Latina/o Religious Studies Since the 1970s

This article provides an overview of the field of Latina/o religious studies since the 1970s. Motivated by the political tenor of the times, Latina/o religious studies began as a political project committed to contextualizing theological studies by stressing racial identity, resistance to church hierarchy, and economic inequality. Rooted in a robust interdisciplinary approach, Latina/o religious studies pulls from multiple fields of study. This article, however, focuses on the field’s engagements with ethnic studies in the last fifty years, from the 1970s to the contemporary period. It argues that while the field began as a way to tell the stories, faith practices, and theologies of religious insiders (i.e., clergy and religious leaders), recent scholarship has expanded the field to include the broader themes of community formation, labor, social movements, immigrant activism, and an intentional focus on the relationships with non-religious communities.

Notes on Latino Philology

This article reflects on the importance of language studies as an essential yet forgotten portal through which to appreciate politics, society, and culture. Written in an accessible tone in direct response to the insistently obtuse academic style that isolates such explorations from the reading public, it looks at grammar, semantics, syntax, and lexicography as interconnected disciplines always linked to the history and currents defining culture. Structurally, the article is divided into two parts: the first part is a personal reflection of linguistics as a discipline; the second is a proposal for a never-before attempted history of the Spanish language written from the perspective of a Latino scholar.

Women, Gender, and Sexuality in Latina/o Culture

This article begins delving into the intersectionality of the conceptual knowledge embedded in the terms “women,” “gender,” and “sexuality.” The evolution of these three concepts has transformed the field of women, gender, and sexuality studies. While drawing on feminist and interdisciplinary methods to center on women’s issues, the field examines constructs of gender power relations, systems of oppression, and privilege. Students and scholars in the field examine these concepts as they intersect with other identities and social sites such as race, sexual orientation, inequality, class, and disability. The article begins with a general examination of the epistemological inquires considered in the title. It then traces the interdisciplinarity of women’s studies and feminist theory while contextualizing Latina feminism within Third World feminisms as conceptualized in the twentieth century. The article also argues that in Latina/o culture, the epistemology of these terms is reinforced by the power of heterosexuality, patriarchy, and the ramifications of colonial history. In this framework, the article examines the dichotomy of marianismo and machismo as markers of the legacy of colonialism. In what contexts this legacy influences Latina feminist discourses and views in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? What type of genealogies have been fundamental in tracing the colonial history of Latina/American feminism across borders? What kinds of methodological considerations for studying sexuality, and non-conforming gendering processes in Latina/o/Latinx culture in the twenty-first century are currently relevant? Are Latinas becoming more visible and influential in the twenty-first century? These inquiries are considered important for engaging with contemporary issues in Latino/a studies.

North–South, East–West

This article is divided into two halves: the first offers nineteen theses on the role of topography in the shaping of Hispanic identity in general and Latinidad in particular; and the second is a rumination on the impact of geography on identity. The style of each of these parts is deliberately dissimilar yet they are built through continuities. The contributions of Oswald de Andrade, Gloria Anzaldúa, Walter Benjamin, Jorge Luis Borges, Álvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, José Hernández, Claude Lévi-Strauss, José Ortega y Gasset, Octavio Paz, José Enrique Rodó, Juan Rulfo, and José Vasconcelos are placed in dialogue and concepts like Mestizaje and Tropicalismo are considered.

Latino Urbanism and the Gentrifying City

The nexus between Latina/o Studies and urban planning scholarship is thin but slowly growing. There remains opportunity to add critical perspectives to this emerging body of work.This article examines key conditions and trends in urban planning and the political economy context in Latina/o communities in American cities. It also reviews the intentions of the urban planning field and discusses key themes and progress within the Latino urbanism scholarly movement. The article then examines the political economy dimensions and profound implications of gentrification on the Latina/o population, especially in major US cities, and emerging gentefication racial and class debates. The article concludes with a forward-looking orientation by offering gentefication and gentrification research agendas.

Latinx Pop Cultural Studies Hoy!

Despite Latinxs being the largest growing demographic in the United States, their experiences and identities continue to be underrepresented and misrepresented in the mainstream pop cultural imaginary. However, for all the negative stereotypes and restrictive ways that the mainstream boxes in Latinxs, Latinx musicians, writers, artists, comic book creators, and performers actively metabolize all cultural phenomena to clear positive spaces of empowerment and to make new perception, thought, and feeling about Latinx identities and experiences. In film, one sees Latinx actors in mainstream and Latinx films, playing Latinx-identified characters. It’s important to understand, though, that Latinxs today consume all variety of cultural phenomena. For corporate America, therefore, the Latinx demographic represents a huge buying demographic. Viewed with cynical and skeptical eyes, the increased representation of Latinxs in the entertainment industry is a result of this push to capture the Latinx consumer market. Within this schema, Latinx actors are rarely cast as the protagonists. As such, there is an active metabolizing and critical redeployment of these narratives as well as the fashioning of entirely new cultural phenomena. Latinx filmmakers are working in the realist, motion-photographic mode to push back and clear new spaces for Latinx subjectivities and experiences; they are also innovating in the pop cultural space of music videos. Some Latinx creators use the Internet to convey the richly layered aspects of being Latinx. Meanwhile, relative low production costs in areas such as music and comic books have led to a tremendous outpouring of Latinx pop cultural creation in these areas.

