CHAPTER THREE. Indigent Latinities

1. The Diccionario de la Real Academia Española enumerates prieto as (1) “said of a color: very dark and almost indistinguishable from black” (“Dicho de un color: Muy oscuro y que casi no se distingue del negro”); (2) as a Cuban term “Said of a person: of the black race” (“Cuba. Dicho de una persona: De raza negra”); and (3) as a Mexican label “Said of a person: of brown skin” (“Méx. Dicho de una persona: De piel morena”). Negro is “Said of a person: Whose skin is of a black color” (“Dicho de una persona: Cuya piel es de color negro”). (All English translations are mine.) I adopt brownish blackness and blackish brownness from W. D. Wright, who takes them up as descriptors in Black History and Black Identity. Wright informs us, “Skeptics of a Black ethnic group might point out that all people of that group are not black in color, and thus are not all black people. There is truth in this observation, but some falsity in it as well. What is false about it is the projection of the idea of a pure black race, which has never existed in the world, not even in Africa. In Africa there have always been shades of blackness, including brownish blackness or blackish brownness, or even shades of brownness. […] The amalgamation of white and black people in the United States has not destroyed the black race as such, as that race is still overwhelmingly black, blackish brown, or brownish black, as it was before coming to the United States” (2002: 90).

2. This brownness speaks through a bodily taxonomy. For example, Oscar Hijuelos codifies and naturalizes this Latino brownness in relation to his brother, José-Pascual, whose hair (not skin) “of a brownish-red coloration bespoke somewhat more Latino origins” (2011: 8).

3. See, for example, Christina Sharpe’s superb study, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects, where she brings to light formulations of “the (New World) black subject” (2010: 3). These subjections—with their routine repetition of sexual violence on these particular bodies—organize the blackening of black subjects and how we come to “know” them as both black and blackened. Sharpe calls the routinization of this violence, as her monograph’s title elucidates, “monstrous intimacies.” These “awful intimate and monstrous configurations” both in slavery and freedom, from her perspective, rely on “the uses of blackness over time” (14, 4). They link black and blackened diasporic “others” through “everyday mundane horrors that aren’t acknowledged to be horrors.” Sharpe defines her ongoing processes of subjectification as a “set of known and unknown performances and inhabited horrors, desires and positions produced, reproduced, circulated, and transmitted, that are breathed in like air and often unacknowledged to be monstrous.” These productions and reproductions of “fundamental familiar violence” are “the most readable and locatable still through the horrors enacted on the black body after slavery and the official periods of emancipation and through further colonialism, imperialism, and the relative freedoms of segregation, desegregation, and independence, whether the body is in the Caribbean, the Americas, England, or post-independence Africa” (2–3). A provocative question raised in Sharpe’s work holds great influence here too: “Do those black and blackened people who can’t or don’t claim that proximity to whiteness […] as positive inheritance become the sole visible bearers of the trauma of the survival of slavery and racism, sole signifiers of an as yet unerased proximity to the blood-stained gate?” (22).

Please allow me, at this point, to better explain Latining America’s analytic quest. I do not make or envision Latino and Latina vocalizations of brownness akin to whiteness. I direct attention to the ways that brownness walks alongside dark brownness and blackness in Latino, Latina, and African American contexts—giving weight to how the blackened signifier moves not only through the demonstrably black and blackened body but also through a dark browned subject that has also been blackened. This is not to say that the black body remains locked in its “own” blackened signifiers. This chapter proposes that the blackened signifier is also “popping” up in this Latino and Latina economy of brown and dark brown indigent Latinities. The blackened signifier also migrates and is transmitted through other bodies and narratives. It turns to another doubling of how processes of blackening fracture at the level of meaning for strictly brown (Latino and Latina) and black (African American) signification. To adapt Lewis Gordon’s words, “The black, subject to interpretation, becomes a designation that could be held by different groups at different times and as such is both concrete and metaphorical” (2000: 63).

4. As Jennifer P. Mathews reminds us, the sapodilla or chicozapote tree from which chewing gum, chicle, is extracted has Mesoamerican origins. Aztec and Maya pre-Columbian cultures had multiple uses for the sapodilla that ranged from chewing the natural gum and eating the tree’s fruit (sapote) to using it to treat hemorrhoids and dysentery to exploiting the wood for firewood and building materials (2009: 1–18). The development of chicle as a commercial industry can be traced to the 1870s, when key entrepreneurial enterprises by Thomas Adams Sr. and William Wrigley Jr. paved the way for “the great American invention” (38). On the other side of this American invention are the gum collectors or rubber tappers, known as chicleros, who face natural difficulties in the Mesoamerican jungles where chicle camps are located. The gum collectors largely comprise indigenous workers, who have been viewed rather negatively: “Local peoples generally feared the chicleros and considered them to be one of the dangers of the jungle, as many were rumored to be ex-convicts, Maya rebels, and criminals on the lam” (85). Mathews mentions, “in addition to their violent reputations, chicleros were criticized for being promiscuous vectors of venereal disease” (86). And yet chicleros are a “complex and misunderstood group [that] has played a significant role in a truly American industry” (92). I include this note to indicate the inseparable signifying space of the economically docile Indian: from commercial production and the selling of chicle to the embodiment of a “different” human subject.

5. Apolinar “hardly counted as a male because he did not count as a human being” (Martin, 2009: 37).

6. Castellanos Moya’s narrator “passed the time, enjoying the brilliant morning among these hundreds of Indians decked out in their Sunday dress of so many festive colors, among the most salient being that joyous cheerful red, as if red had nothing to do with blood and sorrow but was rather the emblem of happiness for these hundreds of domestic servants enjoying their day off in the large square. […] I realized that not one of those women with slanted eyes and toasted brown skin awoke my sexual appetite or my prurient interests” (2008: 67–68).

7. Mayas are not off the radar in Cancún; they form a visible and significant presence and contribute to the area’s way of living. M. Bianet Castellanos’s A Return to Servitude calls attention to Cancún’s tourist industry and how it has fostered, at least since the 1970s, internal indigenous migrations from the Yucatán peninsula to Mexico’s most popular traveling destination. Maya workers make up more than one-third of Cancún’s population. They are also “the second largest indigenous group in Mexico” (2010: 83; xxxv). They were recruited for wage work “from the surrounding countryside to fill the vast labor supply needed to construct this tourist center” (xviii). The Maya worker “represents the ideal body,” since “within the tourist industry, the submissive, exotic, racialized body—which is feminized by the virtue of the work being performed, regardless of the fact that both men and women are employed within this industry—serves as the universal trope by which production is organized and worker subjectivities are constituted” (80).

Castellanos contends that Maya relocation from the countryside to Cancún transforms them “into modern citizens and urban workers,” engaged with “the ideological struggles generated by experiencing work and life within export-processing zones dominated by the production of services” (2010: 78). Maya migrant workers employed in service work are transformed into “‘modern’ citizens.” Those previously hired as farm labor underwent corporate “disciplinary tactics” where they “learned to adhere to a time clock, acquired new skills, and adopted new behavior and attitudes (e.g., submissiveness and attentiveness). […] They learned the intricacies of service: setting a table, greeting a client, adopting a hotel’s standards of cleanliness, and so forth” (92–93). All the same, Cancún’s tourist industry, like maquiladora manufacturing, is typified by “low wages, repetitive motion, attempts to control a worker’s sexuality, limited job promotion, a lack of economic security, and a reliance on racialized bodies” (xxx). Castellanos casts light on Mexican modernization projects that required indigenous assimilation into the nation-state. They were forced “by the state to adopt Western dress and stop speaking their language” and “exited the historical stage of national memory in the 1930s, only to be included once again when national discourse embraced multiculturalism in the 1970s” (xxii). Cancún’s narrative for the traveling class counts on Maya origins. Yet it is “marked by a growing disconnection with the region […] and a pronounced articulation with a global economy” (81).

8. It remains to be said that not all degrees of black and brown invisibility within these discourses are tantamount to a homogeneously hypothesized black and brown collectivity. Brown critical engagement among U.S. Latinos and Latinas with Afro-Latino populations is, at best, embryonic. Even more, as Ernesto Sagás identifies in the Latino Studies Journal, “most Latino studies scholarship” has the tendency to principally concern “itself with the examination of the Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Cuban experiences in the United States” (1998: 5). Sagás conveys, in the context of U.S. Dominican populations, that hierarchical perceptibilities direct which Latino and Latina subgroup has more visibility and legitimate claims to being institutionalized within the field of Latino/a studies. This absence of black Latinos and Latinas and groups outside the aforementioned Latino/a trinity also echoes the types of sedentary African Americanness recognized in U.S. discourses on blackness. Mary Waters discusses, with regard to West Indian migrations to North America, that “the invisibility of the Caribbean immigrants as immigrants [alludes to] their visibility as blacks” (1997: 3). The lives of certain individuals from the Afro-Caribbean imply struggles with processes of negotiating migratory identities from the Americas, of altering such identifications to U.S.-centered notions of Americanness, and of specifically becoming black Americans.

9. Vicki L. Ruiz offers this note on Mexican, Mexican American, Chicano, and Chicana categories: “People of Mexican birth or descent refer to themselves by many names—Mexicana/o, Mexican American, and Chicana/o (to name just three). Self-identification speaks volumes about regional, generational, and even political orientations. Mexicana/o typically refers to immigrants, while Mexican American signifies U.S. birth. Chicana/o reflects a political consciousness born of the Chicana/o Student Movement, often a generational marker for those of us coming of age during the 1960s and 1970s. Chicana/o also has been embraced by our elders and our children who share in the political ideals of the movement” (2004: 344).

10. The idea of a linear U.S. Latino and Latina brownness that omits other dark brown tints is particularly evocative post-9/11. Some U.S. Latino and Latina cultural workers are disentangling the meanings of Latino and Latina brownness—engulfed by issues of migration, incarceration, education, employment, political activism, and justice—through the U.S. quest for and a formation of a twenty-first-century brown genealogy. Consider the group the Chicano Messengers of Spoken Word, composed of artists Paul Flores, Amalia Ortiz, and Marc David Pinate. They titled their first play Fear of a Brown Planet, dialoguing with Public Enemy’s 1990 canonical hip-hop album, Fear of a Black Planet. The Chicano Messengers of Spoken Word’s piece, which premiered in 2005, was envisioned as a “new spoken word/hip hop theater play.” Fear of a Brown Planet describes how two Chicanos and a Chicana find themselves in “a psycho-spiritual journey into the dark prison of the mind in a quest for meaning to our collective Brown existence” (Mojica Arts, 2005). But this brownness reads like a referent locked in Latino and Latina specificities. Asked about what sparked the group’s enterprise by the Houston Chronicle in 2007, Flores touched on the political effects of brownness from a Chicano/Latino composition. He qualified the group’s production in this manner: “We invented a scenario commenting on the issue of ‘brownness.’ If, as projected, by 2050 the majority population will be either Latino or mixed heritage, what is the potential effect of that? We started with three archetypal characters we find in the community. I play a stubborn construction worker who barely graduated high school and was always told he wouldn’t amount to anything. Marc’s character is a radical labor-party lawyer who’s now defending drug dealers. Amalia plays a Hispanic socialite/trophy wife, who’s married to a judge. Having them find themselves in an internment camp lets us comment on post-9/11 America” (quoted in Evans, 2007).

11. Caramelo, as a descriptor brought up in the book, implies a “corn teeth smile” (Cisneros, 2002: 36), a brown skin color reminiscent of a peanut (11), a hue “bright as a copper veinte centavos color after you’ve sucked it” (34), a tone “more bright than chicharrón” (74), a shade that is “creamy” (103), and a texture “as dark as cajeta” (116). Even though the streaks of caramelo, “like all mestizos, [come] from everywhere” (96), a caramel state encompasses Indianness in light, intermediate, dark, and extra dark tones.

12. Piri Thomas’s phrase from chapter 11 of Down These Mean Streets comes to mind: “How to Be a Negro without Really Trying” (1997: 95–104). Thomas does not italicize the word “Negro” in his book, since he uses it in an English-language context. I emphasize the word in this instance to mark its existence in Spanish as well as to bring out its “Latin” brownness.

