Reimagining US Colombianidades: Transnational subjectivities, cultural expressions, and political contestations (The Latino Studies, 3) 3031217837, 9783031217838

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Reimagining US Colombianidades: Transnational subjectivities, cultural expressions, and political contestations

Edited by Lina Rincón · Johana Londoño Jennifer Harford Vargas · María Elena Cepeda

Reimagining US Colombianidades: Transnational subjectivities, cultural expressions, and political contestations

Lina Rincón • Johana Londoño Jennifer Harford Vargas • María Elena Cepeda Editors

Reimagining US Colombianidades: Transnational subjectivities, cultural expressions, and political contestations

Previously published in Latino Studies Volume 18, issue 3, September 2020

Editors Lina Rincón Diversity & Inclusion California State University, Sacramento Sacramento, CA, USA

Johana Londoño Director of LACS Graduate Studies University at Albany, State University o Albany, NY, USA

Jennifer Harford Vargas Bryn Mawr College Bryn Mawr, PA, USA

María Elena Cepeda Williams College Williamstown, MA, USA

Spinoff from journal: “Latino Studies” Volume 18, issue 3, September 2020 ISBN 978-3-031-21783-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022, Corrected Publication 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

A note from the editor ............................................................................................. 1 Lourdes Torres: Latino Studies 2020, 2020: 18:299–300 (31, July 2020) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-020-00270-8 Reimagining US Colombianidades: Transnational subjectivities, cultural expressions, and political contestations ................................................... 3 Lina Rincón, Johana Londoño, Jennifer Harford Vargas, and María Elena Cepeda: Latino Studies 2020, 2020: 18:301–325 (3, August 2020) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-020-00271-7 Latina feminist moments of recognition: Contesting the boundaries of gendered US Colombianidad in Bomba Estéreo’s “Soy yo”.......................... 29 María Elena Cepeda: Latino Studies 2020, 2020: 18:326–342 (31, July 2020) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-020-00267-3 Diasporic home: US Colombian belonging and becoming in Patricia Engel’s Vida ......................................................................................... 47 Catalina Esguerra: Latino Studies 2020, 2020: 18:343–362 (31, July 2020) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-020-00264-6 Asserting difference: Racialized expressions of Colombianidades in Philadelphia ....................................................................................................... 67 Diane R. Garbow: Latino Studies 2020, 2020: 18:363–389 (3, August 2020) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-020-00265-5 Disaggregating the Latina/o/x “umbrella”: The political attitudes of US Colombians .................................................................................................. 95 Angie N. Ocampo and Angela X. Ocampo: Latino Studies 2020, 2020: 18:390–419 (4, August 2020) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-020-00268-2 New York’s lonely streets: Constructions of soledad in Colombianx migrant experiences ............................................................................................. 125 Ariana Ochoa Camacho: Latino Studies 2020, 2020: 18:420–441 (14, August 2020) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-020-00266-4

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Concrete disavowal: Re‑placing Colombian communities into the New York landscape before World War II ......................................... 147 John Mckiernan‑Gonz lez: Latino Studies 2020, 2020: 18:442–456 (10, August 2020) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-020-00260-w Y qué de Andrés? On the need for queer‑centered asylum laws and histories ......................................................................................................... 163 Yamil Avivi: Latino Studies 2020, 2020: 18:457–465 (31, July 2020) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-020-00258-4 ?

Strategies of segregation: Race, residence, and the struggle for educational equality....................................................................................... 173 Philis M. Barragán Goetz: Latino Studies 2020, 2020: 18:466–468 (31, July 2020) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-020-00269-1 Pathways of desire: The sexual migration of Mexican gay men ...................... 177 William A. Calvo‑Quiros: Latino Studies 2020, 2020: 18:469–471 (3, August 2020) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-020-00263-7 Undocumented storytellers: Narrating the immigrant rights movement ....... 181 Naseem Jamnia: Latino Studies 2020, 2020: 18:472–474 (3, August 2020) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-020-00259-3 Deported to death: How drug violence is changing migration on the US–Mexico border ................................................................................... 185 Adrián Márquez Rabuñal: Latino Studies 2020, 2020: 18:475–477 (6, August 2020) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-020-00262-8 Ricanness: Enduring time in anticolonial performance ................................... 189 Iván A. Ramos: Latino Studies 2020, 2020: 18:478–481 (31, July 2020) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-020-00261-9 Correction to: Listening to more than salsa: A letter of appreciation to Dr. Frances R. Aparicio .................................................................................. 193 Wilson Valentín‑Escobar: Latino Studies 2020, 2020: 18:482 (10, August 2020) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-020-00257-5 Correction to: New York’s lonely streets: Constructions of soledad in Colombianx migrant experiences .................................................................. C1

Latino Studies (2020) 18:299–300 https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-020-00270-8 EDITORIAL

A note from the editor Lourdes Torres1 Published online: 31 July 2020 © Springer Nature Limited 2020

Although the conceptual framework of Latinidades is continually called into question for its gaps and exclusions, I remain committed to its usefulness and its capacity to speak to the range of realities and experiences of Latin American and Caribbean communities residing in the United States. Since its inception, Latinidades has been under construction and ever-evolving as marginalized and excluded subjects make their voices heard and work to revise and reconfigure its meaning. This special issue, “Re-imagining US Colombianidades,” focuses our attention on yet another community that has been scantily represented in Latino/a/x studies scholarship. US Colombians are no longer content to be characterized as “the other Latinos,” and the editors of this special issue make the case that study of US Colombianidades enhances and productively troubles Latino/a/x studies. This engaging set of essays highlights the rich diversity of US Colombianidades as well as the group’s similarities and differences with other Latino/a/x groups. With its innovative cultural studies and social sciences perspectives and interpretive theories, this volume offers a deep dive into issues such as how racial, gender, sexual, and socioeconomic realities shape US Colombian experience; the representation of US Colombians in popular culture; interethnic relations between Colombians and other Latina/o/xs; the political participation of Colombians in US electoral politics; Colombian transnational understandings of identity; and much more. I want to thank the editors of this special issue—Lina Rincón, Johana Londoño, Jennifer Harford Vargas, and María Elena Cepeda—for curating a set of articles that will most certainly inspire Latino/a/x studies scholars to expand our notions of Latinidades and be attentive to the ways in which a focus on US Colombianidades complicates and enriches our field.

Chapter 1 was originally published as Torres, L. Latino Studies (2020) 18: 299–300. https://doi.org/10.1057/ s41276-020-00270-8.

* Lourdes Torres [email protected] 1



DePaul University, Chicago, IL, USA

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L. Torres

Publisher’s Note  Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

2

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Latino Studies (2020) 18:301–325 https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-020-00271-7 SPECIAL ISSUE INTRODUCTION

Reimagining US Colombianidades: Transnational subjectivities, cultural expressions, and political contestations Lina Rincón1 · Johana Londoño2 · Jennifer Harford Vargas3 · María Elena Cepeda4 Published online: 3 August 2020 © Springer Nature Limited 2020

On 2 February 2020, while we were in the process of composing this introduction, more than a hundred million global television viewers witnessed perhaps the most hotly discussed Latina/o/x live musical event since the electrifying 1999 Grammy performance of “Livin’ La Vida Loca” by Puerto Rican entertainer Ricky Martin. The Latinidad on display in 2020 was distinctly female, Colombian, and Puerto Rican: Shakira and Jennifer Lopez headlined the Super Bowl halftime show, making them the first two Latinas in history to perform on it together. Juxtaposed against the racial tensions of the post–Colin Kaepernick National Football League; white middle-class viewers’ concerns about the ostensibly “vulgar” spectacle of two unapologetically sexy and talented Latinas; critiques regarding the show’s centering of white Latinidad1; and the rampant anti-Latina/o/x sentiment of the Trump era, the 2020 1

 We note here the strong critiques of the show’s privileging of Latina/o/x whiteness that quickly emerged from Latina scholars, such as Petra Rivera-Rideau (2020), who questioned the effectiveness of the artists’ calls for Latina/o/x unity within a context in which only a small fraction of the community was racially represented, and Zaire Dinzey-Flores (2020), who stated, “I’d suggest that the performance exhibits the seduction of whiteness and the continual ability for non-Black Latinas/os/xs to imagine a world where Blackness is part and parcel of their community and not a root or influence.” Chapter 2 was originally published as Rincón, L., Londoño, J., Vargas, J. H. & Cepeda, M. E. Latino Studies (2020) 18: 301–325. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-020-00271-7.

* Lina Rincón [email protected] Johana Londoño [email protected] Jennifer Harford Vargas [email protected] María Elena Cepeda [email protected] 1

Framingham State University, Framingham, USA

2

University at Albany, SUNY, Albany, USA

3

Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, USA

4

Williams College, Williamstown, USA



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halftime show offered many insights into the fundamental nature of US Colombianidades. It was, we argue, a critical moment in the potential rebranding of Colombian identity in the global popular imagination, in which US Colombians and Latina/o/xs become central, not peripheral, to the collective celebrations and histories of US cultural touchstones such as the Superbowl, as problematic as they may be. Together, Lopez and Shakira underscore the inherently relational, dynamic character of Latinidad. When read comparatively, we can note the more overt and legible political stances adopted by Lopez in her performance (such as her use of the Puerto Rican flag; the sampling of Bruce Springsteen’s classic “Born in the USA,” which was performed by children emerging from prop cages that evoked the detention of migrant children, led by Lopez’s own daughter; and her exhortation for “Latinos” to “get loud” against respectability politics) in contradistinction to Shakira’s less legible identity markers and physical postures (the incorporation of various uniquely Colombian and specifically costeña/o/x musical genres and references2; Barranquilla carnival culture and the inclusion of the zaghrouta and other markers of diasporic Lebanese identity; and the use of Colombian backup dancers and Colombian reggaetón megastar J. Balvin). As a Puerto Rican from the Bronx and as a member of a much larger, more visible, and historically established Latina/o/x community, Jennifer Lopez’s relationship to Latinidad is unquestioned. In contrast, the Colombian-born Shakira, and the US Colombianidades she was associated with on that emblematic stage of US sport culture,3 is hyper-visible yet unseen in her complexity and specificity because of a dominant global imaginary regarding Colombians that is limited to images of Juan Valdés coffee, drugs, masculinist violence, corruption, war, and normatively beautiful women. Some Latina/o/x viewers critiqued the traces of Colombianidad recognizable in the spectacle (especially of Shakira’s light-skinned body) as yet another instance of a white-presenting South American celebrity employed to market and signify a racially diverse US Latinidad, while key aspects of her performance, such as the Colombian and costeña/o/x facets, were unreadable to many, including other Latina/o/xs. One example of the illegibility that surfaced in public responses to Shakira’s performance was the erroneous reading of the high-pitched, warbling cry (otherwise known in the Arab world as a zaghrouta) that she released at a key point in the show. Many viewers interpreted the sonic gesture, captured in an endless series

2

  “Costeño, “costeña” or the less commonly used “costeñx” are the colloquial referents for the natives of Colombia’s northern Caribbean coast, popularly known as “La Costa.” We assert here as well as later on in this introduction that the need to familiarize oneself with the specificities of Colombian regionalisms in order to fully capture the subtleties of Shakira’s performance highlights the saliency of regionalized perspectives within studies of transnational Colombian culture. Moreover, by designating Shakira’s performance as more subdued, we do not wish to suggest that Shakira’s performative choices were somehow less “political,” but rather that they were more coded and therefore ostensibly less recognizable to non-Colombian viewers. For a distinctly US Colombiana perspective on the show, see Varela Rodríguez (2020). 3   We use “US Colombian” and not “Colombian American” because we agree with scholars who have pointed out that adding “American” to the nation of origin or region (i.e., Colombian American or Central American American) plays into the US co-optation of the term “American” and because it  is also redundant, since Colombia is in the Americas (Oboler 1995; Gruesz 2007). 4

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of memes picturing Shakira with her tongue out and peering into the camera, as a form of sexual display. Those familiar with Colombian regional cultures, however, quickly recognized the zaghrouta as emblematic of Shakira’s deep roots in the large Lebanese-origin population of Barranquilla, the largest city of the country’s northern Caribbean coast (see Barron 2020; Celis 2012; Cepeda 2003, 2008, 2010; Fuchs 2007; Gontovnik 2010; Iskandar 2003). We attribute this particular instance of misrecognition on the part of viewers as evidence of the enduring power of hypersexualized imagery and its historic association with Latina and gendered, racialized bodies in general.4 Some public reaction to Shakira’s performance also reignited stereotypes about US Colombianidades and US South Americans in general, such as the notions that they uniformly enjoy class privilege, are white, and are “new” migrants mostly categorized as Latin Americans. While this may be true of Shakira, it is not true of all US Colombians. Moreover, as María Elena Cepeda (2003, 2010) has argued, Shakira’s Latinidad underscores—though rarely is acknowledged as such—the centrality of transnational ties in any consideration of the dynamic relationship between the categories of “Latina/o/x” and “Latin American.” These popular interpretations of Shakira’s performance in the Super Bowl emphasize the ways that US Colombians are simultaneously hyper-visible yet unseen in US society, which powerfully resonates with the ideas and vision that motivate this special issue. This special issue moves beyond and at times challenges dominant assumptions about Colombians: that they are a “new” group in the US; that they are an “other” within the broader Latina/o/x imaginary; that Colombians (and South Americans in general) are more privileged middle- and upper-class migrants; and that the community can be comprehensively understood through the paradigms of narco-trafficking and hypersexualized femininity. We believe that the extant frameworks for understanding the US Colombian experience do not fully account for the distinct intricacies of Colombian diasporic lives. At this fruitful cultural, historical and political moment, we therefore invite scholars to explore the central thematics, analytical lenses, and driving preoccupations of US Colombianidades within a resolutely interdisciplinary, transnational, and relational Latina/o/x studies framework. Our vision for this special issue arose out of an interdisciplinary symposium organized by the US Colombianx Editorial Collective (comprising María Elena Cepeda, Jennifer Harford Vargas, Johana Londoño, John Mckiernan-González, Michelle Nasser De La Torre, and Ariana Ochoa Camacho) at Williams College in October 2017. Twenty-seven scholars from US colleges and universities and Colombia- and US-based community groups gathered to present research on an array of topics including US Colombian artists, US electoral politics, Colombian diasporic novelists, Colombian global cultural productions, US Colombian communities, US tourists in Colombia, and Colombian beauty pageants in the United States, among 4

  Shakira thus constitutes a vivid example of how, as Jesús Estrada asserts, hypervisibility frequently decontextualizes Latina bodies (Jesús Estrada, personal communication with María Elena Cepeda, 3 May 2020). Moreover, Shakira is best understood as a diasporic subject two times over (Cepeda 2003, 2010): she is the daughter of two migrants and a migrant herself, a specific positionality frequently witnessed in Colombia’s Caribbean port cities, yet one that may also go mis- or unrecognized in studies of US Colombianidades that fail to account for regional and transnational perspectives. Reprinted from the journal

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others. All the articles for this special issue were presented and workshopped at the symposium or at a number of panels on US Colombianidades we have organized at the last two Latina/o Studies Association conferences and at the last two annual meetings of the American Studies Association. Through this sustained collaboration across multiple disciplines, we have begun to build the interdisciplinary subfield of US Colombian studies, and we view this special issue as an integral part of imagining the futures of US Colombianidades. This special issue foregrounds overlooked instances of Colombianidades in the United States and centers US Colombian community formations, transnational imaginaries, media representations, involvement in electoral politics, and queer activism in relation to other (not “other”) Latina/o/xs. In thinking of US Colombians alongside Latina/o/xs of multiple national, racial, gender, sexual, and socioeconomic identities, we collectively unveil the uniquely Colombian stories that have shaped and continue to shape Latina/o/x cultures, politics, and lives. Our goal for this introduction and for all of the articles included herein is to contribute to an interdisciplinary archive of US Colombian scholarship, to intentionally deploy citational politics in the service of helping scholars pursue research on US Colombianidades, and to provide readers with a sense of the various experiences and narratives of Colombianidad. The archive of references, texts, and examples we offer in this special issue is not exhaustive; rather, it is a selective offering and an opening for future work. Our hope is that we can move beyond the currently delimited and limiting vision of Colombians toward a richer, more complex understanding of US Colombianidades in all its plurality, contradictions, and transnational and intra-ethnic complexities. In the sections that follow, we illustrate how the presence of Colombians in the US has been characterized by the same tension between invisibility and hypervisibility that we observed in public commentary regarding Shakira’s appearance in the Super Bowl. We then discuss the impacts of Colombia’s political history and of its regional dynamics and trace the transhistorical presence of Colombians in the US to contextualize their nuanced transnational experience. Finally, we lay out our vision for centering US Colombian studies within the parameters of Latinidad and the larger field of Latina/o/x studies.

Contesting representational paradigms The relative paucity of published materials on US Colombians has prompted specialists in the field to become adept scholars in the histories, cultural production, and politics of other Latina/o/x national-origin populations in order to better understand the contexts that shape the US Colombian community. The study of diasporic Colombians necessitates a relational approach vis-à-vis other Latinidades, while it simultaneously demands careful attention to place (Londoño 2016) and a transnational scope (Cepeda 2003, 2010; Harford Vargas 2017b; Porras Contreras 2017). As our introduction and each of our contributors to this special issue demonstrate, US Colombian studies is relational, local, and transnational in orientation, driven both by the norms of Latina/o/x studies as it has

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developed as well as by the unique demographic characteristics of US Colombians and Colombia’s historic relationship to the United States. US Colombians have been an understudied group in the field of Latina/o/x studies, erroneously depicted as “new” or “other” Latinos. The language positing “new” and “other” Latina/o/xs is both historically inaccurate (Colombians have been in the US since at least the nineteenth century) and limiting. Built into the field of Latina/o/x studies is a critique of normative postures and categories; therefore, it is necessary to contest the norms that are subtly, even if unintentionally, invoked and reinscribed with the use of “other”/“new” Latina/o/xs. Moreover, the idea of being an “other” Latina/o/x is based on the presumed norm of the triumvirate national-origin populations in the field—Chicana/o/x/Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and US Cuban. These three groups and their distinct migration histories and sociopolitical relationships to the US have shaped the historical development of the field of Latina/o/x studies and are often understood based on their own national-origin specificity (Aparicio 2017, 2019). More recent studies of previously understudied national-origin groups, such as US Dominican studies, and regional studies, such as US Central American studies, have expanded Latina/o/x studies. Our attention to US Colombianidades parallels and intersects with these recent field expansions, and this special issue is our call for the field to understand US Colombians in their own right. As US Colombian academics invested in the study of the Colombian diaspora and its cultural production, political dynamics, and ethnographic particularities, we are keenly aware of how a general lack of knowledge about the Colombian diaspora among US- and Latin America–based academics reflects the manner in which hierarchies of knowledge and beliefs about what is “worth knowing” are shaped by financial considerations and other institutional objectives, themselves molded by ideology (Lippi-Green 2012, p. 283). The recent publication of the text Latina/o Studies (2018) by Ronald L. Mize, designed as a brief introduction to Latina/o/x studies, proves a case in point. Unlike other texts in the same vein, Mize includes a discussion of US South American studies, although it totals less than one page. He attributes US South American studies’ lack of visibility to several nebulous factors, most notably the South American diaspora’s failure to embody Latinidades in the quotidian context. As such, the illegibility of US South American studies more broadly, and US Colombian studies more specifically, is associated with a nebulous communal deficit model. Moreover, Mize includes no consideration of the actual structural issues affecting knowledge production, encompassing issues such as ingrained Colombian communal norms regarding “proper” career paths (read, not an ethnic studies professor); the pervasive desconfianza (mistrust) within Colombian diasporic communities born of the narco-trafficking stigma and generalized violence in Colombia (Guarnizo et  al. 1999; Guarnizo and Espitia 2007), which has led to a lack of communal cohesion; and the difficulty in obtaining institutional funding to conduct transnational fieldwork in a country deemed too “dangerous” by those outside of the field. Mize also provides no citations of the existing literature on US Colombians, giving the impression that no such publications exist. In his superficial recognition of the field, Mize thereby ultimately unwittingly erases South American

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identities, enacting the very epistemological violence that the inclusion of the paragraph on US South American studies was likely intended to contest.5 The politics of recognition in the neoliberal academy demands that, in order to be recognized within current Latina/o/x studies, subfields must be “re-cognized,” or (re)fashioned in the image of existing—and thereby legible—academic cultural scripts (Cardenas 2017, p. 87). Not only does the “other”/“new” Latina/o/x label historically decontextualizes US Colombian presence, it also leads many faculty and administrators—including those in Latina/o/x studies—to believe that, since our numbers must be few, there is not a pressing need to teach the subfield, much less hire diasporic Colombians. This fetishization of demographics as razón de ser is a key element driving the invisibility of US Colombian studies within the hierarchies of worth that define Latina/o/x studies. It is from within this charged context, or the ongoing institutionalization of Latina/o/x studies within US neoliberal systems of higher education, that we posit that the study of US Colombianidades facilitates a much-needed aperture in the existing Latina/o/x studies canon, particularly at a political moment marked by a global rise in xenophobia and ethno-nationalisms. An estimated five million Colombians live abroad, or approximately one-tenth of the country’s population.6 According to the 2010 United States census and a 2013 Pew Research Center estimate, between one million to 1.1 million of these individuals live in the United States, a figure that almost certainly represents an underestimate (LaRosa and Mejía 2017, p. 216). Indeed, Ochoa Camacho employs an amalgam of Colombian and US data to determine that, by the year 2020, the US will be home to approximately 2.2 million individuals of Colombian origin (Ochoa Camacho 2016, pp. 167, 168).7 Sixty percent of the contemporary US Colombian community is foreign-born, and 40% is “established,” or has lived in the United States for more than 20 years. Fifty-six percent of US Colombians are US citizens (a figure that has grown since the opportunity to hold dual citizenship was enshrined in Colombian law in 1991), but roughly 40% of the population is undocumented (Cepeda 2010; Ochoa Camacho 2016, p. 168); and, as recently as 2000, Colombians constituted the fourth-largest undocumented population in the US (Guarnizo and 5

  Falconi and Mazzotti’s edited book The Other Latinos: Central and South Americans in the United States 2008) similarly includes only brief data on Colombians in the United States. Other scholars have attended to US Colombians under the framework of US South American studies (Oboler 2005a, b, and Heredia 2013, 2018). A more robust development of US South American studies remains to be developed in Latina/o/x studies, and our hope is that our study of US Colombians will further the development of this national-origin subfield and of a regional US South American subfield. 6   As LaRosa and Mejía note in their commentary on Colombians abroad, we should consider this figure while keeping in mind that, in other highly populated South American nations such as Argentina, a little more than one million citizens live abroad, or roughly 2% of Argentina’s forty-four million residents. For further comparison, only slightly more than 2% of US residents live outside the nation’s political boundaries (LaRosa and Mejía 2017, p. 215). 7   See Cepeda (2010) and Ochoa Camacho (2016) for further discussion of this persistent undercounting and its attendant consequences. Cepeda (2010) and Ochoa Camacho (2016) rely on various sources for their data because errors in the US Census have repeatedly resulted in a very inaccurate count of the US Colombian population. Unfortunately, the 2010 US Census and more recent studies, such as those released by the PEW Research Center (2017, 2019) and the Migration Policy Institute (2015, 2017, 2018), still appear to underestimate the number of US Colombians. For a comprehensive wave-based overview of Colombian migration to the United States, see Cepeda (2010). 8

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Espitia 2007, p. 375). Although the New York metro area and specifically Queens have historically been the areas most closely associated with the Colombian diaspora, 33% of US Colombians now live in Florida, where their numbers are second only to those of US Cubans in terms of population size in major urban centers like Miami, which has emerged in recent years as the primary locus of studies of the Colombian diaspora alongside New York (see Avivi, this issue). Other significant sites of Colombian diasporic settlement include northern New Jersey, California (primarily Los Angeles), Boston, Houston, New Orleans and, more recently, Atlanta. Outside these spaces, the US Colombian diaspora remains notably geographically dispersed, a factor that can be accounted for by the gradual nature of Colombian settlement in the United States (with the exception of periods such as the 1990s and early 2000s, when violence tied to the civil conflict markedly increased in Colombia and drove out-migration) and by the impact of drug-trafficking stereotypes on intraColombian communal cohesion (LaRosa and Mejía 2017, p. 216; Guarnizo et  al. 1999). Although we are tempted to assert that Colombians are an important national-origin group to consider in Latina/o/x studies because they are the largest population of South American origin in the United States, we are wary of making a demographic argument for their inclusion. Demographics, or the capitalistic assumption that “in order to count one must be counted,” also deeply informs the intellectual hierarchies of worth in Latina/o/x studies. In an analogous case, Cardenas observes, Using demographics as a justification for representation has also been deployed as a form of silencing. … The labels constantly attached to Central Americans such as “recent immigrants” or “other Latinos” is one that is often explained by their demographic presence within the US’s social ordering of minority subjects. Demographics are also used to explain why Latino studies must almost exclusively focus on certain larger or historical communities in the US. (Cardenas 2017, p. 92). In this sense, the invisibility of US Colombians in current demographic data indicates the urgency of imparting the experiences of those whom “we don’t see” or “can’t see.” Demographic presence does not explain, for example, experiences of soledad, as discussed by Ariana Ochoa Camacho in this issue, or the auto-ethnographic rendering of Latina feminist media recognition included in María Elena Cepeda’s article in this volume. At the same time, we recognize the importance of demographics for understanding the experience of US Colombians. In this issue, for example, Angie N. Ocampo and Angela X. Ocampo compiled data from six different national datasets to construct the first nationally representative sample of US Colombians in order to understand the political attitudes of US Colombians during the 2016 presidential election. Their analysis brings light to the crucial importance of class and racial dynamics, as well as US Colombians’ transnational experience, as catalysts of divergent political leanings and experiences. When not ignored, recognized very briefly, or categorized as “new” or “other,” Colombians are often depicted in stereotypes, most particularly in exaggerated gender roles along a hyperfeminine and hypermasculine heteronormative binary. As scholars such as Cepeda (2003, 2008, 2010, 2018, 2019, forthcoming), Nasser Reprinted from the journal

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(2012), Nasser De La Torre (2013), Schaeffer (2012) and Porras Contreras (2017) have traced, in the US popular imagination Colombianidad is persistently filtered through gendered, sexualized imagery, as the ubiquitous figures of Sofía Vergara, Shakira, Kalis Uchis, and Colombian beauty queens underscore. These feminized representations are starkly juxtaposed against the images of masculinist violence, corruption, and illicit drug activity that mark the other half of the Colombian representational binary. The narco genre and the accompanying stereotype of Colombians as drug lords and drug smugglers has been widely pervasive in the US from the 1980s to the present in films and television shows such as Scarface (1983), Miami Vice (1984–1990), Clear and Present Danger (1994), Blow (2001), Maria Full of Grace (2004), Colombiana (2011), and Narcos (2015–present), to name just a few. But the most salient and pervasive example of this in the narco genre is the Pablo Escobar narrative, a mediated rendering of Colombia mired in the dramatically violent period during the 1980s and 1990s marked by the rise and spectacular fall of the narcotics kingpin. Informed by the discursive stylings of a heavily commodified magical realism, the cultural industry built around the Escobar narrative is a source of distress and resentment for Colombians around the globe, yet the endless accumulation of tell-all books, films, and television series rooted in it provide a significant source of capital for many. Significantly, this stereotypical association of Colombia with drug lords and drug smuggling has emerged from within as well as from without the transnational Colombian community (Cepeda forthcoming, 2018, 2019; Harford Vargas 2019; Herrero-Olaizola 2007; Nasser 2008; Ochoa Camacho 2016; Pobutsky 2013, 2017, 2020). Cultural scripts such as the sexy Colombian female and ruthless male Colombian narco-trafficker narrative act as epistemological disciplinary mechanisms that diminish our understanding of US Colombianidades and delimit the possibilities of US Colombian studies in the academy and beyond. This special issue seeks to contest the predominant yet severely limited representational frameworks that mark US Colombianidades, just as it simultaneously addresses the relative invisibility of US Colombians within the broader contours of Latina/o/x studies. Indeed, Yamil Avivi’s essay in this special issue interrogates this invisibility, in its vivid account of the asylum process for Miami-based transsexual Colombian Andrés that provokes valuable questions regarding the heterosexist, first world orientation of US immigration law and scholarly accounts of migratory populations.

Archiving the transhistorical presence of Colombians in the United States For a population commonly, though inaccurately, described as “new” arrivals to the United States, US Colombians appear scattered across space and time in various books, cultural texts, and social movements, and often immersed among long-standing Latina/o/x communities. It may come as a surprise to learn that the first documented Spanish-language US Latina/o/x novel on the theme of immigration, Lucas Guevara, was written in 1914 by Alirio Díaz Guerra, a well-heeled Colombian exile living in New York City (Kanellos and Hernández 2003; Torres-Saillant 2007). The 1961 film West Side Story, an icon of Puerto Rican representation in popular media, 10

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denounced for having only one Puerto Rican actor in its cast, Rita Moreno, had, it turns out, two Latina/o/x actors: José De Vega Jr., born in San Diego to a Colombian mother and a Filipino father, played Chino in the film (Fojas 2014, p. 140).8 At the height of Puerto Rican struggles for space in 1960s New York City, Colombian Edmundo Facini led Barrio Nuevo, an organization that challenged urban expansion plans (Aponte-Pares 1998, p. 413). Colombians at the time also joined the Young Lords Party (Morales and Oliver-Velez 2010, p. xi). Meanwhile, José Julio Sarria, a Colombian Nicaraguan Californian, is believed to have been the first drag performer and gay rights advocate to run for public office in the United States, in 1961. Sarria, known as the “first Empress of San Francisco,” founded what eventually became The International Court System, a North American organization for gay men, crossdressers, and drag queens (Erickson-Schroth 2014, p. 514). Colombians have also been elected officials in US politics since at least the 1990s, if not earlier (Cepeda 2010). Colombians in the United States cannot be labeled as “new” when their stories are tied to, and constitutive of, the histories, cultures, politics, and communities of some of the most legendary eras, populations, and spaces in Latina/o/x studies. By the same measure, the ordinary lives of thousands of Colombian immigrants and refugees who have arrived since the early twentieth century to pursue middle-class professions and/or work for low wages in factories, agriculture, and service industries in Florida, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island, for example, cannot be considered “new” when they have helped, alongside existing Latina/o/x populations, boost local economies and emerging Latina/o/x communities. Indeed, Colombians have a long, rich, and variegated historical and cultural presence in the United States that merits further study. Moreover, US Colombian cultural production is flourishing, with a number of recent authors and artists emerging on the scene in the last few years and with US Colombian actresses and actors gaining more prominent roles in recent years. We provide a robust list of writers, artists, and actors in order to make visible these achievements and to provide Latina/o/x studies scholars with an array of US Colombians they can incorporate into their courses and consider as they develop their research projects. US Colombian writers include Jaime Manrique, Tatiana de la Tierra, Patricia Engel, Daisy Hernández, Sergio de la Pava, James Cañón, Silvana Paternostro, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Anika Fajardo, Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Grisel Acosta, Julianne Pachico, Mary Angélica Molina, Diane Guerrero, Rosa Boshier, and Juliana Delgado Lopera, who work across genres and move between fiction, memoir, and nonfiction. As exemplified by Daisy Hernández’s epigraph to A Cup of Water Under My Bed (2014), which references Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros querying, “What does a woman inherit/that tells her how/to go?,” these authors figure US Colombianidades in dialogue with traditional Latina/o/x literary tropes. At the same time, their writings are often shot through with references to or scenes set under the civil war in Colombia, making their representations of US imperialism and state support of right-wing counterinsurgency forces similar to representations

8   US Colombianas also have starring roles in the new versions of West Side Story: Yesenia Ayla is playing Anita in the Broadway revival, while Rachel Zegler will play Maria in the Hollywood remake.

