The Spaces of Spanishes (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Spaces of Spanishes: AOC's 'latina thing' and/as language fetishism
In this chapter, we theorize the intrinsic relation among language, (racialized) bodies, and space, grounded in an analysis of discourses by and about U.S. Latina politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC). Building on Sarah Ahmed's concept of "stranger fetishism" (2000), we show how disputes between AOC and conservative pundits over what it means to do the 'latina thing' rely on a fetishized understanding of the 'Spanish' language, both in AOC's and her supporters' rhetoric, and that of her opponents. Such fetishizing, we argue, obscures the investments in the interconnected ideologies of racism, monolingualism, and nationalism that shape who gets to speak, and in what ways, when it comes to the US public sphere. We conclude with some reflections of the implications of our study for a simultaneous reclamation and rethinking of transnationalism in critical intercultural studies.
Rethinking the Lens of Spanish: Grounding a Chicana Feminist Language
Contemporary U.S. Latinx Literature in Spanish, 2018
This essay examines the significant role Chicana feminist writers play in contesting mainstream perspectives on U.S. Spanish. Through the development of Chicana and U.S. Latina feminist discourse centered on the reclamation and affirmation of one's inherited tongue, women have generated robust methodologies to understand the benefits of embracing the hybridity, intersectionality, and complexity of communication. From Gloria Anzaldúa's "mestiza consciousness" and Cherríe Moraga's "theory in the flesh" and "coming from a long line of vendidas" to Ana Castillo's "Xicanisma" and Emma Pérez "sitio y lengua," a new understanding of identity formation about the languages defining one's cultural reality enabled women the ability to challenge the hegemonic identity politics for women by fostering narratives of "selfhood" that rethink the lens of Spanish in Chicana feminism.
What’s in an "x"?: An Exchange about the Politics of "Latinx"
Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures, 2017
From its origins in queer community conversations online, the term “Latinx” continues to gain wider circulation in various publics. This scholarly exchange examines the language and other politics of choosing to employ or to reject the “x” signifier. To engage a variety of perspectives on this topic, we invited five scholars with expertise in language, sexuality, gender, and latinidad from the continental United States and Puerto Rico to participate in an online exchange about what the “x” linguistic marker enables and constrains. Contributors do not always agree, and the tensions that arise point to broader discussions and strains unfolding beyond the pages of this journal. Ultimately, this exchange seeks to enliven ongoing conversations and to spark new ones among those interested in the politics, intersectional social locations, and exigencies implicated in discussions about “Latinx” and similar linguistic choices. As this exchange elucidates, the answer to “what’s in an ‘x’?” depends on whom you ask.
MEXTESOL Journal , 2019
The result of arduous and committed ethnographic work, Rosa's book examines the co-construction of language and race: a key feature of modern governance saturating individuals with contradictory narratives around language and race. With regard to social and institutional expectations for individuals to look like a language, Rosa argues that Latinxs' phenotypic, cultural and linguistic heterogeneity becomes erased by racializing ideologies that homogenize them as racial Others. This erasure, he maintains, is rooted in spectrum-based White supremacist logics of Indigenous erasure and anti-Blackness, in which brown bodies become more desirable as they stand between Blackness and Whiteness. Regarding social and institutional expectations for individuals to sound like a race, Rosa demonstrates how Latinx's linguistic practices are constructed as deficient by privileged White perceiving subjects. Throughout his book, Rosa problematizes how particular linguistic practices are construed as emblematic of certain racial categories, and how certain racial categories are constructed as representative of stereotypical linguistic practices. The book is anchored on a raciolinguistic perspective (Rosa & Flores, 2017), comprised of five components. The first references the racialization of subjects and the ranking of languages to justify the imposition of European epistemology. The second points to Whites as privileged subjects that perceive others as different and thus inferior. The third references the reified nature of named languages and racial categories, which allows for the study of how language and race are perceived and experienced in relation to one another. The fourth points to the need to unveil how categories of language and race are intersectionally assembled and discursively co-constructed. Finally, the fifth component centers on the dismantling of White supremacy as a form of struggle for social change. Given that this perspective examines complex phenomena and aims at de-centering and challenging regimented processes, a multi-sited ethnographic research approach that provides thick descriptions proves to be the most fitting. That is, the complexity of Rosa's research enterprise justifies his choice of ethnography as the lens through which he analyzes racializing ideologies and how these were met with resistance at the research site. The ethnographic work