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Writing about marginalized lives has the power to shift norms. In telling their own stories, John Rechy, Aurora Levins Morales, Gloria Anzaldúa, and other Latinx writers make visible experiences and bodies that are rarely at the center of the stories we read, and they dramatize the complexity of human agencies and responsibilities. Yet the memoirs this book analyzes move beyond focus on the human as their subjects’ personal histories intertwine with communities, animals, spirits, and the surrounding environment. This interconnectedness resonates with critical developments in posthumanist theory as well as recalling indigenous worldviews that are “other-than-Humanist,” outside of Western intellectual genealogies. Bringing these two frameworks into dialogue with feminist theory, queer theory, disability studies, and ecocriticism enables an expansive way of viewing life itself. Rejecting the structures of Humanism, Shared Selves decenters the individualism of memoir and highlights the webs of relation that mediate experience, agency, and identity.

Since the 1990s, there has been unparalleled growth in the literary output from an ever more diverse group of Latinx writers. The extant criticism, however, has yet to catch up with the diversity of writers we label Latinx and the range of themes about which they write. Little sustained scholarly attention has been paid, moreover, to the very category—Latinx—under which we group this literature. Latinx Literature Unbound, thus, begins with a fundamental question “What does it mean to label a work of literature or an entire corpus of literature Latinx?” From this question a host of others spin out: What does that grouping allow us to see, predispose us to see, and preclude us from seeing? If the grouping—which brings together a heterogeneous collection of people and groups under a seemingly homogeneous label—tells us something meaningful, is there a poetics we can develop that would facilitate our analysis of this literature? In answering these questions, Latinx Literature Unbound seeks to unbind Latinx literature from taken-for-granted critical assumptions about identity and theme. It argues that there may be more salubrious taxonomies than Latinx for organizing and analyzing this literature. Following a neo-formalist interpretive model that privileges reading as a temporal, meaning-making event, the book argues that genre may be a more durable category for analyzing this literature. Finally, Latinx Literature Unbound suggests some ways in which we might want to proceed as we move forward with future studies of the writing we have come to identify as Latinx.

Frustrated with the flood of news articles and opinion pieces that were skeptical of minority students' “imagined” campus microaggressions, the author of this book set out to provide a detailed account of how racial-ethnic identity structures Black and Latinx students' college transition experiences. Tracking a cohort of more than five hundred Black and Latinx students since they enrolled at five historically white colleges and universities in the fall of 2013, the book finds that these students were not asking to be protected from new ideas. Instead, they relished exposure to new ideas, wanted to be intellectually challenged, and wanted to grow. However, the book argues, they were asking for access to counterspaces—safe spaces that enable radical growth. They wanted counterspaces where they could go beyond basic conversations about whether racism and discrimination still exist. They wanted time in counterspaces with likeminded others where they could simultaneously validate and challenge stereotypical representations of their marginalized identities and develop new counter narratives of those identities. This critique of how universities have responded to the challenges these students face offers a way forward that goes beyond making diversity statements to taking diversity actions.

Kids at Work is the first book to look at the participation of child street vendors in the United States. The children portrayed in this book are the children of undocumented Latinx immigrants who are relegated to street vending because they lack opportunities to work in the formal sector of the economy. On the streets of Los Angeles, California, the children help their parents prepare and sell ethnic food from México and Central America, such as pozole, pupusas, tamales, champurrado, tacos, and tejuino. Shedding light on the experiences of children in this occupation highlights the complexities and nuances of family relations when children become economic co-contributors. This book captures a preindustrial form of family work life in a postindustrial urban setting where a new form of childhood emerges. Child street vendors experience a childhood period and family work relations that lies in the intersection of two polar views of childhood, which embodies a mutually protective and supportive aspect of the economic relationship between parent and child. This book is primarily based on the point of view of street vending children, and it is complemented with parent interviews and rich ethnographic fieldwork that humanizes their experience.

This book uses Southern California to explore a series of questions about the relationship between globalization, race, space, and class. It begins with an analysis of how growing consumer demand, innovative retail business practices, and the infrastructure required to support global commodity chains made Southern California into the largest trade gateway in the United States. Warehouse work and the contentious spatial politics of inland Southern California’s logistic landscape provide the data to examine how the shifting ground of money and people intersected with local histories to reterritorialize race and capitalism at the turn of the twenty-first century. While global logistics innovations provided the impetus for capital and the state to transform Southern California’s economy, it also created pockets of resistance among labor, community, and environmental groups, who argued that commodity distribution exposed them to economic and environmental precarity. How people gave meaning to space and mobilized them to contest logistics space is at the crux of this project. The book is divided into three parts. The first part provides an introduction into the spatial politics of Southern California’s logistics regime by showing how the forces of global economic restructuring after the 1980s intersected with regional entrepreneurial actors to produce Los Angeles and inland Southern California as a space for logistics. I argue that logistics represents a major rearticulation of modern capitalist space. Part 2 examines how the flexible production and distribution systems that were critical to the expansion of global capitalism during the neoliberal age were responsible for creating social and economic precarity for logistics workers, many of whom were undocumented. The final part of the book shows how regional development policies and global restructuring combined with demographic change to reterritorialize Southern California’s geographies of race and class. The book concludes by showing how inland Southern California became a key site for the production of new Latinx geographies.

