The literary and cultural legacy of Spanish-language and bilingual newspapers in New Mexico provides insight into the changing political climate of the territory and state from the early 19th century to the years following statehood in 1912. As such, New Mexico newspapers provided an outlet for Hispanic New Mexicans to publish political commentary and literary production that promoted cultural preservation and served as a mode of resistance to incoming Anglo-American outsiders who arrived to this region in the years prior to and following the Mexican–American War (1846–1848). While newspapers came and went, the literature published and later recovered through more contemporary efforts of preservation and dissemination can be viewed as an important contribution to the current body of literature that informs regional New Mexican studies as well as larger Chicano/a literary and Latino/a literary studies.
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New Mexico Newspapers
Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez
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Nuns’ Writing in Colonial Mexico
Stephanie Kirk
During the colonial period in Mexico, convents and their inhabitants played a central role in society. Nuns, who lived in permanent enclosure behind convent walls, were living emblems of New World orthodoxy and of the success of the Spanish evangelization project. Subject to a repressive gender ideology and the misogyny of the Church, nuns’ lives were carefully monitored and contained. While becoming a nun represented a valid and often attractive choice for the Spanish and criolla women who were permitted to profess as nuns in convent, the Church authorities went to great lengths to ensure they followed strictly circumscribed rules regarding their daily lives and spiritual trajectories. Nuns, however, succeeded in finding a variety of ways to exercise agency and demonstrate their individuality including the writing of different types of texts. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695), was both a nun and the most influential writer of her age. While the depth of her erudition and the breadth of her literary skill set her apart from other nuns, she nonetheless shared their devotion to God and their experience of convent life in colonial Mexico. While most other nuns did not always possess such great literary skills, their works stand as documents that detail women’s spirituality and the affective response this engendered in them, as well as providing evidence of their daily lives. Their writings allow us a glimpse into their worlds, in which they express their great devotion and love of God but also detail the challenges they encounter as “brides of Christ” subject to male control. The most significant genre of convent writing is the spiritual autobiography or vida. Nuns could only embark on the drafting of these texts at the instigation of and under the supervision of the male confessor. These men would reorganize and rescript them to ensure they conformed to male-defined norms of spiritual exemplarity for women. However, women’s own words show how, even while they understood the power dynamics of this relationship, they drew on rhetorical and discursive strategies to communicate their subjectivity. Nuns also wrote a variety of different texts including letters, poetry, and theater (mostly, but not exclusively, of a religious nature).
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Nuyorican and Diasporican Literature and Culture
Jorge Duany
The term “Nuyorican” (in its various spellings) refers to the combination of “Puerto Rican” and “New Yorker.” The sobriquet became a popular shorthand for the Puerto Rican exodus to the United States after World War II. Since the mid-1960s, the neologism became associated with the literary and artistic movement known as “Nuyorican.” The movement was institutionalized with the 1973 founding of the Nuyorican Poets Café in the Lower East Side of Manhattan by Miguel Algarín and Miguel Piñero. Much of Nuyorican literature featured frequent autobiographical references, the predominance of the English language, street slang, realism, parodic humor, subversive politics, and a rupture with the island’s literary models. Since the 1980s, the literature of the Puerto Rican diaspora has been characterized as “post-Nuyorican” or “Diasporican” to capture some of its stylistic and thematic shifts, including a movement away from urban blight, violence, colloquialism, and radicalism. The Bronx-born poet María Teresa (“Mariposa”) Fernández coined the term “Diasporican” in a celebrated 1993 poem. Contemporary texts written by Puerto Ricans in the United States also reflect their growing dispersal from their initial concentration in New York City.