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of the Cold War, militarization, and dictatorship by Latina/o/x novelists and artists of a number of different national origins. They simultaneously also differ because US Colombian literary production is not post-conflict, whereas the work of their Latina/o/x contemporaries is post-dictatorship (see Harford Vargas 2017a; Ortíz 2016; Vigil 2014). Though scholars have studied some of this literary production, and Catalina Esguerra in this special issue analyzes Patricia Engel’s Vida (2010), evocatively demonstrating how Engel provides a dynamic vision of diaspora as a condition in process formalized in the novel’s scattered story structure, most of it remains to be substantively examined, underscoring the need for a more comprehensive study of US Colombian literature as a whole. Contemporary US Colombian artists, like the writers, exhibit visual imaginations that share the concerns of their Latina/o/x counterparts, especially in relation to shifting anti-immigrant discourses, interrogating systems of oppression, and celebrating Colombianidades, Latinidades, and folks of color more generally. Jessica Sabogal became nationally visible while collaborating with Amplifier’s “We the People” posters for the Women’s March following the 2017 Trump inauguration by producing the “We the Indivisible” and “Women Are Perfect” pieces that celebrated queer Latina/x love and Afro-Latinidad while the muralist GLeo painted “The Original Dream” across grain silos in Wichita, breaking the world record for the largest single-artist mural and celebrating Latinidades in the Midwest in vivid tones on a grand scale. Michelle Angela Ortíz has monumentalized undocumented migrants who have been detained and deported through her murals, site installations, and documentaries, and Mónica Enríquez-Enríquez has used video installations to capture the experiences of queer migrants and asylum seekers. From Fanny Sanin’s geometric abstracts and Diana Restrepo’s abstract paintings of disrupted territories to Sandra Parra’s Frida Kahlo-like self-portraits that incorporate Colombian food products and Carlos Motta’s use of newsprint to represent US interventions in Latin America, US Colombian artistic mediums and thematic concerns are wide-ranging, and their work has been shown in galleries and art museums around the United States, in Colombia, and globally. Finally, a number of US Colombian performers are important for considering how US Colombianidades have shaped the cultural landscape of Latinidades. From Sofia Vergara, John Leguizamo, Diane Guerrero, Isabella Gómez, and Stephanie Beatriz to “Mo” (Maurice Alberto) Rocca, Odette Annable, and Wilmer Valderrama, US Colombians (some of whom are intra-Latina/o/x such as the US Colombian Puerto Rican Leguizamo) have acted in popular movies and television shows. The fact that they most frequently play characters of different, or even vague, Latin American origins speaks to Hollywood’s representational imprecision when it comes to national origins as well as its attempt to construct an audience so it can appeal to and profit from the so-called Hispanic market (Dávila 2012). Yet, these performers are also evidence of the importance of US Colombianidades in shaping contemporary television and film, even when they are not known generally for their national origin. These descriptive lists of US Colombian historical, artistic, and cultural figures we have provided indexes the necessity of archiving the rich historical and contemporary presence of Colombianidades within Latinidades.

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Contextualizing the transnational experiences of US Colombians To understand US Colombians, it is imperative to understand the political history and regional dynamics that centrally shape Colombians both in Colombia and abroad. For more than 50 years, Colombia was engaged in a protracted civil war, the longest of any nation in the Western Hemisphere.9 As LaRosa and Mejía (2017, p. 232) observe, the duration of the Colombian conflict is directly tied to its ability to adjust to shifting historical conditions within Colombia as well as globally. Since the 1990s, Colombia has also held the dubious distinction of being the most violent country in the region, with the worst human rights record, the highest number of murdered trade unionists, and the world’s largest population of internal refugees.10 On November 24th 2016, the country signed an official peace agreement. Although generalized violence has abated since its signing, targeted assassinations—specifically of social leaders and human rights activists, many of them indigenous or AfroColombian—have increased, rendering it impossible to speak yet of a “post-conflict” Colombia. Both of the two most prominent warring factions in Colombia’s dirty war—the various guerrilla groups and paramilitary forces—have committed grave human rights violations. Yet, notably, since their emergence as US-trained counterinsurgency forces in the 1960s, the paramilitary forces alone have enjoyed intimate ties to the Colombian ruling establishment and are responsible for approximately 80% of all human rights violations. Akin to many other Latin American nations, Colombia has also been shaped by US Cold War politics and imperialist military influences, which in turn has affected migratory flows and transnational communal formations. In this regard, the US Colombian diaspora is, to borrow Nadine Naber’s phrase, “a diaspora of empire” (Naber 2012, p. 197). One prominent recent example of the profound influence of US interventionism is Plan Colombia (2000–2015), a US-backed, $10 billion counter-narcotics initiative first championed by the governments of Andrés Pastrana (1998–2002) and Bill Clinton (1993–2001). Under Plan Colombia, US taxpayers funded the mass aerial fumigation of coca crops in Colombia, a strategy that was ultimately halted because of widespread reports of communal displacement, serious health concerns, environmental havoc, and damage to food crops. Plan Colombia also enabled the Colombian government to siphon money to paramilitary death squads responsible for many of the era’s most egregious human rights violations under the guise of counterinsurgency efforts. President Juan Manuel Santos (2010–2018) ended the program in 2015 because of its devastating health and environmental effects. However, under pressure of decertification by the Trump

9

  For comprehensive, English-language monographs analyzing the Colombian conflict, US-Colombian relations, and contemporary Colombian history in general, see Appelbaum (2003), Bergquist et  al. (2001), Bushnell (1993), Farnsworth-Alvear et  al. (2017), LaRosa and Mejía (2017), López-Pedreros (2019), Palacios (2006), Paternostro (1998, 2007), Rappaport (1990), Roldán (2002), Safford and Palacios (2001), Stanfield (2013), and Wade (1993, 2000). 10   This translates into nearly 15,000 civilian deaths at the hands of paramilitary groups at the height of the violence between 1988 and 2003. By 2009, the number of political murders in Colombia had exceeded those of any overt Latin American dictatorship (Hristov 2009). Reprinted from the journal

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government,11 by October 2018 the Iván Duque administration (2018–) had initiated a pilot program of aerial fumigation in the Antioquia region, a long-standing seat of paramilitary power (King and Wherry 2018). As in other Latin American countries, race and institutional racism are part of the structure of Colombian society. Although Colombia is a racially diverse country (10% of the total population identifies as Afro-descendant, the second-largest population in South America after Brazil, while 4.4% identifies as indigenous) (DANE 2019; La población indígena 2019),12 racial dynamics and relations have been historically dominated by discourses and practices that hold light skin and European culture in higher regard (Leal 2010; Wade 2012). This ideology stems from a colonial racial project that aimed to unify the nation and its regions. In this project, Colombia embraced a hierarchy that conflated high status and social class with whiteness, and this conflation was a condition for accessing political and economic power (Appelbaum 2003). Race, however, is not widely discussed or recognized as a central aspect of social relations (Bonilla-Silva 2002; Wade 2012). As a result, an important part of the experience of Colombian migrants in the United States is to learn to navigate and make sense of their place in the racial hierarchy. Within this context, it is critical to acknowledge the potency of Colombian regionalism and its impacts on the specific hierarchies of race, nation, language, and sexuality within both Colombia and the diaspora. The US Colombian community is replete with profound regional differences (Williams 2018, p. 68). As in much of the Americas, regionalist discourse in Colombia has historically been framed in oppositional terms (Appelbaum 2003, p. 39). For example, natives of the Caribbean and Pacific coasts are most frequently associated with blackness—framed as stereotypically less inclined toward hard work—whereas inhabitants of the nation’s highlands are “naturally” industrious. These epistemological frameworks span time and space, informing intergenerational and diasporic understandings of Colombianidad. Shaping not only local but, ultimately, also global constructs of race, gender, nation, and desire, “in Colombia, history gave race a regional structure such that race cannot be simply understood as a social construction around phenotype, but must also be seen as a social construction around region” (Wade 1991, p. 46). To cite but one example, the identity of Antioquia highlands natives has long been closely associated with civilization, capitalism, labor, and, ultimately, whiteness (Tubb 2013, p. 627), a discursive correlation notably present in local narratives about the late Pablo Escobar. Within Colombia, the raza antioqueña (or the “Antioquian race” of the Antioquia department) has therefore historically been considered superior, premised

11

  In 2017, the Trump government threatened to decertify Colombia, effectively placing the country on a black list of nations not deemed to be combating the global drug trade effectively enough. Under decertification, a country forfeits all US foreign aid not directly tied to anti-narcotics measures. In the case of Colombia, this would entail ceasing all aid related to the 2016 peace accords. The Trump administration has also supported a return to aerial fumigation and forced eradication such as deployed under Plan Colombia, despite their well-documented negative impacts. 12  Although we cite these statistics, we recognize that they are not necessarily an entirely accurate reflection of how Colombians not claiming indigenous or Afro-diasporic identities are racialized on the ground, both in Latin America and within the diaspora. 14

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on a supposed mixture of Jew, Creole, and Spaniard and corresponding stereotypes of hardworking, astute, and entrepreneurial populations (Rojas 2001, p. 30). “The white legend” or the myth of paisa whiteness thus boasts an extensive history born of racialized regionalism and is rooted in the profound sense of regional exceptionalism undergirding Antioquia’s racial claims (Appelbaum 2003, p. 12; Tubb 2013, p. 633), as well as those of other highlands spaces within Colombia. Regionalism in Colombia is therefore of paramount importance to the transnational study of Colombian communities because it upholds the specific ethnoracial imaginaries that inform inter-Colombian and intra-Latina/o/x dynamics at home and abroad. As Garbow’s analysis in this special issue underscores, regional and racial dynamics inform the understanding diasporic Colombians have of where they stand in the US racial hierarchy and the place of other Latina/o/x migrants in that framework. US Colombian political participation and transnational involvement is varied and at times disparate from other Latina/o/x groups. Although US Colombians have not been as politically active in their home country and in the United States (Jones-Correa 1998; Guarnizo et al. 2003), they are one of the groups with higher naturalization rates in the United States (Liang 1994; Sierra et al. 2000). Because US Colombians have been able to hold dual citizenship since 1991, naturalization allows them to maintain social and emotional ties in their home country while providing them with tools to overcome the restricted social rights imposed by temporary and permanent resident legal statuses (Escobar 2004). In this issue, Ocampo and Ocampo reveal how these patterns of political participation develop as Colombians settle permanently in the United States. They show that this more permanent settlement leads to an increased involvement in US politics, with orientations that vary largely by class and by the region where US Colombians live and where they come from, as well as by their immigration status. They demonstrate that the political attitudes and experiences of US Colombians challenge the assumption of the so-called Latino vote as a homogeneous, unified category. Although Colombians in the United States are generally depicted as a group that is relatively successful socially and economically in comparison to other Latina/o/x national-origin groups, their experience of racialization and their unstable legal status leads to an experience of “privileged marginality” (Rincón 2015). Indeed, many still face economic, legal and social constraints that delay their economic and social incorporation experience in US society. This experience of privileged marginality is important for Latina/o/x studies to consider in order to further nuance the field’s understanding of class and race relations within and across Latina/o/x nationalorigin populations. For example, highly educated Colombians can often land a relatively good job, but racial and legal marginalization can hinder their ability to achieve occupational and economic upward mobility. Colombians in high-skilled occupations have also confronted marginalization and delayed economic mobility as a result of their accents and origins (Rincón 2015). Middle-class Colombians have reported working two to three low-paying jobs because of limitations imposed by temporary visas (Rincón 2017) and skills transferability in the US job market (Meyer et al. 1997). Working-class Colombians tend to be undocumented and subject to exploitation (Collier and Gamarra 2001). Colombians in the United States, for the most part, experience downward mobility and economic marginalization, Reprinted from the journal

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regardless of the socioeconomic status they held when they arrived to the country. Legal barriers and discrimination on the basis of race, origin, and accent are at the root of economic marginalization. When analyzed as a whole, however, US Colombians are more likely to assimilate to mainstream US ways socially and economically; they also tend to maintain their membership and network connections in their home country (Guarnizo et al. 2003; Escobar 2004). Their high levels of education have allowed Colombian migrant professionals to achieve relative socioeconomic success in the United States. This success has led high-skilled Colombian migrants to stay in the United States in higher numbers than those with lower educational levels (Medina and Posso 2009). Despite the relatively privileged conditions of US Colombians, many face economic, legal, and social constraints that delay their economic and social incorporation into  US society (Meyer et  al. 1997; Banarjee and Rincón 2019). Though middle-class descriptors are often used to discuss Colombians, such as, they are “entrepreneurs,” “well-educated,” and speak “good Spanish,” Colombians also work in low-wage sectors and exhibit working-class characteristics. While  empirical observations of Colombian working-class experiences throughout the United States are abundant, scholarly evidence of this working-class presence can largely be found in research about the old industrial centers of the northeast. Regarding New England, Aviva Chomsky notes that Central Falls, Rhode Island, and Lowell, Massachusetts, two of the oldest textile towns in the region, attracted a chain migration of Colombian textile workers from Antioquia starting in the 1960s (Chomsky 2008, pp. 159–168). Using census data, the Boston Redevelopment Authority found that by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century only 8% of the Colombian population living in Boston held a graduate or professional degree and nearly half of the foreign-born Colombian population worked in food preparation and serving occupations or building and grounds cleaning and maintenance occupations.13 Colombian factory workers have also been present in New Jersey and Long Island, especially after deindustrialization in New York City forced industry to move to the outskirts starting as early as the 1950s (Fernandez-Kelly and Sassen 1995; Londoño 2015). Several of our contributors focus on the working class: Ochoa Camacho and Garbow examine Colombian low-wage earners in New York and Philadelphia, while María Elena Cepeda examines the cultural significance of the young US Colombian girl who “effortlessly moves through workingclass space” in the streets of Brooklyn in Bomba Estéreo’s “Soy yo” music video. Working-class US Colombianidad is observable in other cultural representations, such as in the overblown personality and personal aesthetics of Sofía Vergara’s character Gloria in the sitcom Modern Family (2009–2019); in Daisy Hernández’s memoir A Cup of Water Under My Bed, which documents her family’s experience in working-class northern New Jersey; in the abjection of a Colombian immigrant child corralled in a detention center in HBO’s film Icebox (2018); and in a single

13

  BRA Research Division and the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Advancement, “Imagine All the People: Colombians,” 2016, accessed 9 January 2020. http://www.bosto​nplan​s.org/getat​tachm​ent/5facd​1a3-2ec24e59-ac33-995cd​365a6​e0. The authors use data from the 2009–2013 American Community Survey. 16

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mother and her children’s efforts to survive in Queens by collecting trash cans in the film Entre Nos (2009). Attending to experiences of undocumented migration expands our understanding of the socioeconomic locations US Colombians occupy, and it opens up rich avenues of inquiry and conceptual tropes for Latina/o/x studies. Colombians colloquially describe crossing undocumented into the United States as going por el Hueco, which translates as “through the Hole” or “through the Gap.” As Harford Vargas has theorized, this Colombian metaphor of el Hueco provides a fruitful new trope for Latina/o/x studies, one that is directly rooted in the experience of undocumented migration and that complements “the guiding metaphor of Latino studies: ‘la frontera,’ the border” (Harford Vargas 2017b, 2019; Flores 2000, p. 212). To gain entry into the United States, Colombian undocumented migrants use multiple routes that extend throughout South America, Central America, and Mexico, as well as the Caribbean, which is key, since studies of undocumented migration primarily focus on the routes through Central America and Mexico and rarely consider South America and the Caribbean. As a conceptual metaphor for undocumented migration rooted in this extended geography, el Hueco captures both the time and place where migrants cross geopolitical borders undetected, as well as the entire complex process of entering into and subsequently navigating life as undocumented subjects in the United States, since subjects do not simply pass through el Hueco when they enter the US but rather live in el Hueco as they navigate gaps in the state’s surveillance apparatus and holes in access to social services and employment. Given the dominant focus on the US-Mexico border in the US political imaginary, and the stereotypical assumption in the public sphere that undocumented migrants are impoverished Mexicans (or, more recently, Central Americans), it is pressing that Latina/o/x studies contest these oversimplified views by considering Latin American migration from a relational perspective that accounts for different national groups, modes of crossing, socioeconomic classes, and geographic sites of entry (see Castaño 2017). Attending to US Colombians facilitates a more comprehensive understanding of Latina/o/x experiences of undocumented migration while also providing a vocabulary for articulating these realities. Moreover, a more nuanced socioeconomic panorama of US Colombians emerges when we take into account the environments that they produce and inhabit. The majority of Colombians migrate from urbanized areas in Colombia and settle in major metropolises of the United States. In this way, they resemble many other Latina/o/x migrants. Nonetheless, in important ways, US Colombianidades move beyond what has traditionally preoccupied scholars studying urban Latinidad. Though certain urban communities are hubs of Colombian culture and life, such as Queens (discussed in Ochoa Camacho’s article) or Philadelphia (discussed in Garbow’s article), it would be difficult to take on a study that focuses exclusively on a Colombian urban community or Colombian “barrio,” to use the scholarly term that is often applied to Latina/o/x neighborhoods (Londoño 2015). In contrast to Latina/o/x studies texts on Mexican/Chicana/o/x or Puerto Rican barrios, for example, it is difficult to locate a Colombian barrio in the United States. Indeed, patterns of Colombian urban settlement in the United States may be most in need of what Gina Pérez and colleagues call moving “beyond the barrio” (2010). Most Colombians who settled Reprinted from the journal

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in US cities in the 1970s and through the 1990s arrived when other, diverse groups of Latina/o/xs were also arriving. These immigrants transformed what were once Mexican or Puerto Rican barrios into nationally and racially diverse communities. Moreover, Colombians, like many other Latin American immigrants who arrived in large numbers in the late twentieth century, settled in metropolitan areas that were changing because of gentrification in cities and the increased suburbanization of people of color (Jones-Correa 2006). Some Colombians who immigrated in the late twentieth century settled in the outlying semi-suburban or suburban areas of cities rather than in the “inner-core” (Aparicio 2014). This spatial dispersion contributes to the invisibility of Colombians in a Latina/o/x studies field that has focused predominantly on inner-city barrios. The difficulty of studying a “Colombian barrio” challenges scholars to study multiple places—a multi-nodular approach—and their networks and/or to do comparative ethnic, intra-Latina/o/x studies of place.14 In his “Páginas Recuperadas,” John Mckiernan-Gonzalez takes the other spaces of Colombianidad even further by directing his gaze at the inside of the Museum of Natural History in New York City. There, he homes in on a mural depicting the signing of the Panama Canal, a visual he reads as a site of Colombianidad obscured.

Framing the futures of US Colombianidades within Latinidad When a national group is entirely subsumed within the established frameworks of Latinidad, particularities and complexities are obscured, but a grounding in US Colombian studies can nuance our understanding of different Latina/o/x positionalities. As we have discussed, the logics of inclusion and visibility in the field of Latina/o/x studies have  often been dictated by historical presence, demographic data, and oppressed/resistant subjectivities, all of which are useful but also incomplete frameworks for understanding US Colombians. If Latinidades has been used by scholars to capture “the shared experiences of subordination, resistance, and agency of the various national groups of Latin Americans in the United States,” how do we account for subjects who have been left out of a scholarly narrative about working-class and marginalized Latinidad (Aparicio 2017, p. 115)? As this introduction and the articles in this special issue demonstrate, US Colombianidades are neither “new” nor strictly comprise marginalized and/or resistant subjects. One of the salient contributions of US Colombian studies to Latina/o/x studies is that attending to US Colombianidades enables us to examine nonnormative subjects in Latina/o/x studies, thereby expanding the kinds of subjects Latina/o/x studies scholars typically examine. US Colombians as a group experience Latinidad similarly but also differently because the community is simultaneously unseen and hyper-visible: it is rarely the focus of scholarly studies or media representations, and when US Colombians do

14

  For more on examining Latina/o/x spaces that go beyond contiguous barrio concentrations, see Mike Davis, Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US Big City (New York: Verso, 2001) and Johana Londoño, Abstract Barrios: The Crises of Latinx Visibility in Cities (2020). 18

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constitute an area of scholarly focus, it is almost exclusively within a binary of being either criminalized or privileged. That is, US Colombians are most often depicted as drug traffickers, beautiful women, and elite migrants. Despite needing to contest these stereotypes, we would argue that scholars also need to attend to this array of less “likable” subjects.15 The transnational drug trafficker and the middle- or upperclass professional migrant are not categories that are usually examined in the critical literature, yet this more diverse array of both critiqued and celebrated subjects shape US Colombianidades, impelling us to deal with these contrasts. Attending to the full range of US Colombianidades allows us to foreground these subjects who Latina/o/x studies has usually not examined while also continuing to attend to the subjects who have been represented (i.e., low-income individuals/communities, colonial agents, the transnational subject, the hyperfeminine Latina). We thus offer the term “US Colombianidades” to provide a paradigm for understanding the plurality of US Colombian experiences and identities that the term capaciously embraces. The term is shifting and complex, is bilingual and bicultural, is produced by nation-states and by the community, and is influenced by the way various Latinidades have been conceptualized. As Lorgia García-Peña uses the term dominicidad, we are interested in employing a term that encompasses the power relations of transnational movement and the “dictions–stories, narratives, and speech acts–” that they produce (García-Peña 2016, pp. 1, 2).16 And like Frances Aparicio’s framing of the term “Latinidad/es” as rooted in “semantic messiness … and numerous and contradictory iterations,” US Colombianidades is generative, messy, and, at times, contradictory in the set of experiences and identities the term seeks to capture (Aparicio 2017, p. 113). It indexes the diverse range of people and “multiplicity” of experiences in terms of race, color, gender, sexuality, class, regional location (both in the United States and from Colombia), citizenship status, type of migration, residence, language usage, political affiliation, ideology, religion, age, ability and even national origin without collapsing these distinctions (HamesGarcía 2011). We include national origin here because it encompasses those who are mixed-origin US Colombians, or “intra-Latina/os,” as Aparicio terms those who are “of mixed and/or multiple nationalities” (Aparicio 2019, p. 2).17 Indeed, the “es” in

15

 This is true of illicit subjects deemed unlikable or unsavory, like the drug trafficker and the coyote/human smuggler, as well as middle- and upper-class Latina/o/xs, who are often accused of being “sellouts” for being economically privileged. For studies of middle-class Latina/o/xs, see Elda María Román’s Race and Upward Mobility (2017) and Jody Agius Vallejo’s Barrio to Burbs (2012). Shakira, an elite migrant, is also often thought of as a Latin American rather than a Latina, in part because of her class status, light-skinned privilege, and the unclear temporality of when a Latin American migrant becomes “Latina/o/x” (Cepeda 2010). 16   Although we are reminded of García-Peña’s focus on the contradictory dictions, or “contradictions” as she writes it, that produce Dominican subjectivities, spaces, and ethnoracial identifications from the top-down and bottom-up and across spaces, we find it necessary to pair Colombianidades with “US” to underscore the paucity of research on Colombian migrants in the United States and to include the “es” to emphasize the plurality of the term (García-Peña 2016, p. 1). 17   In her study, Frances Aparicio (2019) interviews a “ChileanColombian,” an “IrishMexiColombian,” and “MexiColombians” in Chicago. She even opens her introduction by citing US Colombian Cuban writers Grisel Acosta and Daisy Hernández, formally embodying in her scholarship what we see as the

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US Colombianidades seeks to emphasize this plurality and diversity of identifications and subject positions. We also employ the terms “Colombianidades” and “Latina/o/x” to evoke and invoke terminological developments in the field. We retain the “a” in particular in recognition of historic Latina feminist struggles and contributions, as Nicole Trujillo-Pagán has cogently asserted (Trujillo-Pagán 2018); we use the “x” to disrupt the gender binary as well as to mobilize the rich set of additional connotations that the “x” conjures and the conceptual possibilities it opens up.18 Most salient for this special issue, we conceive of the “es” in Colombianidades functioning similarly to the “x” in marking discursive fluidity, as well as the heretofore underexamined presence of US Colombianidades in Latina/o/x studies. Reflecting on her underrepresented Central American background in the field, Claudia Milian suggests that the “x” offers a representational space to those sidelined by “the conventional understandings of what it means to be Latino or Latina” (Milian 2019, p. 2). As a national-origin group that has also been understudied and underrepresented, our use of “es” likewise articulates a space of presence and here-ness for US Colombians. Moreover, the “speculative” nature of the “x” parallels our future-oriented vision of US Colombianidades contributing to the field of Latina/o/x studies as well as our use of this special issue to open up a space to curiously theorize US Colombianidades in a generative manner that invites future research on US Colombian experiences and cultural production (Milian 2019, p. 6). As a subset of Latinidad, we also consider US Colombianidad as open-ended, ongoing, and contingent on affinities and building alliances. Cristina Beltrán conceptualizes Latina/o/x identity as “something we do rather than as something we are,” asserting that the term “is a verb” (Beltrán 2010, pp. 19, 157). As Aparicio observes of the term “Latinidad,” “the semantic transformations in the scholarship about Latinidad reveal a morphological shift from noun to action” such that it is no longer solely a description of national origin and ethnic identity but also a means of coalition-building and strategic group identification between and among people from the same and different national-origin groups (Aparicio 2019, p. 33). We position our use of US Colombianidad in this bilingual modal verb sense of the term in order to highlight the linkages (and the dissonances) with other US Latina/o/x national-origin populations and the non-static process of constructing group identity. The essays in this special issue likewise take as their point of departure an understanding of US Colombianidades that intersects with conceptualizations of Latinidad in a recognition of the powerful shared commonalities between national-origin groups and a healthy skepticism toward the flattening of difference that Latinidad can portend. More in-process than “found object,” and explicitly plural as opposed

Footnote 17 (continued) central importance of US Colombianidades for Latina/o/x studies. Unlike Aparicio, we choose to separate the names of countries and include “US” when we designate national origin for ease of reading. 18   Among others, see Claudia Milian’s LatinX (2019) and the 2017 special issue of Cultural Dynamics on the term Latinx; for a US Colombiana take on “Latinx,” see Patricia Engel’s article “On Naming Ourselves, or: When I Was a Spic,” in the same special issue. 20

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Reimagining US Colombianidades: Transnational…

to singularly monolithic, we frame US Colombianidades as subjectivities-in-themaking that emerge from within as well as from outside the various US Colombian communities. As a product of both the transnational cultural industries and popular media, as well as of the lived experiences, cultural expressions, and political practices of US Colombian subjects themselves, the articles in this special issue underscore the often contradictory—and not necessarily exclusively transgressive— nature of US Colombianidades, in addition to some of the key historical and political moments that have informed their construction. Moreover, we recognize that US Colombianidad is rooted in and draws from Latinidad because US Colombians are not understood for their own specificity. Nor do they have access to robust USbased aesthetic and historical traditions and archives like some major national-origin groups do. Given their often marginal presence, US Colombians read US Colombianidades into the sociocultural texts at hand and frequently articulate their identities and histories in dialogic relationship to Latinidad. US Colombian studies share the central concerns of Latina/o/x studies, but this introduction and the following essays demonstrate that a focus on US Colombianidades provides new salient conceptual tropes and methodologies for Latina/o/x studies. The issue offers a rich set of articles rooted in different disciplinary formations that are in interdisciplinary dialogue with one another in a number of ways. María Elena Cepeda and Catalina Esguerra illuminate how US Colombian cultural production enriches our understanding of the class dynamics of diasporic subjectivities. María Elena Cepeda unveils how the non-virtuosic performance of a brown girl in an urban space in the Bogotá band Bomba Estereo’s video of “Soy Yo” offers spaces of intersectional recognition and connection for diasporic and brown Latina/xs along the lines of race, class, and gender beyond national boundaries. These spaces of recognition and connection also come to light in Catalina Esguerra’s analysis of Patricia Engel’s work Vida, as she shows how the choppy narration of an upper-middle-class US Colombian life represents the always fluctuating nature of diasporic realities. Diane Garbow’s discussion of interethnic relations between Colombians and other Latina/o/xs in Philadelphia, Ariana Ochoa Camacho’s ethnographic exploration of Colombian migrants in Queens, and Angela X. Ocampo and Angie N. Ocampo’s analysis of the political participation of Colombians in US electoral politics underscore the intricate ways in which Colombians negotiate their social and political incorporation in the United States. Garbow’s piece highlights how premigration constructions of race and nationality inform how Colombians in Philadelphia emphasize their whiteness and class background to distinguish themselves racially and geopolitically from other Latina/o/xs. Ochoa Camacho’s article aligns with that same effort of distinction from Colombians in the United States and reveals how this distinction leads to isolation embodied in an ever-present experience of soledad; her article thus offers the term soledad as a uniquely US Colombian migrant affect, which is the product of racial and spatial structures of power. Simultaneously, the strong interest US Colombians express in regard to immigration reform and the US economy in the Ocampos’ analysis reveals the crucial centrality of US institutions and discourses in shaping their political incorporation. Collectively, these articles lay a foundation for reflecting on the intricate ways in which transnational Reprinted from the journal

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understandings of class, race, region, and politics intersect to shape the cultural and sociopolitical experiences of US Colombians as diasporic subjects; they also provide US Colombians with specific repertoires to assert commonalities and differences among themselves and also in relationship with other Latina/o/xs. Building on and extending the articles’ attention to US-Colombian relations, John Mckiernan-González’s “Páginas Recuperadas” and Yamil Avivi’s “Vivencias” unveil how imperial processes have disavowed the Colombianx presence in the United States. Looking at the murals that decorate the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Rotunda in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, Mckiernan-González critically exposes and examines the mural’s obscured depiction of a colonial encounter between US officials and racialized labor on what was once Colombian territory, thereby reminding us that Colombian presence in the United States is entangled in imperial processes. Yamil Avivi confirms the experience of invisibility of queer Colombians through his account of Andrés’s life as an asylum-seeker in the US, revealing the clash between dominant first world sexual liberation narratives and the realities of legal stipulations that prevent Latina/o/xs from achieving their versions of the American dream. The essays in this special issue thus provide a new set of terms and methodologies for Latina/o/x studies. Whether through a particular term like soledad, or methodologically through multi-scalar analyses that are attentive to local, intraethnic, interracial, national, and transnational frameworks, the essays in this issue demonstrate that attending to US Colombianidades prompts a new set of critical questions that enrich our Latina/o/x field imaginaries. As we discuss in this introduction, US Colombian studies is a subfield whose acceptance and recognition within Latina/o/x studies has been persistently tied to an indeterminate future inclusion within the existing literature. The moment for expanding Latina/o/x studies to include a vigorous, nuanced examination of US Colombianidades has been in the making for decades. This special issue reveals the development of US Colombian subjectivities as they respond to transnational and intersectional understandings of race, gender, sexuality, class dynamics, community formations, and imperial exploits, as well as divergent political alignments and contestations. Attending to the nuanced landscape of US Colombian lives and imaginations, and the cultural and sociopolitical exchanges between the United States and Colombia, this special issue tracks common thematic and sociohistorical intersections between US Colombians and other Latina/o/x-origin groups, as well as those uniquely salient for US Colombians. Much as does our opening discussion of the 2020 Superbowl halftime show featuring Jennifer Lopez and Shakira, this special issue traces the ways in which these narratives complicate our understanding of Latinidades in a manner that illuminates inter-Latina/o/x solidarities as well as the uniqueness of US Colombian Latinidades. We thereby invite our fellow Latina/o/x studies practitioners to expand and trouble the boundaries of the field by understanding how US Colombians are integral to the fabric that holds Latina/o/x experiences together rather than understanding the community as an additional, discrete subfield of Latina/o/x studies. We believe that such a relational approach is an underexplored yet critical direction for a future Latina/o/x studies. 22

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Reimagining US Colombianidades: Transnational… Acknowledgements  Muchísimas gracias to the participants of the October 2017 symposium on US Colombianidades at Williams College and subsequent panels at the Latina/o Studies and American Studies Association gatherings. This special issue is dedicated to these individuals as well as to future scholars of the US Colombian diaspora.

