to both sides of the border” (p. 161) and emphasizes naturalness of migrations and the flow of peoples in the Americas, extending Kaup’s arguments about Chicanos/​as to Latinx in general. Kaup (2001), quoting Juan Gómez-​Quiñones, defines Chicanx as a “charter” as well as an “immigrant group” in the U.S. (as cited in Kaup, 2001, p. 10) and claims that their hybrid status is reflected in literary and cultural productions through “nation-​based and immigrant paradigms” (p. 11), which have been constructed in direct reference to the border, because in the nation-​based paradigm the border is treated as homeland whereas in the immigrant paradigm the border is “a line crossed in the northward migration from Mexico” (p. 11). Discussing Cervántez’s Tierra Firme, Pérez (2007) maintains that the artist “suggests that Chicanos/​as are in their ancestral homelands” (p. 161), yet simultaneously the critic also emphasizes “ubiquity among most peoples of some form of migration, or […] ‘the timelessness of movement’ ” (Pérez, 2007, p. 161). Pérez (2007) thus proposes to include other Latinx groups into the discussion on la frontera and argues that Chicana/​os, like other Latina/​os, whether recent immigrants or descendants of previous generations of U.S. citizens, descend from Native Americans and, in the West Coast and Southwest, the Spanish, the first European colonizers. The American continent and islands are the homelands of Latina/​os, alongside full-​blooded Native people. (p. 161) Therefore, the hybrid status of Latinx in the U.S. is to a large extent informed by la frontera –​both in a geographical and a metaphorical sense. Consequently, as Amstrong argues, the border as the organizing theme that shapes “the structure of expression and constitute its form […] has come to inform and structure the design of various discourses” (as cited in Kaup, 2001, pp. 6–​7) and new interpretations of the border lead to shifts in Chicanx (and Latinx) identity discourse. The U.S.–Mexico border, which has been discussed throughout this volume has been present in literary texts as one of the crucial factors informing the construction of Latnix and Chicanx identities. In addition, the border has been a central theme of various cultural productions created at/​about/​from the border. Those works complement literary representations of the border and become a significant voice in the discussion on re-​definitions of latinidad. In those works numerous Latinx artists address diverse issues related to this space, including the question of immigration, environment protection,

140 Antoszek land ownership, violence or political aspects, to name just a few. Laura Pérez analyzes some of these works of female artists in the Chapter “Tierra, Land” of her Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities where she examines the works of Yreina D. Cervántez or Consuelo Jiménez Underwood in the context of migration across borders, focusing on the literal representation of the border as a geopolitical construct. Metaphorical representations of the border appear in turn appear in innumerable works and productions of Latinx artists.2 Moreover, the examples of border artivism,3 such as border graffiti and murals (including Enrique Chiu’s works), Overpass Light Brigade’s projections, The Parade of Humanity, JR’s installations and performances, M. Jenea Sanchez’s works and installations, or Ronal Rael’s transborder projects –​to mention just a few –​contribute significantly to the discussions on the role of the border in the construction of Latinx identities, since they are often presented and documented via the social media and on the Internet in general. Thus they are more accessible to larger audiences and such a way of presentation encourages commentaries from the viewers –​the spectators become participants in those projects, even if it is an indirect participation –​ and their voices in the discussion on the border and latinidad become heard. Such new representations of la frontera inform the ongoing debate about borders in general and the status of the U.S.–Mexico border in particular. Consuelo Jiménez Underwood and Ana Teresa Fernández are among the artists, who in their works present consistently issues related to la frontera, referring to the transformations that are happening on the border and in this way proposing new perspectives on the U.S.–Mexico border and its influence on the formation of Latinx identites. Due to the scope of this analysis, in the second part of this chapter I will focus solely on selected paintings by the two artists that are of particular significance for the discussion on la frontera and latinidad.4 2 Santa Barraza, whom María Herrera-​Sobek calls the “artist of the borderlands” in the book of the same title, is an example of an artist who in her works addresses the question of Chicana identity, referring to the border and borderlands, both in their geographical and metaphorical sense: the border is the location, signified, for example, by particular plants endemic to the region (in, for example, La Lupe Tejana, 1995, Renancimiento/​Rebirth, 1980, or Homage to My Mother, Frances, 1992) and it can also be a metaphorical construct, i.e. the third border that Chicanas have to cross on a daily basis (in, for example, La Malinche, 1991). Alma López, another Chicana artist who in her works represents various metaphorical border crossings. 3 Kayla Schierbecker deploys the term “artivism” for the first time to discuss the question of graffiti of the Black Lives Matter movement. I apply the term to discuss the examples of border art which at the same time is social activism. 4 I conduct a more comprehensive analysis of Consuelo Jiménez Underwood’s works from the Borderlines series in “La Frontera Re-​visited: Consuelo Jiménez Underwood’s Borderlines Series” published in El Mundo Zurdo 7 (Aunt Lute Books) in 2019. I also analyze some of

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The first artist whose works are to be discussed in this part, Consuelo Jiménez Underwood, is an artist based in California, who often acknowledges the importance of multiple borders in her life. As “the daughter of migrant agricultural workers, a Chicana mother and a father of Huichol Indian descent” (UCLA, 2014), Underwood has experienced the influence of multiple borders in her life, including the U.S.–Mexico border. As a result, the border often becomes an organizing theme in her works, whether she deploys a nation-​based paradigm to discuss it, like in Land Grabs. 500 Years (1996), or the immigrant paradigm, prevalent in her rebozos and the works from the Borderlines series that include mixed media installations with very indicative titles: Undocumented Border Flowers (2010); Undocumented Border Flowers: Día (2011); La Borderline (2014), Welcome to Border-​landia (2013); Flowers and Borders and Threads, Oh My! (2013); Mountain Mama Borderline Blues (2015); Borderline Premonitions. New York (2015); Undocumented Border X-​ings. Xewa (Flower Time) (2016); Undocumented Border Tracks (2017) and We are Here Borderline (2017). Out of these Undocumented Border X-​ings. Xewa (Flower Time) (2016) demonstrates a particularly interesting approach to the question of the U.S.–Mexico border. On the one hand, the artist highlights the function of the border as the political line dividing two nation-​states with a prominent color –​yellow, so that the viewer can see it from a distance. It occupies the central place in the installation and as such can be seen from different angles as well. Its visibility is further highlighted by green stripes, resembling leaves of grass, painted alongside the line. The effect may seem a bit less striking than in other Borderlines installations, as in the other works Underwood paints the border red, brownish or purplish, which conjures up connotations with blood and blood trail marked along the borderline (or by the border, perhaps?). Such a presentation of the border immediately evokes Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1999) description of the U.S.–Mexico-​border as “una herida abierta –​an open wound that divides both spaces and cultures” (p. 24). Here, the effect is not achieved by the yellow color of the line, but by those green stripes, which in their structure resemble stitches or healing scars, implying how conflicted and divisive this space is. The green “belt” alongside the line is different from other works in the Borderlines series where the artist leaves two parallel white lines on both sides alongside the border, which symbolize not only a no man’s land alongside the borderline Ana Teresa Fernández’s works in “The U.S.-​Mexico Border as a Palimpsest in Ana Teresa Fernández’s Art” published in The Polish Journal for American Studies in 2018. Some quotations I cite in this chapter appear also in the abovementioned articles. Some of the analyses of the works of art I make here may correlate with the conclusions I draw in the articles as well.

142 Antoszek where one cannot enter, but also the “dead zone” (Consuelo Jiménez Underwood Speaks), or the “desert wasteland” (Consuelo Jiménez Underwood Speaks) –​ecological disaster that occurs in the aftermath of the construction of the wall (UCLA, 2014). In one of the most recent of Underwood’s works, Undocumented Border Tracks (2017), the borderline is white, the crafts of grass receding, and the lines spreading from the center, parallel to the main line, grow darker –​as if the line had this detrimental and destructive effect that reaches further away, also to the regions located more remotely from the border. The dividing function of the borderline is reinforced by the barbed wire woven into the installation and nails put in the locations where the wall has been already constructed. The barbed wire –​“wartime matériel,” in Kelly Lytle Hernández’s words (as cited in Cantú, 2019, p.75) repurposed in the process of what Victoria Hattam denominates “imperial recycling” (as cited in Cantú, 2019, p. 75) –​is one of Underwood’s trademarks, which she uses not only in the Borderlines series but also in her rebozos and quilts to emphasize the role of the border to separate two spaces and keep off potential border crossers. The artist herself explains how the barbed wire functions, maintaining that it is like “a futile attempt of man to control life” (Threads). The nails put in several spots along the line confirm the role of the border to separate and divide. They, as if crucifying this space, hurt it, which refers to violence occurring on the border and in the borderlands on a daily basis. That such an interpretation is not far-​ fetched is confirmed by one of the most recent installations, Undocumented Border Tracks (2017), where the artist interweaves the barbed wire with yellow police tape used to separate crime scenes –​also suggesting violence and deaths as an intrinsic part of borderlanders’ and border crossers’ lives. On the other hand, the barbed wire not only separates but serves as a connector as well, stitching two seemingly distinctive spaces in a hurtful way, which can be read as a direct reference to the history of interdependence of the U.S. and Mexico and its effects on people on both sides of the border. The nails that cut the space of the border, in turn symbolize the currency used “back in the day” –​gold for dollars and silver for pesos (Threads) and consequently “all the border fight is about gold and silver” (Threads), as Consuelo Jiménez Underwood argues. This battle has been taking place in the borderlands and further away from the border for a long time, contributing to the interconnectedness of the two nation-​states. Moreover, on those nails hang pendants with images of various products or cultural symbols that are known on both sides of the border –​for example, the pendant located in the eastern part of the line, corresponding to the location Texas, shows photos of Tex-​Mex food. The pendants are placed where twin cities along the borderline are geographically located. In addition, they cross the border –​they are suspended from the nail

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located north of the border and they end south of the border. In this way, the artist shows how various goods and cultural symbols are the same on both sides, regardless of the political line dividing those spaces, which is typical of borderlands. In addition, Underwood also reiterates the connections between both sides of the U.S.–Mexico border. Those connections are emphasized by another trademark of Underwood’s, namely safety pins that are often attached to those pendants and whose role, however tenuous and temporary, is to join those two spaces. Apart from that, what draws the viewer’s attention is the flowers attached to the image and placed on both sides of the borderline. The flowers are of different texture and material than the rest of the installation, and hence, they become prominent and visible from a distance as well, just as the borderline is. They are native to the region and even the border cannot prevent them from growing south and north of the line. However, as Underwood admits, the wall can have a detrimental effect on them: “The flowers live on both sides of the US/​MX border wall. All are undocumented, and are referred to as ‘illegal aliens.’ Worse yet, their homelands are becoming wastelands” (Jiménez Underwood, 2016). Talking about Undocumented Border Flowers, the artist comments: “The California poppy, Arizona saguaro, New Mexico yucca, and the Texas bluebonnet grow on both sides of the border. Will they require documentation as well? How? Yikes!” (Jiménez Underwood, 2010). Through those images and her commentary Underwood once again engages the viewer in the debate on the effects the border has on the environment on its both sides. For example, in Undocumented Border Tracks (2017) she adds prints of animals’ tracks that cross the border just as the flowers do. She also explores how it influences people living in the borderlands and those who cross the border. These people are often discriminated against on the basis of their appearance, regarded as undocumented and thus illegal immigrants, no matter what their status in the U.S. is and therefore policed and persecuted. She also refers to those Indigenous to the borderlands, members of the First Nations, who, because of the fence or the wall, cannot perform their rituals or whose “cross-​border pilgrimage routes” (Rivas, as cited in Cantú, 2019, p. 77) have been cut off, making it impossible for them to move freely around what used to be their land. In this way, Underwood signals not only a possible environmental disaster at the border, but also an imminent humanitarian crisis whose signs are already noticeable in border cities such as, for example, Tijuana that has been recently receiving hundreds if not thousands of deportees from the U.S. At the same time, in spite of difficulties, both the flowers and the animal tracks appear on both sides of the border –​sometimes originating in the north or in the south respectively, but sometimes as a result of their migration to the

144 Antoszek other side. That, in turn, implies porosity of the border and inability to keep it closed and fixed. This idea of some permeability of the border is reinforced by the sketch of sturgeons that cross the border to the north. Being both native and migrant species they, “up until the 1970s, swam … freely, from continent to continent, undocumented, up and down the great Potomac and Anacostia Rivers” (Jiménez Underwood, 2016). The double status of the sturgeons can be interpreted symbolically –​like the hybrid status of Latinx, who are not solely immigrants in the U.S. The unrestricted freedom of movement may refer to the aforementioned Pérez’s idea of “timelessness of movement” and naturalness of migrations in the Americas (2007, p. 161). However, superimposed on the image is the drawing of running people and the “caution” sign often placed near the border and warning drivers of immigrants crossing the roads. With that sign Underwood once again deploys the immigrant paradigm to illustrate the issues pertaining to the status of the Mexican-​American border, but to counter that, she also adds in the corners of the image references to Meso-​American architecture and at the bottom of the installation she lists the Indigenous languages “that were spoken when John Smith first entered the Washington, DC region” (Jiménez Underwood, 2016). Thus, once again, the artist looks at the border through a nation-​based perspective and her work confirms Pérez’s remarks about Chicanos/​as who, according to the critic, share the “twilight sense of belonging to Americas as ancestral homelands” (Pérez, 2007, p. 147). The combination of nation-​based and immigrant paradigms that Consuelo Jiménez Underwood deploys in her representation of la frontera addresses the transformations that have occurred in the discourse on the border mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. With her depiction of the border the artist suggests, like many other artists, writers and critics, the danger of telling a single, equivocal story, as such stories run the risk of being at least exclusive and harmful. Presenting both indigenous and immigrant border tales in one image Underwood emphasizes the complexity of this conflicted space, which also refers to the complex status of Latinx in the U.S. Moreover, she also indicates those who are most vulnerable and at risk of losing in this conflict, namely people and the environment, since the borderlands are already experiencing major humanitarian and ecological crises. Laura Pérez (2007), analyzing the spiritual importance of the land, argues that the two spheres –​that of human beings and nature, are always interconnected, as “[o]‌ur care of the natural world is eventually reflected back to us within our own flesh” (p. 148). Displacement, disempowerment, and the prevalent sense of uprootedness so common in the borderlands contributes according to Pérez (2007), to “the loss of physical sense of belonging” (p. 148), which, combined with “cultural imperialism that disregards customs, habits, and traditions, imposing its own

