Friday, April 14, 2017

Session 1: 9:00 – 10:15 a.m.

1. Race, Masculinity, and the Coloniality of History in Puerto Rican Literature

“And always Puerto Ricans”: Urban Archipelagoes and the Coloniality of Middle-class, White, Gay Male Desire in 1970s New York” Enmanuel Martínez, Rutgers University A popular gay novel set and published in the social and political aftermath of the monumental Stonewall Riots of 1969, Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance (1978) marks a major turning point in the larger history of post-World War II queer literature and liberation in the United States. Set across the urban archipelago of 1970s NYC, Dancer from the Dance tells the story of Anthony Malone, a middle-class, white, gay man, and his lifelong desire for island spaces (i.e. Manhattan, Long Island, and Fire Island) and bodies—above all, the body of the working-class, gay, Puerto Rican men: “Each year you love someone new: Orientals in 1967, Italians in 1968, blacks in 1969, and bearded blonds in 1970; and always Puerto Ricans… You remember the eyes, as beautiful as bare trees against the sky: naked, away. Years pass loving such eyes” (Holleran 131). I argue that the figure of the silent, working-class, gay, Puerto Rican man in Holleran’s novel is one that inadvertently flattens and, thus, trivializes the historical presence and contributions of queer Latinxs in NYC in the 1970s in general and queer Puerto Rican men in particular. Drawing upon the work of Latin American and U.S. Latinx scholars of decolonial thought and criticism such as Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Maria Lugones and Walter Mignolo, my paper performs a close reading of Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance with the aim of decolonizing such literary representations of the hegemony of middle-class, white, gay male desire. Tracing the structures of queer coloniality in Holleran’s novel, my paper examines the degree to which the mute presence of a racialized other (in this case, the silent body of the working-class gay Puerto Rican man) functions as “underside” of middle-class, white, gay “modernity”—the latter fundamentally depending of the presence of the former for its own erotic self-realization. My analysis of Holleran’s novel thus elucidates the degree to which a colonial logic of representation continues to structure popular literary representations of queer Latinxs. In critiquing the coloniality of middle-class, white, gay male desire as reproduced by Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, I work to better acknowledge and validate the central role that queer Latinxs have and continue to play in the larger history of contemporary, U.S. America LGBTQ politics and art.

“Identity Starts at Home: Developing Counterhegemonic Afro-Latino Masculinity in Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets” Regina Marie Mills, University of Texas at Austin The family home is the first place that Piri Thomas realizes that his ambiguous identity leaves his racial loyalty and his national and ethnic pride in question. Through a reading of Piri Thomas’s Down These Streets, I argue that Piri invokes a ‘counterhegemonic Afro-Latinidad’ in the spirit of William Luis’s claim that, “Afro-Latino identity in particular sets the groundwork for questioning the hegemonic positionality to which Afro-Latinos and non-Afro-Latinos subscribe.” Piri’s Afro-Latino masculinity becomes a means of interrogating the racial and ethnic assumptions of Black, Puerto Rican, and white communities, though it fails to interrogate, and often incorporates, troubling gender and sexual politics. Within Thomas’s memoirs, the home is the starting place in Piri’s construction of a counterhegemonic Afro-Latino masculinity that serves both as an identity and a lens of interrogation. By thinking deeply about the subtle and overt acts of racism that he experiences in his family, Piri develops a counterhegemonic Afro- Latino masculinity that challenges the assumptions and actions of his family and the Puerto Ricans and Black Americans that he meets in the streets. In this presentation, I identify the tense relationship between Piri and his father as the catalyst for the centering of his Afro-Latino identity

“‘The island was abandoned by history’: Geographies of Race in Victor Hernández Cruz’s Red Beans” Gabriela Ramirez-Chavez, University of California, Santa Cruz I draw on Frances R. Aparicio’s concept of tropicalization, which views the politics of representation as a multidirectional process “by examining the shifting semantics of cultural signifiers,” to link the geographies of race to the idea of spatial and racial time.1 Departing from past studies on tropicalization and, specifically, Hernández Cruz’s “hispanization” of English, I argue that he “tropicalizes” both the United States and the island of Puerto Rico by deconstructing and recombining the signs associated with each space. Cruz’s collection Red Beans (1997) destabilizes Western dichotomies of time and space, North and South, and Self and Other. By linking industrial materials and modern technologies with the West/“future” and romantic images of the tropics with the Caribbean/“past,” his speaker appears to reify developmentalist approaches that situate Latin America in an earlier stage of development vis-à- vis the United States and, by extension, what Johannes Fabian calls “the denial of coevalness,” or the ethnographer’s assumption that subaltern subjects do not exist in the same historical time. Yet through various poetic techniques, Hernández Cruz converges both spaces and conveys their interdependency, inseparability, and synchronicity.

2. Re/imagining Race: Borders, Gender, and Eugenics

“La Leyenda Negra: Racial Imaginaries of Haiti and the US/Mexico Border” Katherine Steelman, University of California, San Diego In this paper I examine blackness in Tijuana, BC, MX, specifically focusing on how the US media, Mexican media, and social media users have been representing the migration of Haitian refugees to the city. In 2004, wrote an article titled, “Haiti: la maldición blanca,” in which he argues that since its independence from France, Haiti has been cursed by white imperial powers for being the site of the first successful slave rebellion. Much scholarship has been produced, including that of Manoucheka Celeste, and Robert Lawless, about the ways in which the media has been complicit in this “curse” against Haiti. New York Times articles dating back to 1915 have laid the foundation for the vilification of Haiti in the US imaginary. Similarly, Tijuana itself is a place that has seen material ramifications as a result of representations in US media. An article published in the New York Times in 1920 sets the groundwork for the ways Tijuana is represented in US cultural production, which is both racialized and sexualized. Fast forward to the present day, and there is increasing news coverage of Haitian migration to Tijuana, which is building upon these histories of representations of both Haiti and Tijuana. With these histories in mind I examine representations of Tijuana and Haiti in newspaper archives, comic books, film and literature, in juxtaposition with contemporary representations of Haitians in Tijuana. I analyze these representations not only to examine their negative effects, but also to take up the ways in which they have been resisted and reimagined by alternative representations in culture and social media.

“Writing While Brown: , , and Lucha Corpi” Leigh Johnson, Marymount College Life writing (memoir and autobiography) puts the writer in the position of the character. While Ana Castillo’s recent memoir, Black Dove: Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me, chronicles her son’s arrest and incarceration, it also positions her as a daughter, lover, and mother. The fraught politics of race comes to bear upon the relationships presented in the book from her relationship with her darker- skinned mother, to her “brown” son, to her light-skinned lover. This essay takes up the conference theme of Latnix Lives, Matters, and Imaginaries: Theorizing Race in the 21st Century by examining how recent life writing by Chicana authors (Lucha Corpi, Sandra Cisneros, and Ana Castillo) positions the writer as lone intellectual in struggle with the ramifications of the US history of racial prejudice and violence. The writers use their essays as a way of theorizing the ways in which race affects their ability to parent, write, move, and live.

“Remapping Eugenics and Mestizaje in River of Angels (2014)” Christine Fernández, U.S. Military Academy, West Point The canon of Chicanx literature has often situated itself within the borderlands as a historical site of political, linguistic, and cultural contestation and renegotiation, which discloses the region’s complex settlement following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848. Earlier canonical texts, such as Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s novel, The Squatter and the Don (1885) observe the early formative cultural and racial/ethnic cartography of Californio/ Mexican-American settlers throughout the late 19th century. Other key authors, such as Alejandro Morales, have incorporated the concept of mestizaje, within the locus of Southern California. He returns to early California settlement with his most recent novel, River of Angels (2014), which unearths the hidden history of eugenics and its central role in the urban development of Southern California’s Los Angeles River basin. I argue that Morales’s novel demonstrates the aesthetics of mestizaje through his fiction as an ongoing process that is not only counterpuntal to the historical framework of eugenics, but it allows us to reassess the cultural cartography and intersections of Californios, mestizo Hispanics, and the contributions of other ethnic/ racial identities throughout Southern California.

3. Documenting Crisis: Myths, Immigrants and the Intervention of Literature

“‘Refugees of a World on Fire’: The Turn to the Undocumented in Women of Color Feminisms” Esmeralda Arrizón-Palomera, Cornell University This project identifies the post-Civil Rights Era as a moment in which the undocumented immigrant emerges as an analytical framework in U.S. women of color feminisms. Specifically, this project examines the use of the term “refugee” in writings by radical women of color during the 1980s to describe the experience of women of color in the U.S. and to name their connection to women in other parts of the world. I read the turn to the “refugee” as a shift from a national to an international perspective in women of color feminisms that is prompted by U.S. domestic and foreign policies and argue that the use of the term “refugee” is an important turning point in the development of Chicana/Latina and Black feminist thought and praxis. I map the shift from a national to an international perspective in women of color feminisms in feminist anthologies by women of color that include This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, All the Women are White, all the Blacks are Men, but Some of us are Brave, and Making Face, Making Soul=Haciendo Caras and discuss how the turn to the “refugee” strengthens the links between women of color in the United States.

"Chupacabras: They Myth of the Bad Immigrant" Silvia Rodríguez Vega, University of California, Los Angeles Few studies/films have highlighted the voices of criminalized immigrants impacted by an enforcement focused immigration system. This community-created visual ethnography seeks to shed light on those experiences through digital media. Based on interviews in California, undocumented immigrants and allies talk about their first encounters with dehumanization or discrimination based on their undocumented status, and how they have experienced it in their daily lives. This film uses the metaphor of the “Chupacabras” as a threatening and dangerous depiction of undocumented immigrants coming into the U.S. Thus, this film is different from the “worthy” immigrant narrative (i.e. DREAMers) that have become popularized in recent years, where every immigrant is bad until proven exceptional. Through humor and satire, we want to expose the “good/bad” immigrant binary. As the media perpetuates a discourse of immigrants as dangerous and threatening to a sanitized American way of life, (Chavez, 2001, 2008, Santa Ana, 2002, 2012) my aim is that this film and study will bring focus to the often forgotten stories of people left out of the immigrant right’s agenda and often the main targets of punitive legal measures. I will also discuss the Chupacabra Selfie Project that has emerged from film screenings, where people get involved in the dialogue and take a stance through the hashtags #YourChupacabras and #NotYourChupacabras as a way of showing solidarity.

“In the Cut: Latina/o Literature and Criticism in a Time of Crisis” Belinda Linn Rincón, John Jay College

4. Affective Burdens: Meloncholia, Shame, and Stereotypes

““When the Anglo Came Into as a Foreigner”: Reies López Tijerina and the Racial Melancholia of the Indohispano” Nicholas M. Duron, New York University In this paper, I address the affective and psychic dimensions racialization of the “Indo-hispano,” the principal resistant subject co-produced by Chicano activist Reies López Tijerina and La Alianza Federal de Mercedes as part of their land grant movement of the 1960s and 1970s. A unique racial formation, the Indo-hispano acts as a generative site for rethinking history writing and alternative genealogies and geographies of Mexican American mestizaje. Works such as Rudy Busto’s King Tiger (2006) and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Roots of Resistance (2007), as well as several recent articles and a panel at the 2016 National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies conference, consider the legacy and significance of Tijerina, the Alianza, and other legal claims to land grant recognition as early articulations of anti-colonial critique of the U.S. Taking Tijerina’s autobiography Mi lucha por la tierra (English translation: “They Called Me King Tiger”: My Struggle for the Land) as my source text, this paper will follow logic of Tijerina’s and La Alianza’s their redeployment of Spanish colonial history for an oppositional politics of loss that resists and restructures melancholic racial formations in relation to indigeneity and to whiteness. Ultimately, I read the discursive formation of the Indo-hispano subject as an attempt at navigating complex coalitional alliances across racial identity categories and a call for the production of alternative racial imaginaries.

“Embodied Shaming of/in Diaspora: Response and (Re)Negotiation of Shame in Migdalia Cruz’s Yellow Eyes” L. Bailey McDaniel, Oakland University Psychologist Gershen Kaufman argues, “Shame is important because no other affect is more disturbing to the self, none more central to identity.” If Kaufman is correct and shame is the most instrumental of emotions in shaping self, then what are the repercussions for an individual or a community who suffers the agony of shame that specifically orbits ethnic subjectivity? The powerful drama of Nuyorican playwright Migdalia Cruz regularly presents audiences with characters who endure sexual, physical, emotional, and culturally-based trauma - - traumas that are often a consequence of their ethnically-, diasporically- or class-informed marginalization. In her formidable 1999 play Yellow Eyes, Cruz constructs a Bronx neighborhood populated by Nuryorican and African American characters who endure such traumas, from contemporary adolescents dealing with sexual abuse, neglect, poverty, and interracial violence; to beloved great-grandparents still haunted by the trauma of slavery in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico. Shame theorists agree that trauma produces shame: an illogical-but-overpowering desire to disappear based in a self-loathing that itself emerges from a belief in one’s unworthiness. My paper explores how Cruz’s brilliant and lyrical play employs the affect of shame, particularly embodied shame, as a figurative battleground for reconciling and often resisting the emotional and material violence that accompanies diaspora. I suggest, in other words, that as a pyscho-social phenomenon that shapes community subjectivity as well as individual selfhood, narratives of and resistance to (trauma-based) shame exist for Cruz as a compelling and resilient (if sometimes excruciating) negotiation of the violent legacies of European and American imperialism.

“Soy Brown and Nerdy: The ChicaNerd in Chicana Young Adult (YA) Literature” Cristina Herrera, California State University, Fresno In their 2016 music video for the song, “Soy Yo,” the Colombian duo, Bomba Estéreo, features an unknown but instantly lovable young Latina girl as the protagonist. In her long braids, overalls, thick-rimmed glasses, and Crocs shoes, one thing is for certain: this young Latina is unabashedly a nerd. Borrowing Bomba Estéreo’s mantra of “soy yo,” I examine this reclamation and powerful acceptance of one’s nerdy Chicana self in two young adult (YA) texts by Chicana writers, Ashley Hope Pérez’s What Can(t) Wait (2011) and Isabel Quintero’s Gabi, A Girl in Pieces (2014). While popular culture and mainstream media have shaped the well-known figure of the nerd as synonymous with White maleness, Chicana YA literature subverts the nerd stereotype through its negation of this identity as always White and male. These ChicaNerds, as I dub them, unite their burgeoning sociopolitical consciousness as young nonwhite girls with their “nerdy” traits of bookishness and love of learning. Combining the sociopolitical consciousness of Chicanisma with one aligned to the well-known image of the “nerd,” ChicaNerds learn to navigate the many complicated layers of coming to an empowered declaration of “soy yo.” I unearth the ways in which this nerd identity offers teenaged Chicanas an empowered subjectivity in stark contrast to all-too familiar stereotypes of the fumbling, rejected (White male) nerd in popular culture. While the characters I study do not necessarily refer to themselves as nerds, they do, in fact, claim their right to intellectual curiosity and enthusiasm for “nerdy” school subjects, qualities I read as nerdiness.

Session 2: 10:25-11:40 a.m.

5. Latinidad and the Undead

This panel explores the racial, gendered, and sexual politics mediated the relationship between Latinos/as and Goth subculture. Addressing the limits and possibilities of Latino Goth and the adoption of Goth by Latinas/os in response to political challenges, the negotiation of identities, and as a site of alternative kinship practices, each panelist will foreground how understanding alternative cultural practices need not be divorced from racial/ethnic histories. Moreover, the recognition of these histories as alive and well—“undead,” as it were—allows us to rethink Latina/o literary, music, and youth cultures from fresh, transnational, and “dark” perspectives.

Chairs: Ariana Ruiz, Assistant Professor, University of Iowa; Richard T. Rodríguez, University of California, Riverside

“…tears and blood and rain: Their Dogs Came With Them and the Urban Gothic” Annemarie Pérez, California State University Dominguez Hills U.S. literary critic Leslie Fiedler writes of gothic literature “it is the gothic form that has been most fruitful in the hands of our best writers,” yet relatively little has been written about the use of the gothic by authors of ethnic U.S. literature except in relation to the history of slavery. This paper offers a reading of Helena Maria Viramontes' East Los Angeles novel Their Dogs Came With Them as a Chicana/o urban gothic and science fiction novel. Her text turns the uncanny around, making Chicano culture the “normal” and the hegemonic U.S. culture the Other, the uncanny and frightening one. I argue that Their Dogs moves the gothic away from supernatural and magical real events and into explorations the reader’s state of mind regarding social issues and experiences, shifting from the seemingly gritty realism of the historical novel, into the hyperreal and uncanny of science fiction. My paper explores how Viramontes’ novel uses elements of the horrific, the violent, the unorthodox, and transgressive to explore anxieties about the instability of identity and nation. Looking at the gothic elements of Viramontes' text new light on their East Los Angeles’ historical experiences and representation, then takes this realism into the imagined oppression of the Quarantine Authority which, arguably represents the strangeness and oppression of the Chicana/o colonial experience. Their Dogs Came With Them has a gothic timelessness, addressing the history which haunts East Los Angeles, past, present and future.

“El Morro, Si!” Eliza Rodríguez y Gibson, Loyal Marymount University Mexicanized images of Morrissey, that is, those that insert the English pop star into the visual iconographies of Latinidad are everywhere online; more than one vendor on Etsy can be found selling handmade objects that evoke the semiotics of a cultural authenticity in a visual register shot through with Latina/o camp style. A queer aesthetic register that disidentifies stereotype through humor and irony, Latina/o camp articulates a potent site of material cultural production that can navigate the contradictions embodied in engagements with popular culture. Moreover, it is expansive and flexible enough to contains contradictory elements of irony and earnestness, pleasure and pain, belonging and alienation, in the case of Latina/o Goth style, embodied in the iconographies of death and aestheticized suffering. This paper focusses on the material culture created by Latina/o fans of Morrissey that articulate a particularly Latina/o goth style as filtered through a Latina/o camp sensibility, such as images of Morrissey as heavily tattooed Cholo evoking both Cholo and Gothic iconography. While Cholo-goth has begun to be articulated and theorized as an alternative site of pop-music Latinidad (focusing on the music group Prayers), the images of Morrissey that I’m most interested in are shot through with a knowing humor that complicates these embodiments of Goth style in a form of racialized and queer humor. The tongue-in-cheek and yet earnest yearning embodied in these images articulates a simultaneous state of both alienation and community that illuminates the limits and possibilities of community forged with the materials of mass culture.

“: The Latina Muse and the Bauhaus School” Richard T. Rodríguez, University of California, Riverside Taking its title from the English post-punk band Bauhaus’s 1980 single (which followed their more famous song, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” released the previous year), this talk examines the role of the Latina muse for the musicians who formed this sui generis goth group and the mutual influences between the band (and its offshoot projects) and Latinas in the U.S. Part of a larger project on the connections between U.K. post-punk artists and Latina/o communities, this talk offers a close reading of Bauhaus bassist . Haskin’s recently published autobiography, Who Killed Mister Moonlight: Bauhaus, Black Magick, and Benediction. In particular, the reading will focus on an incident Haskin recounts during which a Chicana fan confesses her love for him and passionately pleads with the bass player to open his hotel room door. Functioning primarily as a moment for Haskins to reflect on and question his long-term monogamous relationship, his description of the Chicana is quite revealing, as she is described in terms that draw attention to her ethnicity, often times bordering on racialized, stereotypical typecasting. The talk then shifts to a discussion of Love and Rockets, both the comic book created by brothers Jaime, Gilbert, and Mario Hernandez and the post-Bauhaus band launched by former band members by Haskins, Daniel Ash, and Haskins’ brother Kevin. Elaborating on how the band took their name from Los Bros Hernandez’s comic book, the talk closes by showing how the band did not have a mere familiarity with Mexican Americans during but rather an intimate report with them.

“Paint it Black: Difference and Divergence in the Work of Myriam Gurba” Ariana Ruiz, Assistant Professor, University of Iowa When asked about the intended audience for her short story collection, Painting Their Portraits in Winter (2015), Myriam Gurba declared: “I wrote this for Mexican girls who sit alone in their bedrooms at night painting their fingernails black.” While the image of the lone adolescent speaks to the embodied and performative aspects of Goth Culture, Gurba’s interest in writing Mexican-American macabre also touches upon the process of transculturation among cross- generational Mexican and American folk and popular culture as enacted by a young Chicana participant of the subculture. Loosely based on Gurba’s own coming of age and coming out, Painting places women at the center of the ghostly hauntings. Women are the violent actors as well as the most attuned to the supernatural happenings that often result from their gendered and sexual identities. As such, this paper explores the incorporation and queering of traditional Mexican and Mexican-American cultural signifiers as a way to constitute community, push codes of authenticity and femininity, while also informing a Chicana Goth sensibility. I contend that it is through Gurba’s disidentification with her Mexican grandmother’s folkloric stories and negotiation with Goth culture’s paradoxically somber and camp themes that long-standing ideas about knowable and identifiable Chicana subjectivity are challenged. The result is a productive site from where to explore new ways of being, belonging, and identifying with Chicanidad, Latinidad, gender, and sexuality.

6. On the Colorline: The Clashing Racial Paradigms of Latinidad

This panel proposes an analysis of the clashing racial paradigms that have historically defined Latinidad. Understanding that the racialization of Latinx people has frequently occurred at the intersection of U.S.-based and Latin American conceptions of race, this panel posits that it is precisely in the spaces where these discourses meet that new racial imaginaries can be formed. The panel explores the places of tension and possibility that occur on the liminal space of the colorline.

Chair: Kristie Soares, University of Massachusetts Amherst

“Nature and the Nature of Quisqueyanas’ Writing on Turtle Island at the Turn of a Century” Isabel Espinal, University of Massachusetts Amherst The urban/rural distinction in criticism of Dominican results in a racialization and association of Dominican writers with urbanness, precluding a discussion of Black Latinx culture and nature, and of Indigeneity and spirituality in Dominican literature. Nature as a space of Dominican women’s expertise come through loud and clear in the works of Marianela Medrano and Yrene Santos and from conversations with the writers themselves; yet in the spaces of contemporary USA literary criticism, they are not thought of as having anything to say about nature, similar to how African Americans are not thought to be experts about nature, but are too often seen as writing exclusively from and about urban spaces. Camille Dungy writes, “For years, poets and critics have called for a broader inclusiveness in conversations about ecocriticism and ecopoetics, one that acknowledges other voices and a wider range of cultural and ethnic concerns. African Americans, specifically, are fundamental to the natural fabric of this nation but have been noticeably absent from tables of contents. To bring more voices into conversations about human interactions with the natural world, we must change the parameters of the conversation.” Other elements in Medrano and Santos’ writings further complicate the color and gender lines drawn around their nature writing and the nature of their writing: specifically, Medrano’s engagements with Taina culture and symbolism and Santos’ alliances with a world mystical tradition.

“The Complexity and Vitality of Latinx Theater in Chicago” Priscilla Page, University of Massachusetts Amherst There is a thriving Latinx community in Chicago, one that has a longstanding theater history that has been largely ignored by both theater and Latinx scholars. In this paper, I focus on an epoch of Latinx theater history that includes four companies and spans nearly forty years. These are Latino Chicago, Aguijón, Teatro Vista, and Teatro Luna. Taken together, the work of the artists at each of these companies exemplifies the complexity of Latinx lives while employing an array of aesthetics that often upsets conventional notions about what constitutes theater and how it should be created. This community of artists serves as a model for alternative modes of production, creative partnerships in production, and the use of nontraditional spaces to showcase their work. These artists destabilize what we think theater is and where and how it should be produced. By describing the aesthetics and the artistic practice of these companies in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as well as the productions they create, I will discuss how the persistence of Brown bodies onstage undoes the predominant black/white narrative imposed on the incredibly diverse city of Chicago. My work also disrupts narrow constructions of theater history that erases Latinx contributions as it asserts and affirms the presence and the vitality of U.S. Latinx theater in the 21st century.

