After a long void in scholarship, literature on US/Central American art began to emerge in the decade of the 2010s. As this new body of literature emerges it is important to consider the politics of visuality and visibility as it informs production and reception of contemporary art by US Central Americans. During the years of US intervention that fueled Central American conflicts (1970s–1990s), the United States produced a visual discourse on Central Americans for US audiences, especially evident in photography, political posters, and Hollywood films. This visual discourse relied on a what I call a “solidarity aesthetics” for Central America, in which images and representations of Central Americans were made, selected, disseminated, and framed to produce empathy and encourage action with the region across the globe. Yet, this solidarity aesthetics entailed optical codes—imagery on poverty, violence, and tropical landscapes—that subsequently established a reductive visual trope about Central America still used today. This visual discourse not only objectifies a Central American subject, but further enables the erasure of US/Central American creative practices as it implies the region produces violence and not art. In the context of such visual discourse, art by Alma Leiva, Muriel Hasbun, Beatriz Cortez, Jessica Lagunas, and Óscar Moisés Díaz exemplifies a disruption of dominant visual discourse by US Central Americans artists. They create art and images that counter historical erasure and the visual tropes that propagate violence while offering alternative visual narratives that reflect on the legacies of war, US intervention, and the consequential displacement and mass migration of thousands of Central Americans.
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US Central Americans in Art and Visual Culture
Kency Cornejo
Article
US Latina/os and the White Imagination
Lee Bebout
There is no singular manifestation of Latina/os in the white imagination. Rather, Latina/os occupy various, competing, and interdependent forms of representation. Latina/os are depicted as perpetually foreign and as the future of conservative American values. They are cast as lazy drains on society and as people who outwork Americans and take their jobs. Latinas are rendered as sexy señoritas who desire US white men and as hyper-fertile producers of “anchor babies” in the United States. And these are just a few of the ways in which US whiteness imagines Latina/os. These representations find expression in stereotypes, discursive tropes, and racial scripts—beliefs that explicitly or implicitly take narrative form. As a product of the white imagination, these depictions of Latina/os find expression in a wide array of discursive locations, from film and literature to journalism and political speech, to name a few.
These manifestations of Latinas/os in the white imagination stretch across US history from the late 18th century to the 21st century. These representations have been shaped by and met the exigencies of US whites’ national and racial projects. As such, depictions of Latina/os reveal crucial aspects of US whiteness within a given historical moment and across time. While there are numerous, often contradictory elements of these depictions, they are also interdependent and work together to meet the needs of whiteness. Critically, however, Latinas/os have not been imagined by whiteness without response. Rather, throughout this history, Latinas/os have actively negotiated these dominant racial scripts—from claiming whiteness and citizenship to asserting indigenous heritage or pride in ethnic heritage—in order to meet their own needs.
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Vindicating Dominican latinidad through Pedro Henríquez Ureña’s First New York Stay
Sharina Maillo-Pozo
Pedro Henríquez Ureña is arguably the most influential Dominican thinker of the 20th century and one of the most esteemed Latin American and Caribbean intellectuals. He spent almost ten years in the United States where he engaged in literary and intellectual activities and has been deemed by many critics as one of the precursors of the Caribbean intellectual diaspora. Yet, since his legacy predates the consolidation of Latina/o studies in the late 1960s, his vast body of work has been regarded as valuable contribution exclusive to the Latin American and Caribbean intellectual archive rather than as testimony of the long-standing presence of Latina/o writings in the United States. The seminal works of scholars such as Alfredo Roggiano, Silvio Torres-Saillant, Victoria Nuñez, and Danny Méndez have shifted the dialogues on Pedro Henríquez Ureña’s trajectory considering his life in the United States and his experience in the New York metropolis. Situating him in a “Latino continuum,” to borrow Carmen Lamas’s term, within United States latinidad, engages with early 21st century scholarship on Latina/o studies that challenge the limitations of nationalist US literary and intellectual history and regionalist Latin American studies. The case of Pedro Henríquez Ureña sheds light on the important contributions of Spanish-speaking Caribbean-Latina/o writings in the early 20th century and highlights the intellectual activity of Dominicans, an ethnic group within the Latina/o umbrella that has remained obliterated in general discussions on latinidad. Thus, Pedro Henríquez Ureña’s trajectory in the United States, and most specifically New York, underscores the cultural dynamism of Latinas/os in early-20th-century New York with a special focus on pre-diasporic Dominican latinidad.