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Lina Rincón  is Assistant Professor of sociology at Framingham State University. Her scholarly work focuses on the intersections of immigration, race, racism and legality among Latin American and Caribbean highly skilled migrants in the United States. Rincón has published scholarly articles on the legal struggles confronted by Colombian migrant professionals and on scholarly activism in higher education. Her publications have appeared in Latino Studies, Contexts, The Humboldt Journal of Social Relations, and in the edited volume Migrant Professionals in the City. Johana Londoño  is Assistant Professor in the Department of Latin American, Caribbean, and US Latina/o studies at the University at Albany, SUNY. Her publications appear in edited volumes, such as Latino Urbanism (NYU Press 2012), and journals including American Quarterly and Social Semiotics. She has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation; Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities; and NYU; among other institutions. Londoño’s book, Abstract Barrios: The Crises of Latinx Visibility in Cities, is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Jennifer Harford Vargas  is  Associate Professor of English at Bryn Mawr College. She  researches and teaches Latina/o/x cultural production, theories of the novel, decolonial imaginaries, undocumented migration narratives, and testimonio forms in the Americas. She is the author of Forms of Dictatorship: Power, Narrative, and Authoritarianism in the Latina/o Novel and co-editor of Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination. She has published in the journals MELUS, Callaloo, and Symbolism, and contributed to the edited books Border Cinema, Monument Lab, and Latina/o Literature in the Classroom. María Elena Cepeda is Professor and co-chair of Latina/o studies at Williams College, where she researches Latina/o/x media and popular culture. Cepeda is the author of Musical ImagiNation: U.S.Colombian Identity and the “Latin Music Boom” and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Latina/o Media. Cepeda has published in Women’s Studies Quarterly, Feminist Media Studies, Women and Performance, and Identities, and her commentary has been featured by National Public Radio, the New York Times, and Rolling Stone, among other media outlets.

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Latino Studies (2020) 18:326–342 https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-020-00267-3 ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Latina feminist moments of recognition: Contesting the boundaries of gendered US Colombianidad in Bomba Estéreo’s “Soy yo” María Elena Cepeda1 Published online: 31 July 2020 © Springer Nature Limited 2020

Abstract Interwoven with a textual analysis of Colombian electronica band Bomba Estéreo’s viral music video “Soy yo” (2016), here I offer an autoethnographic perspective on the experience of Latina feminist media identification for a US Colombiana/Latina viewer unaccustomed to encountering herself in popular media. I trace the numerous moments of what I term “Latina feminist recognition” in “Soy yo,” with an eye toward how the video, often described as an “ode to little brown girls everywhere,” implies a universality of Latina experience, yet may simultaneously be read as a uniquely Colombian diasporic text. In centering the Latina contemplative eye, I assert that the power ascribed to “Soy yo” is in significant part anchored in the Latina female gaze. This gesture ultimately offers a potent alternative paradigm for reimagining gendered US Colombianidad and Latinidad in popular media generated within the Global North as well as by the Colombian state. Keywords  Colombians · Feminism · Identification · Latinas · Media · Music video

Momentos de reconocimiento de latinas feministas: Cuestionando los límites de la colombianidad estadounidense planteada en función de género en “Soy yo” de Bomba Estéreo Resumen Entrelazado con un análisis textual del “viral” video musical “Soy yo” (2016) de la banda electrónica colombiana Bomba Estéreo, ofrezco en este trabajo una perspectiva autoetnográfica sobre mi experiencia de identificación latina y feminista en los medios, como espectadora colombiana estadounidense/latina no acostumbrada Chapter 3 was originally published as Cepeda, M. E. Latino Studies (2020) 18: 326–342. https://doi.org/ 10.1057/s41276-020-00267-3.

* María Elena Cepeda [email protected] 1



Williams College, Williamstown, USA

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a verse en los medios populares. Identifico los múltiples momentos de lo que llamo “reconocimiento de latinas feministas” en el video “Soy yo,” con la mirada puesta en cómo el video, que a menudo se describe como una “oda a las niñas mestizas en todo el mundo” implica una universalidad de la experiencia latina que también podría leerse simultáneamente como un texto particular representativo de la diáspora colombiana. Al centrar la mirada contemplativa latina, afirmo que el poder adscrito a “Soy yo” está en gran parte afianzado por la visión de la mujer latina. Este gesto a la larga ofrece un poderoso paradigma alternativo para reimaginar la colombianidad y la latinidad estadounidenses en función de género en los medios populares generados dentro del norte global así como por el estado de Colombia. Palabras clave  Colombianas · Feminismos · Identificación · Latinas · Medios · Video musical Imagine if you grew up seeing more brown girls like yourself on television that you could relate to? —Cindy Rodríguez, Huffington Post. Adhering to an atypically linear narrative arc and bathed in soft yellow vintage tones, the music video for Colombian electronica band Bomba Estéreo’s “Soy yo” (That’s Me) opens with a rich intertextual visual (Bomba Estéreo 2016). Referencing the memorable Betty Suárez “Queens for a Day” makeover scene from the opening season of the hit ABC series Ugly Betty (2006–2010),1 “Soy yo” begins by focusing on perhaps the only other young Latina nerd known to the US popular imagination as she spies herself in the mirror with visible pleasure. With multiple braids of varying sizes askew on all sides of her head and oversize, retro glasses, eleven-year-old Peruvian–Costa Rican actress Sarai González begins her afternoon, nodding in satisfaction at her appearance in time with the heavy thudding beats of the electronica single’s opening bars. Accompanied by a soundtrack punctuated by the high-pitched, reedy tones of the Colombian gaita (cane flute), in contrast with the bass, the unnamed protagonist pauses at the door of the salon to survey the city streets that are her home. Sporting faded short overalls, a printed navy T-shirt, and imitation Crocs, González exits the salon and begins her journey around the neighborhood by bike.2 In what becomes the signature motif of the video’s narrative, González abruptly stops short on the sidewalk in front of two nearly identically clothed, conventionally attractive white female peers. Over the strains of the chorus “Tú no te preocupes / Si no te aprueban / Cuando te critiquen / Tú solo di / ‘Soy yo,’”3 González not only meets the incredulous gazes of her peers, but also performs the music herself on a recorder. With the nerd instrument par excellence

1

 For an in-depth analysis of this particular episode of Ugly Betty, see Chapter  4 (“ ‘Ugly’ America Dreams the American Dream”) in Molina-Guzmán (2010). 2   Like many contemporary music videos, the setting of “Soy yo” plays on the tensions between specificity (the rapidly gentrifying streets of González’s Brooklyn neighborhood) and ambiguity (a nameless urban center), reflecting the desire of video creators to market their product to a global audience, increasing its potential consumer appeal. 3   “Don’t worry / If they don’t approve of you / When they criticize you / Just say / ‘That’s me.’” 30

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pointed toward the cloudless sky, she swivels her hips and mimes the strains of the gaita with gusto, oblivious to the horrified reactions of those before her. This is but one hallmark moment of “Soy yo,” which is predicated on a series of encounters between González and other youths of various subjectivities throughout the course of a typical day in a vibrant city. The video then concludes as González, who has just completed an enthusiastic sidewalk dance routine, is escorted down the street by an adult male carrying her backpack. In a final gesture of recognition, the actress turns, meets the viewer’s gaze and launches a handful of silver confetti directly toward the camera, simultaneously lip-synching the final “Soy yo” of the track to her audience as the video ends. Released in early September 2016, the music video for “Soy yo,” taken from Bomba Estéreo’s 2015 album Almanecer and produced under Sony US Latin, is the band’s first major-label work. Within a few days of its release, “Soy yo” went viral, garnering a million views on YouTube (Correal 2016) and inspiring multiple hashtags, such as #SoyYo and #AsiSoyYo, animated GIFs, and memes, and attracting the attention of media outlets ranging from NBC News and the New York Times to the Latina/o/x4-centered Fusion. By winter 2019, its views had climbed to more than eighty-one million. Protagonized by New Jersey native González, the piece was directed by Torben Kjelstrup,5 a Dane who won a contest to direct the music video. Intended to paraphrase traditional hip-hop videos, “Soy yo” was shot in the Williamsburg and Bushwick sections of Brooklyn, inspired by a 1990s-era photograph of the director’s girlfriend in which she sports braces and an ostentatious track suit (Correal 2016; Rodríguez 2016). Interwoven with a textual analysis of “Soy yo,” here I offer an autoethnography regarding the process of Latina feminist media identification. In this provocation I consider what the experience of media recognition might entail for a US Colombiana/Latina viewer unaccustomed to seeing, much less hearing, herself in viral popular media. I also trace the numerous moments of Latina feminist recognition in “Soy yo,” with an eye toward how the song and music video’s status as an “ode to little brown girls everywhere” implies a common Latina experience, yet may simultaneously be read as a uniquely Colombian diasporic text. Moving beyond a focus on the white, heterosexual male gaze long critiqued by feminist film scholars, my analysis centers the US Colombiana/Latina contemplative eye. The music video for “Soy yo” and the performance of actress Sarai González in it are in large part anchored in the authority ascribed to the Latina gaze—and more specifically, the power of a Latina girl’s gaze. Indeed, “the ability to manipulate one’s gaze in the face of structures of domination that would contain it, opens up the possibility of agency”

4

  I elect to use the more expansive “Latina/o/x” throughout this piece in recognition of the fact that individuals experience gender in multiple and at times shifting ways. As a feminist scholar I believe in retaining the “a” and the “x” in particular given the rich history of Latina feminist activism (see Trujillo-Pagán 2018) as well as the important need to acknowledge non-binary individuals within our scholarly work. 5   A detailed consideration of production-level concerns is beyond the scope of this essay, but I would like to underscore the potential implications of Kjelstrup’s male and European positionalities, however briefly. I am particularly interested in the director’s status, a fact that renders “Soy yo” and its affirmative message a particularly thorny vehicle for co-optation. Reprinted from the journal

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(hooks 1992, p. 116), imbuing such an act with subversive potential. As such, both “Soy yo” and my response to it constitute purposeful attempts at claiming representational space traditionally denied to US Colombianas and Latinas in the US and global mediascapes. I am painfully cognizant of the fact that I am writing from between the cracks, from an interstitial, hybrid space within dominant culture and the existing regimes of representation for Latinas/os/xs and, specifically, US Colombians. And I am anxious as I type these words, wrestling to compose them from the many fissures that I have fallen through in this life: as a US Colombiana with roots in the Caribbean,6 as a female, as the middle offspring, as the parentified child of immigrants, as the product of intergenerational trauma, and as an underexamined subject of inquiry within the broader paradigms of Latina/o/x studies. I proceed with trepidation as I confront what Ruth Behar characterizes as the “awful prospect” of relinquishing my “cloak of academic integrity” (1996, p. 11). In these pages I offer a layered account juxtaposed against a more traditional academic analysis, the former consisting of self-reflexive writing that candidly reflects the manner in which I conceptualize and move through everyday life. Autoethnography overtly challenges just as it expands the parameters of disciplinary knowledge, provoking very palpable anxieties around forfeiting disciplinary control and inciting talk of intellectual illegitimacy. As it privileges lived experience and the inherent messiness of human existence, autoethnography’s embrace of the quotidian renders it a particularly effective tool for the thematic exploration of popular culture and media, given their grounding in the everyday.

On being hailed: Media traces and US Colombiana/Latina subjectivities I am a Latina, yet in many ways I am not like the youthful protagonist of Bomba Estéreo’s viral music video “Soy yo.”7 The little girl we observe onscreen is brown, I am light-skinned; she effortlessly moves through working-class space, whereas my immigrant family managed to firmly ascend to the middle class; the protagonist is barely in her tweens, while I am forty-something; and she espouses an infectious self-assurance that I have probably never possessed as a grown woman, much less as a child. Yet my adult self still watches this video with unfettered joy, as upon every single viewing I feel hailed. I indulge in three glorious minutes of intense media identification with the solitary youthful feminine figure who dares to look everyone and everything, including the camera itself (and by extension, the audience), 6

  I signal the particular marginalization of studies of Colombia’s Caribbean coast and its diaspora with irony. As Wade (2000) cogently argues, despite its persistent framing as a culturally, racially, and linguistically inferior space relative to the nation’s interior Andean regions, La Costa (as it is popularly known) frequently stands in for Colombian culture as an undifferentiated whole in the Colombian domestic as well as the global popular imagination. 7   Bomba Estéreo, “Soy yo,” 7 September 2016, YouTube, https​://www.youtu​be.com/watch​?v=bxWxX​ ncl53​U. 32

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directly in the eye. As an admittedly nerdy second-generation US Colombiana of a similar age growing up in an almost entirely white, economically depressed rust belt town, I was invisible yet simultaneously hypervisible. Drawn into Bomba Estéreo’s compensatory fantasyland of beloved Latina nerd-dom, I instead feel myself not only visible, but also audible in uniquely Colombian fashion—and, dare I say, in a singularly costeño or Colombian Caribbean musical style. (The song’s composer and performer is the aforementioned Samuet—a native of Santa Marta, Colombia, near Barranquilla, the coastal city where my family is from). In sonic terms, the auditory bliss provoked by Bomba Estéreo’s irreverent, carefully crafted blend of electronic beats and traditional Colombian instrumentation counters the ever-present narrative of masculinist violence, criminalization, intergenerational trauma, dislocation and corruption so often attached to Colombian identity in the global popular imagination. I write here about just how it feels to watch and listen to “Soy yo” from my unique positionality in part as a means of acknowledging how autoethnography constitutes a form of embodied knowledge, and that we write about ourselves as a means of achieving a “deeper critical understanding with others of the ways in which our own lives intersect with larger sociocultural pains and privileges” (Nzibi Pindi 2018, pp. 25–26). As such, my words do not engage in an examination of the self in isolation; rather, I seek to engage in a broader cultural critique and illuminate questions pertinent to US Colombiana and Latina collectivities (Boylorn and Orbe 2013, p. 17). The music video for “Soy yo” encompasses a visual and sonic narrative that privileges Latina subjectivities in ways rarely seen. Its action reflects an interlocking series of what I identify as various Latina feminist moments of recognition, or protracted instances of awareness regarding the self and/or the other as gendered, raced, and classed subject(s), along with all of the privileges, conflicts and power differentials that said subjectivity/ies imply. “Soy yo” is rooted in what Hilarie Ashton terms “the sonic feminine,” or the intersection of the sonic, the visual, and the spatial as deployed by feminine figures in popular music. As she proposes, the sonic feminine constitutes more than a univocal attention to sound; rather, it simultaneously describes the other transgressive aesthetic and space-making efforts of women and girls (2018). While Ashton utilizes this term to specifically acknowledge the cultural labor that female musicians in particular engage in, I extend her analysis to trace the cultural work of female music video performers as well, particularly Latinas. “Soy yo” as such has been described as “an ode to little brown girls everywhere”8 (López 2016; emphasis added) or a “self-love anthem” (Rodríguez 2016) that has prompted Latina writers such as Cindy Rodríguez (2016) to claim the text as their own. (Her Huffington Post essay subtitle confesses, “I immediately saw my former awkward self in her”). Yet I would argue that Rodríguez oversimplifies the dynamics of media identification, framing it as a straightforward process, when in practice identification does not follow a facile trajectory. Identification is not rooted

8

  I would be remiss if I did not point out the exclusionary ethnoracial logic at the heart of any attempt to simplistically wed Latinidad to brownness or mestiza/o/x identity, a move that ultimately erases Latin American and Latina/o/x Afro-descendant and indigenous subjectivities. Reprinted from the journal

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in a linear mapping that unites the character onscreen with the individual viewer (Valdivia 2000, pp. 154–155). It is not “structured around fixed ‘selves’ which we either are or are not” (Hall 1996a, p. 444), and therefore offers the possibility of recognition as well as misrecognition. As such, identification is “conditional, lodged in contingency” or a never-finalized construction in constant progress (Hall 1996b, p. 2). Equally as important, feminist film scholars such as Anne Friedberg have asserted that identification can be realized only via recognition (1990, p. 45). Friedberg maintains that the process of identification is instead designed to “encourage a denial of one’s identity, or to have one construct identity based on the model of the other, maintaining the illusion that one is actually inhabiting the body of the ego ideal” (1990, p. 44). However, I posit that such a perspective fails to account for the affirmative potential of music videos such as “Soy yo” for many Latinas, and for the powerful digital traces that such texts leave behind, in the form of comments on social media outlets, “likes,” intertextual digital send-offs, and additional subscribers. But it is not merely a simple question of identificatory pleasure, an emphasis upon which can undercut the imagination-based labor of resistance that so many Latinas engage in in response to media texts (Valdivia 2000, p. 159). As such, Latina spectatorship practices encompass more than resistance or reactions; indeed, alternative texts often emerge from them (hooks 1992, p. 128). Frustration—the exasperation at rarely if ever observing oneself onscreen, and at never hearing Latina voices articulated over the airwaves—also plays a major factor. As Angharad Valdivia queries, “Can recognition be made through absence?” But as Latinas we are not, as she has also aptly argued, merely dealing with the effects of symbolic media annihilation; for, in order to be symbolically annihilated, Latinas must win equal representational space in the first place (Valdivia 2000, p. 155; Valdivia 2018). As a second-generation US Colombiana, here I am—to utilize a phrase originally employed by bell hooks (1989) and later discussed by Báez (2018) in her groundbreaking study of Latina media audiences— “talking back,” or engaging in a shift from “silence into speech” that denotes the transformation from object into liberated subject. Moreover, much like the video’s young Latina protagonist, I am looking back at the video, and in a less direct sense at its global Latina/Colombiana audience. To engage in a scholarly discussion of “Soy yo” as a visual Latina text, and as a transnational Colombian cultural text, is to expand the boundaries of what is intellectually legible within Latina/o/x studies and feminist media studies. Discussion also counters the de facto erasure of young girls of color within most scholarly research and popular narratives, locating them instead within a discursive framework from which “histories can be revised and stories told from the perspectives of those whose lives are actually on the line. Being talked about at least means that you have a chance to talk back” (Cox 2015, vii–viii; emphasis added). Furthermore, as a popular Latina feminist treatise, the music video for “Soy yo” positions Latina nerd-dom as a social possibility within the global popular imagination. Therein lies much of its power with respect to Latina media representation in particular, as Latina/Colombiana feminine power is so narrowly yet persistently tied to hypersexuality, self-abnegating motherhood, and/or gendered service labor. There exists a clear need to theorize the intersectional specificities of US Colombiana girl- and womanhood, a practice that simultaneously elucidates and disrupts reigning cultural 34

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frameworks of Latina subjectivities (see Nzibi Pindi 2018), just as it sheds valuable light on the profound impacts that a lack of media representation portends for Latinas in general and US Colombianas in particular.

Dying to see and hear ourselves: Latinas, US Colombianas, and media invisibility The invisibility of US Colombians in the US popular imagination and within Latina/o/x studies is in part a product of our demographic inconspicuousness, which is in turn tied to the community’s persistent institutional undercounting. Currently, nearly five million diasporic Colombians reside en el exterior9 around the globe (approximately one out of every ten Colombian citizens) (LaRosa and Mejía 2017, p. 215) a figure that locates Colombia as second only to Mexico in terms of Latin American emigration rates. Significantly, these emigration statistics represent an almost certain undercounting of Colombian immigrants, caused by the challenge of locating post-migration populations, as well as by Colombians’ historic mistrust of government. (For example, in key receiving nations such as the United States, the 1990 census undercounted Colombians at well over 50%). Although exact population statistics are difficult to compile, Ochoa Camacho employs US as well as Colombian government data to estimate that, by the year 2020, the US will be home to approximately 2.2 million individuals of Colombian origin (Ochoa Camacho 2016, pp. 167–168). However, these numbers generally fail to account for second- and third-generation Colombian transnationals, many of whom are eligible for dual citizenship and who may also maintain vigorous affective, commercial, and political ties to the nation. Media is deployed by many Latinas as a critical gauge by which to measure their community’s status in the United States. In short, media communicates to us just what and who is important—and by extension, worthy. More specifically, we can conceptualize Latinas in light of what Báez terms a “cinema of hunger,” or a marked desire for more onscreen representations of ourselves. This desire can lead to Latina media audiences clinging (although not necessarily uncritically) to the limited images of Latina femininity in circulation (Báez 2018, p. 76). Latinas in general are quite literally symbolically starved for more media representation, while smaller Latina subpopulations such as US Colombianas experience media invisibility even more acutely, as Colombian identity writ large is so frequently narrowly filtered through gendered representations in global media via the ubiquitous presence of hypersexualized female figures such as Sofía Vergara, Shakira and Kali Uchis, among others.10 Notably, while “Soy yo” represents a marked departure from the hypersexualized, kitschy performances of Colombianidad offered in the much of the 9

  “En el exterior” (On the outside) is the official designator employed by the Colombian state to label the Colombian diaspora. 10   For additional scholarship on the most highly visible and audible US Colombianas, see the following pieces on Shakira: Celis (2012), Cepeda (2003, 2008, 2010), Fuchs (2007), and Gontovnik (2010). Regarding Sofía Vergara, see Casillas et al. (2018), Porras Contreras (2017), Fernández L’Hoeste (2017), Molina-Guzmán (2014, 2018), and Vidal-Ortiz (2016). Reprinted from the journal

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work of these aforementioned women, they all illuminate an experience of gendered Latina/US Colombiana identity that works to reinforce the notion of Otherness within the US context, if to varying degrees. Transnational media texts such as “Soy yo” can therefore prove integral to the multifarious process of gendered, diasporic identification. I return again to Valdivia’s important remark about recognition forged via absence, as this is precisely the sort of media consumption labor in which US Colombianas and the Colombian diaspora as a whole have always engaged. The viral character of “Soy yo”’s circulation therefore demonstrates the importance of informed media analysis as a critical tool for comprehending dynamically transnational populations such as US Colombians, for whom the quotidian realities of diaspora cannot be divorced from everyday media practices. Given the foreign-born, dynamically transnational character of the Colombian community, it is commonplace for Colombians to deploy media as a form of community-building absent direct communicative contact. Markedly geographically dispersed and communally fragmented due in large part to a “double discourse” of criminality rooted in their association with “illegal” border crossings and narcotrafficking (Ochoa Camacho 2016), the Colombian diaspora is therefore perhaps uniquely suited to a brand of digital transnational activity that acts as the virtual counterpart to the material labor traditionally realized by transnational home associations, even if it does not entirely supplant them or their contributions. On both the domestic and global levels, “Soy yo” potentially fulfills such a community-building function for the diasporic Colombianas and Latinas occupying cyberspace. Indeed, “Soy yo” engenders multiple, and perhaps at times even contradictory, interpretations that point to both pan-Latina/o/x as well as specifically Colombian diasporic readings of the video. As Bomba Estéreo member Simón Mejía articulates in a 2016 National Public Radio interview, Sarai González’s casting constituted a careful calculation embedded with the potential for pan-Latina/o/x representation: “She [González] can be from everywhere in Latin America, from Mexico to even Argentina, she could be anyone. … She represents a whole community who are immigrants living in a foreign country, so she’s representing what’s happening in the world” (NPR Staff 2016).11 While such a quasi-universalist stance certainly offers the potential to obscure the uniquely Colombian features of the video, I would assert that as a representational paradigm, Latinidad perhaps proves even more critical to less visible Latina/o/x diasporic populations such as Colombians, as it often serves as the primary if not sole lens through which we are scripted and hailed. However, “Soy yo” simultaneously may also be read as a specifically Colombian diasporic text in part on the basis of the status of the song’s creators and performers. Bomba Estéreo’s members are firmly entrenched as global Colombians and highly

11

  In his attempts to locate a universal Latinidad in the mestiza body of Sarai González, Mejía unwittingly draws our attention to the ethnoracial national hierarchies that animate the Latin American and Latina/o/x popular imaginations. Specifically, his comment that González could be from Mexico or “even Argentina” indexes the ways in which Mexico is broadly associated with mestiza/o/x brownness, whereas Argentina is unproblematically conceptualized as the “whitest” of all Latin American nations, in a manner that challenges our ability to imagine the existence of Argentine indigenous and Afro-descendant subjects. 36

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mobile, twenty-first-century hybrid subjects. Notably, the music video showcases a “new” Latina actress of mixed South/Central American parentage, a choice that foregrounds the increasing saliency of “Other” as well as hybrid Latinas/os/xs. The decision to film the video in New York City as opposed to Colombia also renders it a diasporic text. It is also a markedly diasporic text because of its hybrid sonic qualities, which, like most Colombian diasporic production, reflect the aesthetic union of the Global North and South. However, “Soy yo”’s sonic profile also highlights how, within diasporic cultural production, there can be “no simple ‘return’ or ‘recovery’ of the ancestral past which is not re-experienced through the categories of the present: no base for creative enunciation in a simple reproduction of traditional forms which are not transformed by the technologies and the identities of the present” (Hall 1996a, p. 448). We may note this, for example, in “Soy yo”’s reliance on autochthonous instrumentation such as the gaita12 in particular as part of its hybrid electronica composition, as visually signified by the aforementioned recorder in the video. The video’s sonic and visual features thus expand the Colombian popular imaginary to encompass the diasporic, just as the digital platforms that enable its circulation facilitate the creation and maintenance of those same diasporic subjectivities. In another sense, “Soy yo” illuminates the manner in which the boundaries of Colombianidad might be (re)imagined as well as felt. It potentially enables US Colombianas to feel part of the nation (Fernández L’Hoeste and Vila 2018, p. 3), and pointedly prompts us to filter Colombian identities through the prism of diaspora. Ultimately, much like the Latina gaze that undergirds “Soy yo”’s narrative core, the video’s sounds and imagery offer the possibility for sensorial self-recognition to Colombiana and Latina media consumers around the globe.13

Latina feminist moments of recognition: The command of the US Colombiana/Latina gaze There is power in looking. —bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation. In the mid-1970s, feminist film critic Laura Mulvey utilized a psychoanalytical approach to uncover the way patriarchal society has unconsciously shaped film form, and in particular how it drives what she famously termed the (white) “male gaze”—the assertion being that pleasure in looking has been historically divided along the lines of normative gender categories, or “active/male” and “passive/

12

  Here I wish to acknowledge the potential for the gaita as a uniquely Colombian musical reference to be lost or mis-taken by many media consumers, a fact that may render “Soy yo” a more generically panLatina/o/x composition. 13   The intertextual, mediated nature of diasporic cultural production proves significant here, given that, as a feminist anthem for young Latinas—indeed, as a feminist text directed at Latinas of all ages— the lyrical content of “Soy yo” engages in direct conversation with the work of earlier global feminist Colombian bands such as Aterciopelados, specifically their 1997 single “No necesito,” off of La Pipa de la Paz.

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female,” in which men act as the bearers of the look and women constitute the objects of the look (Dirse 2013, p. 18). Mulvey argued that cinema is structured around a trio of overtly male looks or gazes. These include the first gaze, or the look of the camera in the particular context under filming (this is an ostensibly neutral gaze, until we recognize the reality that most directors are male); the second gaze, or the male gaze within the narrative, which is framed in such a fashion that women are rendered the objects of this very gaze; and the third gaze, or the look of the male spectator, which mimics the previous two looks (Mulvey 2009; Kaplan 1983, p. 30). Not surprisingly, for Mulvey film is even more specifically “fitted to the heterosexual male gaze,” a dynamic to which female and queer viewers are expected to acquiesce (Cohen 2010, p. 80). Although a landmark piece of scholarship, Mulvey’s theorization does not account for the unique dynamics of the white male gaze as it is leveled at women and girls of color. Furthermore, as Valdivia notes, Freudian frameworks are overwhelmingly masculinist and Western in their orientation. Desire is construed in purely Oedipal terms, a move that again benefits the white male spectator, even in the face of the shifts in and perhaps even the failure of identification that may take place. All of these factors portend very real consequences for the study of women of color audiences (Valdivia 2000, p. 154). Notably, in more recent decades the notion of the female gaze has emerged, as feminist film studies scholars such as Jackie Stacey have examined the gendered dynamics of looking versus being looked at (1994, p. 7; emphasis original), just such as filmmaker Zoe Dirse has explored the unique dynamics prompted when the “bearer of the look” is female-identified, and the object of that glance is female as well (2013, p. 18). Several distinct, frequently intersecting female gazes in the video exist, which I characterize as “Latina feminist moments of recognition,” or key instances of rupture that mark productive, Latina feminist tactics of inversion. In sum, the prevailing dynamics of gender, ethnoracial identity, space, language, and nation are regularly upended via the Latina gaze in “Soy yo.” I outline a few of the principal moments in this media text in which the protagonist engages in protracted instances of Latina feminist awareness, both of the self and/or the other. Despite—and perhaps in stark contrast to—the exuberant performance of its lead protagonist, “Soy yo” is a music video largely populated by blank faces, a directorial choice that further underscores the vibrant, markedly expressive affect of its Latina star, potentially enabling viewers to identify more readily with González. First, we must consider the moment of self-awareness apparent in the opening scene, in which González studies herself in the salon mirror. It is best understood as adhering to the inherent logic of music video, which is designed to chronicle the (female) performer’s body (Vernallis 2004, p. 97). Yet this is not simply the internalized, self-disciplining neoliberal gaze that constitutes a hallmark of the postfeminist condition; González is not seeking to meet the gendered aesthetic expectations of others. Rather, her eyes remain resolutely focused on meeting her own gaze in the salon mirror, and on pleasing herself. (For some fleeting moments at the video’s onset, it actually appears as if nothing but the self exists for the video’s protagonist). As viewers, we are also positioned by the camera’s/

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González’s glance, as we fleetingly gaze on her figure in the mirror and spy her face directly contemplating us, the spectator(s). Moreover, in “Soy yo” the young female protagonist exhibits an awareness of other figures onscreen and, more specifically, her peers on the street. She freely occupies public space, or gendered, raced sites traditionally associated with heterosexual males, whiteness, and English. Leveling an epic side-eye glance, González firmly meets the gaze of her twin-like white female peers, contesting their traditional embodiment of gendered aesthetics (specifically, their normative iteration of white femininity) and public comportment. In this regard, “Soy yo” rejects the premise that girls must be “strong and assertive” yet “still … [conventionally] beautiful according to Eurocentric paradigms” (Valdivia 2009, p. 76). And even when we are not privy to the movements of the protagonist’s head, the camera’s gaze acts as González’s eyes, tracing her line of sight for the viewer and further cementing her weight within the video’s narrative arc. González also demonstrates that she too knows how to maneuver on the basketball court; she observes tactics, to loosely paraphrase de Certeau (1984). For this female tween, this does not entail merely a display of how to spatially dominate traditionally masculine spaces such as the basketball court and the sidewalk hip-hop dance floor. Rather, she is engaging in a broader performance of how one young girl navigates life. Consistently, González subverts the male gaze; she is looked at, but in reality does most of the (unflinching) looking. Ultimately, the protagonist and episodic narrative of “Soy yo” denote an awareness of the viewing audience itself. Consider, for example, the evocative final frame of the video, in which González directly addresses the camera, informing us in no uncertain terms that she has been aware all along of our voyeuristic presence. This constitutes the signature moment of the video, as the protagonist looks directly into our eyes, tossing a handful of silver paper confetti in our direction as she hails us into her sphere of self-confidence, lip-synching the phrase “Soy yo” (reminding us once again that “That’s/She’s me”) as the music fades. The decision to have González lipsynch here is significant: as a formal “purveyor of similarity and contrast”(Vernallis 2004, p. 55), this singular moment of vocal mimesis draws our attention to a key shift in the direction of the protagonist’s gaze and attention. This gesture also underscores the stakes at hand in this pivotal moment of audience awareness, in which the discomfort summoned by the rupture of the fourth wall mingles with our delight at the protagonist’s audacity. Finally, we must acknowledge the moments of recognition that surface when the spectator potentially spies her, him or themself in the figure of the video’s protagonist. These are the moments that I reference in the autoethnographic portions of this essay. In the Latina feminist tactics of inversion that characterize the action of “Soy yo” and González’s contestatory glance, this is perhaps the most revolutionary moment of recognition in the video, as it wields the potential for uniting the realm of the representational with the actual lifeworlds of US Colombiana/Latina media consumers (also allowing, however, for the potential of mis-recognition with the figure onscreen). The non-virtuosic character of González’s female body in particular counters the emphasis on normative Colombian female beauty bolstered in Colombian government-sanctioned and/or popular campaigns aimed at re-semanticizing the nation and its diaspora, such as Colombia es Pasión (Colombia Is Passion) Reprinted from the journal

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and the more recent “It’s Colombia NOT Columbia” social media campaign (see Cepeda 2018; Garbow 2016; Nasser 2012). Although not an independent media text in the strictest of senses, “Soy yo” nevertheless constitutes the brand of alternative media product that may counter the flattened narratives of gendered Latinidad and US Colombianidad generated by outlets in the Global North and by the Colombian state, as I have learned in my own recent encounters with the Colombian government, just as it simultaneously illuminates the centrality of mestizaje/hybrid brownness within the global Latina/o/x ethnoracial imaginary.