13. But if blacks-browns have an intimate knowledge of their negro location in the U.S. labor force, such approximation also administers blackness as a distant site. This black distance from brownness, as it could play out in the service industry, underscores brown submissiveness and desexualization. Consider, for instance, “wisecracks” about black coffee, or café negro. As Renán Almendárez Coello (aka “El Cucuy de la Mañana”) recounts it, “¿Usted sabe qué le dice la taza al café? […] ¡Hay, qué negro tan caliente!” (2002: 11). Or, loosely translated, the idiom is, “Do you know what the cup tells its coffee? […] Oh, what a hot negro!”

14. Cisneros spells out racial hierarchies through combinations of Indian, black (negro), and Spanish ancestry; see the chapter “Echando Palabras” (2002: 79–86). Cisneros’s inclusion of this social dictum resonates with another Latin-American aphorism: “trabajo como negro para vivir como blanco” (I work like a negro, to live like a white person).

15. In connection to Mexican migrations and Mexican American ethnoracial identity formation, Tomás R. Jiménez proffers the notion of “immigrant replenishment.” This concept refers to the ways in which ongoing Mexican migration “sustains both the cultural content of ethnic identity and the ethnic boundaries that distinguish both groups.” It is “the means by which Mexican Americans come to feel more positively attached to their ethnic roots.” But renewal and attachment also have their implications in U.S. society, as Mexican and Mexican American experiences invariably become “new” to the United States, barring “Mexican Americans from being fully regarded as part of the quilt of ethnic groups that make up the ‘nation of immigrants’” (2010: 5). Jiménez elaborates, “The consequences of replenishment depend in large part on the status that the replenishing immigrants occupy in U.S. society. If the immigrant group occupies a low status in the host context—as is the case with the largely poor, laboring, and unauthorized Mexican-immigrant population—then those who are members of the ethnic group being replenished may experience status degradation” (21–22).

16. In Richard T. Rodríguez’s words, “If there is a single issue almost always at stake in Chicano/a cultural politics since the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s, it is the family in some shape, form, or fashion. Indeed, the family is a crucial symbol and organizing principle that by and large frames the history of Mexican Americans in the United States” (2009: 2). Rodríguez’s work, however, departs from “exclusionary kinship relations” that have provided “the foundation on which la familia become adopted as an organizing strategy for communitarian politics” wedded to masculinity, nationalism, and heteropatriarchy (7, 15). He takes on “the family trope as a doubleedged sword, a signifier with many meanings that both troubles and assists in the struggle for communitarian politics” (12).

17. See “Brown, Brownness, Brown Pride, Brownout” and “Brown Berets” (Allatson, 2007: 49–51).

18. I provided some working parameters for the Chicano movement in the notes to the introduction, but we can also profit from this straightforward delineation by sociologist Marta Lopez-Garza. She clarifies, “In the mid-1960s, militant Mexican-American nationalists introduced the word ‘Chicano’ to the North American vocabulary, and, through the Chicano movement, brought class and race consciousness to Mexican-American politics. The movement was an informal ideological umbrella for a number of Mexican-American (or primarily Mexican-American) organizations. Among the most influential of these were the United Farm Workers, the Federal Alliance of Land Grants in New Mexico, the Brown Berets, Crusade for Justice in Colorado, and Chicano student organizations, such as the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MECHA) and the United Mexican American Students (UMAS). Identifying oneself as Chicano (someone born of Mexican ancestry, but living in the United States) or with ‘Chicanismo’ became a politically significant factor reflecting political mobilization and active participation in social change. (The leading explanation of the origin of the term ‘Chicano’ is that the Nahuatl or Aztec pronunciation of the word describing people living in Mexico is Mechicano. The term had evolved through various stages of meaning by the time the nationalists appropriated it as a political statement.) A Chicano was one who did not wish to be known as ‘American’ in the U.S. sense, but whose history and experience were somewhat different from those living in Mexico” (1992: 35).

19. La raza also translates as “the race.” I employ “the people” to speak to what Rivera identifies as the “stories of Mexican peoplehood,” which are “fundamental to understanding not only the contradictory logic of American democratic culture but also Mexican American cultural production and the ambivalent location of Mexicans as citizen-subjects in the United States.” Rivera communicates that “the people” operates as “the cultural framework for democracy, ‘the people’ have historically become a discursive site that fostered both igalitarianism and egalitarianism, exclusion and inclusion. To this end, defining who counts as ‘the people’ reveals the contradictory logic of democratic nation-states and the ways in which rhetoric about the people facilitates democratic legitimacy and power for the majority population in the United States” (2006: 3–4). At the same time, I recognize the historical specificity and function of la raza as “the race.” Haney López submits that the “repeated use of la raza” in East Los Angeles during the arrests and indictments of the East LA Thirteen “began to translate more readily into ‘the race’ rather than ‘the people.’” For Haney López, “Mexicans using that phrase [la raza] in East Los Angeles in the late 1960s were not deaf to its resonance when translated into English as ‘race.’ Increasingly, the U.S. sense of race informed the activist community’s invocation of la raza as they moved toward a non-white conception of themselves” (2003: 170). For a critique of la raza as a political movement and its patriarchal cultural nationalism, see Chabram-Dernersesian (1992).

20. I use Chicano in this instance, rather than “Chicano/a,” or “Chicano and Chicana,” concurring with Ramón A. Gutiérrez’s stance in relation to Chicano mobilization from the mid-1960s to the 1970s. He writes, “It is currently common to use the term Chicano/a instead of simply Chicano to indicate that the word includes females too. […] I retain Chicano here for historically specific reasons, namely that Chicano as a political identity was initially claimed largely by men” (2004: 294).

21. Sheila Marie Contreras identifies the movement’s indigenous turn as “Chicana/o indigenism.” She remarks that “Chicanas and Chicanos are indigenous to the Americas” and “bear the weight of this history of social relations of power as they attempt to conceptualize relationships both to Mexico and to the United States” (2008: 1, 2). The movement’s appropriation of iconic signifiers was “[a]rticulated within a matrix of recovered Mesoamerican mythology.” Chicana/o indigenism therefore “mobilize[d] the story of the Aztec migration from the ancestral homeland of Aztlán, the cosmogonic narrative of el Quinto Sol/the Fifth Sun, and the cross-culturally significant figure of the plumed serpent, also known as the god-king Quetzalcoatl. Indigenism found outlets in fiction and poetry, in public mural art of the period, and in the drama productions of El Teatro Campesino” (71–72).

22. There were some political exceptions in terms of Chicano collaborations with U.S. African Americans, of course, and Haney does bring them to mind in his East Los Angeles discussion of the Chicano movement years. Tatcho Mindiola Jr., Yolanda Flores Niemann, and Nestor Rodriguez also make note that activists from the black and Chicano movements in the Houston area “supported each other ideologically and sometimes cooperated in political work.” Still, they underscore that “[l]ong after the Black and Chicano movements subsided, the perception of the need for intergroup political solidarity remained a value for many African Americans and Chicanos. However, stereotypes and competition for resources, among other factors, have mediated this solidarity” (2003: 11). These authors contend that “[s]everal of the terms describing Hispanics [by African American respondents in their research] deal with competition, for example, taking over jobs, [being] underpaid, [becoming a] growing population, [and acting as] opportunistic” (33). They also note that their “results indicate that in general African Americans have more positive views of Hispanics than vice versa” (35).

23. Santa Ana methodologically relies on the Los Angeles Times, because “it is the newspaper of greatest distribution in California. It is the local newspaper of California’s most populous city and home to the nation’s largest Latino population” (2002: 54).

24. “What did Nixon know?” Richard Rodriguez asks. “Did he really devise to rid himself of a bunch of spic agitators by officially designating them a minority, entitled to all rights?” (2002: 117). Nixon is also responsible for a Latino and Latina look southward: “As a result of Nixon’s noun, our relationship to Latin America became less remote” (121).

25. Considering Márez’s imaginative assembling of the “lowbrow(n)” qualifier, one also wonders if a “highbrow(n)” brown style can emerge. What would be the “highbrow(n)” influences? What would they look and sound like?

26. Cf. Kemo the Blaxican’s website (D. Thomas, n.d.).

27. Hazel Rowley explains in her Richard Wright biography that his maternal grandmother, Margaret Bolden, who is also depicted in Black Boy, “was so small and slight, with deep set brown eyes and long straight hair. She was so light-skinned that until she opened her mouth and spoke pure Southern Negro dialect, strangers thought she was white. Her grandson Richard Wright believed she was a mixture of Irish, Scottish, and French stock, ‘in which somewhere Negro blood had somewhere and somehow been infused’” (2001: 1–2). And “Wright’s paternal grandmother, Laura Calvin, was thought to be partly Choctaw Indian” (4).

Audre Lorde’s mother, Linda, passed for Spanish in New York (De Veaux, 2004: 11). Alexis De Veaux, Lorde’s biographer, writes that Lorde recognized “herself as the darkest child” and illustrates moments that speak to Anzaldúa’s struggles with coming to terms for being “la prieta,” her family’s dark one. De Veaux writes, “Not pretty, not light-skinned, she was the outsider in a family of outsiders” (18). Lorde’s 1954 trip to Mexico exhibited fluid states of brownness, blackness, and overlapping Latin-American nationalities. “At times,” De Veaux brings up, “she was mistaken for Cuban by Mexicans and for Mexican by Americans” (49). Lorde “was in awe of seeing brown-skinned people, of every hue, wherever she went” in Mexico. She wrote in a missive that “she felt ‘like an onion,’ peeled of layers of its own smothering skins” (50).

One Zora Neale Hurston comment worth citing here is her reflection, “I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow” (1997: 1010). This statement on the assortment of inhabitants of this mixed brown bag reflects Latino and Latina states too. Hurston is referring, in this regard, to U.S. African American complexion tests that ranked and organized dark and light blackness around the brown paper bag. These tests connote, as Audrey Elisa Kerr has keenly interpreted it, “degrees of acceptance and inclusion (that is, if one is fairer than the brown bag).” The brown paper bag forms a part of a “complexion lore” that “has been used liberally and with great frequency by African Americans throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, with references to paper bag parties, paper bag churches, brown bag clubs, or brown bag social circles that have resulted in a proscribed language of exclusion and exclusiveness” (2005: 272).

28. Harriet Jacobs expounded on this matter: “Southern women often marry a man knowing that he is the father of many little slaves. […] They regard such children as property […] and it is seldom that they do not make them aware of this by passing them into the slave-trader’s hands. […] and thus getting them out of their sight” (2000: 37). Once the visible markers that produce black mixture—and the violence attached to the emergence of “black mestizos”—are out of sight, to borrow from the colloquial expression, they are also out of the normative mind. Mestizaje was dropped from black mixture in the United States. There was no room for this type of mestizaje, as U.S. laws of the time mandated. An appendix in the Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown (1851) notes that the state of South Carolina did not really differentiate between “negroes, mulattoes, or mertizoes” (H. Brown, 2002: 71). The word “mestizos” in this Anglophone context is listed as “mertizoes.” Both terms are interchangeable. The misspelling of mestizos signals unfamiliarity with—and a “newness” around—an unrecognizable term as well as population. The incomprehensibility of a classification like mestizo and an ideology like mestizaje still create relative confusion in the twenty-first-century United States. The PMLA’s tribute to Anzaldúa in January 2006 included a typographical error that demonstrated the foreignness of mestizaje. A recurring misprint identified mestizaje as mestizahe (Martín Alcoff, 2006; emphasis added). Although this typo could be regarded as a genuine oversight, the misprint evokes incomprehensibility about racial mixture in America; perhaps, even a negation of the “unreadable” yet contradictory positions that subaltern subjects can occupy. It is easier to see and differentiate “them” as “nonwhite” than to address the ways mixed whiteness permeates in these supposedly unchanging black (and brown) states.

29. My intent here is to show brownness in all its manifestations and in contexts that cannot be reduced to “brown” Spanish-speaking Latino and Latina bodies. I recognize that the brownness of Senna’s dad, Carl Senna, could be attributed to the fact that the family believed he was the son of a Mexican boxer “who had abandoned his wife with three kids and was never seen again” (2009: 16). As far back as 1998—the year that Senna’s first novel, Caucasia, was published—the author identified herself as “a black girl with a Wasp mother and a black-Mexican father [with] a face that harkens to Andalusia, not Africa” (1998: 15). But Senna reveals a more complicated story in Where Did You Sleep Last Night? A Personal History, where she uncovers that her paternal grandfather could actually be an Irish priest.

