Chiricú Journal Selected Works 2019

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JOURNAL

Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures

2018 CELJ BEST NEW JOURNAL SELECTED WORKS | 2019

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Chiricú Journal (ISSN 0277-7223, e-ISSN 2472-4521) is published semiannually by Indiana University Press, Office of Scholarly Publishing, Herman B Wells Library 350, 1320 E. 10th St., Bloomington, IN 47405-3907. Periodicals postage paid at Bloomington, IN, 47405-3907 and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Journals and Electronic Publishing, Indiana University Press, Office of Scholarly Publishing, Herman B Wells Library 350, 1320 E. 10th St., Bloomington, IN 47405-3907. The views expressed in this publication are solely those of the authors.

Manuscripts intended for publication should be submitted via the journal’s online submissions portal at http://chiricu.indiana.edu. The journal’s style guide and submission guidelines are available on the site.

SubScription rateS Individuals: $40.00 (print), $38.00 (electronic), $44.00 (print & electronic) Institutions: $75.00 (print), $67.50 (electronic), $99.75 (print & electronic) Foreign postage: $10.50 (surface), $18.00 (airmail) For single print and electronic issue pricing, please visit IU Press online at http://www.iupress .indiana.edu/journals/. ordering information Order subscriptions or single issues online from JSTOR at http://www.jstor.org/r/iupress or call 1-888-388-3574 (individuals) or 1-877-786-7575 (institutions). Print single issues, back issues, and bulk orders may be ordered directly from Indiana University Press by phone at 1-800-842-6796/1-812-855-8817; by fax at 1-812-855-7931; or by email at iuporder@indiana.edu. A limited number of full-run back issues of Chiricú (1976–2012) are available for purchase. Please contact chiricu@indiana.edu. Notice of nonreceipt of a print issue must be received within four weeks after the receipt of the subsequent print issue. Please notify Indiana University Press of any change of postal or email address. Print issues missed because of outdated addresses will not be replaced free of charge. advertiSing For information about print and online advertising, please visit http://www.iupress.indiana.edu /journals-advertise. permiSSionS No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, or distributed, in any form, by any means electronic, mechanical, photographic, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Indiana University Press. For information about classroom use, institutional deposit, and republication, please visit http://iupress.indiana.edu/rights.

GST No. R126496330 Copyright © 2018 The Trustees of Indiana University

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Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures Volume 2

Number 1 SELECTED WORKS | 2019

Fall 2017

From the Editor: The Inaugural Issue of Chiricú Journal .................... 5 John Nieto-Phillips

Things and Images: Essay, Photos, and Film .................................... 11 Edmundo Desmoes and Jennifer Boles

What's in an "x"?: An Exchange about the Politics of "Latinx" .......... 29 Catalina (Kathleen) M. de Onís

She Will... .................................................................................. 43 Eloísa Pérez-Lozano

A Latinx Folklorist's Love Letter to American Folkloristics: Academic Disenchantment and Ambivalent Disciplinary Futures ..... 45 Rachel V. González-Martin

Raquel Cepeda's Digital and Literary Publics: Twitter and Bird of Paradise .......................................................... 66 Megan Jeanette Meyers

El sueño de la sombra .................................................................. 84 Alejandra Carrillo-Estrada

Latinxfuturist Poems ..................................................................... 88 Vincent Toro

The Places and Spaces of Latinx Cultures ........................................ 93 Alberto Varon

Poder y cultura: Latinx If you enjoy this sample, visit bit.ly/iup-chiricujournal learn more.

Folklore andto Popular Culture

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editor John Nieto-Phillips, Indiana University editor iSSue editor John Nieto-Phillips, Indiana University Alberto Varon, Indiana University iSSue editor editoriaL aSSociate Varon, Indiana University OliviaAlberto Holloway Salzano, Indiana University editoriaL editoriaL aSSociate aSSiStant Olivia Holloway Salzano, Indiana Cristóbal Garza González, IndianaUniversity University editoriaL aSSiStant editoriaL Board Cristóbal Garza González, Indiana Indiana University Anke Birkenmaier, Spanish & Portuguese, University Deborah Cohn, Spanish & Portuguese, Indiana University editoriaL Board Serafín Coronel-Molina, Literacy, Culture, & Language Education, Indiana University Anke Birkenmaier, Spanish & Portuguese, Indiana University Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez, Arizona State University Deborah Cohn, Spanish & Portuguese, Indiana University R. Andrés Guzmán, Spanish & Portuguese, Indiana University Serafín Coronel-Molina, Literacy, Culture, & Language Education, Indiana University Vivian Halloran, English & American Studies, Indiana University Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez, Arizona State University Cara Kinnally, Languages and Cultures, Purdue University R. Andrés Guzmán, Spanish & Portuguese, Indiana University Sylvia Martinez, Educational Leadership & Policy Studies, Indiana University Vivian Halloran, English & American Studies, Indiana University Mintzi Auanda Martínez-Rivera, Sociology, Providence College Cara Kinnally, Languages and Cultures, Purdue University Luciana Namorato, Spanish & Portuguese, Indiana University Sylvia Martinez, Educational Leadership & Policy Studies, Indiana University Jonathan Risner, Spanish & Portuguese, Indiana University Mintzi Auanda Martínez-Rivera, Sociology, Providence College Amanda M. Smith, Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz Luciana Namorato, Spanish & Portuguese, Indiana University Alberto Varon, English, Indiana University Jonathan Risner, Spanish & Portuguese, Indiana University Amanda M. Smith, Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz Alberto Varon, English, Indiana University adviSory Board Rolena Adorno, Yale University Lalo Alcaraz, Artist, Cartoonist, Writer adviSory Board Frances Aparicio, Northwestern University Rolena Adorno, Yale University Giannina Braschi, Author Lalo Alcaraz, Artist, Cartoonist, Writer Denise Chávez, Author Frances Aparicio, Northwestern University Cristina García, Author Giannina Braschi, Author María Herrera-Sobek, University of California, Santa Barbara Denise Chávez, Author Manuel M. Martín-Rodríguez, University of California, Merced Cristina García, Author Manuel Martínez, University of Texas, Dallas María Herrera-Sobek, University of California, Santa Barbara John McDowell, Indiana University Manuel M. Martín-Rodríguez, University of California, Merced Gabriel Meléndez, University of New Mexico Manuel Martínez, University of Texas, Dallas Danny Méndez, Michigan State University John McDowell, Indiana University Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Columbia University Gabriel Meléndez, University of New Mexico Kirsten Silva Gruesz, University of California, Santa Cruz Danny Méndez, Michigan State University Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Columbia University Kirsten Silva Gruesz, University of California, Santa Cruz

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From the Editor The Inaugural Issue of Chiricú Journal John Nieto-Phillips, Indiana University

“Chiricú es una revista que, tarde o temprano, tenía que aparecer entre nosotros.”

With these words, Professor Luis Dávila and a handful of his students at Indiana University launched their literary “magazine.” The year was 1976.

Conceived as a venue for Latina and Latino students to “define themselves by means of an art whose design is bi-cultural,” the publication welcomed work in English and Spanish—and later, Portuguese. It was a catholic (note: small “c”) venture with a capacious vision and an important mission: to not only celebrate Latina/o literature, art, and culture, but also to critically examine Latina/o identity and “la circunstancia del hispano en los Estados Unidos.” Over the next thirty-two years Chiricú embraced works of poetry, fiction, art, folklore, reviews, essays, and “trozos de novelas y polémicas de toda índole.”

As the magazine grew into a journal, it gained visibility. Submissions arrived from all parts of the United States, and from many parts of Latin America. In its pages can be found the early writings of Norma Alarcón (who was one of those pioneering IU students) and Sandra Cisneros, as well as interviews with Jorge Luis Borges and Edward James Olmos. The issues were replete with line drawings and sketches, with testimonios and reflections that exuded deseo, añoranza or saudade.

Born in the ferment of 1970s student activism and an awakening Latina/o consciousness, Chiricú sought to mirror the diversity of the nation’s growing Latina/o populations. Its very name gestured to that diversity. “CHIcano, RIqueño, and CUbano, and other Latinos” had come together to create the journal, in collaboration, it must be said, with non-Latinas/os. Their coming together—their convergence of energy, ideas, and words—was directed at fundamental questions of being and belonging: “Where did I come from?” and, implicitly, “Where am I?” The Midwest was a foreign land to many students who arrived from California or Florida, Puerto Rico or Mexico. Yet, other Latina/o students at IU were raised in the region—in East Chicago or Indianapolis or Fort Wayne. “No matter where a hometown or pueblo may be,” the editors explained, “we have put down roots in both Spanish and North-American culture, and the two mingle and work together.

Chiricú Journal, Vol. 1.1, pp. 1–6 Copyright © 2016 Trustees of Indiana University • doi:10.2979/chiricu.1.1.01

Chiricú Journal, Vol. 1.1

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Figure 1. The rst issue of Chiricú (above) appeared in 1976 bearing the toucan logo and original1. font that areissue the inspiration our current design. andthe the toucan 1977 issue Figure The rst of Chiricúfor (above) appeared in That 1976issue, bearing logo(below), and origiwerethat 8-x-11 inchinspiration “magazines” the design. poetry and stories of graduate student, nal font are the forfeaturing our current Thatshort issue, and the 1977 issue (below), Alarcón. Bothfeaturing covers were

by Ferdinand Martínez. wereincluding 8-x-11 Norma inch “magazines” thedesigned poetry and short stories of graduate student,

including Norma Alarcón. Both covers were designed by Ferdinand Martínez.

FROM/THE EDITOR Nieto-Phillips From the Editor

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Figure 2. The introduction to the second issue of Chiricú, in 1977, explained the origins of the journal’s title and celebrated the “double world” that Latinas and Latinos brought to Bloomington.

So we bring our double world, the people and places that were our origins, and our experiences of North-American life, to Bloomington, Indiana.”

The twenty-six issues that comprise the life of the journal known simply as Chiricú are imbued with the sentiments and longings and questions that inspired its creation. Dilemmas of identity, language, citizenship, and sexuality; inquiry into the human condition; appreciation for diversity, for the wide range of Latinas/os’ experiences and cultures—these were the core and fiber of Chiricú. They were the source material for its tapestry of text and artwork. And to a large extent, these concerns are what inform the new journal you are reading.

In 2012, the impending retirement of Luis Dávila, Chiricú’s faculty advisor since its founding, along with fiscal cutbacks, drew into question the journal’s future. Other imperatives, however, precluded its demise; foremost among them, the growth of Latina/o Studies on the IU campus and nationwide, and the College’s recognition of the need for more investment in Latina/o humanities, not less.

As a scholarly, multidisciplinary enterprise, Latina/o Studies is necessary.

Shifting demographics demand it. Fifty-odd million Latinas and Latinos are worthy of it. More importantly, the social, economic, and political environment in which we live—that continues to marginalize and exclude and dehumanize

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Figure 2626 issues between 1976 and and 2012.

The above coverscovers are from Figure3.

3.Chiricú Chiricúpublished published issues between 1976 2012.

The above are1980, from1984, 1980, 1984,

2003, 2003,and and2009.

2009.

FROM/THE EDITOR Nieto-Phillips From the Editor

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“others”—makes the work we do as scholars, artists, and authors all the more urgent. The work we do remains unchanged from decades ago: to question Latina/o conditions, to generate new knowledge and subtle appreciation, and to both create and critically engage Latina/o literatures, arts, and cultures. That is the mission of this new endeavor.

It gives us great pleasure to present to you our inaugural issue of Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures. We aspire to build on the legacy of the “magazine” that Luis Dávila and his students started in 1976 and that ceased publication after its 2012 issue. As you might surmise from the title, Chiricú Journal seeks to honor and explore the plurality of literary, artistic, and cultural traditions of Latinas and Latinos. More than that, however, Chiricú Journal is a platform for the interrogation—through both creative and critical works—of coercive practices and essentializing categories based on race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship, among others. Like the vision of the original Chiricú, ours is catholic and capacious. We seek to celebrate as well as study all that comprises our lived experiences.

Just as Latina/o scholarship traverses disciplinary boundaries, Latina/o communities and cultures have flowed and ebbed, to and fro, throughout the Americas, for generations. This transhemispheric, transnational movement is a defining feature of our collective past. It is also the focal point of considerable scholarship and the inspiration for many Latina/o artists and writers. Similarly, linguistic boundaries (for many Latinas and Latinos) are equally permeable to movement, to transgression.

For all the above reasons, Chiricú welcomes submissions in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Indigenous languages; and we invite and wish to encourage creative submissions of fiction and non-fiction, as well as poetry and the visual arts.

We welcome critical work across the humanities disciplines (which may necessarily involve the social sciences), in the form of scholarly articles. Also, we invite scholars to serve as reviewers of manuscripts, books, films, and exhibitions. Calls for papers, as well as scholar profile forms and submission guidelines, can be found at: http://chiricu.indiana.edu. All critical submissions will be peer-reviewed and all creative pieces will be selected in consultation with members of our editorial and advisory boards.

As we embark on this journey, we have mapped four destinations—or issue themes—to guide us in the coming years: film, the politics of language, poetry & fiction, and folklore & popular culture. We welcome your suggestions of additional themes.

This inaugural issue of Chiricú Journal takes as its focus Latina/o Cinema. I am delighted to have worked with John Risner (IU Spanish & Portuguese), the inaugural issue editor, whose outreach, expertise, and insights where crucial to this issue. While Latinas and Latinos have been involved in cinematic production since its inception, recent years have seen an exponential growth in popular demand for, and the study of, Latina/o films. That growth and its implications were the

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impetus for three 3-day Latino Film Festival and Conference events organized (in 2012, 2014, and 2016) by the Indiana University Cinema and the Latino Studies Program. Those events focused, variously, on issues of migration, citizenship, labor, sexuality, and gender—and their intersectionality. Over the years, among the filmmakers and artists we had the good fortune to host were: Alex Rivera, Rashaad Ernesto Green, Miguel Coyula, Sonia Fritz, Laura Amelia Guzmán, Tanya Valette, Edmundo Desnoes, John Valadez, Cristina Ybarra, Patricia Cardosa, Edward James Olmos, Andrea Meller, Renee Tajina-Peña, and Natalia Almada. Several of these filmmakers/artists are the subject, or authors, of pieces in this first issue of Chiricú Journal.

Because any endeavor such as this requires a collective effort, I would be remiss to not acknowledge the collaboration of many great colleagues at Indiana University who agreed to serve on our Editorial Board. I particularly wish to thank: Anke Birkenmaier, for co-authoring the funding proposal that kept alive the legacy of Chiricú; the Latino Studies Program; the College of Arts & Sciences for underwriting this journal; and the Indiana University Press, for its material and technical support. Our in-house editors—Jonathan Risner, Amanda Mignonne Smith, Tamara Mitchell, and Cristóbal Garza-González—made a fabulous collaborative team over the past year, and Luciana Namorato (IU Spanish & Portuguese) was particularly helpful in the editing process. Any errors or oversights, however, are my own. Finally, we are especially honored and immensely grateful to the distinguished writers, artists, and scholars who comprise our Advisory Board. Thank you one and all.

The following collection of scholarly articles, essays, photos & illustrations, poems, and film & book reviews represents our modest, first effort to confront the essential (if unspoken) question, What can Latina/o cinema tell us about who we are and who we long to become? If this project can catalyze this and other questions that foment critical engagement, it will have been worth the effort. In the course of reading this journal you may wonder about its unique font and icons; they are borrowed from Luis Dávila’s Chiricú and serve as subtle tribute to him and his students, huellas of those who pioneered Latina/o arts and letters at Indiana University.

John Nieto-Phillips is Associate Professor of History & Latino Studies at Indiana University and author of The Language of Blood: The Making of Spanish-American Identity in New Mexico, 1880s–1930s (2004).

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Things and Images Essay, Photos, and Film Edmundo Desnoes and Jennifer Boles

Editor’s Note: In April of 2012, filmmaker Jennifer Boles met the author Edmundo Desnoes at Indiana University’s Latino Film Festival. That fortuitous encounter marked the beginning of an artistic collaboration that has resulted in a short film and photo essay by Boles titled “Things & Images,” inspired by Desnoes’ essay of the same title. Boles’ camera captures the inner world of the Cuban-born author of Memorias del subdesarrollo (1968). What follows is a condensed version of Desnoes’ essay and Boles’ photos and essay reflecting on their collaboration and on Desnoes’ artistic vision.

Figure 1. Edmundo Desnoes. Courtesy of Jennifer

Boles.

Things and Images: An Essay Edmundo Desnoes

We are all naked. Born without a stitch. We surround ourselves with things and images, to dress up and attempt to mean something.

I can’t help seeking to discover the real and yet I am only able to cover my flesh.

Surface is a slippery body, content and meaning punctuate my existence. I’m always nailing my fleeting contact with the world in layers of meaning. Recovering life and nailing death.

My first love and desire was the Virgin Mary, my mother had the image above her bed. I craved to be under her feet or at least was willing to accept suffering so long as I wasn’t nailed to the cross. And her feet were naked, stepping on the snake, the index toe longer than the others . . .

Chiricú Journal, Vol. 1.1, pp. 106–123 Copyright © 2016 Trustees of Indiana University • doi:10.2979/chiricu.1.1.08

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I was born in Havana and lived in Spanish streets but spoke English indoors with my mother. Opposites touched me: the absolute certainty of Don Quijote and yet the doubts of Hamlet.

Fidel Castro trapped and enriched me with an impossible dream. This photo shows the two pressures of the quixotic endeavor: you don’t know if the Cuban people are supporting Fidel or whether Castro is crushing them. I later discovered that the tango and Carlos Gardel will survive Che Guevara, the mambo rhythm create by cacão will outlive the Castro brothers. Music is the existential greatness of the Cuban people. We will always live in the present.

Martí helped me believe in the impossible dream of the revolution, but his passion for women and his poetry are in my guts. I visit his tomb when I visit his monument. It’s the only equestrian monument where the hero is not mastering the horse but falling off, dropping. He died the first time he went into battle. Martí wanted to show he was not only a man of words but a man of action. Yet words are a form of action. Even mine although they might be useless.

A typewriter is a typewriter is a typewriter.

I placed the revealing bottle with the two roses, one looking at me, the other at itself. The eternal feminine is half of myself. Again, always wanting to mean something, I needed to display my masculine side: the cobblestone with the castaway seed of a peach.

The hammer and the sickle of communism, of my commitment to the Cuban revolution, became a sickle that severed my individual writing hand and, and the hammer knocked down the red rose. My blood is black ink.

I discovered that Whistler’s model for “Symphony in White” was also Courbet’s nude horizontal “Woman with a Parrot.” Joanna Hiffernan was modest and pure and innocent for Whistler and horizontal and ripe for Courbet. The bragging display of sensuous flesh and the inward power of a restrained waistline.

Opposites can both be true because they’re real. Reality in two faces.

Stupidly I sought meaning in religion and politics. Religion left me in the clouds and politics enriched my cross-eyed commitment to the Cuban revolution.

Left me once again alone.

Art was the closest I’ve ever been to helping me embrace my delicious ambiguity. So I took the star on Che Guevara’s beret and placed it fully on old Rembrandt’s headgear.

I met Felicia Rosshandler as an adolescent in Cuba. Hitler had thrust her into my arms. We danced in Havana and I had an erection as we danced cheek to cheek.

She was my first girlfriend. In 1948 she left the island. Decades later, in 1980, when

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I defected we collided again in New York. We were together in the early dawn and again together as the sun set.

The neck is the most attractive area of a woman’s body, free of the apple that chokes me and deepens my voice.

Barbie’s plastic flesh is as real as classic marble. American flesh. Yes, and where am I? Before writing I tried to be a painter but having to stretch canvasses and spread oily colors with a brush and the smell of turpentine was too cumbersome, writing was as complex but cleaner.

Collages are my violon d’Ingres, my challenge to a thousand words. And I don’t have to handle so much stuff, the size of each collage is never larger than a magazine page.

There are critical memories of Cuba, reactions to my new country, recreations of Nine Eleven and how I see approaching death: I am the skeleton and women are the eternal reality.

We’re alone, we are all alone. There’s only one God, they keep saying, and he’s alone. One and only.

In spite of all my attempts, of all the crap I display in my study, of all the words I use to dress up the emptiness that makes us possible, we are naked. Words can explain it all yet words have nothing to do with reality.

Borges revealed that the meaning of the universe is written in the unintelligible spots of the jaguar.

At 84, all my years and all my days have left me with the transitory beauty of the ephemeral, the enormous pleasure of the dented and the cracked. The meaning is mortality.

I know you might not, but please erase everything I’ve displayed and said.

Why did I do it then?

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Things & Images: A Film Jennifer Boles

Edmundo Desnoes is a renowned Cuban intellectual who has been living in exile in New York City for over thirty years. He is most known for his novel Memorias del subdesarrollo (1965), that was adapted into a 1968 film, Memories of Underdevelopment, one of the most important Latin American films of the 20th century. He recently completed his last novel, Memories of Development, at the age of 82. In April of 2012, I met Edmundo at the Lati- Figure 2. Desnoes and Rosshandler at the 2012 no film festival at Indiana University Latino Film Festival and Conference, Indiana where I learned about his obscure University Cinema. Jennifer Boles. artistic practice of turning magazine clippings into a vast collection of collages.

As the voice of a passing generation of Cuban intellectuals, his collages reveal, in provocative ways, a visual tapestry of a life lived in “contrast,” at the interstices of the United States and Cuba, between the dream of social revolution and its failure, and the “inconsolable memories” of the past and his impending mortality.

Desnoes was born in 1930 in Havana, Cuba to a middle-class Cuban father and white Jamaican mother. He lived and received his education in both the United States and Cuba. At the time of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Desnoes was twenty-eight, living in New York and working as editor of the Latin-American magazine Visión. The following year he returned to Cuba “as a middle-class skeptical intellectual, doubtful of everything,” he says. Seeing how successful the Revolution was in its early years, he came to believe that “maybe justice and equality are possible in the world” (Luis 10). In later years, he wrote that, as someone who lived between worlds his entire life, the Revolution was a spiritual “quest” more than it was a political or social dream. It was “an attempt to end [his] existence as an outsider” (Desnoes, 2004). “My middle-class background plus living in an underdeveloped country led to a clash between past and the present which then became my subject for writing fiction. I would now write about a clash between a highly industrialized society and an underdeveloped society. My subject, my theme, would be underdevelopment and socialism and capitalism” (Luis 10).

Desnoes wrote his most esteemed novel, Memorias de subdesarollo in 1965, which was adapted into the eponymous film by Cuban director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea in 1968. While both the film and the novel are reflections upon what he described as an ambivalent existence, the message, especially in the film, is

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decidedly in favor of the Revolution and the individual who must serve it or perish.

History plays a much greater role in the film, placing the character Sergio, who is stuck in the past, “in a vacuum” as he becomes increasingly alienated from the new Cuba, in tension with the historical change that engulfs him. “At the end, [Sergio] understands that words are not enough, and that he has to act. He has to participate” (Luis 12). In later years, Desnoes claimed that the book was much less decisively in favor of the Revolution, but that its ambivalence allowed the meaning to change over time, both for Desnoes and for his readers, as he grew more distant from the Revolution. “The novel is of an enormous and deliberate ambiguity. That is why today I can read it without wanting to change a single word. And that is why, if I may say so, restless young men and women in Cuba identify with my narrative voice” (2004).

In the 1970s, Desnoes grew increasingly disillusioned with the Revolution, particularly after the arrest of the poet Heberto Padilla and the increasing censorship and exile of critical artists and intellectuals. In 1971, Desnoes himself was subjected to censorship for an article that he wrote critiquing the omnipresent heroic, masculine image of Che Guevara. In this atmosphere, he began to doubt his fidelity, and at the end of the decade, he decided that he would leave the island at the first opportunity. In 1979, he defected and relocated to the United States. He still held on to the social promise of the Revolution which he had lived so “intensely” that it haunted him. But he began to see the errors of the regime, primarily what he described as naïve illusions about social change and an insistence on exporting it around the globe rather than focusing on the needs of the island. “What we thought was an authentic possibility turned into a cruel utopia.” He admitted his own ignorance about the realities of the economy and the difficulty of reconciling social justice with the freedom to consume and express oneself. This was the lesson he learned in exile: that perhaps social justice and freedom were incompatible, “but that in order to survive, one had to make compromises” (Desnoes 2013).

He did not write another novel for over thirty years. “I was so traumatized for leaving Cuba that I was silent for a long time. It was a trauma of exile. I didn’t want to abuse the third world. I didn’t want to turn anti-Castro . . . that’s why all, a lot of the writers rejected me here, the Cubans, because all of them had become violently anti-Castro, anti-revolution” (Desnoes 2013).