Violentologies: Violence, Identity, and Ideology in Latina/o Literature explores how various forms of violence undergird a wide range of Latina/o subjectivities, or Latinidades, from 1835 to the present. Drawing upon the Colombian interdisciplinary field of Violence studies known as violentología, which examines the transformation of Colombian society during a century of political and interpersonal violence, this book adapts the neologism violentology as a heuristic device and epistemic category to map the salience of violence in Latina/o history, life, and culture in the United States and globally. The term violentologies thus refers to culturally specific subjects defined by violence—or violence-based ontologies—ranging from Latina/o-warrior archetypes to diametrically opposed pacifist modalities, plus many more. It also signifies the epistemologies of violence: the political and philosophical logic and goals of certain types of violence such as torture, military force, and other forms of political and interpersonal harm. Based on one hundred primary texts and archival documents from an expansive range of Latina/o communities—Chicana/o, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, Salvadoran American, Guatemalan American, and various mixed-heritages and transversal hybridities throughout the world—Violentologies features multiple generations of Latina/o combatants, wartime noncombatants, and “peacetime” civilians whose identities and ideologies extend through, and far beyond, familiar Latinidades. Based on this discrepant archive, Violentologies articulates a contrapuntal assessment of the inchoate, contradictory, and complex range of violence-based Latina/o ontologies and epistemologies, and corresponding negotiations of power, or ideologies, pursuant to an expansive and meta-critical Pan-Latina/o methodology. Accordingly, this book ultimately proposes an antiidentitarian post-Latina/o paradigm.

This book argues that the process of recovering Latina/o figures and writings in the nineteenth century does not merely create a bridge between the US and Latin American countries, peoples, and literatures, as they are currently understood, but reveals their fundamentally interdependent natures, politically, socially, historically, and aesthetically, thereby recognizing the degree of mutual imbrication of their peoples and literatures of the period. Largely archived in Spanish, it addresses concerns palpably felt within (and integral to) the US and beyond. English-language works also find a place on this continuum and have real implications for the political and cultural life of hispanophone and anglophone communities in the US. Moreover, the central role of Latina/o translations signals the global and the local nature of the continuum. For the Latino Continuum embeds layered and complex political and literary contexts and overlooked histories, situated as it is at the crossroads of both hemispheric and transatlantic currents of exchange often effaced by the logic of borders—national, cultural, religious, linguistic, and temporal. To recover this continuum of Latinidad, which is neither confined to the US or Latin American nation states nor located primarily within them, is to recover forgotten histories of the hemisphere, and to find new ways of seeing the past as we have understood it. The figures of Félix Varela, Miguel Teurbe Tolón, Eusebio Guiteras, José Martí, and Martín Morúa Delgado serve as points of departures for this reconceptualization of the intersection between American, Latin American, Cuban, and Latinx studies.

To examine the intersection of religion and ethnicity among Mexican immigrants, this volume takes readers into the vibrant neighborhoods of central Santa Ana, California, a Mexican-majority metropolis with high rates of religious participation. Ethnic Mexicans have traditionally been characterized by their religiosity, and have historically been marked as ethno-racially distinct from the white majority. On the one hand, this volume investigates whether Mexican ethnicity is indeed a cohesive organizing principle that continues to mark Mexicans as distinct. On the other hand, the volume examines the mechanisms of religion that sustain or alter in-group understandings of ethnicity. To highlight the mechanisms that shape ethnic identity, the volume takes a comparative approach, juxtaposing the experiences of Catholic and evangelical Mexican immigrants, the two largest religious groupings in the city. Through five years of participant observation within formal and informal Catholic and evangelical spaces in Santa Ana, and based on in-depth interviews of fifty parishioners, this book argues that religious affiliations set Catholics and evangelicals along diverging trajectories of ethnic identity construction. In particular, the author argues that while Mexican Catholics ritualize a sense of their ethnic past, Mexican evangelicals posit a rupture with the past rooted in conversion. Catholics and evangelicals’ diverging understandings of ethnic community and of ethnic identity manifest as distinct practices of ethnic space.

Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx/Latinx Young Adult Literature signals a much-needed approach to the study of Latinx young adult literature. This edited volume addresses themes of outsiders in Chicanx/Latinx children’s and young adult literature. The collection insists that to understand Latinx youth identities, it is necessary to shed light on outsiders within an already marginalized ethnic group: nerds, goths, geeks, freaks, and others who might not fit within Latinx popular cultural paradigms such as the chola and cholo, identities that are ever-present in films, television, and the Internet. In Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks, the through-line of being an outsider intersects with discussions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. The volume addresses the following questions. What constitutes “outsider” identities? In what ways are these “outsider” identities shaped by mainstream myths around Latinx young people, particularly with the common stereotype of the struggling, underachieving inner city Latinx teen? How do these young adults reclaim what it means to be an “outsider,” “weirdo,” “nerd,” or “goth,” and how can the reclamation of these marginalized identities expand much-needed conversations around authenticity and narrow understandings of what constitutes Latinx identity? How does Chicanx/Latinx children’s and YA literature represent, challenge, question, or expand discussions surrounding identities that have been deemed outsiders/outliers?