"Dáltonismo Chick: Colorblindness in Chica Lit" Aida Roldan Garcia, University of Massachusetts Amherst Race has been a major topic within Latina literary tradition. Works such as "This Bridge Called my Back" are examples of how Latinas have had the necessity to vindicate their voices and experiences as ethnic, gendered, racialized subjects in the last fifty years. However, this literary political stance have nowadays been subverted in certain Latina popular genres such as Chica lit. Despite portraying a wide range of racialized characters, many of these texts fail to address topics related to racial inequality and structural and societal racism. On the contrary, racial otherness does not seem to be a problem for the heroines of these novels when it comes to accessing white privilege and status. The first part of this presentation explores different reasons why these novels tend to erase issues of systemic racism from their narratives. The second part focuses on how by avoiding these topics, these novels fall into practices of colorblindness which minimize racism and racial inequalities, giving the impression to the readers that these are no longer important concerns for US society. The third part deals with the consequences that these colorblindness discourses have in relation to the construction and representation of the Latina subject. For example, how by refusing to acknowledge racialization and its social repercussion, these novels are not only representing and constructing a misleading model of Latina women, but also ignoring the complexities of Latina subjectivity.

“‘Angelito’s Not Black, He’s Cuban’: Competing Discourses of Blackness in ¿Qué Pasa U.S.A.?” Kristie Soares, University of Massachusetts Amherst This paper analyzes the clashing of Cuban and U.S.-based racial paradigms in the 1970s television sitcom ¿Qué Pasa U.S.A.? The bilingual show, which aired on P.B.S. from 1977- 1980, chronicled the humorous but often painful process of a Cuban exile family adapting to life in a racially-segregated Miami. ¿Qué Pasa, U.S.A.? was funded entirely by U.S. Office of Education Emergency School Assistance Act-Television Program (ESAA-TV), which came with a mandate to “improve interethnic and intra-ethnic relations in general and help Cuban American adolescents in particular to become bicultural, well-adjusted, self-fulfilled individuals,” as the show’s grant proposal stated. As such, the show was in the unique position of having to both cater to Cuban American viewers eager to see themselves represented on screen, and participate in a larger political mission rife with assimilationist undertones. In this paper, I posit that ¿Qué Pasa U.S.A.? navigated its multiple missions by mocking both the expectations of the Cuban American viewership and of the assimilationist politics of 1970s PBS. It did this by consistently positioning itself as a meeting place of Cuban “race-as-culture” and U.S.-based “race-as- blackness” racial discourses, deliberately pitting one against the other so as to make clear the shortcomings of both. Looking specifically at the episode “Computer Friend,” I demonstrate how the sitcom unpacked these competing racial discourses by placing them onto the body of a character that identifies as both Black and Cuban.

“The Portrait of the Activist as A Young Man: Evelio Grillo, the Popular Front, and the Freemasonry of the Race” Trent Masiki, Quinsigamond Community College This paper examines the relationship between transethnic acculturation, pragmatic nationalism, and Popular Front and liberal coalition politics in Evelio Grillo’s Black Cuban, Black American: A Memoir. Black Cuban, Black American deserves renewed and sustained attention as a bildung memoir because it is not only a narrative about Afroethnic transculturation, but it is also a story about political acculturation and maturity. Grillo’s memoir prompts significant questions about regional pride, social mobility, panethnic identity formation, and cultural authentication in post- Civil Rights, transcultural Afro-Latino autobiographical narratives.

7. Politics of Identity in Children’s and Young Adult Literature

“I Begin Within the Deep Dark Earth: Spirit, Race and Gender in Children’s Literature” Christina Garcia Lopez, University of San Francisco Children’s book writer and illustrator Maya Christina Gonzalez relates that as a child, she used to draw her “big, round Chicana face” into the blank pages of books because there were none that represented her or the people she knew. As a queer Chicana artist, author, educator, and activist, Gonzalez has approached children’s books as a site of radical, transformational change for the last 20 years; indeed, it was in 1996 that she provided the illustrations for Gloria Anzaldúa’s Prietita and the Ghost Woman/ Prietita y la llorona. More recently, in Call Me Tree/ Llamame árbol (2014), Gonzalez presents a story that creatively affirms the intersections of gender neutrality, racial diversity, and a spirituality deeply rooted in the living earth. The child narrator, drawn recognizably brown and purposefully gender-free, describes a developmental consciousness based on a relational identity to the environment, specifically trees. The child— growing like a seed “within the deep dark earth” into a full grown “tree”—reaches out towards other trees (children) who reflect racial variations and inhabit various modes of being and spatial locations. This paper argues that Gonzalez crafts the interplay between illustration and text to playfully communicate a spiritual awareness that displaces binary-based paradigms of race, gender, and being; instead the narrative embraces “seeing” ontological and embodied difference while asserting a shared belonging and “rootedness” in the earth. Drawing on Gloria Anzaldúa, Theresa Delgadillo, and Laura Pérez, I situate this children’s book as actively reflecting and promoting the actualization of a radical transformational consciousness.

“Canonical Jovenes: Adolescent Time, the Chicano Bildungsroman, and the Politics of Recovery” Noel Zavala, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana This paper focuses on the centrality of adolescence in to explore its representations of Mexican-American masculinity through an analysis of what I call “adolescent time,” a unique, liminal temporality in which adolescents simultaneously have their growth circumscribed and yet they are nonetheless permitted to explore nontraditional ways of being. Identifying “adolescence” as a form of what Dana Luciano has termed chronobiopolitics, I examine how José Antonio Villareal and Américo Paredes’ respective canonical texts, Pocho (1959) and George Washington Gómez (1990), rely on certain notions of adolescence and genre conventions of the bildungsroman to represent Mexican American coming-of-age. Concerns over identity and assimilation have long proven to be a central trope in Chicano literature, as these texts indicate, but when considered through the lens of adolescence and masculinity studies the linear development these authors ascribe to their protagonists reifies legible representations of masculinity and forecloses any lateral growth, resulting in queer identities and practices being viewed as examples of arrested developments, and yet these protagonists and other adolescent male characters in the texts invariably grow queerly. As these canonical jovenes do not offer easy sites of identification, I argue that the continued study of these texts shed light on the politics of recovery by the Chicano movement and canon.

“Becoming Latinx in Young Adult Literature in an Era of Mass Expulsions” Susana S. Martínez, DePaul University, Chicago Latinx under the age of 18 now total 18.2 million, a 47% jump since 2000. Despite the growing numbers of Latinx youth, their lived experience continues to be largely absent from Children’s and Young Adult Literature. This paper examines a corpus of works that deal with the representation of Dreamers or youth who were brought to the U.S. as children and explores what it means to be a Latinx American while liiving in the shadows due to their status in immigration limbo. Young adult novels such as The Circuit (1997) and Breaking Through (2001) by Francisco Jimenez, Libertad by Alma Fullerton (2008), Return to Sender (2009) by Julia Alvarez, and The Distance Between Us (2012) by Reyna Grande depict the distressing existence of an estimated 2.1 million undocumented youth. I addresses a range of questions to rethink racialized imaginaries centered on notions of illegality, such as: What is the “coming of age” experience like in an anti-immigrant era where the president elect characterize Mexicans as rapists that bring crime drugs into the country? Given the ‘school-to-deportation’ pipeline, how do the young protagonists cope with the fear of deportation and navigate the school system with limited English skills? Lastly, how might these works help readers of all ages better understand the root causes of migration within the larger context of globalized capitalism and neoliberalism through the lens of precarious lives?

8. Title TBA

Chair: Ana Patricia Rodriguez, University of Maryland

TBA

Session 3: 11:50-1:05 p.m.

9. Beyond and Within the Human: Race, Abjection, and Decolonial Imaginaries

“Transmogrifications in Brown: Racialized Materiality, Humanness, and The Undocumented Body in The Real Death Valley” Marcos Santiago Gonsalez, CUNY Graduate Center In her essay, “1492: A New World View,” Sylvia Wynter postulates that the model of “Man,” the Western, white, and rational subject, is “over the interests both of the flesh-and-blood individual subject and of the human species as a whole, together with, increasingly, that of the interests of all other nonhuman forms of life on this planet” (47). Laboring in the productive openness of Wynter’s work, I aim to conceptualize how the “flesh-and-blood” of Wynter’s human needs to be revised according to a shapeshifting materiality of the human, that is, to theorize racialized humanity like undocumented bodies, the nonwhite Other outside of the propter nos of Man, requires a recalibration of what constitutes the proper study of a human, accounting for the human, and how the nonhuman can become an optic for theorizing racialized bodies differently within critical race studies. I will do this by examining how, The Real Death Valley, a documentary showcasing the journey migrants from Central America and Mexico undertake through the dangerous Texas brush, stages, in its failure to humanize through filmic narrative the humans they seek to represent, alternative rubrics, protocols, and archives for theorizing the racialized body through the nonhuman. Unidentifiable bones in a mass gravesite, a wallet in the brush, an abandoned pink jacket, and a binder filled with images of bodies in the desert animate politics for engaging with racialized life in its plurality of ontological form.

"Tomate & Chocolate: There Is Life Beyond the Human, or How to Exist in Disgust and Dirt" Elena Igartuburu, University of Massachusetts Amherst Erika Lopez’s graphic “Trilogy of Tomatoes” tears apart dominant categories of race, gender and sexuality. Lopez’s raw irreverent language and cheeky stories manage to objectify and animalize the characters she presents, but far from dehumanizing her characters, the cartoonist presents an ironic account of the challenges faced by a young hybrid Latina in a world of labels. The highly ironic and insolent tone and content of the trilogy transgress the limits of propriety and intently inhabit the turbid, wet and slippery terrain of the inappropriate, the unexpected and the disgusting. As the main character Tomato “Mad Dog” Rodriguez’s adventures touch on matters of affect, community and gentrification, we witness a world in which the everyday takes on tints of the surreal. This alternative view of reality helps Tomato explore the limits and possibilities of dominant categories, including that of the human. Through the identification of the character with different objects and animals, Lopez’s questions the legitimacy and value of hegemonic notions of humanity. Far from trying to re-draw the boundaries of ordinary categories, Lopez’s narrative and characters do not struggle with fragmentation or rejection. They do not try to fit in or be recognized as human. They embrace their otherness and accommodate their lives in the uncomfortable and unstable spaces of the margins, appreciative of the productive scenario that they provide.

“Unsettling the Category of the Human: Reading the Decolonial Imaginations of Gloria Anzaldúa and Sylvia Wynter in the Era of the Anthropocene” Victoria Sánchez, University of California, Santa Cruz It is crucial to understand the instrumentality of the coloniality of power and modernity in the intertwining production of race, gender and sexuality in what Maria Lugones has called the modern/colonial gender system to theorize race in the 21st century. With the decolonial turn as most recently articulated by scholars in Latinx and Latin American studies (Nelson-Maldonado Torres 2011, Walter Mignolo 2011, Arturo Escobar 2010, Hanna, Vargas, and Saldívar 2016), my paper explores the decolonial imaginations of Gloria Anzaldúa and Sylvia Wynter to consider the ways in which Chicanx and Black women of color in the Americas have challenged the ontological and epistemological conceptions of the category of the Human. In this paper, I examine the understudied nonhuman dimensions in Gloria Anzaldúa’s seminal text Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) and Anzaldúa’s posthumously released work Light in the Dark/Luz En Lo Oscuro (Anzaldúa and Keating 2015). More specifically I consider Anzaldua’s spiritual and animal worlds as it intersects with embodiment to unsettle conceptions of race, time, space, and what it means to be human. By critically reading Sylvia Wynter’s “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human After Man Its Overrepresentation-An Argument” (2003) alongside Gloria Anzaldúa, I highlight the ways in which both scholars problematize Eurocentric, racist conceptions of the figure of Man to provide an opening into thinking about coloniality/decoloniality, race and humanness. This paper hopes not to replace the category of the human but to use Latinx literature as a way to unsettle the category of the human in order to gesture at the possibilities for theorizing about human rights, living and dying in the age of the Anthropocene and building anti-racist futures.

10. Something There is That Doesn’t Love a Ghost: Racial (Post) Memory, ‘Bare Race’, African Hauntings, and Patriarchal Exorcism in Latinx Literature

This panel aims to explore the various ways racial construction and elision haunts Latinx literary and cultural production. Drawing on fiction, nonfiction, and drama, this panel discusses two responses to the racial histories of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora: 1) active engagement and resistance to the oppression of those histories and 2) the continued elision of the Africanist presence in the Latinx imaginary. Karen Christian will explore literary representations of what geneticists call “transgenerational epigenetic inheritance”: the postmemory of the trauma and violence that engendered Afro-Latinx identity. Ylce Irizarry will consider how Puerto Rican author Mayra Montero’s prescient attention to ecology and environmentalism in Haiti frames the transnational nature of Latinx literature. Marion Rohrleitner will illustrate how Afro-Dominicana authors write back/against racist and misogynist colonial narratives that have been reinscribed within the Latina/o literary canon.

Chair: Ylce Irizarry, University of South Florida

“Off the Radar or Front and Center: Racial (Post) Memory in Latinx Writing” Karen Christian, California Polytechnic State University Afro-Latinx writers often draw upon lived experiences that include ongoing challenges to their very identity; these artists destabilize binary paradigms of race by defying simple classification as Latinx or African-American. That is, Afro-Latinx identity may be perceived as culturally and racially unintelligible and hence “off the radar,” even for other Latinx writers. There is nonetheless a growing body of Latinx writing in which Afro-Latinx identity is foregrounded. These narratives and poetry engage questions of blackness, often in the form of postmemory of slavery and its consequences, and expand the scope of Latinx discourse on race. Afro-Caribbean subjectivity constructed through writing is a kind of palimpsest, layered over a legacy of slavery and a complex cultural heritage that has developed through generations. As Jamaican-born Canadian writer Makeda Silvera observes, “Through three hundred years of history we have carried memories and the scars of racism and violence with us. We are the sisters, daughters, mothers of a people enslaved by colonialists and imperialists.” In this presentation, I explore works by an array of Latinx writers, including Cristina García, Achy Obejas, Elías Miguel Muñoz, H.G. Castillo, Adrián Castro, Junot Díaz, Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, and Nelly Rosario. I argue that these texts – by both (white) Latinx and Afro-Latinx authors – are literary representations of what geneticists call “transgenerational epigenetic inheritance,” that is, postmemory of the trauma and violence that engendered Afro-Latinx identity.

“Ecology and Environment in Montero’s in The Palm of Darkness” Ylce Irizarry, University of South Florida Discourse on ecology and environmentalism accompanies the turn to the historic in Latinx fiction.1 This paper will argue the historic returns Latinx literature to its Caribbean origins. Mayra Montero is a Puerto Rican author of Cuban origin who often writes about the Afro- Caribbean Disapora. Her 1997 novel, In the Palm of Darkness, 2 juxtaposes species extinction with post-Aristide chaos and genocide in Haiti.3 While herpetologist Victor and his local guide Thierry search for a vanishing frog species, the grenouille du sang, Victor largely ignores the recurring signs of Haiti’s broken social environment: faceless, tortured bodies hanging from trees, children and pregnant women disappearing, piles of body parts set aflame. Montero is not only indicting the fatal violence perpetuated by the Duvalier regimes and the Ton Ton Macoutes; she is also criticizing the neocolonial discourse Victor Grigg represents, which elides the impact of global capitalism on Haiti’s ecological sovereignty. 4 This paper draws on Giorgio Agamben’s concept of “Bare Race” to examine Montero’s attempts to deconstruct the undermining of Haiti’s ecological sovereignty.

“Afro-Dominicanas Write Back: Deconstructing the Canonical Latina/o Gaze” Marion Rohrleitner, University of Texas at El Paso A critical engagement with texts that rewrite the colonizers’ master narratives has become commonplace in the study of postcolonial literature; studies of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Derek Walcott’s Omeros, and Maryse Conde’s Windward Heights, for example, have safely entered the undergraduate classroom. Yet, the act of “writing back” as a politically motivated discursive practice lives on in feminist rewritings of now canonical texts produced by their more established counterparts. In this presentation, I examine three feminist responses to three canonical texts of contemporary Caribbean and Caribbean diasporic literature. I show that a new generation of Afro-Dominican women writers irreverently move beyond the master text and highlight the sometimes humorous and the sometimes sobering ways gender and class privilege can reinscribe colonial privilege in postcolonial texts. The presentation begins with Nelly Rosario’s “How to Date a Thugboy, Artboy, Nerdboy, or Papichulo,” her provocative response to the sexist narrative voice in Junot Diaz’s short story collection This is How You Lose Her, continues with “When Was the Last Time You Saw a Black Boy Smile?, Jazminne Mendez’s lyrical response to Pedro Pietri’s focus on the patriarchal nuclear family in “When Was the Last Time You Saw Mami Smile?”, and concludes with contrasting Rita Indiana’s dizzying experimental coming-of-age narrative Papi with Julia Alvarez’s canonical and comparatively tame novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent.

11. Symbolic Crisis: Afro-Religious Visions, Performance, and Transformations

“Brujos: At the Intersection of Affect and Race” Thomas Conners, University of Pennsylvania Following four gay Latinx graduate students endowed with supernatural powers, the web-series Brujos details the experiences inherent to the familiarly chaotic school semester and a “witch- hunt led by the straight, wealthy, white male descendants of the first New World colonizers,” as Ricardo Gamboa, Brujos creator and actor, describes. Showcasing a cast that includes women, trans, and queer people of color, the series draws critical attention to the current and violent realities such communities face—realities blatantly absent from mainstream representation and sociopolitical discourse. Weaving speculative and magical realism with the quotidian, Brujos harnesses the power of fiction to affectively present populations that have been historically reduced and othered due to racialization and non-normative sexuality. I use affect to refer to unquantifiable, visceral reactions that precede cognitive codification, often expressions of physical rage, distress, and fear. In such affective instances, visible on the faces of the characters, I read a disidentifying potential. Borrowing from José Muñoz, I refer to disidentification as a performative strategy in which lived experiences, implicated in the formation of identity, neither assimilate nor reject dominant ideology. Instead, they seek to transform cultural logic by problematizing structural categories while still esteeming the significance of local, personal struggles. Brujos disidentifies on those two levels: on the local within the narrative, given that the plot confronts the characters’ personal, individual tribulations that produce anger and terror, and on a structural level with the audience’s viewing of such experiences, ones that debunk the exhausted mainstream queer and Latinx tropes. At the intersection of affect and race, Brujos makes racial and non-normative identities complex—rounding them out—to call attention to the fact that the characteristics involved in othering are the very points upon which agency is constructed.

“‘Working juju with the word on the world’: Afro-Latinas’ Poetry and Performance as Transformative Racial and Identity Counter-discourse” Maria Esther Alvarez Lopez, Universidad de Oviedo In “Does the City Have Speech?” (2013), Saskia Sassen refers to speech as “a foundational element in theories about democracy and the political”. Making speech, therefore, enables those who lack access to established instrumentalities to talk back—against colonization, acculturation, exclusion, and inequities. With a survivalist poetics of resistance and informal (counter) political practices that reclaim ‘speech’ as a vehicle for the expression and foregrounding of identity, contemporary Latina poets and spoken word performance artists from Afro-Puerto Rican descent, such as Mayda del Valle, Caridad de la Luz (La Bruja), and María Teresa Fernández (Mariposa), among others, explore the complexities and interplay of issues of race, identity, gender, translocation, and decolonization. Through their poetic and performative enunciations, they critically question dominant views, destabilize stabilized meanings, affirm their cultural pride, and claim their (multiple) mixed-race ancestry – “descendancy” in Mayda del Valle’s poem, i.e., African, Puerto Rican, Taína, Yoruba, etc.— as a form of individual and communal validation, strength and empowerment. In making speech and talking back, they work “juju with the word on the world”—in Larry Neal’s expression—through the transformative potential of their poetic words/performances. In the 1970s Nuyorican writer Miguel Algarín insisted on the responsibility of the poet to create “alternatives” for the survival of the poor New York Puerto Ricans, and the need of a new vocabulary in which to express them. Today’s Afro-Latina poets and spoken word artists are these new urban bards who fight with words, creating alternative kinds of verbal action and imaginaries in order to effect social and political change.

“Sick of the Symbolic: Trance and Ritual in Lyn DiIorio Sandin’s Outside the Bones, ’s The Salt Eaters, and ’s Praisesong for the Widow” Victoria A. Chevalier, Medgar Evers College (CUNY)

12. Uncanny Translations, Or, the Enterprise of Art

“Reimagining “Other” Latinos/as: The Technological and Spectral Origins of “Othered” Latinidad” Cynthia Martínez, Indiana University - Bloomington My project seeks to explore questions of identity construction, migration, displacement, and ethnoracial and class positionings in transnational literary texts by authors of Central American and South American national origin or heritage who publish, reside, and/or narratively situate novels in the United States. Rather than provide a comparative study of these regional groupings, my project traces the divergences and convergences found in each grouping’s narrative treatment of migration and belonging in order to explore subjects’ ambiguous and so-called “other” positioning within contemporary understandings of Latinidad. I briefly discuss models of “difference” found within Latinx studies, such as border consciousness and hybridity, in order to propose that the ambiguously situated textual groupings I analyze engage in different and innovative negotiations of ethnoracial identity. Rather than privilege a fusion of differences within the self, I suggest that the literary texts I study reimagine twoness, the double, and fragmentation as productive ground for cultural identification and political practice instead of as mere problematic state of (negatively) contradictory being. DuBois’s “double consciousness”, as well as current iterations of the concept such as Claudia Milian’s “open double consciousness” and Doris Sommer’s “vindication of double consciousness,” help me clarify how my project interprets the “double,” especially for subjectivities labeled as “other” vis-à-vis Latinidad. I further situate two literary tropes that appear throughout my textual groupings, the technological and the spectral, as corollaries to the subject positioning of “other” Latinxs, as their narrative use renders literal the fragmentation and ambiguity of “othered” subjects and subjectivities.

“Moctesuma Esparza’s Artistic and Business Enterprises” Elda María Román, University of Southern California One of the most influential producers of Latina/o representations is Moctesuma Esparza, albeit in a behind-the-scenes role as a movie producer. Esparza is a Chicano activist and notably one of the organizers of the 1968 East LA walkouts. This paper will discuss how, during the Chicano Movement, he co-hosted an alternative news show called La Raza Nueva. It will also delve into his post-70s enterprises as a film producer. He has produced many Latino films, including The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, Selena, and Mosquita y Mari. He also founded Maya Entertainment, a media company dedicated to producing and distributing Latino films, as well as a line of movie theaters called Maya Cinemas found throughout California. He has also served as a founder or board member of numerous philanthropic organizations dedicated to education and increasing the participation of Latina/os in the media. There is scarcely any scholarship on Esparza, and my paper will discuss how his life history might help us understand a broader cultural history of how 1960s activism has been translated in institutional and corporate settings.

