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This brief concluding section summarizes the implications of analyzing Intralatino’a lives for Latino/a Studies. It identifies future research topics that can be framed as inter- and intralatino/a studies. Moving away from the limitations of Latinidad as a pan-ethnic signifier, the book exhorts readers to engage the horizontal hierarchies that inform social interactions and constructions of the other in Latino USA.

I begin by identifying Intralatino/a writers and characters nationwide whose voices claim the need for their public acknowledgement and recognition. I define Intralatino/as as embodying multiple Latin American nationalities and ethnicities, and anticipate for the reader the heterogeneous processes through which they negotiate their nationalities and reaffirm a sense of belonging and non-belonging within their family lives. By unveiling the temporality of Intralatino/a identities—that they are not new nor exceptional, but hidden in histories marked by segmented national frameworks—I argue for the need to render these subjectivities visible and public, and worthy of academic analysis. In terms of methodology, I highlight the tensions between, on the one hand, personal narrative, the anecdote, and poetry, which frame my reading of the twenty interviews that inform the book, and, on the other, the sociological impetus for categorizing and for identifying patterns and structures. I locate this book project centrally within the field of Latinx Studies amid questions of culture, identity, hybridity, and transnationalism. I also discuss Chicago as a city of Latinidad and highlight the ways in which the analysis paves the way for future studies about Intralatino/as in other Latino urban centers in the United States.

This chapter examines the stories of the first-generation, immigrant parents of the Intralatino/as interviewed for the book. I analyze their personal stories of migration from their home countries, the romantic encounters with their partners as National Others, and the emerging conflicts and resistance on the part of their relatives and family members that they faced as they decided to start a family with a partner who was not of their own national community. That Chicago was the site for these inter-latino encounters speaks to the rich history of immigrant arrivals to the city. Historicizing the social meanings and tensions produced by interlatino/a desire and romance in Chicago, I highlight the courage and resilience of these interlatino couples given the challenges most of them faced for marrying outside their national community.

Chapter 3 considers how South Asian immigrants reconciled notions of class and race from India and Pakistan with those of a changing American South. Tolerated but socially marginalized as too foreign, Indian and Pakistani students collapsed their own national identities to form an interethnic community identity, mainly through the university. Through the American Host Family program, a Cold War initiative, students also built an off-campus support network.