NOTES

INTRODUCTION. The Copiousness of Latin

1. An explanation is in order for how the categories “U.S. African American” and “Latinos and Latinas” are being referenced in this enterprise. In summoning “U.S. African American,” I follow Ifeoma Nwankwo’s exercising of the term. She explains her use of this nomenclature: “U.S. African American here refers to people of African descent from the U.S. African American is a general term more appropriate for describing all people of African descent in the Americas. Black here is intended as a general term to index people of African descent more broadly” (2006: 597). Nwankwo also provides Pan-American parameters for analysis. “We need to rethink what we mean when we say ‘African American,’” she urges, “so that we include the other Black Americas there (in ‘Nuestra América’), as well as here (in the United States)” (2005: 17). My use of this category does not suggest an understanding of U.S. African American as a homogeneous classification and comprehensive experience. Recent scholarship such as Ira Berlin’s The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations (2010) documents other groups that are broadening the U.S. meaning of “African America”: migrants from the Caribbean and Africa. Berlin notes that after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which created a yearly limitation of three hundred thousand annual visas on a first-come, first-served basis, “Black America, like white America, was also becoming an immigrant society” (2010: 6). In light of its complex sociohistorical transformations, U.S. African Americanness is also a harbinger of new demographics, representational tensions, and different meanings: “African American migrants,” let us say, “have struggled with established residents over the very name ‘African American,’ as many newcomers—declaring themselves, for instance, Jamaican Americans or Nigerian Americans—shun that title, while other immigrants have denied native black Americans’ claim to the title ‘African American’ since they had never been to Africa” (7). The slavery-to-freedom narrative also diverges. Berlin points out that some of the new arrivals, “rather than being descended solely from those who were sold, […] trace their ancestry to the sellers of slaves” (10). Whereas others, rather than “condemn[ing] their forced removal from Africa, […] celebrate their arrival in America, in the words of Barack Obama’s father, as a ‘magical moment’” (11).

Throughout this work, I highlight the separate nature of U.S. Latinos and Latinas to concentrate on these two gendered categorizations and experiences. I employ Latino and Latina when referring to individuals and apply Latino/a when citing Latino/a studies as an academic field and its intellectual discourses and practices. This book’s epilogue elaborates my concern for the unpronounceable turns Latino and Latina groups are taking through the inclusion of the slash in Latino/a or the “@” sign in Latin@ to detail gender inclusion. As a final note, I use the U.S. Latino and Latina category not as a means to exclusively center and disassociate these U.S. identities from other relational elsewheres. I am also aware that Latinos and Latinas exist in Latin America, Europe, and other locations in the Global South as well as the Global North. I reference U.S. Latino and Latina to provide a context for the population being discussed. This is not to say that U.S. Latino and Latina and Latin American Latino and Latina equivalencies do not exist. Rather, the Latinidad thread I follow and question, as manifested in Latino/a studies, is a U.S. articulation.

2. For additional analyses on Latinidad, consult Beltrán (2010); Caminero-Santangelo (2007); Sugg (2004); J. Rodríguez (2003); Dávila (2001); Aparicio and Chávez-Silverman (1997a); Oboler (1995); Sommers (1991); and Padilla (1985).

3. Further elaborating on her evocation of double consciousness, Portman thoughtfully stated in her apology, “Du Bois writes about how black Americans often view the world simultaneously from other people’s point of view (from the outside in), as well as from their own points of view (from the inside out), because they are so aware of how they are scrutinized by other people and prejudices others may have against them. […] I merely related to the overall framework of his idea—what it feels like to always see yourself from within and from without, knowing how other people view you and judge you and knowing how you view and judge yourself, at the same time. […] I tried to explain my experience using a concept written by someone light-years more intelligent than I am, whose writing made me feel like someone else had been through a similar psychological experience to mine in some way. […] I do believe, however, that it is in the small ways we relate to each other, even if we do so inaccurately, that we build our relationships with each other and realize our common humanity” (2004: 32).

4. This is not to say that Du Boisian double consciousness has not been likened to other U.S. contexts as well within U.S. African American studies. Robin D. G. Kelley, for example, tells us to “think of early New World Euro-Americans as possessing what Du Bois called ‘double-consciousness’: say, English and American, with whiteness as a means of negotiating this double consciousness.” These incisive moments of equivalency also have corollaries with other bodies and geohistories, having the potential, as Kelley also sees it, to deepen “our understanding of race, nationality, and culture” (2002: 129).

5. Arlene Dávila has examined how a “commercial Latinidad” (2001: xiv)—as constructed by Hispanic marketing agencies in the United States—promotes the use of Spanish by Latinos and Latinas “to be symbolically moved and touched” through “their language” (71). The value of Spanish “is built as the paramount basis of U.S. Latinidad” (4). As a consequence, the Hispanic marketing industry—or, simply, the Latin market—re-creates “essentialist equations of Latinos” through the continuous reinforcement of Spanish in the advertising world (71). Soetoro-Ng’s real-world illustration conveys the different ways that the U.S. category “Latino or Latina” is being inhabited, highlighting other supplemental fashionings of—and constitutions for—the makings and unmakings of a “Spanish people” who are not limited to the Spanish-language world of the Latin market.

6. These migrations to black-brown ways of being can be situated within María Lugones’s “‘world’-travelling.” The working characteristics of this concept “serve to distinguish between a ‘world,’ a utopia, a possible world in the philosophical sense, and a world-view. By a ‘world’ I do not mean a utopia at all. A utopia does not count as a world in my sense. The ‘worlds’ that I am talking about are possible. But a possible world is not what I mean by a ‘world’ and I do not mean a world-view, though something like a world-view is involved here.” Lugones’s hermeneutic is outlined in this manner: “For something to be a ‘world’ in my sense it has to be inhabited at present by some flesh and blood people. That is why it cannot be a utopia. It may also be inhabited by some imaginary people. It may be inhabited by people who are dead or people that the inhabitants of this ‘world’ met in some other ‘world’ and now have in this ‘world’ in imagination. A ‘world’ in my sense may be an actual society given its dominant culture’s description and construction of life, including a construction of the relationships of production, of gender, race, etc. But a ‘world’ can also be such a society given a non-dominant construction, or it can be such a society or a society given an idiosyncratic construction. As we will see it is problematic to say that these are all constructions of the same society. But they are different ‘worlds.’ A ‘world’ need not be a construction of a whole society. It may be a construction of a tiny portion of a particular society. It may be inhabited by just a few people. Some ‘worlds’ are bigger than others” (1987: 8–9). Soetoro-Ng and Portman’s traveling can be regarded as an identifying act that may be worked on rather than dismissed for its lack of brown or black “authenticity.” Through Lugones’s words, we could then “understand what it is to be them and what it is to be ourselves in their eyes. Only when we have travelled to each other’s ‘worlds’ are we fully subjects to each other” (17).

7. I do not wish to be misunderstood here: I do not assert that Latinos and Latinas are the only “brown people” in the United States. Rather, I question why brownness has been exclusively designative of U.S. Latino and Latina lives through the dominant framework advancing Latino/a studies—namely, Latinidad. Attempting to find and fully delineate moments of passing among the multitudes of U.S. brown populations would deflect from the groups that I am critically focusing on: Latinos, Latinas, and African Americans. For analyses on the capacious brown canvas, the reader may consult, for example, Vijay Prashad’s The Karma of Brown Folk (2001).

8. Chapter 3 explores a brown–dark brown symbology and how it is put into use by both U.S. African Americans as well as U.S. Latinos and Latinas.

9. There are changing definitions and transnational dimensions to the nation at hand—in this instance, the United States. In this sense, this monograph concurs with the aims of Nancy Raquel Mirabal and Agustín Laó-Montes’s edited volume, Technofuturos: Critical Interventions in Latina/o Studies, in which they aim “to provide an intellectual and creative space for destabilizing and reassessing our understanding of Latinidades during a period of accelerated globalization, transnationalism, transmodernity, and reconfigurations of empire,” thereby “complicating how we narrate, conceive, and reconstruct the workings of Latinidad and the field of Latina/o studies in the twenty-first century” (Mirabal, 2007: 1). Here, states of U.S. Latinoness and Latinaness are punctuated by “exile, imposed citizenship, ‘undocumented’ immigrations, colonialism, diaspora, ‘legal’ residency, cultural citizenship, or historical absorption as a result of the United States–Mexican War of 1846 and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, land and landlessness, whether imagined and/or real, are all fundamental delineators of what constitutes being Latina/o” (8).

10. In employing minoritized or minoritization as particular modes, I echo Michael Dear and Gustavo Leclerc’s useful lens for this concept, which refers to “the process by which no racial or ethnic category becomes large enough to command a majority in public dialogue, elections, etc.” (2003: xi–xii).

11. Although W. E. B. Du Bois used the term “color line” in the singular, he did not strictly mean one arrangement of a line. Lewis Gordon has observed, “The color line is also a metaphor that exceeds its own concrete formulation. It is the race line as well as the gender line, the class line, the sexual orientation line, the religious line—in short, the line between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ identities” (2000: 63). I invoke it in the plural, as color lines, to underline the multiple passages that transport us to what Aimee Carrillo Rowe calls the “lines of contact we build with others” (2008: 2).

12. Gavin Jones proposes that “Du Bois’s famous aphorism, ‘the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line,’ can be read as a remotivation of the phrase ‘the Negro Problem’ itself, a remotivation that identifies the ‘problem’ as the paradoxical politics of segregation rather than simply that of racial presence.” Jones puts forth that “by locating the true color-line not between black and white society, but at the interface of blackness and a Southern culture that had assimilated that blackness, Du Bois was able to force upon his reader a recognition of a racially hyphenated nation. Du Bois’s rhetorical task was to transform the paradoxical America of the color-line.” Seen as such, Du Bois’s hyphenated structuring of a “color-line” nests, as he wrote in The Souls of Black Folk, as a “point of transference where the thoughts and feelings of one race can come into direct contact and sympathy with thoughts and feelings of the other” (Gavin Jones, 1997: 30–31; Du Bois quoted on 31).

13. The OED defines a line as signifying “a row of written or printed words” and “the words of an actor’s part,” thus applying to the world of thespians. Actors perform different characters, adding the features, traits, and peculiarities that they understand to form the individual nature of a person, circumstance, or thing. I make note of actors’ lines as these apply to the world of plays, motion pictures, and television broadcasts, among other possibilities, to consider the staging of Latinness, which often surpasses the representation of an “authentic” Latino or Latina subject. As John Leguizamo points out in the context of cinematic passing lines, Latinness moves in various directions. Leguizamo’s Colombian and Puerto Rican Latinness were once converted into Italianness. Discussing his role in the 1999 crime drama directed by Spike Lee, Summer of Sam, Leguizamo added this autobiographical remark: “I got deep into my character Vinny the hairdresser. Pretty ironic. The story’s by an Italian guy [screenwriter Victor Colicchio] who played Puerto Ricans in movies. Now I’m a Puerto Rican playing an Italian in his movie. Holy shit, I crossed over! I figure I was on the Al Pacino exchange program. If he can play Latin twice, I get to be Italian once” (2006: 205).

14. In relation to the exceptionalist tradition of American studies, Brian T. Edwards and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar make an assertion that holds relevancy here as well. “We are all studying dying formations,” they argue, “with their archives simultaneously ossifying and fragmenting. We are struggling to decipher the new formations as they emerge from the debris of eroding traditions and worlds” (2010: 6).

15. One reason that Latinidad, as a unification strategy, has not adequately focused on “other” forms of Latinness that exceed the consolidation of panethnic subjects may have to do with its “forthcoming” temporality. Antonio Viego submits that “the interpretive contortions necessary to think that Latinos in the United States can constitute a nation in the first place are not only a testament to the ways in which the idea of ‘nation’ is significantly up for grabs these days. They are also a sign of the more general interpretive contortions that mark the contemporary discourse on Latinidad. Theorists of all stripes discuss Latinidad in relation to the future, the tense that appears to naturally elect itself for these discussions. [… T]he broadcasting of the Latino future is intimately dependent upon what will have already been claimed back as evidence of a Hispanic past” (2007: 108). Put another way: the Latinidad “hereafter” also bespeaks of the coming of a “new era” that returns to coherent dispositions of Latinidad.

16. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak references such grammatical constructions as “to lexicalize.” She puts across, “To lexicalize is to separate a linguistic item from its appropriate grammatical system into the conventions of another grammar. Thus a new economic and cultural lexicalization […] demands a delexicalization as well” (2004: 118).

17. The colorings of Latinoness and Latinaness illustrate that they are always on the move. As sociologist Clara E. Rodríguez has written, “[A]lthough some Latinos are consistently seen as having the same color or ‘race,’ many Latinos are assigned a multiplicity of ‘racial’ classifications, sometimes in one day.” She continues, “In addition to being classified by others (without their consent), some Latinos shift their own self-classification during their lifetime. I have known Latinos who became ‘black,’ then ‘white,’ then ‘human beings,’ finally again ‘Latino’—all in a relatively short time. […] I have come to understand that this shifting, context-dependent experience is at the core of many Latinos’ life in the United States. Even in the nuclear family, parents, children, and siblings often have a wide range of physical types. For many Latinos, race is primarily cultural; multiple identities are a normal state of affairs; and ‘racial mixture’ is subject to many different, sometimes fluctuating, definitions.” In light of these multiple locations, my interest is not so much about finding a subject’s definitive ethnoracial identity. It is, instead, about finding relational meaning when a subject taps into another’s color line. The idea of Latinoness and Latinaness as provisional states dialogues with Rodríguez’s premise: “[F]or many Latinos, ‘racial’ classification is immediate, provisional, contextually dependent, and sometimes contested” (2000: 4–6; emphasis added).

18. An argument can be made that Richard Rodriguez was also searching for, in his third autobiographical project, a verb that would impart expressions of existence by brown actors who defy traditional ways of living and thereby remake, in this process, the United States. Calling himself a Hispanic, “a middle-aged noun” (2002: 105), Rodriguez holds a predilection for this term over “Latino,” because it admits “a relationship to Latin America in English” (110). In attempting to find a language for himself, the self-defined “Hispanic memoirist” (111) fluctuates between nouns and adjectives (cf. 103–23). Rodriguez concludes that both Hispanic and Latino honor “linguistic obeisance to Spain” and returns to the Latin location of these categories (109). He asks, “For what, after all, does ‘Latin’ refer to, if not the imperial root system?” Rodriguez narratively progresses by “Latinizing” his categorical preference and discloses, “Hispanicus sui.” This browned Latin Hispanicity comes out in the United States, for in his estimation, “Only America could create Hispanics, Asians, African Americans” (119). Sociopolitical actors with tangible ethnoracial and national particularities invariably perform Rodriguez’s brownness and Hispanization, even though the transgressive future of brown is uncertain in terms of deeds and doers. Latinities anticipate moving actors and geographies beyond Latina, Latino, and Hispanic lives.

19. As Juan Flores claims, “personally and collectively, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Cubans, Dominicans, and each of the other groups project their own respective national backgrounds as a first and primary line of identity and on that basis, fully mindful of differences, distances, and particularities, negotiate their relation to some more embracing ‘Latino’ or ‘Hispanic’ composite” (1997: 187).

20. Latin body politics have broader implications that go beyond normative American, Latino, and Latina perceptions of the fixed U.S. Latino and Latina subject. Lázaro Lima’s deft study provides a lens on “the conditions under which it becomes necessary to create a specific Latino subject of American cultural and literary history.” His book, The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory, “tells the story of the U.S. Latino body politic and its relation to the state: how the state configures Latino subjects and how Latino subjects have in turn altered the state’s appellative assertions of difference (the contemporary emphasis on ‘Latino’ instead of ‘Hispanic,’ for example) to their own ends in the public sphere” (2007: 6).

21. U.S. scholarship on “the full range of important historical, political, and cultural connections between Asian Americans and African Americans” is critically unfolding, as evidenced with publications such as Ho and Mullen (2008: 2). Consult also Lee (2011). Asian-Indian connections in Mexico prove equally relevant as well, for “Asians brought to Mexico in slavery on the Manila-to-Acapulco galleons […] were labeled ‘African’ because the Spanish wanted more slaves, and by law only Africans could be slaves” (Vincent, 2001: 1).

22. Richard Rodriguez’s excerpt reads, “My brown is a reminder of conflict. And of reconciliation” (2002: xii).

23. For studies on the African presence in Mexico, consult Gates (2011: 59–90); Vinson and Restall (2009); Bennett (2009); Irwin (2008); Hernández Cuevas (2004); Vinson and Vaughn (2004); and Jiménez Román (n.d.). For analyses on the Africana diaspora in Central America, refer to Feracho, Mosby, and Nwankwo (forthcoming); Gudmundson and Wolfe (2010); Mosby (2003); E. Gordon (1998); and Minority Rights Group (1996).

24. A model for brownness and “brown pride” transpired during the 1960s Chicano movement, when the Brown Berets also materialized. Ian F. Haney López relays that the political and community organization “adopted the following pledge: ‘I wear the Brown Beret because it signifies my dignity and pride in the color of my skin and race’” (2003: 18–19). The Chicano movement—el movimiento, or the Chicano civil rights movement—served as “an insurgent uprising among a new political generation of Mexican-Americans” that “channeled their collective energies into a militant civil rights and ethnic nationalist movement in the late 1960s and 1970s” (A. García, 1997: 1–2). Alma M. García adds that the movement was surrounded by a radical national climate that included “the Black power movement, the anti–Vietnam War movement and the second wave of the women’s movement [… and] focused on social, political, and economic self-determination and autonomy for Mexican-American communities throughout the United States” (2). Lee Bebout expands on the meanings of el movimiento, noting that it can be described “more accurately […] as a complex, diverse collection of struggles. During the 1960s and 1970s, Chicanos fought for political representation, labor rights, social programs, and access to education. These struggles were undertaken by disparate Chicano communities. Indeed, land grant activists, farm workers, students, and barrio organizers found the movement in their own localized struggles, marking a tension between Chicano diversity and the desire to imagine a national, unified front” (2011: 3–4). In addition, refer to Montejano (2010); C. Jackson (2009); Gonzalez, Fox, and Noriega (2008); Muñoz (2007); Treviño (2001); Saldívar-Hull (2000); and Gaspar de Alba (1998).

25. Cf. R. T. Rodriguez (2010); Flores and Rosaldo (2007); Cabán (2003); Poblete (2003); de la Torre and Pesquera (1993); and Rosaldo (1985).

