Friday, April 14, 2017
Session 1: 9:00 – 10:15 a.m.
1. Race, Masculinity, and the Coloniality of History in Puerto Rican Literature
“And always Puerto Ricans”: Urban Archipelagoes and the Coloniality of Middle-class, White,
Gay Male Desire in 1970s New York”
Enmanuel Martínez, Rutgers University
A popular gay novel set and published in the social and political aftermath of the monumental
Stonewall Riots of 1969, Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance (1978) marks a major
turning point in the larger history of post-World War II queer literature and liberation in the
United States. Set across the urban archipelago of 1970s NYC, Dancer from the Dance tells the
story of Anthony Malone, a middle-class, white, gay man, and his lifelong desire for island
spaces (i.e. Manhattan, Long Island, and Fire Island) and bodies—above all, the body of the
working-class, gay, Puerto Rican men: “Each year you love someone new: Orientals in 1967,
Italians in 1968, blacks in 1969, and bearded blonds in 1970; and always Puerto Ricans… You
remember the eyes, as beautiful as bare trees against the sky: naked, away. Years pass loving
such eyes” (Holleran 131). I argue that the figure of the silent, working-class, gay, Puerto Rican
man in Holleran’s novel is one that inadvertently flattens and, thus, trivializes the historical
presence and contributions of queer Latinxs in NYC in the 1970s in general and queer Puerto
Rican men in particular. Drawing upon the work of Latin American and U.S. Latinx scholars of
decolonial thought and criticism such as Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Maria Lugones and Walter
Mignolo, my paper performs a close reading of Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance with the aim
of decolonizing such literary representations of the hegemony of middle-class, white, gay male
desire. Tracing the structures of queer coloniality in Holleran’s novel, my paper examines the
degree to which the mute presence of a racialized other (in this case, the silent body of the
working-class gay Puerto Rican man) functions as “underside” of middle-class, white, gay
“modernity”—the latter fundamentally depending of the presence of the former for its own erotic
self-realization. My analysis of Holleran’s novel thus elucidates the degree to which a colonial
logic of representation continues to structure popular literary representations of queer Latinxs. In
critiquing the coloniality of middle-class, white, gay male desire as reproduced by Holleran’s
Dancer from the Dance, I work to better acknowledge and validate the central role that queer
Latinxs have and continue to play in the larger history of contemporary, U.S. America LGBTQ
politics and art.
“Identity Starts at Home: Developing Counterhegemonic Afro-Latino Masculinity in Piri
Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets”
Regina Marie Mills, University of Texas at Austin
The family home is the first place that Piri Thomas realizes that his ambiguous identity leaves his
racial loyalty and his national and ethnic pride in question. Through a reading of Piri Thomas’s
Down These Streets, I argue that Piri invokes a ‘counterhegemonic Afro-Latinidad’ in the spirit
of William Luis’s claim that, “Afro-Latino identity in particular sets the groundwork for
questioning the hegemonic positionality to which Afro-Latinos and non-Afro-Latinos subscribe.”
Piri’s Afro-Latino masculinity becomes a means of interrogating the racial and ethnic
assumptions of Black, Puerto Rican, and white communities, though it fails to interrogate, and
often incorporates, troubling gender and sexual politics. Within Thomas’s memoirs, the home is
the starting place in Piri’s construction of a counterhegemonic Afro-Latino masculinity that
serves both as an identity and a lens of interrogation. By thinking deeply about the subtle and
overt acts of racism that he experiences in his family, Piri develops a counterhegemonic AfroLatino masculinity that challenges the assumptions and actions of his family and the Puerto
Ricans and Black Americans that he meets in the streets. In this presentation, I identify the tense
relationship between Piri and his father as the catalyst for the centering of his Afro-Latino
identity
“‘The island was abandoned by history’: Geographies of Race in Victor Hernández Cruz’s Red
Beans”
Gabriela Ramirez-Chavez, University of California, Santa Cruz
I draw on Frances R. Aparicio’s concept of tropicalization, which views the politics of
representation as a multidirectional process “by examining the shifting semantics of cultural
signifiers,” to link the geographies of race to the idea of spatial and racial time.1 Departing from
past studies on tropicalization and, specifically, Hernández Cruz’s “hispanization” of English, I
argue that he “tropicalizes” both the United States and the island of Puerto Rico by
deconstructing and recombining the signs associated with each space. Cruz’s collection Red
Beans (1997) destabilizes Western dichotomies of time and space, North and South, and Self and
Other. By linking industrial materials and modern technologies with the West/“future” and
romantic images of the tropics with the Caribbean/“past,” his speaker appears to reify
developmentalist approaches that situate Latin America in an earlier stage of development vis-àvis the United States and, by extension, what Johannes Fabian calls “the denial of coevalness,” or
the ethnographer’s assumption that subaltern subjects do not exist in the same historical time.
Yet through various poetic techniques, Hernández Cruz converges both spaces and conveys their
interdependency, inseparability, and synchronicity.
2. Re/imagining Race: Borders, Gender, and Eugenics
“La Leyenda Negra: Racial Imaginaries of Haiti and the US/Mexico Border”
Katherine Steelman, University of California, San Diego
In this paper I examine blackness in Tijuana, BC, MX, specifically focusing on how the US
media, Mexican media, and social media users have been representing the migration of Haitian
refugees to the city. In 2004, Eduardo Galeano wrote an article titled, “Haiti: la maldición
blanca,” in which he argues that since its independence from France, Haiti has been cursed by
white imperial powers for being the site of the first successful slave rebellion. Much scholarship
has been produced, including that of Manoucheka Celeste, and Robert Lawless, about the ways
in which the media has been complicit in this “curse” against Haiti. New York Times articles
dating back to 1915 have laid the foundation for the vilification of Haiti in the US imaginary.
Similarly, Tijuana itself is a place that has seen material ramifications as a result of
representations in US media. An article published in the New York Times in 1920 sets the
groundwork for the ways Tijuana is represented in US cultural production, which is both
racialized and sexualized. Fast forward to the present day, and there is increasing news coverage
of Haitian migration to Tijuana, which is building upon these histories of representations of both
Haiti and Tijuana. With these histories in mind I examine representations of Tijuana and Haiti in
newspaper archives, comic books, film and literature, in juxtaposition with contemporary
representations of Haitians in Tijuana. I analyze these representations not only to examine their
negative effects, but also to take up the ways in which they have been resisted and reimagined by
alternative representations in culture and social media.
“Writing While Brown: Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, and Lucha Corpi”
Leigh Johnson, Marymount College
Life writing (memoir and autobiography) puts the writer in the position of the character. While
Ana Castillo’s recent memoir, Black Dove: Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me, chronicles her son’s arrest and
incarceration, it also positions her as a daughter, lover, and mother. The fraught politics of race
comes to bear upon the relationships presented in the book from her relationship with her darkerskinned mother, to her “brown” son, to her light-skinned lover. This essay takes up the
conference theme of Latnix Lives, Matters, and Imaginaries: Theorizing Race in the 21st Century
by examining how recent life writing by Chicana authors (Lucha Corpi, Sandra Cisneros, and
Ana Castillo) positions the writer as lone intellectual in struggle with the ramifications of the US
history of racial prejudice and violence. The writers use their essays as a way of theorizing the
ways in which race affects their ability to parent, write, move, and live.
“Remapping Eugenics and Mestizaje in River of Angels (2014)”
Christine Fernández, U.S. Military Academy, West Point
The canon of Chicanx literature has often situated itself within the borderlands as a historical site
of political, linguistic, and cultural contestation and renegotiation, which discloses the region’s
complex settlement following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848. Earlier canonical texts,
such as Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s novel, The Squatter and the Don (1885) observe the
early formative cultural and racial/ethnic cartography of Californio/ Mexican-American settlers
throughout the late 19th century. Other key Chicano authors, such as Alejandro Morales, have
incorporated the concept of mestizaje, within the locus of Southern California. He returns to
early California settlement with his most recent novel, River of Angels (2014), which unearths
the hidden history of eugenics and its central role in the urban development of Southern
California’s Los Angeles River basin. I argue that Morales’s novel demonstrates the aesthetics of
mestizaje through his fiction as an ongoing process that is not only counterpuntal to the historical
framework of eugenics, but it allows us to reassess the cultural cartography and intersections of
Californios, mestizo Hispanics, and the contributions of other ethnic/ racial identities throughout
Southern California.
3. Documenting Crisis: Myths, Immigrants and the Intervention of Literature
“‘Refugees of a World on Fire’: The Turn to the Undocumented in Women of Color Feminisms”
Esmeralda Arrizón-Palomera, Cornell University
This project identifies the post-Civil Rights Era as a moment in which the undocumented
immigrant emerges as an analytical framework in U.S. women of color feminisms. Specifically,
this project examines the use of the term “refugee” in writings by radical women of color during
the 1980s to describe the experience of women of color in the U.S. and to name their connection
to women in other parts of the world. I read the turn to the “refugee” as a shift from a national to
an international perspective in women of color feminisms that is prompted by U.S. domestic and
foreign policies and argue that the use of the term “refugee” is an important turning point in the
development of Chicana/Latina and Black feminist thought and praxis. I map the shift from a
national to an international perspective in women of color feminisms in feminist anthologies by
women of color that include This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color,
All the Women are White, all the Blacks are Men, but Some of us are Brave, and Making Face,
Making Soul=Haciendo Caras and discuss how the turn to the “refugee” strengthens the links
between women of color in the United States.
"Chupacabras: They Myth of the Bad Immigrant"
Silvia Rodríguez Vega, University of California, Los Angeles
Few studies/films have highlighted the voices of criminalized immigrants impacted by an
enforcement focused immigration system. This community-created visual ethnography seeks to
shed light on those experiences through digital media. Based on interviews in California,
undocumented immigrants and allies talk about their first encounters with dehumanization or
discrimination based on their undocumented status, and how they have experienced it in their
daily lives. This film uses the metaphor of the “Chupacabras” as a threatening and dangerous
depiction of undocumented immigrants coming into the U.S. Thus, this film is different from the
“worthy” immigrant narrative (i.e. DREAMers) that have become popularized in recent years,
where every immigrant is bad until proven exceptional. Through humor and satire, we want to
expose the “good/bad” immigrant binary. As the media perpetuates a discourse of immigrants as
dangerous and threatening to a sanitized American way of life, (Chavez, 2001, 2008, Santa Ana,
2002, 2012) my aim is that this film and study will bring focus to the often forgotten stories of
people left out of the immigrant right’s agenda and often the main targets of punitive legal
measures. I will also discuss the Chupacabra Selfie Project that has emerged from film
screenings, where people get involved in the dialogue and take a stance through
the hashtags #YourChupacabras and #NotYourChupacabras as a way of showing solidarity.
“In the Cut: Latina/o Literature and Criticism in a Time of Crisis”
Belinda Linn Rincón, John Jay College
4. Affective Burdens: Meloncholia, Shame, and Stereotypes
““When the Anglo Came Into New Mexico as a Foreigner”: Reies López Tijerina and the Racial
Melancholia of the Indohispano”
Nicholas M. Duron, New York University
In this paper, I address the affective and psychic dimensions racialization of the “Indo-hispano,”
the principal resistant subject co-produced by Chicano activist Reies López Tijerina and La
Alianza Federal de Mercedes as part of their land grant movement of the 1960s and 1970s. A
unique racial formation, the Indo-hispano acts as a generative site for rethinking history writing
and alternative genealogies and geographies of Mexican American mestizaje. Works such as
Rudy Busto’s King Tiger (2006) and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Roots of Resistance (2007), as
well as several recent articles and a panel at the 2016 National Association of Chicana and
Chicano Studies conference, consider the legacy and significance of Tijerina, the Alianza, and
other legal claims to land grant recognition as early articulations of anti-colonial critique of the
U.S. Taking Tijerina’s autobiography Mi lucha por la tierra (English translation: “They Called
Me King Tiger”: My Struggle for the Land) as my source text, this paper will follow logic of
Tijerina’s and La Alianza’s their redeployment of Spanish colonial history for an oppositional
politics of loss that resists and restructures melancholic racial formations in relation to
indigeneity and to whiteness. Ultimately, I read the discursive formation of the Indo-hispano
subject as an attempt at navigating complex coalitional alliances across racial identity categories
and a call for the production of alternative racial imaginaries.
“Embodied Shaming of/in Diaspora: Response and (Re)Negotiation of Shame in Migdalia Cruz’s
Yellow Eyes”
L. Bailey McDaniel, Oakland University
Psychologist Gershen Kaufman argues, “Shame is important because no other affect is more
disturbing to the self, none more central to identity.” If Kaufman is correct and shame is the most
instrumental of emotions in shaping self, then what are the repercussions for an individual or a
community who suffers the agony of shame that specifically orbits ethnic subjectivity? The
powerful drama of Nuyorican playwright Migdalia Cruz regularly presents audiences with characters
who endure sexual, physical, emotional, and culturally-based trauma - - traumas that are often a
consequence of their ethnically-, diasporically- or class-informed marginalization. In her formidable
1999 play Yellow Eyes, Cruz constructs a Bronx neighborhood populated by Nuryorican and African
American characters who endure such traumas, from contemporary adolescents dealing with sexual
abuse, neglect, poverty, and interracial violence; to beloved great-grandparents still haunted by the
trauma of slavery in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico. Shame theorists agree that trauma produces
shame: an illogical-but-overpowering desire to disappear based in a self-loathing that itself emerges
from a belief in one’s unworthiness. My paper explores how Cruz’s brilliant and lyrical play
employs the affect of shame, particularly embodied shame, as a figurative battleground for
reconciling and often resisting the emotional and material violence that accompanies diaspora. I
suggest, in other words, that as a pyscho-social phenomenon that shapes community subjectivity as
well as individual selfhood, narratives of and resistance to (trauma-based) shame exist for Cruz as a
compelling and resilient (if sometimes excruciating) negotiation of the violent legacies of European
and American imperialism.
“Soy Brown and Nerdy: The ChicaNerd in Chicana Young Adult (YA) Literature”
Cristina Herrera, California State University, Fresno
In their 2016 music video for the song, “Soy Yo,” the Colombian duo, Bomba Estéreo, features
an unknown but instantly lovable young Latina girl as the protagonist. In her long braids,
overalls, thick-rimmed glasses, and Crocs shoes, one thing is for certain: this young Latina is
unabashedly a nerd. Borrowing Bomba Estéreo’s mantra of “soy yo,” I examine this reclamation
and powerful acceptance of one’s nerdy Chicana self in two young adult (YA) texts by Chicana
writers, Ashley Hope Pérez’s What Can(t) Wait (2011) and Isabel Quintero’s Gabi, A Girl in
Pieces (2014). While popular culture and mainstream media have shaped the well-known figure
of the nerd as synonymous with White maleness, Chicana YA literature subverts the nerd
stereotype through its negation of this identity as always White and male. These ChicaNerds, as I
dub them, unite their burgeoning sociopolitical consciousness as young nonwhite girls with their
“nerdy” traits of bookishness and love of learning. Combining the sociopolitical consciousness
of Chicanisma with one aligned to the well-known image of the “nerd,” ChicaNerds learn to
navigate the many complicated layers of coming to an empowered declaration of “soy yo.” I
unearth the ways in which this nerd identity offers teenaged Chicanas an empowered subjectivity
in stark contrast to all-too familiar stereotypes of the fumbling, rejected (White male) nerd in
popular culture. While the characters I study do not necessarily refer to themselves as nerds, they
do, in fact, claim their right to intellectual curiosity and enthusiasm for “nerdy” school subjects,
qualities I read as nerdiness.
Session 2: 10:25-11:40 a.m.
5. Latinidad and the Undead
This panel explores the racial, gendered, and sexual politics mediated the relationship between
Latinos/as and Goth subculture. Addressing the limits and possibilities of Latino Goth and the
adoption of Goth by Latinas/os in response to political challenges, the negotiation of identities,
and as a site of alternative kinship practices, each panelist will foreground how understanding
alternative cultural practices need not be divorced from racial/ethnic histories. Moreover, the
recognition of these histories as alive and well—“undead,” as it were—allows us to rethink
Latina/o literary, music, and youth cultures from fresh, transnational, and “dark” perspectives.
Chairs: Ariana Ruiz, Assistant Professor, University of Iowa; Richard T. Rodríguez,
University of California, Riverside
“…tears and blood and rain: Their Dogs Came With Them and the Urban Gothic”
Annemarie Pérez, California State University Dominguez Hills
U.S. literary critic Leslie Fiedler writes of gothic literature “it is the gothic form that has been
most fruitful in the hands of our best writers,” yet relatively little has been written about the use
of the gothic by authors of ethnic U.S. literature except in relation to the history of slavery. This
paper offers a reading of Helena Maria Viramontes' East Los Angeles novel Their Dogs Came
With Them as a Chicana/o urban gothic and science fiction novel. Her text turns the uncanny
around, making Chicano culture the “normal” and the hegemonic U.S. culture the Other, the
uncanny and frightening one. I argue that Their Dogs moves the gothic away from supernatural
and magical real events and into explorations the reader’s state of mind regarding social issues
and experiences, shifting from the seemingly gritty realism of the historical novel, into the
hyperreal and uncanny of science fiction. My paper explores how Viramontes’ novel uses
elements of the horrific, the violent, the unorthodox, and transgressive to explore anxieties about
the instability of identity and nation. Looking at the gothic elements of Viramontes' text new
light on their East Los Angeles’ historical experiences and representation, then takes this realism
into the imagined oppression of the Quarantine Authority which, arguably represents the
strangeness and oppression of the Chicana/o colonial experience. Their Dogs Came With Them
has a gothic timelessness, addressing the history which haunts East Los Angeles, past, present
and future.
“El Morro, Si!”
Eliza Rodríguez y Gibson, Loyal Marymount University
Mexicanized images of Morrissey, that is, those that insert the English pop star into the visual
iconographies of Latinidad are everywhere online; more than one vendor on Etsy can be found
selling handmade objects that evoke the semiotics of a cultural authenticity in a visual register
shot through with Latina/o camp style. A queer aesthetic register that disidentifies stereotype
through humor and irony, Latina/o camp articulates a potent site of material cultural production
that can navigate the contradictions embodied in engagements with popular culture. Moreover, it
is expansive and flexible enough to contains contradictory elements of irony and earnestness,
pleasure and pain, belonging and alienation, in the case of Latina/o Goth style, embodied in the
iconographies of death and aestheticized suffering. This paper focusses on the material culture
created by Latina/o fans of Morrissey that articulate a particularly Latina/o goth style as filtered
through a Latina/o camp sensibility, such as images of Morrissey as heavily tattooed Cholo
evoking both Cholo and Gothic iconography. While Cholo-goth has begun to be articulated and
theorized as an alternative site of pop-music Latinidad (focusing on the music group Prayers),
the images of Morrissey that I’m most interested in are shot through with a knowing humor that
complicates these embodiments of Goth style in a form of racialized and queer humor. The
tongue-in-cheek and yet earnest yearning embodied in these images articulates a simultaneous
state of both alienation and community that illuminates the limits and possibilities of community
forged with the materials of mass culture.
“Dark Entries: The Latina Muse and the Bauhaus School”
Richard T. Rodríguez, University of California, Riverside
Taking its title from the English post-punk band Bauhaus’s 1980 single (which followed their
more famous song, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” released the previous year), this talk examines the role
of the Latina muse for the musicians who formed this sui generis goth group and the mutual
influences between the band (and its offshoot projects) and Latinas in the U.S. Part of a larger
project on the connections between U.K. post-punk artists and Latina/o communities, this talk
offers a close reading of Bauhaus bassist David J. Haskin’s recently published autobiography,
Who Killed Mister Moonlight: Bauhaus, Black Magick, and Benediction. In particular, the
reading will focus on an incident Haskin recounts during which a Chicana fan confesses her love
for him and passionately pleads with the bass player to open his hotel room door. Functioning
primarily as a moment for Haskins to reflect on and question his long-term monogamous
relationship, his description of the Chicana is quite revealing, as she is described in terms that
draw attention to her ethnicity, often times bordering on racialized, stereotypical typecasting.
The talk then shifts to a discussion of Love and Rockets, both the comic book created by brothers
Jaime, Gilbert, and Mario Hernandez and the post-Bauhaus band launched by former band
members by Haskins, Daniel Ash, and Haskins’ brother Kevin. Elaborating on how the band
took their name from Los Bros Hernandez’s comic book, the talk closes by showing how the
band did not have a mere familiarity with Mexican Americans during but rather an intimate
report with them.
“Paint it Black: Difference and Divergence in the Work of Myriam Gurba”
Ariana Ruiz, Assistant Professor, University of Iowa
When asked about the intended audience for her short story collection, Painting Their Portraits
in Winter (2015), Myriam Gurba declared: “I wrote this for Mexican girls who sit alone in their
bedrooms at night painting their fingernails black.” While the image of the lone adolescent
speaks to the embodied and performative aspects of Goth Culture, Gurba’s interest in writing
Mexican-American macabre also touches upon the process of transculturation among crossgenerational Mexican and American folk and popular culture as enacted by a young Chicana
participant of the subculture. Loosely based on Gurba’s own coming of age and coming out,
Painting places women at the center of the ghostly hauntings. Women are the violent actors as
well as the most attuned to the supernatural happenings that often result from their gendered and
sexual identities. As such, this paper explores the incorporation and queering of traditional
Mexican and Mexican-American cultural signifiers as a way to constitute community, push
codes of authenticity and femininity, while also informing a Chicana Goth sensibility. I contend
that it is through Gurba’s disidentification with her Mexican grandmother’s folkloric stories and
negotiation with Goth culture’s paradoxically somber and camp themes that long-standing ideas
about knowable and identifiable Chicana subjectivity are challenged. The result is a productive
site from where to explore new ways of being, belonging, and identifying with Chicanidad,
Latinidad, gender, and sexuality.
6. On the Colorline: The Clashing Racial Paradigms of Latinidad
This panel proposes an analysis of the clashing racial paradigms that have historically defined
Latinidad. Understanding that the racialization of Latinx people has frequently occurred at the
intersection of U.S.-based and Latin American conceptions of race, this panel posits that it is
precisely in the spaces where these discourses meet that new racial imaginaries can be formed.
The panel explores the places of tension and possibility that occur on the liminal space of the
colorline.
Chair: Kristie Soares, University of Massachusetts Amherst
“Nature and the Nature of Quisqueyanas’ Writing on Turtle Island at the Turn of a Century”
Isabel Espinal, University of Massachusetts Amherst
The urban/rural distinction in criticism of Dominican American literature results in a
racialization and association of Dominican writers with urbanness, precluding a discussion of
Black Latinx culture and nature, and of Indigeneity and spirituality in Dominican literature.
Nature as a space of Dominican women’s expertise come through loud and clear in the works of
Marianela Medrano and Yrene Santos and from conversations with the writers themselves; yet in
the spaces of contemporary USA literary criticism, they are not thought of as having anything to
say about nature, similar to how African Americans are not thought to be experts about nature,
but are too often seen as writing exclusively from and about urban spaces. Camille Dungy writes,
“For years, poets and critics have called for a broader inclusiveness in conversations about
ecocriticism and ecopoetics, one that acknowledges other voices and a wider range of cultural
and ethnic concerns. African Americans, specifically, are fundamental to the natural fabric of
this nation but have been noticeably absent from tables of contents. To bring more voices into
conversations about human interactions with the natural world, we must change the parameters
of the conversation.” Other elements in Medrano and Santos’ writings further complicate the
color and gender lines drawn around their nature writing and the nature of their writing:
specifically, Medrano’s engagements with Taina culture and symbolism and Santos’ alliances
with a world mystical tradition.
“The Complexity and Vitality of Latinx Theater in Chicago”
Priscilla Page, University of Massachusetts Amherst
There is a thriving Latinx community in Chicago, one that has a longstanding theater history that
has been largely ignored by both theater and Latinx scholars. In this paper, I focus on an epoch
of Latinx theater history that includes four companies and spans nearly forty years. These are
Latino Chicago, Aguijón, Teatro Vista, and Teatro Luna. Taken together, the work of the artists
at each of these companies exemplifies the complexity of Latinx lives while employing an array
of aesthetics that often upsets conventional notions about what constitutes theater and how it
should be created. This community of artists serves as a model for alternative modes of
production, creative partnerships in production, and the use of nontraditional spaces to showcase
their work. These artists destabilize what we think theater is and where and how it should be
produced. By describing the aesthetics and the artistic practice of these companies in the late
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as well as the productions they create, I will discuss
how the persistence of Brown bodies onstage undoes the predominant black/white narrative
imposed on the incredibly diverse city of Chicago. My work also disrupts narrow constructions
of theater history that erases Latinx contributions as it asserts and affirms the presence and the
vitality of U.S. Latinx theater in the 21st century.
