Keywords for Latina/o Studies

Deborah R. Vargas, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Nancy Raquel Mirabal

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781479837212
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Hispanic American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

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

1

Afro-Latinas/os

Tanya Katerí Hernández

The terms “Afro-Latina” and “Afro-Latino” refer to those Latinas/os in the United States who are of African ancestry and choose blackness as a racial identity in addition to identifying along ethnic lines with their Latina/o national origins. The terms are not exclusive to the United States, as activists of African descent in Latin America and the Caribbean have also begun to use them (Whitten and Torres 1998; Seelke 2008). As the Latina/o population has grown in the United States, so has the number of Latinas/os of African descent (López and Gonzalez-Barrera 2016). According to the 2010 U.S. census, the 50.4 million Latinas/os in the United States (the nation’s largest panethnic group) account for 16.3 percent of the country’s population. About 2.5 percent of those Latinas/os also identified themselves as “Black” on the 2010 census. That compares with close to 53 percent who said they were also “White” and the 36.7 percent who described themselves as “some other race.” (The 2010 census permitted Latinas/os to select a “Hispanic/Latino” ethnic origin category in addition to selecting any number of the racial categories of black, white, Asian, or “some other race.”) Most Afro-Latinas/os in the United States can trace their origins to Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Panama (among other Central American countries), and Puerto Rico, though over a quarter of a million people of Mexican heritage also defined themselves as “Black” in the 2010 census; many Mexicans are of African descent (Vinson and Restall 2009). As compared to other Latinas/os, Afro-Latinas/os are much less likely to be immigrants and are more likely to speak English in their homes.

Despite the small percentage of Latinas/os who officially acknowledge their African ancestry on U.S. census forms, the academic study of their complex identities predates the origins of Latina/o studies as a field. Indeed, the Afro–Puerto Rican bibliophile Arturo Alfonso Schomburg added his collection of more than 5,000 books, 3,000 manuscripts, 2,000 etchings and paintings, and several thousand pamphlets concerning Afro-Latinas/os and other African diaspora descendants to the New York Public Library Division of Negro Literature, History and Prints back in 1926; this division was the forerunner to the presently named Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (Sinnette 1989; Valdés 2017). Today, the Schomburg Center is one of the world’s leading research facilities devoted to the preservation of materials on the global African and African diaspora experiences.

Yet in spite of the richness of the existing material regarding the Afro-Latina/o experience (Jiménez Román and Flores 2010), this area of research is often overlooked in Latina/o studies. Silvio Torres-Saillant (2003) has noted that many Latina/o studies scholars have thus far been content to treat the racial mixture of Latinas/os as eviscerating any racial differences. In fact, Latina/o studies extends the Latin American studies concept of mestizaje (the notion that racial mixture in a population is emblematic of racial harmony and insulated from racial discord and inequality) into the belief that Latinas/os in the United States are racially enlightened because of their racial mixture (Dzidzienyo and Oboler 2005). At the same time, Torres-Saillant (2003) has noted that many Latina/o scholars have been content to focus on mestizaje-pride without thoroughly interrogating its subtext of white supremacy.

Some examples of the mestizaje-pride element surface in the work of Victor Valle and Rodolfo D. Torres (1995), along with the more famous example of Gloria Anzaldúa (1987). Anzaldúa was so enamored of mestizaje as a concept that she went so far as to refer favorably to Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos’s (1925) “cosmic race” theory of Latin American racial superiority through racial mixing, without mentioning the strong white supremacist aspects of his theory. According to Vasconcelos, the benefits of the cosmic race mixture occur as “the lower types of the species will be absorbed by the superior. In this manner, for example, the blacks could be redeemed, and step by step, by voluntary extinction, the uglier stocks will give way to the more handsome” (1997 [1925], 32). Anzaldúa’s endorsement characterizes the cosmic race theory as being “opposite to the theory of the pure Aryan, and to the policy of racial purity that white America practices”; she adds that “his theory is one of inclusivity” (1987, 77). Despite the fundamental racism of Vasconcelos’s theory, Anzaldúa goes on to posit that a Latina/o “mestiza consciousness” breaks down paradigms and is thus more progressive about race relations and thereby allows mestizas (read “Chicanas”) to act as mediators linking different groups of people together. This fascination with a benevolent mestizaje is also echoed by Victor Valle and Rodolfo D. Torres when they characterize it as an “outlaw discourse” which is “radically inclusive” and a “response to Western imperialism” (1995, 148–49). Unfortunately, Latina/o celebrations of mestizaje leave little room for acknowledging the particularities of more pronounced African ancestry in facial appearance, skin shade, or hair texture.