26. Paul Cuadros suggests another Latinidad that surfaces in connection to the world of high school sports, which we can reference as “Soccer Latinidad.” He contrasts this Soccer Latinidad with the “all American” football town of Siler City, North Carolina. Cuadros’s delineation of an athletic Latinidad is premised on how the team he coaches, “Los Jets,” successfully integrates the three differentiated groups in Siler City’s Jordan-Matthews High School (JM): newcomers, immigrant “kids,” and “Chicanos.” He describes these group’s differentiations: “[T]hose feelings of alienation translated into many kids feeling lost, lost in themselves and lost in their communities. You could see that clearly in the halls of JM among the Latino students. There were generally three groups of Latinos at school. There were the ‘newcomers,’ kids fresh from the border who didn’t speak a word of English and were placed in the English As a Second Language classes. Then there were the ‘immigrant’ kids, like Fish and Indio, who’d come to the United States when they were younger and could speak English. And finally there were the ‘Chicanos,’ kids like Enrique and Edi who’d been born here and could often speak languages fluently. A newcomer had little in common with a Chicano who perhaps couldn’t speak Spanish as well. We had all three groups on the team—one of the few places at the school where they could come together for something that they all loved” (2006: 155).

This inclusion is significant, as Cuadros expresses his desire for his players to think of themselves as a “Latino” family (2006: 163). His mediated efforts at creating a sense of family, together with a championship team, warrant a Latinidad context, which is organized here around English language proficiency, time of U.S. arrival and/or legal status, and Americanization. This Soccer Latinidad, while not entirely dependent on the Spanish language alone, is framed as a coalitional effort that guides, all the same, the road to American access and success. Cuadros admits as much: “I wanted to make the guys winners—to insulate them from the prejudice, their residency status, and allow them to overcome the barriers erected by the close-minded” (226). Despite Cuadros’s best intentions, the highly ethnoracialized features of his players remain untransferable within this coach’s Peruvian American gaze and, one must punctuate, within America at large. Cuadros feels inclined to provide not just his players’ nationalities but their ethnoracial markers as well. As the soccer players are all referenced through nicknames, the following descriptions follow Cuadros’s narrative style. The most light-skinned of the players, “Guero” (spelled without the diaeresis on the “u”), is depicted as having “light brown eyes, beneath the straight, honey-brown hair. […] There was a reason why all the kids called him Guero—he looked white. You’d never know that Guero was a Latino kid until he opened his mouth. He was handsome, strong, a bit dangerous, and naturally all the girls were wild about him” (217). Ironically, in this hierarchical construction of whiteness, the other handsome white figure, distinguished as such, is David Duke, a former Louisiana U.S. Senate candidate and former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, who attended an anti-immigration rally at Siler City. In one instance, Cuadros writes that Duke possesses “Hollywood good looks” (52). In another, Duke stands out as “the tallest, the best-dressed, and best-looking” in the crowd (55). To return to Cuadros’s racialized portrayals of his Latino players: “Oso,” from Honduras, is defined as “coffee-bean black” (72). “Lechero” is indigenized: “He had dark-chocolate-colored skin with a triangular-shaped face, large eyes, and a broad nose. You could see the indigenous features in him” (76). Cuadros, on the other hand, appears as the bearer of a Latinidad marked through brownness. He is “short, brown, with dark hair” (113).

27. Expanding the scope of Julia Alvarez’s exploration of U.S. Latina quinceañera extravaganzas, it can be claimed that an exception to the presumably cogent, Spanish-speaking background that detonates Latinidad is what I am suggesting here as a “Quinceañera Latinidad.” This conceptual category refers to the conventional requirements promoted—or to use Alvarez’s phraseology, “touted”—by U.S. marketing sectors in the construction of a Latin “traditional” event. To be sure, a Quinceañera Latinidad depends on the idea of a Latin tradition to explicitly target Latina youth and their parents in what Alvarez identifies as “our Pan-Hispanic United States” (2007: 75). These Latin assemblages are a marker of “an ethnicity with a label that reads MADE IN THE USA (or ‘Remade in the USA,’ if you will)” since there is socio-cultural “pressure to honor a tradition whose content and origins remains vague” (116; 110). The same vagueness is applicable to the subjects and origins subsumed by the U.S. Latino or Latina category. But unlike other kinds of Latinidad, the Spanish language is not a vital part for the manufacturing of a Quinceañera Latinidad. As Will Cain, the president and founder of Quince Girl magazine, tells Alvarez, “The Hispanic community is this very fractured community. You have your Mexican Americans and your Puerto Ricans and your Cuban Americans. And the only thing that ties all these separate nationalities together—no, it’s not Spanish. […] What ties them together, the one single tie that binds all these cultures … is the tradition celebrated across the whole diverse group: the quinceañera. I mean, it is big” (2007: 68–69).

Additional corporate recognition of a Quinceañera Latinidad—mindful of what Alvarez christens as a “flamboyant new kind of American, the Latina American”—includes Kern’s Nectar sponsorship of its annual Dulce Quinceañera Sweepstakes and Maggi’s Put-Flavor-in-Your-Quinceañera Sweepstakes (2007: 121; 71; 118). The Latinidad that sets the stage for a Quinceañera Latinidad composed of diverse “cultural borrowings” is synthesized as follows: “So that now, Cuban quinceañeras in Miami are hiring Mexican mariachis to sing the traditional ‘Las Mañanitas.’ The full court of fourteen damas and chambelanes, ‘each couple representing a year of the quinceañera’s life,’ a mostly Mexican practice, is now a traditional must. As is the changing of the shoes to heels, which seems to originally have been a Puerto Rican embellishment. From the Puerto Ricans as well, though some say from the Mexicans, came the tradition of la última muñeca, a ‘last doll’ dressed exactly like the quinceañera” (78, 75). As is the case with other Latinidades, there are separations and exclusions within the dominant trends mapping U.S. quinceañera festivities and practices. According to Alvarez, the price tag for this festive occasion can range “anywhere from a hundred bucks for a cookout in the backyard and a stereo booming music for the young lady and her friends to fifty grand and up in a hall with a party planner, a limo, dinner for a hundred or more” (64–65). Central Americans—with their frugal cook-out quinceañeras—are a group that stands at the lowest socioeconomic echelons of a Quinceañera Latinidad. As Alvarez explains it, “I have to conclude that the cookout quinceañeras are becoming the exception. In the past, perhaps they were the rule. In the old countries, of course. In small homogeneous pockets—a border town in Texas, a barrio composed solely of Central Americans; in other words, a group still largely out of the mainstream loop, perhaps” (65).

A Quinceañera Latinidad, then, emerges among the most visible Latinos and Latinas in terms of buying power, although Alvarez’s example of a Latin cultural hodgepodge for quinceañeras largely depends on the “traditional” groups that encompass the U.S. Latino and Latina triad. Those on the margins of a Quinceañera Latinidad—that is, those hosting cookout quinceañeras—fall under the demographic radar because, as Alvarez reports, they are “taking place in segregated, often undocumented populations” (2007: 78). The most conspicuous “Quinceañera Latinos” participating in what Alvarez designates as an American “celluloid dream” are decidedly more marketable, desirable, and memorable in the formation of this Quinceañera Latinidad as well as in Latino and Latina cultural identity–making processes (121).

28. Tronto’s ethic of care implicates these four phases: (1) caring about, (2) caring for, (3) caregiving, and (4) care receiving. Caring about implies an awareness of the need to genuinely care in the first place. This “requires listening to the articulated needs, recognizing unspoken needs, distinguishing among and deciding which needs to care about.” Caring for entails a “responsibility to meet a need that has been identified.” Here “someone has to assume responsibility for organizing [….] The moral dimension of caring for is to assume, and to take seriously, responsibility.” Caregiving is a phase in which “individuals and organizations perform the necessary caring tasks. It involves a knowledge about how to care.” Care receiving “involves the response of the thing, person, or group that received the caregiving. [It] requires the complex moral element of responsiveness” (1998: 16–17). Tronto’s ubiquitous ethic of care is linked to Latinities, because it insists on the significance of analyzing human activities and interactions that, in a way, dismantle “the myth of our own invulnerable autonomy” (19). Tronto’s ethic also brings with it gendered and class components that can be attached to ethnoracial factors: “caring is greatly undervalued in our culture—in the assumption that caring is ‘women’s work,’ in perceptions of caring occupations, in the wages and salaries paid to workers in provision of care, in the assumption that care is menial” (16). Consult also Tronto (1993).

29. Regina M. Marchi suggests that the U.S. observance of the Day of the Dead—“a fusion of Indigenous and Roman Catholic rituals for honoring the deceased” in places like Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador (2009: 10–11)—is not limited to U.S. Latinos and Latinas. She remarks that this annual holiday, held on 1 or 2 November, merits greater examination. Marchi insists, “[S]tudies of Latinidad should not be confined to analyses of how Latinos create and fortify cultural ties in response to the dominant U.S. society. They should also examine how phenomena considered Latino enter different cultural spaces and change the dominant culture” (97). One can argue that the U.S. Day of the Dead, as a general manifestation of an ethic of care, has led to the “‘Latinization’ of U.S. culture” where forms of public mourning can take place, since “the basic object of the celebration—collectively remembering the dead—is universal enough” (101). Marchi also adds that the Day of the Dead in the United States has been popularized because of a new openness to non-Western spiritualities.

30. With this in mind, I am following a set of paramount questions raised by José Esteban Muñoz: “‘Latino’ does not subscribe to a common racial, class, gender, religious, or national category, and if a Latino can be from any country in Latin America, a member of any race, religion, class, or gender/sex orientation, who then is she? What, if any, nodes of commonality do Latinas/os share? How is it possible to know latinidad?” (2000: 67).

31. A clarification is required for the ways that these Latinidades are manifested in De Genova and Ramos-Zayas’s research on the racialized distinctions between Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Chicago, “one of very few sites where [these two groups] have both settled over several decades” (2003: 1). Latinidad as the “American” abjection of the U.S.-born constitutes the ways that Mexicans and Puerto Ricans perceive this “Latinidad as an identity that fundamentally pertained to many ‘second-generation’ youth as the effect of a kind of racially subordinate ‘Americanization.’ This type of ‘American’ abjection was generally considered to be a degeneration of the ‘good’ or ‘proper’ values that migrants prized, and was readily conflated with ‘laziness’ and welfare system dependency” (179). This Latinidad also demonstrates how migrants view second-generation Latinos and Latinas as “mere ‘minorities’ who did not speak any language ‘properly’ [and] embodied values or behaviors more stereotypically associated with African Americans” (180).

The second of these—a Latinidad framed through migrant illegality as well as a Latinidad without Puerto Ricans—emerges through Mexican recognition of other groups, such as Guatemalans, who cross multiple borders to get to the United States. De Genova and Ramos-Zayas further tweak this Latinidad by calling it an “empathetic Latinidad,” which is a uniting force with Central American migrants’ plight due to the “compounding of nation-state borders” (2003: 184). A Latinidad in opposition to African Americans distrusts and fears African Americans. This Latinidad can also be deemed as “a strategy for the avoidance of blackness” (189). Here, blacks are perceived as too slow, lazy, and with “unfair advantages” at the U.S. workplace. De Genova and Ramos-Zayas elaborate, “It was abundantly evident in these comments that the equation of African Americans with laziness [… ] became conjoined with the denigration of racial Blackness, and that this conjuncture became one kind of condition of possibility for the sense of the shared (racialized) identity—as ‘Latinos’—to be mutually invoked by Mexican migrants and Puerto Ricans” (188). A Latinidad as an articulation of working-class solidarity is produced “in racialized opposition to whiteness and Blackness […] an unequivocal sameness or equivalence between Mexicans and Puerto Ricans (and also Central Americans) [… ] in a class-inflected opposition, above else to specifically Latino bosses […] demonstrating their greater loyalty and devotion to whites and Blacks” (195).

A Latinidad as a strategy of middle-class formation relates to “the process of becoming ‘middle-class’ [as] consonant with ‘becoming Latino.’” This way of being both “middle-class” and “Latino” is “rooted in an affirmative sense of ‘giving back’ or ‘serving the community,’ and ‘remembering where you came from’ without ‘selling out’” (De Genova and Ramos-Zayas, 2003: 198). Finally, a fractured Latinidad through institutional contexts, whiteness, and power was deployed “in overt relation to whiteness” at institutional settings “traditionally associated with ideas of ‘mobility,’ ‘assimilation,’ and ‘mainstreaming’ (i.e., college).” This Latinidad “became a form of racial identification that held the promises of coalition and solidarity for the sake of contesting the dominant racializations of ‘Mexicans’ and ‘Puerto Ricans’ that both groups had to confront” (205).

32. Robin D. G. Kelley sets forth a useful definition of Africana diasporas, explaining that “its contemporary usage emerges clearly in the 1950s and 1960s. It served in scholarly debates as both a political term emphasizing the unifying experiences of African peoples dispersed by the slave trade and an analytical term that enabled scholars to talk about black communities across national boundaries. Much of this scholarship examines the dispersal of people of African descent, their role in the transformation and creation of new cultures, institutions, and ideas outside of Africa, and the problems of building Pan-African movements across the globe. A critical component of this work, as well as all diaspora studies, is the construction and reproduction of a diaspora consciousness. The main elements of such a consciousness (to varying degrees, of course) include a collective memory of dispersal from a homeland, a vision of that homeland, feelings of alienation, desire for return, and a continuing relationship and identity with the homeland” (2002: 126). Frank Andre Guridy cogitates on this diaspora “as both the dispersal of Africans through the slave trade and their ongoing social, political, cultural interactions across various boundaries after emancipation. As a concept that illuminates the creation of cross-border communities, diaspora is a useful way to interpret cross-national, Afro-descended interaction that is not reducible to politicized forms of ‘black internationalism’ or ‘racial solidarity’” (2010: 4–5).

33. Oscar is “a hardcore sci-fi and fantasy man” who cannot surpass his nerd status (Díaz, 2007: 6). Initially, however, “in those blessed days of his youth,” Oscar was one “of those preschool loverboys who was always trying to kiss the girls, always coming up behind them during a merengue and giving them the pelvic pump, the first nigger to learn the perrito and the one who danced it any chance he got.” Díaz adds, “Because in those days he was (still) a ‘normal’ Dominican boy raised in a ‘typical’ Dominican family, his nascent pimp-liness was encouraged by blood and friends alike” (11). Even though Oscar grows out of his “innate” Dominican dancing skills, the expected and “natural” rhythm of the Latin subject constantly follows him, one can say, through the name association with Oscar D’León. Oscar Emilio León Somoza, otherwise known as Oscar D’León, was born in Caracas in 1943. Reaching musical success in the 1980s, D’León is nicknamed “El Sonero del Mundo” (The Son Singer of the World). He has collaborated with such stars as Celia Cruz, Tito Puente, Arturo Sandoval, and Luís Enrique.

34. Gabriel García Márquez’s fictional village of Macondo informs Díaz’s moving literary world, which is also in line with its updated, hyperurban space, conceived in the mid-1990s, “McOndo” (Díaz, 2007: 7). The latter refers to a Latin American literary movement taking its root from Macintoshes, McDonald’s, and condos (cf. Fuguet and Gómez, 1996). Not to be overlooked is Díaz’s gesture to the Anglo-and Francophone Caribbean. Derek Walcott’s poem from 1979, “The Schooner ‘Flight,’” which speaks to the rich cultural mixtures of the Caribbean and takes the reader to the narrator’s brief history of his life, serves as the epigraph to Díaz’s book. He also references Martinican intellectual Édouard Glissant, whose theorization of cultural interrelationships in the Caribbean through processes of creolization and conceptual terms like “relation” have served as important landmarks for diasporic studies and the relational links between the Caribbean and the Atlantic world (Díaz, 2007: 92).

35. The complex bridging of high and low popular culture mediums is best raised by Díaz himself, who clues readers on the novel’s narration. He told the New Yorker that to understand the “narration enigma,” readers “have to know a little bit about the comic book series The Fantastic Four. Each of the family members is explicitly linked to one of the Four—Oscar is the Thing, Abelard is Mr. Fantastic, Belicia is the Invisible Woman, and Lola is the Human Torch—something I stole from Rick Moody’s incomparable novel The Ice Storm” (2010).

36. Paula M. L. Moya and Ramón Saldívar, among other literary theorists, have evaluated the shifting articulations of American national identities and literatures through the optic of the “trans-American imaginary” and have called for the need “to see American literature as heterogeneous and multiple.” Such a mode requires an alteration of the American corpus, since its influences exceed “nations other than England and idioms that do not originate in the English language have been unevenly and inadequately incorporated into the larger narrative of American literary historiography.” Moya and Saldívar provide the hemispheric vantage point—“the interpretive framework that yokes together North and South America instead of New England and England”—of the “transnational imaginary” (2). This literary form of geopolitical kinship “make[s] visible the centrality of Latinidad to the fictional discourses that continue to shape the American national imaginary” (5). Its theoretical contribution is a “chronotope, a contact zone that is both historical and geographical and that is populated by transnational persons whose lives from an experiential region within which singularly delineated notions of political, social, and cultural identity do not suffice” (2).

This renewed vision of American literature is both opportune and valuable, as Moya and Saldívar seek to extricate the recurring “Americanness” in normative domains that restrict a “national” American corpus. I use a “Latined literature” as a literary resource, rather than the aforementioned terms. Although my perspectives dialogue with Moya and Saldívar, the idea of a Latined literature—or a Latined literary space—diverges insofar as I am interested in the function of U.S. Latino and Latina literature outside the confines of the American geographic, national, cultural, and ethnoracial context that also locates these groups and “their” productions as “Latino” and “Latina.” Despite its “trans-Americanness,” Latino and Latina writing appears to become standardized within and channeled through the United States, dwelling in literary Americanness. Latino and Latina narrative productions become “naturalized” to the U.S. literary map, as critics seek to find and insist on the centrality of their space in U.S. American literature. But what of such texts as they speak to and restore Caribbean, Central American, and Latin American regional struggles and thinking? I am advancing, then, a rereading—while going beyond the boundaries—of Latinoness, Latinaness, and Latinidad and their insular relation to ideological Americanness. An “American” novel (in the U.S. sense) may herald a Latined perspective, and it may or may not necessarily be written by “Latinos” and “Latinas.” Such a text, for instance, could just as well reconstitute a “new” American self—in the continental sense—in the Americas. But it also fashions a new form of writing and engages with hermeneutic turns that integrate and disrupt literary conventions in Latin America and the United States. Latin American cultural practices are now gesturing toward Latinos and Latinas, placing their oeuvres in a new regional and historical context, with a literary temporality that is also navigating mass migrations, transnational communities, cultural alterations, and millennial transitions.