Memories of Development (2006) was his last novel. Like Memories of Underdevelopment, it reads like a diary that plunges readers into the depths of his “intense subjectivity” ( Jaimes 2006). Written after living in exile for more than three decades, it is a collage of fiction and autobiography, of memories and reflections. It is most powerful in its metaphorical reflections on the depths of the mundane and the solitary experience of aging. Like the Cuban Revolution, he identifies himself as a “failure.” Yet it is a dignified failure that he learned from Borges—“defeat

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has a dignity that noisy victory does not deserve”—that collides with the undignified experience of losing control over one’s body and mind. “Failure is our only triumph . . . I believe in rebellion without expectations. In justice as an impossible dream.” The novel was also adapted into an experimental feature film in 2010 by the young Cuban filmmaker Miguel Coyula. The epilogue of the novel, which is told from the point of view of the protagonist’s daughter in the days before his death, is currently being adapted into a fiction film in Brazil.

It was watching Coyula’s Memories of Development in preparation for my interview with Desnoes for Indiana University’s 2012 Latino Film Festival when I learned that Desnoes was also an artist. Piled precariously into folders in his study are dozens of small collages made with images from popular magazines. In many ways, the collages extend what is a lesser-known contribution of his writing: a series of short essays about Latin American photography. In “The Photographic Image of Underdevelopment” (1967), his book Para verte mejor, América Latina (1972), and later essays, Desnoes argues for a more ethical, contextualized photography in “an overwhelming and oppressive world . . . that manifests itself fundamentally through the image.” The “visual power of present-day capitalism,” he wrote, “are refined ways of inhibiting and crushing man” (“Cuba Made Me So” 403). His collages speak to the politics of these essays, but they do so in a more subjective way, merging his politics, views of history, and experience of exile and aging with his sexuality, much like his novels.

With minimal resources and time, and our shared desire to avoid traditional documentary approaches, we chose a performative, literary approach with sparse interviews. He wrote the “script” above and we filmed it almost entirely on a single cold day in New York City in early 2015. The most difficult and perhaps naive task that I faced was how to bring our voices together in creative tension rather than collusion. That is, I wanted there to be a separation, for his performance and self-presentation to be transparent, but for my voice to be evident in the editing.

Things & Images enters the mind of Edmundo in (what he thinks to be) the last years of his life, expressing in beautiful, biting metaphors how he sees the world and sees approaching death. Edmundo spends the majority of his days inside, surrounded by his objects and the comforts of his pipe and coffee. While he no longer writes novels, he engages with the world through the consumption and manipulation of images found in pornography and in fashion, art, and nature magazines.

He reflects upon the objects that surround him in his study, the canvases of symbolic objects and images that decorate his mantel and bookshelves. The order in the clutter of otherwise meaningless collection of “things and images” shield him at the same time that they remind him that he is nothing more or less than these memories. “In spite of all my attempts, of all the crap I display in my study, of all the words I use to dress up the emptiness that makes us possible, we are naked.”

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My interest in Edmundo relates most specifically to this relationship between history and the individual and how that is translated into a particular artistic process and creation. History, more than anything else, has made Edmundo who he is. The Cuban Revolution inspired him just as it betrayed him and pushed him out of his own country. Radically, Edmundo subverts the still heroic, yet commodified image of the revolutionary hero Che Guevara, distorting his attractive, ubiquitous features, emasculating him, and changing his gender. In these, we can see his complicated relationship to the Cuban Revolution and the myth that sustained it for so long—a myth that he, too, believed in at one time. Che, he claims, is a loser, just as he himself is a self-proclaimed “loser,” because the Revolution failed. The Revolution that Edmundo lived is the inconsolable memory that he will carry to his death: the “intensity” that is its residue. “The hammer and the sickle of communism, of my commitment to the Cuban Revolution became a sickle that severed my individual writing hand and, and the hammer knocked down the red rose. My blood is black ink.”

Even more, Edmundo’s recent novel and his collages reflect upon the universal experience of love, mortality, and aging. The loss of sexuality and the decay of the body contrasts with the fantasy and impossible utopia symbolized by consumerism and women’s bodies: “I am the skeleton and women are the eternal reality.” The collages, much like his most recent book, articulate his connection to the history of the Revolution and his experience of exile and aging in the 21st century, in a world that he describes as having afforded him peace and new freedoms but that operates according to a violent consumerism that contrasts radically with the revolutionary desires of his youth. He intends the collages to enact a refusal of passive absorption and subvert the images that barrage him daily, uninvited, exerting violence and power innocuously. They are a way to “defend” himself and subvert what he feels is a defining feature of our contemporary society: the intersection between violence, patriarchy, consumption, and the truth value and fantasies we associate with images.

Like his novels and collages, Things & Images is also a collage, an amalgamation of the “honey and the shit” of who Edmundo is and who he wanted to be, his dreams and his regrets. As he said of the characters in his novels, which are a blend of fiction and autobiography, “you cannot take out of reality the human thought process and feelings.” Indeed, Edmundo seems most human through the eyes of his partner, the photographer and novelist Felicia Rosshandler (Passing through Havana: A Novel of Wartime Girlhood in the Caribbean, 1984), a Jewish refugee of World War II who he met in Cuba as an adolescent and upon which is based the elusive character Hannah in Memories, the only woman that the protagonist Sergio seems to truly love. Reunited decades later in New York, they share the experience

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of being uprooted and shaped by the contingencies of history but also of love and mortality.

As a filmmaker, my presence adds another layer to this, as generations of radically different backgrounds collide and converge. The editing and the music are my shaky imprint, they are my collages of his collages—the marker of an unresolved collaborative tension that he welcomed and perhaps pursued while the performance reveals a man marked by history, “drowning” in memories and “yearning for life with melancholy, the triumph with . . . defeat.”

Editor’s Note: Things & Images, the film by Jennifer Boles, and additional content can be viewed by visiting: http://chiricu.indiana.edu Work Cited Desnoes, Edmundo. “Cuba: yo y mi circunstancia.” Unpublished talk, Israel, 2010.

———. “Cuba Made Me So,” in On Signs. Edited by Marshall Blonsky. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins UP, 1985, 384-403.

———. “Introduction,” Memories of Underdevelopment, English Translation, Latin American Literary Review Press, 2004.

———. Memories of Development: A Last Novel. CITY: Bilingual Press, 2013.

Luis, William. “America Revisited: An Interview with Edmundo Desnoes.” Latin American Literary Review 11, no. 21 (1982): 7–20.

Jaimes, Héctor. “Memorias del Desarrollo: El placer de las ruinas (Entrevista a Edmundo Desnoes).” A Contracorriente 4, 1 (September 1, 2006): 110–19.

Peavler, Terry J. “Edmundo Desnoes and Cuba’s Lost Generation.” Latin American Research Review 12, 3 ( January 1, 1977): 129–53.

Jennifer Boles is Visiting Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago and the 2016-17 Postdoctoral Fellow and Program Coordinator for IUPLR’s Mellon Foundation Fellows Program. She is currently working on a multimedia project about the life and archive of Mexican eight-millimeter filmmaker Sergio García.

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What’s in an “x”?

An Exchange about the Politics of “Latinx” Catalina (Kathleen) M. de Onís, Indiana University Abstract: From its origins in queer community conversations online, the term “Latinx” continues to gain wider circulation in various publics. This scholarly exchange examines the language and other politics of choosing to employ or to reject the “x” signifier. To engage a variety of perspectives on this topic, we invited five scholars with expertise in language, sexuality, gender, and latinidad from the continental United States and Puerto Rico to participate in an online exchange about what the “x” linguistic marker enables and constrains. Contributors do not always agree, and the tensions that arise point to broader discussions and strains unfolding beyond the pages of this journal. Ultimately, this exchange seeks to enliven ongoing conversations and to spark new ones among those interested in the politics, intersectional social locations, and exigencies implicated in discussions about “Latinx” and similar linguistic choices. As this exchange elucidates, the answer to “what’s in an ‘x’?” depends on whom you ask.

Keywords: Chicanx, heteronormativity, identity, language, Latinx, linguistic transgression El uso o desuso de la palabra va a dictar su futuro.

—Pilar Melero

This epigraph about the role that linguistic choices play in shaping the circulation and uses of a particular word resonates deeply with this Chiricú Journal issue focusing on “The Politics of Language.” As we reflect on this theme, readers may have noted that the title of this publication, Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures, exhibits a few notable linguistic choices. These decisions include the fusion of the “CHIcano,” “RIqueño,” and “CUbano” descriptors to create “Chiricú,” as well as plural references to “literatures, arts, and cultures” to acknowledge and encourage multiplicity, heterogeneity, and difference. Readers also may have Chiricú Journal, Vol. 1.2, pp. 78–91 Copyright © 2017 Trustees of Indiana University • doi:10.2979/chiricu.1.2.07

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observed that the subtitle contains the “a/o” ending in “Latina/o.” This signifier and other related linguistic markers—such as “@” and, more recently, “x”—invite reflection on the evolution, fluidity, and slipperiness of language.

Engaging questions about the “x” signifier and the extent to which the symbol advances intersectional social justice efforts is both urgent and vital. This issue’s focus on the complexities, challenges, and contours of language offers a forum for such a conversation, and the current US socio-political milieu further enjoins engagement with this topic. As Karma R. Chávez reminds us in her work documenting queer migration politics that resist heteronormativity, our language practices constitute social imaginaries about who we are as community members and who we might become.1 “Latinx” and other choices of linguistic transgression continue to gain wider circulation in various publics, including in academic journal essays, books, and online popular press articles.2 As this term and other x-carrying signifiers (e.g., lxs, todxs) have spread beyond the online queer Latinx community where they originated, varying viewpoints about these linguistic moves tend to emerge, especially regarding whether “Latinx” should be used as a replacement for or a supplement to “Latina/o.” Some individuals and communities readily adopt and advocate for increased usage of “Latinx,” arguing for its transgressive sexual, gender, and language politics. Meanwhile, others express hesitancy or reject usages of “x” altogether, maintaining that the signifier symbolizes linguistic imperialism, poses pronunciation problems, and alienates non-English-speaking im/migrants.

To situate these different perspectives in conversation, I invited five Latina/ o/x scholars from universities in the continental United States and Puerto Rico to engage several questions and to dialogue with each other on this topic.3 The 1. Karma R. Chávez, Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2013).

2. Alternative signifiers to the “Latina/o” gender binary emerged in online, queer spaces. See Juana Rodriguez, Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (New York: New York UP, 2003).

Popular press articles on this topic include: Nancy Bird Soto, “¿Términos apropiados? El potencial latinx,” Cruce: Crítica Socio-cultural Contemporánea, January 29, 2017, http://revistacruce.com/politica -y-sociedad/item/2255-terminos-apropiados-el-potencial-latinx; Gilbert Guerra and Gilbert Orbea, “The Argument Against the Use of ‘Latinx,’” The Phoenix, November 19, 2015, http:// swarthmorephoenix.com/2015/11/19/the-argument-against-the-use-of-the-term-latinx/; Raquel Reichard, “Why We Say Latinx: Trans & Gender Non-Conforming People Explain,” August 29, 2015, Latina, https://www.latina.com/lifestyle/our-issues/why-we-say-latinx-trans-gender-non -conforming-people-explain#1; Lissette Rolón Collazo, “De la @ a la x,” 80grados, April 18, 2014, http://www.80grados.net/de-la-a-la-x/; María R. Scharrón-del Río and Alan A. Aja, “The Case FOR ‘Latinx’: Why Intersectionality Is Not a Choice,” Latino Rebels, December 5, 2015, http://www .latinorebels.com/2015/12/05/the-case-for-latinx-why-intersectionality-is-not-a-choice/.

3. Regarding criteria for selecting contributors, I sought individuals with expertise in language, sexuality, gender, and latinidad, who also represented diverse institutions and departments.

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result was a lively discussion of diverse perspectives on uses of “Latinx,” including the term’s political possibilities and what it enables and constrains, for whom, and in what contexts. Hopefully, the themes, tensions, and turns of these scholars’ arguments will be generative for continuing to examine and to practice linguistic choices that disrupt efforts to dehumanize, criminalize, and brutalize im/ migrant, Latina/o/x, Black, queer, and trans communities and those who speak in “accented” ways. After all, language serves as an indispensable resource for imagining and enacting more just, livable communities.

On Method and Medium To collaborate across time zones and different institutional affiliations, I prepared a shared Google document with five questions and invited contributors to respond to the prompts and posts from other participants. Scholars were offered twelve days to reply and could post as many times as they wished. The most dissonant sections of the exchange were selected as excerpts for publication.

Latinx Exchange Participants Pilar Melero is a professor, researcher, and writer. Her books include Mythological Constructs of Mexican Femininity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), From Mythic Rocks: Voces del Malpáis (fiction) and La Casa de Esperanza: A History. Her research interests include the history and literature of and by Latinx and Latin American women.

Eric César Morales is a PhD candidate in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology and an associate instructor for the Latino Studies Program at Indiana University. His research engages with Latino and Polynesian populations at home and in the diaspora, focusing primarily on large-scale cultural productions. His key sites of interest are film, festival, and foodways.

Roy Pérez is assistant professor of English and American Ethnic Studies at Willamette University. His writing appears in Women & Performance, Bully Bloggers, FENCE, and Narrative, Race and Ethnicity in the Americas. His current book project, Proximities: Queer Configurations of Race and Sex, examines sexuality and cross-racial representations in US Latina/o narrative, visual art, and performance.

Sandra L. Soto-Santiago is assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez. Her current research foci are sociocultural aspects of education, translanguaging, and Puerto

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Rican transnationalism. Her essays can be found in the journal HOW and in the edited collection U.S. Latinos and Education Policy: Research-Based Directions for Change.

Stacey K. Sowards is professor and chair of the Department of Communication at The University of Texas at El Paso. Her research interests are in environmental, intercultural, and gender communication, with specific focuses on Latin America, Indonesia, and US Latin@-x populations.4

The Conversation: What’s in an “x”?

Catalina: Varying viewpoints exist regarding uses of “x” in “Latinx,” “Chicanx,” “lxs,” and other identifiers and articles. The evolution from “Latino,” “Latina/o,” “Latin@,” and, more recently, “Latinx” signals different shifts in thinking about subject positions, constituting difference in language, ethno-racial, gender, and sexuality politics, and more. In light of these transformations and the different perspectives that respond to these moves, what is to be gained by the use of “Latinx” (or “Chicanx”) and what might be lost?

Stacey: The benefit of Latinx or Chicanx and other related words (e.g., lxs) is to gender neutralize the terms, while also providing a term for those who are transgender or queer. These are important considerations given that Spanish and other romance languages are gendered through standard language conventions, particularly nouns, articles, indirect objects, and groups of people. For instance, in traditional Spanish language conventions to refer to “we,” one would use nosotros to refer to an all-male group or a mixed group of people. Nosotras would be used for a group of all females, and so on and so forth with other such words. As we all know, every noun in Spanish is gendered (e.g., la gente, la familia, la persona, el amigo, el grupo); to gender neutralize Latinx and Chicanx is an attempt to create more inclusive and accepting language particularly for transgender and queer folks. However, attempting to neutralize such language may be impossible within a language in which every noun is gendered. Gender neutralizing words that refer to groups of people, such as past efforts including Latin@, Latina/o, and Chicana/o moves in that direction. Latina/o and Chicana/o still reflect a gender binary, so a term (or spelling) like Latin@ or Latinx addresses inclusion issues for queer communities of color.

4. Dr. Sowards thanks her colleagues Carlos Tarín, Karma Chávez, Sarah de los Santos Upton, and Jesús Valles for their insights.

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Eric: Nothing is to be gained from using “Latinx.” Quite the contrary. The term does not correspond to Spanish syntax and this will prevent Spanish dominant people from identifying with it, creating a larger schism between recent Latino immigrants and American born Latinos. Additionally, there is something incredibly condescending for an English speaker to tell recent immigrants that Spanish is a gendered and patriarchal language but not to worry, because they can fix it with a term that does not conform to Spanish grammar.

On top of that, any interpretation of Spanish as a patriarchal language requires a very superficial reading of the language. For instance, “a” and “o” endings do not necessarily render a term as masculine or feminine. There are numerous words that don’t correspond to that structure: la mano, el día, la noche, etc. If anything, the argument can easily be made that Spanish is gender fluid even when it comes to people, as biological sex does not necessarily need to correspond with gendered nouns or adjectives. For instance, the simplistic statement, “El hombre Mexicano es una persona indígena,” has a male subject referred to with a feminine noun and adjective. As Stacey mentioned, the most common argument for “x” is that in a mixed gender group the masculine modifier is used, but, from my understanding, the Real Academia Española [RAE] says that it is acceptable for the modifier to correspond with the dominant gender present, be it male or female. While this isn’t largely practiced, it can easily be adopted.

Roy: What might be gained is a shift away from a casual and compulsory androcentrism, and the Spanish male/female linguistic bind Stacey describes. If we understand language as one medium among many for making political interventions, I think the instability of the -x is very useful. If I might reverse the question a little bit, I’m not sure what’s gained from demanding proper Spanish syntax, as Eric does. Even though género in Spanish grammar is not always related to, or consistent with, biological sex, we do make a gendered presumption when we assign -a or -o to a person or a group in front of us. Even if the stakes of gendered language do not feel high to some of us, they do feel high to many vulnerable others. As a supplement and not a substitute, Latinx offers a decent alternative to that unnecessary imposition of gender. And while a person could certainly insist on Latinx in a condescending tone, I don’t think the act of introducing Latinx into the lexicon is fundamentally condescending or imperialist—I’ve heard many folks in Lima, DF, and in Spanish-speaking online venues taking the term and all its baggage seriously, and using it, suggesting that immigrants are more diverse in their thinking than we might imagine. Indeed, I think many of the students and activists who advocate for Latinx seem to me to be quite Spanish literate, even if they may not always be Spanish fluent. I’m not sure we need to be terribly concerned with the prescriptions of the Real Academia Española (isn’t that prescriptive impulse itself quintessentially imperialist?), but I do believe in using language to effect change

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and expand the social world. The Royal Academy does not seem to offer a good alibi for refusing a politics of inclusion.

As an important aside, I would like to offer that the cultural dominance of first-generation, English-dominant Latinx youth in the US (the population whose interests I believe are at stake here) is overstated, and the separation from their immigrant peers not so clean cut. If we’re not careful to recognize the nature of contemporary transnational immigrant flows, both physical and virtual, we risk obstructing the empowerment of US-based Latinx subjects, in favor of Latin American, international interests (that aren’t always so very disenfranchised), in the name of preserving some idea of proper Spanish. Moreover, in the US we lose Spanish for reasons that are often related precisely to economic mobility and educational access in a colonial system. Privilege and culture in this landscape we’re talking about aren’t so clearly divided between citizen and immigrant. But I do agree that there are some losses, most importantly the specificities of a broad spectrum of national, cultural, and racial identifications, including Indigenous and Black latinidad. I think this loss is mitigated if we understand Latinx as a supplement rather than an enforced replacement. Latinx can exist alongside Puerto Rican, Mexican, Cuban, and Chicana/o/x, as a tool in the discursive box. I tell my students that when we’re talking about Latinx populations in general terms, it’s perfectly alright to stumble through a chain of slippery signifiers, and I regularly drop some version of “Chicanx/Rican/Latina/o/x” when I’m speaking in class, refusing to impose and stick to a particular label unless specificity calls for one.

Language offers that fluidity and we should take advantage of it.

Pilar: I agree with Stacey and Roy both in terms of what can be gained and what may be lost, and I am not going to repeat their eloquent arguments. But I’d like to expand on an idea expressed by Roy, the idea that Latinx is not an English-speaking imposition but a Spanglish version of the term that brings into the discussion social justice issues. In that respect, it is logical that the RAE opposes it, as members oppose any changes that do not come from them. Ultimately, I would not worry too much about the RAE’s insistence on Latino. (Excellent linguists they may be, but I am not sure they have been as exposed as Latinxs to post-colonial studies and matters of social justice.) I also would not worry too much about academia dictating the use of Latinx, because, ultimately, the term will be generally accepted or not, regardless of what the RAE or academics say. But we do have something very important to gain by engaging the term, and that is bringing into the discussion issues faced by marginalized communities within the binary o/a of traditional culture/language/society. This, to me, is worth any loss we face for using Latinx/ Chicanx, etc. In my courses, I teach the o/a forms of gender in traditional Spanish, but I also make it a point to explain the use of the “x”, and explain why. This alone

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has made gender-queer students more receptive to traditional Spanish grammar, as they feel there are ways to express their own identities if they choose to do so and do not have to conform to the one-size fits all o/a. At the same time, students, who traditionally have no exposure to issues facing genderqueer communities, have expressed that they are seeing the world under a larger gender light, regardless of whether they agree with the use of the term or not.

Eric: I’d like to make a clarification. My reference to the RAE was only in the idea that, from my understanding, it says it’s acceptable for mix gendered groups to be referred to by the dominant gender present, be it feminine or masculine. This is relevant only in that it counters the argument of Spanish necessarily being androcentric. I do not know if they have made any statement opposing or approving of “Latinx,” nor am I venturing to do so. Even without the RAE, however, there is nothing stopping people from referring to a mix gender group by using the feminine form. Over the years, I have been in situations where it has occurred and this signifies that a shift from “a casual and compulsory androcentrism” can be made without using “Latinx.”

I must also advance that this isn’t about preserving proper Spanish as much as it is respecting those who speak it as a dominant or sole language by recognizing the natural rhythm of the language. Using “x” and “lxs” in Spanish is extensively difficult, for while they seem manageable when written, in pronunciation they read more as “ex” and “lexes.” Try saying the phrase, “Mis amigexes en Indiana son lexes Latinexes.” The use of “x” interrupts one of the beautiful things about language—that its speakers give it a natural flow. This might sound like a minor issue to bilingual individuals established in the United States, but when Spanish is the only language a person speaks and they’re already operating on the margins of society in this country, it’s clear that “Latinx” was not meant to be inclusive of their spoken realities.

I advocate for a comprehensible and smooth Spanish syntax precisely because of transnational immigrant flows. I am the product of nearly a century of immigration, moving back and forth across the US-Mexico border with each generation of my family born on both sides. For those of us who straddle the border and its many cultures, there is a requisite need to code switch between languages. This is why my mother consciously bestowed upon all six of her children names that could be pronounced in English and Spanish with only changing the accent—this was especially relevant during the period of American history when Latino children would have their names Anglicized in schools. I navigate an identity where growing up I have been singled out as “other” in the US because my first language is Spanish, yet called a “pocho” in Mexico, because I am US born and English dominant. Having a term that encompasses both identities, that corresponds to English and Spanish syntax, that stays consistent even

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though the perception of who I am on both sides of the border fluctuates, is beautiful. And while I agree, having “Latinx” be an addition to other labels is less obtrusive, that’s not the way I’m seeing it manifest. As Pilar stated, “Latinx” is starting to be used, not in addition to, but instead of “Latina/o” in the titles of academic majors and minors.

Sandra: As Roy mentioned, at some point the terms “Latino/Latina” and “Latin@” became a way to achieve inclusiveness and gender neutrality. This discussion is particularly significant for Spanish, a language in which gender is differentiated with “a” or “o”. At that time it served its purpose, but the use of the “x” goes beyond the issue of gender because it attempts to be inclusive of all those who identify as part of the super diverse Latinx population and to embrace our uniqueness within the Latinx community. This includes gender, sexual preferences, and transnationality, among many others. I feel that what we gain by using this term is the awareness of the complexities that come with individual and collective identities. This can also be perceived as an appropriation of the language so that it reflects the dynamic identities among the Latinx community rather than a prescriptive use of it, which would be more aligned with colonial ideologies that are still part of our Latino communities. I also agree with Roy that “Latinx” is an addition to our linguistic repertoire and that what is important is that we are aware, and that we make others aware, of what the term implies and why it exists and co-exists with other terminology.

Catalina: To what extent do you agree, as some have argued, that the “x” termination advances social justice for transgender, genderqueer, and non-gender-conforming bodies, experiences, and perspectives?

Stacey: I strongly agree that the “x” termination advances social justice for queer and non-gender conforming bodies; it’s a step in the direction of creating more inclusive language. Terms like this that refer to people can be neutralized (at least to some extent), especially in written usage; it is also important for reimagining the way in which language functions and how it evolves. While some might contend that to gender neutralize all derivative words from Spanish, French, Portuguese or Italian is impossible, language evolves and emerges in new contexts; it’s always at least worth trying to imagine new possibilities within language usage. Just because a word or a usage of a word is not in a dictionary does not mean it isn’t being used and isn’t widely accepted or even preferred. A dictionary or institution that documents language represents current or past usage, but does not create new imaginaries for language usage.

Eric: I completely disagree. The “x” termination is not about inclusivity but about making a public and political statement, which comes at the cost of further

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marginalizing recent immigrants who are increasingly vulnerable in this country.

Additionally, the “x” termination is ripe with symbolism, interpreted as either “no more” or “a variable.” The fact one could read it either way makes it a violent change to language that can be easily misunderstood. It’s also unnecessary. English speakers seem to forget that for a good chunk of time, Latinos were referred to with the gender neutral “Latin,” as in: Latin lover, Latin food, Latin music, Latin looks—they could even go back to just being referred to as Hispanic. The adoption of “Latino” seemed to be predicated on its ability to be used by Spanish speakers.