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ones” (p. 148) results in “people torn between the once respected ways and dominating culture imposing its claims to superiority” (p. 148). Such an experience of un-​belonging pertains to all the groups under the heterogeneous term Latinx, thus impacting the formation of individual and collective identities. The images the artist presents in the series may also suggest such a unifying role of a border experience, since in none of the images does the artist present a single person, thus making it a more universal experience, which, as mentioned before, is different for each group, yet at the same time has a potential to unite all the border crossers. Finally, Consuelo Jiménez Underwood’s works on the border also underscore its paradoxical character to divide and create interdependence at the same time, which has to be included in the discussion on redefinitions of latinidad, as an integral aspect of Latinx situation in the U.S. As Laura Pérez (2007) argues, some artists “take up the concepts of homeland and social and cultural belonging by structuring their work through reference to land and territory” (p. 151). Others, she continues, “[relate] the significance of space and land or tierra to the sexed, racialized, and gendered human body as the particular site where exclusions or conditional, normativizing inclusions and, conversely, practices of ‘disidentification’ (J. E. Muñoz, 1999) with social orders are played out” (as cited in Pérez, 2007, p. 151). Ana Teresa Fernández, the second artist to be discussed in this chapter is an artist who combines those two strategies mentioned by Pérez in her best-​known and widely recognized painting re-​visioning the U.S.–Mexico border, Erasing the Border/​ Borrando la Frontera (2013). Similarly to Consuelo Jiménez Underwood, Ana Teresa Fernández recognizes the importance of crossing multiple borders in her life and Erasing the Border/​Borrando la Frontera (2013) as a part of Foreign Bodies (2014), her first solo exhibition at Gallery Wendi Norris, “explores how women navigate the geographic, social, and physiological boundaries between the United States and Mexico” (Fernández, n.d.). She does so by “[d]‌ocumenting her performances and installations using photography and the painted image” and as a result, her “work reveals how women’s bodies become surfaces imprinted with political and social upheavals” (Fernández, n.d.). In this way, Fernández offers yet another contribution to the discussion on the formulation of Latinx identity and a new perspective on the U.S–​Mexico border. The interconnectedness of the border and Latinx women’s identity is apparent in Borrando la Frontera (2013), as the painting shows a Latina standing with her back to the audience and painting a tall fence. The scene takes place at the beach and owing to the title, the viewer may assume that the fence is the infamous marker of the political line dividing the U.S. and Mexico, located most probably somewhere between Tijuana and San Diego, as the ocean is visible

146 Antoszek from a distance.5 Due to the framing, the fence covers the whole surface of the painting so the viewer, who stands as if behind a woman painting the fence, has this subliminal notion of being behind bars, imprisoned. This idea is reinforced by the fact that the part of the fence to the left is still unpainted and the rusty, dark brown color makes it even more prominent against blue skies. The rods of the fence cut the sand and divide the space that otherwise seems to be a whole, just as the borderline does. In this way, Fernández first draws the viewers’ attention to the divisive role of the border that separates two states and prevents movement between the two sides located to the south and to the north. Nevertheless, at the same time, the artist suggests that certain breaches and transgressions do take place at the border, since it is marked by a fence –​not a wall, yet and owing to that, both the woman and the viewers can see to the other side. There is also some kind of communication between two sides possible, as the fence would allow voices to cross. Some other movements, of the air, sand, or water are also unavoidable and cannot be prevented. Moreover, having a closer look at the painting it can be noticed that there is a ladder propped against the fence, right in the middle of the image. It is not visible at first glance, as it is silver and as such blends with the painted rods. However, its central position in the painting suggests that the ladder has a more important role than solely that of a tool deployed to paint the fence, especially because the woman in the image is not using it, but standing to the right of the ladder. The ladder is as tall as the fence, covering the whole image and it reaches to the skies –​thus it can be interpreted as the ladder to heaven –​the American Dream, waiting on the other side of the border and in this way it can be also treated as an instrument of transgression to the other side. All those hints incorporated by the artist in the image suggest that the border is more permeable than generally assumed or, as Edward Casey and Mary Watkins (2014) argue, that it is not only a fixed and impervious borderline, but retains attributes of a boundary, which they define as a concept that “too, can have cultural and historical aspects, but it is paradigmatically natural in status […] rarely demarcated with exacting precision, varying in contour and extent depending on surrounding circumstances” (p. 14) and “[m]‌ost important, it is porous” (p. 15) and “lacks precise positioning” (p. 15). This suggestion is developed further by the artist, as in the places where the fence is already painted, it ‘disappears:’ the woman paints it blue, which against blue skies gives the viewer the illusion that the

5 The community project of the same title took place on the U.S.–Mexico border in Nogales, Mexico in 2015.

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fence –​the marker of the border, does not exist, or has been erased (hence the title, Erasing the Border), at least from a distance. The border fence seems to be temporary and illusory, which refers to the history of this territory and reinforces the idea that the space of borderlands used to be one once. Casey and Watkins (2014) insist that this is the future of all the borders, including la frontera (p. 26), however unlikely it may seem in the light of the current political situation around the U.S.–Mexico border. Such a symbolic erasure of the border may be also interpreted as Paulo Freire’s limit act Casey and Watkins (2014) evoke in their analysis of border-​wall art, which “both resists the imposition of destructive limits and creates anew in the face of them” (p. 206). In the case of Erasing the Border/​Borrando la Frontera (2013), this act Fernández performs has (at least temporary) power to undermine the divisive role of the fence, and leads to the re-​interpretation of the border. A hypothetical and yet critical question –​what if the border did not exist –​‘posed’ by the artist pertains as well to the question of identity, identity without militarized border markers in the form that we are familiar with nowadays. Another re-​definition the artist offers in her work is that of the female roles in Latinx communities, due to a specific portrayal of a woman-​painter of the fence. She is a brown-​skin black-​haired woman, so the viewer may assume it is a Latina, though her positioning –​with her back to the audience, precludes an unequivocal assessment. What strikes the observer immediately is the woman’s outfit which seems to be completely out of place and unsuitable for the occasion, since she is painting the fence wearing a black dress and black stiletto shoes. Fernández herself discusses such a representation of the woman-​ painter, and she reveals that through such a portrayal she wants to defy stereotypes haunting Latinas in the U.S. She explains: My work investigates how women identify their strengths and sensuality in performing labor in which there is no visible economic or social value, and which is frequently considered “dirty.” I also subvert the typical overtly folkloric representations of Mexican women in paintings by changing my protagonist’s uniform to the quintessential little black dress. Wearing this symbol of American prosperity and femininity, the protagonist tangos through this intangible dilemma with her performances at the San Diego/​Tijuana Border –​a place I myself had to cross to study and live in the US. (Fernández, n.d.) In the light of this commentary, the positioning of the woman-​painter also acquires a symbolic meaning –​she shows her back to the audience’s assumptions about Latinas; she may as well be someone else, we do not know her and

148 Antoszek moreover, we do not even get to see her face. The artist develops this play with the viewer in her other series of paintings: in Pressing Matters (pun intended) she plays with assumptions about female roles and at the same time recognizes the problem of environmental destruction at the U.S.–Mexico border; in her most recent one –​Ablution –​the artist “[addresses] rituals of cleansing and maintenance, focusing on gender, labor, sexuality and race” and at the same time “playing an ironic dirty twist for ‘wetback’ ” (Fernández, n.d.).6 In this way, Fernández also addresses the question of multiple borders Latinas have to cross on a daily basis and contributes to the discussion of new definitions of latinidad which are coined in the shadow of the border. Monika Kaup (2001) claims that the shift to the Chicanx post-​nationalist generation means that “the politics of location and the politics of identity have entered a new configuration, in which location is no longer narrowly understood as living in the place of one’s birth and one’s ancestors, but expanded to stress the increasing contemporary reality of ‘travelling culture’ ”(p. 84), which has also influenced the redefinitions of the concept of the border. Those transformations are still in progress and the works of both Consuelo Jiménez Underwood and Ana Teresa Fernández discussed in this chapter have been created in the reaction to those changes and as such, they contribute to the discussion on the U.S.–Mexico border, Latinx identities, and latinidad. Even though both artists deploy the already existing paradigms to discuss the aforementioned issues (i.e. nation-​based and immigrant paradigms) and often address similar problems concerning the border, each of them, in fact, tells her own story and re-​writes the Mexican-​American border from her own perspective. This tendency will most probably prevail to emphasize there is not a single history or story of a place, but there are different versions that depend on the positionality of the speaker. For example, Debra A. Castillo and María Socorro Córdoba (2002) when analyzing representations of the U.S.–Mexico border maintain that “the border as perceived from the United States is more textual and theoretical than geographical, whereas from the Mexican side the geopolitical referent never entirely disappears” (p. 16) and “[f]‌rom the Mexican side […] the borderline itself retains a stronger materiality than is typical in U.S.-​based commentary” (p. 3). Even if their opinion may raise some objections from Latinos/​as in the U.S. for whom the border does indeed retain geopolitical valence, it is yet another voice in this debate and my assumption is there will be numerous diverse voices joining the debate on the border in the years

6 I have also analyzed other works by Fernández in “The U.S.–Mexico Border as a Palimpsest in Ana Teresa Fernández’s Art” (Antoszek, 2018).

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to come. In addition, this trend is most probably going to be combined with further rejection, or diminishing role, of Western/​Anglo-​centric/​Euro-​centric perspectives and introduction of other viewpoints. Consequently, border tales and identity formation stories may become more inclusive, in this way contributing to the more comprehensive definition of latinidad. At the same time, such a development can pose challenges about how to avoid the domination of one story among other narratives: the question of legitimacy, or in other words, who is entitled to tell this story may become even more critical. Furthermore, border discourse will continue to focus on various socio-​ political issues –​just like the artists’ works touch upon the question of perils of immigration, the situation of Indigenous people, land, gender inequality, environmental destruction, etc., so will do new works discussing the issues that are currently important and those that have not been recognized as such, yet. Borders can be literal and metaphorical, as mentioned previously. Monika Kaup (2001) describes the metaphorical border as “an intermediate stage between a home country and a past left behind and a future anticipated in a destination of choice” (p. 12), which relates to the aforementioned borders haunting Latinx in the U.S. on a daily basis. This concern will possibly resurface in the discussion on the U.S.–Mexico border; however, for the time being the geopolitical division line between the U.S. and Mexico seems to be the focus of most of the debates on the border, especially now that the somewhat illusory idea of walling off a country and other “most egregious border-​enforcement practices” (Cantú, 2019, p. 75) are becoming a fact. The construction of the wall on the border inscribes itself in the long history of abuse in the borderlands and it is the infamous continuation of the mythologization of borderlands that happened at the expense of others, like the frontier myth, incited by Frederick Jackson Turner which came to reality, in Grandin’s words, “putting down people of color, and then continuing to define their [Anglos’] liberty in opposition to the people of color they put down” (as cited in Cantú, 2019, p. 74). Analyzing the story behind the wall, Francisco Cantú (2019) summons this history and, quoting Grandin, he maintains that Trump’s pledge to erect a “big beautiful wall,” from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean, serves many of the same purposes as the earlier expansionist rhetoric –​the border remains abstract in the minds of most Americans, yet it represents a problem and a promise distinct enough to distract from more immediate and enduring social ills. A completed border wall, and the victory it would represent to many, is thus conveniently unattainable, allowing for the same fleeing forward that has always tugged at American history, After all, as Grandin shrewdly observes, “the

150 Antoszek point isn’t actually to build ‘the wall’ but to constantly announce the building of the wall.” (p. 76) In light of this commentary, it seems plausible that physical markers of la ­frontera (the fence, the wall, the wire) will keep dominating the story for some time now even if, as Cantú claims, they serve “as an inescapable reminder of the brutalities and injustices that have long been unleashed upon the frontier. The very presence of a barrier represents a profound psychological, political, ecological, cultural, and spatial reordering” (p. 77) which has an enormous influence on people living on both sides of the border. As a result, as Monika Kaup (2001) suggests, “the U.S.–Mexican border increasingly resembles the Atlantic Ocean: the geographic proximity of Mexico does not matter anymore. Mexico is now the past. It seems nearly as distant as any other country” (p. 92), which also transforms profoundly the experience of immigration and influences the processes of identity formation. To challenge this power of the b­ order and counter the effects of walling off, Kaup (2001) suggests a “need to establish transnational links between the Latina diaspora in the U.S. and Latinas at home in their countries south of the U.S.–Mexico border” (p. 238). Her call for solidarity is to a large extent influenced by Sonia Saldívar-​Hull’s feminism on the border that involves alliances with those “whose national descent differs from their own, yet whose marginal position within the U.S. borderlands makes them quasi-​natural political allies” (as cited in Kaup 2001, p. 291). Those strategies of resistance constructed in reaction to the changing function of the border have been and will be producing new Latinx identities, just as the border has always produced “new narrative forms” (Kaup 2001, p. 6), as it was both “place, territory and geography and […] the symbol for identity –​both collective and individual” (Kaup 2001, p. 205). Consequently, the re-​visions of the border will contribute to new perspectives on Latinx identity and latinidad.

References

Anzaldúa, G. (1999). Borderlands/​La frontera. The new mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books. Antoszek, E. (2019). La Frontera re-​visited: Consuelo Jiménez Underwood’s Borderline Series. In S. A. Ramirez, L. M. Mercado-​Lopez & S. Saldivar-​Hull (Ed.), El Mundo Zurdo 7: Selected works from the 2018 meeting of the society for the study of Gloria Anzaldúa (pp. 117–​125). San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books. Antoszek, E. (2018). The U.S.-​Mexico border as a palimpsest in Ana Teresa Fernández’s art. Polish Journal for American Studies, 12, 197–​210.

