Latino Studies最新文献

Since the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre, a plethora of artistic and commemorative efforts have been erected in Orlando, Florida. While the commemorative sites have brought attention to LGQTB + causes and visibility in the area, they have also obfuscated the presence of queer Latinx lives that were disproportionately affected by the massacre. With twenty-three of the forty-nine victims being Puerto Rican and 90% being Latinx, the presence of Latinx lives in this commemorative wall has brought attention to the simultaneous visibility and invisibility of Latinxs in the Central Florida region. This article examines the Pulse nightclub’s physical and archived artistic productions to create a mosaic commemorative site that breaks spatial and temporal limitations. I develop the concept of kaleidoscopes of memory, or the continual structural and intersectional traumas that define memory for minoritized peoples, to better understand the representational incongruencies in the memorial wall. This article reveals the tensions and contradictions of Latinx belonging in Central Florida that experience continual shrouding in the broader US imagination.

For more than two decades, Latina/o critical theory (LatCrit) scholars have called for moving beyond the Black/White binary in conversations on race. By emphasizing Black people, proponents have argued, we ignore Latinx and other racialized minorities who are neither Black nor White and who often live in transnational contexts with transnational identities. This article engages with those scholars who call for moving beyond the Black/White binary by asking how their arguments stimulate anti-Black discourse. Ultimately, LatCrit writers fail to engage with Black Latinx critical race theorists in both the United States and Latin America and, as a result, reproduce anti-Blackness. The call to move beyond a Black/White binary is really a call to make Latinx Blackness invisible. As such, it is not a step toward racial justice but another articulation of anti-Blackness presented as progressive racial thinking. Here I engage with Black Latinx and Black Latin American critical race scholars who challenge US LatCrit scholars to think about how anti-Blackness is part of Latinidad.

This essay traces the connections between queer theory and the term “Latinx” to argue that the widespread academic embrace of Latinx has imposed a queer anti-identitarianism onto the term. Arguing that Latinx has become too mainstream, this essay shows how Latinx’s initial gender nonconforming, nonbinary, and trans origins and radical politics have been recuperated and depoliticized to mask and preserve cis-normativity as a hegemonic structure of power in the academy. The essay contends that Latinx would benefit from avowing a selective specificity, rather than queer anti-identitarianism, and from emphasizing the need to practice Latinx politics, instead of merely invoking the term in a nominal move toward inclusivity.

Recent scholarship on Latinos and crime has invited scholars to reimagine the scholarly project of Latino Studies more broadly. Existing accounts suggest Latino Criminology (LC) can help decolonize or correct colonial, imperialist, and carceral logics within the study of Latinos and crime. However, this paper asks: what actual contributions can Latino studies offer LC, and vice versa? To explore this question, we examine how entire communities—including our own student-educator relationships—are differentially affected by police killings, as Latine/xs are forced to enact the labor of healing in the immediate aftermath of their loved ones’ deaths. We examine how carceral violence makes healing unavoidable not only for families and loved ones of people killed by police, but also for students, educators, and academics writing about police terror. By examining how social media, corporate news networks, and criminological analyses narrate the impact of carceral and police violence in Latine/x communities, we invite scholars to engage in their own healing from depoliticized analyses that seek new paradigms and theories without lifting up the ongoing efforts of local communities already organizing against racialized carceral violence.

K. S. León (2021) has proposed the need to “unfuck” criminology’s colonial investments via the possibilities offered by Latino criminology. However, to “‘unfuck’ criminology’s colonial inheritances,” we introduce three intervening premises: sexual politics are central to the uses and understandings of “fuck,” sexual violence is central to colonialism, and colonialism is central to academic governance. We argue that Latina/o/x criminologies’ calls for decolonization must contend with sexual governance as a cohering feature of Western institutions’ colonial foundations, and that the academy is one such institution. In other words, we assert that contending with sexual violence is a mandate for academics in fields that grapple with colonial violence—like Latinx criminology—to disrupt the structures and practices that enable sexual violence as a regular feature of academic discipline, exclusion, and punishment. We build with Latinx/a/o studies scholarship to challenge three harmful fantasies upheld in mainstream criminology: (1) academic work is distinct from sex work; (2) criminologists do not enact or experience sexual violence; and (3) due process can protect us from sexual violence.

A 6.4 magnitude earthquake struck Puerto Rico on 7 January 2020, adding a new episode to the multilayered political, economic, and humanitarian crisis affecting the island since 2006. This article demonstrates how the recovery efforts and management of the emergency constitute a state crime. The analysis draws from governmental and journalistic investigation and engages with legal and critical discourse analysis to provide a criminological and sociolegal analysis of state crimes in Puerto Rico–which feature prominently in US colonial and racialized history and anticorruption policies in PR–and of the genealogy of colonial violence that generates these and other legalized and state-facilitated harms. The article analyzes legally contrived states of exception and executive orders used to manage the earthquake emergency, the cases of corruption and criminal negligence (so salient in the public conscience that structural critiques of incompetent, unethical, and extractive governance have been coalesced by popular movements under the hashtag #wandalismo), the legislative public hearing on the case of the government hoarding and stalling distribution of disaster supplies, and the anticorruption mobilizations of January 2020. The article articulates the timeliness and urgency of prioritizing research and theorizing of state crimes within the burgeoning field of Latina/o/x criminology.

Abstract

Media and public discourse perpetuate the myth that immigrants—particularly those from Latin America and the undocumented—are crime-prone. Numerous empirical studies refute this. Fewer studies examine how Latinx communities internalize these faulty associations, or how they perceive criminality of other Latinx people. We address two research questions: How do first- and second-generation Latinx individuals conceptualize immigration-related offenses (e.g., driving without a license or working without authorization) in relation to criminality? How do they view their own law-breaking behavior and that of other first- and second-generation Latinx people? To answer these questions, we analyze data from focus groups in a diverse South Florida community with a large indigenous Guatemalan-Maya population. We find participants’ framing of their own immigration-related offenses, like working without authorization or driving without a license, can be understood through the lens of techniques of neutralization. We also find participants exhibited a unique “immigrant legal consciousness” in which immigration-related law-breaking is distinct from “mainstream” state-centered definitions of criminal behavior.

This article situates the US-Mexico border and anti-immigration law in the context of US imperialism and settler colonialism. It centers Tohono O’odham land, presence, and Indigenous sovereignty in an examination of Latin@/x migration, border policies, and im/migrant rights. Contributing to scholarship in critical Latinx indigeneities, this article contends that the structures and mechanisms of border militarization are inherently anti-Indigenous. While targeting migrants and refugees who often are Indigenous elsewhere, this racial profiling happens on Native land and against Native peoples. The article further examines discourses of sanctuary in relation to Indigenous sovereignty to spotlight the necessity of integrating Indigenous perspectives within im/migrant rights discourses.