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Works Cited Aldama, Frederick Luis. Long Stories Cut Short: Fictions from the Borderland. Tucson,

AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2017. Allatson, Paul. Key Terms in Latino/a Cultural and Literary Studies. Malden, MA:

Blackwell Press, 2007. Lipski, John M. Varieties of Spanish in the United States. Washington, DC: Georgetown

University Press, 2008. Nieto-Phillips, John. “Language.” In Keywords in Latina/o Studies, edited by

Deborah R. Vargas, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Nancy Raquel Mirabal. New York: New York University Press, 2017, pp. 109–113.

Ramírez, Catherine S. “Saying ‘Nothin’: Pachucas and the Languages of Resis- tance.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 27, no. 3, 2006, pp. 1–33.

San Miguel, Guadalupe Jr. Contested Policy: The Rise and Fall of Federal Bilingual Education in the United States, 1960–2001. Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 2004.

Sánchez, Rosuara. Chicano Discourse: Socio-Historic Perspectives. Arte Público Press, 1994.

Téllez, Kip. “Preparing Teachers for Latino Children and Youth: Policies and Practice.” The High School Journal, vol. 88, no. 2, 2004/2005, pp. 43–54.

Zentella, Ana Celia. “Spanglish.” In Keywords in Latina/o Studies, edited by Deborah R. Vargas, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Nancy Raquel Mirabal. New York: New York University Press, 2017, pp. 209–212.

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Latinxs in the US have a rich variety of ancestral and cultural roots, including deep ties to Mexico, Central and South America, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Cuba, among others. There are important cultural, historical, and political legacies and contexts that differentiate these groups. For example, the various groups that inform the umbrella concept of Latinidad have different histories and experiences with migration. For instance, because of US immigration policies that wanted to put a good face on the US in contrast with the bad face of Cuba, those migrating from Cuba in the 1980s had a different experience to those migrating from Central America and Mexico; today, Puerto Ricans can move freely between the US mainland and Puerto Rico. However, there’s also a sense of commonality: long histories of conquest, colonization, and today’s neoliberal policies that continue to discriminate and oppress Latinxs of all ancestral origins. Latinx Studies scholars seek to at once

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C o p y r i g h t 2 0 1 9 . R o u t l e d g e .

A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d . M a y n o t b e r e p r o d u c e d i n a n y f o r m w i t h o u t p e r m i s s i o n f r o m t h e p u b l i s h e r , e x c e p t f a i r u s e s p e r m i t t e d u n d e r U . S . o r a p p l i c a b l e c o p y r i g h t l a w .

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acknowledge the differences as well as the commonalities. The umbrella term used to identify this sense of a shared history and inter-ethnic belonging is Latinidad.

For Latinx Studies scholars, the concept of Latinidad recognizes the need to overcome inter-group differences as a survival tactic within regions and communities where Latinxs are underrepresented. For instance, Mario T. García’s ethnographic work at UC Santa Barbara (2002–2010) determined that ancestrally different Latinx groups forged bonds on campus, leading to cross-cultural influences and the forging of a pan Latinidad. Indeed, already in 1971 Wayne State University established The Center for Chicano-Boricua Studies to clear a space for the forming of a translatinidad among students. And, Felix Padilla’s ethnographic work in Chicago (1965–1975) determined that to gain “access to American urban systems” (p. 64), Latinx workers put aside differences of national origin to form pan-Latinx coalitions and a pan- ethnic consciousness. Thus Latinidad (or what Padilla identifies as Latinismo) grew from a need to stand in solidarity against racial discri- mination and exploitation in the work place.

For other Latinx Studies scholars, the concept recognizes inter-group commonalities based on shared conquest and colonial legacies (Euro- Spanish genocides of indigenous peoples and slavery) as well as decolonial histories, origin languages, and cultural practices. For these scholars, identi- fying shared experiences across the different Latinx groups (Mexican, Central American, Dominican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, and so on) of racialized violence—slavery, exploitation, surveillance, incarceral practices, linguistic discrimination—is important for the emergence of a resistant pan-Latinx identity and political solidarity. The use of the concept stands against other models for understanding US ethnoracial configurations, including the melting pot and assimilationist ones that seek to erase racial and ethno-cultural differences into a dominant, homogenous monolithic US culture and people. The melting pot and assimilationist ideologies assume Latinxs offer only a deficient, primitive culture in need of erasure for the full realization of a better “American” (mainstream) life. It’s this ideology constantly pressuring Latinxs in all parts of daily existence that leads author and critic Richard Rodriguez to characterizes his sense of self as “mixed, confused, lumped, impure, unpasteurized” (Brown 197).