Take note of how Junot Díaz and Daniel Alarcón, a Peruvian American writer, are being imported southward. They recently had the distinction of being the only two U.S. Latinos who were named as two of the most renowned thirty-nine authors under thirty-nine (or as pitched in Spanish, treinta y nueve escritores menores de treinta y nueve) by the 2007 Bogota World Book Capital. The literary measure of U.S. Latinos and Latinas changes perspective and becomes regional “Latin American.” The rest of the “thirty-nine under thirty-nine” authors, selected by a jury composed of Colombian novelists Piedad Bonnett, Hector Abad Faciolince, and Oscar Callazos, write primarily in Spanish and come from Latin America. Díaz’s and Alarcón’s works are two concrete cases in point of U.S. Latino/a publications that are translated into Spanish. One might ask, where does their “trans-ness” reside, in “trans-America” or “trans-Latin America”? In what ways do their literary forms unsettle both U.S.-based Americanness and Latin Americanness? We must bear in mind the different continental understandings of their endeavors, as the American nation and the American hemisphere mark them. In effect, they bear the geo- and biographical distanciation from these spaces, lending themselves to my premise: that the symbolic acts and geographies with which we are grappling constitute Latinings. Such works are not purely (North or Latin) American but an elective representation of a subject with multiple thresholds and continuous denationalizations. What might this mean for hemispherist Latino and Latina creative workers with many detours? What of their translated writings, circulating in more and more globalized settings and linked to other “foreign” aesthetics and literary practices?

37. By separating “re” and “cognition,” I am building from the standard meaning of “recognition.” The OED defines this noun as “the action or process of recognizing or being recognized, in particular” and the “identification of a thing or person from previous encounters or knowledge.” But I am also expressing the process of redoing something, like the act of cognition, whose OED meaning entails “the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses” and “a perception, sensation, idea, or intuition resulting from this.”

38. But this Latining certainly operates in “Latin” America. Just as I explore the itinerant meanings of U.S. Latinoness and Latinaness within an expansive vista of the color line and U.S. borders, Néstor García Canclini’s work Latinoamericanos buscando lugar en este siglo (2002) seeks to decipher the locations of Latin Americans and Latin Americanness in this century. García Canclini’s point of departure includes the following concerns: “What does it mean to be Latin American?” (12); “Where are Latin American accounts located now?” (17); and “Who wants to be Latin American?” (23). The context for the first query reads as follows: “What does it mean to be Latin America? I sought to elaborate an essay about the way in which the question is changing and the new answers that are being constructed. There are still historical voices in this debate, but different ones are being added, and sometimes with new arguments. The scale also has expanded: the present condition of Latin America exceeds its territory. Those who left their countries and are now extending their cultures beyond the region demonstrate the painful dislocation of Latin Americans and the opportunities offered by global exchanges” (12; my translation).

39. Latining also motions toward the critical inclusion of U.S. Latino and Latina cultural and intellectual production in Latin American studies. It is frequently obvious to me how U.S. Latinos and Latinas discursively integrate Latin American history, culture, and politics in their works (e.g., Julia Alvarez, Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, Junot Díaz, Martín Espada, Cristina García, Francisco Goldman, and Héctor Tobar, among many others). This linking, however, is not so apparent when it comes to Latin American literary production and intellectual thought and their examination of—or even interrelation with—U.S. Latinos and Latinas.

40. As geo-and biographical migratory passages, these movements create, as Ira Berlin has elucidated in the context of the transformations underpinning U.S. African American life, “a glimpse of the future, for the new history has not one story line but many and has not one direction but several” (2010: 9). He adds that exploring the complex struggles of the ever-widening African American experience “does not create a single culture, produce an established political goal, or culminate in a pre-established outcome. Rather it raises questions about the character of the master narrative of African American history” (10).

41. At the same time, of course, such subjects may not accept the construction as an accounting of themselves. It is productive to once again turn to Lugones’s sagacious observations on “‘world’-travelling.” She indicates, “In a ‘world’ some of the inhabitants may not understand or hold the particular construction of them that constructs them in that ‘world.’ So, there may be ‘worlds’ that construct me in ways that I do not even understand. Or it may be that I understand the construction, but do not hold it of myself. I may not accept it as an account of myself, a construction of myself. And yet, I may be animating such a construction.” The recurring, but differing exercise of “Latin” throughout should be apprehended as a conjectural approach that simultaneously seizes and excoriates stereotypes of the temperamental “Latin.” Lugones brilliantly speaks to the meanings behind this construction: “One can be at the same time in a ‘world’ that constructs one as stereotypically latin, for example, and in a ‘world’ that constructs one as latin. Being stereotypically latin and being simply latin are different simultaneous constructions of persons that are part of different ‘worlds.’ One animates one or the other or both at the same time without necessarily confusing them, though simultaneous enactment can be confusing if one is not on one’s guard” (Lugones, 1987: 10). Lugones adds, “Given that latins are constructed in Anglo ‘worlds’ as stereotypically intense—intensity being a central characteristic of at least one of the anglo stereotypes of latins—and given that many latins, myself included, are genuinely intense, I can say to myself ‘I am intense’ and take a hold of the double meaning. And furthermore, I can be stereotypically intense or be the real thing and, if you are Anglo, you do not know when I am which because I am Latin-American. As Latin-American I am an ambiguous being, a two-imaged self: I can see that gringos see me as stereotypically intense because I am, as a Latin-American, constructed that way but I may or may not intentionally animate the stereotype or the real thing knowing that you may not see it in anything other than in the stereotypical construction. This ambiguity is funny and is not just funny, it is survival-rich” (13).

42. I interrogate the relevance of double consciousness in light of José Luis Falconi and José Antonio Mazzotti’s identification of it as an “old notion” in their edited volume The Other Latinos: Central and South Americans in the United States. They ask, “Is the old notion of a ‘double consciousness’ still useful in depicting these new collective subjectivities?” (2007: 3).

43. I discuss, in chapter 4, José Luis Falconi and José Antonio Mazzotti’s “Other Latino” designation in greater length.

44. Cary D. Wintz notes that “taken together,” the Harlem Renaissance, the New Negro Movement, and the Negro Renaissance “provide a succinct and remarkably accurate glimpse of the diverse and diffuse currents that surfaced in the mid-1920s and gave rise to a surge of black creativity.” But this literary and intellectual movement also poses some definitive chronological limitations. “Generally,” Wintz states, “the consensus among scholars has been that the Harlem Renaissance was an event of the 1920s, bounded on one side by the war and the race riots of 1919 and on the other side by the 1929 stock market crash” (1988: 1). Jeffrey B. Perry adds that the Harlem Renaissance “is a much-debated concept—its very existence and name are challenged by some. In general, ‘the Harlem Renaissance’ refers to the literary outpourings, mostly by Black writers working on Black subject matter with a new sense of confidence and achievement, that reached much wider audiences in the period of the 1920s, particularly the second half of the decade. (Some would date the ‘Renaissance’ from 1917 through about 1935.) The location of the ‘Renaissance’ is also contested—some emphasize its national or international character, while most locate it in New York City, particularly Harlem. Much-discussed aspects of the ‘Renaissance’ concern the authors, their audiences, their themes and subject matter, the quality of their work, and the disproportionate role played by white publishers and white patrons in shaping their artistic works” (2001: 351).

45. Influential literary and cultural vehicles were established during the 1910s and 1920s for these aims, which included the Crisis, founded by W. E. B. Du Bois as the official publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Urban League’s Opportunity, edited by sociologist Charles S. Johnson (1893–1956).

46. And yet ironically Down These Mean Streets, a text hailed for its palpable blackness, exposes an anxiety of brownness-cum-blackness. Conversations between mother and son reveal a concurrent brownness and blackness. In one instance, she reassures him, almost soothingly, “You are not black, you’re brown, a nice color, a pretty color” (P. Thomas, 1997: 135). A few pages later, it is the term “Negrito” that turns into the problematic loving diminutive, as the mother asks Thomas, “Why does it hurt you to be un Negrito?” (148).

47. Thomas misspells trigueño and trigueña as tregeño and tregeña in his glossary. The Diccionario de la Real Academia Española identifies trigueño and trigueña as “wheat-colored; between dark-skinned and blonde” (my translation). The Spanish definition reads, “de color del trigo; entre moreno y rubio.”

48. Although I am borrowing Juan Gonzalez’s (2000) apt description and book title in connection to U.S. Latinos and Latinas, I would slightly rearrange it to “harvest of empires,” attempting to underscore that interest in Latin America has historically varied and has not been limited just to the United States. For instance, despite the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, which stipulated U.S. protection over the Western Hemisphere, Britain “largely filled the vacuum left by Spain in Central America” (Stiles, 2009: 183). T. J. Stiles recounts, “Leapfrogging from the colonies of Jamaica and British Honduras (later Belize), English merchants had come to dominate the region’s trade. In 1841, the British had extended their sway by proclaiming a protectorate over the ‘kingdom’ of the Miskito (corrupted to ‘Mosquito’ by the British) Indians on Nicaragua’s sparsely populated Atlantic Coast. The Nicaraguans regarded it as an insult to their sovereignty—an insult the British had compounded in 1848, when they had occupied San Juan del Norte and renamed it Greytown to block any canal or transit route” (2009: 183). Another lingering intercontinental example of European and American entrepreneurial and imperial coupling is the initial excavation of the Panama Canal by the French and its subsequent successful construction by the United States in 1914. It illustrates U.S. and European attention for “the fever of the Great Idea” that became the Central American waterway, thereby stressing “the poetry of capitalism” for France and a “strategic and economic crossroads of the Americas” for U.S. military power (Parker, 2009: 86, 238). Matthew Parker writes that Frenchmen were “prepared to die for the Great Idea of the canal,” especially because the Central American tropics represented a space in which French planners “were going to engage in the great scientific battle” (90–91). For Americans in the United States, Panama served as an important route that facilitated a link between the East and West Coasts during the Gold Rush, becoming “an American protectorate”—an appendage to U.S. Western expansion and nation formation (36). Parker contends that “between 1861 and 1865, the U.S. was, of course, fighting its own civil war, and the Panama route was used several times for moving troops, materials, and bullion from coast to coast” (37).

49. This absence also lends itself to other levels of nonpresence indicating outsiderness—or even “alienized signification”—within normative mappings of U.S. Latinoness and Latinaness. As Héctor Tobar points out in The Tattooed Soldier, this state of unmappable (Central American) “otherworldliness,” a Latinity that is not accounted for in Latino/a studies because of its Guatemalan ties, operates as a perpetual U.S. oddity. Central American subjects, under Tobar’s literary representation, look “like walking question marks” (1998: 41). Discrepant and irreconcilable, perhaps, but thrusting one to speculate if these question marks, as paradoxically marked invisible beings, require an answer or clarification, since they are beyond the grasp of the American and Latino and Latina social pattern.

50. Nwankwo directs our attention to the proclivity by U.S. “Americanist scholars to think of work by or about U.S. African Americans as falling neatly into one of the two categories—as part of the ‘new’ hemispherist American studies or as holding firm to academic versions of the national political commitments that undergirded the creation of African-American studies in the first place” (2006: 582).

51. John Hope Franklin also advanced a resonant observation. He had this to say about U.S. African American internationalism and their reactions to Italy’s 1935 invasion of Ethiopia: “Almost overnight even the most provincial among the Negroes became international-minded” (quoted in Taketani, 2010: 146).

CHAPTER ONE. Southern Latinities

1. Different scholars attempting to discuss the phenomenon of the Nuevo or New South have employed similar terminology. The designation “Nuevo New South” is traced to Raymond A. Mohl (2005). “New South” was used after the Reconstruction Era (1865–77). Its coinage is generally attributed to Henry Woodfin Grady (1850–89), editor of the Atlanta Constitution, who delivered a classic speech before the New England Society in 1886, titled “The New South.” Grady’s dynamic New South promoted southern industrial growth and northern investment.

2. This tracing of the South’s other routes resounds with V. S. Naipaul’s preoccupation more than two decades ago in A Turn in the South. Naipaul conveyed a nexus with contemporary frameworks that impel further inquiry into what is now framed as the Global South. While acknowledging that his familiarity with the United States was limited to New York and New England, his interest derived from a southern link that binds Naipaul to his homeland, Trinidad (1989: 23). “And for the first time,” he writes, “it occurred to me that Trinidad, a former British colony (from 1797), and an agricultural slave colony (until 1833, when slavery was abolished in the British Empire), would have had more in common with the old slave states of the Southeast than with New England or the newer European-immigrant states of the North.” Yet Naipaul’s connection was postponed for decades. This personal oversight is induced by the psychological impact that the South’s racialized dynamics have had not just in domestic U.S. settings but at an international scale too. This South-South link is so manifest that it “should have occurred to me a long time before, but it hadn’t,” he concedes (24). “What I had heard as a child about the racial demeanor of the South had been too shocking. It had tainted the United States, and had made me close my mind to the South.” But Naipaul’s mind, also tainted by U.S. segregationist practices, does not entirely bar the South as a correlational terrain of inquiry. His southern discussion is preoccupied with historical continuity and discontinuity in a landscape—or a “country place”—“where little changed and little happened” (3).

While the landscape may be static in this view, the people of the South are not. Naipaul’s prologue bears witness to the region’s variegated colorings and developing socioeconomic relations, although the stifling weight of the black-white racial paradigm is skillfully illustrated through the guided tour he received from a North Carolina woman. Calling her remarks “a chant,” he describes the comments she furnished him with through two particular repetitions. One of them is: “Black people there, black people there, white people there. Black people, black people, white people, black people. All this side black people, all this side white people. White people, white people, black people, white people” (1989: 10). The other reiteration, more economical with words, is still an echo of the former: “All this side white people, all that side black people. Black people, black people, white people, black people. Black people, white people” (17). Despite this black-white reiterative synonymity, we meet “Indians from India” who are “buying the motels from the South from white people” (6). An older Nuevo South is surfacing also, and it did not escape Naipaul’s eye. “The Mexicans did the fruit-picking,” he reports, making them an ethnoracial site that provoked a “pro-American attitude [in the South that] extended to foreign affairs” among certain black community members (16–17). Naipaul’s undertaking surfaces from his interest in U.S. black responses to “immigrants of a new sort”: Latin Americans and Asians (29).

3. While interrogating such boundaries, I attempt to cross and recross these scholarly undertakings, as John Muthyala (2001) has prompted.

4. As a cursory outline on the differences between Hispanics and Latinos, William Luis puts forth a useful, though certainly not definitive, distinction between these categories. I draw on Luis’s working definition, because it explains these categories through “writerly” perspectives and traditions: “Hispanics are those who are born or raised and educated in their native country, which they leave for political or economic reasons to reside in the U.S.A. Latinos are those who are born or raised and educated in the U.S.A., and have been subjected to the demands of U.S. society and culture. Hispanics have closer ties to the language and culture of their country of origin; Latinos recognize their parents’ ancestry, but they feel closer to U.S. culture. Hispanic writers tend to write in Spanish; Latino writers tend to write in English, and they contribute to a Latino literature. While I propose a definition for Hispanic and Latino, I also recognize that a Hispanic can identify himself as a Latino and vice versa” (2003: 122).

5. Bernadette Marie Calafell, a Mexican American from Arizona, proposes some interesting insights on what she calls “the new Latina/o South.” Calafell begins by telling readers that she followed her Chicana path until she enrolled at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for a doctorate in communication studies. Her self-identification was “forced, for the first time, really to identify myself as a Latina—a Latina in a space that negated Chicana identities.” She elucidates, “Latina was a term I had not previously used to describe myself because of its generality. […] Thus, in coming to North Carolina, a land whose population was unknown to me, I chose Latina because of the possibility of identification across ethnic groups” (2007: 14). It is the U.S. Southeast—the new Latina/o South—that opens up Calafell’s Chicana consciousness to the emergent possibilities of Latina being. She proffers some considerations for Chicanos and Chicanas in the twenty-first century: “Questions regarding the possibility of Chicana/o as a political and cultural identification for the future suddenly became more and more apparent to me as I forced myself in a world in which very few people knew what Chicana/o meant or identified in that way. What I found instead was a vibrant and growing community of Mexican, Central American, Latina/o, and Arab immigrants who were remaking the face of North Carolina and with it my assumptions about the face of the South. What would Chicana/o come to mean to those children born Mexican American in the South—the next generation? What would Aztlán, our physical and symbolic nation, mean to those who had never visited it or had no concept of it? Would Chicana/o as a term of identification survive once Mexican Americans had moved beyond the Southwest? Or, because of the multiple connections being made in contact zones such as North Carolina would Chicana/o become something else, allowing a new political identification to emerge?” (16).

These conjectural concerns can surface in the Southwest, given that the demographics Calafell references also exist there, with the exception that this area has been historically defined as Aztlán, a Chicano-and Chicana-specific space. Calafell’s questions become more tangible for her in light of the black history of the Southeast. She concedes as much, stating that the Southeast imparted a “sense of homelessness that seemed to guide many of our experiences as the weight of the history of the South bore down on our daily lives” (2007: 48). While Calafell’s impressions have great promise, they neatly—“authentically”—form a Chicano and Chicana Southwest/African American Southeast impenetrable dyad. Under this structuring, a “Latina/o” emergence cannot transpire in the “new Latina/o South” because the “I” at hand is invariably—and must be told as—“Chicana/o.” What analytically attracts me, nevertheless, are mobile subjects and their impulses toward Latined beginnings and articulations in the U.S. Southeast as well as the Southwest.

6. For Houston A. Baker Jr. “‘tight places’ are constituted by the necessity to articulate a position that combines the specters of abjection (slavery), multiple subjects and signifiers ([Jim] Trueblood’s narrative [in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man] is produced for a rich, northern, white philanthropist), representational obligations of race in America (to speak ‘Negro’), and patent sex and gender implications (the role of the Law as the Phallus)” (2001: 15).

7. Lawrence A. Herzog’s qualifier of a new borderland urbanism is a locus of a new border city as a tangible living space that crosses national political boundaries, confronting “the conditions under which the global economy collides with social space in a bicultural, first-world–third-world, high density, rapidly urbanizing international boundary region” (2003: 120). In mentioning the black-white plantation South, I am aware that this space is by no means static and monolithic, as Lacy K. Ford and George Brown Tindall, among others, have demonstrated. Ford’s examination of the slavery question, which is not one query but a set of interrelated troubling concerns for the upper and lower South during the founding era, “contends that there was not one antebellum South but many, not one southern white mind-set but several” (2009: 4). The following questions reflect Ford’s preoccupations, methodologically explored between 1787 and 1840: “Could slavery coexist with the nation’s republican ideals? Did the economic benefits of slavery outweigh the costs? Did slavery expand or limit economic and social opportunities for whites? Was there any other way to generate as much wealth in the South as slavery created? Would the wealth held in slaves survive an effort to change systems? Would the spread of evangelical Christianity challenge the dominant slaveholding ethos?” (3). Tindall’s Natives and Newcomers likens U.S. southerners to migrants: “It had suddenly dawned on me that southeners, white and black, were outsiders in much the same way as were recent immigrants. Southeners differed from immigrants, however, in being home-grown outsiders in the nation” (1995: 23).

8. There are, to be sure, black Latinos and Latinas who migrate to and settle in the U.S. Southeast. As my primary focus is the semiotics of blackness through brownness and dark brownness—and how blackened bodies are constructed and positioned—I defer to future studies on this topic of the politics of space and place for “Afro-Latin@s” in the “New South.”

