From Threatening Guerrillas to Forever Illegals

by Yajaira M. Padilla

Author	: Yajaira M. Padilla
Publisher	: University of Texas Press
Total Pages	: 270
Release	: 2022-06-21
Genre	: Social Science
ISBN	: 1477325298

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The experience of Central Americans in the United States is marked by a vicious contradiction. In entertainment and information media, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, and Hondurans are hypervisible as threatening guerrillas, MS-13 gangsters, maids, and “forever illegals.” Central Americans are unseen within the broader conception of Latinx community, foreclosing avenues to recognition. Yajaira M. Padilla explores how this regime of visibility and invisibility emerged over the past forty years—bookended by the right-wing presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump—and how Central American immigrants and subsequent generations have contested their rhetorical disfiguration. Drawing from popular films and TV, news reporting, and social media, Padilla shows how Central Americans in the United States have been constituted as belonging nowhere, imagined as permanent refugees outside the boundaries of even minority representation. Yet in documentaries about cross-border transit through Mexico, street murals, and other media, US Central Americans have counteracted their exclusion in ways that defy dominant paradigms of citizenship and integration.

Central American Migrations in the Twenty-First Century

by Mauricio Espinoza

Author	: Mauricio Espinoza
Publisher	: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages	: 369
Release	: 2023
Genre	: Social Science
ISBN	: 081655191X

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"Central American Migrations in the Twenty-First Century is an interdisciplinary approach to human mobility in Central America and beyond"--

Crossing Waters

by Marisel C. Moreno

Author	: Marisel C. Moreno
Publisher	: University of Texas Press
Total Pages	: 421
Release	: 2022-07-26
Genre	: Social Science
ISBN	: 147732562X

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2023 Honorable Mention, Isis Duarte Book Prize, Haiti/ Dominican Republic section (LASA) 2023 Winner, Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Book Award, Caribbean Studies Association An innovative study of the artistic representations of undocumented migration within the Hispanophone Caribbean Debates over the undocumented migration of Latin Americans invariably focus on the southern US border, but most migrants never cross that arbitrary line. Instead, many travel, via water, among the Caribbean islands. The first study to examine literary and artistic representations of undocumented migration within the Hispanophone Caribbean, Crossing Waters relates a journey that remains silenced and largely unknown. Analyzing works by novelists, short-story writers, poets, and visual artists replete with references to drowning and echoes of the Middle Passage, Marisel Moreno shines a spotlight on the plight that these migrants face. In some cases, Puerto Rico takes on a new role as a stepping-stone to the continental United States and the society migrants will join there. Meanwhile the land border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the only terrestrial border in the Hispanophone Caribbean, emerges as a complex space within this cartography of borders. And while the Border Patrol occupies US headlines, the Coast Guard occupies the nightmares of refugees. An untold story filled with beauty, possibility, and sorrow, Crossing Waters encourages us to rethink the geography and experience of undocumented migration and the role that the Caribbean archipelago plays as a border zone.

Clicas

by Frank García

Author	: Frank García
Publisher	: University of Texas Press
Total Pages	: 273
Release	: 2024-07-23
Genre	: Social Science
ISBN	: 1477329455

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How Latina/o/x gang literature and film represent women and gay gang members’ challenges to gendered, sexual, racial, and class oppression. Clicas examines Latina/o/x literature and film by and/or about gay and women gang members. Through close readings of literature and film, Frank García reimagines the typical narratives describing gang membership and culture, amplifying and complicating critical gang studies in the social sciences and humanities and looking at gangs across racial, ethnic, and national identities. Analyzing how the autobiographical poetry of Ana Castillo presents gang fashion, culture, and violence to the outside world, the effects of women performing female masculinity in the novel Locas, and gay gang members’ experiences of community in the documentary Homeboy, García complicates the dialogue regarding hypermasculine gang cultures. He shows how they are accessible not only to straight men but also to women and gay men who can appropriate them in complicated ways, which can be harming and also, at times, emancipating. Reading gang members as (de)colonial agents who contest the power relations, inequalities, oppressions, and hierarchies of the United States, Clicas considers how women and gay gang members resist materially and psychologically within a milieu shaped by the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and class.

Channeling Knowledges

by Rebeca L. Hey-ón

Author	: Rebeca L. Hey-ón
Publisher	: University of Texas Press
Total Pages	: 229
Release	: 2023-07-18
Genre	: Literary Criticism
ISBN	: 1477327258

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"Hey-Colón considers the central role of water within the writings and imaginations of Latinx and Caribbean women writers and artists. Water is seen as a political border with the United States, but also symbolically as a carrier of knowledge, place of transmutation, and an embodiment of the Afro-diasporic religious figure of Yemayá, the orisha who is most directly tied to water. Oceans, seas, and rivers are the crux of narrative applications by writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa in her seminal work Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, which likens the Rio Grande to an open wound "where the Third World grates against the First and bleeds," and thus the locus of trauma, but also of processing trauma. Likewise, Hey-Colón argues that the physical and the sacred are intimately tied together in Afro-diasporic beliefs--the body is literally the repository of the sacred within spirit possession and so these bodies, when they were captured and subjected to the traumas of slavery, were experienced at the same time over their travels across the Atlantic by the spirits they brought with them from the Old World to the New. In doing so they became a sort of living archive and invocation that is continually passed down through successive generations to their descendants. Water and spirituality are a place of trauma and of healing"--