Mediated US Colombianidad: Diasporic subjectivities and state‑sponsored selves On a hot, humid Thursday in mid-June 2017, I travel the two-hours-plus journey with my parents from their home in Sarasota, Florida, to the Colombian consulate on T.G. Lee Boulevard in Orlando. The purpose of the journey is twofold: we aim to retrieve my mother’s renewed Colombian cedúla (national identity card) and inquire yet once more as to how to begin the process of obtaining Colombian citizenship for me, a privilege extended to all individuals born en el exterior to a Colombian parent or parents since the new Colombian Constitution of 1991. Located on the second floor of a large, multistoried mirrored office building on the outskirts of Orlando near the airport, the consulate surprises me with its rather aseptic appearance. The white walls are accented by large, light-gray stone floor tiles that lend the space the appearance of an upscale hospital as opposed to a government office. It is a space marked by quiet tones; the speech of both the Colombian employees and visitors is uncharacteristically hushed. Even the large, flat-screen television featured on one wall of the waiting room at the end of the consulate opposite the front door has its volume respectfully lowered until it is barely audible. Staffed by two young women, the consulate’s large reception desk is clearly the office hub, and a short, orderly line forms beside it as each individual awaits their turn to ask questions about pending or future paperwork. When my turn at the desk arrives, I greet the young women in formal, slightly nervous Spanish and politely inquire about the necessary steps to obtain a cedúla and then a passport. The older of the two women—in her early thirties with black locks swept back into a ponytail—is clearly in charge of the desk, and she confidently informs me in an accent from the Colombian interior that first I must register as a Colombian national. She instructs the twenty-something woman with long dyed faded red hair at her side to retrieve the proper paperwork from an accordion file. Silently, the younger woman obediently leafs through the file from beginning to end without success a few times until finally her superior grows impatient and briskly requests the file folder, skillfully producing the correct form within a few seconds. Simultaneously overwhelmed by the red tape (Where was I to find all of these original documents? Did my parents even have their required original cédulas after decades in the United States? How would I locate a suitable translator for my birth certificate?) yet grateful for the straightforward answers, I extend my thanks and leave the reception desk to meet my mother in the waiting room. 40

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Faultlessly clean and sparely decorated save a collection of modern gray chairs arranged in a semicircle, this end of the consulate is populated by a sizeable group of Colombians of various ages and genders. There was little conversation in the area, as most eyes are transfixed on the flat-screen television adorning the end of the space nearest the reception desk. Even as the volume is lowered, the unmistakable sounds of US English emanate from the television during an extended advertisement for travel to Colombia. Onscreen a middle-aged white US male dressed in a casual button-down shirt and khaki pants extols the virtues of various destinations in the country against a backdrop of spectacular aerial footage interspersed with more intimate shots of foreign tourists enjoying themselves in an open-air restaurant surrounded by dancing Colombians in colorful folkloric dress. I reflect with a slight grimace: once more, this is an exercise in diasporic subjects being instructed in the technologies of the self by the long arms of the Global North and the Colombian state. I find myself sorely tempted to crane my head to observe the Colombians watching this particular televisual rendition of Colombia but restrain myself from being too obvious. Instead, I focus on the next series of ads, which contain commercials for Colombian beer and yet another extended collage-like advertisement for the hashtag campaign #LoBuenoDeColombia (#WhatsGoodFromColombia). As we return to the car shortly thereafter for the return trip to Sarasota, I reflect: what I have just observed onscreen in the waiting room and “Soy yo” are quite different media texts. Yet how have popular media narratives about Colombia shifted in recent years, if at all? What does it mean to strategically replace one set of stereotypes (masculinist violence, corruption, disorder and drug-trafficking) with yet another (lush landscapes, beautiful women, endless celebration, and perpetually happy citizens)? As both an explicitly referenced and subtextual category, how does gender figure into these media narratives and the manner in which Colombians and others around the globe decipher them? Which entities and individuals benefit most from the persistent invocation of certain archetypes about ethnoracial identity, gender, and nation? Indeed, this brief period in the waiting room has proven a lesson in the significance of Colombians learning about their own country—or diasporic Colombians in essence learning about what it means to be Colombian—on the basis of media narratives generated and distributed both in the Global North and by the Colombian state. In the broadest of senses, my moments in the waiting room speak to the centrality of popular media narratives in the construction of (trans)national subjectivities, or as tools that both mold as well as reflect the self. I realize that because of its status as an alternative media text, in some regards “Soy yo” may be limited in its power, given the very real potential for transnational Colombian popular music and its gendered expression of happiness to be co-opted as part of a gendered, emergent neoliberal discourse on global Colombian identity (Cepeda 2018).

Conclusion: Media legibility and the “othered other” Boylorn and Orbe maintain that critical autoethnographers “write as an Other, and for an Other” (2013, p. 15). I would assert that US Colombianas constitute such an Othered Other, not only within mainstream US media, but also as subjects of Reprinted from the journal

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inquiry within Latina/o/x, media, and gender studies. Although I am writing from my own singular perspective, my intention in writing here about “Soy yo” from the combined perspective of reflexive autobiography and textual analysis is collective as opposed to individual. I employ reflexive autobiography in particular in order to shade the broader contours of US Colombiana and Latina media subjectivities—and specifically to highlight their related nodes of invisibility within the global popular imagination. As an “ode to little brown girls everywhere,” the nerdy Latina protagonist of “Soy yo,” much like this essay, privileges Latina subjectivities in a unique fashion and troubles the boundaries of Latina/o/x, media, and gender studies, just as it potentially leads us to question the wholesale application of “brownness” to our understanding of Latinidad in a manner that erases the specific complexities—if not the mere existence—of Afro-Latinidades in particular. My analysis enhances the scant existing research on these topics via a consideration of how one US Colombiana actively grapples with the scant if powerful media Colombian archetypes in everyday life. Indeed, “Soy yo” points to how sound and image—and not solely lyrics or letters—contribute to the construction of a Colombian transnational imaginary (Fernández L’Hoeste and Vila 2018, p. 19). The mindful emphasis here on second-generation US Colombiana subjectivity in particular also displaces the “universal” Anglo subject and the first-generation immigrant population privileged in most considerations of ethnic media audiences to date (Parameswaran 2003, pp. 311, 314; Oh 2015, p. xi), just as it offers a micro-level analysis of the potential impacts of US Colombian media representation until now only broadly explored in sociological studies of the community. Perhaps most notably, “Soy yo” offers Latina nerd-dom as a social possibility and an alternative template for contemplating gendered Latinidad/US Colombianidad. It is a move that directly refutes an array of historic media stereotypes attached to Latina/US Colombiana female subjectivities. Much like the telenovela, as a global media text “Soy yo” has engendered “unbound” audiences linked across cultural as well as national borders. Yet as Mayer (2003) reminds us, it is critical that we separate the unfettered character of the audience from actual media consumers, who are always anchored in the local. In short, my positionality as a US Colombiana with roots in Florida, Massachusetts, and Barranquilla, Colombia, deeply informs my singular understanding of the video. As I navigate representational terrain that is at once foreign and intimate in “Soy yo,” I am fascinated by the manner in which identification—never a neat linear proposition, nor ever a mere question of pleasure—potentially flows out of US Colombiana consumption practices, and the ways in which the protagonist of the video engages us as a mobile signifier to which second-generation US Colombianas and Latinas might attach a multitude of meanings in order to fit our own needs and experiences in the local context (Mayer 2003, pp. 489, 493). For, much like other girls of color, the presence of young Latinas can alter public and private spatial dynamics while simultaneously demanding that we envision and comprehend those spaces in a different manner (Cox 2015, pp. 25–26). Grounded in the nonconforming aesthetic and spatial project of the sonic feminine, “Soy yo” ultimately offers the potential to engage US Colombiana/Latina viewers via its numerous, multilayered feminist moments of recognition, instances which complicate dominant aesthetic, 42

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ethnoracial, and spatial cultural norms, and which extend to us a powerful alternative paradigm for reimagining gendered US Colombianidad and Latinidad. Acknowledgements  Muchísimas gracias to Jennifer Harford Vargas, Johana Londoño, Lina Rincón, and to my anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments. I am also grateful to audiences at Brown University, the University of Kansas, and Williams College for their feedback on earlier versions of this work.

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Publisher’s Note  Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

María Elena Cepeda  is Professor and co-chair of Latina/o Studies at Williams College, where she researches Latina/o/x media and popular culture. Cepeda is the author of Musical ImagiNation: U.S.Colombian Identity and the “Latin Music Boom” and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Latina/o Media. Cepeda has published in Women’s Studies Quarterly, Feminist Media Studies, Women and Performance, and Identities, and her commentary has been featured by National Public Radio, The New York Times, and Rolling Stone, among other media outlets.

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Latino Studies (2020) 18:343–362 https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-020-00264-6 ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Diasporic home: US Colombian belonging and becoming in Patricia Engel’s Vida Catalina Esguerra1 Published online: 31 July 2020 © Springer Nature Limited 2020

Abstract This article analyzes Patricia Engel’s Vida (Grove Atlantic, New York, 2010) as a groundbreaking novel that narrates the US Colombian diasporic experience. The article argues that becoming and belonging evolve across the intricacies of the transdiasporic journey of class, race, and gender presented throughout the novel. Through a close reading of Vida, the article asserts the importance of this group’s place in the US immigrant imaginary and the broader Latinx diaspora. Its analysis of Vida affirms the significance of US Colombians as a meaningful and distinctive part of Latinx diaspora studies, asserts the role of US Colombians as part of the transnational Latinx cultural imaginary, and considers how literary analysis about diasporic Colombian fiction might ultimately expand ways of theorizing transnational Latinx cultural production. Keywords  Transdiaspora · Colombianidad · Feminism · Home · Belonging · Immigration

Hogar diaspórico: La pertenencia y el devenir de los colombianos estadounidenses en la novela Vida de Patricia Engel Resumen Este artículo analiza el libro Vida de Patricia Engel (2010) como novela innovadora que narra la experiencia de la diáspora colomboestadounidense. Propone que el devenir y la pertenencia evolucionan dentro de la complejidad de la travesía transdiaspórica de clase, raza y género expuesta a lo largo de esta novela. Partiendo de una lectura a fondo de Vida, el artículo afirma la importancia del lugar de este grupo en el imaginario inmigrante de los Estados Unidos y la diáspora latina en general. Su Chapter 4 was originally published as Esguerra, C. Latino Studies (2020) 18: 343–362. https://doi.org/ 10.1057/s41276-020-00264-6.

* Catalina Esguerra [email protected]; [email protected] 1



Miller School of Albemarle, 1000 Samuel Miller Loop, Charlottesville, VA, USA

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C. Esguerra

análisis de la novela afirma la importancia de los colombianos estadounidenses como parte significativa y distintiva de los estudios de la diáspora latina, afirma su papel como parte del imaginario transnacional cultural latino y examina cómo el análisis literario de las obras de ficción colombianas podría a la larga desarrollar nuevas formas de teorizar la producción cultural latina transnacional. Palabras clave  Transdiáspora · Colombianidad · Feminismo · Hogar · Pertenencia · Inmigración What is home? The place I was born? Where I grew up? Where my parents live? Where I live and work as an adult? Where I locate my community, my people? Who are “my people”? Is home a geographical space, a historical space, an emotional, sensory space? —Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders (2003) In an era of growing xenophobia in US geopolitical discourse and increasingly reductive understandings of Latinx populations, the US Latinx diaspora contends with the inevitable need for a complex reimagining of home and belonging.1 Yet, for Latinxs, belonging within their diasporic communities often comes with navigating both explicit and coded acts of exclusion from the US nation-state. Ana Ribero’s chapter, “Citizenship,” in Decolonizing Rhetoric and Composition Studies: New Latinx Keywords for Theory and Pedagogy (2016) demonstrates how US constructs of belonging strictly define belonging as a binary between inclusion and exclusion: As the building block of the nation-state—itself a requisite for the workings of neocolonialism and neoliberalism—citizenship helps to delineate and reinforce national borders that constitute global hierarchies of social, political, military and economic power, hierarchies that disproportionately benefit the Global North at the expense of the racialized peoples of the Global South. (p. 33). When defining the non-belonging of Latinx communities, the state and anti-immigrant discourses set up a hierarchy of us versus them that is predicated on creating a categorical criminal distancing and on promoting the Latinx migratory community as a drain on the resources of the nation-state—politically, socially and economically. Moreover, in an effort to dehumanize these “racialized peoples of the Global

1

  I utilize the term “Latinx” as a way to underscore and label identities grounded in the spectrum of Latin American heritage and descendance that can also exist in, between, and beyond the gender binary. While aurally challenging in Spanish, I assert the term as a visual statement of resistance to the patriarchy innate to Spanish, offering a way to categorize the intersectional nature of Spanish-speaking immigrant identities; Latinx studies volumes—such as Imagined Transnationalism: U.S. Latino/a Literature, Culture and Identity (Concannon et al. 2009) and Global Latin(o) Americanos: Transoceanic Diasporas and Regional Migrations (Overmyer-Velázquez and Sepúlveda 2018)—have considered the transnational shifts in studies on Latinx migration by de-privileging the exclusive study on US-centered migratory patterns, ultimately interrogating how Latinx migration has distinctive effects among its varied diasporic subjects. 48

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South,” the dominant US national imaginary excludes Latinx communities from belonging within their surrounding labor, social, and political spaces. Interrogating the very idea of national belonging, then, is a critical practice for better understanding the negotiated expressions of US Latinx identities. Moreover, as the US manages the influxes of both documented and undocumented Latinx immigrants, how do these varied Latinx populations imagine their belonging—both within and outside of the broader US Latinx diaspora? In terms of US Latinx populations, Colombians factored as the single largest group of documented immigrants to the United States from 1998 to 2010. In fact, Colombians made up 30% of all documented immigrants from South America during this period (Carvajal 2017) and studies evidence that Colombia remains one of the major contributors of migrants from Latin America in the world.2 Historically, the 1980s brought a rise of violence in Colombia—associated with the narco trade—and thus ushered in a significant wave of US-emigrating Colombians. Kidnappings, bombings in urban hubs, and the political assassinations of members of the upper echelon of Colombian society found many seeking sociopolitical asylum in the United States. Additionally, the 1990s witnessed a sharp increase in emigration, due to the economic crisis associated with a steep decline in coffee prices and the increasing violence of the armed civil conflict—fueled by the vacuum of power left in the wake of the collapse of the large-scale drug cartels (Silva and Massey 2015, p. 165).3 Virginia Bouvier, in “A Reluctant Diaspora? The Case of Colombia” (2007), puts it as follows: “Between 1996 and July 2003, 1.6 million Colombians ‘permanently’ left Colombia, with 49% of the total emigrating between 1999 and 2001” (p. 134). Given these figures of emigration, how are these diasporic Colombian subjects creating new homes and finding their fit elsewhere? Better understanding how the US Colombian community navigates belonging is essential—given this community’s role as a major Latinx group and the significance of their cultural diaspora. What does it mean for Colombians to be part of a diaspora and how does their diasporic experience shape how they understand belonging? Ricardo L. Ortíz, in Keywords for Latina/o Studies (2017), offers an astute definition for “diaspora” and reflects how, in his view, “calling oneself a ‘diasporic subject’ … necessarily suggests identification with a group, however scattered, committed to the same work of cultural retention, reproduction, and revival of a home culture in an alien, foreign, ‘host’ setting” (p. 93). Ortíz also points out that the nature of diaspora is a

2

  According to Colombia’s National Administrative Department of Statistics, 3.3 million Colombians are living outside Colombia, and some statistics put that figure closer to 4 million, which amounts to about 10% of the population. For more information on these statistics, see Bushnell and Hudson, “Emigration,” in Colombia: A Country Study (2010). 3   María Elena Cepeda’s Musical ImagiNation: U.S.-Colombian Identity and the Latin Music Boom provides a more thorough historical overview of immigration patterns of US Colombians. This work broadly interrogates the epicenter of what Cepeda terms the “imagined topographies” of US Colombians (i.e., Miami) and the idea that this imagined community is sustained by and mediated through Colombian music, which functions as a site of self-exploration and self-representation for Colombians in the diaspora. Reprinted from the journal

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way of categorizing “living human practices,” rather than legal frameworks around related terms such as exile, immigrant, expat, or even refugee (2017, p. 93). Attending to the “living human practices” that manifest themselves in the US Colombian community and the role belonging plays in whether Latinx immigrants internalize (or not) their transnational US belonging is crucial for understanding their diaspora. Colombians make up such a significant part of the recent history of US immigration, but scholars have yet to consider how US Colombians define the idea of home and belonging through their writing. Patricia Engel’s debut fictional work Vida (2010), Fruit of the Drunken Tree (2018) by Ingrid Rojas Contreras, and Julianne Pachico’s The Lucky Ones (2017) are a few recent diasporic Colombian works—written in English—that grapple with how, whether, and in what ways to tether belonging to nationality.4 Colombian writers face a unique challenge, given the wealth of reductive cultural stereotypes that abound about Colombia in media, television, and literary fiction. As diasporic Colombian authors are expanding ways of understanding Latinx identities, their work must navigate descendancy from a country constantly associated with criminality. In each of these novels, the idea of Colombian-ness is traversed through and by other intersecting racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic identities. On the one hand, Contreras’s book, Fruit of the Drunken Tree, returns to an old, familiar tune: the Pablo Escobar days of doom. Instead of challenging the narco-associations that riddle Colombian cultural production, Contreras’s novel embraces them and places them on full view. On the other hand, while Pachico’s The Lucky Ones avoids the constant cartel references, it still manages to peddle in exoticism through its surrealist style that both captures readers and objectifies the Colombian characters. What Engel’s Vida does differently from both of these novels is engage the complexities, contradictions, and conflicts that come with narrating Colombian realities to readers, without collapsing the people or the place. Given that all three novels are marketed to Anglo audiences, I argue for a need to complicate, not simplify, our understanding of Colombians and the Colombian diaspora. Contreras’s Fruit of the Drunken Tree vacillates between varying first-person narrations between seven-year-old Chula and her family’s live-in maid, Petrona. Contreras’s work undoubtedly invokes classism familiar to Colombian and US Colombian identities by way of the narration of the live-in maid. Yet, Contreras challenges this classism by featuring Petrona’s lower-class voice prominently, as an authority figure, in her novel. While the bulk of the narrative moves back and forth between this mother-daughter type relationship, Contreras’s novel ultimately ends with Chula seeking asylum in the United States, as a result of narco-violence. As “cartel” has become synonymous with “Colombian,” Bouvier discusses how this stigmatization serves not only to marginalize diasporic Colombians, but also to sow divisions

4

  These authors’ backgrounds exemplify three varieties of Colombian diaspora. Patricia Engel was born in New Jersey to Colombian parents who immigrated to the United States. Julianne Pachico was born in Cambridge, England, raised in Cali, Colombia, and immigrated to the US in 2004 for a bachelor’s degree. Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia, earned her MFA from Columbia College, Chicago, and now permanently resides in the United States. 50

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among them: “The engagement of some Colombians in international drug-trafficking and dominant stereotypes of Colombians as drug-traffickers have also precluded the development of strong community identities among Colombians abroad and have sown discord within the diaspora community” (Bouvier 2007, p. 140). The resulting shame “contributes to high levels of distrust within the Colombian diaspora, affects the capacity of Colombians abroad to be effective advocates, and has diminished the credibility of Colombian migrant groups within policy-making circles abroad” (p. 140). Contreras’s novel reinforces that distrust, particularly given its marketing to mostly white Anglo readers. Sadly, constant allusions to the drug trade represent one way that English-written fiction about Colombia can totalize its people. Further, diasporic Colombian authors also contend with the pressure to objectify and exoticize Colombian subjects for the pleasure of (and high readability value to) English-speaking markets, and Julianne Pachico’s The Lucky Ones, sadly, gives in to this pressure. The Lucky Ones is presented as a novel yet reads more seamlessly as a series of connected stories. Like Fruit of the Drunken Tree, Pachico’s debut also engages the classist portrayals of Colombia’s ultra-elite (as the work’s setting vacillates from chic expat homes in Manhattan to lavish luxury farmsteads on the outskirts of Cali) and the guerrilla threats of kidnapping and coercion historically faced by this upper echelon. The fragmented short-story form employed by Pachico indicates that one can fictionalize a place as surreal as Colombia only in a kind of piecemeal fashion. Yet, the novel utilizes elements of literary surrealism that exoticize and even objectify Colombia—as both a country and a people. Considering again the literary market to which Pachico’s book is aimed, this book reifies the mythification of Colombia and fails to explore what it might mean to create a diasporic home bearing the burden of exoticism and criminality. In Musical ImagiNation:  US-Colombian Identity and the Latin Music Boom (2010), María Elena Cepeda examines the effects of this burden upon US Colombians, where  “the characteristic Colombian desconfianza, or lack of trust...follows those who relocate to the United States, in turn affecting their willingness to interact with other colombianos or to publicly recognize their own national identity at all” (p. 18). Cepeda’s perspective helps to illuminate how these totalizing stigmas negatively impact US Colombians, as they seek to form a supportive diasporic network. Ultimately, Fruit of the Drunken Tree and The Lucky Ones chronicle, in different ways, the psycho-emotional effects of the seventy-year civil conflict in Colombia, while Vida is a novel that frankly explores how to forge a diasporic Colombian identity with that difficult history percolating in the proverbial background. Vida avoids the trope of the 1980s and 1990s bloodbath tales of Colombia’s largescale cartel capos and avoids being another work in a swath of diasporic Colombian fiction that narrates itself always in reference to the drug trade. Through its narration of one woman’s journey of identity mostly outside Colombia, it rejects collapsing all Colombian fiction as narco-fiction and all Colombians as narco-subjects. Vida is a series of nine interconnected stories—told from the perspective of an upper-class Colombian immigrant woman named Sabina. Vida’s stories can each function independently, but I argue for reading them together, as a cohesive mosaic novel. Additionally, I argue that this framing word, diaspora, and the novel’s form are indivisibly linked. The word diaspora originates from the Latin dia, meaning Reprinted from the journal

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“across” and speirein, meaning to “scatter.” Indeed, the novel disperses its details across the nine stories—four of which are titled after main characters in Sabina’s life (“Lucho,” “Paloma,” “Vida,” “Día”), and four of which are titled in Spanish (“Desaliento,” “Cielito” “Lindo,” “Madre Patria”). The section titles are in both Spanish and English, with some of the titles having a double entendre. For instance, “Green” is the section in which Sabina narrates a confessional encounter with a former high school peer (Maureen), who is actually a mean-girl nemesis of sorts. Not surprisingly, then, the title “Green” is not only the color of Sabina’s sweater during their diner date, but also a masterful play on “green with envy.” Overall, the nine different stories are told in a realist, matter-of-fact language and style within a piecemeal-structured novel that emphasizes the ordinary rather than the extraordinary. Instead of surrealism, the stories unfold around real experiences like love, loss, and self-exploration. In terms of content, the work does not follow any chronological order—continuously vacillating between the protagonist’s childhood, her adolescence, and the present. There is no plotline, story arc or narrative climax. The action takes place across a variety of settings, as the protagonist has residences or at least access to those with residences in four different locations—New York, Miami, Bogotá, and New Jersey. Finally, in the sections “Green” and “Cielito Lindo,” the novel utilizes second-person narration, a rare stylistic choice. Read holistically, all the sections underscore the nonchronological and dynamic ways in which diasporic identity and belonging ebb, flow, and are ultimately formed. As such, I contend that Patricia Engel’s Vida (2010) reexamines the stakes of the US Colombian diasporic experience by highlighting how diasporic subjectivity is formed and how belonging evolves across the intricacies of the diasporic journey. Through a close reading of Vida, I assert in this article the importance of this group’s place in the US immigrant imaginary and the broader Latinx diaspora. My analysis of Vida affirms the significance of US Colombians as a meaningful and distinctive part of Latinx diaspora studies, asserts the role of US Colombians as part of the transnational Latinx cultural imaginary, and considers how literary analysis about diasporic Colombian fiction might ultimately expand ways of theorizing transnational Latinx cultural production.

Home: A condition in process Vida is a novel that is preoccupied with the entangled process of forging and condition of belonging—through place and time. In “Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African Diaspora and the Making of the Modern World” (2000), Tiffany Ruby Patterson and Robin D. G. Kelley offer this useful conceptual lens for diaspora: Diaspora is both a process and a condition. As a process, it is constantly being remade through movement, migration, and travel, as well as imagined through cultural production, and political struggle. Yet, as a condition, it is directly tied to the process by which it is being made and remade. (p. 20). 52

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Diaspora, then, is as much a process in movement among the networks and affiliations that come to make up the life of the diasporic subject as it is the condition that motivates this homing desire. In The Diaspora Strikes Back: Caribeño Tales of Learning and Turning (2009), Juan Flores calls this phenomenon “diasporization,” explaining that “diasporas are not about fixed states of social being but about process—what is clumsily but usefully called diasporization, that is, how diasporas come into being and develop over time” (p. 17). This dispersed structure, then, serves as a metaphor for the diasporic experience—given that the process and condition of belonging for Latinxs is undoubtedly multilingual, multirelational, complex, and in flux across time. The very essence of Sabina and the very structure of the novel beautifully illustrate how these seemingly disparate intangibles—that is, as process and condition—are reconciled. She is a protagonist who articulates herself as disarticulated—constantly being made and remade through her hybrid existence of US and Colombian, neither and both. Engel’s Vida further complicates belonging through challenging the idea of “home,” since, “for many migrants, a sense of home is no longer neat or easy to define as they live or interact with more than one spatial and cultural location, thus undermining the sense of one nation” (Concannon et  al. 2009, p. 4). Through its narrative form, the novel formally represents this lack of a “neat or easy” vision of home by way of a short-story structure. In this manner, it puts itself in conversation with the corpus of Latinx writers who have utilized a similar short-story form, which include Tomás Rivera’s … y no se lo tragó la tierra / … And the Earth Did Not Devour Him (1992), Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1991), Junot Díaz’s Drown (1996), Justin Torres’s We the Animals (2011), and Díaz’s latest, This Is How You Lose Her (2012). I argue that Vida, like other Latinx short-story novels, gestures toward a connection between form as symbol, meaning, Engel’s debut work necessarily reconsiders how an interlinked short story might symbolize the piecemeal yet connected ways in which immigrants form their subjectivities in the diaspora. Moreover, the back-and-forths that are ever-present in short-story writing recall Gloria Anzaldúa’s articulation of home’s dynamism. Writing about queer Chicana/Latina community’s homemaking in Homecoming Queers, Danielson (2009) emphasizes the immigrants’ search for home, “whether it be the mythical Chicano homeland of Aztlán, an idealized country of origin within a diaspora, or a more localized sense of belonging within a particular geographical or demographic community” (p. 2). She draws on the invaluable work of Anzaldúa, whose “portrayal of home is characterized as a site of equal parts power and pain” and who describes “herself as a turtle, traveling with her own semblance of home” (Danielson 2009, p. 2). Indeed, Anzaldúa claims that, if denied home as an immigrant outsider, she will claim it anyway—“with my own lumber, my own bricks, and mortar and my own feminist architecture” (Anzaldúa 1987, p. 44). Latinx authors, then, explore and analyze what agency, desire, and forms home takes, as it comes to be built and rebuilt “as a site of … power and pain.” Through the power and pain in Sabina’s mishmashed journey, Vida’s structure offers a unique take on the examination of what it means to be at home.

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Transdiasporic bodies in a diasporic home Moreover, Vida also asks us to consider a question: What are the ways in which the diaspora of Colombians (and Latinxs) is increasingly transdiasporic, not merely transnational, in nature? A recent term in migration and diaspora studies, “transdiaspora” has offered scholars a way to better conceptualize the diaspora in the black Atlantic as well as the Francophone diaspora. As Jocelyn Frelier explains, “Transnational theory focuses on cross-boundary spaces, arguing that we must look beyond the nation-state as we contemplate what shapes our contemporary world. Transdiaspora exists in parallel to prior work that addresses the usefulness of contemplating trans conditions” (2020, p. 1). Transdiaspora, then, opens up a way to conceive of the multiple valences of homeland and belonging, not limited to a community of proximity. Frelier astutely asserts that the term demands a timely interrogation of the effects of globalization on previous understandings of diasporic subjectivity: In other words, an identity rooted in notions of the transdiaspora would be shaped around multiple places of origin, it would entertain multiple homecomings as an answer to the quandary of “the impossibility of return,” it would change shape across time, and it might inhabit a third place of belonging. (p. 2). If transdiaspora inhabits a third place of belonging, then Avtar Brah’s formulation of “diasporic space” in Cartographies of Diaspora (1996) provides a term for that third space. Extending Brah’s term, I argue that Vida is a tale about claiming “diasporic home.” As Brah posits, “The concept of diaspora places the discourse of ‘home’ and ‘dispersion’ in creative tension, inscribing a homing desire while simultaneously critiquing discourses of fixed origins” (1996, p. 93). The scattered stories in Vida function to show how the work’s protagonist, Sabina, pushes against fixed-origin belonging by living through a dispersed identity. By examining the work’s resistance to a linear chronology, fixed setting, and single narration, I contend that Vida articulates home as dynamic and belonging as iterative. Sabina’s transdiasporic story is the process of discovering where, how, and to what extent she belongs anywhere or to anyone—given how she moves among cities, loyalties, and languages in Vida. Vida demonstrates a fresh portrayal of the interstitial home-lessness and conditional belonging that US Colombians may experience. Brah points to the composite nature of the diasporic identity, “constituted within the crucible of the materiality of everyday life; in the everyday stories we tell ourselves individually and collectively” (1996, p. 183). In the same way the novel is a composite of stories, so Sabina becomes a subject whose composite belonging is constituted by and through the characters, settings, and feelings present in each of the novels’ sections. For her, diaspora means that home is a mutable condition and belonging is always-in-process. Far from being home-less, Sabina creates her own diasporic home as a transdiasporic subject.

