In the U.S.–Mexico context, the concepts of the border, borderlands, and la frontera represent their ongoing complex geopolitical, cultural, and historical relations. With the signing of the Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty in 1848 and the Gadsden Purchase in 1853, the Mexican and U.S. governments established the southern border of the United States. The border is the international boundary line between the two countries, and the borderlands are the zones neighboring both sides of that boundary. It is a place where the First and Third Worlds collide daily, creating borderlands that amount to collective spaces of transcultural/transnational encounters. The concept of la frontera represents a counter-narrative of the term “frontier,” which became synonymous with American expansionism, or the westward expansion of the United States as proclaimed by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1883. The Spanish term “frontera,” as used in this framework, presupposes a knowledge production ranging from the implications of land annexation to the geopolitical and cultural processes of borderland sites. While the borders mark the place where adjacent jurisdictions, communities, and nation-states meet, it has also been a hotly contested subject—literally and figuratively speaking—inciting extreme emotional reactions that fuel negative stereotypes about immigrants, ethnic discrimination, and xenophobia. Immigration has become one of the most salient sociopolitical issues discussed on the national level. Unfortunately, it is debated mainly outside of the historical context because the histories embedded in its borderlands can contribute enormously to inform current political debates about immigration in the United States. Border crossers coming from south of the border are often portrayed by U.S. politicians as the most unwelcome and undesirable (yet necessary) immigrants. As the national discussion on immigration reform continues and the alleged ills of the U.S.–Mexico border dominate the political discourse and the media, expressive art and print culture must continue to form novel epistemologies of borders and counter unsubstantiated alternative facts propagated by anti-immigrant groups. To that end, it is important to consider the border's literature and imagine the borderlands as the fruitful heterogeneous site of an imagined and creative homeland: Aztlán.
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Border and la frontera in the US–Mexico Borderlands
Alicia Arrizón
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Butchlalis de Panochtitlan
Wanda Alarcón
Butchlalis de Panochtitlan are a queer Chicana-Latina theater and multimedia performance group active as an ensemble from 2002 to 2010. Formed in Los Angeles, they have performed in a range of venues and events throughout California and nationally. They premiered their major stage works at the important queer cultural arts center Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, California. Their irreverent name, a play on Tenochtitlan, the pre-Columbian name for modern day Mexico City, and panocha, creative Spanglish slang for female genitalia, translates to “the butch stars of pussy land.” True to their name, BdP render brown butch-centered worlds in their works that map the City of Los Angeles through the queer life in its neighborhoods, barrios, nightclubs, and re-imagined spaces of radical possibility. Although they are no longer active as a group and few primary documents exist, their impact is traceable well beyond these limits and local contexts. This article presents an overview of the work and impact of Butchlalis de Panochtitlan with attention to key themes in their body of work including home, belonging, queer family, gentrification, butch-femme relations, and brown butch socialities and aesthetics. This article draws from primary and secondary sources, digital recordings, visual images, online sources, ephemera, reviews, and published interviews.
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Central American-American Identity and Politics
Maritza E. Cárdenas
The use of the term “Central American” as an identity category is neither new nor restricted to the US diaspora. However, it is within the last forty years and in the geopolitical setting of the United States that a thriving identity politics has developed. It is during this time period that the use of the term Central American has emerged to denote a tactical American pan-ethnic social identity. This act of consciously employing the term “Central American” as a unification strategy for peoples from the isthmus in the United States echoes other US-based ethnoracial identity politics. Such movements often utilize a pan-ethnic term not only to advocate on the behalf of a racialized minoritarian community but also seeking to provide them a space of belonging by focusing on sociopolitical, cultural, and ethnic commonalities. As other identity markers in the United States such as “Asian American” and “African American” illustrate, Central Americans are not the first population to utilize a region as a strategic unifying term of self-identification. Yet, unlike these other US ethnoracial categories, for those who identify as “Central American” the term “Central America” often connotes not simply a geographic space but also a historical formation that advances the notion that individuals from the isthmus comprise a distinct but common culture. Another key difference from other US ethnoracial identities is that use of the term “Central American” in US cultural politics emerged during a historical era where the broader collective terms “Hispanic” or “Latino” were already in place. The creation and deployment of “Central American” is therefore an alternative to this other supra-ethnic identity category, as subjects view this isthmian-based term as being able to simultaneously create a broader collective while still invoking a type of geographic and cultural specificity that is usually associated with national identities.