To then change it to something Spanish speakers can’t say, well, it runs counter to the very reason behind having the term.

If one were to try to use an inclusive gender neutral termination, it would be “e”. There is already precedent for this in the Spanish language. Words like “cantante” and “estudiante” are neutral and rely on accompanying articles to denote gender. Since they exist currently in Spanish, occurring infrequently without challenging the dominant a/o construction, it would be relatively easy to just append the “e” termination to some more nouns while leaving the rest of the gendered nouns as is. By adopting “e” and introducing the article “le,” we would have a truly inclusive term that works within Spanish syntax. The fact that the “e” termination never gained traction might speak to the fact that people were more enamored with the ripe symbolism of “x” than its functionality. Ironically, this type of prejudice, through rendering the Spanish dominant immigrant population invisible, is exactly what the LGBTQ+ community has been rightfully fighting against for so many years.

Roy: I really like the “x” signifier as a reclamation of all kinds of erasure. By using the “x” we expose erasure and refuse it at the same time. I’m a nerd, so for me it invokes the X-Men, one of our most culturally visible and diverse narratives about xenophobia and fascism. It’s also not lost on me that Black slaves, denied literacy and proper names, were compelled to sign “X” on their freedom papers. When we cross something out, the original remains doggedly just underneath. The “x” also has a history in the borderlands that Stacey describes below. All told, the “x” has a complex transnational history that is much more rich and full of resistance than a simple story of erasure suggests. I think it’s great to be enamored with these linguistic possibilities—Spanish-speaking cultures are all about linguistic play and appropriation. That itself is a kind of freedom. To answer the question, though, I think the fact that we’re having this conversation in such a visible venue, with all its rich divergences, is itself evidence that the introduction of Latinx is effecting social change that advances trans/queer justice. So long as we’re obliged to grapple with these thorny linguistic problems, we find ourselves centering the experiences and demands of trans/queer Latinx subjects—documented, undocumented, or

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US-born. This visibility itself and its new vocabulary, while double-edged, has made it easier for trans and queer thinkers and activists to articulate a movement.

Pilar: Again, I find myself in agreement with Stacey and Roy, but I’d like to engage Eric on a couple of points: (1). “The x is not about inclusivity but on making a public or political statement.”

Isn’t inclusivity gained through public and political discourse? In other words, would we have made the social gains we have made, precisely on inclusivity, were we to not engage in public and political discourse about it?

(2). “The use of the ‘x’ comes at the cost of further marginalizing recent immigrants, who are increasingly more vulnerable…” This assumes all recent immigrants reject the use of the term, and it even implies that they are all heteronormative. On the contrary, I believe new immigrants, like other people, will make their own decisions on the use of the term, depending on their own socio-cultural background and identity needs. However, I think the option of having a gender-neutral pronoun liberates those immigrants who belong to non-gender conforming communities and feel the need to identify as gender-queer. I think the point is not should we use the x or not, but let it be an option. El uso o desuso de la palabra va a dictar su futuro.

(3). The use of the “e”. I have made this same observation, that if we wanted a neutral term we could just go to “e” (doctore, enfermere, etc.). I am not sure if someone has proposed it, or if it simply has not been pointed out as an option, especially for Spanish speakers (as opposed to those comfortable with English or Spanglish). I think it is a workable alternative. I am sure, however, that we would find resistance there also, from those “enamored” with traditional Spanish, and especially those whose identities fit their use of language.

Eric:

(1). Inclusivity is indeed gained through making a public or political statement—I never stated anything to the contrary. We should definitely have conversations about inclusivity and be public about them, but our movement towards inclusivity needs be cognizant of all vulnerable populations. If the political statement is made at the cost of a different marginalized group, it is not an effort at inclusivity, especially not when the gender inclusive English pronouns of Latin and Hispanic exist as well.

When English dominant or bilingual speakers are imposing value judgments on the Spanish language and deciding that it needs to be changed, they are also making value judgments on the people who speak that language as their only linguistic vehicle for expression. Even looking at the term “Latinx” as a valuable Spanglish label is an exercise in privilege not afforded to monolingual Latin American immigrants who exist in this country and should be taken into consideration.

(2). In preparation for a future article on this topic, I have been informally interviewing Latino individuals: monolingual Spanish speakers, all levels of bilinguals, and monolingual English speakers—including subjects who identify as queer, trans, and cis, and have varying levels of education, ranging from completion of a high school diploma or equivalent to the attainment of a doctoral degree. While I cannot make any definite statements at this point, I am seeing patterns starting to

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form. People who speak English at greater fluency and have attained a higher degree of education seem to be the most likely to look favorably at the use of “Latinx”; those who speak Spanish with greater fluency and have attained only a high school diploma or equivalent are at the other end of the spectrum, being more likely to be taken aback by the term. I am also not seeing trans and queer people universally accept “x” as a marker of self-identity either. One informant clearly stated to me that he worked hard to be seen as a male and to be referred to in gender neutral terminology undermines his true gender identity—while he does not deny anyone else the ability to be referred to as “Latinx,” it’s not a term he would use on himself. I do, however, need to speak with more trans individuals to even get a working hypothesis on how acceptance of the term in the community relates to education and English/Spanish fluency.

(3). I have seen the term “e” suggested in a few online blogs and in the comments section of articles discussing “Latinx.” There would definitely be a pushback to using this as well due to points I bring up elsewhere and Pilar’s assertion that there are people enamored with Spanish or feel the language fits their current needs. None of the potentially positive aspects in the “Latinx” movement, however, would be lost with the “e”, and it would provide at least a symbolically important gesture at being cognizant of existing Spanish syntax and conventions, thus enabling it to be more readily accepted by transnational populations.

Sandra: To me this is both about making a political statement against the exclusion of these individuals from language and policies. By doing so we are seeking social justice and equality. Using the “x” could be a way to empower these individuals and a way to shake up what is normal and appropriate. The “x” makes you think and questions who I included and opens the possibilities to basically everyone. In fact, the first time I engaged in a conversation particularly about the “x”, and even about other possibilities, was in a conference about gender, transgender, queer, and non-gender-conforming individuals. Deciding to use the “x” is taking a stance against the current prescriptive use of language that is often not aligned with our realities.

Catalina: What is your response to claims that the “x” signifier marks an untranslatability in Spanish and a form of “linguistic imperialism”?

Stacey: Claims about linguistic imperialism are certainly valid and such claims are important to consider. And Latinx is difficult to say, although I’ve only seen it in written contexts. The letter X might be considered an important letter at least in the Mexican and Mexican American contexts in representing culture and national pride. For example, I’m thinking of the giant red X that is supposed to represent mexicanidad in Ciudad Juárez, just across the border from where I live in El Paso, Texas. That red X can be seen from many parts of the city and may be considered a symbol of Mexican culture and pride (although there has been some controversy about the installation of this X, but that’s another story). On one hand, US usage

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of the term may in fact demand a gender neutrality and fluidity that doesn’t really exist in Spanish, and that can legitimately be considered linguistic/cultural imperialism. On the other hand, there is precedent for the usage of the term Latinx in Mexico. And the former president of Argentina, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, is known for attempting to use more gender-neutral language (although not with the x). So, there are currents of discontent within South American/Central American Spanish language communities; it’s not just US Latinas/os who are interested in these changes. Now, I don’t know how much demand for gender neutral language or terms like Latinx there is, but there is some.

Eric: In a December 2015 post on Latino Rebels, professors María R. Scharróndel Río and Alan A. Aja argued that Spanish is already “the most blatant form of linguistic imperialism for Latin Americans.” I find this position to be short-sighted.

Imperialism and the accompanying colonialism are inherently acts of control predicated on an outside powerful group imposing itself on another group. In this instance, a term designed for English speakers being thrust upon Spanish speakers with little concern of existing syntax and reliant on a superficial interpretation of grammar is an act of colonialism—one that is not negated simply by arguing that Spanish is already a colonizer language. Nahuatl is also a colonizer language, seeing as the Aztecs were imperialistic and already colonized a large part of MesoAmerica before the Spaniards arrived, but that does not negate the impact of Spanish colonialism on the Aztecs.

Living in an imperialistic nation like the United States, we need to be doubly aware of how our incriminations against other cultures and their languages affect the global discourse. If we are saying that we are adopting “x” in order to advance inclusivity, we need to be absolutely sure that “x” is the best way to do that. I am not remotely convinced. By choosing a term that is untranslatable and using it to impose our “morals” onto a less powerful population, what are we saying? That we are somehow better than they are? Are we not lessening the Spanish-speaking Latin American population to the world by accusing them of patriarchy and using that to justify our attempts to change their language? Why even engage in this conversation when we could more easily go back to the terms of “Latin” and “Hispanic”?

This is not just linguistic imperialism, it IS imperialism. We have a president who refers to undocumented Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers, and to then have the educated masses accuse the very Spanish language of toxic masculinity only furthers that disturbing discourse and justifies discrimination against Latino immigrants.

Roy: I think we dangerously misunderstand how imperialism works when we fail to differentiate between grassroots cultural interventions that gain popular momentum among diverse brown, trans, queer and feminist activists, and forms

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of state imperialism enacted through military invasion and exploitive economic policy. The suggestion that Latinx originates exclusively in the English-speaking US misunderstands the internet, transnational immigrant flows, and the nature of trans/queer solidarity and activism. Let’s not forget that all US terms—including Latina/o and Chicana/o—have roots in English-speaking activism and present the same problem of cultural imposition as Latinx. I think the idea that we are morally imposing Latinx on an innocent and vulnerable immigrant population is couched in dubious immigrant family stereotypes (assimilated children rejecting salt-ofthe-earth parents), and insults the intellectual and political capacity of transnational immigrant subjects. I don’t think recognizing Latinx is a moral question—in this light it would be immoral to ask laborers to adopt the language of US worker’s rights that is necessary to resist labor exploitation. It is a political question, which is not the same thing. The term Latinx does not deny anyone anything, because other identities and labels remain. For example, I continue to identify as Latino, and feel no moral obligation to identify as Latinx, even while I identify as queer and recognize the political exigencies to which Latinx points. Instead, I think the term Latinx brings new, diverse, politically resistant subjects into existence against imperialist containment. We’re asked to stand alongside them.

Pilar: I concur with Roy. Eric: The idea that Chicano/a presented the same type of cultural imposition as Latinx fails to take into consideration the fact that Chicana/o denotes one specific subgroup within the US Latino diaspora. It is, by nature, not directly engaging with transnational identities, not making any larger commentaries on the Spanish language, and its use as a marker of identity is restrictive. Additionally, Chicana/o is a term that has been in use in a pejorative way since early in the 20th century. The accompanying Chicano Movement of the 1960s was, in part, reclaiming the term during a larger activist effort, and turned it into a source of pride. In this context, the importance of the label Chicano has much more in common with the term “queer” and its history in the LGBTQ+ community than it does with “Latinx.”

Using “Latinx” as a supplement to existing labels, as I see Roy using it, definitely does not deny anyone anything. When used as a replacement to “Latina/o” or “Latin@,” along with the accompanying discourse of being inclusive, it sets up a false binary. It assumes that those who reject the term are, in fact, rejecting the mantra of inclusivity—when, in fact, they may be responding to various other problems presented by the term. That conversation is detrimental and has more potential for division than for unity. When presented as “Latina/o/x,” however, there is a platform to argue a conscious effort at inclusivity by acknowledging varying identities.

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Sandra: I also concur with Roy and restate that the use of “x” is a way to appropriate language, it is a bottom-up proposition that seeks to question and move away from the existent rules that are imposed on us by the RAE or by Academia. Those rules I see as a form of imperialism and colonialism. The “x”, the “@”, and whatever may come after this, are an invitation to question language and those who impose those rules upon us. Communication and how we engage in it is an everyday practice and that cannot be predetermined by any group because it is an organic process that is ongoing. I also believe that the untranslatability of the term is what makes it more empowering. It does not seek to create a new rule but rather to dismantle what exists and invites us to re-think how individuals with different ideologies, perspectives, and identities are included or rejected from different spaces or communities through language.

Editor’s Note: The full exchange can be found at http://chiricu.indiana.edu Catalina M. de Onís, editorial associate of Chiricú Journal, served as the discussion moderator. She completed her PhD in Communication and Culture at Indiana University and will join the faculty of Willamette University in summer 2017. Her research examines reproductive, climate, and energy (in)justices in Latina/o/x communities from a rhetorical perspective. Her scholarship appears in Environmental Communication, Women’s Studies in Communication, and Women & Language.5

5. I wish to thank the five contributors who made this conversation possible with their energy, expertise, and enthusiasm. Also, thank you to the editorial team and board for being open to including this exchange in the pages of Chiricú Journal.

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She Will…

Eloísa Pérez-Lozano

Her hands are trembling like leaves blowing in the wind, barely on a branch but she’s made her decision.

She will share who she really is the life she’s kept a secret for years when she comes out to her parents.

She will tell them she’s known since she was eight that the boys in her life would only be friends.

She will tell them her best friend whose eyes always see into her soul is actually her novia of two years.

She slowly walks into the kitchen the aromas of café and huevos intermingling, adorning the air.

Her father fixes his tie before Mass and her mother picks at her plate listening to the TV, her eyes transfixed.

Suddenly, she hears what her mother hears: “Orlando…shooting…gay club” and her heart drops to the floor.

“It serves them right, sick godless people,” her father says to the mirror in the hall the anger flaring in his eyes reflected back.

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Her mother doesn’t disagree only shakes her head in pity, her huevos rancheros getting cold.

It is then that her daughter steps back into the role of la hija responsable the one with good grades, obedient.

She will not tell them today; even though it’s hard to hide she can’t bear to lose them.

She will allow their condemnation to go unchecked, nodding her head to their hate so they won’t suspect.

She will keep on holding Ana’s hand and drinking the honey from her lips but only in the dark, behind closed doors.

For now, she will slip on her mask to attend a service where she’s told God forgives certain sins, but not hers.

She heads to the car in silence the golden medalla from her madrina feeling a little too tight around her neck.

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A Latinx Folklorist’s Love Letter to American Folkloristics Academic Disenchantment and Ambivalent Disciplinary Futures Rachel V. González-Martin, University of Texas, Austin

Abstract: A work of creative nonfiction, this essay employs three types of writing styles—ethnographic observation, life-writing, and academic discourse. It weaves a love letter into an emotionally volatile critique of disciplinary futures, highlighting a rejection of false scientism and respectability politics that often keeps minoritized scholars silent. The goal of this work is to illustrate the way in which minority academics, particularly Latinx scholars, navigate the field of American Folkloristics as an area of study dominated by white, cishet male privilege. The author explicitly discusses the burden of minority scholars and scholarship in the discipline while both criticizing and romanticizing the disciplinary present. Guided by the affective reality of academic discourse, the author concludes by pleading for the inclusion of conceptual frameworks that would allow the discipline’s collective future to include scholars of color and other minoritized professionals: interdisciplinarity, intersectionality, and translocality.

Keywords: Latinx, Folkloristics, intersectionality, translocal, folklore futures Do work that matters. Vale la pena, it’s worth the pain.

—Gloria Anzaldúa1

1. This quote is often attributed to Gloria Anzaldúa, writer, activist, and philosopher of Mexican Borderlands subjectivities, but rarely is it located in space and time. This statement comes at a later point in Anzaldúa’s career, in an essay titled “Let Us Be the Healing of the Wound: The Coyolxauhqui Imperative—la sombra y el sueño.” Published just after the attacks on US soil on September 11, 2001, Anzaldúa and other womanist scholars of color collectively responded to the national violence that only reinforced the violent histories on marginalized bodies in the Americas. Bearing witness, at what Chiricú Journal, Vol. 2.1, pp. 19–39 Copyright © 2017 Trustees of Indiana University • doi:10.2979/chiricu.2.1.04

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Do great work and call yourself a folklorist.

—Diane Goldstein2

*** When I left Bloomington on this visit, I felt different. I felt as though I was walking away from you, not only your intellectual embrace, but your centrality in my life. I left feeling our relationship strained over time and experiences—I had moved forward, I had to, but you did not. You remained comfortable in your rut, assuming I’d return. But I only came back for the few remnants of myself I had left behind. Our future together is unclear, even murky. It doesn’t have to be, but only if you can embrace change, and claim me.

*** On May 18, 2017, at 1:30 in the afternoon, I found myself at the front of a lecture hall at the first Future of American Folkloristics Conference (FOAF) at Indiana University, Bloomington. The panel my colleagues (Mintzi MartínezRivera, Solimar Otero, and Guillermo de los Reyes) and I had organized was titled “Discussing Latina/o Impacts and Contributions to American Folklore Futures.”

I had returned to my alma mater, the only university in the United States where one can earn a PhD in the field of Folklore (in name), to speak about where Latinx scholars and scholarship fit into the future of American Folkloristics in the United States. There were only two other academics of color in the room who were not graduate students, and one was my copresenter. The audience dominated by white was surely a precipice overlooking an uncertain future, I draw on her wisdom, knowing that right now Latinx-identifying scholars and other scholars occupying gender, class, and racialized subjectivities look upon the future of American Folkloristics with a sense of personal dread—given the years of labor dedicated to integrating minority scholars that established such special-interest sections as the Chicano-Chicana Section, Folklore Latino & Caribbeño Section, African Studies Section, LGBTQA Section into the field as full-fledged members continues to fall on deaf ears. What can the future look like, if minority voices continue to be contingently accepted?

2. This statement emerged in Goldstein’s end-of-term Presidential Address at the national meeting of the American Folklore Society in October of 2013, in Providence, Rhode Island. Her statement was a critical articulation of the identity of the field of folklore study, noting that in this twentyfirst-century context, “our intellectual context has pretty radically changed in light of a growing populism in the intellectual, bureaucratic, and popular world around us that (for better or worse) now pays greater attention to the voices and knowledges of vernacular culture” (1). She claims the rejection of “grand narratives” in favor of vernacular discourse—rooted in ethnographic methods. Goldstein’s commentary fails to recognize folklore as a discipline is itself a grand discourse, especially as it integrates professionals of color and those working from a perspective of minoritized communities who no longer concede to the historical colonial precedents rooted in ethnographic and intellectual methodological formations.

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academics sat stiff, many choosing not to make eye contact. My hands trembled.

I couldn’t tell whether I was nervous or angry, or both. As I began to speak, the room seemed to calm, and then as pleasant introductions subsided, the tension returned.

As a scholar of color, working within Latinx3 communities in the United States, and Mexico, I have discovered that the two statements above are interpreted differently by peers who have little to no intellectual or personal connection to minoritized populations. I only realized this after I returned home from the conference.

Such a conference, more than an intellectual engagement, was a space of affective connection between my past as a student of American Folklore and my future as a professor of Latinx Studies. Regardless of what popular narratives of academic culture may claim, academia as a space is one of the most emotionally driven work environments one can occupy, drawing on experiences of marginalization, discomfort, anger, shame, and romantic nostalgia, among others. In this context, dispassionate research and practice that affirm value through scientism seem the farthest priority from reality, but also the least honest way to represent shared knowledges.

Recognizing academia as a fundamentally affective space, I offer a love letter to my discipline. Drawing on poet Rupi Kaur’s book Milk and Honey, I divide this essay into three sections: The Loving (past), The Breaking (the present), and The Healing (the future). These three sections narrate a view of race and cultural politics from a woman of color scholar who came of age within folklore studies, found a home, and then realized to keep living, she must either dismantle and rebuild her home, or abandon it for another.

Minority scholars of folklore like me unsettle a discipline that remains uncertain of who we are and what we do. Professionals who are committed to working with populations living in the interstices of raced, classed, and gendered subjectivities in the United States, who theorize their collaborations within and adjacent to the field of American Folkloristics, potentially find themselves in an often unspoken conflict with espoused disciplinary values. One of the most championed disciplinary assets, indeed one that fundamentally separates it from its original parent discipline, anthropology, is the notion that Folklore and by extension folklorists seek out cultural practice and performance in their “own backyards.” Rather than demanding international travel, scholars are to embrace the local. Little did I realize, the “local” had been implicitly racialized, where my claim to a local looked quite exotic to many who took their academic degrees in the mid to late 3. The term “Latinx,” which substitutes an “x” for the gendered “a” or “o” of Spanish grammar, is used to include nonbinary gender constructions, and Indigenous populations, into the discourse of “Latino” ethnoracial identifications and populations. The term is still contentious and experimental within Latina/o ethnic and gender studies discourse, but in this case represents the discursive politics of the author.

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twentieth century. In many ways, the questions forged here, and which delve into the potential of the disciplinary futures of Folkloristics, are built from the critical labor of women of color scholars, whose critical interventions in feminist, gender, and cultural analysis are situated within the greater United States, while simultaneously drawing on hemispheric Latinx epistemologies.

The intellectual and emotional labor of interdisciplinary folklorists continues to pave the way for new cohorts of interdisciplinary folklorists of color to thrive and question how activating minority positionalities, in contexts of both academic and public practice, in a field dominated by Western theoretical frameworks, is a form of transgressive scholarly practice. Distinguished scholars such as Norma E. Cantú, María Herrera-Sobek, Olga Nájera-Ramírez, Solimar Otero, Brenda Romero, Ana Cara, and Olivia Cadaval are folklorists who represent myriad disciplines and trainings but who find themselves regularly presenting their research at the American Folklore Society meetings. Such scholars have supplemented a system that was not in place during their years of training, and have created an intellectual exchange that students of color, including me, could count on year after year. Their practice, by no means unique to Folklore, instead stems from larger political discussions of women of color feminisms mobilized by multiracial women of color such as those published in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Moraga and Anzaldúa), seeking to counter hegemonic systems of power and oppression by acknowledging intersectional experiences. Indeed, these women of color scholars maintain such a legacy by time and time again mentoring and counseling the next generation of young professionals, without pay or public recognition, and do so as a commitment to profound social and professional change. At the same time, their scholarship pushes the boundaries of expected theoretical norms of the field, crafting intersectional scholarship (gender, race, class, sexuality studies) that lacks centrality in the field more broadly concerned with the intricacies of form and texture.

The collective intellectual labor of these scholar-mentors in the mid and late twentieth century and early twenty-first century speaks to critical understandings of bordered subjectivities (Cantú), gendered positionality (HerreraSobek), hybridity and creolization (Cara and Baron), historicity and practice (Nájera-Ramírez, Cantú, and Romero), the politics of public practice (Cadaval), and the convergence of queer and Afro-Latinx rhetorics within the Atlantic world (Otero). And yet, their work has had to be found, discovered, and recommended through informal collaborative networks—never required readings.

This legacy of marginality is nothing new, as Latina scholars from across the Hemispheric Americas find their innovative contributions subsumed under the work of male colleagues. Jovita González was the first Mexican woman to serve as president of the Texas Folklore Society in 1930. Her master’s thesis, “Social

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Life in Cameron, Starr, and the Zapata Counties,” completed at the University of Texas in Austin, was acknowledged to be “one of a few produced at the time that did not view Mexicans as a social problem” (Orozco and Acosta). Such a discourse, expanded to include the race and class politic affecting diversely situated Latinidades in the United States, continues to resonate into the twenty-first century, although few in the discipline of folklore would acknowledge her work as critical intervention.

While the above Chicana and Latina scholars actively engage with the discipline of folklore and its flagship conference in the United States, many more do not, and instead choose to carve out their folkloristic niche elsewhere. For instance, Domino R. Perez, professor at the University of Texas and the author of There Was a Woman: La Llorona from Folklore to Popular Culture (2008), has had a career focused in the field of English, but has written a seminal book on the use of folklore in new media and popular culture, exemplified through exhaustive analyses of multimodal versions of the US Latina/o, Chicana/o folktale La Llorona. Her work addresses questions of the relevance of folklore beyond academic circles, and antiquarian salvage expeditions to vividly illustrate the way folklore is instrumentalized beyond oral communication, and made immediately relevant to communities and entrepreneurs in the twenty-first century. Raquel Romberg, professor of anthropology at the University of Tel Aviv and author of Witchcraft and Welfare: Spiritual Capital and the Business of Magic in Puerto Rico (2003), offers an in-depth analysis that assesses spiritual practices and regional belief systems in tandem with their material manifestations as a product of neocapitalism in modern Puerto Rico. Her work creates a direct and invaluable link to larger studies of economic anthropology and sociology, and foregrounds the kinds of innovative analysis that can advance the scope and relevance of American folkloristics, if only Puerto Rican folklore were genuinely recognized as part of American folklore. Similarly, University of Michigan professor of anthropology Ruth Behar, who is identified in part as a folklorist, adds a different critical narrative to American Folkloristics: that of the politics of writing, and creating discourse. Her work as an anthropologist focuses on the lives of women in developing nations (with a significant portion of work committed to her experiences as a Cuban-Jewish exile living between the United States and Cuba), is diversely sited, and her chosen forms of discourse range from ethnography to young-adult fiction. Behar’s critical perspective on writing practice, best exhibited in her book The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart (1996), situates the role of the author/person within ethnographic narrative creation. Her understanding of the significance of authorial positionality within communities, both material and entextualized, is precisely the mode of critical self-reflection that folklore scholars must embrace and foreground to move forward as ethical participant observers in the twenty-first century. While there are many more to name,

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these three senior scholars exemplify the critical perspectives lost to the field of American Folklore, as the discipline continues to centralize a narrow, Eurocentric view of “America” and still view interdisciplinary scholars of minority communities as niche researchers rightly residing in the margins of American Folkloristics, and never as progenitors of core theory. While I focus on Latina scholars4 and their roles in this conversation, the same assessments could be made, even more stringently, about Asian American, African American, and Native American scholars and queer-identifying colleagues.