"Dáltonismo Chick: Colorblindness in Chica Lit"
Aida Roldan Garcia, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Race has been a major topic within Latina literary tradition. Works such as "This Bridge Called
my Back" are examples of how Latinas have had the necessity to vindicate their voices and
experiences as ethnic, gendered, racialized subjects in the last fifty years. However, this literary
political stance have nowadays been subverted in certain Latina popular genres such as Chica lit.
Despite portraying a wide range of racialized characters, many of these texts fail to address
topics related to racial inequality and structural and societal racism. On the contrary, racial
otherness does not seem to be a problem for the heroines of these novels when it comes to
accessing white privilege and status. The first part of this presentation explores different reasons
why these novels tend to erase issues of systemic racism from their narratives. The second part
focuses on how by avoiding these topics, these novels fall into practices of colorblindness which
minimize racism and racial inequalities, giving the impression to the readers that these are no
longer important concerns for US society. The third part deals with the consequences that these
colorblindness discourses have in relation to the construction and representation of the Latina
subject. For example, how by refusing to acknowledge racialization and its social repercussion,
these novels are not only representing and constructing a misleading model of Latina women, but
also ignoring the complexities of Latina subjectivity.
“‘Angelito’s Not Black, He’s Cuban’: Competing Discourses of Blackness in ¿Qué Pasa
U.S.A.?”
Kristie Soares, University of Massachusetts Amherst
This paper analyzes the clashing of Cuban and U.S.-based racial paradigms in the 1970s
television sitcom ¿Qué Pasa U.S.A.? The bilingual show, which aired on P.B.S. from 19771980, chronicled the humorous but often painful process of a Cuban exile family adapting to life
in a racially-segregated Miami. ¿Qué Pasa, U.S.A.? was funded entirely by U.S. Office of
Education Emergency School Assistance Act-Television Program (ESAA-TV), which came with
a mandate to “improve interethnic and intra-ethnic relations in general and help Cuban American
adolescents in particular to become bicultural, well-adjusted, self-fulfilled individuals,” as the
show’s grant proposal stated. As such, the show was in the unique position of having to both
cater to Cuban American viewers eager to see themselves represented on screen, and participate
in a larger political mission rife with assimilationist undertones. In this paper, I posit that ¿Qué
Pasa U.S.A.? navigated its multiple missions by mocking both the expectations of the Cuban
American viewership and of the assimilationist politics of 1970s PBS. It did this by consistently
positioning itself as a meeting place of Cuban “race-as-culture” and U.S.-based “race-as-
blackness” racial discourses, deliberately pitting one against the other so as to make clear the
shortcomings of both. Looking specifically at the episode “Computer Friend,” I demonstrate how
the sitcom unpacked these competing racial discourses by placing them onto the body of a
character that identifies as both Black and Cuban.
“The Portrait of the Activist as A Young Man: Evelio Grillo, the Popular Front, and the
Freemasonry of the Race”
Trent Masiki, Quinsigamond Community College
This paper examines the relationship between transethnic acculturation, pragmatic nationalism,
and Popular Front and liberal coalition politics in Evelio Grillo’s Black Cuban, Black American:
A Memoir. Black Cuban, Black American deserves renewed and sustained attention as a bildung
memoir because it is not only a narrative about Afroethnic transculturation, but it is also a story
about political acculturation and maturity. Grillo’s memoir prompts significant questions about
regional pride, social mobility, panethnic identity formation, and cultural authentication in postCivil Rights, transcultural Afro-Latino autobiographical narratives.
7. Politics of Identity in Children’s and Young Adult Literature
“I Begin Within the Deep Dark Earth: Spirit, Race and Gender in Children’s Literature”
Christina Garcia Lopez, University of San Francisco
Children’s book writer and illustrator Maya Christina Gonzalez relates that as a child, she used to
draw her “big, round Chicana face” into the blank pages of books because there were none that
represented her or the people she knew. As a queer Chicana artist, author, educator, and activist,
Gonzalez has approached children’s books as a site of radical, transformational change for the
last 20 years; indeed, it was in 1996 that she provided the illustrations for Gloria Anzaldúa’s
Prietita and the Ghost Woman/ Prietita y la llorona. More recently, in Call Me Tree/ Llamame
árbol (2014), Gonzalez presents a story that creatively affirms the intersections of gender
neutrality, racial diversity, and a spirituality deeply rooted in the living earth. The child narrator,
drawn recognizably brown and purposefully gender-free, describes a developmental
consciousness based on a relational identity to the environment, specifically trees. The child—
growing like a seed “within the deep dark earth” into a full grown “tree”—reaches out towards
other trees (children) who reflect racial variations and inhabit various modes of being and spatial
locations. This paper argues that Gonzalez crafts the interplay between illustration and text to
playfully communicate a spiritual awareness that displaces binary-based paradigms of race,
gender, and being; instead the narrative embraces “seeing” ontological and embodied difference
while asserting a shared belonging and “rootedness” in the earth. Drawing on Gloria Anzaldúa,
Theresa Delgadillo, and Laura Pérez, I situate this children’s book as actively reflecting and
promoting the actualization of a radical transformational consciousness.
“Canonical Jovenes: Adolescent Time, the Chicano Bildungsroman, and the Politics of
Recovery”
Noel Zavala, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana
This paper focuses on the centrality of adolescence in Chicano literature to explore its
representations of Mexican-American masculinity through an analysis of what I call “adolescent
time,” a unique, liminal temporality in which adolescents simultaneously have their growth
circumscribed and yet they are nonetheless permitted to explore nontraditional ways of being.
Identifying “adolescence” as a form of what Dana Luciano has termed chronobiopolitics, I
examine how José Antonio Villareal and Américo Paredes’ respective canonical texts, Pocho
(1959) and George Washington Gómez (1990), rely on certain notions of adolescence and genre
conventions of the bildungsroman to represent Mexican American coming-of-age. Concerns over
identity and assimilation have long proven to be a central trope in Chicano literature, as these
texts indicate, but when considered through the lens of adolescence and masculinity studies the
linear development these authors ascribe to their protagonists reifies legible representations of
masculinity and forecloses any lateral growth, resulting in queer identities and practices being
viewed as examples of arrested developments, and yet these protagonists and other adolescent
male characters in the texts invariably grow queerly. As these canonical jovenes do not offer easy
sites of identification, I argue that the continued study of these texts shed light on the politics of
recovery by the Chicano movement and canon.
“Becoming Latinx in Young Adult Literature in an Era of Mass Expulsions”
Susana S. Martínez, DePaul University, Chicago
Latinx under the age of 18 now total 18.2 million, a 47% jump since 2000. Despite the growing
numbers of Latinx youth, their lived experience continues to be largely absent from Children’s
and Young Adult Literature. This paper examines a corpus of works that deal with the
representation of Dreamers or youth who were brought to the U.S. as children and explores what
it means to be a Latinx American while liiving in the shadows due to their status in immigration
limbo. Young adult novels such as The Circuit (1997) and Breaking Through (2001) by
Francisco Jimenez, Libertad by Alma Fullerton (2008), Return to Sender (2009) by Julia
Alvarez, and The Distance Between Us (2012) by Reyna Grande depict the distressing existence
of an estimated 2.1 million undocumented youth. I addresses a range of questions to rethink
racialized imaginaries centered on notions of illegality, such as: What is the “coming of age”
experience like in an anti-immigrant era where the president elect characterize Mexicans as
rapists that bring crime drugs into the country? Given the ‘school-to-deportation’ pipeline, how
do the young protagonists cope with the fear of deportation and navigate the school system with
limited English skills? Lastly, how might these works help readers of all ages better understand
the root causes of migration within the larger context of globalized capitalism and neoliberalism
through the lens of precarious lives?
8. Title TBA
Chair: Ana Patricia Rodriguez, University of Maryland
TBA
Session 3: 11:50-1:05 p.m.
9. Beyond and Within the Human: Race, Abjection, and Decolonial Imaginaries
“Transmogrifications in Brown: Racialized Materiality, Humanness, and The Undocumented
Body in The Real Death Valley”
Marcos Santiago Gonsalez, CUNY Graduate Center
In her essay, “1492: A New World View,” Sylvia Wynter postulates that the model of “Man,”
the Western, white, and rational subject, is “over the interests both of the flesh-and-blood
individual subject and of the human species as a whole, together with, increasingly, that of the
interests of all other nonhuman forms of life on this planet” (47). Laboring in the productive
openness of Wynter’s work, I aim to conceptualize how the “flesh-and-blood” of Wynter’s
human needs to be revised according to a shapeshifting materiality of the human, that is, to
theorize racialized humanity like undocumented bodies, the nonwhite Other outside of
the propter nos of Man, requires a recalibration of what constitutes the proper study of a human,
accounting for the human, and how the nonhuman can become an optic for theorizing racialized
bodies differently within critical race studies. I will do this by examining how, The Real Death
Valley, a documentary showcasing the journey migrants from Central America and Mexico
undertake through the dangerous Texas brush, stages, in its failure to humanize through filmic
narrative the humans they seek to represent, alternative rubrics, protocols, and archives for
theorizing the racialized body through the nonhuman. Unidentifiable bones in a mass gravesite, a
wallet in the brush, an abandoned pink jacket, and a binder filled with images of bodies in the
desert animate politics for engaging with racialized life in its plurality of ontological form.
"Tomate & Chocolate: There Is Life Beyond the Human, or How to Exist in Disgust and Dirt"
Elena Igartuburu, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Erika Lopez’s graphic “Trilogy of Tomatoes” tears apart dominant categories of race, gender and
sexuality. Lopez’s raw irreverent language and cheeky stories manage to objectify and animalize
the characters she presents, but far from dehumanizing her characters, the cartoonist presents an
ironic account of the challenges faced by a young hybrid Latina in a world of labels. The highly
ironic and insolent tone and content of the trilogy transgress the limits of propriety and intently
inhabit the turbid, wet and slippery terrain of the inappropriate, the unexpected and the
disgusting. As the main character Tomato “Mad Dog” Rodriguez’s adventures touch on matters
of affect, community and gentrification, we witness a world in which the everyday takes on tints
of the surreal. This alternative view of reality helps Tomato explore the limits and possibilities of
dominant categories, including that of the human. Through the identification of the character
with different objects and animals, Lopez’s questions the legitimacy and value of hegemonic
notions of humanity. Far from trying to re-draw the boundaries of ordinary categories, Lopez’s
narrative and characters do not struggle with fragmentation or rejection. They do not try to fit in
or be recognized as human. They embrace their otherness and accommodate their lives in the
uncomfortable and unstable spaces of the margins, appreciative of the productive scenario that
they provide.
“Unsettling the Category of the Human: Reading the Decolonial Imaginations of Gloria
Anzaldúa and Sylvia Wynter in the Era of the Anthropocene”
Victoria Sánchez, University of California, Santa Cruz
It is crucial to understand the instrumentality of the coloniality of power and modernity in the
intertwining production of race, gender and sexuality in what Maria Lugones has called the
modern/colonial gender system to theorize race in the 21st century. With the decolonial turn as
most recently articulated by scholars in Latinx and Latin American studies (Nelson-Maldonado
Torres 2011, Walter Mignolo 2011, Arturo Escobar 2010, Hanna, Vargas, and Saldívar 2016),
my paper explores the decolonial imaginations of Gloria Anzaldúa and Sylvia Wynter to
consider the ways in which Chicanx and Black women of color in the Americas have challenged
the ontological and epistemological conceptions of the category of the Human. In this paper, I
examine the understudied nonhuman dimensions in Gloria Anzaldúa’s seminal text
Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) and Anzaldúa’s posthumously released work Light in the
Dark/Luz En Lo Oscuro (Anzaldúa and Keating 2015). More specifically I consider Anzaldua’s
spiritual and animal worlds as it intersects with embodiment to unsettle conceptions of race,
time, space, and what it means to be human. By critically reading Sylvia Wynter’s “Unsettling
the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human After Man Its
Overrepresentation-An Argument” (2003) alongside Gloria Anzaldúa, I highlight the ways in
which both scholars problematize Eurocentric, racist conceptions of the figure of Man to provide
an opening into thinking about coloniality/decoloniality, race and humanness. This paper hopes
not to replace the category of the human but to use Latinx literature as a way to unsettle the
category of the human in order to gesture at the possibilities for theorizing about human rights,
living and dying in the age of the Anthropocene and building anti-racist futures.
10. Something There is That Doesn’t Love a Ghost:
Racial (Post) Memory, ‘Bare Race’,
African Hauntings, and Patriarchal Exorcism in Latinx Literature
This panel aims to explore the various ways racial construction and elision haunts Latinx literary
and cultural production. Drawing on fiction, nonfiction, and drama, this panel discusses two
responses to the racial histories of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora: 1) active engagement and
resistance to the oppression of those histories and 2) the continued elision of the Africanist
presence in the Latinx imaginary. Karen Christian will explore literary representations of what
geneticists call “transgenerational epigenetic inheritance”: the postmemory of the trauma and
violence that engendered Afro-Latinx identity. Ylce Irizarry will consider how Puerto Rican
author Mayra Montero’s prescient attention to ecology and environmentalism in Haiti frames the
transnational nature of Latinx literature. Marion Rohrleitner will illustrate how Afro-Dominicana
authors write back/against racist and misogynist colonial narratives that have been reinscribed
within the Latina/o literary canon.
Chair: Ylce Irizarry, University of South Florida
“Off the Radar or Front and Center: Racial (Post) Memory in Latinx Writing”
Karen Christian, California Polytechnic State University
Afro-Latinx writers often draw upon lived experiences that include ongoing challenges to their
very identity; these artists destabilize binary paradigms of race by defying simple classification
as Latinx or African-American. That is, Afro-Latinx identity may be perceived as culturally and
racially unintelligible and hence “off the radar,” even for other Latinx writers. There is
nonetheless a growing body of Latinx writing in which Afro-Latinx identity is foregrounded.
These narratives and poetry engage questions of blackness, often in the form of postmemory of
slavery and its consequences, and expand the scope of Latinx discourse on race. Afro-Caribbean
subjectivity constructed through writing is a kind of palimpsest, layered over a legacy of slavery
and a complex cultural heritage that has developed through generations. As Jamaican-born
Canadian writer Makeda Silvera observes, “Through three hundred years of history we have
carried memories and the scars of racism and violence with us. We are the sisters, daughters,
mothers of a people enslaved by colonialists and imperialists.” In this presentation, I explore
works by an array of Latinx writers, including Cristina García, Achy Obejas, Elías Miguel
Muñoz, H.G. Castillo, Adrián Castro, Junot Díaz, Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, and Nelly Rosario. I
argue that these texts – by both (white) Latinx and Afro-Latinx authors – are literary
representations of what geneticists call “transgenerational epigenetic inheritance,” that is,
postmemory of the trauma and violence that engendered Afro-Latinx identity.
“Ecology and Environment in Montero’s in The Palm of Darkness”
Ylce Irizarry, University of South Florida
Discourse on ecology and environmentalism accompanies the turn to the historic in Latinx
fiction.1 This paper will argue the historic returns Latinx literature to its Caribbean origins.
Mayra Montero is a Puerto Rican author of Cuban origin who often writes about the AfroCaribbean Disapora. Her 1997 novel, In the Palm of Darkness, 2 juxtaposes species extinction
with post-Aristide chaos and genocide in Haiti.3 While herpetologist Victor and his local guide
Thierry search for a vanishing frog species, the grenouille du sang, Victor largely ignores the
recurring signs of Haiti’s broken social environment: faceless, tortured bodies hanging from
trees, children and pregnant women disappearing, piles of body parts set aflame. Montero is not
only indicting the fatal violence perpetuated by the Duvalier regimes and the Ton Ton Macoutes;
she is also criticizing the neocolonial discourse Victor Grigg represents, which elides the impact
of global capitalism on Haiti’s ecological sovereignty. 4 This paper draws on Giorgio
Agamben’s concept of “Bare Race” to examine Montero’s attempts to deconstruct the
undermining of Haiti’s ecological sovereignty.
“Afro-Dominicanas Write Back: Deconstructing the Canonical Latina/o Gaze”
Marion Rohrleitner, University of Texas at El Paso
A critical engagement with texts that rewrite the colonizers’ master narratives has become
commonplace in the study of postcolonial literature; studies of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea,
Derek Walcott’s Omeros, and Maryse Conde’s Windward Heights, for example, have safely
entered the undergraduate classroom. Yet, the act of “writing back” as a politically motivated
discursive practice lives on in feminist rewritings of now canonical texts produced by their more
established counterparts. In this presentation, I examine three feminist responses to three
canonical texts of contemporary Caribbean and Caribbean diasporic literature. I show that a new
generation of Afro-Dominican women writers irreverently move beyond the master text and
highlight the sometimes humorous and the sometimes sobering ways gender and class privilege
can reinscribe colonial privilege in postcolonial texts. The presentation begins with Nelly
Rosario’s “How to Date a Thugboy, Artboy, Nerdboy, or Papichulo,” her provocative response
to the sexist narrative voice in Junot Diaz’s short story collection This is How You Lose Her,
continues with “When Was the Last Time You Saw a Black Boy Smile?, Jazminne Mendez’s
lyrical response to Pedro Pietri’s focus on the patriarchal nuclear family in “When Was the Last
Time You Saw Mami Smile?”, and concludes with contrasting Rita Indiana’s dizzying
experimental coming-of-age narrative Papi with Julia Alvarez’s canonical and comparatively
tame novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent.
11. Symbolic Crisis: Afro-Religious Visions, Performance, and Transformations
“Brujos: At the Intersection of Affect and Race”
Thomas Conners, University of Pennsylvania
Following four gay Latinx graduate students endowed with supernatural powers, the web-series
Brujos details the experiences inherent to the familiarly chaotic school semester and a “witchhunt led by the straight, wealthy, white male descendants of the first New World colonizers,” as
Ricardo Gamboa, Brujos creator and actor, describes. Showcasing a cast that includes women,
trans, and queer people of color, the series draws critical attention to the current and violent
realities such communities face—realities blatantly absent from mainstream representation and
sociopolitical discourse. Weaving speculative and magical realism with the quotidian, Brujos
harnesses the power of fiction to affectively present populations that have been historically
reduced and othered due to racialization and non-normative sexuality. I use affect to refer to
unquantifiable, visceral reactions that precede cognitive codification, often expressions of
physical rage, distress, and fear. In such affective instances, visible on the faces of the characters,
I read a disidentifying potential. Borrowing from José Muñoz, I refer to disidentification as a
performative strategy in which lived experiences, implicated in the formation of identity, neither
assimilate nor reject dominant ideology. Instead, they seek to transform cultural logic by
problematizing structural categories while still esteeming the significance of local, personal
struggles. Brujos disidentifies on those two levels: on the local within the narrative, given that
the plot confronts the characters’ personal, individual tribulations that produce anger and terror,
and on a structural level with the audience’s viewing of such experiences, ones that debunk the
exhausted mainstream queer and Latinx tropes. At the intersection of affect and race, Brujos
makes racial and non-normative identities complex—rounding them out—to call attention to the
fact that the characteristics involved in othering are the very points upon which agency is
constructed.
“‘Working juju with the word on the world’: Afro-Latinas’ Poetry and Performance as
Transformative Racial and Identity Counter-discourse”
Maria Esther Alvarez Lopez, Universidad de Oviedo
In “Does the City Have Speech?” (2013), Saskia Sassen refers to speech as “a foundational
element in theories about democracy and the political”. Making speech, therefore, enables those
who lack access to established instrumentalities to talk back—against colonization, acculturation,
exclusion, and inequities. With a survivalist poetics of resistance and informal (counter) political
practices that reclaim ‘speech’ as a vehicle for the expression and foregrounding of identity,
contemporary Latina poets and spoken word performance artists from Afro-Puerto Rican
descent, such as Mayda del Valle, Caridad de la Luz (La Bruja), and María Teresa Fernández
(Mariposa), among others, explore the complexities and interplay of issues of race, identity,
gender, translocation, and decolonization. Through their poetic and performative enunciations,
they critically question dominant views, destabilize stabilized meanings, affirm their cultural
pride, and claim their (multiple) mixed-race ancestry – “descendancy” in Mayda del Valle’s
poem, i.e., African, Puerto Rican, Taína, Yoruba, etc.— as a form of individual and communal
validation, strength and empowerment. In making speech and talking back, they work “juju with
the word on the world”—in Larry Neal’s expression—through the transformative potential of
their poetic words/performances. In the 1970s Nuyorican writer Miguel Algarín insisted on the
responsibility of the poet to create “alternatives” for the survival of the poor New York Puerto
Ricans, and the need of a new vocabulary in which to express them. Today’s Afro-Latina poets
and spoken word artists are these new urban bards who fight with words, creating alternative
kinds of verbal action and imaginaries in order to effect social and political change.
“Sick of the Symbolic: Trance and Ritual in Lyn DiIorio Sandin’s Outside the Bones, Toni Cade
Bambara’s The Salt Eaters, and Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow”
Victoria A. Chevalier, Medgar Evers College (CUNY)
12. Uncanny Translations, Or, the Enterprise of Art
“Reimagining “Other” Latinos/as: The Technological and Spectral Origins of “Othered”
Latinidad”
Cynthia Martínez, Indiana University - Bloomington
My project seeks to explore questions of identity construction, migration, displacement, and
ethnoracial and class positionings in transnational literary texts by authors of Central American
and South American national origin or heritage who publish, reside, and/or narratively situate
novels in the United States. Rather than provide a comparative study of these regional groupings,
my project traces the divergences and convergences found in each grouping’s narrative treatment
of migration and belonging in order to explore subjects’ ambiguous and so-called “other”
positioning within contemporary understandings of Latinidad. I briefly discuss models of
“difference” found within Latinx studies, such as border consciousness and hybridity, in order to
propose that the ambiguously situated textual groupings I analyze engage in different and
innovative negotiations of ethnoracial identity. Rather than privilege a fusion of differences
within the self, I suggest that the literary texts I study reimagine twoness, the double, and
fragmentation as productive ground for cultural identification and political practice instead of as
mere problematic state of (negatively) contradictory being. DuBois’s “double consciousness”, as
well as current iterations of the concept such as Claudia Milian’s “open double consciousness”
and Doris Sommer’s “vindication of double consciousness,” help me clarify how my project
interprets the “double,” especially for subjectivities labeled as “other” vis-à-vis Latinidad. I
further situate two literary tropes that appear throughout my textual groupings, the technological
and the spectral, as corollaries to the subject positioning of “other” Latinxs, as their narrative use
renders literal the fragmentation and ambiguity of “othered” subjects and subjectivities.
“Moctesuma Esparza’s Artistic and Business Enterprises”
Elda María Román, University of Southern California
One of the most influential producers of Latina/o representations is Moctesuma Esparza, albeit in
a behind-the-scenes role as a movie producer. Esparza is a Chicano activist and notably one of
the organizers of the 1968 East LA walkouts. This paper will discuss how, during the Chicano
Movement, he co-hosted an alternative news show called La Raza Nueva. It will also delve into
his post-70s enterprises as a film producer. He has produced many Latino films, including The
Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, Selena, and Mosquita y Mari. He also founded Maya Entertainment,
a media company dedicated to producing and distributing Latino films, as well as a line of movie
theaters called Maya Cinemas found throughout California. He has also served as a founder or
board member of numerous philanthropic organizations dedicated to education and increasing
the participation of Latina/os in the media. There is scarcely any scholarship on Esparza, and my
paper will discuss how his life history might help us understand a broader cultural history of how
1960s activism has been translated in institutional and corporate settings.