described in this book was conducted between 2007 and 2010 at a newly founded public high school on the Near Northwest Side of Chicago. The student population in New Northwest High School (NNHS) was classified as nearly 90% Mexican and Puerto Rican and 10% African American. Within this high school, the principal created an administrative project that redressed racial/class exclusion and intersectional forms of gender/sexual discrimination, which often reflected but also resisted the notions of assimilation to normative American Whiteness and maintenance of cultural authenticity. Overall, students at NNHS often had to learn to showcase their racial and linguistic differences (their Puerto Ricanness and Mexicanness) without overstepping what is tolerable racial and linguistic difference in the US, thereby revealing schools' role in (re)producing legitimate US citizen-subjects. Besides the introductory and conclusion chapters, the book is composed of two parts. In Part I, "Looking like a Language: Latinx Ethnoracial Category-Making", the author includes three chapters. In Chapter One, Rosa discusses how NNHS principal's goal of transforming students from 'gangbangers and hoes' into 'young Latino professionals' reflected broader social anxieties anchored on stereotypes about Latino 1
Language and Education, 2015
As the editors point out in their introduction, this volume is solidly based on research carried out during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries on Spanishspeaking populations in the United States. It is the case that certain Spanishspeaking communities in the US, particularly in its Southwestern regions, have had an uninterrupted existence here that predates the arrival of English speakers on this continent. However, given recent demographic shifts, other US Spanish-speaking communities are relatively new. The volume's focus is on diaspora, and part 1, ''Established Communities,'' centers on the newer communities. The first two chapters study the dynamics of language contact in Chicago, Illinois, with regard to dialect and identity negotiation. Significant inflows of Mexican and Puerto Ricanorigin Latinos into the area have brought cultural and linguistic norms, mediated through Spanish, crashing together. The studies seek to work toward unravelling the complexities of how the Spanish-speaking Mexican, Puerto Rican and ''MexiRican'' communities interact with and accommodate one another. At the same time, the shared experience of speaking a non-English language results in negotiating a shared identity and strategies to maintain that identity within a larger Englishspeaking context, as discussed in Chapter 3. The linguistic and ideological dynamics among recent arrivals in contact with established Latino communities is further explored in the context of Spanish language use in the media, specifically radio broadcasting. These studies represent well-established research foci in US Spanishlanguage studies. Chapter 4, ''Queer Latin@ Networks: Languages, Identities, and the Ties That Bind,'' contributes to the exploration of language and identity as well, but also represents an innovative trend in the study of US Spanish. LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) Spanish-speaking communities have largely been ignored in the literature, and this chapter not only contributes to the sound
Dirty Contradictions: Latinidad, Migration, and Discourses of In/Ex-clusion
Douglas (2002) defines dirt as “matter out of place”—implying a “set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order” (36). For example, dirt or soil is not seen as dirty if it is found in the ground, but it is when placed upon the dining room table. Through a close reading of Douglas’s theory of dirt, this project seeks to explore the system or set of ordered relations that render the bodies of Latin American subjects as dirty, dangerous, sub-human upon the crossing of simultaneously imagined and physical line. As a result, this project is located within the intertwining of global and local forces, in particular migration, knowledge, technology, culture, production, and law. It will explore the discursive contradictions that construct and shape this views in oppositional manners vis-à-vis their global position within national boundaries. Within this geographical of border crossing, Latin American subjects metamorphize into Latin@1 as they cross the US-Mexico border. This epic journey gives rise to the subject position of Latino@, which Viego (2007) argues, through the deployment of psychoanalytic theory, renders the subjects dead through the modern state project of managing and controlling ethnic and racialized subjects. However, Rodriguez (2003) points to the complexity of establishing a Latin@ identity or latinidad through her analogous portrayal of it with queerness. Rodriguez argues that Latinidad describes a geopolitical experience but it is ishot through with contradictions of immigration, (post)(neo)colonialism, race, law, etc. These condractions produce unanswerable questions such as who is Latin@? How is it identified? Is it history, language, culture, geography, or blood? Therefore, a main concern of this project will be to produce and collect working definitions and theories of Latinidad that encompass the fluidity, mobility and contradictions of the identity. The aim of this thread of the project will be to understand Latinidad through its transcendence of geography and national histories, for they are based on historical and political definitions that are US-Centric and erases local narratives and subjectivities.
