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The representation of both individuality and collectivity in Latina/o literatures can be understood in terms of racial representation as well as in relation to colonial and neocolonial Weltanschauungen or worldviews. The colonial past of Spanish/Latin America imposed economic and biopolitical conditions based on a casta system that assigned different levels of humanness and determined the life expectations of human beings depending on a racial structure of signification that placed skin coloration and racial phenotype at the center of the colonial biopolitical order. Within the US context, this structure of racial signification has historically relied on the conceptualization of Brownness as a starting point to access the overarching terms of mestizaje/miscegenation, which through the early stages of the formation of the Latina/o literary canon have been both racial and literary tropes that have distinguished the coming-of-age process of Americanization—without losing their ties to Latinidad—of Mexican Americans/Chicanas/os, Puerto Ricans/Nuyoricans, Dominican Americans, U.S. Central Americans, and Cuban Americans, among other communities with cultural and ethnic links to Spanish/Latin America. Although since the first decades of the 20th century mestizaje became in Spanish/Latin America a synthetic racial category that underscored dark Brownness as the result of the racial intermix between Spanish and Indigenous people, the historical development of the term mestizaje hasn’t had the same connotations among U.S. Latina/o communities. Mestizaje in the United States, instead, has been read mostly in relation to Mexican Americans and Chicana/o collectivities, with a geopolitical focus on Mexican American people from the Borderlands. From approximately 2010 to 2020, the emergence of the term “Latinx” has shed critical light upon historically erased collectivities that in both the United States and Spanish/Latin America have been placed within the racialized boundaries of Blackness. Thus, the biolegitimization of “Afrolatinx” and “Afro-Latin American” communities not only has acquired an identity politics signification but has also entered the literary imagination of new Latina/o literatures. Departing from this critical perspective, the maintenance of the Latina/o literary field requires the development of an organic engagement with the political and cultural signifiers “Latinx” and “Afrolatinx,” as each of these terms brings into the Latina/o literary realm the continuous exploration of racial, gender, and national identity fluidity among Latina/o communities.

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.

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.

Throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, intellectuals and politicians have focused on three main groups as foundational to national and cultural identities: indigenous, African, and European. Mestizaje or racial mixing as a political project has worked to silence the presence and contributions of people of African and Asian descent, while favoring intermixing among European and indigenous. Researchers in the fields of history, anthropology, and sociology have long debated the role of Asians in the transition from slavery to wage labor and produced studies on the transnational and diasporic dimensions of Asian migration and settlement in the region. However, literature and cultural production captures aspects of the Asian presence in the Caribbean Latina/o world that remain absent or underplayed in most empirical studies. Prominent Latina/o writers and artists from the Caribbean (Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic) incorporate Asian characters and themes into their work on history, migration, and diaspora. They explore the Asian dimensions of Caribbean Latina/o racial, ethnic, gendered, and class identities and pose a challenge to foundational discourses of national and cultural identities based on mestizaje and syncretism that serve to subsume and erase the Asian presence. Secondary migrations of Asians from Latin America and the Caribbean to North America has produced a small but significant demographic of Asian Latina/os, some of whom reflect on their experiences through essays, memoirs, fiction, poetry, and art. The cultural production of Asian Latinas/os resists hegemonic concepts of race, nation, citizenship, and identity.