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Home in motion In Vida, Sabina’s socio-emotional journey of self-enlightenment is carried out through a shifting of setting. I read the flows through the different sites (Miami, Bogotá, New Jersey and New York) as a purposeful allegory for the fluid conceptualization of homeland. The novel is composed of a constellation of flashes of Sabina’s life, revealing the contradictory amalgam that have formed Sabina’s familial and cultural identity, as a subject finding what it might mean to create “home.” For example, in the novel’s final section, “Madre Patria,” Sabina narrates her family’s visit to Bogotá as a child. During the visit, Sabina becomes keenly aware of her parents’ disparate relationships to their emigration to the United States. Sabina’s insight into one of the semi-frequent visits invokes a push–pull imagery around her family’s Colombian roots: This country is a giant cemetery,” Papi said. In a way, it was true, most everyone Mami has ever loved was dead. Every visit to Bogotá was marked by a full day of leaving flowers at the tombstones of relatives I never met, including Mami’s parents. Mami got mad when he talked like that, said they were both born of Andean earth and we should honor it. “Es que no entiendes, María. This country doesn’t want us back. (Engel 2010, p. 160). Sabina’s father has internalized a feeling of rejection from his madre patria, translated literally as “maternal homeland,” that is, Colombia. Undeniably, her family seems split between the real and the symbolic, to invoke James Clifford’s terms: “The transnational connections linking diasporas need not be articulated primarily through a real or symbolic homeland. … Decentered lateral connections may be as important as those formed around a teleology of origin/return” (1997, pp. 249–250). Clifford deconstructs the way homeland is articulated through the literal and figurative, as a result of a diasporic self-development. In the excerpt above, Sabina’s mother appeals to the “symbolic,” with her appropriated notion of belonging to the earth—an imagery most certainly not utilized by her Colombian upper-class peers when referring to their birthplace. Further, this imagery gestures toward a kind of reductive mysticism that her mother seems to have appropriated about her national identity. Meanwhile, her father functions in the “real,” and is therefore averse to any nationality myth. He is attuned to the real sociopolitical situation in the country, so much so that he is unable to see this motherland as anything other than a “crimeridden cemetery.” Both her parents have self-expelled from Colombia, and in this prolonged separation, they can no longer understand what it might mean to have a neatly conceived relationship to a birthplace origin. In different ways, each of them is forced to grapple with what it may mean to live banished from the possibility of completely inhabiting one single expression of national identity. Yet, despite their differing individual experiences of diaspora, Sabina’s parents are committed to projecting a unified version of Colombian-ness onto Sabina. Through a combination of visits to Colombia and US-located familial encounters with other Colombian expatriates, they project onto Sabina their own versions of what it means to be Colombian, jointly mediated by their upper-class immigrant

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status. For Sabina’s mother, Colombia as homeland represents a kind of nostalgia, as her mother makes sense of the country’s history of violence by remembering how connected she feels to her family and to the belonging associated with childhood. On the other hand, Sabina’s father’s version of homeland is that of distance, as he is gratified to be able to reference himself as an exception to what he resents as Colombia’s endemic characterization as an unruly land filled with violent peoples. Clifford’s emphasis on decentered connections points to the transdiasporic reality for those who are navigating the multiple valences of living and belonging elsewhere—including economic class, different hierarchies of racialization, and different gendered norms. Discussing the Vietnamese-Francophone diaspora, Alexandra Kurmann writes, In this way, Thúy and Tran-Nhut reveal … the divergent refugee and migrant realities particular to the experiences of mobile Vietnamese, who must negotiate a relationship with their parents’ homeland while also dealing with issues of acculturation into Canadian, French and American societies. To do so, both writers adopt a two-pronged strategy of resistance aimed at safeguarding a fluid position as both witness and hybrid wordsmith … [and] satisfy both a communitarian desire to speak to the Vietnamese diaspora’s experiences of loss and an individual impetus to tell their own “travel stories” to an emerging Western readership each without giving way to an obligatory rhetoric of gratitude toward the host nation or to the exoticization of an “other region” of the world. (2018, p. 66). Although Kurmann’s study examines transdiasporic narratives in the Francophone world, her unpacking of the particularities faced by diasporic writers illuminates some of what undergirds the narrative in Vida, especially in the aforementioned passage. Indeed, Sabina’s parents are pressing acculturation onto Sabina, even as they balance the stakes for themselves. Moreover, Sabina seems to carry the weight of their loss, alongside the “impetus to tell [her] own ‘travel stories,’” precisely because of her mobile lifestyle. Finally, Sabina’s recounting of her experiences—both in the United States and in Colombia—manages to escape a deference to or mythification of, respectively, her divergent homelands. Indeed, she articulates a transdiasporic tale amid forging a diasporic home. Sabina’s version of homeland waxes and wanes, as she navigates this incongruous nostalgia and distance her parents feel for their country and how these feelings may exist within her, if at all. Chandra Mohanty, in Feminism Without Borders (2003), conveys the fabricated quality of the idea of “home,” in an effort to demystify and desacralize it as an inevitably occurring phenomenon: “Being home” refers to a place where one lives within familiar, safe, protected boundaries; “not being home” is a matter of realizing that home was an illusion of coherence and safety based on the exclusion of specific histories of oppression and resistance, the repression of differences even within oneself. Because these locations acquire meaning and function as sites of

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personal and historical struggle, they work against the notion of an unproblematic geographic location of home. (p. 90). In this way, Engel’s work similarly represents a narrative that interrogates how home is an “illusion of coherence.” In the novel, Sabina’s existence is, at times, incoherent, as she traverses through different settings and varied narrations. Nevertheless, her difficult journey leads her to the stark realization that home is illusory, and how she makes sense of that is precisely the emotional voyage to which readers are witness in Vida. Vida demonstrates that reifying native homeland as the inexorable desire for Latinx diasporic subjects fails to capture how this sustains the exclusion Latinxs already face when asserting belonging to US sociocultural histories. Additionally, through the shifting of setting, Vida works to deconstruct the static iteration of home. Sabina is a subject defined by her dynamism across borders. Jennifer Harford Vargas, in her essay “The Undocumented Subjects of el Hueco: Theorizing a Colombian Metaphor for Migration” (2017), problematizes border imaginaries in relation to US-Latinx crossings from south to north. Vargas invokes the Colombian expression of el Hueco in an effort to enact a “critical shift in the discourse used to imagine the border” (p. 34). Her essay points to the instability of borders, which I extend to an instability of homeland. “The trope of el Hueco thus works in tandem with the trope of the borderlands in fashioning an alternative national cartography demarcated not by natural, static, and stable boundaries but by gap-filled, fissured, and porous margins” (Vargas 2017, p. 34). Considering the fissured structure of Vida, Sabina is undoubtedly building for herself a life that dispenses with any nostalgic referents to homeland—as many US Colombians and Latinx subjects have had to do when fleeing from their own “giant cemetery.” Instead, Sabina attempts to embrace the “porous margins” of her existence through the moveable and dynamic diasporic home-spaces in the novel.

Home as relation Throughout Vida, not only is a static setting nonexistent, chronology is also not a priority. After all, the book moves among narrations of past and present, starting with a recounting of Sabina’s adolescent first love (“Lucho”) and ending with a childhood trip to Bogotá (“Madre Patria”). Indeed, home is about relationships. In other words, the structure reveals that Sabina’s journey is much more about the “who”s than about tracking the timeline of the “what”s. Four of the stories—titled with the monikers of some of the people most salient to Sabina’s journey (“Lucho,” “Paloma,” “Vida,” and “Día”)—demonstrate that Sabina’s articulation of identity is in direct reference to the ways in which others see her and themselves. Sabina is exposed to her own self through the relationships she has with each of these characters, much like a coming-of-age novel. Works by Sandra Cisneros, Junot Díaz, and Justin Torres have also been interpreted within this tradition, as each grapples with some form of coming of age. In “Crossing the Borders of Genre: Revisions of the ‘Bildungsroman’” (1998), Maria Karafilis points out the contradictory ways Reprinted from the journal

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in which this genre is both critiqued and utilized in Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street and Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John. Her reading provides a helpful point of departure, in terms of situating Vida within the rich history of the Caribbean Bildungsroman: Discussion of this particular genre continues because what we really mean, as critics, when we refuse to abandon the Bildungsroman, is that we are interested in how texts negotiate the development/education of their protagonists and how these protagonists negotiate themselves in a larger social context, whether it be within the dominant Anglo-American culture, a local community, ethnic group, nation, or combination of the above. … Many women writers of color, both ethnic American and postcolonial, use the Bildungsroman precisely to “affirm and assert” the complex subjectivities of their characters and, by extension, themselves. (1998, p. 63). To be sure, Vida is nothing if not a work about negotiation—of what it means to be woman, of what it means to be a US Colombian, and of what it means to create for oneself home in the diaspora. Sabina’s subjectivity is complexly forged and in constant evolution, and her journey is about understanding herself through being understood by others. In the section “Lucho,” Sabina’s obsession with being fully known and fully seen by others is first premiered, and it results from the profound disconnect she feels toward herself and her role within her family. Lucho may be Sabina’s teenage crush, but written as luchó in Spanish, the word means “to have fought.” Considering that this section begins the novel, it may indicate that to narrate this journey, Sabina must have had to fight. Undoubtedly, she first fought to be understood by Lucho. At the beginning of “Lucho,” Sabina establishes how people came to define her and her family in those adolescent years, saying “we were foreigners, spics, in a town of blancos” (Engel 2010, p. 3). The derogatory phrase “spics” is often used to offensively label the Spanish-speaking community in the US, and Sabina internalizes that her family is seen as just another bunch of Latinx “foreigner[s].” Nevertheless, her family also has a distinctive relationship to social class (revealed later in the novel), which serves to nuance Sabina’s specific Colombian experiences of US marginalization. They hail from an upper-class stratum, but upon their emigration from Colombia, they are reduced to homogeneity with all the other “foreigners, spics.” They are scripted, relationally speaking, as having more in common with “spics” than with any other neighbors. In her article, Bouvier describes the makeup of emigration patterns in the 1990s: This latest wave of migrants—the largest in the history of Colombia—is once again made up of a broad cross-section of Colombian society, including university-educated professionals, businessmen and young middle-class students, as well as representatives of marginalized sectors of society, petty thieves, drug-traffickers and contracted killers. A disproportionate number of these immigrants are from the middle and upper-class. (2007, p. 135).

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It should come as no surprise, given these patterns, that Vida is protagonized by an upper-class Colombian family. Nevertheless, despite their former status, Sabina’s family is conflated as poor merely because they are Latinx immigrants “in a town of blancos” (Engel 2010, p. 3). As Sabina faces being first misunderstood as an immigrant, she must conceive of what it might mean to never fully belong to any one community—“foreigners, spics … [or] blancos” (p. 3). As for the section’s main character, Lucho (her unconsummated high school love), he dies tragically in a car accident at the end of this first section. In him and through him, Sabina gets a first and brief taste of what it might feel like to be recognized and to figuratively belong. She longingly concludes this section saying, “He came looking for me when I was invisible. And when he was with me, he acted like I was the only thing he could see” (Engel 2010, p. 22). The notion of invisibility is not just germane to the characters in Engel’s novel, but also points to an experience shared by many US Latinxs, whose livelihoods are made invisible by the obstacles faced in their efforts to truly belong within their US transnational and transdiasporic communities. Moreover, the homogenizing gesture present in “Lucho”—that is, derogatorily lumping all Spanish-origin peoples as “spics”—characterizes a frequent iteration of the US cultural imaginary around Latinx immigrants, whose humanity is stripped as they are reduced to being solely defined by their otherness. In the section “Paloma,” Sabina dissects relation through the depth of family ties, kinship and bonds through her mother’s half-sister, Paloma. Meaning “dove” in Spanish, Paloma’s namesake symbolizes the peace she seeks, in spite of her conflicted identity. The section is bookended with Paloma’s death, and readers are reminded that Sabina’s journey through and with people is frequently potholed with death. Nevertheless, for Sabina, it is the way Paloma lives that intrigues and inspires her. At one point, Sabina narrates the ways that her mother and Paloma navigate their experiences of diaspora. “They clung together like schoolgirls, linking elbows as they walked, talking for hours about people I didn’t know, about the world they left behind in South America, in a way that made it sound like a miniseries” (Engel 2010, p. 88). Through her family’s performance of relationality, Sabina tries to figure out belonging to them. Her push–pull relationship with belonging is articulated around other people’s way of identifying how they belong and how they meaning-make their diasporic home through relationships. In seeing the relationship between her mother and Paloma, Sabina regards their bond as symbolic of their struggle to rearticulate home outside Colombia. According to her, what binds these women is a shared (albeit constructed) memory—a transdiasporic communal longing—for a place that neither of them has completely left behind nor remembers with accurate detail, as they rewrite what diasporic home means through their familial relationship. Moreover, the way Sabina uses “miniseries,” when describing the life and loves Paloma and her mother left behind makes their experiences seem highly dramatic, gesturing toward a telenovela quality of their interactions. In a sense, Sabina intuits their nostalgia as fictitious, closer to a fantasy than reality. Likewise, it is telling that these women continue to ruminate about missing a life in South America when, in fact, each has spent more than two decades (in Paloma’s case, three) in the Reprinted from the journal

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United States. Somehow, who they were in Colombia and the cultural associations that formed them are more potent than the realities they have lived for so long in the United States. Their linked-elbows-walk suggests that no amount of time living in the US can truly manifest belonging for them, but out of their relationship, they can together reconceive of home. In this same section, Sabina also takes clues from Paloma not only in how she comes to understand her Colombian-ness but also in how she comes to understand her US identity. Sabina details Paloma’s reticence to assimilation and her aggressive stances toward her own bilingual status, commenting, Paloma had been in New York for thirty years but she spoke English as if she had arrived last week. She recklessly spliced her two languages, but she wrote perfectly in English, and was skilled at dictation. Her voice, though, carried more than an accent, constantly cracking as if a thousand years of tears slept under every breath. (Engel 2010, p. 83). Paloma’s undercurrent of profound sadness is understood by Sabina as part of this push-and-pull identity. It remains unclear whether Sabina critiques Paloma’s resistance to a more assimilated accent (evidenced by her describing her language mixing as “reckless”) or whether she admires the act of defiant aggression (invoked by the usage of “splicing”) that Paloma displays toward her bilingualism. Either way, Sabina’s own identity is clearly framed by the journeys she travels through and with her aunt, recognizing that Paloma’s friction with identity parallels her feelings of internal discord. Finally, in the section “Vida,” we encounter the character for whom the broader work is named and who has the greatest impact on Sabina’s journey of self-discovery. Sabina meets Vida through a shared network of Hungarian immigrants, two of whom are the women’s boyfriends. Sabina narrates, “Vida raised an eyebrow at me the first time she heard I was Colombian. The boyfriend said it when he introduced us, as if that’s all we needed to become like sisters” (Engel 2010, p. 120). From the onset, both characters are situated such that nationality (in their case, Colombian) is the prominent and defining characteristic. Most assuredly, this reveals that the Hungarian group of men do take their shared nationality as sacrosanct. Therefore, they expect that somehow this should instantly connect Vida and Sabina. Yet, the novel exposes that what defines them may be their nationality, but not because both of them experience it in the same way. Rather, they both experience their nationality as a complicated identity, and that is why they immediately bond. As both women negotiate their differing relationships to diasporic Colombianness, each is bound by that defining complexity, even as it manifests itself differently in their lives. Vida (whose full name is Davida) has this nickname as a result of “the plane ride over the Caribbean [that] broke her life in two” (Engel 2010, p. 119). Indeed, Davida becomes Vida (translated as “life” in Spanish) precisely by sacrificing hers. Previously a beauty pageant queen, Vida was brought over to the US under the auspices of a modeling career and was later sold into sexual slavery. In “Bellas por naturaleza: Mapping National Identity on U.S. Colombian Beauty Queens” (2013), Michelle Rocío Nasser De La Torre discusses the cultural creation of beauty and belonging in the diaspora through Houston’s annual Concurso 60

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Señorita Independencia de Colombia. Engel’s inclusion of Vida’s background as a pageant queen engages the imagined community around this industry (both in Colombia and abroad) and showcases the social capital of Colombian beauty pageants. De La Torre writes, Beauty pageants are more than just contests that judge arbitrary beauty standards. In Colombia they have become career launchers, escape valves and pastimes. Government and non-government organizations charge beauty pageants and their queens with the creation of the “new image” by which Colombia will be recognized internationally in the twenty-first century. (p. 295). Indeed, Vida must have envisioned her pageant status as an escape valve to the US, never anticipating that she would be trafficked. Luckily, her Hungarian boyfriend, Sacha, worked as the bodyguard for the brothel and ultimately helped Vida flee. For Vida, Colombia remains her homeland—a place frozen in time, which she mourns almost daily. In contrast, for Sabina, Colombia is a conflicted place, wrapped up in associations of family, loss, and self-loathing. As a result, there is a sense that Sabina’s attachment to Vida comes from a desire to absorb the kind of wistfulness and hope toward her Colombian identity that Vida feels for hers. Sabina goes so far as to say, “I just wanted to drink her up like everyone else” (Engel 2010, p. 134). Sabina recognizes that Vida’s emotive and nostalgic desperation for Colombia, and more generally for the possibility of home itself, is incoherent with her own inability to connect with her muddled feelings around belonging. Sabina’s embroiled and negotiated identity finds its place in Vida, whose ironic namesake leaves the reader unsure whether she is fully alive in her diaspora or desperate to be so, in spite of it. Sabina’s intense connection to Vida is wrapped up in seeing in her a “parallel life, one that my mother always imagined aloud: the What if we had stayed to live in Colombia? narrative” (Engel 2010, p. 133). Sabina mitigates her own self-estrangement to her Colombian-ness by drinking in Vida, and their friendship opens Sabina up to finding peace with her inner conflict and, perhaps, more life. Ultimately, Sabina uses the relationships in the novel as cornerstones for her diasporic home in her transdiasporic reality. In spite of this relational home-making being a trademark of the transdiasporic experience, Sabina’s experience ultimately distinguishes itself from other diasporic tales through an element seminal to Engel’s portrayal of this Colombian family: privilege. Juan Flores demonstrates the stakes of examining class when studying diasporas: It is crucial to differentiate along class lines, however roughly, and to distinguish between what we might call “diasporas of privilege” and “diasporas of deprivation.” Though they are all diasporas, it is not the same thing to be considering, on the one hand, those comprised mainly of professional entrepreneurs, and endowed political exiles whose transnational experience is aimed at or results in an increased accumulation of cultural capital, and on the other hand, the more widespread and numerous communities formed of labor migrations and impoverished refugees. (Flores 2009, p. 20). Reprinted from the journal

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No doubt that part of what makes belonging so difficult for Sabina is how she straddles upper- and lower-class identities through the intersecting factors of being, for the first time, racialized as brown and being determined as poor. In Colombia, they likely understood themselves as “white,” or at least as betterthan-brown, and the novel gives no indication that their emigration is compelled by poverty. How then does Engel narrate Sabina’s own understanding of privilege and all that accompanies that prescribed social class? By unpacking Sabina’s clash with her privilege, Vida exposes why Sabina’s transdiasporic reality expands our understanding of class-based Latinx emigration.

Privileged failure Sabina is a well-off daughter of upper-class and thoroughly elitist Colombian parents. They live in New Jersey, travel semi-regularly to Bogotá, and Sabina goes back and forth between their home life in New York and life in Miami. She has no coherent career and can come off as petulant. She possesses a profound lack of awareness about her privileged positionality. Indeed, Engel’s characterization of Sabina suggests that she exists to both intrigue and disturb the reader. Throughout Vida, her narration disavows sympathy—despite the many tragedies she experiences throughout the novel (e.g., death of both family members and friends and romantic catastrophes). In one such narration, she details a trip to Miami as a frequently completed, effortless jaunt, in terms of both time and money. In the backand-forth between stints in Miami and New York, Sabina reveals her economic privilege. She has little regard or need (it seems) for a steady job, and at no point does money for plane tickets or rent seem to be an issue: I was back in Miami for two weeks, on a date with some other son of a family friend, set up through the Colombian Diaspora dating network. He was a few years older than me, some kind of Brickell banker and he seemed potentially cool, not uptight like the other Colombian guys around. I was always getting set up with these super lame hijos de papi. I rejected all of them, earning me a rep as a failed Colombiana, or possibly a lesbian, and my mom pretended this didn’t worry her. (Engel 2010, p. 70). Sabina’s name-dropping of this “Brickell banker”s employment (Brickell Avenue being a notoriously affluent neighborhood in Miami) and her affront to the “hijos de papi” (a term especially used to describe silver-spooned children of wealthy upper-class Latin Americans), point to Sabina’s privileged rebuff of her upperclass economic status. Additionally, though, this excerpt also points to Sabina’s exceptional set of failures that transcend economic belonging. Failing as a “Colombiana” has a layered meaning: it means both failing as a financially upward-looking member of the upper class and failing as an elite heteronormative woman. First, she fails to abide by the standards set forth by her family’s social class, since she rejects seeking to improve her financial station, so to speak, made possible through the economic status of a male partner. Implicitly, then, a good “Colombiana” would be downright thrilled to have an 62

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“hijo de papi” by her side. Exposed as a desire that categorizes Sabina’s social class, she has thus failed her membership in said class. Second, Sabina falls short of the standards set before her an elite heteronormative woman. Her mother’s worry seems spread across a disappointment about her daughter’s failure to share the values inherent to her family and failure to meet the bar set for femininity. Sabina comes from prestigious US Colombian social circles, whose norms are dictated by wealthy immigrant parents trying to maintain the perfect balance of being assimilated Americans yet nostalgically Colombian. In defining “diaspora,” Ortíz distinguishes diasporic subjects from their other foreign counterparts by this impulse of “cultural retention.” “Diasporic communities evince their lack of choice in migrating precisely by at least resisting if not entirely rejecting the often common, and for some understandable, ‘immigrant’ impulse to assimilate fully into the host country and culture” (Ortíz 2017, p. 93). Sabina’s parents teeter on the line of assimilation, holding fast to their upper-class identities as Colombians who are able to make the annual figurative pilgrimage to Colombia, given their economic status, while still successfully existing as diasporic subjects. Returning to Sabina’s feminist disavowal, by rejecting “all of them,” Sabina puts into question her normative femininity; after all, an implicitly desirable quality of a “good Colombiana” is compulsory heterosexism. Moreover, Sabina’s renounced femininity is meant to disassociate her from social circles in which she has never truly belonged. At one point, Sabina says to herself, “Your mom was always saying a woman should cherish her femininity but you wanted to destroy yours—never wore makeup, always bit your nails, and knotted your long hair into a bun” (Engel 2010, p. 51). Essentially, Sabina rejects the social rigidity, hyperfeminine gender performance, and normative scripts that sustain these elite circles and, in that way, rejects in no small part her identity as a prized daughter of upper-class Colombians. The irony, of course, is that in repudiating her femininity, she actually shows herself to be more like her mother, exposing that each of them has rejected these norms. Her mother’s disappointment actually reveals itself as self-internalized shame. That is, she herself became a “cualquiera [translated as “a nobody”] in New Jersey,” constantly questioned by her Colombian family of origin, who desperately implore, “How can you be happy when you’re invisible?” (Engel 2010, pp. 169–170). In Vida, successful femininity is equated with being seen, being straight, being desired, and being on display. Sabina’s mother undoubtedly feels like a failure—having given up a position in which she was prominently on display as upper-class woman and instead embracing an under-the-radar, middle-class US identity. As such, she projects this self-contempt onto Sabina by pushing her toward an up-and-up marriage with a “proper” diasporic subject. Even though Sabina’s statement functions as an act of rebellion, destroying her feminine edge may paradoxically function to bond, rather than break, the tenuous relationship between mother and daughter— a bonded belonging created by their transdiasporic reality. Finally, Sabina’s failure is a privilege, since her disavowal of economic mobility is a choice, rather than a sentence, and ultimately will not result in destitution. By highlighting this aspect of diasporic Colombian-ness, Engel’s work expands our understanding how gender and class influence Latinx immigrant identity.

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Life, but how much? For a book whose title means “life,” there is a surprising lack of it in Vida. In the novel, the condition of diaspora is a constant encounter with loss, as each section in the work ends with heartbreak or death—an indicator of the depth of intergenerational and historic trauma that follows US Colombians. Upon reflection, Engel’s work points to a certain understanding about the inescapable presence of calamity. Life (vida) is in fact a delicately balanced tragedy—living is a dialectical encounter with the inevitability of death. In Vida, Sabina’s life is marked by death, both on a personal level (as is the case with Lucho, Paloma, Maureen, and her babysitter Carla) and also on a national level (as evidenced by her pilgrimages to family grave sites in Bogotá and conversations around Colombia as a “giant cemetery”). In Vida, Sabina often maneuvers her way through these losses by grasping at the indulgences of living—such as driving bullet-red Ferraris while having a salacious affair with an older man (Engel 2010, p. 108). In fact, it is only upon meeting Vida that she realizes that she is half-living—resisting an honest and vulnerable encounter with selfawareness because of her own conflicted preoccupations with her cultural identity. In order to live, Sabina must first choose that life, in whatever harried shape it may take. A novel like Vida is an invitation to consider how the US Colombian immigrant experience is positioned to understand home itself as a mutable construct and belonging in the diaspora as a condition-in-process. Vida challenges conceptions of emigration in which migrants leave their homeland, compelled solely to build a new home, in a new place. After all, Sabina’s search for her identity and what it might mean to be “home” is ultimately a search for stability. By accepting instability as a necessary condition of diaspora, Sabina’s story challenges the slippages present in simplistic constructs of belonging. Furthermore, Vida depathologizes hybridity, framing it instead as a constitutive condition of today’s global transdiasporas and transnational realities. Sabina’s US Colombian identity is inferior to neither an exclusively Colombian or US identity; rather, her fusion is more the rule, rather than the exception. With Vida, Patricia Engel positions herself among a corpus of Latinx writers, navigating multiple iterations of US transnational inclusion and exclusion through their work. By deprivileging home as either static or stable, Vida offers its readers an expanded articulation of diaspora through the imagining of a diasporic home. Through Vida, Engel proves herself as a critical US Colombian voice in broader Latinx literature and shows her work to be formidable in the growing field of transdiasporic Colombian fiction. Acknowledgements Thank you to María Elena Cepeda, Lina Rincón, Jennifer Harford Vargas, and Johana Londoño: your perseverance made this project possible. Dedicated to my Doro, in whom I find my home.

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References Anzaldúa, G. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute. Bouvier, V. 2007. A Reluctant Diaspora? The Case of Colombia. In Diasporas in Conflict: Peace-Makers or Peace-Wreckers?, ed. H. Smith and P. Stares, 129–152. Tokyo: United Nations University Press. Brah, A. 1996. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contested Identities. New York: Routledge. Bushnell, D., and Rex A. Hudson. 2010. Emigration. In Colombia: A Country Study, ed. R.A. Hudson, 98–99. Washington, DC: Library of Congress. Carvajal, D. 2017. As Colombia Emerges from Decades of War, Migration Challenges Mount. Migration Information Source, 13 April. https​://www.migra​tionp​olicy​.org/artic​le/colom​bia-emerg​es-decad​eswar-migra​tion-chall​enges​-mount​. Cepeda, M.E. 2010. Musical ImagiNation: U.S.-Colombian Identity and the Latin Music Boom. New York: New York University Press. Cisneros, S. 1991. The House on Mango Street. New York: Vintage. Clifford, J. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Concannon, K., F.A. Lomelí, and M. Priewe. 2009. Introduction. In Imagined Transnationalism: U.S. Latino/a Literature, Culture and Identity, ed. K. Concannon, F.A. Lomelí, and M. Priewe, 1–12. New York: Palgrave McMillan. Contreras, I.R. 2018. Fruit of the Drunken Tree. New York: Doubleday. Danielson, M.T. 2009. Homecoming Queers: Desire and Difference in Chicana Latina Cultural Productions. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press. De La Torre, M.R.N. 2013. Bellas por naturaleza: Mapping National Identity on U.S. Colombian Beauty Queens. Latino Studies 11 (3): 293–312. https​://doi.org/10.1057/lst.2013.17. Díaz, J. 1996. Drown. New York: Riverhead Books. Díaz, J. 2012. This Is How You Lose Her. New York: Riverhead Books. Engel, P. 2010. Vida. New York: Grove Atlantic. Flores, J. 2009. The Diaspora Strikes Back: Caribeño Tales of Learning and Turning. New York: Routledge. Frelier, J. 2020. Family Narratives and Transdiasporic Experiments in Fawzia Zouari’s Ce pays dont je meurs (1999). Texas A&M ACES Postdoctoral Fellowship Talk, 3 February. College Station: Texas A&M University. Karafilis, M. 1998. Crossing the Borders of Genre: Revisions of the “Bildungsroman” in Sandra Cisneros’s “The House on Mango Street” and Jamaica Kincaid’s “Annie John”. Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 31 (2): 63–78. Kurmann, A. 2018. Aller-retour-détour: Transdiasporic Nomadism and the Navigation of Literary Prescription in the Work of Kim Thúy and Thanh-Van Tran-Nhut. Australian Journal of French Studies 55 (1): 65–78. Mohanty, C.T. 2003. Feminism Without Borders. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ortíz, R.L. 2017. Diaspora. In Keywords for Latina/o Studies, ed. D. Vargas, N.R. Mirabal, and L. La Fountain-Stokes, 92–97. New York: New York University Press. Overmyer-Velázquez, M., and E. Sepúlveda III. 2018. Introduction. In Global Latin(o) Americanos: Transoceanic Diasporas and Regional Migrations, ed. M. Overmyer-Velázquez and E. Sepúlveda, 1–15. New York: Oxford University Press. Pachico, J. 2017. The Lucky Ones. New York: Spiegel and Grau. Patterson, T.R., and R.D.G. Kelley. 2000. Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African Diaspora and the Making of the Modern World. African Studies Review 43 (1): 11–45. Ribero, A. 2016. Citizenship. In Decolonizing Rhetoric and Composition Studies: New Latinx Keywords for Theory and Pedagogy, ed. I.D. Ruiz and R. Sánchez, 31–46. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rivera, T. 1992. y no se lo tragó la tierra /…. And the Earth Did Not Devour Him. Trans. Evangelina Vigil-Piñón. Houston, TX: Arte Publico Press. Silva, A.C., and D.S. Massey. 2015. Violence, Networks, and International Migration from Colombia. International Migration 53 (5): 162–178. Torres, J. 2011. We the Animals. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin. Vargas, J.H. 2017. The Undocumented Subjects of el Hueco: Theorizing a Colombian Metaphor for Migration. In Symbolism 17: Latina/o Literature, ed. A.R.F. Kläger and K. Stierstorfer, 31–53. Berlin: De Gruyter.

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Publisher’s Note  Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Catalina Esguerra  is a Spanish instructor and the Coordinator of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the Miller School of Albemarle in Charlottesville, Virginia. She earned her PhD in 2019 in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on the global understanding of Colombianidad through literature, mass media, and film, bridging the disciplines of Latin American studies and Latinx studies through research combining Colombian and US Colombian texts.