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Circumventing Racialism through mulataje
José F. Buscaglia-Salgado
Mulataje is a neologism, reclaimed in 2003 in Undoing Empire: Race and Nation in the Mulatto Caribbean by José F. Buscaglia-Salgado. Prior to this reclamation, the term was used sparingly and in a very limited way to refer to “racial mixing” in societies that were predominantly composed of Afro- and Euro-descendants in the Caribbean and Brazil. As such it was simply an adaptation and a synonym of mestizaje, used in the context of the Afro-diasporic populations of the Atlantic World.
Conceptually reformulated, in its current acceptation, mulataje identifies a counterhegemonic culture that, since the earliest times in modernity, has moved against all colonialist calculations aimed at the possibility of moving beyond and leaving behind all things racial. As a most fundamental practice of being and of knowing informing individual self-conception and social action in the modern colonial world, mulataje speaks to the movements, great and small, individual and collective, that have attempted to outmaneuver all racial codes and racialist conventions as they have informed the distribution of labor and the allocation of natural resources and political rights past and present. Ultimately, the movement of mulataje points to the possibility of dethroning race as a valid and privileged category of knowledge.
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Decoloniality and Identity in Central American Latina and Latino Literature
Arturo Arias
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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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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Interlingual Literature, Tropicalization, and Bilanguaging
Shawn Gonzalez
US Latina/o literature is shaped by the hierarchical relationship between Spanish and English in the United States. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, writers working in various genres have explored this linguistic relationship by representing the interaction between English and Spanish in their literary works. Within a broader context of bilingual literary creation, many Latina/o writers have innovated with Spanish and English in ways that trouble the boundaries between these languages and, by extension, their relationship. In response to these literary experimentations, scholars have developed a range of perspectives to analyze writing that cannot be fully described by the term bilingual. Juan Bruce-Novoa proposes the term interlingual to analyze texts that do not treat Spanish and English as separate, independent codes but rather place the languages in a state of relation that makes a purely monolingual reading impossible. Frances Aparicio approaches this writing through the framework of tropicalization, a term that signals both dominant US cultural stereotypes about Latina/os as well as subaltern responses to those stereotypes. While Bruce-Novoa generally focuses on texts that include a high volume of both Spanish and English, Aparicio highlights the work of Latina/o writers, like Sandra Cisneros, Gary Soto, and Helena María Viramontes, who work primarily or exclusively in English. Aparicio traces the presence of Spanish in seemingly monolingual works through strategies like the use of literal translation and the phonetic representation of accent in English dialogue. She analyzes these strategies as sources of linguistic tension and literary creativity that transform the experiences of both monolingual and bilingual readers. Walter Mignolo offers a third perspective on bilingual writing, approaching it through the framework of decolonial theory. Like Bruce-Novoa, Mignolo highlights the creative use of the space between distinct languages. He argues that writers, like Gloria Anzaldúa, who operate in this liminal space participate in an active process of social transformation by denouncing and re-imagining hierarchical, colonial relationships between languages and cultures. While Bruce-Novoa, Aparicio, and Mignolo offer distinct perspectives on Latina/o writing between languages, they share a recognition of creative work that moves beyond the mere coexistence of Spanish and English to create meaning in the messy interaction between languages. In doing so, these creative and critical writers challenge their audiences to new modes of reading literature as well as of imagining linguistic, cultural, and political relationships between English and Spanish.
