Latinx Studies

The Key Concepts

Frederick Aldama, Christopher González

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138088443
• eBook ISBN: 9781351614351
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ancient Languages
• Index: Social Sciences

Latinx Studies: The Key Concepts is an accessible guide to the central concepts and issues that inform Latinx Studies globally. It summarizes, explains, contextualizes, and assesses key critical concepts, perspectives, developments, and debates in Latinx Studies. At once comprehensive in coverage and detailed and specific in examples analyzed, it provides over 25 key concepts to the field of Latinx Studies as shaped within historical, social, cultural, regional, and global contexts, including:

• Body

• Border Theory

• Digital Era

• Familia

• Immigration

• Intersectionality

• Language

• Latinidad/es

• Latinofuturism

• Narco Cultura

• Popular Culture

• Sports

Fully cross-referenced and complete with suggestions for further reading, Latinx Studies: The Key Concepts is an essential guide for anyone studying race, ethnicity, gender, class, education, culture, and globalism.

Latinx Studies

The Key Concepts

Américas

The concept of the Américas within US Latinx Studies encompasses a wide range of debates, theories, and scholarship that locate US Latinx subjects, experiences, histories, linguistic practices, and cultural phenomena generally within a hemispheric, transnational north and south continental American framework. As such, the Américas denotes more than a cartographic space. Rather, as Alexandra T. Vazquez sums up, it is an “anti-cartographic object, curricular and aesthetic and alive, that gets us toward a more expansive sense of place and time and people” (p. 11).

Within US Latinx Studies, many scholars aim to understand the historical, social, cultural forces that have shaped and continue to shape the very varied Latinx communities and experiences within and across the regions and nations that make up the north and south American continents. As such, many Latinx Studies scholars have been attentive to the histories and material outcomes of colonial, imperial, and capitalist socioeconomic and ideological forces that have created systemic patterns of disenfranchisement and inequality across the Américas, especially for mestizo/as, Afrolatinos, and indigenous peoples. Scholars have attended to the different transcultural networks that grow out of contact zones of cultural creation across the Américas. While seeking to identify historical and cultural common grounds, the aim is to not reduce, as Paul Allatson writes “the Americas to a homogenous whole or a mere space of diversity” (p. 19).

The early histories of conquest and colonization of the Américas become a common ground for US Latinx and Latin American scholars to bring a multipronged (historical-material, ideological, and transcultural) approach to their hemispheric scholarship. Many scholars excavate and analyze the early chronicles, or crónicas, of EuroSpanish conquistadores and clergy and the ways that their narratives “invented” and alchemize the physical, geographic, and human material space of the Américas into imaginary spaces in need of filling; that is, these scholars excavate how these conquistadors and clergy created narratives that imagined an Américas avant la lettre in need of taming: namely, exploiting, raping, and mass-scale murdering. Several consider the “invention” of the Américas to take place already with Columbus’s 1492 diaries and Amerigo Vespucci’s pamphlet, Mundus Novus (1503) that combined the magical with realism in their narratives. (See also Frederick Luis Aldama’s Postethnic Narrative Criticism). And for others it happens with early maps of the Américas, beginning with Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann’s Universalis Cosmographia (1500) and its use of the the name America to identify this new world geographic space. For José Rabassa, it is Hernán Pérez de Oliva’s use of the concept “invention” in the title of his crónicas, Historia de la invención de las Yndias (1528), that solidifies the construction of a Europe-as-civilized vs. the Américas-as-wild Manichean allegory (Inventing America 54). Indeed, for Rabassa, it is through the “dismantling of how America was invented in the sixteenth century, and continues to be invented” that we can understand the deep history of colonization that connects the disenfranchised across the Américas. To this end, Rabassa reads the construction of the Américas “as a regime of signs” that can shed light on the “the geographic, cartographic, and historic constituents underlying our present picture of the world” (p. 214). For Jesús Carillo, it is chivalric romance author and conquistador Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo’s Historia general y natural de las Indias (1526, 1535; and posthumously as complete volume 1851–1855) that conceived of an Américas that stretched beyond the continent to include the Pacific Rim countries where Spanish conquests continued, including Moluccas and the Philippines (1519 and 1542).

Many scholars have critically excavated these early EuroSpanish crónicas to show how expansive this dark, racialized ideological construction of the Américas became over time. However, there have been others who have excavated other early crónicas to shed light on how the pre-Columbian indigenous presence linked communities and people across the Américas before the conquest and colonization. For some scholars today and important figures in history such as Simón Bolívar, it is texts such as Bartolomé de Las Casas’s Historia de Las Indias (written in 1542 and published in 1552) that defend the indigenous peoples of the Américas—albeit as primitive, noble savages—that proved counterpoints to those of the conquistadores. Indeed, some consider de Las Casas’ text to be the main inspiration of Simón Bolívar who aimed to at once establish sovereign proto-nation-states and unite South American peoples in order to liberate the Américas from Spanish rule. (See Paul S. Vickery’s “Bartolomé De Las Casas: Prophet of the New World.”) And, other Latinx scholars have recuperated Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación (1542) as an early trans-hemispheric narrative. Indeed, Nicolás Kanellos includes La Relación in Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States as one of the foundational narratives of Latin/o Americas. And, Genaro Padilla considers Gaspar Perez de Villagra’s Historia de la Nueva México (1610) to be one of the first Latinx narratives as it combines “European and indigenous Mexican figures, rituals, and origin stories into a single tale” (p. 35) along with Aztec symbols (cactus, eagle, and serpent).