"Sounds, Translation, and Interlingualism in Woman Hollering Creek" Abraham Encinas, University of California, Los Angeles My paper seeks to think about Sandra Cisneros’ short story collection Woman Hollering Creek through the nexus of sound, silence, onomatopoeia, music, and translation. I argue that by naming the collection after the story “Woman Hollering Creek”, Cisneros asks us to think about hollering as a feminist poetics. And more broadly, she asks us to think about the sounds of the babble of languages. I argue that the multivalency of holler is a metaphorical sound image for a consideration of language as sound and its translative ambiguity when we think of it as pure sound. I will trace Cisneros’ sound play in rhetorical and figurative language such as onomatopoeia, her use of musical epigraphs to structure the short story collection as a musical of sorts, and her translations between Spanish and English. By paying attention to the relationship between sound and language, I want to offer a slightly different reading on the meaning of interlingualism; that is, I think of the state of interlingualism as an affective moment of joy in sounds and the play of language. In this sense, Malinche, the Chicana cultural figure of translation, becomes an important site for thinking through the feminist poetics of hollering and its relationship to pure language and interlingualism. Finally and in addition, I want to suggest that to think about race in the 21st century requires us to continue thinking about interlingualism, its corollary of miscegenation, and the question of how much language either does or does not constitute culture and race.

Session 4: 2:40-3:55 p.m.

13. Home, Love, and the Desire for Salvation in Chicana Fiction

“Home as a Territory of Desire: Divine Queer Relationality and Belonging in Chicana Literature” Sofi Chavez, Bryn Mawr College Representations of queer kinship structures in Helena María Viramontes’s novel Their Dogs Came with Them and Virginia Grise’s blu illustrate the urgency of home spaces for queer Chicana subjects. This paper argues that queer Chicana literature is a spiritual project which cultivates an expansive internal sense of home to resist violent, hegemonic external forces. This paper asks: in what ways do queerness and spirituality employ the same structuring principle of desire as an imaginative mechanism to envision another way of being? While Chicana feminist criticism often highlights sexual desire, this paper analyzes the role that desire plays in constructing non-sexual queer relationality. Within these new kinds of queer relationships—such as a girl gang and the relationship between a teenager and her mother’s female partner—the texts illustrate that spiritual knowledge production creates kinship bonds which fulfil the Chicana subject’s yearning for home in spaces of queer, divine potentiality. In Viramontes’s and Grise’s work, we see that for the queer Chicana subject, home spaces must be what I call a territory of desire. My reading of desire and spaces of potentiality enable us to see a territory of desire as any space of spiritual transformation and freedom, where a subject is free from physical and emotional harm. In these texts, we find not only stories of loss, displacement, and mourning, but also the necessary tools and tactics to imagine a queer future that features spiritual healing, love, and belonging.

“Love and Salvation Unites the Body and Soul” Julia Torrico, Marymount University Demetria Martinez’s The Block Captain’s Daughter examines the true meaning of connecting the body and soul to form physical and spiritual salvation. I discuss over the connection of the body and soul beyond religious practices in society, and I further discuss the concept of body and soul affecting one’s destiny. Martínez presents lovemaking as a form of salvation for couples and perhaps links this to salvation for social networks. Individual forgiveness brings salvation, which connects individuals to earth’s salvation. Channette Romero’s article “Embodying Latina Salvation” presents Martinez’s focus on spiritual and ethnic diversity through Latina/o identities associated in Mother Tongue. This article is used to support Martinez’s view on the relationship between the body and soul. This presentation challenges the argument of the soul being the sole object of worthy value. The imposition of Catholicism’ and other religions’ concept of the value of soul have created spiritual oppression in U.S. and Latin American society. As a writer and activist, Martinez suggests the importance of placing value on the connection of body and soul.

14. Goth Girls, Vampires, and Ghosts: Queer Subjectivity, Rebellion, and Freedom in Latinx Literature

Moderator: Carlos Ulises Decena, Rutgers University

“Reading Rechy and Zapata in an Era of Homonormativity and Homonationalism” Jorge Estrada, SUNY Oneonta Reading about hustlers in John Rechy’s City of God (1963) and Luis Zapata’s El vampiro de la colonia Roma (1979) takes us to a specific queer time and space, applying Judith Halberstam’s concept of queer temporality. The youngman in Rechy’s novel and the chichifo in Zapata’s explore queer underworlds that exist in major urban centers in the U.S. and Mexico, meeting other queer subjects who, like vampires, come out only at night. In this paper, I look at homonormativity and Jasbir K. Puar’s concept of homonationalism (2007) in our reading of these two queer canonical Chicanx and Mexican novels today. In an era where queer subjects who do not fit within the confines of gay-straight, white sexuality remain heavily policed, I discuss how the politics of respectability play a role in defining our queer literary past, and how contemporary notions of “equality” and “freedom” have changed since the 1960s and 1970s.

“Brown Skin, Goth Drag: The use of Goth Aesthetics as Rebellion in Caribbean Diaspora Novels” Virginia Arreola, Hartwick College Across several Hispanophone Caribbean-Diaspora novels published at the turn of the millennium, such as The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Dreaming in Cuban, a unexpected trope has manifested: That of a rebellious adolescent girl who takes on goth or punk- like fashion and behavior as a way to rebel against their immigrant parents. Goth/punk is arguably the quintessential form of rebellion among white Western adolescents since the 1970s. The visual juxtaposition of taking on a look associated with a deathly pale complexion by a girl of color makes the act doubly subversive. As Butler, Halberstam, and other queer theorists have argued, the exaggeration in femininity/masculinity in drag performance, as in drag queens/drag kings, makes the schism between the sexed body and gendered body patently obvious. furthermore, regardless of the reason a person engages in drag queen/king performance, it is not necessarily for the purpose of identifying as a woman/man. Using the lens of drag performance to analyze this trope, I argue that in these novels the mental juxtaposition created by brown, goth female characters pushes society’s idealization of whiteness to a subversive extreme. The young characters in these novels, Lola and Pilar, for example, do not become goths/punks because they want to be white racially or culturally. The death-like goth aesthetic they perform alludes to the consequences of attempting to or being unable to fulfill a white “ideal”: both a literal physical death and a racial/ethnic/cultural death.

“Of Stone and Paper: Mapping the Memory of AIDS through the Writing of Gil Cuadros' and Grave Markers in Los Angeles Cemeteries” Eddy Francisco Alvarez Jr., SUNY Oneonta Buildings, parks, cemeteries, and streets tell stories. As sites of memory and texts they speak to the forgotten and erased histories of the city. Although in denial when the epidemic first began in Los Angeles, the Latinx community eventually responded through activism and cultural production, including theater, and poetry. In this paper I focus on several texts that function as sites of memory about Latinx AIDS history. First, inspired by Horacio Roque Ramirez’s, research on AIDS obituaries in 1990s San Francisco, I read grave markers in Los Angeles cemeteries to see what these texts tell us about erasure, shame, kin and queerness at a time when the stigma of AIDS continued even after death. I juxtapose these grave markers with the writing of queer Chicano poet Gil Cuadros, who died of AIDS in 1996. Analyzing “My Aztlan: White Place” and the poem “Conquering Immortality,” from his book City of God (1994), I argue that his texts map a personal and intimate geography of AIDS, from white West Hollywood, to the 101 freeways, to his own body as a site of memory, infection, and shame. Cuadros’ memories and poetry, create a cartography of AIDS, marking his personal roads, pathways, hiding spaces, cruising spots, and spaces of memory during his time living with AIDS. Jointly, through the analysis of grave markers and Cuadros’ writing, I show how recuperating the memory of AIDS and HIV from multiple sites is a way of finding sequins in the rubble of erasure and loss.

15. Queer Motion and the Longing for Home

“Jotería in Popular Culture: Queer Identities in Motion” Daniel Enrique Pérez, University of Nevada, Reno This essay examines the portrayal of Jotería in popular culture to demonstrate how such portrayals remain in constant flux and are uniquely shaped by the identity of the artists and producers. The author includes an analysis of the representation of queer Chicanx and Latinx identities in literature, film and television to explore the politics of representing Jotería in popular culture. He argues that the portrayal of Jotería in cultural production has a lengthy history and is replete with complex Jotería stories and identities that must be taken into consideration when examining the overarching politics of representation. The researcher includes an analysis of the works of writers John Rechy, Michael Nava and Rigoberto González, as well as a comparative analysis of Ugly Betty, La Mission and Quinceañera. He argues that these texts create decolonial imaginaries and discourses that shape a legacy of queer Chicanx and Latinx representation where Jotería subjectivities are reimagined in social locations that transcend the negative stereotypes that have historically shaped their identities and lived experiences. At the same time, he underscores how problematic the representation of Jotería in popular culture remains by comparing the stereotypical portrayals that persist. He demonstrates how integral the representation of Jotería in popular culture can be to larger political projects and movements that center on recovering and redefining Jotería legacies.

“The Uncertain Harbor of Home: Queering Families in Manuel Muñoz’s ‘Bring Brang Brung’” William Orchard, Queens College, City University of New York In “Bring Brang Brung,” a short story from his 2007 collection, The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, Manuel Muñoz tells the story of a Chicano man who returns to his hometown after his Cuban-American boyfriend, with whom he has adopted a child, dies. The story chronicles the man’s attempt to get his bearings in his hometown, reestablish ties with his estranged family, and forge solidarities that will help him navigate various state bureaucracies. In this paper, I examine how the story disrupts and “queers” two versions of family, and, in the process, reveals how the world-making potentialities of queerness may sometimes reside in subjects who are not gay or lesbian but who have had to invent lives outside of normative institutions. On the one hand, the story disrupts the upwardly mobile gay male narrative, in which gay men flee small-town enclaves for large metropolitan cities like San Francisco and New York, enter into monogamous relationships, and start families. Here, the homonormative narratives of progress and upward mobility are ruptured by an accident, sending the protagonist into a financial and psychological crisis that forces his return home. On the other hand, the story ruptures the stereotyped image of the ethnic American family as hostile to their gay child. Although the protagonist encountered homophobia and rejection in his youth, he returns to find his family newly configured: his parents have died and his sister is a single mother struggling to raise a son. Indeed, his sister and her network of single mothers—a group that the protagonist initially shames and condescends to—educate the protagonist in new ways of being and of imagining belonging. Drawing on the work of Cathy Cohen and Juana María Rodríguez, I argue that this return home also signals the protagonist’s return to a queer, rather than homonormative, life. Moreover, the story stages this in such a way that homonormativity is aligned with a Latino imaginary, while the queer family he returns to is aligned with Chicana/o identities and politics. In this way, the story figures Chicana/o as a category that has not been superseded by Latina/o but rather as one that is still generative and politically relevant.

16. Love and the Potentiality of Race

“Love & Justice in Ana Castillo’s Peel My Love like an Onion” Susan C. Méndez, University of Scranton Ana Castillo’s Peel My Love like an Onion (1999) is filled with issues of social injustice. The novel’s characters face ability, class, race/ethnicity, and gender issues, along with transgender violence, drug addiction, gang violence, and the problematic rise of the cost of living. Yet, all hope is not lost, as the main character, Carmen, finds herself in love with two men: Agustin and Manolo. Although she wants to be claimed by Manolo, she cannot be as Manolo is Agustin’s godson. Therein lies the tension in these love stories, which is only resolved when Carmen acts out of love and finds fulfilling work that allows her to support herself and her family with ease, strength, and beauty. When the love stories are resolved, so are many of the novel’s social injustice issues. Castillo’s text chronicles “from below” the ways in which conventional notions of identity and social problem resolution are challenged, so that new social and cultural possibilities can be realized. Through the alternative imaginary of love, Castillo expands notions of race/ethnicity, gender, sex, and class as they pertain to identity while simultaneously fostering a critical consciousness so that more just and complex lives can be envisioned. Regardless of which love-story the readers follow, they realize that a framework of love is needed to actualize social justice in one’s life. Theorists and writers such as , Chela Sandoval, and St. Augustine of Hippo will support this essay’s argument.

“Decolonial Love against Racialization and Intergenerational Trauma in The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” Rafael Vizcaino, Rutgers University In this paper, I argue that The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), by Dominican- American writer Junot Díaz, is a recent case of a decolonizing poetics in the tradition of the Martiniquean writer Edouard Glissant. I will focus on the novel’s deployment of a form of love that seeks to challenge the patterns of racialization and the traces of intergenerational trauma that are the result of the living legacies of colonialism. This is a decolonial love that is thus rooted in the work of memory and in the generous open receptivity to the other, a receptivity that at its most radical leads to an existential substitution. Within the novel’s narrative, this is seen most explicitly in the scenes of brutal violence that take place in the sugarcane fields of the Dominican Republic. The figure of Mongoose, an animal whose history in the Caribbean parallels the history of the Caribbean’s colonization, who finds itself present during these critical moments in Oscar Wao, in my reading becomes the depository for the historical memory of colonial violence and the messenger of decolonial love. I conclude that decolonial love is the content that is meant to fill both the voids within Díaz’s characters and more literally the many dotted lines and empty pages within Oscar Wao. To embrace decolonial love is to seek to heal the wounds of racialization and the traces of intergenerational trauma among racialized/colonized peoples today.

“Afro-Latina Lives Matter: Marta Moreno Vega as Transnational Scholar/Cultural Worker” Juanita Heredia, Northern Arizona University Marta Moreno Vega is mainly know for her memoir When the Spirits Dance Mambo (2004) and her cultural work The Altar of My Soul: The Living Traditions of Santería (2000) which have garnered important critical attention. It is just as significant to recognize her role as a scholar/cultural worker in a transnational context. She has not only been instrumental in participating and founding key cultural institutes that disseminate Latino cultural practices in New York City but she has also played a crucial role as a transnational ambassador who visits key sites in Puerto Rico and Cuba, among other nations, to research the African heritage of her culture in the areas of spirituality and gender issues. In the collection Women Warriors of the Afro-Latina Diaspora (2012) Moreno Vega and her coeditors Marinieves Alba and Yvette Modestin reach another milestone in chronicling the experiences of women of African descent on both sides of the U.S./Caribbean/Latin American borderlands. In this mixture of creative pieces and scholarly essays, the coeditors demonstrate that Afro-Latinas’ contributions to their respective communities are multi-faceted because they embody and negotiate multiple roles based on gender, race, and various nations. In other words, they assert that Afro-Latina lives matter by intervening and remaking the history of the Americas.

17. Textual, Visual, and Archival Contestations of Blackness and Afro-latinididad in the Puerto Rican and Dominican U.S. Diasporas

“Digital Dominicanidad: Race (on)-line(s)” Megan Jeanette Myers, Iowa State University The Dominican Republic’s Tribunal Court Ruling (0168-13) retroactively strips the citizenship of ethnic Haitians living in the Dominican Republic. This ruling, known simply “la sentencia” in the Dominican Republic (“the verdict”), reflects a long history of anti-Haitianism. While the ruling is supported by some vocal Dominican nationalists, it has faced heavy criticism on a global scale. Reconoci.do is a group based in the Dominican Republic demanding the Dominican government to recognize those born in the country as birthright citizens. Others groups with a public, online-based platform addressing statelessness in the Dominican Republic are rooted in the U.S. diaspora; two of these groups are Dominicanos x derecho and We Are All Dominican. This paper begins by charting the digital connections between these groups, primarily through text mining each groups’ Twitter campaigns against the ruling. The paper also signals the response of Dominican American authors to Haitian-Dominican relations and/or “la sentencia” by analyzing two recent memoirs written by Dominican Americans Julia Alvarez and Raquel Cepeda: A Wedding in Haiti (2012) and Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina (2013). Reading the works of Alvarez and Cepeda against the activist platforms of the three aforementioned groups problematizes the Haitian-Dominican dynamic within the space of the U.S. diaspora and assesses how growing web campaigns have guided the conversation.

“On the Cusp of Blackness: Junot Díaz, African American Literature, and Black Recognition” Raj Chetty, St. John’s College Building on my work examining blackness in Dominican literature, this paper explores the “blackness” of Junot Díaz’s novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The novel deploys both recognizable and unrecognizable forms of blackness—recognition here defined in relation to U.S. literary studies and African American literary studies, in particular. Seen under this rubric of recognition, however, the novel’s performance of blackness raises interesting possibilities for blacknesses that exceed the narrow boundaries set by dominant conceptions of race and being. Scholarship on the novel eschews engaging blackness in the novel, treats it lightly, or focuses on those recognizable markers of blackness that the novel deploys (hair, language, skin color). My paper will foreground the mis- or unrecognized blackness in the novel, arguing that these kinds of blackness require a wider understanding of Dominican race relations and a corresponding reading practice that might be called, following Brent Hayes Edwards, black international translation.

“Beyond Black & White?: Photography in Loida Martiza Pérez, Julia Alvarez, and Félix Morisseau-Leroy” John Ribó, Florida State University In her article “The Photographic Thought of Latina/o Literature and Cultural Critique” (2009) María DeGuzmán argues that photography in Dominican-American literature often addresses “questions about racial identification and socio-political agency” pointing to the description of faded family photos in Loida Maritza Pérez’s Geographies of Home (1999) that blur the color line between black and white (362-363). Yet many of the photos included in A Wedding in Haiti (2012), Julia Alvarez’s memoir of two road trips to Haiti before and after the 2010 earthquake, only reinforce tropes of blackness and stereotypes of Haitians deployed since the turn of the 19th century to silence the radical promise of the Haitian Revolution. My talk compares close readings of Pérez’s novel, of Alvarez’s memoir, and of two poems by Haitian poet Félix Morisseau-Leroy—“Tourist” and “Boat People”—in order to explore the ethics of representing race in transnational approaches to Hispaniola in Dominican Studies and beyond.

18. Feminist Currents in Latina/o Literature

“Meditations on the Shadow: Stereotypes of Latinx Women in Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass and Jane the Virgin” Jessica Flores, California State University, Fullerton Media, as an informing influence in an individual’s life, contributes to the construction of worldview in what is represented and withheld. Though the invisibility of people of color within media has been mitigated within the past decade, questioning how representation can fall short is an important exercise to acknowledge its pitfalls and products. Examining Meg Medina’s young adult novel, Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass, in relation to the popular television show Jane the Virgin, created by Jennie Snyder Urman, reveals the tenuous balance between stereotype and complexity that can be successfully – or unsuccessfully – navigated when representing the Latinx community. Both works, while being female-centric, diverge in their utilization of stereotypes. Medina, in developing her protagonist Piddy Sanchez against her antagonist, Yaqui Delgado, creates a stark binary between the two; Piddy, as the academically successful Latina, comes out the victor in contrast to Yaqui’s limited characterization as the menacing chola. Urman, while depicting Latinx stereotypes such as the sexualized Latina, moves beyond them to craft characters reflecting the depth within the Latinx community beyond the stereotypes they are often seen through. Using Medina’s work as the point of departure towards Urman’s work structures an analysis of the outcomes of representation, positive and negative. Creating a space for Latinx characters to exist both on the page and screen, while vital in creating a worldview reflecting the presence of this community, requires a troubling of existing stereotypes in order to successfully combat the single story of the Latinx community.

Session 5: 4:05-5:20 p.m.

19. Sounding Latinidades: Race, Cultural Citizenship, and In the Heights

Before Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, there was In the Heights, the Tony-award musical about the New York City neighborhood of Washington Heights and the lives of its Latino inhabitants aspiring to attain the American dream. With lyrics by Miranda and book by Quiara Alegría-Hudes, In the Heights stages citizenship, neoliberalism, race, and space through affective performative dimensions, where citizenship is renegotiated and resisted through sonic performance. This panel underscores In the Heights as a social document that captures everyday realities, inscribing history, memory, and culture onto the aural imagination of America. By identifying points of cross-racial syncretism between shared histories of oppression, Miranda offers a social commentary on the shared quests for freedom between African American and Latina/o/x peoples as he illuminates the inter-ethnic coalitions that can be formed in these efforts for self and community dissident claims to full citizenship in the United States. In an era where neoliberalism has sought to minimize minority difference, the music and sounds of In the Heights amplify pan-ethnic notions of Latinidad. Paradoxically, while the music makes racial, ethnic, and gender differences audible, it also minimizes difference within a universal “common sense” pursuit of individual freedoms, academic success, and economic mobility. What do the amplification and reduction of sonic Latinidades in the various productions of In the Heights teach us about race, racism, and neoliberalism in America? What is distinctive and culturally constitutive of “American” sound in a country of immigrants? How do inflections of voice gesture toward other versions of America without voice? How does In the Heights reveal the significant auditory strategies Latinos implement to confront and inflect American theater with racial, ethnic, and gender difference?

“Sonic Pan-Ethnicity: Listening in Detail to In the Heights” Patricia Herrera, University of Richmond Patricia Herrera’s paper explores how the musical draws from hip hop, salsa, merengue and soul music to offer a Latina/o/x pan-ethnic framework that illuminates the complex history of racial relations in neoliberal America. Her work magnifies the sonic compositions of the musical, including voice, ethnic accents, and sound-producing physical movements, to reveal the significant auditory strategies that simultaneously amplify and minimize notions of Latinidad. The paper also incorporates archival research of the performance and soundtrack held at the NYC Public Library to grapple with methodological questions of how historians read Latinidad in the aural textures and contours of language.

“‘Lights Up on Washington Heights’: Lin-Manuela Miranda’s Hip Hop Musical Mash-Up of the American Dream” Nicole Hodges Persley, University of Kansas Nicole Hodges Persley’s paper explores the sonic and embodied mash-ups of diverse Latina/o/x cultural experiences as they relate to sampling and remixing in Miranda’s work. Her paper amplifies how Miranda’s characters draw from a variety of musical and embodied dance languages that allow them to connect to, and to overcome via performance, the limitations imposed on minoritized experiences of American citizenship. By mashing-up Latina/o/x diasporic immigrant stories with first generation Latina/o/x dreams, a sonic and visual worldview emerges on stage that is fused much with Hip Hop and Latinidad as it is the cityscape of New York. Hip Hop becomes a vehicle for Miranda to make forgotten Latino influences in Hip Hop visible and audible.

“Sounding Authentic: Casting In the Heights beyond Broadway” Brian E. Herrera, Princeton University Brian E. Herrera’s paper listens to the restagings of In the Heights beyond Broadway, particularly exploring the sound of the show when envoiced by multiethnic college ensembles. Drawing on his unofficial In the Heights viewing tour, Herrera argues that In The Heights amplifies university theatre programs’ paradoxical status as professional producers and amateur educational productions. He argues that casting, especially in the university context, should be embraced as invitations to rigorously explore particular principles of practice—around linguistic fluency, cultural competence, and creative coalition—that might productively guide those invested in bringing more Latina/o/x plays to more university stages.

“Listening to Latinidad: Sonic Cultural Citizenship and In the Heights” Marci R. McMahon, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Marci R. McMahon’s paper engages with the musical’s staging of “sonic cultural citizenship,” a phrase she uses to underscore citizenship as performed through sound, and listening as central to performances of citizenship. In order to critically hear the sonic notes of citizenship in In the Heights, she closely listens to how the musical stakes claims to belonging and not belonging through space, race, and gender. With attention to the act of listening, her presentation underscores the relation between the performance of citizenship and its discourses, and between its performance and audiencing. In the Heights underscores how audiences must listen critically and loudly to forward an América in which Latina/o/xs shape the contours of their own identities.