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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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Latina/os in Media: Representation, Production, and Consumption
Manuel G. Avilés-Santiago
Developments in contemporary Latina/os media are the result not only of an exponentially growing Latina/o population in the United States but also of the synergy between transformations in the global political economy and the emergence of new media platforms for production, distribution, and consumption. To reflect upon the emergence of the industry is to consider the politics of the labeling of the Latina/o community and the eventual configuration of a market audience. It also requires a confrontation with the cultural history of representations and stereotypes of Latina/os, particularly in radio, TV, film, and the internet, and the transnational aesthetics and dynamics of media produced by and/or for Latina/os in the United States. If the notion of media revolves around a technological means of communication, it also encompasses the practices and institutions from within which the Latina/o communities are imagined, produced, and consumed. At the start of the 21st century, the idea of Latina/os in media revolved around a handful of Latina/o stars in Hollywood who often performed stereotypical representations, a racialized and marginal Spanish-language radio industry, and two Spanish television networks, Univision and Telemundo. A more complex constellation of representations has evolved in both mainstream and Spanish-language media, among them new platforms for production and resistance, including social media (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat), radio podcasts and streaming services (e.g., Hulu and Netflix), and a more active and engaged audience that consumes media in Spanish, English, and even Spanglish.
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Latinx Popular Culture and Social Conflict: Comics, Graphic Novels, and Film
Frederick Luis Aldama
Despite Latinxs being the largest growing demographic in the United States, their experiences and identities continue to be underrepresented and misrepresented in the mainstream pop cultural imaginary. However, for all the negative stereotypes and restrictive ways that the mainstream boxes in Latinxs, Latinx musicians, writers, artists, comic book creators, and performers actively metabolize all cultural phenomena to clear positive spaces of empowerment and to make new perception, thought, and feeling about Latinx identities and experiences. It is important to understand, though, that Latinxs today consume all variety of cultural phenomena. For corporate America, therefore, the Latinx demographic represents a huge buying demographic. Viewed through cynical and skeptical eyes, increased representation of Latinxs in mainstream comic books and film results from this push to capture the Latinx consumer market. Within mainstream comic books and films, Latinx subjects are rarely the protagonists. However, Latinx comic book and film creators are actively creating Latinx protagonists within richly rendered Latinx story worlds. Latinx comic book and film creators work in all the storytelling genres and modes (realism, sci-fi, romance, memoir, biography, among many others) to clear new spaces for the expression of Latinx subjectivities and experiences.
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Morrissey as Latina/o Literary and Cultural Icon
Melissa M. Hidalgo
Morrissey is a singer and songwriter from Manchester, England. He rose to prominence as a popular-music icon as the lead singer for the Manchester band The Smiths (1982–1987). After the breakup of The Smiths, Morrissey launched his solo career in 1988. In his fourth decade as a popular singer, Morrissey continues to tour the world and sell out shows in venues throughout Europe and the United Kingdom, Asia and Australia, and across North and South America. Although Morrissey enjoys a fiercely loyal global fan base and inspires fans all over the world, his largest and most creatively expressive fans, arguably, are Latinas/os in the United States and Latin America. He is especially popular in Mexico and with Chicanas/os from Los Angeles, California, to San Antonio, Texas. How does a white singer and pop icon from England become an important cultural figure for Latinas/os? This entry provides an overview of Morrissey’s musical and cultural importance to fans in the United States–Mexico borderlands. It introduces Morrissey, examines the rise of Latina/o Morrissey and Smiths fandom starting in the 1980s and 1990s, and offers a survey of the fan-produced literature and other cultural production that pay tribute to the indie-music star. The body of fiction, films, plays, poetry, and fans’ cultural production at the center of this entry collectively represent of Morrissey’s significance as a dynamic and iconic cultural figure for Latinas/os.
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From Nationalist Movements to Transnational Solidarities: Comparative and Pan-Latina/o Literary Studies
Marta Caminero-Santangelo
While literature by Latin American origin groups within the United States (e.g., Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican) has been treated as a single literary corpus—“Latina/o Literature” or “Hispanic Literature”—since the last decades of the 20th century, in practice, the commonalities among such texts were more comparative than panethnic in nature until significantly more recently. That is, while literature by different national-origin groups revealed some strong similarities in theme and form, the writing itself reflected the specific concerns, background, and history of the specific national-origin group, rather than giving evidence of intra-Latino group interaction or a developing sense of a shared intra-Latino culture. This article traces the commonalities among these bodies of literary production, including in the “pre-Latino” period, the 19th to mid-20th centuries, before there was even a commonly understood concept of “US Latino literature,” as well as during the Chicano and Nuyorican Movements of the 1960s and 1970s. It then turns to a discussion of developing representations of inter-group interactions and tensions, including in the more recent emergence of “Central American American” literary production. Particularly in the increasingly cosmopolitan urban centers of the United States, an evolving sense of intra-Latino solidarity and panethnic Latino “community” has come into view in the literature produced by Latinx writers of the later 20th and 21st centuries.