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Castillo, D. A. & Tabuenca Córdoba, M. S. (2002). Border women: Writing from la frontera. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Cantú, F. (2019, March 11). Boundary conditions: What happens when the American frontier becomes a wall? The New Yorker, 73–​77. Casey, E. S. & Watkins, M. (2014). Up against the wall: Re-​imagining the U.S.-​Mexico border. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Consuelo Jiménez Underwood Speaks on Her Piece “Undocumented Flowers.” Retrieved from www.consuelojunderwood.com. Davis, M. (2008). Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City. New York, NY: Verso. Fernández, Ana T. (n.d.) anateresafernandez.com. Retrieved from https://​ ­anateresafernandez.com/​. Ganster, P. (2016). The U.S.-​Mexican Border Today: Conflict and Cooperation in Historical Perspective. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Grandin, G. (2019). The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books. Herrera-​Sobek, M. (2001). Santa Baraza, Artist of the Borderlands texas A&M University Press. Jiménez Underwood, C. (2010, 2016) consuelojunderwood.com. Retrieved from http://​ www.consuelojunderwood.com/​. Kaup, M. (2001). Rewriting North American Borders in Chicano and Chicana Narrative. New York: Peter Lang. Martínez, E. (1998). ‘Chingón politics’ die hard: Reflections on the first Chicano activist reunion. In Carla Trujillo (Ed.), Living Chicana Theory (pp. 123–​135). Berkeley, CA: Third Woman Press. Muñoz, J. E. (1999). Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Pérez, L. E. (2007). Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Schierbecker, K. (2019). Black Lives Matter vandalism strikes Civil War monument at UNC (again). Retrieved from http://​www.thecollegefix.com. Threads. pbs. (2012, May 11). Retrieved from http://​www.craftinamerica.org/​episodes/​ threads/​. ucla Chicano Studies Research Center. (2014, November 6). Artist’s Talk: Consuelo Jiménez Underwood [Video file]. Retrieved from https://​www.youtube.com/​ watch?v=96Amz6dSrms.

Borders and Immigration

Revisiting Canonical Chicano Literature under Trump’s Regime José Antonio Gurpegui Abstract This essay brings the Chicano canon back into focus and explores the elements that contribute to current developments in latinidad from the inception of the cannon to its current state by reformulating the understanding of it at the border and also through the recent lens of the Trump administration. By contending that the victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 elections changed the political landscape of the U. S. and created a double-​space of Hispanic presence at the border and beyond, this chapter explores how these politics seep into the literature of a community who were made protagonists of Trump’s policies. Thus, this chapter not only situates the Hispanic presence in the new social context of the United States by revisiting three canonical authors (Rivera, Barrios and Morales) in light of the new sociological, political, and cultural moment, but it also explores the cultural and theoretical conceptions that are birthed at the border in order to permit a deeper understanding of postmodernity and interculturalism and create new realities, spaces, intersections, and perspectives of self-​representation, self-​identification, and pluralism.

Keywords Chicano cannon –​Trump administration –​rasquachismo –​Chicano border literature

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to cross borders of political, social, linguistic, cultural, economic and technological construction … we will cross. For long before there were borders, there were crossers […] and we hold that crossing is a basic human right. Furthermore, we hold this right to be in-​illegal alienable. víctor payan and perry vasquez, “Keep on Crossin’ Manifesto” (2005)

∵ © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004460430_009

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The geographic space on either side of the Rio Bravo or Rio Grande, for Mexicans and Americans respectively, becomes an interesting literary space where the confluences between social complaint and artistic vocation come to be mixed in a truly unique way. As Rodrigo Pardo Fernández points out in “La ficción narrativa en la frontera” (2013), the intention of this border literature “ha sido conformar un espacio de confluencia y memoria compartida, tendente a transformaciones sociales a partir por lo menos de la puesta en evidencia de lo que sucede en ese contexto” (p. 159). Border singularity and its derived social realities is a theme that has been debated for more than a century and is still a major focus of discussion. In “On the Banks of the Rio Grande” (1939) Arthur L. Campa romanticized with a certain naïvety about the infinite possibilities offered by the border by stating that, If the future of the North American nation rests on spreading southward […] The Rio Grande will see the development of a new civilization: gifted with the serenity of the Indian, guided by the zealous spirit of the Yankee, and tempered by the spirituality and love of life of the Mexican heir of Spain who cultivates his inheritance in the land of Anahuac! (as cited in García 1989, p.289) The “New Civilization” to which Campa referred had emerged after three generations, although the reality is far from the idyllic perspective he predicted. In any case, the frontier, and especially the literature produced in that environment, acquired a new metaphorical dimension in 1987 with Gloria Anzaldúa and her seminal Borderlands/​La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Since the work of Anzaldúa the concept of frontier overcame the physical and geographical restrictions, and started to be interpreted within the context of intellectual premises. That is why the aesthetic pleasure of reading was developed within a different and new dimension that interests the theoretical field. It is within this context where the mythical Aztlán acquires full significance1. Luis Leal had already pointed in that direction in his seminal work “In Search of Aztlán” (1981), where he not only located it in a geographic space identified with the southwest of the United States, but he also claimed that “Aztlán symbolizes the spiritual union of the Chicanos, something that is carried in the heart” (p. 18).

1 Other authors such as María Socorro Tabuenca assume, on the contrary, that “Aztlan has been left behind and the borderlands are now the new metaphor of Chicano theoretical discourse” (p. 57, as quoted in José Pablo Villalobos “Border Real, Border Metaphor: Altering Boundaries in Miguel Méndez and Alejandro Morales” p. 132).

154 Gurpegui During the elaboration of this essay, news on televisions around the world echo the forced displacement of Central American citizens who are heading towards the Mexican-​American border in different columns. The administration of President Donald Trump assumes the border not as a space that can economically and culturally enrich both Mexico and the United States, but as the hotbed of all problems that affect American society. However, it would be unfair to blame exclusively this last president for the tragedy that crossing the border represents for thousands of human beings. For at least four decades immigration has become an extremely delicate question for the different tenants of the White House. The signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-​ Hidalgo in 1848, which put an end to the war between the United States and Mexico, meant the annexation of half of the nation of the south by the nation of the north. At the beginning of the 20th century immigration in general, but specially that from south to north became a state matter for the different American administrations. In 1921 the Quota Law was approved and later on, in 1952, the Immigration and Nationalization Law –​popularly known as the McCarran-​Walter Act –​was passed. The latter was to be reformed in 1965 and 1976, establishing the number of visas that could be granted at 20,000. In 1986 the Immigration Reform and Control Act, also known as the Simpson-​Rodino bill, was approved. It was the first time that a law proposed the construction of walls in some border cities, such as San Diego, El Centro, Yuma, El Paso, Del Rio, Laredo, and McAllen. In the decade of the 90s a whole series of operations were promoted like the Bloqueo (1993), Guardian (1994), Salvaguarda (1995) or Río Grande (1997), the purpose of which was that each state should control immigration on its borders. Finally, it should be mentioned the 2014 Mexico-​ United States Border Alliance that was forged to shield the frontier. Since President Trump reached the presidency, the immigration issue, and particularly the construction of a wall on the southern border, as he refers to the Mexican-​American border, has become the flagship issue of his administration. Regarding the column of Central American immigrants, he sent a large contingent of police and soldiers to avoid the massive border crossing that might occur and warned that any attack on these forces would be answered with “real fire.”2 2 In the 2019 State of the Union Address he proudly stated that he had ordered the deployment of 3750 soldiers at the border. The assertion of Frederick J. Turner back in 1893 continues fully in force, “The American frontier is sharply distinguished from the European frontier -​a fortified boundary line running through dense populations.” (The Significance of the Frontier in American History, p. 2. Retrieved from http://​nationalhumanitiescenter.org/​pds/​gilded/​ empire/​text1/​turner.pdf).

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The current situation seems to recall, in a certain way, that of the 50s and 60s when the population of Mexican-​American origin, the Chicanos, began a series of protests, denunciations, and mobilizations. These protests, known as Movimiento Campesino of Cesar Chavez, were quickly seconded by intellectuals, university students, and writers. These bequeathed us a whole series of texts of social condemnation, which are currently considered canonical. At the end of the 80s this type of literature lost some vigor. There were two main reasons: the irruption of the Chicana authors, who had other social and artistic concerns; and the logic evolution of Chicano literature whose authors were now more concerned with artistic postulates than with social activism. A good number of Chicana authors from the years covered in this essay –​ Estela Portillo-​Trambley, Isabella Rios, Pat Mora among others –​are also susceptible to being read on the basis of the postulates proposed in this essay, even though, as Frauke Gewecke (2001) contends Chicanas “enfocan, en sus poemas, narraciones, piezas de teatro y ensayos, ante todo la subjetividad femenina en el contexto de raza, clase y género, rebelándose contra la coacción que sufre la mujer a raíz de las estructuras patriarcales dentro de la comunidad y proyectando conceptos emancipatorios que permitan a la mujer conjugar su identidad de género y sexo” (p. 188). As Gewecke acknowledges, Chicana writers also share with their male counterparts “los temas de protesta social y de resistencia contra la deculturación tanto del individuo como de la comunidad” (p. 188). Analyzing the works of these pioneering Chicana authors on the basis of the proposal here suggested would imply an added complexity since other factors come into play in their literature in relation to what has come to be labeled as “Politics of Gender”. The well-​known differentiation established by Elaine Showalter between “feminine,” “female,” and “feminist identity” cannot be ignored either. The true meaning of the works of these authors, who want to express that “the subject of Chicana writing is the Chicana subject: feminine subjectivity in a Mexican American context” (Madsen, 2000, p. 5), should not be lost in a wide framework such as the proposed here3. 3 Sonia Saldivar-​Hull (Feminism on the Border. Chicana Gender Politics and Literature. Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press; 2000) offers a detailed study of individual works from the perspective of the referential topics of feminist models on the border. Also appropriate is Karin Rosa Ikas’ Chicana Ways: Conversations with Ten Chicana Writers (University of Nevada Press, 2001). In a conversation with Prof. Ikas we have discussed her doctoral thesis, “Die zeitgenössische Chicana-​Literatur: Eine interkulturelle Untersuchung” (Universitätsverlag C. Winter, Heidelbert; 2000), in which she also deals with this isue. The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Indiana University Press; 1999) by Emma Pérez is also highly illustrative.

156 Gurpegui Alejandro Morales in Reto en el Paraíso (1983) presents a significant situation in the micro story “El autoexiliado”. Fel and Dennis travel to Mexico to interview Ricardo Moreno, “un escritor chicano, un novelista chicano, aun cuando no lo deseaba, era y sería identificado como artista chicano” (p. 321). He sees himself as “a great universal writer” and forces the interview to be conducted in English for he does not want being considered Chicano because “I cannot grasp its meaning” (p. 322). When the two young Chicanos have finished the interview and are in the street they hear him screaming: “Chicano! Chicano! I’m not a Chicano writer! I’m a great universal writer! Not a Chicano. Chicano, Chicano, Chicano, Chicano, Chicano, Chicano, Chii-​ Caa-​ Noo!” (p. 322). The anguished cry of Ricardo Moreno fosters an interesting reflection from Dennis: Fel, la última sílaba que gritaba ese loco es “no”. La última sílaba niega las dos anteriores y niega la palabra chicano en total. Parece que al pronunciar chicano se declara una autonegación. Chicano es anularse a sí mismo. Me molesta. (p. 322) It is commonly accepted that the origin of modern Chicano literature corresponds with the publication of Pocho (1959) by José Antonio Villarreal, according to Ramón Saldívar in “A Dialectic of Difference: Towards a Theory of the Chicano Novel” (1979), where he states that “[a]‌fter Pocho, the question about the Chicano novel is no longer one of where it exists but of how it exists” (p. 78). Continuing with the same generalization it is also accepted that the works produced during the following decades appear as an attempt to search for identity and/​or a social denunciation of the exploitation suffered by the population of Mexican origin in a society politically and economically dominated by the Anglos. According to Tomás Rivera, “Chicano literature has a triple mission: […] conservation, struggle, and invention” (as cited in Olivares, 2008, p. xl). Rivera also mentions how one of the objectives of Chicano literary production should be to achieve “intellectual emancipation” and proposes “decolonizing the mind.” Moreover, Saldivar in an article published in 1979, claims that “the general impulse of the Chicano novel leads to examine root concepts” (p. 85) and, in exposing his theory about the “dialectics of difference” that he coined as “new criticism,” he remarked that It would place “truth,” as does the Chicano novel itself, in brackets and consider the analytic process as an ongoing operation, rather than as a static event in historical time and cultural space. (p. 89)

