The presence of coloniality is critical for the explication, and reflection, on racialized and subalternized relations of dominance/subordination. The Spanish invasion in 1492 was the first marker and constitutive element of modernity. In 1992 Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano introduced the category of coloniality of power, further developed by Walter Mignolo. This epistemic change 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 but 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 independence from Spain or Portugal, the pattern elaborated by Quijano continues to our day, structuring processes of racialization, subalternization, and knowledge production. This is the reason Mignolo labels it a “matrix of power.”
Central American–American literature represents the nature of colonialized violence suffered by U.S. Central Americans and constitutes racialized and subalternized migrants as a form of interpellating agency deployed in the name of the excluded subjects. Novelist Mario Bencastro’s Odyssey to the North, Sandra Benítez’s Bitter Grounds, Francisco Goldman’s The Divine Husband, and the EpiCentro poets mobilize in different fashions and directions the inner contradictions of identitary and decolonial issues in reaction to colonialized perceptions of textual subjectivities—or their traces—manifested in their respective discursive practices. These phenomena cannot be understood outside of the historical flux generated by the coloniality of power.
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Decoloniality and Identity in Central American Latina and Latino Literature
Arturo Arias
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Díaz, Junot
Yomaira C. Figueroa
Junot Díaz is a Dominican American award-winning fiction writer and essayist. For over twenty years his work has helped to map and remap Latinx, Caribbean, and American literary and cultural studies. Since his collection of short stories, Drown, debuted in 1996, Díaz has become a leading literary figure in Latinx, Afro-Latinx, and diaspora studies. His voice is critically linked to the legacy of Latinx Caribbean literary poetics reaching back to the 1960s (including Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets, 1967). Díaz’s work is likewise transnational and diasporic, often reflecting the lived experiences of working-class immigrant populations of color in northeastern urban centers. Within a broader scope, Díaz’s writing is tied to feminist African American and Chicana literary traditions, with Díaz citing the influence of writers such as Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros in his writing practice. His 2007 award-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, earned him a Pulitzer Prize in fiction and catapulted him into literary superstardom. Díaz followed that success with his 2012 collection of short stories, This Is How You Lose Her, which was a finalist for both the 2012 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2013 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. In 2012, Díaz was conferred the MacArthur Fellows Program Award, commonly known as the MacArthur “Genius Grant,” and in 2017, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2019, he was the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the fiction editor at the renowned literary magazine the Boston Review.
Over the course of his professional writing career, Díaz has published numerous nonfiction essays and political commentaries, and coauthored opinion editorials on immigration and reflections on Caribbean and US politics. His short story “Monstro,” published in 2012, further rooted Díaz in the genres of science fiction and Afrofuturism. “Monstro” was understood to be a teaser for a now discarded novel of the same name. The simultaneous publication of the English-language Islandborn and Spanish-language Lola in 2018 represented the author’s first foray into the genre of children’s literature. Like much of Díaz’s literary oeuvre, the children’s books chronicle the experiences and memories of Afro-Dominicans in the diaspora through the perspective of a child narrator. Díaz is one of the founders of Voices of Our Nation (VONA), a summer creative writing workshop for writers of color where he helps aspiring writers to workshop their fiction. Díaz’s fiction and nonfiction writings have catalyzed work in literary, Latinx, and Afro-Latinx studies, prompting renewed discourses on literary representations of masculinity, gender, sexuality, intimacy, sexual violence, dictatorship, immigration, disability, Dominican history, race and anti-blackness, anti-Haitianism, decolonization and radical politics, and diaspora and belonging.
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Hispanic Caribbean Sexiles
Consuelo Martinez-Reyes
From the countryside to the city, from the city to foreign lands, people who challenge heteronormative notions of gender and sexual practices have left their place of origin in search for freedom of expression for ages. Despite this, it was only in the late 1980s to early 1990s that migration studies scholars started to look at the role of sexuality within migratory patterns, probably due to historical facts such as the civil rights movements, new trends within feminism (i.e., Third World feminism), the birth of fields that spur on intersectional approaches (such as cultural and LGBTQ studies), and most importantly, the AIDS pandemic and the way it “traveled” around the world, particularly affecting sexual and racial minorities.
Whereas exile is often understood as a legal or political category, sexile may come detached from official institutions and yet still imply an individual’s undesired uprooting from his or her nation state. Building on the scholarship of David William Foster, Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, José Quiroga, and others, Puerto Rican academic and author Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes was the first to put into circulation the implications of sexual practices and identities for migratory patterns within Latin American literary studies. But it was Puerto Rican sociologist Manolo Guzmán who coined the neologism “sexile” to refer to emigration caused by one’s sexual orientation.
