Post Borderlandia

Bringing Chicana/o studies into conversation with queer theory and transgender studies, Post-Borderlandia examines why gender variance is such a core theme in contemporary Chicana and Chicanx narratives. It considers how Chicana butch lesbians and Chicanx trans people are not only challenging heteropatriarchal norms, but also departing from mainstream conceptions of queerness and gender identification. Expanding on Gloria Anzaldúa’s classic formulation of the Chicana as transformer of the “borderlands,” Jackie Cuevas explores how a new generation of Chicanx writers, performers, and filmmakers are imagining a “post-borderlands” subjectivity, where shifting national, racial, class, sexual, and gender identifications produce complex power dynamics. In addition, Cuevas offers fresh archival analysis of the Chicana feminist canon to reveal how queer gender variance has always been crucial to this literary tradition.

For more than forty years, Chicana author Ana Castillo has produced novels, poems, and critical essays that forge connections between generations; challenge borders around race, gender, and sexuality; and critically engage transnational issues of space, identity, and belonging. Her contributions to Latinx cultural production and to Chicana feminist thought have transcended and contributed to feminist praxis, ethnic literature, and border studies throughout the Americas. Transnational Chicanx Perspectives on Ana Castillo is the first edited collection that focuses on Castillo’s oeuvre, which directly confronts what happens in response to cultural displacement, mixing, and border crossing. Divided into five sections, this collection thinks about Castillo’s poetics, language, and form, as well as thematic issues such as borders, immigration, gender, sexuality, and transnational feminism. From her first political poetry, Otro Canto, published in 1977, to her mainstream novels such as The Mixquiahuala Letters, So Far From God, and The Guardians, this collection aims to unravel how Castillo’s writing impacts people of color around the globe and works in solidarity with other third world feminisms.

2022 Honorable Mention, John Leo & Dana Heller Award for Best Single Work, Anthology, Multi-Authored, or Edited Book in LGBTQ Studies, Popular Culture Association (PCA) 2023 Honorable Mention, Outstanding Book, Latinx Studies Section of Latin American Studies Association (LASA) This study argues that powerful authorities and institutions exploit the ambiguity of Latinidad in ways that obscure inequalities in the United States. Is Latinidad a racial or an ethnic designation? Both? Neither? The increasing recognition of diversity within Latinx communities and the well-known story of shifting census designations have cast doubt on the idea that Latinidad is a race, akin to white or Black. And the mainstream media constantly cover the “browning” of the United States, as though the racial character of Latinidad were self-evident. Many scholars have argued that the uncertainty surrounding Latinidad is emancipatory: by queering race—by upsetting assumptions about categories of human difference—Latinidad destabilizes the architecture of oppression. But Laura Grappo is less sanguine. She draws on case studies including the San Antonio Four (Latinas who were wrongfully accused of child sex abuse); the football star Aaron Hernandez’s incarceration and suicide; Lorena Bobbitt, the headline-grabbing Ecuadorian domestic-abuse survivor; and controversies over the racial identities of public Latinx figures to show how media institutions and state authorities deploy the ambiguities of Latinidad in ways that mystify the sources of Latinx political and economic disadvantage. With Latinidad always in a state of flux, it is all too easy for the powerful to conjure whatever phantoms serve their interests.

Imagining Latinx Intimacies addresses the ways that artists and writers resist the social forces of colonialism, displacement, and oppression through crafting incisive and inspiring responses to the problems that queer Latinx peoples encounter in both daily lives and representation such as art, film, poetry, popular culture, and stories. Instead of keeping quiet, queer Latinx artists and writers have spoken up as a way of challenging stereotypes, prejudice, and violence occurring in communities ranging from Puerto Rico to sites within the mainland United States as well as transnational flows of migration. Such migrations are explored in several ways including the movement of queer people from Chile to the United States. To address these matters, artistic thinkers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, and Rane Arroyo have challenged such socio-political problems by imagining intimate social and intellectual spaces that resist the status quo like homophobic norms, laws, and policies that hurt families and communities. Building on the intellectual thought of researchers such as Jorge Duany, Adriana de Souza e Silva, and José Esteban Muñoz, this book explains how the imagined spaces of Latinx LGBTQ peoples are blueprints for addressing our tumultuous present and creating a better future.