"Sounds, Translation, and Interlingualism in Woman Hollering Creek"
Abraham Encinas, University of California, Los Angeles
My paper seeks to think about Sandra Cisneros’ short story collection Woman Hollering
Creek through the nexus of sound, silence, onomatopoeia, music, and translation. I argue that by
naming the collection after the story “Woman Hollering Creek”, Cisneros asks us to think about
hollering as a feminist poetics. And more broadly, she asks us to think about the sounds of the
babble of languages. I argue that the multivalency of holler is a metaphorical sound image for a
consideration of language as sound and its translative ambiguity when we think of it as pure
sound. I will trace Cisneros’ sound play in rhetorical and figurative language such as
onomatopoeia, her use of musical epigraphs to structure the short story collection as a musical
album of sorts, and her translations between Spanish and English. By paying attention to the
relationship between sound and language, I want to offer a slightly different reading on the
meaning of interlingualism; that is, I think of the state of interlingualism as an affective moment
of joy in sounds and the play of language. In this sense, Malinche, the Chicana cultural figure of
translation, becomes an important site for thinking through the feminist poetics of hollering and
its relationship to pure language and interlingualism. Finally and in addition, I want to suggest
that to think about race in the 21st century requires us to continue thinking about interlingualism,
its corollary of miscegenation, and the question of how much language either does or does not
constitute culture and race.
Session 4: 2:40-3:55 p.m.
13. Home, Love, and the Desire for Salvation in Chicana Fiction
“Home as a Territory of Desire: Divine Queer Relationality and Belonging in Chicana
Literature”
Sofi Chavez, Bryn Mawr College
Representations of queer kinship structures in Helena María Viramontes’s novel Their Dogs
Came with Them and Virginia Grise’s blu illustrate the urgency of home spaces for queer
Chicana subjects. This paper argues that queer Chicana literature is a spiritual project which
cultivates an expansive internal sense of home to resist violent, hegemonic external forces. This
paper asks: in what ways do queerness and spirituality employ the same structuring principle of
desire as an imaginative mechanism to envision another way of being? While Chicana feminist
criticism often highlights sexual desire, this paper analyzes the role that desire plays in
constructing non-sexual queer relationality. Within these new kinds of queer relationships—such
as a girl gang and the relationship between a teenager and her mother’s female partner—the texts
illustrate that spiritual knowledge production creates kinship bonds which fulfil the Chicana
subject’s yearning for home in spaces of queer, divine potentiality. In Viramontes’s and Grise’s
work, we see that for the queer Chicana subject, home spaces must be what I call a territory of
desire. My reading of desire and spaces of potentiality enable us to see a territory of desire as any
space of spiritual transformation and freedom, where a subject is free from physical and
emotional harm. In these texts, we find not only stories of loss, displacement, and mourning, but
also the necessary tools and tactics to imagine a queer future that features spiritual healing, love,
and belonging.
“Love and Salvation Unites the Body and Soul”
Julia Torrico, Marymount University
Demetria Martinez’s The Block Captain’s Daughter examines the true meaning of connecting
the body and soul to form physical and spiritual salvation. I discuss over the connection of the
body and soul beyond religious practices in society, and I further discuss the concept of body and
soul affecting one’s destiny. Martínez presents lovemaking as a form of salvation for couples and
perhaps links this to salvation for social networks. Individual forgiveness brings salvation, which
connects individuals to earth’s salvation. Channette Romero’s article “Embodying Latina
Salvation” presents Martinez’s focus on spiritual and ethnic diversity through Latina/o identities
associated in Mother Tongue. This article is used to support Martinez’s view on the relationship
between the body and soul. This presentation challenges the argument of the soul being the sole
object of worthy value. The imposition of Catholicism’ and other religions’ concept of the value
of soul have created spiritual oppression in U.S. and Latin American society. As a writer and
activist, Martinez suggests the importance of placing value on the connection of body and soul.
14. Goth Girls, Vampires, and Ghosts: Queer Subjectivity, Rebellion, and Freedom in
Latinx Literature
Moderator: Carlos Ulises Decena, Rutgers University
“Reading Rechy and Zapata in an Era of Homonormativity and Homonationalism”
Jorge Estrada, SUNY Oneonta
Reading about hustlers in John Rechy’s City of God (1963) and Luis Zapata’s El vampiro de la
colonia Roma (1979) takes us to a specific queer time and space, applying Judith Halberstam’s
concept of queer temporality. The youngman in Rechy’s novel and the chichifo in Zapata’s
explore queer underworlds that exist in major urban centers in the U.S. and Mexico, meeting
other queer subjects who, like vampires, come out only at night. In this paper, I look at
homonormativity and Jasbir K. Puar’s concept of homonationalism (2007) in our reading of
these two queer canonical Chicanx and Mexican novels today. In an era where queer subjects
who do not fit within the confines of gay-straight, white sexuality remain heavily policed, I
discuss how the politics of respectability play a role in defining our queer literary past, and how
contemporary notions of “equality” and “freedom” have changed since the 1960s and 1970s.
“Brown Skin, Goth Drag: The use of Goth Aesthetics as Rebellion in Caribbean Diaspora
Novels”
Virginia Arreola, Hartwick College
Across several Hispanophone Caribbean-Diaspora novels published at the turn of the
millennium, such as The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Dreaming in Cuban, a
unexpected trope has manifested: That of a rebellious adolescent girl who takes on goth or punklike fashion and behavior as a way to rebel against their immigrant parents. Goth/punk is
arguably the quintessential form of rebellion among white Western adolescents since the 1970s.
The visual juxtaposition of taking on a look associated with a deathly pale complexion by a girl
of color makes the act doubly subversive. As Butler, Halberstam, and other queer theorists have
argued, the exaggeration in femininity/masculinity in drag performance, as in drag queens/drag
kings, makes the schism between the sexed body and gendered body patently obvious.
furthermore, regardless of the reason a person engages in drag queen/king performance, it is not
necessarily for the purpose of identifying as a woman/man. Using the lens of drag performance
to analyze this trope, I argue that in these novels the mental juxtaposition created by brown, goth
female characters pushes society’s idealization of whiteness to a subversive extreme. The young
characters in these novels, Lola and Pilar, for example, do not become goths/punks because they
want to be white racially or culturally. The death-like goth aesthetic they perform alludes to the
consequences of attempting to or being unable to fulfill a white “ideal”: both a literal physical
death and a racial/ethnic/cultural death.
“Of Stone and Paper: Mapping the Memory of AIDS through the Writing of Gil Cuadros' and
Grave Markers in Los Angeles Cemeteries”
Eddy Francisco Alvarez Jr., SUNY Oneonta
Buildings, parks, cemeteries, and streets tell stories. As sites of memory and texts they speak to
the forgotten and erased histories of the city. Although in denial when the epidemic first began in
Los Angeles, the Latinx community eventually responded through activism and cultural
production, including theater, and poetry. In this paper I focus on several texts that function as
sites of memory about Latinx AIDS history. First, inspired by Horacio Roque Ramirez’s,
research on AIDS obituaries in 1990s San Francisco, I read grave markers in Los Angeles
cemeteries to see what these texts tell us about erasure, shame, kin and queerness at a time when
the stigma of AIDS continued even after death. I juxtapose these grave markers with the writing
of queer Chicano poet Gil Cuadros, who died of AIDS in 1996. Analyzing “My Aztlan: White
Place” and the poem “Conquering Immortality,” from his book City of God (1994), I argue that
his texts map a personal and intimate geography of AIDS, from white West Hollywood, to the
101 freeways, to his own body as a site of memory, infection, and shame. Cuadros’ memories
and poetry, create a cartography of AIDS, marking his personal roads, pathways, hiding spaces,
cruising spots, and spaces of memory during his time living with AIDS. Jointly, through the
analysis of grave markers and Cuadros’ writing, I show how recuperating the memory of AIDS
and HIV from multiple sites is a way of finding sequins in the rubble of erasure and loss.
15. Queer Motion and the Longing for Home
“Jotería in Popular Culture: Queer Identities in Motion”
Daniel Enrique Pérez, University of Nevada, Reno
This essay examines the portrayal of Jotería in popular culture to demonstrate how such
portrayals remain in constant flux and are uniquely shaped by the identity of the artists and
producers. The author includes an analysis of the representation of queer Chicanx and Latinx
identities in literature, film and television to explore the politics of representing Jotería in
popular culture. He argues that the portrayal of Jotería in cultural production has a lengthy
history and is replete with complex Jotería stories and identities that must be taken into
consideration when examining the overarching politics of representation. The researcher includes
an analysis of the works of writers John Rechy, Michael Nava and Rigoberto González, as well
as a comparative analysis of Ugly Betty, La Mission and Quinceañera. He argues that these texts
create decolonial imaginaries and discourses that shape a legacy of queer Chicanx and Latinx
representation where Jotería subjectivities are reimagined in social locations that transcend the
negative stereotypes that have historically shaped their identities and lived experiences. At the
same time, he underscores how problematic the representation of Jotería in popular culture
remains by comparing the stereotypical portrayals that persist. He demonstrates how integral the
representation of Jotería in popular culture can be to larger political projects and movements that
center on recovering and redefining Jotería legacies.
“The Uncertain Harbor of Home: Queering Families in Manuel Muñoz’s ‘Bring Brang Brung’”
William Orchard, Queens College, City University of New York
In “Bring Brang Brung,” a short story from his 2007 collection, The Faith Healer of Olive
Avenue, Manuel Muñoz tells the story of a Chicano man who returns to his hometown after his
Cuban-American boyfriend, with whom he has adopted a child, dies. The story chronicles the
man’s attempt to get his bearings in his hometown, reestablish ties with his estranged family, and
forge solidarities that will help him navigate various state bureaucracies. In this paper, I examine
how the story disrupts and “queers” two versions of family, and, in the process, reveals how the
world-making potentialities of queerness may sometimes reside in subjects who are not gay or
lesbian but who have had to invent lives outside of normative institutions. On the one hand, the
story disrupts the upwardly mobile gay male narrative, in which gay men flee small-town
enclaves for large metropolitan cities like San Francisco and New York, enter into monogamous
relationships, and start families. Here, the homonormative narratives of progress and upward
mobility are ruptured by an accident, sending the protagonist into a financial and psychological
crisis that forces his return home. On the other hand, the story ruptures the stereotyped image of
the ethnic American family as hostile to their gay child. Although the protagonist encountered
homophobia and rejection in his youth, he returns to find his family newly configured: his
parents have died and his sister is a single mother struggling to raise a son. Indeed, his sister and
her network of single mothers—a group that the protagonist initially shames and condescends
to—educate the protagonist in new ways of being and of imagining belonging. Drawing on the
work of Cathy Cohen and Juana María Rodríguez, I argue that this return home also signals the
protagonist’s return to a queer, rather than homonormative, life. Moreover, the story stages this
in such a way that homonormativity is aligned with a Latino imaginary, while the queer family
he returns to is aligned with Chicana/o identities and politics. In this way, the story figures
Chicana/o as a category that has not been superseded by Latina/o but rather as one that is still
generative and politically relevant.
16. Love and the Potentiality of Race
“Love & Justice in Ana Castillo’s Peel My Love like an Onion”
Susan C. Méndez, University of Scranton
Ana Castillo’s Peel My Love like an Onion (1999) is filled with issues of social injustice. The
novel’s characters face ability, class, race/ethnicity, and gender issues, along with transgender
violence, drug addiction, gang violence, and the problematic rise of the cost of living. Yet, all
hope is not lost, as the main character, Carmen, finds herself in love with two men: Agustin and
Manolo. Although she wants to be claimed by Manolo, she cannot be as Manolo is Agustin’s
godson. Therein lies the tension in these love stories, which is only resolved when Carmen acts
out of love and finds fulfilling work that allows her to support herself and her family with ease,
strength, and beauty. When the love stories are resolved, so are many of the novel’s social
injustice issues. Castillo’s text chronicles “from below” the ways in which conventional notions
of identity and social problem resolution are challenged, so that new social and cultural
possibilities can be realized. Through the alternative imaginary of love, Castillo expands notions
of race/ethnicity, gender, sex, and class as they pertain to identity while simultaneously fostering
a critical consciousness so that more just and complex lives can be envisioned. Regardless of
which love-story the readers follow, they realize that a framework of love is needed to actualize
social justice in one’s life. Theorists and writers such as bell hooks, Chela Sandoval, and St.
Augustine of Hippo will support this essay’s argument.
“Decolonial Love against Racialization and Intergenerational Trauma in
The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”
Rafael Vizcaino, Rutgers University
In this paper, I argue that The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), by DominicanAmerican writer Junot Díaz, is a recent case of a decolonizing poetics in the tradition of the
Martiniquean writer Edouard Glissant. I will focus on the novel’s deployment of a form of love
that seeks to challenge the patterns of racialization and the traces of intergenerational trauma that
are the result of the living legacies of colonialism. This is a decolonial love that is thus rooted in
the work of memory and in the generous open receptivity to the other, a receptivity that at its
most radical leads to an existential substitution. Within the novel’s narrative, this is seen most
explicitly in the scenes of brutal violence that take place in the sugarcane fields of the Dominican
Republic. The figure of Mongoose, an animal whose history in the Caribbean parallels the
history of the Caribbean’s colonization, who finds itself present during these critical moments in
Oscar Wao, in my reading becomes the depository for the historical memory of colonial violence
and the messenger of decolonial love. I conclude that decolonial love is the content that is meant
to fill both the voids within Díaz’s characters and more literally the many dotted lines and empty
pages within Oscar Wao. To embrace decolonial love is to seek to heal the wounds of
racialization and the traces of intergenerational trauma among racialized/colonized peoples
today.
“Afro-Latina Lives Matter: Marta Moreno Vega as Transnational Scholar/Cultural Worker”
Juanita Heredia, Northern Arizona University
Marta Moreno Vega is mainly know for her memoir When the Spirits Dance Mambo (2004) and
her cultural work The Altar of My Soul: The Living Traditions of Santería (2000) which have
garnered important critical attention. It is just as significant to recognize her role as a
scholar/cultural worker in a transnational context. She has not only been instrumental in
participating and founding key cultural institutes that disseminate Latino cultural practices in
New York City but she has also played a crucial role as a transnational ambassador who visits
key sites in Puerto Rico and Cuba, among other nations, to research the African heritage of her
culture in the areas of spirituality and gender issues. In the collection Women Warriors of the
Afro-Latina Diaspora (2012) Moreno Vega and her coeditors Marinieves Alba and Yvette
Modestin reach another milestone in chronicling the experiences of women of African descent
on both sides of the U.S./Caribbean/Latin American borderlands. In this mixture of creative
pieces and scholarly essays, the coeditors demonstrate that Afro-Latinas’ contributions to their
respective communities are multi-faceted because they embody and negotiate multiple roles
based on gender, race, and various nations. In other words, they assert that Afro-Latina lives
matter by intervening and remaking the history of the Americas.
17. Textual, Visual, and Archival Contestations of Blackness and Afro-latinididad in the
Puerto Rican and Dominican U.S. Diasporas
“Digital Dominicanidad: Race (on)-line(s)”
Megan Jeanette Myers, Iowa State University
The Dominican Republic’s Tribunal Court Ruling (0168-13) retroactively strips the citizenship
of ethnic Haitians living in the Dominican Republic. This ruling, known simply “la sentencia” in
the Dominican Republic (“the verdict”), reflects a long history of anti-Haitianism. While the
ruling is supported by some vocal Dominican nationalists, it has faced heavy criticism on a
global scale. Reconoci.do is a group based in the Dominican Republic demanding the Dominican
government to recognize those born in the country as birthright citizens. Others groups with a
public, online-based platform addressing statelessness in the Dominican Republic are rooted in
the U.S. diaspora; two of these groups are Dominicanos x derecho and We Are All Dominican.
This paper begins by charting the digital connections between these groups, primarily through
text mining each groups’ Twitter campaigns against the ruling. The paper also signals the
response of Dominican American authors to Haitian-Dominican relations and/or “la sentencia”
by analyzing two recent memoirs written by Dominican Americans Julia Alvarez and Raquel
Cepeda: A Wedding in Haiti (2012) and Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina (2013). Reading
the works of Alvarez and Cepeda against the activist platforms of the three aforementioned
groups problematizes the Haitian-Dominican dynamic within the space of the U.S. diaspora and
assesses how growing web campaigns have guided the conversation.
“On the Cusp of Blackness: Junot Díaz, African American Literature, and Black Recognition”
Raj Chetty, St. John’s College
Building on my work examining blackness in Dominican literature, this paper explores the
“blackness” of Junot Díaz’s novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The novel deploys
both recognizable and unrecognizable forms of blackness—recognition here defined in relation
to U.S. literary studies and African American literary studies, in particular. Seen under this rubric
of recognition, however, the novel’s performance of blackness raises interesting possibilities for
blacknesses that exceed the narrow boundaries set by dominant conceptions of race and being.
Scholarship on the novel eschews engaging blackness in the novel, treats it lightly, or focuses on
those recognizable markers of blackness that the novel deploys (hair, language, skin color). My
paper will foreground the mis- or unrecognized blackness in the novel, arguing that these kinds
of blackness require a wider understanding of Dominican race relations and a corresponding
reading practice that might be called, following Brent Hayes Edwards, black international
translation.
“Beyond Black & White?: Photography in Loida Martiza Pérez, Julia Alvarez, and Félix
Morisseau-Leroy”
John Ribó, Florida State University
In her article “The Photographic Thought of Latina/o Literature and Cultural Critique” (2009)
María DeGuzmán argues that photography in Dominican-American literature often addresses
“questions about racial identification and socio-political agency” pointing to the description of
faded family photos in Loida Maritza Pérez’s Geographies of Home (1999) that blur the color
line between black and white (362-363). Yet many of the photos included in A Wedding in
Haiti (2012), Julia Alvarez’s memoir of two road trips to Haiti before and after the 2010
earthquake, only reinforce tropes of blackness and stereotypes of Haitians deployed since the
turn of the 19th century to silence the radical promise of the Haitian Revolution. My talk
compares close readings of Pérez’s novel, of Alvarez’s memoir, and of two poems by Haitian
poet Félix Morisseau-Leroy—“Tourist” and “Boat People”—in order to explore the ethics of
representing race in transnational approaches to Hispaniola in Dominican Studies and beyond.
18. Feminist Currents in Latina/o Literature
“Meditations on the Shadow: Stereotypes of Latinx Women in Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick
Your Ass and Jane the Virgin”
Jessica Flores, California State University, Fullerton
Media, as an informing influence in an individual’s life, contributes to the construction of
worldview in what is represented and withheld. Though the invisibility of people of color within
media has been mitigated within the past decade, questioning how representation can fall short is
an important exercise to acknowledge its pitfalls and products. Examining Meg Medina’s young
adult novel, Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass, in relation to the popular television show
Jane the Virgin, created by Jennie Snyder Urman, reveals the tenuous balance between
stereotype and complexity that can be successfully – or unsuccessfully – navigated when
representing the Latinx community. Both works, while being female-centric, diverge in their
utilization of stereotypes. Medina, in developing her protagonist Piddy Sanchez against her
antagonist, Yaqui Delgado, creates a stark binary between the two; Piddy, as the academically
successful Latina, comes out the victor in contrast to Yaqui’s limited characterization as the
menacing chola. Urman, while depicting Latinx stereotypes such as the sexualized Latina, moves
beyond them to craft characters reflecting the depth within the Latinx community beyond the
stereotypes they are often seen through. Using Medina’s work as the point of departure towards
Urman’s work structures an analysis of the outcomes of representation, positive and negative.
Creating a space for Latinx characters to exist both on the page and screen, while vital in creating
a worldview reflecting the presence of this community, requires a troubling of existing
stereotypes in order to successfully combat the single story of the Latinx community.
Session 5: 4:05-5:20 p.m.
19. Sounding Latinidades: Race, Cultural Citizenship, and In the Heights
Before Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, there was In the Heights, the Tony-award musical
about the New York City neighborhood of Washington Heights and the lives of its Latino
inhabitants aspiring to attain the American dream. With lyrics by Miranda and book by Quiara
Alegría-Hudes, In the Heights stages citizenship, neoliberalism, race, and space through affective
performative dimensions, where citizenship is renegotiated and resisted through sonic
performance. This panel underscores In the Heights as a social document that captures everyday
realities, inscribing history, memory, and culture onto the aural imagination of America. By
identifying points of cross-racial syncretism between shared histories of oppression, Miranda
offers a social commentary on the shared quests for freedom between African American and
Latina/o/x peoples as he illuminates the inter-ethnic coalitions that can be formed in these efforts
for self and community dissident claims to full citizenship in the United States. In an era where
neoliberalism has sought to minimize minority difference, the music and sounds of In the
Heights amplify pan-ethnic notions of Latinidad. Paradoxically, while the music makes racial,
ethnic, and gender differences audible, it also minimizes difference within a universal “common
sense” pursuit of individual freedoms, academic success, and economic mobility. What do the
amplification and reduction of sonic Latinidades in the various productions of In the Heights
teach us about race, racism, and neoliberalism in America? What is distinctive and culturally
constitutive of “American” sound in a country of immigrants? How do inflections of voice
gesture toward other versions of America without voice? How does In the Heights reveal the
significant auditory strategies Latinos implement to confront and inflect American theater with
racial, ethnic, and gender difference?
“Sonic Pan-Ethnicity: Listening in Detail to In the Heights”
Patricia Herrera, University of Richmond
Patricia Herrera’s paper explores how the musical draws from hip hop, salsa, merengue and soul
music to offer a Latina/o/x pan-ethnic framework that illuminates the complex history of racial
relations in neoliberal America. Her work magnifies the sonic compositions of the musical,
including voice, ethnic accents, and sound-producing physical movements, to reveal the
significant auditory strategies that simultaneously amplify and minimize notions of Latinidad.
The paper also incorporates archival research of the performance and soundtrack held at the
NYC Public Library to grapple with methodological questions of how historians read Latinidad
in the aural textures and contours of language.
“‘Lights Up on Washington Heights’: Lin-Manuela Miranda’s Hip Hop Musical Mash-Up of the
American Dream”
Nicole Hodges Persley, University of Kansas
Nicole Hodges Persley’s paper explores the sonic and embodied mash-ups of diverse Latina/o/x
cultural experiences as they relate to sampling and remixing in Miranda’s work. Her paper
amplifies how Miranda’s characters draw from a variety of musical and embodied dance
languages that allow them to connect to, and to overcome via performance, the limitations
imposed on minoritized experiences of American citizenship. By mashing-up Latina/o/x
diasporic immigrant stories with first generation Latina/o/x dreams, a sonic and visual worldview
emerges on stage that is fused much with Hip Hop and Latinidad as it is the cityscape of New
York. Hip Hop becomes a vehicle for Miranda to make forgotten Latino influences in Hip Hop
visible and audible.
“Sounding Authentic: Casting In the Heights beyond Broadway”
Brian E. Herrera, Princeton University
Brian E. Herrera’s paper listens to the restagings of In the Heights beyond Broadway,
particularly exploring the sound of the show when envoiced by multiethnic college ensembles.
Drawing on his unofficial In the Heights viewing tour, Herrera argues that In The Heights
amplifies university theatre programs’ paradoxical status as professional producers and amateur
educational productions. He argues that casting, especially in the university context, should be
embraced as invitations to rigorously explore particular principles of practice—around linguistic
fluency, cultural competence, and creative coalition—that might productively guide those
invested in bringing more Latina/o/x plays to more university stages.
“Listening to Latinidad: Sonic Cultural Citizenship and In the Heights”
Marci R. McMahon, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
Marci R. McMahon’s paper engages with the musical’s staging of “sonic cultural citizenship,” a
phrase she uses to underscore citizenship as performed through sound, and listening as central to
performances of citizenship. In order to critically hear the sonic notes of citizenship in In the
Heights, she closely listens to how the musical stakes claims to belonging and not belonging
through space, race, and gender. With attention to the act of listening, her presentation
underscores the relation between the performance of citizenship and its discourses, and between
its performance and audiencing. In the Heights underscores how audiences must listen critically
and loudly to forward an América in which Latina/o/xs shape the contours of their own
identities.
20. Imagining Black-Brown Solidarity: Forms, Limits, Futures
Recent work such as Gordon Mantler’s Power to the Poor: Black-Brown Coalition and the Fight
for Economic Justice, 1960-1974 (2013) and John D. Márquez’s Black-Brown Solidarity: Racial
Politics in the New Gulf South (2014) have demonstrated that we need a more nuanced
understanding of multiracial coalition, and that instead of hindering coalition, race-based identity
politics are central to alliance-building. While some attention has been paid to Afro-Latinx
literature and identity formations, our panel highlights the shared yet distinct forms of racialethnic oppression and their representation through particular generic conventions in African
American and Latinx literature. This panel examines representations of Black-Brown
imaginaries to explore the tensions between historical archives, national narratives, and
embodied memory. The papers in this panel explore the literary conventions and genres in
African American and Latinx literature to demonstrate the alternative forms of solidarity and
kinship that emerge from placing these traditions in conversation. Moreover, this panel seeks to
showcase how such intersecting violent historical pasts showcase alternative forms of affective
ties and possibilities of Black-Brown solidarity through representations of race-based
imaginaries. The papers in this panel explore several questions, including: What new affective
ties, forms of of kinships, and minoritarian knowledges emerge through Brown-Black solidarity?