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We agree with the idea that the “analytic process” is “an ongoing operation”. The historical evolution, or if you prefer the new reality of the early twenty-​ first century, fosters a new re-​reading of the Chicano literature where identity and social denunciation are an indivisible part of the new reality that has little to do with that of four decades ago. This is not also true for Chicano literature, but also for what has come to be called “Frontier Literature”. Some examples are The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972) by Oscar Z. Acosta, Peregrinos de Aztlán (1974) by Miguel Méndez, or El diablo en Texas by Aristeo Brito (1976). This type of frontier story finds its antecedent in Las aventuras de Don Chipote o cuando los pericos mamen (1928) by Daniel Venegas, and a worthy follower of Alejandro Morales and his The Rag Doll Plagues (1992) to mention only five canonical narrations that can be revisited with old questions about identity, civil rights and solidarity asked anew. In this sense, the approach of Francisco Lomelí in “La frontera entre México y Estados Unidos: transgresiones y convergencias en textos transfronterizos” (2012) is illuminating: Es también una conceptualización cultural y teórica que nos permite comprender los fenómenos de la posmodernidad como la interculturalidad, donde se unen elementos dispares para producir realidades conformes a relaciones interseccionales con sus respectivas proyecciones de representación. (p. 130) The title of Latinidad at the Crossroads of this very volume expresses very clearly the new reality of the population of Hispanic or Latino origin in the United States. The re-​reading of those canonical texts written a few decades ago under the light of the new situation created on the Mexican-​American border might illuminate and offer an answer to the current social situation of humanitarian tragedy for all those people. For the time being, the presidential threat to use real fire if necessary seems to be a boast; let us hope it never becomes a reality as happened in the story “Paso del Norte” included in El llano en llamas (1953) by Juan Rulfo. Like the protagonist of that story, Central American emigrants leave their homes because “[l]‌a semana pasada no conseguimos pa’ comer y en la antepasada comimos puros quelites. Hay hambre, padre”. It is obvious that the situation in the first decades of the 21st century is far from that of the 60s and 70s. Nowadays the term Chicano has transcended its original reference to Mexican origin favoring a broader consideration of struggle for freedom, and demand for social and civil rights; somehow a similar perception and consideration to that of the “border pilgrims”. I am far from being original since José Antonio Villarreal in “Chicano Literature: Art and Politics from the Perspective of the Artist” was the first one to defend such approach, when he stated that

158 Gurpegui the Chicano label not only “has become a term implying freedom and equality,” but “a symbol for an end to inequities against all our people, if they are with us or not” and claimed that “the word Chicano […] is dynamic and important” (1979, p. 162; italics in the original). Forty years have passed since the publication of this interesting essay by Villarreal, and its rereading propitiates singular interpretations. It is an inclusive term, even for those who do not recognize themselves as Chicanos, since it has undeniable political implications and entails an attempt to achieve equality and freedom, and dynamism would be one of its main characteristics as it has helped transcend its original meaning. The columns of Central American immigrants who are walking towards the border are doing so in search of the equality and freedom that Villarreal talked about and as “our people” these new immigrants are suffering the same social injustice and lack of freedom. Oscar Z. Acosta seems to put in the mouth of the indulgent Brown Buffalo a similar reflection –​in relation to identity paradigms –​when he mentions that “I’ve been mistaken for American Indian, Spanish, Filipino, Hawaian, Samoan, and Arabian,” but concedes that “[n]‌o one has ever asked me if I’m a spic or greaser” (1972, p. 68). Many years will pass until the epitaph of the term Chicano is written. Its referential reality, as the historical validity of the concept of Aztlán, will last over time. However, the border chronotope has varied substantially. Undoubtedly the historical reality of the new emigrants does not share the social imaginary since the socio-​historical heritage of Chicanos was framed by some more or less conventional references, such as the Treaty of Guadalupe-​Hidalgo (1848), the Zoot Suit Riots of 1945, the grape strikes in Délano (1965), or the Walkouts (1968) unknown by someone from El Salvador or Honduras. The current Chicano reality cannot be maintained on exclusion, ignoring those who do not participate in the mentioned referents. This would mean reproducing the same paradigms against which they have been fighting for decades. One fundamental characteristic of the different manifestations of Chicano art has been its opposition to, or at least the questioning of, the conventional vision of reality. Its purpose was to reflect a more hybrid, more complex, and more avant-​garde and challenging reality. The border has evolved creating a much more heterogeneous social space than that of just two decades ago. It has become a unique melting-​pot, where individuals of different nationalities and races have interacted in such a way that a new hybrid individual reality has emerged. I use the term melting pot fully aware of its meaning. The reality of the population of Hispanic origin in the space of the southern border is heterogeneous in terms of its origin, but the coincidences between the different Hispanic nationalities that converge there, fundamentally those related to

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language and religion on the one hand, and their social condition of marginality (illegality, for some) on the other, have resulted in a melting with each other in a similar way to what happened with European immigrants in previous centuries. It is irrelevant, if not shortsighted, to establish national differences between these new immigrants, since both are suffering the same persecution and official stigmatization. The narrative –​not in the literary sense –​of this new reality has placed the debate around the “legality” or “illegality” of immigration. All governments seem to admit the need for immigrants to maintain their economic growth. The principle of “Yes to immigration; but in a legal and orderly manner,” seems at first sight fair and reasonable; and it is not only accepted by American citizens, but also by a considerable segment of the population of Hispanic origin. But when we analyze this idea deeply, we realize that it is a fallacy similar to the one proposed by President Trump in his affirmation, made on June 16, 2015 in his speech announcing his candidacy for the presidency of the United States, that “[w]‌hen Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with them. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists” (Mark, 2018). President Trumps’s words are specially relevant for two reasons: on the one hand, because all migrants are stigmatized and stereotyped as “illegal” and criminals (both concepts seem to be interchangeable and synonymous); on the other, because it is the President of the United States himself who endorses the theory defended here, by not distinguishing between Mexican emigrants and those from other Central American nations. Once more, we are confronted with Trump’s analytical simplicity as he is using the Mexican label to include the rest of Central and South American immigrants. The fact of ignoring the rest of the Latinx immigrants implies in itself contempt and complete ignorance, especially coming from the President of the United States. It is true that, in a certain way, he echoes the “Mexicanization” of any immigrant of Hispanic origin assimilated by a part of the Anglo-​American population, especially his followers. However, immigration, beyond humanitarian speculations, has undeniable intrinsic values t​​ o invigorate and regenerate cultural models, strengthen the economic -​migratory flows in Western countries coincide with the moments of greater economic growth-​, and it also perfects the political system. As Payan and Vasquez (2005) affirmed in the introductory quote, now more than ever, “crossing is a basic human right”. The theory I am proposing is that canonical works may offer a valid understanding of this new and singular reality around the cultural hybridization that

160 Gurpegui generates a new type of individual. Tomás Ybarra-​Frausto proposed a similar approach in “Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility” (1989) when affirming that “[r]‌asquachismo is neither an idea nor a style but more of an attitude or taste” (p. 5). The roots of rasquachismo are found in the Mexican vernacular traditions “but it has evolved as a bicultural sensibility among Mexican Americans” (p. 5). And, as Ybarra-​Frausto claims, “Rasquachismo is brash and hybrid […] To be rasquache is to be down, but not out, (fregado pero no jodido). Responding to a direct relationship with the material level of existence or subsistence is what engenders a rasquache attitude of survival and inventiveness” (p. 5). Ybarra-​Frausto’s ideas continue to be valid today since, for the Chicano movement, rasquachismo has become a term of ironic resistance against discrimination and oppression. If anything, they should be adapted or updated to the new situation since biculturalism (Mexican and North American), or hybridization, is now multicultural because it needs to include immigrants from several nations. As Ybarra-​Frausto ironically contends, “[o]‌ne is never rasquache, it is always someone else, someone of a lower status, who is judged to be outside the demarcators of approved taste and decorum” (p. 5) and it seems obvious that within the new sociopolitical context those of a lower status, identified as “la plebe,” are now the new “pariahs” walking to the north. This becomes even more explicit when he mentions Luis Valdez, who in his Teatro Campesino was among the first to recognize and give universal significance to the multifaceted bittersweet experiences of “la plebe,” a term he uses to refer to “the working class” (p. 7). The income levels of the immigrant population of Hispanic origin have usually been far much lower than that of the mainstream society since most of them get jobs that require less qualification such as harvesting or any other agricultural work, and services are in the hands of Hispanics. But it is no less true that during the last two decades the growth of per capita income and consolidation of an incipient middle class of Hispanic origin is a reality. A brief review of some statistical tables proves to be quite revealing. At present Latinos are no longer the ethnic group with the lowest income per household. They occupy the fifth position with $46,882, surpassing those of the African-​American population with $38,555, and approaching the traditional white Anglo-​Saxons with $61,3494. More young Hispanics are graduating from high school and universities both numerically and percentage wise5. They are the group with the greatest decrease in the birth rate, -​18.78% between 4 Source, American Community Survey. Retrieved from https://​www.census.gov/​programs -​surveys/​acs. 5 According to Noe-​Bustamante (Pew Research, 2020, April 7), educational levels of Latino immigrants have “reached hits highest level in at least three decades” with 65% having

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2008–​2016.6 Their political participation has also risen exponentially and they hold important positions as mayors of historic cities (Antonio Villaraigosa, Los Angeles, 2005–​2013); govern states (Bill Richardson, New Mexico, 2003–​ 2011); or occupy important presidential secretariats (Ken Salazar, Secretary of Interior, 2009–​2013). But what is most significant is that it is the group with the greatest confidence in the future growth of their income. In 2008, 67% expressed confidence in a better economic future and in 2018 it had grown up to 81%7. It has just been mentioned that the current presidential approach to immigration is accepted as valid by an important group of Hispanics. The acceptance among Hispanics of the Republican Party increased during the first two years of Trump’s term. In 2016 it was 11% and in 2018 it was 14%; in that same period, confidence in the Democratic Party fell from 54% to 48%.8 The question is obvious, what is the reason for this change? Alfredo Ortiz, President and ceo of the Jobs Creator Network, on the website of the political newspaper The Hill, in an article published on August 19, 2018, stated that the income of Hispanics had grown during the first year of the Trump government; 3.7% after accounting for inflation, and 4.3% accumulated in 2018; higher than the average of North American households. In addition, the unemployment rate was below 5%, which is a similar percentage to that of Anglo-​American workers. Finally, Ortiz stated that, President Trump’s pro-​growth policies have had a disproportionately positive impact on Hispanics because they are more entrepreneurial than the general population. Hispanics start businesses at a faster rate than any other ethnic group. Since 2007, the number of Latino-​owned businesses has grown by nearly 50 percent, nearly double the rate of all other ethnic groups combined. (Ortiz, 2018) It is precisely in the zeitgeist of this apparent economic bonanza when it is convenient to remember some of the literary passages that recreated a dystopia that, perhaps, is not so far away. Undoubtedly the Mexican-​American reality has not been monolithic; not even the Chicano term was universally accepted. But there was a certain ideological cohesion and, from a general point of view, completed high school in 2018 (up from 38% in 1990) and one-​in-​ten having got a “college degree in 2018.” 6 Source, Institute for Family Studies. 7 Source, Pew Research Center. These percentages are more significant when compared to the national average, which has only grown 3 points, from 58% in 2008 to 61% in 2018. 8 Source, Pew Research Center.

162 Gurpegui all participated in the same imaginary social history already mentioned. The demands of this group for social and labor improvements and for cultural acceptance were assumed by the great majority. However, at present there is no such a level of commitment, involvement and empathy with newcomers as before. It is not unreasonable to talk about a Chicano elite that shares the same benefits as the mainstream society, and perhaps we are witnessing an identity fragmentation like never before, with the potential danger that this entails. This transformation is similar to that described by Miguel Méndez in Los criaderos humanos (Épica de los desamparados) (1975), where the author illustrates how the poor who ascend socially and economically tend to contribute to the oppression of the new poor: En un tiempo pasado había sucedido algo extraordinario: un criadero se había rebelado. Tras una lucha cruenta los hambrientos derrotaron a los Rapiña. Los ejecutaron. Tras la venganza pareció haber llegado la justicia. Entonces se operó una metamorfosis rarísima: los caudillos del movimiento revolucionario se transformaron a su vez en Rapiñas olvidando su origen. Desde mi refugio podía identificarlos: chapeados de oro sañosos eran los más crueles los más ostentosos más avorazados. (36–​37) Roger Rouse’s essay “Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism” (1991) reveals the interpretive complexity of the social event that immigration represents for, as he remarks, “[w]‌e live in a confusing world, a world of crisscrossed economies, intersecting systems of meaning, and fragmented identities” (p. 8). This idea can be extrapolated to literary studies in the line marked by Ramón Saldivar in “A Dialectic of Difference: Towards a Theory of the Chicano Novel” (1979). According to Saldivar, “a confrontation with the sociological, historical, and cultural conditions under which the Chicano novel has been created is indispensable” (p. 73). Other Chicano scholars are also conscious of

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the necessity of analyzing how discourses constructed around the theme of the border have and impact on self-​representation: Las representaciones sociales son construcciones intersubjetivas formadas a través del lenguaje; por ello, resulta relevante analizar la construcción de los discursos sobre la frontera, como elementos que intervienen en la reconstrucción de las propias representaciones que la integran. (Valenzuela, 2000, p. 38) Carmen Salazar (1977), in “Current Trends in Chicano Literary Criticism,” divided Chicano critics into two groups. On the one hand, those who judged Chicano literature as a reflection of the sociohistorical and cultural circumstances of Chicanos and followed the ideas presented by Armando Rendón in “El plan espiritual de Aztlán,” who proposed that Chicanos “must ensure that our writers, poets, musicians, and artists produce literature and art that is appealing to our people and relates to our revolutionary culture” (1969). On the other hand, those who prefer to emphasize the artistic values ​​of their literary production. This essay does not participate in the exclusive “canon game” denounced by Juan Bruce-​Novoa (1990), by ignoring those works which do not participate to the political ideology of the Chicano Movement. Indeed, the aim is to propose a new model of revisiting border texts according to the new socio-​historical reality. We participate in the appreciation expressed by Joseph Sommers, a scholar who advocates for a historical-​dialectical approach to Chicano literature. For, as he states in “Critical Approaches to Chicano Literature” (1979) regarding the role of Chicano literary criticism, [t]‌he role of the critic is to challenge both writer and reader to question the text for meaning and values (which are inseparable from its formal disposition), and to situate this meaning and these values in a broad cultural framework of social and historical analysis. (p. 151) In “Dynamic identities in Heterotopia” (1995) Morales himself has theorized on this notion, assuming that the concept of heterotopia, as coined and developed by Foucault, “explains border culture” (p. 23)9. He exposes it in a clear and artistic way in the micro story “Los ninguneados” of the aforementioned Reto en el paraíso, and, in his disquisitions about the Chicanos, he claims that

9 Manuel Martín-​Rodríguez in “Deterritorialization and Heterotopia: Chicano/​a Literature in the Zone” (1995) also offers an approximation similar to that of Morales.

