Hemispheric Latinidad

Hemispheric Latinidad describes various aspects of cultural proximity across the diverse ethnic, national, and geopolitical terrains of the Americas. The prefix “hemi,” from the Greek word meaning “half,” is joined to the Latin word “sphera,” which denotes a round, solid formation, such as a ball or globe. The planet, envisioned in terms of two halves (hemispheres) is conceived as a division of the Earth from either north to south or east to west by an imaginary line passing through the poles. As such, hemispheric Latinidad constitutes a 21st-century reconfiguration of the panethnic identity “Latino/Latina” (or Latinx) that emerged during the final quarter of the 20th century to replace the “Hispanic” designation for peoples of Latin American extraction contributing to the US national project. As a site of continual political contest (rather than a finished product), Latinidad has garnered skepticism from observers and scholars who argue that political opportunism and governmental expedience undergird attempts to consolidate Latinx subjects across divisions of race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, migratory patterns, religion, language, and other axes of social difference to formulate a single, homogenous identity. However, contemporary scholarship that engages the conceptual framework of hemispheric Latinidad endeavors to take into account both the limitations, and the liberatory prospects, of approaches that emphasize interrelationships across Latinx and Latin American experiences. Hemispheric Latinidad hones in on the notion of overlap, as populations across the Americas contend with interlocking levels of domination that stem from the consequences of colonization, patriarchal hegemony, late capitalism, and other hemispheric structures that consolidate institutional powers and privileges along corporatist agendas. This interstitial approach to hemispheric experience informs projects of documentation, theorization, transformation, and rehabilitation of Latin American and Latinx peoples who share common experiences of national rejection within the US context, while contending with US economic, political, cultural, and military interventions and incursions into Latin American, the Caribbean, and indigenous territories in the Western Hemisphere that shape hemispheric patterns of migration, mobility, and immobility. Proponents of hemispheric Latinidad argue that these cumulative, interstitial encounters with Western domination and resistance occasion the need for conversations under an expansive rubric to describe a range of inter/intranational circumstances.

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Arguably the most important poet of the colonial period in Latin America, and perhaps of any time, Mexican poet and playwright Sor Juana Inés de La Cruz (b. 1648–d. 1695) has a number of claims to fame. She is arguably the most important poet of the colonial period in Latin America and among the first to be read in Europe. She is also an influential proto-feminist whose ideological vision defined generations. Her life is divided into three more or less symmetrical parts: her out-of-wedlock birth, education as a criolla, an individual of Spanish descent born in Latin America, in what is today Mexico City, and early manifestations of poetic talent; her life at the viceroyalty court, particularly her relationship with the Condesa de Paredes; and her decision to become a nun or spend her life in the convent, at which time her local and international fame challenged the male ecclesiastical hierarchy in New Spain, prompting her confessor and other authorities to silence her. Her most important works are her philosophical poem Primero sueño (First Dream, 1692), her comedia Los empeños de una casa (Pawn of a house, first performed in 1683) and Amor es más laberinto (Love is but a labyrinth, 1689), her loas or autos sacramentales—religious one-acts—including El divino Narciso (The divine Narcissus, 1689), her “Carta atenagórica” (Athenean letter, 1690) in which she debates the work of Portuguese theologian Antonio Vieira, her proto-feminist “Respuesta a Sor Filotea” (Response to Sor Filotea, published in 1700) where she responds to her confessor’s command to give up her writing, and, mostly, an assortment of sonnets and other poems, including “Hombres necios” (Stubborn men). Fluent in Latin and also active as a writer in Nahuatl, Sor Juana’s oeuvre is relatively compact: it includes poetry and theater and her autobiographical and philosophical letters. A substantial amount was published in her lifetime. After her death, there were hagiographies and, especially in the early 20th century, foundational scholarly studies. Still, she was the property of a small cadre of followers until she breached into the larger public realm and elicited enormous critical attention after Octavio Paz, Mexico’s recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, released his years-in-the-making biography in 1982. Since then a slew of fresh, reinvigorated research has opened up new vistas on Sor Juana. Her correspondence with her confessor, the Bishop of Puebla, has been found, changing the established academic opinion that he obstructed her intellectual development. Correspondence with other colonial poets, a possible collaboration in a comedia, and other findings have inspired sorjuanistas in international forums. Sor Juana has also become a popular icon not only in Mexican culture but across the Hispanic world, especially among Latinos in the United States. Her image appears in portraits and on Mexico’s 200-peso bill; there are several biographies; and her story has been the subject of operas, movies, TV mini-series, novels, plays, and poetry collections; and her politics have inspired feminists around the world. This bibliography highlights the most important critical editions of her work, in Mexico and outside. It lists canonical scholarly book-length contributions. It catalogues translations into English and her impact among Chicanas in the United States. And it features creative works based on her life and politics. This bibliography isn’t exhaustive. It showcases Sor Juana’s most significant contributions and her reverberations in history. It opens with significant critical editions, moves to attributed works and other references, features important biographies, concentrates on selected studies principally in book form, acknowledges previous bibliographies, and showcases her presence in films, operas, theater, and in literary works. It concludes with a section on Sor Juana in the United States. Important sorjuanistas are identified with biographical dates and relevant contextual information.