20. Imagining Black-Brown Solidarity: Forms, Limits, Futures

Recent work such as Gordon Mantler’s Power to the Poor: Black-Brown Coalition and the Fight for Economic Justice, 1960-1974 (2013) and John D. Márquez’s Black-Brown Solidarity: Racial Politics in the New Gulf South (2014) have demonstrated that we need a more nuanced understanding of multiracial coalition, and that instead of hindering coalition, race-based identity politics are central to alliance-building. While some attention has been paid to Afro-Latinx literature and identity formations, our panel highlights the shared yet distinct forms of racial- ethnic oppression and their representation through particular generic conventions in African American and Latinx literature. This panel examines representations of Black-Brown imaginaries to explore the tensions between historical archives, national narratives, and embodied memory. The papers in this panel explore the literary conventions and genres in African American and Latinx literature to demonstrate the alternative forms of solidarity and kinship that emerge from placing these traditions in conversation. Moreover, this panel seeks to showcase how such intersecting violent historical pasts showcase alternative forms of affective ties and possibilities of Black-Brown solidarity through representations of race-based imaginaries. The papers in this panel explore several questions, including: What new affective ties, forms of of kinships, and minoritarian knowledges emerge through Brown-Black solidarity? Can minoritarian knowledges be imagined without the lens of whiteness and does this speculative world-building project enable alternative forms of affect? What literary conventions are necessary and particular for the representation of Black-Brown imaginaries? How do Latin American conceptions of race offer new possibilities for conceiving blackness and brownness within the Americas more broadly? Through explorations of a wide-range of authors, including Cristina García, Roberto Bolaño, Henry Highland Garnet, and Martin R. Delany, this panel investigates how literary representations of Black-Brown solidarities offer new imaginaries for our contemporary political moment . Chair: Randy Ontiveros, Maryland University

“Slave Narrative and Testimonio in Cristina García’s Monkey Hunting” Renee Hudson, University of California, San Diego This paper brings together discussions of slave narrative and testimonio to consider how these forms of bearing witness offer us new ways to imagine Black/Brown solidarity. Through an examination of Cristina García’s Monkey Hunting (2003), I demonstrate how García encourages us to consider the formal aspects of solidarity as she reorients the slave narrative as an African diasporic genre to a form central to the Americas more broadly by drawing together the literary conventions of testimonio and slave narrative. Significantly, she does so through the figure of Chen Pan, a Chinese immigrant who, by occupying a space outside of what might typically be seen as distinctive Black and Latin American experiences, illuminates forms of solidarity across literary traditions to demonstrate the interconnected literary and political histories that draw people together. Considering slave narrative and testimonio together addresses a gap in literary criticism as little work has been done to examine both traditions despite the shared formal features of both genres, such as their role in bearing witness to atrocities, the multiple levels of mediation required to authenticate them, and the ultimate goal of liberation. I contend that by examining how García incorporates both of these genres into Monkey Hunting, we can see how she imagines Black/Brown solidarity on a formal level to demonstrate the shared experiences of oppressed peoples in the Americas and new imaginaries for liberation.

“Rodeado de fantasmas”: Death, Pleasure, and Fragmentation in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 Maia Gil’Adi, George Washington University This paper explores the representations of race and post-humanity in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 to argue that the novel presents the U.S.-Mexico border as the re/producer of material and metaphorical death and racial expendability. Focusing on the novel’s third section, I argue that “The Part About Fate” is a crucial aperture for the understanding of Bolaños fragmented, ruthless, and excessive text, which centers on the Ciudad Juarez femicides. My paper demonstrates how, as the only African American in the novel, Oscar Fate carries the symbolic weight of blackness into the U.S.-Mexico border, indexing his body through the violent history of racialization while enabling the creation of alliances of illegibility between himself and the murdered women of 2666. Fate’s blackness is a lens through which to examine the female corpse as an exciting and repelling form that functions as a monstrous symbol of illegality that brings into question national narratives of belonging and that threatens the border with its walking- deadness. The Black-Brown kinship established in 2666, however, forecloses the possibility for social justice and instead relishes in the violence of the border, demonstrating it to be a site of expendable bodies needed to support a neoliberal system that subsists on institutional death.

“The Colors of Blackness in the Hemispheric Abolitionism of Henry Highland Garnet and Martin R. Delany” Jazmín Delgado, University of Pennsylvania This paper examines mid-nineteenth-century articulations of brownness and blackness in the abolitionist writings of Henry Highland Garnet and Martin R. Delany, arguing that the capacious category of what I am calling “coloredness” allowed these thinkers to hold space for the entanglements and gaps between populations who have been racialized as black, brown, or indigenous. This conceptual task was prompted by the unique challenges confronting free and enslaved Black U.S. Americans in the years following the Mexican-American War, a period which was punctuated by a series of territorial concessions made to slaveholders, key among them the so-called Compromise of 1850 and its attendant Fugitive Slave Law. The internal and external boundaries of the nation were proving themselves to be extremely malleable and so were the racial formations that gave territories their coherence. Indeed, the geographic coordinates of slave territory were shifting under the very feet of enslaved and free African Americans alike, precipitating a flurry of black abolitionist writing that limns an emancipatory vision of black futurity in the age of Manifest Destiny while theorizing the particular positionality of people of African descent within the widening gyre of settler-colonialism. Garnet and Delany, key contributors to this body of abolitionist writing, turned their gaze to Latin America and its “Colored Republics” in order to trace the contours of the blackness of coloredness and the colors of blackness.

21. Redoubling Consciousness: the Body, Invisibility, and Whiteness in Latinx Literature

“The Double Consciousness of Conquest: Race, Gender and Empire in Esmeralda Santiago’s La Conquistadora” Lorna Perez, Buffalo State, SUNY “To describe and interpret colonial culture means, first of all, to disassemble it, to probe beneath the official surface and seek out those latent cultural traditions that have been systematically smothered by the reality of colonial imposition, political despotism and slavery.” (Juan Flores, “The Puerto Rico that José Luis González Built”; Divided Borders). Esmeralda Santiago’s 2012 historical novel La Conquistadora is a novel that probes the contradictions of feminine conquest within the frame of neo-slave narrative. This paper will argue that though centered on the feminist leanings of Ana Cubillas, the white slave owner, what the novel ultimately reveals are the machinations of violence inherent in conquest and empire. I argue that the political work of the novel is not in positioning Ana as a favorable character, but lies in revealing her violence, her contradictions, and the unnerving assumptions that lie at the heart of her desire, specifically the colonial imperative manifested through her position as an owner of both land and people. In other words, though Ana’s position is fraught, the real force that haunts the novel (in the Derridian sense) is not the nuances of Ana’s feminist agency against patriarchal norms, rather it is the violence of her ownership. La Conquistadora is a novel of conquest, and while that conquest is complicated by a female protagonist, the facts of Ana’s racial violence is heightened, not diminished, by the novel’s gender dynamics.

“A Politics of Invisibility: the Ethno-Racial and Laboring Immigrant Body” Kristy L.Ulibarri, East Carolina University At the very end of the 20th century, David Riker directed and produced a series of short films that came to make up The City/La Ciudad (1999). Two of the shorts, “Bricks” and “Seamstress,” present immigrant laboring bodies that are invisible, deregulated, privatized, and seemingly without power. This film marks the launch of the 21st century and the way labor and race become entangled as pure forms of global capital. Here at the beginning of the new century, we get narratives, such as Cristina Henriquez’s The Book of Unknown Americans where the labor of the father figure occurs in the dark recesses of a mushroom factory: the worker must literally labor in a space of invisibility. Race and ethnicity work more subtly in these texts, through the semiotics of nation that marks these bodies as genotypically excluded/”foreign” but simultaneously economically contained within the US. In this paper, I argue that ethno-race and labor become intertwined because of a politics of invisibility in these texts. While much scholarship has been done regarding the way undocumented immigrants often must “pass” and live invisibly in the US due to legal and (sometimes) economic retribution (see Shuman and Bohmer, De Genova), I am adding to this discussion by thinking about invisibility as the central mode of operation under global capitalism, regardless of documentation. The City/La Ciudad and The Book of Unknown Americans demonstrate the way these bodies undergo strategic and political acts of concealment that begin to define these im/migrant experiences and subjectivities on multiple levels.

“Skin in the Game: Theorizing Whiteness in Latina/o/x Studies” Victoria Bolf, Loyola University Chicago In Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit musical Hamilton, the eponymous Alexander Hamilton explains political wheelings and dealings thus: “When you got skin in the game, you stay in the game/ But you don’t get to win unless you playin’ the game./ Oh, you get love for it, you get hate for it, / You get nothin’ if you wait for it.” The lines jump out at me for their pithy descriptiveness; of unknown origin but richly evocative, is “skin in the game” a reference to Wall Street investments, as Lee Bebout asserts in his essay of the same name, or is it about sports, skins versus shirts? Or perhaps it is darker than that, more akin to Shylock’s pound of flesh? The metaphor is useful precisely for the myriad suggestive possibilities it conjures and withholds. As a white woman, I am confronted with a similar tongue-tied knowingness when I think about my own investment in Latinidad. Like the term “Latino/a/x,” terms like “Anglo” or “ally” cover a range of experiences and identities that benefit from careful and critical analysis, especially when deployed within Latino/a/x literary criticism. Using Hamilton as a case study, this presentation will explore possibilities for nuanced engagement of those usually considered “allies” in movements for racial justice. Just as Hamilton asserts that people of color, immigrants, and young people have a stake in the project of United States democracy, it also galvanizes white folks, non-(recent) immigrants, and older people to put their skin in the game of racial justice.

22. John Jay Student Panel Panelists TBA

Saturday, April 15, 2017

Session 1: 9:00-10:15 a.m.

24. Subversive Irruptions: the Body, Performance, and Activism

“Acts of Resistance: Identity as Bodily Performance in Esmeralda Santiago’s Almost a Woman” C. Christina Lam, Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie asserts that “power is the ability not to just tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.” I thus read Esmeralda Santiago’s memoir Almost a Woman not simply for its aesthetic value as a work of creative writing but also for the way it intervenes to expand notions of Latinx subjectivity. The importance of her-story becomes clear when we acknowledge that Latina/os are often rendered invisible to the dominant culture only as stereotypes. Santiago’s memoir thus provides a counter- narrative “from below” that combats reductive scripts of Latinidad that would otherwise conflate race and class to put forth a single story. Central to Santiago’s memoir is, I argue, a focus on the performativity of race and gender that interrogate the ways in which they are constructed. Furthermore, in her representations of working class realities she takes on such stereotypes as “hyper-sexualized and fertile Latina welfare mother” to further the kind of critical consciousness needed to challenge facile scripts of the working poor. In the process of recovering her-story she complicates what it means to come into womanhood in bilingual and bi-ethnic space to allow for new social and political possibilities.

“Girls Behaving Badly: Subversion of Hegemonic Gender and Racial Ideals in Contemporary Hispanic Caribbean [Diasporic] Narratives” Jennifer E. Irish, Florida State University In this presentation, I will analyze the presence and use of toy dolls as sites for gender and racial subversion in contemporary Hispanic Caribbean literature, both from the home nation and its diaspora in the United States. Puerto Rican author Rosario Ferré’s “Amalia” and Dominican- American author Loida Maritza Pérez’s Geographies of Home both feature young women who are characterized by their families as rebellious. Each girl questions societal expectations regarding gender and race, prompting different, mostly negative, reactions from her family. Each receives a toy doll as a gift, which inspires an act of subversion. Expanding on Simone de Beauvoir’s idea that gender is something learned and not innate, and taking into account W.E.B. Dubois’ notion of double-consciousness regarding race, I will discuss how the dolls in these narratives are used to educate young girls on gender roles, customs, and hegemonic racial ideals. To contextualize these works, I will focus on constructions of gender and race in the Hispanic Caribbean, namely Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, and their diaspora in the United States. In both stories, the girls destroy or mutilate their toy dolls in different ways, expressing an inadequacy or dissatisfaction with the physical appearance of the dolls that they were given. This destruction and modification of the dolls exposes an underlying rejection of the hegemonic ideals that the dolls reinforce, and, to utilize theory from Kimberlé Crenshaw, an ultimate recognition and appreciation of intersectional identities, and thus revealing a shift in identity politics for Dominican and Puerto Rican women.

“A Home of Our Own: Theory and Literary Activism of Gwendolyn Brooks and Sandra Cisneros” Eileen Barrett, California State University, East Bay “A Home of Our Own” uses autobiography as theory and analyzes commitments of Brooks and Cisneros to represent the marginalized, create empathic spaces for readers to reimagine their lives, and inspire work for social change. Brooks’s Maud Martha (1953) depicts communal and private spaces that convey how a family survives racism in the 1930s. Inspired by Black Arts and Black Power, Brooks’s In the Mecca (1968) describes a mother’s search for her daughter in a dilapidated apartment complex. A modern-day Demeter, Mrs. Sallie’s search for Pepita entangles this lyric in the hallways and rooms of the Mecca housing complex, exploring segregated, impoverished spaces of Black Americans, emphasizing bonds among women, obstacles to creativity, and new locations or homes necessary for art and radical social change. In “Letter to Gwendolyn Brooks,” Cisneros connects Brooks’s Maud with Esperanza in The House on Mango Street. Both works situate characters in familial and communal spaces; both artists use spatial imagery in developing marginalized characters. In redefining the space called home both works exemplify literary activism. Cisneros’s Caramelo or Puro Cuente (2002) crosses boundaries, questions narration, and challenges genre assumptions; this bilingual, transgenre narrative mirrors experiences of characters who traverse geographical, cultural, and political boundaries. In Brooks’s lyric a mother seeks her daughter; in Cisneros’s novel, Celaya records generations of the Reyes family. Tracing the aesthetic power to the family’s Mexican village, Cisneros celebrates the art of the rebozo and expands the meaning of home.

25. Racial Innovations: Form, Sexuality, and Imaginative Path-ologies

“Arroz poéticas:” Race, Legality, and Formal Innovation in Javier Huerta’s American Copia” Jennifer A. Reímer, Bilkent University This paper explores the racialization of identity for Latinx persons, specifically the category of “undocumented” person (“illegal alien”), through literary analysis of Latinx literature that probes the racialization of identity as both historical process and literary aesthetic. In particular, I propose to examine how Javier Huerta’s cross-genre poetry collection, American Copia: An Immigrant Epic (2012) participates in the creation of an emerging innovative poetics by LatinX who combine a tradition of narrative-based lyric poetry with experimental aesthetics that draw inspiration across the borders of tradition(s), nation(s), language(s) and identities. Through close reading of the text and historical analysis of U.S. immigration law, I link Huerta’s literary strategies and innovations to the material realities of racialization as an undocumented Latino in the United States. While grounded in the poetic traditions of chicanismo, as well as classic forms such as epic and Keatsian ode, Huerta’s poem pushes the boundaries of such traditions with his cross-genre poetic prose sentences, bilingual word plays, collage techniques, allusion, multiplicity, and disjunctive temporality. Huerta fashions, both as spectacle and as form, a new direction in American poetics that is as abundant and transnational as it is specifically located in the material realities of being undocumented, of growing up poor, and of being a racial-ethnic minority in the United States. In combining tradition and innovation, Huerta’s “arroz poéticas” testifies to the dynamic, transnational nature, not only of social belonging as a raced person in America, but also of language itself.

“Reproducing the Unproductive: Sexual Excess, Racialized Sexuality, and the ‘Uncivil Other’ in Chicana Narrative” Bernadine Hernández, University of New Mexico As Michel Foucault reminds us, sexuality is a technology of control over certain populations marked for surveillance through discipline and knowledge production. By extension, sexuality has always been inextricable from historical processes and the racial, gendered, and classed distinctions that inform its positionality. This paper interrogates contemporary Chicana narratives marked by sexual excess and the “unproductive” only to become devalued through racialized sexuality in contrast to positive representations in other Chicana and Latina narratives. This paper primarily focuses on Ana Castillo and her newest novel Give It To Me and it historicizes gender and sexuality from a Chicana feminist theoretical lens and situates the novel in between two narrative trends in Chicana and Latina literature. In thinking about the shift from productive racialized sexuality to unproductive, I examine postmodernist theory in order to map out how the deviant and “uncivil” other is produced in this neoliberal, global moment. In theorizing the racialized sexual excess for the Chicana body, I argue that the surveillance of “sexual excess” in neoliberal terms marks certain bodies for death and destruction, which disguises the inextricable link between race, gender, sexuality, and class. Give It To Me by Ana Castillo centers the sexually excessive protagonist to interrogate the limits of proper corporeal containment for Chicana bodies and interrogates how sex and sexuality is not useful for production for the Chicana body politic.

“'Que India!': Racialization and Pathologization in Daisy Hernandez's A Cup of Water Under My Bed (2015)” María J. Durán, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Daisy Hernandez’s A Cup of Water Under My Bed (2015) presents a coming-of-age story that engages in the complexities of race, sexuality, and language. This paper examines the practices of racialization by Latina/o immigrants using indigenous referents and the subsequent ways that non-heteronormative sexuality becomes pathologized in Hernandez’s memoir. As a Cuban- Colombian bisexual/queer American, Hernandez’s encounters with contradictory understandings of race unfold in conversations with her Colombian Tía Dora, who engages in persistent racialization when using the phrase, “que india.” Indeed, the phrase “que india/o” is commonly circulated in Central and South America in ways that attach negative associations to indigenous groups. On one hand, Tía Dora relies on visible markers on the body to racialize individuals; on the other hand, she ignores visible “Indian” features and instead racializes identity based on “uncivilized” behaviors and speech. When Hernandez tells her aunt that she has kissed a woman, Tía Dora stops speaking to her because she has “used the wrong words.” Hernandez gets labeled as an india because her wrong words are telling of her deviant sexual behavior. Tía Dora’s deployment of india demonstrates that the meaning of race is not grounded in biological essentialism or any static denotation; racism is defined by contradictions, as Hernandez admits, and thus may never cease to exist. In light of Hernandez’s transnational experiences, I argue that the memoir’s contradictions of race suggest that the definition of race is “moving” and thus open to transformation, especially in the face of contemporary resistance and political contestation.

26. Exilic Imaginaries; States of Estrangement

“At Home Abroad: Josefina Niggli, México de afuera, and Expatriate Citizenship” Alberto Varon, Indiana University The Mexican Revolution (~1910-1922) has traditionally been seen as marking a crisis in both political and social Mexican life; subsequent historians have regarded the Revolution as the central, formative moment in Mexican modernity. Fleeing the chaos of the Revolution, about one million Mexicans emigrated to the United States who, to varying degrees, incorporated themselves into their adopted country. Many of these exiles would begin new ventures or participate in an already existent, robust, and thriving print culture (primarily in periodicals but also in other media) where they interjected in American political life during a period when the nation grappled with its own global involvement. This paper looks at selected writings by Mexican American journalists against Josefina Niggli’s novel Step Down, Elder Brother (1947) to examine the expatriate phenomenon known as "mexico de afuera” that emerged during and after the Mexican Revolution. I situate Niggli’s overlooked novel (usually discounted as local color) within the tradition of mexico de afuera to interrogate how she trades on the ambiguous status of “Mexican American” as a gendered category of both race and citizenship. While much ink has been given to expatriate American white authors, far less has been said about how Mexican Americans participated in debates about the nation’s role as an emerging leader among nations in the postWWII global order. As Niggli’s writing helps show, in the mid-twentieth century, Mexican Americans were concerned with the seeming contradiction between domestic and foreign, between native and immigrant, a form of manhood I call “expatriate citizenship.” Reading Niggli demonstrates a more robust and divergent Latinx creative expression than the legacy of the post-civil rights movement suggests, and my reading places Niggli within a longer history of women Latina writers and within American literary modernism. For her many white and Latinx readers, Niggli’s novel helped them deliberate on their own nation’s place as an emergent global superpower and the contradictions posed between exported democracy, its attendant rise of capitalist economies, and multifaceted citizenship.

“Outcast from the Patria: Lorenzo de Zavala and U.S. Democracy” Evelyn Soto, University of Pennsylvania This paper will focus on a theoretical and ethnographic study of U.S. democracy by an exile of Mexico’s post-independence turmoil: in 1834, Lorenzo de Zavala published Viaje a los Estados- Unidos del Norte de América / Journey to the United States of America. Not only does Zavala’s text predate Tocqueville’s well-known Democracy in America (1835), the study provides a glimpse into early interrogations of social belonging and difference, political traditions, and cultural distinctions across the Americas that create an opportunity to reflect on the beginnings of a Latinx experience. For Zavala, such an experience was defined at the crossroads of U.S. American political thought and Spanish American customs. This approach to reading a Latinx experience in the nineteenth century is indebted to the work of Rodrigo Lazo, Kirsten Silva- Guesz, and Raúl Coronado, among many others, who consider the multiplicity of meanings and experiences of “Latinx” in a broader historical span of time in order to better theorize our present. In his Viaje a los Estados Unidos, Zavala often risks reiterating the discourse of the Spanish Black Legend: a racialized account of Spanish America’s backwardness, dependence on the U.S., and teleological progression towards U.S. democratic principles. I argue that Zavala ventriloquizes this racializing discourse as a way to reckon with the ongoing legacy of Spanish imperialism in Mexico, on the one hand, and to theorize both the possibilities and impasses for “a combined regimen of the American system and Spanish customs and traditions,” on the other (194).

“Cecile Pineda: The Undisciplined Subject” John Waldron, University of Vermont John Waldron, in “Cecile Pineda: The Undisciplined Subject,” examines Pineda’s work as an undisciplined challenge to us as readers. Rather than telling stories about herself and her family of immigrants who came to the U.S. to avoid the ravages of the Mexican Revolution, Pineda forces us to inhabit the thoughts and see the world through the perspectives of subjects who undergo radical transformations (Face, Fishlight or Bardo 99) or who confront shattering realities (Bardo 99, Redoubt, Frieze). Pineda’s work asks not that we locate her work using signs of her disciplinary difference, but rather that we identify with the lack at the core of her characters’ and our own being. The result is that the disciplinary structures used to domesticate the untamable are revealed to be incomplete and unfinished, and Pineda allows us to imagine new, more malleable constructs that allow for the recognition and inclusion of true, undisciplined difference.

27. Translating History: the Elision of Race in the Puerto Rican Imaginary

“Jesús Colón: A Puerto Rican in New York Writing about Race in the 1950’s” Melissa Coss Aquino, Bronx Community College, CUNY Born in Cayey, Puerto Rico in 1901, Jesús Colón arrives in New York City in 1918. He is one of the earliest arrivals and unquestionably one of the most influential on the formation of an early Puerto Rican literary, cultural and political landscape in New York City. In his first collection A Puerto Rican in New York, published in 1961, though many were written in the 30s and 40s, six of the vignettes deal directly with encountering racism, but there is no mention of race in the titles. They have titles like “Kipling and I , “Hiawatha in Spanish”, “Little Things are Big,” “The Mother , The Daughter and Myself” , “She Actually Pinched Me” and “Greetings from Washington.” In these vignettes he explores racism as a black Puerto Rican, but the titles offer little hint of the content. In complete contrast the vignettes collected in The Way it Was ( and published posthumously) have titles like “Little Rock,” “The Negro in Puerto Rican History,” “The Negro in Puerto Rico Today” and “Arthur Schomburg and Negro History.” This presentation will explore Colón’s continuously evolving stance on writing about solidarity and consciousness around race, and the Puerto Rican struggle as being directly linked with the racial struggles of African Americans in the United States, and more broadly the African Diaspora all over the world.

“Erasing Race: Translating Out the “Afro” in René Marqués’s La Carreta/The Oxcart” Bret Maney, Lehman College, CUNY Considered one of the highpoints of twentieth-century Puerto Rican literature, René Marqués’s 1953 play La Carreta has nonetheless come under withering criticism from Latin@ critics and writers due to its elitism, essentializing linkage of puertorriqueñidad with rural life, and negative representation of diasporic Puerto Ricans. This paper opens up the possibility for a revised estimate of the politics of Marqués’s play by arguing that the English translation of La Carreta (The Oxcart) has obfuscated the Spanish original’s early articulation of U.S. Afro-Latin@ experience. In effect, the sole published English translation, which served as the basis for performances in New York starting in the late 1960s, has distorted La Carreta’s complex treatment of race. Most notably, the translation expunges the racialized component of a scene of police brutality involving a black Puerto Rican and omits a long speech in which a Puerto Rican character expresses solidarity with Southern blacks living under Jim Crow after she attends a civil rights gathering in Harlem. The translation’s scrubbing of markers of Afro-Latinidad and Puerto Rican-African American solidarity is systematic, a fact that is striking given that the English-language version of the play was the first work performed by the progressive Puerto Rican Traveling Theater (PRTT) and played to mixed ethnic audiences across the city. What purpose could this racial erasure have had other than diminishing the cultural work that the PRTT’s staging of the play was meant to do? In addition to exploring the ramifications of the ideologically suspect English translation on the politics and reception of the play, my paper investigates the possible motives for these stunning erasures through interviews and archival research. Finally, in its overall thrust, the paper makes a case for the retranslation of this classic play, one that would restore La Carreta’s vigorous early representation of Afro-Latin@ experience in midcentury New York.