The roles of the above mentors and scholars illustrate the need for transgressive occupation of intellectual and social spaces in academia in order to move the discipline of folklore, and its interdisciplinary partners (English, anthropology, ethnic studies, and ethnomusicology), toward a critical and mutually intelligible future. The political and community centric ideologies these scholars bring to methods and ethics of the field, and academic discourse in general, create an implicit hostility between professionals who know diversity sells and those who truly want to diversify and decolonize academic spaces.

At the 2015 American Folklore Society meeting in Long Beach, California, a colleague and professor of English at the University of Missouri, Anand Prahlad, shared a question during a diversity round-table presentation that I had organized as part of the society’s Cultural Diversity Committee that has plagued his career in Folklore, and that I will never forget. He asked, “How can we diversify a space [academia] that was never intended to be diverse?” Granted, his question speaks not only to Folklore as a discipline, but to a professional reality of broadly framed academic labor, which to this very moment haunts me as I search unsuccessfully for its answer, while still identifying myself as a “folklorist.” Finding ways to negotiate academic power structures as a raced, classed, and gendered professional leaves scholars dedicated to making change in marginalized communities, who are themselves intimately connected to those communities both professionally and personally, struggling to strike a balance between the notion of doing “great work” and doing “work that matters.” The primary problem presented between the two quotes presented above, one from folklorist and former president of the American Folklore Society Diane Goldstein, and the other from queer Chicanx feminist thinker Gloria Anzaldúa, is a lack of resolution of two basic questions: “what is great work?” and “to whom does it need to matter?” The answers to both of these questions are highly variable, and rightly so in a discipline that should demand scholars check their personal and academic positionality regularly—whether working within communities, accessing archives and print sources, or facilitating 4. Another argument needs to be made that includes scholars from Central and South America as well as Canada to further complicate and clarify the notion of the Hemispheric Americas and the locations of influential folklore scholarship.

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public arts programs. As a woman of color academic working in structurally marginalized communities, I assert that the narratives of value excavated within communities of color and other spaces particularly subject to structural oppression not replace but simply be included in the potential answers to the above questions.

Longing for inclusion, within this essay I comment upon the contingent value placed on scholars of color, particularly Latinx-identifying folks from across the Hemispheric Americas.

While I speak of Latinx Folklore Studies as a necessary addition to American Folklore Studies, I hope that these ideas resonate with other scholars of positional diversity still fighting for a place within our discipline where we can be ourselves. Latinx Folklore Studies is not a salvage expedition; we are here to visibilize our communities’ narratives of the present, supplementing a vacant past, in order to expose vibrant and structurally unanticipated Latinx futures. There are many of us dedicated to this premise, and our numbers are only growing.

The practices of Latinx Folklore Studies draw heavily on the social and political premise of studying communities that have and continue to be erased from mainstream popular and disciplinary discourses. As such, the scholars who have shaped my perspectives are not necessarily “trained” folklorists, instead coming from Folklore, American Studies, Anthropology, English, History, Cultural Studies, and Ethnic Studies among others. Nor is my intellectual genealogy composed solely of Latinx scholars, but of those who have found relevance in foregrounding community voices and practices at the center of their scholarship, as well as those theorizing systems of power, both from the past and continuing into the present. Even those who are recognized as folklorists are not claimed as canonical figures in disciplinary histories in the United States, as mentioned above. The most recognized figure, Américo Paredes, who pioneered the study of border ballads (corridos) in the United States, was rendered marginal in the history of anthropological folkloristics in the United States, earning but one cursory reference in Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt’s American Folklore Scholarship: A Dialogue of Dissent (1988).

The displacement of the labor of scholars and practitioners of color serves to mark their professional presence as contingent—subject to its capacity or desire to be legible to white, middle-upper-class academic audiences. This contingent status implicitly informs the way in which minority scholars are sidelined as ethnic-specialists, seemingly incapable of contributing to generalizable disciplinary theory.

In 1988, Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt, with whom I share an intellectual genealogy, published American Folklore Scholarship: A Dialogue of Dissent, only one year before Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality in her article “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.”

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Intersectionality has since transcended its start in Black Feminist and Legal Studies and continues to be integrated into other intellectual debates as a “way of conceptualizing the relation between systems of oppression which construct our multiple identities and our social locations in hierarchies of power and privilege” (Carastathis 304). As contemporaries in the academy, both authors offer distinct discursive frames, especially with regard to their relevance to folklorists of color today. Zumwalt, a dedicated American folklorist, took on the task of dissecting the establishment of the American disciplinary field of folklore by way of methodological practice—literary versus anthropological. She would eventually come to claim that the discipline’s intellectual trajectory must be balanced by the coexistence of the two strands, each with different relations to their specifically European (read British) origins. Her work foregrounded control over forms, while Crenshaw’s intervention into academic thought more broadly asked scholars to reframe their understanding of how systems of structural power affect the lived experiences of different communities.

Crenshaw’s foundational framework rooted in critical race theorizing asserts that minoritized populations, particularly women of color (speaking specifically to African American community experiences), cannot distill their experiences down to repercussions of solely gender identification in the United States. Rather, the experiences of women of color are compounded by multiple, overlapping, and fundamentally entangled forms of oppression that simultaneously connect race, class, and gender politics as an intersectional everyday lived experience. At the same time, Crenshaw illustrates how white-feminist discourses could not accurately represent women of color, feminists or otherwise. Both of these discourses have affected my formation as a WOC-folklorist trained in American Folkloristics, in particular as someone who now finds it necessary to identify herself as a queer Latinx folklorist.

The Loving/Coming to Folklore We met when I was very young. You were dashing and new, I couldn’t help but be drawn toward you. You said everything I ever wanted to hear. I was enamored with the questions you asked and the stories you told. It was love at first cite! I was small, unassuming, and reluctantly finding myself at your doorstep; uncertain about my disciplinary future, no longer certain about a career in medicine, and you took me in. You embraced me, and I knew I was in love. You would be my life, and would help me fill the intellectual emptiness that had been consuming me as the university failed to inspire meaning in my life.

We grew close instantly—reminding me of who I was and what I had known before I ever entered pallid university classrooms. You were vibrant. You valued my insights, and perspectives, you made me feel heard and seen. You were different from

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the others I had committed to before, you were fearless against the real life ambivalence rejected by scientism, and scoffed at the need to find meaning beyond our own backyards—actively distancing yourself from your academic parentage. It was so refreshing to be guided toward the familiar, the locally underappreciated—it seemed ideal for a woman of color and novice young scholar to fit into this space. Could I really chronicle my own community narrative? Would people listen—yes. I am part of the missing 95%. I was excited by the possibilities that lay ahead of us—what work we could do together! I was smitten.

I didn’t know how long we’d be together, but as the years passed I grew restless. I was devoted to you, to your ideas—I took your recommendations on faith, this was how we operated. I knew one day you’d get to what was relevant to me—soon, I thought. But soon was farther on the horizon than I’d initially anticipated. I chased you across the country. Our relationship changed in our new Midwestern surroundings. I worked hard, and I thought I made you happy. All of a sudden you were hostile, and even dismissive of me in public—I found myself silenced, fearful of speaking up. “I am lucky to be here,” I thought to myself as I cried on my walk home from your house. We were no longer speaking to one another. You were speaking at me, and wanted me to appreciate the attention I was now getting, implying there were many others who weren’t so fortunate.

I was confused, but I knew I was still new to this experience, and so I would be patient, and eager to find value in the voices, faces, and ideas that did not care to acknowledge my humanity.

I was reaffirmed in my decision to stay with you after meeting friends we had in common, a new network emerged, and they thought like me, and in many ways, were disenchanted like me, but we decided to stay—knowing you had our best interests at heart. After all, you spoke to and through people who find themselves at the margins of social, cultural, and political life! I surely had a place with you . . .

*** It was the fall of 2006, my first semester serving as one of three teaching assistants for the large introductory folklore lecture course taught at Indiana. The professor, and later my advisor, Pravina Shukla shared an idea attributed to Warren E. Roberts, recipient of the first PhD granted in Folklore from my home department, with her class. She noted that Roberts has claimed that documented history narrates the experiences of five percent of the population, and through the study of folkloric forms, we could account for the lives and experiences of the missing ninety-five. This thought moved me as I thought about my own gaps in familial memory and group history brought on by an epistemology centered on movement as survival. I thought Folklore spoke to me personally, that it could see value in me that I couldn’t. For that, I will always be grateful. However, the longer I subsumed myself in the discipline, the less clearly I fit into its discourse and practices.

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I realized in my later graduate years that to be accountable to the Latinx communities of practice with whom I aspired to work, my scholarly frameworks required expansion and revision.

I am a queer Latinx folklorist in a conspicuously white, cishet5 discipline.

Here, queering discourses are not necessarily sexual, but can be. Rather, the use of “queer” in this context draws on José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of disidentification— where individuals choose to live fully between mainstream and staunch countercultural identifications, claiming both their insider and outsider “parts” as their own. “[D]isidentification is a step further than cracking open the code of the majority; it proceeds to use this code as raw material for representing a disempowered politics or positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture” (Muñoz 31). It is this theorizing that shapes the core of my folkloristic inquiry—rather than foregrounding incongruity in forms of cultural production over time, we must foreground nuanced strategies of visibilizing selfhood emergent in communities at large. Muñoz establishes a definition of queerness as a rejection of “straight time,” the “here and now,” and an insistence on the “then and there.” Muñoz proposes the concept of disidentificatory performances as acts of transgression and creation, by which racial and sexual minorities, or minoritarian subjects, articulate the truth about cultural hegemony. Here, foregrounding a queer Latinx perspective allies one with a collective process of dismantling so-called normative standardizations in everyday life, and helping inform a wider understanding of an emergent Critical Latinx Folkloristics. It is not only an acceptance of the unconventional or noncanonical, but a direct refutation that convention and canon are anything more than the manifestations of hegemonic structures of oppression designed to motivate self-censorship and self-imposed erasure. The lens of Critical Latinx Folklore involves accepting a subject position that seeks to both establish and challenge expected practices of gendered, classed, and racialized norms of ethnic minority personhood. While referencing visible ethnic and racial markers in US sociocultural contexts, it also seeks to account for the silenced intersections of Blackness and erasure, legacies of genocide, violence, and subjugation, whose result is an ethnoracial hybridity that seeks to bring into conversations of “Latino” folklore, contemporary communities of transhemispheric Afro-Latinx communities, as well as Indigenous nations. Such a perspective centralizes folklore and cultural practices as inextricably tied to transnational movement, and settlercolonialism in the United States. Such interpersonal and familial legacies of racialized rejection are also present in the history of Folkloristics in the United States, and the narratives of culture practice that, more than anything, are fundamentally the product of colonialism.

5. This is a term denoting someone who identifies and presents as cis-gendered as well as heterosexual.

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The presence of colonial legacies via cultural practices that implicate race, class, and gendered ideologies create a precarious intellectual context for the study of Latinx cultural practices. In particular, tension is reified at the seams where assertions of beauty, exoticism, and romantic nationalism are implicitly paired with narratives of hegemony, gendered violence, racial subjugation, and cultural erasure. Collection practices, especially those that imply the continued existence of Latinx peoples in the United States, alongside a white liberal imperative to give voice, or create visibility for Latinx communities, do not make the romantic objectification of “folk” culture any less offensive, oppressive, or condescending. We are not a dying community. We are a body of intertwined translocal communities in transition. The practice of salvage collecting, especially those that gather practices of communities of color without long-term accountability to those communities, mirrors an inability to see minority scholars as educated, competent professionals. Instead, academic peers are more comfortable assuming our roles as cultural practitioners in the service to the discipline. This speaks to implicit patterns present in the training of new scholars, those emerging in the twenty-first century, which prioritize an understanding of disciplinary histories that privilege the perspectives of white, cis-gendered European men.

The Breaking/Invisibility It took years before our relationship truly began to fall apart—the honeymoon period. It was at this time that you introduced me to new ways of seeing the world ethnographically—touching, hearing, tasting, and seeing culture around me. Remember that class, the one that thought the 1980s was “the present”? I laughed, and thought, well, you have a lot going on. I’ll just work through this one on my own. Peopled research appealed to me, and you were very supportive, showing me the critical work that could be accomplished speaking to living informants, but not the pitfalls that would plague the politics of collaboration. I had to learn those lessons on my own. And yet, I knew you had good intentions, after all you still seemed to care for me, and so I knew I could acquaint myself with these ideas, and not bother you.

I was enlivened by the possibilities of such a method. My love of the archives did not waver, but living communities were where I belonged—seeing memory come alive in the present. As I became more involved in my community-based research, I found myself eager to learn more formally about things you just didn’t seem to care about. I started seeing someone else. Not wholly abandoning you, but the friendships I made were deep—deep enough to shift my attention away from what you were doing, to what I could be doing. It only took a few months before I had to admit to you, after much trepidation, that I was, in fact, interdisciplinary. You didn’t reject me or even seem to care.

You let me go and experiment theoretically. In fact, you seemed pleased, as the work I could do went beyond your capacity, but also outside your interests. I assured you of the

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constancy of my affection, but you were too busy to care, worried where the next scholar of European forms would come from. I waited for you to acknowledge my work and my needs, but my claims fell on deaf ears. You had me convinced I’d serve as a labor for the future, when I might find a place nearest you. That never happened.

Your friends were all white, mostly men, young and old, eager to discover new territory in old places. I was a dark-haired, brown-skinned Latina, I did not fit in, always being seen as “the help” in the service of the discipline—never capable of directing its future. The more we visited your friends, the more I realized I was the exotic novelty— being pursued for my diverse personal profile rather than my intellectual contributions.

When I found out I was moving away, I knew it would be hard to maintain our relationship, but I had hoped we’d stay in contact.

We embraced, promised to keep in touch, but your final words were cool and distant.

As I left you behind, I knew we might never be close again. It’s been years now, and I feel the sting of unfamiliarity. We crossed paths, and when we met, you looked at me as a traitor—I thought to cut the tension with a joke, “una Malinche!”—but you didn’t get it.

I had forgotten to take you just as you were: unchanged, still invested in the same conversations, ignorant of the adventures you’d already missed. No longer intimate, I realized if we were to remain friends, we’d need to speak honestly about our goals. I’d experienced too much in the world to go backward.

*** In her 1988 explication of the field, Zumwalt asserts that “[American] Folklore is a young discipline, protective of its territory and defensive of its identity” (12).

While this seems especially true with the continued difficulty the profession has in diversifying its demographic profile within academic contexts, it is also true that the tension that was kicked up as my colleague and I stood before the audience at the FOAF conference seemed more genuinely an issue of generation than one of race or even class-based assumptions. The oldest among us remember using rotary phones, while the youngest likely received their first iPads as toddlers. The identity of Folklore in question in the twenty-first century—really, what remains at stake— is whose life perspective is going to help inform the future of the discipline? And is it going to blend the newest generation of young scholars’ perspectives, or will Folklore turn a blind eye? One of the key elements that must be understood is a shift in timelines. I began my career in higher education at the turn of the twenty-first century. As a Latinx scholar, a moment when the term was yet to exist, I did not locate my intellectual reference point in the civil rights movement of the 1960s; I was fully invested in the 2000 census that acknowledged the undeniable presence of US Latinos as the fastest growing demographic in the country. This shift in generational frameworks means I likely have more in common with millennial academics than senior scholars, regardless of race, who locate their scholarship

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in a past that no longer defines my generation. Moreover, whose priorities frame the future?

This future, as I asserted earlier, is undefined, and I as a scholar of color am ambivalent as to my desire to invest in such uncertainty. Such intellectual precarity affects early career professionals differently than it does those headed into retirement. Lingering in uncertainty is a privilege I do not have. Such assertions come upon the very real heels of understanding my own job security as a young faculty member. I cannot earn tenure in a discipline at whose national conference I cannot strengthen my own methodological and theoretical arguments. While this is often claimed as selfish, in reality, in order to ensure there is a next generation of Latinx folklorists, invested scholars of color need to endure to train and support them—paying forward what was offered to me. However, this also indicates a blindness to the stakes of career advancement for female and minority scholars, who must do visible and invisible labor to meet their personal and professional work on a simultaneous timeline. The convenient blindness toward academic “service” providers also speaks to the way in which we are devalued as competitive scholars, and instead more comfortably interpreted as “the help,” destined to enter and exit from the back door. This critique of selfishness also comes from a realization explained by University of Pennsylvania education scholar Marybeth Gasman, who notes, “[t]he reason we don’t have more faculty of color among college faculty is that we don’t want them. We simply don’t want them” (hechingerreport.org). This speaks volumes about the privilege that pervades the academic discipline, more than simply coded in texts and apolitical, pedagogical shortcomings, but on the field’s inability to support scholars of color. Is it ability or desire that speaks to this absence? If it is truly ability, or capacity to speak to the discipline, that is most concerning to the field, then American Folkloristics needs to rethink its use of “American” as a moniker of its disciplinary identity and scope.

The name “American” folklore, from a historical studies perspective, would appear to account for communities culturally and geographically tied to the Western hemisphere, engaging communities from Canada to Tierra del Fuego, inclusive of the Caribbean Basin. In her 2006 Presidential Address to the Organization of American Historians in Washington, DC, titled “Nuestra América: Latino History as United States History,” renowned historian Vicki Ruiz discusses the ways in which reading archival data with an understanding of the complexity of the cohabitation of the US West by Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and EuroAmericans disrupts the imagined binary rhetorically constructed between EuroAmericans and a designated “other” (655). Such an understanding can illuminate disciplinary discourses in Folklore, by questioning, “who in the 21st century context is still considered an ‘other’ in American Folklore?” Although Ruiz notes that divided ethnic national Latino communities, Mexican Americans, Cubans, and

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Puerto Ricans have impacted life and culture in the United States since 1848, US Latinos as a collective community have formally been claiming public space since 1948, concomitant with the striking down of antimiscegenation laws (Perez v.

Sharpe) in California (670–71). Such key points in US history show how Latino histories “complicate constructions of empire and citizenship” and are a byproduct of “layering of nationalities, generations, and experiences” that are fundamental to understanding US-Latino relations that are at the same time embedded in both local and transhemispheric experiences (672). The continued use of “American” as an organizational designation reveals a lingering undercurrent of structural EuroAmerican centricity in a discipline that praises itself on representing communities forgotten by mainstream histories.

In recent years, the American Folklore Society has materialized desires to collaborate with European folkloric professional organizations across the Atlantic, rather than those just south of the US-Mexico border, with the 2016 meeting being jointly hosted with the International Society for Folk Narrative Research (ISFNR). ISFNR boasts membership from eighty separate nations, only one hailing from Latin America. If the discipline is using the term as an item of folk speech, it needs to reassess its uncritical and painfully apolitical assertion that “America” is synonymous with the United States. We must take a cue from performance scholar Diana Taylor, who frames her logic proposing a shift from “American” to “Hemispheric” as “America, Americas, and hemispheric are terms not for places or objects but for practices, and there is a relation between how one lives America and the naming and conceptualization of a field of study” (1417). Integrating an understanding of folkloric forms as modes of living the Americas rhetorically shifts the legibility of American Folklore Studies, creating an opening from which a wider range of cultural studies discourses develop cross-disciplinary conversations with Folkloristics. While this seems like a minor transgression, what the older generation fails to acknowledge is that their interpretation of America affects the potential for including scholars and practitioners of color who assume they are included in the discursive legacy of the discipline, only to find out they are doubly marginalized—rhetorically and intellectually negated. However, at this moment, when there are enough early-career voices to sustain a conversation of dissent, there is a moment of possibility, where we can draw on our interdisciplinary placement and informal trainings to offer ways in which the discipline can begin to foster intellectual inclusion of minority scholarship, and possibly even minority scholars.

The Healing/Recommendations I was glad I had made copious notes—I had even written bright red comments to myself to be extra polite and calm to my audience. This cautionary

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note manifested that I had fully internalized my own professional disposability.

I knew that to be heard, I would have to be assertive, but also calm, clear-voiced, and prepared. While I had seen people struggle through presentations, particularly those that questioned the politics of the discipline, I knew that could not be me. I have no such disciplinary standing to make mistakes and presume I’d get the benefit of the doubt. As it stood, I later heard through the academic grapevine that there were a variety of senior scholars who interpreted our presentation on the perspective of Latinx Futures as simply a “bitch session” fomented by junior faculty.6 I can almost imagine that also present in that conversation was the use of the word “upstarts.” I felt quite certain that had I been a young, white, male scholar, I would be touted as a future leader in the field, or at the very least, considered insightful. And yet, as a woman of color who holds a PhD in Folklore and who is working toward tenure at a research-one university, why couldn’t my interpretations be trusted? How did I disquiet those observers?

Regardless of such sentiment, at the time I could not help but be excited, on the border of agitated, as I was most keen on sharing my view on the future of the discipline to an audience of senior scholars, and what seemed like the entirety of the society’s executive board, including outgoing and incoming presidents.

My recommendations were limited to three suggestions that could, in my estimation, move the discipline forward, if only through facilitating cogent conversations across contemporary cultural studies fields. The future of American Folklore as a discipline rooted in literary, archival, public, and ethnographic praxes needs to embrace the following intellectual conversations if it hopes to retain politically engaged scholars of color: (1) normalize interdisciplinary research in the humanities and the social sciences, (2) recognize intersectionality as a lens through which to assess systems of oppression affecting US populations and their cultural productions, and (3) teach the centrality of translocal relationships and deterritorial citizenship as part of hemispheric-American identity formations.

6. While I am a junior scholar, I am explicitly trained in the field of American Folkloristics, beginning my folklore studies at the University of California, under the late Alan Dundes, continuing my education at Indiana University, Bloomington, in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, and receiving my doctorate in Folklore with an emphasis in Latino/a Studies in the spring of 2014.

I have been a member of the American Folklore Society since I was an undergraduate, and have attended, presented, moderated, chaired, and spoken about my research on preorganized and invited panels as an undergraduate, master’s student, doctoral student, and now as tenure-track faculty. I am currently a co-chair of the AFS standing Cultural Diversity Committee, embarking on my fourth year as a committee member, and have been asked to serve on the organization’s nominating committee. I also return each year and engage in the conference as a member of interconnected minoritized social and scholarly communities as a queer-identifying Latinx woman from an educated yet working-class background.

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Multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity go hand in hand, but are clearly not the same. Folklorists often engage implicitly with multiple disciplines as there are few academic homes that are in name “Departments of Folklore.” But, these adjacent disciplines are mostly occupied by literary studies in English departments, occasionally as programs of American Studies, and departments of anthropology, such as at University of North Carolina and the University of California, respectively. However, more than simply occupying these locations, we as scholars need to work at bridging the priorities of folklore theories with the contemporary discourses to actively move folklore theory forward. From an interdisciplinary perspective, being housed in a Latina/o Studies department at a university with a long-standing relationship with Folklore Studies, my own research embraces the interdisciplinarity that comes with being split between my training and the critical concerns emergent in Latinx communities and classrooms dominated by Latinx and other minority-identifying students. As such, as a collective body, American Folklore must decide if we share not only methods and subjects with other disciplines but also larger sociopolitical stakes, in order to create cogent intellectual bridges that are necessary for our discipline to grow and flourish in a changing twenty-first-century United States. This incorporates an understanding of the politics of citation. Scholars of color have long known that to represent the interests of their communities, we need to cite outside of the discipline—because to be closed off from wider conversations of race and class politics in academic discussions of cultural production minimizes not only our professional relevance but also our capacity to situate our work with our community collaborators accurately and ethically. This helps contextualize the second recommendation, which asks the discipline of folklore to embrace the notion of intersectionality.

