Late in the “Introduction” to his 2004 collection , Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth, the Latin Americanist cultural studies scholar John Beverley refers briefly but pointedly to one then-underreported facet of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States . While those attacks, he observes, were “directed against a homogeneous corporate-imperial America, symbolized by the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, [their] immediate aftermath revealed instead a ‘real’ multicultural, middle- and working-class America among the victims” (24–25). ¹ Beverley remembers the revelation of the “multicultural” cast to that population of victims, especially among people working that day in the twin towers in lower Manhattan, as occurring repeatedly in ritual performance in the intervening years: “In the symbolic readings of the names of the dead on the anniversary of September 11,” he recalls, “—a common form of testimonial commemoration—a significant number were Hispanic . Many of them, we know, were illegal immigrants from countries like El Salvador and Guatemala, fleeing … counterrevolutionary violence , … and working for minimum wage in the interstices of the new global cities” (25). I wrote a very early draft of this essay in September of 2014, using Beverley’s then-decade-old reference to an even more distant but still insistent act of mass atrocity, whose actual victims included perhaps surprisingly large numbers of undocumented workers from Central America, to underscore the political and historical distance traveled, or not traveled, between 2004 and 2014, a distance even more appallingly vast from the vantage of 2018. That summer of 2014 saw, as one of a number of troubling instances of excessive state aggression colliding with either catastrophic state failure or increasingly violent (and mostly criminal) political action on the part of non-state entities against actual (often certainly not entirely innocent) states, ² reports of an unprecedented humanitarian immigrant crisis on the southern border of the United States, a crisis involving many tens of thousands of unaccompanied and undocumented minors from some of the same countries in Central America mentioned in John Beverley’s 2004 piece referring to 2001. Readers familiar with the exacerbation of these already fraught dynamics, occasioned first by the election to the US Presidency of Donald J. Trump in November of 2016, and afterwards by the long series of Trump Administration anti-immigrant policies that led by the summer of 2018 to the crisis surrounding immigrant families separated at the US southern border, will understand how a historical process already decades underway in 2011 continue to unfold in their devastating relentlessness against the very same vulnerable populations from the same nations and communities .

In that 2004 chapter, Beverley labels that population of murdered undocumented immigrants as already “Hispanic,” and I want to pause at this act of demographic categorization and ethnic naming to initiate my own reflections on the precariousness and instability of both “Hispanic,” Beverley’s term of use and also Latinx, ³ the primary alternative to “Hispanic” that other critics and scholars might employ in reference to roughly the same group today. Beverley’s rhetorical construction of the “Latinx” dimension of 9/11 underscores for me something of the ongoing challenge (even in 2018) to any US Latinx studies practice, and certainly to anything that might want to claim to work as a US Latinx political project, given what we might term the persistent and even recalcitrant historical (perhaps, indeed, ontological) evanescence of some part of the demographic object-in-question that these projects might want to name as demonstrably, substantially, and coherently “Latinx.” What possible historical, political and cultural status, we might ask, accrues to the multitude of bodies of murdered persons who found themselves living and working without legal documentation in a geographical zone that pulls them simultaneously toward a past that explains their precarious situation in the present moment of their collective murder (that is, toward the historical space dominated by the narrative protagonism of the nation-state, where they can be said to have fled countries ravaged by “[counter-]revolutionary violence ” fueled in large part by the foreign policy of the imperial state where they later find themselves working, living, and dying, without papers) and toward a future they themselves will not survive to see (but one where the historical-narrative monopoly of the nation-state begins to recede in favor of trans-national, supra-national, and sub-national formations that will tend increasingly toward the non- and even anti-national, located here in Beverley’s reference to “the interstices of the new global cities”). In the years following 2001, one could already experience a kind of conceptual vertigo in attempting to account, historically, for how this “undocumented” population with no official sanction to work or to live in the nation-state they inhabited and labored to serve, and clean, and build, would still find commemoration as nameable, hence to that extent legitimate(d) and meaningful victims (or even martyrs?) for that nation-state, so much so that their names could be read aloud at public, sanctioned events commemorating their deaths, their martyrdoms, at Ground Zero and elsewhere, everywhere that such commemorations were (and still continue to be) held .