Many US Latinx scholars who seek to re-orientate cultural histories with an Américas purview in mind have found inspiration in the work of Cuban author and activist, José Martí. His 1891 essay, “Nuestra América” (first published in New York City then Mexico City), envisions a hemispheric unity in the struggle against divisive US imperialist forces. As Ramón A. Gutiérrez and Elliott Young sum up, “Martí proposed an international order governed by states, organized around a common identity as Americans in the north and in the south, which obliterated the borders of nation-states along with U.S. economic and cultural dominance” (p. 30). Scholars such as José David Saldívar have used Martí as a springboard to conceptualize an analytic framework for understanding the creation of resistant and revolutionary cultural phenomena as grown from shared histories of struggle against colonization and US imperialism across the Hispanophone Caribbean and latinoaméricas. Saldívar uses Martí as a sounding board of sorts to give shape to a politically resistant “pan-American literary history” (The Dialectics of our America 5). Saldívar deepens the move to articulate a hemispheric Américas in his Border Matters (1997) and Trans-Americanity (2012). In each we see scholarly moves that expand the borders for studying Latinx cultural phenomena across the Américas—and inclusive of other colonized regions of the planet’s southern hemisphere such as Subcontinental India. He articulates a global borderlands, a postcolonial trans-americanity that’s “outernational” to study US Latinx cultural phenomena like literature within other global south cultural practices.

Other Hispanophone Caribbean and Latin American scholars have proved important for the articulation of a hemispheric Américas critical framework for analyzing cultural phenomena. For instance, Roberto Fernández Retamar’s essay “Caliban” (1970 in Spanish and 1974 in English) has proved to be an important inspiration to both Latinx and Latin American scholars today who seek to excavate hemispheric cultural traditions that resist nation-state exceptionalism and US imperialism and that affirm the struggles of mestizos across the Hispanophone hemisphere. Others such as Nestor García Canclini and his concept of hybridity have been used by Latinx scholars to reveal how artificial notions like highbrow and lowbrow culture are ideological constructs that deepen class and social divisions. And, much like Caclini’s formulation of a hybrid, transformative cultural production and knowledge making in and across the Américas, so too has the work of Fernando Ortiz proved useful. In his Cuban Counterpoint he formulates the concept of “transculturation” to identify how cultures move across nation-state borders, and in multidirectional patterns of mutual transformation that ultimately create a new cultural object. For Latinx scholars, Ortiz’s “transculturation” and its generative concept of social and cultural syncretism across the Américas stand in sharp contrast with an acculturation model that’s assimilative in its unidirectional move from non-US (inferior) to US culture (superior). Indeed, Ortiz’s dynamic model has been useful for today’s Latinx scholars to articulate how shared contact zones across the Américas have created powerful transculturative products, and this in an ever continuous and transformative way whereby these new fusions lead to the emergence of new cultural phenomena. (See Aldama and Stavans ¡Muy Pop!)

Some US Latinx scholars choose to excavate other early narratives that sought to identify an affirming common ground between different subjugated populations across the Américas, including Amerindians, mestizos, and Afrolatinos. Latinx scholars such as Juan Bruce-Novoa, Jesse Alemán, José Aranda, Kirstin Silva Gruesz, Amelia María de la Luz Montes, John Michael Rivera, and Raúl Coronado recover the textual phenomena of earlier epochs to move cultural histories away from English-only, and an East-to-West (or Europe/Anglo Eastern US) orientation. They do so to formulate a multilingual, comparative, trans-hemispheric framework for analyzing cultural phenomena. In Ambassadors of Culture Kirstin Silva Gruesz excavates new hemispheric literary genealogies by attending to Spanish language archives that show how this “larger web” of publishers, circulation, and reading communities expand our notions of white, Anglophone centers of cultural production. With Latinx scholars seeking to explore ways that movement of culture and knowledge from Spanish and Portuguese contexts to North American Anglophone contexts creates a more accurate history of transculturation across the Américas we’ve seen the flourishing of new work. Non-Latinxs such as Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine articulate an Américas framework. In Hemispheric American Studies the essays identify how literary, cultural, social, political, and economic relationships between the United States and other nations in the Américas have shaped cultural production in the early North American US republic. And, in Anna Brickhouse’s Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (2004) she demonstrates how an Américas orientation can open canonical US literature to other ways of understanding how they work within a larger network of the texts from Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and how they are all shaped by complex intercultural and postcolonial interrelations. (See also Juan Poblete’s edited Critical Latin American and Latino Studies.)