“The Invisible History of Race at the Willowbrook State School, Staten Island, New York: 1947- 1975” Jorge Matos, Hostos Community College This paper will discuss the topic of race in the history of the infamous Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, New York. The name Willowbrook is recognized in Disability Rights History as a pivotal milestone in exposing the inhumane treatment of the mentally and developmentally challenged. In early 1972, a young reporter by the name of Geraldo Rivera revealed in a televised exposé, Willowbrook: The Last Great Disgrace, to a shocked national audience, the appalling living conditions in which over five thousand children and adults lived inside the nation’s largest mental institution. The legal and social struggles which ensued to close asylums and provide alternative services for the disabled became a centerpiece of the national disability rights movement. But conspicuously absent, is that a disproportionate number of the hospital’s residents were of Puerto Rican and African-American descent, comprising the largest minority population of any asylum in New York State. This major omission goes unnoticed despite the multiple intersections between race and class in the history of Willowbrook and its aftermath. I will explore how a historical incident of such magnitude where both Puerto Rican/Latin@s and African-Americans were present as residents, staff and activists was largely ignored in both communities. How such a silence occurred in the heyday of the liberationist narrative of the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement and Puerto Rican/Latino social movements such as the Young Lords Party will be examined. I will argue for a re-evaluation of race and the disabled body in the aforementioned struggles and fields of Disability Studies, Puerto Rican/Latin@ Studies and African-American Studies.

28. John Jay College student panel

Session 2: 10:25-11:40 a.m.

29. Racial Protagonisms in US Cuban Literary and Cultural Studies

The proposed panel offers four quite distinct examples of overlooked, understudied and occluded instances of complex racial interaction, tension and play in Cuban American literary and cultural studies. They range from a historical account of immigrant political organizing in Afro-Cuban New York City in the early- to mid-twentieth century, to an excavation of the cultural and material history (from indigenous origins to current, ongoing impact) of the engineered canals that run through and define Cuban Hialeah, to the gap in critical attention to the post-Cold War journeys of Cuban and Guatemalan “testimonial” texts in US based Latin(o) American literary studies, to a cultural and performance studies account of the practice of blackface by Cuban American comedian-performers in Miami in the early twenty first century. “Protagonisms” here signifies a common theme of refusing the imbedded logics of “Antagonism” in characterizing the long history of black, white and indigenous racial politics in the context of US-Cuba relations: organizations like El Club Mella model black-white racial integration in mid-century New York; Hialeah as “canal zone” helps to render materially the indigenous roots of the urban and cultural conditions that anchored Cuba onto US ground and launched countless Cubans into the America beyond its borders; post-Cold War culture in the US exhibits Cuban traces that link to those of other Latin American countries differently caught in the Cold War matrix, as well as in prevailing racial matrices, thereby exceeding the dialectical logics of communism versus capitalism, revolution versus exile, white versus black versus indigenous; blackface as practiced by white Cuban performers makes a dramatic reappearance on Spanish-language television in Obama-era Miami. The panel as a whole hopes to serve as an analytical intervention critical of conventionally reflexive habits of racial thought in US-Cuban studies, and an opportunity to model alternative modes of reflection, critique, and imagination regarding the still-imperceptible horizon of the Cuban-American racial reality still in the process of becoming.

Chair: Antonio López, George Washington University

“Televising Blackface in 21st Century Miami” Albert Laguna, American Studies, Yale University Though blackface performances draw quick, widespread condemnation in mainstream US popular culture, they continue to play a visible role on Spanish-language television shows in South Florida catering to the area’s large Cuban population. This paper examines particular moments of blackface performance to engage the following questions: 1. What has been the role of blackface in Cuban popular culture historically? 2. What is the place of blackface in an increasingly diverse Cuban Miami? 3. What does blackface in 21st century Miami tell us about a Cuban Miami whose demographic makeup has shifted dramatically with heavy migration from the island since 1994? To do this work, I will focus primarily on a blackface character named Mañeña featured frequently on a channel called América Tevé in 2010. Focusing on Mañeña, played by island-based actor Osvaldo Doimeadiós, provides an opportunity to engage with the questions above and to speak to how warming relations between the US and Cuba and economic interests on both sides are deeply affecting the circulation and production of Cuban popular culture on and off the island.

“Indigeneity, Canals, and the Fiction of a Cuban South Florida” Antonio López, English, George Washington University I am interested in how Hialeah, Florida, has taken shape as a center of the Cuban diaspora in the U.S. in ways that are irrevocably linked to indigeneity, the environment, and fictional narrative. We can begin by noting that Hialeah is the South Florida place that, perhaps more than any other, both island and U.S. Cubans (love to) call home, want to come to at all costs, and want to abandon as soon as possible, usually in a proof of upward mobility. These competing desires, trained on geographic space and unresolved as they are, establish a foundation for the low and dirty, ribald and funny schemes that Hialeah living offers those who outright claim, sidle up to, or deny its homeland capacities. This talk offers a literary-formalist and historicist reflection on the indigenous and eco-material environments of the city and their mannered, self-disclosing agency in the realities of the world and fictional narrative. The indigenous and eco-material signs I focus on are the longstanding Mikasuki presence in what becomes the city and two Hialeah early- to mid-twentieth-century canals: the one that runs along Okeechobee Road and, from there, north through the heart of the state, and the one that runs behind the iconic Westland Mall (Cuban America’s version of the Sherman Oaks Galleria). Mikasuki people inhabit the Hialeah zone at least as far back as the early 19th century, resisting Hispano- and Anglo-white settler colonialisms; by the 20th century, they become acceptable, sales-promoting others to real-estate and tourism sectors. Meanwhile, canals are land speculation’s literal channeling of indigenous land (and the land itself as eco-material agent) in the interests of anti-black development. These “dirty-water” channels are inflexible in their construction and purpose, and, as such, they prove a burden to dialogue with: They are a certain depth, they are straight, and they play one function, to manage still the drainage of the Everglades that once upon a time and today continues to make the city of Hialeah possible. Within those limits, fictional narrative—in this particular instance, that of Jennine Capó Crucet, a Hialeah local—comes as many a hopeful, self-defeating dialoguera has come before: To call and respond to a form, in the canal and its indigenous associations, that doesn't seem to want to talk back. My talk shows that in the challenging back and forth between indigeneity, canals, and literary representation there is another contribution to the culture and history of Cuban South Florida in what I call the fictions of the Hialeah Canal Zone. A sign of the human-engineered drainage that once cut into the swamp and its Mikasuki past and now flows as dirtiness and eyesore, the Hialeah Canal Zone imagines Cuban Americans as latter-day participants in a scene of settler-colonial (and, indeed, species) supremacy on the raggedy, once (and future) submerged tip of the Florida peninsula.

“Archival Disappeared: The Unknowable History of El Club Julio Antonio Mella in New York, 1932-1940” Nancy Raquel Mirabal, American Studies, University of Maryland In February of 1932 the Spanish-speaking members of the Cervantes Fraternal Society of the International Worker’s Order-a Communist Party affiliated mutual aid fraternal society- established logia (lodge) 4763 also known as El Club Julio Antonio Mella. El Club Mella, as it was commonly known lasted only eight years before it was merged with other Spanish speaking logias in the city. Organized precisely at the moment the Cuban people were under the tyrannical regime of the Machado government, the racially integrated, Club Mella emerged as one of the most influential and radical logias in the city. According to the report authored by the National Committee of the Hispanic Section of the IWO, there were no clubs in the United States for Cuban residents who wanted to protest and challenge the Machadato. Once El Club Mella was formed the report claimed that “thousands of workers, many of them Cuban” as well as those who had been “exiled for political reasons,” joined the club. El Club Mella was both reminiscent and a departure from the Cuban political clubs formed in the nineteenth century to fight Spanish colonial rule and establish Cuban independence. While on the one hand, they employed Cubanidad as a site of belonging and community formation, on the other, they considered themselves to be an integral part of a racially inclusive Spanish-speaking community in New York. No longer invested in the politics of return, the members of El Club Mella articulated and fashioned a diasporic politics that included support of labor and labor unions, racial and gender equality, immigrant rights, and fighting Fascism, including sending members to Spain to fight against General Francisco Franco. In addition to El Club Mella, Cubans in New York also formed the Organización Revolucionaria Cubana Anti-imperalista (ORCA) and El Club Martí. Both clubs were organized in Harlem in 1935. At the same time, members of ORCA published the short-lived but widely disseminated newspaper, Frente Único. In examining the history of El Club Julio Antonio Mella, this paper interrogates the trajectory of Cuban diasporic historiography, especially one that has yet to fully examine and synthesize the impact of Afro- Cuban political and cultural productions in New York. It provides a critical reading of the politics of archives, and theorizes the unknowable and the unthinkable as important strategies for understanding why certain histories, especially those that challenge traditional discourses and historical narratives, are silenced and marginalized. And finally, it argues that by acknowledging and integrating such histories, we expand our reading of what constitutes Latinx history, present, and future.

“The Racial Crucible of Genre: Reinaldo Arenas, Rigoberta Menchú and Literary Practice “After” Testimonio” Ricardo Ortiz, English, Georgetown University This paper argues that much can be learned by going back to the moment in literary and cultural history when Rigoberta Menchú’s famous 1983 testimonio I, Rigoberta Menchú had emerged as a touchstone of both the Cold War and of the culture wars raging in the Reagan-era United States, and juxtaposing that event with the parallel appearance, roughly a decade later, of another non-fiction testimony of precarious life in a Latin American country also wracked by the violent collateral, bio-political and racial traumas of US Cold War policy in the region, Reinaldo Arenas’ posthumously published memoir, Before Night Falls. The paper will focus on It will focus on the remarkably analogous and remarkably uneven histories of critical reception of these two texts, primarily in the US based fields of Latin American and US Latino literary and cultural studies; the marked racial asymmetries at work in these histories of critical reception, for example, determine how Menchu’s indigeneity can so fully ground her text’s claims to truth and authenticity while Arenas’ whiteness, indeed his racial status as such, radically evanesces in favor of his queerness and eventually his status as a person with AIDS. This analysis will trouble and complicate what are often rendered as dialectical dynamics of political, philosophical and aesthetic argumentation that passively mimic the larger dialectical logics of the global and regional Cold War (and its aftermaths) in general. It argues that a productively “queering” triangulation happens when we pit Arenas’ testimonial gestures alongside and against Menchú’s, especially as those gestures play out in North American intellectual, institutional and ideological contexts where the generic instabilities of both texts, indeed their parallel failures as testimonio, produce opportunities for critical intervention that resist and exceed any expectations that the prevailing dialectical logics of the Cold War, and the prevailing dialectical logics of “race,” especially in the New World, can do anything to explain the political, racial, cultural and aesthetic formations that have survived it. The paper will briefly trace the considerable history of critical engagements of each testimonio to highlight how in each case the absence of reference to the other haunts any attempt on either critical project’s part to tell the whole truth about testimonio, or about its discursive foil, “literature.” It concludes with a brief aside regarding Cristina García’s 2010 novel, The Lady Matador’s Hotel, written by an iconic Cuban American writer of fiction, set in an unnamed Cental American capital that could only be Guatemala City, and featuring at least one Cuban character who resembles Arenas enough, and one Guatemalan character (among many) who resembles Menchú enough; García, I will suggest in concluding, thereby offers us her own triangulating, tri-alectical alternative approach to thinking the through the worst, often most local and intimate, legacies of Cold War violence, and its racial corollaries, as a once-general condition of life, through a discursive and aesthetic practice that refuses to choose between criticism, and testimonio, and literature.

30. Fashioning the Racialized Subject: Aesthetics, Power, and the Politics of Style

This panel brings together three different perspectives on the centrality of aesthetics and politics in Latina/o cultural production. Animated by the methods of close reading and textual analysis, all three are driven by an attention to the importance of style. This focus on the formal is centered on the question of how power is articulated and embodied in the texualized bodies of Chicanas (in two of the three papers), as well as how power shapes affect in each of the texts under consideration. Julie Avril Minich’s paper on Chicana Fat Aesthetics focusses on the body of work produced by two fat-identified Chicana artists, Laura Aguilar and Virgie Tovar, whose work centers on their bodies. Minich’s articulation of questions of the power dynamics of reading and interpretation of these bodies are central to the questions that this panel explores. Ralph Rodriguez’s paper examines the formal choices Ana Menéndez makes in her short story “Why We Left” to explore questions of distance and intimacy, memory and narrative coercion, that are stylized in the use of particular pronouns. Eliza Rodriguez y Gibson’s examination of Helena Maria Viramontes’s novel, Their Dogs Came With Them centers both narrative style as well as the fashions of clothing that characterize the four Chicana protagonists. Rodriguez y Gibson suggests that both fashion and literary style encapsulate the centrality of formal and stylistic concerns in Viramontes’s articulation of Chicana subjectivity, and that there is no articulation of Chicana subjectivity outside of style. Taken together, these three papers suggest that discussions of power and cultural politics benefit from the methods of close literary analysis—and that style makes the (racialized wo)man.

Chair: Eliza Rodríguez y Gibson, Loyola Marymount University

“Chicana Fat Aesthetics” Julie Avril Minich, University of Texas at Austin This talk unravels connections between the construction of race, normative beauty ideals, and dominant conceptions of health, using the framework of disability studies to illuminate how panic over the so-called obesity epidemic functions as a technology of racialization. I understand obesity panic as a manifestation of what disability theorist Robert McRuer calls compulsory able-bodiedness, or the belief that an able body is an unquestioned social good, that everyone can and should preserve their bodies in a state of maximum ability, and that health maintenance is a criteria of good citizenship. The fat-identified Chicana artists Virgie Tovar and Laura Aguilar resist compulsory able-bodiedness by reimagining the fat Mexican body and challenging its subordinate place in the U.S. body politic. Disrupting a presumed correlation between beauty and (perceived) health, Tovar and Aguilar advance a Chicana fat aesthetic that offers new possibilities for valuing diverse bodies.

“From Where I Stand: Intimacy and Distance in Ana Menéndez’s ‘Why We Left’” Ralph E. Rodriguez, Brown University Ana Menéndez’s unusual and compelling story “Why We Left,” from her collection In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, details the lives of characters in the wake of the Cuban revolution. Many of the characters speak of the loss of homeland in the wake of the revolution; they deal with the plight of living in exile, of having been a regal German Shepherd in Cuba, but only a degraded mutt in the United States; they wrestle with the complications of family, and a persistent theme throughout is memory—its nostalgia, its capacity to misremember, and the illusions it creates. In a collection of exquisite stories, “Why We Left,” however, stands out as special for a number of formal reasons, and those formal matters—especially the use of pronouns and how they influence the affective experience of the story—are what I analyze in this paper. I examine the intimate, and perhaps coercive, act narrators perform in wrangling the reader into their stories. What does it do, for instance, to use that intimate first-person plural gesture of we to denote narrator and reader? What does it do to narrate a first-person self (I) through the second- person pronoun you? What happens when characters are never named, but instead labelled exclusively you and I? From its very title, Menéndez plants a number of dramatic questions in the reader’s mind: Who is the we? From where have they left? And why have they left? We know, that is, what we are reading toward in this story, but the answers we are not what we might expect.

“Styling the Subject in Their Dogs Came With Them” Eliza Rodríguez y Gibson, Loyola Marymount University Written in Helena María Viramontes’s signature style that foregrounds the subjectivity of her principle characters, Their Dogs Came With Them is an elliptical narrative that forms a chain of interlinked lives in East LA in the 1960s; four young Chicanas who whose lives are marked by alienation from each other and themselves. The effect of the tale, which is told from multiple points of view, is simultaneously fragmentary when viewed up close and mosaic-like when seen from a distance. This embedding of each person's life within many others creates connections that, while sometimes invisible to the characters themselves, are legible to the reader as repeated fragments and phrases. In this paper, I’m interested in the manner in which ethics and aesthetics sustain each other—and more precisely the ways in which style articulates subjectivity—put another way, I suggest that there is no subjectivity outside of literary style. Viramontes’s formal manipulations of temporality and the subsequent the refraction of narrative point of view creates an image-driven and cinematic sensibility, which articulates a particularly gendered, classed, and racialized relational subjectivity. Moreover, this fashioning of selfhood is further reflected in the particularities of dress that characterize the novel’s four Chicana protagonists. Style—as in fashion, and style as in literary form are central concerns in this novel’s articulation of Chicana subjectivity.

31. Race in/as the Future: Gender, Sex, and the Language of Encounter

“Using Chicanafuturism for Utopian Dreaming: Mestizaje of Language and Religion in Ernest Hogan's High Aztech” Iracema M. Quintero, Texas Tech University My presentation “Using Chicanafuturism for Utopian Dreaming: Mestizaje of Language and Religion in Ernest Hogan's High Aztech” presents a closed reading of Ernest Hogan’s Chicanafuturist novel High Aztech. I engage in Hogan’s use of mestizaje and indigenismo in language and religion to assert that Hogan creates a mestiza consciousness to establish a utopic state in the novel. I first examine the significance of Hogan’s Aztequisms—slang phrases mixed in Spanish, English, and Náhuatl—which challenge the practice of maintaining power with a pure language. This hybridized language incorporates the forgotten indigenous Aztec language alongside dominant Spanish and English. Then, I explore the cohabitation of multiple faith viruses in a single host as a challenge to religious colonization. High Aztech follows Xólotl, the main character, on his chaotic journey of religious contamination, internalization of religious codes, and religious self-awareness. Xólotl, in the end, embraces all faiths and provides readers with an egalitarian, utopian worldview. This critical analysis offers a deconstructive approach to colonization using Catherine Ramirez’s Chicanafuturism genre, Gloria Anzaldúa’s new mestiza consciousness, and Chela Sandoval’s differential oppositional consciousness as the tools for enacting a utopic state in the novel. The Chicanafuturism genre has created an avenue for the marginalized, especially the Indigenous, to use utopia or dystopia to challenge established views of nationhood and colonization. My article extends the discussion of High Aztech’s Chicanafuturist features and argues that the mestizaje of language and religion not only provides a Chicana/o space but also establishes a visionary fiction illustrating utopian possibilities.

“Digitizing Dominican Blackness: Explorations of the Linguistic and Semiotic Strategies of Dominican Online Content Producers” Saudi Garcia, New York University This paper uses linguistic and semiotic approach to examine the tactics that Dominican content producers in digital public spheres engage to communicate message about blackness in the context of contemporary Dominican society. The paper first examines the images and commentary on “Dominicans Be Like,” a Facebook community with a large following, to understand the inner workings of racialization in the digital era, and in the context of the hegemonic discourses of racial democracy in Latin American and color blindness in the United States. Then, the paper turns to a discussions of the Dominican digital sphere’s meme-based responses to the racial discrimination case that unfolded around political science and scholarship applicant Nicky Gonzalez in July 2016. This paper theorizes the significance of the different tactics that content producers use to exploit the affordances of digital platforms, in particular Facebook and Instagram, to communicate complex messages that support and subvert the racial hierarchies that organize Dominican society.

“(En)Counter Narratives: Black, White, and Brown Racialized and Sexualized Rhetoric” Christopher Rivera, Essex County College Satire and parody historically have been critical ways minority voices, or, as Juan Flores refers to it as, voices “from below,” deal with societal injustices. There is nothing new in the notion that to the victors go the spoils. That is to say, those throughout history that have had the privilege/power to narrate and document history from their perspectives created a sense of racial, ethnic, national and sexual ideological permanence that continues to remain dominant even today. The social constructions of race, ethnicity, sexuality and nationality are actively problematized by disempowered individuals and groups who hope to raise awareness and challenge these same social metanarratives that define/categorize bodies of color in contemporary representations. This paper will unmask ideological understandings of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and nationalism through close reading ’s construction of Haitian vs. Dominican identity in The Farming of Bones (1998), Eduardo del Río’s (also known professionally as Rius) political cartoons that deal with U.S. national identity vs. mexicanidad compiled in machismo, feminismo, homosexualismo (2000) and The Latino Comedy Project’s focus on the dangerous of immigration in 300 (2007) and, their most recent socio-political commentary, Pachanga for Trump (2016). I utilize these texts in order to show how in historical fiction, political cartoons, and scripted performances, the color line is both normalized and queered, following Siobhan B. Somerville’ publication, Queering the Color Line (2000). Applying a queer reading of race, ethnicity, and nationality opens up new avenues to discuss both the real and imagined meanings of difference in U.S.

32. Genre, Race, and the Aesthetics of Diaspora

“Gender, Genre and Postrace Tolkien Aesthetics in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” Angie Bonilla, University of California, Santa Cruz I utilize Jose Saldivar’s idea of “postrace aesthetics” to conceptualize Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as a postrace speculative fiction that sits at the crux of a diasporic discourse on speculative realism and historical fantasy, gender and race, and narrative and coloniality. These shifting frameworks, seen through Díaz’s citation of a fantastic Tolkien universe, I argue, opens up the possibility of a queer futurity, what José Muñoz calls a reality “not yet here,” that, nevertheless, resonates in the present social imaginary of the Dominican Republic and, more broadly, transnational latinidades. Postmodern critics have argued that the J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings simultaneously represses and evokes the historical and colonial. While Tolkien and the discourse surrounding his work have silenced these discourses, including the categories of gender and race, I apply a cultural studies/postmodern critique to the Díaz/Tolkien fantastic imaginary to fill in those historical silences and, thus, recharge Tolkien with an ethical and political value. Both writer’s investment in fantasy reveals a larger, male-centered, and heteronormative cultural desire for intimacy and belonging that transcends typical boundaries of gender, genre and race. As a central presence in Díaz’s novel, Oscar’s portrayal of genre nerdiness epitomizes this desire, giving way to a future queer space of radical Latinx lives and masculinities.

“Desarrollando un(a) estétic@ transgénero en la diáspora” Stephanie Contreras, Florida State University La revista de historietas Sexile (2004) de Jaime Cortez es un testimonio gráfico que relata la vida de Adela Vázquez, una cubana transgénero exiliada a los Estados Unidos. El testimonio usa dibujos para representar la formación transgénero de Jorge a Adela durante su diáspora. En conjunto con la adaptación textual de “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above The Village of Chamounix Performing Transgender Rage” por Susan Stryker, propongo que el uso de los dibujos de Cortez y la representación de Stryker crean un espacio visual, fuera de los límites de lenguaje, para captar la esencia del ser transgénero y desarrollar un(a) estétic@ transgénero. Cortez y Stryker defienden un estético nuevo de la belleza —“this beautiful freak body”— para colocar al ser transgénero y darle un espacio de visibilidad, articulación y transformación. De modo que desean crear un espacio para poder exponer las construcciones socioculturales de género y las formas de violencia y transgresiones que se infligen a los que no caen dentro de estas construcciones. Usando ambos textos, explico que el espacio de transición y progreso para la identidad del ser transgénero se encuentra en la representación de estar sumergido bajo el agua; para Adela, se encuentra en el espacio entre Cuba y los Estados Unidos.