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Oral Culture: Literacy, Religion, Performance
Cara Anne Kinnally
While cultural critics and historians have demonstrated that print culture was an essential tool in the development of national, regional, and local communal identities in Latin América, the role of oral culture, as a topic of inquiry and a source itself, has been more fraught. Printed and hand-written texts often leave behind tangible archival evidence of their existence, but it can be more difficult to trace the role of oral culture in the development of such identities. Historically, Western society has deeply undervalued oral cultures, especially those practiced or created by non-Westerners and non-elites. Even before the arrival of the first printing presses to the Americas, starting with the very first encounters between Spaniards and indigenous peoples in the Americas in the late-15th and early-16th centuries, European conquerors understood and portrayed European alphabetic written script as a more legitimate, and therefore more valuable, form of history and knowledge-making than oral forms. Those cultures without alphabetic writing were deemed barbaric, according to this logic. Despite its undervaluation, oral culture was one of the principal ways in which vast numbers of Latinas/os were exposed to, engaged with, and exchanged ideas about politics, religion, social change, and local and regional community identity during the colonial period. In particular, oral culture often offers the perspective of underrepresented voices, such as those of peasants, indigenous communities, afro-Latinas/os, women, and the urban poor, in Latina/o historical, literary, and cultural studies. During the colonial period especially, many of these communities often did not produce their own European script writing or find their perspectives and experiences illuminated in the writings of the letrados, or lettered elites, and their voices thus remain largely excluded from the print archive. Studies of oral culture offer a corrective to this omission, since it was through oral cultural practices that many of these communities engaged with, contested, and redefined the public discourses of their day.
Oral culture in the colonial period comprised a broad range of rich cultural and artistic practices, including music, various types of poetry and balladry, oral history, legend, performance, religious rituals, ceremonies, festivals, and much more. These practices served as a way to remember and share ideas, values, and experiences both intraculturally and interculturally, as well as across generations. Oral culture also changes how the impact of print culture is understood, since written texts were often disseminated to the masses through oral practices. In the missions of California and the present-day US Southwest, for example, religious plays served as one of the major vehicles for the forced education and indoctrination of indigenous communities during the colonial period. To understand such a play, it is important to consider not just the printed text but also the performance of the play, as well as the ways in which the audience understands and engages with the play and its religious teachings. The study of oral culture in the Latina/o context, therefore, includes an examination of how literate, illiterate, and semi-literate Latinas/os have engaged with, resisted, or repurposed various written forms, such as poetry, letters, theater, testimonios, juridical documents, broadsides, political treatises, religious texts, and the sermon, through oral cultural practices and with various objectives in mind. Oral culture, in all of its many forms, has thus served as an important means for the circulation of knowledge and the expression of diverse world views for Latinas/os throughout the colonial period and into the 21st century.
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Paredes, Américo
Héctor Pérez
The remarkably multi-faceted Américo Paredes Manzano attained the status of renowned scholar, teacher, author, and poet over his tumultuous and illustrious lifespan. Born in 1915 in Brownsville, at the southeastern-most corner of the state of Texas bordering Mexico, Américo Paredes passed away in Austin in 1999. His life and professional career spanned much territory, touched many lives, and affected areas of study and pedagogy as few individuals can claim. His impressive body of work is encyclopedic in range and awe-inspiring in its originality. Certainly, Paredes’s life circumstances must be read in their historical context. He was born at a time when the scent of revolution was strong in the air, declared in Mexico in 1910, and with the nascent organizing of the revolt to liberate south Texas from the rest of the state in 1915. Tensions among competing groups in the formation of Texas since the treaty of 1848 had not yet been resolved and the state of a negotiated pluralistic existence was still precarious at best. For generations, university students have first encountered the work of Paredes through his major work of scholarship on the border corrido (ballad), namely the fully contextualized and historicized analysis of “El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez”/ “The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez.” However, those who look further into his work realize that Paredes had already started to make his mark in the area of ethnomusicology, a branch of anthropology. His contributions are not insignificant as a number of his students went on to carry and extend Paredes’s teachings to other institutions of higher learning. One might see the logical relationship between this scholar’s interest in and knowledge of the Texas-Mexico border corrido and the more global ethnomusicologist’s perspective. In the same manner, Paredes trained and inspired numerous cadres of scholars in cultural and literary studies. By extension, his mentees have likewise now trained generations of scholars who have applied variants of the critical model pioneered by Paredes, rooted in his observations and study of the clash of cultures. Not unlike the history of other major intellectuals, the history of Paredes’s influence is marked by scholars who emulate, extend, revise, and also critique earlier views and critical approaches in a variety of areas such as language and linguistics, gender, class, race and ethnicity, and regionalism.