Can minoritarian knowledges be imagined without the lens of whiteness and does this
speculative world-building project enable alternative forms of affect? What literary conventions
are necessary and particular for the representation of Black-Brown imaginaries? How do Latin
American conceptions of race offer new possibilities for conceiving blackness and brownness
within the Americas more broadly? Through explorations of a wide-range of authors, including
Cristina García, Roberto Bolaño, Henry Highland Garnet, and Martin R. Delany, this panel
investigates how literary representations of Black-Brown solidarities offer new imaginaries for
our contemporary political moment
.
Chair: Randy Ontiveros, Maryland University
“Slave Narrative and Testimonio in Cristina García’s Monkey Hunting”
Renee Hudson, University of California, San Diego
This paper brings together discussions of slave narrative and testimonio to consider how these
forms of bearing witness offer us new ways to imagine Black/Brown solidarity. Through an
examination of Cristina García’s Monkey Hunting (2003), I demonstrate how García encourages
us to consider the formal aspects of solidarity as she reorients the slave narrative as an African
diasporic genre to a form central to the Americas more broadly by drawing together the literary
conventions of testimonio and slave narrative. Significantly, she does so through the figure of
Chen Pan, a Chinese immigrant who, by occupying a space outside of what might typically be
seen as distinctive Black and Latin American experiences, illuminates forms of solidarity across
literary traditions to demonstrate the interconnected literary and political histories that draw
people together. Considering slave narrative and testimonio together addresses a gap in literary
criticism as little work has been done to examine both traditions despite the shared formal
features of both genres, such as their role in bearing witness to atrocities, the multiple levels of
mediation required to authenticate them, and the ultimate goal of liberation. I contend that by
examining how García incorporates both of these genres into Monkey Hunting, we can see how
she imagines Black/Brown solidarity on a formal level to demonstrate the shared experiences of
oppressed peoples in the Americas and new imaginaries for liberation.
“Rodeado de fantasmas”: Death, Pleasure, and Fragmentation in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666
Maia Gil’Adi, George Washington University
This paper explores the representations of race and post-humanity in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 to
argue that the novel presents the U.S.-Mexico border as the re/producer of material and
metaphorical death and racial expendability. Focusing on the novel’s third section, I argue that
“The Part About Fate” is a crucial aperture for the understanding of Bolaños fragmented,
ruthless, and excessive text, which centers on the Ciudad Juarez femicides. My paper
demonstrates how, as the only African American in the novel, Oscar Fate carries the symbolic
weight of blackness into the U.S.-Mexico border, indexing his body through the violent history
of racialization while enabling the creation of alliances of illegibility between himself and the
murdered women of 2666. Fate’s blackness is a lens through which to examine the female corpse
as an exciting and repelling form that functions as a monstrous symbol of illegality that brings
into question national narratives of belonging and that threatens the border with its walkingdeadness. The Black-Brown kinship established in 2666, however, forecloses the possibility for
social justice and instead relishes in the violence of the border, demonstrating it to be a site of
expendable bodies needed to support a neoliberal system that subsists on institutional death.
“The Colors of Blackness in the Hemispheric Abolitionism of Henry Highland Garnet and
Martin R. Delany”
Jazmín Delgado, University of Pennsylvania
This paper examines mid-nineteenth-century articulations of brownness and blackness in the
abolitionist writings of Henry Highland Garnet and Martin R. Delany, arguing that the capacious
category of what I am calling “coloredness” allowed these thinkers to hold space for the
entanglements and gaps between populations who have been racialized as black, brown, or
indigenous. This conceptual task was prompted by the unique challenges confronting free and
enslaved Black U.S. Americans in the years following the Mexican-American War, a period
which was punctuated by a series of territorial concessions made to slaveholders, key among
them the so-called Compromise of 1850 and its attendant Fugitive Slave Law. The internal and
external boundaries of the nation were proving themselves to be extremely malleable and so
were the racial formations that gave territories their coherence. Indeed, the geographic
coordinates of slave territory were shifting under the very feet of enslaved and free African
Americans alike, precipitating a flurry of black abolitionist writing that limns an emancipatory
vision of black futurity in the age of Manifest Destiny while theorizing the particular
positionality of people of African descent within the widening gyre of settler-colonialism. Garnet
and Delany, key contributors to this body of abolitionist writing, turned their gaze to Latin
America and its “Colored Republics” in order to trace the contours of the blackness of
coloredness and the colors of blackness.
21. Redoubling Consciousness: the Body, Invisibility, and Whiteness in Latinx Literature
“The Double Consciousness of Conquest: Race, Gender and Empire in Esmeralda Santiago’s La
Conquistadora”
Lorna Perez, Buffalo State, SUNY
“To describe and interpret colonial culture means, first of all, to disassemble it, to probe
beneath the official surface and seek out those latent cultural traditions that have been
systematically smothered by the reality of colonial imposition, political despotism and slavery.”
(Juan Flores, “The Puerto Rico that José Luis González Built”; Divided Borders). Esmeralda
Santiago’s 2012 historical novel La Conquistadora is a novel that probes the contradictions of
feminine conquest within the frame of neo-slave narrative. This paper will argue that though
centered on the feminist leanings of Ana Cubillas, the white slave owner, what the novel
ultimately reveals are the machinations of violence inherent in conquest and empire. I argue that
the political work of the novel is not in positioning Ana as a favorable character, but lies in
revealing her violence, her contradictions, and the unnerving assumptions that lie at the heart of
her desire, specifically the colonial imperative manifested through her position as an owner of
both land and people. In other words, though Ana’s position is fraught, the real force that haunts
the novel (in the Derridian sense) is not the nuances of Ana’s feminist agency against patriarchal
norms, rather it is the violence of her ownership. La Conquistadora is a novel of conquest, and
while that conquest is complicated by a female protagonist, the facts of Ana’s racial violence is
heightened, not diminished, by the novel’s gender dynamics.
“A Politics of Invisibility: the Ethno-Racial and Laboring Immigrant Body”
Kristy L.Ulibarri, East Carolina University
At the very end of the 20th century, David Riker directed and produced a series of short films that
came to make up The City/La Ciudad (1999). Two of the shorts, “Bricks” and “Seamstress,”
present immigrant laboring bodies that are invisible, deregulated, privatized, and seemingly
without power. This film marks the launch of the 21st century and the way labor and race become
entangled as pure forms of global capital. Here at the beginning of the new century, we get
narratives, such as Cristina Henriquez’s The Book of Unknown Americans where the labor of the
father figure occurs in the dark recesses of a mushroom factory: the worker must literally labor in
a space of invisibility. Race and ethnicity work more subtly in these texts, through the semiotics
of nation that marks these bodies as genotypically excluded/”foreign” but simultaneously
economically contained within the US. In this paper, I argue that ethno-race and labor become
intertwined because of a politics of invisibility in these texts. While much scholarship has been
done regarding the way undocumented immigrants often must “pass” and live invisibly in the US
due to legal and (sometimes) economic retribution (see Shuman and Bohmer, De Genova), I am
adding to this discussion by thinking about invisibility as the central mode of operation under
global capitalism, regardless of documentation. The City/La Ciudad and The Book of Unknown
Americans demonstrate the way these bodies undergo strategic and political acts of concealment
that begin to define these im/migrant experiences and subjectivities on multiple levels.
“Skin in the Game: Theorizing Whiteness in Latina/o/x Studies”
Victoria Bolf, Loyola University Chicago
In Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit musical Hamilton, the eponymous Alexander Hamilton explains
political wheelings and dealings thus: “When you got skin in the game, you stay in the game/ But
you don’t get to win unless you playin’ the game./ Oh, you get love for it, you get hate for it, /
You get nothin’ if you wait for it.” The lines jump out at me for their pithy descriptiveness; of
unknown origin but richly evocative, is “skin in the game” a reference to Wall Street
investments, as Lee Bebout asserts in his essay of the same name, or is it about sports, skins
versus shirts? Or perhaps it is darker than that, more akin to Shylock’s pound of flesh? The
metaphor is useful precisely for the myriad suggestive possibilities it conjures and withholds. As
a white woman, I am confronted with a similar tongue-tied knowingness when I think about my
own investment in Latinidad. Like the term “Latino/a/x,” terms like “Anglo” or “ally” cover a
range of experiences and identities that benefit from careful and critical analysis, especially when
deployed within Latino/a/x literary criticism. Using Hamilton as a case study, this presentation
will explore possibilities for nuanced engagement of those usually considered “allies” in
movements for racial justice. Just as Hamilton asserts that people of color, immigrants, and
young people have a stake in the project of United States democracy, it also galvanizes white
folks, non-(recent) immigrants, and older people to put their skin in the game of racial justice.
22. John Jay Student Panel
Panelists TBA
Saturday, April 15, 2017
Session 1: 9:00-10:15 a.m.
24. Subversive Irruptions: the Body, Performance, and Activism
“Acts of Resistance: Identity as Bodily Performance in Esmeralda Santiago’s Almost a Woman”
C. Christina Lam, Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY
Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie asserts that “power is the ability not to just tell the
story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.” I thus read Esmeralda
Santiago’s memoir Almost a Woman not simply for its aesthetic value as a work of creative
writing but also for the way it intervenes to expand notions of Latinx subjectivity. The
importance of her-story becomes clear when we acknowledge that Latina/os are often rendered
invisible to the dominant culture only as stereotypes. Santiago’s memoir thus provides a counternarrative “from below” that combats reductive scripts of Latinidad that would otherwise conflate
race and class to put forth a single story. Central to Santiago’s memoir is, I argue, a focus on the
performativity of race and gender that interrogate the ways in which they are constructed.
Furthermore, in her representations of working class realities she takes on such stereotypes as
“hyper-sexualized and fertile Latina welfare mother” to further the kind of critical consciousness
needed to challenge facile scripts of the working poor. In the process of recovering her-story she
complicates what it means to come into womanhood in bilingual and bi-ethnic space to allow for
new social and political possibilities.
“Girls Behaving Badly: Subversion of Hegemonic Gender and Racial Ideals in Contemporary
Hispanic Caribbean [Diasporic] Narratives”
Jennifer E. Irish, Florida State University
In this presentation, I will analyze the presence and use of toy dolls as sites for gender and racial
subversion in contemporary Hispanic Caribbean literature, both from the home nation and its
diaspora in the United States. Puerto Rican author Rosario Ferré’s “Amalia” and DominicanAmerican author Loida Maritza Pérez’s Geographies of Home both feature young women who
are characterized by their families as rebellious. Each girl questions societal expectations
regarding gender and race, prompting different, mostly negative, reactions from her family. Each
receives a toy doll as a gift, which inspires an act of subversion. Expanding on Simone de
Beauvoir’s idea that gender is something learned and not innate, and taking into account W.E.B.
Dubois’ notion of double-consciousness regarding race, I will discuss how the dolls in these
narratives are used to educate young girls on gender roles, customs, and hegemonic racial ideals.
To contextualize these works, I will focus on constructions of gender and race in the Hispanic
Caribbean, namely Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, and their diaspora in the United
States. In both stories, the girls destroy or mutilate their toy dolls in different ways, expressing an
inadequacy or dissatisfaction with the physical appearance of the dolls that they were given. This
destruction and modification of the dolls exposes an underlying rejection of the hegemonic ideals
that the dolls reinforce, and, to utilize theory from Kimberlé Crenshaw, an ultimate recognition
and appreciation of intersectional identities, and thus revealing a shift in identity politics for
Dominican and Puerto Rican women.
“A Home of Our Own: Theory and Literary Activism of Gwendolyn Brooks and Sandra
Cisneros”
Eileen Barrett, California State University, East Bay
“A Home of Our Own” uses autobiography as theory and analyzes commitments of Brooks and
Cisneros to represent the marginalized, create empathic spaces for readers to reimagine their
lives, and inspire work for social change. Brooks’s Maud Martha (1953) depicts communal and
private spaces that convey how a family survives racism in the 1930s. Inspired by Black Arts
and Black Power, Brooks’s In the Mecca (1968) describes a mother’s search for her daughter in
a dilapidated apartment complex. A modern-day Demeter, Mrs. Sallie’s search for Pepita
entangles this lyric in the hallways and rooms of the Mecca housing complex, exploring
segregated, impoverished spaces of Black Americans, emphasizing bonds among women,
obstacles to creativity, and new locations or homes necessary for art and radical social change.
In “Letter to Gwendolyn Brooks,” Cisneros connects Brooks’s Maud with Esperanza in The
House on Mango Street. Both works situate characters in familial and communal spaces; both
artists use spatial imagery in developing marginalized characters. In redefining the space called
home both works exemplify literary activism. Cisneros’s Caramelo or Puro Cuente (2002)
crosses boundaries, questions narration, and challenges genre assumptions; this bilingual,
transgenre narrative mirrors experiences of characters who traverse geographical, cultural, and
political boundaries. In Brooks’s lyric a mother seeks her daughter; in Cisneros’s novel, Celaya
records generations of the Reyes family. Tracing the aesthetic power to the family’s Mexican
village, Cisneros celebrates the art of the rebozo and expands the meaning of home.
25. Racial Innovations: Form, Sexuality, and Imaginative Path-ologies
“Arroz poéticas:” Race, Legality, and Formal Innovation in Javier Huerta’s American Copia”
Jennifer A. Reímer, Bilkent University
This paper explores the racialization of identity for Latinx persons, specifically the category of
“undocumented” person (“illegal alien”), through literary analysis of Latinx literature that probes
the racialization of identity as both historical process and literary aesthetic. In particular, I
propose to examine how Javier Huerta’s cross-genre poetry collection, American Copia: An
Immigrant Epic (2012) participates in the creation of an emerging innovative poetics by LatinX
who combine a tradition of narrative-based lyric poetry with experimental aesthetics that draw
inspiration across the borders of tradition(s), nation(s), language(s) and identities. Through close
reading of the text and historical analysis of U.S. immigration law, I link Huerta’s literary
strategies and innovations to the material realities of racialization as an undocumented Latino in
the United States. While grounded in the poetic traditions of chicanismo, as well as classic
forms such as epic and Keatsian ode, Huerta’s poem pushes the boundaries of such traditions
with his cross-genre poetic prose sentences, bilingual word plays, collage techniques, allusion,
multiplicity, and disjunctive temporality. Huerta fashions, both as spectacle and as form, a new
direction in American poetics that is as abundant and transnational as it is specifically located in
the material realities of being undocumented, of growing up poor, and of being a racial-ethnic
minority in the United States. In combining tradition and innovation, Huerta’s “arroz poéticas”
testifies to the dynamic, transnational nature, not only of social belonging as a raced person in
America, but also of language itself.
“Reproducing the Unproductive: Sexual Excess, Racialized Sexuality, and the ‘Uncivil Other’ in
Chicana Narrative”
Bernadine Hernández, University of New Mexico
As Michel Foucault reminds us, sexuality is a technology of control over certain populations
marked for surveillance through discipline and knowledge production. By extension, sexuality
has always been inextricable from historical processes and the racial, gendered, and classed
distinctions that inform its positionality. This paper interrogates contemporary Chicana
narratives marked by sexual excess and the “unproductive” only to become devalued through
racialized sexuality in contrast to positive representations in other Chicana and Latina narratives.
This paper primarily focuses on Ana Castillo and her newest novel Give It To Me and it
historicizes gender and sexuality from a Chicana feminist theoretical lens and situates the novel
in between two narrative trends in Chicana and Latina literature. In thinking about the shift from
productive racialized sexuality to unproductive, I examine postmodernist theory in order to map
out how the deviant and “uncivil” other is produced in this neoliberal, global moment. In
theorizing the racialized sexual excess for the Chicana body, I argue that the surveillance of
“sexual excess” in neoliberal terms marks certain bodies for death and destruction, which
disguises the inextricable link between race, gender, sexuality, and class. Give It To Me by Ana
Castillo centers the sexually excessive protagonist to interrogate the limits of proper corporeal
containment for Chicana bodies and interrogates how sex and sexuality is not useful for
production for the Chicana body politic.
“'Que India!': Racialization and Pathologization in Daisy Hernandez's A Cup of Water Under My
Bed (2015)”
María J. Durán, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Daisy Hernandez’s A Cup of Water Under My Bed (2015) presents a coming-of-age story that
engages in the complexities of race, sexuality, and language. This paper examines the practices
of racialization by Latina/o immigrants using indigenous referents and the subsequent ways that
non-heteronormative sexuality becomes pathologized in Hernandez’s memoir. As a CubanColombian bisexual/queer American, Hernandez’s encounters with contradictory understandings
of race unfold in conversations with her Colombian Tía Dora, who engages in persistent
racialization when using the phrase, “que india.” Indeed, the phrase “que india/o” is
commonly circulated in Central and South America in ways that attach negative associations to
indigenous groups. On one hand, Tía Dora relies on visible markers on the body to racialize
individuals; on the other hand, she ignores visible “Indian” features and instead racializes
identity based on “uncivilized” behaviors and speech. When Hernandez tells her aunt that she
has kissed a woman, Tía Dora stops speaking to her because she has “used the wrong words.”
Hernandez gets labeled as an india because her wrong words are telling of her deviant sexual
behavior. Tía Dora’s deployment of india demonstrates that the meaning of race is not grounded
in biological essentialism or any static denotation; racism is defined by contradictions, as
Hernandez admits, and thus may never cease to exist. In light of Hernandez’s transnational
experiences, I argue that the memoir’s contradictions of race suggest that the definition of race is
“moving” and thus open to transformation, especially in the face of contemporary resistance and
political contestation.
26. Exilic Imaginaries; States of Estrangement
“At Home Abroad: Josefina Niggli, México de afuera, and Expatriate Citizenship”
Alberto Varon, Indiana University
The Mexican Revolution (~1910-1922) has traditionally been seen as marking a crisis in both
political and social Mexican life; subsequent historians have regarded the Revolution as the
central, formative moment in Mexican modernity. Fleeing the chaos of the Revolution, about one
million Mexicans emigrated to the United States who, to varying degrees, incorporated
themselves into their adopted country. Many of these exiles would begin new ventures or
participate in an already existent, robust, and thriving print culture (primarily in periodicals but
also in other media) where they interjected in American political life during a period when the
nation grappled with its own global involvement. This paper looks at selected writings by
Mexican American journalists against Josefina Niggli’s novel Step Down, Elder Brother (1947)
to examine the expatriate phenomenon known as "mexico de afuera” that emerged during and
after the Mexican Revolution. I situate Niggli’s overlooked novel (usually discounted as local
color) within the tradition of mexico de afuera to interrogate how she trades on the ambiguous
status of “Mexican American” as a gendered category of both race and citizenship. While much
ink has been given to expatriate American white authors, far less has been said about how
Mexican Americans participated in debates about the nation’s role as an emerging leader among
nations in the postWWII global order. As Niggli’s writing helps show, in the mid-twentieth
century, Mexican Americans were concerned with the seeming contradiction between domestic
and foreign, between native and immigrant, a form of manhood I call “expatriate citizenship.”
Reading Niggli demonstrates a more robust and divergent Latinx creative expression than the
legacy of the post-civil rights movement suggests, and my reading places Niggli within a longer
history of women Latina writers and within American literary modernism. For her many white
and Latinx readers, Niggli’s novel helped them deliberate on their own nation’s place as an
emergent global superpower and the contradictions posed between exported democracy, its
attendant rise of capitalist economies, and multifaceted citizenship.
“Outcast from the Patria: Lorenzo de Zavala and U.S. Democracy”
Evelyn Soto, University of Pennsylvania
This paper will focus on a theoretical and ethnographic study of U.S. democracy by an exile of
Mexico’s post-independence turmoil: in 1834, Lorenzo de Zavala published Viaje a los EstadosUnidos del Norte de América / Journey to the United States of America. Not only does Zavala’s
text predate Tocqueville’s well-known Democracy in America (1835), the study provides a
glimpse into early interrogations of social belonging and difference, political traditions, and
cultural distinctions across the Americas that create an opportunity to reflect on the beginnings of
a Latinx experience. For Zavala, such an experience was defined at the crossroads of U.S.
American political thought and Spanish American customs. This approach to reading a Latinx
experience in the nineteenth century is indebted to the work of Rodrigo Lazo, Kirsten SilvaGuesz, and Raúl Coronado, among many others, who consider the multiplicity of meanings and
experiences of “Latinx” in a broader historical span of time in order to better theorize our
present. In his Viaje a los Estados Unidos, Zavala often risks reiterating the discourse of the
Spanish Black Legend: a racialized account of Spanish America’s backwardness, dependence on
the U.S., and teleological progression towards U.S. democratic principles. I argue that Zavala
ventriloquizes this racializing discourse as a way to reckon with the ongoing legacy of Spanish
imperialism in Mexico, on the one hand, and to theorize both the possibilities and impasses for
“a combined regimen of the American system and Spanish customs and traditions,” on the other
(194).
“Cecile Pineda: The Undisciplined Subject”
John Waldron, University of Vermont
John Waldron, in “Cecile Pineda: The Undisciplined Subject,” examines Pineda’s work as an
undisciplined challenge to us as readers. Rather than telling stories about herself and her family
of immigrants who came to the U.S. to avoid the ravages of the Mexican Revolution, Pineda
forces us to inhabit the thoughts and see the world through the perspectives of subjects who
undergo radical transformations (Face, Fishlight or Bardo 99) or who confront shattering realities
(Bardo 99, Redoubt, Frieze). Pineda’s work asks not that we locate her work using signs of her
disciplinary difference, but rather that we identify with the lack at the core of her characters’ and
our own being. The result is that the disciplinary structures used to domesticate the untamable
are revealed to be incomplete and unfinished, and Pineda allows us to imagine new, more
malleable constructs that allow for the recognition and inclusion of true, undisciplined
difference.
27. Translating History: the Elision of Race in the Puerto Rican Imaginary
“Jesús Colón: A Puerto Rican in New York Writing about Race in the 1950’s”
Melissa Coss Aquino, Bronx Community College, CUNY
Born in Cayey, Puerto Rico in 1901, Jesús Colón arrives in New York City in 1918. He is one of
the earliest arrivals and unquestionably one of the most influential on the formation of an early
Puerto Rican literary, cultural and political landscape in New York City. In his first collection A
Puerto Rican in New York, published in 1961, though many were written in the 30s and 40s, six
of the vignettes deal directly with encountering racism, but there is no mention of race in the
titles. They have titles like “Kipling and I , “Hiawatha in Spanish”, “Little Things are Big,” “The
Mother , The Daughter and Myself” , “She Actually Pinched Me” and “Greetings from
Washington.” In these vignettes he explores racism as a black Puerto Rican, but the titles offer
little hint of the content. In complete contrast the vignettes collected in The Way it Was ( and
published posthumously) have titles like “Little Rock,” “The Negro in Puerto Rican History,”
“The Negro in Puerto Rico Today” and “Arthur Schomburg and Negro History.” This
presentation will explore Colón’s continuously evolving stance on writing about solidarity and
consciousness around race, and the Puerto Rican struggle as being directly linked with the racial
struggles of African Americans in the United States, and more broadly the African Diaspora all
over the world.
“Erasing Race: Translating Out the “Afro” in René Marqués’s La Carreta/The Oxcart”
Bret Maney, Lehman College, CUNY
Considered one of the highpoints of twentieth-century Puerto Rican literature, René Marqués’s
1953 play La Carreta has nonetheless come under withering criticism from Latin@ critics and
writers due to its elitism, essentializing linkage of puertorriqueñidad with rural life, and negative
representation of diasporic Puerto Ricans. This paper opens up the possibility for a revised
estimate of the politics of Marqués’s play by arguing that the English translation of La Carreta
(The Oxcart) has obfuscated the Spanish original’s early articulation of U.S. Afro-Latin@
experience. In effect, the sole published English translation, which served as the basis for
performances in New York starting in the late 1960s, has distorted La Carreta’s complex
treatment of race. Most notably, the translation expunges the racialized component of a scene of
police brutality involving a black Puerto Rican and omits a long speech in which a Puerto Rican
character expresses solidarity with Southern blacks living under Jim Crow after she attends a
civil rights gathering in Harlem. The translation’s scrubbing of markers of Afro-Latinidad and
Puerto Rican-African American solidarity is systematic, a fact that is striking given that the
English-language version of the play was the first work performed by the progressive Puerto
Rican Traveling Theater (PRTT) and played to mixed ethnic audiences across the city. What
purpose could this racial erasure have had other than diminishing the cultural work that the
PRTT’s staging of the play was meant to do? In addition to exploring the ramifications of the
ideologically suspect English translation on the politics and reception of the play, my paper
investigates the possible motives for these stunning erasures through interviews and archival
research. Finally, in its overall thrust, the paper makes a case for the retranslation of this classic
play, one that would restore La Carreta’s vigorous early representation of Afro-Latin@
experience in midcentury New York.