9. This black prominence certainly stands out. Intellectual history discussions verify the importance of a dynamic Durham for U.S. African Americans. Du Bois lauded this urban center in 1912 as an important community that “characterizes the progress of the Negro American” (quoted in Brown, 2008: 12). E. Franklin Frazier denominated it in 1925 as the “Capital of the Black Middle Class” (14). But during the city’s “upbuilding,” as historian Leslie Brown has shown, “almost everyone who lived in Durham came from someplace else” (16). Brown applies the Du Boisian term of upbuilding in her study to depict the socioeconomic development “of black communities after slavery, upbuilding was the literal and figurative construction of structures African Americans used to climb out of slavery” (10).

10. Texas, as Neil Foley argues, oversteps the U.S. boundaries that mark the South and West. It “fits comfortably within the cultural and historiographical boundaries of the South, with its history of slavery, cotton, and postemancipation society.” But Texas also has “cultural elements of the South, the West, and Mexico [that] form a unique borderlands culture” (1997: 2). Mexicans forged new identities in the region by “rupturing the black-white polarity of southern race relations.” The cotton culture of central Texas, brought together “by blacks and whites in the South, and Mexicans and Anglos in the Southwest,” created a “hybrid southwestern culture” (4–5). That being so, this geography is not “racially static or bipartite but a site of multiple and heterogeneous borders where different languages, experiences, histories, and voices intermingled amid diverse relations of power and privilege. Partly for these reasons, the categories of Anglo, black, and Mexican are wholly inadequate—and even misleading—in describing the highly miscegenated culture of central Texas” (7).

11. The city’s shifting entrepreneurial governance in the late 1990s, Thaddeus Countway Guldbrandsen specifies, has been reorganized around a way where “Durham’s trajectory resembles most closely that of those cities in the American South whose economic competitive advantage was built partly on the lasting legacy of some aspects of their Southernness, including low property values and low labor costs, as well as on massive public investment in universities, roads, telecommunications, and other infrastructure” (2005: 83). The region’s transfigurations can also be accounted for in terms of the bourgeoning Spanish-language press, as newspapers like La Voz de Carolina (formerly La Voz del Pueblo, 1993, Chapel Hill), La Conexión (1995, Raleigh), and La Noticia (1997, Charlotte) attest. For an analysis of interethnic relations among African Americans, Latinos, Latinas, and Afro-Latinos, as represented in the Spanish-language media, see Jackson et al. (2008).

12. The Herald-Sun, a local newspaper, recently summarized that “the black community decreased” from 2000 to 2006 and estimated a 68 percent growth in Durham among Latinos and Latinas. The Hispanic “population swell,” as this venue dubbed it, is “changing the face” of the medium-sized city and the “contiguous counties” of Durham, Chatham, Orange, Granville, and Person. The boom is attributed to Latino and Latina wage work in agricultural plants and construction jobs, giving way to the Herald-Sun’s description of a “flooding of the region” that is “readily apparent by the number of Hispanic tiendas, restaurants, laborers, and families” (West and Hoyle, 2007: B1). Adding to this journalistic representation from the celebratory culinary perspective, the now-defunct Gourmet, “The Magazine of Good Living,” devoted its September 2007 issue to “Carolina Cocina.” Gourmet illustrated how Durham—and by extension, much of the U.S. South—is becoming “Latin” in its culinary preference. But the food discussion soon turned sociological, noting that approximately “570,000 [Hispanic] people are scattered around the state, many of them living in the so-called Triangle defined by the cities of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill” (C. Andrews, 2007: 34). There was also a tone of caution as much as a sense of gastronomic discovery in the feature article. Revealing the shared, sustaining sameness between nation and narrator, Gourmet observed that in these eateries “you might not hear a word of English spoken for hours at a time” (36).

This uncovering of Durham’s surprisingly profitable enterprises—brown and dark brown follies, one might say, in twenty-first-century capitalism—calls for an abridged deliberation of what makes the spice world of a Latino menu so novel in the South? Far from trivial, this concentration on Latino cooking and food choices alludes to how “the South gets defined, by whom, at what time, and why it matters.” In a southern meal, Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt communicates, “you see visible expressions of our background regional identity” (2011: 4). Engelhardt puts forward that “scholars, media, advertisers, and artists not only excavate food practices, we actively shape them as well. Our definitions of ‘true’ southern foods change and evolve constantly, as some foods are lifted and celebrated while other equally common ones stay in the background waiting for their day” (6–7).

Gourmet’s exposure of Latino fare accentuates its estranged, non-black-white southernness at the regional level, while nationwide colloquial truisms take note of how many people in the United States prefer salsa to ketchup. Such propensity for salsa indicates that there is familiarity with Latin ingredients around the American table. Dating further back than the consumption of salsa as an edible phenomenon—and aptly complementary to our lens of the Global South—however, is another demonstrable preference for Latinness and tropicality through the more substantial plant, herb, and grass known as the banana. The fruit, as is widely known, is harvested in Central America, Caribbean posts including Jamaica and Cuba, as well as Colombia and Ecuador. This crop has become the most popular item on supermarket shelves, and “the only other products beating the banana on to our shopping lists” are gasoline and lottery tickets (Chapman, 2007: 17). And yet as a recent pop culture study about the “remarkable culinary evolution” that has “exploded” in the United States points out, “it is a great time to be an eater” in this nation. The researcher adds that “food is an area of American life where things just continue to improve,” insofar as “Americans are increasingly sophisticated about what they eat and expansive in their tastes” (Kamp, 2006: xi–xiv). Even though Gourmet informed, at the time, middle- or upper-class American subjects about Latino cookery—this type of panethnic food, unlike the more upscale haute cuisine genre of “Nuevo Latino”—is more affordable and crosses into a pan-Latino domain despite its Mexican taquería specificity.

13. Latino and Latina national incipiency seems to germinate and become more visible through southern passages and myriad exchanges from the Southwest to the Southeast. According to the Los Angeles Times journalist and novelist Héctor Tobar, California is now “sending off its more ambitious and restless” Latino and Latina “sons and daughters to settle in newer places.” Tobar records how local gossip about North Carolina stresses that there is “so much work carving up chickens you could save up enough to buy up your own little rancho” (2005: 28). Sonia Nazario, also a Los Angeles Times reporter, expands on these Southwestern-Southeastern migrations and networks facilitating such geographic exchanges. Her coverage of Lourdes, a Honduran migrant, notes that she moved from the Golden State to the Tar Heel State because “California is too hard.” Lourdes’s trajectory is retold in this fashion: “She has followed a female friend to North Carolina and started over again. She sold everything in California—her old Ford, a chest of drawers, a television, the bed she shares with her daughter. It netted $800 for the move” (2007: 27). Although Lourdes and her daughter end up moving farther South to Florida, Nazario writes that Lourdes came to love North Carolina. Her daughter, who was born in California, learned to quickly speak English there, “something she hadn’t done surrounded by Spanish speakers in California” (186).

Perhaps what is so striking is that North Carolina is providing a more feasible (if not expedient) version of the “American Dream”—or quicker cultural assimilatory evidence—than California. Even so, these questions remain: Why is it so astonishing that Latinos and Latinas are moving out of the Southwest? Is it because they are exceeding the bounds of where they “belong”? How is their incessant movement, as history has shown, continually shifting the geography of “ethnoracial reason” in the U.S. map? I am, of course, echoing the objectives of the Caribbean Philosophical Association (CPA) when I raise this concern. Since its first international conference in 2004, the CPA has organized around the theme of “Shifting the Geography of Reason” in such countries as Barbados (2004), Puerto Rico (2005), Canada (2006), Jamaica (2007), Guadeloupe (2008), Colombia (2010), and Trinidad (2012). The intent behind this analytic geography of reason is to focus “on the broad impact of the rise of Africana and other ‘third world’ philosophies from geographical notions, metaphors, and assumptions that have long been associated with modern concepts of philosophical reason.” The CPA thus “look[s] closely at the variety of intellectual movements that have shaped the development of ideas, especially in the Caribbean, that have contributed to, and continue to have an impact (positive or negative) on, the geography of reason” (Caribbean Philosophical Association, n.d.).

14. Du Bois cautioned on the economic challenges in the South more than a century ago, when he spoke not only of the struggles of the black body but also of the integration of “that” black being into U.S. socioeconomic and nationalist projects. “To be a poor man is hard,” Du Bois observed, “but to be a poor race in the land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships” (2003: 12). C. Vann Woodward wrote about the “great changes that are altering the cultural landscape of the South almost beyond recognition.” Among those changes, particularly those of the 1940s, is urbanization. To this end, Woodward drew on the symbol of the bulldozer as “the advance agent of the metropolis” to point to the growth of what he terms the “Bulldozer Revolution” (1960: 5–6). The Bulldozer Revolution plowed “under cherished old values of individualism, localism, family, clan, and rural folk culture” in the South, bringing about “industrialism, urbanism, unionism, and big government [that] confirmed or promised too many coveted benefits” (10). By the 1950s a “considerable portion of these Southerners moved from country to suburb,” forming a “rurbanization” that “skipped the phase of urbanization entirely” (6–7). The 1950s also signified that “the voice of the South [during this period] had become the voice of the chamber of commerce, and Southerners appeared to be about as much absorbed in the acquirement of creature comforts and adult playthings as any other Americans” (9).

Regarding the Nuevo (“alien”) South, Stack’s research interposes these public perceptions and interjections, noting that “even after a generation or more of prattle about a new new new South, there still were no jobs to speak of” for the young African Americans of North and South Carolina (1996: 5). And yet does U.S. African American relocation signify erasure from an entire regional and national landscape? Stack’s work on U.S. African American migrations to the rural, eastern parts of North and South Carolina presses for the exploration and reflection of the structures that bind individuals to a sense of place and social identities. She notes that figures released by the U.S. Census Bureau as far back as 1975 document the first numbers of a black American exodus from the industrious North to the rural South. Since then, a “small counterstream of perhaps 15,000 people a year [moved] against the overwhelming northward tide that had been flowing throughout the twentieth century” (xiii). So much so that by 1990, “the South had gained more than half a million black Americans who were leaving the North—or more precisely the South had regained from the cities of the North the half-million black citizens it had lost to northward migration during the 1960s” (xiv). Stack’s multilayered ethnographies concerning what she calls an evolving Great Return Migration to southern “homeplaces” stress a reversal of push-and-pull factors anticipating other social dynamics, as internal transformations are bound to take place, and not entirely because of Latinos and Latinas (7). Those returning to the South, Stack insists, “are changed in all the usual mortal ways […] and they are also changed in particular and profound and historical ways, their consciousness shaped by their experience of America at a certain time, in certain American places” (xv). Returning migrants are, in this regard, “more like strangers than homefolk; […] they are very much like migrants moving someplace new,” as they seek to develop “a place in which their lives and strivings will make a difference—a place in which to create a home” (199).

15. Fink’s central focus is Morganton’s labor force transformation through Guatemalan and Mexican migrant poultry workers. He inserts scary quotes around the “Hispanic” category under which these groups fall in Morganton, an industrial center whose previous settlers were whites, blacks, and Hmong refugees. Further inquiry into these communities and their demographic shifts demonstrates that the Guatemalans are, in fact, “nearly all” Highland Maya (2003: 2). They are a Q’anjob’al-speaking population “from the mountain villages of the northwestern province of Huehuetenango” that also includes “Awakatekos and Chalchitekos from the commercial agricultural valley of Aguacatán” (4). Fink examines the “cultural adjustment among the new migrant workers,” asking, “with what capacity and vision but also at what cost did the Guatemalan Maya transplant themselves to a new North American setting” (2–3)? For the purposes of this study, I am also interested in how these indigenous groups are mutually “Hispanized” or “Latinized” in the United States, particularly through public discourses on “new” migrations and processes of “alienization.” As Fink states, “the arriving Guatemala Maya presented a puzzle and a challenge to the established citizenry of Morganton even as this North Carolina town equally presented its own mysteries to the new arrivals. […] [T]he problem was, and remains, more severe—a horde of aliens would ravage the landscape, threatening the very foundation of the community, and deprive others of their chance for the good life” (32). Mayas also pose a form of “Latin” abstraction in the U.S. imaginary. “In this small southern town,” Fink writes, “the questions of who is an American, who will do the work, and under what conditions echoed with renewed insistence” (33).

16. I recognize of course the presence of Native Americans in the U.S. South. Although southeastern and southwestern Native populations are not analyzed in a similarly in-depth manner as Africana and Latino and Latina populations in this book, I am aware that they have navigated geographic and national tensions concerning the U.S. South and Jim Crow laws, notions of U.S. and hemispheric Americanness, and their construction as a “race.” Malinda Maynor Lowery’s study, Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation, frames the subject formation of North Carolina’s Lumbee Indians—also known as Tuscarora, Croatan, Cherokee, and Siouan—through a trifold subject formation that brings in Lumbee identity as well as their southernness and Americanness. Lowery explains that the Lumbee Tribe of Robeson County, North Carolina, has “crafted an identity as a People, a race, a tribe and a nation. They have done so not only as Indians but also as Southeners and Americans. And they have done so against the backdrop of some of the central issues in American history: race, class, politics, and citizenship.” Lumbees formed “their own sense of nationhood, […] adopting (and adapting to) racial segregation and creating political and social institutions that protected their distinct identity” (2010: xii).

17. Cuadros characterizes this Latino and Latina silent migration in the rural South to poultry-processing work available in Siler City, North Carolina. This industry is unlike other agricultural enterprises: the meatpacking and poultry-processing plants have a “year-round, six days a week, three shifts” schedule (2006: 12). Cuadros chronicles the ethnoracial and linguistic tensions between white and African American Siler City residents and Latinos and Latinas. He accounts for the latter group’s facing of prejudice and fear in that town’s public schools. Siler City citizens “needed the Latino workers to man the chicken plants and keep their economy going, but they didn’t necessarily want the people or their children to live with them or share their resources” (41). Cuadros perceives that Siler City’s townspeople cope with the Latino and Latina presence through “stages similar to the five stages of grief.” The steps for such a process brings about “denial, where communities ignore the presence of Latino workers in their town. The next stage is anger. The third stage is bargaining, and sometimes people would say that as soon as the economy took a downturn the Latinos would leave. The fourth is depression. […] The last stage, of course, is acceptance, and in 1999, Siler City was nowhere near accepting the Latino population. Siler City was angry” (42). Most striking is Cuadros’s recount of a 2000 KKK rally in Siler City featuring David Duke, “the former grand dragon of the KKK in Louisiana and U.S. Senate candidate” (47). The mass gathering objected to the “unburdenable strain on the indigenous residents here, our traditions, our institutions, and our infrastructure.” Whiteness is indigenized in this instance, preceding any “other” group. Siler City’s African Americans, however, denounced the protest: “They reasoned that if it were still possible for Klan supporters to hold an open rally after all the previous suffering, there was no guarantee they were any safer than before” (46–47).

18. For Edwards, décalage—“one of the many French words that resists translation into English” but that can nonetheless be thought of as “‘gap,’ ‘discrepancy,’ ‘time-lag,’ or ‘interval’”—furnishes a model for Africana groups through “the very weave of culture” that paradoxically brings up “a haunting gap or discrepancy that allows the African diaspora to ‘step’ and ‘move’ in various articulations” (2003: 13–15).

19. Conventionally, passing has typified, as historian Martha A. Sandweiss denotes it, a practice that “generally involves adopting a particular identity to move toward greater legal and social privilege. It might mean taking on a different gender, or ethnic or national identity, but it most often involves the assumption of a different racial identity. And since, in the United States, social privilege has been associated with lighter-colored skin, passing usually entails concealing one’s African American heritage to assume a white identity. The entire practice hinges on a peculiar idea” (2009: 7). Mary Bucholtz also elaborates on the academic fields that dissect this “peculiar idea,” making it known that “whereas gender theorists celebrate passing as an achievement, a transcendence of sexual difference, in ethnic studies the phenomenon is generally considered an evasion of racism, an escape that is available only to individuals who can successfully represent themselves as white” (1995: 352). But whiteness is not a linear end for all subjects. There is an overlapping instability within blackness, brownness, dark brownness, and whiteness. These colorings pass and tinge one another in the creation of new biographical moments that attempt to forge a language of selfhood, nation, and ethnicity. Bucholtz is mindful of these possibilities, writing, “passing is not a one-time event but a never-completed process of achieving a position in a recognized category” (354).

20. Charles W. Chesnutt seemed to have this point in mind with his depiction of U.S. African Americans and the alternative routes some took to access the benefits conferred on whiteness within the color line. One of his protagonists in The House behind the Cedars (1900) implores that he and his sister must be taken for themselves alone, maintaining “we are a new people” (1993: 57). This newness concentrates on access and self-invention rather than on the exceptionalist idea of being a “rare”—or even a “unique”—American of mixed race.

21. Sonia Saldívar-Hull also applies notions of a “larger political family” (2007: 3)—as evinced in Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera—and a “Familia de Mujeres” in Feminism on the Border (2000: 56–57).

22. These equivalencies between what Cohn identifies as the South and Spanish America engender “a fundamental paradigm structuring social organization and relations, as well as leaving a legacy of strict social hierarchization and a deeply rooted aversion to miscegenation” (1999: 6).

23. Though I express and attempt to open a new interpretive window into new subjectivities, migrants, and migrations, I wish to stress Alfred J. López’s productive prompt: “Of course the places and peoples that make up today’s Global South are not exactly new; it is rather their commingling and alignment under the banner of globalization and its aftermath, among other things, that distinguishes today’s Global South from yesterday’s Third World and other such terms” (2007b: v).

24. On this point about African–New World studies, consult Davies et al. (2003).

25. Adams and Phillips Casteel admit that they “are not the first to argue for a connection between Canada and the Americas” (2005: 7). This admission does not diminish their contribution to Canadian, American, and Latin American studies. They offer an intersecting schema between Canadian and broader continental frameworks. Their corollaries for “critical conversations about a hemispheric American Studies” include the following four points: “(1) Canada’s place in the history of slavery and the black diaspora; (2) Canada’s official policies of bilingualism and multiculturalism and its struggles with linguistic and cultural diversity; (3) The U.S.-Canadian border provides an opportunity to expand the borderlands paradigm from encounters between Mexican and Anglo cultures to a comparative view of contact zones across the Americas; and (4) Canadian discourses of racial hybridity may be seen as counterparts to the more well-known theories of Latin American proponents of mestizaje such as Simón Bolívar, José Martí, José Vasconcelos, and Roberto Fernandez Retámar” (8–11).