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The Pasts and Futures of Latina/o Indigeneities
Simón Ventura Trujillo
The question of indigeneity in the study of Latina/o literature and culture points toward conflictive histories of colonization and invigorates a set of global directions for the future of Latina/o studies. The pairing of the two terms—Latina/o and Indigeneity—appears initially counterintuitive. Conventionally understood as an ancestral relation of Latina/o communities that has been vanished or lost over the duration of the European colonization of the Americas, Indigeneity opens a set of insuperable problematics that continue to pattern and shape multiple and incommensurate iterations of Latina/o politics and culture. While “Latina/o” in some instances denotes ancestral relation with Native tribes in the Americas, for many the term has also come to signify decidedly non-indigenous mestiza/o, settler, or migrant identities, imaginaries, and belongings. The literary, cultural, and intellectual production of Latina/o Indigeneity offers a unique window into the ways in which Native politics continue to compete with, accommodate, and challenge multiple regimes of colonial occupation and periods of modern state formation. Indigeneity illuminates places of Latina/o literary and cultural production through which to engage the historic ascendance of a number of fundaments of modern life across the globe, including capitalism, nation-state sovereignty, and the transnational social structures of race, sex, citizenship, and gender.
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Pérez, Emma
Ellie D. Hernández
The work of writer, historian, and theorist Emma Pérez encompasses a broad intersectional approach to the study of Chicanas. Her life’s work crosses disciplinary boundaries by working with history and literary fiction. Noted for her dedicated study of gender and sexuality, Pérez also demonstrates a commitment to feminist studies, Chicana studies, and especially Latinx LGBTQ communities. Her complex interlaced approach brings together a powerful critique of the problems within the historical discipline and redirects her concerns for the erasures of Chicana lesbians from the historical record and cultural archive by writing novels that revise the past. Furthermore, in her theoretical work, particularly her groundbreaking book, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas Back into History (1999), Pérez revises the representation of Chicanas by revisiting the history of colonialism and devising a theoretical approach that aims to recast Chicana subjectivity. In her theory of the “decolonial imaginary,” she identifies a set of conditions that presumptively casts Chicanas in a subservient or sexualized role that cannot be easily undone without changing the representations of these conditions, specifically the representations of conquest and colonialism. Likewise, Pérez’s effort to rework the colonial past is performed by her inclusion of Chicanas and Chicana lesbians in her literary works. Her first book of fiction, the novel Gulf Dreams (1996), is unique for its portrayal of sexual violence, racial ambivalences, and romantic love. In her second book, the historical novel Forgetting the Alamo, or Blood Memory (2009), she explores deep same-sex love, complex political histories revolving around differential regard for the lives of women and people of color, and gritty depictions of hardship, loss, historical memory, and the complexities of forgiveness. In the larger scope of Chicana/o literature, Pérez bears no claim to idealizing Chicana/o culture; rather she harmonizes the good with the bad and lets the reader decide what is real. Trained as a historian, Emma Pérez understands that changing the historical past requires reassessing reality, and her work accomplishes this goal.
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Periodicals in Chile during the Government of Salvador Allende and the Dictatorship
César Zamorano Díaz
Periodicals have been a significant part of Chile’s cultural history. Groups and networks of writers, intellectuals, and artists have orbited around literary and cultural periodicals with the aim of disseminating cultural and aesthetic projects. The study of periodicals addresses dialogues that have moved from the specificities of their disciplinary practice to political and social contexts. Reconstructing the trajectory of periodicals allows for the articulation of a dialogue with the voices that congregate in them to propose, question, and harbor specific currents capable of intervening in the configuration of the disciplines, the theoretical and cultural guidelines that determine an era. Dialogues that at certain junctures can transcend this resonance and expand considerably.
The history of Chile as read through cultural and literary periodicals reveals the concerns that the cultural and artistic debate promoted during two distinct periods: during the Unidad Popular project, led by the government of Salvador Allende (1970–1973), and its interruption with the coup d’état that initiated one of the bloodiest and most extensive dictatorships in Latin America (1973–1990). These concerns were articulated within a decisive collaboration of artists and writers during the Unidad Popular and altered under the persecution and rupture with the state during the dictatorship. In these two moments the journals opened debates and proposed and discussed ideas from a specific historical time, along with problematizing the exercise of their intellectual practice and reflecting on the disciplinary limits that sustain them. The analysis of the trajectory of periodicals in the cultural history of Chile recognizes the social, political, and cultural transformations of these two moments in the history of Chile.