“The Invisible History of Race at the Willowbrook State School, Staten Island, New York: 19471975”
Jorge Matos, Hostos Community College
This paper will discuss the topic of race in the history of the infamous Willowbrook State School
in Staten Island, New York. The name Willowbrook is recognized in Disability Rights History as
a pivotal milestone in exposing the inhumane treatment of the mentally and developmentally
challenged. In early 1972, a young reporter by the name of Geraldo Rivera revealed in a
televised exposé, Willowbrook: The Last Great Disgrace, to a shocked national audience, the
appalling living conditions in which over five thousand children and adults lived inside the
nation’s largest mental institution. The legal and social struggles which ensued to close asylums
and provide alternative services for the disabled became a centerpiece of the national disability
rights movement. But conspicuously absent, is that a disproportionate number of the hospital’s
residents were of Puerto Rican and African-American descent, comprising the largest minority
population of any asylum in New York State. This major omission goes unnoticed despite the
multiple intersections between race and class in the history of Willowbrook and its aftermath. I
will explore how a historical incident of such magnitude where both Puerto Rican/Latin@s and
African-Americans were present as residents, staff and activists was largely ignored in both
communities. How such a silence occurred in the heyday of the liberationist narrative of the Civil
Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement and Puerto Rican/Latino social movements such
as the Young Lords Party will be examined. I will argue for a re-evaluation of race and the
disabled body in the aforementioned struggles and fields of Disability Studies, Puerto
Rican/Latin@ Studies and African-American Studies.
28. John Jay College student panel
Session 2: 10:25-11:40 a.m.
29. Racial Protagonisms in US Cuban Literary and Cultural Studies
The proposed panel offers four quite distinct examples of overlooked, understudied and occluded
instances of complex racial interaction, tension and play in Cuban American literary and cultural
studies. They range from a historical account of immigrant political organizing in Afro-Cuban
New York City in the early- to mid-twentieth century, to an excavation of the cultural and
material history (from indigenous origins to current, ongoing impact) of the engineered canals
that run through and define Cuban Hialeah, to the gap in critical attention to the post-Cold War
journeys of Cuban and Guatemalan “testimonial” texts in US based Latin(o) American literary
studies, to a cultural and performance studies account of the practice of blackface by Cuban
American comedian-performers in Miami in the early twenty first century. “Protagonisms” here
signifies a common theme of refusing the imbedded logics of “Antagonism” in characterizing the
long history of black, white and indigenous racial politics in the context of US-Cuba relations:
organizations like El Club Mella model black-white racial integration in mid-century New York;
Hialeah as “canal zone” helps to render materially the indigenous roots of the urban and cultural
conditions that anchored Cuba onto US ground and launched countless Cubans into the America
beyond its borders; post-Cold War culture in the US exhibits Cuban traces that link to those of
other Latin American countries differently caught in the Cold War matrix, as well as in
prevailing racial matrices, thereby exceeding the dialectical logics of communism versus
capitalism, revolution versus exile, white versus black versus indigenous; blackface as practiced
by white Cuban performers makes a dramatic reappearance on Spanish-language television in
Obama-era Miami. The panel as a whole hopes to serve as an analytical intervention critical of
conventionally reflexive habits of racial thought in US-Cuban studies, and an opportunity to
model alternative modes of reflection, critique, and imagination regarding the still-imperceptible
horizon of the Cuban-American racial reality still in the process of becoming.
Chair: Antonio López, George Washington University
“Televising Blackface in 21st Century Miami”
Albert Laguna, American Studies, Yale University
Though blackface performances draw quick, widespread condemnation in mainstream US
popular culture, they continue to play a visible role on Spanish-language television shows in
South Florida catering to the area’s large Cuban population. This paper examines particular
moments of blackface performance to engage the following questions: 1. What has been the role
of blackface in Cuban popular culture historically? 2. What is the place of blackface in an
increasingly diverse Cuban Miami? 3. What does blackface in 21st century Miami tell us about a
Cuban Miami whose demographic makeup has shifted dramatically with heavy migration from
the island since 1994? To do this work, I will focus primarily on a blackface character named
Mañeña featured frequently on a channel called América Tevé in 2010. Focusing on Mañeña,
played by island-based actor Osvaldo Doimeadiós, provides an opportunity to engage with the
questions above and to speak to how warming relations between the US and Cuba and economic
interests on both sides are deeply affecting the circulation and production of
Cuban popular culture on and off the island.
“Indigeneity, Canals, and the Fiction of a Cuban South Florida”
Antonio López, English, George Washington University
I am interested in how Hialeah, Florida, has taken shape as a center of the Cuban diaspora in the
U.S. in ways that are irrevocably linked to indigeneity, the environment, and fictional
narrative. We can begin by noting that Hialeah is the South Florida place that, perhaps more than
any other, both island and U.S. Cubans (love to) call home, want to come to at all costs, and want
to abandon as soon as possible, usually in a proof of upward mobility. These competing desires,
trained on geographic space and unresolved as they are, establish a foundation for the low and
dirty, ribald and funny schemes that Hialeah living offers those who outright claim, sidle up to,
or deny its homeland capacities. This talk offers a literary-formalist and historicist reflection on
the indigenous and eco-material environments of the city and their mannered, self-disclosing
agency in the realities of the world and fictional narrative. The indigenous and eco-material signs
I focus on are the longstanding Mikasuki presence in what becomes the city and two Hialeah
early- to mid-twentieth-century canals: the one that runs along Okeechobee Road and, from
there, north through the heart of the state, and the one that runs behind the iconic Westland Mall
(Cuban America’s version of the Sherman Oaks Galleria). Mikasuki people inhabit the Hialeah
zone at least as far back as the early 19th century, resisting Hispano- and Anglo-white settler
colonialisms; by the 20th century, they become acceptable, sales-promoting others to real-estate
and tourism sectors. Meanwhile, canals are land speculation’s literal channeling of indigenous
land (and the land itself as eco-material agent) in the interests of anti-black development. These
“dirty-water” channels are inflexible in their construction and purpose, and, as such, they prove a
burden to dialogue with: They are a certain depth, they are straight, and they play one function,
to manage still the drainage of the Everglades that once upon a time and today continues to make
the city of Hialeah possible. Within those limits, fictional narrative—in this particular instance,
that of Jennine Capó Crucet, a Hialeah local—comes as many a hopeful, self-defeating
dialoguera has come before: To call and respond to a form, in the canal and its indigenous
associations, that doesn't seem to want to talk back. My talk shows that in the challenging back
and forth between indigeneity, canals, and literary representation there is another contribution to
the culture and history of Cuban South Florida in what I call the fictions of the Hialeah Canal
Zone. A sign of the human-engineered drainage that once cut into the swamp and its Mikasuki
past and now flows as dirtiness and eyesore, the Hialeah Canal Zone imagines Cuban Americans
as latter-day participants in a scene of settler-colonial (and, indeed, species) supremacy on the
raggedy, once (and future) submerged tip of the Florida peninsula.
“Archival Disappeared: The Unknowable History of El Club Julio Antonio Mella in New York,
1932-1940”
Nancy Raquel Mirabal, American Studies, University of Maryland
In February of 1932 the Spanish-speaking members of the Cervantes Fraternal Society of the
International Worker’s Order-a Communist Party affiliated mutual aid fraternal societyestablished logia (lodge) 4763 also known as El Club Julio Antonio Mella. El Club Mella, as it
was commonly known lasted only eight years before it was merged with other Spanish speaking
logias in the city. Organized precisely at the moment the Cuban people were under the tyrannical
regime of the Machado government, the racially integrated, Club Mella emerged as one of the
most influential and radical logias in the city. According to the report authored by the National
Committee of the Hispanic Section of the IWO, there were no clubs in the United States for
Cuban residents who wanted to protest and challenge the Machadato. Once El Club Mella was
formed the report claimed that “thousands of workers, many of them Cuban” as well as those
who had been “exiled for political reasons,” joined the club. El Club Mella was both reminiscent
and a departure from the Cuban political clubs formed in the nineteenth century to fight Spanish
colonial rule and establish Cuban independence. While on the one hand, they employed
Cubanidad as a site of belonging and community formation, on the other, they considered
themselves to be an integral part of a racially inclusive Spanish-speaking community in New
York. No longer invested in the politics of return, the members of El Club Mella articulated and
fashioned a diasporic politics that included support of labor and labor unions, racial and gender
equality, immigrant rights, and fighting Fascism, including sending members to Spain to fight
against General Francisco Franco. In addition to El Club Mella, Cubans in New York also
formed the Organización Revolucionaria Cubana Anti-imperalista (ORCA) and El Club Martí.
Both clubs were organized in Harlem in 1935. At the same time, members of ORCA published
the short-lived but widely disseminated newspaper, Frente Único. In examining the history of El
Club Julio Antonio Mella, this paper interrogates the trajectory of Cuban diasporic
historiography, especially one that has yet to fully examine and synthesize the impact of AfroCuban political and cultural productions in New York. It provides a critical reading of the
politics of archives, and theorizes the unknowable and the unthinkable as important strategies for
understanding why certain histories, especially those that challenge traditional discourses and
historical narratives, are silenced and marginalized. And finally, it argues that by acknowledging
and integrating such histories, we expand our reading of what constitutes Latinx history, present,
and future.
“The Racial Crucible of Genre: Reinaldo Arenas, Rigoberta Menchú and Literary Practice
“After” Testimonio”
Ricardo Ortiz, English, Georgetown University
This paper argues that much can be learned by going back to the moment in literary and cultural
history when Rigoberta Menchú’s famous 1983 testimonio I, Rigoberta Menchú had emerged as
a touchstone of both the Cold War and of the culture wars raging in the Reagan-era United
States, and juxtaposing that event with the parallel appearance, roughly a decade later, of another
non-fiction testimony of precarious life in a Latin American country also wracked by the violent
collateral, bio-political and racial traumas of US Cold War policy in the region, Reinaldo
Arenas’ posthumously published memoir, Before Night Falls. The paper will focus on It will
focus on the remarkably analogous and remarkably uneven histories of critical reception of these
two texts, primarily in the US based fields of Latin American and US Latino literary and cultural
studies; the marked racial asymmetries at work in these histories of critical reception, for
example, determine how Menchu’s indigeneity can so fully ground her text’s claims to truth and
authenticity while Arenas’ whiteness, indeed his racial status as such, radically evanesces in
favor of his queerness and eventually his status as a person with AIDS. This analysis will trouble
and complicate what are often rendered as dialectical dynamics of political, philosophical and
aesthetic argumentation that passively mimic the larger dialectical logics of the global and
regional Cold War (and its aftermaths) in general. It argues that a productively “queering”
triangulation happens when we pit Arenas’ testimonial gestures alongside and against Menchú’s,
especially as those gestures play out in North American intellectual, institutional and ideological
contexts where the generic instabilities of both texts, indeed their parallel failures as testimonio,
produce opportunities for critical intervention that resist and exceed any expectations that the
prevailing dialectical logics of the Cold War, and the prevailing dialectical logics of “race,”
especially in the New World, can do anything to explain the political, racial, cultural and
aesthetic formations that have survived it. The paper will briefly trace the considerable history of
critical engagements of each testimonio to highlight how in each case the absence of reference to
the other haunts any attempt on either critical project’s part to tell the whole truth about
testimonio, or about its discursive foil, “literature.” It concludes with a brief aside regarding
Cristina García’s 2010 novel, The Lady Matador’s Hotel, written by an iconic Cuban American
writer of fiction, set in an unnamed Cental American capital that could only be Guatemala City,
and featuring at least one Cuban character who resembles Arenas enough, and one Guatemalan
character (among many) who resembles Menchú enough; García, I will suggest in concluding,
thereby offers us her own triangulating, tri-alectical alternative approach to thinking the through
the worst, often most local and intimate, legacies of Cold War violence, and its racial corollaries,
as a once-general condition of life, through a discursive and aesthetic practice that refuses to
choose between criticism, and testimonio, and literature.
30. Fashioning the Racialized Subject: Aesthetics, Power, and the Politics of Style
This panel brings together three different perspectives on the centrality of aesthetics and politics
in Latina/o cultural production. Animated by the methods of close reading and textual analysis,
all three are driven by an attention to the importance of style. This focus on the formal is
centered on the question of how power is articulated and embodied in the texualized bodies of
Chicanas (in two of the three papers), as well as how power shapes affect in each of the texts
under consideration. Julie Avril Minich’s paper on Chicana Fat Aesthetics focusses on the body
of work produced by two fat-identified Chicana artists, Laura Aguilar and Virgie Tovar, whose
work centers on their bodies. Minich’s articulation of questions of the power dynamics of
reading and interpretation of these bodies are central to the questions that this panel explores.
Ralph Rodriguez’s paper examines the formal choices Ana Menéndez makes in her short story
“Why We Left” to explore questions of distance and intimacy, memory and narrative coercion,
that are stylized in the use of particular pronouns. Eliza Rodriguez y Gibson’s examination of
Helena Maria Viramontes’s novel, Their Dogs Came With Them centers both narrative style as
well as the fashions of clothing that characterize the four Chicana protagonists. Rodriguez y
Gibson suggests that both fashion and literary style encapsulate the centrality of formal and
stylistic concerns in Viramontes’s articulation of Chicana subjectivity, and that there is no
articulation of Chicana subjectivity outside of style. Taken together, these three papers suggest
that discussions of power and cultural politics benefit from the methods of close literary
analysis—and that style makes the (racialized wo)man.
Chair: Eliza Rodríguez y Gibson, Loyola Marymount University
“Chicana Fat Aesthetics”
Julie Avril Minich, University of Texas at Austin
This talk unravels connections between the construction of race, normative beauty ideals, and
dominant conceptions of health, using the framework of disability studies to illuminate how
panic over the so-called obesity epidemic functions as a technology of racialization. I understand
obesity panic as a manifestation of what disability theorist Robert McRuer calls compulsory
able-bodiedness, or the belief that an able body is an unquestioned social good, that everyone
can and should preserve their bodies in a state of maximum ability, and that health maintenance
is a criteria of good citizenship. The fat-identified Chicana artists Virgie Tovar and Laura
Aguilar resist compulsory able-bodiedness by reimagining the fat Mexican body and challenging
its subordinate place in the U.S. body politic. Disrupting a presumed correlation between beauty
and (perceived) health, Tovar and Aguilar advance a Chicana fat aesthetic that offers new
possibilities for valuing diverse bodies.
“From Where I Stand: Intimacy and Distance in Ana Menéndez’s ‘Why We Left’”
Ralph E. Rodriguez, Brown University
Ana Menéndez’s unusual and compelling story “Why We Left,” from her collection In Cuba I
Was a German Shepherd, details the lives of characters in the wake of the Cuban revolution.
Many of the characters speak of the loss of homeland in the wake of the revolution; they deal
with the plight of living in exile, of having been a regal German Shepherd in Cuba, but only a
degraded mutt in the United States; they wrestle with the complications of family, and a
persistent theme throughout is memory—its nostalgia, its capacity to misremember, and the
illusions it creates. In a collection of exquisite stories, “Why We Left,” however, stands out as
special for a number of formal reasons, and those formal matters—especially the use of pronouns
and how they influence the affective experience of the story—are what I analyze in this paper.
I examine the intimate, and perhaps coercive, act narrators perform in wrangling the reader into
their stories. What does it do, for instance, to use that intimate first-person plural gesture of we to
denote narrator and reader? What does it do to narrate a first-person self (I) through the secondperson pronoun you? What happens when characters are never named, but instead labelled
exclusively you and I? From its very title, Menéndez plants a number of dramatic questions in
the reader’s mind: Who is the we? From where have they left? And why have they left? We
know, that is, what we are reading toward in this story, but the answers we are not what we
might expect.
“Styling the Subject in Their Dogs Came With Them”
Eliza Rodríguez y Gibson, Loyola Marymount University
Written in Helena María Viramontes’s signature style that foregrounds the subjectivity of her
principle characters, Their Dogs Came With Them is an elliptical narrative that forms a chain of
interlinked lives in East LA in the 1960s; four young Chicanas who whose lives are marked by
alienation from each other and themselves. The effect of the tale, which is told from multiple
points of view, is simultaneously fragmentary when viewed up close and mosaic-like when seen
from a distance. This embedding of each person's life within many others creates connections
that, while sometimes invisible to the characters themselves, are legible to the reader as repeated
fragments and phrases. In this paper, I’m interested in the manner in which ethics and aesthetics
sustain each other—and more precisely the ways in which style articulates subjectivity—put
another way, I suggest that there is no subjectivity outside of literary style. Viramontes’s formal
manipulations of temporality and the subsequent the refraction of narrative point of view creates
an image-driven and cinematic sensibility, which articulates a particularly gendered, classed, and
racialized relational subjectivity. Moreover, this fashioning of selfhood is further reflected in the
particularities of dress that characterize the novel’s four Chicana protagonists. Style—as in
fashion, and style as in literary form are central concerns in this novel’s articulation of Chicana
subjectivity.
31. Race in/as the Future: Gender, Sex, and the Language of Encounter
“Using Chicanafuturism for Utopian Dreaming: Mestizaje of Language and Religion in Ernest
Hogan's High Aztech”
Iracema M. Quintero, Texas Tech University
My presentation “Using Chicanafuturism for Utopian Dreaming: Mestizaje of Language and
Religion in Ernest Hogan's High Aztech” presents a closed reading of Ernest Hogan’s
Chicanafuturist novel High Aztech. I engage in Hogan’s use of mestizaje and indigenismo in
language and religion to assert that Hogan creates a mestiza consciousness to establish a utopic
state in the novel. I first examine the significance of Hogan’s Aztequisms—slang phrases mixed
in Spanish, English, and Náhuatl—which challenge the practice of maintaining power with a
pure language. This hybridized language incorporates the forgotten indigenous Aztec language
alongside dominant Spanish and English. Then, I explore the cohabitation of multiple faith
viruses in a single host as a challenge to religious colonization. High Aztech follows Xólotl, the
main character, on his chaotic journey of religious contamination, internalization of religious
codes, and religious self-awareness. Xólotl, in the end, embraces all faiths and provides readers
with an egalitarian, utopian worldview. This critical analysis offers a deconstructive approach to
colonization using Catherine Ramirez’s Chicanafuturism genre, Gloria Anzaldúa’s new mestiza
consciousness, and Chela Sandoval’s differential oppositional consciousness as the tools for
enacting a utopic state in the novel. The Chicanafuturism genre has created an avenue for the
marginalized, especially the Indigenous, to use utopia or dystopia to challenge established views
of nationhood and colonization. My article extends the discussion of High Aztech’s
Chicanafuturist features and argues that the mestizaje of language and religion not only provides
a Chicana/o space but also establishes a visionary fiction illustrating utopian possibilities.
“Digitizing Dominican Blackness: Explorations of the Linguistic and Semiotic Strategies of
Dominican Online Content Producers”
Saudi Garcia, New York University
This paper uses linguistic and semiotic approach to examine the tactics that Dominican content
producers in digital public spheres engage to communicate message about blackness in the
context of contemporary Dominican society. The paper first examines the images and
commentary on “Dominicans Be Like,” a Facebook community with a large following, to
understand the inner workings of racialization in the digital era, and in the context of the
hegemonic discourses of racial democracy in Latin American and color blindness in the United
States. Then, the paper turns to a discussions of the Dominican digital sphere’s meme-based
responses to the racial discrimination case that unfolded around political science and scholarship
applicant Nicky Gonzalez in July 2016. This paper theorizes the significance of the different
tactics that content producers use to exploit the affordances of digital platforms, in particular
Facebook and Instagram, to communicate complex messages that support and subvert the racial
hierarchies that organize Dominican society.
“(En)Counter Narratives: Black, White, and Brown Racialized and Sexualized Rhetoric”
Christopher Rivera, Essex County College
Satire and parody historically have been critical ways minority voices, or, as Juan Flores refers to
it as, voices “from below,” deal with societal injustices. There is nothing new in the notion that
to the victors go the spoils. That is to say, those throughout history that have had the
privilege/power to narrate and document history from their perspectives created a sense of racial,
ethnic, national and sexual ideological permanence that continues to remain dominant even
today. The social constructions of race, ethnicity, sexuality and nationality are actively
problematized by disempowered individuals and groups who hope to raise awareness and
challenge these same social metanarratives that define/categorize bodies of color in
contemporary representations. This paper will unmask ideological understandings of race,
ethnicity, sexuality, and nationalism through close reading Edwidge Danticat’s construction of
Haitian vs. Dominican identity in The Farming of Bones (1998), Eduardo del Río’s (also known
professionally as Rius) political cartoons that deal with U.S. national identity vs. mexicanidad
compiled in machismo, feminismo, homosexualismo (2000) and The Latino Comedy Project’s
focus on the dangerous of immigration in 300 (2007) and, their most recent socio-political
commentary, Pachanga for Trump (2016). I utilize these texts in order to show how in historical
fiction, political cartoons, and scripted performances, the color line is both normalized and
queered, following Siobhan B. Somerville’ publication, Queering the Color Line (2000).
Applying a queer reading of race, ethnicity, and nationality opens up new avenues to discuss
both the real and imagined meanings of difference in U.S.
32. Genre, Race, and the Aesthetics of Diaspora
“Gender, Genre and Postrace Tolkien Aesthetics in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of
Oscar Wao”
Angie Bonilla, University of California, Santa Cruz
I utilize Jose Saldivar’s idea of “postrace aesthetics” to conceptualize Junot Díaz’s The Brief
Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as a postrace speculative fiction that sits at the crux of a diasporic
discourse on speculative realism and historical fantasy, gender and race, and narrative and
coloniality. These shifting frameworks, seen through Díaz’s citation of a fantastic Tolkien
universe, I argue, opens up the possibility of a queer futurity, what José Muñoz calls a reality
“not yet here,” that, nevertheless, resonates in the present social imaginary of the Dominican
Republic and, more broadly, transnational latinidades. Postmodern critics have argued that the
J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings simultaneously represses and evokes the historical
and colonial. While Tolkien and the discourse surrounding his work have silenced these
discourses, including the categories of gender and race, I apply a cultural studies/postmodern
critique to the Díaz/Tolkien fantastic imaginary to fill in those historical silences and, thus,
recharge Tolkien with an ethical and political value. Both writer’s investment in fantasy reveals a
larger, male-centered, and heteronormative cultural desire for intimacy and belonging that
transcends typical boundaries of gender, genre and race. As a central presence in Díaz’s novel,
Oscar’s portrayal of genre nerdiness epitomizes this desire, giving way to a future queer space of
radical Latinx lives and masculinities.
“Desarrollando un(a) estétic@ transgénero en la diáspora”
Stephanie Contreras, Florida State University
La revista de historietas Sexile (2004) de Jaime Cortez es un testimonio gráfico que relata la vida
de Adela Vázquez, una cubana transgénero exiliada a los Estados Unidos. El testimonio usa
dibujos para representar la formación transgénero de Jorge a Adela durante su diáspora. En
conjunto con la adaptación textual de “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above The Village of
Chamounix Performing Transgender Rage” por Susan Stryker, propongo que el uso de los
dibujos de Cortez y la representación de Stryker crean un espacio visual, fuera de los límites de
lenguaje, para captar la esencia del ser transgénero y desarrollar un(a) estétic@ transgénero.
Cortez y Stryker defienden un estético nuevo de la belleza —“this beautiful freak body”— para
colocar al ser transgénero y darle un espacio de visibilidad, articulación y transformación. De
modo que desean crear un espacio para poder exponer las construcciones socioculturales de
género y las formas de violencia y transgresiones que se infligen a los que no caen dentro de
estas construcciones. Usando ambos textos, explico que el espacio de transición y progreso para
la identidad del ser transgénero se encuentra en la representación de estar sumergido bajo el
agua; para Adela, se encuentra en el espacio entre Cuba y los Estados Unidos.