As Afro-Cuban author Evelio Grillo has noted in his memoir about growing up in Tampa, Florida, in the 1920s and 1930s, Afro-Latinas/os are often “too black to be Hispanic” (2000, xiii). This coincides with Piri Thomas’s (1967) experiences as described in his memoir of growing up in New York City in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as with observations of the contemporary Afro-Latina/o context (Bonilla-Silva 2010). Latina/o studies as a discipline has traditionally reflected this invisibility of Afro-Latina/o identity (Hernández 2003).

What is most disturbing about the dearth of Afro-Latina/o research in Latina/o studies is the way in which it obscures the complexity of the socioeconomic racial hierarchy that exists across Latina/o communities. Indeed, Afro-Latinas/os in the United States consistently report receiving racist treatment at the hands of other Latinas/os in addition to being perceived as outsiders to the construction of Latina/o identity. For example, Afro-Latinas/os are frequently mistaken for African Americans in their own communities and upon identifying themselves as Afro-Latinas/os are told, “But you don’t look Latina!” (Comas-Díaz 1996, 168). Indeed the 2002 National Survey of Latinos sponsored by the Pew Hispanic Center and the Kaiser Family Foundation indicated that Latinas/os with more pronounced African ancestry, such as many Dominicans, more readily identify color discrimination as an explanation for the bias they experience from other Latinas/os (Pew Research Center 2002). Moreover, the 2010 National Survey of Latinos found that after immigrant status, skin color discrimination is the most prevalent perceived form of discrimination for Latinas/os (Pew Research Center 2013). In turn such experiences of bias within the U.S. culture of racial consciousness motivate Latinas/os of African descent to begin self-identifying as Afro-Latinas/os.

In addition, studies suggest that the socioeconomic status of Afro-Latinas/os in the United States is more akin to that of African Americans than to other Latinas/os or white Americans. According to How Race Counts for Hispanic Americans (Logan 2003), a study by the State University of New York at Albany released in July 2003, Latinas/os who define themselves as “black” have lower incomes, higher unemployment rates, higher rates of poverty, less education, and fewer opportunities and are more likely to reside in segregated neighborhoods than those who identify themselves as “white” or “other.” Based on such data, the study concluded that there are stark differences between the standard of living for Afro-Latinas/os and that of all other Latinas/os in the United States. For this reason, the U.S. Census Bureau’s suggestion for modifying the census demographic questions so as to remove the Hispanic/Latino option as an ethnic choice and instead have it presented as a racial category distinct from black and all others has been viewed with alarm by Afro-Latina/o activists (Reyes 2014). Collapsing Latina/o and Hispanic ethnic identity into the list of racial categories risks obscuring the number of Afro-Latinas/os and rendering invisible the socioeconomic status differences of Latinas/os across race that exist.

The disparities in living standards among Latinas/os of different races may thus also account for the increased willingness to identify as Afro-Latina/o in the United States (Darity Jr., Hamilton, and Dietrich 2010). Furthermore the segregated residential patterns of Afro-Latinas/os in areas of African American settlement provide Afro-Latina/o youth with an exposure to African American culture and racial consciousness that also influences their choice to identify as Afro-Latinas/os (Golash-Boza and Darity Jr. 2008). Indeed, one study of Afro-Dominicans found that the longer Afro-Dominicans resided in the United States, the more likely they were to identify with African Americans (Bailey 2001). These are all issues that warrant much closer examination in the field of Latina/o studies.

There are notable exceptions to the disregard for Afro-Latina/o subjects in Latina/o studies. Latina/o scholars Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores made a significant contribution to the field when they published The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States in 2010. The anthology is a rich compilation of texts regarding Afro-Latina/o identity, history, culture and politics.