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Poetry of the Latin American Avant-Garde
Justin Read
The Latin American avant-garde—more widely known by the Spanish vanguardia or vanguardismo—emerged after 1910, roughly contemporaneously with parallel literary movements in Europe and Anglo America, and often in direct dialogue with them. Although vanguardistas worked across various media and genres (novels, theatre, film, painting, sculpture), the primary modes of vanguardismo were poetry and, curiously, poetic manifestos that blur lines between poetry and performance (a hybridized “performance manifesto” as Vicky Unruh has called it). Like many other facets of Latin American culture and society, the historical trajectory of vanguardista poetry roughly traces patterns of political-economic dependency between rich and poor countries in the 20th century. Vanguardismo was born of the rapid transformation of Latin America from rural-agrarian to urban-industrial societies between 1870 and 1920. New modes of transportation made circum-Atlantic travel and communication more fluid than ever. A poet like Vicente Huidobro (considered the foundational figure of vanguardismo) could follow new artistic developments in Europe from his native Chile, reject the traditionalism of prior generations, and reformulate symbolism, cubism, futurism, and so forth into his Creacionismo—a movement he then “exported” back to Spain, fomenting vanguardismo in the former colonial metropolis. Huidobro would be followed by several major “international” vanguardistas—notably Pablo Neruda (Chile), César Vallejo (Peru), Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina), and Nicolás Guillén (Cuba)—who ingrained themselves in key literary circles like Dada, negritude, surrealism, and other Parisian avant-garde “-isms.” Back in the Western Hemisphere, vanguardista poetry flowered in the 1920s and 1930s, yet mainly by way of small, close-knit intellectual circles in urban centers publishing their own small, ephemeral journals. This “localized” vanguardismo most forcefully began in São Paulo, Brazil with the “Modern Art Week” held in the city’s beaux-arts Municipal Theatre in February 1922. The three-day event abruptly altered the literary culture of the entire nation and continues to influence poetry, popular music, film, and art. Brazilian poets would be followed by other small movements in other large Latin American cities. Although these movements often had minimal contact with one another, they almost uniformly promised the creation of a national utopia by means of new poetic practice. Such movements did not merely rehash or regurgitate Europe and Anglo-American “advancements” so much as they attempted to reformulate Latin American identity vis-à-vis Europe. Rather than colonial copies of European development, Latin American poetry would now be exported back to Europe as a utopic beacon of a new modernity; while Europe fell into decadence, the Latin American vanguardia remained largely hopeful and positive despite its frequent attacks on tradition. Poetic utopias failed to materialize even as vanguardismo continued to influence poetic innovation in the latter half of the 20th century. In retrospect, vanguardista poets transformed literary arts, yet could not revolutionize the rest of society. The era was dominated by the poetic production of white males (with very few black, indigenous, and female poets) who continued to perpetuate legacies of colonial appropriation even as they sought to dismantle them.
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Politics and Book Publishing in Argentina
Ezequiel Saferstein
In a country where literacy rates are among the highest in the region, books are cultural objects cherished by vast sectors of the Argentine population as well as powerful symbolic, cultural, economic, and political artefacts. In particular, books on politics are an indispensable segment in the catalog of any Argentine publishing house. The vertiginous nature of politics and the historical significance of the book in Argentine society are such that the publishing sector has been—and still remains—one of the preferred spaces where symbolic and political power is disputed. Throughout the 20th century and the first two decades of the 21st century, the publishing market responded to different historical circumstances by producing headlines that sought to engage readers in different ways, helping them make life choices and understand the significance of their own time, as well as forming or reinforcing their opinions. Manufactured from the Left to the Right, books on politics expressed and shaped wills and aspirations, serving as combat weapons and means for the creation of spaces where ideas and political sentiments flourish.
There are historical ties between the Argentinean publishing and political spheres, and the publishing process works as a fundamental form of mediation concerning the production and distribution of political ideas. Against the image of the book as an exclusive bridge connecting the authors with the reading public, a sociological and material viewpoint might focus on the publishing world and its protagonists: the ghost editors and agents who play an indispensable and decisive role in the processes whereby a book becomes an entitled cultural, economic, and political intervention—a great factory of ideas, discourses, and products with material and symbolic ramifications that influence public debates and agendas.