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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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Salinas, Raúl
Louis G. Mendoza
The poetry, memoirs, essays, letters, prison journalism, and other forms of writing by Raúl Salinas (1934–2008) were grounded in his commitments to social justice and human rights. He was an early pioneer of contemporary Chicano pinto (prisoner) poetry whose work was characterized by a vernacular, bilingual, free verse aesthetics. Alongside other notables like Ricardo Sánchez, Luis Talamentez, Judy Lucero, and Jimmy Santiago Baca, Salinas helped make Chicana and Chicano prisoner rights an integral part of the agenda of the Chicana/o Movement through his writing and activism while incarcerated (1959–1972) and following his release. He was also a prolific prose writer in prison, and much of his journalism, reflective life writing, essays, and letters from his archives were published following his release. As important as his literary and political production in prisons was for establishing his literary recognition, it is important to note that the scope of his writing expands well beyond his prison experience. Though his literary and political interventions were important to a still emergent Chicana and Chicano literary, cultural, and political aesthetic, he was influenced by, but was not limited to, American and Latin American literary traditions. Given the scope of his life’s work, his indigenous and internationalist commitments, Salinas’ literary output make him a Xicanindio (indigenous identified Chicano) poet, a Latino internationalist, as well as a spoken word jazz and hip-hop artist whose work engaged, adapted and transformed elements of the American literary canon.
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Tígueres and Tígueras in Dominican National and Diasporic Culture
Jacob C. Brown
This article explores evolving representations of the Dominican colloquialism and concept tíguere in academic scholarship and Dominican national and diasporic culture. Phonetically, the word tíguere is a “Dominicanized” pronunciation—with one extra syllable added in the middle—of tigre, the Spanish word for tiger. Instead of purporting an exhaustive analysis of every utterance of tíguere in the vast archives of Dominican culture (a Quixotic affair for a single encyclopedia entry), this article observes how scholarship in the last forty years has approached the “tíguere” as a Dominican cultural expression. While academic books and articles on Dominican culture vary insofar as their discussions of the origins of the term and to whom it applies (whether they be men or women; “straight” or queer; black, white, or mixed), they also show continuity in reinforcing the basic characteristics of tigueraje (wit, grit, and resourcefulness; cunning, confidence, and showmanship; stoicism, style, and fierce determination) as expressions of dominicanidad, or Dominican-ness. This article does not pretend to be an exhaustive study but rather shows some of the ways in which authors and academics have spotted and studied tígueres in the milieu of Dominican cultural production. While the growing fields of contemporary Dominican scholarship, media, and literature have gradually deconstructed and adapted the tíguere within critical, queer, gender-inclusive, racially conscious, and transatlantic methodologies, in doing so it has also played a role in reinscribing the tíguere’s place in Dominican culture, both at home on the island and across oceans.
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Transgender Studies and Latina/o/x Studies
Francisco J. Galarte
The field of Latina/o/x studies has long been interested in various forms of gender and sexual deviance and diversity as a site of inquiry. Yet, there are many gaps in the literature of the field when it comes to the study of trans subjectivities, politics, and cultural formations. Foundational theoretical works such as Sandy Stone’s “A Posttransexual Manifesto” (1991) and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands (1987) share a theoretical approach to understanding autoethnographic texts that propose to write minoritarian subjects into discourse. The result of the two works is the emergence of the “new mestiza” and the “posttranssexual,” two figures that come to shape the fields of transgender, Chicana/o/x, and Latinx studies, respectively. There are myriad ways in which the fields of transgender studies and Latinx studies overlap and depart from each other. Most often, transgender studies is characterized as not grappling directly with race, colonialism, and imperialism, while Latina/o/x studies can at times be read as treating transgender subjects as objects, or sites of inquiry. Therefore, there is much to be gleaned from exploring how the two fields might come into contact with each other, as each becomes increasingly institutionalized.
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US Central Americans in Art and Visual Culture
Kency Cornejo
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 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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