30. The list of racial terms Piri Thomas defines in alphabetical order are “los blancos: the whites,” “mi negrito: my little black one,” “morenito: little dark brown one,” “moreno: dark brown, almost black,” “moyeto: Negro, black man,” and “tregeño, tregeña: dark-skinned” (1967: 332–33). Although the last two words are not amended in the thirtieth-anniversary edition of Down These Mean Streets (1997), Thomas may conceivably mean trigueño and trigueña. Thomas also provides brief definitions for another problematic way of being through sexual orientation. The two debasing labels—the other double haunting a Latino masculinity—are “maricón: homosexual, faggot” and “pato: faggot, homosexual” (1967: 333). These two derogatory terms in Spanish—maricón and pato—become formalized in translation through the courteous insertion, in English, of homosexual, which needs no translation in either language: they are both written in the same way and have congruous definitions.

31. Santiago’s glossary defines negrita or negrito as an “[e]ndearment, little black one” (1993: 273). This theme of abandoning a seemingly authentic national way of life is articulated in Oscar Hijuelos’s first book of nonfiction, Thoughts without Cigarettes (2011). Hijuelos titles his memoir’s first chapter more forcefully than Santiago, calling it “When I Was Still Cuban,” leading us to speculate on how his Cubanness was abandoned (or altered) and what he has now become (2011: 3–52).

32. Ginetta E. B. Candelario puts forward that “Dominican whiteness” has been “an explicitly achieved (and achievable) status with connotations of social, political, and economic privilege, and blackness signaled foreignness, socioeconomic subordination, and inferiority.” Dominican “blackness”—or, in Candelario’s language, “discourses of negritude”—are not utilized as a mode of Dominican national representation and self-identification. Instead, “Dominicans use language that affirms their ‘Indian’ heritage—Indio, Indio oscuro, Indio claro, trigüeno [sic]—and signals their resistance to foreign authority, whether Spanish or Haitian, and their autochthonous claims to sovereignty while accounting for the preponderance of medium to dark skin and complexions in the population” (2007: 5). Candelario’s study hinges on “Dominican identity discourses that negotiate blackness and Hispanicity” (6). She adds, “Although Dominicans often share the experience of being Caribbean immigrants who are perceived to be black, unlike British West Indians Dominicans are also Hispanic. Hispanicity in both the United States and the Dominican Republic offers an alternative to blackness. Although ‘Hispanic’ is a racialized non-white category in the United States, it is also a non-black one” (12).

33. Moraga classifies this approach to and use of “truth” in autobiography as the “fiction of our lives.” Give attention to this fragment: “Through the act of writing that so-called autobiography, I learned that a story well told is a story embellished and re-visioned just like the stories that poured from my mother’s mouth in our family kitchen some forty years earlier. The fiction of our lives—how we conceive our histories by heart—can sometimes provide a truth far greater than any telling of a tale frozen to the facts” (2011: 3–4). These autobiographical moments are reinterpretations of past events, with creative and critical emendations, as the memoirist sees fit.

34. Anzaldúa is mindful of the implications of this color consciousness in her essay, “La Prieta.” In penning this composition, Anzaldúa records that she “was terrified,” because it necessitated that she “be hard on people of color who are the oppressed victims. I am still afraid because I will have to call us on a lot of shit like our own racism, our fear of women and sexuality” (1983: 198).

35. Menchaca notes that in this hierarchical racial structure “[m]estizos enjoyed a higher social prestige than Indians, but were considered inferior to the Spaniards” (2001: 63). As for blacks in Mexico, Menchaca explicates, “Free afromestizos were accorded the same legal privileges as the mestizos. Because they were of partially Africana descent, however, they were stigmatized and considered socially inferior to the Indians and mestizos” (64). Under U.S. expansion in the nineteenth century, “state governments prevented ‘American-born’ racial minorities from exercising their citizenship rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. Anglo Americans argued that the spirit of the Fourteenth Amendment applied only to Blacks and Whites and that therefore Asians, American Indians, Mexicans, and ‘half-breeds’ were not entitled to its protection.” De jure racial segregation applied to nonwhite Mexicans who “were legally excluded from public facilities reserved for whites” (287). For other studies on the role of pigmentation in the U.S. Southwest and its interconnections with race and gender, vide Haas (1996) and Gutiérrez (1991).

36. The larger impression claimed is that strands of the Caribbean resonate throughout the Americas. Certainly the connection to Mexico and Greater Mexico is fitting, given their prominent associations with indigenousness. As Martin writes, however, the Caribbeanness of Mexico is evident to such cognoscenti as Gabriel García Márquez, whose process of “Latin Americanization” occurred while living in that nation. It was there where García Márquez “absorbed the fact that Mexico, a desert country and a high plains country, was also, in effect, a Caribbean country” (Martin, 2009: 264).

37. It bears mentioning that the articulation—or more accurately phrased, the enunciation—of a Latina project appears in an aporetic, if not unconvincing, manner in Borderlands/La Frontera. Consider, as a brief illustration, how Anzaldúa presupposes that Latinas are fluent Spanish speakers whose purported linguistic hegemony is at par with the Real Academia Española, or the Royal Spanish Academy. She states, “Chicanas feel uncomfortable talking in Spanish to Latinas, afraid of their censure. Their language was not outlawed in their countries.” Anzaldúa further contends, “We don’t say claro (to mean yes), imagínate, or me emociona, unless we picked up Spanish from Latinas, out of a book, or in a classroom” (1999: 79–80). Latinas, in this instance, mean Latin American women in both Latin America and the United States; additionally, they seemingly stand out as more educated. “The first time I heard two women, a Puerto Rican and a Cuban, say the word ‘nosotras,’” she writes, “I was shocked. I had not known the word existed. Chicanas use nosotros whether we’re male or female. […] Even our own people, other Spanish speakers nos quieren poner candados en la boca. They would hold us back with their bag of reglas de academia” (76).

These perceptions—which occlude the regionalisms and spoken differences in the Spanish language within the Americas—renders U.S. Latinos and Latinas, many of whom speak, like Anzaldúa, a “border tongue” and are thus neither “fully” fluent in Spanish and English, as more linguistically tied to Latin America than the United States. Such understandings could have precarious effects within “the borderlands,” being that Latino and Latina could be read as normative. Their “otherness” is neutralized and, curiously enough, is not “heard” within “brown” border discourses that chronicle “outsiderness” from both English and Spanish. I mention this point not to quibble with Anzaldúa, but as an assigned task—if not an open question—for Latino/a studies scholars to acknowledge: Can Latinoness and Latinaness be disburdened from a suspect state within “established” U.S. groups?

38. Still, there are contradictions in how Chicano, Chicana, Latino, and Latina subjects are often positioned in relatively equivalizing terms—even within these two distinct trajectories that somehow institutionally become one. For instance, Chicanos and Latinos are discursively collapsed in many U.S. institutions, as evinced in “Chicano/Latino studies programs” at such institutions as California State University, Long Beach; Eastern Washington University; Sonoma State University; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of California, Irvine; Michigan State University; Portland State University; Scripps College; and University of Wisconsin, Madison, among many others.

39. Du Bois’s observations on the term “Negro,” and which groups are subsumed as such, prove fruitful: “As long as the majority of men mean black or brown folk when they say ‘Negro,’ so long will Negro be the name of folks brown and black” (1996a: 70).

40. Moraga’s quotation on her mother and how color creates a different class of people reads, “She often called other lower-income Mexicans ‘braceros,’ or ‘wet-backs,’ referring to herself and her family as ‘a different class of people’” (1983b: 28). Helena María Viramontes’s depiction of Mexican American farmworkers in Under the Feet of Jesus, a novel dedicated to César Chávez (1927–93), echoes Moraga’s take on the racial connotations of fieldwork. The appearance of Estrella, a central figure in the text, is described as “[d]irty face, fingernails lined with mud […] tennis shoes soiled, brown smears like coffee stains on her dress where she had cleaned her hands” (1995b: 137).

41. Hughes also brings this to view in The Big Sea: “On many sides, the color-line barred your way to making a living in America” (1993: 86).

42. In using “cosmic” and “uncosmic,” I am referencing José Vasconcelos’s theory, from 1925, of la raza cósmica, the cosmic race. For Vasconcelos (1882–1959), Latin America demonstrated greater promise in the development of a new age because of the region’s mestizaje. This new age foments aesthetic ideologies, creative endeavors, and racial mixtures that will bring into fruition a new (Latin-American) humanity. Although Vasconcelos embraces the heterogeneity of racial compositions, he does not account for Indianness and blackness. Most provocative about his delineation is its approach to race mixing through an “artistic impulse” dictated by appearance. Vasconcelos’s idea of a “new” racial project moves toward the elimination of blackness, or what Frantz Fanon called a process of “lactification” that “whiten[s] the race” and “ensure[s] its whiteness” (2008: 29–30). Vasconcelos forewarns, “in a few decades of aesthetic eugenics, the Black may disappear, together with the types that a free instinct of beauty may go on signaling as fundamentally recessive and undeserving” (1997: 32). Through what he calls “the faculty of personal taste,” the quest to eliminate “ugliness” emerges. “The very ugly will not procreate,” Vasconcelos instructs. “They will have no desire to procreate. What does it matter, then, that all the races mix with each other if ugliness will find no cradle? Poverty, defective education, the scarcity of beautiful types, the misery that makes people ugly, all those calamities will disappear from the future social change. The fact, common today, of a mediocre couple feeling proud of having multiplied misery will seem repugnant then, it will seem a crime” (30).

This aesthetic breeding process involves what Felix Clay identified, under the framework of “The Origin of Aesthetic Emotion,” as “the pleasures of recognition.” In it, “we find that rhythmical movement, or a harmonious combination of colour or sound, can by themselves give rise to a simple feeling of pleasure that is instinctive and quite independent of any mental or intellectual appreciation of the cause” (1908: 282). One could conjecture that Vasconcelos seeks an emotional response to the (“cosmic”) results based on his theory of race as an art form. Latin American artistic bodies are pushed into the realm of “modern,” “first world” visual pleasure. This pleasure of the racial text is “naturalized” to the extent that this regional beauty—or even the race of artists—transacts a message for the rest of the world. As works of “art,” these Vasconcelian concoctions illuminate this question: how will his cosmic beauties—or, to put it with less veneration, cookie-cutter multiplication of cosmic things—be valued and judged by the white American and European worlds he is trying to mimic? Marilyn Grace Miller substantiates that the rise of Vasconcelos’s idea “of a beneficial mixed race was riddled with the numerous obstacles and contradictions imbedded in a colonial history in which questions of racial difference and distinction were paramount. The complexity of the racial discourse produced in the colonies is most graphically portrayed, perhaps, in several sets of paintings which catalogues racial types, or castas. Proceeding from a strange racial alchemy, earlier broad divisions of Spaniard, Indian, negro, and mestizo or mulatto were splintered into retrograde hybrids such as the lobo (wolf) and the salta atrás” (2004: 2). Seen in this light, this Vasconcelian structuring of dark Latinness as ugly requires a new visual order of aestheticized pleasure.

43. An incident in Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets mirrors this conflation of “negrito” and “ugly.” Thomas describes how after returning from playing one day, his mother urges him to take a bath. As the fourteen-year-old son bemoans this quotidian activity, the mother responds, “I have to love you because only your mother could love you, un negrito and ugly” (1997: 19). The use of the “affectionate” negrito differs from Rodriguez’s portrait in that there is not a possessive operating here, just the article un. This incident also proves provocative for another set of reasons: the qualifiers employed for the teenage Thomas move through a particular racial hierarchy that builds on his actions. Walking into his apartment and slamming the door shut makes him a simple “muchacho.” His silliness/“monkeying around” is soon assessed as “a funny morenito” (18). His compliments to his mother later earn him the expression, “Ai, qué negrito” (19).

44. Citing the court transcript of the 1946 landmark case Mendez v. Westminster, where educational boundaries in Mexican neighborhoods led to school segregation, Ruiz makes note of “a laundry list of hygienic deficiencies peculiar to Mexican children that warranted, in part, their segregation.” The Mexican dirtiness to which Rodriguez alludes can infer, as Ruiz lists the deficiencies of the time: “lice, impetigo, tuberculosis, generally dirty hands, face, neck, and ears” (Ruiz, 2004: 356).