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Postcolonial Avant-Garde Fiction
Adam Spanos
Postcolonial novelists face a difficult double bind. On one hand, they are expected to produce fiction that accurately represents the political and social circumstances of the nations to which they belong. Yet realism came to them as an inheritance of imperial rule, and as such it served as a tool for organizing colonial understandings of time, social relations, and interior experience. On the other hand, experiments in novelistic form that would break with the tenets of realism are often understood as frivolous capitulations to Western fashions or as bitter attacks on cherished traditional aesthetics. For if literary experiments are conducted with the intention of transforming popular tastes, they may very well be taken as analogues of the imperial civilizing mission, which claims to be justified in forcing cultural transformations on colonized populations by virtue of their purported indolence and backwardness. Evidently there is no position that a postcolonial writer can adopt that does not involve some kind of complicity with imperial interests or mimicry of its aesthetic forms. Yet the postcolonial avant-garde can be defined by its refusal of the binary choice between colonial-national and metropolitan-imperial imperatives. Its aesthetic innovations are defined by the intention of challenging not simply the realities created by empires but the very social imaginary, often uncritically adopted by colonial or postcolonial populations, on which the imperial project rests. Writers working in this tendency develop non-, pseudo-, or para-mimetic narratives to force readers to entertain the possibility of realities existing outside the terms of the real as this has been prescribed by dominant agencies, including imperial ones; alternatively, they turn their prose to ends other than representation in order to demonstrate the embeddedness of ordinary language in imperial discourses and to indicate other possible usages of a shared tongue. Magical realism, most influentially and spectacularly, began as a challenge to the disenchanted and positivist nature of the Western gaze: writers like Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, and Ben Okri reveal the everyday power of forces not recognized by modern secular reason. Other writers, like Samuel Beckett and Clarice Lispector, disclose the relation between realist literary representation and the very order of rationality that consigns heterogeneous or dissident elements to the status of madness. Postcolonial avant-garde fiction is thus distinguished intellectually from realist writing by its assault on the presuppositions or unconscious preconditions of imperial domination as these have been taken up among colonized populations. Insofar as imperialism, in its liberal varieties at least, works through an epistemological register to transform the ways in which colonized populations think, avant-garde artists must direct their polemical energies against both foreign and domestic audiences simultaneously. The obscurity and difficulty of postcolonial avant-garde fiction is thus the result not only of the novel narrative and descriptive strategies it employs but also of the tenuous and often untenable situation of the avant-garde writer in the postcolony, a gadfly to all implied readers. The formal innovations developed by postcolonial avant-garde writers are vast, but all serve the project of offering new modes of perception that cannot be contained by either imperial or nationalist worldviews. In this sense the avant-garde is a democratizing agency, opposing consensual fictions and opening up multiple possible avenues for experiencing and responding to the problems and potentials of postcolonial existence.
Article
The Presence of Coloniality in Central American-American Fictions
Oriel María Siu
The Spanish invasion of 1492 was the first marker and constitutive element of coloniality. The presence of coloniality is critical for the explication and reflection on racialized and subalternized relations of dominance/subordination in the Americas and all other places affected by European colonization. In 1992, Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano introduced the category of coloniality of power, further developed in 2000 by Walter Mignolo in his work Local Histories/Global Designs. Coloniality not only constituted a pattern of continual production of racialized identities, and an unequal hierarchy whereby European identities and knowledge were considered superior to all others in what amounted to a caste system; it also generated mechanisms of social domination that preserved this social classification into the present. Coloniality is not limited to the colonial period, which ended for most of Latin America in the first quarter of the 19th century. Despite political independences from Spain and Portugal, the pattern articulated by Quijano continues to our day, structuring processes of racialization, subalternization, and knowledge production. This is the reason Mignolo labels coloniality a “matrix of power.” The literature examined in this article concerns itself with revealing the markers of coloniality on the Central American social body in diaspora. This article contends that diasporic Central American literatures produced within the United States represent not only the experience of exile and migration, but also an experience of continued war and perpetual violence, as Central American bodies discover in this US diasporic landscape, the racialization of their bodies, and how they in turn become disposable as a result of their status.