A Borderlands History of Latinx Cinema

This article focuses on cinematic representations of the Latinx experience of the B/borderlands over the course of five distinct periods: silent cinema (1900s–1920s), commercial sound cinema (1930s–1960s), social problem films (1930s–1950s), New Latinx cinema (1970s), mainstream televisual cinema (1980s–1990s), and cinema in the digital age (2000s–present). Throughout her book Borderlands / La Frontera, Anzaldúa associates lowercase borderlands with destructive confrontations, and uppercase Borderlands with productive transformations. By this double definition, cinematic representations of the Latinx borderlands with a lowercase b have always dominated the big screen via Latinx characters who are either negative stereotypes or simply absent. But even as early as the silent period there have been attempts to represent the complex and oftentimes contradictory perspectives of the Latinx experience of the Borderlands with a capital B, where the switching of cultural, cinematic, and linguistic codes creates a new language: the language of a Borderlands cinema.

Always in Translation

For outsiders, the languages of Latino literature are English, Spanish, and code-switching between the two languages. What is more, code-switching is considered a symptom of not knowing either language well. At the same time, Latinos themselves feel anxiety toward perceived deficiencies in both languages. This essay argues that Latino literature offers a complex use of language that can be appreciated through the lens of translation. This essay explores the forms of translation present in Latino literature suggesting that Spanish and English always exist in the presence and under the influence of each other. Discussions of Felipe Alfau, Junot Díaz, and Urayoán Noel highlight the centrality of translation issues in Latino writing ranging from creative output and expression to the making of subsequent versions of literary texts. Overall, considerations of translation in Latino studies can lead to a more complex understanding of the work of translators and multilingual writing in general.

Latina/os and Race

This chapter argues that the subject of racism and race is crucial to Latino studies in that the historical conditions responsible for birthing gospels of phenotype and fundamentalisms of ancestry began in sites of Hispanic colonial domination in our hemisphere. Only later did racial literacies and pedagogies travel to other colonial domains within the hemisphere and across the globe. The chapter stresses the crisis of Christian piety that caused colonizing nations to produce discourses of disparagement meant to reduce or stigmatize the humanity of their subjects, the eminently historical nature of racial thought, and the role of cultivated intellects in defining, demeaning, and debasing conquered populations that differed from them in heritage, origin, and appearance. It posits that racist violence, including of the genocidal kind, is not an aberration but a vital factor of the civilization that European colonial ventures forged in the Americas. It offers an outline for a pan-hemispheric history of discourse from the Anglo and Iberian Americas to illustrate how feasibly one can claim that in the hemisphere one is racist by default. The exclusion of black, Indian, or Asian-descended people not only recurs as an ideal for the region’s foremost thinkers, political theorists, and founding fathers, but it also creeps into the pages of schoolbooks and the media in general. This scenario leaves it up to the maligned groups in the citizenry to devise ways of surviving the animosity hurled at them from various levels of public discourse in their own country. Nothing, then, would seem more urgent to fuel visions of humane solidarity and peaceful coexistence across difference of phenotype and ancestry in the Americas than to rehabilitate social relations by disabling the App of racial acrimony installed in the social fabric of our nations by the founding discourses that created our civilization.

Bridges to Cuba and Latina/Latino Studies

This essay focuses on the complex relationship between Cuban studies and Latina/Latino studies. A full engagement between the two scholarly endeavors is often difficult because of the ongoing efforts at reconciliation among the Cuban people. While more fluidity now exists, there are continuing divisions between Cubans of the island and the diaspora. So long as Cuba continues to be a site of obsessive fascination both to Cuban Americans and to non-Cuban promoters of Cuban identity and culture in the United States, it is challenging for scholars in Cuban studies to address connections with the intersectional approaches at the heart of Latina/Latino studies. Drawing on a personal approach and the author’s own experiences as a scholar, writer, and activist for cultural exchanges with Cuba, this entry explores the generational changes that have taken place in the search for bridges to and from Cuba and how this search for identity and belonging contributes idiosyncratic but important nuances to the field of Latina/Latino studies.