For some Latinx Studies scholars and creators, the concept of Latini- dad (what we will hereby identify as a strategic Latinidad) clears the space for critiquing the colonial and neoliberal ideologies and contra- dictory practices that racialize Latinxs as brown, primitive—Other. So, while Latinxs are not as distinct a racial category as African Americans

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are with Caucasians, the everyday racism that Latinxs face in effect racialize Latinxs in the US. Richard Rodriguez enacts a kind of strategic Latinidad when he embraces and affirms the contradictory ideologies that inform his brown identity; or, as he states, “the gringo I became, the Mexican I remain [and who] violates straight narrative lines, again and again” (p. 276). For scholar Juana María Rodríguez, if one con- ceives of Latinidad as a constructed concept and space filled with contradictions, cross pollinations, translations, and transformations it can be used to intervene and move against monolithic ideologies (Queer Latinidad 22–23).

As an appendage to colonial legacies of exploitation and oppression and today’s neoliberalism, the mainstream media plays an important role in this racializing of Latinxs. It does so through stereotypes seen with African Americans such as replicating Latinxs as at once dangerous and consumable objects, or mindless bodies to be more precise. The main- stream collapses and erases the different Latinx cultures—say, Puerto Rican with Mexican or Cuban—and reconstructs this as a homogenized whole for easy consumption. Latina media scholars such as Mary Beltrán, William Nericcio, Deborah Paredez, and Isabel Molina- Guzman, among others, critique the mainstream media’s fusion of Latinx differences. They consider how mainstream film, TV, media, music, and dance reproduce stereotypes of Latinidad: from buffoon and bandido to eroticized brown bodies. They also consider how Latinxs actors and performers use a kind of strategic Latinidad to trouble and resist this mainstream homogenizing and racializing impulse.

Latinx Studies scholars have introduced important additions and correctives to what we identify as a strategic Latinidad. This includes the affirmation of other ancestries, including African, Asian, and indigenous native ancestral roots.

In terms of the inclusion of African legacies, Latinx Studies scholars have identified how in the US the mainstream media and dominant ideologies make race visible as black vs. white, neglecting the complex African and Latinx ancestral histories of cultural and biological crossings. For instance, Juana María Rodríguez critiques how the casting in main- stream media in the US and Central and South America perpetuates this white vs. black binary by erasing the intertwined histories of indigenous and African slavery as well as the intermixing with EuroIberian blood- lines; she’s critical of the mainstream’s elevating of whiteness (the casting of light-skinned, European looking Latinxs as heroes and protagonists) and denigrating those who look darker, more indigenous or African; she identifies how Afrolatinos are often only cast as santeras and

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curanderas, functioning as dark, exotic, mystical, and impure figures who emphasize the purity of the light-skinned heroes and protagonists (Queer Latinidad 19). Other scholars identify how the black vs. white racialized schemas not only erase the complex biological mixtures that shape Latinidad but also how these schemas limit how Afrolatinos (or Blatinos) can represent themselves. The actress Zoe Saldana is a case in point. She’s rarely (possibly only in the film Colombiana) given a role where she’s identified squarely as Afrolatina. With black vs. white racial schemas permeating the US way of life, this often leads to people such as the author and poet Piri Thomas to delink identification with his Latinx heritage and community. (See also Claudia Milian’s Latining America, Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores’ The Afro-Latino Reader, and I. P. Godreau’s Scripts of Blackness.)

