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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US Latina/os and the White Imagination
Lee Bebout
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The US–Mexico War and American Literary History
Jaime Javier Rodríguez
The US–Mexico War produced a wide range of literature in the United States that exposed the provisional and contingent qualities of US nationalism, even while it also asserted the anti-Mexican racism and xenophobia that continues to shape cultural and political discourse in the early 21st century. Much of the popular literature produced in mass-market novelette form, for example, deployed a range of Mexican enemies that ran through a sequence from noble, chivalrous opponents, to fiendish enemies and terrorist bandits. This instability in how writers saw Mexico and Mexicans suggests that the war could paradoxically generate critical self-reflections that countered essentialist notions of manifest destiny. The eventual projection of the bandit figure as the prototypical Mexican villain reinforced Anglo-American national self-definitions of moral, cultural, and racial superiority as a response to the destabilizing energies resulting from the invasion of a neighboring American republic. For Mexican American writers, the war, although a major feature of Mexican American literature, nonetheless became an environment in which to explore conditions of non-national, liminal border identities, which became strikingly relevant as the 20th century turned into the 21st. In Mexico, the agonized response to the nation’s failure to stop the “Yankee” invader led instead to a confrontation with its own lack of a unifying national identity and forced writers and political intellectuals to ask hard questions about Mexico’s destiny.
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A Very Brief Survey of Twentieth-Century Latin-American Literature
Jorge Fornet
The 20th century in Latin America began, in literary terms, with the emergence of Modernism, which exerted enormous influence over both sides of the Atlantic. From then on, the literature of the region—at least the literature written in Spanish and Portuguese—has been on a long process of assimilation in favor of the best features of the universal tradition enriched with the specificities of Latin American culture and history. Impacted both by competing aesthetic trends and social and political upheaval, the literature of Latin America provides a unique place from which to observe the contradictions of the region, as well as to attempt to answer the major questions that the region poses. Some basic certitudes do not prevent one recurring question from coming up: Does a Latin American literature exist? The answer is more complex than it appears on the surface, but the truth is that the most significant and ambitious moments of that literature—Modernism, the Vanguards, and the celebrated boom of the novel in the 1960s—have been those in which Latin American writers have been recognized as belonging to a common literary space. A journey through fictional narrative, poetry, essays, and even a relatively new genre such as testimony can attest to the way in which Latin Americans see themselves and think of themselves, with their own national and regional specificities and, in contrast with the others, beyond the space of the region. In the last decade of the 20th century, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Latin America was no longer what it had been for thirty years. By then, revolutionary dreams, guerrillas, the long nights of dictatorships, and the recovery of democracy—just to mention a few of its most recognizable aspects—felt like a distant past. In this context, a new generation emerged in order to close out the 20th century, and beyond that, to begin the 21st. To read, even if it is from a bird’s eye view, the interval between the Modernists to the 21st-century generation is the aim of these pages.
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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.
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Women and Writing in Spanish America from Colonial Times through the 20th Century
Carolina Alzate and Betty Osorio
As in the case of other Western literary traditions, women’s relationship to writing in Spanish America has been problematic since early modernity. From colonial times onward, women’s emergence on the writing scene as authors went hand in hand with a redescription of the feminine that allowed them to become producers of written culture and to find a respectable entry into the public sphere from which they were excluded. Spanish-American feminine tradition from the 16th through the 20th centuries may be read as a gradual, heterogeneous, and difficult but nonetheless sustained and very productive occupation of new ground. Legitimation of their voice passed through the reading of the male tradition, the establishment of a female tradition, and the redescription of a subjectivity that would make it possible for them to take up the pen and eventually to imagine themselves being read by others. Establishing the contents of these women’s libraries, reconstructed through their testimonies of reading both in a colonial society in which illiteracy was very high—especially among women—and in 19th-century society in general, and in which access to the written word remained restricted, are key elements for understanding their writing. Most female authorship during the colonial period took the form of religious writing and was dependent upon the male figure of the confessor, as was the possibility of publishing their life stories and writings. But women authors were not only nuns, and it is also possible to find examples of women who left their mark on writing due to special circumstances (travelers and so-called witches). Male tutelage tended to remain in force throughout the 19th century, and newspapers would provide vitally important new spaces for publication in the young independent republics. Women’s relationship to newspapers, both as readers and authors, was essential to this writing tradition, and it would allow them to build reading and editorial networks—both within the Americas and across the Atlantic, a context that must be understood to properly understand their writing projects. Women writers in the early 20th century would travel, not without difficulty, along the roads paved by the pioneers. The year 1959, a provisional closing date marked by the Cuban Revolution, helps position 20th-century literature as one of the forms of the crisis of modernity: that which reveals and celebrates heterogeneity and could no longer openly continue excluding women from the authorized spaces for the production of meaning.
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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.