Yet now, in this 2018 of the post-Obama Trump era, a corresponding conceptual vertigo might set in if we consider in turn: many of the children and older adolescents attempting to reach US American ground in and since the summer of 2014, including those migrating with their parents, were attempting to reach relatives, including parents, who were already in the United States, with or without papers of their own; many of these relatives had already lived and worked in the United States for years, and had already had US-born children or otherwise formed deep affective and practical ties with family and communities in the United States; and finally, most of the young people traveling north did so to escape persecution , physical and sexual assault and possible murder, at the hands of mostly drug-running urban gangs which, like MS-13 and the 18th Street gang, have their origins in US American cities like Los Angeles and Washington, DC. ⁴ Regardless of how little direct experience most of these young immigrants had had of the United States before arriving into its national territorial space, how is their experience not always-already a “US Latinx” formation ? ⁵ Certainly while these unaccompanied and separated children, bereft of both parental protection and the formal legal protection of state documentation, present their own unique version of a kind of biopolitical precarity, it doesn’t quite match that accrued by the Latinx “martyrs,” whose own precarity saw eventual, if ironic, redemption according to the logic of a prevailing post-9/11 US American national symbolic of mourning. ⁶ Both episodes, however, together tell us something about how one ongoing formation unfolding in the current historical moment, one that emphatically takes on the designation of “US Latinx,” in doing so also reveals a great deal about the increasing precarity of the national state form itself, certainly for smaller, more vulnerable states that continue barely to survive violent transnational forces (from the Cold War, to the drug wars, to a resurgent “war on terror,” to all the various pressures and demands of the global neoliberal political economy), but also for larger, even imperial and hegemonic, national states experiencing the gradual but persistent withering away of their historical dominance . ⁷

By the time he publishes Latinamericanism After 9/11 (his follow-up to the 2004 Testimonio collection) in 2011, John Beverley can make the following bracing declaration: “The reality on the ground,” as a general condition of political life in the Americas of the early twenty-first century, “is that the border is an increasingly anachronistic and violent fiction ” (2011, 16). To the extent that such a fiction , especially in all the ways that such a diagnosis applies to the general movement of Latin Americans to the United States, can explain the northern imperial hegemon’s increasing encounter with its own internal racial, ethnic and cultural complexity and otherness to itself, it stages a scene in the 2011 “Introduction” that neatly corresponds in practice to the one posed in theory in 2004. If, in theory, an adequately “radical multiculturalism” can “propose to redefine the identity of both the nation and the international order, … ask[ing] of the state not ‘recognition’ of [its, multiculturalism’s] alterity, but rather that the state recognize itself as other: that it is always-already multicultural,” (2004, 24), then, in practice, even the mere “demographic” pressure of an “exploding” Latinx population might “oblige … the United States [to] become as a nation something other than it is (or imagines itself to be) today” (2011, 16). By 2011, of course, some aspects of the looming Latinx challenge to the US American national cultural imaginary that Beverley could anticipate in 2004 had already started to materialize: one can point briefly, at least at the level of national politics, to the extraordinary protests in favor of immigration reform across the United States in 2006, to the rising influence of US Latinx voters in the national elections of 2008 (and again later in 2012), and to the on-again-off-again national prominence of debates and activism surrounding the DREAM Act , the Obama-era DACA and DAPA policies , and more comprehensive attempts at immigration reform since at least 2006 and across the ongoing US American Trump era (even ignoring here both positive political developments at the state, local and regional levels, as well as the more negative , harmful and desperate attempts of primarily conservative, nativist political forces to tighten by further militarizing border security, and intensifying law enforcement and deportation practices against undocumented persons already settled and committed to building their US American lives). Underlying much of this movement at social, political and historical levels is the irresistible force of unprecedented demographic growth: “[W]ith a Hispanic population currently estimated at forty five million and rapidly growing,” Beverley could write in 2011, “the United States is on the road to becoming in the next ten years or so, after Mexico , the second-largest nation of the Spanish-speaking world, surpassing Spain itself in that regard” (15); for this reason Beverley can conclude later in the essay, and in a phrase that echoes his prediction of 2004, that “the United States will have to become as a nation something other than it is (or imagines itself to be) today ” (16). ⁸

In roughly the same historical moment that John Beverley was tracing the shifting contours and proposing the compelling promise of a decidedly post-9/11, and compellingly trans-hemispheric critical Latin(x)americanism, the US-based political scientist and theorist Cristina Beltrán was producing one of the more sustained, comprehensive, and theoretically rigorous analyses of the specifically US-based formation of latinidad to appear by that point, in her 2010 study, The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity. Beltrán’s more capacious conceptual work in that volume will frame for us our own more specific considerations of US Latinx literary studies’ ongoing attempts, even as 2018 turns toward 2019 and beyond, to come to coherent and productive critical terms with its own shifting primary object of study, an object still undergoing complex alchemical mutations thanks to the ongoingly stubborn undecidabilities of its two constituent elements , literature and latinidad. Not surprisingly, Beltrán at times takes recou...