In terms of expanding the concept of Latinidad to include Asian ancestry, scholars such as Rudy Guevara and Camilla Fojas have identified how the history of EuroIberian conquest has led to a translatinidad formed out of the inter-ethnic relationship between the Filipinos and hemispheric American Latinxs. For instance, in Becoming Mexipino, Rudy Guevara traces the history of the making of this translatinidad to the Acapulco–Manila Galleon Trade (1565 to 1815) routes that created contact zones between indigenous peoples (slaves, servants, prostitutes, soldiers) in the Philippines and Mexico. Many of those forcibly removed from homelands and transported would escape upon arriving in Manila and Acapulco respectively; they would then blend in to the local indio and mixed-race communities. Along with trade routes that transported people in both directions for over 250 years (what Guevara refers to as resulting in Filipinized Mexicans in the Philippines, and Mexicanized Filipinos in Mexico) there was the shared indoctrination of Catholicism with its practices of compadrazgo (godparent- hood), religious festivals such as Día de los Muertos, and the coming-of-age ceremonies such as the quinceañera that continue to create common cultural ground between Mexicans and Filipinos and that continue to inform this expansive sense of a pan-Pacific Americas translatinidad.

In terms of the indigeneity, there’s a long history of Latinx Studies scholars identifying and affirming ancestral ties to indigenous peoples. This along with the acknowledgment of the violence, murder, rape, and torture of indigenous ancestors becomes a way of Latinxs standing in solidarity with indigenous peoples today. Maylei Blackwell charts histories of colonization of indigenous peoples as a way “to articulate a diplomatic and legal framework for their survivance, self-determination, and territorial integrity in relation to colonial powers and settler states” (Keywords 100). An indigenous informed Latinidad was a way of

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affirming indigenous ancestry as well as recognizing the trauma of a shared history of genocide, epistemic violence, and trauma.

We see this impulse in the Brown Power Movements (Chicano and Nuyorican) of the 1960s and 1970s. For instance, El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán proclaimed the reclamation of expropriated lands (the South- west) and symbolic and cultural recuperation of indigenous practices: community-based reclamations known as indianismo as opposed to state-sanctioned practices of indigenismo that preserved a commodified version of indigenous cultures all while committing acts of genocide. (See Josephina Saldaña-Portillo’s The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and Indian Given.) This was also a way of affirming a Latinidad whereby ancestral indigenous roots transcend nation-state-imposed borders and policies that declared those who moved across these artificially imposed borders without government approval as illegal—as criminals. The embrace of indigenous roots (and with Nuyoricans this was with Taíno and Arawak Carib peoples) during the 1960s and 1970s allowed for the articulation of a Latinidad that was anticolonial and anticapitalist. It’s a way of recognizing, too, that today our Latinidad is shaped daily by migrations of Oaxans, Mixtec, Triqui, and Zapotecs from Mexico and Central America to the US. (See Rafael Pérez-Torres’s Movements in Chicano Poetry and Mestizaje, Dylan Minor’s Creating Aztlán, and Arturo Aldama et al.’s Comparative Indigeneities of the Américas.)

In another important corrective move, Latinx Studies scholars have added to the concept of Latinidad the identity category of non- heteronormative sexualities. Building on the foundational work of scholar-creators such as Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, Latinx scholars today such as Alicia Arrizón, Michael Hames-García, Ernesto Javier Martínez, Richard T. Rodríguez, Juana María Rodríguez, and Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, among many others have identified how significant sexuality is in the shaping of Latinidad. For some, non- heteronormative sexualities create a common, coalitional base for Latinxs with disparate ancestral heritages (Puerto Rican, Mexican, Dominican, Central American, and so on) to struggle in solidarity against straight and Anglo structural and ideological dominance. For instance, in Performing Queer Latinidad Ramón H. Rivera-Servera conceives of queer Latinidad as a counterpublic, an action, and “a model of social engagement” not necessarily defined through identity, but “more open to improvisational, at times accidental, routes to the formation of community and home” (p. 69). For Rivera-Servera the Latinx Pride Picnic clears a space for the articulation of a queer latinidad that materializes “pan-Latina/o queer social networks”

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(p. 3). It’s the space where “nonnormative sex practitioners of Latin American descent with greatly differing cultures, histories of migration or annexation to the United States, and contemporary living conditions encounter each other and build social, cultural, and political bonds” (p. 6).