In a talk delivered at Harvard University during Malcom X Weekend in 1982, Audre Lorde stated, “[t]here is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives” (138). A Black feminist precursor to Crenshaw and her coining the term “intersectionality” to reflect the lived experiences of Black women in the United States, Lorde refers to the intersecting matrixes of domination and oppression that Black women, now extended to women of color more broadly, must labor against in order to counter social, political, and economic inequity. I begin my Introduction to Latinx Folklore undergraduate course with this quote. My intention is to train students to see folklore as a tool for uncovering the complexity of folklore and cultural productions as representations of webs of identity that have a critical relationship to the varied structures of power in which they and their communities live. Intersectionality begins research practice from a perspective that accepts that communities of color, particularly women, are disproportionately affected by structural systems of power resulting in systemic oppression. Students learn that intersectional perspectives account for multiple

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simultaneous functions of folkloric texts. In this conversation, context takes on even greater importance to analyses, as students learn to examine context as critically tied to multiple identity factors but also as fundamentally transitory. By considering intersectional analysis and creating a place for it in Folkloristics, scholars of folklore eager to learn how to address and conceptualize communities of color or understand the stakes of work in communities of color need not rely on the subjective perspectives of individual scholars of color or those invested in other minoritarian communities. Race, class, education, gender, as well as other politicized categories that are used against communities of practice become part of textual analysis, while also espousing the relevance of folkloric forms and theories in the advancement of cultural studies discourses that at times only scrape the surface of racialized cultural forms. Currently, I find the perspective conspicuously absent from discussions of American folklore, save for a few dedicated scholars of color I have seen return year after year since I began attending folklore society meetings in 2004. Drawing on intersectional frameworks allows folkloric inquiries to move from intimate knowledge of the local to link that local to a larger conception of translocality. In the space of the translocal, the relationship between text and geographic location becomes complicated.

Engaging with the concept of deterritoriality in the context of folklore studies requires interrogating the distinction between practice considered part of “real” life and “digital” life. Luckily, if you came of age after the 1990s, this distinction is easily resolved—digital life is real life, and real life, also known as material life, could not function as we know it without our digital engagements. Although such a distinction should be easily resolved, here is where conceptions of generational ideologies complicate a movement into critical media studies in folklore. New texts that approach folkloric texts online—for instance, the edited collection released in 2009 titled Folklore and the Internet: Vernacular Expression in a Digital World—are being published. However, regardless of the rhetoric around its publication, which makes bold claims about being at the forefront of new folkloric studies on the internet, the volume fails to move the discipline forward at the outset by simply being unable, or perhaps unwilling, to engage with the politics of class- and racebased access to technology as a seminal part of critical interpretations of digital, deterritorial social spaces. I propose that conceptualizing deterritoriality as a critical assessment of digital spaces as emergent community spaces for ethnographic study be conceptualized within concepts of translocality.

Translocality is a framework relating to a conceptualized hemispheric study of folklore in and of the Americas, foregrounding the relationship between cultural production, movement, and meaningful interactions. According to Turkish American scholar Arif Dirlik, the concept of the translocal is both flexible and grounded, and “carries us [scholars] from one conceptual realm—that of nations and civilization—to another—that of places” (397). While Dirlik assesses such

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meaning-making in the context of creating historical locations, where movement begets spaces that often outlive the nation, scholars of Latinx folklore have been adept at considering how practice and performance move between places, creating geographies of meanings in the present that both transcend and challenge conceptions of nationhood and, by extension, citizenship. For example, cultural theorist Juan Flores notes how Caribbean communities “cannot be understood today in isolation from the diasporic pole of their translocal realties . . . it is the relation between and among the poles of national and regional history of diasporic re-creation . . . that is most radically re-fashioning what being Caribbean is all about” (170).

The continuous waves of peoples crossing the US-Mexico border on foot, cycles of mainland-island air and sea circulation to and from the Caribbean basin, and the history of Indigenous migrations that preceded colonial rule in the Americas have created spaces that are overlooked because their historicity cannot be established, despite the fact that their affective values manifest in new, less obvious ways that disrupt cultural expectations, and elude casual observers. How will Folkloristics account for bodies and communities in continuous cultural, emotional, and physical motion? The answer becomes further impacted by the reality that this question is not an optional one. Instead, the ability to address migratory populations in their entirety as cultural producers despite locality will affect the discipline’s ability to both recruit and retain scholars whose work sits at the center for such movement—communities defined by cycles of mobility, leave-taking and returns, nostalgia and new beginnings.

Despite the potential for progress, discussions with colleagues, many of whom share my positional identity as scholars of color, yield to a collective realization that we have arrived at a professional impasse. Do we stay and fight to be seen in American Folklore, or reallocate our labor toward supporting and clarifying our own research in disciplines that embrace our necessarily intersectional labor as critical, innovative, and future-oriented?

“Do work that matters.” What does it mean to do work that matters? And can that work ever be viewed as “great” if it does not prioritize disciplinary formations over individual relationships? Posing these questions publically is contentious as conversations regarding the diversification of the discipline of American folklore stagnate at the surface, reappearing in familiar forms from year to year.

As a scholar of color, one risks becoming a racialized broken record, an agitator who returns to these concerns over the course of many years. However, these conversations also manifest very clearly within and primarily among dominant audiences. The most explicit discussions involve white, middle-class folklorists asking to be taught how to work in minority communities, or how to be and act with minority scholars—in many ways asking absolution for ignorance, but putting intellectual and emotional labor back onto minority, often young scholars

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of color, to rationalize their existence within the field. Folklore, in search of its disciplinary identity in the twenty-first century, needs to collectively decide on its disciplinary identity(ies). What is truly at stake? And is the disciplinary body willing to be disquieted and disrupted on the road to reinvention? Moreover, if scholars in the field desire to be conversant with other fields of cultural inquiry and analysis such as ethnic studies, cultural studies, critical race studies, and gender and women’s studies, to name a few—it must also realize that scholars of color, class, and gender marginality are not here to tell majoritarian scholars who to be, how to teach, or even how to think amid the volatile twenty-first-century American cultural and political landscape. What must be recognized is that minority scholars deserve to be recognized as scholars, not as subjects or field assistants. If scholars in the field want to understand our ideas and methods, then recognize the soundness of labor—publish our manuscripts, read our work, and cite our insights. If majoritarian folklorists think that they are embracing a scholarly ethos accounting for the ninety-five percent of experiences that conventional historical narratives have erased, and they aren’t willing to accept that the missing ninety-five are here and now in their midst as colleagues, they need to think again. To be both impactful and enduring, the future of folklore studies will require that current professionals take a cue from our own disciplinary history and present work, where communities teach us that contextual relevance continuously supersedes comfortable stagnation—where stagnation is extinction. The profession must risk discomfort and adapt to new modes of circulation, social politics, and lived experiences that have the capacity to make folklore, as an academic discipline, relevant to wider audiences. Indeed, the field has the potential capacity to affect academia more broadly, if it embraces its own emic interpretations of multiple sources and forms of knowledge as equal. We must recall what many of us saw as we entered the discipline—an innovative intellectual space to value cultural productions and people, a potential to collaborate across disciplinary boundaries, an ideal to exchange knowledge regardless of real and imagined geographic boundaries, in order to transform our current collective intellectual project into one patterned to be sensitive to the intersectional complexities of American life, now and into the future.

*** I am uncertain where we go from here. But I do not want to let go. No, I cannot—you are a part of me, and whether you believe it or not, I am a part of you. So let’s begin again. If you speak, I will listen. But, if you cannot respect me as an equal, I will go, run to another who claims me already. You must know you’ve changed me for the better, and I will never forget that. The future remains a mystery. We only have today.

Con amor, xo

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Works Cited Anzaldúa, Gloria. “Let Us Be the Healing of the Wound: The Coyolxauhqui Imperative—la sombra y el sueño.” One Wound for Another: Una herida porotra. Testimonios de Latin@s in the U.S. through Cyberspace (11 de septiembre de 2001–11 de marzo de 2002), edited by Claire Joysmith and Clara Lomas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Centro de Investigaciones sobre América del Norte, 2005, pp. 92–103.

Behar, Ruth. The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart. Beacon P, 1996.

Blank, Trevor, editor. Folklore and the Internet: Vernacular Expression in a Digital World. Utah State UP, 2009.

Cadaval, Olivia. Creating a Latino Identity in the Nation’s Capital: The Latino Festival. Routledge, 1998.

Cantú, Norma E. Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera. U of New Mexico P, 1995.

Cara, Ana, and Robert Baron, editors. “Creolization and Folklore (Special Issue).” Journal of American Folklore, vol. 116, no. 459, Winter 2003.

Carastathis, Anna. “The Concept of Intersectionality in Feminist Theory.” Philosophy Compass, vol. 9, no. 5, 2014, pp. 304–14.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum, vol. 140, 1989, pp. 139–67.

Dirlik, Arif. “Performing the World: Reality and Representation in the Making of World Histor(ies).”

Journal of World History, vol. 16, no. 4, 2005, pp. 391–410.

Flores, Juan. The Diaspora Strikes Back: Caribeño Tales of Turning and Learning. Routledge, 2009.

Gasman, Marybeth. “The Five Things No One Will Tell You About Why Colleges Don’t Hire More Faculty of Color.” hechingerreport.org/five-things-no-one-will-tell-colleges-dont-hire-faculty -color. Accessed May 27, 2017.

Goldstein, Diane. “Vernacular Turns: Narrative, Local Knowledge, and the Changed Context of Folklore.” Journal of American Folklore, vol. 128, no. 508, Spring 2015, pp. 125–45.

Herrera-Sobek, María. The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis. Indiana UP, 1990.

International Society for Folk Narrative Research (ISFNR). “Membership.” n.d. www.isfnr.org /index2.html. Accessed May 27, 2017.

Kaur, Rupi. Milk and Honey. Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2015.

Lorde, Audre. “Learning from the 60s.” Zami/ Sister Outsider /Undersong, W. W. Norton, 1993, pp. 134–44.

Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Persephone P, 1981.

Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. NYU P, 2009.

Nájera-Ramírez, Olga, Norma E. Cantú, and Brenda Romero, editors. Dancing Across Borders: Danzas y Bailes Mexicanos. U of Illinois P, 2009.

Orozco, C. E., and T. P. Acosta. “Jovita González de Mireles.” The Handbook of Texas Online. N.d.

Otero, Solimar. Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World. U of Rochester P, 2010. Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora.

Perez, Domino R. There Was a Woman: La Llorona from Folklore to Popular Culture. U of Texas P, 2008.

Romberg, Raquel. Witchcraft and Welfare: Spiritual Capital and the Business of Magic in Modern Puerto Rico. U of Texas P, 2003.

Ruiz, Vicki L. “Nuestra América: Latino History as United States History.” Journal of American History, vol. 93, no. 3, 2006, pp. 655–72. www.jstor.org/stable/4486408.

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Taylor, Diana. “Remapping Genre through Performance: From ‘American’ to ‘Hemispheric’ Studies.”

PMLA, vol. 122, no. 5, 2007, pp. 1416–30. www.jstor.org/stable/25501794.

Zumwalt, Rosemary Lévy. American Folklore Scholarship: A Dialogue of Dissent. Indiana UP, 1988.

Rachel V. González-Martin is a folklorist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas in Austin. Her forthcoming book, Coming Out Latina: Quinceañera Style and Latinx Consumer Identities, explores the cultural and gendered economies of practice surrounding contemporary Latina coming-of-age celebrations.

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Raquel Cepeda’s Digital and Literary Publics Twitter and Bird of Paradise Megan Jeanette Myers, Iowa State University Abstract: This study charts language use in two public spheres: literary and digital. Cepeda’s 2015 memoir Bird of Paradise, much like fellow Dominican American author Junot Díaz’s works, utilizes untranslated code switching and requires both linguistic and cultural translations on the part of the reader. Cepeda’s digital public, analyzed via her active Twitter account with over 11,000 followers, employs language in different ways to reach a wider, transnational audience. This essay considers how both Cepeda’s literary and digital spheres connect her to a diverse readership and can be considered examples of (digital) activism.

Keywords: Dominican American literature, memoir, code switching, Twitter, public sphere

In just the first two pages of Raquel Cepeda’s memoir Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina (2015), untranslated words in Spanish, from papi chulo to arroz and mangú, challenge the monolingual English reader. Besides the uncontested Spanish-English language duality of the text, the organization is also two-part. The autobiographical work begins by detailing Cepeda’s childhood in New York City with her father during the hip-hop generation and in Paraíso, Dominican Republic, with her grandparents. The second part discloses the author’s DNA test results and attempts to uncover Cepeda’s ancestral roots prior to the emergence of the umbrella identifier “Latina/o.” The fracturing of the memoir itself exposes other dualities of the work by highlighting the Dominican American journalist and documentary filmmaker’s hyphenated identity and also stresses a linguistic divide. While the Spanish-English binary of Bird of Paradise constitutes one possible language-based analysis of the work, another is its streetwise, colloquial jargon. This essay relates the language patterns in Bird of Paradise to Cepeda’s “unconventional activism” both on- and off-page and an expansion or widening of an increasingly prolific and transnational Latina/o “public sphere,” explored through a joint analysis of the author’s public Twitter account (@RaquelCepeda) and 2015 memoir. The Chiricú Journal, Vol. 2.1, pp. 40–57 Copyright © 2017 Trustees of Indiana University • doi:10.2979/chiricu.2.1.05

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following pages analyze both the similarities and divergences between Cepeda’s digital and literary public spheres, deciphering how language use can provide both access to and blockades from a given target audience.

The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (2011), the most complete anthology of Latina/o literature to date, utilizes a chronological framework to highlight the more than 200 Latina/o authors in its 2,000-plus pages. This parsing or segmentation of Latina/o literature into specific time periods provides an ideal means of organization for an expansive corpus of texts, but such fragmentation also serves to decentralize the connections between phases. The period from 1946 to 1979, for example, titled “Upheaval,” in part represents a period of growing activism in the Latina/o community. The civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s may not have resulted in concrete changes for Latina/os on a national scale, but Latina/ os geographically positioned in the Southwest and West, for example, protested against racial discrimination. Mexican Americans in particular, unified by the self-proclaimed “Chicano” identifier, “defined their collective identity as a nation within a nation” (Stavans and Acosta-Belén 589). Moreover, Latina/o novels that depict the 1950s and 1960s, written during or following the “Upheaval” phrase, often reflect this activist pulse. Two prime examples include Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets (1967), which explores the racial awakening of the author and narrator as he confronted racial prejudice and discrimination in New York City in the 1950s, and Julia Alvarez’s autobiographical novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), in which the author paints herself and her three sisters as ingrained in the youth decade of the 1960s, the novel’s protagonist labeled an “American hippie” by her Dominican family. On the heels of civil rights movements and initial pushes for racial integration and equality, the final phase indicated in the anthology is “Into the Mainstream: 1980–Present.” The most concrete trace of Latina/o literature entering the digital age in the introduction to this current, unterminated phase is the following: At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the Latino literary renaissance, along with television, radio, the Internet, music, and politics, promoted “a fusion,” a mix of diverse, heterogeneous voices, a call for unity under the rubric of Latinidad, an invitation to be part of an imagined community of Latinos. (1469)

To what extent, then, has the Internet 2.0—a term focused on the Internet as a space for collaborating and sharing information via social media—for example, promoted this “fusion” of diverse Latina/o voices and how does it relate to the

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activism reminiscent of the previous “Upheaval” phase? How has this cultural mixing enabled Latina/os to connect virtually with their homelands, thus impacting their experience in the US diaspora? More specifically, for Latina/o writers, how does an individual’s linguistic identity change on and off the page and how is it manipulated for an increasingly digital readership? While the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature recognizes, albeit fleetingly, the upswing of digital text and growing presence of Latina/o authors’ self- and literary expression via digital mediums, the connection between the social activism of the “Upheaval” phase and the technological pulse of the current phase remains disjointed. This study attempts not only to fuse activism and social media use together, but also to gauge the growing online presence of Latina/o writers, with a primary focus on Twitter, as a possible signpost for social and digital activism on a transnational scale.

The concept of “unconventional politics,” defined as the juxtaposition to “conventional politics,” which refer to voting and other forms of electoral politics, allows for an understanding of transnational and digital activism. In many cases, individuals on the outskirts, many of whom belong to minority ethnic groups in the United States, “adopt unconventional political strategies and participate in protest politics” (Martinez 137–38; my emphasis). Studies on the political engagement of Latina/ os and their predisposition to protest confirm that the diverse political orientation of Latina/os—namely, differences in citizenship status, education, income, and dominant language—lead to a diverse affinity toward unconventional politics (Uhlaner, Cain, and Kiewiet). Protest and social activism disseminated through social media outlets such as Twitter, then, are representative of the unconventionality of “unconventional politics.” While not centered specifically on the Latina/o community, but certainly extending to the Afro-Latina/o community, a specific example of a contemporary social movement and platform disseminated through the microblogging service Twitter is #BlkTwitterstorians. This digital humanities project uses digital tools to share and disseminate knowledge and connects at a fundamental level with the Movement for Black Lives as “#BlkTwitterstorians was created in the context of a new social movement concerned with the liberation of Black people” (Brown and Crutchfield 49). The fact that #BlkTwitterstorians is a digitally born movement is key because the open-access, hashtag-searchable platform allows for the hypervisible project to be read as a “mode of resistance.” Aleia M. Brown and Joshua Crutchfield confirm: “It resists the pedagogy that white scholars are the sole purveyors of knowledge. It resists the idea that Black people, particularly young adults, are not politically engaged” (53). As #BlkTwitterstorians exemplifies, digital venues offer individuals an alternative mode, often in real time, to engage with a diverse public. Protest and political activism through multimedia sharing platforms such as Twitter confirm the multiple forms protest can take on a national or global scale. Thus, given the demonstrated turn of Latina/os toward nonelectoral politics, how might Latina/o authors use digital platforms as an

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activist outlet, and how does this connect (or disconnect) them to their country of origin? The following pages attempt to answer this question by analyzing Cepeda’s memoir as well as her Twitter account, with a focus on the conflation of target audience and language use.

With respect to interconnected publics and social networking, the concept of the public sphere proves helpful when approaching the target readership for a memoir like Bird of Paradise, deemed the first nonacademic memoir by a Dominican American in the popular market. While the term has been reassessed and applied to different, international spheres in millennial scholarship, the initial emergence of the public sphere credits German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962). The theory was originally designed to describe eighteenth-century publicity and public space in Britain. Despite the elitist initial understanding of the public sphere, the Habermasian theory can be approached as an “ideal projection” (228) to exploring the category, as Eduardo Mendieta asserts. The goal of this study is to move beyond Habermas’s delineation of the public sphere, using his work as a starting point, to consider how Latina/os such as Cepeda—via a textual and digital presence—redefine the contested concept of what can be considered a “public sphere” and, relatedly, who can be considered a “postcolonial intellectual.” According to Mendieta, what is missing from narratives defining the public sphere and public intellectuals—who are best described as “eighteenth-century cosmopolitan intellectual[s]” (215)—is the notion of a “postcolonial intellectual.” Cepeda, with a digital and literary corpus, then, can stand for a postcolonial (digital) intellectual who exists in and contributes to communities with multisensory, interactive platforms. Mendieta does not represent the only scholar to challenge Habermas’s narrow vision of the public sphere; James Scott’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990) constitutes another prime example.1 The modern relevance of the public sphere, in reference to Habermas’s delineation of the network of individuals together forming a public, doubles as an ideal theoretical thrust that enables social media outlets like Twitter to function as signposts for unconventional politics.2 Habermas’s public sphere as first sketched in the 1960s delineated an inclusive public arena, but full entry into the all-embracing space was dependent upon a given individual’s level of education and property 1. Scott’s work posits that the public transcript signals an imbalance of power between dominant and subordinate groups. Scott offers the term “hidden transcripts” to refer to discourse created outside of the public transcript, “beyond direct observation by powerholders” (10). While the Internet and digital mediums can give some a false sense of power, they can also attribute agency to individuals positioned at the periphery or outskirts of a dominant, intellectual public sphere. Twitter, for example, allows for “hidden transcripts” to find (easily accessible) public expression.

2. Habermas more specifically referred to this concept as the “bourgeois public sphere,” defined as “the sphere of private people come together as a public” (17).

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ownership. Habermas’s introduction to Structural Transformation discerns: “We call events and occasions ‘public’ when they are open to all” (1). While mass media traditionally represented a domain of those with economic and social capital, Internet use is rising on a global level, especially in emerging and developing countries. On a broad level, the Internet also traditionally defines as open-access (a global system of computer networks), and public social media accounts can be considered platforms of public access. Although Habermas does not address the Internet and social mass media, he does address what he refers to as “the realm of mass media,” noting that “publicity has changed its meaning” (2). Habermas’s direct reference to mass media signals the juxtaposition of private and public as the increasing stronghold of mass media served to further publicize or broadcast a group’s opinion and interests. Twitter, in particular, is inherently “public” given that most Twitter users elect to not “protect” their tweets, granting followers and nonfollowers unlimited access to their profile. Twitter’s simplistic mission is “To give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers” (“About Twitter”). Twitter’s mission, on the surface, aligns directly with Habermas’s distinction of “public” as “open to all.”

While Habermas’s understanding of nonprivatized space centers on the area in which individuals come together to engage in conversation about societal issues (often giving way to political action), contemporary literary critics have interpreted the notion of a public sphere as a means to better understand “the emergence of the literary public sphere and its functioning within the broader society” (McCarthy xiii). In particular, Raphael Dalleo offers a poignant reading of Caribbean access to and blockades from the public sphere in his book Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere: From the Plantation to the Postcolonial (2011). Dalleo problematizes the understanding of “public” in a Caribbean context. He suggests that conceptions of “public” in the global Caribbean have over time become both raced and gendered and further confirms that “the process of imagining an embodied public has proven both enabling and restricting” (2). The following pages build on the idea of a Caribbean public sphere, signaling more concretely a Latina/o or diasporic Caribbean public sphere, by deciphering how writers interact (or refrain from interaction) with social media platforms. Similar to Dalleo, I am interested in the ways in which this sphere, owing to its digital repercussions, transforms into a transnational space of influence. I also consider Cepeda’s digital-political platform as a model case to better understand the presence of Latina/o authors within an increasingly technologically based “public sphere.” A focus on language and a consideration of how language choice and language use relate directly to the transnational public that Latina/os such as Cepeda address in both digital and print form stresses the intersections between the literary public sphere and the digital/social media sphere, an inherently public domain.

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Besides the aforementioned unconventional politics in which Latina/os traditionally engage, scholars have also addressed unconventional publics, designated by Michael Warner as “counterpublics,” or publics that are aware of their “subordinate status” (56). Dalleo suggests the Caribbean public sphere is an exemplary counterpublic in regards to its inconsequential status when compared to European literature (4). Latina/o literature, too, often finds itself relegated to the margins, but a bilingual or multilingual digital presence has, in some cases, resituated Latina/o literature in the mainstream. The public sphere, as expressed by Habermas, originally manifested in common social spaces such as coffee houses. However, as interactions become increasingly digital and Latina/os can more readily connect with a public in both the United States and their country of origin, the need for a physical space is no longer essential. In this way, the Latina/o public sphere, as a response to the often ambiguous status between country of origin and the adopted homeland, has no physical grounding. Likewise, the Internet 2.0—directly referencing social networking—performs as a transnational space or a counterpublic that distorts a traditional understanding of a given public. While social media may not exist face to face, it does hold both discursive and representational power. As exemplified by the map of Cepeda’s Twitter followers below, Latina/o authors succeed in connecting with individuals on an international scale. Cepeda’s realm of influence, as confirmed by Twitter, stretches far beyond the United States and Dominican Republic.

Twitter represents an ideal example of the border-crossing capability of social media. The microblogging service started in 2006 with the first official tweet from the company’s founder, Jack Dorsey. The seemingly simple first tweet—“just setting up my twttr”—utilized a mere 20 of the 140 allotted characters and responded to Twitter’s original slogan or prompt, “What are you doing?” Fast forward just over a decade and users of the microblogging service no longer simply describe what they are doing; instead, Twitter has developed into a social media platform that also shares, often in real time, what others are doing. In this sense, many tweets double as reactions to specific events or responses and critiques of local, national, and global issues. Twitter, then, is a contemporary example of Habermas’s public and has developed into a virtual space in which “people engage in rational-critical debate,” a space that contests and critiques public opinion and its fleetingly uniform existence (Habermas 69). The following paragraphs analyze Cepeda’s public Twitter account; the “handle” or username of the account is @raquelcepeda.3 3. It is important to briefly explain how I access and analyze the information from the author’s account. The Twitter Search API allows queries against the indices of popular tweets from the past seven days for any given account. I connect to the Search API by using the free coding software R. Although one can build a query using this platform in many different ways, in this case I am interested in searching tweets by language and place. In the first instance, I generate a cloud of most common words used in Cepeda’s tweets over a period of seven days. The second instance geocodes the location of a subset of Cepeda’s more than 11,000 followers.

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Figure 1. Keywords: 200 Most Recent Tweets, @raquelcepeda, 18–24 Feb. 2017. Courtesy:

Megan Jeanette Myers.

The two figures here chart language use and the geography of followers. The first, a commonly used word cloud, constitutes a text-mining exercise that visualizes frequently used keywords of the account over a seven-day period (in this case, a sample, from February 18 to February 24, 2017). My interest here is not in the specific date of the tweets, but in the general use of language and emergent trends in Twitter language.