Reclaiming the Americas

by Tatiana Reinoza

Author	: Tatiana Reinoza
Publisher	: University of Texas Press
Total Pages	: 311
Release	: 2023
Genre	: Colonies in art
ISBN	: 1477326901

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"Tatiana Reinoza examines how geography, immigration, and art all converged as deepening interests for Latinx graphic artists, specifically those working in different forms of printmaking. By highlighting the work of four artists, based out of four distinct studios in East LA, Tempe, Austin, and East Harlem, she is able to uncover how their work these past three decades has transcended the more defined lines of scholarship that focus on specific ethnic groups (Chicano, Puerto Rican, etc.). She makes a case for how spatial projects allow for a more collective critique of anti-immigrant discourse, visualize immigrant lives, and articulate the ways in which printmaking has been historically complicit in the colonizing of the Americas"--

Revolting Indolence

by Marcos Gonsalez

Author	: Marcos Gonsalez
Publisher	: University of Texas Press
Total Pages	: 254
Release	: 2024-12-03
Genre	: Social Science
ISBN	: 1477330534

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How indolent practices in Latinx LGBTQ culture challenge capitalist imperatives to be productive. Revolting Indolence makes a case for laziness as an aesthetic-political strategy for countering the oppressive logics of cisheteronormative racial capitalism. Focusing on ways in which queer and trans Latinx people demonstrate the unwillingness of their participation in “productivist” ethics and allied respectability politics, Marcos Gonsalez argues that slacking off, lounging, daydreaming, and partying are liberatory practices—revolts that in turn are treated as revolting. Gonsalez explores how queer and trans Latinx artists refute discourses in which work is a moral good. In Paris Is Burning, RuPaul's Drag Race, documentary photography of queer and trans Latinx life in Los Angeles, and other sources, Gonsalez identifies two lazy styles: first, flagrant refusals of work that critique capitalist reason; and second, the invention of alternative aesthetic worlds beyond racial capitalism and violence targeting queer and trans people, whose rejection of the cisgender nuclear family paradigm is rightly seen as threatening the stability of a functioning capitalist system. Reclaiming laziness as a resource for radical imagining, Revolting Indolence asks us to do that which we want most and which capitalist exploitation can least tolerate: to slow down.

Invisibility and Influence

by Regina Marie Mills

Author	: Regina Marie Mills
Publisher	: University of Texas Press
Total Pages	: 256
Release	: 2024-06-04
Genre	: Literary Criticism
ISBN	: 1477329161

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A rich literary study of AfroLatinx life writing, this book traces how AfroLatinxs have challenged their erasure in the United States and Latin America over the last century. Invisibility and Influence demonstrates how a century of AfroLatinx writers in the United States shaped life writing, including memoir, collective autobiography, and other formats, through depictions of a wide range of “Afro-Latinidades.” Using a woman-of-color feminist approach, Regina Marie Mills examines the work of writers and creators often excluded from Latinx literary criticism. She explores the tensions writers experienced in being viewed by others as only either Latinx or Black, rather than as part of their own distinctive communities. Beginning with Arturo (Arthur) Schomburg, who contributed to wider conversations about autobiographical technique, Invisibility and Influence examines a breadth of writers, including Jesús Colón; members of the Young Lords; Piri Thomas; Lukumi santera and scholar Marta Moreno Vega; and Black Mexican American poet Ariana Brown. Mills traces how these writers confront the distorted visions of AfroLatinxs in the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean, and how they created and expressed AfroLatinx spirituality, politics, and self-identity, often amidst violence. Mapping how AfroLatinx writers create their own literary history, Mills reveals how AfroLatinx life writing shapes and complicates discourses on race and colorism in the Western Hemisphere.

Narcomedia

by Jason Ruiz

Author	: Jason Ruiz
Publisher	: University of Texas Press
Total Pages	: 356
Release	: 2023-10-10
Genre	: Social Science
ISBN	: 1477328211

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Exploring representations of Latinx people from Scarface to Narcos, this book examines how pop culture has framed Latin America as the villain in America’s long and ineffectual War on Drugs. If there is an enemy in the War on Drugs, it is people of color. That is the lesson of forty years of cultural production in the United States. Popular culture, from Scarface and Miami Vice to Narcos and Better Call Saul, has continually positioned Latinos as an alien people who threaten the US body politic with drugs. Jason Ruiz explores the creation and endurance of this trope, its effects on Latin Americans and Latinx people, and its role in the cultural politics of the War on Drugs. Even as the focus of drug anxiety has shifted over the years from cocaine to crack and from methamphetamines to opioids, and even as significant strides have been made in representational politics in many areas of pop culture, Latinx people remain an unshakeable fixture in stories narrating the production, distribution, and sale of narcotics. Narcomedia argues that such representations of Latinx people, regardless of the intentions of their creators, are best understood as a cultural front in the War on Drugs. Latinos and Latin Americans are not actually America’s drug problem, yet many Americans think otherwise—and that is in no small part because popular culture has largely refused to imagine the drug trade any other way.