26. Juan Flores defines cultural remittances as “the ensemble of ideas, values, and expressive forms introduced into societies of origin by remigrants [returning emigrant nationals] and their families as they return ‘home,’ sometimes for the first time, for temporary visits or permanent re-settlement, and is transmitted through the increasingly pervasive means of telecommunications” (2009: 4). Cultural remittances are nonmonetary and “may bear even greater consequences than the ‘cash transfers.’” We need to “understand the potential deeper significance of all ‘transfers’ emanating from diasporas,” he adds, as “our notion of culture needs to embrace collective, ideological, as well as artistic meanings of the term” (9).

27. One could also take into account Harlem, the urban center of Alain Locke’s “New Negro.” This neighborhood is represented as a space whose diasporic blackness is not only wedded to the U.S. South. As a “race capital,” Harlem “has attracted the African, the West Indian, and the Negro American” (1997: 963). But the characteristics of what can be read as a Global South apply to the “New Negro,” as evidenced in the production of linguistically mixed Harlem publications. Locke notes that “Negro” newspapers “carry news material in English, French, and Spanish, gathered from all quarters of America, the West Indies, and Africa has maintained itself in Harlem for over five years” (968).

28. As Sandweiss references in Passing Strange, the biography of Clarence King, “an explorer of the American West, a geologist, an accomplished writer and storyteller” (2009: 3), the Southwest—namely, the territory between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada—began to be formally surveyed and mapped in 1867 by civilian scientists under the influence of the Northeast’s intellectual and political establishments. These men were employed by King, who was appointed and funded by the federal government as U.S. geologist in charge of the U.S. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel, a Southwest military operation that included graduates from Yale and Harvard Universities (48). Sandweiss writes that King’s expedition “represented American ambitions for the West writ at large. And King’s efficient field organization, emphasis on the practical uses of basic science, and new, more rigorous methods of topographic mapping provided a model and standard for the rest. The data he and his fellow survey leaders gathered aided economic development in the post–Civil War West, and the scientific reports, maps, popular literature, and stunning photographic views that flowed forth year after year built broad public support for western exploration as a valuable national enterprise” (50). Despite U.S. expansion, King was skeptic about whether “a vibrant American culture could thrive in the West.” Unlike Americans in the East, King found that “California people are not living in a tranquil, healthy, social régime” (60).

Ana Castillo’s query consequently bears pertinence, considering that the U.S. Southwest and West—as they come to be historically recorded—exist from the governmental and institutional circuits of the North. Equally salient is Castillo’s point of geographic interest, as it moves out of a U.S. North/U.S. South historical deadlock in terms of nation formation. Herewith, one cannot fail to mention, as well, Saldívar-Hull’s fierce remembrance of southern marginality on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands: “Living in Brownsville, Texas, meant living at the southernmost tip of the United States. When I was a child, the knowledge that we were at the bottom of the U.S. map made sense to me” (2000: 12).

29. Hill Collins proceeds to reference the exclusion of educator and activist Septima Clark, who remarked, “I found all over the South that whatever the man said had to be right. They had the whole say. A woman couldn’t say a thing” (1990: 8).

30. Palumbo-Liu argues that the “Asia Pacific paradigm is a crucial task for Asian American studies, one that might be facilitated by alternative modernities in South Asia, especially as the momentum toward the Pacific has been modified by the recent instabilities of Asian economies and new waves of South Asian populations have refigured America in critical ways.” The modernizing of America excluded certain groups but accommodated others. It framed “the appearance and function of Asian America […] [as] deeply rooted in the histories of both willed and forced migrations, of both national and global economic change, of wars of colonization, decolonization, and global strife” (1999: 6). U.S. practices of exclusion and accommodation led to a “crisis management,” where “American development as a global power sets in motion a complex history of strategizing the precise nature of that [Asian and Asian American] incorporation, and of reading the effects of increased contact upon the national body” (8). Palumbo-Liu asks, “how to understand Asians if not to plumb the psychic content of the body, to see the possible affinities and points of alienation” (7)?

31. It has been assessed that the South’s Jim Crow segregation has now become “Juan Crow” due to strict anti-immigration laws and attitudes. The name has been linked to Alabama’s anti-immigration measure, HB 56, which directs law enforcement officers to “act as de facto immigration agents during routine traffic stops and requiring school systems to document the citizenship status of new students.” Juan Crow is “a play on Jim Crow, the moniker for segregation in the pre–civil rights South—because of the likelihood that Hispanics will be subjected to racial profiling and dubious detentions” (Person, 2011). Roberto Lovato has likened Juan Crow to anti-immigration politics in Georgia. Juan Crow, as a regime, is “the matrix of laws, social customs, economic institutions and symbolic systems enabling the physical and psychic isolation needed to control and exploit undocumented immigrants” (2008).

32. Du Bois described Atlanta’s geography as “South of the North, yet North of the South” (1996b: 63). Rubén Martínez synthesized the power dynamics informing the hierarchical normativity of the North/South he encountered—in Los Angeles, Mexico City, and San Salvador—in this manner: “[W]herever I am now, I must be more than two. I must be North and South in the North and in the South” (1993: 5). Martínez’s social locations, positionings, and meanings call for linkages that disharmonize the fixity of each location, or in Jon Smith’s estimation, “postplantation economies in the New World, and, with appropriate qualification, throughout much of the Third World or Global South” (2004: 144).

33. Robert McKee Irwin, Claudia Sadowski-Smith, and Sophia A. McClennen articulate three notable breaks in the study of the U.S.-Mexico border (Irwin), the Canada--U.S. frontier (Sadowski-Smith), and inter-American studies (McClennen). Irwin upholds that U.S.-Mexico border studies needs to integrate Mexican perspectives into U.S.-based discussions of this southern boundary to challenge “implicit hierarchies that go beyond economics, technology, and military might” and enter “the realms of academics and publishing, the production of knowledges.” More scholarly reciprocity is found from South to North, a case advanced by Irwin: “It is certainly more common, for example, for Mexican scholars of Mexican culture to be informed and conscious of what has been published on Mexican culture in English by scholars at U.S. universities than for U.S.-based scholars of American culture to know or care about what Mexicans working at Mexican universities and publishing in Spanish may contribute to the field” (2001: 510). He adds, “While it is true that Mexican Americans are marginalized in racist U.S. society, in the borderlands themselves, hierarchies are more complex. Chicano culture is not synonymous with U.S.-Mexico border culture. Chicano culture very specifically reflects the lives of Mexican immigrants (first generation or otherwise) in the geopolitical terrain of the United States. The borderlands of Sonora or Nuevo León are not equivalent to those of New Mexico or Southern California” (517). Irwin sparks meaningful and convincing observations. While I understand that he explicitly focuses here on U.S.-Mexico border studies, U.S. border studies and its emergent knowledges should not be limited to the U.S.-Mexico or Mexico-U.S. dyad. Mexico also shares a 750-mile southern border with Belize and Guatemala, and an understanding of U.S.-Canadian border politics necessitates epistemic terms as well.

Sadowski-Smith, for instance, has drawn on Canadian border narratives to consider how this cultural production symbolizes “Canadian internal diversity and its difference from ethnic frameworks in the USA.” She marks Canada’s “declining economic, political, and cultural autonomy, while also signifying the country’s growing relationship to other parts of the hemisphere.” In general, Canada’s five-thousand-mile border with the United States has indexed a division demonstrating that country’s “political and cultural autonomy from the USA, as a marginal space that signifies Canada’s marginal position in the world, and as a sanctuary for U.S. Americans, including indigenous peoples and slaves during the nineteenth century and Vietnam War resistors, draft evaders and other political dissenters during the twentieth century” (2005: 65–66).

McClennen calls for the displacement of U.S. culture in inter-American studies to move to other comparative models, as U.S. reference points have served as the predominant “central signifier” to investigate the region. She writes, “If Inter-American Studies are to effectively dislocate the United States from the center of the hemisphere’s academic purview, then comparisons of works from within Latin America should also form part of the work of Inter-American Studies.” McClennen’s illustration of corresponding research includes “a comparison of the feminist theories of Clarice Lispector, Luisa Valenzuela, Diamela Eltit, and Cristina Peri Rossi, or the political aesthetic of the Bolivian Grupo Ukumau and the Peruvian Grupo Chaski” (2005: 393–94). These examples and possible approaches are indisputably important. Yet we should also recall that this proposal suggests a distinctive Inter-South American dialogue that for the most part overlooks Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.

34. Jovita González and Eve Raleigh’s Caballero: A Historical Novel takes us to the slavery that existed in the U.S. South’s plantation system. They link it to the lowest class of workers in Texas as well as in the unfolding U.S. Southwest in 1846. González and Raleigh’s fragment on life in the Virginia plantation and its parallel with occupied Texas reads: “Black slaves! […] ‘A man should be a slave only if he wishes it. Slavery as such does not exist here [in Texas], but we have peonage which is almost as bad. If your [American] nation is so progressive, why does it not free its slaves? Only freedom of the individual is progress’” (2008: 45).

35. The Great Migration, for example, elicited dreams about America and freedom through the North/South divide and African American odysseys to the North. Hazel Rowley sums it up in Richard Wright: The Life and Times: “In the North, wages for blacks could be as much as four times higher than wages in the South. […] You would not be lynched for running a successful business. You could vote. You could live in a brick house and send your children to school for the whole of the school year and you could sit anywhere you liked on public transport and not be bothered. You did not have to step off the sidewalk if a white came along, or raise your hat, or say ‘yes-sir,’ or wait until all whites were served first before you could buy your newspaper” (2001: 52). Rowley’s portrayal of the Ohio River during these migrations evokes a North/South borderland. It functioned as “the border between slavery and freedom. Southern blacks still see it as a gateway to freedom” (50).

36. But we also find a disjunction: while some scholars insist on the academic “openness” of Latino/a studies, such multiple entrances are not extended to the Latino or Latina subject, who is always presumably bound by a discernible way of being “Latino.” Angie Chabram-Dernersesian’s words hold relevance in terms of the other fields with which Latino/a studies dialogues. At the same time, I am pushing for the study of Latino and Latina theories and bodies through comparative approaches that also focus on the commonplaces and acts through which Latinities speak. Chabram-Dernersesian comments, “With regard to the ways Latina/o studies get articulated in the academy, I would agree with those who propose that what is required is ‘numerous entrances, exits,’ and ‘escape routes’ as well as ‘collaboration versus subsumption.’ Already the trend of Latina/o studies is toward the dispersal of the lines of affiliation, not the promised self-contained overarching umbrella. (The study of Latinas/os can be found in a number of diverse departments including women’s studies, law schools, feminist studies, ethnic studies, Native American studies, Black studies, cultural studies, gay and lesbian studies, border studies, and community studies)” (2003: 116).

37. To the notion of “Transamerica,” a “Transafrica” can also be appended, as the TransAfrica Forum attests. The TransAfrica Forum is “the oldest and largest African American human rights and social justice advocacy organization promoting diversity and equity in the foreign policy arena and justice for the African World” (2011). Consult also Early (2003).

38. These epistemic terms also have resonances with Mignolo’s theory of “border gnosis,” where he aspires to “open up the notion of ‘knowledge’ beyond cultures of scholarships” (2000: 9).

39. For recent contributions to the widening field of inter-American studies, consult Fox (2005).

40. Though not grounding her theoretical contributions through the optic of the Global South, Jody Berland also articulates a double consciousness when it comes to her interrogation of Canadian studies in relation—and contrast—to U.S.-centered Americanisms that slight Canadian discourses. Berland contends in North of Empire that Canadians experience “a form of a double consciousness similar to yet profoundly different from the ‘doubling’ of black consciousness described by race theorists such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and Paul Gilroy. In this writing, the black person sees himself from the vantage point of both the other and himself, and experiences an irresolvable schism between the two perceptions. Rather than remaining invisible behind the veil of the raced body, the Canadian hides behind verisimilitude, ‘passing’ as the other while recognizing the other not as oneself. This vantage point is double-reflected through a one-way mirror in which ‘America’ does not see Canada at all. The nonknowing of the other is part of what the Canadian knows, and it shapes her scholarship and art” (2009: 3). Canada’s northern subalternity conflicts with the hegemonic neighbor that geographically stands south of its borders.

Taking us to the geopolitics of Panama and the West Indies, Sonja Stephenson Watson implements and problematizes a Du Boisian double consciousness in conjunction with the “‘duality’ of being both Panamanian and Caribbean” (2009: 231). As she gauges it, specific contemporary Panamanian writers—Carlos Wilson, Gerardo Maloney, and Carlos Russell—negotiate their “Anglophone Caribbean heritage with their Hispanic heritage that is often viewed in conflict with the [nonblack] nation-state” (232). Anglophone West Indians, who are also “bilingual speakers of Spanish and English and navigate culturally and linguistically between Panama, Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States” (231), do not correspond “with the national imaginary, which promoted homogeneity over racial differences” (235). Their oeuvre disputes “national anti-West Indian sentiment and make[s] an effort to integrate the Anglophone Caribbean into the national discourse of panameñidad,” thus contributing to “debates on race, language, and identity in their 20th-century and 21st-century texts” (237–38).

41. Connell calls attention to the fact that Du Bois “connected race issues in the metropole with movements in the colonial world and, increasingly, with the structure of global capitalism” (2007: 20). Du Bois’s double consciousness was undeniably fashioned from an Africana framework that incorporated his genealogical story of New England, the U.S. South, and the Afro-Caribbean. David Levering Lewis has recounted that class and social interactions were at work also. He writes that Du Bois’s “sense of identity or belonging was spun out between the poles of two distinct racial groups—black and white—and two dissimilar social classes—lower and upper—to form that double consciousness of being he would famously describe at age thirty-five” (1993: 12).

42. And yet as Caroline F. Levander has pointed out, Du Bois’s Pan-Africanism is hardly linked to other spheres in the Americas like Cuba. “Less familiar” is Du Bois’s “interest in Cuba’s struggle for independence from Spain. […] Most scholars have tended to overlook the significance of Cuba for Du Bois’s thinking, focusing instead on his attention to Haiti and its influence on his commitment to Pan-African nationalism. Yet Du Bois remained interested in Cuba throughout his career, making many trips to Cuba, [and] engaging in extensive correspondence with Cuban political leaders such as Fernando Ortiz” (2006: 158–59). Du Bois’s Pan-Africanism can be examined and supplemented through more heterogeneous geographies and knowledges.

43. Carby has noted, Du Bois’s “theory of double-consciousness has been so widely adopted to explain the nature of the African American soul.” The Souls of Black Folk, she adds, “is so frequently taken to be representative of black intellectual, psychological, and existential reality” (1998: 2).

44. Connell further clarifies on this general theory and its possible effects: “Overwhelmingly, general theory is produced in the metropole. Does this matter? The sociology of knowledge would suggest that it does. On the other hand, the very generality of general theory, the aspiration to general relevance, implies that this genre could escape from local determinations” (2007: 28). When I mention general theory and the Global South, I am also inferring its possibility as a shifting intellectual undertaking that labors through ideas and frameworks from “the periphery that have to be considered as part of the dialogue of theory” (46).

45. Provocatively, African American writer Gayl Jones provides a margin-to-margin discussion of the asymmetrical location of Africana and Chicano books. In her novel Mosquito, Jones records a Chicana character, Delgadina, as saying, “I figure when they figure out how to commercialize Chicano literature and put us into the category of Entertainment, we’ll get some popularity. Well, there are some publishers who are publishing some Chicano-oriented books and books in Spanish, but that’s mostly because of the numbers of Chicano readers. We aren’t as popular as African-American writers with white readers, though. And mostly we’re published by little publishers, like E. D. Santos” (1999: 95).

46. As of this writing, three autobiographical narratives by and about notable men who were born in the United States during the 1910s have been restored and published in the first decade of the twenty-first century. These works include Grillo’s Black Cuban, Black American; John Hope Franklin’s Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin (2005); and Ben Vinson III’s account, Flight: The True Story of Virgil Richardson, a Tuskegee Airman in Mexico (2004). Both Franklin and Grillo wrote their respective stories later on in life as accomplished individuals, whereas Richardson’s autobiography, while told in the first person, is registered through Vinson’s meticulous historian filter and the questions he solicited from his subject. Richardson’s oral reflections were narrated to Vinson. It is striking that Richardson’s text is not conceived in ways that parallel testimonial literature and the latter’s incorporation of socioeconomic, ethnic, and political marginalities and struggles. I do not seek transparent literary categories for Vinson’s characterization of Richardson’s life. But as these life narratives are being literarily and historically recuperated, it is important to reflect on these works’ solidity. It is not only the autobiographical subject who “is radically in question,” as Robert Folkenflik has written, but also the “different vantage points” that publicly shape these modes of self-conception (1993: 12).

In the context of Grillo’s memoir, it is worth coupling his life story with a contemporary, such as African American historian John Hope Franklin (1915–2009). Read together, Grillo and Franklin highlight the public representation of a biographical continuity—even literary beginnings—touching not only on the self’s reconstruction but also on the importance of restoring particular Jim Crow histories. These projects are attentive to a “collective” (racial) narrative—vis-à-vis individual success—of American achievement. Franklin’s autobiography, Mirror to America, admits that “Unfortunately, I kept no records of my life until I was a tenured professor and chair of the department at Brooklyn College” (2005: ix). We find a conscientious chronicler who regulates the course of his autobiography through what can be verifiably recorded and granted archival permanence. Grillo’s and Franklin’s life stories are written after they gained social and political realization, a notable feat since they overcame what Nell Irvin Painter calls the invisible/hypervisible color line at a time prior to the institutionalization of affirmative action (2008: 36).

Ben Vinson’s Flight has resonances with Grillo insofar as we find correlative Latinities. Flight is a historical portrayal of Virgil Richardson (1916–2004), an Arkansas-born African American who was “part of a sub-current of the black diaspora, a member of a small clique of black military servicemen who retired in Mexico” (2004: 2). Arriving in 1950, Richardson lived in Mexico for forty-seven years, returning to Texas in 1997. Virgil’s story is notable because he was a former Tuskegee airman, a cluster of elite fliers who inhabit “a special place in the mythology of America.” As Richardson recalled his accomplishment, “Learning to fly at Tuskegee was a marvelous and unique opportunity. Most whites in America didn’t believe that blacks had the reflexes or intelligence to fly planes” (39). Tuskegee airmen “were among the ‘talented tenth’ of their generation, whose pedigree among blacks was unquestioned, and whose patriotic service to their country would eventually earn wide respect and praise” (3). Richardson’s Mexican migration was part of larger pursuits, as Vinson records it, by African American GIS who “began branching out internationally after World War II, with many taking advantage of the GI bill to improve their education.” Mexico provided a “cheap alternative to crowded U.S. schools. In the 1960s and 1970s, black vets from the Korean and Vietnam wars added to the mix. Even wounded soldiers found a new lease on life south of the border, settling, marrying, and thriving in the wonderful Mexican climate” (3).

47. “A common racial identity did not bridge the gulf that existed between the two groups,” Grillo mentions. “Black Americans spoke English and followed Protestant religions. Black Cubans spoke Spanish and practiced Catholicism” (2000: 11). These black distinctions differ through Cuban and American nationalities.

