A Companion to Latina/o Studies

Juan Flores is currently Professor of Latino Studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. For many years he has taught Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at the City University of New York (CUNY) and in the Sociology Program at CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of Divided Borders, La venganza de Cortijo, From Bomba to Hip-Hop, and Poetry in East Germany, and co-editor of On Edge: The Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture. Among his other publications are the translations of Memoirs of Bernardo Vega and Cortijo’s Wake/El entierro de Cortijo by Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá. A Chicano scholar, Renato Rosaldo is Lucy Stern Professor Emeritus at Stanford where he taught for many years, and he now teaches at NYU where he was founding Director of the Latino Studies Program. His books include Ilongot Headhunting, 1883–1974 and Culture and Truth. A collection of his essays, Renato Rosaldo: Ensayos en antropología crítica, was recently published in Mexico. He has edited a collection, Cultural Citizenship in Island Southeast Asia, and also co-edited collections, The Incas and the Aztecs, 1400–1800, Creativity/Anthropology, and The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader. Written in English and Spanish, his first collection of poetry, Prayer to Spider Woman/Rezo a la mujer araña, won an American Book Award, 2004. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Notes on Contributors ix

Editors’ Foreword xxi

Acknowledgments xxvii

Part I Latinidades

1 Marks of the Chicana Corpus: An Intervention in the Universality Debate 3
Helena María Viramontes

2 The New Latin Nation: Immigration and the Hispanic Population of the United States 15
Alejandro Portes

3 “Dime con quién hablas, y te diré quién eres”: Linguistic (In)security and Latina/o Unity 25
Ana Celia Zentella

4 (Re)constructing Latinidad: The Challenge of Latina/o Studies 39
Frances R. Aparicio

5 The Name Game: Locating Latinas/os, Latins, and Latin Americans in the US Popular Music Landscape 49
Deborah Pacini Hernández

6 Cuando Dios y Usted Quiere: Latina/o Studies Between Religious Powers and Social Thought 60
David Carrasco

7 Latina/o Cultural Expressions: A View of US Society Through the Eyes of the Subaltern 77
Edna Acosta-Belén

Part II Actos: Critical Practices

8 José Limón, the Devil and the Dance 93
José E. Limón

9 The Everyday Civil War: Migrant Labor, Capital, and Latina/o Studies 105
Nicholas De Genova

10 The Powers of Women’s Words: Oral Tradition and Performance Art 116
Yolanda Broyles-González

11 Language and Other Lethal Weapons: Cultural Politics and the Rites of Children as Translators of Culture 126
Antonia I. Castañeda

12 Looking for Papi: Longing and Desire Among Chicano Gay Men 138
Tomás Almaguer

13 On Becoming 151
Nelly Rosario

Part III Vidas: Herstories/Histories

14 Of Heretics and Interlopers 159
Arturo Madrid

15 Coloring Class: Racial Constructions in Twentieth-Century Chicana/o Historiography 169
Vicki L. Ruiz

16 “El Louie” by José Montoya: An Appreciation 180
Raúl Villa

17 Preservation Matters: Research, Community, and the Archive 185
Chon A. Noriega

18 The Star in My Compass 194
Virginia Sánchez Korrol

19 “Y Que Pasara Con Jovenes Como Miguel Fernández?” Education, Immigration, and the Future of Latinas/os in the United States 202
Pedro A. Noguera

Part IV En la lucha: Sites of Struggle

20 Latinas/os and the Elusive Quest for Equal Education 217
Sonia Nieto

21 The Moral Monster: Hispanics Recasting Honor and Respectability Behind Bars 229
Patricia Fernández-Kelly

22 A Rebellious Philosophy Born in East LA 240
Gerald P. López

23 Latinas/os at the Threshold of the Information Age: Telecommunications Challenges and Opportunities 251
Jorge Reina Schement

24 Conceptualizing the Latina Experience in Care Work 264
Mary Romero

25 Surviving AIDS in an Uneven World: Latina/o Studies for a Brown Epidemic 276
Carlos Ulises Decena

26 Post-Movimiento: The Contemporary (Re)Generation of Chicana(o) Art 289
Tomás Ybarra-Frausto

27 “God Bless the Law, He Is White”: Legal, Local, and International Politics of Latina/o and Black Desegregation Cases in Post-World War II California and Texas 297
Neil Foley

Part V Mestizaje: Revisiting Race

28 Latinas/os and the Mestizo Racial Heritage of Mexican Americans 313
Martha Menchaca

29 Looking at that Middle Ground: Racial Mixing as Panacea? 325
Miriam Jiménez Román

30 Color Matters: Latina/o Racial Identities and Life Chances 337
Ginetta E. B. Candelario

31 Between Blackness and Latinidad in the Hip Hop Zone 351
Raquel Z. Rivera

32 Afro-Latinas/os and the Racial Wall 363
Silvio Torres-Saillant

33 The (W)rite to Remember: Indígena as Scribe 2004–5 (an excerpt) 376
Cherríe Moraga

Part VI Identidades: Producing Subjectivities

34 “How I Learned To Love Salseros When My Hair Was A Mess” by Edwin Torres: A Comment 393
Edwin Torres

35 Reflections on Thirty Years of Critical Practice in Chicana/o Cultural Studies 397
Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano

36 Social Aesthetics and the Transnational Imaginary 406
Ramón Saldívar

37 The Taíno Identity Movement Among Caribbean Latinas/os in the United States 417
Gabriel Haslip-Viera

38 Looking Good 427
Frances Negrón-Muntaner

39 “Chico, what does it feel like to be a problem?” The Transmission of Brownness 441
José Esteban Muñoz

40 “Fantasy Heritage”: Tracking Latina Bloodlines 452
Rosa Linda Fregoso

Part VII En El Mundo: Transnational Connections

41 Latinas/os and Latin America: Topics, Destinies, Disciplines 461
Román de la Campa

42 Latinas/os and the (Re)racializing of US Society and Politics 469
Suzanne Oboler

43 Refugees or Economic Immigrants? Immigration from Latin America and the Politics of US Refugee Policy 480
María Cristina García

44 Inter-American Ethnography: Tracking Salvadoran Transnationality at the Borders of Latina/o and Latin American Studies 492
Elana Zilberg

45 From the Borderlands to the Transnational? Critiquing Empire in the Twenty-First Century 502
María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo

Index 513