A close look at this word cloud reveals the political tone of the Twitter account during this time period. While both “Donald” and “Trump” register as frequently used words, clear responses to the political climate in February 2017 and the wake of the presidential inauguration, numerous words related to race also appear, including “white” and “racist.” The keywords suggest the purposes for which Cepeda uses Twitter: to respond to and voice her opinion on current events. Her ideas, then,

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Figure 2. @raquelcepeda: Geography of Followers, 2017. Courtesy: Megan Jeanette Myers.

are instantly shared with her thousands of followers. Unsurprisingly, many of the words identified as keywords in the text cloud above are abbreviations or combinations of words: “debatenight,” “demdebate,” “amp,” “ur,” “RT” (Retweet). While the shortening of words and phrases is a key characteristic of Twitter language given the limit of characters per tweet, the use of abbreviated words and slang in online written expressions carries over into literary expressions, and similar word uses can be identified in Bird of Paradise.

Figure 2 turns to a visualization of the geographical location of the @raquelcepeda Twitter account followers. Each of the account’s 11,000-plus followers embed a geotag on their Twitter profile and, provided the authenticity of the location noted by the Twitter user, this location can be mapped alongside that of other followers of a specific account.4 Mapping Cepeda’s Twitter followers confirms the global reach of her Twitter account. While the word cloud confirms the author’s digital response to politics and her exercise of unconventional politics—in that Cepeda uses an online platform to protest or espouse her own political views—the follower map signals a type of transnational activism. Moreover, Cepeda’s followers are not just inactive receivers of Twitter content; instead, they are able to interact with the material and elect to retweet or reply to a tweet. This asynchronous, yet direct online model for conversation signals an incessant exchange of ideas and a constant, unmediated dialogue.

In addition to the multifaceted dialogue(s) Twitter encourages, knowledge of the diverse geographic locations of Cepeda’s digital public as referenced by Twitter allows for a tracing of Cepeda’s digital footprint and shows how Latina/os can use 4. It should be noted that the coding software R needs to “clean” location data retrieved from Twitter prior to running additional code to plot and graph the results. Depending on the extent of the cleaning, this lowers the number of Twitter followers with locations that can be plotted on a map.

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digital platforms as an activist outlet connecting them to their country of origin. The geographical range of Cepeda’s followers, however, extends far beyond the United States and Hispaniola, confirming a wider following and international influence.

After considering language patterns referenced on Cepeda’s personal Twitter account and visualizing the global makeup of her followers, I now turn to Bird of Paradise, to analyze the use of language in the autobiographical text and the ways in which language caters to a specific audience. First, I will consider the constant use of code switching in the text. From the opening pages of the memoir, code switching emerges as a constant. There are over eighty Spanish-language words in the first chapter alone; such insertions appear interspersed as a single word or short phrase, and always in italics. It is important to distinguish between Spanglish and code switching. Spanglish, in linguistic terms, is a form of code switching representative of an Anglicized dialect of Spanish spoken in the United States. Cultural critic and linguist Ilan Stavans purports Spanglish to be a linguistic phenomenon, stating in Spanglish: The New American Language (2004) that instead of describing Spanglish as a “clash,” his “own political approach is made clear by the alternative: encounter. English and Spanish have found each other, they have become partners in this ever-expanding mode of communication” (18).5 Regarded by some scholars as constituting a “broken” language (17), Spanglish, as Stavans defines it, is “the verbal encounter between Anglo and Hispano civilizations” (5). My primary focus in analyzing Bird of Paradise is code switching, which is generally regarded as the alternation—rather than the “encounter” or “intermixing”—of two separate languages in a given conversation or text. The examples of code switching in Bird of Paradise are plentiful and to some extent the motivation or use of the language alternation can be codified. The paragraphs below chart code switching in the memoir as an attempt to mask a derogatory term in English, to provide culturally specific alternatives to racially charged terms, and to represent regionalisms or dominicanismos.

The alternation of languages in Bird of Paradise is not solely between Spanish and English. Rather, the text is multidialectal. While code switching between Spanish and English dominates the memoir, Dominican Spanish, Ebonics, Haitian Creole, and other languages also find representation in the two-part text. There is also an alternation between standard English and colloquial English. On Twitter, a more informal platform in which typos and abbreviations are considered the norm, colloquial English is the standard. Moreover, while many Latina/o authors who publish primarily in English, including Cepeda, occasionally tweet in Spanish or code switch within a single tweet, the juxtaposition between the two alternating 5. Examples of Spanglish in the text are minimal. One example is the use of the term “dominiyorkian” (9). This fusion of “Dominican” or “dominicano” and “York” (from New York) is reflective of Josefina Báez’s use of the term and its variants in her performance text Dominicanish (2000).

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languages is less explicit on Twitter, in part because Twitter does not allow for words to be italicized. Furthermore, it can be difficult or impossible to reproduce accents and special characters in the Spanish language on formats such as Twitter. Ñ (or enye), for example, cannot be included as part of a handle or username.

Numerous linguists have codified the range of code switching strategies utilized by Latina/o authors. Lourdes Torres’s 2007 study considers Latina/o texts written between 1990 and 2004 and assesses a range of different literary works for their levels of accessibility for the monolingual reader. Torres identifies the following three categories: (1) “Easily Accessed, Transparent, or Cushioned Spanish”; (2) “Gratifying the Bilingual Reader”; and (3) “Radical Bilingualism.” Easily accessed code switching is the alternation between languages when the second language, in this case Spanish, is familiar for the monolingual reader. Examples include proper names like “mamá,” or common Hispanic foods. In this first category of code switching as detailed by Torres, if the translation is not obvious it is provided and the Spanish words are marked in italics. Writers who use this technique, to an extent, “may desire to mark the text as Latino/a at the linguistic level but may not wish to alienate monolingual English readers” (79). The second category provides no translation or distinguishing of text written in the foreign language (no italics or quotation marks). Writers employing the “Gratifying the Bilingual Reader” strategy prioritize the bilingual and bicultural reader. The final category denotes a “Radical Bilingualism” in the sense that code switching pervades the entire text, a uniquely bilingual work. These texts model sustained code switching and are accessible only to bilingual readers. Unsurprisingly, such experimental texts—Torres identifies Giannina Braschi’s Yo-Yo Boing! and Susana Chávez-Silverman’s Killer Crónicas as two examples—are published primarily by academic presses as opposed to mainstream or trade presses.

While other studies besides Torres’s three-tiered approach also identify types of code switching in Latina/o literature, the majority of these center on linguistic classifications and constraints on code switching, applying “linguistic criteria to literary code-switching” (Lipski 194).6 John Lipski’s “Spanish-English Language Switching in Speech and Literature: Theories and Models,” for example, is an earlier model similar to Torres’s in that it denotes three “types” of code switching, of varying accessibility for nonbilingual readers. Lipski’s Types II and III, similar to Torres’s distinction between the “Bilingual Reader” strategy and “Radical Bilingualism,” are differentiated by “intersentential” (Type II) and “intrasentential” (Type III) code switching. Here, intersentential refers to the alternation of 6. A sampling of such studies includes Gary D. Keller’s “The Literary Stratagems Available to the Bilingual Chicano Writer” (1979), Laura Callahan’s Spanish/English Code-Switching in a Written Corpus (2004), and Carol Myers-Scotton’s Duelling Languages: Grammatical Structure in Code-Switching (1993).

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Spanish and English sentences; intrasentential, to the replacement of one language by another midway through any given sentence. Following this model, in which Lipski focuses on Latina/o literature, one can categorize most of the code switching in Bird of Paradise as intrasentential. Although intersentential switching does exist in the text, it occurs primarily within dialogue between the author and a Spanish speaker.

In his 1978 study, linguist Rodolfo Jacobson attempts to delineate linguistic criteria that allow code switching to occur. In doing so, Jacobson identifies the all-encompassing category of “preference,” a category that can explain code switching in a literary text when no specific reason is clear. The constant use of code switching in the case of derogatory or vulgar words can be classified as one of “preference”: an author’s decision to reproduce words often deemed unprofessional or inappropriate in Spanish reflects personal preference and is often a reflection of his or her own societal use of language. An example in Bird of Paradise is a conversation between Cepeda’s stepmother, Rocío, and a friend. The friend “calls Rocío una santa for sacrificing so much for the boys while their father, a good-for-nothing comemierda, parties with other women” (75). Comemierda represents a Spanish compound (come meaning “eat” and mierda meaning “shit”) that functions as a synonym for “jackass” or “imbecile” in English. Additionally, the word “bitch” appears only once in English (on p. 240) in the memoir. The multiple other allusions are to the Spanish equivalent, puta (10, 16, 25, 26, 92, 95). Other Spanish-language insertions for what many consider to be profanities in English include culo (“ass,” 5, 15), coño (“shit/fuck,” 7), and jodedores (“fuckers,” 4), among others. Such examples are often syntactic reversals, Spanish nouns inserted for their English counterparts. As Casielles-Súarez notes in a study about Junot Díaz’s use of what she refers to as “radical code-switching,” in instances with strong language “rather than switching codes, Díaz is massively borrowing Spanish lexical items and treating them as if they were English terms” (480). In most cases, the insertion of strong language in Spanish does not conform to Spanish grammatical structures. Cepeda’s “tons of putas of all ages” (16), for example, defies traditional Spanish grammatical syntax, which instead would begin the sentence with the noun: “. . . putas de varias edades.”

The second pattern evident in the author’s use of code switching in Bird of Paradise centers on the appearance of racial terms. Reflective of Cepeda’s marked interest in race on her Twitter account as well as her role as one of the codiscussants of the recently cancelled Panoply podcast “About Race” (Full title: “Our National Conversation About Conversations About Race”), the memoir at large is rooted in racial exploration. Cepeda explores race on an individual and familial basis, but also comments on the racial consciousness of Dominicans, both on the island and in the diaspora. Just before she narrates her candid discussion with Dominican historian Frank Moya Pons, Cepeda summarizes anti-Black sentiment

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in the Dominican Republic for her readers, noting, “Dominicans have, perhaps intrinsically, managed to resist disremembering their African ancestry rather than forgetting it” (251). Dominicanist Silvio Torres-Saillant in Introduction to Dominican Blackness (2010) shares Cepeda’s reference to a “black behind the ear” mentality.7 Torres-Saillant confirms: “Blacks and mulattoes make up nearly 90% of the contemporary Dominican population. Yet no other country in the hemisphere exhibits greater indeterminacy regarding the population’s sense of racial identity” (4). Examples of code switching in Bird of Paradise in which Cepeda elects to write racial terms as untranslated Spanish are numerous and include morena (15, 112), caramelito (42), trigueña (47), prieta (63), indio/a (31, 57, 107), and africana (13, 97). These examples range from formal terms used in the Dominican Republic to codify race on national identity cards (or cédulas) to terms of endearment with racial undertones.8 Indio/a, when referring concretely to its historical use in the Dominican Republic, can denote a racial category imposed by the infamous twentiethcentury Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo in the 1950s. Kimberly Eison Simmons clarifies: “The construction of indio as a non-black, mixed, race/color category is in relation to Haitians, who were defined on the census as black.” She continues, “Over time, the usage of indio color descriptors and categories had the effect of distancing Dominicans from their African heritage and ideas of blackness in an attempt to create an affinity toward Spanish ideals against an indigenous (Taíno) landscape” (29). The irony, perhaps, in the use of the term “indio”9 in the Dominican context has to do with the fact that the term historically implies a negation of Blackness and African heritage. The repeated appearance of “indio/a” in the memoir is capable of reinforcing racial hierarchies, despite the work’s overall rhetoric of racial democracy. Throughout the second part of the memoir, however, 7. This term, “El negro tras de la oreja,” references an 1883 poem by Dominican Juan Antonio Alix in which the poetic voice criticizes Dominicans attempting to pass as white and deny their Black ancestry. Critic Ginetta Candelario popularized the phrase with the publication of her book Black behind the Ears: Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to Beauty Shops (2007).

8. Cepeda addresses in the preface to Bird of Paradise the “Dominican Republic Electoral Law Reform,” the bill passed in 2011 that eradicated the category “indio/a” on the cédula. Post-2011, the Dominican cédula offers only three options, all related to an established ethnic group: mulatto, black, and white. Cepeda writes, “I find it troubling that if I wish to officially recognize the Indigenous fragment of myself, it won’t be legal” (xvii).

9. There are various uses of “indio/a” in the memoir, many with different contextual significance.

The “india” on page 31, for example, references the Dominican Virgin, La Virgen de Altagracia. Page 57, on the other hand, refers to a racial, phenotypic understanding of the term: “His long black DA and those high cheekbones made him look like an indio.” The eighth chapter, titled “God Bodies and indios” (107), instead points to an Indigenous understanding of the term as Taíno or Carib; Cepeda writes in the chapter: “Look, even in the D.R., the Taíno and Carib Indians and the Original Asiatic Black had to contend with those white devil Spaniards” (111).

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Cepeda celebrates her DNA results with clear roots in Africa. The maternal ancestry on both her mother’s and father’s sides, for example, hails from West and Central Africa (242, 264). Cepeda remarks: “the history of Africa in the Americas is a fascinating one, and somewhere along the line, the narrative runs through my veins” (246). The inclusion of various racially charged Spanish terms in the memoir in many ways speaks to the complexity of race in the Dominican Republic and the Dominican diaspora and confirms contemporary usage of Dominican racial terms in the United States regardless of connotation or etymology.10 The aforementioned podcast “About Race” furthers Cepeda’s racial dialogue as related specifically to Dominican politics; an entire episode titled “Cancel Your Punta Cana Wedding” focuses on the 2013 Dominican Tribunal Court ruling that stripped the citizenship of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent.

In the preface to her memoir, Cepeda offers her commentary on Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s series Black in Latin America. The episode focused on the Dominican Republic includes a conversation between Gates and a Ministry of Culture employee in which said employee states “there were no more Indigenous people left on the island like there were in South America, so Dominicans used the term [indio/a] to negate their blackness” (xvi–xvii). Cepeda identifies the surface-level racial dialogue between the two men as “archaic,” faulting the discussion for not addressing the reasons behind a denial of Blackness for Dominicans and other Latina/os. What can make conversations surrounding the complexities of race and identity less “archaic” includes the motion to integrate new generations of Dominicans and transnational Dominican Americans into the conversation. A widening of the public sphere for Caribbean Latina/os, as well as the expansion of the public sphere into a digital public sphere as exemplified by Cepeda’s wide Twitter following, more profoundly examines and probes existing and “archaic” or traditional racial dialogues. In this sense, the code switching in Bird of Paradise in specific reference to racial terms succeeds in meeting and encouraging a bilingual readership. A literary confrontation of the complexities and tensions surrounding racial identity in the Dominican Republic and the Dominican diaspora becomes enhanced and increasingly authentic via dual language behavior.

Finally, the third pattern in Cepeda’s use of code switching in Bird of Paradise relates to the myriad dominicanisms or regionalisms in the text. Many of these instances favoring colloquial language speak to the pattern of nonliterary language or streetwise jargon in both the memoir and Cepeda’s presence on Twitter. The abbreviations used on Twitter and visible in the word cloud of Cepeda’s Twitter

10. One example is the use of racial terms as nicknames, often used in loving, familial terms in Dominican culture: “I’ve heard Mama and Papa say that people in Santo Domingo referred to Ercilia’s mother as la prieta Francisca because she was darker than the night sky” (63).

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account are, similar to the dominicanisms, not comprehensible for all users.11 While abbreviated words and nongrammatical syntax are hallmarks of Twitter, fellow Dominican American author Junot Díaz often faces criticism for the fact that his writing requires readers not only to translate unitalicized or unmarked Spanish words and phrases but also to perform a cultural translation, in an attempt to make sense of history, popular culture, and racial politics.12 In an article titled “Revenge of the Nerd: Junot Díaz and the Networks of American Literary Imagination,” critic Ed Finn considers Díaz’s general online readership. Finn puts into focus the “digital traces of book culture” (1) to decipher the ways that readers and machines work in tandem to undertake a novel like The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. While Finn primarily analyzes consumer reviews and automated recommendations from websites like Amazon and LibraryThing, Díaz’s 2007 novel has also been annotated by a public readership online. The public glossary www.annotated -oscar-wao.com, for example, contains notes and translations for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao created by a monolingual reader who found herself unable to page through the novel without constantly referencing Wikipedia and free online translation programs like Google Translate. The connections between readers and machines relates directly to an understanding of vernacular culture.

If the digital or the machine can stand for the informal, nonelite, or subordinate sphere, this notion allows one to consider how digital dialogues encourage individuals to question and reshape understandings of difficult concepts relating to identity and geopolitical borders, for example. Approaching the digital sphere as borderless helps to approach a translational Latina/o public sphere that also inherently crosses boundaries. The hybrid nature of web-based communication, then, allows for users to prioritize the vernacular over institutional, elitist discourse.

Cepeda’s memoir, in a similar fashion, forces the monolingual reader to keep his or her laptop or Spanish-English dictionary accessible. While Cepeda elects to mark non-English words in italics, there is no glossary and the constant use of regionalisms or dominicanisms makes the text, at times, difficult to understand even for bilingual readers. A sample of such “dominicanismos” includes “cibaeña” (12), referring to an individual from the Cibao region in northern Dominican Republic; “tigere” (12), a dominicanism for “hustler”; “di’que” (4), meaning “he said/she said”; and “fukú” (78), referring to the curse Dominicans believe Christopher Columbus brought to Hispaniola in 1492. To understand these terms, 11. A reason behind the abbreviations on Twitter is the 140-character maximum. Many tweets challenge grammatical syntax and shorten words as much as possible.

12. Díaz represents just one example of a larger phenomenon within Latina/o literature; within Dominican American letters alone, other notable authors to perform linguistic and cultural code switching include Julia Alvarez, Loida Maritza Pérez, and Josefina Báez.

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a reader would need to be familiar with a specific (Dominican) Spanish dialect in addition to a particular cultural and historical context. Moreover, much like the evasion of grammatical norms on Twitter, oftentimes dominicanisms and other Spanish words do not follow Spanish syntactical norms. While Cepeda reproduces the Dominican phrase for “hustler” (or a deceitful, manipulative individual) as “tigere,” the phrase—in order to preserve the correct Spanish pronunciation— should be spelled “tiguere.” Relatedly, although some Spanish words in the memoir are accented correctly, many are not: “a quien estás mirando?,” “que paso” (111), and “sientate” (113) are just a few examples. Although a missing accent may be relatively insignificant, and does not change the message or value of the literary text, the miswritten Spanish words serve to conflate the intended audience of the memoir. These examples of missing accents mirror the often nongrammatical Spanish of bilinguals on Twitter. Moreover, the grammatical lapse suggests that the accentuation of Spanish words is irrelevant because most readers do not need the written accentuation to correctly pronounce the words; this argument assumes the pronunciation of these Spanish words would likely already be compromised by the monolingual English-speaking reader.

In Cepeda’s attempt to recreate her own search for an identity “before we became Latino” (xiv) within the text, the regionalisms and dominicanisms prove representative of her individual journey and the diverse communities she inhabits. These colloquialisms reflect the author’s voice and experiences. What makes the memoir increasingly complex is the fact that Cepeda’s inclusion of “regionalisms”—words and phrases linked to a specific space or geography—hail from not one but two spaces: the Dominican Republic and New York. Born in Harlem but later connected to uptown Manhattan’s hip-hop culture, Cepeda at times prompts the reader to perform cultural translations, as opposed to simply linguistic translations. Thus, returning to Torres’s three categories of code switching strategies in Latina/o texts, none of the three adequately fits Bird of Paradise. Although Cepeda’s use of Spanish may appear to be “easily accessed,” in large part due to the fact that Spanish words are italicized and set apart from the English text, the lack of glossary or translations and the existence of multiple linguistic and cultural registers pushes the memoir’s code switching strategies even beyond that of “gratifying the bilingual reader.” It may be that no reader, monolingual or multilingual, approaches a text like Bird of Paradise without some difficulty. The epigraph at the beginning of chapter 7 (written first in Spanish and directly below in English) is from Chicana Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1986): “Simultaneously, I saw my face from different angles/And my face, like reality, had multiple characters” (87).

While the quote speaks to individuals of multiethnic identities, it also relates to multilingual identities. Anzaldúa, in fact, writes about her experience with language as “linguistic terrorism,” framing language in Foucauldian terms based on its

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ability to exclude.13 Anzaldúa’s motives for code switching are political, intended to force others—namely, monolingual readers—to feel the same split or disconnect that she has. In this sense, the code switching in Bird of Paradise can be understood as the politically charged equivalent to Cepeda’s public Twitter account, framed largely as a response to US politics. Cepeda’s memoir, albeit more subtly, asserts Blackness and other aspects of the US Latina/o experience by asking readers to perform a translation of transnational terminology.

Discerning Cepeda’s motive behind code switching in Bird of Paradise also relates to the intended audience of the memoir. While analyzing various uses of code switching in the work frames the text as multidialectal, Bird of Paradise is not fully accessible for a monolingual reader. The imagined “public sphere” with language skills and the historical and cultural context necessary to fully understand the memoir is a limited one. While code switching offers cultural and linguistic authenticity to a text and can best represent the dual language use of Latina/o authors like Cepeda, it can also limit the audience. A literary public sphere, however, is not the same as a digital public sphere. As referenced by Cepeda’s Twitter account and its global follower profile, a digital message—in a condensed, colloquial format—is more readily accessible to the masses. Notably, no non-English words registered in the word cloud search of keywords over the seven-day span of @raquelcepeda, possibly confirming that intended readership may differ from online to the written page. At the same time, the political thrust of Cepeda’s Twitter account, as well as her colloquial, relaxed language, concretizes parallels between the digital and the literary.

Cepeda explores both the digital and literary public spheres considered in the previous pages via her racial commentary. This dialogue, highlighted or emphasized in the memoir by the code switching and a clear thematic pattern in Cepeda’s tweets, signals the most obvious example of unconventional politics in Bird of Paradise in the sense that the author espouses her own politically charged responses to racial realities and adds her voice to both national and international conversations about race. Although the mediums are different and autobiography and microblogging platforms like Twitter are not approached with the same writer’s mindset or end goal, both Bird of Paradise and @raquelcepeda respond to political, social, and cultural realities—Twitter just does so in real time. Cepeda’s recent memoir as well as her digital presence, as referenced by her Twitter account, 13. Anzaldúa’s linguistic stance paints language as a violent clash, a sentiment shared by Díaz. Díaz notes in an interview with Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch’ien: “When I learned English in the States this was a violent enterprise.” Díaz then denotes his attempt to mirror this clash or violence on the written page as his “revenge on English” (209–10). Not translating, much as it is for Anzaldúa, is a political move for Díaz, to not position Spanish as a second-rate language.

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are signposts for boundary-less communities in dialogue with diverse, multicultural public spheres. Both, in their own ways, mimic the sentiment shared by fellow Dominican American writer Julia Alvarez when describing her own artistic motivation: “I’m mapping a country that’s not on the map, and that’s why I’m trying to put it down on paper” (173). While Cepeda’s imaginary literary public sphere is accessed “on paper,” a possible digital Latina/o sphere widens her audience—in part because of a confirmed transnational following but also due to the condensation of the dialogue to respect the 140-character limit. The online presence, in many ways, is increasingly important for Latina/o authors as its orality and brevity render (digital) messages accessible for a wider audience. Cepeda’s exploration of identity both on- and off-page, professed to a digital and literary public, as “a transnational who isn’t all the way American or Dominican but travels between both worlds” (177), demonstrates how language choice and language use relate directly to the transnational public that Latina/os such as Cepeda address in both digital and print form.

Works Cited “About Twitter.” Twitter, 27 Feb. 2017, about.twitter.com.

Alvarez, Julia. “Doña Aída, with Your Permission.” Something to Declare, Plume, 1999, pp. 171–75.

———. How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. Algonquin Books, 1991.

“The Annotated Oscar Wao: Notes and Translations for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao \by Junot Díaz.” Annotated Oscar Wao, 9 Mar. 2017, www.annotated-oscar-wao.com.

Báez, Josefina. Dominicanish: A Performance Text. Alexander Street P, 2000.

Brown, Aleia M., and Joshua Crutchfield. “Black Scholars Matter: #BlkTwitterstorians Building a Digital Community.” The Black Scholar, vol. 47, no. 3, 2017, pp. 45–55.

Callahan, Laura. Spanish/English Code-Switching in a Written Corpus. John Benjamins, 2004.

Candelario, Ginetta E. B. Black behind the Ears: Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to Beauty Shops. Duke UP, 2007.

Casielles-Suárez, Eugenia. “Racial Code-Switching in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, vol. 90, 2013, pp. 475–87.

Ch’ien, Evelyn Nien-Ming. Weird English. Harvard UP, 2004.

Dalleo, Raphael. Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere: From the Plantation to the Postcolonial.

U of Virginia P, 2011.

Dorsey, Jack. “just setting up my twittr.” Twitter, 21 Mar. 2006.

Finn, Ed. “Revenge of the Nerd: Junot Díaz and the Networks of American Literary Imagination.”

DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 1, 2013, pp. 1–18.

Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger, MIT P, 1991.