45. Just like a passing black figure portrayed in U.S. African American fiction, people nonfictionally wondered if Rodriguez’s mother “is Italian or Portuguese” (1982: 114). But the definitive response is “‘We are Mexicans,’ my mother and father would say, and taught their four children to say whenever we (often) were asked about our ancestry” (115).

46. Moraga speaks to her “white” U.S. American and “brown” Mexican mixture in her latest enterprise also. Consider the following excerpts: “My racial identity has always been more ambiguous,” she observes in A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness (2011: 12). “Me, a light-skinned mixed-blood Chicana with lousy Spanish” (15).

47. Given Moraga’s “social advantage” of looking white, as she calls it (2011: 7), Soto emphasizes her capacity to write “herself into a narrative of racialized difference, emerging as they do from a profound desire to be recognized and engaged as a racialized subject. To that end, Moraga rearranges and reconfigures the epistemological and ontological tropes that one expects to find in accounts of difference” (2005: 238).

48. Soto states, “Moraga’s self-racialization depends on the idea that even if one’s formative socialization did not include the daily experiences and negotiations of being seen and treated by dominant society as racially different and, importantly, racially inferior (the long-term cumulative effects of which presumably could never be alienable), one can grasp the singular concept of race well enough at the theoretical and historical levels to incorporate it decisively into one’s personhood as an adult” (2005: 250).

49. Notions of the “American” tragic mulatto come to mind, of the incessantly conflicted, mixed-race subject that has functioned under Donald Bogle’s lens as “the third figure of the black pantheon” (2001: 9). Hortense J. Spillers expands that “this peculiar new-world invention” is “stranded in cultural ambiguity” (1989: 165). The mulatto was “created to provide a middle ground of latitude between ‘black’ and ‘white,’ the customary and permissible binary agencies of the national adventure, mulatto being, as a neither/nor proposition, inscribed no historic locus, or materiality, that was other than evasive and shadowy on the national landscape.” Yet they embody “an alibi, an excuse for ‘other/otherness’ that the dominant culture could not (cannot now either) appropriate or wish away.” Mulattos are “an accretion of signs that embody the ‘unspeakable,’ of the Everything that the dominant culture would forget, the mulatto/a, as term, designates a disguise, covers up, in the century of Emancipation and beyond, the social and political reality of the dreaded African presence.” The “mulatto/a,” Spillers observes, “exists for others,” but he or she is also a “site of contamination” (1989: 165–67; emphasis added).

Spillers’s judicious insertion, in the English language, of a slash and an “a” in the masculine word, “mulatto,” catches the eye. This use is more common now in a romance language like Spanish where categories such as “Latino/a” are written as such to denote gender inclusion. Spillers’s use of mulatto/a as far back as 1989 predates Latino/a studies’s employment of “Latino/a” as an analytic classification. Mulatto/a invites other views of the masculine-centered trajectory of the mulatto man and, one might add, moves toward forging new corollaries with the mulato or mulata in Latin-American contexts. Although Anzaldúa refers to “mulatto blood” rather than calling herself “mulata,” the same general understanding of the “dreaded African presence” prevails within the indigenous bloodlines her family wishes to advance. On the distinction between mestizos and mulatos in Spanish America, Ilona Katzew submits, “these appellations developed progressively over time and varied from region to region. The terms mestizo and mulato gained widespread popularity from the sixteenth century and remained current until the end of the colonial period. Mestizo referred to culturally mixed peoples in general and to the combination of Spaniards and Indians in particular, while mulatto—a zoologically inspired term that referred to the hybrid nature of mules—designated the offspring of Spaniards and Africans. […] The term mulatto was appropriate for this kind of mixture instead of the generic mestizo, because this racial combination ‘was deemed uglier and stranger, and to make the point of comparing it to the nature of the mule’” (2004: 43–44).

For an analysis of racial mixture in American literature that dissects the ways in which mulatto and mestiza representations are intertwined, refer to Suzanne Bost’s Mulattas and Mestizas: Representing Mixed Identities in the Americas, 1850–2000. “Just as biracialism leads African-American writers to think about the nature of racial identity,” Bost states, “contemporary work by Chicana/o writers often centers on the issue of racial mixture” (2003: 19). There are, of course, moments of divergence. Bost asks, “If mixed-race identity arouses pride for the Latina/o raza, why have relatively few African-Americans celebrated the biracialism of the mulatto? Is the mulatto not a border figure and a cultural translator as much as the Mexican-American mestiza? […] While Mexican and Chicana/o histories feature Mestizaje as a central component in defining national identity, African-American identity has been built on greater polarization” (20–21). As the reader can discern, I am interested in the structuring of a “brown”—or, in Bost’s phraseology, a “Latina/o raza”—mixture that shuns blackness, even one that is mixed, as “mulatto” attests in this Anzaldúan moment of grave concern for her exposing, tumultuous dark marker. African American mixture or fluidity does not become “mixed” only through white contact. Another insightful nexus might be that of the Hispanophone mulata and the function of the mestiza.

50. Soto attends to this reference also, appraising it as a statement that “frame[s] and enact[s] ‘going brown’ as an ongoing discursive process performed at a number of levels, not the least of which is the writing or illocution itself, as the utterances perform the very action they describe. That is, Moraga not only describes a certain kind of speaking to and for her mother (here rendered symbolic of Chicana and Mexicana women) that enables her to ‘go brown,’ but uses this kind of speech—indeed, repeats it again and again—to speak/write to us, her readers” (2005: 252).

51. It is also a new image of brownness and brown sexuality vis-à-vis india love. Observe, for instance, this stanza: “When her India makes love / it is with the greatest reverence / to color, texture, smell” (Moraga, 1993: 91).

52. Brownness and Indianness conflate and participate in a shared danger. “Since my earliest childhood,” Moraga attests, “I knew Mexican meant Indian. […] I knew ‘Indian’ was dangerous, like lesbianism” (2011: 13).

53. Moraga strives, as well, for these illegitimacies that replenish queerness, unbelonging, and nonnormativity, proclaiming, “May we strive always for illegitimacy and unlawfulness in this criminal culture. May our thoughts and actions remain illicit. May we continue to make art that incites censorship and threatens to bring the army beating down our desert door” (2011: 17).

54. This is not to say that Anzaldúa’s dark brownness has been entirely evaded and discounted at the academic level. Nor do I suggest that Anzaldúa has conveniently, evenly, and facilely fled from dark brownness. And I certainly do not claim that Anzaldúa’s theories have not been instrumental for Chicanos, Chicanas, Latinos, and Latinas. I am, however, interested in the further excavation of her dark matter, insomuch as she is mostly made out as “a brown-skinned” or brown subject (Keating, 2000: 2; 2009). There are glimpses of Anzaldúa’s darkness at the level of criticism. Sonia Saldívar-Hull provides a good example of how Anzaldúa’s “New Mestiza revolutionary theory” operates as a way for “dark women to [reclaim] the right to theorize and create new world visions” (2000: 62–63). Anzaldúa thus accomplishes, in Saldívar-Hull’s estimation, a “conscious rupture with all oppressive traditions of all cultures and traditions” (Anzaldúa, quoted in Saldívar-Hull, 2000: 63).

Indeed, one is inclined to think that Anzaldúa’s personal history of abject dark brownness and her prieta status is hinged on an intrinsically oppressive tradition. As a result, her procurement of brownness is fundamental because she resists and attenuates the “traditional” abject location of dark brownness. This mestiza spin on Anzaldúa’s burgeoning brownness becomes a new strategy and symbol for the self as well as for the larger constitution of a Chicano and Chicana—and by extension a Latino and Latina—browned “we,” or in Saldívar-Hull’s terms, “collective historia” (2000: 71). Yet the thought I do want to advance is that dark brownness has been jettisoned at the discursive level. The social and familial unacceptability of la prieta that the reader witnesses in Anzaldúa’s work remains unacceptable and inadmissible. Might there be any limits in a collective self’s recreation, as it fixes itself by shedding dark brownness? Are we relegating dark brownness to an autobiographical memory—a scenario from the transcended past? Brownness hovers over dark brownness as a site and framework of subject recognition. And brownness, in turn, becomes a recognizable counterstory to dark brownness. I encourage further critical labor on dark brownness. The asymmetrical and still untold story of the kinship between brown and dark brown needs to be problematized and analogously brought into the conversation. Studying the “other” part of brownness—dark brownness—would give rise to the reshaping and rewriting of “brown” existence. Far from a signifier of brown estrangement, dark brownness would surface as a key component of Latino and Latina subject formations.

55. By interracial literature Sollors means “works in all genres that represent love and family relations involving black-white couples, biracial individuals, their descendants, and their larger kin—to all of whom the phrasing may be applied, be it as couples, as individuals, or as larger family units” (1997: 3).

56. It is not that U.S. Latinos and Latinas, as a plenitude of mixtures, are monoracial, of course. Rather, I am alluding to how a collective articulation of brownness brings about a mestizaje whose new fabric is tinged by a homogeneous, yet stimulative, brownness.

57. A brown space as constitutive of U.S. Latinas and Latinos comes to mind. Shane T. Moreman and Dawn Marie McIntosh build on “brown scriptings and rescriptings” of Latina drag queens through a “brown space” (2010: 118). Brown, in their view, “more captures the fluidity of cultural identity that is characterized by the fluctuating representations of those who can claim to this identity.” Brownness can be captured and enacted only by brown practitioners with their rightful claim to being “Latina/o, Hispanic and even Chicana/o.” Informed by Angharad N. Valdivia, they deem Latino and Latina as “the ‘Brown race,’ falling somewhere between White Eurocentric and Black Afrocentric racial categories. […] Not purely a particular race, brown is a ‘hybrid of hybrids.’ […] Latina/o is not simply brown, but a hybrid negotiation of browns that moves across borders” (119). I concur with brownness as a hybrid negotiation of browns. But I also differ in the sense that this hybrid brownness assumes that its mobility and negotiation can be attained only through Latinoness and Latinaness. Non-“Latino/a” hybrids that have hybridized brownness are shut off from Latinoness and Latinaness.

CHAPTER FOUR. Disorienting Latinities

1. I am following the 1900 introduction of the Du Boisian color line, as Brent Hayes Edwards has underscored, not through the wide currency it later gained with the publication of The Souls of Black Folk, but through its international antecedent, the Pan-African conference in London. The color line can be situated beyond the “U.S. debates and civil rights struggles that are commonly taken to be its arena, [and] in the much broader sphere of ‘modern civilization’ as a whole” (2003: 1–2). Indeed, events in Central America from the beginning of the twentieth century strengthen the weighty significance of places like Panama, particularly through the 1914 U.S. construction of that nation’s canal, which underpins additional terrains and dates from the Global South. The year 1903, for example, charts Panamanian independence from Colombia; nine years after the U.S. Congress passed the Panama Canal Act. This date provides a foundation for a Panamanian/Central American scholarly link to American studies, Chicano/a studies, ethnic studies, and Latino/a studies discussions that historically mark deracinated subjects in the Americas, namely through key imperial occurrences like the 1846–48 Mexican-American War and the 1898 Spanish-American War. The construction of the República de Panamá, largely supported by the United States as a means to control the canal uniting both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, provides a correlative model of annexation, nation formation, and expansion. A new Panamanian nationality came into being from the previously recognized Colombian citizenship. There was, as well, the advancement of a new “racial ‘ladder’” during this period, celebrating U.S. engineering innovation. As Matthew Parker writes, “the Americans and the hundred or so British [were] at the top; next came the Panamanians and the Spanish ‘almost-whites’; at the bottom were the blacks, with the West Indians beneath the locals in status” (2009: 413–14). Salaries were organized in a way where gold coins were largely reserved for white U.S. citizens and local currency, Panamanian silver, for the West Indian darker shades. U.S. segregation in the Canal Zone stressed an acute observation by a patroller in the area that runs thus: “Panama is below the Mason and Dixon Line” (381).

2. As Peter Chapman points out, a banana republic does not “have to produce bananas to qualify for the title. Nicaragua, for example, did not grow bananas in any great commercial quantity. The country’s banana republicanism resided in the happy coincidence of views enjoyed by the ruling Somoza family, United Fruit, and the U.S.” (2007: 6).