Food Industry

Food’s complex roles in Latinas/os’ lives are such that we simultaneously need to explore the dynamics caused by the food industry as well as those created by people’s foodscapes. The social and health sciences have for a long time researched how the three pillars of the food industry, production, distribution, and consumption, impact the Latina/o “body.” What these studies often show is how the economics and politics governing the mechanism of the food industry negatively affects Latinas/os’ lives in terms of labor conditions and consumer habits. More recently, the humanities—particularly history, literary studies, philosophy—have placed the focus on people’s foodscapes. This refers to the places and spaces where people gather, prepare, share, speak about, and eat food. It includes stories of food’s significance at the personal, familial, cultural, and historical level. Foodscapes encapsulate how and why people create and perform food narratives that define and redefine their sense of identity. Studying food narratives of how Latinas/os gather and share information meaningful to them, shifts the focus from “bodies” that keep the food industry in operation to people who embody food’s material and symbolic realities.

Latinas and Soccer: An Understudied Population

The history of the participation of Latinas in sports, leisure and recreational activities has been neglected by both historians of American women and researchers on the history of Latinas/os in the United States. The contribution of Latinas to soccer organizations, soccer leagues, soccer fields and soccer teams is a vastly unexplored territory mainly because of the resistance of historians of American women to incorporate Latinas in the national narrative and the negligence of Latino researchers in recognizing the presence and role of Latinas in the world of sports and recreation in the United States. This double inattention is not only rooted in the nativist shaping of the perspectives on the studies of American women and soccer, but also in the prevalent views inside Latino families, and sometimes Latino scholars, that soccer is a sport for men and, along with boxing, baseball and other sports, is a unique venue to display and assert Latino masculinity.

Filipinos

“Filipino” refers to those who claim ethnonational ties to the Philippines. At the same time that the term assumes such an affiliation, its invocation problematizes this connection. The term itself cannot be said to be autochthonous to the archipelago, as it is the namesake of Prince Felipe II of Asturias of the 16th century. While certainly not exceptional to many accounts of places and nations that share a colonial past, scholars in Latino studies might think, along with scholars in Filipino studies, what it might mean to articulate an Asian identity, culture, and history via a name inherited from colonial Spanish. Indeed, the Filipino alphabet does not even have an “F”—“Filipino” may hail as much into existence as it displaces from colonial memory. Contemporary and historical migration patterns of Filipinos similarly speak to such displacements. By some accounts, more than ten million Filipino citizens live outside of the national and geographic boundaries of the Philippines; hence its diaspora is not singular but multifarious and expansive. As some of these texts certainly attest, human labor is the country’s most profitable export. The study of Filipinos and the Philippines, moreover, finds its place in studies of Asia, the Pacific, the Middle East, and Latin America. In other words, even as “Filipinos” presumes a certain geographical fixity, it also generates a host of queries that incisively call into question this assumption and the politics it holds. In particular, how does one articulate an ever-shifting diaspora? Under what conditions was the “Filipino” made possible, and what did its invocation foreclose and provoke? Who did it include then, and what might it exclude now? The literature included here focuses on the study of Filipinos not in any attempt to produce objective knowledge about a single group of people, but rather treats Filipinos as an entry point for interrogating the terms by which Filipinos are known and understood. For instance, literature on migration calls into question not only the telos of immigration to point to the necessary multidirectionality of Filipino movement, but also points to the state itself as developing into an entity that must manage a citizenry that lives elsewhere. Filipino literature in Spanish, moreover, necessitates a study of the transpacific that attends to competing and overlapping empires. This bibliography also aims to enumerate to works of cultural and literary production (beyond just secondary academic sources) that we feel would be most relevant to scholars in Latinx/a/o studies and Latin Americanists who are interested in looking at Spain’s lone colony in Asia. Nevertheless, the list of literary and cultural sources here is by no means meant to be exhaustive, but is rather a point of departure. For instance, listing works in Spanish by Filipino authors, while historically relevant, is certainly not completely (or at all) representative of “Filipino literature,” particularly because Spanish is not widely spoken in the Philippines today.