"Transatlantic Diasporas in Latinidad"
Sarah Quesada, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
What is the new direction of Latinx theory within the comparative framework of
multiculturalism? As Juan Poblete has asserted, Chicanx (and by extension, Latinx) and AfricanAmerican studies have seen a polarization by virtue of “cultural and nationalistic autonomy.”
The integration of Latin American and Latinx studies has long been debated. At the same time,
African studies struggles against isolation as new research surfaces. One of the main goals of a
inclusive comparatism has always been to seek lines of inquiry that assuage the trauma of what
Gloria Anzaldúa calls, “una herida abierta” (“where the Third World grates against the first and
bleeds”). As a response to these multicultural disciplinary disjunctions, this paper draws from the
works of Latinx’s Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me Ultima, and Dahlma Llanos Figueroa’s Daughters
of the Stone and well as Guinean Camara Laye’s L’enfant noir (The African Child). It seeks
textual ontologies and epistemologies that meditate on the common denominator between the
three axes mentioned in an exploration of cosmology, informed by gender and race. This paper
considers the historical diaspora of Afro-Latinxs during the Atlantic World formation and
stretches its consequences into the 21st century. As a result, it pushes the limits of Latinidad into
conversation with West Africa. Specifically, I use anthropological query to find how African
spiritual sites conceptualize a new dimension in Latinx narratives: mainly, to see these narratives
as “textual” sites of consolation for the Latinx African Diaspora. I conclude by highlighting
Afrolatinidad as an organizing principle that guides the much-needed vector between Latinidad,
Latin America and West Africa.
33. Brown & Queer Aesthetics: Animals, Objects, Plants, & Cyborgs, Part 1
What does it mean to be marked as something other, other than human? And how does one
rigorously engage with brownness and queerness when the subject is not at the center of a critical
inquiry of existence? This panel is interested in placing pressure on the conditions and
boundaries of racialized and sexualized ontologies by turning to animality, objecthood, ecology,
and cybernetics in literature, performance, and aesthetics.
Panel Chair: Sandra Ruiz, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
“The Resentimentality of Latinidad in Richard Rodriguez’s Brown”
Joshua Javier Guzmán, University of Colorado-Boulder
For many scholars in Latino studies, Richard Rodriguez stands as an aberration within Chicano
and Latino literary history. In the 1980s, Rodriguez was lauded as the perfect minority from the
U.S. far-right after having built his early career as a public intellectual on the premises of
undermining racial discourse, while proclaiming a robust mode of shame around his meztizo
identity. This came in direct conflict with the bourgeoning multicultural America that at once
sought the voices of people of color in order to meld them together under the utopian fantasy of a
post-racial America. In contrast, Rodriguez rose from the hangover of the Brown power
movement and denounced bilingual education and affirmative action programs thereby standing
as the primary (brown) face of racial uplift ideology under Reagan’s America. By 2002 and with
the publication of his collection of essays on brownness, Rodriguez will come to offer what
many critics have criticized as a precious formalism in his thinking of race in America. By
emptying the historical contents by which race has come to figure primarily as a technology of
control, Rodriguez treads the line between romanticizing its formal qualities while
simultaneously disavowing his own racial identity. This paper will linger with Rodriguez’s
Brown to argue that in fact a deep seeded ambivalence permeates the text’s formal investigation
into identity politics in order to foreground an aesthetics of resentimentality—an aesthetic
practice that undermines itself in spite of its insistence on sentimentality.
"Everything Becomes Form": The Racial Quotidian in Paul Pescador's Crushes”
Iván A. Ramos, University of California Riverside
This paper examines the work of multi-disciplinary Los Angeles based artist and writer Paul
Pescador. In particular, I show how Pescador uses the minor—in his writings, use of found
objects, and performance practice—to explore the racial and queer valences of what the artist
names as being “stuck on daily experience.” Pescador’s work, I argue, dwells at the margins of
experience to grapple with the quotidian absurdity of identity. How does Pescador’s approach to
materiality deploy what José Esteban Muñoz called the “sense of brown” as an attachment to
discarded or ephemeral objects, moments, affects? The essay focuses in particular on Pescador’s
series Crushes. The series consists of a novella, photographs, and a feature length experimental
film that reach the personal by circumventing the autobiographical. Instead, Pescador offers
written fragments of moments, photographs of found objects, and a non-narrative film to evade
the pitfalls of identity and narrative instead offering a vocabulary for the series of evanescent
moments that define the queer racialized subject. I draw from what Lauren Berlant calls the
“counterpolitics of the silly object” and Yu Jon Kim’s notion of the racial mundane to explore
how irreverence, playfulness, and the fragmentary offer an alternative account of queer
Latinidad. This account, ultimately aimless in its goal, offers novel possibilities for thinking
queerness and race beyond the demands of belonging.
“Amorphous Amalgamation in the Work of Firelei Báez and Wangechi Mutu”
Leticia Alvarado, Brown University
In her solo exhibition, Bloodlines, Dominican born artist Firelei Báez presents amorphous
amalgamations of flora and fauna that reconfigure models of resistant organisms beyond human
analytic frames. This paper deploys brownness as a queer analytic in comparative analysis of
Báez’s amalgamations and the amorphous figures in the work of Nairobi-born artist, Wangechi
Mutu. Aesthetically, both artists share the use of constricted, patterned color fields in the
rendering of eroticized, racialized and gendered presentations of colonial encounters. The figures
they render are neither wholly human, animal or plant but rather organic amalgamations marked
as much by race and sexuality as they are by their inhumanity. Geographically, Báez and Mutu
share a city—New York—working within local art markets that exceed national boundaries and
regulations. In this paper, the queer analytic of brownness will illuminate anticolonial aesthetics
forged by multiple displacements that, following Lisa Lowe, underscore intimacies across
continents ultimately providing a heuristic for critical solidarity. The transnational and global
frame that emerges in the comparison of the work of these artists will also put under examination
the systems of circulation for artworks that traverse global systems of capital un-beholden to the
nation-sate. The shared, affectively charged, sense of brown that animates this exploration, then,
will be shown to both animates politically salient anticolonial aesthetic gestures while querying
the limits of cultural production distributed through dominant monetized circuits.
Session 3: 11:50-1:05 p.m.
34. Brown & Queer Aesthetics: Animals, Objects, Plants, & Cyborgs, Part 2
What does it mean to be marked as something other, other than human? And how does one
rigorously engage with brownness and queerness when the subject is not at the center of a critical
inquiry of existence? This panel is interested in placing pressure on the conditions and
boundaries of racialized and sexualized ontologies by turning to animality, objecthood, ecology,
and cybernetics in literature, performance, and aesthetics.
Panel Chair & Presenter: Dr. Sandra Ruiz
“Organismal Futurisms in Brown Sound and Queer Luminosity”
Sandra Ruiz, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Queer and Colombian performance artist, Erica Gressman, energized a room of minoritarian
audience members in her 2016 avant-garde piece Wall of Skin. Fusing noise music, analogue
technology, including circuit-bent electronics, handmade synthesizers, cybernetics, and
biomechatronics, Gressman entered a darkened room dressed from head-to-toe in a snug, white
nylon one-piece, her breasts taped tightly against her chest to erase any marker of conventional
gender expression and sexual desire. With an impulse towards the synesthetic, Gressman creates
what she calls a “cybernetic skin for a world filled with white male experimental sound organs,”
from a formerly handcrafted light sensitive oscillator instrument, made by the artist in the
tradition of Nicolas Collins's original designs. Playing here with the heteronormativity of white
sound and the ontic infelicities of brownness and sexuality, Gressman covers herself in
photocells, utilizing the cyborg as an aesthetic and political intervention. She becomes an organ
made of photosensors, prompting the proliferation of sound through the simultaneous
interactions of bodily movements and light. The spectator experiences luminosity as Gressman
becomes the live embodiment of sound, creating a musical score with her body. By turning to
experimental sound theory, queer theory, Brown Studies, and a Serresian account of sensory
stimulus and skin, I argue that technology and science transcend the senses, querying the
spectator to experience aesthetics carefully within those inharmonious moments in queerness and
brownness. By performing as the closest thing to the visual embodiment of sound, I argue that
Gressman’s sonic and kinetic enactments transition her into a new organism, making light
change sound, being brown and queer in performatively cyborgian ways.
“Losing the Pack: Ambivalent Animality and Queer Inhumanism in Justin Torres’ We the
Animals”
Christina A. León, Oregon State University
In the 2011 novel, We the Animals, queer, Nuyorican writer Justin Torres crafts ambivalent
animal metaphors as a form of opaque, aesthetic resistance. Set in upstate of New York, Torres
creates a set of distilled vignettes about three boys born to a poor white mother and a Puerto
Rican father. Figured as mutts, these boys blur the boundaries between animality and humanity
through their childlike experimentations with belonging. One figure, though, emerges later in
the text as the narrator and separates himself from his “pack” as he comes to embody his own
queer desires. I read this novel alongside current queer theories that engage animal studies to
show how Torres figures ambivalent animality as an opaque resistance to upstanding family
morals—and, in particular, a strident neoliberal fantasy of Latina/o familial relations that
opposes latinidad and queerness. Torres raises these stakes of relation and kinship precisely
through his animal metaphors—an unlikely mode of representation. Rather than figuring the
queer, racialized child as a victim of his family’s composite structures of belonging, Torres ends
his novel on a note of undecidable, radically ambivalent animality that takes the narrative beyond
liberatory humanist promise and into the uncertain terrain of desire.
“Canal Narratology”
Roy Pérez, Willamette University
Jennine Capo Crucet's novel Make Your Home Among Strangers, set amid a fictional version of
the Elian Gonzalez controversy, employs an ecological subplot about the polluted state of
Miami's arterial inland waterways. The winding, manmade, algae-infested canals entwine
military complexes, schools, stripmalls, and exurban housing developments throughout South
Florida and link the lives of racially and economically segregated enclaves through a shared
experience of toxic flow. The canals weave through the protagonist's life first as a site of refuse
flowing behind her childhood home, then as a site of scientific study through her job at an
environmental think tank. Juxtaposed against the hackneyed tropicalization of Miami and the
open, mythical seas through which the young "Ariel Hernandez" braves beast, storm, and
national guard, these green canals littered with shopping carts and spilled cement offer a critical
addendum to current visions of Caribbean littoral connection and cultural proximity. In this
paper I offer the arterial reach of the canal system in Make Your Home Among Strangers as a
narratological backwater: a subplot for the transnational orientation of cultural studies in the
Americas. The figure of the stagnant inland waterway as part of domestic space marked by the
capitalist expansion and corporate neglect of Miami's urban development strikes a vital contrast
with transnational archipelagic studies. This tension between the arterial and the oceanic--the
baroque epistemological flow of the archipelagic set against the circuitous interior of the
mainland--reminds us not to abandon the texture of the local as we devise better and broader
transnational optics through which to understand new cultural formations of Caribbean diaspora.
35. Temporalities of Race
“Temporality and Tortillas: The Great Secular Host”
Marcela Di Blasi de Quiroga, Dartmouth College
Religion--- especially Roman Catholicism--- is an undertheorized area of inquiry in Latinx
literary studies. In persuasive and definitive readings, the early seminal scholarship dismissed the
value of religious faith in Latinx literary production, but consequently also dismissed the
practitioners of those faith-ways in literature. The literary practitioners of faith are most often
characterized by what I term “queerly aged” post-reproductive women. More central—and not
coincidentally younger—characters repeatedly ridicule these women precisely for their faith. A
superficial gloss of canonical Latinx and Chicanx fiction reveals this to be true: Maria from
Américo Paredes’George Washington Gomez (1930’s/1990), Consuelo from José Antonio
Villareal’s Pocho (1959), “the mother” in Tomás Rivera’s …y no se lo trago la tierra (1971),
Amalia from John Rechy’s The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez, etc. Too often, I argue,
critics have assumed child-characters unreasonably capable of interpreting their mothers. So
even when the cast of characters shifted, with less focus on hope for messianic sons of social
consciousness, we Latinx literary critics have lacked a framework for taking representations of
religious faith seriously. What have we missed when we only read religious faith to critique it?
In this paper—a test-case—I ask how we understand the relationship between religious faith and
radical temporality through close readings of the uncontainable temporality of Holy Communion.
I ask what this Catholic idea makes possible for the poetry of Gloria Anzaldúa, the fiction of
Helena María Viramontes, the performances of Jesusa Rodríguez, and the throwaway
generalizations of Cormac McCarthy alike?
“Harboring Spirits: Theories of Time, Relativity, and Race in Gods Go Begging by Alfredo Vea”
Richard Perez, John Jay College, CUNY
Brown Aesthetics, Textual Performances, and Trans-Temporal Latinx Racial Formations”
Christofer A. Rodelo, Harvard University
To theorize race in the 21st century, we must be adept at historicizing Latinx racial formations
across multiple time periods. This paper queries the aesthetic formation of brownness through an
examination of 19th century literary and performance cultures and their ramifications in the nearcontemporary moment. The nineteenth century is a foundational moment for reckoning with
formations of race, gender, sexuality, and empire, yet remains an understudied area of Latinx
Studies. Moreover, the relationship between literary, performance, and aesthetic forms
(especially for historical subjects) merits further exploration. In the spirit of a recent turn towards
the nineteenth century (Guidotti-Hernández 2011, Ruiz 2014, Coronado 2014, Lazo and Alemán
2016), I expand existing Latinx criticism through attention to performance history. My paper
recovers and analyzes the story of 19th freak-show performers Maximo and Bartola, as an early
case example of the ways in which Latinx brownness came to enter the racial imaginary of the
United States. Maximo and Bartola, who suffered from encephalitis, were coercively brought to
the United States from their native El Salvador in the 1840s, to perform as “Aztec Children” in
numerous sideshows, exhibitions, and viewings across the United States and Europe. In this
paper, I examine Maximo and Bartola’s performance archive—specifically travel narratives and
photographs-- in relation to Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco’s 1992-1993 performance
exhibit The Couple in the Cage. Moreover, I model a mode of critique attentive to the
textuality/literariness/forms of performance archives, mainly through close readings of textual
representations of theatrical bodies. This trans-temporal study of Latinx aesthetic performance
helps to understand how Latinx bodies were racialized beyond the black/white binary in the
nineteenth century, a legacy with ramifications for contemporary Latinx artistic production.
36. Im/Possibilites of Utopia: Borders, Visions, and Speculative Fiction
“Latinx Border Dystopias”
Marta Caminero-Santangelo, University of Kansas
My paper looks specifically at the emerging genre of Latino/a dystopia. Since the
implementation of Operation Gatekeeper (1994) and similar strategies of border enforcement, as
well as the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and, most recently, the election of Donald
Trump-whose campaign notably fanned the flames of nativist and white supremacist fervorLatinos increasingly face a frightening social and political environment that is, specifically,
racially charged. I argue that, riding the wave of popularity of dystopian fiction, some recent
Latino/a narrative (fiction, non-fiction, drama) adopts and incorporates elements of dystopia as a
way of critiquing the most negative elements of today's nationalist and nativist US culture, which
specifically targets the bodies of people of color. The 2008 independent film Sleep Dealer, in
which undocumented workers cross the border only virtually and the developed world north of
the border controls access to the water that flows south, is perhaps the most perfect example of
the narrative of the new Latino border dystopia: in the futuristic world, the problems of
undocumented migration have been "solved" by preventing migrants from actually crossing the
physical border, although their labor can still be exploited through virtual means reminiscent of
long hours of repetitive factory work. This movie, I wish to argue, directly addresses the ways in
which nativism and global capitalism, together, create dystopia for Latino workers. However, I
will further argue that Latino/a narrative does not have to be "science fiction" in order to be
dystopian. Alicia Gaspar de Alba's novel Desert Blood (2007), about the murders over the last
three decades of hundreds of women at the U.S.-Mexican border, shares the depiction of a
society gone terrifyingly wrong through the combination of global capitalism, exploited labor,
and the explicit and grotesque targeting of female brown bodies; while the book is set in the
present, scenes of ghoulish dismembered and even disemboweled bodies strewing the desert
create a surrealistic and nightmarish border landscape.
“Visions of a World Foreclosed: The Imaginative Possibilities of Jicotencatl”
Petrina Crockford, University of Southern California
Jicotencatl, published in Philadelphia in 1826, has received little attention in US literary studies.
As Ann Brickhouse notes, its transnational genealogy and unknown authorship make it a site
from which competing, allegorical readings are made, though these readings are often done
through the lens of US/Anglo political, literary, and epistemological modes. But when read
through Spanish Enlightenment thought and in the context of the 1826 Congress of Panama—
which imagined a Pan Latin American union and citizenship—Jicotencatl reveals itself as a
novel that offers an alternative vision of a sociality and a self ultimately foreclosed (the pan Latin
American vision of the Congress of Panama was never to be). This paper attends to the literary
construction of this world to illustrate how it imagines a self/nation that is non-binary, fluid, and
collective, and based on Spanish, Catholic conceptions of natural law and the social contract;
Jicotencatl thus offers a counter to the individualistic nation-building projects of the US at the
same time it offers an understanding of writing/literary production that is collective. As an early
example of indigenismo, Jicotencatl’s methods also offer a counterpoint to the vanishing projects
of the literary US at the same time it points to its own anxieties about race. In focusing on this
brief moment of imaginative possibility and revealing its construction and complexities, this
paper offers a possible groundwork from which to discuss or imagine contemporary Latinx
writings.
“Latin@s in the Slipstream: Latin@ Speculative Fiction and the Pursuit of Utopia”
Clarissa Goldsmith, Arizona State University
The slipstream, as defined in speculative fiction, is the conflation of magical realism and science
fiction. It is the insertion of the surreal into the mundane. By definition, the slipstream forges
new worlds that reject the linear concept of time and the perceived construction of reality. Erased
from the historical narrative and forcibly shaped by imperialism, the colonized Latin@ identity
already exists in the slipstream. The creation of Latin@ speculative and slipstream productions
lays claim to the slipstream and enacts the potential for a new queer utopia. Building off of José
Esteban Muñoz’s assertion that a queer utopia is a “backward glance that enacts a future vision,”
I argue that Latin@ speculative fiction looks to the indigenous past to create a queer futurity. A
brief survey of Latin@ speculative fiction reveals the importance of indigeneity in creating a
queered concept of reality and futurity. This presentation will focus on the short story “Them
Ships” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and “Journey into the Vortex” by Maya Khankoje and analyze
how their use of slipstream speculative fiction and indigeneity lends to the creation of a queered,
Latin@ utopia. These works enact decolonial praxis first by their presence in a traditionally
Eurocentric genre and secondly by their imagining of worlds outside of coloniality. The
speculative fiction tradition, as imagined by Latin@ creators, introduces alternate realities that
reframe the present, recreate the past, and have the potential to create a utopic futurity.
37. Desire for Synchronicity: Race, Masculinity, and the Perils of Identity
“Dominican Masculinity in the International Sphere: Violence, Sex and the Nation”
René Cordero, Maria de Hostos Community College, CUNY
“Dominican Masculinity in the International Sphere: Violence, Sex and the Nation” explores the
Dominican tíguere (literally, tiger) as a post-colonial male identity. Although Dominican men
use this identity to create and sustain their domination in the D.R., it is an identity that emerged
from the country’s interactions with the outside world. The Dominican tíguere originates in the
country’s traumatic history of colonialism, dictatorship, two U.S. invasions in less than a century,
and massive emigration to the U.S. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo’s dictatorship (1930-1961)
embodied and popularized the image of the tíguere. Analyzing tigueraje within the corridors of
power in the Dominican Republic, as well as the popular imageries of svelte Dominican playboy
Porfirio Rubirosa, professor René Cordero’s work looks at how the image of the Dominican
tíguere served as a nationalist and political tool during the Cold War, its imagery and lexicon
sealed in the Dominican vernacular of today. Building on the scholarship of Lauren Derby and
her analysis of Dominican nationalism as a “manipulation of quotidian practices” and
“vernacular politics,” as well as concepts from feminist scholarship like Anne MCclintock’s
“metaphysics of gender violence,” I approach the tíguere persona as an embodiment and
expression of the power imbalances between the U.S. and the Dominican Republic. The tíguere
as a cultural expression renders a microcosmic example of how these manly behaviors stem from
broader political themes in the history and trauma of a collective.
“Love, Racial Knowing, and the Perils of Brown Masculinity”
Adriana Estill, Carleton College
In my work on the haunting and complicated presence of “telenovelas” on U.S. television shows,
one element that stands out is the way in which shows as diverse as 30 Rock, Warehouse 13, and
The O.C. imagine Latino men as caricatures, complete with big, dark mustaches,
hypersexualized bodies, bombastic manners, and “loud” clothing and accessories. These
representations mirror Charles Ramírez Berg’s 2002 analysis of dominant Latinx stereotypes.
Indeed, the white U.S. television industry’s imagining of --or failure to imagine--Latino men is
such that, even as they adapt telenovelas like Ugly Betty and Jane the Virgin to serve as vehicles
for incredible women of color protagonists, they pair these women up with white men, a move
that further erases men of color on television and, as Erica Chito Childs points out, works to
“privilege, protect, and illustrate the power of whiteness.” This paper analyzes the televisual text
that defies these prescriptions and expectations that erase Latinos or mold them into a mix of the
“Latino Lover” and the “Bandido”--East Los High. Developed as a U.S. “telenovela,” it features
an all-Latinx cast with all Latinx romances. Here, love and reproduction can be imagined within
a brown world, and brown masculinity is able to be multiple, complicated, and vulnerable. I
examine the show to better understand how it defies the strictures generally at work in the U.S.
telenovela that serve to deform or erase brown masculinity.
“A ‘Synchronized Struggle’: US Black and Puerto Rican Fraternities in 1940s New York”
Cristina C. Pérez Jiménez, Manhattan College
This paper lends historical depth to the experiences of Afro-Puerto Ricans in New York by
recuperating a lost chapter of their history of mobilization around the intersecting issues of race
and class. Specifically, I examine how New York’s Communist-sponsored cultural and
sociopolitical organizations created new social spaces for the physical and intellectual
convergence of politicized, working-class Puerto Ricans, predominantly of visible African
heritage, and US Blacks during the 1940s. The articulation of a discourse of fraternity between
US Blacks and Afro-Puerto Ricans was predicated on a shared anti-colonial imaginary. In this
politicized milieu, the fight against racism and discrimination at home was framed in a language
of decolonization and anti-imperialism abroad. Racism and colonialism were understood as
interrelated phenomena, which required US Blacks and Puerto Ricans, of all races, to mobilize in
tandem, thus forging what I call a “synchronized struggle.” Puerto Ricans, moreover, were
encouraged to see themselves as part of permanent (Latino/a) national minority akin to US
Blacks. While these contacts led to more Black-affirmative identifications among radical Puerto
Ricans, and a greater acknowledgement of the role race played in social relations on and off the
island, I argue that it also curtailed Afro-Puerto Ricans’ full racial identification with US Blacks
in New York, since it underscored Puerto Ricans and US blacks as distinct groups with parallel
trajectories. By recovering the 1940s New York Puerto Rican and US Black “synchronized
struggle,” this paper maps new coordinates for the study of Afro-Latino/a cultural and sociopolitical histories.
38. Writing Letters, Checking Off Boxes: Negotiating Identity and Confinement from New
York Chicanidad to LGBTQ Detainees in Arizona
How do Chicanxs, and Xican@s who were raised in New York navigate geographical location,
spirituality, spatial injustice, and social/ political activism, compared to those in the Southwest?
How do asylum seekers in the United States deal with the application process and the reinjury of
having to come out and share trauma in that process? What is the impact of a Pen-pal program
and letter writing between SUNY Oneonta students and LGBTQ undocumented detainees in
Arizona? This panel takes up these questions based on undergraduate independent studies
projects at SUNY Oneonta. Collectively, the papers look at the way Latinx migrants, immigrants
and diasporic peoples, in the flesh and in print, negotiate relations of power, emotional, physical,
and discursive borders and confinement. The presenters explore how Latinx and Chicanx
subjects “create alternative sites of possibility, engagement, and critique,” through paper trails
and what Chela Sandoval calls “decolonizing movidas.” These movidas or everyday acts of
resistance and self-making, include auto-historias, letter writing, memories, asylum paperwork
and procedures. The panel explores various institutional, collective and personal ways that
Latinx communities are bound by different borders, but also how they navigate these even in the
face of displacement, criminalization, detention, and marginalization.