3. Consult, for example, the introductory volume of the journal the Global South. Alfred J. López, the editor, wrote that the Global South “can and does serve as a signifier of oppositional subaltern cultures ranging from Africa, Central and Latin America, much of Asia, and even those ‘Souths’ within a larger perceived North, such as the U.S. South and Mediterranean and Eastern Europe” (2007b: 8). Note López’s qualification of “Central and Latin America.” It seems cognizant of how Central America is excluded from the Latin American map. Central and Latin America need to be named through this conjunction. And yet Central and Latin America simultaneously mark their separateness. Curiously, the Caribbean is omitted from this Latin American equation.

4. U.S. Salvadoran migrants textually appear in Latino/a fiction as fetishized, unassimilated, monstrous bodies, albeit torture and civil strife. Consult, for example, Demetria Martínez’s Mother Tongue, which occupies a notable literary space in Chicano/Latino literature. Martínez’s narrative was first published by the Arizona-based Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe in 1994, and reissued in 1996 through a corporate publisher, One World/Ballantine Books, a division of Random House. Awarded the 1994 Western States Book Award for Fiction, Mother Tongue illustrates how Salvadoran refugees inhabit the U.S. terrain. But despite its aims at sociopolitical solidarity, Martínez’s work writes Salvadorans outside of U.S. life. The novel is double voiced: it is told through the two competing narratives of a Chicana, María, and a Salvadoran, José Luis. My observations focus on María’s impressions of the Salvadoran figure. Engagement with the novel’s first part calls for a pressing attentiveness to how invisible secondary Latino and Latina groups become visible Latinos and Latinas. Martínez provides stimulus for exploring how Salvadoran “silence” speaks through Chicana literature. As I argue, to “be” Central American is to be that which is about to emerge, about to be seen, and possibly, about to be heard. María falls in love with José Luis, a tortured refugee who flees to Albuquerque. José Luis’s arrival may be a reference to 1986, when New Mexico governor Toney Anaya declared this state (the first in the nation) as a sanctuary for Central American refugees. Because José Luis is in danger, his name is a pseudonym. (His nom de plum later turns out to be his birth name.) María looks after José Luis in the absence of her godmother and is determined to fall in love with him. Her desire is included in the novel’s first sentence: “I knew I would one day make love with him.” María adds familiarity to her subject’s dark brownness by describing José Luis’s features: “His face was a face I’d seen in a dream. A face with no borders: Tibetan eyelids, Spanish hazel irises, Mayan cheekbones. I don’t know why I had expected Olmec: African features and a warrior’s helmet” (1996: 3–4). María romanticizes a war hero who is anything but Salvadoran, extending her Mexican Olmec past. But how would El Salvador’s Pipil Indians fit within José Luis’s multiple racial and ethnic compositions? José Luis’s facial traits have no borders and add a different twist to José Vasconcelos’s cosmic race, as civil war becomes a racializing ingredient. Mother Tongue presents the remaking of a new political, Cold War Latino mestizo. As María procreates with José Luis, their child represents the forging of an unnamable Latino union. This Latinized Cold War mestizaje presents a U.S. citizen whose identity is informed by his mother’s Chicananess. Through this Cold War mestizo, the reader sees the discursive fracturing of what turns out to be a U.S. Latino disunion. U.S. Salvadoranness is nonexistent, even though its North American rebirth stems from a mixed Indianness in relation to an English-speaking empire. Since José Luis speaks only Spanish, the Americanization of his U.S. Salvadoranness cannot be literally heard. U.S. Salvadoran “speech” is outside of “Latino” (and American) normativity. The new Cold War mestizo is a U.S. inflection of U.S. Salvadoran/”Latino” bastardry.

5. McGrath’s narrator, a psychiatrist, explains, “Their buried materials was throwing up nightmares and other symptoms, and would continue to do so until the trauma could be translated into a narrative and assimilated into the self” (2008: 31). It can be said that a discursive Latino or Latina self perceives and chronicles the “buried trauma” of Central American nightmares and their deficient conditions. But what still needs to be translated and assimilated, narratively speaking, is the language of multiple Central American selves, as they resurface in the United States.

6. The armed conflict displaced so many Central Americans that even Gabriel García Márquez’s 1982 Nobel Laureate address speaks to the outpouring of Salvadoran migrations: “Since 1979, the civil war in El Salvador has produced almost one refugee every twenty minutes.” García Márquez also puts into words the larger diasporic “nation” formed by Latin populations of displacement, adding, “The country that could be formed of all the exiles and forced emigrants of Latin America would have a population larger than that of Norway” (1982).

7. By U.S.-centered American ideologies, I mean to denote nationalist characterizations of citizenship, opportunity, equality and justice, and democracy and order. U.S.-centered forms of Americanisms are localized within U.S. renditions of being American. Nations in the Americas have their own foundations for understanding, using, and claiming their particular American identity in relation to themselves or in a hemispheric context that counters U.S.-centrism.

8. John Rechy, for instance, provides such a glimpse of a disorienting Latino or Latina in The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez. Facing a day of socioeconomic and individual complications in “East Ellay” that can be resolved only through a miracle, the leading character in this novel thinks about an underlying but unspeakable question. Amalia, the protagonist, contemplates why her son, Juan, allows a motherless Salvadoran teenager to sleep in their garage. The teenager’s motherless state is more credible than his nationality, and Amalia asks herself, “Was he Salvadoran? Had Juan told her that only to disorient her?” (1991: 94). Representations of refugee and motherlessness notwithstanding, what makes this passing interest of marginal U.S. Salvadoranness so disorienting? Is it because of the contemporaneity of both U.S. Salvadorans and Salvadoranness in a geography that can be bound only to Aztlán? Do these disorienting citizens orient us to graver (U.S. Salvadoran) problems than one’s (non-Salvadoran) own?

9. Political iconomy centers on “the operations of the image economy, the now ubiquitous and vastly important system of symbolic exchange between people, interest groups, cultures, an exchange conducted largely but never exclusively through visual images, both actualised and imagined” (T. Smith, 2003: 33).

10. El Salvador, for instance, was dubbed by Nobel Laureate Gabriela Mistral as the Little Tom Thumb of America, el pulgarcito de América. The smallness of the Little Tom Thumb perpetuates the supposition that there is cultural dearth in the region. This “affectionate” diminutive reduces El Salvador to a charming, quaint region whose size is equivalent to that of Massachusetts. Contemporary equations of El Salvador to Tom Thumb echo early European writers who, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, would contrast a monster, Gargantua, to Tom Thumb, a nameless pigmy. This discourse of smallness indicates that there are many Tom Thumbs within the U.S. and European neocolonial imaginaries. Anne Lake Prescott remarks that “Europeans had in fact long associated giants and pygmies, for both inhabit distant or doubtful terrain and both raise question about size’s relation to status (especially as traditional pygmies would be tiny—half a cubit, said one authority)” (1996: 75). While El Salvador is not collapsible to the giant monsterhood that is Gargantua, its anomaly is nonetheless emphasized in size, development, and culture. These aberrations also serve as a threat. The political activities of Tom Thumb could turn the pigmy into the monstrous Gargantua; the 1980s civil war in the region is a case in point.

11. The idiom is indexed in a threefold manner: (1) “De guatemala se fue a guatepeor,” (2) “Salió de guatemala y cayó en guatepeor,” and (3) “Salí a guatemala y entré a guatepeor” (Glazer, 1987: 148–49).

12. Central America, historian Greg Grandin contends, keeps “showing up” in the United States “in the oddest ways” (2006: 223). It was there that the Republican Party “first combined the three elements that give today’s imperialism its moral force: punitive idealism, free-market absolutism, and right-wing Christian mobilization” (3). In the exercising of a “new revolutionary imperialism” after “America’s latest episode of imperial overreach in the wake of 9/11 […] a recycling of personnel” was ushered into the George W. Bush administration. They were “veterans of Ronald Reagan’s Central American policy in the 1980s,” involving advisers and hangers-on like “Elliott Abrams, Bush’s deputy national security adviser in charge of promoting democracy throughout the world; John Negroponte, former U.N. ambassador, envoy to Iraq and intelligence czar; Otto Reich, secretary of the state for the Western Hemisphere during Bush’s first term, and Robert Kagan, an ardent advocate of U.S. global hegemony.” John Poindexter, President Reagan’s former national security adviser convicted of lying to Congress during the Iran-Contra scandal, was subsequently appointed by Donald Rumsfeld to direct the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness Program. And John Bolton, who “served as Reagan’s point man in the Justice Department,” had a role as the twenty-fifth U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (4–5). This cast of political personae is not superfluous. The cabinet members became the political “founding fathers” (or stepfathers, if you will) of Central American–American beginnings.

13. There are various Facebook pages mocking this expression. One of these platforms, which joined Facebook on 2 March 2010, calls itself “Irte de guatemala a guatepeor.” As of 8 June 2012, this page had 4,838 “likes.” The page’s “about” tab lists another Spanish expression, “La suerte de la fea, la guapa la desea,” as its main and only source of information. The phrase roughly translates to “The ugly girl’s luck is what the good-looking girl wants.”

14. As the title of Myra Mendible’s anthology From Bananas to Buttocks: The Latina Body in Popular Film and Culture (2007) suggests, the banana emerges as a representational icon and marker of U.S. Latino and Latina existence in popular culture typifications of Latinidad. Mendible’s volume specifically centers on Latina subjects, although it bears mentioning that the banana has also evoked a “tropical” optic emphasizing, more generally, the differences between countries with varying levels of industrialization. For the most part, U.S. Latino/a cultural studies have turned to the banana from a Hispanophone Caribbean standpoint to stress misrepresentations from the “other” Americas as well. But this banana trope spreads to Central and South America and can be positioned and referenced through its own particularities. The inability to ground the banana in other discursive, Latinized forms overlooks the expansive terrain of Latinidad and the conditions that insert—or “write in”—one’s arrival to this realm. Such cultural domain has not been an equitable one, as Kirsten Silva Gruesz has written. She points out “the idea that Central American nations are even later arrivals than the rest of Latin America to the table of modernity” (2008: 141).

One example of a “Caribbeanized” banana, as it has been charted in Latino/a studies, is Frances Aparicio’s and Susana Chávez-Silverman’s edited volume on cultural representations of U.S. Latinos and Latinas, Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad (1997b), where they draw from Victor Hernández Cruz’s work by adding a plurality to their anthology’s title, an homage to that poet’s first book, Tropicalization (1976). The editors elicit Hernández Cruz’s alienation from the U.S. metropolis, one in which the poet substitutes snow for green bananas in the cold urban landscape, forecasting a “Weather report: Green bananas have been reported falling from heaven in some parts of the city.” Through this verse, U.S. Latino and Latina voices “transform the U.S. landscape into realities informed and subverted by visual icons, cultural practices, texts, and language from the Hispanic Caribbean” (Aparicio, 1997: 194). Aparicio’s sharp points Caribbeanize the island of Manhattan from the Global North. But Hernández Cruz’s tropical conversation with the frigid “first world” moves toward richer banana connotations that get eliminated from Latinidad. His jocular approach—a retropicalized Caribbean-specific response—is rooted at the level of the witty and has not been placed in interlocutory discussion with the sobering effects of the banana for those in Central and South America whose national identities are shaped by U.S. economic and political interests.

The ways that intellectuals from “banana republics” studiously navigate the transformation of local landscapes need to be conjoined to a Latinidad that would be significantly sharpened by relating to—and often diverging with—how such figures from the Global South may (or may not) be in dialogue with U.S. Latino and Latina cultural producers. The United Fruit Company (UFC), founded in 1899, created a group of “Banana Zone gypsies,” to paraphrase from Gerald Martin, that included, in places like Santa Marta, Colombia, “artisans, merchants, boatmen, prostitutes, washerwomen, musicians, [and] bartenders.” These migrant, “tropicalized” communities, not unlike U.S. Latinos and Latinas, “became plugged into the international market of goods,” a consumptive Americanization, one could claim, with a range of such U.S. products as “Montgomery Ward catalogues, Quaker Oats, Vicks Vaporub, Eno Fruit Salts, [and] Colgate Dental Creme” (2009: 39). I would argue that one pressing preoccupation that can be teased out and rendered more complex in Latino/a studies involves how literary figures from the “tropics” untropicalize the banana by transporting us to this fruit as (1) a symbol of labor exploitation (Ernesto Cardenal, Nicaragua), (2) a “civilizing” tool for the developing nation (Carlos Luis Fallas, Costa Rica), (3) an allegory for a “new” quadcultural mestizo and mestiza (Francisco Goldman, Guatemala and the United States); and (4) a haunting national memory (Gabriel García Márquez, Colombia).