Indigeneity

Issues of indigeneity, along with mestizaje—racial and cultural mixtures of African, indigenous, and Spanish ancestries and cultures that came as a result of the European colonization of the Americas—are core aspects of Chicana and Chicano and Latina and Latino identities, histories, and cultures. For Chicanas and Chicanos, understandings of indigeneity have shifted significantly since the early 1960s. During that time, tropes of cultural nationalism argued that all Mexican-origin people were descendants of the Aztecs, and that Aztlán—what many believed to be the conquered homelands of their Aztec ancestors encompassing the Four Corners region of the United States (Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona)—should be reclaimed. Today, a more nuanced understanding of Latinx/Chicanx indigeneity considers, for example, the complex politics of indigenous subjects migrating to settler colonial nation-states such as the United States, and the resulting negotiations of language and identity in this transnational space. Scholars of decolonial studies have added to this nuance by analyzing systems of heteropatriarchy (and the resulting gender binaries and practices of toxic masculinity) imposed through colonization and reinforced by such institutions as the Catholic Church. The editors seek to assemble and summarize key sources that speak to how indigeneity works within the transnational and transborder archives of colonization. This includes the differentiated ways that nation-states in the Americas have engaged with their indigenous pasts (including the sociopolitical and legal definitions of and practices toward indigenous communities and nations within the nation-state), as well as indigenous-led revitalization and sovereignty movements that envision decolonial futures. The goals of this bibliographic overview are to provide scholars interested in indigeneity in the Latinx context with key sources specific to Latinx communities and histories, while also considering important works that are grounded in Latin American, US, and Canadian indigenous contexts and histories. This bibliography thus invites scholars to explore the legal, political, social, and historical differences and similarities of indigeneity across hemispheric geographies. By juxtaposing the radical feminism of Gloria Anzaldúa (writing from the US-Mexico borderlands) with the decolonial visions of Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Simpson (writing from her Canadian First Nation) the disjunctures and commonalities of indigeneity and decolonial thought are highlighted. The bibliography also include some key texts on indigeneity in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Peru, and Bolivia that discuss places where the majority populations are mestiza/o and indigenous, and yet most indigenous communities, many whose first language is not Spanish, live in varying degrees of dispossession, poverty, and racial marginalization. The bibliography also invites scholars to consider Afro-Indigenous identities and community struggles in hemispheric frames.

Guillermo del Toro

Guillermo del Toro (b. 1964) is an Oscar-winning Mexican director, screenwriter, producer, novelist, film scholar, curator, and nonfiction writer who works internationally on English-language and Spanish-language projects in Mexico, New Zealand, Spain, and the United States and across a number of different media, including film, television, animation, and novels. Although he has worked in multiple genres, including horror (Mimic (1997), Blade II (2002), Crimson Peak (2015)), action/fantasy (Hellboy (2004), Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)), science fiction (Pacific Rim (2013)), and hybrids of these and other genres (The Shape of Water (2017)), he is most known for the gothic sensibility of many of his projects (Cronos (1993), The Devil’s Backbone (2001), Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), Crimson Peak (2015)). Relatedly, Del Toro’s Cronos and his subsequent films, including those he has produced have contributed greatly to the rehabilitation of the horror and fantasy genres from the cultural disreputability they suffered through the 1960s to the early 1990s and also facilitated more horror production in Mexico going forward. In addition to the gothic quality of his work, Del Toro’s auteur status is often traced through the recurring imagery, themes, and monsters that appear across his oeuvre and through the recurring preoccupations with the contiguity of real and fantasy worlds and with ghosts as manifestations of the (historical and political) past. Although Del Toro has made and been involved in the production of some notable franchise films in recent years, directing Blade II, Hellboy, and Hellboy II: The Golden Army, receiving a screenwriting credit for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012), The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013), and The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014) he has also turned down several opportunities to work on franchise films in the Narnia and Harry Potter series (passing on directing Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban but suggesting his compatriot Alfonso Cuarón for the job instead) and leaving the production of The Hobbit films after work on the scripts. He’s also received writing credit on Trox Nixey’s Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (2010).

Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY)

Adriano de Jesús Espaillat is the first Dominican American congressperson in the history of the United States. He was elected in 2016 to represent New York State’s 13th Congressional District in the House of Representatives. This district includes the area of Harlem, located in New York City’s northern Manhattan, which is an iconic area of black culture and political history. Congressman Espaillat is the first nonblack official to represent Harlem in seven decades; the district was redrawn in 2012 and currently encompasses two areas of heavy Dominican concentration as well. While there have been many foreign-born members who became naturalized citizens before serving in the US Congress, Espaillat is one of the first two known to have had an undocumented immigration status for some time. His example of political ascent to Congress is relevant in the context of the current national immigration debates and marks a milestone in the political history of Dominican Americans—a group that started migrating significantly in the late 1960s and is currently one of the two largest Hispanic groups in New York City, and the fifth largest Hispanic group in the country. Espaillat’s election illustrates current interactions among minority groups in large cities and new trends in American urban politics; it also shows the great difficulties that candidates of new immigrant groups continue to face in achieving political success. Adriano Espaillat has attracted considerable attention—albeit nonuniform—from numerous printed and electronic political media. However, scholarly works about him are in incipient stages. Research on members of Congress usually takes the form of case studies, minority or Latino politics projects, or specialized encyclopedias or dictionaries. Few of them have been published since Espaillat’s election as a Democratic Representative to the 115th Congress in 2016. The process to create this bibliography has been twofold: first, this is a selection of substantive, informative, and overall balanced sources available in national and local political media, most of them primary sources and some published in Spanish. The collected materials are then placed in relation to different sets of scholarly work: Dominican Americans studies, urban politics, political incorporation of immigrants, and political ascent of ethnic politicians. They provide concepts for understanding—with depth and perspective—Congressman Espaillat’s success.

Photography

This bibliography reflects the multifaceted relationship between Latina/os and various photographic traditions. As individuals and groups placed in front of the camera lens, Latino/as have often found themselves stigmatized, marginalized, or criminalized. Photographs taken by reformers, the police, and documentarians since the late 19th century, for instance, have often generated harmful or homogenizing visions of the US Latina/o population that frame them as racially different or otherwise problematic. Since the early decades of the 20th century, however, Latino/a photographers have produced bodies of work that challenge these limited visions to craft new images of identity, community, and history. Some of these individuals have harnessed the capacity of photography to fulfill an evidentiary or realist function as either social documentation, a political organizing tool, or a challenge to exclusionary mainstream media coverage. Others have explored the aesthetic and formal potential of photography by engaging in conceptual art practices, crafting speculative reimaginings of history, using it as an extension of performance, integrating it into other media, or mobilizing it as a complex mechanism of community- or self-representation. This bibliography covers the major works of scholarship that have attended to these key photographic tendencies and the places where they overlap, considering works that discuss Latina/os both in front of and behind the lens. Also included here are key exhibition catalogues and photographic essays that provide a representative sampling of visual tendencies or traditions mobilized by practicing Latina/o photographers, with particular attention to regional and ethnic diversity.

Sports and Community Building in California

Alta California had been claimed by the Spanish Empire since the 16th century. However, Spain professed little interest in the region until the second half of the 18th century, when North American holdings seemed threatened by European rivals. Thus, it dispatched contingents of soldiers and Franciscan missionaries into what is now the state of California in order to establish a viable presence in the region mainly by persuading indigenous Californians, through intimidation and spiritual proselytizing, to become loyal Spanish subjects. When California Indians proved difficult to convert, the Spanish established pueblos—civilian and secular municipalities in San José, Los Angeles, and Branciforté, which is now embraced by Santa Cruz. Subsequently, well-connected Spanish subjects received enormous grants of land largely in the central coast of California—grants of land that would be transformed into ranchos generally concentrating on cattle raising. When an independent Mexico took control of California in the early 1800s, the missions were secularized, the pueblos stagnated, and the ranchos relatively prospered, fueled by the labor of indigenous and mestizo/a people. Mexico’s reign in California lasted but a generation or so before the US-Mexican War ushered in American rule, soon accompanied by the Gold Rush and eventual statehood in 1850. While recognized as white by the US government, Mexican Californians quickly encountered racialized forms of political/legal discrimination, cultural oppression, and labor exploitation. Nevertheless, Mexican communities persisted in the Golden State—communities reinforced by migrants from Mexico but ever vigilant to the suspicion, hostility, and legal repression surrounding them. By the end of the 20th century, Mexican Americans in California often shared neighborhoods with migrants from Central and South America pushed from their countries of birth by poverty and political oppression. In California, as elsewhere, Latino/as have worked hard to establish and maintain community bonds. One of the more interesting and underappreciated ways they have done so is through play; that is, the formation of ethnic-based sports teams and leagues. In the process, they have cheered on individual Latino/s athletes who have garnered neighborhood, regional, national, and international fame, while maintaining sometimes tense relationships with local professional sport franchises such as the Los Angeles Dodgers and the at-present Oakland Raiders.