Indeed, several Latinx scholars have excavated early colonial and post-colonial narratives to identify a borderland hemispheric Américas that affirms pan-Amerindian, feminist, and queer subjectivities and experiences. We see this in the 1970s and 1980s in the work of Gloría Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Ana Castillo, Lucha Corpí, and Pat Mora. José Vasconcelos’ 1925 publication of La Raza Cósmica: Misión de la raza iberoamericana proved seminal to the articulation of a hemispheric concept of Latinidad—or Latinoness. Rather than see racial mixture (European, African, indigenous) across the Américas—his “bronze continent”—as a deficit, as the colonizers did, Vasconcelos positively affirms mestizaje as the next evolutionary phase of humans. Several scholars and activists used this as the springboard to formulate a reconquest of the US Southwest—formerly Mexico’s northern territories and the space of the mythic Aztlán. Others complicated Vasconcelos’ affirmation of the bronze race (“la raza de bronce”) to formulate a borderland, hemispheric space of inclusion. We see this in Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza where she claims the space for women and lesbians of color. We see here and elsewhere the work of Latina queer feminists clearing the space for an Américas that affirms racial mixture or mestizaje and that celebrates anti-colonial, hemispheric unities out of the diverse indigenous histories and egalitarian politics. (See also This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color.) Finally, Latinx scholars such as Anzaldúa and others recuperated the Nahuatl word and concept, “Nepantla” to identify their “in-between” existence: one caught up in between the legacies of ancient Aztec knowledge and cultural practice along with the brutal histories of EuroSpanish conquest and colonization. As Walter Mignolo sums up of this Nepantla in-between state of surviving, it is “not a happy place in the middle” but rather “a general question of knowledge and power” (p. 2) for the dislocated and disenfranchised of the Américas. (See Arturo Aldama et al. Comparative Indigeneities of the Américas: Toward a Hemispheric Approach.)

The concept of an expansive, ever breathing and growing of peoples and cultures within in-between spaces of the Américas is made explicit not only within US/Mexico borderlands (the focus of Anzaldúa, for instance), but also expansive concepts of Caribbean, Greater Mexico, and the South as the Global South and Nuevo South. (See Jamie Winders’s “Commentary: New Directions in the Nuevo South.”) Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s “repeating islands” concept of Caribbean archipelago seeks to express the complexity of hybrid transculturative processes and experiences and subjectivities formed across national boundaries. And, Silvio Torres-Saillant identifies Dominican Latinxs also within a hemispheric space whereby a diverse range of Dominican Latinxs speak “with a complex but single voice” (p. 139). And, those such as José Limón and Ramón Saldívar variously use the concept of “Greater Mexico” to expand their study of Latinx cultural production beyond US nation-state boundaries. For instance, in American Encounters José Limón uses the concept of “Greater Mexico” (Américo Paredes) to consider how mestizo bodies at once become objects of racialized “eroticism and desire” (p. 4) and resist such objectification. And, in The Borderlands of Culture Ramón Saldívar identifies how seminal Latinx scholar and cultural creator, Américo Paredes, embodies the “transnational imaginary” of a Greater Mexico consciousness formed out of a pan-American culture (430). And, Latinx scholars have used the “Global South” concept to enrich understanding of confluences of Latinx and African American coexistence and co-cultural production. For instance, in Latining America Claudia Milian uses the Global South concept to identify “Latinities of blackness” that resist brown vs. white racial paradigms. For Milian, Langston Hughes can be seen as providing “critical energy for new articulations, signs, color lines, and assemblages of bodies that pass through the apodictic character of U.S. Latino and Latina brownness and dark brownness as well as U.S. African American blackness” (p. 151).

The Américas has been used by Latinx scholars to expand the ways in which we understand histories of cultural production, dissemination, and consumption. They do so to clear spaces for greater inclusivity of mestizo, African, and indigenous legacies. Ramón A. Gutiérrez writes how nation-state borders and boundaries fail “to contain, to constrain, to delimit, or to fully define how humans live their lives” (p. 29). Indeed, for US Latinx scholars, the proximate location to language and cultures of the Central and South Américas necessarily make this a non-assimilative population. With constant vital growing of Latinx populations from those from the Global South and beyond, Latinx demographics are constantly changing the racial and cultural configuration of the US—and in a transculturative (and not assimilationist) manner. This said, Latinx scholars are mindful that there continue to exist unequal exchanges and flows of cultural (and intellectual) phenomena across the Américas; US mainstream culture and English-language intellectual and creative products continue to overwhelm the lives of those of Central and South America. The Hollywood juggernaut is a case in point. Latinx scholars are mindful that the nation-state borders and boundaries have artificially cut up the Américas in ways that prevent the movement of real bodies—and with tragic consequences. NAFTA...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• The Key Concepts
• Glossary
• Suggested Further Reading
• Index