48. Gary R. Mormino and George E. Pozzetta record that Ybor City became “a new industrial enterprise” in 1886, the year that “workers put the finishing touches on the magnificent Statue of Liberty” (1987: 63). This industrial boom expanded from 1886 to 1900, a formative period that marked “the rapid and uninterrupted growth of an industry” (68). Curiously, this Latin boom—largely indebted to the recruitment of skilled labor from Spain and Cuba—is characterized through food. Mormino and Pozzetta note that “along with their tote bags, Cubans and Spaniards brought a cultural vitality that helped create an ethnic paella unique for the South” (70). Ybor City’s Latinness was growing through Sicilian migrants to Florida and New Orleans (81). Italians in Florida “labored in the phosphate mines of Tampa and on construction crews at the magnificent Tampa Bay Hotel” and even went on to establish a “Little Italy” in the mid-1890s (82). For Mormino and Pozzetta, this signifies “the building of a community” in Ybor City that “centered around Seventh Avenue and Eighteenth Street, which remained the settlement’s core for the next seventy-five years” (86).

49. Román de la Campa finds that Arte Público Press’s RUSHLH’s texts are a “major effort” that launch a U.S. Latino and Latina literary boom with beginnings “from each of [the] historically established groups in the United States.” This literary heritage is “analogous on a minor scale to the Latin American literary ferment of the past thirty years [that] has provided an interesting retrospective framework, through which the long history of the U.S. Hispanic heritage is now being discovered and rediscovered. Its meaning, as with any other complex historical object-subject, will be open to debate, but it promises to challenge any simple desire to affirm or deny a pan-ethnic Latino identity. It also promises to complicate how these groups and their cultural production are viewed by scholars and critics, though both the Anglo and Latin American literary establishments—but especially the latter—have resisted acknowledging this considerable corpus” (1994: 63). What interests me about Black Cuban, Black American is precisely its embodiment of another literary tension. Grillo’s new mode of self-articulation is an immersion into a (Latined) American blackness that is also part of the African American canon.

50. This literary struggle also has implications for how we read Grillo’s function as an autobiographer. What are his inquiries into the self, as he develops an epistemology of his existence’s coetaneous dimensions? Put another way, what is the larger self-transformation at the level of black and Latin epistemologies? Profoundly embedded to “his” selfhood are the “evidentiary” components of his categorical blackness and Cubanness as well as their textual negation of each other. Grillo’s lines of thought as a being-in-the-world are narratively skewed. An autobiographer, William Gass bids, is also “a shaping self: it is the consciousness of oneself as a consciousness among all these other minds, an awareness born out much later than the self it studies, and a self whose existence was fitful, intermittent, for a long time, before it was able to throw a full beam upon the life already lived and see there a pattern, as a plowed field seen from a plane reveals the geometry of the tractor’s path” (1994: 51). An autobiographer’s new consciousness requires an inner self that also distantiates itself from the representativeness of the narratively constructed self. Such distance—or “othering” of Grillo’s Cubanness and blackness—demands that we ask, how does he “rewrite” each black and Cuban situation and their turning points?

51. Wald’s take on official stories reads, “I use the term ‘official’ because of the authority they command, articulated, as they are, in relation to the rights and privileges of individuals. They determine the status of an individual in the community. Neither static nor monolithic, they change in response to competing narratives of the nation that must be engaged, absorbed, and retold: the fashioning and endless refashioning of ‘a people’” (1995: 2).

52. Grillo’s entry into the “American way of life” is not white Americanness but a black Latined Americanness that also registers—to make use of Anna Julia Cooper’s efforts in A Voice from the South — dissatisfaction with the American present. This discontentment builds on what Cooper, a North Carolinian, called a “satisfaction in American institutions [that] rests not on the fruition we now enjoy, but [that] springs rather from the possibilities and promise that are inherent in the system, though as yet, perhaps, far in the future” (1998: 54). If the promise of a satisfactory American future is unknowable and unimaginable, so is the arrival of the Latin subject to America. What do we make of such a typically omitted subject—and in changeable manifestations of Latinness? How do we insert it as a possibility and a promise that inherently spring in the American processes and institutions that un-Americanize it? Like Cooper’s insistence that the projected voice of the South fails to consider the standpoints of “the expectant Black woman” as an “important witness” to social thought emanating from the South, Grillo’s book brings to the fore what Cooper called “one silent strain in the Silent South” (51). Latinity, in this instance, refers to the Cuban cultural practices that Grillo addresses, customs and meanings that do not necessarily impart Cuban but Latin. Despite being told from a racialized man’s perspective overlooking Latina voices from the South, Grillo’s other layer of the Latino Silent South makes known that Latino and Latina stories are still in the making and have yet to be fully recorded.

53. Jennifer DeVere Brody cogitates on punctuation marks and their proliferation as “visual (re)marks” (2008: 2). She posits, “Punctuation is not a proper object: it is neither speech nor writing; art nor craft; sound nor silence. It may be neither here nor there and yet somehow it is everywhere” (3). Punctuation is marked by “ambiguous movements.” Depending on the editorial setting, they “function as shadow figures that both compose and haunt writing’s substance” (5). Grillo appears to underscore a robust comma as a subject of punctuation as well as a deferred selfhood that cannot intrude on the present jagged mapping of the past through Arte Público Press’s steps to recover the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage.

54. We could recollect James Weldon Johnson’s discussion in Along This Way of the kinds of families he encounters when teaching in rural Hampton, Georgia. During one stop, Johnson meets a homeowner caught between the crevices of being “white” and “colored.” The homeowner is described as “an intelligent, light-complexioned man, who had a job with a railroad; the wife was a comely light-brown woman; and there was a pretty little girl named Alma.” Johnson does not discount the rich spectrum of the color line as well as the nuances behind the girl’s name. He immediately follows with this contention: “I wondered how her parents came to choose the name, a word that in Spanish means soul” (2000: 106). Alma, it should also be noted, means “soul” in Latin. This seeming itinerant moment in Johnson’s autobiography pushes the reader to think about black-brown exchanges—lexical doppelgängers—through this family’s southern Latinities. One indeed wonders how they—and their names—came to be and how they passed into the racial, historical, and geographic realm of indigent U.S. African American rural life. And yet there is also something obstinately unmoving in this customary mode of passing. The name Alma eclipses, not so subtly, another deviation of lo negro. Though Johnson does not expand on other forms of blackness in this rustic part of Georgia (to retain his phrasing), one could interpret such a rupturing moment of the black-white color divide as substantial enough in that it stands out in Johnson’s memory as well as text (113).

Karla F. C. Holloway has written about Johnson’s representative mode of remembrance in Along This Way, alluding to the “fragility of the recollections,” in the context of mother-son readerly and artistic formation. Johnson intentionally filled his narrative “spaces with ellipses as if to indicate that even though these are ‘intensely vivid’ memories, they are vignettes, and they have for him as much visual memory as they do power of recall. He allows his reader to fill in the spaces” (2006: 107). This “Alma vignette” can be framed through a similar literary and interpretive milieu. Johnson’s sentence omissions become critical ellipses whose elliptical blanks are filled differently by different readers. What proves extraordinarily elucidating at auditory, linguistic, and visual levels is the possibility that this Alma moment presents: the continuous remix of blackness and brownness as “a sampling machine where any sound can be you” (P. Miller, 2008: 5). This general “you” lends itself to Africana, Latino, and Latina spectrums. This point does not suggest that I am unencumbered by historical accuracy, as assigned to Johnson’s period. Rather, I want to access and incorporate another interpretive reentry for evaluating general constructions of U.S. “ethnics.” To not be receptive to or deny other readings of a Latin Alma is to endeavor in a literalist analytic take and “translation” of what amounts to, for me, a turning point in perceptions about U.S. African American authenticity in the South. This noteworthy moment can also serve as commentary for readers to extrapolate whether they can hear and tell the difference between an Alma that is U.S. African American or Latina. Since Alma is being narratively represented in a Latined fashion, the question that arises is, what do we care to hear (or not hear) when “something” works against what may be too easily definable?

55. Irving Lewis Allen delineates in The Language of Ethnic Conflict that the term wop appeared in American slang by the mid-1890s, “near the peak of Italian immigration to the United States,” as “a derogatory epithet for Italians.” He annotates how “the offensive nickname for an Italian probably derives from the Neapolitan dialect’s guappo, a dandy (literally a handsome man), later used as a Neapolitan greeting and by other Italians to refer to a Neapolitan” (1983: 118). Allen expounds that “a popular but probably wrong story has it that wop derives from the acronym for the phrase With Out Papers (or sometimes Passport). […] The With-Out-Papers story for wop is seductive because it is consistent with the fact that later nicknames for other groups did emerge from the bureaucratic insensitivities of the host society” (119). He adds that wop has also signified Work-On-Pavement, “probably inspired by the occupational stereotype of Italians as concentrated in the masonry, construction, and road-building industries” (120).

56. Mormino and Pozzetta note that the Afro-Cuban presence in Ybor City constituted “13 percent of the Cuban population” in 1900. They observe that “Black Cubans, like white Cubans, were extremely mobile geographically, shuttling frequently between Tampa and the island” (1987: 79).

57. Earl Lewis and Heidi Ardizzone focus on the media uproar resulting from the 1924 interracial marriage between Alice Jones, a black woman, and Leonard Rhinelander, a white trust-fund heir. Their relationship and the court case to annul their marriage “prompted outraged editorials regarding interracial mixing, racial definitions, white manhood, upper-class morals, working class respectability, and the place of racial and class hierarchies in a democratic society” (2001: xiii). The national sensationalism and impact of “The Rhinelander Case,” as it has come to be known, was also referenced in Nella Larsen’s novel, Passing (1929), a connection that has been widely studied (cf. Larsen, 2007; Madigan, 1990). Rhinelander was hailed as a successor to a “well-heeled family” listed in the Social Register. The Rhinelanders “descended from several of New York’s founding families.” They were “an American version of aristocracy” (Lewis and Ardizzone, 2001: xi), making their fortune “as provision merchants, shipping agricultural goods to the West Indies” (9). By contrast, Jones was the daughter of a colored man, and as newspapers of the time described this family’s “disparate class standing,” a “cabby” (11).

What interests me from Lewis and Ardizzone’s discussion is the Latin linkage that surfaces for both Jones and Grillo. In that coloring of blackness, Jones and Grillo point to the roundabout paths that blackness takes, as opposed to steering only toward the “main road”: the one-drop rule of black racial identity. Analyzing Jones’s media coverage, Lewis and Ardizzone write, “Again and again papers tried to describe Alice, an endeavor that actually painted a range of images of her appearance: She was ‘dark’; ‘she was ‘of light complexion’; she was ‘dusky’; she was a ‘pretty girl of the Spanish type’; she was ‘of medium height, dark and of a Spanish or Latin type of features. Her straight black hair is worn in a long bob’; she was ‘a comely young woman with bobbed black hair and a complexion of Spanish tint.’” These statements seem to work through the rich semiotics of blackness and Latinness, an operating Latinities of sorts. Though the remarks seem to invariably translate into blackness, they also paradoxically undermine “the most straightforward definition of blackness […] that someone is black who looks black” (2001: 24).

58. At this point of our discussion, Julie M. Weise’s research on the race and class dimensions of the “Mexican generation” and the “Mexican American generation” in New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta demands special note to broaden our Latino and Latina compass of the U.S. South. The former pertains to “Mexican immigrants of the 1910s and 1920s who created homeward-looking cultures as bulwarks against a society that had begun to exclude and racialize them”; the latter speaks to those whose “service in World War II was an integral component of a new political strategy, and in some cases identity shift, emphasizing U.S. citizenship” (2009: 247). Weise’s work, dating from 1908 to 1939, adds an interesting configuration to the corpus of the U.S. South: her analysis revolves around the sociocultural acquisition of whiteness by Mexicans and Mexican Americans, which came into being from abroad. Mexican government representatives, in confronting “the black-white eugenic binary of U.S. white supremacy” (250), exercised a “banner of Mexican nationalism” that granted migrants a social status affiliated with U.S. whiteness (269). Weise contends that “the leadership of Mexico’s New Orleans consulate and of its Mexican Honorary Commission in Gunnison, Mississippi […] [engaged in] distinctly Mexican strategies which Mexicans of all social classes pursued in their quest to attain and retain white status in the U.S. South” (249–50). These commissions “promoted Mexican culture, organized politically, and offered communal support” (258), under a type of Mexicanness—a cultural whitening—that emphasized North-South “cordial relations” (269). This is not to imply, however, that Mexicans and Mexican Americans were not racialized in the South. This point is not amiss in Weise’s calculations. “Certainly,” she claims, “Mexicans arriving in the South at the close of the Mexican Revolution faced the possibility of becoming racialized not as white nor black, but ‘Mexican’” (255). Particularly striking is that although “by 1920 the federal census listed 1,242 Mexican-born whites in New Orleans,” it is possible that “an additional ten percent lived there as well, classified as negro or mulatto” (252). All to say, then, that Grillo’s coloring has Mesoamerican counterparts, as negro and mulato are inhabited by Latinos and Latinas. Negro and mulatto do not just stem from U.S. blackness.

59. Still, Grillo expresses disappointment with an institution that did not trust him “in asserting my individuality outside the campus on my own.” His individual and institutional differences are framed through political and religious ideologies that are not in line with Xavier University. Since he was considered a “renegade” on campus with “Communist leanings,” Grillo intimates that such political differences may have been what led to the university not granting him the highest honors. “Graduation seemed like a bad dream,” he bemoans, “with my classmates inquiring, ‘What happened?’ Visibly embarrassed and upset, I had not learned to be cool under fire.” But Grillo, the author with finessed political experience, returns to this moment of disappointment. He seems to want to reconcile these differences by writing, “In the perspective of the years, however, it is not appropriate or necessary to focus on the negative aspects of my largely pleasant years at Xavier. Xavier took me in, one of many penniless if deserving young people of college age.” His racial uplift story is obliged to admit that Xavier “provided me with a superb education, which I have used advantageously for my own growth in life, for my family’s benefit and, I hope, for the benefit of the many communities that I have served” (2000: 89–90).

60. The organization’s website notes, “The Unity Council (officially known as the Spanish Speaking Unity Council) was founded in 1964, incorporated in 1967, and received 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status in 1968. The Unity Council is a non-profit community development corporation committed to enriching the quality of life of families primarily in the Fruitvale District of Oakland. Its mission is to help families and individuals build wealth and assets through comprehensive programs of sustainable economic, social and neighborhood development.”

61. With Amparo’s exception, members of her household appear as castrated figures, including Grillo’s stepfather, Luis, a “classic passive observer.” He was “thoroughly defeated and humorless” but played “an indirect role” in Grillo’s quest for sex education. Grillo credits Luis with “a few helpful, exciting lessons.” Taking “a peep through the keyhole in the bedroom,” Grillo saw his mother and stepfather “carry out amazing gyrations under the blanket.” They made “intriguing noises, poorly contained by the thin walls” (2000: 25). The mother’s repression seems to be released in the bedroom, but it bears mentioning that two humorless individuals perform this undoing. Grillo’s undercover investigation made him “wild with excitement” but “afraid of being caught, and guilty, because I knew I was doing something wrong.” While illustrating adolescent inadequacies and anxieties around sexual matters, Grillo’s representation also intimates a search for who may be symbolically big enough to dominate Amparo. That figure may as well be Grillo, a beneficiary of his mother’s “wisdom and strength” (24). Soon after describing his mother’s sexual desires, Grillo assigns political respectability to Amparo. He relates that she legally married the passive and seldom employed Luis, thereby recording how his stepfather established “his right to be in the house and to sleep with her” (26).

62. As Gina M. Pérez, Frank A. Guridy, and Adrian Burgos Jr. put across in their edited volume, Beyond El Barrio: Everyday Life in Latina/o America (2010), scholars have examined Latinoness and Latinaness as a problem and threat to America. But what also warrants more analytic attention is how Latinos and Latinas become a problem with concomitant black problems. Du Bois’s problem, let us recall, is about the meaning of blackness. The question remains how Latino and Latina—as an amalgam of many things—pose a particular brown or dark brown problem akin to the meaning of blackness. To borrow from Lawrence D. Bobo (2010), how might we articulate, as a counterpart to blackness, Latino and Latina (brown/dark brown) “human strivings”? By translating the problem as Latino and Latina, Du Bois’s formation of the problem stays in its inert blackness, as though the problem of blackness has not migrated to other U.S. ethnoracial domains. The Latino and Latina problem, by contrast, holds a prominent place through the ethnoracially ambiguous Latino/Latina label, not through a dehumanizing symbology of being blackened. I suggest that Latino and Latina ambiguity, and its appended, monolithized brownness, are part of the contemporary American problem. U.S. Latinoness and Latinaness must be dissected not just through its perceived inherent brownness but also through the overlooked body politics of a problematic, caricatured blackness, brownness, and dark brownness that inform and move through U.S. African Americanness, Latinoness, and Latinaness.

63. Du Bois’s peerless excerpt reads, “After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (2003: 9). For an analysis of the sources from which Du Bois drew his own articulation of double consciousness—that is, European romanticism and American transcendentalism as well as the field of psychology—see Bruce (1992) and Gates and Oliver (1999).

64. My reference to epistemic lines of thinking draws from Mignolo’s appraisal that if the problem of the twentieth century was measured through the color line, dilemmas for the twenty-first will fall along what he has identified as the “epistemic line” (2010).

65. This ingression into double consciousness also invites a reinterpretation of how Du Bois’s framework has been articulated. For instance, Toi Derricotte could account for such an open double consciousness through the various self-vehicles that are always “there,” open for dialogue, and receptive to meanings unmasking the things that estrange us from the world. In her creative nonfiction project, The Black Notebooks, Derricotte writes about the many people, subjectivities, and translocations she embodies. Notice the following declaration: “I was watching the world as if I were looking through the eyes of the most vicious racist, but I was also looking through the eyes of white literary critics, black literary critics, of light-skinned black women and dark-skinned black women, of middle class and poor. I was looking through the eyes of my mother, cousins, and aunts. I had to find a way, not only to go around competing and repressive voices, but to address them, to listen and record, to disarm them and to bring them to another perspective, to resolve conflicting aims. Voice becomes, not a synthesis of opposing voices, but rather a path of energy that is allowed by all sides, one that gains egress past restrictions by bowing to them at the same time they are disobeyed, by bargaining and earning” (1997: 20). Derricotte’s excerpt zooms into “the world”: the cacophony of conflicting voices that overcrowds and divides her macrocosm. As a manifestation of an unsettled articulation of double consciousness, Derricotte’s feelings and thoughts are being opened to a plenitude of social worlds. Derricotte admits another point for deliberation: “Whiteness has to be examined, addressed, not taken as ‘normal.’ White people have to develop a double consciousness, too, a part in which they see themselves as ‘other.’ We are all wounded by racism, but for some of us those wounds are anesthetized. When we begin to feel it, we’re awake” (125). She promotes the need, for all those wounded by racism, to open up and feel “it” as a problem but not necessarily to be one. On a fictional level, James Weldon Johnson’s anonymous narrator in The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man articulates a double consciousness embodied through the protagonist’s black-and-white biraciality. But since the character’s biracial body can signify various readings (and, indeed, misreadings), he moves, I insist, toward an open double consciousness. His namelessness intensifies this “openness.” The fact that he is unnamed leads to shifting forms of self-reflection that continually allow him to name—and rename—himself. As he transitions from one world into another, he “looked out through other eyes, my thoughts were coloured, my words dictated, my actions limited by one-dominating, all pervading idea which constantly increased in force and weight until I finally realized in it a great, tangible fact” (1989: 21).