Jacobson, Rodolfo. “Code-Switching in South Texas: Sociolinguistic Considerations and Pedagogical Applications.” Journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest, vol. 3, 1978, pp. 20–32.

Keller, Gary D. “The Literary Stratagems Available to the Bilingual Chicano Writer.” The Identification and Analysis of Chicano Literature, edited by Francisco Jiménez, Bilingual P, 1979, pp. 262–316.

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Lipski, John. “Spanish-English Language Switching in Speech and Literature: Theories and Models.”

The Bilingual Review / La Revista Bilingüe, vol. 9, no. 3, 1982, pp. 191–212.

Martinez, Lisa M. “Yes We Can: Latino Participation in Unconventional Politics.” Social Forces, vol. 84, no. 1, 2005, pp. 135–55.

McCarthy, Thomas. “Introduction.” The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by Thomas Burger, MIT P, 1991, xi–xiv.

Mendieta, Eduardo. “What Can Latinas/os Learn from Cornel West? The Latino Postcolonial Intellectual in the Age of the Exhaustion of Public Spheres.” Nepantla: Views from South, vol. 4, no. 2, 2003, pp. 213–33.

Myers-Scotton, Carol. Duelling Languages: Grammatical Structure in Code-Switching. Clarendon P, 1993.

Scott, James. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. Yale UP, 1990.

Simmons, Kimberly Eison. Reconstructing Racial Identity and the African Past in the Dominican Republic. UP of Florida, 2009.

Stavans, Ilan. Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language. Harper Perennial, 2004.

Stavans, Ilan, and Edna Acosta-Belén, editors. The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature.

W. W. Norton, 2011.

Thomas, Piri. Down These Mean Streets. New American Library, 1968.

Torres, Lourdes, 2007. “In the Contact Zone: Code-Switching Strategies by Latino/a Writers.”

MELUS, vol. 32, no. 1, 2007, pp. 75–96.

Torres-Saillant, Silvio. Introduction to Dominican Blackness. CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, 2010.

Uhlaner, Carole J., Bruce E. Cain, and Roderick D. Kiewiet. “Political Participation of Ethnic Minorities in the 1980s.” Political Behavior, vol. 11, 1989, pp. 195–231.

Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. Zone Books, 2002.

Megan Jeanette Myers is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Latino/a Studies at Iowa State University. She recently published articles in Hispania and Confluencia. Her current book project analyzes the representation of Haitians in Dominican and Dominican American literature.

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El sueño de la sombra Alejandra Carrillo-Estrada, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

El sueño de la sombra (The shadow’s dream) was created as a need to visually express and comment on the danger of President Donald Trump’s proposed wall. It is a sculpture consisting of 64 miniature steel ladders either leaning against or surrounding an 8-inch-tall by 24-foot-long steel wall embedded in soil. Its intention is to demonstrate the duality of the wall and ladders, the hopelessness felt in the imposition of the wall but also the hopefulness in the ladders defeating the obstacle. The ladders represent the border community and the refugees who are fleeing very harsh and violent conditions in search of a safer place and a better future. The ladders are also stand-ins for the families who have been separated due to deportation. Beyond immigrants and refugees, however, the ladders symbolize growth, rising up, ascending, and shifting to a different place physically, mentally, and spiritually (figure 1).

The ladders, which vary from 2 to 12 inches, were created to characterize expressions and emotions; they are deliberately made imperfect because no human being is perfect. Some of them are broken and incomplete or their legs are not leveled. The ladders are delicate and fragile as a symbolic gesture to represent the people who are sacrificing so much of their lives to overcome the obstacles implied by the wall (figure 2).

During their fabrication, the ladders go through a process of hammering and pounding, which represents some of the challenges migrants and refugees encounter and endure in their journey to the United States. The material I use is also symbolic: the ladders are made out of stainless steel shot. Shot is an abrasive media used in a tumbler whose function is to polish “more valuable” metal like silver or gold in order to bring out a bright, shiny, and impeccable surface. Recently, in conversation about my piece, a family member made me see this as a class distinction between the metal doing the polishing and the metal being polished and a metaphor for the immigrant working class “polishing” society and making this world a better place (figure 3).

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Carrillo-Estrada / El sueño de la sombra Carrillo-Estrada / El sueño de la sombra

Figure Figure1.

1.“El “ElSueño Sueñode delalasombra” sombra”installed installedatatthe theUS-Mexico US-Mexicoborder border in in Juárez, Juárez, Mexico Mexico with with border border

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fence fenceininthe thebackground, background,2017.

2017.Courtesy: Courtesy:Alejandra AlejandraCarrillo-Estrada.

Carrillo-Estrada.

Figure 1. “El Sueño de la sombra” installed at the US-Mexico border in Juárez, Mexico with border Figure 1. “El Sueño de la sombra” installed at the US-Mexico border in Juárez, Mexico with border fence fenceininthe thebackground, background,2017.

2017.Courtesy: Courtesy:Alejandra AlejandraCarrillo-Estrada.

Carrillo-Estrada.

Figure Figure 2.

2.Detail Detail ofof ladders, ladders, 2017.

2017. Courtesy: Courtesy: Figure Figure 3.

3. The The hammer hammer and and steel plate used in

AlejandraCarrillo-Estrada.

Carrillo-Estrada.

Alejandra Figure Figure 2.

2.Detail Detailofofladders, ladders,2017.

2017.Courtesy: Courtesy: Alejandra AlejandraCarrillo-Estrada.

Carrillo-Estrada.

the process process of of manipulation, manipulation, 2017. Courtesy: the Alejandra Carrillo-Estrada.

Alejandra Carrillo-Estrada.

Figure Figure 3.

3.The Thehammer hammerand and steel steel plate plate used used in in

the the process process ofof manipulation, manipulation, 2017.

2017. Courtesy: Courtesy: Alejandra AlejandraCarrillo-Estrada.

Carrillo-Estrada.

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I use a heavy steel hammer to flatten the shot pieces one by one and then a micro welder to fuse them together to form a line for each side of the ladder.

Finally, the shot is added in between to complete the ladder (figures 4, 5).

Working on these ladders is a meditative practice as the pounding is a repetitive motion, which creates a sustained rhythm. Many times, while working I am also listening to stories on the National Public Radio about refugees and immigrants. These stories from podcasts like Latino USA inspire my work by reminding me I am not alone in my feelings or fears and the more united our community is, the stronger our voices will become. This provides my fuel to continue working.

When hammering out and making these ladders I also think about the physical labor of farmers and domestic workers, who are mostly immigrants, and what they go through 12 or more hours a day. As such, the physical sacrifice that I make in creating my artwork is my contribution, my personal offering to the laborers who have to endure worse working conditions. Feeling that physical pain is a reminder that what I am doing is nothing in comparison, and this, in turn, feeds my need to continue my creations.

Another meaningful layer of El sueño de la sombra rests in the number of ladders and the measurement of the wall. My personal migration story is reflected in these digits. One of the reasons I was brought to the United States was to have better educational opportunities. I started my formal education in the United States on August 24 (8/24) and the wall measures 8 inches by 24 feet.

The number of ladders, 64, represents the number of weeks I have been enrolled in my MFA program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).

Therefore, El sueño de la sombra represents the continuation of my higher education, an opportunity I greatly value, and climbing new levels through hard work (figures 5 and 6).

The first time El sueño de la sombra was exhibited as the focus of a public art critique at UIUC in 2017, I learned that the piece makes people uncomfortable.

Perhaps this is because as a society we do not normally talk about these issues openly or because we do not have enough information or awareness in order for our conversation to be more useful. In this sense, El sueño de la sombra is a contribution to the much-needed collective conversation about pressing social issues regarding the Trump administration’s proposed US-Mexico border wall. I hope that it can serve as a starting point that can lead to real dialogue and future concerted action. If it does this for some people, I am honored and motivated to continue to explore my own creative potential for change.

Carrillo-Estrada / El sueño de la sombra EL SUEÑO DE LA SOMBRA

Figure 4. The fabrication process of building

the ladders, 2017. Photo by Lilah Leopold.

Courtesy: Alejandra Carrillo-Estrada.

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Figure 5. Details of the ladders installed on the Mexican side of the border with border fence in the background, 2017. Courtesy: Alejandra Carrillo-Estrada.

Figure 6. Installation view at UIUC exhibition, 2017. Photo by Alethea Busch. Courtesy: Alejandra

Carrillo-Estrada.

Alejandra Carrillo-Estrada is a Mexico-born interdisciplinary artist who grew up on the US-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas. She is currently in her third and last year of her MFA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she also teaches Introduction to Metalsmithing.

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Latinxfuturist Poems Vincent Toro

DREAMcatcher Illegal my eyes.

Iris of unfertilized plateaus.

Unforgiven for surging into a dialect with no global market value. Illegal my argot.

I cannot just wade out in neutral lakes. I cannot say.

Cannot evade the plexus that marks me contraband.

When I seed above ores you crave you illegal me, forge deeds, uproot me, hire me to manage the waste, illegal my soles when your arsons drag me to your doorstep. Illegal my faith.

Broadcast me an illegal substance. Refuse me lodging if I refuse to be free labor.

Allege me vermin, toxin, zombify all kin who return enraged by your tombopolis.

Illegal my relics, confiscate my liver.

Now even my scars must be registered. Illegal my pyres enkindled by your rote pandemics. Illegal the bronze of my cutis.

If I split walnuts with the neighbors somehow it’s lascivious.

Illegal my parchments, my pons, my corybantic time signatures.

Only my silence is welcome. Only my silence is suspect.

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Human instamatic after Martin Wong Roach motel in cinders.

Electromagnetic hand jive. Interregnum of Alphabet City. Dilapidated voices from 1981 rescinded. Secret Caribe Suzuki walk. The brick hearted extinction dressed

in suede. Handball court liturgies. Little Ivan of the Aztec jungle prays before drowning in concrete.

The butcher

boxed in, boxed over, boxed out.

barrel slapped, foments the foremen to kiss before perspiring slums adorned in the drag of bathtub gin. Avenues of mopped constellations

Infanticide among the scree.

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Morir de angustia. Slump and throttle.

Courtroom shocker, he’s got wrecking balls for lungs, hickory smoked.

This life utterly a chain link of indelible arsons, a sweet mad marquee dimmed, diced in Wurlitzer blood. Congeals into a pond, it’s no place to raze, to raise Cupcake annunciations padlocked, soap dished, panned out across Cepheus.

a raza.

Desespera siempre, negrito, siempre desaparecidos.

Gas mask revelation, paper lamps bequeathed in tow away zones.

Benevolent diss associations. Insolent departures from blue faced angels named Angel, who prattle with pipes in the basement.

Implicated by the artifice of silence. The sitter is a blabbermouthed coconut.

Cocotazos para todos!

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What I saw was what I meant was what was was a voluptuous parade of laminated totems to the south. To the north, an impaired phalanx of demure demagogues recolonizing the pool hall.

The rubble kings resurrected as testimonios stricken from public record.

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Cinephrastic: Sleep Dealer Dry, this mesa. What is potable siphoned by drone shepherds warding these hinterlands. Their lenses sniff me hyperpoaching company waves. Delete my source code, spurring migration via system integration.

My rural gone obsolete. Bail to become dermal conduit. Repurposed by coyote tech. Ahora soy prosthetic stoop labor. Discarnate extremities uprooting cassava via live stream. The innovation this demesne of capital gain has sought: an interface that unBrowns the goods.

Each hour spent betahitched to network of cyber-maquilas surges my amaurosis.

Neural bandwidth atrophies when chains go asomatous. Mi memoria outsourced to depleted sectors, embezzled and greased to snooze pilferers.

Nodehunted. Ramsacked. My narcoprocessors watt sapped, until Luz hemohacks wetware syncretism. Until metacarpal of drone shepherds hits ctrl-altdel. Hops mode and margin. Excises ill logic gate that robohews granjero from extranjero. Inducing bit torrent deluge of ancient rain to el campo. The fileswarm englutting me shunted.

Vincent Toro is a Puerto Rican poet, playwright, and professor from the New York area. His debut collection of poetry, Stereo. Island. Mosaic., was awarded the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and the Sawtooth Poetry Prize, and a poem from the collection won The Caribbean Writer’s Cecile De Jongh Poetry Award.

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Introduction

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The Places and Spaces of Latinx Cultures Alberto Varon, Indiana University Issue Editor

As promised during his campaign, President Trump made immigration central to his administration’s goals, aiming to restrict the influx of those who immigrate to the United States through either legal or extralegal means. Almost immediately after taking office in January 2017, President Trump issued an executive order instructing the Department of Justice to prioritize the criminal prosecution of immigration offenses. The current attack on immigrants took further shape in September 2017, when President Trump chose to rescind protections under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) afforded to the estimated 800,000 people brought to the US as minors. Despite widespread and bipartisan support for the Dreamers, as DACA recipients are often called, President Trump directed the agencies under his purview to phase out the program that enabled DACA recipients to avoid deportation and to work legally in the country. Ending DACA put hundreds of thousands of child immigrants at risk, deliberately undermining these young Americans’ chance of success and preventing their inclusion as members of society. The changes to DACA were a clear attack on the social incorporation of a vulnerable segment of the population, paving the way for the immigration crisis the following summer. These attacks deliberately racialize and exclude Latinx people, demanding a collective and concerted response. The immigration crisis requires us to imagine how Latinx communities can engage, resist, and reshape the spaces that structure our lives.

From the fall of 2017 into the summer of 2018, under the direction of the Trump administration, the offices under the Department of Homeland Security altered their policies on how to process undocumented immigrants to the United States. On May 7, 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions publicly declared a “zero-tolerance policy” for those entering the country without authorization.

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Whereas previously authorities working in US border control and enforcement had several options and could exercise discretion, the Trump administration has taken a hardline stance, demanding full criminal prosecution of those entering the country without appropriate documentation and prioritizing deportation as quickly as possible, often at the cost of due process. As part of the drive to criminally prosecute unauthorized immigrants, the administration instituted a “family separation” policy that facilitated the rapid deportation of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers deemed unworthy or undesirable by authorities. Minors, some as young as toddlers, were torn from their families and travel companions, forced into state custody or detained until foster care arrangements could be made. This practice peaked in the summer of 2018, when over two thousand children remained in detention separate from their families and travel companions. Such practices come with untold costs to the mental and material well-being of those being held, and have direct implications for the immigrants’ pending cases. Following an international outcry and national protests, the family separation practice was ended by executive order on June 20, 2018, and a federal judge gave the US government thirty days to reunite families. Nonetheless, in order to remain in compliance with the law, officials have shifted immigration strategy so that families are now detained together. While this shift restores some of the basic human rights and dignity to the detained families, immigration enforcement officials continue to treat migrants as criminals.

While there is no official US government policy requiring the separation of families, this is precisely what makes this policy especially pernicious. The decision whether or not to separate families relies on prosecutorial discretion. Should an unauthorized immigrant be held for immigration proceedings, they remain in detention centers united with their kin. However, under the revised directive, adult immigrants are to be tried as criminals, and thus sent to prisons separate from the minor children. Although immigration rates have remained relatively stable year after year, by late summer 2018 an estimated 12,000 migrant children were held in government-contracted detention centers and shelters, with over a thousand others expected to join those ranks.1 Mr. Sessions, who in his announcement of the family separation policy expressed skepticism over the legitimacy of a majority of asylum cases, has long maintained a cynical position regarding American race relations. His record on these issues stretches back decades, and has surfaced front and central in his current position as US Attorney General. Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1986 during his failed nomination to fill a US District Judgeship, Mr. Sessions remarked that when civil rights organizations such as the NAACP 1. Caitlin Dickerson, “Detention of Migrant Children Has Skyrocketed to Highest Levels Ever,” New York Times, 12 Sept. 2018.

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or the ACLU promote “foreign policy issues” deemed “un-American,” those organizations “hurt themselves; they lose credibility.” According to his testimony, when organizations take a position supporting sanctuary for refugees, it “causes them to lose support. They lose their moral authority” (543).2 When pressed to define the foreign policy issues to which he referred, Mr. Sessions explained, “the sanctuary movement and Sandinistas” (51). How we conceive of immigrant lives is now linked to these sites of detention and family trauma.

To be fair, Mr. Sessions (born in a segregated pre–civil rights Selma, Alabama) did, in the same conversation, acknowledge that “Federal intervention was essential in the South,” where racial integration would have otherwise been impossible (52).

Yet his office’s current position, whether self-directed or under the direction of the President, represents a biting reversal and fallible logic. While in the 1980s Mr. Sessions chastised specific activist groups for what he deemed “moral” dubiousness, perhaps no government policy since then has so shamefully abdicated our nation’s moral responsibility and weakened our nation’s moral authority on the global stage. Claiming that support of sanctuary cases is un-American, but then calling for the detention of those with the least ability to defend themselves, constitutes nothing less than full abdication of human rights enshrined as legal and moral responsibility since World War II. At stake is the very definition of the categories of detention, sanctuary, and asylum, and the racialized subjects that are produced by them. These immigration categories, and the spaces in which they are actualized, reproduce a racialized, national hierarchy that privileges certain groups and devalues others.

The family separation policy, intended to deter unauthorized immigration, continued increasingly hostile US government attitudes to migrants, and failed to take into account the wide range of reasons and motivations behind immigration.

It is important to distinguish between unauthorized immigrants and those seeking asylum, since US immigration law holds these groups in separate legal categories and thus with different legal options and distinctions. As an immigration category, asylum allows individuals who present themselves at the US border or who meet the international definition of “refugee”: a person who is or has a well-founded, credible, or reasonable fear of persecution in their home country because of their race, religion, nationality, or group membership. This definition was codified in the United States in the Refugee Act of 1980. Noncitizens who arrive at the US border have the legal right to apply for asylum defensively, as a remedy against deportation, and are due a hearing to evaluate the merit of their case. On average, asylum 2. “Hearings Before the Committee on the Judiciary United States Senate, Ninety-Ninth Congress, Second Session, on the Nomination of Jefferson B. Sessions, III, of Alabama, to be U.S. District Judge for the Southern District of Alabama,” March 13, 19, 20, and May 26, 1986, serial no. J-99-120, Government Printing Office, 1987.

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proceedings can take upwards of two years to wind through the immigration system.

Asylum has its antithesis in deportation, yet between these lie detention, racialization, and prosecution. There is a slippage between categories of immigration, and the current administration remains hostile to the global currents that produced the migrant crisis we currently experience. For instance, temporary protected status (TPS), a program in effect since 1990 that offers people from war-torn countries or those who have suffered environmental disaster a special legal status to remain, is also under threat. TPS overwhelmingly supports asylum seekers from Central America and a select few countries in Africa; in eliminating the program, racial bias clouds the real needs of those facing dire circumstances, and the government fails to recognize the difference between those coming as economic refugees and the violent gang members produced by civil conflict.

The United States often denied or made difficult the mechanisms and possibility of asylum for many displaced peoples. Immigration status on its own is not a criminal offense, and it is against United Nations’ international law to deny asylum proceedings. (It is also worth noting that the US is bound by its treaty obligations since World War II to honor these laws preventing the persecution of asylum seekers.) When asylum proceedings fail, or move so sluggishly that they have detrimental impact on noncitizens’ lives, efforts to provide sanctuary emerge from nongovernment groups seeking to remedy potential injustices. Although sanctuary has its origins in the nineteenth-century abolition efforts, the sanctuary movement of the late twentieth century has been intimately connected to Latinx culture. In the 1980s, nearly a million Central Americans sought refuge in the United States, fleeing violence resulting from civil conflict and Cold War proxy battles. With bitter irony, the United States’s own complicity in inciting or fomenting the violence caused the upswell in refugee migrants, to which the Reagan administration then denied entry. The incongruity of these two facts—US political destabilization in Latin America and increasingly restrictive immigration policies—heightens and exposes some of the most complicated ideas facing Latinx culture even today: what does it mean to move between national spaces? What responsibility does the nation have to its noncitizens?

Returning to the issue of family separation, these migrant children are officially labeled “unaccompanied alien children,” and are placed under the protection of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which moved thousands of children to detention centers. By current agreement known as the Flores Settlement, the federal government is obligated to release minors from detention within twenty days of their confinement, a fact that the current administration treats as a legal inconvenience. By limiting the length of their detention, this consensus document protects children from unnecessary detainment and from the ensuing physical and psychological damage that detention could produce. In a further attempt to strip immigrant children of their human rights, the Department of Homeland Security

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and the Department of Health and Human Services proposed changes that would terminate the Flores Settlement Agreement, removing the twenty-day detention limit and releasing the government from the requirement that child detention centers be state-licensed.3 Justifying the easement of child protections by citing “operational difficulties” caused by the Flores Settlement, the government’s proposed rule fails to see that the overburdened system is a consequence of its own heightened prosecutorial discretion. In September 2018, after three lawsuits successfully challenged the family separation policy, the Trump administration began allowing some of those impacted by family separation to have their asylum claims reconsidered.4 In contrast to the narrowly prescribed legal venues for immigration assistance, sanctuary decentralizes immigration protections from the space of government and relocates these to places committed to supporting immigrants without regard for official status. These spaces can be official, such as those actions at the state or city level that designate their jurisdiction safe, or they can be more local or informal, such as schools, campuses, or private business that open their doors. These solutions offer temporary reprieve, and function as sites of protest for the unjust practices of a nation, but cannot address the underlying problem at the heart of the immigration debate. The minors impacted by the family separation policy (if not the families overall) are criminalized because of a law that equates arrival with criminality. As A. Naomi Paik explains of sanctuary generally, “though cast as violators of the law and therefore deserving of discipline, criminalised populations are in fact produced as an effect of the law, which has ensnared them through an ever-expanding scope of law-breaking behavior” (9).5 Paik points out the difficulty facing the sanctuary movement as it attempts to unify multiple disparate groups attempting to resolve a crisis whose scale exceeds localized efforts. Where does that leave those immigrants who find themselves forced to navigate a shifting terrain of legal inclusion?

3. “Apprehension, Processing, Care, and Custody of Alien Minors and Unaccompanied Alien Children,” Proposed Rule dated September 7, 2018, DHS docket no. ICEB-2018-0002, Document 83 FR 45486.

4. These lawsuits were Ms. L—v. ICE; M- M- M- v. ICE; and Dora v. Sessions. While the majority of minors have since been reunited with their families, over a hundred still remain separated as of September 24, 2018. See “Joint Status Report,” September 27, 2018, www.aclu.org/sites/default/files /field_document/2018-09-27_status_report_joint_dckt_243_0_0.pdf.

5. A. Naomi Paik, “Abolitionist Futures and the US Sanctuary Movement,” Race and Class, vol. 59, no. 2, 2017, pp. 3–25. Paik provides a brief history of the sanctuary movement and how the sprawling movement has historically adapted to changing social needs.

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Theorizing Detention: The Space between Borders As these cases demonstrate, the legal spaces through which we imagine belonging remains contested. The detention center produces and reproduces a logic of racialized America that determines one’s status, how one can move, even one’s right to belong. While these concerns are not new, they mark a shift in the national use of violence and police power to suppress. Yet, the detention center, which is actively being used to contain brown life, might actually facilitate a new way of thinking about the spaces of latinx culture. When the detention center replaces the court as the institution mediating one’s legal status, the permanence of the nation-state gets replaced by precariousness. These spaces thrive on, depend on, precarity; they are in their very nature precarious. As opposed to incarceration, detention suggests an impermanence, a temporary grounding on a longer journey elsewhere. Yet in reality, the detention center becomes a final destination, a blockage that refuses passage where the promise of a better future, of equality, becomes equivocation. If the precarity of living in a detention center was not sufficient, in September 2018, the Trump administration quietly relocated approximately 1,600 migrant children from licensed shelters into a temporary tent city in Tornillo, Texas, making even more visible the force of the detention centers’ imaginative capacity to terrorize and cordon off noncitizen members of society. Through the detention center as a space of meaning production, narratives of immigration shift their meaning from the promise of opportunity to sites of “deterrence,” discouraging the possibility of incorporation into the US body politic. Detention precludes the possibility of social incorporation either in the present, as immigrants are physically separated from the local and national communities that might support them, or in the future, as the trauma produced by these spaces lingers and marks those that pass within it.

While the treatment of unaccompanied minors and separating families is shocking, it represents a small percentage of the overall undocumented population in the United States. Rather, as a site of meaning-making, the detention center becomes a place through which fear can be packaged and disseminated; the power of the detention center as a tool of deterrence lies largely in its ability to intimidate.

Locally, it seeks to rupture communities from their immigrant neighbors; nationally, it seeks to suppress the efforts of immigrant activists; and internationally, it terrifies potential immigrants against the risk of fleeing to a better life. But the determination around who gets detained is never separate from the long-standing ideas about racial power. The detention center, by extension, brackets off noncitizens from their social world, attempting to rupture their connection to community and nation. The term “noncitizen,” by design, neglects the distinction between those residing in the US without authorization and those who have legal, permanent status but not citizenship. The power of sanctuary lies in its ability to elide the

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boundary between the citizen and the noncitizen. The detention center triggers a strong emotional response from people on both sides of the political spectrum, either empathetic or hostile, and the detention center, along with sites of sanctuary springing up around the nation, offer nodes in a complex network of responses to this moment in Latinx history.