Take Cardenal’s foundational poem, “Zero Hour,” which draws on the ways in which this Nicaraguan poet chronicles the U.S. banana industry in that nation while tracing the life of revolutionary leader Augusto César Sandino. Cardenal’s tropicalization stresses a southern Latinity where the crudity of U.S.-sponsored economic and political violence in Nicaragua is implied in location. Cardenal depicts Central America as a place of chaos and dictatorship, tropicalized no less than by the U.S. intervention that propels Nicaraguan struggles for democracy. The poem’s opening sentence attests to this point: “Tropical nights in Central America, / with moonlit lagoons and volcanoes / and lights from presidential palaces, / barracks and sad curfew warnings” (1980: 1). Here, bananas—their color, green or yellow, is beside the point—are not merely used to represent an inversion of U.S. climate. They are applied to direct attention to the demands of U.S. capital: “The banana is left to rot on the plantations, / or to rot in the cars along the railroad tracks / or it’s cut overripe so it can be rejected / when it reaches the wharf or be thrown into the sea; / the bunches of bananas declared buried, or too skinny, / or withered, or green, or overripe, or diseased: / so there’ll be no cheap bananas, / or so as to buy bananas cheap. / Until there’s hunger along the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua” (1980: 3).

Other forms of banana tropicalizations from the Global South include Fallas’s novel, Mamita Yunai (1966), which focuses on the life and working conditions of bananeros in “La Yunai,” the popular pronunciation of the UFC. Goldman’s The Long Night of White Chickens posits that North American market-driven tropicalizations have created a “quadcultural synthesis” in Central America (1992: 242). This quadcultural character accounts for a Guatemalan mixture that reflects “banana-boat loaders and North American fruit company clerks, Indian, African blood, Spanish-Moorish and who knows what else?” (160). Goldman’s and Cardenal’s analytic acts of southern Latinities are critiques of a tropicalizing Latinidad that are reported back to North Americans. Indeed, Goldman narrates Guatemala’s formation as a banana republic in his third novel, The Divine Husband, a provocative representation of the political and economic emergence of Central America in the nineteenth century. He writes about the exotic appropriation of a “nearly naked, vixenish, and seed-eyed Indian woman, wearing a flamboyant serpent-feather headdress, standing in a canoe piled with fruits and paddled by monkey, parrot, and lizard” for the U.S. branding of Chiquita bananas (2004: 142). U.S. capitalist demands vis-à-vis banana investments also extend to South America.

García Márquez reports in Living to Tell the Tale about the socioeconomic impact of the investments by the UFC in Colombia. More than countering a northern tropicalization, the economic exploitation of the banana workers marks for Colombians, as García Márquez’s mother tells it, a place where the world ends. The Nobel Laureate makes known, “I followed the direction of her [his mother’s] index finger and saw the station: a building of peeling wood, sloping tin roofs, and running balconies, and in front of it an arid little square that could not hold more than two hundred people. It was there, my mother told me that day, where in 1928 the army had killed an undetermined number of banana workers. I knew that event as if I had lived it, having heard it recounted and repeated a thousand times by my grandfather from the time I had a memory: the soldier reading the decree by which the striking laborers were declared a gang of lawbreakers; the three thousand men, women, and children motionless under the savage sun after the officer gave them five minutes to evacuate the square; the order to fire, the clattering machine guns spitting in white-hot bursts, the crowd trapped by panic as it was cut down, little by little, by the methodical, insatiable scissors of the shrapnel” (2003: 14–15). The repetition of labor—coupled with the redundancy in telling his story, a political tale that marks the time the author “had a memory”—makes this account part of Colombian national history.

15. “Guatepeorianness” and nothingness, as a conjunction, summarize Goldman’s assertion that “Guatemala doesn’t exist” in the epistemological sense (1992: 21). Goldman hence qualified this statement about Guatemalan and Central American modernity as “poor little countr[ies], no luck at all, nothing ever goes right” (243).

16. Santiago may mean “guate-peor” instead of “guata-peor,” although the latter use coincides with the common misspelling, in English, of Guatemala to Guatamala. Given that Peoria exists as a geographic location in the United States and as a reference point for dull and uninspiring American attitudes, de Guatemala a Guatepeor could be translated as “from Guatemala to Guatepeoria,” or simply “from Guatemala to Peoria.”

17. Some well-known U.S. Central American authors also reproduce this trope of Guatepeorianness. Mario Bencastro’s novel, Odyssey to the North, is one example that molds the untamable lifestyles of Salvadorans in the United States. Primarily the story of Calixto, a dishwasher in a Washington, D.C., hotel, Odyssey to the North takes place in the 1980s and early 1990s. Calixto works alongside three other men: the distinctively named Caremacho (“Machoface”), Juancho, and Cali. Other character names include Pateyuca (“Yucafeet”), Lencho, and Chele Chile. The last two designations are too regional and folkloric to attempt to make an English translation. All the same, Bencastro’s figures enter the U.S. domestic realm through economic disillusionment. The novel’s introduction to U.S. Salvadoranness occurs through the representation of the hardworking Salvadoran—with “enough” victimhood in his narrative to represent these migrants as “likeable” and tolerable but ultimately unacceptable. From the strong Salvadoran matriarch/tamale vendor who hides in the bushes to give birth only to immediately return after this incident to continue selling her cornmeal dish to unruly immigrants in D.C., Bencastro’s portrayal of unbefitting Salvadoran attributes dehumanizes them. Calixto, for example, shares a foul-smelling one-bedroom apartment with nineteen other people. Those living in this unit lack documentation and fear having their housing conditions and legal statuses detected by authorities. As a result, they take shifts: ten people live in the apartment during the day, and the other ten at night. The ways that the twenty individuals dispose of their feces is alarming. According to Calixto, the residents “use plastic bags or newspaper and throw everything into the incinerator. The one who was actually renting the apartment used to say that the building superintendent complained of the terrible stench that filled the building when he burned the garbage” (1998: 15). To gain a kind of Latino literary entrance, Bencastro has to adopt a recognizable Guatepeorianness within the broader U.S. Latino and Latina world.

18. Cristina García also created a fictional Central American—Guatepeorian—nation in The Lady Matador’s Hotel. This tropical Guatepeor is a “wedge of forgotten land between continents, [a] place of hurricanes and violence and calculated erasures” (2010: 4). There are insurmountable deaths in this nation; it has “coffins, pine-wood coffins stacked up to the sky” (8). The violence of the 1980s civil war lingers, even though the region’s twenty-first-century forms of violence and fear are due to transnational gangs, or maras. The economy of García’s nation is predictably tied to bananas, as the “President of the Universal Fruit Company, Federico Ladrón-Benes” makes his home there. The novel also alludes to representations of buried trauma and collective amnesia. One of García’s characters, Aura, “is convinced that the entire country has succumbed to a collective amnesia. This is what happens in a society where no one is permitted to grow old slowly. Nobody talks of the past, for fear their wounds might reopen. Privately, though, their wounds never heal” (9).

19. The Salvadoran agricultural landscape is described as full of birds. It also includes tamarind and orange trees. Marta Claros is introduced as a child vendor who walks the “roughly paved streets of her San Salvador” to sell used clothing (C. García, 2007: 18). Her brother Evaristo first lives in a coral tree in San Salvador, followed by a banyan tree (22, 87). Both of these branched and leafy homes are later substituted for a eucalyptus tree in Los Angeles. Marta hails from a land where peasant Salvadoran machos fight by avocado trees during quinceañera parties. Banana trees are in abundance too. Just as Marta’s stepfather dies after a “commotion” during a quinceañera celebration, someone naturally rips off one of the bountiful leaves from a banana tree and begins fanning the dead body (56). Along fairly similar lines, Z. Z. Packer’s Drinking Coffee Elsewhere offers an analogous comparison. Packer pens the fictional Lupita, a Guatemalan migrant who takes care of the birds owned by the main character’s black father in the short story, “The Ant of the Self” (2003: 73–104). The narrator informs us more concretely that “Lupita knew about birds […] because she’d once owned a rooster when she was five back in Guatemala.” Lupita, a charming caricature in diminutive, becomes a literary element that emphasizes the black character’s pitiful life in the Midwest. To put it boldly, Lupita dresses like a cheaply adorned dissolute woman, wearing “satiny pajamas that show her nipples. Pink curlers droop from her hair like blossoms.” Packer’s representation reaches laughable proportions when Lupita, echoing Speedy Gonzalez, yells remarks like, “What do joo want?” “Enough eez enough!” and “Joo are never thinking about maybe what Lupita feels!” Even the birds echo Lupita’s speech, reciting, “Arriba, ‘riba, ‘riba” (82–83).

20. Julia Alvarez presents a revealing autobiographical moment in Once upon a Quinceañera, where two distinct episodes of mistreatment in the public sphere build on the racialization of her use of the Spanish language and the presumed communism of both her family’s political migration to the United States and their struggles for U.S. socioeconomic advancement in the 1960s. Though told from a Dominican perspective, Alvarez’s fragments nonetheless connote strained versions of U.S. belonging and the idea of American success. In effect, Alvarez’s Dominicanness can be seen as an embryonic form of a political migration that stands as too ideologically loaded and that somewhat parallels the present Central American–American situation: unpronounceable, estranged, and un-American. Alvarez’s passage remaps the Dominican Republic as being next to Cuba—erasing Haiti in this process but still attempting to find Latin corollaries in the United States: “Pale as we were, hadn’t my sisters and I been told by passersby on the street who heard us talking loudly in Spanish: Spics! Go back to where you came from! There had been several incidents at my school, older boys spitting at me, throwing pebbles at me, chasing me down the block, accusing me of being a Commie because they had overheard me say that our island was next to Cuba, where the dreaded Castro was getting ready to launch a bomb against the United States” (2007: 26).

21. We could conceive this “pan-third world” literary moment with what Marc Zimmerman has identified as a “literature of settlement,” which looks back “on the homebase and immigration, but from a more settled-in framework, with an existing Latino tradition behind it, now reaching out to other minority and mainstream (U.S. mainly but also Latin American, African, etc.) to expand horizons and move either to pan-Latin American, ‘pan-third world’ or U.S. mainstream identifications” (1992: 21). I insist, however, that the way in which such solidarity among nations is constructed warrants closer scrutiny, especially when “Latino” or “Latina,” as we have seen in this book, is not a given but an identificatory process gathered from different perspectives and subject positions that do not always involve the national. Zimmerman is certainly aware of this point, remarking in his book that “of course […] there are no Latinos, that the word is a construct bringing together diverse people who while they clearly share certain bases, are often quite distinct and only identify with each other in opposition to the non-latinos and that usually for very specific, contingent and often political, epiphenomenal and ephemeral concerns” (40). Latinos and Latinas “exist” through Latinidad. This book, however, has strived to show that Latino and Latina textures can and do exist through the variants of Latinities. These referents convey meaning beyond the brown reach of Latinidad.

22. In a Chicano and Chicana context, Francisco A. Lomelí and Donaldo W. Urioste (1976) posit this “sympathetic fiction” as literatura chicanesca, or “Chicanesque literature.” Hector Torres writes that “early in the history of Chicano/a critical discourse” literatura chicanesca designated “a body of literature written about the Chicano/a experience by a non-Chicano/a writer” that provided “a valuable external point of view on the Chicano/a experience” (2000: 159).

23. In addition, 1992 heralded, as Arias has pointed out, the Los Angeles uprising. Although this year marked the Peace Accords in El Salvador, the “peace dividend never took place” in that nation. As Arias elaborates, “the arrival of peace did end actual military combat, as guerrillas turned their weapons in and formed legal political parties that now play the role of a loyal opposition in Congress and have, in El Salvador’s case, succeeded in winning many municipal elections, including the city of San Salvador. But the much-promised international aid never did arrive in sufficient quantity. What was expected to be a massive Marshall-like plan to fully modernize these nations to uproot a model of underdevelopment marked by massive amounts of landless peasants, racism against Maya indigenous peoples, and an inability to train the bulk of their populations in the basic rudiments of modern life, including reading and writing, all of these major issues that fed into the civil wars’ conflicts, became only a trickle that dwindled to almost nothing after 2000” (2007: 175).