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Latino Studies (2020) 18:363–389 https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-020-00265-5 ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Asserting difference: Racialized expressions of Colombianidades in Philadelphia Diane R. Garbow1 Published online: 3 August 2020 © Springer Nature Limited 2020

Abstract Intra-Latina/o/x dynamics are fundamental to the negotiation of Latina/o/x identity, especially as Latina/o/xs communities in US cities become increasingly diverse. How Latina/o/xs try to differentiate themselves from one another is a salient, but often overlooked, part of their lived experiences. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Philadelphia, this article explores articulations of Colombianidades through the framework of assertions of differentiation, which centers how Colombiana/o/xs express that their experiences, perspectives, and characteristics are distinct and inherently different from those of other Latina/o/xs. I explore assertions of differentiation to reveal how conceptions of race are produced and enacted across transnational, national and local scales as they are anchored within material conditions and scarce resources. I argue that the production and negotiation of difference rework Latin American geopolitics, US-Colombia relations, local racial dynamics of Philadelphia, and US and Latin American racial ideologies, as Colombiana/o/xs attempt to avoid being positioned at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. Keywords  Intra-Latina/o/x dynamics · Race · Colombians · Philadelphia · Racial hierarchy

Afirmando las diferencias: Expresiones racializadas de la colombianidad en Filadelfia Resumen La dinámica intralatina es fundamental para la negociación de la identidad latina, sobre todo porque las comunidades latinas de los Estados Unidos se vuelven más diversas cada día. La manera en que las personas latinas tratan de diferenciarse unas de otras es un aspecto prominente, aunque a menudo pasado por alto, de sus experiencias vivenciales. Este artículo se basa en un trabajo etnográfico de campo reChapter 5 was originally published as Garbow, D. R. Latino Studies (2020) 18: 363–389. https://doi.org/ 10.1057/s41276-020-00265-5.

* Diane R. Garbow 1



Baton Rouge, USA

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alizado en Filadelfia para explorar las articulaciones de colombianidad dentro del marco de las afirmaciones de diferenciación, centrándose en la forma en que los colombianos articulan que sus experiencias, perspectivas y características son distintas e intrínsecamente diferentes a las de otros grupos latinos. Exploramos dichas afirmaciones de diferenciación para develar cómo los conceptos de raza se producen y se representan a escala transnacional, nacional y local según se afianzan dentro de las condiciones materiales y los escasos recursos. Argumentamos que la producción y la negociación de la diferencia replantean la geopolítica latinoamericana, las relaciones entre Colombia y los Estados Unidos, la dinámica racial de Filadelfia a nivel local y las ideologías raciales estadounidenses y latinoamericanas, a medida que los colombianos intentan no ser colocados en el fondo de la jerarquía racial. Palabras clave  Dinámica intralatina · Raza · Colombianos · Filadelfia · Jerarquía racial This article focuses on the lived experiences of US Colombiana/o/xs,1 not simply as a nationally defined group, but as social actors who produce ideas about Colombianidad, or the sense of Colombianness, vis-à-vis their experiences with and perceptions of other Latina/o/xs. To that end, I emphasize the strategic production not of a singular Colombianidad but of the multiple and often contradictory expressions of Colombianidades that are dynamically “animated by the structure and spontaneity of everyday life” (Rúa 2005, p. 506) where Colombiana/o/xs seek to define what Colombianness is by what it is not, with specific reference to their differences with other Latina/o/x groups. By exploring the negotiations Colombians make regarding how Colombianidad is assumed and expressed in Philadelphia, I show how assertions of differentiation are central to the production and performance of race and belonging and how these processes of identity formation take place across transnational, national and local scales. By assertions of differentiation I refer to ways Colombiana/o/xs articulate how their experiences, perspectives, tastes, self-presentation, and characteristics are distinct and inherently different from those of other Latina/o/xs. Though on the surface differentiation may appear as an attempt to carve out what is unique about Colombianidad, it is an attempt “to circumvent the racialized and stereotypical construction of other Latinos” (Grosfoguel and Georas 2001, p. 97). The emphasis of difference in these contingent identities elucidates how Colombianidades are formed at the nexus of geopolitics in Latin America, US– Colombia relations and the local racial dynamics of Philadelphia.

1

  In this article I use Colombiana/o/x and Latina/o/x to recognize “Colombianx” and “Latinx” as gender neutral and gender nonconforming descriptors. The “x” serves as an interrogation of and resistance to the gender binary in language and culture. I preserve the “a” and “o” as options within “Latina/o/x” and “Colombiana/o/x” to mirror the self-identification of some the interlocutors in my fieldwork who identify as such as it is their experiences, words and ideas inform the analysis in this article. For discussions on the importance of Latinx see Johnson (2015), which brings race and intersectionality to the fore, and for discussions of Latina/o/x see Vidal-Ortiz and Martínez (2018) and Trujillo-Pagán (2018). 68

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Expressions of difference are made and remade referencing past and present, and here and there, as Colombiana/o/xs attempt to render visible distinctions betwixt and between Latina/o/xs. As Alcoff notes, “social identities are not simply foisted on people from the outside, as it were, but are more properly understood as sites from which we perceive, act, and engage with others” (2006, p. 287). By centering the production of Colombianidades, this article underscores that social identities are both relational—forged in relation to others—and contingent—grounded locally in historically specific contexts where meanings shift across time and space. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork across Philadelphia with Colombian migrants and US-born Colombians, this article examines the production, meaning and consequences of Colombianidades through three particular instantiations. First, it explores how Colombiana/o/xs understand themselves alongside their perceptions of Venezuela and Venezuelans, revealing how historic and contemporary relationships among Latin American nations are in dialogue with the experiences of US Colombiana/o/xs. I argue that countries of origin continue to animate the organizing schemes through which Colombiana/o/xs interpret their own racialization and the racialization of other Latina/o/xs. Second, the article traces how some Colombiana/o/xs draw on both the perception of Latinidad as synonymous with Puertorriqueñidad and dominant US discourses of inferiority and dependency to marginalize Puerto Ricans. Moreover, Puerto Rican citizenship shapes assertions of Colombians’ superiority as hardworking immigrants. Third, the article explores how conceptions of race grounded in the historically constructed regionalism of Colombia structures judgments about gender, class, sexuality and bodily comportment. Not only do Colombiana/o/xs draw on dynamics within Latin America to distance themselves from other Latina/o/xs, they can leverage the anti-blackness that structures the social hierarchies of Philadelphia and Colombia in attempts to better position themselves within it, as is common among US Latina/o/xs (Dzidzienyo and Oboler 2005; Bonilla-Silva 2004). Imagined sameness offers a complex negotiation of blackness that explores the contours of shared experience, language and region while still emphasizing distinctions. Expressions of difference and distinction were some of the most ubiquitous comments in fieldwork, often tossed off as casual remarks that functioned as deeper frames of analyses that structured conversations about people’s relationships and everyday lives. Although some were explicitly about race, the comments operated as covert racializing discourses whereby people, places, things, and practices became marked as inherently other, without having to ever be directly about race. Attitude, comportment, and dress became identifying cultural features that pointed to historically grounded ways that “such indexical regimes ‘lay claim on’ people” (Dick and Wirtz 2011, p. E4). For example Julia2, born in Bogotá, migrated to Philadelphia during middle school and expressed gratitude that as she entered her twenties she adopted a more “Colombian” orientation to her hair. She chose styles that made her look “softer” and more “feminine”—medium length, blow-dried hair with highlights—in 2

  All names that appear in this article are pseudonyms.

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distinction to the “hard” hairstyles she favored as a teenager, a high, slicked-back ponytail with baby hairs combed down and a lollipop stuck atop. As a way to fit in, Julia copied that look from Puerto Rican girls she befriended at school, who wanted to look “hard” and act “tough.” A recent encounter with a high school friend left Julia surprised that the girl maintained a “hard” look, with dyed, asymmetrical short hair; she judged it as “too Puerto Rican” and not “professional enough.” Julia’s assessment is never directly about race, but focuses instead on creating a racialized distance between Colombianness and Puerto Ricanness through judgments about what hairstyles symbolize. It echoed the social, economic and geographic distance between the two women as Julia had completed college and moved to the suburbs, while her friend never attended college and continued to live in their childhood neighborhood. Her assessments of hair illustrate how Colombianidades operate as efforts of distinction (Bourdieu 1984), whereby quotidian instances of self-positioning create and legitimate social difference within Philadelphia in ways that implicate race within Latin America, in Colombia and between US Latina/o/xs. Julia, like other Colombiana/o/xs, is acting within a racialized social structure in which the group is simultaneously marginalized, compared with white Americans, yet advantaged compared with Black Americans3 and more-stigmatized Latina/o/x national-origin groups. Yet as Colombiana/o/xs navigate and reproduce ideas about racialized difference, the articulation of difference within interpersonal relations— the micro level—further entrenches and shapes racial hierarchy at the macro level.

Navigating racial hierarchies in Colombia and in the United States The legacies of slavery and indigenous dispossession across the Americas inextricably linked race with projects of colonization and nationhood, but elaborations of racial hierarchy in the United States and across Latin America produced different ideologies, discourses and embodied experiences. Postindependence Latin American ideologies of mestizaje, racial and cultural mixture, attempted to forge a unified national identity through racial homogeneity. Elites, fixated on modernity and progress, advanced ideas about blanqueamiento (whitening) wherein class and occupation could elevate, or “whiten,” one’s standing. These ideologies denied the importance of race while maintaining the colonial racial order in which those deemed

3

  I choose to capitalize “Black” to, as Shange notes, to signal with orthography “the specificity of racial condition of Black people” (2019, p. 169) and to recognize the political condition of Black people in and across the Americas (see also Tharps 2014). Following Shange, I do not capitalize “blackness” recognizing it “as a state of being, blackening, or any other derivative terminology because those words are more capacious and permeable than the ascription of ‘Black’” (2019, p. 169). As Crenshaw (1991) notes regarding the capitalization of “Black,” “‘Blacks,’ like Asians, Latinos, and other ‘minorities,’ constitute a specific cultural group and, as such, require denotation as a proper noun,” and she explains that she does not capitalize “white” because “it is not a proper noun, since whites do not constitute a specific cultural group. For the same reason I do not capitalize ‘women of color’” (p. 1244). Additionally, I do not capitalize “white” to challenge the institutionalized racism and white supremacy inscribed in our orthographic choices. 70

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white remained at the top, and black and Indigenous remained at the bottom (Wade 1997; Golash-Boza and Bonilla-Silva 2013). In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Colombia’s divided topography meant racial hierarchy became mapped “onto an emerging national geography composed of distinct localities and regions” (Appelbaum 2003, p. 3). Discourses about regional differences ascribed greater morality and modernity to interior regions marked as whiter, while backwardness, inferiority and disorder became linked to regions seen as more Indigenous, black or racially mixed (Appelbaum 2003, 2016; Wade 1993, 2000). Different regional trajectories of economic and political development further enmeshed race and region, as ideas about place, temperament, and cultural characteristics maintained the racial hierarchy regardless of racial and phenotypical diversity within regions (Roldán 2002). La Costa is seen as racially ambiguous and blacker, and costeña/o/xs are read as more emotional, sexual, vulgar, backward, warmer and friendlier (Wade 1993, 2000). The Andean interior is read as whiter, industrious, and pragmatic, and people are perceived as cold, boring, snobbish, uptight and insincere. Colombiana/o/xs draw on regional differences as a means to understand other Colombians and uphold regional pride (Porras Contreras 2017; Nasser De La Torre 2013).4 Systemic racism structures US nationhood, ensures power and privilege to whiteness, denigrates blackness, and erases Native Americanness through the social, legal, political and material reproduction of racial hierarchy. Deeply entrenched antiblack racism sustains a black-white binary in which whites exist at the top and African Americans/Blacks occupy the bottom, and all other racial and ethnic groups in the US become positioned within it (Feagin 2006, 2010). The historical oppression of Asian and Latina/o/x populations desired as cheap labor but despised as “forever foreign” is central to the production of the racial hierarchy (Perea 1997; Alcoff 2003; Wu 2002; Tuan 1998). The particular histories of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans as migrants and neocolonial subjects shaped their racialization in the United States, with Mexicans being constructed as inherently illegal migrants and Puerto Ricans as deficient citizens (Chávez 2008; De Genova 2002, 2005; Ramos-Zayas 2004; Grosfoguel 2003). In turn, this shapes how different groups of Latina/o/xs are racialized in the US hierarchy. The processes and circumstances of Latina/o/s migration alongside class, color, gender and nationality likewise structure their differential racialization (Flores 2000; Bonilla-Silva 2004).

4

  As Bibiana, a twenty-two-year-old Philadelphia-born Colombiana whose family hails from Cali, the capital of the Valle del Cauca departamentos, with a political and economic center in the interior but territory that reaches the Pacific coast, told me, “Caleños are the best of both worlds. We have the friendliness of the coast and know how to have fun, but don’t overdo it. We know how to work too but aren’t so obsessed with it that we forget how to enjoy life like in Bogotá.” Reprinted from the journal

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Racialization and intra‑Latina/o/x dynamics Scholars that historicize Hispanic/Latino as categories of identification show how the production of the pan-ethnic label “Hispanic” by the US state in the 1960s and 1970s attenuated political power through the elision of differences as the term became institutionalized through its use by the US Census, media, advertising, marketing and activists (Oboler 1995; Dávila 2001; Mora 2014). More than simply assuming “pan-ethnic” cohesion of cultural, social, political and economic interests, the labels function as “sanitized” or “white-washed” identities that erase differences and ignore frictions, tensions, or power differentials (Zentella 1995; Beltrán 2010; Dávila 2008; Flores-González 2017). A focus on Latina/o/x racialization reveals how racial difference is made and remade as the significance and substance of race come from the historic, contingent, and local contexts and relations through which they emerge (Omi and Winant 1986). Still, scholars acknowledge that Latina/o/x identity formation demonstrates the interplay of both race and ethnicity. Alcoff (2006) notes the concept of ethnorace eschews the biological determinism of common descent endemic in race while recuperating the give and take between the agency of self-fashioning and the racialized aspects of the visible body for Latina/o/x. Dávila argues the concept of ethnorace allows scholars to be attentive to processes of racialization and racism that take “place alongside and beyond ‘race’” (2008, p. 17), specifically that, while some Latina/o/x may be (visibly) whiter, this whiteness is “suspect and conditional” (2008, p. 18) because, as Latina/o/x, they are part of a racialized group whose class, language and cultural competence can racially mark them as other. Roth (2012) illustrates how migration shapes how Latina/o/xs think about race and classification, their own and that of others, as they navigate multiple concepts of race. Moreover, Latina/o/x migrants’ existing conceptions of race and the racial hierarchy shape how they understand their racialization as they encounter the US racial binary, while they, alongside US-born Latina/o/xs, remake US conceptions of race to include Latina/o/x as a racial identity (Roth 2012). Intra-Latina/o/x solidarity in shared urban space retains intractable significance as daily interactions between Latina/o/xs cultivate strong social ties even as neighborhoods and cities experience influxes of diverse Latina/o/xs (Ricourt and Danta 2003; Stepick et al. 2003; Duany 2012; Reyes-Santos and Lara 2018). Padilla (1985) illuminates how economic and racial marginalization created panLatino consciousness through political mobilization among Chicago’s Puerto Ricans and Mexicans in the 1970s and 1980s, but shows how ethnic and cultural boundaries persist even within pan-ethnic formations (see also García and Rúa 2007). Highlighting solidarity is essential but leaves little room for attending to the complexities of identity instantiated in difference or to explore the fractures and cleavages that emerge in intra-Latina/o/x relations. A vital and growing body of literature explores how Latina/o/xs are racialized in relation to one another (Dávila 2001; Pérez 2003; García and Rúa 2007; Aparicio 2009; Ramos-Zayas 2007, 2012), but these works do not address how the politics between nations of origins shape these processes or how Latin American

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geopolitics converge with locally specific conditions. As US involvement in Latin America is often the catalyst for migration (González 2000), it is essential to understand how the historic specificity of US-Latin American nation-state relations shapes racialization for different Latina/o/x groups, but the scholarship needs to go beyond centralizing the United States. Scholarship on intra-Latina/o/x dynamics focuses on the largest groups, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, and to a lesser extent Cubans, partly because of their longstanding history of migration and their predominant place within the largest US cities: New York and Chicago and, secondarily, Miami and Los Angeles. The narrow focus on global cities establishes what García and Rúa (2007) term “geographic hegemony” and creates limited understandings of the range of Latina/o/x lived experience. Difference remains painfully salient for Colombiana/o/xs who endure their particular struggles as Colombiana/o/xs but remain invisible among other Latina/o/x national-origin groups while hypervisible as racialized Latina/o/xs (Guarnizo et al. 1999; Guarnizo and Díaz 1999; Collier and Gamarra 2001; Ochoa Camacho 2016; Harford Vargas 2017). Recentering intra-Latina/o/x dynamics on how Colombians produce the distinctions between themselves and others avoids geographic and national-origin narrowness and offers a perspective from the margins that weaves together commonalities and differences with reference to local, national, transnational and hemispheric frames. This article offers analysis of intra-Latina/o/x relations grounded in processes of racialization in countries of origin, and in the historic and contemporary social, economic, and political relations within Latin America more broadly as Colombianidades are made both in and between the United States and Latin America (Cepeda 2010).

Asserting difference in Philadelphia Colombiana/o/xs draw on their understandings of race in Latin America and Colombia as they navigate Philadelphian and US racial hierarchies. Philadelphia’s downward political economic trajectory in the twentieth century sharpened the social, spatial and economic Black-white divide, and that binary remains significant. Post–World War II, suburban white flight, the second wave of the great migration of Blacks north, and Puerto Rican migration, shifted Philadelphia’s racial makeup. Puerto Ricans and Blacks endured racism and resentment from remaining white residents, while 1960s race “riots” racialized both groups as dangerous (Whalen 2001; Vázquez-Hernández 2005; Wolfinger 2007). As Colombiana/o/xs arrived and became incorporated into the local racial hierarchy, they learned and negotiated their place within it. Colombiana/o/xs sift through the overlaps and disjunctures of Colombian racial hierarchies, US racial hierarchies, and the local Philadelphian connotations, creating a racial calculus5—a malleable and shifting framework used to explain particular 5

  Harris (1970) used the term “racial” calculus to refer the phenomenon whereby Brazilians do not come to common conclusions about individuals’ racial classification. Ramos-Zayas (2012) uses Harris’s term to describe Brazilians’ racial understandings in Newark, but neither precisely define racial calculus or the parameters of its usage. Reprinted from the journal

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situations in the present, make sense of the past and help navigate future interpersonal encounters—to pull together a workable understanding of social relations between themselves and others as they assert difference. Thus Colombianidades are constituted through the interplay of multiple, covalent frameworks as Colombiana/o/xs apprehend, reproduce and rework racial hierarchies as they straddle multiple “translocal” (Láo-Montes 2001) positionalities. This focus emphasizes how individual lived experience is shaped by the structural and material conditions of both the Black-white paradigm of the United States and Latin America racial hierarchies (Alcoff 2006; De Genova and Ramos-Zayas 2003a, b). By analyzing assertions of differentiation, this article goes beyond the boundaries of traditional conceptualizations of transnationalism in which the United States and Colombia are the only nodes of reference, to illuminate the convergence and reinterpretation of hemispheric and local dynamics as imbricated in intra-Latina/o/x relations. Since 2000, Philadelphia has attempted to attract migrants to offset six decades of population loss. In 2010 the city experienced its first population growth since 2000, as more Latina/o/x, Asian and African migrants moved there. The contours of Colombian migration to the US and the reemergence of Philadelphia as an immigrant destination in the twenty-first century positions Colombiana/o/xs as an indispensable group for understanding intra-Latina/o/x dynamics. In Philadelphia, Colombiana/o/xs occupy an ambiguous position in the racial hierarchy. Like other US Colombiana/o/xs, they often have higher educational attainment and are more likely to be middle class than other Latina/o/x groups (Mottel and Patten 2012). Most are lighter-skinned, though there are Afro-Colombians, and many experienced downward social mobility after migration, despite holding professional jobs. Though there were Colombians who came earlier, the first substantial wave of Colombian migrants arrived between the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, as urban, predominantly white, middle-class and professional migrants escaped enduring repercussions of violence, political volatility, and economic instability linked to La Violencia, the civil war between the conservative and liberal parties in Colombia that lasted from the 1940s to the 1950s. By the late 1980s, Colombiana/o/xs were the second largest foreign-born group in Philadelphia and the second largest Latina/o/x group after Puerto Ricans. The second wave of migration began in the late 1990s and continued into the 2000s, as middle- and lower-class Colombiana/o/xs left during a period of heightened drug trafficking, paramilitary violence, and economic depression following neoliberal restructuring. Migrants from both waves came from primarily urban areas, and while phenotypically diverse, most came from whiter, interior departamentos—Colombian administrative political divisions—rather than racially mixed coastal departamentos. Colombiana/o/x migrants, including secondary migrants from New York, settled primarily into neighborhoods that rapidly transitioned from predominantly white to Puerto Rican, in areas of North Philadelphia that suffered the turmoil of the drug epidemic. These circumstances reinforced stigmas of drug trafficking and violence associated with Colombia and shaped Colombiana/o/xs’ racialization. In the larger city landscape, decades of race and class segregation in the second half of the twentieth century wedged Latina/o/xs into the Black-white spatial order. Puerto Ricans arrived beginning in the 1940s under exploitative US-Puerto Rican 74

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labor contracts, and though they gained employment they experienced discrimination in labor and housing markets. The economic shift away from manufacturing created widespread unemployment for Puerto Rican workers in Philadelphia while urban renewal projects from the mid- to late 1960s and in the 1980s, alongside decades of gentrification, displaced Puerto Ricans from the centrally located Spring Garden neighborhood to present-day enclaves north and east. These changes created decades of Puerto Rican marginalization and economic precarity, which shaped their racialization in Philadelphia. New enclaves coalesced around Fifth Street, which became the main business corridor in Latina/o/x spaces of North Philadelphia. El Bloque de Oro, a stretch of north Fifth Street that visually marks Latina/o/x space in North Philadelphia, is rich with music stores, bodegas, botánicas, restaurants, cultural centers, murals bearing Puerto Rican (and to a lesser extent other Latina/o/x) historical figures, iconography and flags. The lower section of Latina/o/x neighborhoods in North Philadelphia occupies a “buffer zone” between predominantly Black neighborhoods to the west and predominantly white ones to the east, as their geographic location mirrors the in-between-ness of Latina/o/xs’ social location between blackness and whiteness in the US racial order (Goode and Schneider 1994; De Genova 2005; Flores-González 2017). The northern portion of Latina/o/x space maintains a western border with predominantly Black neighborhoods, but moving eastward, space becomes racially mixed with African Americans, Asian migrants, and Anglophone and Francophone Black Caribbean migrants. This sociogeographic location shapes discourses of Colombianidades with references to both US and Latin American notions of blackness in Philadelphia. Though Colombiana/o/xs have become anchored in Latina/o/x spaces, there is no Colombian enclave  and influxes of other Latina/o/xs have diversified North Philadelphia in recent decades. Post-1965 immigration reform ushered the arrival of Dominicans and refugees from Central America, but Colombians remained the second largest Latina/o/x group from the 1970s to the early 1990s, when rapid immigration of Mexicana/o/xs and Dominicana/o/xs rendered Colombiana/o/xs a smaller share of the city’s Latina/o/xs. The Dominican community settled in North Philadelphia, to become the second largest Latina/o/x group. Mexican migrants established significant enclaves in South Philadelphia, and smaller ones in North Philadelphia since the mid-1990s, following the North American Free Trade Agreement’s transformation of Mexico’s agricultural economy. Central Americans came to the city as migrants, asylees and refugees, joining Latina/o/x s in North Philadelphia but predominantly settling into South Philadelphia since the 1990s.6 Colombiana/o/xs’ daily existence in schools, neighborhoods, workplaces, parks, and churches involves the constant navigation of Latina/o/x social life. Colombiana/o/xs’ fall to the fourth largest Latina/o/x population and the resurgence of immigration to Philadelphia

6

 According to the 2010 US census, the top ten Latina/o/x populations in Philadelphia are 121,643 Puerto Ricans; 15,963 Dominicans; 15,531 Mexicans; 4675 Colombians; 3930 Cubans; 2262 Guatemalans; 1642 Hondurans; 1542 Ecuadorian; 1085 Peruvians; and 1049 Salvadorans. Reprinted from the journal

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positions them as a particularly revelatory group in which to examine how difference operates in the dynamics of intra-Latina/o/x racialization. Though Colombiana/o/xs experience both the racialized stigma of being Latina/o/x and the vulnerability of differing legal status, as well as privileges facilitated by education and skin tone, they are less racially stigmatized than their Puerto Rican counterparts, with whom they share space in North Philadelphia, and their Mexican counterparts, who reside primarily in South Philadelphia.7 The Dominican and Colombian communities are similar, as both have a substantial middle class and poor or working-class families, yet the high rate of Dominican ownership of businesses like bodegas, hair salons and restaurants form a large presence in Latina/o/x space. Puerto Ricans remain the predominant Latina/o/x group, as their larger numbers have translated into political power, electing members to the Philadelphia City Council and Pennsylvania state legislature since the 1980s. Latina/o/xs, including Colombians themselves, consider Colombiana/o/xs to be whiter than other Latina/o/xs despite their limited visibility in the broader cultural landscape, while Dominicans and Puerto Ricans are read as blacker, in part because of their phenotypical diversity, marginalization in Philadelphia, and institution-sharing with African Americans. In this context I show how, as racialized individuals and national groups, Latina/o/xs are “compelled to vie with one another for position” (De Genova and Ramos-Zayas 2003a, p. 214) and argue that assertions of differentiation throw into sharp relief the ways Latina/o/xs enact power on each other as they navigate and reproduce ideas about racialized difference.

Methods The examples presented in this article come from 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork across the city of Philadelphia from 2009 to 2013 as part of a larger project that explored how the localization of migration policy, specifically Philadelphia’s attempts to attract more immigrants to become more “global,” affect Colombiana/o/xs’ experiences and ideas about citizenship, belonging and race. Through the larger project, the question of what made Colombians distinct from other Latina/o/xs became surprisingly salient and inextricably linked to the broader questions. In particular, semi-structured interviews and open-ended questions revealed insights about migration experiences, racism, intra-Latina/o/x relations and the city itself—though it is important to note that many of the insights were yielded not through questions that asked directly about differences between Colombiana/o/xs and other Latina/o/xs, but rather emerged through discussion about other topics. As it became clearer throughout fieldwork that assertions of differentiation were integral to understandings of Colombianidad in this particular time and place, follow-up questions about distinction and difference were incorporated into the interview protocol.

7

 As of 2013, more than half of Colombiana/o/xs—56%—had US citizenship, although a substantial portion is undocumented and the exact numbers are difficult to estimate (López 2015a; Ochoa Camacho 2016). 76

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I interviewed forty-four Colombian migrants and seven US-born Colombians, who were between the ages of twenty-one and sixty-eight at the time of my data collection. Of the total fifty-one Colombiana/o/xs interviewed, nineteen granted multiple interviews, and their diversity in terms of legal status, generation and gender identity illuminated different life experiences. Depending on respondents’ preferences, interviews were conducted in English, Spanish or a combination. I was able to conduct additional extended life-history interviews with ten individuals, the majority Colombian-born, of the group of fifty-one. Six of the ten life-history interviews came from individuals who granted multiple interviews; for three of those six, life-history interviews were conducted first, followed by semi-structured interviews, which allowed for tailoring based on expeiences and insights that arose during life histories, while for the other three, their life-history interviews followed their primary interviews. The remaining four life histories were stand-alone interviews. Life-history interviews illuminated different reasons for migrating and different experiences upon arrival for those born in Colombia, and for Colombiana/o/xs who had lived most of their lives in the United States, life histories fleshed out complex understandings of relations among Latina/o/xs particular to Philadelphia. Participant observation of everyday life occurred in neighborhood restaurants, churches, businesses, parks, neighborhood meetings, individual homes and street corners. I attended public events in and around the city but focused my efforts across three North Philadelphia neighborhoods—Hunting Park, Juniata and Feltonville—neighborhoods with the highest concentration of Latina/o/xs and the majority of Colombians who live in the city. Involvement with a Colombian organization formed in 2004 offered rich opportunities for participant observation of board meetings, cultural events, and mobile consul visits from 2009 to 2013. In the spring of 2011, I co-taught a weekly citizenship workshop designed to help Spanish-dominant Latina/o/xs prepare for the naturalization exam. My presence as white-skinned, USborn Colombiana, who spoke “unaccented” English, facilitated relationships with Colombians and Latina/o/xs who participated in the organized events and the naturalization course. As I built relationships with Colombians who participated in the organized events and Latina/o/xs from the naturalization course, I utilized snowball sampling techniques as professional, familial and friendship groups allow me to find additional participants via word of mouth, email and social networking sites. Fieldnotes, life histories and interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed. I conducted a theme analysis with multiple rounds of data coding using Nvivo qualitative data analysis software.

Findings Colombia y Venezuela: Here and there, then and now Colombiana/o/xs’ comments on the difference between Colombians and Venezuelans are some of the most ubiquitous distinctions, despite the relative paucity of Venezolana/o/xs in the city; there are fewer than eight hundred Venezuelans but nearly five thousand Colombians who also have a longer history of migration to Reprinted from the journal

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the area and in the five-county metropolitan area (US Census Bureau 2010). Yet, after the United States, the second largest groups of Colombians who reside outside the nation live in Venezuela (Bérubé 2005; DANE 2005; Ramírez and Mendoza 2013). Venezuelans in the United States, like Colombians, tend to be educated and whiter relative to other Latina/o/x groups (López 2015b). For much of the twentieth century, Venezuela was politically and economically stable in large part because of its oil-rich resources. By contrast, Colombia was the archetype of Latin American political instability throughout the twentieth century, often labeled a failed state because of widespread violence and drug cartels’ stronghold over politics. Labor demands in Venezuela’s agricultural sector long compelled Colombian migration, but in the 1960s and 1970s the increased price of petroleum fueled the oil industry boom and drove half a million Colombians to cross the border in search of work in Venezuela’s growing economy.8 Venezuela remained a destination for those seeking to flee escalating violence. Closed borders and restrictive immigration policies meant Colombia/o/xs entered Venezuela without authorization and became characterized as an illegal, unwanted scourge. In Colombia, armed conflict between the government and cartels, guerillas and paramilitaries created decades of tension with Venezuela, which charged that guerilla intrusions impinged on its territorial sovereignty. However since 2012, recession, inflation, unemployment, and food, power and medicine shortages have upended Venezuela’s economic stability and prompted mass Venezuelan migration to Colombia. Despite the humanitarian crisis that reversed the nations’ seemingly intractable images, Venezuela figures prominently in Colombians’ understanding of themselves as a symbol of everything that Colombia was not in the twentieth century. After we spent the morning outside a church at a gathering for peace, coordinated by a local Colombian organization, dedicated to calling attention to the 2010 border conflicts between Colombia and Venezuela, Ernesto shared his assessment of Venezolana/o/xs: Well now the Venezuelans have to come down a notch, you understand? They’ve always thought they are better than us. And now with Chávez they can’t act like they used because of that oil money. Now they can’t just think they’re superior; they can’t be all high and mighty. They live down on earth with us now. He felt strongly about that summer’s tensions—a diplomatic standoff between the two nations over allegations from Colombian president Álvaro Uribe that the Venezuelan government was actively permitting guerrillas safe haven in its territory. Ernesto’s comment jumped across time and space, joining that morning’s event in Philadelphia to the long history of neighboring nations. To be sure, Ernesto implicated the ways Latin America is ever-present in the lives of Colombiana/o/xs even decades after they migrate, illustrating how Latin American entanglements become

8

 Between 556,000 and 580,000 Colombians migrated to Venezuela from 1964 to 1973, and only approximately 100,000 migrated with authorization (Sassen-Koob 1979). As of 2005, an estimated 5.6 million Colombians were living in Venezuela (DANE 2005). 78

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the material for intra-Latina/o/x dynamics. The remarks, made before Chávez passed away but during a period of heightened international criticism of the populist, were highly attuned to Colombian-Venezuelan relations within Latin America and in Philadelphia.9 As Ernesto declared, “Now they can’t just think they’re superior, they can’t be all high and mighty,” he covertly gestured toward race by touching his forearm as a way to indicate skin color and stroked his index finger upward off the tip of his nose to mimic looking down on someone. Asserting with both conviction and delight that Venezuelans must recognize they are not better than Colombians, Ernesto made an appeal to mitigate the whiteness of Venezuelans, who in his perception, thought they were better than other Latina/o/xs. Ernesto grew up in Cali in the 1970s and migrated to Philadelphia in 1988 while in his early thirties. His adolescence came at the height of Colombian migration to Venezuela, as Cali was a locus of out-migration to Venezuela and locus for rural-to-urban migration within Colombia, and he was keenly aware of the stigmatization Colombian migrants endured (Pellegrino 1984). Though none of my interlocutors ever migrated to Venezuela for work, several mentioned clandestine migration as shaping perceptions of Colombians in Latin America as “lower class,” “poor” “unsophisticated” workers desperately seeking a way out of their country. This history undoubtedly contributed to Ernesto’s evaluation of Venezuelans’ perceptions of Colombians, which carry over into their lives in the United States. Ernesto’s comment struck me not simply because it was made at a rally for peace, but because his was not the only one that day. Miriam, a social worker in her late twenties who migrated to Philadelphia as a teenager, grabbed my arm and said in a hushed voice, “You know things have gotten really bad because Venezuelans pretend to be Colombian now.” Though I never encountered any Venezuelan who tried to cover up their national origin, these sorts of statements were ever-present as people commented on the state of affairs in Latin America, connecting it to their own experiences in Philadelphia with  people from those nations. A few months later, while discussing a news story about Colombia’s flourishing biofuel industry, Miriam turned the conversation to her perceptions of Venezuelans in Latin America and Philadelphia, explaining, Status and image are so important for Venezuelans. They always think they are the best in Latin America. “Oh, we have the most beautiful women.” “Oh, we have oil money.” “Oh, we have the best manners.” It’s the same with Argentinos and Chilenos. They want to talk about how they are from Europe, and everything good to them is from Europe. Some Colombians are like that too, but for them it’s an obsession. I have a friend whose landlord is Venezuelan and her landlord insists they were descended from Spanish royalty and I just shake my head. Her landlord constantly tells her how close Venezuelans are to

9   The specter of far-left Venezuelan populism gone awry was a key issue in the public discourses surrounding the 2018 Colombian presidential election.