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Print Culture and Literature in 19th-Century Brazil
Ana Utsch
The history of Brazilian print culture is closely connected to the establishment of national literature in the 19th century. Indeed, after three centuries of prohibition of printing activity in the colony by the Portuguese Crown, Impresão Régia, the first legal printing establishment in Brazil, was created in 1808 due to the arrival of the Portuguese royal family during the Napoleonic wars. From the late implementation of Imprensa Régia, which became Typographia Nacional after the independence of Brazil in 1822, to the consolidation of the publishing world in the second half of the century, marked by the controversial French presence, the discourses on literature and print production modes tend to reflect the different circulation spheres. In fact, following the long period of colonization under Portuguese rule, print production modes were implemented simultaneously with the consolidation of a broad print culture, characterized by the growth of newspapers, the circulation of images, and the impactful arrival of the novel. Undeniably, the sudden and concurrent arrival of the two worlds—technical and cultural—in addition to the paradoxical development of the print world, marked by its two technical systems—artisanal and industrial—strongly influenced the material aspects of 19th-century Brazilian publishing production. In this context, under the argument of an alleged precariousness of local print production, writers, critics, typographers, engravers, and bookbinders created literary and editorial polemics in newspapers, magazines, and books that contributed to the very construction of a “literary system.” Despite the intrinsic relationships established between literature and publishing, the multidisciplinary field of the history of the book insists on separating approaches dedicated to the technical production processes and the material analysis of objects of written culture from the approaches dedicated to print circulation and uses. Understanding the contradictions imposed by the simultaneous implementation of two technical systems, which are found when analyzing the traces left by the print equipment supply trade and the conditions to build a printing workshop, contributes to understanding the historical conditions of print production. In this sense, the historiographical perspective dialogues with heritage studies in the notion of printing heritage, understood in its tangible and intangible dimensions, considering the machines and tools of the past, together with the techniques then in use. In fact, while bringing together a set of material, technical, and mechanical elements of different production modes, printing heritage also contains the memories of the human actions that set them in motion.
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Print Culture and Censorship from Colonial Latin America to the US Latina/o Presence in the 19th Century
Matthew J. K. Hill
Print culture refers to the production, distribution, and reception of printed material. It includes the concepts of authorship, readership, and impact and entails the intersection of technological, political, religious, legal, social, educational, and economic practices, all of which can vary from one cultural context to another. Prior to their arrival in the Americas, Spain and Portugal had their own print culture and, following the conquest, they introduced it into their colonies, first through the importation of books from Europe and later following the establishment of the printing press in Mexico in 1539. Throughout the colonial period, the importation of books from abroad was a constant and lucrative practice. However, print culture was not uniform. As in Europe, print culture in Latin America was largely an urban phenomenon, with restricted readership due to high rates of illiteracy, which stemmed from factors of class, gender, race, and income, among others. Furthermore, the press itself spread slowly and unevenly, according to the circumstances of each region. One thing, however, that these territories had in common was widespread censorship. Reading, writing, and printing were subject to oversight by the Inquisition, whose responsibility was to police the reading habits of the populace and to ensure that no texts were printed that could disrupt the political and religious well-being of the colonies, as they defined it. In spite of Inquisitorial restrictions, print culture flourished and the number and kind of materials available increased dramatically until the early 19th century, when most of the territories under the Iberian monarchies became independent, a phenomenon due in part to the circulation of Enlightenment thought in the region. Following the era of revolutions, newly established republics attempted to implement freedom of the press. While the Inquisition no longer existed, censorship continued to be practiced to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the circumstances and who was in power. This also applies to Cuba and Puerto Rico. Immediately prior to Latin American independence, the United States became a sovereign nation. Commercial and cultural exchanges, including print materials, between the United States and Latin America increased, and many Latin Americans were traveling to and residing in the United States for extended periods. However, it was also in this period that the United States began a campaign of expansionism that did not cease until 1898 and resulted in the acquisition of half of Mexico’s national territory and of Spain’s remaining American colonies, Cuba and Puerto Rico. In addition to the land itself, the United States also “acquired” the people who had been Spanish and Mexican citizens in California, the Southwest, and Puerto Rico. With this change in sovereignty came a change in language, customs, and demographics, which provoked a cultural crisis among these new Latina/o citizens. To defend themselves against the racial persecution from Anglo-Americans and to reverse the impending annihilation of their culture and language, they turned to the press. The press allowed Latinas/os a degree of cultural autonomy, even as their position was slowly eroded by legal and demographic challenges as the 19th century progressed.
Article
Publishing in Colombia
Diana Paola Guzman and Paula Andrea Marín Colorado
Milestones in the history of publishing in Colombia stretch from a little before the arrival of the printing press in the country to the 21st century with the emergence of dozens of independent publishers. Thus, important events in the history of books, publishing, and reading in Colombia in the 19th century intersect with the influence of numerous civil wars and confrontations between liberals and conservatives. In the 20th century, the figure of the modern editor emerges along with campaigns for the mass production of books. In the 21st century, editorial projects seek to resist against the phenomena of editorial concentration.
