Negotiating Latinidad


Book Description

Longstanding Mexican and Puerto Rican populations have helped make people of mixed nationalities—MexiGuatamalans, CubanRicans, and others—an important part of Chicago's Latina/o scene. Intermarriage between Guatemalans, Colombians, and Cubans have further diversified this community-within-a-community. Yet we seldom consider the lives and works of these Intralatino/as when we discuss Latino/as in the United States.In Negotiating Latinidad, a cross-section of Chicago's second-generation Intralatino/as offer their experiences of negotiating between and among the national communities embedded in their families. Frances R. Aparicio's rich interviews reveal Intralatino/as proud of their multiplicity and particularly skilled at understanding difference and boundaries. Their narratives explore both the ongoing complexities of family life and the challenges of fitting into our larger society, in particular the struggle to claim a space—and a sense of belonging—in a Latina/o America that remains highly segmented in scholarship. The result is an emotionally powerful, theoretically rigorous exploration of culture, hybridity, and transnationalism that points the way forward for future scholarship on Intralatino/a identity.




Latinidad at the Crossroads


Book Description

Latinidad at the Crossroad: Insights into Latinx identity in the Twenty-First Century encompasses an interdisciplinary perspective on the complex range of latinidades and simultaneously advocates a more flexible (re)definition of the term that may overcome static collective representations of identity, ethnicity and belonging.




The Latino Continuum and the Nineteenth-Century Americas


Book Description

This work demonstrates how Latina/os have been integral to US and Latin American literature and history since the nineteenth century.




Domestic Negotiations


Book Description

This interdisciplinary study explores how US Mexicana and Chicana authors and artists across different historical periods and regions use domestic space to actively claim their own histories. Through “negotiation”—a concept that accounts for artistic practices outside the duality of resistance/accommodation—and “self-fashioning,” Marci R. McMahon demonstrates how the very sites of domesticity are used to engage the many political and recurring debates about race, gender, and immigration affecting Mexicanas and Chicanas from the early twentieth century to today. Domestic Negotiations covers a range of archival sources and cultural productions, including the self-fashioning of the “chili queens” of San Antonio, Texas, Jovita González’s romance novel Caballero, the home economics career and cookbooks of Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, Sandra Cisneros’s “purple house controversy” and her acclaimed text The House on Mango Street, Patssi Valdez’s self-fashioning and performance of domestic space in Asco and as a solo artist, Diane Rodríguez’s performance of domesticity in Hollywood television and direction of domestic roles in theater, and Alma López’s digital prints of domestic labor in Los Angeles. With intimate close readings, McMahon shows how Mexicanas and Chicanas shape domestic space to construct identities outside of gendered, racialized, and xenophobic rhetoric.




Building Sustainable Worlds


Book Description

Latina/o/x places exist as both tangible physical phenomena and gatherings created and maintained by creative cultural practices. In this collection, an interdisciplinary group of contributors critically examines the many ways that varied Latina/o/x communities cohere through cultural expression. Authors consider how our embodied experiences of place, together with our histories and knowledge, inform our imagination and reimagination of our surroundings in acts of placemaking. This placemaking often considers environmental sustainability as it helps to sustain communities in the face of xenophobia and racism through cultural expression ranging from festivals to zines to sanctuary movements. It emerges not only in specific locations but as movement within and between sites; not only as part of a built environment, but also as an aesthetic practice; and not only because of efforts by cultural, political, and institutional leaders, but through mass media and countless human interactions. A rare and crucial perspective on Latina/o/x people in the Midwest, Building Sustainable Worlds reveals how expressive culture contributes to, and sustains, a sense of place in an uncertain era.




Negotiating Group Identity in the Research Process


Book Description

Negotiating Group Identity in the Research Process: Are You In or Are You Out? focuses on researcher identity and the role it plays in conducting research, whether as a member of the culture being studied (i.e., an insider) or as an outsider to that culture. Contributors address the problems researchers face as insiders and outsiders, the practical strategies used to overcome related obstacles, the implications of insider/outsider status for the design of the study, the value of insider and outsider perspectives, the impact of this on the findings of a study, the implications for advocating on behalf of a group being studied, and other important topics. These scholars are from within and outside the field of communication and include well-known and emerging scholars who have studied a multitude of groups using various methodological strategies.




Salsa Crossings


Book Description

In Los Angeles, night after night, the city's salsa clubs become social arenas where hierarchies of gender, race, and class, and of nationality, citizenship, and belonging are enacted on and off the dance floor. In an ethnography filled with dramatic narratives, Cindy García describes how local salseras/os gain social status by performing an exoticized L.A.–style salsa that distances them from club practices associated with Mexicanness. Many Latinos in Los Angeles try to avoid "dancing like a Mexican," attempting to rid their dancing of techniques that might suggest that they are migrants, poor, working-class, Mexican, or undocumented. In L.A. salsa clubs, social belonging and mobility depend on subtleties of technique and movement. With a well-timed dance-floor exit or the lift of a properly tweezed eyebrow, a dancer signals affiliation not only with a distinctive salsa style but also with a particular conceptualization of latinidad.




Latinos and American Popular Culture


Book Description

This book offers a complete overview of the contributions of U.S. Latinos to American popular culture and examines the emergence of the U.S. Latino identity. According to the 2010 Census, Latinos represent more than 16 percent of the total population and are the largest and fastest-growing minority group in the United States. Their vast contributions to popular culture are visible in nearly every aspect of American life and are as diverse as the countries and cultures of origin with which Latinos identify themselves. This book provides a historical overview of the developments in U.S. Latino culture and highlights the most recent expressions of Latino life in American popular culture. With coverage of topics like Latino representations in television, radio, film, and theater; U.S. Latino literature and art; Latino sports stars in baseball, basketball, boxing, football, and soccer; and contemporary pop music; this book will appeal to general readers and be a useful and engaging resource for high school and college students. The work examines the cultural ties that U.S. Latinos maintain with their country of origin or that of their ancestors, explains why language is a critical cultural marker for Latinos, and identifies how Latinos are changing American popular culture. Insightful information on U.S. Latino identity issues and prevalent cultural stereotypes is also included.




Reimagining US Colombianidades: Transnational subjectivities, cultural expressions, and political contestations


Book Description

This book focuses our attention on yet another community that has been scantily represented in Latino/a/x studies scholarship. US Colombians are no longer content to be characterized as “the other Latinos,” and the editors of this special issue make the case that study of US Colombianidades enhances and productively troubles Latino/a/x studies. This engaging set of essays highlights the rich diversity of US Colombianidades as well as the group’s similarities and differences with other Latino/a/x groups. With its innovative cultural studies and social sciences perspectives and interpretive theories, this volume offers a deep dive into issues such as how racial, gender, sexual, and socioeconomic realities shape US Colombian experience; the representation of US Colombians in popular culture; interethnic relations between Colombians and other Latina/o/xs; the political participation of Colombians in US electoral politics; Colombian transnational understandings of identity; and much more. I want to thank the editors of this special issue—Lina Rincón, Johana Londoño, Jennifer Harford Vargas, and María Elena Cepeda—for curating a set of articles that will most certainly inspire Latino/a/x studies scholars to expand our notions of Latinidades and be attentive to the ways in which a focus on US Colombianidades complicates and enriches our field. Previously published in Latino Studies Volume 18, issue 3, September 2020




Queering Mestizaje


Book Description

Rethinking mestizaje and how it functions as an epistemology of colonialism in diverse sites from Aztlán to Manila, and across a range of cultural materials