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Europeans, that they share manners, and that she is a good tenant not like other Colombians. Miriam directly invokes race and implicates Venezuelans (Chilenos and Argentinos) as whiter Latina/o/xs who emphasize their oft-imagined connection to Europe and perceived higher-class status as the justification for their superiority. Her comments demonstrate that the symbolic whiteness that Venezuelans wield is not confined to the geographic boundaries of Latin America and illustrate how Latina/o/xs socially locate themselves with reference to others across various scales (Mahler 2018). Taken together, the comments of Ernesto and Miriam draw on the history of Colombia-Venezuela relations and show how contemporary changes affect the ways Colombiana/o/xs approach intra-Latina/o/x dynamics. Ernesto’s comments reveal how the past remains in the present as the residual xenophobia Venezuelans held for Colombians informs how he imagined their supposed superiority to be in jeopardy in the US because of Chávez’s government. Ernesto indexes the whiteness of Venezuelans as part and parcel of their wealth and oil, locating their superiority in Venezuelans’ racialization and marginalization of Colombians. Like many Colombiana/o/xs, Ernesto and Miriam drew on past relations to craft a particular kind of racial calculus whereby contemporary geopolitical relations in Latin America converged with local relations to indict the position of Latina/o/x groups within Philadelphia. Laborious frictions: Colombians and Puerto Ricans Despite the resentment of their racialization as less white than Venezuelans, many Colombians also learned to distance themselves from other subordinated groups as they navigated the racial hierarchy of Philadelphia, where Puerto Ricans and African Americans were positioned at the bottom. Puerto Ricans occupy a tenuous position in the racial hierarchy; in spite of their sociopolitical prominence and cultural visibility, Puerto Ricans’ racialization as criminal, lazy, and closer to blackness mirrors their position at the bottom of the labor market (Urciuoli 1996; Whalen 2001; Duany 2002; De Genova and Ramos-Zayas 2003a). As Grosfoguel and Georas (2001) note, Latina/o/xs in New York must negotiate how they are conflated with Puerto Ricans in the hegemonic imaginary, which often produces a contradictory relationship among Latina/o/x groups as Colombians and others painstakingly avoid being seen as Puerto Rican. In this respect, forms of Colombians’ assertions of differentiation derive from a racial calculus that seeks to escape being racialized like Puerto Ricans at all costs. Despite the cultural gymnastics that Colombians use to emphasize difference in order to not be mistaken for Puerto Rican, many depend on their social ties with Puerto Ricans, and use Puerto Rican’s US citizenship, itself a result of extractive colonialism, to their own benefit. Moreover, they reproduce the deeply stigmatized racialization of Puerto Ricans and maintain the racial hierarchy for their own marginally better position within it. The story of Abel, a man in his late sixties originally from Cali, who migrated to Philadelphia in 1978 without papers, exemplifies this reproduction of racial hierarchy in Colombianidades. 80

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As a teacher at a technical high school in Buenaventura on the Pacific coast of Valle del Cauca in the 1970s, Abel used his knowledge of French to translate for a visiting Canadian mission and, at the encouragement of one of the delegates, became a university student in Québec. When he was no longer able to sustain himself by working jobs under the table, he moved in with a Colombian friend in Philadelphia who gifted Abel a social security card bought from a Puerto Rican man. Abel made no compunction about taking advantage of the birthright citizenship afforded to Puerto Ricans, and his connections to Puerto Ricans, to gain employment. After getting papers in his own name, Abel’s Filipina roommate suggested he interview at a large fishing equipment company but warned that the owners did not like “Hispanics.”10 Not wanting to miss the opportunity, Abel lied that he was French Canadian, an assertion facilitated by his ambiguous whiteness: light skin, hazel eyes, partial fluency in French and accented English. Asked only if he had a social security card, he started work the next day. After Abel’s younger sister Leticia migrated to Philadelphia, he wanted to get her a job at the company but was again confronted with his employer’s racism, as Leticia’s darker olive-toned skin, dark eyes and dark hair could not be read as ambiguously white. Instead of acknowledging she was his sister, Abel reassured his boss, “She might be from Puerto Rico. She might be Hispanic. But she’s nice and she’s a good worker.” To get Leticia hired, Abel vouched for his sister by concealing their relationship as siblings, and his passing as white meant that he could attest to her character. He chose to present her as a “good” Puerto Rican, one who had the desirable demeanor and work ethic to counter his employer’s racial bias, and whose citizenship, and hence eligibility to work legally, would not be questioned. The intimate environment of work shaped Abel’s assessment of his co-worker’s disposition toward “hard work” and taught Abel about his place and the place of others in the US racial hierarchy. Abel speculated why his boss disliked “Hispanics,” saying, Why he got this bias probably justifiable, or not, I don’t know. … There was this Puerto Rican guy who worked in the shop where I worked. He was probably fine but more than often he would engage in fights, physical fights with whomever, especially with Americans. For this or for that, for any reason. He [co-worker] was lazy, bad all around. So maybe that’s why he [boss] was against Hispanics. Abel positioned himself as an ideal worker, who remained quiet and kept his nose down, in contrast to this problematic co-worker. Policing boundaries of what Colombianness meant vis-à-vis Puerto Ricanness, Abel reinforced aspirations of upward mobility and whiteness rooted in expectations of being read as “hardworking” and “polite.” Abel’s evaluation of his Puerto Rican co-worker relied on racialized assessments of his temperament as lazy and prone to fighting and Abel’s own calculation of and integration into the local labor market. While he drew broad conclusions about Puerto Ricans’ attitudes about work based on this singular co-worker, 10

  “Hispanics” is the term Abel used, and so I preserve his choice of terminology.

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Abel’s work eligibility was made possible only through social relations with Puerto Ricans who lent their identities and risked their own security, as part of their own labor market hustle, to other Latina/o/xs in need. Part of Abel’s understanding of the racial hierarchy came from a lack of awareness and willful ignorance about the US conquest, colonial annexation and continual labor exploitation of Puerto Rico. This “historical amnesia” persists as US national mythology that glosses over perpetual exclusion through the “nation of immigrants” narrative and because geopolitical relationships between the United States and Latin America erase Puerto Rico beyond its relation to the US (Behdad 2005; Cepeda 2009). Abel’s careful navigation of the local Philadelphia racial hierarchy, including obtaining work through extralegal means, meant using Puerto Ricans’ citizenship to his advantage while readily embracing his own national identity to distance himself from Puerto Ricans’ racialization. Abel consistently relied on the generosity of Puerto Ricans to get documentation that helped gain employment in Philadelphia’s survival economy, and relied on the very “criminality” he sought to separate himself from. Here, the emphasis of difference between Colombiana/o/xs and other Latina/o/xs is often aimed at better positioning themselves in the racial hierarchy, closer to what Bonilla-Silva (2004) terms “honorary whites” against “the collective black” because they know they are unable to petition for full whiteness in the United States. Abel’s assertions of differentiation seek to create distance from Puerto Ricans, while younger US-born Colombiana/o/xs perspectives offer alternative evaluations of difference, alongside appeals for sameness. Daniel, a thirty-year-old born in the US, who spent his elementary school years in Medellín, adheres strongly to the philosophy that, for Latina/o/x, “the differences don’t matter, it’s about what we have in common. There’s so much we face we cannot afford to tear each other down. That’s what makes us stronger, togetherness.” This is reflected in his work as an activist and career in nonprofits. He acknowledges that things have improved from “back in the day” when Philadelphia Puerto Ricans were not attentive enough to how legal precarity shaped life for other Latina/o/x/s, owing the change to the tragedy of sustained deportation. For Daniel, pan-Latino solidarity and empowerment was the key to improving conditions for all Latina/o/x, while his cousin Flora, a twentyseven-year-old Philadelphia-born Colombiana whose parents where from Cali and Medellín, believed differences between Colombiana/o/x and other Latina/o/x were indispensable to her experience growing up in Philadelphia. Flora explained, “We’re all Latin, but I am Colombian. It’s like a special flavor, part of the bigger thing. It’s different but the same, not ‘either, or’ more like ‘both and in this specific way.’” And while she and her three friends, one Puerto Rican, one Dominican and one Ecuadorian-Dominican, laughed about the many things they had in common, such as things their mothers would say to them growing up, Flora would feel compelled to point out the differences. Yet her friends would joke, “Colombians don’t count” in response. Flora posited, Because there are more of them in numbers but also when you think of Latino things people think of Puerto Rican things, Mexican things because that’s what is “Latino.” Like “all Hispanos eat pan dulce” or “get the chancleta when you 82

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misbehave as a kid.” But to me those aren’t Latino things. Those are things that some Mexicans do, or some Puerto Ricans, because that’s not what I do or my family does. So in some ways Colombian things—things that only we do or say—don’t always get seen as Latin even by other Latinos. … We’re always off to the side. As Flora reckoned with the perceived invisibility of Colombians vis-à-vis the sociocultural salience bolstered by population size of other Latina/o/x groups (Negrón 2018), she also condemned her parent’s criticisms of other Latina/o/x that sought to assert Colombian superiority. Flora insisted that no one is better than anyone else and that her parent’s judgments of other Latina/o/xs were problematic because “we live in the same neighborhoods, go to the same church.” Flora was critical of her parents’ assertions of differentiation toward Puerto Ricans and what she saw as her cousin Daniel’s limited understanding of the overlaps and disjunctures of Colombianidades and Latinidades. Flora noted that when they were younger Daniel would always chastise her when she repeated differences about Colombians and Puerto Ricans that insinuated the latter were inferior, but she realized that even as adults he teased her for her “Puerto Rican–sounding” Spanish, a contrast to his Colombianaccented Spanish. For Flora, “that’s who I grew up around,” and despite his career Daniel was as judgmental and misguided in his apprehension of intra-Latina/o/x relations in Philadelphia as her parents. Ultimately Flora’s assertions of differentiation draw attention to shared space in Philadelphia as informing her resistance to hierarchical positioning among Latina/o/xs alongside her assertions of differentiation that point to the meaningfulness of difference vis-à-vis Colombiana/o/x invisibility. Flora’s racial calculus shifted across time. When she was younger she accepted the emphasis on difference evident in her parents critiques of other Latina/o/xs. As she grew older she hedged against Daniel’s embrace of pan-Latinidad to carve out her own sense of solidarity and self-positioning based on her life experiences that legitimated certain, but not all, social differences between US Latina/o/xs. Forming lo Caribeño: Disposition, gender, sexuality, and dress Expressions of Colombianidades in Philadelphia parallel intra-Latina/o/x dynamics in other US cities (see Negrón 2018; Mahler 2018; De Genova and RamosZayas 2003a). Similar to Dávila’s conclusion about Latina/o/xs in New York, Colombiana/o/xs in Philadelphia are often “intent on staking a higher claim in the city’s ethnic order of Latinidad by differentiating themselves from Puerto Ricans and increasingly Dominicans” (2008, p. 38). Concerns with bodily comportment and dress became a way for Colombiana/o/xs to distance themselves from what they determined to be the inadequate attitudes and behaviors of Caribbean Latina/o/xs. These assessments drew on understandings of the local racial hierarchy in Philadelphia and regional distinctions within Colombia, where coastal departamentos are associated with blackness, sexuality and a set of aesthetics that differ from the whiter, more mestizo interior departamentos (Wade 1993, 2000). Yet Colombiana/o/xs also reworked ideas about race and region to characterize the Caribbean and, by Reprinted from the journal

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extension, caribeña/o/xs, from Colombia and elsewhere, in their assertions of differentiation. Lourdes, a woman in her early thirties who came to Philadelphia in 2003, was born in Bucaramanga in the interior, but her darker-complected husband Bernardo grew up in Barranquilla on the Caribbean coast, and the interior/coast dichotomy remained an important frame through which she understood herself, other Colombiana/o/xs and other Latina/o/xs. Lourdes decided to pursue her passion for fashion when she migrated by creating a homemade jewelry business and judging local Latina beauty pageants, ultimately aligning her professional aspirations with the Colombian emphasis on beauty and evaluation (Cepeda 2018; Nasser De La Torre 2013; Schaeffer 2012). Her upward mobility, evidenced by her entrepreneurship and homeownership, made class-based distinctions an underlying feature of the ways Lourdes assessed racialized differences between Latina/o/xs. As we sat in her kitchen, Lourdes greeted her friend Melkys by teasing her for wearing sweatpants, an old T-shirt and a hat to cover her hair, exclaiming, “Oh girl,11 you are already ready for the party!” Melkys, originally from the Dominican Republic, dropped by to pick up a dress that Lourdes previously borrowed that she planned to wear that night to Lourdes’s party. Lourdes used the gentle ribbing that often indexes familiarity as an opportunity to explain important differences she perceived between Latina/o/xs after Melkys left: The women from the Dominican Republic sometimes, in public, when they are outside, they will leave the house with rollers in their hair. On the bus I see the rollers. They do not even hide them, they don’t cover up with a scarf. They must do that in their country. … But it’s so messy.12 But they think its ok. It is all out in the open. Me? I would never leave my house like that. That’s not what I was taught. Lourdes admonished Dominicanas for transgressing gendered expectations of selfpresentation in contrast to her own Colombian sensibility. For Lourdes, her Colombianness was an ideal intermediary sufficiently distanced from rude, non-familyoriented, sloppily dressed Americans, who in her perception were the only people truly considered white in the US and far enough from other Latina/o/xs and Black Americans, who she deemed usually “not hardworking” and “disrespectful.” Usually she positioned Melkys as an “exceptional” Dominicana by emphasizing Melkys’ homeownership, “good” job as a nurse, and well-behaved children. Locating Melkys closer to her white Colombianidad than her perceptions of blacker Caribbeanness, prompted her astonishment at Melkys’ clothes for corresponding to Lourdes’s racialized, gendered and classed perceptions of other caribeña/o/xs as deficiently feminine. On other occasions Lourdes characterized Dominican women as dressing too “flashy,” “revealing” or “sexy” for occasions like going to parties, to dinner or out dancing. Observations about Lourdes’s own Costeño family, specifically that they had “more in common with the others, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, 11

  Mija translated from Spanish.   Descuidada translated from Spanish.

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than Colombians” and shared a predilection for flashy and overly colorful clothing, suggest a unified perception of caribeña/o/xs and aesthetics. La Costa, and by extension costeña/o/xs, are seen as blacker and come to embody excess and sexuality in the Colombian imaginary, as “tropicalizing narratives posit the Caribbean landscape and its women as sensual, exotic, and desirable” (Porras Contreras 2017, p. 308; see also Wade 1993, 2000). Lourdes characterized Dominicans’ aesthetic choices as both excessive and deficient—showing too much and not caring enough. Drawing from Colombian geography, she linked gender and sexuality to a racialized Caribbeanness and contrasted it with her ideas about proper performances of gender, specifically femininity and appropriate sexuality as indexed by dress that was sufficiently neat and modest. Through her assertions of differentiation, she distanced herself from Caribbeanness. Lourdes continued, “I mean not all of them, but it shows they don’t care, about themselves or others. The men too, so many of them are womanizers,13 wearing the little white tank tops on the street, on their porches during the day, no job. It’s just not right.” Lourdes extended her criticism to Dominican men, where clothing symbolizes mistreatment of women and lack of employment as her disparagement of men’s tank tops as too skimpy employs a criticism usually reserved for women’s clothing. These assessments indexed moral worth and interior dispositions based on an evaluation of the external presentation and the physical body that render distinctions as “natural” and hierarchical (Bourdieu 1984; Stoler 1995, 2002; Wade 2000).14 Her comments also link her Costeño family to her Latina/o/x Caribbean friends and to her abstracted sense of Dominicans in Philadelphia through style choices she perceived to violate her own whiter, middle-class mores in public space. As the second largest Latina/o/x population, Dominicans share neighborhoods and social institutions with Colombiana/o/xs. Though there are nearly three times as many Dominicana/o/xs as Colombians in Philadelphia, they have similar experiences in terms of both secondary migration from New York and class divisions; Dominicans are more visible because of larger population and business ownership. Yet this offers only a partial picture, as nearly half of Philadelphians live in poverty and Colombians’ judgments are made within a city where all people of color struggle for economic and social resources. As such, Lourdes’s judgment of Dominican men as unfit contributors to society because they do not work and spend time outside in inappropriate clothing is embroiled within the local labor market’s scarcity of resources. As a small-business owner with clear aspirations for upward mobility, Lourdes made her assertions within a landscape of economic competition. Lourdes’s criticisms of hair rollers, flashy dresses, and tank tops became gendered markers of race, class, nation and region that disparaged Dominicans in a 13

  Mujeriegos translated from Spanish.  Stoler (1995) notes that the maintenance of colonial racial hierarchies necessitated the policing of boundaries of gendered sexual and moral behavior. Language, hygiene, bodily comportment, and dress were used as metrics to differentiate and sort people within the rigid colonial matrix of race. Wade (2000) draws from Stoler to explore the dynamics of similar colonial moral boundaries in Colombia, arguing that the development of Colombia solidified the association between geographic regions to specific ideas about racialized sexuality of people within regions. 14

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frame of anti-blackness that mapped Colombian racialized differences onto other Caribbean Latina/o/xs in Philadelphia. Boundaries of Dominicanidad are carefully negotiated with respect to blackness, legacies of slavery, dictatorship and relationship to Haiti, and the intimate ties among Dominicans, African Americans and other Latina/o/xs in the diaspora in the US (Candelario 2007; Aparicio 2006; Dzidzienyo and Oboler 2005; Duany 1998). Lourdes’s assertion of differentiation drew from her understanding of Dominican racial hierarchies that she gleaned from conversation with Melkys, neighbors and friends alongside her assessment of Dominicans within Philadelphia’s Latina/o/x racial hierarchy. Evaluations of aesthetic norms contribute to ongoing projects of race and racism where conforming to dominant expectations of value through appearance and labor is imagined to ensure dignity and respect, and where distancing oneself from performances marked as Black or closer to blackness is imagined to bring one closer to whiteness (Morrison 1994). Yet there are Colombiana/o/xs who maintain an ambivalent relationship with assertions of differentiation. For Afro-Colombiana/o/xs in Philadelphia, experiences with racialization offer another lens to apprehend intra-Latina/o/x dynamics. For Sandra, a self-identified Afro-Colombiana from Cartagena on the Caribbean coast, her darker skin and curly hair meant that growing up she often endured harsh stares in public and insults from light-skinned classmates. In Colombia Sandra felt ambivalent about identifying as Afro-Colombiana, considering it reserved for those darker than she or for those whose parents identified as such, and thought of herself as morena. However, other Latina/o/xs’ perceptions of her and her friendships with other migrants from the Caribbean “opened her eyes” to her Afro-Colombianidad. Conversations with friends in Philadelphia, in particular other women who identified as Black or negra even if they were lighter-skinned, encouraged her to rethink her racial identity. When she first migrated with her parents at age twenty-two, in 1990, her social group consisted primarily of other Colombians, as their company offered familiarity in a new environment. Yet her conceptions about race, self-identification and perception of intra-Latina/o/x dynamics shifted as Sandra formed friendships with other Spanish-speaking and non-Spanish-speaking Caribbean migrants. After a few years she noticed that when she met light-skinned Colombian migrants they would not follow up with plans to meet again, whereas if she made the acquaintance of other caribeña/o/xs, regardless of nationality, those plans would stick. For Sandra these interpersonal slights pointed to the broader structural forces of racism. She began to see it as an “obsession with Colombianness” that got in the way of being one’s true self and making friends, as she noted: We [Colombians] are very critical of other people. It’s too much. I fit in with lots of different people—Colombians, Dominicans, people from Haiti, Jamaica, Brazil—because I have a part of me where I can understand their experience and they can understand mine. We are from the same part of the world. … We know how to treat people right. Here racialized conceptions of characteristics, like friendliness versus coldness, are mapped on Sandra’s encounters in Philadelphia, whereby the Colombianidades of others is predicated on criticism and implied whiteness that impedes social relations 86

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and stands in contrast to her sense of self. Sandra’s sense of Colombianness is predicated on her warmth and understanding, emphasizing shared experience and dispositions among migrants from the Western Hemisphere. Her migration experience recalibrated her racial calculus to help her carefully select potential friends. Sandra maintained that she would always have the most in common with Colombians but that Caribbean Latina/o/xs, like Dominicans, share a certain way of doing things, including an openness to racial diversity and blackness absent in her Colombiana/o/x counterparts. Although she imagined she could make friends with anyone, she perceived her non-Spanish-speaking caribeña/o/xs friends as closer to African Americans, and thus further from her Afro-Colombianidad, while claiming she had more in common with the few white Brazilians in Philadelphia, despite similar language differences. Sandra’s experiences with Colombiana/o/xs and other Caribbean Latina/o/xs reflects both an internal hierarchy of Caribbeanness shaped by Colombian racial division alongside a sense of “cohesion across differences” (Reyes-Santos 2015, p. 3). Sandra’s assessments, like those of Lourdes, drew on understandings of the local racial hierarchy in Philadelphia and Colombian conceptions of race, but each reworked those frames to navigate their particular experiences and social relationships in their assertions of differentiation. The consequences of Colombianidades Taken together, these disparate experiences reveal the complexities and the contradictions of Colombianidades, as Colombiana/o/xs produce ideas about Colombianidad vis-à-vis their experiences with and perceptions of other Latina/o/xs. As I have argued, these assertions of differentiation operate as efforts of distinction (Bourdieu 1984) that implicate social, geopolitical and racial relations within Latin America, in Colombia and between US Latina/o/xs. I demonstrated how these assertions of differentiation operate as covert racializing discourses whereby they do not directly invoke race, but are occasions where people, behaviors, and dispositions became marked as inherently other, reproducing racial hierarchy while also informing Colombiana/o/xs’ identity formation. The three instantiations explored in this article—Colombians vis-à-vis Venezuelans, Puerto Ricans, and Dominicans—reveal what may be the most sensitive touch points for how Colombians understand their racialization in relation to these particular national-origin groups. First, though there are few Venezuelans in Philadelphia, both Ernesto and Miriam emphasized the perceived arrogance of Venezolano/a/xs in terms of their imagined racialized superiority against inferiority of Colombians, and their judgments are informed by the long historical tensions, relative economic strength and shifting geopolitics. They understood their racialization through the lens of how they imagine Venezuelans see them, and so their racialization in Philadelphia (and the United States) as not fully white is informed by who they imagine to be closer to whiteness. Second, Colombians also sought to understand their own racialization with reference to their perceptions of the racialization of Puerto Ricans, who, as the largest Latina/o/x group in Philadelphia with the longest immigration history, hold substantial social Reprinted from the journal

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and political capital, but many remain largely marginalized in term of education, income and occupation in a city with one of highest rates of deep poverty in the United States. The disparate efforts of distinction between Abel, who was able to leverage Puerto Rican citizenship to secure employment upon arrival in Philadelphia, and Flora, born and raised in Philadelphia, illuminated how individuals can differentially uphold, challenge and change the boundaries between Latina/o/x groups. Third, the article explored how the racialized geography of Colombia, divided between the blackness of the coasts and the whiteness of the Andean interior, animated how Colombiana/o/xs mapped these understandings onto Caribbean Latina/o/xs in Philadelphia. Lourdes’s racialized, gendered and classed notions of comportment and dress became the elements of her Colombianidades, which she used to separate herself from Dominicana/o/xs in Philadelphia. By contrast, Sandra reconfigured her racial calculus as experiences with other Latina/o/x Caribbean in Philadelphia changed whom she pursued friendships with and compelled her to rethink her own racial self-identification to embrace herself as Afro-Colombiana. As many Colombiana/o/xs in Philadelphia express anxiety about their racialization, social location, legal status and material conditions, it is no surprise that assertions of differentiation are predicated on both who they may see as “on top”—that is, Venezuelans—and those who may or may not be seen as “below”—that is, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. These ethnographical examples illustrated how Colombians “produce and are the product of social relations of subordination” (Ramos-Zayas 2007, p. 104), navigating racial hierarchies to better position themselves even if it means reproducing the very hierarchies that positions them as less than in the first place. This focus illuminated how Colombiana/o/xs stand in relationship to general US racial structure as well as how they stand in relation to how Latina/o/xs navigate that structure. As Philadelphia’s Latina/o/x communities grow in number and increase in diversity, especially with respect to national origin, understanding the contours of intraLatina/o/x dynamics—the tensions and attempts at distancing—becomes increasingly important. Assertions of differentiation are not unique to Colombiana/o/xs in Philadelphia. We see similarities with how Colombiana/o/xs position themselves in other US cities (Negrón 2018; Mahler 2018; Mallet and Pinto-Coelho 2018), as well as how other Latina/o/x groups position themselves within intra-Latina/o/x hierarchies (De Genova and Ramos Zayas 2003a, b; Dávila 2004; Ramos-Zayas 2012; Aparicio 2019). Instead, it is set apart by the nuances of its expressions, which take on uniquely Colombian contours informed by Colombia’s racialized geography, its history, its changing geocultural location within Latin America, and its relationship to the United States, as well as US racial hierarchies and the political economy of Philadelphia. A focus on Colombiana/o/xs and the multiple, contradictory expressions of Colombianidades complexifies our understanding of intra-Latina/o/x processes of differentiation and racial hierarchy. Looking at Colombiana/o/xs offers an understanding of the interplay between privileges and disadvantages Latina/o/xs endure, specifically higher levels of education, income and occupation attainment coupled with downward social mobility in the US, and legal precarity and ambiguous position in the racial hierarchy. We must attend to their invisibility and their 88

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hypervisiblity as racialized Latina/o/xs as the resurgence of nativism and entrenchment of deportation increases vulnerability. A focus on difference remains indispensable, not as something inherent but as something emergent; as Hall argues, identity is “a ‘production,’ which is never complete, always in process” (1990, p. 222). Analyzing assertions of differentiation in Colombianidades recuperates what differences matter most, their stakes and consequences. As diverse Latina/o/xs live and share space, intra-Latina/o/x dynamics take many expressions. Division exists both easily and uncomfortably alongside solidarity. The centrality of difference in Colombiandades does not foreclose meaningful and intimate relationships between acquaintances, co-workers, schoolmates, neighbors, friends and families. Rather, foregrounding Colombianidades in intra-Latina/o/x relations illuminates the historic, social, political and cultural dilemmas and power differentials at the heart of Latina/o/xs’ lived reality (Aparicio 2009). This work recuperates difference and distinction as vital forms of identity formation that have been overlooked in scholarship despite their ubiquity. This article brings into sharp relief how US Colombiana/o/xs navigate and produce boundaries between Latina/o/xs, and expands our understandings of Latina/o/x identity formation. My research leverages the cultural, economic, and political connections of the Americas to illuminate how individuals craft identities under the shifting structural conditions of Philadelphia, Colombia, and Latin America to show how local, national, and hemispheric dynamics shape intra-Latina/o/x relations. Examining assertions of differentiation invoked in Colombianidades creates a more comparative and hemispheric approach to Latina/o/x studies, by conceptualizing them as a means of negotiating local Philadelphia and US dominant racial norms and ideologies alongside Latin American and Colombian ones—a multifaceted social process under constant transformation in an increasingly global context. Acknowledgements  I am indebted to the three anonymous reviewers for providing incisive and helpful feedback to improve this article. The guest editors of this special issue, Lina Rincón, María Elena Cepeda, Jennifer Harford Vargas and Johana Londoño, have been unwavering in their support, encouragement and advice. Finally, thank you to Savannah Shange for her insightful comments and suggestions on a previous iteration of this work and the biggest thank you to Brittany Webb who has provided feedback on these ideas since their inception.

References Alcoff, L.M. 2003. Latino/as, Asian Americans, and the Black-White Binary. Journal of Ethics 7 (1): 5–27. Alcoff, L.M. 2006. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. New York: Oxford University Press. Aparicio, A. 2006. Dominican-Americans and the Politics of Empowerment. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Aparicio, F. 2009. Cultural Twins and National Others: Allegories of Intralatino Subjectivities in U.S. Latino/a Literature. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 16 (5): 622–641. Aparicio, F. 2019. Negotiating Latinidad: Intralatina/o Lives in Chicago. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Appelbaum, N. 2003. Muddied Waters: Race, Region, and Local History in Colombia, 1846–1948. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Diane R. Garbow  holds a PhD in anthropology from Temple University. Her research focuses on Colombian migration and shifting dynamics of race and citizenship in the context of increasingly localized immigration policies and critical examinations of sanctuary cities.

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Latino Studies (2020) 18:390–419 https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-020-00268-2 ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Disaggregating the Latina/o/x “umbrella”: The political attitudes of US Colombians Angie N. Ocampo1 · Angela X. Ocampo2 Published online: 4 August 2020 © Springer Nature Limited 2020

Abstract Although scholars theoretically acknowledge the diversity of the Latina/o/x vote, few studies have investigated similarities or differences beyond those of the largest Latina/o/x groups. To better understand the nuance of the Latina/o/x vote, this article examines the political preferences of Colombian Americans relative to those of other Latina/o/x subgroups in the United States. We pool data from six surveys of Latinas/os/xs during the 2016 presidential election to construct the first and largest nationally representative sample of US Colombians. Our findings highlight many similarities between Colombian Americans and other Latinas/os/xs, including partisan affiliation and likelihood of voting. At the same time, there are differences in support for individual political candidates, which suggests that important sources of heterogeneity are present within the Latina/o/x vote. Although the concept of the “Latina/o/x vote” holds ground because of the commonalities shared by subgroups under this umbrella, the notable differences warrant careful analysis and consideration. Keywords  Latina/o/x politics · US Colombians · Political attitudes · Political engagement · 2016 election · Latinidad

Desagregando la “sombrilla” latina: Actitudes políticas de los colombianos estadounidenses Resumen Aunque los académicos reconocen teóricamente la diversidad del voto latino, pocos estudios han investigado más allá de las similitudes o las diferencias de los grupos Chapter 6 was originally published as Ocampo, A. N. & Ocampo, A. X. Latino Studies (2020) 18: 390–419. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-020-00268-2.