In addition to making a significant contribution to Latina/o studies, the burgeoning work on Afro-Latinas/os also enriches other related fields such as Black studies and African diaspora studies. Frank Guridy’s (2010) work examining the cross-national relationships between Afro-Cubans and African-Americans is a prime example of the production of knowledge in this area, along with Antonio López’s (2012) distillation of a century-long archive of Afro-Cuban / African American experiences in the United States. Nancy Raquel Mirabal (2017) has focused on Afro-Cubans in New York City in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In addition, the intersectional positions of Afro-Latina women (Jorge 1979; Comas-Diaz 1996; Vega, Alba, and Modestin 2012) and Afro-Latino gays and Afro-Latina lesbians (Lara 2010; Johnson and Rivera-Servera 2016) are also beginning to be researched. It is to be hoped that with the growth of knowledge of Afro-Latinas/os, the discipline of Latina/o studies will continue to expand and move beyond representations of Latinas/os as racially homogenous.

2

Americas

Alexandra T. Vazquez

Imagine carrying a gargantuan landmass, capped by glaciers, across your shoulders, the way people pose with reptiles at Coney Island. “Americas” is an impossible wonder to take on. This heavy expanse of a sign has the tendency to weigh down even the most ebullient. It means nothing and everything. America is named and narrated after the Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci—a figure whose unverifiable itineraries continue to stump historians across the centuries (Lush, date unknown; Arciniegas 2002; de las Casas 2010). Although he was not the first to encounter all that lay west of Europe, nor are his voyages fully substantiated or substantiatable, the ancient continents were made his attribute by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, who imposed it on his 1507 in utero rendering of the world, the Universalis Cosmographia (Hébert 2003). The naming, a grandest of prizes given to this grandest instance of fronting, carries in it a mystifying credit, a grotesque trophy, a cartographer’s stamp. Americas has tried hard to shorthand and eradicate vast and dynamic Indigenous conceptions of space and time. As a catch-all, it supports a lazy and willful forgetting of Tawantinsuyu (Quechua for the four regions of the Inca Empire) and Anáhuac (Nahuatl for the Aztec’s “land by the waters”). Why these names don’t roll off all our tongues suggests the unfamiliar and unrelenting consonants roiling under our collective surface. This imposition of the Old World and all its diseased baggage atop the New, the actual and discursive annihilation of what and who was here before, is just one method in the genocidal repertoire enabled by what Walter Mignolo calls the “two entangled concepts” of “modernity and coloniality” (Mignolo 2005, 2011; Quijano 2007). Americas is a utility for the making-vague and making-available of history and all its submerged players so that the New World can be easily wedged into the Old World’s narrative of progress, within which we’ll include area studies. In other fields that hold up the North American academy, “The Americas” is what the field of English, and English discipline, will do just about anything to repress, or make a special issue of, even and especially when it allows for “American Literature” (Saldívar 1991; Brady 2002; Gruesz 2002).

And yet, Americas is one of the dozens, if not hundreds of New World signs (like the “New World”) that require an “and yet” after an acknowledgment of its ferocious development and usages. The “and yet” turns up voluminous, insurgent actions that have long been prepared for any annihilating project. It is a creative holding place for that which takes in and moves in the words of Sylvia Wynter (1995, 7), “beyond the premises of both celebrants and the dissidents.” And yet, although the term’s ambiguity has facilitated violence, its very ambiguity can and has made possible the wondrous availability of Americas for other means. It is warranted and needed when there is a clear line between the us and the them (Martí 2002; Montero 2004). It can be a baroque altar for study that insists on all the racial, ethnic, gendered, and classed histories that have been lived, danced, and sounded across national paradigms; a way of retaining the complications and unpredictable effects of the “coloniality of modernity” without leaving anyone or anything out. There are as many senses of Americas as there are Americans. There is no way to take singular possession of it, even if that is the shared and singular aim of many. Americas suggests all parts north, central, south, and the archipelagos that spindle out from its corners. It is an ongoing, collective process that reveals just how the New World formed and forms the Old. Take the posthumous rebellion by the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres and his generous minimalist experiments in world-making that shook up the America pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale (Spector et al. 2007). Evoked in whatever language or paralanguage, Americas can hold a mangrove tangle of Afro/Hispano/Luso/Franco/Indo/Sino/Creole phonics and accompaniments. To use “Americas” or “Américas” might not matter as it can’t ever be fixed or made into a satisfactory pronoun with orthographic correctives. Regardless of whether one wants the word to represent and make legible its internal differences (or not), there is still the fact of all the unfamiliar and unrelenting accents roiling above our collective surface. Americas rustles the singular and plural at once.