"Transatlantic Diasporas in Latinidad" Sarah Quesada, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign What is the new direction of Latinx theory within the comparative framework of multiculturalism? As Juan Poblete has asserted, Chicanx (and by extension, Latinx) and African- American studies have seen a polarization by virtue of “cultural and nationalistic autonomy.” The integration of Latin American and Latinx studies has long been debated. At the same time, African studies struggles against isolation as new research surfaces. One of the main goals of a inclusive comparatism has always been to seek lines of inquiry that assuage the trauma of what Gloria Anzaldúa calls, “una herida abierta” (“where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds”). As a response to these multicultural disciplinary disjunctions, this paper draws from the works of Latinx’s Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me Ultima, and Dahlma Llanos Figueroa’s Daughters of the Stone and well as Guinean Camara Laye’s L’enfant noir (The African Child). It seeks textual ontologies and epistemologies that meditate on the common denominator between the three axes mentioned in an exploration of cosmology, informed by gender and race. This paper considers the historical diaspora of Afro-Latinxs during the Atlantic World formation and stretches its consequences into the 21st century. As a result, it pushes the limits of Latinidad into conversation with West Africa. Specifically, I use anthropological query to find how African spiritual sites conceptualize a new dimension in Latinx narratives: mainly, to see these narratives as “textual” sites of consolation for the Latinx African Diaspora. I conclude by highlighting Afrolatinidad as an organizing principle that guides the much-needed vector between Latinidad, Latin America and West Africa.

33. Brown & Queer Aesthetics: Animals, Objects, Plants, & Cyborgs, Part 1

What does it mean to be marked as something other, other than human? And how does one rigorously engage with brownness and queerness when the subject is not at the center of a critical inquiry of existence? This panel is interested in placing pressure on the conditions and boundaries of racialized and sexualized ontologies by turning to animality, objecthood, ecology, and cybernetics in literature, performance, and aesthetics.

Panel Chair: Sandra Ruiz, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“The Resentimentality of Latinidad in Richard Rodriguez’s Brown” Joshua Javier Guzmán, University of Colorado-Boulder For many scholars in Latino studies, Richard Rodriguez stands as an aberration within Chicano and Latino literary history. In the 1980s, Rodriguez was lauded as the perfect minority from the U.S. far-right after having built his early career as a public intellectual on the premises of undermining racial discourse, while proclaiming a robust mode of shame around his meztizo identity. This came in direct conflict with the bourgeoning multicultural America that at once sought the voices of people of color in order to meld them together under the utopian fantasy of a post-racial America. In contrast, Rodriguez rose from the hangover of the Brown power movement and denounced bilingual education and affirmative action programs thereby standing as the primary (brown) face of racial uplift ideology under Reagan’s America. By 2002 and with the publication of his collection of essays on brownness, Rodriguez will come to offer what many critics have criticized as a precious formalism in his thinking of race in America. By emptying the historical contents by which race has come to figure primarily as a technology of control, Rodriguez treads the line between romanticizing its formal qualities while simultaneously disavowing his own racial identity. This paper will linger with Rodriguez’s Brown to argue that in fact a deep seeded ambivalence permeates the text’s formal investigation into identity politics in order to foreground an aesthetics of resentimentality—an aesthetic practice that undermines itself in spite of its insistence on sentimentality.

"Everything Becomes Form": The Racial Quotidian in Paul Pescador's Crushes” Iván A. Ramos, University of California Riverside This paper examines the work of multi-disciplinary Los Angeles based artist and writer Paul Pescador. In particular, I show how Pescador uses the minor—in his writings, use of found objects, and performance practice—to explore the racial and queer valences of what the artist names as being “stuck on daily experience.” Pescador’s work, I argue, dwells at the margins of experience to grapple with the quotidian absurdity of identity. How does Pescador’s approach to materiality deploy what José Esteban Muñoz called the “sense of brown” as an attachment to discarded or ephemeral objects, moments, affects? The essay focuses in particular on Pescador’s series Crushes. The series consists of a novella, photographs, and a feature length experimental film that reach the personal by circumventing the autobiographical. Instead, Pescador offers written fragments of moments, photographs of found objects, and a non-narrative film to evade the pitfalls of identity and narrative instead offering a vocabulary for the series of evanescent moments that define the queer racialized subject. I draw from what Lauren Berlant calls the “counterpolitics of the silly object” and Yu Jon Kim’s notion of the racial mundane to explore how irreverence, playfulness, and the fragmentary offer an alternative account of queer Latinidad. This account, ultimately aimless in its goal, offers novel possibilities for thinking queerness and race beyond the demands of belonging.

“Amorphous Amalgamation in the Work of Firelei Báez and Wangechi Mutu” Leticia Alvarado, Brown University In her solo exhibition, Bloodlines, Dominican born artist Firelei Báez presents amorphous amalgamations of flora and fauna that reconfigure models of resistant organisms beyond human analytic frames. This paper deploys brownness as a queer analytic in comparative analysis of Báez’s amalgamations and the amorphous figures in the work of Nairobi-born artist, Wangechi Mutu. Aesthetically, both artists share the use of constricted, patterned color fields in the rendering of eroticized, racialized and gendered presentations of colonial encounters. The figures they render are neither wholly human, animal or plant but rather organic amalgamations marked as much by race and sexuality as they are by their inhumanity. Geographically, Báez and Mutu share a city—New York—working within local art markets that exceed national boundaries and regulations. In this paper, the queer analytic of brownness will illuminate anticolonial aesthetics forged by multiple displacements that, following Lisa Lowe, underscore intimacies across continents ultimately providing a heuristic for critical solidarity. The transnational and global frame that emerges in the comparison of the work of these artists will also put under examination the systems of circulation for artworks that traverse global systems of capital un-beholden to the nation-sate. The shared, affectively charged, sense of brown that animates this exploration, then, will be shown to both animates politically salient anticolonial aesthetic gestures while querying the limits of cultural production distributed through dominant monetized circuits.

Session 3: 11:50-1:05 p.m.

34. Brown & Queer Aesthetics: Animals, Objects, Plants, & Cyborgs, Part 2

What does it mean to be marked as something other, other than human? And how does one rigorously engage with brownness and queerness when the subject is not at the center of a critical inquiry of existence? This panel is interested in placing pressure on the conditions and boundaries of racialized and sexualized ontologies by turning to animality, objecthood, ecology, and cybernetics in literature, performance, and aesthetics.

Panel Chair & Presenter: Dr. Sandra Ruiz

“Organismal Futurisms in Brown Sound and Queer Luminosity” Sandra Ruiz, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Queer and Colombian performance artist, Erica Gressman, energized a room of minoritarian audience members in her 2016 avant-garde piece Wall of Skin. Fusing noise music, analogue technology, including circuit-bent electronics, handmade synthesizers, cybernetics, and biomechatronics, Gressman entered a darkened room dressed from head-to-toe in a snug, white nylon one-piece, her breasts taped tightly against her chest to erase any marker of conventional gender expression and sexual desire. With an impulse towards the synesthetic, Gressman creates what she calls a “cybernetic skin for a world filled with white male experimental sound organs,” from a formerly handcrafted light sensitive oscillator instrument, made by the artist in the tradition of Nicolas Collins's original designs. Playing here with the heteronormativity of white sound and the ontic infelicities of brownness and sexuality, Gressman covers herself in photocells, utilizing the cyborg as an aesthetic and political intervention. She becomes an organ made of photosensors, prompting the proliferation of sound through the simultaneous interactions of bodily movements and light. The spectator experiences luminosity as Gressman becomes the live embodiment of sound, creating a musical score with her body. By turning to experimental sound theory, queer theory, Brown Studies, and a Serresian account of sensory stimulus and skin, I argue that technology and science transcend the senses, querying the spectator to experience aesthetics carefully within those inharmonious moments in queerness and brownness. By performing as the closest thing to the visual embodiment of sound, I argue that Gressman’s sonic and kinetic enactments transition her into a new organism, making light change sound, being brown and queer in performatively cyborgian ways.

“Losing the Pack: Ambivalent Animality and Queer Inhumanism in Justin Torres’ We the Animals” Christina A. León, Oregon State University In the 2011 novel, We the Animals, queer, Nuyorican writer Justin Torres crafts ambivalent animal metaphors as a form of opaque, aesthetic resistance. Set in upstate of New York, Torres creates a set of distilled vignettes about three boys born to a poor white mother and a Puerto Rican father. Figured as mutts, these boys blur the boundaries between animality and humanity through their childlike experimentations with belonging. One figure, though, emerges later in the text as the narrator and separates himself from his “pack” as he comes to embody his own queer desires. I read this novel alongside current queer theories that engage animal studies to show how Torres figures ambivalent animality as an opaque resistance to upstanding family morals—and, in particular, a strident neoliberal fantasy of Latina/o familial relations that opposes latinidad and queerness. Torres raises these stakes of relation and kinship precisely through his animal metaphors—an unlikely mode of representation. Rather than figuring the queer, racialized child as a victim of his family’s composite structures of belonging, Torres ends his novel on a note of undecidable, radically ambivalent animality that takes the narrative beyond liberatory humanist promise and into the uncertain terrain of desire.

“Canal Narratology” Roy Pérez, Willamette University Jennine Capo Crucet's novel Make Your Home Among Strangers, set amid a fictional version of the Elian Gonzalez controversy, employs an ecological subplot about the polluted state of Miami's arterial inland waterways. The winding, manmade, algae-infested canals entwine military complexes, schools, stripmalls, and exurban housing developments throughout South Florida and link the lives of racially and economically segregated enclaves through a shared experience of toxic flow. The canals weave through the protagonist's life first as a site of refuse flowing behind her childhood home, then as a site of scientific study through her job at an environmental think tank. Juxtaposed against the hackneyed tropicalization of Miami and the open, mythical seas through which the young "Ariel Hernandez" braves beast, storm, and national guard, these green canals littered with shopping carts and spilled cement offer a critical addendum to current visions of Caribbean littoral connection and cultural proximity. In this paper I offer the arterial reach of the canal system in Make Your Home Among Strangers as a narratological backwater: a subplot for the transnational orientation of cultural studies in the Americas. The figure of the stagnant inland waterway as part of domestic space marked by the capitalist expansion and corporate neglect of Miami's urban development strikes a vital contrast with transnational archipelagic studies. This tension between the arterial and the oceanic--the baroque epistemological flow of the archipelagic set against the circuitous interior of the mainland--reminds us not to abandon the texture of the local as we devise better and broader transnational optics through which to understand new cultural formations of Caribbean diaspora.

35. Temporalities of Race

“Temporality and Tortillas: The Great Secular Host” Marcela Di Blasi de Quiroga, Dartmouth College Religion--- especially Roman Catholicism--- is an undertheorized area of inquiry in Latinx literary studies. In persuasive and definitive readings, the early seminal scholarship dismissed the value of religious faith in Latinx literary production, but consequently also dismissed the practitioners of those faith-ways in literature. The literary practitioners of faith are most often characterized by what I term “queerly aged” post-reproductive women. More central—and not coincidentally younger—characters repeatedly ridicule these women precisely for their faith. A superficial gloss of canonical Latinx and Chicanx fiction reveals this to be true: Maria from Américo Paredes’George Washington Gomez (1930’s/1990), Consuelo from José Antonio Villareal’s Pocho (1959), “the mother” in Tomás Rivera’s …y no se lo trago la tierra (1971), Amalia from John Rechy’s The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez, etc. Too often, I argue, critics have assumed child-characters unreasonably capable of interpreting their mothers. So even when the cast of characters shifted, with less focus on hope for messianic sons of social consciousness, we Latinx literary critics have lacked a framework for taking representations of religious faith seriously. What have we missed when we only read religious faith to critique it? In this paper—a test-case—I ask how we understand the relationship between religious faith and radical temporality through close readings of the uncontainable temporality of Holy Communion. I ask what this Catholic idea makes possible for the poetry of Gloria Anzaldúa, the fiction of Helena María Viramontes, the performances of Jesusa Rodríguez, and the throwaway generalizations of Cormac McCarthy alike?

“Harboring Spirits: Theories of Time, Relativity, and Race in Gods Go Begging by Alfredo Vea” Richard Perez, John Jay College, CUNY

Brown Aesthetics, Textual Performances, and Trans-Temporal Latinx Racial Formations” Christofer A. Rodelo, Harvard University To theorize race in the 21st century, we must be adept at historicizing Latinx racial formations across multiple time periods. This paper queries the aesthetic formation of brownness through an examination of 19th century literary and performance cultures and their ramifications in the near- contemporary moment. The nineteenth century is a foundational moment for reckoning with formations of race, gender, sexuality, and empire, yet remains an understudied area of Latinx Studies. Moreover, the relationship between literary, performance, and aesthetic forms (especially for historical subjects) merits further exploration. In the spirit of a recent turn towards the nineteenth century (Guidotti-Hernández 2011, Ruiz 2014, Coronado 2014, Lazo and Alemán 2016), I expand existing Latinx criticism through attention to performance history. My paper recovers and analyzes the story of 19th freak-show performers Maximo and Bartola, as an early case example of the ways in which Latinx brownness came to enter the racial imaginary of the United States. Maximo and Bartola, who suffered from encephalitis, were coercively brought to the United States from their native El Salvador in the 1840s, to perform as “Aztec Children” in numerous sideshows, exhibitions, and viewings across the United States and Europe. In this paper, I examine Maximo and Bartola’s performance archive—specifically travel narratives and photographs-- in relation to Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco’s 1992-1993 performance exhibit The Couple in the Cage. Moreover, I model a mode of critique attentive to the textuality/literariness/forms of performance archives, mainly through close readings of textual representations of theatrical bodies. This trans-temporal study of Latinx aesthetic performance helps to understand how Latinx bodies were racialized beyond the black/white binary in the nineteenth century, a legacy with ramifications for contemporary Latinx artistic production.

36. Im/Possibilites of Utopia: Borders, Visions, and Speculative Fiction

“Latinx Border Dystopias” Marta Caminero-Santangelo, University of Kansas My paper looks specifically at the emerging genre of Latino/a dystopia. Since the implementation of Operation Gatekeeper (1994) and similar strategies of border enforcement, as well as the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and, most recently, the election of Donald Trump-whose campaign notably fanned the flames of nativist and white supremacist fervor- Latinos increasingly face a frightening social and political environment that is, specifically, racially charged. I argue that, riding the wave of popularity of dystopian fiction, some recent Latino/a narrative (fiction, non-fiction, drama) adopts and incorporates elements of dystopia as a way of critiquing the most negative elements of today's nationalist and nativist US culture, which specifically targets the bodies of people of color. The 2008 independent film Sleep Dealer, in which undocumented workers cross the border only virtually and the developed world north of the border controls access to the water that flows south, is perhaps the most perfect example of the narrative of the new Latino border dystopia: in the futuristic world, the problems of undocumented migration have been "solved" by preventing migrants from actually crossing the physical border, although their labor can still be exploited through virtual means reminiscent of long hours of repetitive factory work. This movie, I wish to argue, directly addresses the ways in which nativism and global capitalism, together, create dystopia for Latino workers. However, I will further argue that Latino/a narrative does not have to be "science fiction" in order to be dystopian. Alicia Gaspar de Alba's novel Desert Blood (2007), about the murders over the last three decades of hundreds of women at the U.S.-Mexican border, shares the depiction of a society gone terrifyingly wrong through the combination of global capitalism, exploited labor, and the explicit and grotesque targeting of female brown bodies; while the book is set in the present, scenes of ghoulish dismembered and even disemboweled bodies strewing the desert create a surrealistic and nightmarish border landscape.

“Visions of a World Foreclosed: The Imaginative Possibilities of Jicotencatl” Petrina Crockford, University of Southern California Jicotencatl, published in Philadelphia in 1826, has received little attention in US literary studies. As Ann Brickhouse notes, its transnational genealogy and unknown authorship make it a site from which competing, allegorical readings are made, though these readings are often done through the lens of US/Anglo political, literary, and epistemological modes. But when read through Spanish Enlightenment thought and in the context of the 1826 Congress of Panama— which imagined a Pan Latin American union and citizenship—Jicotencatl reveals itself as a novel that offers an alternative vision of a sociality and a self ultimately foreclosed (the pan Latin American vision of the Congress of Panama was never to be). This paper attends to the literary construction of this world to illustrate how it imagines a self/nation that is non-binary, fluid, and collective, and based on Spanish, Catholic conceptions of natural law and the social contract; Jicotencatl thus offers a counter to the individualistic nation-building projects of the US at the same time it offers an understanding of writing/literary production that is collective. As an early example of indigenismo, Jicotencatl’s methods also offer a counterpoint to the vanishing projects of the literary US at the same time it points to its own anxieties about race. In focusing on this brief moment of imaginative possibility and revealing its construction and complexities, this paper offers a possible groundwork from which to discuss or imagine contemporary Latinx writings.

“Latin@s in the Slipstream: Latin@ Speculative Fiction and the Pursuit of Utopia” Clarissa Goldsmith, Arizona State University The slipstream, as defined in speculative fiction, is the conflation of magical realism and science fiction. It is the insertion of the surreal into the mundane. By definition, the slipstream forges new worlds that reject the linear concept of time and the perceived construction of reality. Erased from the historical narrative and forcibly shaped by imperialism, the colonized Latin@ identity already exists in the slipstream. The creation of Latin@ speculative and slipstream productions lays claim to the slipstream and enacts the potential for a new queer utopia. Building off of José Esteban Muñoz’s assertion that a queer utopia is a “backward glance that enacts a future vision,” I argue that Latin@ speculative fiction looks to the indigenous past to create a queer futurity. A brief survey of Latin@ speculative fiction reveals the importance of indigeneity in creating a queered concept of reality and futurity. This presentation will focus on the short story “Them Ships” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and “Journey into the Vortex” by Maya Khankoje and analyze how their use of slipstream speculative fiction and indigeneity lends to the creation of a queered, Latin@ utopia. These works enact decolonial praxis first by their presence in a traditionally Eurocentric genre and secondly by their imagining of worlds outside of coloniality. The speculative fiction tradition, as imagined by Latin@ creators, introduces alternate realities that reframe the present, recreate the past, and have the potential to create a utopic futurity.

37. Desire for Synchronicity: Race, Masculinity, and the Perils of Identity

“Dominican Masculinity in the International Sphere: Violence, Sex and the Nation” René Cordero, Maria de Hostos Community College, CUNY “Dominican Masculinity in the International Sphere: Violence, Sex and the Nation” explores the Dominican tíguere (literally, tiger) as a post-colonial male identity. Although Dominican men use this identity to create and sustain their domination in the D.R., it is an identity that emerged from the country’s interactions with the outside world. The Dominican tíguere originates in the country’s traumatic history of colonialism, dictatorship, two U.S. invasions in less than a century, and massive emigration to the U.S. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo’s dictatorship (1930-1961) embodied and popularized the image of the tíguere. Analyzing tigueraje within the corridors of power in the Dominican Republic, as well as the popular imageries of svelte Dominican playboy Porfirio Rubirosa, professor René Cordero’s work looks at how the image of the Dominican tíguere served as a nationalist and political tool during the Cold War, its imagery and lexicon sealed in the Dominican vernacular of today. Building on the scholarship of Lauren Derby and her analysis of Dominican nationalism as a “manipulation of quotidian practices” and “vernacular politics,” as well as concepts from feminist scholarship like Anne MCclintock’s “metaphysics of gender violence,” I approach the tíguere persona as an embodiment and expression of the power imbalances between the U.S. and the Dominican Republic. The tíguere as a cultural expression renders a microcosmic example of how these manly behaviors stem from broader political themes in the history and trauma of a collective.

“Love, Racial Knowing, and the Perils of Brown Masculinity” Adriana Estill, Carleton College In my work on the haunting and complicated presence of “telenovelas” on U.S. television shows, one element that stands out is the way in which shows as diverse as 30 Rock, Warehouse 13, and The O.C. imagine Latino men as caricatures, complete with big, dark mustaches, hypersexualized bodies, bombastic manners, and “loud” clothing and accessories. These representations mirror Charles Ramírez Berg’s 2002 analysis of dominant Latinx stereotypes. Indeed, the white U.S. television industry’s imagining of --or failure to imagine--Latino men is such that, even as they adapt telenovelas like Ugly Betty and Jane the Virgin to serve as vehicles for incredible women of color protagonists, they pair these women up with white men, a move that further erases men of color on television and, as Erica Chito Childs points out, works to “privilege, protect, and illustrate the power of whiteness.” This paper analyzes the televisual text that defies these prescriptions and expectations that erase Latinos or mold them into a mix of the “Latino Lover” and the “Bandido”--East Los High. Developed as a U.S. “telenovela,” it features an all-Latinx cast with all Latinx romances. Here, love and reproduction can be imagined within a brown world, and brown masculinity is able to be multiple, complicated, and vulnerable. I examine the show to better understand how it defies the strictures generally at work in the U.S. telenovela that serve to deform or erase brown masculinity.

“A ‘Synchronized Struggle’: US Black and Puerto Rican Fraternities in 1940s New York” Cristina C. Pérez Jiménez, Manhattan College This paper lends historical depth to the experiences of Afro-Puerto Ricans in New York by recuperating a lost chapter of their history of mobilization around the intersecting issues of race and class. Specifically, I examine how New York’s Communist-sponsored cultural and sociopolitical organizations created new social spaces for the physical and intellectual convergence of politicized, working-class Puerto Ricans, predominantly of visible African heritage, and US Blacks during the 1940s. The articulation of a discourse of fraternity between US Blacks and Afro-Puerto Ricans was predicated on a shared anti-colonial imaginary. In this politicized milieu, the fight against racism and discrimination at home was framed in a language of decolonization and anti-imperialism abroad. Racism and colonialism were understood as interrelated phenomena, which required US Blacks and Puerto Ricans, of all races, to mobilize in tandem, thus forging what I call a “synchronized struggle.” Puerto Ricans, moreover, were encouraged to see themselves as part of permanent (Latino/a) national minority akin to US Blacks. While these contacts led to more Black-affirmative identifications among radical Puerto Ricans, and a greater acknowledgement of the role race played in social relations on and off the island, I argue that it also curtailed Afro-Puerto Ricans’ full racial identification with US Blacks in New York, since it underscored Puerto Ricans and US blacks as distinct groups with parallel trajectories. By recovering the 1940s New York Puerto Rican and US Black “synchronized struggle,” this paper maps new coordinates for the study of Afro-Latino/a cultural and socio- political histories.

38. Writing Letters, Checking Off Boxes: Negotiating Identity and Confinement from New York Chicanidad to LGBTQ Detainees in Arizona

How do Chicanxs, and Xican@s who were raised in New York navigate geographical location, spirituality, spatial injustice, and social/ political activism, compared to those in the Southwest? How do asylum seekers in the United States deal with the application process and the reinjury of having to come out and share trauma in that process? What is the impact of a Pen-pal program and letter writing between SUNY Oneonta students and LGBTQ undocumented detainees in Arizona? This panel takes up these questions based on undergraduate independent studies projects at SUNY Oneonta. Collectively, the papers look at the way Latinx migrants, immigrants and diasporic peoples, in the flesh and in print, negotiate relations of power, emotional, physical, and discursive borders and confinement. The presenters explore how Latinx and Chicanx subjects “create alternative sites of possibility, engagement, and critique,” through paper trails and what Chela Sandoval calls “decolonizing movidas.” These movidas or everyday acts of resistance and self-making, include auto-historias, letter writing, memories, asylum paperwork and procedures. The panel explores various institutional, collective and personal ways that Latinx communities are bound by different borders, but also how they navigate these even in the face of displacement, criminalization, detention, and marginalization.