24. I have reworked this concern to advance Patricia Zavella’s question raised in Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork: “What happens when ethnic insiders gain access to a community similar to their own?” (1996: 139).

25. Michael Parenti finds that civil conflict in Central America enabled the United States to perform the role of a “‘helpless giant’ pushed around by third-rate powers” (1989: 1). The position of many Central American nations as third-rate powers also intones matters of cultural dearth and irrelevance on U.S. and Latin-American realms. Arias has pointed out the absence of Central American literature from Latin American and U.S. literary discourses. He notes that work from this region is “almost like an invisible literature to the degree that it is not addressed critically, it doesn’t exist. [Literature from Central America is] not in the bibliographies, it’s not on the Modern Language Association panels, it’s not named, and so it has to be named” (quoted in Roberts, 1997: 32). Arias’s comments identify the invisibility of Central American letters within the Americas.

Evidence of this literary absence can also be found within Central America. The editor of a Salvadoran anthology, spanning from 1880 to 1955, wrote, “It has often been said that El Salvador is an intellectual desert, in no way fertile ground for manifestations of the spirit.” The text reads, “Se ha dicho repetidas veces que El Salvador es un desierto intelectual, en nada propicio para manifestaciones del espíritu” (Barba Salinas, 1959, 10; my translation). Nearly four decades later, Salvadoran novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya tackles this motif in his existentialist novel, El asco. He reappropriates Latin American and U.S. perceptions about El Salvador. Castellanos Moya, possibly distraught by the emptiness that surfaces in relation to most “things” Salvadoran, forces his public to think about the implications of cultural and geographic obscurity. The novel progresses through the often-disgusted monologue of Thomas Bernhard, a Salvadoran émigré, now a naturalized Canadian citizen, who is obliged to visit his birthplace because of a death in the family. The protagonist’s countless denunciations are incitations prompting Salvadoran “pathologies,” as living subjects, to begin uncriminalizing the misrepresentations of Salvadoranness. The narrator declares, “This race quarrels with knowledge and with intellectual curiosity, this country is out of time and the rest of the world, it only existed when there was carnage, it only existed thanks to the thousands that were assassinated, thanks to the criminal capacity of the military and the communists, outside this criminal capacity [El Salvador] has no possibility of existence” (1997: 57–58; my translation). Central America, far from being an “intellectual desert,” has long housed intellectuals and critics of what C. L. R. James calls the role of the United States as “the representative banker, armorer and political mentor of one political system in opposition to another” (1993: 201).

26. The translation of García Canclini’s passages is my own. The quoted excerpts, in the original Spanish, read, “América latina no está completa en América latina” and “Podemos decir que ‘lo latinoamericano’ anda suelto, desborda su territorio, va a la deriva en rutas disperas” (2002: 19–20).

27. Arias asks, “when we look at the phenomenon of Central American–Americans captured in the United States and deported to their alleged country of origin, where they are perceived as tattooed aliens—that is, doubly alien, alien in the sense of being foreigners to the nation-state that does not recognize their blood tie to it, their belongingness to their particular sovereign space, and aliens in the sci-fi sense of appearing to be a different species altogether with their innumerable tattoos, postmodern space travelers of a sort—who is global, and who is, indeed, local?” (2007: 182).

28. Ilan Stavans, the editor of the Penguin Classics edition of Rubén Darío: Selected Writings, explains, “Modernismo was, more than anything else, a metaphysical pursuit by a cadre of [Latin American] intellectuals disenchanted with institutionalized religion and with the ideological currents available” (2005: xxx). The modernista movement—or revolution, as Stavans calls it—“occurred roughly between 1885 and 1915 (or with Darío’s death, a year later), and although it spilled into other artistic arenas, its central tenets apply to literature almost exclusively, and to poetry most vividly” (xxxi).

29. President Reagan’s reminder of this particular territory’s value noted, “Central America is a region of great importance to the United States. And it is so close—San Salvador is closer to Houston, Texas, than Houston is to Washington, D.C. Central America is America; it’s at our doorstep” (Reeves, 2005: 218).

30. The idea of an “additional otherness” and its connection to other U.S. ethnoracial groups commonly perceived as “homogeneous” is being unraveled in other spheres. Consult, for example, Shaw-Taylor and Tuch (2007), which unsettles the construction of an “insular” blackness in the U.S. racial taxonomy.

31. Peru Ana and Ana Peru manifest a type of “geographic Latinities” that does not extend to just individuals with mercurial sociocultural qualities. Typifying a landscape whose migratory movements and cultural crossings underscore the malleable attributes of the city and its citizens, Peru Ana’s and Ana Peru’s geographic Latinities delocalize and denationalize—consuming whatever may fall under urbanity. V. S. Naipaul seemingly speaks to this state of urban and national statelessness when he notes, in connection to London life in the 1950s, that “[c]ities like London were to change. They were to cease being more or less national cities; they were to become cities of the world, modern-day Romes, establishing the pattern of what great cities should be, in the eyes of islanders like myself and people even more remote in language and culture” (quoted in French, 2008: 68).

32. I am not making a motion for each Latino and Latina group to have a corresponding field of inquiry apart from Latino/a studies based on their “inherent,” “all-informing” national identity. Rather, my proposition is that Latino/a studies lacks a feasible comparativist project that, like Latinidad, is “produced in tension,” as Mérida Rúa has put it. Rúa has offered some glimpses into Latino and Latina futures categorized by a conjunction of Latin American nationalities that do not only challenge Latino/a studies but also widen its meanings. She deliberates on “interLatino relationships and how prospective identities […] unfold from them” vis-à-vis her research with Puerto Rican–Mexican Chicago residents in their twenties and thirties (2001: 118). Her characterization of “PortoMex” and “MexiRican” subjectivities cues us into the rupturing of the relatively “neat” subject delineations found in Puerto Rican studies, Chicano/a studies, and Latino/a studies. To these modalities, we can also recall Angie Chabram-Dernersesian’s (1994) transnational connection and interrogation of her “Chicana-Riqueña” plurality.

Rúa seeks an inter-Latino/a studies model that has not been geographically divided by a U.S. East and West dyad predicated on “when the Chicano encounters the Nuyorican” (2001: 120). Her ethnographic investigation illustrates how a dual Latinoness has been induced by a subject’s convergence of coeval Puerto Ricanness and Mexicanness. This nationally mixed Latino and Latina subject “seldom receives scholarly attention” from their “respective” disciplines: Chicano/a studies and Puerto Rican studies (119). I would note, however, that the analytic and conceptual role of Latino/a studies for Latino and Latina multitudes that do not solely and particularly depend on national identities and signifiers has yet to be explored. Rúa’s study is certainly instructive, as is her view of Latinidad. The latter is “a cultural expression that embraces blood and fictive kin, lovers, friends, neighbors, co-workers, and even strangers in an everyday form of community building. Individuals engaging in these community-building efforts come to know themselves by way of their interactions with members of diverse Latino ethnoracial groups.” I concur with this stance to an extent, but I must also question whether one needs a binationally transmuted Latino or Latina to make sense of one’s self. More specifically, does one need a “diverse” Latino and Latina to make sense of one’s own diversity? Is a Latino or Latina with one nationality invariably uniform and uninformed about “the malleable boundaries” of Latino and Latina life (120)?

One must be cautious, for to privilege a Latino or Latina based on a double national Latin American background renders this positioning in biological terms. If one is not born into these binational circumstances, one lacks that “lived experience of everyday Latinidad” (Rúa, 2001: 118). Aparicio seems to advance this claim of “hybrid Latino subjects who are the offspring of Latinas/os of two different national groups” and their distinct negotiation of Latino and Latina identity. It varies, Aparcicio writes, “from the Anglo-Latino power dyad that has structured most of our understanding about Latinas/os in the United States. […] [They] make strategic decisions about national differentiation based on a variety of contextual, family, and social factors. Thus, their identity constructions tend to be more concentric, multiple, and diffused than what we are accustomed to” (2007: 45). These mixtures propel a panethnicity for certain Latinos and Latinas that moves away from the specificity of being a Chicano, Chicana, or Nuyorican into different processes of binational identification. But we should also question the idea of Latinoness and Latinaness as definitive, determined, and empirical. Latinoness and Latinaness seem to consistently share one agreeable definition because one nationality coherently guides a particular Latino or Latina. Aparicio also enumerates other national Latino and Latina varieties, among them, “Cubolivians [and] Mexistanis (Mexican and Pakistani),” which are “but a few of the possible hybrid identities that populate our urban centers” (47).

33. I would venture to add that Juan Gonzalez presents an interesting prototype not just for a U.S. Latino Puerto Ricanness but also through his drafting of U.S. Latino and Latina history in Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America. Herewith, Gonzalez enacts a fascinating hopscotch of Latin American and U.S. history: his account executes a hemispheric narrative of “states” of Latinaness and Latinoness vis-à-vis a simultaneous examination of nation formation in the United States and Latin America. Gonzalez, a Puerto Rican who grew up in New York City, claims a Latino identification not merely as a form of Latinidad but plausibly within the context of my focus here, as a Latinity aware of the many cross-identificatory tenets gestating U.S. Latino and Latina states. Bridging Latino, Latina, and Latin American outlooks from various geohistorical locations, Harvest of Empire reminds the U.S. “common reader” that although there may be “a growing number of Latino professionals, students, and intellectuals who may know a great deal about their particular ethnic group—Chicano, Puerto Ricans, Cubans,” they understand “little else about other Hispanics” (2000: xvi). Gonzalez situates his writing as one advanced by “the perspective of a Latino,” calling it “a frank attempt to make sense of both the Latin American and North American experience” (xvii–xviii). His work underscores that “Latino/a” becoming is tied to U.S. growth and territorial expansion of Latin America.

34. To this end, we can profit from Michaeline Crichlow and Patricia Northover’s Globalization and the Post-Creole Imagination, where they wrestle with the politics of forging place in the Caribbean, a specificity that resonates with other groups. The Caribbean can be extended to Central America, alongside the traveling meanings of Central American–American, which signals the location of “other” Central Americans within the isthmus and the ongoing mappings of Central American–Americanness. Such a project applies to notions of being as they relate not only to existence but also to articulations of place and space and a subject’s capacity to be present. The supposed fixity of a nation and standard identifications of a region must deal with the traveling body. These moving bodies are “journeys toward the refashioning of the self, times, and places and the intertwinement of global and local processes,” since they invariably shift and redirect our understanding of creolization (2009: ix). Such maneuvering—or “mobile strategies”—invite theoretical groundings and dynamics (xiv). They provide en entry into a continual “mapping of the present”; new geographic and cultural milieus restart through creolization processes (22). The “original” Caribbean setting of creolization is therefore broadened and becomes an exchange of boundless presencing, or the “ontologies of lived space.” These anthologies are driven by multidirectional “hi/stories” delineating human identity stories (18–20).

35. Themes of indigence and underdevelopment, confusion, violence, and monstrosity abound in Graciela Limón’s In Search of Bernabé, a novel that received the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in 1994 as well as literary honors, in 1991, from the Chicano Literature Contest at the University of California, Irvine. One of the main characters in Limón’s work, Luz Delcano, takes refuge in the Los Angeles–based Casa Andrade, which functions as a “temporary home, town hall, and information center” (1993: 80). The services provided by Casa Andrade become a form of dependency for Luz, who, as Limón writes, “had never lived under the same roof with so many people, some of them crowded into rooms according to families, age or sex. […] Luz had always worked for her keep, and she found her stay at Casa Andrade difficult to accept. She tried to compensate by helping out in the kitchen or by watching children who had no one to take care of them or by cleaning the house. But nothing helped to dispel her feeling of dependency” (1993: 80). Despite Helena María Viramontes’s allegiance with U.S. Central Americans, the complexities of revolutionary processes are simplified and commodified for U.S. readers. In “The Cariboo Café,” a short story published in The Moths and Other Stories (1995a), Viramontes attempts to localize Nicaraguan revolutionary politics in the U.S. realm. But one of the concurrent narratives in this story implies that the loss of a mother’s son is linked to the “contras,” the Sandinistas. Viramontes has not properly addressed this type of literary obfuscation. To this end, Ellen McCracken attempts to explain this confusion in a chapter footnote of her book, New Latina Narrative: The Feminine Space of Postmodern Ethnicity. McCracken notes that Viramontes “intended the term to refer generically to a political group against any government. Given the American media’s prevalent usage of the term ‘Contra’ to refer to anti-Sandinista at the time the story was published (1985), Viramontes’ use of the word is overcoded to imply strongly that the Sandinistas are responsible for this woman’s misfortune. Perhaps in a subsequent edition of the story, Viramontes will devise a mode to distance the term clearly from its common usage in the United States” (1999: 208–9). Carole Fernández’s Sleep of the Innocents takes place in a fictional town of Soledad (solitude, in English), which tropes, to a certain extent, on Gabriel García Márquez’s construction of Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Soledad residents live in adobe huts, but the poor village still manages to glow in the afternoon sun (1991: 27).