Given the presence of undocumented LGBTQ Latinxs in the US, these counterpublic spaces provide a refuge for those who navigate homophobia and anti-immigration bodily violations. And, Juana María Rodríguez identifies “spastic contradictions and wild paradoxes of bodies and sites” as contradictory, where different discourses of histories, geogra- phies, and “language practices collide” (Queer Latinidad 9–10). It’s a Latinidad that undoes itself by constantly asking: “Who is Latina? Is latinidad in the blood, in a certain geographic space? Is it about language, history, and culture, or is it a certain set of experiences?” (pp. 9–10). In Juana María Rodríguez’s Sexual Futures, she formulates a “theory of queer gesture” through kinship practices and sexual couplings that transcend identity groups and that push against straight-only nation-state sanctioned ways of existing. For Rodríguez, it’s the Latinx queer club that provides a glimpse into a coalitional and contestatory space of Latinidad. The space of nonnormative sexual expression allows for the interconnecting of different Latinx groups in the affirmation of a queer pan-Latinidad.

Whether in the recent reshaping of the concept as a translatinidad or a queer pan-Latinidad, Latinx Studies scholars are constantly working to refine and expand the concept so that it continues to at once embrace a coalitional identity (economic, political, and intersectional) and acknowl- edge important differences within and across US Latinx communities. It’s why Karen Christian identifies the concept as reflecting “ethnic identity as process” (p. 4). It’s why Paul Allatson defines Latinidad as “panethnic Latinx identifications, imaginaries, or community affiliations that encom- pass, but do not supersede, diminish, or destroy, national origin or historical minority identifications” (p. 138). It’s why Frances R. Aparicio identifies Latinidad as “the condition of being Latina/o” and as anchored in the “social, everyday realities of our diasporic communities and in the spaces populated by Latinas/os of various nationalities, generations, immi- grant statuses, and racial and gender identities” (p. 113). The concept has importantly also been expanded to include those who are undocumented, DAPA (Deferred Action for Parents of Americans), and DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) within our Latinx communities. In this expansive sense, Caminero-Santangelo wants us to keep our eyes wide open to ways that we can imagine Latinidad not as “a single, monolithic” category but rather one that contains, in her words, “multiple Utinidades [sic]” (p. 214). Latinidad in all its powerful expansions and refinements

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provides an important conceptual framework for scholars and activists to recognize differences as well as join arms to push against forces of oppression and exploitation.

Works Cited Aldama, Arturo J., M. Bianet Castellanos, and Lourdes Gutiérrez Nájera, eds.

Comparative Indigeneities of the Américas: Toward a Hemispheric Approach. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2012.

Allatson, Paul. Key Terms in Latinx Cultural and Literary Studies. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007.

Aparicio, Frances R. “Latinidad.” In Keywords for Latina/o Studies, edited by Deborah R. Vargas, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, and Nancy Raquel Mirabal. New York: New York University Press, 2017, pp. 113–117.

Blackwell, Maylei. “Indigeneity.” Keywords for Latina/o Studies, edited by Deborah R. Vargas, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, and Nancy Raquel Mirabal. New York: New York University Press, 2017, pp. 100–104.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. On Latinidad: US Literature and the Construction of Ethnicity. Gainsville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2007.

Christian, Karen. Show and Tell: Identity as Performance in U.S. Latina/o Fiction. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1997.

García, Mario T. The Latino Generation: Voices of the New America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

Godreau, I. P. Scripts of Blackness: Race, Cultural Nationalism, and U.S. Colonialism in Puerto Rico. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2015.

Guevara, Rudy. Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012.

Hames-García, Michael, and Ernesto Javier Martínez, eds. Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

Jiménez Román, Miriam, and Juan Flores, eds. The Afro-Latino Reader: History and Culture of the United States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.

Milian, Claudia. Latining America: Black-Brown Passages and the Coloring of Latinx Studies. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2013.

Miner, Dylan. Creating Aztlán: Chicano Art, Indigenous Sovereignty, and Lowriding Across Turtle Island. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2014.

Padilla, Felix M. Latino Ethnic Consciousness: The Case of Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans in Chicago. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985.

Pérez-Torres, R. Mestizaje: Critical Uses of Race in Chicano Culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

——. Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, Against Margins. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Rivera-Servera, Ramón H. Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance, Sexuality, Politics. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2012.

Rodríguez, Juana María. Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces. New York: New York University Press, 2003.

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