Chair: Eddy Francisco Alvarez Jr., SUNY Oneonta

“New York and East Coast Chicanxs/ Xican@s, Autohistorias and Decolonizing the Self” Cristina Castelan, SUNY Oneonta Gloria Anzaldúa’s work has taught us about the space called the borderlands, and how brown bodies navigate a world in which we are in limbo. Her writings have also helped to understand the impact of colonization, globalization, mass expulsion, and war. These have influenced how we live, develop, and identify in the spaces around us. She has made sense of how it is we find home in a place where people are categorized as “other.” Not only does she make us aware but also helps us understand what it means to decolonize the psyche. By analyzing the lived experiences of first generation Latinx people on the East Coast borderlands, we are able to identify the causality on how and why we often have a hard time embracing our indigenous culture. This presentation is a glimpse of a project on oral his/herstories and their lives as Xican@ and Latinx people in New York, which also includes queer identifying folk. The project follows the work of Vicki Ruíz, Maylei Blackwell, and the Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios project, and is based on my experience as a Xicana living in the Bronx, NY. Discussing how my family moved upstate for more educational opportunities, I investigate the impact on geographical location, spirituality, spatial injustice, and social/ political activism relation to how New York Xican@s identify. My hopes are that this project will highlight our different experiences, our cultures, migration patterns, and our identities as Chican@ in this country.

“Document(ing) Trauma: Asylum Seekers, Application Processes and Risk” Janine Cardoso, SUNY Oneonta Many people from Latin America migrate to the United States in search for a safe space where they can grow, and escape horrors they face in their home country. There are some who are eligible for Asylum to stay in America, but unfortunately this creates new obstacles for applicants to overcome. According to Eithne Luibhéid and Lionel Cantú Jr. in Queer Migrations applicant are forced to “come out”, and shed light on traumatizing personal experiences to justify their chance to get asylum. The “threat” posed by these asylum seekers is left for the government to define as they have to deal with a deluge of paperwork, forms of confession and injurious documentation of their trauma. Not only do class, gender, and social groups play a role within the process of application, but also infer new risks for the refugee. Using interviews from refugee and asylum seekers’ experiences along with an analysis of how these folks are represented in literature and media, I hope to bring awareness about how these processes cause more harm than good.

“Mariposa Letters: Epistolary Healing and Storytelling of Undocumented Pen-Pals in Detention Centers in Arizona” Alexandra Bates, SUNY Oneonta As part of my Spanish independent study on the topic of immigration, I was required to perform 15 total hours of service learning outside of the classroom, as a component of this course. It was through service learning that I, along with seven other students, had received the opportunity to write letters and form pen-palships with undocumented immigrants, some of whom identified as part of the LGBTQ community, at both Eloy and Florence detention centers located in Arizona. The focus of this project was to create friendships with detainees in both centers, learn about their personal immigration stories, and practice writing in the target language (Spanish). Throughout the semester, each student had between two and four pen pals. Most were from countries in Central America, including Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, and El Salvador. It was through the exchange of letters between the students and their pen-pals that students were able to understand the struggles faced by these immigrants, both in their countries of origin and once inside the United States, learn more about their lives inside the detention centers, and get to know to their pen-pals on a deeper level. Using a “queer migrations” approach and following Lionel Cantu’s notion of the “sexuality of migration,” this presentation provides an overview of the project, highlighting the important nexus between migration and queerness, and how detainees negotiate these intersections through letters and friendship.

Session 4: 2:40-3:55 p.m.

39. Latinx Environmentalisms I: Race, Aesthetics, and Literary Histories

We propose two, consecutively-scheduled, linked panels that explore the intersections of environmental studies and Latinx literary and cultural imaginaries. While Latinx studies has emphasized social justice as it relates to race, nation, migration/immigration, class, sexuality, and gender, little critical attention has been given to robust environmental imaginaries in Latinx literary and cultural forms. Similarly, ecocriticism emphasizes an earth-centered scholarly vision, but has yet to engage the innovative ways Latinx literatures and cultures articulate environmental identities and resist environmental degradation. Moreover, dominant strains of environmental studies emphasize privileged perspectives of wilderness and pristine nature over the views of people of color, the poor, and the formerly colonized. Both panels seek to remedy these gaps by staging a dialogue designed to highlight how Latinx literature and culture imagines environmental issues as integral to racial and social justice.

The scholars included on both panels seek to broaden, challenge, and complicate discussions of environmental justice, race, nation, class, decoloniality, transnationalism, and space in both Latinx studies and environmental studies. Rather than seeing the environment as marginal to anti-racist struggles, the papers collectively locate how Latinx literary and cultural texts integrate environmental concerns with questions of social and political justice. While this view is contrary to the popular imaginary that holds that subjugated peoples either don’t care about or don’t have time for environmental issues, the panels build on the work of postcolonial critics like Ramachandra Guha and Rob Nixon and also environmental justice scholars like Laura Pulido, Joni Adamson, and Devon Peña, all of whom argue that marginalized peoples are often at the forefront of environmental thinking. We therefore seek to rethink the environmental humanities through the social justice lenses offered by Latinx literature and culture, while also pointing to the environmental representations that have been occluded within Latinx literary and cultural studies.

Our approach is to link discussions of racial, environmental, and social justice imaginaries through two rough temporal and aesthetic frames: Race, Aesthetics, and Literary History and Futurity, Race, and Speculative Utopias. Panel 1 examines understudied and occluded literary historical and aesthetic aspects of Latinx literature and culture, aspects that are rooted in histories of environmental and social justice struggles. Panel 2 examines speculative possibilities that emerge out of these historical contexts. The panels thus balance literary history with contemporary Latinx environmental dynamics in order to interrogate the stakes of racial and environmental imaginaries in Latinx literature and culture.

In Panel 1, Julie Minich considers the 2015 Disney film McFarland USA, and specifically how McFarland, CA’s history of cancer clusters haunts the film’s portrayal of the McFarland track stars. The omission of McFarland’s disabled history from a film about able-bodiedness and athletic prowess reveals the discursive process through which environmental injustice becomes unrecognizable as violence. Randy Ontiveros considers another understudied aspect of both Latinx and environmental studies: the suburbs. His analysis of poetry by Victor Valle, Urayoán Noel, , and Aracelis Girmay explores representations of the suburbs in Latino/a poetry, with particular attention paid to how this verse tradition understands relationships between suburban built and natural environments. Jennifer García-Peacock turns to spatial relationships in another context: California’s Central Valley. She examines how Chicanx artists in the region use the built environment to create an archive documenting how water has shaped the cultural landscape of greater Fresno since the mid-twentieth century, creating a curious problem of urbanization in California’s rural interior that can be read in Chicanx visual culture. Priscilla Ybarra picks up on understudied histories by looking into the archive to amplify an understanding of Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo and his family’s impact on California winemaking. Agoston Haraszthy, a Hungarian immigrant, is known as the father of California viticulture, but Vallejo also played a role. Ybarra argues that Vallejo’s untold story of environmental impact serves an imperialistic agenda, at the same time that Harazsthy’s story serves an “ideal immigrant” narrative. The tangled stories of these two families makes a perfect case study for the negotiations of race, migration, and the environment in the nineteenth century.

Chair: Priscilla Solis Ybarra, University of North Texas

“It Happened Through the Grapevine: Narratives of Race, Migration, and Environment in California Winemaking” Priscilla Solis Ybarra, University of North Texas This presentation will discuss the narratives surrounding winemaking in California, with particular attention to the dynamics of race, migration, and the environment in the viticultural industry. In the 1885 novel The Squatter and the Don by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, a brother-sister pair of Anglo Americans, Lizzie and George Mechlin marry a brother-sister pair of Mexican Americans, Gabriel and Elvira Alamar. This fictional double wedding imitates a real- life 1863 double wedding when two Mexican American sisters, Jovita Francisca and Natalia Veneranda Vallejo, married two Hungarian American brothers, Alfred and Atilla Haraszthy. This double wedding represents the union of two prominent families in California at the time. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo was known for his service as military commander of northern California during the Mexican period and for his election to California state senate in 1849. His family’s union with the Haraszthys also brings attention to his interest in viticulture, as the patriarch of the Haraszthys, Agoston, was known as the father of California viticulture. Agoston Haraszthy immigrated to the U.S. from Hungary and brought with him several vines that helped to establish the California wine industry. This presentation will trace the collaboration between Haraszthy and Vallejo and the cultural contributions of their descendants—among them several vintners and an actor/dancer. This is just one historical example of untold stories of the environment that makes the case for the diversity and migrations that shape the human relation with the land in the U.S. By uncovering richer narratives of the diversity of approaches and collaborations that go into industries such as winemaking, we can put into better perspective our ongoing relations with nature.

“Greenwashing the White Savior: Cancer Clusters, Supercrips, and McFarland USA” Julie Avril Minich, University of Texas at Austin The 2015 Disney film McFarland USA, starring Kevin Costner as a white high school track coach who leads a Latino cross-country team to win the 1987 California state championship, was not without controversy. While numerous critics have condemned the film’s use of a “white savior” narrative, however, they have largely not discussed the significance of the film’s setting. The small farming town of McFarland, CA, was known throughout the 1980s and early 1990s as a cancer cluster, with an unusually high instance of childhood cancers and birth defects between 1975 and 1995. This talk examines how this history – which is never addressed in the film itself – haunts the film’s portrayal of the McFarland track stars. I read the McFarland, USA track stars, who perform spectacular ability under profoundly disabling conditions, as figures whose narrative function aligns with what disability scholars have called “supercrips.” The omission of McFarland’s disabled history from a film about able-bodiedness and athletic prowess reveals the discursive process through which environmental injustice becomes unrecognizable as violence.

“Reflections on the Suburban Landscapes of Latina/o Poetry” Randy Ontiveros, University of Maryland The country or the city. These are the two geographies most closely associated with the history and the cultural expression of Latinos in the United States. There’s good reason for this. Urban areas like San Francisco’s Mission District or Miami’s Little Havana have been home to and served as artistic inspiration for Latinos and Latinas across generations. So too have rural places such as New Mexico’s Rio Grande Valley or southern Minnesota’s beet fields. Suburbs, though, have also been vital to Latino experiences past and present in the United States, and in ways that are enormously understudied and underappreciated. Jodi Agius Vallejo, Eric Avila, Wendy Cheng, Zaire Zenit Dinzey-Flores, and a handful of other scholars have written insightfully on Latino suburbia in recent years. However, apart from their work and from the occasional journalistic piece on what is too often framed as a Latino “invasion” of the suburbs, next to nothing has been written on this pressing or timely or urgent topic. Certainly no in-depth treatment has been given to the shape and significance of the suburbs in and other forms of Latino creative expression or creativity. This paper will explore the representation of the suburbs in Latino/a poetry, with particular attention paid to the ways in which this verse tradition understands the relationship between the suburban built environment and the suburban natural environment. Writers to be discussed include Victor Valle, Urayoán Noel, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and Aracelis Girmay.

“Race, Water, and Public Art in the Urban Mexican/American Countryside: The Rise, Fall, and Restoration of Fresno Fulton Mall Art Program, 1963-2016” Jennifer García-Peacock, University of Michigan Over time, geography, capital, and social relations have combined to produce two distinct cultural landscapes in the region surrounding Fresno, California: a thick circuit of economic activity and settlement along the canals, rivers, highways, and railroads lining the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada range and a relatively sparse presence of people and infrastructure along the western—and drier—edge of the valley. This spatialization has strong racial links, a disparity that became even more entrenched with the introduction of large scale irrigation in the twentieth century required to sustain water intensive crops such as grapes, citrus and stone fruit, and nuts. As a result, a tiered system of agricultural labor emerged in the Valley, with highly specialized, long-term workers forming a rich network of cities and towns along the eastside and relatively little permanent settlement along the west side, where seasonal workers and high rates of mobility were the norm. In this paper, I examine the ways that this move towards a more productive organization of the Central Valley countryside was represented in a robust public art program sponsored by the City of Fresno, Fresno County, and private investors between1963- 2016. Focusing on the landscape design work of Garrett Eckbo at Fresno’s Fulton Mall, including several fountains and other public art features exploring the region’s connection to water, I draw connections to lesser appreciated works by Chicanx artists in the region that have received less critical and popular attention. In the process, I explore how these works of art and features of the built environment serve as an important—and often overlooked—archive documenting the ways that water has shaped the cultural landscape of greater Fresno since the mid-twentieth century. I argue that this spatialization, driven by the agricultural industry, has created a curious problem of urbanization in California’s rural interior that can be read in its visual culture, particularly the placemaking practices of Chicanxs who have been largely left out of major public and private art funding streams.

40. Altermundos: The Other Worlds of Latinx Speculative Aesthetics

This panel brings together various contributors to the recently published collected works Altermundos: Latino Speculative Literature, Film, and Popular Culture (2017; University of Washington Press) co-edited by Cathryn J. Merla-Watson and Ben Olguín to explore new, hybrid genres and innovative theorizations engendered by Latin@ speculative aesthetics, which includes the related genres of science fiction (sci-fi), fantasy, and horror as well as their myriad subgenres. Inspired by altermondialism and Chican@ feminist and queer of color theory, altermundo indexes third space visions grounded in concrete realities while gazing toward the decolonial and utopian” (Merla-Watson 2015). These utopian visions are heterogeneous and dissensual, bespeaking the actual pluriversality comprising Latin@ identity and our shared “alter-Native” (Gaspar de Alba 1998) futures. As this panel will demonstrate, the altermundos of Latin@futurism and Latin@ speculative aesthetics is not simply mimetic of dominant speculative genres, but rather critiques and disidentifies with it, as well as creates their own autonomous aesthetics with their own particular cultural vocabularies, genealogies, and cultural contexts—which in turn vociferously demand new theoretical approaches. To that end, this panel explores the following: How do Latin@ speculative aesthetics redefine traditional genres? What kinds of utopian/dystopian affects and structures of feeling does it unveil? In what ways does Latin@futurism conceptualize new paradigms of political praxis, resistance, survival, and cultural affirmation? How do Latin@ speculative aesthetics intervene and/or contribute to understandings of queer futurity? In what ways is Latin@futurism grounded in the present (and past) exigencies of diverse Latin@ lived experiences?

Chair: Ben Olguín, University of Texas-San Antonio

“Contesting Monstrosity in Horror Genres: Chicana Feminist Mappings of de la Peña’s “Refugio” the Vampire Vis-à-vis Hamilton’s Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Series” Luz María Gordillo, Washington State University Vancouver Challenging the exclusion of Latinas as authors of science fiction and as occupants of alternative worlds of vampires, this essay examines Chicana Terry de la Peña’s “Refugio” and Euroamerican Laurell Hamilton’s Anita Blake series as paradigmatic oppositional texts; the former functions as a subversive metatext to Hamilton’s fiction which justifies ontologies of imperialism. I argue that de la Peña’s Chicana lesbian vampire and shape shifter Refugio, disrupts mainstream hetero-racist narratives with alternative signifiers grounded on politico- cultural resistance. On the other hand, Mexican American necromancer and vampire slayer Blake, posits a discourse of white supremacy that problematizes Latina representation and subjectivity.

“Apocalyptic Affect and Perform-Antics in Recent Queer Chicanx Literature and Performance” Cathryn Merla-Watson, University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley In this presentation I braid together theories of affect, queer theory, genre criticism, and Latinx cultural studies, among others, to theorize what I term “apocalyptic affect” in recent queer Chicanx cultural production, such as that of Virginia Grise, Adelina Anthony, Joe Jimenez, among others. Apocalyptic affect names a structure of feeling animated by confluences of the personal, historical, and political, which I posit queer Chicanx artists deploy to make palpable the complex and multiple ways in which their intersectional lived experiences feel nothing less than world-ending. I argue that in doing so, these artists dramatize and make sensible diverse differential lived experiences as queers of color, pointing to how the apocalyptic—or what is perceived as world-ending—is figured by the intersectional categories of identity, thereby intervening with in white, dominant forms of affect disseminated by popular culture. I further examine how the performance of apocalyptic affect engenders “perform-antics” that speaks to the particular queer feelings and knowledges engendered in the fraught site of the Borderlands.

“The Ghostly Matters of Border Horror: (Post)Coloniality, The New Mestiza, and Américo Paredes’s The Shadow” Cynthia Saldivar, University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley The presentation will analyze the novel The Shadow by Américo Paredes set in a post- revolutionary Mexico. The Shadow is a fictional novel that centers around Antonio Cuitla who was once a revolutionary leader and is now forced to come to terms with his place in the modern world. I approach The Shadow through the lens of domestic horror by reengaging Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera. In doing so, I foreground not only the subjective nature of horror, but also how Chicano authors redeploy this genre to expose horrific violence on the U.S./Mexico border. Anzaldúa continuously describes how combining two cultures creates a synthesis that is more than a sum of its parts, “the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country – a border culture” (25). Paredes rewrites domestic horror to include the space of the home as well as the nation-state. In doing so he collapses traditional genre interpretations of terror and horror to expose the atrocities of an ostensible postcolonial, postrevolutionary world. Applying Anzaldúa’s definition of the “new mestiza” breaks the binary classifications of terror and horror, generating borderlands horror born. Borderlands horror is not rooted in individual hauntings; on the contrary, borderlands horror sheds light on the collective, historical atrocities shaping present.

“Imagining Chicanx Human Rights Law: Chicanx Science Fiction at the end of the Twentieth Century” Andrew Uzendoski, Lafayette College This paper analyzes Chicanx science fiction published in the 1990s that reimagines human rights ideals from non-western perspectives. I position these speculative texts at the vanguard of reforming human rights law at the end of the twentieth century. Sapogonia (1990) by Ana Castillo, The Rag Doll Plagues (1992) by Alejandro Morales, High Aztech (1992) by Ernest Hogan, The New World Border (1992-1994) by Guillermo Gomez-Peña, and The Hungry Woman (1995) by Cherríe Moraga all imagine the dangerous consequences of repressing alternative conceptions of human rights. These novels do not just critique international legal norms, nor do they outright reject human rights ideals. These speculative texts recover and promote alternative models for universal human rights that privilege non-western sources of knowledge and ways of being—producing literary interventions that are enabled by the world- making qualities of science fiction. These novels offer alternative models of human rights ideals at a moment when human rights law and discourse are grounded in Eurocentric epistemologies. Thus, they can be read as examples of how the Indigenous labor diaspora can collectively reform human rights law and international legal norms. Focusing on texts written by Castillo and Gomez-Peña, I will identify and discuss the dominant trends of this era of Chicanx science fiction in terms of revising human rights law from Chicanx and Latinx perspectives.

41. Kinship: Latinx-Asian Transculturation

“Reunification Dreams: 1970s North Korea and Speculations of Kinship in Chicano Fiction” Joo Ok Kim, University of Kansas This paper examines Martin Limón's North Korea novels, and the fantasies of reunification and kinship in 1970s Korea. George Sueño, the Chicano protagonist of Limón's series, speculates that he—a U.S. Army sergeant—may have a child in North Korea. The possibility that he may have a son with his former lover, Doc Yong, furnishes dreams of nuclear kinship beyond the heavily militarized 38th parallel. Passing as a Romanian soldier in North Korea, which Sueño states is only possible due to North Korean provincialism, he infiltrates in order to reunite with Doc Yong and to meet his child in the hopes of smuggling them back to the south. This paper thus reaches back to the unique role of the Chicano U.S. Army sergeant stationed in the Cold War Korean peninsula of the 1970s, but also reaches forward with the familial implications of this military mystery novel. Amidst contemporary concerns about global militarized nuclear warfare, what does the fictive figure of a Chicano North Korean offer to Latinx Studies? How do Limón's novels contribute to, and perhaps push up against, sensationalist discourses about North Korea? My paper, "Reunification Dreams: 1970s North Korea and Speculations of Kinship in Chicano Fiction," addresses these questions in the wake of—and anticipating other horizons of— globalized militarization.

“Chinese in Her Liver, Chinese in Her Heart”: Transculturation in Cristina García’s Monkey Hunting” Suzanne Uzzilia, CUNY Graduate Center In Monkey Hunting by Cristina García (2003), Lucrecia Chen, a black Cuban character, leads a generally happy life because of her freedom to choose from a variety of cultural traditions. Her belief systems are strongly influenced by the men in her life. She undergoes a re-Orient-ation of her beliefs when her father/master/rapist, Don Joaquín Alomá, is replaced by Chen Pan, the Chinese-Cuban main character who purchases her and her young son. Though it seems that she has traded one version of servitude for another, Chen Pan provides her with materials to make candles, religious objects that she sells to make enough money to purchase her coartación, a version of freedom. However, by the time she earns the money for this, she finds that it is no longer needed, as she is free and chooses to stay. In the “after” of her family life with Chen Pan, she grows to embrace Chinese culture and to integrate it into her Afro-Cuban religious and cultural framework. However, her experience goes beyond “passing”; instead, she performs the transculturation that Fernando Ortiz discusses in Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar and passes through their two distinct cultures into a syncretic experience. This syncretism is facilitated by Lucrecia’s relative freedom to earn money and thus choose her path in life. Though the bonds of race and family are severed in her life, she manages to weave a fabric of Chinese and Afro-Cuban beliefs that allows her to affirm, “More than half my life has been happy” (180).

42. Musical Subversions; Semiotics of Ideology

“The Opens Veins of ‘Latinoamérica’: Calle 13 and Neoliberalism” Lupe Escobar, New York University In 1971, Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano published The Open Veins of Latin America, a revolutionary historiography that continues to elicit critical awareness of economic, political, and military interventions in the global South. We see and hear traces of Galeano’s influence, addressing the pillage of Latin American laborers and land, in the contemporary musical critiques of Puerto Rican musical group Calle 13. For instance, the music video performance of “Latinoamérica” engages in visual and textual intertextualities with Galeano’s decolonial imaginary from a pulsating heart rooted in Mother Earth to lyrics such as “I am the blood in your veins.” In terms of musical genre, “Latinoamérica” echoes La Nueva Canción tradition, particularly with the inclusion of Andean elements, elements banned from folk music in the 1970s. “Latinoamérica,” I argue, denounces current neoliberalism, the still open veins, negotiating diverse Latinidades while simultaneously stressing temporal and spatial solidarities. In doing so, Calle 13’s music video expresses what we might think about as a “testimonial afterlife.”

“(Re) Constructing Dominican Latinidad: Intersections Between Ethnicity, Race, and Hip-Hop” Sharina Maillo-Pozo, New Paltz, SUNY “This book, then, speaks of my existence. My preoccupations with the inner life of Self, and with the struggle of that Self amidst adversity and violation; with the confluence of primordial images; with the unique positionings consciousness takes at these confluent streams; and with my almost instinctive urge to communicate, to speak, to write about life on the borders, life in the shadows.” —Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. In this presentation, I analyze the first coming-of-age memoir set in New York City written by Raquel Cepeda, a second generation Dominican-American author, filmmaker, and hip-hop journalist. Drawing on Wendy Roth's conceptualization of "racial strategies," Raquel Z. Rivera's links between Puerto Rican latinidad and blackness, and Silvio Torres Saillant's theorizations of Dominican blackness, I argue that the memoir is fundamental to the (re)construction and continuous redefinition of an Afro-centric Dominican latinidad. In this paper, I will trace key moments that led to Cepeda’s constant performance of what I call Dominican-latinidad in a period of radical reconfiguration of the Latinx community in New York City. Over the course of this presentation, I will focus on few instances that illustrate Cepeda’s strategies to negotiate her life in an ethno-racial, hyphenated identity. Furthermore, I will examine the role of hip-hop in Cepeda’s journey to becoming Latina and how she positions not only herself, but Dominicans alike, at the center of the discussions on the relationship between Latinx identity and hip-hop in New York City. Lastly, because hip-hop has a central role in the text, I will discuss how the memoir underscores the socio-cultural identifications of second generation Dominicans with African Americans and other Afrodiasporic groups in New York City.

