Latino Studies最新文献

This essay analyzes two contemporary Latinx operas, Cruzar la Cara de la Luna (2010) and Pancho Villa from a Safe Distance (2016), to develop the “acousmatic” as a racialized form of listening. Acousmatic refers to a sound whose source is undetermined, a form of hearing without access to the source of the sound’s production. Contemporary Latinx opera stages a politicized form of acousmatic listening that forces an encounter with what is otherwise unheard, unseen, or refused. I develop this idea to unpack the relationships among race, sound, and performance in this sphere.

This article offers a critical analysis of two poetic appropriations of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy: “El Hamlet Fronterizo” by Guillermo Gómez-Peña and “To be a Pocha or not to be” by Iris De Anda. Both poets use the languages, geographies, and ontological concerns of the US–Mexico Borderlands to reimagine the Danish prince’s famously introspective speech as a performance text that reflects their lived experiences and consciousnesses as border subjects. For Gómez-Peña and De Anda, the figure of Hamlet becomes a means through which to reject Western colonial worldviews, to refuse assimilation, and to center Borderlands ways of knowing, being, and doing. When Hamlet’s soliloquy is reimagined in these ways, the most urgent question is not whether or not to be but rather what it means to be someone whose existence is made vulnerable precisely because it exceeds the increasingly policed boundaries of nation, language, race, and gender.

The workplace emerged as a primary site of infectious disease during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in occupations having little to no social distancing or potential for remote work. The pandemic had a huge impact on the physical and mental health of farmworkers, and it exposed the labor-market inequities in the United States, exacerbated by the lack of preventive measures to protect these vulnerable workers. In this paper, we use a social constructionist perspective to explore the meaning of “essential worker” by interviewing thirty farmworkers who during the pandemic came to work in a labor market shaped by exploitation and oppression and related unsafe working conditions. We argue that these workers, who are considered “essential” but treated as disposable, work under structural racist capitalism, and our findings contribute to a better understanding of how these Northern California farmworkers perceive being essential under these working conditions.

This article analyzes Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier as a hemispheric critique of racialization and social dispossession bridging the gap between Central America and the United States. Examining the homeless and the refugee subjects in the novel as structurally equivalent, the article explores the ramifications of internal and external displacements in relation to the protections of citizenship and political asylum. It explores how neoliberal ideologies and practices allow for the creation and naturalization of urban spaces of abjection, effectively condoning the social death of subjects not deemed worthy of respect or social value. In doing so, the article demonstrates how social and spatial dispossession is subsumed into everyday life, becoming naturalized and invisible. It demonstrates how social and political disenfranchisement are constructed discursively and spatially, considering the novel’s stories of immigration and asylum-seeking not only as Latina/o/x stories but also as intrinsic parts of the stories that constitute the United States.

This article examines two 1984 murals—Keeping the Peace in Central America and Culture Contains the Seed of Resistance, Which Blossoms into the Flower of Liberation—painted in San Francisco’s Mission District by members of PLACA, a multi-ethnic collective of thirty-six mural activists. I discuss how the artists depicted imperial encounters in their murals dedicated to US-Central American solidarity as a strategy for building transnational support for Central American liberation movements in the 1980s. PLACA transformed Balmy Alley by creating twenty-seven murals protesting US intervention in Central America and celebrating Central American culture. The collective played a pivotal role in transforming Balmy Alley and manifested the larger Central American solidarity movement taking place across the United States.

This essay examines the cultural stakes of Latinx involvement in the outdoor diversity movement through a close reading of the organization Latino Outdoors’ blog, Yo Cuento. Contributors to Yo Cuento conceptualize Latinx outdoor engagement and environmentalism as rooted in transnational notions of family, place, and community rather than US national identity and individuality. Yo Cuento challenges the structures of racial capitalism that attempt to reduce Latinxs to their productivity and labor identities. In celebrating Latinx leisure, blog contributors reclaim a pleasurable relationship to the environment severed by colonialism, immigration, and economic exploitation. The transmedia testimonios of Yo Cuento collectively produce a Latinx outdoor recreation identity that reclaims a pleasurable, unproductive, shared (rather than possessive) relationship with the more-than-human world.

This article examines the performance of Latinidad in the television show Switched at Birth (2011–2017) by excavating how Latinidad is used as a mask-like prop that characters can easily put on or discard depending on their ethno-racial and economic contexts. By connecting media, Latinx, and performance studies, this article demonstrates how popular television series exploit Latinx identities and render them commodities that are easily consumable by the presumed white viewer. Through an analysis of the show’s two teenaged “Latinx” characters—Bay Kennish and Daphne Vasquez—this study focuses on how one can presumably become and unbecome Latinx if one happens to fit a certain idealized image of Latinidad. In examining the policing and erasing of Latinx identity in the show, this article contributes to the growing field of Latinx pop culture studies by illustrating how shows like Switched at Birth fail to provide a sense of cultural belonging for Latinx audiences.

This article examines how the novels Across a Hundred Mountains (2006) by Reyna Grande and The Guardians (2007) by Ana Castillo participate in a hemispheric conversation about migration, disappearance, and gender violence. The article considers these two works of fiction within the context of the vanishing of immigrants in the borderlands and the subsequent search and mourning endured by the relatives. The study invokes the concept of sovereignty to establish a link between the disappearances at the border and authoritarian regimes, which is visible through Giorgio Agamben’s paradigm of homo sacer, an individual stripped of legal status and exposed to death. Further, the article analyzes how these novels focus on the precarious living conditions, violence, and oppressive circumstances of families left behind.