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Puerto Rican Nationhood, Ethnicity, and Literature
Frances R. Aparicio
Given Puerto Rico’s long colonial history, Puerto Ricans both on the island and in the diaspora have had to grapple with contested notions of nationhood. Having been described as a “divided nation” and a “commuter nation” due to the geographical divides between the island population and those who have migrated to cities in the United States, Puerto Ricans have deployed literature to forge and re-imagine a space for belonging and community informed by the experiences of living in between the island and New York, in between Spanish and English, and in between racial notions of skin color, social class, and gender and sexualities. Challenging and unsettling the foundational discourses of national identity on the island, “Diasporican” literature proposes alternative imaginaries that resist power inequalities. This essay argues that Diasporican literature has come into its own, contributing new understandings of the fissures of Puerto Rican national, ethnic, and cultural identities.
Puerto Rican writers in the United States have textualized their experiences of migration and transnationalism through their poetry as well as fiction, memoirs, and autobiographical narratives. They have contested traditional notions of home and have explored the failures and limitations of a sense of belonging. Rejecting both the island of Puerto Rico as the geographical site for Puerto Rican authenticity and the dominant urban imaginaries of New York City that have long excluded their working-poor communities, Puerto Rican writers in the United States have represented el barrio as an urban space that offers them a sense of community despite the mainstream notions of hyper-masculinity, violence, and illegal practices. Afro-Boricua and Diasporican writers have also reflected on the fissures of racial belonging, as their dark skin color is not always integrated into dominant notions of the Puerto Rican and U.S. national imaginaries. Their deployment, in poetry, of English, Spanish, and “Spanglish” speaks mostly to the centrality of orality and sounds in the formation of nationhood, while challenging the homology of Puerto Rican nationality to Spanish. Exploration of the ways in which female, feminist, and queer Diasporican writers grapple with issues of belonging, gender, and sexuality foregrounds how these categories of identity continue to go against the grain of traditional masculine narratives of nationhood. It is essential to acknowledge the geographic dispersion of Diasporican voices away from New York and the transcultural alliances and global identities that are being produced in Morocco, Hawaii, and other far regions of the world. A short discussion of Lin Manuel Miranda’s “In the Heights” focuses on an example of staging a return home to New York, in a performance that celebrates community, family, and the neighborhood for second- and third-generation Puerto Ricans among other Latino and Latina groups. The multiple and complicated ways in which Diasporican literary voices, from poetry to theater to fiction, textualize notions of home, belonging, and community are examined within the larger frameworks of nationhood and ethnicity.
Article
Queerness in Latina/o/x Literature
Liliana C. González
To think about queerness in Latina/o/x literature necessarily entails a consideration of how queerness is regarded within Latina/o/x cultural expressions. But within popular Latino/a/x queer expressions, it would be difficult not to invoke the image of Mexican singer/ and composer Juan Gabriel and his unabashed gestures and sensuality. Juan Gabriel became a symbol of Latino/a queer subjectivity by “being” and “being seen” as “queer” but never explicitly “coming out” in the US mainstream sense. His unwillingness to conform to masculine gendered expectations within Mexican ranchera music and his reluctance to accept globalized gay modalities in many respects continues to embody the Latina/o racialized sexual experience in the United States. “Queerness” herein refers to a position of being queer in defiance of social norms within a given sociopolitical context rather than articulating a fixed state with a single understanding of what it means to be queer. As an expression with political impetus, queer has the capacity to mobilize resistance against sexual and gender norms, and is as much a political identity as it is a way to read society. The “ness” in “queerness” enables queer’s ability to modify conventional analysis and enhance readings of social relations as difference but, more important, as relations of power. That is, queerness as a relational mode of analysis unfolds the disruption of hierarchical binaries such as man/woman, masculine/feminine, and homosexual/heterosexual. The emergence of Chicana lesbian theory in the 1980s and queer of color critique in literary and cultural studies signaled a significant shift in thinking queer within Latina/o/x culture and thinking race, ethnicity, and class as integral to queer analysis, which had been previously overlooked by queer scholarship. As such, queerness has come to be understood as a critical lens that is capable of reading antagonizing associations not only against what is deemed as the sexual norm but precisely the way in which sexuality interacts with racialized, gendered, and class-based discourses. As a corpus, Latina/o literature reflects a range of topics that grapple with what it means to be a US Latina/o and to hold an ambiguous place in American racial and cultural politics and an often nostalgic yet contentious relationship with Latin America. Queerness, specifically in relation to Latina/o literature, is to imagine and create between and beyond these rigid delineations of gay and lesbian identity but at the same time breaking with assumptions of US Latina/o/x experience as exclusively heteronormative. In this sense, queerness within Latina/o/x literature imparts an unequivocal motion of being, thinking, and feeling against the grain of both Latina/o patriarchal literary traditions and the white US literary canon.