“Chicana Feminist Semiotics: Culture Jamming / Meta-Ideologizing / Genre Subversion” Melanie Hernandez, California State University, Fresno While operating through deceptively simple surface-layer formal qualities, many modes of Chicana cultural production actually enact a complicated semiotic liberatory practices which utilize guerilla re-appropriation tactics. Complicated sign systems are layered with additional meaning that do not simply supplant the original meaning—they fully embrace the original as a starting point to build upon and defamilize it. The result is to expose the underlying ideology and to emphasize the constructedness of their original meaning so that it can no longer be mistaken as an extension of “Nature.” While my ongoing work explores these semiotic practices through juvenile and young adult literature, this paper unpacks the layers of signification embedded within picture book illustrations—specificially, within the illustrations of both hard cover and paperback editions of Sandra Cisneros’ Have You Seen Marie?. In the realms of anti- corporate branding and media activism, this process is known as “culture jamming,” which “seeks to undermine the marketing rhetoric of multinational corporations, specifically through such practices as media hoaxing, corporate sabotage, billboard ‘liberation,’ and trademark infringement.” Stated plainly, a culture jammer will tweak (often through vandalism) an existing corporate message in order to embed a counterargument atop the original. It allows the culture jammer to combat the corporation’s political clout and deep pockets, using the corporation’s own media campaign as the canvas for the protest messaging. Culture jammers rely on the recognizability of the original corporate branding materials, but whatever modification they make to the original image creates a disparity between the corporation’s intended message and social protest launched through the jammed image. This is a pictographic appropriation strategy that Chicana artists have undertaken for generations. To explore this process, this paper focuses on a single semitoic chain—the signifier “La Llorona”—as its meaning is made into a sign system, imbued with ideological meaning at the secondary signfication level, and finally defamiliarized and re-appropriated at a third-level signification using the process of “meta-ideologizing” as described in Chela Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed. The paper uses Esther Hernandez’s “Sun Mad” as its point of departure, and then turns to more complicated sign system re-appropriation in Have You Seen Marie?, whose original semiotic chain signifier (“La Llorona”) is all the more difficult to pin down since it is only ever implied, but never overtly mentioned. Finally, the analysis unpacks these signification methods to explore the ways that other visual pieces like Alma Lopez’ Coyolxauquhi Returns As Our Lady Disguised As La Virgen de Guadalupe to Defend the Rights of Las Chicanas must turn to sophisticated semiotic layerings as a performative strategy in order to appropriate and reinscribe meaning onto hegemonic sign systems in the service of Chicana feminist political imperatives.

Session 5: 4:05-5:20 p.m.

43. Latinx Environmentalism II: Futurity, Race, and Speculative Utopias

Panel 2 takes up questions of race, futurity, and speculative utopias. Christopher Perreira shows how Latinx cultural texts like Sánchez and Pita’s sci-fi novel Lunar Braceros: 2125-2148 provide a speculative platform on which to interrogate and redefine environmental discourse in relation to state violence and terror. Latinx studies scholar David Vázquez extends this analysis by considering the relatively upbeat endings of Alex Rivera’s 2009 film Sleep Dealer and Alejandro Morales’s 1992 novel The Rag Doll Plagues. Vázquez argues that the hope evident in these endings counters the dystopian strains of much contemporary speculative fiction, precisely in order to imagine more just racial and environmental futures. Gabriela Nuñez takes up the question of cli-fi and sci-fi narratives by asking whether it is productive to read Latinx sci-fi through the lens of climate change. She suggests Latinx sci-fi portrays the dire consequences of extractivism for both the natural environment and the health and well-being of Latinxs, countering these discourses with the concept of el buen vivir as a solution to climate change and a way to preserve the biodiversity that helps Latinx communities thrive. Taking up the relationship between the dystopian present and a utopian future, Shane Hall examines the photography of Delilah Montoya and the Electronic Disturbance Theater/b.a.n.g. lab’s art installation, the Transborder Immigrant Tool. Hall argues that these direct action interventions offer a contested vocabulary of protest that disrupts the use of the environment in the U.S./Mexico borderlands as a weapon, and points to how artists and activists denaturalize environmental military violence and humanize migrants traversing the desert regions of the Southwestern United States. Both panels seek to engage the audience with the following questions: First, what are the intersections between environmental imaginaries and Latinx literature and culture? Second, how do Latinx environmental imaginaries contribute to more robust understandings of issues like climate change and toxic risk? Indeed, how do Latinx environmental imaginaries help us to reconsider aspects of social and racial justice as part of the remedy for environmental crises? Finally, how do Latinx authors conceive of and represent alternative environmental utopias that imagine social justice and environmental justice as intertwined?

Chair: David Vázquez, Associate Professor of English, University of Oregon

“Futurity in Memory: Horizons and the Cultural Politics of Lunar Braceros: 2125-2148” Christopher Perreira, University of Kansas This paper links the conference title and themes—Latinx Lives, Matters, and Imaginaries: Theorizing Race in the 21st Century—to the instability of memory as it is represented in the 2009 science fiction novel Lunar Braceros: 2125-2148, co-written by Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita. In an essay on the historical narratives of xenophobia in the Unites States, Sánchez argues that the “spectre of Latinidad,” narrated by media and rightwing politics, reveals an important paradox: that Latino/as “are the spectre and yet [...] are simultaneously real.” Sánchez continues: “In some sense, we are an incarnation of the future but in another more immediate way, real; we are flesh and blood and our growing numbers [...] will undoubtedly transform this country, [...] culturally, perhaps linguistically, and hopefully politically and economically” (128). Drawing out these tensions as they emerge in Lunar Braceros, this paper shows how such cultural texts provide a speculative platform on which to interrogate and redefine environmental discourse in relation to state violence and terror. Deploying what I am calling “futurity in memory”—an approach that takes seriously the horizons hailed by Latinx speculative cultural production—Lunar Braceros presents, among other things, land reservations designed to contain the continuous production of poor surplus labor, or what one character describes as “a population control camp mechanism” (13). From the vantage point of the future, the book interrogates social and ecological tensions between land on Earth and the toxic landfills established on the Moon to speculate on the revolutionary imaginaries that have, and will continue to emerge from such memories.

“Speculative Hope: Countering Dystopian Environmental Futures in Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer and Alejandro Morales’s The Rag Doll Plagues” David J. Vázquez, University of Oregon Contemporary speculative cultural production seems preoccupied with a relentlessly dystopian future. From the atavism and environmental scarcity of The Walking Dead, to the utter destruction of both human communities and natural resources in The Passage vampire trilogy, the future seems bleak for civilization and the natural world. Part of this hopelessness is certainly a remnant of postmodern and post-structuralist thinking that de-emphasized meaning and faith in institutions. While these forms of thinking were useful for critiques of global capital, they left a residue of pessimism—a pessimism exacerbated by environmental risks like climate change. This pessimism, however, has come under scrutiny by late 20th and 21st century Latinx artists who employ what Ramón Saldívar calls “postrace aesthetics,” or the yoking of Civil Rights optimism with postmodern form. The aim of postrace aesthetics is to maintain a tension between hope (however tenuous) and skepticism of its fulfillment. I examine two representations of dystopian futures that retain moderate hope for environmental and social change. In Alex Rivera’s 2009 film Sleep Dealer, the protagonist, Memo, is able to facilitate the destruction of a dam that releases water to a now desertified Oaxaca. Similarly, the protagonist of Alejandro Morales’s 1992 novel The Rag Doll Plagues, finds a cure for a global pandemic that elevates the status of Chicanxs in the U.S. Although both endings qualify their hope, they evidence what Linda Tuhiwi-Smith calls “relentless optimism,” or the maintenance of a desire for progressive change, even in the face of persistent racialization and environmental crisis.

“Reading Latin@ SF through the Lens of Climate Change and El Buen Vivir” Gabriela Nuñez, California State University, Fullerton Recent scholarship has addressed the use of futurity in Latin@ SF as a way to critique economic, environmental, and political crises in the present and as a way to recognize that hegemonic discourses of technological and scientific “progress” can be devastating for Latin@ communities (Ramírez 2008, Rivera 2012). Part of these dystopic scenarios overlap with the growing popularity of the cli-fi or the climate fiction literary genre, and climate change as an important new topic or category in contemporary literature. Since cli-fi addresses climate catastrophe, oftentimes in the form of a cautionary tale, the characteristics of the genre coincide very closely with the SF genre. However, is it productive to read Latin@ SF through the lens of climate change, and if so, what does a focus on climate change reveal about Latin@ SF? In this presentation I analyze examples of Latin@ SF through the lens of climate change. I argue that Latin@ SF addresses many of the concerns of cli-fi literature by promoting the indigenous concept of ‘buen vivir,’ or ‘living well.’ The concept of el buen vivir has its origins in South American indigenous cultures that emerge as a reaction and alternative to bank and government development projects that have social, environmental, and economic impacts on local communities since the early 2000 (Gudynas 2011, 442). Latin@ SF portrays the dire consequences of extractivism for both the natural environment and the health and well-being of Latin@s. Latin@ SF presents el buen vivir as a solution to climate change and a way to preserve the biodiversity that helps Latin@ communities thrive.

“Utopic Designs for a Dystopic Desert: Interrrupting Environmental Warfare through the Art of the Transborder Immigrant Tool and Humanitarian Water Caches” Shane Hall, University of Oregon Since the Reagan administration, U.S. border policy—including in spaces ostensibly dedicated to nature and wilderness conservation—has emphasized the weaponization of the harsh Sonoran Desert environment as a tool used to discourage undocumented immigrants from Latin America. Despite the fact that the number of crossers has declined since 2008, hundreds continue to die in the desert every year. Groups such as No Mas Muertes/No More Deaths, Border Angels, and Humane Borders intervene in this weaponized environment by placing jugs or larger caches of water—a simple but lifesaving maneuver. Water caches act as humanitarian aid, art, and rhetoric; as such they are provocative objects of analysis because they disrupt the mechanisms that kill migrants. I examine the aesthetic reproduction of these caches in the nature photography of Delilah Montoya as well as the tactical media project of the Transborder Immigrant Tool. Physically, the caches work to defang the deadliest points of the weaponized desert environments (the so-called “last mile” sections where migrants most frequently perish). Discursively, the stations, and their trafficking in various forms of media, disrupt the trope of migrant as “illegal” or “invader” as they draw attention to immigrants and migrants in need of the most basic human necessities for life. These direct action interventions offer a contested vocabulary of protest that disrupts the environmental weaponry of the borderlands, and points towards ways artists and activists denaturalize environmental military violence of the borderlands and fight against the dehumanization of the migrants facing this violence.

44. Marketplace of the Visual: Identity Representations and the Imagery of Race

“A Weapon of My Own”: questioning race, culture, gender, and sexuality through graphic narrative in Cristy C. Road’s Spit and Passion” Carla Suárez Vega, University of Massachusetts Amherst When cultural identity, race, gender and sexuality intersect, a space where non normative subjects are oppressed and alienated is created. In her graphic novel Spit and Passion (The Feminist Press, 2012), Christy C. Road locates herself at this crossing where normative ideals of gender and sexual behavior intertwine with identity politics and cultural tradition. From the margins of the literary world, Christy C. Road articulates her feminist and queer discourse through a graphic narrative that is a combination of graphic novel, autobiography and monologue; a text that showcases the richness of sequential art. In her coming of age novel the author questions most of the preconceived ideas that were imposed onto her as a Cuban American teenager growing up in Hialea, Miami FL. As a twelve year old discovering her own identity and her place within society, young Christy has trouble combining her queer desires with her Cuban Catholic values and education. From this intersection of cultural tradition and queerness she is looking for a weapon that will give her the opportunity to question this double oppressor system that doesn’t let her explore and come to terms with her Queer Latina identity. She finds in Punk and in her obsession with the band Green Day the tool she needed to embrace both her identities as a queer woman and as a Cuban American proud of her family traditions.

“Resisting the Call to Hate (Again): Representations of Race and Border in U.S. Latino/a Picture Storybooks” Maya Socolovsky, University of North Carolina, Charlotte In this presentation I explore how issues of race, migration and border crossing are narrated in a selection of early 21st century U.S. Latino/a picture storybooks and how such representations intersect with the U.S.’s rhetoric of nationhood and belonging. As illegal immigration increased in the 1990s, so did anti-immigrant sentiments, and entering the 21st century strong legislative, administrative and popular rhetoric about controlling the nation’s borders appeared. Books such as ’s Super Cilantro Girl (2003), René Colato Lainez’s From North to South (2010), Duncan Tonatiuh’s Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote (2013), Jairo Buitrago’s Two White Rabbits (2015), and José Manuel Mateo’s Migrant (2011) all “create dangerously,” functioning as important sites of radical resistance to this rhetoric. The traditional thematic quest narratives that determine so many children’s storybooks are, from the outset, challenged in these texts. The texts I examine seek to offer safety and belonging to their protagonists – and potentially, to their readers – but perpetuate feelings of dislocation and non-belonging, mapping traditional tropes and themes onto radical representations of the U.S.-Mexico border. In so doing, I argue, the books insist on laying bare the contradiction at the heart of each story: while official records estimate that 50,000 children migrate to the U.S. each year, suggesting that the myth of the U.S. as a safe haven for refugees and migrants is still strong, its entry point - the U.S.-Mexico border – increasingly operates as a violent uncovering and exposure of the nation’s exclusionary racial policies and practices.

“Unbinding Latinidad: Latinx Book Covers in the Contemporary Literary Marketplace” Isabel Duarte-Gray, Harvard University This paper will explore the convergence of critical race theory, Latinx literature, and book history to consider how Latinx literature can exist and simultaneously as a space of radical transnational imagining and as a racially demarcated and physically bound commodity in a global marketplace. I posit that the territory between the nationally unbound Latinx imaginary and the marginal space it is accorded by the marketplace is negotiated through what Genette calls paratexts, and specifically through peritexts, the visible marketing materials designed to hail cross-community audiences in book stores and online. In this paper, I will outline the visual vocabulary developed by trade publishes to market Latinx literature during a period recognized by Latinx scholars as a transition “into the mainstream” from 1980 into the contemporary moment. By surveying broad trends in Latinx literary marketing and scrutinizing covers designed for Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban, Helena Viramontes’ Under the Feet of Jesus, and a reprinting of Antonio Villarreal’s Pocho, I will demonstrate that while the covers commissioned to sell Latinx novels for trade presses have largely re-tropicalized Latinidad for their envisioned hegemonic audiences and undermined the texts they literally bind, their visual vocabulary of cooptation leaves room for rich and subversive reimagining by Latinx artists, authors, publishers, and agents of cultural production.

45. Indigeneity: Constructions of Race; Aesthetics of Identity

“The Term Hispanic is Racist: Anti-Black and Anti-Indigenous Resistance in Toronto, Canada” Andrea Vásquez Jiménez, University of Toronto The term Hispanic which is commonly used and imposed on peoples of Latin-America and its diaspora worldwide is Eurocentric, whitewashing, and has its roots embedded in Anti-Blackness and Anti-Indigeneity. No terms are neutral and the identity term Hispanic is no different. Language has the power to include, exclude and input boundaries as to who or what is spoken about. Even if it is unintentional it is important and our responsibility that we stop using terms that (re)perpetuate the hegemonic dominant lens that erases and romanticizes the colonial legacy. The term is oppressive and racist and therefore the continuing use of it upholds white supremacy. In continuing acts of resistance to dismantle the term Hispanic and resist a singular identity, Andrea Vásquez Jiménez created a petition based out of Toronto titled, “Change Hispanic Heritage Month to Latin-America History Month”. The purposeful focus on a geographical region results in a space where people can self-identify and is inclusive to multiple and intersectional forms of identities such as, but not limited to Indigenous Peoples and Afro/Black- Latinx. It simultaneously also seeks to decolonize and connect shared hxstories through the land. This petition catapulted a chain of events which sparked a movement in Toronto resisting the term Hispanic and the continuing purposeful creation of safer and more inclusive spaces for our peoples.

“Unsettling Racial Geographies across the Americas & the Atlantic: Indigenismo, Anticolonial Critique and the Aesthetics of Deception” Jennifer Flores Sternad Ponce de León, University of Pennsylvania This paper examines Raiders of the Lost Crown (2013), a transmedial literary work and alternate reality game by New York-based writer and media artist Fran Ilich Morales Muñoz. Raiders’ participatory narrative and gameplay follows a transnational “support network” as it plots the “recapture” and restitution to Mexico of a famed Tenochca/Mexica headdress that is owned and displayed by an ethnology museum in Vienna. Raiders’ narrative unfolds across myriad platforms, including written communiqués and epistolary exchanges, a petition campaign, a guerrilla intervention at the Viennese museum, and invisible theater. It uses international controversy surrounding the ancient Mexica headdress as a device of emplotment to advance a multilayered narrative that is ultimately concerned with long histories of colonial and racial violence in the Americas, the vitality of anticolonial resistance in the present, and the poverty of European humanism’s universalizing claims and moral feeling founded upon these. With mordant wit and calculated deception, Raiders elaborates a trenchant anticolonial and antiracist critique that speaks to different racial and imperial/(neo)colonial ideologies that operate across the transnational geography in which Raiders was produced and received (which spans the U.S., Mexico and Latin America, and Western Europe). I show how Ilich negotiates and exposes racial and colonial ideologies that underlie the interpretation of Raiders’ various narrative components, as well as the racialized interpellation of his own person as author, in order to disrupt or parody these and ultimately expose the epistemic and material violence that underlie them. I specifically attend to the work’s critique of a form of indigenismo that selectively glorifies ancient indigenous culture while ignoring or obfuscating the social condition and political struggle of living Indians and I compare this to the decolonial and utopian imaginary Raiders puts forward, which may superficially resemble a kind of indigenismo, but ultimately provokes a re-thinking of globalized modernity through colonial difference.

‘No soy Latina’: The Construction of Diasporic Maya Identity in the United States” Stephanie Luna Padilla, University of California, Santa Cruz Via an in-depth analysis of Julia Gomez Ixmatá’s poem “Me llaman ‘Latina,’ aunque no soy” and Jab’ellalih’s “Recollections of an 11-Year-Old Native Daughter,” this paper will examine the ways in which Maya identities are reconstructed, redefined, and maintained within diasporic Maya communities located in the United States. The perpetuation of a sense of connection and belonging to ancestral lands plays a pivotal role in the construction of indigenous identities. How, then, does migration away from those lands impact Maya migrants’ understanding of themselves as Maya? How do they continue to maintain their cultural identities in territories to which they are not, strictly speaking, indigenous? What we can glean from the two poems I have chosen to analyze is the importance of maintaining a sense of cultural continuity via the transmission of language, practices, beliefs, ceremonies, and histories across generations. To what degree, however, does the crossing of national borders impact the ways in which Mayas are rendered legible both culturally and legally? Mayas in the United States are subjected to similar processes of homogenization and erasure that they face in their nations of origin, since in the United States they are legible only as Latino and not as indigenous. Gomez Ixmatá and Jab’ellalih’s poems detail the complex web of racial hierarchies in which Mayas in the United States find themselves enmeshed as their identities and languages are erased, scorned, and ridiculed.

46. Marginal Features; Spatializing Race

“Pasas, “Raisins of Hair”: El pelo como marcador racial en Song of the Water Saints de Nelly Rosario” Jhoanna Méndez, Florida State University En la literatura el cuerpo es un sitio en donde actos violentos contra el Otro han sido desempeñados. Particularmente, se ha prestado especial atención al fenotipo, incluyendo: la nariz, los labios, el pelo, etc. con tal de yuxtaponerlo al del blanco. En la obra Song of the Water Saints (2002) de la novelista dominicana-americana Nelly Rosario, el pelo es un medio por el cual implicaciones raciales se exploran explícitamente e implícitamente. Esto es evidente cuando unas vecinas se burlan de los “raisins of hair” (22) de Graciela. Esta traducción errónea resalta la ineptitud del inglés, y por extensión la sociedad occidental, para captar la realidad dominicana y resulta en una distorsión burlesca. Pese a que la cabellera se ha examinado en cuanto a la identidad en la literatura latinoamericana, la dominicana-americana es un producto en ciernes. Por tanto, propongo indagar la representación del pelo como marcador racial con el cual se cuestiona el estándar de belleza hegemónico que jerarquiza las facciones occidentales. Como resultad, se analizará la negociación con la cual los personajes crean su propia identidad, específicamente su aceptación y rechazo de su descendencia africana. Para condensar las observaciones del profesor Silvio Torres-Saillant en “The Tribulations of Blackness: Stages in Dominican Racial Identity” (1998), el 90% del pueblo dominicano es mulato o afro- descendiente. Entonces, ¿por qué persiste esta negación? Se escogió este texto precisamente por su cuestionamiento de la ideología hegemónica, la cual subraya la valorización de todo lo Occidental mientras simultáneamente denigra lo que no lo es.

“Reinscribing the Liminal Other” Diane M. Brown, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica The politics of hybridity is always a complex issue. Postcolonial debates over “nationalism” from Fanon’s moving portrayal of colonial antagonism to Said’s movement for self- determination, often share a concern for the term’s limitations in conceptualizing the overlapping, migratory movements of cultural and racial formation across global divisions of labour. Theoretical positioning offered by Homi K. Bhabha and Stuart Hall subvert binary racial constructions, interrogating these “in-between” categories of competing cultural and racial identities and differences. Additionally, they elucidate the “liminal” negotiation of identities, consequently creating a new cultural meaning. Interstitial racial paradigms may be evidentiary in some Latin American territories, but within this liminality, there is a denial of the presence of vibrant communities of Afro-descendants, as well as a disavowal of their cultural influence. This blackness is occluded in the discourse of the mestizaje, which mostly privileges the cultural and racial mixture between indigenous communities and cultures of the descendants of European colonizers because of the advantage which is given to European identity. Therefore, the influence of Afro-Latinidad is often minimalized. To conclude, I will examine the poetics of the Dominican, Blas Jiménez, as to how he highlights the complex phenomenon of mestizaje, in addition to his investigation of “racial passing” and “cultural browning”, while he celebrates the presence and dignity of the Other through the valorization of blackness within this liminal Latin American diasporic construction, employing Negritudist philosophy.

“Ana Mendieta and the Brown Spatialization of Blackness” Lucas de Lima, University of Pennsylvania A Cuban exile working in the US, the multimedia artist Ana Mendieta famously drew from Afro- Cuban spirituality throughout her oeuvre. Consisting of figures carved into rock, mud, and clay beds as well as portraits of herself lying down, Mendieta’s Siluetas series in particular took inspiration from Black spiritual ecologies, foregrounding her interest in Yoruba deities. While critics have analyzed Mendieta’s references to Santería and other ancestral traditions as a sign of her complex racial positioning, however, the relationship between her work and historical formations of Afro-Cuban identity has yet to be analyzed. Departing from Fernando Ortiz’s canonical studies of Afro-Cuban religious practice, I argue that Siluetas reconfigures the ethnographic tradition of white-authored Blackness from the location of brownness. Whereas Ortiz’s narration hinges on white transcendentality, thus subordinating Afro-Cubans as primitive others to possessive whiteness, Mendieta unsettles dominant geographies through a production of difference based on horizontal negotiation and embedded praxis. Against the vertical production of national space, then, Mendieta inscribes an evisceration of self as groundwork for Black- Latinx coalitional politics.