Militarized Mestizajes

Chapter 5 focuses on how the War on Terror’s permutations of Latina/o war literature, theater, television, film, and popular music present methodological and political challenges to conventional understandings of Latina/o relationships to power as inherently oppositional to capitalism and US imperialism. These relatively new genres include Latina/o War on Terror combat action memoir and related oral histories; wounded warrior narratives; protofascist Special Forces Über-warrior memoir and biographical profiles; Conscientious Objector testimonio, ideologically ambivalent wartime theater, and pacifist performance art; military command memoirs by junior and senior officers; as well as Latina/o spy memoir, biography, and historical fiction. Despite the authors’ profound differences in cultural heritage, experiences, and aesthetic capacities, their cultural productions cohere around intersecting, and diverging, violence-based theories of knowledge and being that extend through, but also far beyond warfare and wartime contexts. They also demonstrate the stark right-wing turn in a large segment of contemporary Latina/o life writing, which accentuates the wide range of ideological trajectories identified in earlier chapters.

Violence and the Transnational Question

Chapter 4 disentangles the distinct ideologies often conflated under the expansive and notoriously vague rubric of Latina/o “transnationalism.” It first interrogates the limits of Radical Regionalism Studies by explicating the specter of nationalism in Emma Pérez’s ostensibly contestatory Tejana lesbian feminist regionalist historical fiction. The chapter further deconstructs the Latina/o Studies fixation on hyperlocalities and celebratory transnationalisms by interrogating the various aestheticizations of violence in Latina/o literatures about Central American civil wars, femicide in the US-Mexico border, and revolutionary insurgencies throughout North, Central, and South America, in addition to the Caribbean. It closes by underscoring Pan-Latina/o political diversity through the recovery of testimonial prose and poetry from Latina/o internationalist partisans and combatants vis-à-vis the antitestimonial memoirs, novels, and poetry by and about right-wing Latina/o soldiers and CIA officers.

Caballeros and Indians

Chapter 1 examines Latina/o encounters with and reclamations of indigeneity from the eighteenth century to the present. Deploying violentologies as a heuristic device and hermeneutic prism, it focuses on established and emergent Latina/o autobiographical literary genres, cinematic texts, performative popular culture spectacles, and recently recovered archival materials and unique oral histories. These texts cumulatively reveal the wide spectrum of Latina/o antipathies toward, and affiliations with, Native nations and indigenous peoples in the United States and abroad. This chapter thus foregrounds the ideological diversity of supra-Latina/o violentologies by examining the myriad Latina/o involvements in the US Indian Wars vis-à-vis ambidextrous, albeit ambivalent, Latina/o neoindigenous, as well as problematic indigenist, performances of XicanIndia/o and LatIndia/o modalities, in addition to mixed-heritage, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and nonbinary (LGBTQI+), as well as Two-Spirit warrior paradigms in Indian Country and elsewhere.

Macho Man

Chapter 2 is devoted to the WWII-Soldado Razo archetype that anchors Latina/o civic and cultural citizenship models, transnational mestizaje and hybridity paradigms, and hypermasculinist warrior hero discourses. Through a reassessment of familiar, as well as neglected and undertheorized literary and performative texts, the chapter examines the conservative—specifically heteronormative, capitalist, and protoimperialist—nature of prevailing triumphalist historiographies of the WWII Soldado Razo as a member of the proverbial “Greatest Generation.” Both familiar and new permutations of WWII-Soldado Razo archetypes, as well as related civilian archetypes such as Pachucas and Pachucos, reveal this figure’s varied negotiations of ideology. In the process they also complicate our understanding of the racialized, gendered, and sexualized texture of this epochal milieu and its Latina/o protagonists. This chapter’s case studies reveal that the Soldado Razo actually anchors a wide variety of WWII-era supra-Latina/o violentologies. These range from hyperlocal cultural nationalisms, protofascist imperialisms, frequently ignored WWII-era Marxist internationalisms, and protoqueer warrior heroes, all of whom are intertwined with homosocial and simultaneously homoerotic Pachucos!

{ Introduction }

The introduction uses the 2005 memoir of a Mexican American volunteer in the French Foreign Legion, along with accounts of other Latina/o soldiers who fought in France during WWI and WWII, to illustrate the inadequacy of extant paradigms and hermeneutic practices for explicating the expansive and ideologically discrepant range of Latina/o spatial ontologies and uniquely globalized identities from the midnineteenth to twenty-first centuries. It simultaneously introduces a new theory for Latina/o literature that draws upon the Colombian interdisciplinary field of Violence Studies—violentología—to adapt a flexible yet historically grounded method for identifying how Latina/o identities throughout time and place, or chronotopes, are undergirded by various forms of violence. These intersecting yet unique Latina/o formations extend through and beyond conventional theories of Latina/o citizenship, nationality, and history, as well as Latina/o identity, culture, and ideology—or Latininidades—and thus are identified as supra-Latina/o violentologies. This new and expansive category accommodates a fuller range of complex Latina/o modalities across geopolitical terrain and the ideological gamut. The subsequent introduction of proliferating and increasingly diverse Latinidades thus foregrounds a new era for Latina/o Studies.

Latina/o-Asian Encounters

Chapter 3 commences the recovery of an expansive plurality of globalized supra-Latinidades by exploring Latina/o-Asian wartime encounters in life-writing genres, wartime cinema, and performative popular culture such as spoken word and Hip Hop from WWII to the War on Terror. In addition to reassessing established and canonized texts about Latina/o wartime encounters with specific Asian nations, peoples, and cultures from WWII, the Korean War, and the US war in Vietnam, the chapter also recovers the neglected legacy of Latina/o exoticist and neo-Orientalist Latina/o travelogues in Cold War China and, more recently, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Turkey. The wide range of these Latina/o encounters with the broader transcontinental space of Eurasia, the colonialist chronotope of the “Orient,” and equally complicated notion of the Ummah, or global community of Muslims, involves a multiplicity of transversal LatinAsian violentologies. These pressure for radical expansions of Latina/o mestizajes beyond conventional frameworks predicated upon Judeo-Christian and Mesoamerican legacies, and also extend through and beyond Latina/o mulattaje paradigms that weave Africa and the continent’s wide gamut of ethnicities, cultures, and religions into the mix. The wide violentological variations in these case studies span transcontinental Eurasia, the Levant (the eastern Mediterranean part of western Asia), Northern Africa, and the Americas. They thus further challenge the lingering resistance paradigm and other teleologies, and ultimately militate for a radical globalization of Latina/o Studies.

{ Conclusion }

The conclusion assesses the 2015 Broadway hit Hamilton: An American Musical by mixed-heritage (Puerto Rican, Mexican, black, and white) Lin-Manuel Miranda, which emerges as the quintessential violentological text and supra-Latina/o chronotope. This sui generis phenomenon models all the conceits and contradictions explicated throughout this book, while also consolidating the vexed and vexing Latina/o move from the margins to the center. My assessment of this spectacle as part of the ever-more discrepant Latina/o archive, which consists of widely diverging supra-Latina/o and even post-Latina/o violentologies, underscores the need for a paradigm shift in our understanding of the ontological and epistemological pasts, presents, and futures of Latina/o Studies.