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Radio and the (Re) Construction of Maya Identity in the Diaspora
Alicia Ivonne Estrada
Founded in 2003 by Maya immigrants in Los Angeles, California, the radio program Contacto Ancestral, which airs weekly on the community station KPFK and online, creates a sense of community through the reaffirmation of indigenous cultural practices as well as the construction of a historical memory in the diaspora. This sense of community is particularly highlighted through the articulation of a Maya identity that is linked to indigenous hemispheric struggles and their resistance movements. Through the varied interviews with indigenous elders, activists, and community members on issues that range from the Guatemalan genocide, land, and environmental struggles to the multiple forms of violence faced by indigenous immigrants in the United States Contacto Ancestral creates, to use Ann Cvetkovich’s term, a “community-based archive.” This archive highlights a shared history between indigenous peoples as well as their differences and heterogeneity. In doing so, Contacto Ancestral produces an essential space to link and empower multiple generations of particularly Maya communities living in Mesoamerica, the diaspora, and elsewhere.
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Rechy, John
Ricardo L. Ortiz
For half of his nearly sixty-year writing career, John Rechy was recognized primarily for his contributions to homosexual literature in the United States, even as from the beginning of that career he consistently cast his major protagonists as young men of mixed ethnicity, part-Mexican and part-Scottish, hailing like him from the border city of El Paso, Texas. As the fields of queer and US Latinx literary studies emerged in the 1980s, critics and scholars began to study the important intersectionalities of Rechy’s multiple identities more explicitly and intentionally, and that attention has been sustained ever since, leading to a significant rethinking of earlier responses to Rechy’s literary work, and a significant opening of the possible viable readerly approaches to Rechy’s entire writing career. Underrepresented in this matrix of critical approaches toward Rechy’s work that favor issues of identity, however, is a more direct, committed interest in describing the specifically literary, and aesthetic, aspects of Rechy’s contributions to the cultural traditions to which he matters, regardless of whether that interest foregrounds or not the understandably compelling factors of identity (ethnic, gender, sexual, class, geographic, etc.) that drive so much extant Rechy criticism. That critical project will surely benefit from a greater attention to, for example, Rechy’s experiments with form, style, and the materiality of print across the six decades of his career, very likely discovering there that those experiments can open alternative doors to understanding not only Rechy’s artistry, but also the unique qualities of his queerness, and the unique qualities of his latinidad.
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Roberto Bolaño within World Literatures
Oswaldo Zavala
The name Roberto Bolaño (Santiago, Chile, 1953–Blanes, Spain, 2003) has become a central signifier within Latin American contemporary literature but also a key reference in what is often called “world literature” in academic discussions and mainstream editorial circles. At the regional and the global levels, both in the original Spanish and in English translation, Bolaño’s work moved from the margin to the canonical center as Latin America’s foremost representative in the 21st century, as Argentinean Jorge Luis Borges, Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, Mexican Carlos Fuentes, and Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa all did during the 20th century. Bolaño’s novels, short stories, essays, and poetry delve critically into Latin America’s past—Chile’s 1973 coup d’état and subsequent military dictatorship and Mexico’s convulsive 1960s and ’70s society—but also offer insightful explorations of contemporary Western culture and its history of violence, from the effects of world wars, racism, and gender violence to intellectual engagement, avant-garde poetics, and the question of culture in disenfranchised societies of late capitalism. His two masterpieces are major canonical landmarks: The Savage Detectives (1998), a nostalgic memoir about the forgotten avant-garde “visceral realism” and the artistic ethos of his generation, those who witnessed the defeat of the Latin American’s left with the rise of neoliberal governance, and 2666 (2004), his most ambitious book—composed of five interrelated but independent novels—bridging European, US, and Latin American histories converging in the sinister femicide at the US-Mexico borderlands. Read as the author of a complex œuvre expanding across continents, Bolaño surpasses expectations for writers from non-hegemonic cultural centers, defying various conceptions of Western canons and pioneering the avenues of 21st-century Latin American literature.