164 Gurpegui [e]‌l pueblo chicano es la ausencia de las miradas de los Estados Unidos y México, la pausa en el diálogo de gringo con gringo, mexicano con mexicano y entre gringo y mexicanos, la reticencia en su silencio y la omisión en sus consideraciones […] El chicano es una omisión. (p. 230) The perception of the reality manifested in the works of the referred Chicano authors could be galvanized around the referent of inter-​ethnic relations. These are conditioned not only by racial, historical, and cultural components, but also by economic and political factors. The final goal is to shape a personal and social identity, more or less veiled, so as to encourage a personal and social change at the same time. I am not talking about any cathartic processes resulting from opposing the dominant discourse as was Rivera’s proposal; my proposal has to do with the reading of the Chicano canonical texts, that propitiates a sociopolitical awareness according to the new hybrid historical and cultural reality, in a similar way as when they were published. However, now the search for identity and social concern or denunciation would not be understood as two alternative options; rather, they should be assumed as part of the same concept and with the same purpose. This proposal is in line with that of Carlos Muñoz formulated in Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement (1989) when he addresses “the politics of identity or the identity problematic” (p. 8). The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo is one of the novels that most explicitly illustrates the aforementioned notion of “the identity problematic”. It is July 1, 1967 and the reader finds the protagonist/​narrator, a lawyer of Hispanic origin, looking at himself in the mirror, I stand naked before the mirror. Every morning of my life I have seen that brown belly from every angle. It has not changed that I can remember. I was always a fat kid. I suck it in and expand an enormous chest. (p. 11) Upon arriving at his office in San Francisco, he learns that his secretary has died and decides to make a radical change in his life. He wanders aimlessly from one place to another and takes the decision to travel to El Paso, where he was born, in an attempt to find his own reality: “I decided to go to El Paso, the place of my birth, to see if I could find the object of my quest. I still wanted to find out who the hell I was” (p. 184). But the answer he is looking for will not be found there either. He then goes to Mexico in an attempt to answer his existential questions. But his identity quest poses new problems when, after having lost his personal documents in Taos, he is not able to prove his identity: “[n]‌othing. I’ve got nothing on me to prove who I am […] just my word”

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(p. 195). Finally, he manages to return to his native El Paso and recalls the initial scene looking at himself in the mirror: “I stand naked before the mirror. I cry in sobs. My massive chest quivers and my broad shoulders sag. I am a brown buffalo lonely and afraid in a world I never made” (p. 195). He is confronted with his in-​between identity as he acknowledges, in a phone conversation with his brother, that “I’ve checked it all out and have failed to find the answer to my search. One sonofabitch tells me I’m not Mexican and the other says I’m not American. I got no roots anywhere” (p. 196). And it is at that very moment when he understands the complexity of hybrid, multicultural identities: My single mistake has been to seek an identity with any one person or nation or with any part of history […] What I see now on this rainy day in January, 1968, what is clear to me after this sojourn is that I am neither a Mexican nor an American. I am neither a Catholic nor a Protestant. I am a Chicano by ancestry and a Brown Buffalo by choice. Is that so hard for you to understand? (p. 199) The heuristic process of self-​identification has come to an end. The protagonist has understood his own reality; a new reality in which he is neither Mexican nor American. He is a new person; he is the product of cultural hybridization in a specific geographic space: the border. The reference to Catholicism and Protestantism is decisive, since it transcends the exclusively religious sphere. Religious beliefs are strong paradigms in the making up of people’s social imaginary, and his renunciation of the proposals of the Pope of Rome or those of Luther has nothing to do with faith and dogmas, but with the socio-​cultural implications that derive from them. It is a burden that must be carried to find the answer to the initial quest synthesized in the question: Who am I? When he says “I am a Chicano by ancestry and a Brown Buffalo by choice” (p. 199), he is proposing a new perspective in which the singular is imbricated into the collective. It is a unique experience in which the initial existential isolation is overcome in the new collectivity, in the new conceptual framework, of the “Brown Buffalos”. The loss of identity that gives off his anguished confession “I’ve got nothing on me to prove who I am” (p. 195), supposes the breaking with both, his native United States and with the idealized Mexico of his ancestors. Neither Americans nor Mexicans recognize him as one of their own and he finds himself forced to construct a frontier identity that transcends the fissures between Mexican and American cultures. The political border between the two nations has no meaning for him, and he needs to reinterpret a new cultural frontier that separates him from both the Mexican and the American imaginary. He finally acknowledges that not only the geographical limits may

166 Gurpegui be diffuse, but also the ideological and cultural boundaries delimited by the frontier. Miguel Méndez presents a similar situation of in-​betweenness in Peregrinos de Aztlán (1974). Here the characters are labeled and excluded by others, thus raising identity issues which contribute to their sense of non-​belonging: ​ pá, ¿Qué somos nosotros? A Mexicanos, hijo. Mexicanos y no vivimos en México. ¿Entonces no somos americanos? Sí, hijito, también somos americanos. ¿Por qué entonces, papá, en México nos llaman pochos y aquí Mexican Greasers? (p. 180) The lack of definition reaches a new stage in El Diablo in Texas (1976) by Aristeo Brito. The three sections and the epilogue of the work represent the historical denunciation of the theft of lands perpetrated by Americans even before the United States annexed the territory of Texas. In this historical context, it is significant that already in the very first lines of the “Preface” the narrator echoes an uncertainty similar to that experienced by other characters analyzed in the above examples: “Cuando quiero contarles cómo realmente es [Presidio], no puedo, porque me lo imagino como un vapor eterno” (p. 2). Brito uses in this disturbing novel a narrative model in which he mixes historical reality and fantastic elements. The struggle of the peasantry seems to have been useless for more than a century because “El diablo está listo para seguir su chiste eterno (p. 72). Negative feelings seem to perpetuate throughout the three moments in which life in Presidio is reported (1983; 1942; 1970) when the narrator recognizes that “ese rencor que viene desde muy atrás ahora se me ha pegado” (p. 98); but it is clear there is hope for a future when life will be better, fairer, and more prosperous. Perhaps it is within The Rag Doll Plagues (1992) by Alejandro Morales where the proposal of this essay is best presented and captured. The structure seems to evoke that of El diablo in Texas, since the plot is also divided into three moments that are far apart in time; and as that one, historical reality and fantastic elements are also mixed: “As I read The Rag Doll Plagues, I grasped my inability to discern fact from fiction” (p. 159), confesses the protagonist of the last story. The first story is located in the eighteenth century in New Spain; the second at the end of the 20th century, when the novel is being written, in California; finally, the third part in an indefinite future time in the fictitious nation of lamex that expands from Los Angeles to the Mexican capital. The link between the three stories is a kind of mysterious illness La Mona that

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arises unexpectedly. In each of the three stories (Mexico City, Delhi, Lamex) a doctor will try to fight the mysterious plague. The saving vaccine will be found in the blood of the Mexicans of Mexico D. F. who for years have been living in a highly polluted atmosphere. Wealthy American families have “their” Mexican, who they will present proudly to friends and relatives, whose blood they need to continue alive. Manuel Martín-​Rodríguez elaborates an accurate interpretation of the meaning of this novel in “The Global Border: Transnationalism and Cultural Hybridism in Alejandro Morales’s The Rag Doll Plagues,” As a transnationalistic text, then, Plagues is a novel about the re(b)ordering of the Americas. Borders, in this sense, are not to be understood solely in their geographical sense (as they were during the Chicano movement) but in a newer sense that the term has been given by authors and critics such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Renato Rosaldo, and Mary Louise Pratt. (1995, p. 89)10 Maria Herrera-​Sobek also offers a suggestive interpretation in “Epidemics, Epistemophilia, and Racism: Ecological Literary Criticism and The Rag Doll Plagues”, who considers that “[t]‌he Mexican is perceived as the savior who saves the United States from national catastrophes, just as Mexicans had saved the crops during the Bracero Program in 1942” (p. 106). The image of the Mexican giving his blood to well-​off Americans so they will be protected and will live safely, as Morales proposes in the third book, is tremendously imaginative. Blood has ceased to be a metaphorical resource to become a reality as America needs Mexicans and Latinos to grow and prosper. In this novel, Morales goes a step further by proposing a literature that, unlike that of other authors, is not a reflection of reality, but a disturbing proposal for a new reality. Can we talk about a favorable reinterpretation of the border? Perhaps. In that sense the approach of Francisco Lomelí, in the aforementioned work, seems highly accurate and premonitory, […] legitimizar lo fronterizo es aceptar la transculturación de una cultura con otra más mixta e impura, o sea, reconocer la descentralización de la cultura “oficial” igual que la identidad, puesto que abordan un amplio ámbito social de constantes cambios y asimilaciones. (2012, p. 138) 10 See Culture & Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Beacon Press, 1989) by Renato Rosaldo; and Ojos imperiales: literature de viajes y trasculturización (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1992) by Mary Louise Pratt.

168 Gurpegui The late Frauke Geweke (2001) begins his “De identidades, territorios, y fronteras …” stating that “[l]‌a experiencia migratoria de los chicanos o Mexican Americans, que con más de veinte millones representan el mayor grupo de origen latinoamericano residente en Estados Unidos, difiere en varios aspectos de la experiencia de los otros Hispanics o latinos, hecho que se traduce en una literatura también diferente en varios aspectos” (p. 179). These words were written two decades ago and, while still valid, they do not respond to the current reality. At present, migrants of Mexican origin continue to be the majority, but it is no less true that the number of Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, Hondurans, and other Latinas/​os has been increasing constantly. For obvious reasons of space, and given the seminal nature of this essay, I have focused exclusively on Chicano authors and novels, although it is true that in the present political situation many other migrants from Hispanic origin are experiencing violence and oppression in the frontier with the same intensity as Mexicans. My intention was not to “Mexicanize” any literary work written by Latinx, but to revisit canonical Chicano literature on the basis of the present political context. The works of the Nicaraguan professor Ana Patricia Rodríguez, or the Guatemalan professor and novelist Arturo Arias, propose an interesting critical-​literary revisionism from perspectives that de-​center Mexican and Chicanx (and to a certain extent Puerto Rican)-​ dominated approaches in Latinx literary criticism. Questions such as, What does the Chicano canon offer in terms of understanding border-​crossing in the past couple of decades that these other writings do not?, deserve an essay by itself.

References

Brito, A. (1976). El diablo en Texas. Tucson, Az.: Editorial Peregrinos. Bruce-​Novoa, J. (1990). Canonical and non-​canonical texts: A Chicano case study. In A. LaVonne Brown & J. W. Ward Jr (Eds.), Redefining American Literary History (pp. 196–​209). New York: mla. García, M.T. (Ed.). (1989). Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology & Identity, 1930–​ 1960. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gewecke, F. (2001). De identidades, territorios y fronteras que se cruzan: la(s) lite­ ratura(s) de los Hispanics o Latinos en Estados Unidos (2). Iberoamericana, 1(4), 179–​202. Herrera-​Sobek, M. (1995). Epidemics, epistemophilia, and racism: Ecological literary criticism and The Rag Doll Plagues. Bilingüal Review/​Revista Bilingüe, 20(3), 99–​108. Leal, L. (1981). In Search of Aztlán. Denver Quarterly, 16(3), 16–​22.

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Lomelí, F. A. (2012). La frontera entre México y Estados Unidos: transgresiones y convergencias en textos transfronterizos. Iberoamericana, 12(46), 129–​144. Madsen, D. L. (2000). Understanding contemporary Chicana literature. Columbia: University of South California Press. Mark, M. (2018, April 5). Trump just referred to one of his most infamous campaign comments: calling Mexicans ‘rapists’. Business Insider. Retrieved from https://​www .businessinsider.com/​trump-​mexicans-​rapists-​remark-​reference-​2018-​4. Martín-​Rodríguez, M. (1995). The global border: Transnationalism and cultural hybridism in Alejandro Morales’s The Rag Doll Plagues. Bilingüal Review/​Revista Bilingüe, 20(3), 86–​98. Martín Rodríguez, M. (1995). Deterritorialization and Heterotopia: Chicano/​ a Literature in the Zone. In E. Benjamin-​Labarthe, Y. Grandjeat, and C. Lerat, (Eds.), Confrontations et Métissages (pp. 391–​98). Bordeaux, France: Editions de la Maison des Pays Ibériques. Méndez, M. (1974). Peregrinos de Aztlán. Tucson, Az.: Editorial Peregrinos. Méndez, M. (1975). Los criaderos humanos (Épica de los desamparados). Tucson, Az.: Editorial Peregrinos. Morales, A. (1983). Reto en el Paraíso. Tempe, Az.: Bilingual Press. Morales, A. (1995). Dynamic identities in Heterotopia. Bilingüal Review/​Revista Bilingüe, 20(3), 14–​27. Muñoz, C. (1989). Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement. London: Verso. Noe-​Bustamante, L. (2020, April, 7). Education Levels of Recent Latino Immigrants in the U.S. Reached New Highs as of 2018. Pew Research Center. Retrieved from https://​ www.pewresearch.org/​fact-​tank/​2020/​04/​07/​education-​levels- ​of-​recent-​latino -​immigrants-​in-​the-​u-​s-​reached-​new-​highs-​as-​of-​2018/​ Olivares, J. (Ed.). (2008). Tomás Rivera: The Complete Works (2nd ed.). Houston, TX: Arte Público Press. Ortiz, A. (2018, September 18). Hispanics Flourishing in Trump Economy. The Hill. Retrieved from https://​thehill.com/​opinion/​finance/​407079-​hispanics-​flourishing -​in-​trump-​economy Pardo Fernández, R. (2013). La ficción narrativa de la frontera: El río Bravo en tres novelas mexicanas. Frontera Norte, 25(49), 157–​178. Payan, V. & Vasquez, P. (2005, July 28). Keep on crossin’ manifesto. Retrieved from http://​www.nathangibbs.com/​2005/​07/​. Rendón, A. (1969, March). El plan espiritual de Atlán. First Chicano National Conference, Denver, Colorado, USA. Retrieved from http://​www.medina502.com/​classes/​lals _​311/​readings/​Plan_​Espiritual_​de_​Aztlan.pdf Rouse, R. (1991). Mexican migration and the social space of postmodernism. Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, 1(1), 8–​23. Rulfo, J. (1953). El llano en llamas. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica.