Chair: Eddy Francisco Alvarez Jr., SUNY Oneonta
“New York and East Coast Chicanxs/ Xican@s, Autohistorias and Decolonizing the Self”
Cristina Castelan, SUNY Oneonta
Gloria Anzaldúa’s work has taught us about the space called the borderlands, and how brown
bodies navigate a world in which we are in limbo. Her writings have also helped to understand
the impact of colonization, globalization, mass expulsion, and war. These have influenced how
we live, develop, and identify in the spaces around us. She has made sense of how it is we find
home in a place where people are categorized as “other.” Not only does she make us aware but
also helps us understand what it means to decolonize the psyche. By analyzing the lived
experiences of first generation Latinx people on the East Coast borderlands, we are able to
identify the causality on how and why we often have a hard time embracing our indigenous
culture. This presentation is a glimpse of a project on oral his/herstories and their lives as
Xican@ and Latinx people in New York, which also includes queer identifying folk. The project
follows the work of Vicki Ruíz, Maylei Blackwell, and the Telling to Live: Latina Feminist
Testimonios project, and is based on my experience as a Xicana living in the Bronx, NY.
Discussing how my family moved upstate for more educational opportunities, I investigate the
impact on geographical location, spirituality, spatial injustice, and social/ political activism
relation to how New York Xican@s identify. My hopes are that this project will highlight our
different experiences, our cultures, migration patterns, and our identities as Chican@ in this
country.
“Document(ing) Trauma: Asylum Seekers, Application Processes and Risk”
Janine Cardoso, SUNY Oneonta
Many people from Latin America migrate to the United States in search for a safe space where
they can grow, and escape horrors they face in their home country. There are some who are
eligible for Asylum to stay in America, but unfortunately this creates new obstacles for
applicants to overcome. According to Eithne Luibhéid and Lionel Cantú Jr. in Queer Migrations
applicant are forced to “come out”, and shed light on traumatizing personal experiences to justify
their chance to get asylum. The “threat” posed by these asylum seekers is left for the
government to define as they have to deal with a deluge of paperwork, forms of confession and
injurious documentation of their trauma. Not only do class, gender, and social groups play a role
within the process of application, but also infer new risks for the refugee. Using interviews from
refugee and asylum seekers’ experiences along with an analysis of how these folks are
represented in literature and media, I hope to bring awareness about how these processes cause
more harm than good.
“Mariposa Letters: Epistolary Healing and Storytelling of Undocumented Pen-Pals in Detention
Centers in Arizona”
Alexandra Bates, SUNY Oneonta
As part of my Spanish independent study on the topic of immigration, I was required to perform
15 total hours of service learning outside of the classroom, as a component of this course. It was
through service learning that I, along with seven other students, had received the opportunity to
write letters and form pen-palships with undocumented immigrants, some of whom identified as
part of the LGBTQ community, at both Eloy and Florence detention centers located in Arizona.
The focus of this project was to create friendships with detainees in both centers, learn about
their personal immigration stories, and practice writing in the target language (Spanish).
Throughout the semester, each student had between two and four pen pals. Most were from
countries in Central America, including Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, and El Salvador. It was
through the exchange of letters between the students and their pen-pals that students were able to
understand the struggles faced by these immigrants, both in their countries of origin and once
inside the United States, learn more about their lives inside the detention centers, and get to
know to their pen-pals on a deeper level. Using a “queer migrations” approach and following
Lionel Cantu’s notion of the “sexuality of migration,” this presentation provides an overview of
the project, highlighting the important nexus between migration and queerness, and how
detainees negotiate these intersections through letters and friendship.
Session 4: 2:40-3:55 p.m.
39. Latinx Environmentalisms I: Race, Aesthetics, and Literary Histories
We propose two, consecutively-scheduled, linked panels that explore the intersections of
environmental studies and Latinx literary and cultural imaginaries. While Latinx studies has
emphasized social justice as it relates to race, nation, migration/immigration, class, sexuality, and
gender, little critical attention has been given to robust environmental imaginaries in Latinx
literary and cultural forms. Similarly, ecocriticism emphasizes an earth-centered scholarly vision,
but has yet to engage the innovative ways Latinx literatures and cultures articulate environmental
identities and resist environmental degradation. Moreover, dominant strains of environmental
studies emphasize privileged perspectives of wilderness and pristine nature over the views of
people of color, the poor, and the formerly colonized. Both panels seek to remedy these gaps by
staging a dialogue designed to highlight how Latinx literature and culture imagines
environmental issues as integral to racial and social justice.
The scholars included on both panels seek to broaden, challenge, and complicate discussions of
environmental justice, race, nation, class, decoloniality, transnationalism, and space in both
Latinx studies and environmental studies. Rather than seeing the environment as marginal to
anti-racist struggles, the papers collectively locate how Latinx literary and cultural texts integrate
environmental concerns with questions of social and political justice. While this view is contrary
to the popular imaginary that holds that subjugated peoples either don’t care about or don’t have
time for environmental issues, the panels build on the work of postcolonial critics like
Ramachandra Guha and Rob Nixon and also environmental justice scholars like Laura Pulido,
Joni Adamson, and Devon Peña, all of whom argue that marginalized peoples are often at the
forefront of environmental thinking. We therefore seek to rethink the environmental humanities
through the social justice lenses offered by Latinx literature and culture, while also pointing to
the environmental representations that have been occluded within Latinx literary and cultural
studies.
Our approach is to link discussions of racial, environmental, and social justice imaginaries
through two rough temporal and aesthetic frames: Race, Aesthetics, and Literary History and
Futurity, Race, and Speculative Utopias. Panel 1 examines understudied and occluded literary
historical and aesthetic aspects of Latinx literature and culture, aspects that are rooted in histories
of environmental and social justice struggles. Panel 2 examines speculative possibilities that
emerge out of these historical contexts. The panels thus balance literary history with
contemporary Latinx environmental dynamics in order to interrogate the stakes of racial and
environmental imaginaries in Latinx literature and culture.
In Panel 1, Julie Minich considers the 2015 Disney film McFarland USA, and specifically how
McFarland, CA’s history of cancer clusters haunts the film’s portrayal of the McFarland track
stars. The omission of McFarland’s disabled history from a film about able-bodiedness and
athletic prowess reveals the discursive process through which environmental injustice becomes
unrecognizable as violence. Randy Ontiveros considers another understudied aspect of both
Latinx and environmental studies: the suburbs. His analysis of poetry by Victor Valle, Urayoán
Noel, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and Aracelis Girmay explores representations of the suburbs in
Latino/a poetry, with particular attention paid to how this verse tradition understands
relationships between suburban built and natural environments. Jennifer García-Peacock turns to
spatial relationships in another context: California’s Central Valley. She examines how Chicanx
artists in the region use the built environment to create an archive documenting how water has
shaped the cultural landscape of greater Fresno since the mid-twentieth century, creating a
curious problem of urbanization in California’s rural interior that can be read in Chicanx visual
culture. Priscilla Ybarra picks up on understudied histories by looking into the archive to amplify
an understanding of Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo and his family’s impact on California
winemaking. Agoston Haraszthy, a Hungarian immigrant, is known as the father of California
viticulture, but Vallejo also played a role. Ybarra argues that Vallejo’s untold story of
environmental impact serves an imperialistic agenda, at the same time that Harazsthy’s story
serves an “ideal immigrant” narrative. The tangled stories of these two families makes a perfect
case study for the negotiations of race, migration, and the environment in the nineteenth century.
Chair: Priscilla Solis Ybarra, University of North Texas
“It Happened Through the Grapevine: Narratives of Race, Migration, and Environment in
California Winemaking”
Priscilla Solis Ybarra, University of North Texas
This presentation will discuss the narratives surrounding winemaking in California, with
particular attention to the dynamics of race, migration, and the environment in the viticultural
industry. In the 1885 novel The Squatter and the Don by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, a
brother-sister pair of Anglo Americans, Lizzie and George Mechlin marry a brother-sister pair of
Mexican Americans, Gabriel and Elvira Alamar. This fictional double wedding imitates a reallife 1863 double wedding when two Mexican American sisters, Jovita Francisca and Natalia
Veneranda Vallejo, married two Hungarian American brothers, Alfred and Atilla Haraszthy. This
double wedding represents the union of two prominent families in California at the time.
Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo was known for his service as military commander of northern
California during the Mexican period and for his election to California state senate in 1849. His
family’s union with the Haraszthys also brings attention to his interest in viticulture, as the
patriarch of the Haraszthys, Agoston, was known as the father of California viticulture. Agoston
Haraszthy immigrated to the U.S. from Hungary and brought with him several vines that helped
to establish the California wine industry. This presentation will trace the collaboration between
Haraszthy and Vallejo and the cultural contributions of their descendants—among them several
vintners and an actor/dancer. This is just one historical example of untold stories of the
environment that makes the case for the diversity and migrations that shape the human relation
with the land in the U.S. By uncovering richer narratives of the diversity of approaches and
collaborations that go into industries such as winemaking, we can put into better perspective our
ongoing relations with nature.
“Greenwashing the White Savior: Cancer Clusters, Supercrips, and McFarland USA”
Julie Avril Minich, University of Texas at Austin
The 2015 Disney film McFarland USA, starring Kevin Costner as a white high school track
coach who leads a Latino cross-country team to win the 1987 California state championship, was
not without controversy. While numerous critics have condemned the film’s use of a “white
savior” narrative, however, they have largely not discussed the significance of the film’s setting.
The small farming town of McFarland, CA, was known throughout the 1980s and early 1990s as
a cancer cluster, with an unusually high instance of childhood cancers and birth defects between
1975 and 1995. This talk examines how this history – which is never addressed in the film itself
– haunts the film’s portrayal of the McFarland track stars. I read the McFarland, USA track stars,
who perform spectacular ability under profoundly disabling conditions, as figures whose
narrative function aligns with what disability scholars have called “supercrips.” The omission of
McFarland’s disabled history from a film about able-bodiedness and athletic prowess reveals the
discursive process through which environmental injustice becomes unrecognizable as violence.
“Reflections on the Suburban Landscapes of Latina/o Poetry”
Randy Ontiveros, University of Maryland
The country or the city. These are the two geographies most closely associated with the history
and the cultural expression of Latinos in the United States. There’s good reason for this. Urban
areas like San Francisco’s Mission District or Miami’s Little Havana have been home to and
served as artistic inspiration for Latinos and Latinas across generations. So too have rural places
such as New Mexico’s Rio Grande Valley or southern Minnesota’s beet fields.
Suburbs, though, have also been vital to Latino experiences past and present in the United States,
and in ways that are enormously understudied and underappreciated. Jodi Agius Vallejo, Eric
Avila, Wendy Cheng, Zaire Zenit Dinzey-Flores, and a handful of other scholars have written
insightfully on Latino suburbia in recent years. However, apart from their work and from the
occasional journalistic piece on what is too often framed as a Latino “invasion” of the suburbs,
next to nothing has been written on this pressing or timely or urgent topic. Certainly no in-depth
treatment has been given to the shape and significance of the suburbs in Latino literature and
other forms of Latino creative expression or creativity. This paper will explore the representation
of the suburbs in Latino/a poetry, with particular attention paid to the ways in which this verse
tradition understands the relationship between the suburban built environment and the suburban
natural environment. Writers to be discussed include Victor Valle, Urayoán Noel, Lorna Dee
Cervantes, and Aracelis Girmay.
“Race, Water, and Public Art in the Urban Mexican/American Countryside: The Rise, Fall, and
Restoration of Fresno Fulton Mall Art Program, 1963-2016”
Jennifer García-Peacock, University of Michigan
Over time, geography, capital, and social relations have combined to produce two distinct
cultural landscapes in the region surrounding Fresno, California: a thick circuit of economic
activity and settlement along the canals, rivers, highways, and railroads lining the eastern slope
of the Sierra Nevada range and a relatively sparse presence of people and infrastructure along the
western—and drier—edge of the valley. This spatialization has strong racial links, a disparity
that became even more entrenched with the introduction of large scale irrigation in the twentieth
century required to sustain water intensive crops such as grapes, citrus and stone fruit, and nuts.
As a result, a tiered system of agricultural labor emerged in the Valley, with highly specialized,
long-term workers forming a rich network of cities and towns along the eastside and relatively
little permanent settlement along the west side, where seasonal workers and high rates of
mobility were the norm. In this paper, I examine the ways that this move towards a more
productive organization of the Central Valley countryside was represented in a robust public art
program sponsored by the City of Fresno, Fresno County, and private investors between19632016. Focusing on the landscape design work of Garrett Eckbo at Fresno’s Fulton Mall,
including several fountains and other public art features exploring the region’s connection to
water, I draw connections to lesser appreciated works by Chicanx artists in the region that have
received less critical and popular attention. In the process, I explore how these works of art and
features of the built environment serve as an important—and often overlooked—archive
documenting the ways that water has shaped the cultural landscape of greater Fresno since the
mid-twentieth century. I argue that this spatialization, driven by the agricultural industry, has
created a curious problem of urbanization in California’s rural interior that can be read in its
visual culture, particularly the placemaking practices of Chicanxs who have been largely left out
of major public and private art funding streams.
40. Altermundos: The Other Worlds of Latinx Speculative Aesthetics
This panel brings together various contributors to the recently published collected works
Altermundos: Latino Speculative Literature, Film, and Popular Culture (2017; University of
Washington Press) co-edited by Cathryn J. Merla-Watson and Ben Olguín to explore new,
hybrid genres and innovative theorizations engendered by Latin@ speculative aesthetics, which
includes the related genres of science fiction (sci-fi), fantasy, and horror as well as their myriad
subgenres. Inspired by altermondialism and Chican@ feminist and queer of color theory,
altermundo indexes third space visions grounded in concrete realities while gazing toward the
decolonial and utopian” (Merla-Watson 2015). These utopian visions are heterogeneous and
dissensual, bespeaking the actual pluriversality comprising Latin@ identity and our shared
“alter-Native” (Gaspar de Alba 1998) futures. As this panel will demonstrate, the altermundos of
Latin@futurism and Latin@ speculative aesthetics is not simply mimetic of dominant
speculative genres, but rather critiques and disidentifies with it, as well as creates their own
autonomous aesthetics with their own particular cultural vocabularies, genealogies, and cultural
contexts—which in turn vociferously demand new theoretical approaches. To that end, this panel
explores the following: How do Latin@ speculative aesthetics redefine traditional genres? What
kinds of utopian/dystopian affects and structures of feeling does it unveil? In what ways does
Latin@futurism conceptualize new paradigms of political praxis, resistance, survival, and
cultural affirmation? How do Latin@ speculative aesthetics intervene and/or contribute to
understandings of queer futurity? In what ways is Latin@futurism grounded in the present (and
past) exigencies of diverse Latin@ lived experiences?
Chair: Ben Olguín, University of Texas-San Antonio
“Contesting Monstrosity in Horror Genres: Chicana Feminist Mappings of de la Peña’s
“Refugio” the Vampire Vis-à-vis Hamilton’s Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Series”
Luz María Gordillo, Washington State University Vancouver
Challenging the exclusion of Latinas as authors of science fiction and as occupants of alternative
worlds of vampires, this essay examines Chicana Terry de la Peña’s “Refugio” and
Euroamerican Laurell Hamilton’s Anita Blake series as paradigmatic oppositional texts; the
former functions as a subversive metatext to Hamilton’s fiction which justifies ontologies of
imperialism. I argue that de la Peña’s Chicana lesbian vampire and shape shifter Refugio,
disrupts mainstream hetero-racist narratives with alternative signifiers grounded on politicocultural resistance. On the other hand, Mexican American necromancer and vampire slayer
Blake, posits a discourse of white supremacy that problematizes Latina representation and
subjectivity.
“Apocalyptic Affect and Perform-Antics in Recent Queer Chicanx Literature and Performance”
Cathryn Merla-Watson, University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley
In this presentation I braid together theories of affect, queer theory, genre criticism, and Latinx
cultural studies, among others, to theorize what I term “apocalyptic affect” in recent queer
Chicanx cultural production, such as that of Virginia Grise, Adelina Anthony, Joe Jimenez,
among others. Apocalyptic affect names a structure of feeling animated by confluences of the
personal, historical, and political, which I posit queer Chicanx artists deploy to make palpable
the complex and multiple ways in which their intersectional lived experiences feel nothing less
than world-ending. I argue that in doing so, these artists dramatize and make sensible diverse
differential lived experiences as queers of color, pointing to how the apocalyptic—or what is
perceived as world-ending—is figured by the intersectional categories of identity, thereby
intervening with in white, dominant forms of affect disseminated by popular culture. I further
examine how the performance of apocalyptic affect engenders “perform-antics” that speaks to
the particular queer feelings and knowledges engendered in the fraught site of the Borderlands.
“The Ghostly Matters of Border Horror: (Post)Coloniality, The New Mestiza, and Américo
Paredes’s The Shadow”
Cynthia Saldivar, University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley
The presentation will analyze the novel The Shadow by Américo Paredes set in a postrevolutionary Mexico. The Shadow is a fictional novel that centers around Antonio Cuitla who
was once a revolutionary leader and is now forced to come to terms with his place in the modern
world. I approach The Shadow through the lens of domestic horror by reengaging Gloria
Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera. In doing so, I foreground not only the subjective nature of
horror, but also how Chicano authors redeploy this genre to expose horrific violence on the
U.S./Mexico border. Anzaldúa continuously describes how combining two cultures creates a
synthesis that is more than a sum of its parts, “the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a
third country – a border culture” (25). Paredes rewrites domestic horror to include the space of
the home as well as the nation-state. In doing so he collapses traditional genre interpretations of
terror and horror to expose the atrocities of an ostensible postcolonial, postrevolutionary world.
Applying Anzaldúa’s definition of the “new mestiza” breaks the binary classifications of terror
and horror, generating borderlands horror born. Borderlands horror is not rooted in individual
hauntings; on the contrary, borderlands horror sheds light on the collective, historical atrocities
shaping present.
“Imagining Chicanx Human Rights Law: Chicanx Science Fiction at the end of the Twentieth
Century”
Andrew Uzendoski, Lafayette College
This paper analyzes Chicanx science fiction published in the 1990s that reimagines human rights
ideals from non-western perspectives. I position these speculative texts at the vanguard of
reforming human rights law at the end of the twentieth century. Sapogonia (1990) by Ana
Castillo, The Rag Doll Plagues (1992) by Alejandro Morales, High Aztech (1992) by Ernest
Hogan, The New World Border (1992-1994) by Guillermo Gomez-Peña, and The Hungry
Woman (1995) by Cherríe Moraga all imagine the dangerous consequences of repressing
alternative conceptions of human rights. These novels do not just critique international legal
norms, nor do they outright reject human rights ideals. These speculative texts recover and
promote alternative models for universal human rights that privilege non-western sources of
knowledge and ways of being—producing literary interventions that are enabled by the worldmaking qualities of science fiction. These novels offer alternative models of human rights ideals
at a moment when human rights law and discourse are grounded in Eurocentric epistemologies.
Thus, they can be read as examples of how the Indigenous labor diaspora can collectively reform
human rights law and international legal norms. Focusing on texts written by Castillo and
Gomez-Peña, I will identify and discuss the dominant trends of this era of Chicanx science
fiction in terms of revising human rights law from Chicanx and Latinx perspectives.
41. Kinship: Latinx-Asian Transculturation
“Reunification Dreams: 1970s North Korea and Speculations of Kinship in Chicano Fiction”
Joo Ok Kim, University of Kansas
This paper examines Martin Limón's North Korea novels, and the fantasies of reunification and
kinship in 1970s Korea. George Sueño, the Chicano protagonist of Limón's series, speculates
that he—a U.S. Army sergeant—may have a child in North Korea. The possibility that he may
have a son with his former lover, Doc Yong, furnishes dreams of nuclear kinship beyond the
heavily militarized 38th parallel. Passing as a Romanian soldier in North Korea, which Sueño
states is only possible due to North Korean provincialism, he infiltrates in order to reunite with
Doc Yong and to meet his child in the hopes of smuggling them back to the south. This paper
thus reaches back to the unique role of the Chicano U.S. Army sergeant stationed in the Cold
War Korean peninsula of the 1970s, but also reaches forward with the familial implications of
this military mystery novel. Amidst contemporary concerns about global militarized nuclear
warfare, what does the fictive figure of a Chicano North Korean offer to Latinx Studies? How do
Limón's novels contribute to, and perhaps push up against, sensationalist discourses about North
Korea? My paper, "Reunification Dreams: 1970s North Korea and Speculations of Kinship in
Chicano Fiction," addresses these questions in the wake of—and anticipating other horizons of—
globalized militarization.
“Chinese in Her Liver, Chinese in Her Heart”: Transculturation in Cristina García’s Monkey
Hunting”
Suzanne Uzzilia, CUNY Graduate Center
In Monkey Hunting by Cristina García (2003), Lucrecia Chen, a black Cuban character, leads a
generally happy life because of her freedom to choose from a variety of cultural traditions. Her
belief systems are strongly influenced by the men in her life. She undergoes a re-Orient-ation of
her beliefs when her father/master/rapist, Don Joaquín Alomá, is replaced by Chen Pan, the
Chinese-Cuban main character who purchases her and her young son. Though it seems that she
has traded one version of servitude for another, Chen Pan provides her with materials to make
candles, religious objects that she sells to make enough money to purchase her coartación, a
version of freedom. However, by the time she earns the money for this, she finds that it is no
longer needed, as she is free and chooses to stay. In the “after” of her family life with Chen Pan,
she grows to embrace Chinese culture and to integrate it into her Afro-Cuban religious and
cultural framework. However, her experience goes beyond “passing”; instead, she performs the
transculturation that Fernando Ortiz discusses in Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar and
passes through their two distinct cultures into a syncretic experience. This syncretism is
facilitated by Lucrecia’s relative freedom to earn money and thus choose her path in life. Though
the bonds of race and family are severed in her life, she manages to weave a fabric of Chinese
and Afro-Cuban beliefs that allows her to affirm, “More than half my life has been happy” (180).
42. Musical Subversions; Semiotics of Ideology
“The Opens Veins of ‘Latinoamérica’: Calle 13 and Neoliberalism”
Lupe Escobar, New York University
In 1971, Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano published The Open Veins of Latin America, a
revolutionary historiography that continues to elicit critical awareness of economic, political, and
military interventions in the global South. We see and hear traces of Galeano’s influence,
addressing the pillage of Latin American laborers and land, in the contemporary musical
critiques of Puerto Rican musical group Calle 13. For instance, the music video performance of
“Latinoamérica” engages in visual and textual intertextualities with Galeano’s decolonial
imaginary from a pulsating heart rooted in Mother Earth to lyrics such as “I am the blood in your
veins.” In terms of musical genre, “Latinoamérica” echoes La Nueva Canción tradition,
particularly with the inclusion of Andean elements, elements banned from folk music in the
1970s. “Latinoamérica,” I argue, denounces current neoliberalism, the still open veins,
negotiating diverse Latinidades while simultaneously stressing temporal and spatial solidarities.
In doing so, Calle 13’s music video expresses what we might think about as a “testimonial
afterlife.”
“(Re) Constructing Dominican Latinidad: Intersections Between Ethnicity, Race, and Hip-Hop”
Sharina Maillo-Pozo, New Paltz, SUNY “This book, then, speaks of my existence. My preoccupations with the inner life of Self, and with
the struggle of that Self amidst adversity and violation; with the confluence of primordial
images; with the unique positionings consciousness takes at these confluent streams; and with
my almost instinctive urge to communicate, to speak, to write about life on the borders, life in the
shadows.” —Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. In this presentation,
I analyze the first coming-of-age memoir set in New York City written by Raquel Cepeda, a
second generation Dominican-American author, filmmaker, and hip-hop journalist. Drawing on
Wendy Roth's conceptualization of "racial strategies," Raquel Z. Rivera's links between Puerto
Rican latinidad and blackness, and Silvio Torres Saillant's theorizations of Dominican blackness,
I argue that the memoir is fundamental to the (re)construction and continuous redefinition of an
Afro-centric Dominican latinidad. In this paper, I will trace key moments that led to Cepeda’s
constant performance of what I call Dominican-latinidad in a period of radical reconfiguration of
the Latinx community in New York City. Over the course of this presentation, I will focus on
few instances that illustrate Cepeda’s strategies to negotiate her life in an ethno-racial,
hyphenated identity. Furthermore, I will examine the role of hip-hop in Cepeda’s journey to
becoming Latina and how she positions not only herself, but Dominicans alike, at the center of
the discussions on the relationship between Latinx identity and hip-hop in New York City.