While the practice is, in a sense, a timeless and global phenomenon, it is more common for residents of the Caribbean due to the region’s colonial history. The effects of extended colonialism and its constant cultural contact with previous colonizing empires, as well as neocolonialist socio-economic structures in place at present and common to the geographical zone as a whole, make its development differ from that of other Latin American countries, which obtained independence in the early 19th century. Thus, many of its inhabitants look to move to places such as the United States or Spain, which have commonly influenced their sexual imaginaries, seeking a friendlier environment than that of a region contestably referred to as one of the most homophobic places on earth.
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Labor Movements and Chicana/o Literature
Marcial González
Chicano/a literature may not excel in representing labor movements, but the literature itself has been influenced by, and is often a response to, various labor struggles. Of the labor movements that have had an impact on Chicano/a literature, the farmworkers movement has been the most significant. Even though Mexican American farmworkers throughout the 20th century played a significant role in building an agricultural empire in the United States, they have not been properly credited with this accomplishment, nor have they prospered equitably from the economic gains of agribusiness. Historically, Chicano/a farmworkers have been physically visible in the workplace but not socially recognized—needed for their labor, but not always wanted as participatory citizens. The farmworkers movement led by Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers Union (UFW) during the 1960s and early 1970s contributed to the emergence of the Chicano movement during those same years. The movement in turn served as a catalyst for the emergence of Chicano/a literature. The farmworker has been a central figure in Chicano/a literature since its inception, but representations of farmworkers in the literature have changed over time—from Tomás Rivera’s groundbreaking novel . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra in 1971 to Salvador Plascencia’s fantasy novel The People of Paper in 2005. One of the reasons for these changes has been the rise of neoliberalism, a politico-economic system that has debilitated, and in some cases destroyed, labor unions. Neoliberalism has also contributed to the deterioration of living and working conditions for the working class, especially for those at the bottom of the economic chain, such as farmworkers. Thus, contemporary Chicano/a farmworker literature tends to oscillate between nostalgia for a time when the farmworkers movement was powerful and cautious optimism that a strong movement can once again be built.
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Literature of the Mexican Revolution
Adela Pineda Franco
Summing up the literature of the Mexican Revolution involves the challenge of defining, assessing, and comparing an extensive and heterogeneous corpus of novels, chronicles, testimonial accounts, and short stories under a set of organizing principles, which cannot be thought of as static and invariable. It is important to consider the connection of this literary corpus with the historical event known as the Mexican Revolution; the defining role of this literature in forging a postrevolutionary national culture in Mexico; and the aesthetic and cultural significance of its main practitioners in and beyond Mexico. Besides fictionalizing events related to the revolution’s armed phase, the literature of the Mexican Revolution provides myriad interpretations on the revolution’s outcome and legacy. Hence, as historical inheritance, these literary works were intricately linked to the sociopolitical and cultural struggles of their own time, during the 20th century. Yet, even novels that were published in the 19th century, such as La bola (1887) by Emilio Rabasa, La parcela (1898) by José López-Portillo y Rojas, and Tomochic (1893) by Heriberto Frías, have been included in this corpus, since they foreshadowed the revolution’s outbreak. Los de abajo by Mariano Azuela is considered the foundational novel of the Mexican Revolution. Originally published in 1915, it set the precedent of approaching the revolution as a potentially emancipatory movement gone awry. Its second edition (1920) marked the beginning of the revolution’s literary historiography, a process of selection, exclusion, and reinterpretation of myriad works under the influx of postrevolutionary nationalism. Many literary works of the Mexican Revolution exceed simple classifications. This is the case of José Vasconcelos’s four-volume autobiography; Nellie Campobello’s enigmatic collection of tales Cartucho: Relatos de la lucha en el Norte de México (1931); and novels, such as El águila y la serpiente (1928) and La sombra del caudillo (1929) by Martín Luis Guzmán, Se llevaron el cañón para Bachimba (1941) and ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! by Rafael F. Muñoz, Al filo del agua (1947) by Agustín Yáñez, and El luto humano (1943) by José Revueltas. Such works entail inventive intersections of life-writing and experimental fiction, mordant critiques of power relations; self-reflexivity, intertextuality, and intermediality, among other formal and thematic features. A revisionist overview of this literature sheds light on the significant role that underrepresented actors played in the history of the revolution and its literature. It also brings forward the actuality of the literature of the Mexican Revolution in the 21st century, prompting a reflection on the role of literature as a lens, capable of turning history into a meaningful dimension of the present.