170 Gurpegui Saldívar, R. (1979). A dialectic of difference: Towards a theory of the Chicano novel. MELUS, 6 (3), 73–​92. Sommers, J. (1979). Critical approaches to Chicano Literature. In F. Jiménez (Ed.), The Identification and Analysis of Chicano Literature (pp. 143–​151). New York: Bilingual Press. Valenzuela Arce, J. M. (2000). Norteños ayantados. Discursos y representaciones de la frontera. Comunicación y Sociedad, 38, 37-​57. Villarreal J. A. (1979). Chicano literature: Art and politics from the perspective of the artist. In F. Jiménez (Ed.), The Identification and Analysis of Chicano Literature (pp. 161–​168). New York: Bilingual Press.

Conclusions Amanda Ellen Gerke and Luisa María González Rodríguez 1

Revealing the Kaleidoscope

In the introduction to this volume, we stated that the definition of latinidad is in flux, ever-​changing and multi-​faceted. Latinidad, as a notion articulated within socio-​political as well as socio-​cultural and literary contexts, is as complex (and as powerful) as an earthquake. Sometimes the plates move beneath the ground, reacting and shifting in relation with each other, slowly changing the surface in ways that are not perceived. However, those movements bring a climax of change through the sudden release of energy, and a ripple effect of movement across planes is made. Latinx literature and culture has served as its own epicenter, and, as Lomelí in Chapter Two describes, Chicano/​a (Latinx) literature has “emerged from the underbelly and shadows of American indifference” (p. 25). Through defiance of the mainstream and prescribed viewpoints, it has produced “its own movements and traditions by yearning for self-​representation, and the construction of its own metaphors and meanings” (p. 25). Most of the chapters of Latinidad at the Crossroads speak directly to the importance of self-​definition, in terms of identity-​construction, and the ways in which this is realized through different channels and platforms. Although this volume does not, as a whole nor do the individual chapters, claim to give a definitive definition, we do attempt to synthesize many of the paradigms of latinidad in order to give context to our analyses. Aquino, in Chapter Three, positions latinidad as an “ideological consciousness of unity and shared experience that emerges from the interaction between the groups who are assigned a pan-​ethnic identity” (p. 68). The idea that interaction is the catalyst for identity-​formation is key in our arguments as interaction itself entails an encounter. Self-​definition requires a negotiation between the self and the Other and a reaction to the exterior constraints triggering crossings of people. These interactions create interconnected identities that constitute specific kinds of knowledge and power relations, thus revealing the macrostructure of thought for a whole yet divided community that both creates and breaks down borders. Álvarez López, in her chapter on Spoken Word Performances, furthers this description of latinidad as a collective consciousness. Interactions, as she claims, are formed by, and create a multifarious intersection of discourses allowing for a variety of interconnected identities to constitute specific kinds of knowledge and power relations that become “sites of cultural contestation

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and resistance, of social and political protest, while at the same time […] serve as a means of cultural cohesion” (p. 89). The knowledge/​power tandem in relation to social ideology and identity-​ formation, particular to Laó-​Montes’ influence in this volume, specifically reviewed in Chapters Two by González Rodríguez and Six by Álvarez López, is tied to notions of colonization and the discourse of race, following the idea that any identity-​formation is tied to “familiarity and affinity as well as to a subject position (the state of being Latino/​a) in a given discursive space” (p. 85). In terms of identity-​formation, the relationship between knowledge and power often allows the powerful enactor to gain and maintain control by granting or denying access to this knowledge through discursive power-​plays. In relation to the concept of latinidad, or rather Latinization, the epistemic communities that form ideologies tend to exert oppression through dominant othering-​strategies, political practices, corporate influence and intellectual discourses. If Latinos/​as are denied access to mainstream political and social power but control the passage of knowledge (and therefore power) through the creation of new discursive spaces, the power may effectively be transferred from a political entity to the group it attempts to control or define. Thus, the Latino community may become their own metaphorical gatekeepers and insist on self-​definition and self-​labeling. The new in-​group constructed discourse redrafts the entire dialogue to one that encompasses what Laó-​Montes (2001) describes as “latinization from below,” through which marginality, discrimination, and stereotypes are thwarted (p. 27). This group-​constructed discursive space reframes the entire dialogue from one that views the group as politically, and therefore, socially oppressed, to one of transfer-​of-​power, agency, the ability to self-​define and/​or construct, and challenges the knowledge-​validation process that results in an externally-​defined membership. Conscious as Latinas/​os are that it is in the connections forged among the different groups and in the interstitial spaces that they become a pan-​ethnic group sharing a common imaginary, they have decided to counteract mainstream discriminatory discourses and propose an intersectional perspective on latinidad. The Chicano/​a (Latino/​a) Renaissance pushed this into play in a dynamic and gallant way. The first-​movers of the transition broke ground hard and fast, although they faced many sociological and political obstacles. As a member of the first movers, Lomelí affirms the radical push from below, and emotively confirms the strides made in breaking the silence by proudly claiming that “[w]‌e broke through a sound barrier of oppressive forces that had subjugated us for decades by confronting the demons of American domination” (p. 27). One of the ways in which this metaphorical breaking through has not regressed is explored by Álvarez, in Chapter Six. Self-​affirmation—​a

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progressive parallel to self-​definition—​collective memory and community are critical components of the current and substantial definitions of latinidad. These affirmations are now deeply embedded in the social and cultural artifacts, discourses, and practices today. The uniquely American form of latinidad has now achieved its breakthrough goal of re-​inventing itself at multiple stages of expression across a multitude of mediums, achieving first self-​definition, and reaching a stage of self-​affirmation of sorts. The Latino/​a community have achieved their objective and stand out for their indisputable national presence in literature, cultural studies, academic circles, and artistic venues, as their full agency is now recognized. 2

Who Are You Calling Latinx?

Identity-​formation in the Latino community throughout this volume has been addressed as an attempt to gain an authoritative voice, both as a homogeneous group and as a group divided. Questions have arisen as to whether a group can contain both possibilities and how these divisions are constituted. Sociologists (Brewer 2003; Leonardelli, Pickett and Brewer, 2010) would expect these opposing pulsions within the Latino community to manifest in accordance with the sociological theory of optimal distinctiveness, which seeks to understand ingroup-​outgroup differences. We have just described that the Chicano/​Latino movement broke ground in an insider attempt to distinguish, transform, and self-​define against an outsider indifference that denied agency. However, as Leonardelli, Pickett and Brewer (2010) explain, “[a]‌prevalent conception of contemporary western societies is that society members seek to free themselves from the groups they depend on” and that they seek to pursue personal goals, and “create a world that is a reflection of the self” (p. 64). There is also an individual desire to attain an optimal balance of inclusion and distinctiveness, as Aquino (this volume) contends. This desire may or may not be conscious on the part of individuals or sub-​divisions within a larger group. However, there seems to be a push and pull from the individuals that make up the group. These motives of affinity and separation are in constant opposition with each other, creating an interchange of the two, and a balance of individuation. This is clearly illustrated in Sandra Maria Esteves’ introductory poem (this volume), where the categories of homeland, race and ethnicity that make up Latina/​o identity fluctuate between a desire for self-​differentiation and the need for solidarity that the process of forging a collective identity entails. The sociological processes highlighted in Latinidad at the Crossroads most often center on the idea that a social, public, and private identity is difficult

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to tackle. It is not always easy to separate identities, especially when issues of race and gender emerge, which can be as socially constructed as the overarching ethnic marker in the first place. “Identity, De-​colonization and Cosmopolitanism in Latina Artists’ Spoken-​Word Performances,” by Álvarez López (this volume) speaks directly to ways in which art addresses the notion of creating and articulating an identity within and without the larger social group, particularly regarding issues of race and gender. She states that as an aesthetic practice, spoken-​word performance “author-​izes the self-​fashioning of subjectivities: it allows poets to deal with political and personal themes, linking poetic expression with the expression of racial, ethnic, and gender identity” (p. 86). In a similar vein, Ewa Antoszek in Chapter Seven explores the ways in which Latina artists use their performances and installations to show the relationship between space and the racialized and gendered individual. Here, the creation of spaces allows for this type of self-​expression and formation. If there is an outer-​space of subjugation from outside groups, and an inner-​space of in-​group identity-​formation, a third social space now opens up for the individuals to take on their own transformation. As Miguel Algarín expresses, these spaces allow people to transform themselves in the public eye (1981). It is not just an internal struggle, process, and manifestation, but a public proclamation of the individual. Antoszek also brings to the fore the interrelationship between space and identity construction not only by emphasizing the role of the border in separating spaces and individuals, but also by pointing out that la frontera conflicted space mirrors the complex status of Latinas/​os in the U.S. and the multiple borders they experience in their lives. The Latina identity, as Álvarez López and González Rodríguez point out, is not just an expression of the self, but is characterized in direct relation to a more expansive social identity, and is conscientiously connected to past ancestry, future aspirations, and collective memory. Sometimes this ancestry is internalized in a positive way, as shown in the analysis of Ariana Brown’s poem in Álvarez López’s chapter. Her evaluation of Brown’s description of her grandmother’s neck, father’s hair, grandmother’s tongue, and her own balance, reason, and kin, is a firm and proud expression of the self in connection with one’s family heritage. However, despite the seemingly strong ethnic identity, familial genealogy can be quite ambivalent as it also may stand for cultural tyranny, this chapter reminds us. Álvarez López turns attention to Gloria Anzaldúa’s works that denounce the type of familiar culture that cripples its women and affirms that Latina women have often been colonized by their own people. According to Álvarez, “she [Anzaldúa] rebels against the role of women as bearers of the values of their culture and as transmitters of male rules and laws, whereby they

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actively contribute to the imposition of heteropatriarchal codes and attitudes on their own female offspring” (p. 102). It is in tradition that women have often been silenced. González Rodríguez reflects on Latinas’ ambivalent feelings when forced to choose between their American dreams and “the island dreams of their mothers”; between their ancestors’ traditions or enacting their identities as a domain of difference, where new racially mixed subjects are able to cross racial boundaries and create their own counternarratives. Regarding the love-​ hatred feelings of many Latinas/​os of African descent towards their Blackness, the reading of Chapter Three by González Rodríguez shows how Jasminne Mendez, an Afro-​Dominican writer, challenges their ancestors’ rejection of their African heritage, associated to what they call pelo malo, and decides to postulate her African hair (and identity) as a category of difference. By analyzing two Afro-​Dominican writers’ memoirs, González Rodríguez portrays the different ways of negotiating latinidad and gives testimony of these authors’ struggle to reconcile race and identity in their lives and those of other Latinas/​os. This push and pull from within and without, familial ties, pride and rejection, and other complexities that inform and address the internal and individual struggle of self-​affirmation is also addressed in “Encarnaciones Cubanas: Elías Miguel Muñoz and Queering of the Latino/​a Canon” by Ylce Irizarry (Chapter Six). The concept of arrival is one in which Latino/​a writers are forced to choose one side of the hyphen; one must either give up their culture, orientations, and identity or fail to arrive. Julia Alvarez’s (1998) comments open this chapter, not as the object of study, but to introduce the context of having to choose the “assimilated voice” or one’s own voice: “I hear the cage of a definition close around me with its ‘Chicano and Latino subject matter’, ‘Chicano and Latino style,’ ‘Chicano and Latino concerns’ ” (p. 169). Irizarry bases her argument on the struggle we have pointed out on both sides of the coin. There is a rejection and an acceptance of the counterbalances within and without the social group, and the self. The inter-​connection between memory, familial ties, and origin-​cultures come together here as Irizarry proposes the narrative of new memory, understood as the new memory of latinidad and defined as a cultural archive for communities narrating their lives both through and outside the rhetoric of U.S. neocolonialism. 3

Moving Away from the Hyphen: Creating New Spaces of Latinidad

The notion of arrival described in Irizarry’s chapter, along with the overlapping spaces that comprise identity-​building in this particular aspect of latinidad denote the sometimes explicit theme, and sometimes built-​in leitmotif, of

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space and place. Apart from artistic, discursive, and political spaces, developed in Chapters Three, Five, Seven, and Eight the issue of the border as a space cannot be forgotten when addressing notions and issues surrounding latinidad. Both Chapters Seven and Eight establish the border as both a physical and metaphorical space of conflict and identity-​building. The chapters echo each other by giving a sense that the border necessarily contributes to the formulation of Latino/​a identities, and to the Latino literary canon, due to the history of displacement and domineering policies of the United States. Ewa Antoszek, in “Revisiting La Frontera: Consuelo Jiménez Underwood and Ana Teresa Fernández,” reminds us that the U.S.–​Mexico border not only affects those at the line, or those who have crossed, but may also determine lives in regions thousands of miles away. The physical border becomes an invisible space and force that creeps north and south, permeating the sociopolitical arena that informs individual and group constructs. The border directly informs the ontological and social systems that build and maintain the knowledge/​power tandem, and creates the ideological foundations for both oppression and submission. As Ewa Antoszek states in his chapter, “[t]‌ransitional histories and identities pose a threat to many especially politicians who demand the borders to become the walls and to function as fixed political lines of division that prevent the Other from crossing the border, on the pretext of safeguarding the illusive integrity of the nation-​state” (p. 138). These borders serve as a means of political regularity, but also as a means to advance ideologies and private gain. In the introduction to this volume we highlighted the metaphor of the hyphen in that it describes an in-​between space in which Latinos/​as live. The hyphen is a type of linguistic and internalized border that demarcates a separation of the self. New generations of Latinas/​os are trying to cross over the physical and mental borders that paralyze them in order to shed the hyphen all together. Yet, as we have seen throughout this volume, many Latino/​a writers and artists take on the notion that arrival is not shedding one identity to take on another, but an embrace of an in-​between or even a broader intersectional identity. For many, that pain of the in-​between forms part of self-​affirmation, and shedding it would mean to refuse a part of their individual and group identity. This space has now become a place of resistance and empowerment. The in-​between space of the hyphen can induce a sense that the label the hyphen creates can be seen as broken, hybrid, or compound. Yet, it also creates a sense that the hyphen is not enough. One is not Dominican, American, or Dominican-​American, but Dominican-​American-​Female-​Black, etc., and may include as many identifiers and subsequent hyphens as could fill an entire page. As we have contended, Latinas/​os are struggling to overcome the notion

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of hyphenated identity by proposing intersectional identities that invite more inclusive spaces wherefrom to counteract marginalization and oppression. Latinidad at the Crossroads has not pursued to fill the gap of the hyphen. We have not attempted to bring together its two sides, nor the two sides of a physical border. Instead, we have intended to identify and celebrate the identity-​building processes that happen on both sides. We have endeavored to challenge the stereotypes that oppress with the aim of foregrounding agency in choices, agency in doubt, agency in confidence and agency in decision making regarding identity development. We celebrate the “Pero ni qué what am I? Y qué soy?” of Esteves’ poem “Puerto Rican Discovery #3: Not Neither” featured in our introduction, and we celebrate and embrace the past, present and future of latinidad. The essays assembled here depict a breakthrough of self-​discovery, self-​definition, and self-​ affirmation within he Latina/​o community that, although it is deeply rooted in historical trajectories, moves forward in multiple directions. Latino literature read, and revisited, spurs other movements both at the individual and social levels. As already stated, the concept of latinidad is dynamic and kaleidoscopic, with multifaceted dimensions waiting for its next change of course for, as Lomelí states in this volume, “[p]‌repárense for another future shift and rumblings and don’t say you haven’t been warned” (p. 41).