Lastly, because hip-hop has a central role in the text, I will discuss how the memoir underscores
the socio-cultural identifications of second generation Dominicans with African Americans and
other Afrodiasporic groups in New York City.
“Chicana Feminist Semiotics: Culture Jamming / Meta-Ideologizing / Genre Subversion”
Melanie Hernandez, California State University, Fresno
While operating through deceptively simple surface-layer formal qualities, many modes of
Chicana cultural production actually enact a complicated semiotic liberatory practices which
utilize guerilla re-appropriation tactics. Complicated sign systems are layered with additional
meaning that do not simply supplant the original meaning—they fully embrace the original as a
starting point to build upon and defamilize it. The result is to expose the underlying ideology
and to emphasize the constructedness of their original meaning so that it can no longer be
mistaken as an extension of “Nature.” While my ongoing work explores these semiotic practices
through juvenile and young adult literature, this paper unpacks the layers of signification
embedded within picture book illustrations—specificially, within the illustrations of both hard
cover and paperback editions of Sandra Cisneros’ Have You Seen Marie?. In the realms of anticorporate branding and media activism, this process is known as “culture jamming,” which
“seeks to undermine the marketing rhetoric of multinational corporations, specifically through
such practices as media hoaxing, corporate sabotage, billboard ‘liberation,’ and trademark
infringement.” Stated plainly, a culture jammer will tweak (often through vandalism) an
existing corporate message in order to embed a counterargument atop the original. It allows the
culture jammer to combat the corporation’s political clout and deep pockets, using the
corporation’s own media campaign as the canvas for the protest messaging. Culture jammers
rely on the recognizability of the original corporate branding materials, but whatever
modification they make to the original image creates a disparity between the corporation’s
intended message and social protest launched through the jammed image. This is a pictographic
appropriation strategy that Chicana artists have undertaken for generations. To explore this
process, this paper focuses on a single semitoic chain—the signifier “La Llorona”—as its
meaning is made into a sign system, imbued with ideological meaning at the secondary
signfication level, and finally defamiliarized and re-appropriated at a third-level signification
using the process of “meta-ideologizing” as described in Chela Sandoval’s Methodology of the
Oppressed. The paper uses Esther Hernandez’s “Sun Mad” as its point of departure, and then
turns to more complicated sign system re-appropriation in Have You Seen Marie?, whose
original semiotic chain signifier (“La Llorona”) is all the more difficult to pin down since it is
only ever implied, but never overtly mentioned. Finally, the analysis unpacks these signification
methods to explore the ways that other visual pieces like Alma Lopez’ Coyolxauquhi Returns As
Our Lady Disguised As La Virgen de Guadalupe to Defend the Rights of Las Chicanas must turn
to sophisticated semiotic layerings as a performative strategy in order to appropriate and
reinscribe meaning onto hegemonic sign systems in the service of Chicana feminist political
imperatives.
Session 5: 4:05-5:20 p.m.
43. Latinx Environmentalism II: Futurity, Race, and Speculative Utopias
Panel 2 takes up questions of race, futurity, and speculative utopias. Christopher Perreira shows
how Latinx cultural texts like Sánchez and Pita’s sci-fi novel Lunar Braceros: 2125-2148
provide a speculative platform on which to interrogate and redefine environmental discourse in
relation to state violence and terror. Latinx studies scholar David Vázquez extends this analysis
by considering the relatively upbeat endings of Alex Rivera’s 2009 film Sleep Dealer and
Alejandro Morales’s 1992 novel The Rag Doll Plagues. Vázquez argues that the hope evident in
these endings counters the dystopian strains of much contemporary speculative fiction, precisely
in order to imagine more just racial and environmental futures. Gabriela Nuñez takes up the
question of cli-fi and sci-fi narratives by asking whether it is productive to read Latinx sci-fi
through the lens of climate change. She suggests Latinx sci-fi portrays the dire consequences of
extractivism for both the natural environment and the health and well-being of Latinxs,
countering these discourses with the concept of el buen vivir as a solution to climate change and
a way to preserve the biodiversity that helps Latinx communities thrive. Taking up the
relationship between the dystopian present and a utopian future, Shane Hall examines the
photography of Delilah Montoya and the Electronic Disturbance Theater/b.a.n.g. lab’s art
installation, the Transborder Immigrant Tool. Hall argues that these direct action interventions
offer a contested vocabulary of protest that disrupts the use of the environment in the
U.S./Mexico borderlands as a weapon, and points to how artists and activists denaturalize
environmental military violence and humanize migrants traversing the desert regions of the
Southwestern United States.
Both panels seek to engage the audience with the following questions: First, what are the
intersections between environmental imaginaries and Latinx literature and culture? Second, how
do Latinx environmental imaginaries contribute to more robust understandings of issues like
climate change and toxic risk? Indeed, how do Latinx environmental imaginaries help us to
reconsider aspects of social and racial justice as part of the remedy for environmental crises?
Finally, how do Latinx authors conceive of and represent alternative environmental utopias that
imagine social justice and environmental justice as intertwined?
Chair: David Vázquez, Associate Professor of English, University of Oregon
“Futurity in Memory: Horizons and the Cultural Politics of Lunar Braceros: 2125-2148”
Christopher Perreira, University of Kansas
This paper links the conference title and themes—Latinx Lives, Matters, and Imaginaries:
Theorizing Race in the 21st Century—to the instability of memory as it is represented in the
2009 science fiction novel Lunar Braceros: 2125-2148, co-written by Rosaura Sánchez and
Beatrice Pita. In an essay on the historical narratives of xenophobia in the Unites States, Sánchez
argues that the “spectre of Latinidad,” narrated by media and rightwing politics, reveals an
important paradox: that Latino/as “are the spectre and yet [...] are simultaneously real.” Sánchez
continues: “In some sense, we are an incarnation of the future but in another more immediate
way, real; we are flesh and blood and our growing numbers [...] will undoubtedly transform this
country, [...] culturally, perhaps linguistically, and hopefully politically and economically” (128).
Drawing out these tensions as they emerge in Lunar Braceros, this paper shows how such
cultural texts provide a speculative platform on which to interrogate and redefine environmental
discourse in relation to state violence and terror. Deploying what I am calling “futurity in
memory”—an approach that takes seriously the horizons hailed by Latinx speculative cultural
production—Lunar Braceros presents, among other things, land reservations designed to contain
the continuous production of poor surplus labor, or what one character describes as “a population
control camp mechanism” (13). From the vantage point of the future, the book interrogates social
and ecological tensions between land on Earth and the toxic landfills established on the Moon to
speculate on the revolutionary imaginaries that have, and will continue to emerge from such
memories.
“Speculative Hope: Countering Dystopian Environmental Futures in Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer
and Alejandro Morales’s The Rag Doll Plagues”
David J. Vázquez, University of Oregon
Contemporary speculative cultural production seems preoccupied with a relentlessly dystopian
future. From the atavism and environmental scarcity of The Walking Dead, to the utter
destruction of both human communities and natural resources in The Passage vampire trilogy,
the future seems bleak for civilization and the natural world. Part of this hopelessness is certainly
a remnant of postmodern and post-structuralist thinking that de-emphasized meaning and faith in
institutions. While these forms of thinking were useful for critiques of global capital, they left a
residue of pessimism—a pessimism exacerbated by environmental risks like climate change.
This pessimism, however, has come under scrutiny by late 20th and 21st century Latinx artists
who employ what Ramón Saldívar calls “postrace aesthetics,” or the yoking of Civil Rights
optimism with postmodern form. The aim of postrace aesthetics is to maintain a tension between
hope (however tenuous) and skepticism of its fulfillment. I examine two representations of
dystopian futures that retain moderate hope for environmental and social change. In Alex
Rivera’s 2009 film Sleep Dealer, the protagonist, Memo, is able to facilitate the destruction of a
dam that releases water to a now desertified Oaxaca. Similarly, the protagonist of Alejandro
Morales’s 1992 novel The Rag Doll Plagues, finds a cure for a global pandemic that elevates the
status of Chicanxs in the U.S. Although both endings qualify their hope, they evidence what
Linda Tuhiwi-Smith calls “relentless optimism,” or the maintenance of a desire for progressive
change, even in the face of persistent racialization and environmental crisis.
“Reading Latin@ SF through the Lens of Climate Change and El Buen Vivir”
Gabriela Nuñez, California State University, Fullerton
Recent scholarship has addressed the use of futurity in Latin@ SF as a way to critique economic,
environmental, and political crises in the present and as a way to recognize that hegemonic
discourses of technological and scientific “progress” can be devastating for Latin@ communities
(Ramírez 2008, Rivera 2012). Part of these dystopic scenarios overlap with the growing
popularity of the cli-fi or the climate fiction literary genre, and climate change as an important
new topic or category in contemporary literature. Since cli-fi addresses climate catastrophe,
oftentimes in the form of a cautionary tale, the characteristics of the genre coincide very closely
with the SF genre. However, is it productive to read Latin@ SF through the lens of climate
change, and if so, what does a focus on climate change reveal about Latin@ SF?
In this presentation I analyze examples of Latin@ SF through the lens of climate change. I argue
that Latin@ SF addresses many of the concerns of cli-fi literature by promoting the indigenous
concept of ‘buen vivir,’ or ‘living well.’ The concept of el buen vivir has its origins in South
American indigenous cultures that emerge as a reaction and alternative to bank and government
development projects that have social, environmental, and economic impacts on local
communities since the early 2000 (Gudynas 2011, 442). Latin@ SF portrays the dire
consequences of extractivism for both the natural environment and the health and well-being of
Latin@s. Latin@ SF presents el buen vivir as a solution to climate change and a way to preserve
the biodiversity that helps Latin@ communities thrive.
“Utopic Designs for a Dystopic Desert: Interrrupting Environmental Warfare through the Art of
the Transborder Immigrant Tool and Humanitarian Water Caches”
Shane Hall, University of Oregon
Since the Reagan administration, U.S. border policy—including in spaces ostensibly dedicated to
nature and wilderness conservation—has emphasized the weaponization of the harsh Sonoran
Desert environment as a tool used to discourage undocumented immigrants from Latin America.
Despite the fact that the number of crossers has declined since 2008, hundreds continue to die in
the desert every year. Groups such as No Mas Muertes/No More Deaths, Border Angels, and
Humane Borders intervene in this weaponized environment by placing jugs or larger caches of
water—a simple but lifesaving maneuver. Water caches act as humanitarian aid, art, and rhetoric;
as such they are provocative objects of analysis because they disrupt the mechanisms that kill
migrants. I examine the aesthetic reproduction of these caches in the nature photography of
Delilah Montoya as well as the tactical media project of the Transborder Immigrant Tool.
Physically, the caches work to defang the deadliest points of the weaponized desert environments
(the so-called “last mile” sections where migrants most frequently perish). Discursively, the
stations, and their trafficking in various forms of media, disrupt the trope of migrant as “illegal”
or “invader” as they draw attention to immigrants and migrants in need of the most basic human
necessities for life. These direct action interventions offer a contested vocabulary of protest that
disrupts the environmental weaponry of the borderlands, and points towards ways artists and
activists denaturalize environmental military violence of the borderlands and fight against the
dehumanization of the migrants facing this violence.
44. Marketplace of the Visual: Identity Representations and the Imagery of Race
“A Weapon of My Own”: questioning race, culture, gender, and sexuality through graphic
narrative in Cristy C. Road’s Spit and Passion”
Carla Suárez Vega, University of Massachusetts Amherst
When cultural identity, race, gender and sexuality intersect, a space where non normative
subjects are oppressed and alienated is created. In her graphic novel Spit and Passion (The
Feminist Press, 2012), Christy C. Road locates herself at this crossing where normative ideals of
gender and sexual behavior intertwine with identity politics and cultural tradition. From the
margins of the literary world, Christy C. Road articulates her feminist and queer discourse
through a graphic narrative that is a combination of graphic novel, autobiography and
monologue; a text that showcases the richness of sequential art. In her coming of age novel the
author questions most of the preconceived ideas that were imposed onto her as a Cuban
American teenager growing up in Hialea, Miami FL. As a twelve year old discovering her own
identity and her place within society, young Christy has trouble combining her queer desires with
her Cuban Catholic values and education. From this intersection of cultural tradition and
queerness she is looking for a weapon that will give her the opportunity to question this double
oppressor system that doesn’t let her explore and come to terms with her Queer Latina identity.
She finds in Punk Rock music and in her obsession with the band Green Day the tool she needed
to embrace both her identities as a queer woman and as a Cuban American proud of her family
traditions.
“Resisting the Call to Hate (Again): Representations of Race and Border in U.S. Latino/a Picture
Storybooks”
Maya Socolovsky, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
In this presentation I explore how issues of race, migration and border crossing are narrated in a
selection of early 21st century U.S. Latino/a picture storybooks and how such representations
intersect with the U.S.’s rhetoric of nationhood and belonging. As illegal immigration increased
in the 1990s, so did anti-immigrant sentiments, and entering the 21st century strong legislative,
administrative and popular rhetoric about controlling the nation’s borders appeared. Books such
as Juan Felipe Herrera’s Super Cilantro Girl (2003), René Colato Lainez’s From North to South
(2010), Duncan Tonatiuh’s Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote (2013), Jairo Buitrago’s Two White
Rabbits (2015), and José Manuel Mateo’s Migrant (2011) all “create dangerously,” functioning
as important sites of radical resistance to this rhetoric. The traditional thematic quest narratives
that determine so many children’s storybooks are, from the outset, challenged in these texts. The
texts I examine seek to offer safety and belonging to their protagonists – and potentially, to their
readers – but perpetuate feelings of dislocation and non-belonging, mapping traditional tropes
and themes onto radical representations of the U.S.-Mexico border. In so doing, I argue, the
books insist on laying bare the contradiction at the heart of each story: while official records
estimate that 50,000 children migrate to the U.S. each year, suggesting that the myth of the U.S.
as a safe haven for refugees and migrants is still strong, its entry point - the U.S.-Mexico border
– increasingly operates as a violent uncovering and exposure of the nation’s exclusionary racial
policies and practices.
“Unbinding Latinidad: Latinx Book Covers in the Contemporary Literary Marketplace”
Isabel Duarte-Gray, Harvard University
This paper will explore the convergence of critical race theory, Latinx literature, and book
history to consider how Latinx literature can exist and simultaneously as a space of radical
transnational imagining and as a racially demarcated and physically bound commodity in a
global marketplace. I posit that the territory between the nationally unbound Latinx imaginary
and the marginal space it is accorded by the marketplace is negotiated through what Genette calls
paratexts, and specifically through peritexts, the visible marketing materials designed to hail
cross-community audiences in book stores and online. In this paper, I will outline the visual
vocabulary developed by trade publishes to market Latinx literature during a period recognized
by Latinx scholars as a transition “into the mainstream” from 1980 into the contemporary
moment. By surveying broad trends in Latinx literary marketing and scrutinizing covers
designed for Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban, Helena Viramontes’ Under the Feet of Jesus,
and a reprinting of Antonio Villarreal’s Pocho, I will demonstrate that while the covers
commissioned to sell Latinx novels for trade presses have largely re-tropicalized Latinidad for
their envisioned hegemonic audiences and undermined the texts they literally bind, their visual
vocabulary of cooptation leaves room for rich and subversive reimagining by Latinx artists,
authors, publishers, and agents of cultural production.
45. Indigeneity: Constructions of Race; Aesthetics of Identity
“The Term Hispanic is Racist: Anti-Black and Anti-Indigenous
Resistance in Toronto, Canada”
Andrea Vásquez Jiménez, University of Toronto
The term Hispanic which is commonly used and imposed on peoples of Latin-America and its
diaspora worldwide is Eurocentric, whitewashing, and has its roots embedded in Anti-Blackness
and Anti-Indigeneity. No terms are neutral and the identity term Hispanic is no different.
Language has the power to include, exclude and input boundaries as to who or what is spoken
about. Even if it is unintentional it is important and our responsibility that we stop using terms
that (re)perpetuate the hegemonic dominant lens that erases and romanticizes the colonial legacy.
The term is oppressive and racist and therefore the continuing use of it upholds white supremacy.
In continuing acts of resistance to dismantle the term Hispanic and resist a singular identity,
Andrea Vásquez Jiménez created a petition based out of Toronto titled, “Change Hispanic
Heritage Month to Latin-America History Month”. The purposeful focus on a geographical
region results in a space where people can self-identify and is inclusive to multiple and
intersectional forms of identities such as, but not limited to Indigenous Peoples and Afro/BlackLatinx. It simultaneously also seeks to decolonize and connect shared hxstories through the land.
This petition catapulted a chain of events which sparked a movement in Toronto resisting the
term Hispanic and the continuing purposeful creation of safer and more inclusive spaces for our
peoples.
“Unsettling Racial Geographies across the Americas & the Atlantic: Indigenismo, Anticolonial
Critique and the Aesthetics of Deception”
Jennifer Flores Sternad Ponce de León, University of Pennsylvania
This paper examines Raiders of the Lost Crown (2013), a transmedial literary work and alternate
reality game by New York-based writer and media artist Fran Ilich Morales Muñoz. Raiders’
participatory narrative and gameplay follows a transnational “support network” as it plots the
“recapture” and restitution to Mexico of a famed Tenochca/Mexica headdress that is owned and
displayed by an ethnology museum in Vienna. Raiders’ narrative unfolds across myriad
platforms, including written communiqués and epistolary exchanges, a petition campaign, a
guerrilla intervention at the Viennese museum, and invisible theater. It uses international
controversy surrounding the ancient Mexica headdress as a device of emplotment to advance a
multilayered narrative that is ultimately concerned with long histories of colonial and racial
violence in the Americas, the vitality of anticolonial resistance in the present, and the poverty of
European humanism’s universalizing claims and moral feeling founded upon these. With
mordant wit and calculated deception, Raiders elaborates a trenchant anticolonial and antiracist
critique that speaks to different racial and imperial/(neo)colonial ideologies that operate across
the transnational geography in which Raiders was produced and received (which spans the U.S.,
Mexico and Latin America, and Western Europe). I show how Ilich negotiates and exposes racial
and colonial ideologies that underlie the interpretation of Raiders’ various narrative
components, as well as the racialized interpellation of his own person as author, in order to
disrupt or parody these and ultimately expose the epistemic and material violence that underlie
them. I specifically attend to the work’s critique of a form of indigenismo that selectively
glorifies ancient indigenous culture while ignoring or obfuscating the social condition and
political struggle of living Indians and I compare this to the decolonial and utopian
imaginary Raiders puts forward, which may superficially resemble a kind of indigenismo, but
ultimately provokes a re-thinking of globalized modernity through colonial difference.
‘No soy Latina’: The Construction of Diasporic Maya Identity in the United States”
Stephanie Luna Padilla, University of California, Santa Cruz Via an in-depth analysis of Julia Gomez Ixmatá’s poem “Me llaman ‘Latina,’ aunque no soy”
and Jab’ellalih’s “Recollections of an 11-Year-Old Native Daughter,” this paper will examine
the ways in which Maya identities are reconstructed, redefined, and maintained within diasporic
Maya communities located in the United States. The perpetuation of a sense of connection and
belonging to ancestral lands plays a pivotal role in the construction of indigenous identities.
How, then, does migration away from those lands impact Maya migrants’ understanding of
themselves as Maya? How do they continue to maintain their cultural identities in territories to
which they are not, strictly speaking, indigenous? What we can glean from the two poems I have
chosen to analyze is the importance of maintaining a sense of cultural continuity via the
transmission of language, practices, beliefs, ceremonies, and histories across generations. To
what degree, however, does the crossing of national borders impact the ways in which Mayas are
rendered legible both culturally and legally? Mayas in the United States are subjected to similar
processes of homogenization and erasure that they face in their nations of origin, since in the
United States they are legible only as Latino and not as indigenous. Gomez Ixmatá and
Jab’ellalih’s poems detail the complex web of racial hierarchies in which Mayas in the United
States find themselves enmeshed as their identities and languages are erased, scorned, and
ridiculed.
46. Marginal Features; Spatializing Race
“Pasas, “Raisins of Hair”: El pelo como marcador racial en Song of the Water Saints de Nelly
Rosario”
Jhoanna Méndez, Florida State University
En la literatura el cuerpo es un sitio en donde actos violentos contra el Otro han sido
desempeñados. Particularmente, se ha prestado especial atención al fenotipo, incluyendo: la
nariz, los labios, el pelo, etc. con tal de yuxtaponerlo al del blanco. En la obra Song of the Water
Saints (2002) de la novelista dominicana-americana Nelly Rosario, el pelo es un medio por el
cual implicaciones raciales se exploran explícitamente e implícitamente. Esto es evidente cuando
unas vecinas se burlan de los “raisins of hair” (22) de Graciela. Esta traducción errónea resalta la
ineptitud del inglés, y por extensión la sociedad occidental, para captar la realidad dominicana y
resulta en una distorsión burlesca. Pese a que la cabellera se ha examinado en cuanto a la
identidad en la literatura latinoamericana, la dominicana-americana es un producto en ciernes.
Por tanto, propongo indagar la representación del pelo como marcador racial con el cual se
cuestiona el estándar de belleza hegemónico que jerarquiza las facciones occidentales. Como
resultad, se analizará la negociación con la cual los personajes crean su propia identidad,
específicamente su aceptación y rechazo de su descendencia africana. Para condensar las
observaciones del profesor Silvio Torres-Saillant en “The Tribulations of Blackness: Stages in
Dominican Racial Identity” (1998), el 90% del pueblo dominicano es mulato o afrodescendiente. Entonces, ¿por qué persiste esta negación? Se escogió este texto precisamente por
su cuestionamiento de la ideología hegemónica, la cual subraya la valorización de todo lo
Occidental mientras simultáneamente denigra lo que no lo es.
“Reinscribing the Liminal Other”
Diane M. Brown, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica
The politics of hybridity is always a complex issue. Postcolonial debates over “nationalism”
from Fanon’s moving portrayal of colonial antagonism to Said’s movement for selfdetermination, often share a concern for the term’s limitations in conceptualizing the
overlapping, migratory movements of cultural and racial formation across global divisions of
labour. Theoretical positioning offered by Homi K. Bhabha and Stuart Hall subvert binary racial
constructions, interrogating these “in-between” categories of competing cultural and racial
identities and differences. Additionally, they elucidate the “liminal” negotiation of identities,
consequently creating a new cultural meaning. Interstitial racial paradigms may be evidentiary in
some Latin American territories, but within this liminality, there is a denial of the presence of
vibrant communities of Afro-descendants, as well as a disavowal of their cultural influence. This
blackness is occluded in the discourse of the mestizaje, which mostly privileges the cultural and
racial mixture between indigenous communities and cultures of the descendants of European
colonizers because of the advantage which is given to European identity. Therefore, the
influence of Afro-Latinidad is often minimalized. To conclude, I will examine the poetics of the
Dominican, Blas Jiménez, as to how he highlights the complex phenomenon of mestizaje, in
addition to his investigation of “racial passing” and “cultural browning”, while he celebrates the
presence and dignity of the Other through the valorization of blackness within this liminal Latin
American diasporic construction, employing Negritudist philosophy.
“Ana Mendieta and the Brown Spatialization of Blackness”
Lucas de Lima, University of Pennsylvania
A Cuban exile working in the US, the multimedia artist Ana Mendieta famously drew from AfroCuban spirituality throughout her oeuvre. Consisting of figures carved into rock, mud, and clay
beds as well as portraits of herself lying down, Mendieta’s Siluetas series in particular took
inspiration from Black spiritual ecologies, foregrounding her interest in Yoruba deities. While
critics have analyzed Mendieta’s references to Santería and other ancestral traditions as a sign of
her complex racial positioning, however, the relationship between her work and historical
formations of Afro-Cuban identity has yet to be analyzed. Departing from Fernando Ortiz’s
canonical studies of Afro-Cuban religious practice, I argue that Siluetas reconfigures the
ethnographic tradition of white-authored Blackness from the location of brownness. Whereas
Ortiz’s narration hinges on white transcendentality, thus subordinating Afro-Cubans as primitive
others to possessive whiteness, Mendieta unsettles dominant geographies through a production of
difference based on horizontal negotiation and embedded praxis. Against the vertical production
of national space, then, Mendieta inscribes an evisceration of self as groundwork for BlackLatinx coalitional politics.