36. While U.S. Central American bodies can be read as passing into U.S. states of Mexicanness, Chicanoness, or Chicananess, such admissions are not always altogether “complete.” As Tobar intimates in The Tattooed Soldier, Central Americans incorporate, but do not fully assimilate, Mexican cultural practices in their lives. The Spanish sounds of Los Angeles are a fusion of Central American and Mexican Spanish, coupled with English. Tobar’s linguistic example reads, “Fijate vos, que ese vato from La Mara got in a fight with that dude from la Eighteenth Street who lives down the block. Yeah, right there in the class. Real chingazos. El de La Salvatrucha estaba bleeding y todo” (1998: 59). In the memoir of Los Angeles radio host “El Cucuy de la Mañana”—a story tantamount to a U.S.–Central American testimonial, since Almendárez Coello’s autobiographical account is told through interview form—Renán Almendárez Coello also illustrates this point of U.S. Central American–Mexican linguistic fusion. Almendárez Coello expresses himself through Honduran/Central American regionalisms and Mexican expressions. His “Mexicanization,” or even Mesoamerican Latinity, can also be due to the fact that as a child he lived for some time in Guarizama, a small town in the department of Olancho, Honduras. Guarizama, in his words, was a “small piece of Mexico hidden in the navel of Honduras.” He elaborates that “even the people spoke with a Mexican accent.” Almendárez Coello’s quote, in Spanish, reads, “era un pedacito de México escondido en el ombligo de Honduras. Hasta las gentes hablaban con el acento mexicano” (2002: 52; my translation).

EPILOGUE. @

1. Dora the Explorer made its television debut during the summer of 2000. Dora was first intended as a computer-integrated program for two- to five-year-old children. The New York Times makes known that the Latina character “solves every challenge—in English and Spanish” and “builds confidence in children because she shows them how to deal with different situations” (Olson, 2010). National Public Radio (NPR) reported that Dora cocreator Chris Gifford and his team “set out to engineer a character who could motivate kids to participate [and initially] tried several animated characters—a squirrel, a martin. One promising idea: a bunny.” But the idea of “something altogether different was brewing,” in light of the fact that Brown Johnson, the president of Nickelodeon’s animated programming, had “learned that Latinos aren’t terribly well represented in children’s television. And she was out to change that.” NPR’s Rolando Arrieta recounted that “schoolteachers, sociologists, historians and cultural and language experts were all brought in to help” in Nick’s manufacturing of Dora. There were mistakes along the way, like the naming of Dora’s friend, Tico, who was always asleep under a tree. Johnson explained, “Our cultural consultant said, ‘Not such a good idea.’ A Latino character, who only speaks Spanish, the littlest character, always asleep. Just not a good idea” (2008).

Most notable is Arrieta’s parenthetical clarification, “(If nothing else, such a character might have angered Costa Ricans, who affectionately call themselves ‘Ticos’).” Carlos Cortes, a history professor at the University of California at Riverside, told Arrieta that Dora was consciously framed as a “pan-Latino character, so she can be a source of pride and identity for anyone of Latino background. […] For example, make sure the words we’re using were universal. Not Spanish terms that meant one thing in Cuba and something else in Mexico and something else in Peru” (2008). Rather than seeing this as synthetic, I would add that many Latinos and Latinas speak this kind of generic Spanish—“Telemundo Spanish,” as Patricia Engel’s protagonist would call it (2010: 120). This version of the Spanish language is perhaps a standardized U.S. form of the language, where many Latinos and Latinas strive to be generally or commonly understood by groups outside their specific national and cultural milieus. The Spanish enacted in the United States may also appropriate many regionalisms from Latin America and infuse such terms with their own (“national”) Spanish. Although Dora’s age is marked as a seven-year-old, the year 2010 heralded her tenth birthday. Since her first appearance, her cultural influence involves, as Hank Stuever recapitulated it for the Washington Post, the selling of “a few billion dollars’ worth of toys, books, DVDS and clothing every year.” Stuever added, “she’s on TV all over the world. The back-to-school industry alone owes her big-time. Macy’s made her into its first Thanksgiving parade balloon of a minority cartoon imp” (2010).

2. Airing from 1991 to 1995, the PBS Daytime Emmy Award–winning series Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? was targeted toward eight- to thirteen-year-olds. It was described as a U.S. phenomenon, with some schools hosting what USA Today called “Carmen events” (Woessner, 1992). Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? was partly a response to that decade’s studies, which disclosed “a tremendous ignorance of geography among Americans: according to a National Geographic survey, one in four cannot locate the Soviet Union or the Pacific Ocean. It also comes in the wake of successful game shows for children on commercial television, most notably ‘Double Dare,’ that offer zany, fast-paced antics but little educational substance” (Rabinovitz, 1991). But as Robert Woessner also cautioned, “don’t call [the show] educational to the creators of Carmen Sandiego at Broderbund Software Inc., Novato, Calif. To them, educational equals boring. They prefer ‘explorational’” (1992). Carmen Sandiego’s explorational qualities, in addition to her geographic approach, are important antecedents to Dora the Explorer.

3. Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández, for example, engages with Dora the Explorer through the normative mainstream media venues that create Latinidad, but mostly through Dora as a product and commodity: “The reconfiguration and popularization of Latino/a identity is most effectively analyzed through discourses of Latinidad, which are processes where Latino/a identities and cultural practices are contested and created in media, discourse, and public space. Latinidad influences the construction of Dora, which means that she is not merely created by ideas about Latinas, but she also creates ideas about Latinas.” Guidotti-Hernández also comments, “Dora represents no particular Latino/a national identity, but her otherness is not far removed from the U.S. context, so most viewers assume she is Mexican or Puerto Rican” (2007: 212). From my end, I have been attracted to Dora precisely because she is not tied to any Latin American nation. Dora’s Latin@ “origins” can be explored not through Latino and Latina “wholeness” but through her animated elation and immersion with other Latinos and Latinas enlivening a new @ genealogy.

4. Nationality, Paul Gilroy reminds us, “conditions the continuing aspiration to acquire a supposedly authentic, natural and stable identity. This identity is the premise of a thinking ‘racial’ self that is both socialised and unified by its connection with other kindred souls encountered usually, though not always, within the fortified frontiers of those discrete ethnic cultures which also happen to coincide with the contours of a sovereign nation state that guarantees their continuity” (1991: 4).

5. One of the subjects that has yet to be charted within Latinidad also lacks an at-ness within the @ economy: indigenous groups. The emergent categories for indigenous populations could read thus: “indi@,” “indigen@,” “May@,” “Aymar@,” and so on. “Afro-Latin@s” are mentioned in this register of at-ness, but the qualifier also poses some questions. As identified in The Afro-Latin@ Reader (Jiménez Román and Flores, 2010), for instance, Afro-Latin@s already have an @ within Latin@. But we must also probe into the inclusivity of the category “Afro.” As it currently suggests in English, the Latin@ part of “Afro-Latin@” is inclusive of both genders. The Afro component, however, could be read as neutral, since it maintains a gender bias. It can also be ostensibly interpreted as avoiding a responsibility to semiotically include women, in view of the fact that “Afro” is a term in the English language that lacks grammatical gender in words. Under the logic of gender inclusion for U.S. ethnoracial categories with Latin backgrounds, Afro-Latin@ ought to read, “Afr@-Latin@.” My purpose is not to pettifog or nitpick over language and seemingly paltry details. My focus is to bring attention to the types of terms summoned in Latino/a studies to do the representational work for gender inclusion. Latino seems to be the sole word carrying the weight for this type of indexing in the field.

6. On 22 March 2010 the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) publicly announced that it had acquired the @ symbol. Its value and function, MoMA argued, “has become an important part of our identity in relationship and communication with others.” MoMA’s Inside/Out blog offers a historical commentary on this emblem, which bears Latin and Spanish linguistic similarities in connotation. As clarified, “Some linguists believe that @ dates back to the sixth or seventh century, a ligature meant to fuse the Latin preposition ad—meaning ‘at’, ‘to,’ or ‘toward’—into a unique pen stroke. The symbol persisted in sixteenth-century Venetian trade, where it was used to mean amphora, a standard-size terracotta vessel employed by merchants, which had become a unit of measure. Interestingly, the current Spanish word for @, arroba, also indicates a unit of measure” (Antonelli, 2010).

7. Viego prompts us to “more productively read the term Latino as a term outside and beyond ontologies of race and ethnicity, not because it appears to point to the postraciological but rather because in fact it is a term that is first and foremost remarking on questions of temporality” (2007: 121). Seen in this manner, the Latino category resignifies a temporality that is not just marked by ethnoracial constructs and circumstances. I veer this “Latino temporality” to a Latin@ direction so that the @ in Latin keeps us “on the run”—that is, it permits us to take the detours of Latinness and to recognize its impermanence.

8. The Valdés title I cite here, El dolor del dólar, was actually published in 1999 as Te di la vida entera (I Gave You All I Had) in Spanish. This descriptive heading has been on my radar since finding Valdés’s book at a Parisian bookshop as La Douleur du dollar in 1998. Valdés brings to light matters of translation as well as the titular changes of this novel in her blog, zoevaldes.net. She writes in a 16 March 2008 post, “El dolor del dólar (The Pain of the Dollar) sounded bad in Spanish, and I had to change it for Te di la vida entera. Soon [the significance of] this title in Spanish was lost enormously in translation. […] It sounded better in French than the original one, La Douleur du dólar [sic].” In Spanish, Valdés’s excerpt reads, “El dolor del dólar sonó mal en español y tuve que cambiarlo por Te di la vida entera, y luego este título en español perdía enormemente en la traducción, resultada un título cheísimo, y en francés sonó mejor el que fue realmente el original, La douleur du dólar [sic]” (“París era una rumba,” zoevaldes. net, 16 March 2008; my translation).

9. Embajadora, in Spanish, denotes a woman ambassador. I am exercising a playful use of the Spanish noun to form a nexus with Dora. This evocation would translate as “ambassaDora” in English.

10. One of the most persuasive uses of the slash, as applicable to U.S. ethnoracial identity, has come from Asian American studies and its excogitation of what David Palumbo-Liu identifies as “Asian/American.” Inserting a slash between Asian and American, Palumbo-Liu states that this Asian/American split “signals those instances in which a liaison between ‘Asian’ and ‘American,’ a sliding over between two seemingly separate terms, is constituted.” He details, “As in the construction ‘and/or,’ where the solidus at once instantiates a choice between two terms, their simultaneous and equal status and an element of indecidability, that is, as it at once implies both exclusion and inclusion, ‘Asian/American’ marks both the distinction installed between ‘Asian’ and ‘American’ and a dynamic, unsettled, and inclusive movement” (1999: 1).

11. As an instance of the urgency for referents like Chicana and Latina, take note of Sonia Saldívar-Hull’s trajectory of renaming herself as a Chicana feminist, one who, in her phrasing, “refused the Chicano” (2000: 29). She submits, “To my ear, the o in Chicano struck a dissonant chord. The o began to signify that position bajo cero under the o of tradition, costumbres, what Ms. [magazine] instructed me to identify as patriarchal constraints” (26). Use of the Chicana signifier by “feminists scholars, activists, and writers—who have lived under the o in Chicano” gives, for this reason, meaningful shape and content to “the historical record written by men and male-identified women” (27).