References

Algarin, M. (1981). Nuyorican Literature. MELUS, 8(2), 89–​92. Alvarez, J. (1998). Something to declare: Essays. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. Brewer, M.B. (2003). Optimal Distinctiveness, Social Identity, and the Self. In M. Leary & J. R. Tangney (Eds.), Handbook of Self and Identity (pp 480–​491). New York: Guilford Publications. Laó-​Montes, A. (2001). Introduction. In Laó-​Montes, A. & Dávila, A. (Eds.), Mambo montage. The Latinization of New York (pp.1–​53). New York: Columbia University Press. Laó-​Montes, A. (2005). Afro-​Latinidades and the diasporic imaginary. Iberoamericana, 5(17), 117–​130. Leonardelli, G. J., Pickett, C. L., & Brewer, M. B. (2010). Optimal distinctiveness theory: A framework for social identity, social cognition, and intergroup relations. In M. P. Zanna & J. M. Olson (Eds.), Advances in experimental social psychology, Vol. 43 (pp. 63–​113). Academic Press.

Index Acevedo, Elizabeth 18, 94–​95, 97–​98 Acevedo, Mario 36–​38 Jailbait Zombie 36–​38 Werewolf Smackdown 36–​38 Acosta, Marta 35–​36n11 Happy Hour at Casa Dracula 35–​36n11 Acosta, Oscar Zeta 28–​29 The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo 28–​29, 157, 164 African Americans 7, 57–​58, 69–​71, 87–​ 88, 160 Afro-​Cuban 6 Afro-​Dominican 6, 16–​17, 51, 53, 57–​58, 174–​175 Afro-​latinidad/​Afro-​latinidades 4–​5, 7, 55, 63–​64, 94, 100, 103 Afro-​Latina/​o 6, 7–​8, 18, 55, 63–​64, 86–​87n1, 92–​93n6, 94, 98 Afro-​Latinx 55, 94 aids era 118, 123, 124, 129–​130 Alarcón, Norma 30–​31, 30–​31n4 Alcantara, Marisol 73–​74 Alcaraz, Lalo 36–​38 La Cucaracha 36–​38 Aldama, Frederick L. 39–​40 Postethnic Narrative Criticism 39–​40 Graphic Borders 39–​40 Literature Long Stories Cut Short 39–​40 Alex-​Assensoh, Yvette M. 68–​69 Allatson, Paul 46–​47 Alurista 26–​27, 35–​36 neo-​indigenism 26–​27 As Our Barrio Turns…Who the Yoke B On? 35–​36 Anaya, Rudolfo 28–​29, 32–​33, 35–​36 Alburquerque 32–​33 Bless Me, Ultima 35–​36 Curse of the Chupacabra 35–​36 Anzaldúa, Gloria 31–​32, 102–​103, 141–​142, 153, 155, 174–​175 Borderlands /​La Frontera: The New Mestiza 31–​32, 102, 141–​142, 153 American Politics 66, 154, 159 Aoki, Andrew L. 68–​69, 114–​115 Aparicio, Frances 39–​40

The Routledge Companion to Latino/​a Literature 39–​40 Arias, Arturo 115n24 Arias, Ron 28–​29 The Road to Tamazunchale 28–​29 Artivism 88–​91, 103, 139–​140, 139–​140n3 Arrival 18–​19, 111–​113, 116, 126, 175–​176 Asylum 114–​116 Autobiography 47, 49–​50, 59–​60, 91, 116–​117 Aztlán 26–​27, 28, 38–​39, 55, 153, 153n1, 157, 158, 163 Baca, Jimmy Santiago 35–​36 A Glass of Water 35–​36 Barbot, Karine 3–​4, 11 Barreto, Matt 72, 73–​74 Barrio-​centric 26–​27 Belonging 3–​6, 46–​49, 51–​52, 53, 60, 62–​64, 69, 79–​80, 91, 109–​111, 110–​111n8, 113, 114–​115, 124–​125, 144–​145, 166 Benito, Jesús 12 binational 77–​78 border 1–​2, 6, 7–​8, 9–​10, 11, 12, 32–​33, 60, 62–​63, 77–​78, 96–​97, 135–​150, 152–​155, 157–​159, 162–​164, 163–​164n10, 165–​166, 167, 168 See also la frontera and frontier See also political line Brito, Aristeo 157, 166 Brown, Ariana 86–​87, 92–​93n6, 101–​102 Bruce-​Novoa, Juan 26–​27, 26–​27n2, 163 interlingualism 26–​27 Burciaga, José Antonio 28–​29 Restless Serpents 28–​29 Cabrera, Fernando 74 Calderón, Héctor 30–​31n4 Caminero-​Santangelo, Marta 8–​10, 53–​ 54, 55–​56 Campa, Arthur L. 153 Cantú, Norma 32–​33 Canícula 32–​33 Cantú, Francisco 149 Casey, Edward S. 136–​137n1, 146–​147 Chávez, Cesar 28, 155

180 Index Chávez, Denise 31–​32 The Last of the Menu Girls 31–​32 Chicanas/​os 24, 109–​110, 116–​117, 124–​125 Chicana Postmodern Generation 15–​16, 29–​30n3, 30 Chicano Renaissance 1–​2, 15–​16, 25, 27–​28, 41 second renaissance 30, 33 Caglar, Ayse 3 cara: Chicano Art, Resistance and Affirmation 38–​39n13 Caribbean 6–​7, 26–​27, 54–​55, 57–​58, 62, 87–​ 88, 94–​95, 109–​110, 111–​113, 128, 129–​130 Casanova de, Masi 10, 68–​69 Castillo, Debra Ann 148–​149 Castillo, Ana 31–​33, 39–​40 The Mixquiahuala Letters 31–​32 genre jumping 31–​32n7 So Far from God 32–​33 Cepeda, Raquel 47–​48 Bird of Paradise: How I Became a Latina 47–​48 Cisneros, Sandra 31–​33, 36–​39 The House on Mango Street Woman Hollering Creek 32–​33 Caramelo: Or, Puro Cuento 38–​39 A House of My Own 36–​38 Code-​switching 4–​5, 11, 26–​27, 54–​55 Colombian 69, 72–​73, 74–​76, 79 coloniality 18, 85, 86–​87, 92–​93 of power 18, 85, 86–​87, 90–​91 of gender 86–​87 de-​colonial 17–​18, 84 collectivity 113, 129–​130, 165–​166 Corpi, Lucha 32–​33, 35–​36 Eulogy of a Brown Angel 32–​33 Crimson Moon 35–​36 Cosmopolitanism 18, 89–​93, 96–​97 Critical 89 de-​colonial 89–​90 Cota-​Cárdenas, Margarita 31–​32 Puppet: A Chicano Novella 31–​32 Cuban 6, 56–​57, 66–​67, 69, 109–​111, 113–​117, 113n18, 118–​119, 124 Cuban-​American 26–​27, 29–​30, 109–​110, 110–​111n6, 111–​112n9, 113, 124 Cubanidad 18–​19, 110, 118–​119, 124 (ethno)nationalism 120–​121 Cultural continuity 5–​6, 47–​48, 60–​61, 62–​ 63, 101–​102

Davis, Mike 137 Delgadillo, Theresa 11 De-​linking 90–​91 Descendancy 91 Diaspora 6, 9–​10, 11, 51–​52, 53, 54–​55, 60–​61, 62–​63, 85, 91, 94–​95, 95n7, 96 Afro-​diaspora 57 Mexican 137–​138 Latina 150 discrimination 6, 7, 10, 51, 55–​56, 84–​85, 86–​87, 92–​93, 99, 113–​114, 120–​121, 136–​ 137n1, 143, 159–​160, 172–​173 disidentification 118–​119, 121, 122, 124, 129, 145 Dominicans 46, 66 Dominican-​Americans 46, 66 Dominican Board of Elections 77–​78 Dominican political parties 77–​79 Dominicanidad 66–​67 Dominicanness 52–​53, 54–​55 Dominicanos USA (dusa) 78 See also Afro-​Dominican Espaillat, Adriano (Aquino) 69–​70, 78, 79 ekphrasis 117–​118 Espinal, Aris 75–​76 Espinal, Rafael 74–​75 Esteves, Sandra Maria 4–​6, 7, 8–​9, 173, 177 ethnicity 2–​5, 7, 9–​10, 11, 21, 46–​48, 52–​53, 54–​57, 68–​69, 73–​74, 76–​77, 86–​88, 90–​ 91, 92–​93, 97–​98, 100, 173 panethnicity 3–​4, 8, 10, 11, 17–​18, 46–​47, 49–​50, 57, 66–​67, 68, 69, 70–​71, 73–​75, 171–​173 politics 75–​76, 77 ethnic identity 4–​5, 7, 66–​67, 68, 69, 75, 77, 97–​99, 101–​103, 171–​172, 173–​174 ethnocentric 71 ethnoracialized minorities 68–​69 exiles 110–​111, 111n9, 113 Falcón, Angelo 69–​70 Fernández, Ana Teresa 19–​20, 136–​137, 141, 145–​150 fissures 26, 27–​28, 53 innovative fissures 34–​35 Flor y canto (in Xóchitl in cuicatl) 28–​29 frontera, la 135–​136, 139–​140, 144–​145, 146–​ 147, 150, 163, 168 frontier 153, 154, 157, 166, 168

181

Index Ganster, Paul 136–​137n7 Garcia Bedolla, Lisa 72 Garcia, F. Chris 68–​69 Gaspar de Alba, Alicia 32–​33, 33n8 Sor Juana’s Second Dream 32–​33 Desert Blood 33n8 Gewecke, Frauke 155, 168 Globalization 33–​34, 77–​78 Gonzales, Rodolfo “Corky” 28 I Am Joaquín /​Yo soy Joaquín 28 González Mireles, Jovita 33–​34 Dew on the Thorn 33–​34 graphic novel 36–​38 Grande, Reyna 36–​38 Across a Hundred Mountains 36–​38 Distance between Us: A Memoir 36–​38 Grandin, Greg 149 Grito, el: A Journal of Mexican American Thought 28, 29–​30n3 Hernandez, Ramona 77–​79 Herrera, Juan Felipe 35–​39, 36–​38n12 Cinnamon Girl 35–​36 Half of the World in Light 36–​38 Lotería Cards and Fortune Poems 36–​38n12 Herrera-​Sobek, María 39–​40, 139–​140n2, 167 Hero, Rodney E. 68–​69 heterosexist 111n8, 118–​119, 121n41 Hinojosa-​Smith, Rolando 28–​29 Estampas del Valle y otras obras 28–​29 Hispanic 1–​2, 10, 13–​14, 20–​21, 25, 25n1, 29–​ 30, 33–​34, 54–​55, 66–​67, 69–​71, 76–​77, 108–​110, 108–​109n1, 111, 114–​115, 138, 157, 158–​161, 164, 168 decade of the 29–​30 Hispanic Caribbean 112–​113, 112–​113n14 Hoffnung-​Garskof, Jesse 70–​71 homeland attachments 5–​6, 48–​49, 51–​52, 59, 60–​61, 62–​63, 69–​70, 114–​115, 139, 143–​144, 145, 149–​150, 173 country-​of-​origin attachments 2–​3, 8–​9, 136–​137 homophobia 108–​109, 116, 119, 120–​121, 129–​130 Hoops, Joshua F. 9–​10 idc 75–​76 identity 1–​5, 6, 11–​12, 46–​47, 54–​55, 68, 76–​ 77, 89, 95, 96, 111, 126, 171–​172

aggregate identity 6–​7, 66–​67, 68, 75–​ 77, 79–​80 Chicano identity 1–​2, 137, 138, 139, 139–​ 140n2, 156–​157, 158, 161–​162 construction/​formation 2–​4, 5–​6, 8–​10, 14, 47, 60, 126, 136–​137, 150, 164, 171–​172 hyphenated identity 3, 11–​12, 175 hybrid identity 4–​5, 46–​47, 66–​67, 91, 96, 157–​158, 165–​166 Latina/​o/​x identity 4–​5, 6, 10, 46–​47, 54–​ 55, 59, 66–​67, 68–​69, 95–​96, 98, 145, 173 markers 1–​3, 6, 12 political identity 66–​67, 68, 70–​71, 79–​80 ideology 16, 124, 163, 166, 172, 175–​176 immigration 10, 28–​29n3, 36–​38, 61–​62, 69, 95–​96, 110–​111, 115–​116, 130, 136–​137, 139–​ 140, 149–​150, 154–​155, 156, 158–​159, 162 intergroup 71 behavior 71 solidarity 71 intergroup competition 71 Internal Epic 31–​32 Intra-​history 63–​64 Islas, Arturo 33n10 The Rain God 33n10 Isolated Generation 28–​29 Jiménez Underwood, Consuelo 19–​20, 135–​ 136, 139–​145, 148–​149 Kanellos, Nicolás 25n1, 33–​34, 39–​41 Kanellos and Esteva-​Fabregat 33–​34 Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the United States Hispanic American Literature: Hispanic Immigrant Literature 33–​34 Herencia 33–​34 Greenwood Encyclopedia of Latino Literature 33–​34 Kasinitz, P., Mollenkopf, J.H., Waters M.C., and Holdway, J. 72–​73 Kaup, Monika 137–​139, 148–​150 Klein, Jeff 75–​76 Krohn-​Hansen, Christian 73 language barriers 69–​70 Laó-​Montes, Agustín 6–​7, 9, 18, 58–​59, 84–​ 85, 87, 92–​93, 94–​97, 95n7, 103, 172 Mambo Montage 84–​85