Provides the most comprehensive collection of scholarship on the multiethnic literature of the United States A Companion to the Multiethnic Literature of the United States is the first in-depth reference work dedicated to the histories, genres, themes, cultural contexts, and new directions of American literature by authors of varied ethnic backgrounds. Engaging multiethnic literature as a distinct field of study, this unprecedented volume brings together a wide range of critical and theoretical approaches to offer analyses of African American, Latinx, Native American, Asian American, Jewish American, and Arab American literatures, among others. Chapters written by a diverse panel of leading contributors explore how multi-ethnic texts represent racial, ethnic, and other identities, center the lives and work of the marginalized and oppressed, facilitate empathy with the experiences of others, challenge racism, sexism, homophobia, and other hateful rhetoric, and much more. Informed by recent and leading-edge methodologies within the field, the Companion examines how theoretical approaches to multiethnic literature such as cultural studies, queer studies, ecocriticism, diaspora studies, and posthumanism inform literary scholarship, pedagogy, and curricula in the US and around the world. Explores the national, international, and transnational contexts of US ethnic literature Addresses how technology and digital access to archival materials are impacting the study, reception, and writing of multiethnic literature Discusses how recent developments in critical theory impact the reading and interpretation of multiethnic US literature Highlights significant themes and major critical trends in genres including science fiction, drama and performance, literary nonfiction, and poetry Includes coverage of multiethnic film, history, and culture as well as newer art forms such as graphic narrative and hip-hop Considers various contexts in multiethnic literature such as politics and activism, immigration and migration, and gender and sexuality A Companion to the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States is an invaluable resource for scholars, researchers, undergraduate and graduate students, and general readers studying all aspects of the subject

This reader introduces students to the variety and complexity of Latinxs′ experiences in the U.S., and prepares them for further study in this interdisciplinary field. The opening essay, written by the editors, offers a broad overview of the approximately 59 million people in the U.S. who identify as Hispanic. The rest of the book will consist of contributed essays from Latina(o)/Chicana(o) scholars on a range of subjects including immigration, citizenship, and deportation; racial identities; political participation and power; educational and economic achievement; family; religion; media and popular culture. Although the essays are written for lower-division undergraduates, they reflect many of the leading theoretical and methodological approaches in the field. The essays are unified by an intersectional approach, demonstrating how experiences and life chances of Latinxs are also shaped by gender, social class, sexuality, age, and citizenship status.

LatinAsian Cartographies examines how Latina/o and Asian American writers provide important counter-narratives to the stories of racial encroachment that have come to characterize twenty-first century dominant discourses on race. Susan Thananopavarn contends that the Asian American and Latina/o presence in the United States, although often considered marginal in discourses of American history and nationhood, is in fact crucial to understanding how national identity has been constructed historically and continues to be constructed in the present day. Thananopavarn creates a new “LatinAsian” view of the United States that emphasizes previously suppressed aspects of national history, including imperialism, domestic racism during World War II, Cold War operations in Latin America and Asia, and the politics of borders in an age of globalization. LatinAsian Cartographies ultimately reimagines national narratives in a way that transforms dominant ideas of what it means to be American.

Watchfulness shapes many Chicanxs' and other People of Color's everyday lives in San Diego. Experiencing racist discrimination can lead to becoming vigilant, which frames their subjectivity. Focusing particularly on Chicanxs, we show how they seek to intervene against structural inequalities and threats in their lives, such as by re-claiming space, consciousness raising, participating in protests, and healing practices. We argue that contestations surrounding belonging create particularly watchful selves and that this is a significant aspect of borderland lifeworlds more broadly. The book advances the Anthropology of borders, coloniality, subjectivity, and race, as well as contributing to Chicano and Latino Studies, and Urban Studies. Pushing the boundaries of conventional approaches, this book is methodologically innovative by including team fieldwork, digital ethnography, and illustrative work by a local artist. It fills a gap in Security Studies by examining peer-to-peer vigilance beyond top-down surveillance and bottom-up "sousveillance," and expanding previous understandings of watchfulness as an ambivalent practice that can also express care and contribute to community building, as well as representing a "way of life."