66. For Luis Eduardo Guarnizo, Alejandro Portes, and William Haller “cross-border political relationships” by contemporary U.S. migrants—which in concise form have the tendency to be framed under “transnationalism”—signify “the rise of a new class of immigrants, economic entrepreneurs or political activists who conduct cross-border activities on a regular basis” (2003: 1213). The authors opt for a more accurate qualifier, “political transnationalism,” to differentiate those actors from migrants who participate in “the simple act of sending remittances to families or traveling home occasionally” (1212). For additional studies on American citizenship, disparate American interests, dual nationalities, and the crafting of “transnational life,” consult Oboler (2006); R. Smith (2006); and Duany (2011).

67. Open double consciousness turns the specific double consciousness that Richard Wright postulated in Paris—through the illimitable examination of his handwritten declaration, “I am an American but …”—into other Latined realms informed by the conjunction “but” (Wright, n.d.). Wright’s “but” can be part of a speculative Latined décalage. It has the potential to modify the meanings and actors behind Americanness through the rotating inhabitants of that inevitable contrarian state enunciated with “but.”

68. Perhaps a Mexican American and Chicano and Chicana equivalent to this Du Boisian “other world” could be González and Raleigh’s italicized use of the U.S. nationality Americanos in their novel, Caballero. More than merely applicable to white, U.S. citizens, the idea of Americanos, in Spanish, refers to the unfolding Americanness that awaits the occupied Texan world of González and Raleigh—otherizing not the Mexicanness of what became the U.S. Southwest but the ideological processes that transplant and enforce U.S. Americanness. One of Caballero’s characters tries to grasp the meaning of his sudden Americanness by observing, “[C]an’t you laugh? Is it not something to laugh at? We are Americanos!” (2008: 9). This newly granted and astonishing Americanness is as foreign as the one being brought by the “other world.”

69. Richard Wright’s quote reads, “There is not a black problem in the United States, but a white problem. The blacks now know what they want. … The whites don’t” (quoted in Rowley, 2001: 332).

70. Writing a book review in 1968, the year in which The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century was published, historian Hugh Davis Graham concurred with Du Bois’s own assessment. Graham referred to Du Bois’s third and fullest autobiography as a “thoughtful recollection of a high order” (641). Du Bois’s extract on a theory of a life reads, “Eager as I am to put down the truth, there are difficulties; memory fails especially in small details, so that it becomes finally but a theory of my life, with much forgotten and misconceived, with valuable testimony but often less than absolutely true, despite my intention to be frank and fair” (1997: 12).

71. Feeling alone cannot fully account for a sustained investigation of Du Bois’s centenarian problem. Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, another seminal text in Africana thought, stresses that his book “should have been written” three years prior to its initial publication in 1952. Echoing Du Bois, where to pen The Souls of Black Folk he had to “reduce the boiling to a simmer,” Fanon brings to view the fact that “at the time [1949] the truths made our blood boil. Today the fever gas dropped and truths can be said without having them hurled into people’s faces” (2008: xiii). Fanon also writes, “if I utter a great shout, it won’t be black” (13). Du Bois urged us to think about how “problematic peoples” conceal, disclose, or play with their responses. Feeling like a—and not as the — problem allows the problematic subject to alter codes of behavior that differ from double consciousness inasmuch as this awareness must make meaning of the problem. Double consciousness is the impetus for making sense of “the problem of the color-line” (Du Bois, 1996b: 5).

CHAPTER TWO. Passing Latinities

1. In addition, Samira Kawash provides these definitional parameters for passing: “Common sense dictates that passing plays only with appearance and that the true identities underlying the deceptive appearances remain untouched. This has been the accepted understanding of passing, both on the part of social scientists who attempted to study the phenomenon and literary critics who sought to understand the significance of literary representations of passing” (1997: 126). My approach deals with the moving possibilities—passages—from black and Latin to white and vice versa.

2. Two outstanding works on the African diaspora and Latin America include Nwankwo (2005) and Guridy (2010).

3. This assessment is also evidenced in Rampersad’s first volume of Hughes’s life, whose time in Mexico is described, rather oxymoronically, as a “dull horror” (2002: 32). There may have been dull instants in Hughes’s trip, but as I argue, his journeys to that nation unveil an actively working Latinity.

4. As announced in a supplementary page to this same book, “The best biographical material on James Weldon Johnson is his own autobiography, Along This Way” (2000: xix).

5. Suzanne Bost’s definition of mestizaje provides a good scope of this concept’s working directions: “Mestizaje is the Latin American term for the racial and cultural mixture that was produced by the conquest of the so-called ‘New World,’ in which European colonizers mixed with the darker-skinned colonized subjects. Originally the term was used to describe the Spanish and native heritage, but mestizaje has incorporated additional racial elements. Chicana/o theorists in the United States have drawn attention to the Anglo-American additions to their racial and cultural mixture, but they often elide the African lineage in mestizaje” (2000: 187).

In the context of Nicaragua’s mestizaje, Jeffrey Gould explains that the “myth of Nicaragua mestiza” depends on “the common sense notion that Nicaragua had long been an ethnically homogeneous society is one of the elite’s most enduring hegemonic achievements. The creation of this nationalistic discourse in Nicaragua depended upon the increasing disarticulation of the Comunidades Indigenas. This was realized in the highlands departments of Matagalpa, Jinotega, and Boaco through ladino pressures on indigenous labor and land, which contributed to the weakening of the Comunidades. The incessant questioning of indigenous authenticity that coincided with the ladino advance, contributed both to the consolidation of ladino power and to the erosion of indigenous communal identity. Moreover, that delegitimization of indigenous authenticity, in turn, was related to the development of a democratic discourse of equal rights and citizenship that effectively suppressed specific indigenous rights to communal land and political autonomy” (2003: 365).

6. Johnson remarked, “occasionally race prejudice bumped into me.” Such was the case when a white South Carolinian male was baffled upon encountering the black consul in Nicaragua. “There were several other cases of individuals,” Johnson wrote, who were “caught unawares and psychologically unprepared to meet the situation. I found it best to let them work out their own recovery from the shock and embarrassment” (2000: 258–59).

7. Julie Greene reminds us that empire was a concept that was jettisoned in the United States during Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency. The twenty-sixth commander in chief “eschewed the term ‘empire’ in describing the United States. Instead, he talked about national greatness and the virtues and responsibilities of the Anglo-Saxon race” (2009: 18). As such, Roosevelt needed to win the nation’s “citizenry over to a new identity as an imperial power” (35).

8. As a New York Times headline on 1 August 1912 announced, “Another Nicaragua Revolt: Mena May Bombard Managua—We Send a Ship to Corinto.” The article, a “special to the New York Times,” informed, “The feud between President [Adolfo] Diaz of Nicaragua and his former War Minister Gen. [Luis] Mena, has developed into a revolution, and to protect American interests the 500-ton gunboat Annapolis has been ordered to proceed from San Juan del Sur to Corinto. There the gunboat will restore communication with American Minister [George T.] Weitzel, who has not been heard from since the rebels cut off Managua from the outside world.”

9. On 28 January 1930 Sandino published an opinion piece in the New York World, where he declared, “We have understood that the greatest aim of the United States of North America in Nicaragua is to appropriate Central American territory where possibilities exist for the opening of an interoceanic canal route, in addition to the Gulf of Fonseca as a naval base. And that is why our army, together with all the uncorrupted and uncontaminated Nicaraguan people, has determined that the interoceanic canal as much as the naval base in question must be considered within the sovereignty of Latin American nationality for its progress and self-defense” (1988: 305–6; my translation).

10. Robert E. Fleming informs us that literary reception to The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man “attracted relatively little attention when it was published in 1912, [but] it remained in print until 1918 as indicated by advertisements in the Crisis ‘Book Mart’ advertisements. However, the 1927 Knopf edition, coming as it did at the height of the Harlem Renaissance and at a time when Johnson was perhaps the best-known member of the older generation of black writers, was considerably more influential. Handsomely printed and well distributed, this edition of the novel was reviewed widely not only in America but in England also. Critics from the 1930s to the present have always considered it one of the most important novels of the early part of the century, and in 1965 it was reprinted, along with Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery and W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, as Three Negro Classics, edited by John Hope Franklin” (1987: 41).

11. The most palpable act of anonymity commonly attributed to Johnson’s novel is the leading character’s namelessness and the (black) ethnoracial ambiguity that facilitates his admission, unidirectionally, into whiteness. Overall, however, it can be said that The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man interpretively proposes anonymities, since obscurity is attributed to the world that the “ex-coloured man” encounters. Those inhabiting such a world are never formally named, and so the reader, too, goes by the quiddity attributed to the inhabitants of that literary microcosm. This essence has been largely interpreted in black-white terms. Roxanna Pisiak contends, for example, that in the text “[m]uch ambiguity resides in the very personality of the narrator. While he is always careful to describe the exact color of the black people he meets, the reader is never told of the narrator’s exact racial status, or of his mother’s. This lack of specific racial identity reflects the inanity of the arbitrary racial assumption in American society that any amount of black blood designates an individual as ‘black.’ Furthermore, because we don’t know how ‘white’ or ‘black’ the narrator is (biologically), we can only judge him according to his actions and reactions, and not as a ‘black man’ or a ‘white man’” (1993: 86). The simultaneity of both ambiguity and anonymity can be contextualized through Lewis Gordon’s theorizing on anonymity and antiblackness. Gordon’s premise is that “[o]rdinary existence is an immersion in the bosom of anonymity. Anonymity literally means to be nameless. The context of anonymity with which I am here concerned is an antiblack society. The result in such a society is a violent namelessness committed against blacks whose familiarity is so familiar that it transforms the protective dynamics of anonymity itself. Yet anonymity itself is not the cause of this violence. Anonymity by itself doesn’t cause anything. In a humane world, anonymity is a blessing that offers human possibility and understanding” (1997: 13–14). Johnson’s narrator seems to transcend race through his passing. But his Latined blackness (and deviations thereof) are localized within the dynamics of—and Johnson’s focus on—an antiblack society.

12. Although Johnson’s protagonist travels to Europe, this visit becomes a test for how his ethereal blackness moves through different spectrums outside the United States. Given that a millionaire patron sponsors his trip, it is as though the character becomes a graduate of a European “crash-course” on the Western subject. The narrator mentions that, through this tour of the old world, the white benefactor had made him “a polished man of the world” (1989: 143). The patron concurs, telling him, “my boy, you are by blood, by appearance, by education, and by tastes a white man” (144). Notice that the whiteness proffered is immediately taken back—tinted by the blackness of the light-skinned storyteller through the use of “my boy” as a purported term of endearment.

13. In the case of Hughes’s political proclivities, Lawrence P. Jackson has written that “the boy wonder” of the Harlem Renaissance “was vulnerable in the mainstream and on the Left. […] In payment for his commitment to social justice, Hughes spent much of the 1940s and 1950s having to extricate himself from his most radical works and looking for succor from welcoming black audiences. Despite this sometimes-exhausting trek, Hughes possessed a genuine courage and intellectual flexibility. These qualities enabled him to cultivate the next cadre of artists whose work would project them successfully beyond the confines of racial segregation in the arts. A viable network of writers in Harlem remained, and Hughes, whose regular address shifted only once, from 634 St. Nicholas Avenue to a house at 20 West 127th Street in 1948, often stood at the center” (2011: 19).

14. Latin-America, as “cross-border, transnational zone,” symbolizes what Guridy conceives as the “U.S.-Caribbean world.” This region “first emerged out of the trade networks of the eighteenth century and came to full fruition after the War of 1898. In the four decades before the outbreak of the Second World War, Caribbean and Central American economies and societies became more integrated into U.S.-controlled cross-border linkages. The boundaries of this supranational configuration stretched from the eastern seaboard of the United States southward along the Atlantic coast to the islands of the Caribbean basin, the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, the nations of Central America, and even the northern reaches of South America” (2010: 7).

15. V. S. Naipaul’s insights, as attributed in Patrick French’s The World Is What It Is, bear significance here. Naipaul speaks of an author’s life as a rightful subject of study. His comment reads, “The lives of writers are a legitimate subject of inquiry; and the truth should not be skimped. It may well be, in fact, that a full account of a writer’s life might in the end be more a work of literature and more illuminating—of a cultural or historical moment—than the writer’s books” (2008: xi). Glimpses of Johnson’s and Hughes’s lived anecdotal interludes take us to other cultural and historical oversights: the erasure of their fluctuating Latinities.

16. Writing on American Consular Service letterhead, Johnson told his wife, “Everywhere I go, the people, market women, children, everybody ask[s] me about la niña Graciela, and when she is coming” (1912a: 4 Apr.). A little more than a month later, Johnson repeated a similar sentiment, attributing her absence to the heat: “Everybody keeps asking about you. They all seem to miss you very much—but it is as you say, very hot down here” (18 May). It is common, in some Central American nations, to use the term niña, which literally means girl, to respectfully refer to an adult woman, regardless of her age and social class. Salvadoran novelist Jacinta Escudos elaborates on these conventional titles for different stages of “womanhood.” She has written in her blog that the vagueness of niña or even the employment, in Guatemala, of the term seño (as an abbreviation for señora [woman/Mrs.] or señorita [young lady/Miss]) is more welcoming than doña (lady, Madame, Mrs., or Ms.). The latter, Escudos has observed, “makes me feel like a decrepit being, and, above all, like a deteriorated 115-year-old […]. Far from being an expression of respect, as it is usually justified, it seems like it has a disparaging connotation. It has always appeared like a guarded way to call me vieja [an old woman] to my face” (2008; my translation).

17. Johnson immortalized Manhattan’s allure in The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, wherein the protagonist asserts, “New York City is the most fatally fascinating thing in America. […] [A]s I walked about that evening, I began to feel the dread power of the city; the crowds, the lights, the excitement, the gaiety, and all its subtler stimulating influences began to take effect upon me” (1989: 89–90). Stecopoulos has discussed a distinctive “metropolitan superiority” etched in the minds of the period’s race men. They had a “sense of ‘northerness’ and a concomitant feeling of civilized belonging” (2007: 37). Johnson impregnates Along This Way with a resonating metropolitanism, as he narratively takes the reader to the summer when he taught “in the backwoods of Georgia.” “This was going to be a new experience for me,” Johnson confessed. “True, I was born in a very small city, but it was one, nevertheless, that had quite a metropolitan air; and I knew nothing at all of rural life” (2000: 105). Johnson proceeded to equate the inconveniences of his rural life, such as the lack of light, with the kinds of struggles confronted by “the philosophers and poets of Greece in her age of highest culture” (109).

18. Johnson’s main character, though, never claims while visiting France that he speaks French better than that nation’s citizens. His passage into Latinity is marked through the Spanish language. His French, by contrast, appears a tad rudimentary. He gets by with a vocabulary of “three hundred necessary words”—ergo suggesting that his entrance into Western discourses is unpassable, if not deadlocked (1989: 132–33).

19. The English word that grabs the narrator’s attention—it almost shocks him—is the verb “ramify” (Johnson, 1989: 71).

20. Although an argument can be made that Speedy Gonzalez is bound to a Mexican and Mexican American iconography, his symbolic representation codifies a larger Latin population. Carlos Eire’s Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy affords a viewpoint of the representational lineage under which U.S. Latinos and Latinas have fallen vis-à-vis this caricature. Suggesting an afterlife doom for Mel Blanc (1908–89)—the voice of Speedy Gonzalez among a myriad of canonical Warner Brothers and Hanna-Barbera television productions cartoons like Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and Barney Rubble—Eire utters, “may you burn in hell forever. As one of your God-damned Hispanic Warner Brothers cartoon characters might have said: ‘Sí, señor, firrst I go to zee fiesta and zen I tayk-a siesta, beeforrre I go to anozzer fiesta again. Ole! Andale, ándale! Arriba, arriba!’ I take it back, Mel. Sorry, I got carried away. Hell might be too harsh a punishment for your sins. You must have been clueless, truly. Maybe a better place for you would be heaven, where you might be surrounded by lazy, napping, partying spics who talk funny” (2003: 69). Eire also calls Blanc a “spicmeister” and “colonolialist doofus” (81).

21. Train rides prove critically invaluable when canvassing the unsteady linguistic and semiotic divisions that Latined subjects pass through in the U.S. landscape, as we see here with Johnson. Hughes’s story “Puerto Ricans” in The Best of Simple (1961) also sheds light on how a foreign-sounding Spanish language, as uttered in the United States, deracializes other colored folk. In this piece, Jesse B. Simple boards a New York City subway at 125th and Lenox, hoping to read a recently purchased comic book. During the ride, however, Simple discovers that the book is written in “Español!” (1990: 216). Unable to understand—to which Simple merely remarks “no entiendo”—he offers the comic to a Puerto Rican passenger, caustically noting, “Español! Now that is a language which, if you speak it, will take some of the black off of you if you are colored. Just say, Sí, and folks will think you are a foreigner, instead of only a plain old ordinary American Negro” (217). Of gleaming significance is Simple’s emphasis that español discards “some of the black off of you.” The Spanish language is not a direct passage into whiteness, but a dissembling utterance of incomprehension on both sides. On the one hand, the white side does not speak Spanish. One could say that since it would take too long for this side to intelligibly and reasonably explain the logic and order of Jim Crow, a temporary passing access is granted to Spanish speakers in this U.S. racial order. On the other hand, we find Latins who claim not to understand the black and white of it and thus provide, like Hughes’s character, a simple “no entiendo.” In this Hughesian sense, this presumed lack of understanding transcends a black-and-white impasse, taking us to the useful purpose of the comic book’s narrative value. Toward the story’s end, Simple decides he would like to start a series of comics titled Jess Simple’s Jim Crow Jive. These books would be published in “English and Spanish so Puerto Ricans could laugh, too.” Jess Simple’s Jim Crow Jive would provoke Puerto Rican laughter “because it must tickle them to see what a little foreignness will do” (218; emphasis added). Blackness and whiteness cease to be so inchoate and straightforward. The transparency of the color line requires what Hughes called, in this same volume, “genial souls”—and I italicize genial here since it is a word both in Spanish and English and thus shares passing Latinities—that tap into other colorings of the U.S. panorama (viii).