182 Index Latin American 2, 3–​4, 7–​8, 9–​10, 11, 68–​69, 71–​72, 94–​95, 118, 121n40, 129–​130 Latinidad/​Latinidades afro-​latinidad 94 as concept 2–​5, 8, 12, 24, 32–​33, 55, 56, 66–​67, 68–​69, 71–​72, 79–​80, 84–​87, 110, 111–​113, 135–​137, 139–​140, 157, 171–​172, 175 landscapes of 87 latinismo 69 latinization 84–​87, 94–​95, 172 from below 84–​87, 94–​95, 172 Levitt, Peggy, and Jaworsky, Nadya. 77–​78 Leal, Luis 153 Limón, Graciela 32–​33, 35–​38 The Memories of Ana Calderón 32–​33 Erased Faces 35–​36 The River Flows North 36–​38 literature of Resistance 12 Lomelí, Francisco 2–​3, 15–​16, 28–​29 Lomelí, Francisco and Shirley, Carl 33–​34 Dictionary of Literary Biography: Chicano Writers 33–​34 Lomelí, Francisco and Colahan, Clark 39–​40 Defying the Inquisition in Colonial New Mexico 39–​40 Historical Dictionary of U.S. Latino Literature 40–​41 López, Alma 139–​140n2 López, Josefina 32–​33, 35–​36 Real Women Have Curves 32–​33 Hungry Woman in Paris 35–​36 Madsen, Deborah L. 155 Manzanas Calvo, Ana María 12 Mariel Boatlift the 110–​111, 113–​116, 118–​ 119n34, 120–​121n38 Martín Rodríguez, Manuel 39–​40 Cantas a Marte y das batalla a Apolo 39–​40 Gaspar de Villagrá 39–​40 Martínez, Víctor 32–​33n9 A Parrot in the Oven 32–​33n9 memoir 16–​17, 47–​50, 51, 52–​53, 59–​61, 63–​ 64, 116, 118, 174–​175 memory 4–​6, 14, 16–​17, 21, 47, 55, 58–​61, 62–​63, 91, 92–​93, 94, 97–​98, 100, 101,

102–​103, 117–​118, 117n33, 125–​127, 172–​ 173, 174–​175 broken 4–​6, 59, 62–​64 collective/​cultural 5–​6, 14–​15, 16, 47, 48–​ 49, 51–​52, 84–​85, 91, 94, 172–​173, 174–​175 new memory 18–​19, 108, 110–​113, 113n17, 117, 124, 129–​130 Mendez, Jasminne 16–​17, 47, 51–​55, 56–​57, 59–​60, 63–​64, 174–​175 Island of Dreams 51 Méndez, Miguel 28–​29, 36–​38, 153n1, 157, 161–​162 Peregrinos de Aztlán 28–​29 El circo que se perdió en el desierto de Sonora 36–​38 Messianic and Revolutionary Spirit 28 Mestizaje 2, 6–​7, 54–​55, 61–​62, 95–​ 96, 97–​98 Mexican 1–​2, 6, 25–​27, 36–​38, 36–​38n12, 39–​40, 50–​51, 54, 61–​62, 66–​67, 69, 72–​ 73, 75–​76, 79, 102, 111–​112, 136–​138, 147, 152, 153, 156, 157–​158, 159, 162, 164–​165, 166–​168 Mexican American 1–​2, 8–​9, 25, 28, 33–​ 34, 39–​40, 67–​68, 69–​70, 72, 137–​138, 154, 155, 159, 161 Mexican National Electoral Institute (ine) 79 Milian, Claudia 2, 11–​12, 110 political mobilization 66–​67, 72–​73, 74–​ 75, 77–​78 Mora, Pat 31–​32 Borders 31–​32 Moraga, Cherríe 31–​32 Giving Up the Ghost 31–​32 Morales, Alejandro 29, 32–​33, 35–​36, 153n1, 155, 157, 163–​164, 163–​164n10, 166–​167 Caras viejas y vino nuevo 29 The Rag Doll Plagues 32–​33, 166–​167 River of Angels 35–​36 Morales, Ed 1–​2, 10, 12, 47–​48, 54–​55, 75–​76 movimiento campesino 155 Moya, Francisco 75–​76 Murray, Ixta Maya 33–​34 Locas 33–​34 Muñoz, Elías Miguel 7–​8, 18, 108 nationalism 2, 3, 30–​31, 75–​76, 94–​95, 108–​ 109n4, 120–​121, 137–​138, 148–​149

Index transnationalism 4–​5, 6–​7, 8–​9, 11, 14, 17–​18, 34–​35, 36, 67–​68, 77–​78, 79, 87–​88, 97–​98, 103, 114–​115, 137–​ 138, 167 Nava, Michael 32–​33n8, 33 The Hidden Law 32n8 The Death of Friends 33 Niggli, Josefina 33–​34 nostalgia 18–​19, 59–​60 Nuyorican 84–​91, 98–​99 Nuyorican Poets Café 87–​88, 91, 103 Ocasio-​Cortez, Alexandria 75–​76 Ornelas, Berta 28–​29 Come Down from the Mound 28–​29 Ortiz, Amalia 18, 86–​87, 99, 102–​103 Padilla, Genaro 39–​40 The Daring Flight of My Pen 39–​40 Padilla, Félix M. 8–​9, 69 Pardo, Fernández, Rodrigo 152 Paredes, Américo 33–​34 George Washington Gómez 33–​34 Peralta, Jose 75–​76 Pérez, Emma 33, 139, 158 The Decolonial Imaginary 33 Forgetting the Alamo 36–​38 Pérez, Laura E. 139–​140, 143–​145 Pérez, Luis 33–​34 El Coyote, the Rebel 33–​34 Pérez de Villagrá, Gaspar 39–​40 Historia de la Nueva México 39–​40 Pérez-​Torres, Rafael 39–​40 Mestizaje 39–​40 Pineda, Cecile 31–​32 Face 31–​32 Pita, Beatrice 35–​36n11, 36–​38 Lunar Braceros 36–​38 Plascencia, Salvador 36–​38 The People of Paper 36–​38 Political 2–​3, 4–​5, 9, 10, 11–​12, 13–​15, 17–​19, 20–​21, 26–​27, 34–​35, 46–​47, 55, 62–​63, 66, 85–​87, 88–​89, 93, 94–​95, 98–​99, 103, 108–​109, 108–​109n2, 113–​114, 115–​ 116, 123, 124, 145, 146–​147, 149–​150, 156, 157–​158, 159, 160–​161, 163, 164, 171–​173, 175–​176 political capital 69, 73–​74, 75–​76

183 line 136–​138, 141–​143, 145–​146, 148–​150, 165–​166, 175–​176 political mobilization 66–​67, 72–​73, 74–​75, 77–​78 political pragmatism 67–​68, 69, 71–​72, 73–​74 Portillo-​Trembley, Estela 28–​29, 29–​30n3, 31–​32 Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings 28–​29 Trini 29–​30n3 power access to 10, 67, 172, 175–​176 coloniality of 18, 73–​74, 78–​79, 85–​68 political 69 relations 9–​10, 18, 58–​59, 60–​61, 73, 84–​ 85, 171–​172 Puerto Ricans 4–​6, 7, 8–​9, 26–​27, 29–​30, 54, 66–​67, 68–​76, 87–​88, 91, 98–​99, 109–​ 110, 124, 168 pluriversal 20–​21 pluriversality 18, 89–​90, 96–​97, 98–​99 queer 7–​8, 33, 108, 116, 116n28, 117–​119, 124 queering 7–​8, 110–​111, 111n8, 113, 124, 175 material queering 110–​111, 125 Quijano, Aníbal 18, 85, 95 Quinto Sol Generation 28, 29–​30n3, 40–​41 Quota Law 154 race 6, 7, 9–​10, 16–​17, 21, 31–​32, 47, 55–​56, 57, 63–​64, 86–​87, 91–​93, 95–​96, 147–​148, 158–​159, 172, 173–​174 politics of 55 multiracial 6, 56–​57, 158–​159 Rangel, Charlie 69–​70 Ramos, Manuel 32–​33n8 The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz 32–​33n8 Rasquachismo 38–​39, 38–​39n13, 152–​160 Rechy, John 33n10 City of Night 33n10 Recovery Project of the Hispanic U.S. Literary 25 Reynoso, Antonio 74–​75 Refugees 110, 113n18, 113–​116, 114–​115n20 Ricourt, Milagros and Danta, Ruby 10, 68–​69 Ríos, Isabella 28–​29 Victuum 28–​29

184 Index Rivera, Tomás 41 “…Y no se lo tragó la tierra” 41 Preuhs, Robert 68–​69 Rodríguez, Artemio 36–​38 Lotería Cards and Fortune Poems  36–​38 Rodríguez, Luis 33–​34 La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. 33–​34 Rodriguez, Ydanis 74 Romero, Dennis 1–​2 Rouse, Roger 162 Ruiz de Burton, María Amparo 33–​34 The Squatter and the Don 33–​34 Saénz, Benjamín Alire 33 Dark and Perfect Angels 33 Salazar, Carmen  Salazar, Ken 160–​161 Saldívar, José David 30–​31n4, 34–​35 Criticism in the Borderlands 34–​35 Saldívar, Ramón 33–​34 Saldívar-​Hull, Sonia 33 Sanchez, Gabriel R. 68–​69 Sánchez, Phil 28–​29 Don Phil-​O-​Meno sí la mancha 28–​29 Sánchez, Rosaura 33–​34, 35–​36n11 Telling Identities 33–​34 Lunar Braceros 35–​36n11 Santa Baraza 139–​140n2 Segura, Gary M. 72 Social Identity Theory 71 Soto, Gary 32–​33n12 Baseball in April and Other Stories 32–​33n12 Summer Wheels 32–​33n12 Space 1–​2, 10, 11–​12, 14, 18–​21, 59–​60, 62, 63–​64, 71–​72, 79–​80, 84–​85, 87, 88–​89, 91, 95n7, 135–​138, 136–​137n1, 139–​140, 142–​143, 145, 146–​147, 152, 153, 165–​166, 168, 172–​173, 175 agnostic 88–​89 cultural/​social 156, 158–​159, 162 discursive 84–​85, 172 imaginary 59–​60 literary 152 political 77–​78, 175–​176 striated 136–​137

Stavans, Ilán 39–​41 The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature 40–​41 Survivance 103 Survivalist poetics 98, 100 Tajfel, Henri 71, 71n2 Tatum, Charles 33–​34 Teatro Campesino 28–​29, 160 the Independent Democratic Conference, or idc 75–​76 Thomas, Piri 6, 7 Torres-​Sailant, Silvio 6 Treaty of Guadalupe-​Hidalgo 154, 158 Troncoso, Sergio 32–​33n8 The Nature of Truth 32–​33n8 Trujillo, Carla 33 Chicana Lesbians 33 Trump, Donald 1–​2, 13–​14, 20, 75–​76, 115, 149–​150, 154, 159, 160–​161, 161n9 Turner, John C. 71, 71n2 Urrea, Luis Alberto 36–​38 Into the Beautiful North 36–​38 The Hummingbird’s Daughter 36–​38 US Neocolonialism 111, 111–​112n13, 112–​113, 112–​113n16 Utku, Sazgin 77 Valdez, Luis 28, 35 Mummified Deer and Other Plays 35 Valle, Mayda del 86–​87, 91 Vásques, Perry 152, 159 Velásquez, Gloria 32–​33n9 Juanita Fightgs the School Board  32–​33n9 Venegas, Daniel 157 Las aventuras de Don Chipote o cuando los pericos mamen 157 Villaraigosa, Antonio 160–​161 Villanueva, Alma Luz 35–​36 Luna’s California Poppies 35–​36 Villanueva, Tino 26–​27, 26–​27n2 “bisensitivity” 26–​27 So Spoke Penelope 35–​36 Villaseñor, Víctor 32–​33, 40–​41 Rain of Gold 32–​33

185

Index Villegas de Magnón, Leonor 33–​34 The Rebel 33–​34 Viramontes, Helena María 31–​33, 35–​36 The Moths and Other Stories 31–​32 Under the Feet of Jesus 32–​33 Their Dogs Came with Them 35–​36 Watkins, Mary 136–​137n1, 146–​147 Wolfinger, Raymond E. 74

West-​Durán, Alan 40–​41 Latino and Latina Writers 40–​41 Ybarra-​Frausto, Tomás 38–​39n13, 159–​160 Zambrano, Mario Alberto 28–​29 Lotería: A Novel 28–​29 Zamora, Bernice 28–​29 Restless Serpents 28–​29