We most often associate space with physical location, but within a discourse in which location is rendered unstable, dangerous, and impermanent, space itself becomes a migratory concept, indicative of the imaginative and multiple places in which we imagine belonging. The sites of detention take on and produce multiple meanings and the burden placed on those sites stretched to capacity yet tasked with containing the crisis are actively shaping our understanding of citizenship and belonging. Detention centers have, in many ways, replaced the border as the location of the migrant crisis, and Latinx culture then finds itself in the peculiar position of being of the border, at the border, but having to imagine itself out of such confinements that refuse its passage into a national space.6 The detention center, as a space of brown meaning-making, exhibits as much as it contains. The center functions to prevent entry and incorporation into the national body politic, but it also becomes the focal point for debates about noncitizens’ alleged suitability for inclusion. By shifting the debate around immigration from the border and flow to detention and deportation, debate around immigration is further restricted into sites of increased surveillance and control. It is indicative, as Lisa Marie Cacho has suggested, of a different but related context, “the ways in which social value is also contested and condoned through legally inflected notions of morality” (4).7 More tellingly, the immigrants and discourses of migration that emerge out of the detention center criminalize individuals so that they are even “prevented from being law-abiding,” rendered “ineligible for personhood—as populations subjected to laws but refused the legal means to context those laws as well as denied both the political legitimacy and moral credibility necessary to question them” (4, 6). In the current political moment, minors—in age and racial categorization—are doubly subjected to the divestment of rights as both too young and too brown to be given the possibility of social inclusion.

The kind of racialized separation on display in the detention center, though thankfully a far cry from conditions of the previous century, bears semblance to an earlier moment. The detention center, and the narratives produced by those held there, might offer a twenty-first-century example of a captivity narrative.

6. The “border” is a central concept in Latinx studies and has been conceptualized in myriad ways.

Some of the more influential treatments include work by Gloria Anzaldúa, Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Andrés Reséndez, José David Saldívar, and Alicia Schmidt Camacho.

7. Lisa Marie Cacho, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected, NYUP, 2012.

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Historically, captivity narratives were associated with the US colonization of the frontier and chronicled encounter with Native American tribes and the experiences of those who spent time living with the tribes.8 In these accounts, the generic conventions associated with captivity—such as stereotypical representations of Native Americans, proper gendered comportment, or religious suffering—justified westward expansion and the purported divine sanctioning of the colonial enterprise. The trauma of captivity upturns the captives’ worldview, destabilizing the very institutions charged with providing stability and legitimacy to their social order, which are later restored by the captives’ return. This narrative history, and its inversion of the perpetrator of captivity, reframes and validates extralegal forms of resistance by animating the sanctuary movement’s roots in abolitionism and conscientious objection. Here, captivity is not perpetrated by an outsider but rather by the very mechanisms of the nation-state, by the United States itself. The detention center is a temporary space, a holding ground between points of entry and exit. The detention center is intended as the temporary suspension of freedom in order to restore social balance, yet when the family, a core principle upon which the social order and legal doctrine depends, is rendered unstable and susceptible, its ability to preserve the body politic falls well short of its purported ambitions.

Both President Trump and his predecessor President Obama instituted policies that sought to deter Central American migration through harsh prosecutorial discretion, processing and deporting migrants in record numbers. In contrast to the narrative by President Trump’s administration, the spaces described herein offer different trajectories for the possibility of resistance and social inclusion; they offer avenues to imagine how we imbue space with meaning, and in doing so, make claims of belonging to place and nation. While many of the migrant children have since been reunited with their families—although a troubling number still remain in custody—the aftermath of the migrant crisis still colors our national conversation on immigration and the spaces that Latinxes inhabit. What, then, does it mean to imagine Latinx lives through these physical, geographic, and figurative spaces? It is in this intellectual act of imagining, inhabiting, and contesting the sites that attempt to circumscribe the Latinx experience that space gets transformed.

Almost paradoxically, brown spaces must ground Latinx lives and provide the flexile terrain through which Latinxs can move. Detention is a feeling unmoored—the brown spaces necessary to provide the opportunity to think through how we, individually and collectively, anchor ourselves to place and idea. The ideas produced 8. Mary Rowlandson’s 1682 narrative of life among the Narragansett and Nipmuck Indians following King Philip’s War is perhaps the most famous US example; others include Hannah Dustan’s via Cotton Mather (1702), Sarah Wakefield’s Six Weeks in the Sioux Tepees (1864), and within Latinx literary history, Ruiz de Burton’s fictional Who Would Have Thought It? (1872).

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in and about these facilities threaten to percolate across the nation and into legal frameworks that impact Latinx families and social relations. In these and other ways, detention centers produce meanings that are legal and cultural, meanings that will define not just American immigration policy, but potentially the social fabric of Latinx communities for years to come.

Landscapes of Latinx Memory To talk about space is to imagine how we belong to, through, and within spaces that are simultaneously local and national. Yet, when we issued the call for submissions, we could not predict the range of approaches the scholarly and creative community took. Spaces are not just locations but imagined relations to past and potential futures. How do we navigate our environments, whether those are built or natural? To that end, we selected work by scholars and artists from a range of positions, in and out of the academy. The articles published here gradually move from space imagined through embodied experience to space as a more external reflection of the physical landscape. As demonstrated in these pages, Latinx culture finds itself responding to the political exigencies of a social climate.

The concept of space and memory yielded a strong sensory response, demonstrated by the abundance of visual material in this issue. As we move through the world, our bodies pass through physical spaces that leave imprints on and are variously imprinted by these places. Memory is absorbed, distilled, transcoded in the bodily experience of racialized subjectivity that is both individualized and shared by one’s community.

In her beautiful and imaginative photography, RAEchel Running provides images deeply connected to the people and places depicted, but, using her artistic toolkit, overlays those images with ideas about the land and how it connects us. People are largely absent from the photographs included here, but the somber landscapes evoke issues of sovereignty, indigeneity, and violence, allowing personal memory to overlap with cartographic remembrance. The cover image, one of Running’s photographs, is a forceful testament to the violence of immigration, especially to women who undertake the crossing, and visualizes a refusal to allow those immigrants to be forgotten.

Eric Mayer-García’s article urges us to consider the emotional weight of how we imagine latinidad, as a “multiply-bordered consciousness,” one that inscribes its practitioners within an expanding mesh of supranational affiliation. Mayer-García turns to the off-Broadway production of María Irene Fornés’s Cap-a-Pie (1975)

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and examines the collaborative efforts that produced it. The essay reads the play as an instance of a proto-Latinx set of feelings, “the connection between the memory, the body, and Latinx ways of being and feeling in the world.” Here, what Latina/ os share is parallel legacies of colonial occupation and how those legacies move from memory into aesthetic form, and Cap-a-Pie prefigures some of contemporary latinidad’s preoccupation with connections beyond or exceeding national ethnic labels. Mayer-García builds upon prominent theories of latinidad to identify what “feeling brown” across difference means, and the transfer and transposition of that difference is central to its formation. To access that feeling, Mayer-García turns to Fornés’s play and the experimental assemblages that produced it, in which he finds an early example of how difference takes on aesthetic form that produces and represents differential feelings. Foregrounding displacement as central to latinidad, he asks what connections are possible, even vital, precisely because of and through the differences they broach.

As theorized by these scholars, “cogito, ergo sum” is inverted, becoming “I am, therefore I feel and think differently.” The next contributor, Bonnie Cox, continues thinking through the embodied experience of latinidad, further exploring the convergence of memory and the body. If sites and performance carry affective meaning, the sensory capacity of the body can also produce new meanings of Latinx spaces. Although Cox’s essay occupies the unusual position of analyzing the author’s own performance, such self-referential analysis extends the critical engagement with embodied memory. In the two performances described here, savagery and abjection refute assumptions of what is acceptable to represent and offer a refusal of the exclusion it represents. These performances, analyses, and kinesthetic enactment of gendered and racial violence speak against the sexual and gendered violence that plague the borderlands, spaces where surveillance and the policing of memory production are unfortunately too familiar. The staging of Cox’s Dar a Luz and Censura expose the porousness of borders, that space which both separates and connects. For the performances, the audience sits in the round, circumscribes the stage, acknowledging the mutual complicity between performer and audience, between stage and the real.

Moving from the body to the representational power of language, Ruth Solarte González’s essay directly responds to the legacy of the conditions described above through an attentive reading of William Archila’s The Gravedigger’s Archaeology (2015). Archila’s rich yet understudied collection grapples with the memory of the 1980s Salvadoran civil war, both the events during the conflict and how it is remembered by those who both fled and survived its violence. Solarte González expands our understanding of Salvadoran and Salvadoran American poets by attending to Archila, who, alongside Roque Dalton, Javier Zamora, Willy Palomo, and others, testify to our imbricated hemispheric history and augment the archive of knowledge about that conflict. In her reading, memory is only accessed in

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fragments, by those moments that reveal themselves by chance encounter or active excavation. Solarte González reminds us that a poem holds the power to preserve that which refuses to be forgotten, the unforgiving memory of a violence slipping into the past.

The last two scholarly pieces concretely ground themselves in the nonembodied material space of Latinx lives, though in very different ways. José E. Limón turns to photorealism to grapple with the distance (and desired closeness) between representation and the community represented in aesthetic practice. In its close association with place, particularly the space of San Antonio, Texas, Limón examines the work of Jesse Treviño, who, in Limón’s reading, turns daily visual culture into art, serving to capture the familiar and render it a site for critiquing and relieving the pressures. Building on the work of art critic Chon Noriega, Limón sees Treviño pushing against other abstracted modernist trends that exclude racialized populations, demonstrating how Treviño maintains the activist impulse attached to his community without sacrificing his artistic goals, thereby bridging the high art world with the artist’s own local community. Photorealism both reflects the sites of Mexican American cultural production and pushes the boundaries between the private spaces of everyday life and mass culture.

Memory and meaning are produced on the very landscapes that we inhabit, as Elena V. Valdez illustrates in her essay. Public spaces provide the physical and discursive venues in which we, as a country, debate and discuss the values that shape our nation. Valdez analyzes the Fiesta de Santa Fe, an annual tradition in New Mexico that showcases Hispano heritage through a variety of performances and events. The event encompasses Santa Fe’s people and civic institutions, and Valdez discusses how the school system problematically represents indigeneity and conquest. In her analysis, the school system reproduces a logic of coloniality tied up in long-standing debates over land and power, part of broader investments in fantasy heritage. Here, “folkloric difference” of local performance offers an attempt, though incomplete, to reinscribe racial complexity and self-determination into the legacy of colonial difference. This study underscores the importance of physical space to forge connections within, among, and around Latinx communities.

The interview and roundtable included here further expand the geographic possibilities of Latinx space and make clear the long-standing historical and contemporary alliances between Latinx cultures and Indigenous groups. At the inverse of the collapse of freedom represented by the detention center, the ability to control and manage one’s life within the structures of a just government is a fundamental concept to American democracy. For Indigenous communities, the right to self-determination is never a foregone conclusion and sovereignty takes economic, social, and political urgency in the face of ongoing threats to communal survival. Sovereignty is not just a theoretical concept, but has material impact on the lives of thousands of Native Americans. In April 2018, pushing new legislation

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that requires work verification for Medicaid participation, the Department of Health and Human Services proposed reclassifying Native Americans as solely a racial group, and in doing so removing their status as sovereign political entities. Such a move would overturn nearly two centuries of legal precedent, and the treaties and agreements that designate federal recognized tribes as sovereign governments with treaty and trust obligations accorded to them. This move to divest Native Americans of their status as sovereign governments stems from technicalities around the latest changes to healthcare law, but is another flashpoint in repeated attempts to restrict tribal authority over mineral rights and their effects on energy and environmental policy, such as the standoff at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation over the Dakota Access Pipeline. The roundtable organized by Rafael Martínez and Rebecca Schreiber, and published here, urges us to consider the intersection of scholarship and activism, as the conversations around sovereignty, sanctuary, and settler colonialism are ongoing, and never more pressing.

They invite us to consider alternative perspectives to issues around the criminalization of the undocumented.

Cristóbal Garza-González’s extended interview with Stephanie Elizondo Griest shifts the stage of Latinx encounters. In their conversation, a chance encounter opens up a revealing dialogue about the vivacity of Latinx writing, and this writer in particular. The conversation, like the ideas described within it, travels globally, but finds its home in the literal and figurative borderlands. In sharp contrast to those wishing to contain latinidad, Griest’s lyrical perambulations demonstrate how the writing process is about sharing stories and the lives they contain, making accessible the connections between us rather than the walls that divide.

We have the pleasure of publishing a short excerpt from Griest’s most recent work alongside the interview.

The creative and visual pieces selected for this issue help represent the ways in which memory and storytelling potentially serve vital roles as antidotes to historical exclusion. Written in English, Spanish, and Mayan, these poems and short stories exhibit the range of experiences characteristic of Latinx space. Tino Villanueva’s poems contemplate how memory intersects with history, asking the reader to confront what it is, and how it is, we remember. Renowned writer and poet Ana Castillo uses verse to stage a biting critique of current politics, calling on race and culture that might provide a powerful rejoinder to political narratives of exclusion.

Domino Renee Perez’s poignant story of pain and love focuses on the relationship between people, and readers are treated to the quirkiness of a family brought together by the birth of child, where even a hospital room can be converted into the intimate space of family reunion. In her story, family dynamics are simultaneously familiar and made new, and we, like the characters, are reminded—if but momentarily—of the moments that cement themselves to memory. Urayoán

Chiricú Journal, Vol. 3.1

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THE PLACES AND SPACES OF LATINX CULTURES

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Noel’s poems flit between language, evoking landscape ever changing, ever shifting, and his poems search for a “history of blood” tied up in the vestiges of memory its speaker strives to recall. Wildernain Villegas Carrillo’s poems connect to a long and storied past, rooted firmly in the space of the Yucatán, but in its embodied memory, the past is one still in the making. Since 2005, when LinManuel Miranda premiered In the Heights, the Washington Heights neighborhood has become a nationally recognized symbol of Latinx cultural life. Luis Guzmán Valerio offers a different take on this space, examining the fragments of memory that signal different routes, crossings that get grounded in place, whether Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, or Manhattan and Queens. Sexuality, violence, and gendered expectations come to a head, but in doing so reveal new pathways for Latinx subjectivity.

Finally, the review section showcases the visibility of Latinx culture in mainstream, contemporary global culture, as well as the plasticity and resilience of Latinx culture. Berenice Sánchez reviews Adelina Anthony’s powerful Bruising for Besos, while José de Jesus Flores Figueroa turns to Latinx representation in Hollywood. Included in the issue are also several book reviews concerned with how Latinx people and institutions construct meaning in the spaces in which they dwell, each attending to a case study of how Latinx spaces are built, remembered, forgotten, and ultimately lived; these are stories of how Latinxes reclaim space to create alternative narratives of belonging. As the diversity of these reviews demonstrates, Latinx culture is active, growing in its visibility and in its potential representations. Latinx space is a refusal to be contained or to be relegated to the shadows; ours is a space of promise and possibility.

Alberto Varon is Associate Professor at Indiana University, Bloomington, jointly appointed in English and Latino Studies (LATS), and affiliate faculty in the Departments of American Studies and Gender Studies, where he researches and teaches American, Latinx, and gender studies and literary criticism from the nineteenth century to the present. He is the author of Before Chicano: Citizenship and the Making of Mexican American Manhood, 1848–1959 (NYUP, 2018).

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New content alerts sue examines “Brown Spaces: t @iupjournals Vol 1 No 1: Vol 2 No 1: Vol 3 No 1: Vol Vol Vol Vol1 1No No2: 1: Vol2 1No No1:2: Vol22No No2: 1: Meaning, Stories of (Be)longing.”

Latina/o Cinema Poder y Cultura: t @chiricujournal Brown Spaces: Issue Editors

Issue Editors

Solimarcontents otero and Mintzi auanda Martínez-rivera

Solimar otero and Mintzi auanda Martínez-rivera

Scholarly Works

Contents

Latina/o Latina/oLiteratures, Literatures,Arts, Arts,and andCultures Cultures

Joshua Alma Enslen, EnslenBeaded Art Reflects Religion, Heritage, Jubilant Coral and Jade: How Ailana Afro-Cuban and Anthropology (Art) Navegar: Esaio literário e discussão metodológica (Entrevista) Martin A. Tsang Adriana Lisboa, Romana Radlwimmer Heart (Essay) Jasminne Mendez

Odu in Motion: Embodiment, Autoethnography, and the [un]Texting of a Living Religious Practice Alexander Fernández The Art of Witness Rosa-Linda Fregoso creative Works

Verse 17: La Espiritista (Fiction) Ernesto Quiñonez

Jubilant Coral and Jade: How Afro-Cuban Beaded Art Reflects Religion, Heritage, and Anthropology (Art) Martin A. Tsang Heart (Essay) Jasminne Mendez

Also featured

VIVAALIVE (Short Story) Itzel Guadalupe García

El sueño de la sombra (Art) Alejandra Carrillo-Estrada

Cover: The Spill/El Derrrame, Juana Alicia © 2010

Fall 2017

Fall 2017

Spring 2017

Fall 2016

Spring 2017

VIVAALIVE (Short of Story) The artwork Steven Bundy, Raphael Cornford, Ailana Enslen, Gabriel Itzel Guadalupe García Escobedo, Miguel Gandert, and Omar Sosa-Tzec El sueño de la sombra (Art) Poetry and fiction by Rocio Anica, Erika Ayón, Jeanna Neefe Matthews, Maria Alejandra Carrillo-Estrada Nieto, Silvia Ortiz, William Palomo, Eloísa Pérez-Lozano, Jim Sagel, and Cover: The Spill/El Derrrame, Ximena Keogh Serrano Juana Alicia © 2010 Essays by Josep Miquel Sobrer, Ilan Stavans, and Héctor Tobar

Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures Latina/o Literatures, Arts,Cultures and Cultures Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and

Volume 2, Number 1

Verse 17: La Espiritista Visualizing (Fiction) the Influence of Gonçalves Dias “Canção do Bird-Watching: Ernesto Quiñonez Exilio” (Art Exhibition & Essay)

Expresiones culturales y procesos de integración de migrantes: Los festivales de la Guelaguetza en California Gaspar Rivera-Salgado y Luis Escala Rabadán

Volume 1, Number 2

creativeCreative Works Works

A Latinx Folklorist’s Love Letter to American Folkloristics: Academic Disenchantment and Ambivalent Disciplinary Futures Rachel V. González-Martin

Raquel Cepeda’s Digital and Literary Publics: Twitter and Bird of Paradise Latina/o Arts,Arts, and and Cultures Latina/o Cultures MeganLiteratures, JeanetteLiteratures, Myers

Ghostly Narrators in Zoé Valdés’s Te di la vida entera and Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo: or Puro Cuento Kristina S. Gibby

Volume 2, Number 1

Volume 1, Number 1

Volume 1, Number 2

Ortiz Cofer The ArtJudith of Witness Roberta Hurtado Rosa-Linda Fregoso

Scholarly Works

Journal

AméricoDigital Mendoza-Mori Raquel Cepeda’s and Literary Publics: Twitter and Bird of Paradise Megan Jeanette Myers Trangressing Standard Language Ideologies in the Spanish-as-a-Heritage Expresiones culturales y procesos de integración de migrantes: Los festivales de la Language (SHL) Classroom Guelaguetza en California Sergio Loza Gaspar Rivera-Salgado y Luis Escala Rabadán What is in an “x”? An Exchange about the Politics of Latinx Ghostly Narrators Zoé Valdés’s di la vida entera and Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo: Kathleen in (Catalina) M. deTeOnís or Puro Cuento Kristina Gibby y peregrinos de lenguaje: La técnica de defamiliarización en dos LosS.diablos chicanas Odu in obras Motion: Embodiment, Autoethnography, and the [un]Texting of a Living Religious Jennifer PracticeServi-Roberts Alexander Fernández Language of the Flesh: Colonial Violence and Subversion in the Poetry of

Contents

Journal Journal

Journal Journal

Limpia, fija y da esplendor: Challenging the Symbolic Violence of the Royal Scholarly WorksAcademy Spanish Ana Celia Zentella A Latinx Folklorist’s Love Letter to American Folkloristics: Academic Disenchantment and Ambivalent Disciplinary Futures Quechua Language Programs in the United States: Cultural Hubs for Rachel V. González-Martin Indigenous Cultures

The PoliTics LATINA/O of language CINEMA

Poder y cultura: latinx Folklore and PoPular culture The PoliTics of language

Volume 1Volume | Number | Spring 1 | 2 Number 1 |2017 Fall 2016

Volume 2017 Volume21 || Number Number12 || Fall Spring 2017

BROWN SPACES: LATINX MEMORY, MEANING, STORIES OF (BE)LONGING Volume 3 | Number 1 | Fall 2018

VOX LATINX: AND POLITICS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY PoderLITERATURE y cultura: latinx Folklore and PoPular culture 2 | 2Number 1 |2018 Fall 2017 Volume 2 Volume | Number | Spring

The Politics of Language Latina/o Cinema

Poder y Cultura: Vox Latinx: Literature The Politics of Language Poder y Cultura: Latinx Folklore and Latinx Memory, Latinx Folklore and and Politics in the Latinx Folklore and Popular Culture Meaning, Stories Popular Culture Twenty-First Century Popular Culture •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

of (Be)Longing

Issue Editors Solimar otero and Mintzi auanda Martínez-rivera

Contents

Journal Scholarly Works

Raquel Cepeda’s Digital and Literary Publics: Twitter and Bird of Paradise

Expresiones culturales y procesos de integración de migrantes: Los festivales de la Guelaguetza en California Gaspar Rivera-Salgado y Luis Escala Rabadán

Journal

Journal

A Latinx Folklorist’s Love Letter to American Folkloristics: Academic Disenchantment and Ambivalent Disciplinary Futures Rachel V. González-Martin

Latina/o Arts, and Cultures Megan JeanetteLiteratures, Myers

JOURNAL Journal

Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures

Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures

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Ghostly Narrators in Zoé Valdés’s Te di la vida entera and Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo: or Puro Cuento Kristina S. Gibby Odu in Motion: Embodiment, Autoethnography, and the [un]Texting of a Living Religious Practice Alexander Fernández

creative Works

Verse 17: La Espiritista (Fiction) Ernesto Quiñonez Jubilant Coral and Jade: How Afro-Cuban Beaded Art Reflects Religion, Heritage, and Anthropology (Art) Martin A. Tsang

Volume 2, Number 1

Volume 1, Number 2

The Art of Witness Rosa-Linda Fregoso

Volume 3 JOURNAL Issue 3 coming 5/17/18 soon!

Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures

Heart (Essay) Jasminne Mendez VIVAALIVE (Short Story) Itzel Guadalupe García El sueño de la sombra (Art) Alejandra Carrillo-Estrada

Fall 2017

Spring 2017

Cover: The Spill/El Derrrame, Juana Alicia © 2010

MA

The PoliTics of language

2016

Volume 1 | Number 2 | Spring 2017

VOX LATINX: LITERATURE AND POLITICS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Poder y cultura: latinx Folklore and PoPular culture Volume 2 | Number 2 | Spring 2018 Volume 2 | Number 1 | Fall 2017

CHI v2n2 postcard.indd 1

Vol 1 No 2: Vol 1 No 2: The Politics of The Politics of Language Language

Vol 2 No 2: Vol 2 No 1: Vox Latinx: Literature Poder y Cultura: and Politics in the Latinx Folklore and Twenty-First Century Popular Culture

VOX LATINX: LITERATURE AND POLITICS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Volume 2 | Number 2 | Spring 2018

5/17/18 2:31 PM

Vol 2 No 2: Vox Latinx: Literature and Politics in the Twenty-First Century

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5/17/18

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Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures Critical, creative space for Latina/o scholarship and cultural expression, highlighting transnational cultural exchanges.

Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures is a peerreviewed humanities publication dedicated to both critical inquiry and cultural expression. Chiricú showcases new scholarship from diverse disciplines as well as creative works of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, the visual arts, interviews, personal essays, and reviews of books, film, and exhibitions. Each issue is thematic in nature and capacious in scope. We have published interviews with or original works by prominent artists, writers, and filmmakers, including: Cristina García, Giannina Braschi, Subscribe Silvia Ortiz, Claudia bit.ly/subscribe-chiricujournal Nina, Edmundo Desnoes, John Valadez, Submit Juana Alicia, Lourdes bit.ly/submit-chiricujournal Portillo, Alex Rivera, JSTOR and Natalia Almada; bit.ly/jstor-chiricujournal and scholarly works Project MUSE

by Ana Celia Zentella, bit.ly/muse-chiricujournal Gabriel Meléndez, and Rachel V. Connect González-Martin. t @iupjournals t @ChiricuJournal f @chiricujournal