This book introduces scholars and students of literature to previously neglected or unknown works of literature-such as José Rodríguez Cerna's chronicles and Leonor Villegas de Magnón's memoir of the Mexican Revolution-as well as new approaches to canonical texts by Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Julia de Burgos, Tomás Rivera, and Gloria Anzaldúa. It challenges how previous generations of scholars have understood American modernity by rejecting a standard, historical organization and instead unfolding in clusters of essays related to key terms-space, being, time, form, and labor-corresponding to the overlapping legacies of Spanish and US colonialism and expansion that frame Latinx experience. This volume showcases the diversity of US Latinx communities and cultures, including work on Mexican/Chicanx, Central American, and Caribbean figures and highlighting the evolution of scholarship on Afro-Latinx creative expression and Latinx representations of indigeneity.
Part I. Space: 1. José Garcia Villa's sojourn in New Mexico: rethinking the geographies of Latinidad Paula C. Park; 2. Latinx internationalism, French orientalism, and a Nuyorican Morocco Sarah M. Quesada; 3. Centro America in San Francisco: diasporic literariness at the end of the long nineteenth century Gabriela Valenzuela; 4. Bridges, backs, and barrios: radical women of color feminisms and the critique of modern space Felice Blake; Part II. Being: 5. Brown modernism from María Cristina Mena to Gloria Anzaldúa Renee Hudson; 6. The Spanish-indigenous binary and anti-Blackness as literary inheritance Sheila M. Contreras; 7. The camaraderie of influence: intersectional trauma in Down These Mean Streets Trent Masiki; 8. Spiritual service: rereading religion and labor in … y no se lo tragó la tierra and Face of an Angel Marcela Di Blasi; Part III. Time: 9. Death and afterlives of the silver dollar café in Chicanx cultural production Ariana Ruíz; 10. Passing Time: Latinx racialization, modernist satire, and the captivity narrative Evelyn Soto; 11. Romancing Latinidad: race, resistance, and Latinx theater history Armando García; 12. Singing apocalypse: on Corridos, catastrophe, and the poetics of reconstitution Jonathan Leal; Part IV. Form: 13. Entre Balas y Rugidos: translating the Leonor Villegas de Magnón archive into a digital exhibit Melinda Mejía; 14. Modernism's workshops: printing Latinx literary modernities in New York City Kelley Kreitz; 15. Lyrical mobilities: William Carlos Williams and Julia de Burgos in the Latinx grain María del Pilar Blanco; 16. Bullets, guns, and tattoos: debility in the US Central American literature of Salomón de la Selva and Héctor Tobar Tatiana Argüello and Andrew Ryder; Part V. Labor: 17. Seeking Parteras in the archive: Latinx literature in transition and the labor of labor Erin Murrah-Mandril; 18. The work of war: Latinx literature, racial schismatics, and possible solidarities Eric A. Vázquez and Ariana Vigil; 19. Farmworker culture in literature and film, or Tomaìs Rivera's Brown Noir Curtis Marez; 20. The specter of neoliberalism: labor, activism, and commodity abstraction in early Chicano/a literature Carlos Gallego.
John Alba Cutler is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, where he researches and teaches in the fields of Chicano/a/x and Latino/a/x literatures. He is the author of Ends of Assimilation: The Formation of Chicano Literature (2010). He is the recipient of fellowships from the Alice B. Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the American Council of Learned Societies. He currently serves on the board of the Recovering the US-Hispanic Literary Heritage Project and has served in the past as chair of the MLA Executive Committee on Latinx Literature and Culture. He is one of the executive editors of the new journal Pasados: Recovering History, Imagining Latinidad. Marissa López is Associate Graduate Dean and Professor of English and Chicana/o and Central American Studies at UCLA. Her work has been supported by grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, and she has published in a range of leading journals in her field. Her research focuses on Chican@/x/e literature from the 19th century to the present with an emphasis on 19th century Mexican California. Professor López is the author of two books – Chicano Nations (NYU 2011) and Racial Immanence (NYU 2019) – and is the founder and curator of Picturing Mexican America, a collection of digital and publicly engaged humanities research projects.