* Angela X. Ocampo [email protected] Angie N. Ocampo [email protected] 1

University of Pennsylvania, Philadephia, USA

2

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA



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latinos más grandes. Con el fin de entender mejor los matices del voto latino, este trabajo examina las preferencias políticas de los colomboestadounidenses en comparación con las de otros subgrupos latinos en los Estados Unidos. Agrupamos los datos de seis encuestas a latinos llevadas a cabo durante la elección presidencial de 2016 para construir la primera amplia muestra representativa de colomboestadounidenses a nivel nacional. Nuestros resultados resaltan las numerosas similitudes entre este y otros grupos latinos, incluida la afiliación partidista y la probabilidad de ejercer el voto. Al mismo tiempo, hay diferencias en el apoyo a candidatos políticos individuales que implican la presencia de importantes fuentes de heterogeneidad dentro del voto latino. Aunque el concepto del “voto latino” se mantiene firme dadas las características compartidas por los subgrupos agrupados bajo esta sombrilla, hay diferencias notables que ameritan consideración y un análisis más profundo. Palabras clave  Política latina · Colombianos estadounidenses · Colomboestadounidenses · Actitudes políticas · Participación política · Elecciones de 2016 · Latinidad

The Latina/o/x1 umbrella? The “Latina/o/x vote” is often discussed as a growing electorate, with the power to transform the political landscape of the United States. Resting on the premise of shared goals and interests, the concept of a cohesive group has a strong mobilizing potential within this growing population (Padilla 1985). At the same time, scholars argue that considering Latinas/os/xs only as a singular voting group may homogenize diverse interests within the group (Beltrán 2010). Despite the documented heterogeneity of groups categorized as Latina/o/x, existing research has generally focused on the largest national-origin groups. US Colombians reflect what are termed the “new Latinas/os/xs” (Cepeda 2010), representing growing sources of the Latina/o/x population from more diverse countries of origin, socioeconomic statuses, and contexts of reception upon arrival in the United States. Through a focus on US Colombians, we interrogate the political preferences of this group to understand how “new Latina/o/x” groups may reinforce or challenge notions of “the Latina/o/x vote.” US Colombians2 encompass the largest national-origin group of Latinas/os/xs in the United States originating from South America, totaling 1.2 million residing in the United States as of 2017 (Noe-Bustamante et al. 2019). Since 2000, the number of Colombian Americans has increased 148%, substantially surpassing the growth rate of Mexican American populations (76%), who constitute the largest nationalorigin group (Noe-Bustamante et al. 2019). US Colombians are largely foreign-born 1

  Throughout this article, we use the term “Latina/o/x” to refer to immigrants or descendants of immigrants from Latin America. This term purposely reflects the word’s different suffixes, which aim to be inclusive of all gender identities. 2   We use US Colombian and Colombian American interchangeably as gender-neutral terms to express individuals of Colombian descent living in the United States. This includes those who were born in Colombia (referred to as foreign-born), as well as those born in the United States who self-identify as having Colombian ancestry (referred to as native-born). 96

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(61%) and much more likely to be foreign-born compared to the overall Latina/o/x population (33%). In addition to their growing numbers, US Colombians also uniquely reflect the growing diversity within the Latina/o/x community. As the share of immigrants who are from Mexico has been declining, the number of immigrants from other countries in Central and South America has been growing. US Colombians reflect this newer wave of migrants in their mixed motives for migrating, such as fleeing violence and economic concerns (Cohn et al. 2017). US Colombians also have mixed socioeconomic-status backgrounds, a situation that reflects much of the growing diversity in immigrants, including migrants from South America who tend to have higher socioeconomic statuses compared to other Latinas/os/xs. As such, US Colombians represent an interesting group that mirrors much of the growing diversity in the Latina/o/x population in the United States. Despite the potential for this growing population to contribute to our understanding of how Latinidad plays out in politics, existing studies either do not fully interrogate whether Latinas/os/xs are a cohesive political unit or mainly focus on differences among Mexicans, Cubans and Puerto Ricans. Much of the existing research on US Colombians examines political participation in Colombia (Jones-Correa 1998; Itzigsohn and Giorguli Saucedo 2002) or discusses how organizations mediate civic engagement among US Colombians (Portes et al. 2008). Examining less-studied subgroups is critical for a more comprehensive understanding of whether new Latina/o/x groups are shaping the “Latina/o/x vote” in ways similar to or different from more established groups. In this article, we examine the political incorporation of US Colombians in comparison to other Latina/o/x subgroups. We define political incorporation as the development of political attitudes and opinions among immigrants and their descendants, including perceptions of political parties and candidates, as well as their involvement in the political system through voting. By examining Colombian Americans, one of the groups that makes up “the new Latinas/os/xs,” we seek to expand the discussion of the “Latina/o/x vote” to consider axes of similarities and differences by country of origin. We present one of the first accounts of the political attitudes and political behaviors of Colombian Americans at the national level, contributing to the emerging field of US Colombian studies. Furthermore, this article speaks to the larger debate around the “Latina/o/x vote” as it is deployed by civic organizations, the media and political elites, as our study highlights the nuances in the political attitudes and behaviors of Latinas/os/xs.

Latinas/os/xs as one group The concept of Latinidad, and in turn the empirical examination of Latinas/os/xs, has been widely debated within Latina/o/x studies. Considering Latinidad as a political phenomenon can help mobilize the group (Padilla 1985), but can similarly homogenize varying interests, with scholars arguing that it should be permanently debated as a category (Flores 2000; Beltrán 2010). The “Latina/o/x vote” has been used by civic organizations to denote shared interests among a diverse set of groups, yet the term is sometimes used by political elites who do not seriously engage with the interests of this population (Rumbaut 2009; Beltrán 2010). Although quantitative studies of Latinas/os/xs acknowledge the heterogeneity represented by the term, Reprinted from the journal

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studies of political incorporation generally are unable to interrogate the “Latina/o/x vote” beyond the largest national-origin groups, because of small sample sizes (Beltrán 2010). We build on the depth of qualitative studies of Latina/o/x experiences by examining and comparing the political attitudes and behavior of US Colombians to different Latina/o/x groups at the national level. This analysis will help inform political debates about when the concept of the “Latina/o/x vote” is fruitful and when it is imprecise.

Latina/o/x political incorporation Studies of Latinas/os/xs in US politics focus on the diverse factors and experiences that shape their political incorporation, attitudes and opinions. Two key issues drive contemporary debates about the Latina/o/x vote: partisan identification and likelihood of voting. The political socialization literature posits that a person’s political attitudes, particularly partisan identification, are adopted early in life and are largely influenced by one’s parents (Campbell et  al. 1980; Jennings and Niemi 1968). As such, some scholars argue that Latinas/os/xs are one of the largest “unaligned” groups, given that they are recent entrants into the US political system (Green et al. 2002; Hajnal and Lee 2011). When considering party affiliation, some scholars argue that socialization among Latinas/os/xs can involve a multistage party selection process, where they initially identify as independents or nonpartisan, and eventually decide whether they identify with a specific party (Hajnal and Lee 2011). This trajectory suggests that incorporation into politics occurs with more acculturation, as Hajnal and Lee argue that weaker connections to politics result in lower mobilization rates (Hajnal and Lee 2011). On average, Latinas/os/xs who adopt a partisan identification are more likely to be Democrats than Republicans, which is partly due to the mostly working-class composition of the Latina/o/x population and the documented relationship between socioeconomic status and partisanship (Cain et al. 1991; Garza 2004). Policy preferences are also important, and potentially more so than socioeconomic status, in shaping Latina/o/x partisanship (Alvarez and García Bedolla 2003). Republicans’ anti-Latina/o/x measures and proposals have also pushed Latinas/os/xs closer to the Democratic Party (Barreto et al. 2005; Bowler et al. 2006). Latinas/os/xs are also more likely to identify as Democrats as their length of time in the United States increases (Cain et al. 1991; Barreto and Woods 2003). In terms of voting, it is debated whether Latinas/os/xs as a whole have lower electoral turnout rates than native-born whites, yet research has shown that foreign-born Latinas/os/xs have higher electoral turnout rates in many cases (Michelson 2003; Barreto 2005). The factors that have been demonstrated to be most influential in determining Latina/o/x political attitudes as a whole are the same characteristics that shape key differences within this group. Scholars argue that resource disparities contribute to lower levels of political knowledge and lower rates of electoral participation (Brown and Bean 2016; García Bedolla 2014; Leighley and Nagler 2016; Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier 2016; Michelson 2005). However, Latinas/os/xs in

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politics have been studied mostly as a cohesive electorate, with a few notable exceptions (García-Ríos et al. 2019; Fraga et al. 2010; Garza 2004; DeSipio 1998). Disaggregating the Latina/o/x category has been done mostly in the case of the largest national-origin groups, who at times challenge the notion of the Latina/o/x vote. The studies that have examined different Latina/o/x groups find different perceptions of the political system; for example, South Americans are more likely to perceive that they have political knowledge relative to Mexicans and other Central Americans, but less likely than Cubans, who perceive the greatest political knowledge (Fraga et  al. 2010). Cubans are also the most likely to believe that they can influence politics, with Mexicans and South Americans slightly less likely, and Dominicans the least likely (Fraga et  al. 2010). On the other hand, South Americans have relatively high levels of electoral turnout in the 2004 election compared to Mexicans, yet somewhat lower than Cubans. Furthermore, Cubans are more likely to be Republicans compared to other groups, which poses the largest threat to a unified “Latina/o/x vote” (Garza 2004). South Americans identify as Democrats at rates similar to Mexicans, yet less than Dominicans (Fraga et al. 2010). However, beyond comparisons of Cubans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and, more recently, Dominicans, the political opinions of other Latina/o/x subgroups have been understudied. We contribute to this line of research through our focus on Colombian Americans’ opinions and how these compare to other Latina/o/x subgroups.

Colombian Americans in comparison to other Latina/o/x subgroups US Colombians share a number of similarities and differences with other national origin groups, which highlights the importance of studying this emerging subgroup. Colombian migration to the United States dates back to the early twentieth century, with the first significant wave arriving in the late 1960s (Cepeda 2010). Research suggests that Colombian migrants between the 1960s and late 1970s were primarily working class and motivated by economic concerns. Colombia’s drug war and increasing internal conflict throughout the 1980s, coupled with worsening economic conditions, resulted in migrants fleeing violence and poor economic prospects. The number of Colombians migrating to the United States has dramatically accelerated—more than doubling since 1990 (Cepeda 2010)—and is also increasingly composed of more middle- and upper-class migrants (Escobar 2004; Marrow 2005). Colombian Americans tend to fall in the middle of the socioeconomic spectrum in relation to other Latina/o/x subgroups and are employed in both managerial and professional occupations as well as semiskilled blue-collar occupations, whereas many other Latina/o/x national-origin groups are concentrated on either end of the socioeconomic ladder (Marrow 2005). In addition, Colombian Americans in Los Angeles have higher rates of employment and higher socioeconomic status than those in New York, which highlights how a nationally representative sample may be useful for further study of Colombian Americans (Guarnizo et al. 1999). At the same time, US Colombians are also likely to be different from larger Latina/o/x groups traditionally examined. First, US Colombians are mostly immigrants, compared with other groups such as Mexican Americans, who are primarily Reprinted from the journal

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native-born. Colombian Americans also have a higher naturalization rate than other foreign-born groups (DiPietro and Bursik 2012; Migration Policy Institute 2015). These patterns may influence their political attitudes and may result in either higher or lower likelihoods of voting, because of eligibility. Research on US Colombians’ perceptions of discrimination in the workplace argues that they make sense of this marginalization as originating from their accents, origin and ethnic background, whereas research on other Latina/o/x groups suggests they perceive this treatment stemming from race or legal status (Rincón 2017). Through their varied motives for migration that resemble those of newer migrants from Central America (Cohn et  al. 2017), and their middle position on the socioeconomic spectrum (Marrow 2005), US Colombians uniquely reflect much of the diversity within the Latina/o/x umbrella. However, US Colombians also have unique characteristics that warrant the investigation of how they compare relative to other Latinas/os/xs, including their mostly immigrant origins, as well as their political experiences in their home country (Rouse 2017).

Colombian political incorporation Although little scholarly work has highlighted US Colombians’ involvement in US politics, previous research provides conflicting findings about Colombian involvement in the politics of their home country. Although some scholars suggest that US Colombians have a wide sense of mistrust, due to Colombia’s history of armed conflict, and do not participate in Colombian elections (Guarnizo et  al. 1999), other scholars who study the European context find that although Colombian migrants may be pessimistic, they are not uninterested in their country-of-origin politics (Bermudez 2011). Recent statistics from the 2018 Colombian presidential election show moderate electoral turnout among Colombians residing in the United States, as well as conservative political views. Out of the 355,000 Colombians living in the United States who were eligible to vote in the 2018 Colombian presidential election, 31.7% voted, which is lower than the 53.4% of Colombians overall who voted (Registraduría Nacional del Estado Civil 2018). Furthermore, Colombians citizens living in the United States were more likely to vote for Iván Duque, the Colombian conservative candidate, compared to those living in Colombia. Although this may show that US Colombians are less interested in their home-country politics, barriers to participation may also be a factor in why US Colombians do not participate in Colombian elections. Preregistration is required, and polling places are more scarce in geographic locations with fewer US Colombians. The few existing studies that have examined Colombian American involvement in US politics suggest that their experiences with Colombian politics shape their likelihood of politically engaging in the United States. Some scholars suggest that mistrust of the political system in Colombia, in part fueled by decades of unresolved internal conflict, violence, and the drug war, may influence attitudes toward politics in the United States and may result in lower political involvement (Guarnizo et al. 1999; Escobar 2004). Scholars argue that this hesitancy to participate in politics emerges in the US context among Colombians in terms of electoral and civic 100

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participation (Escobar 2010). On the other hand, recent work based in Europe finds that, for Colombian migrants who were engaged in left-wing politics in their home country, engaging in politics in their destination country is important (Bermudez 2010). Even though their experiences with Colombian politics may be influential, US Colombians may also derive their political attitudes primarily from their experiences once they arrive in the United States, which would result in greater similarities to other Latinas/os/xs. Scholars suggest that policies that restrict the rights of immigrants can spur political involvement in Colombian American communities (Guarnizo et  al. 1999). However, other research suggests that compared to other Latina/o/x groups, US Colombians have yet to achieve a significant political force, with other Latina/o/x communities such as Dominicans having more success organizing political coalitions and electing members into office (Escobar 2004, 2010). Even when Colombians form organizations, they are not very likely to be involved in US-based political activities (Portes et  al. 2008). This suggests that although US Colombians are less likely to be politically involved, there may be potential for mobilization. However, the attitudes of Colombian Americans toward US politics have not been systematically studied, which may underestimate our understanding of Colombian American participation in US electoral politics. The scholarship that has examined US Colombians and political attitudes is generally largely qualitative and uses convenience samples. A quantitative study with a nationally representative sample comparing US Colombians to other subgroups has yet to be conducted.

Toward understanding US Colombian political attitudes and behavior This article argues that an assessment of the political opinions and behavior of “new Latina/o/x” groups, which in this case consists of US Colombians, is essential for understanding points of commonality and difference under the umbrella term of “the Latina/o/x vote.” Prior work provides a limited picture on how Latinas/os/xs other than Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and Cubans are incorporating into US politics. Furthermore, in evaluating Latina/o/x political preferences, this article also considers how other sources of diversity within the Latina/o/x community, such as socioeconomic status, nativity, and the perceived importance of certain political issues, may contribute to differences across subgroups and for US Colombians more specifically. Although the heterogeneity within the Latina/o/x population is recognized among scholars, many studies generally lack a comparative perspective in examining particularities within the group. Examining US Colombians relative to other subgroups is of particular importance, because of the significant growth of this group over the past several decades, as well as its demographic similarities to and differences from other Latina/o/x groups. This article addresses these shortcomings and provides a nuanced understanding of US Colombians’ political attitudes, an understudied group within the Latina/o/x umbrella. By examining the political opinions of Colombian Americans in comparison to those of other Latina/o/x groups, we critically engage Reprinted from the journal

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with the idea of a unified “Latina/o/x vote.” In order to do this, this article compiles several datasets to investigate Colombian Americans’ political attitudes at the US national level with a representative sample, and compares these attitudes to those of other Latina/o/x national-origin groups. This article posits several hypotheses drawing from the existing literature. We expect that US Colombians will be in the center of the political ideological scale— in other words, more moderate than other subgroups and more likely to identify as Republicans. Since US Colombians occupy a middle position on the socioeconomic spectrum (Marrow 2005), they should have greater likelihoods of being conservative relative to other Latina/o/x groups with lower levels of socioeconomic status, but more liberal than those with higher levels (Verba and Nie 1987). The existing literature on US Colombians also suggests that they exhibit high levels of distrust in government, which may result in a lower likelihood of electoral participation (Guarnizo et al. 1999). However, contrary to this, we posit that Colombians are not likely to exhibit major differences in political participation compared to other Latina/o/x subgroups. Immigration is a key mobilizing issue for Colombian Americans (Guarnizo et al. 1999), therefore we expect to see fewer differences between US Colombians and other Latina/o/x groups with similar histories of migration and contexts of reception (Cain et al. 1991; Garza 2004) and for this group to be equally likely to vote in the 2016 election, where immigration was a key political and mobilizing issue (Gutierrez et al. 2019).

Data and methods To investigate the attitudes and political involvement of Colombian Americans in the US, this article compiles six national surveys of Latinas/os/xs conducted during the 2016 presidential election to construct a large and nationally representative sample of US Colombians (n = 531). This dataset compiled by the authors is the largest nationally representative sample of Colombian Americans. We use this data to study the political preferences of US Colombians, including their partisanship, evaluation of candidates during the 2016 US presidential election and their likelihood of voting. We also rely on the entire dataset (n = 16,910), or subsets of it, to examine how Colombian Americans’ attitudes relate to those of other Latina/o/x subgroups.3 Appendix 1 contains detailed information on each one of the samples, when the surveys were conducted, and who they surveyed. All of these samples, with the exception of the Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey, surveyed

3

  The pooled dataset includes data from six surveys, all of which were conducted and fielded by the firm Latino Decisions. Latino Decisions is the nation’s leading expert in Latina/o/x public opinion informed by social science methodology standards. Even though all six surveys were conducted at different points throughout the 2016 presidential election campaign, given Latino Decisions’ methodology and proportional sampling of the Latina/o/x population, we can be confident that the pooling of the data provides a robust and large-N dataset of various Latina/o/x national-origin groups in the United States. Respondents were recruited by Latino Decisions and its managing partner Pacific Market Research using large lists of registered voters from Catalist and an extensive database of consumer lists. 102

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Latina/o/x registered voters of all nationalities.4 Appendix 2 contains information regarding the number of respondents by national-origin group in the pooled dataset. Prior national studies of the political attitudes of US Colombians have not been feasible, given how few Colombians have been surveyed as part of large-scale nationally representative surveys of the Latina/o/x population. For example, the 2006 Latino National Survey, one of the most comprehensive studies of US Latinas/os/xs, included only 139 Colombian Americans (Fraga et al. 2007). On average, the number of Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican and Dominican respondents is much larger in national surveys because their populations are much larger. By pooling six surveys from the 2016 US presidential election, we have compiled a large enough number of Colombian American respondents to run statistical analyses and be confident about the robustness of our results.5 Throughout several analyses, this article relies on questions that were asked in all or most of the surveys. For political party identification, the surveys first asked respondents which party they identified with the most. Respondents who did not identify with one of the two major parties were asked a follow-up question and were asked to pick a party if they had to choose one. They were allowed to choose Independent in the follow-up and were coded as such. The favorability questions asked respondents to evaluate their favorability of the 2016 presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, as well as then-president Barack Obama. Each of these favorability items is measured on a five-point scale, ranging from very unfavorable to very favorable. Lastly, self-reported electoral turnout is used to measure levels of political engagement. This item was coded as 1 (yes) if respondents reported that they had or would turn out to the polls, and 0 (no) if they reported that they had not or would not vote in the presidential election.6 Our models also account for other factors that are known to influence political attitudes and participation. We account for respondents’ age, gender and nativity (whether or not the respondents were born in the United States or abroad). For socioeconomic status, we include a categorical measure for income, wherein the first category represents an income of less than $20,000 and the eighth category represents

4

  All six of the data were conducted with the goal of studying the political opinions and behaviors of the Latina/o/x population. As Appendix 1 indicates, two out of the six samples were conducted among Latina/o/x registered voters in the battleground states of Nevada, Florida, Ohio, Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin. The remainder of the surveys sampled respondents nationally. Given that no particular preference was given to Latina/o/x voters of certain national origin, we have no reason to suspect that the dynamics that led Colombians to show up in the data were any different than those that led other Latinas/os/xs to also show up in the data. Also, given that at least two of the samples drew specifically from the battleground state of Florida, we believe this helped the inclusion of Colombians into the pooled data given that most of the US Colombian population resides in the state of Florida. 5   Other social scientists have used pooling as a method to increase their sample size specially when studying racial and ethnic minorities, given how few of them appear in any given national survey (Tesler 2012). 6   Given that most of the surveys were conducted prior to the election, we were able to obtain items that asked respondents only about the certainty of their participation in the upcoming presidential election. We coded only respondents who were very certain that they would participate in the election as “yes” and those less certain as “no”. Reprinted from the journal

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an income of above $150,000. The measure for education includes a seven-point scale capturing highest level of education earned by the respondent, ranging from having earned a first- to eighth-grade education (1) to having earned a postgraduate education (7). In addition, we also examine whether the survey respondent elected to take the survey in Spanish (1) or in English (0), which we use as a measure of acculturation. We also examine attitudes toward the most important political issue facing the Latina/o/x community that individuals felt either the president or Congress needed to address. Respondents could identify up to two items. Some of these issues identified by the respondents included immigration, the economy, foreign policy, education, housing, healthcare, anti-Latina/o/x sentiment, climate change, and taxes, among others. Based on the distribution of these variables, we include the economy, education, discrimination, healthcare and immigration, but group other issues under “other.”

Results Demographically, US Colombians generally occupy higher socioeconomic statuses relative to Latinas/os/xs as a whole, as they generally have higher incomes and are more likely to have college degrees. Consistent with other work on US Colombians, our sample indicates 68.4% of Colombian Americans were born abroad, compared to 32.2% of other Latinas/os/xs who were foreign-born. When considering partisan affiliation of Colombian Americans relative to the largest Latina/o/x groups (Mexicans, Cubans, and Puerto Ricans, shown in Fig. 1), descriptive findings suggest that Colombian Americans are likely to identify as Democrats (68.9%), at a slightly lower rate than Mexicans but a slightly higher rate than Puerto Ricans. On the other hand, only 38.1% of Cubans identify with the Democratic Party, whereas 52% identify with the Republican Party. Only 21.1% of Colombian Americans identify as Republican, which is slightly higher than Mexicans (16.7%) and Puerto Ricans (18.3%). Colombian Americans are also marginally less likely to identify as Independent than both Cubans and Puerto Ricans, but more likely than Mexicans. Colombian Americans, despite their higher level of socioeconomic status and conservative political views in their home country, are not much more likely to identify as Republicans. In fact, their levels of partisan identification are very similar to those of other Latina/o/x origin groups, except for that of Cubans, who continue to show higher levels of preference for the Republican Party. Figure  2 presents descriptive statistics for favorability of the 2016 presidential candidates, Trump and Clinton, as well as Obama, among Colombian Americans. US Colombians have very positive views of Obama, with 46.3% and 28.1% reporting that they view him very favorably and somewhat favorably, respectively. Although Colombian Americans also report favorable views of Clinton, these are substantially lower than their ratings of Obama, with only a small percentage (19%) reporting that they view her very favorably and 31.5% viewing her somewhat favorably. A sizable 36.6% of Colombian Americans view Clinton very unfavorably. Most Colombian Americans (55.1%) also see Trump very unfavorably, with smaller shares of the group viewing him somewhat favorably (15.6%) and very favorably (8.2%). 104

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Fig. 1  Partisan identification by national origin

Fig. 2  Candidate favorability among US Colombians

Figure  3 examines the policy opinions of Colombian Americans and shows which political issue respondents believe is the most important. The majority of Colombian Americans reported that immigration (27.3%) and the economy (26.5%) are the most pressing issues. Discrimination, education and healthcare Reprinted from the journal

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Fig. 3  Most Important Issues for US Colombians

are all somewhat important, with less than 10% of the sample rating these as their top issues.7 Although the descriptive results provide an important avenue to understand the average political attitudes of US Colombians, accounting for other potential confounding characteristics through multivariate statistical models is essential for considering whether the differences between Colombian Americans and other groups can primarily be explained by other factors, such as different socioeconomic statuses. For country of origin, the models examine US Colombians (the reference category8) in comparison to other large Latina/o/x origin groups. Because of small sample sizes, respondents from South American and Central American countries are combined into larger categories. In the analysis that follows, we use coefficients from logistic regression models representing different variables.9 Given that the coefficients of logistic regression models are directly uninterpretable in terms of their magnitude (King 1998; King et al. 2000), sample predictions are drawn to examine the predicted probability of a respondent reporting a particular attitude or having voted. These predicted probabilities are calculated by holding all the other variables constant at their means.

7

  The ‘Something Else’ category includes issues such as anti-Latina/o/x discrimination and race relations, criminal justice and incarceration, terrorism and foreign policy, global warming, housing affordability, abortion and gay marriage, among others. 8   By setting US Colombians as the reference category, we are able to compare them to the other groups. 9   In every model, we also incorporate variables that represent or account for each survey. These controls allow us to account for any differences that may exist between surveys that are not otherwise reflected in demographic and socioeconomic status characteristics. Although these variables are included in the models, the final tables do not reflect their values since they are not relevant to the analysis. 106

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Table 1 presents nested logistic regression models predicting respondents’ party identification. Colombian Americans share some similarities and differences in partisan identification with other national-origin groups. To interpret these differences, Fig.  4 shows predicted probabilities indicating the magnitude of country-of-origin effects, derived from models 2 and 4, which predict the likelihood of identifying as Democrat and as Republican with all relevant predictors held at their means, respectively. US Colombians have a moderately high likelihood (59%) of identifying as Democrat, yet this is significantly lower than Dominicans (68%), as well as higher than Cubans. On the other hand, they are not very likely to identify as Republicans (21%), which is significantly lower than Cubans (52%) but significantly higher than Dominicans (13%). In addition, US Colombians are more likely to identify as Republican compared to Mexicans, but this effect disappears after accounting for socioeconomic status and demographics. Socioeconomic status and other demographic characteristics operate in the expected direction, where age, education and income are all positively associated with being more conservative, meaning that older, more highly educated respondents and those with higher incomes are more likely to identify as Republican. Generally, these results show that US Colombians are different from Dominicans, who are more likely to identify as Democrats, and Cubans, who are more likely to identify as Republicans. At the same time, these findings show that US Colombians share similarities with most Latina/o/x groups in their relatively high likelihood of identifying with the Democratic Party. Table  2 presents six models that assess favorability toward Obama, Clinton, and Trump. For each candidate, we present logistic regression models predicting the likelihood that they are seen very unfavorably, as well as models predicting the likelihood that respondents see them very favorably.10 Generally, there are no country-of-origin differences in predicting favorability toward Obama, whereas there are differences in support for Clinton and Trump. Figure  5 presents predicted probabilities for the likelihood of viewing Clinton favorably and the likelihood of viewing Trump unfavorably (models 4 and 5), in order to interpret the magnitude of the coefficients for country of origin. US Colombians are less likely to have a very favorable view of Clinton, in comparison to other national-origin groups. Their likelihood of seeing Clinton as very favorable is around 16%, which is significantly lower than other groups such as Mexicans (23%), Puerto Ricans (26%), and even Cubans (21%). These differences remain after controlling for demographic characteristics and their political party identification. US Colombians are also more likely to view Trump unfavorably (64%) relative to other South Americans (54%). In analyses not shown, US Colombians are also more likely to view Trump unfavorably relative to Cubans prior to controlling for

10

  Although ordered logistic regression models would appear to be the best choice in examining an ordinal variable with five categories, we found that the favorability measures violated the proportional odds assumption. In an ordered logistic regression, it is assumed that the increase from one category to the next higher category is the same across all levels. However, this was not the case for the favorability measures. Next, we attempted to recode favorability into three levels: not favorable, neither, favorable. However, this also violated the proportional odds assumption. As recourse, we modeled these as logistic regressions for two of the favorability categories. Reprinted from the journal

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Disaggregating the Latina/o/x “umbrella”: The political… Table 1  Predictors of partisan affiliation (Logit Models) Dependent variable: Democrat (1)

Republican (2)

(3)

Independent (4)

(5)

(6)

Country of origin (ref: Colombia)  Central America  Cuba  Dominican Republic  Mexico  Puerto Rico  South America

− 0.023

− 0.043

− 0.037

0.051

0.037

− 0.002

(0.119)

(0.121)

(0.134)

(0.138)

(0.202)

(0.204)

− 1.317*** − 1.324*** 1.398***

1.380***

0.090

0.189

(0.114)

(0.127)

(0.196)

(0.198)

(0.117)

(0.123)

0.487***

0.408**

− 0.748*** − 0.560**

− 0.298

− 0.310

(0.137)

(0.140)

(0.167)

(0.237)

(0.240)

(0.171)

0.152

0.165

− 0.273*

− 0.224

− 0.189

− 0.235

(0.098)

(0.103)

(0.111)

(0.117)

(0.169)

(0.174)

− 0.064

− 0.020

− 0.178

− 0.212

0.146

0.118

(0.105)

(0.112)

(0.120)

(0.128)

(0.177)

(0.186)

− 0.101

− 0.081

0.094

0.072

− 0.017

− 0.015

(0.113)

(0.115)

(0.127)

(0.130)

(0.195)

(0.196)

Socioeconomic status  Income  Education

− 0.054***

0.095***

− 0.014

(0.010)

(0.011)

(0.017)

− 0.024

0.069***

0.033

(0.013)

(0.015)

(0.023)

− 0.001

0.010***

− 0.014***

(0.001)

(0.001)

(0.002)

0.331***

− 0.392***

− 0.181**

(0.039)

(0.045)

(0.067)

0.055

− 0.087

− 0.039

(0.051)

(0.059)

(0.089)

0.382***

− 0.395***

− 0.277***

(0.048)

(0.056)

(0.084)

Demographics  Age  Female  Foreign born  Spanish Int  Constant Observations

0.970***

0.998***

− 1.315*** − 2.196*** − 2.908*** − 2.001***

(0.113)

(0.152)

(0.126)

(0.175)

(0.207)

(0.266)

13,988

13,803

13,988

13,803

13,988

13,803

Log Likelihood

− 8404.457 − 8158.561 − 6741.247 − 6445.710 − 3642.584 − 3555.010

Akaike Inf. Crit

16,832.920 16,353.120 13,506.490 12,927.420 7309.168

7146.020

Note: Logit coefficients with standard errors in parentheses. *p