22. In relation to U.S. West Indian migrations in the early twentieth century, Martha A. Sandweiss interprets this same incident in Johnson’s text, concurring with Stecopoulos’s analysis. To quote Sandweiss, this was a period where blacks born outside the United States “hung on to their foreign citizenship to assert their social superiority over American-born blacks and shield themselves from some of the most virulent forms of racial discrimination” (2009: 218–19). In connection to Johnson, we must also consider that Rodriguez Ponce is not so much a bridge to whiteness, but a witness to how varieties of blackness walk in and out of both U.S. blackness and whiteness. It is not that Latinos and Latinas, as we now come to know them, are excluded from the black-white binary. Indeed, their racialization processes have been different. This Johnson–Rodriguez Ponce literary episode suggests that U.S. blackness is inclusive of that type of foreign-born blackness. Consider Sandweiss’s observation: “the directions to the census takers suggest, the hardening edge of American racial thought at the end of the century had effectively erased the possibility of a category of mixed-race ‘mulattoes’ with an intermediate status between black and white. If such people had once held a special status that set them apart from ‘blacks,’ new state laws obliterated the distinction between peoples with different degrees of African heritage” (217). Clearly the black mulatto and the Latino mulato/mestizo, “with different degrees of African heritage,” have not been completely removed from the national racial order. Rodriguez Ponce is gaining an instruction on how his Cubanness and Latinoness stand, move, or deadlock in U.S. renditions of unalloyed blackness and whiteness.

23. My uses of Latin@ness/Latin-at-ness are explained in this book’s epilogue.

24. A Latinity, of course, can also be unpassable, as it has been evidenced for Latinos, Latinas, and Latin Americans. Gabriel García Márquez’s biographer, Gerald Martin, chronicles an incident in this writer’s journey to the U.S. South—“Faulkner country”—where Latins cannot even pass as culturally white Mexicans. One evening in 1961, García Márquez and his wife “missed a night [in Montgomery, Alabama] because no one would rent ‘dirty Mexicans’ a room” (2009: 260).

25. Johnson also noted, “Before leaving New York, I had made myself known to Richard Watson Gilder, the editor of the Century Magazine, and to William Hayes Ward, the editor of the Independent. I began mailing manuscripts to them, and my poems began appearing in the two publications” (2000: 237).

26. The letter was sent to Victor M. Shapiro of the Fox Film Corporation. Shapiro responded on the following day with a tactful and noncommittal note: “My dear Mr. Johnson: I deeply appreciate the autographed copy of your book. I will read it with a great deal of interest as I have heard so much about it. If anything develops when I get to Hollywood, I will communicate directly with you. Best wishes and sincerest regards to yourself and Mrs. Johnson. Sincerely, Victor M. Shapiro” (quoted in Johnson, 1931b).

27. Bok mentions that his Dutch family was able “to make an experiment of Americanization” (1927: x). He interpolated American ideology, noting in his third-person written account, “the American spirit of initiative had entered deep into the soul of Edward Bok” (15).

28. Johnson wrote this poem to honor the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, which officially outlawed slavery in 1865.

29. It is worth citing here the 1915 summary of Fifty Years and Other Poems provided by the Cornhill Company. The publicity noted, “This volume includes the poem ‘Fifty Years’ so widely quoted and admired when it was published in The New York Times four years ago. Mr. Johnson sings of a variety of themes with the same unerring touch as in the titular poem. There is a group devoted to Latin-American life called ‘Down by the Carib Sea,’ and a group of ‘Folk Runes,’ pieces in dialect of the pathetic and humorous aspect of Negro life.” Other luminaries who blurbed this book include Elihu Root and Elbridge L. Adams (Johnson, 1915). Root (1845–1937), a lawyer and a recipient of the 1912 Nobel Peace Prize, served as President William McKinley’s secretary of war from 1899 to 1904 and as President Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of state in 1905. Adams (1866–1934) was an attorney with literary ties to Joseph Conrad. He served as chair of the Correspondence Committee of the Civil Service Reform Association in 1919 and cofounded the New York–based Fountain Press in 1929.

30. Curtis Márez calls attention to the characteristic employment of “Pancho” for Chicanos. Building on Américo Paredes, Márez asserts, “‘Pancho suggests the bandit stereotype, the Mexican with the long mustaches and the cartridge belts crossed over his chest.’ In other words, the name calls to mind a stereotyped image of the brown border combatant” (1996: 112).

31. Johnson’s monolingual association with American English is worthy of further consideration, as the Spanish language cannot pass. Given Johnson’s aptness with various languages, his distinctive bonding at this precise moment with American monolingualism could be fashioned through what Ingrid M. Reneau has called, in the context of “‘broad’ Belizean Creole (bBC),” a process of “lightening-up one’s tongue” (2006: 95). This concept refers to a monolithic tongue that does not migrate or intone “a variety of new U.S. landscapes.” In Johnson’s Nicaraguan instance, it can be grounded to an un-Americanized race of color that speaks only Spanish (Reneau, 2006: 95). As Reneau writes, “Internal barriers of personal and historical memories and our perceptions of our selves, linguistically and otherwise, can enable as well as disable our abilities to see our commonalities, our wholeness, not only as Belizeans, but as Caribbean and Central American people and people of the world” (2006: 97). Johnson’s separation from Spanish, as spoken and embodied in Nicaragua, prompts a disabling of any Latin linkages—punctuating, in this process, a foreignness tinged by his own rendition of a U.S.-based Americanness abroad.

32. Johnson’s wife was also learning French, perhaps thinking, like her husband, that they would be going to France in the next consular appointment. Johnson wrote, “Don’t get discouraged with your French. You can only master it by constant repetition. You know it was the same with your Spanish, how after hours of repetition, then suddenly you found out that you could speak Spanish and that you knew more than you had any idea that you knew” (1912a: 18 May).

33. The consul’s preoccupation with Nicaragua’s heat and its tropical nature has resonances with twentieth-century notions on how “the white man ‘can never be acclimated in the tropics’” (Greene, 2009: 27). Greene puts forward that “the ‘tropics’ loomed as a great source of anxiety to many in the early twentieth century. Tropical climates were particularly associated with the absence of civilization” (28).

34. Johnson outlined in one letter the types of transactions for which he was responsible as consul. He confided, “I’m still a bit worried over the responsibility of the Sheridan Estate. In León I collected over $2,000.00 in gold that was due, and $26,000.00 in bills. Mr. L. and I were a whole day counting the bills over. There is still about $6,000.00 in gold to be collected. Besides, his property will amount to about $60,000.00 gold. This is the first big case of the kind I have handled, and, of course, I want every penny to turn just right. My little safe is over loaded with money” (1912a: 5 June).

35. Historian Gerald Horne makes known that Mexico “as a beacon of hope for Negroes was not new. During the antebellum era thousands of enslaved Africans fled to freedom across the border, as Mexico had abolished slavery long before the United States” (2005: 6). Drawing on Hughes’s father, Horne explains African American migration to Mexico as follows: “After the death of Reconstruction some African Americans organized to migrate en masse to Mexico. There were also countless individual migrations, as evidenced by the father of Langston Hughes, the writer. Shortly after he was born, his parents separated because his father wanted to escape the United States and go ‘where a colored man could get ahead and make money quicker, and my mother did not want to go. My father went to Cuba, and then to Mexico, where there wasn’t any color line, or any Jim Crow.’ That Langston Hughes’s father was not alone in wanting to go to Mexico is indicated by the experience of the Alabama Negro colony in Mexico in the 1890s. Fleeing pell mell from Jim Crow, lynchings, and the rest, Negroes were leaving for Liberia, Central America, and elsewhere. There were ‘ten large colonies’ in Mexico. A Mexican official had assured the migrants that his nation ‘will be their Canaan, the land of hope and promise, where they could find relief from the persecution of southern whites’” (21). Other literary forays into Mexico include Richard Wright’s 1940 visit to Cuernavaca. Hazel Rowley, his biographer, reports, “For a black man, Mexico was a welcome heaven” (2001: 197). Wright’s observations of that nation are referenced as follows: “‘People of all races and colors live in harmony and without racial prejudices or theories of racial superiority.’ He added that he only ever experienced racism when he came into contact with American tourists or businessmen.” Wright admitted, “Mexico was beautiful but backward. ‘I wanted to go to Europe,’ Wright pointed out. […] ‘I’m not yet one of those people who can get excited over primitive people. Maybe the reason is that I’m too primitive myself, I don’t know’” (2001: 197). By 1954 Mexico was still “populated with expatriates from abroad” (De Veaux, 2004: 50). Audre Lorde, who traveled to Mexico that year, “described it as ‘a haven for political and spiritual refugees’” (quoted in De Veaux, 2004: 50).

36. Yet Hughes’s mother, who remained in the United States, never quite crossed the Mexican color line. Although she had lived with her former husband, James N. Hughes, in Mexico, she returned to the United States with the “five- or six-year-old” Langston. Hughes recounted their move in this manner: “But no sooner had my mother, my grandmother, and I got to Mexico City than there was a big earthquake, and people ran out from their houses into the Alameda, and the big National Opera House they were building sank down into the ground, and tarantulas came out of the walls—and my mother said she wanted to go back home at once to Kansas, where people spoke English or something she could understand and there were no earthquakes. So we went” (1993: 15–16). Hughes’s mother worked as a stenographer for a “colored” lawyer in Topeka, a cook in Chicago, and a waitress in Cleveland. It is hard to miss the classed and gendered dynamics of these racial and geographic passings (or lack thereof). They seem to facilitate, at a larger and perhaps more generous level, processes of reinvention for some of the race men of the period. Charles W. Chesnutt imbued his novel The House behind the Cedars (1900) with the limits of racial passing. But it is his heroine, Rena Walden (who uses the moniker Rowena Warwick while passing through the other world) who does not pass, unlike John, her brother. Her concluding comments in the novel underscore this gendered constraint when she tells her intended, a white aristocratic male, “You are white, and you have given me to understand that I am black. I accept the classification, however unfair, and the consequences, however unjust, one of which is that we cannot meet in the same parlor, in the same church, at the same table, or anywhere, in social intercourse; upon a steamboat we would not sit at the same table; we could not walk together on the street, or meet publicly anywhere and converse, without unkind remark. As a white man, this might not mean a great deal to you; as a woman, shut out already by my color from much that is desirable, my good name remains my most valuable possession” (1993: 172–73).

37. By the 1930s Hughes’s “revolutionary quality had been recognized before in occasional translations published in Mexico, but the new articles had a more immediate effect. From the mainly apolitical Contemporáneos group to the League of Revolutionary Artists and Writers, he was welcomed by the most accomplished Mexican writers and painters. Among the latter, he met the melancholy Orozco, the mountainous, dark-skinned Diego Rivera (a Negro grandmother, Rivera claimed proudly), Siquieros, Izquierdo, Tamayo, and Montenegro, and was taken up by the flamboyant Lupe Marin, Rivera’s estranged wife and his favorite model” (Rampersad, 2002: 303).

38. This key incident is discussed in Rampersad’s first volume of The Life of Langston Hughes, but it is not assembled within the context of black-brown passing lines that undo the black-white binary or as a border crossing—in effect, a passing—in diasporic blackness (2002: 40). The only time in which Hughes’s passing as a Mexican is mentioned in this biography is when Hughes returns, as the biographer puts it, “home” to the United States. Traveling from San Antonio to Cleveland, a clerk in a Saint Louis soda fountain turned the color line into the national line, asking Hughes “bluntly whether he was Mexican or American” (35).

39. Hughes’s story is, of course, from the perspective of an everyday black man transitioning into generic white Americanness. Sandweiss’s biography of Clarence King, a renowned geologist who passed part-time from distinguished whiteness to anonymous blackness vis-à-vis his common-law marriage to a black woman (née Ada Copeland/Ada Todd) reveals that his written communication with his wife, who had no idea of King’s distinguished record of chronicling U.S. Western expansion, was to be destroyed (2009: 144). Sandweiss quotes King’s final instructions to his spouse, conveyed in this exclamatory, one-sentence supplement: “P.S. Carefully burn my letters!!” (222). Although some letters survived—and even if they all had been completely destroyed—the story of King’s part-time passing lingered. As Sandweiss claims, “‘James Todd’ was his [King’s] greatest fictional work of all” (234).

40. In this way, undocumented migrants can be deported within Mexico or one of its contiguous nations. This passing for a particular nationality facilitates the journey for migrants attempting to cross the Mexico-U.S. border. But in these “brown” Mexico–Central American passages, one seldom hears of Belize and Belizeans, especially when considering Mexico’s southern frontier with Guatemala and Belize.

41. Let us briefly recall restrictive 1920s immigration laws such as the Emergency Quota Act (aka the Emergency Immigration Act of 1921) and the Immigration Act of 1924 (also called the Johnson-Reed Act and the National Origins Act). The former was “designed to ensure access for immigrants from northwestern Europe while restricting those from south/central/eastern Europe.” The latter remained in effect until 1952, yielding “an annual limit of 150,000 Europeans, a total ban on Japanese” and, among other stipulations, “the creation of quotas based on the contribution of each nationality to the overall U.S. population, rather than on the foreign-born population” (LeMay, 2006: 23).

42. The reader also sees passing Latinities that become “paperless” through the sidestepping of the official documentation required at the crossing of geopolitical borders. This maneuver, as Hughes shows, alludes to a general “education in passing” on national (Mexican or “American”) and ethnoracial grounds (“colored,” “Latin,” or “Mexican”). As these subjects acquire a “mastery of moving back and forth,” they authenticate the fact that they can pass, and “no one will ask [them] for [their] papers” (Brady, 2002: 92, 86).

43. These Mexican manifestations of everyday speech reflect Hughes’s coruscating attraction with life stories and cultural expressions and their representation in his oeuvre. Certainly his literary construction of the Virginia-born protagonist, Jesse B. Simple, is the typification of someone, who according to the writer, speculates and laughs off “the numerous problems of white folks, colored folks, and just folks—including himself” (1990: viii).

44. The critical literature on this Fanonian moment is copious. Some of the important works include Gooding-Williams (2005b); N. Gibson (2003); Wynter (2001); Alessandrini (1999); Gordon, Sharpley-Whiting, and White (1996); L. Gordon (1995b); and Bhabha (1994).

45. Switching now from sweets to savory food, Eire spills the beans on his white Cuban constitution. He reveals his avoidance of eating the rice and beans that Nilda, his black nanny, would offer him when growing up in Havana. Nilda’s invitation to the meal was conveyed through the linguistic nudge, “Here, have some more [rice and beans], you’ll grow up to be just like me.” Eire fears his “skin would turn black,” just like his caregiver’s. He states, “I knew even then that there was something awful about being black in Cuba. African Cubans weren’t too lucky, from what I could see. They seemed to do all the hard work, and to have inferior bathrooms” (2003: 152). This fear of blackness, which moves synonymously from Negro and African to brown and dark, continued “for a very, very long time.” Eire adds, “I wouldn’t eat any food that was black or brown. Nothing dark. Not even chocolate” (153). He sums his fear along these lines: “Whatever work needed to be done in the house was done by African women. And whatever hard work needed to be done in the world, that is, my world, always fell to African Cubans, men and women alike. […] So when Nilda asked me to join her in being discriminated against, my immediate reaction was to panic. […] I thought it was some kind of curse placed directly on me, and me alone. I was the only white person who would be turned black by dark foods” (159).

46. By 1935 Hughes had published the play Mulatto with a double “t,” locating the mixed-race matter in the Big House of a Georgia plantation.

47. Guridy’s scholarly exploration on the audience reception to Hughes’s work in Havana proves stimulating. Cuban disposition during this period toward Hughes and U.S. black musicians, Guridy finds, “produced new hierarchal and relational understandings of Afro-diasporic cultures in both countries. Cubans celebrated Hughes as a representative of the most advanced sector of the global ‘colored race’” (2009: 116).

48. Gustavo Urrutia was a prominent black Cuban journalist and a columnist for the daily Havana newspaper, Diario de la Marina.

49. Ortiz is widely recognized as an anthropologist and public intellectual who focused on the study of Afro-Cuban popular traditions. Fernando Coronil’s introduction to Cuban Counterpoint posits that Ortiz’s work practiced the “the self-fashioning of these [Afro-Cuban] peripheries, the counterpoint through which people turn margins into centers and make fluidly coherent identities out of fragmented histories.” Coronil adds that this work “helps show the play of illusion and power in the making and unmaking of cultural formations” (1995: xiv). Herewith, Ortiz brought into circulation the notion of “transculturation” in Cuban Counterpoint as a means to better express “the different phases of the process of transition from one culture to another.” This concept “carries the idea of the consequent of new cultural phenomena” (1995: 102–3). Transculturation conveys “the highly varied phenomena that have come about in Cuba as a result of the extremely complex transmutations of culture that have taken place here, and without a knowledge of which it is impossible to understand the evolution of Cuban folk, either in the economic or in the institutional, legal, ethical, religious, artistic, linguistic, psychological, sexual, or other aspects of life” (98). Ortiz also founded and edited the magazines Archivos del Folklore Cubano, Estudios Afrocubanos, and Surco. He presided over various cultural institutions, including the Society of Cuban Folklore, the Society of Afro-Cuban Studies, and the National Association against Racial Discrimination (cf. M. González, 1946).

50. Ifeoma Nwankwo has put forth that Hughes’s “intraracial translation” transformed Nicolás Guillén’s poetry into African American English. So doing, Hughes exercised a methodology of translation that undertook “intraracial linguistic difference while also affirming racial connectedness” (1999–2001: 55). Nwankwo contends that Hughes’s efforts made Guillén’s translated poetry “feel familiar, like one of our own, in order to emphasize the fact that we are all part of one community, the Black community.” Nwankwo also submits a key conceptual framework, “transnational Black collectivism,” which denotes “a sense of community that prioritizes racial connection over national location. Terms such as ‘pan-Africanism’ have been used to connote similar notions of a lengthy history or histories that trace them through a fixed genealogy” (56). Transnational black collectivism, more specifically, touches on “the general issue of Black-to-Black translation, of the relationship between translation methodology and the desire for an international Blackness” (60).

51. Rampersad has noted that when Hughes lived in Mexico in 1935, he had become a member “of a tiny international advance guard that would eventually include Pablo Neruda of Chile, Jorge Luis Borges of Argentina, Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal, Jacques Romain of Haiti, Aimé Césaire of Martinique, and Nicolás Guillén of Cuba” (2002: 47).

52. As Jean Franco (2002) and Neil Larsen (1995), among others, have brought up, the 1959 Cuban Revolution and the Cold War provoked U.S. academic interest in Latin American literature.