And yet, how to take all this in? And just as hard, how can we ever hope to notate all that Americas retains and refrains? Herein lies the possible transformative power of approaching and reproaching the keyword. “Dance to the hurt!” as Earl Lovelace (1998, 14) once wrote. Americas requires the setting up of ghetto blasters on every corner of every sentence. All that makes it and is made up by it in music expands the repertoire of theory and theorists we associate with the Americas in Latina/o studies. Music allows for us to pick up the ends of the hemisphere’s vertical lines and work them into a helix, double-dutch style, where all, but especially girls, have made beautiful movements. Hear a most palpable instance in Rita Moreno’s version of “América,” after and through Chita Rivera, in that standard penned by Bernstein and Sondheim for West Side Story. This song, an overheard castaway that deserves and requires further listening, is mistakenly shrugged off—via its women’s chorus—as assimilatory fodder. In Moreno’s telling, after Rivera, there is a palpable aesthetics developed by immigrant women who make do and find ways to stay alive despite all that works against them. They set us up, to sample the great phrase by Frances R. Aparicio, for “listening to the listeners” (Aparicio 1998). This song is performative anticipation of and feminist trouble for El Plan de Santa Bárbara that followed (Chicano Coordinating Council 1969). Several decades later, this “América” is made the primary sample and activist grounds for an anthem that marked the conquest’s quincentenary: Los Fabulosos Cadillacs’ 1992 “Quinto Centenario” (Play it!). Their version of this brutal anniversary occupies the Broadway standard version of “América” so that we may listen to the volatile marrow established by some of its past performers. The song leans on this primary songtext as a rumbic invocation, uses it as a suitcase to carry the ska bomba that jumps out of it several bars later. And when the song shows most of its cards, one will need to jump up and down, hard. The anthem reveals how Americas can’t help its myriad punk anti-assimilationisms.

Americas is a sound system: its components, tangled wiring, and conch shells conspire to make immersion the only way in. “Do It Properly,” instructs the house super group 2 Puerto Ricans, a Blackman, and a Dominican—just a few of the company members who turn our ears to the inter-American grounds that are always in search of a vocal. To tend to and aerate these grounds, Americas demands that its scholars (whether musician, balloon seller, professor, nurse) be ready for anything; to do Americas properly means always keeping the dance circle flexible enough for all and any kinds of exits and entries. It insists that we change direction, if not give up on the idea of direction once and for all, as Louise Bennett’s (2008) “Colonisation in Reverse” has for so long taught us. Americas might denote a particular geography, but it is also the kind of anti-cartographic object, curricular and aesthetic and alive, that gets us toward a more expansive sense of place and time and people.

3

Art

Rita Gonzalez

Latina/o art is the shaping, iterating, and/or interrogating of the cultural expressions of one’s relationship—even if contested—to latinidad. This definition speaks to the concerns of artists who may choose to directly or indirectly address latinidad, as well as to the reception and interpretation of the work of Latina/o artists. When art is used with a qualifier such as the point of origin or gender of an artist, questions arise about whether such a designation implies a uniform or identifiable aesthetic outcome. Just as “Latina/o” and “Latin American” are heavily contested terms, so too is “Latina/o art” in that it can be used as an umbrella term to encompass diverse artistic practices from geometric abstraction to activist driven social practice art.

Adriana Zavala (2015) has addressed the shortcomings of the term “Latin@ art,” in particular in its emphasis on immigrant cultures and the ways it does not account for particular histories like the Hispano experience in the Southwest, as well as its elision of class and race differences. Zavala ultimately argues for the importance of Latina/o art as a category worth defining, studying, and supporting so as not to further marginalize the practices of artists who have been relegated to the periphery of attention in American and Latin American art historical accounts.

As a term, “Latina/o” should be considered fluid and similar to the constructed identities of American and Latin American. Latina/o artworks range from the didactic to the diffuse, with some employing the use of clear and succinct iconography to celebrate a cultural knowledge, and others questioning the very framework of nationality, belonging, and authenticity. Guillermo Gómez-Peña (1986) once described as pro...