Latino Dreams: Transcultural Traffic and the U.S. National Imaginary
Latino Dreams: Transcultural Traffic and the U.S. National Imaginary (Amsterdam and New York; Rodopi BV, 2002) http://www.rodopi.nl/functions/search.asp?BookId=PORTADA+14 A welcome addition to the fields of Latino and (trans-)American cultural and literary studies, Latino Dreams focuses on a selection of Latino narratives, performances and films, published or produced between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, that may be said to traffic in the U.S.A.’s attendant myths and governing cultural logics. The selection includes novels by authors who have received little academic attention—Abraham Rodriguez, Achy Obejas, and Benjamin Alire Sáenz—along with underattended works from more renowned writers—Rosario Ferré, Coco Fusco, and Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Latino Dreams takes a transcultural approach in order to raise questions of subaltern subordination and domination, and the resistant capacities of cultural production. The analysis explores how the selected narratives deploy specific narrative tactics, and a range of literary and other cultural capital, in order to question and reform the U.S.A.’s imaginary coordinates. In these texts, moreover, national imperatives are complicated by recourse to feminist, queer, panethnic, postcolonial, or transnational agendas. Yet the analysis also recognizes instances in which the counter-narrative will is frustrated: the narratives may provide signs of the U.S.A.’s hegemonic resilience in the face of imaginary disavowal. Contents: Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1. The transcultural contours of Latino U.S.A. Chapter 2. Rosario Ferré’s trans-“American” fantasy, or subalternizing the self Chapter 3. Abraham Rodriguez’s boy-zone romance of “American” escape Chapter 4. Cuban memory, “American” mobility, and Achy Obejas’s lesbian way Chapter 5. Coming out of the “American” nightmare with Benjamin Alire Sáenz Chapter 6. Coco Fusco, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and “American” cannibal reveries Afterword: Notes on transcultural traffic from across el charco pacífico Bibliography Index Reviews: From Claire Fox, “Review Essay: Comparative Literary Studies in the Americas.” American Literature 76.4 (December 2004): 871-85. “Latino Dreams invokes theoretical concepts from twentieth-century Latin American criticism in order to chart the way in which U.S.-based Latino narratives diversely engage the American Dream. The book thus inverts the common pattern in which metropolitan critics summon U.S. and European theories in order to decode Latin American texts. At the center of Allatson’s methodology is ‘‘transculturation,’’ a concept associated with Cuban ethnographer Fernando Ortiz, who elaborated it as a countertheory to the English-language concepts of acculturation and assimilation. For Ortiz, cultural contact implied not only cultural acquisition but several simultaneous processes, including ‘‘cultural destruction, uprooting, and loss (deculturation), and the productions of ‘new cultural phenomena’ (neoculturation) . . .’’ (32). Subsequent authors and critics, such as José María Arguedas and Angel Rama, recognized the concept’s potential to describe the manner in which Latin American regional literatures channeled the multifocal perspectives and competing signifying systems characteristic of the continent’s interracial and neocolonial societies (33–34). For the purpose of his study, Allatson further submits transculturation to critiques by the U.S.-based Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, which cautions against self-subalternizing maneuvers on the part of national elites (39), and by Marxist critics, who deride transculturation as an accommodating culturalism that depends on dependency, as it were (41). These caveats in place, Allatson’s use of the term transculturation signifies neither seamless hybridization nor textual resistance; rather, the concept’s heuristic value lies in its intrinsic attention to polyvalence and contradiction, which enables the critic to move beyond a hegemonic-resistant binary to distinguish the ‘‘complex, mutable, and often surprising logics of domination, subordination, and resistance’’ that mark Latina(o) literary interactions with the United States (53). ... Latino Dreams is remarkably successful at keeping the myriad identity categories associated with cultural studies in constant play, while pausing frequently to problematize each phase of its own argumentation. Its readings are meticulous yet imaginative. ... Latino Dreams’s brief afterword, about the circulation of Latina(o) texts in the author’s native Australia, is another important critical intervention. Through his discussion of the 1992 Sydney Biennale, in which Gómez-Peña and Fusco staged their well-known performance, ‘‘Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit Sydney, ’’ Allatson highlights several problematic examples of cross-cultural identification between Latinas(os) and Australians. The Biennale’s curator, for example, constructed an analogy between Latina(o) ‘‘border crossers’’ and the historical figure of the Australian boundary rider, ‘‘an icon mythologized from an Australian colonial era and frontier ethos’’ (307) in an apparent effort to claim migrancy as the universal human condition for the postmillennium. Here Allatson is attentive to questions of translation, even in cases where English is the primary language of communication. The afterword further points to an exciting direction for future research inherent in Allatson’s project—if Latino literature somehow exceeds the boundaries of the United States, then it can also be studied from other geographical and national perspectives. ... The work ... under review use[s] race, ethnicity, and aesthetic movements as analytic bridges to link North and South, Europe and the Americas; and in so doing, ... extend[s] the pioneering projects of scholars such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Paul Gilroy, both of whom have had a profound impact on the transnational turn in contemporary U.S.-based American studies.” -------------- From David William Foster, "Review Essay: Recent Latin American Cultural Studies." Chasqui: Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana 33: 2 (November 2004), pp. 157-68. "...this is an important critical contribution to Latino Studies."