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Warfare and Latina/o Social Movements
Belinda Linn Rincón
Despite receiving little to no attention in mainstream academic scholarship about US antiwar movements, Latina/o communities have a long history of protesting wars and military interventions throughout the second half of the 20th century. The wide-scale mobilization of Latina/o protestors against the US war in Vietnam marks an important development in Latina/o social movement history. Another important moment of Latina/o mobilization came in the 1980s and 1990s in response to the mass influx of refugees fleeing war in Central America that resulted in large part from US interventions in Central American civil wars. The historical context, political struggles, and modes of activism of the Central American solidarity movement distinguish it from the Vietnam antiwar movements. Yet, like earlier Chicana/o and Puerto Rican antiwar movements, there remained a concerted focus on transnational solidarity. Notably, each movement accompanied a literary and cultural renaissance in which authors and activists—and, in many cases, author-activists—joined forces to protest the political, economic, and social consequences of warfare. Some even joined revolutionary movements as internationalist volunteers. Latina/o activists and authors have drawn on rich oral, musical, and folkloric traditions and tropes to create new modes of expression and political speech. To fully account for the multiple forms of Latina/o antiwar expression, it is necessary to look beyond traditional literary genres and include protest speeches, agit-prop theater, movement manifestos and newspapers, conference resolutions, handbills, political pamphlets, corridos (ballads), oral histories, induction refusals, and testimonios, among other documents. Through alternative print cultures, Latina/o antiwar activists and authors created a space to summon and address a Latina/o readership whose concerns over war were largely ignored in mainstream publics. Latina/o authors also insisted on creative autonomy and aesthetic sophistication while remaining resolutely committed to producing socially relevant literature whose resonance extended far beyond the page. Such characteristics define a diverse body of Latina/o writing that helped galvanize Latina/o antiwar movements.
Article
Zapotec Literature
Gloria Elizabeth Chacón
Zapotec literature is one of the most diverse and vibrant contemporary Indigenous expressions in the kaleidoscope of spoken languages in México. Its wide-ranging articulations stretch from the foundational rich oral tradition to diverse postmodern narratives. Zapotec literature has a long-written history in both Spanish and Zapotec languages. Several works by 21st-century writers and poets have been translated into a number of Indo-European languages. Over the last five centuries, “Zapotec” has assumed the function of an umbrella term encompassing a number of endangered languages. These have evolved into inter-related but autonomous linguistic codes, analogous to Romance languages. The Zapotec people share territory with several other Indigenous nations. The Mixe, Huave, and Tuun Saavi, among many others in Oaxaca—Mexico’s most linguistically heterogenous region—neighbor Zapotec territories. The term Zapotec originates from the Nahuatl language. Around the time the Spanish armada dropped anchor on the Mexican coast, the Nahua people represented the most powerful community of Central México. The Nahua named the Zapotec people after what they perceived was an abundance of the Zapote tree in the latter’s lands. Of great significance are regional distinctions in contemporary literary expressions. Oaxaca’s topography divides into four regions: isthmus, valleys, Northern Sierra, and Southern Sierra. Most renowned contemporary writers like Natalia Toledo, Irma Pineda, and Victor Cata emerge from the City of Juchitán, about 30 minutes from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Provocative novelists like Javier Martínez Castellanos or Mario Molina hail from the Northern Sierra. Binni Za’ or Cloud people are the self-naming terms used by those writers who come from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec or Juchitán, while Benne Xhon or “people from these lands” are the autonomous names used in the Northern Sierra. Zapotec novelist Castellanos Martínez explains that “xhon” literally means that matter or sediments that stay at the bottom of a liquid. He writes that the idea of dregs may reference those Zapotecs who did not migrate to the mythical City of Tula (2018, 96). Self-naming and language specificity vary according to region and sometimes even in relation to their hometowns. Today, some writers continue to use Zapotec to refer to themselves or their language. In the isthmus, since the 1980s, writers have also turned to more autonomous names like Binni Za or People from the Cloud. In describing their language, many poets employ dillaza or dilla xhon too, but there are many other terms that are used depending on the region.
Zapotec is considered part of the Oto-mangean language family. While linguists tend to classify Zapotec in 40–60 distinct languages, there is a recognition among writers that Zapotec may have been a unique and distinctive language that evolved over time and space. In contrast to other well-known Indigenous communities like the Nahua or Maya, Zapotecs have inherited few written pre-colonial documents despite the development of a writing system that, with well over 2,500 years of history, is considered one of the oldest in Mesoamerica. Foundational Zapotec writers in the early part of the 20th century weaved narratives in their creations that stem from the oral tradition. Other poets, short story writers, and novelists depart from engaging the oral tradition narratives to innovate their cultural production. Salient strategies employed by writers range from a use of linguistic parallelism, myths, intertextuality with other Indigenous texts, and the use of humor to debunk stereotypes. In addition to a legacy of rich verbal arts, Zapotec stories written in the Latin alphabet can be traced to the 19th century. Unrecognized by many scholars is that 19th-century Zapotec texts parallels the birth of what has traditionally been considered canonical, national literature that has been produced in Spanish mainly by criollo elites. In the 1950s, Zapotecs became the first Indigenous community in Mexico to establish a unified alphabet. The use of conventional literary forms by writers in Zapotec, bilingually, or in Spanish reflects its rich history and plurality.
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