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“Afro-Latina/os,” “Afro-Latin@,” “Afro-Latinx,” “afrodescendiente,” “afrolatinoamericano”: these are some of the terms associated with the coming together of “Latino” with the prefix “Afro.” To begin this article by asking what “Afro-Latina/o” does, or what “Afro” and “Latino” do as terms when they are joined, opens this query to complicated trajectories. At the outset, this essay borrows the term “coordinates,” offered by Juan Flores and Miriam Jiménez Román, to point to the assemblage of terms, regional foci, epistemological, experiential dimensions and questions posed by “Afro-Latina/o.”...

Luis Alfaro—routinely introduced in promotional material, reviews, and the critical literature alike as the son of farm workers—is a Chicano performance artist, playwright, fiction writer, poet, theater director, arts administrator, and university educator. Alfaro is renowned for his activism and for mentoring younger generations of theatrical workers and at-risk youth—especially in relation to discussing Chicana/o cultural politics, raising AIDS awareness, critiquing the patriarchal family and its capacities for violence, and promoting minority and immigrant rights and life stories. Alfaro was the recipient of a Macarthur Foundation Fellowship (Genius Award) in ...

One of the most perplexing and debated figures in the struggle for Mexican independence from Spain was José Alvarez de Toledo y Dubois (...

In order to understand Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa and her larger conceptual projects, knowledge of her life and her other writing is essential. Anzaldúa is unlike other writers due to the amount of personal experience that serves as fodder for her writing. As chronicled in ...

The Asian presence in Spanish America dates back to the 16th-century Manila Galleon trade between the Philippines and Mexico, which generated flows of luxury goods and small settlements of people from Asia in port cities, along with images of a distant, exotic Orient....

Jimmy Santiago Baca’s first full-length book of poetry, Immigrants in Our Own Land (1979), was published a few months before he was released from prison after serving five years, an experience foundational to his personal and intellectual development....

It was the first decade of the new century. President Barack Obama was in the White House. The backlash was fierce as anti-immigrant and vitriolic attacks on people of color and hate crimes grew in number. It was an era of contention and dissent; Arizona seemed the perfect setting as the conservative forces headed by a Republican governor found footing in the state’s anti-immigrant sentiment and enacted legislation that reflected this sentiment. The notorious Senate Bill 1070 was signed into law on ...

In the 1840s, westward expansion in the United States was driven by the combined impetuses of the idea of Manifest Destiny and the discovery of gold in California. Of the two, the ideology of Manifest Destiny, which sanctified imperialism as the embodiment of the will of God, was more devastating for Mexicans. The Mexican-American War (...

“Every barrio has its butch!”—Butchlalis de Panochtitlan

“To me the name sounds like Butch Stars in Aztec Pussyland, what does it really mean?” In a ...

A testimonio is an account provided by an individual (to an interviewer, who records the words of the interviewee) who witnessed or participated in historically, socially, or politically significant events. In view of the fact that no tape or digital recorders existed in the ...

Daniel Cano was born August 1, 1947, in Los Angeles, California. He is a professor of English at Santa Monica College, where he teaches composition and literature, including ethnic literatures of the United States, the literature of Mexico, and Chicana/o literature. He received his formal academic education at California State University, Dominguez Hills (Los Angeles)....

Although memorialized by her friends at the time of her premature death due to complications of kidney disease, Lourdes Casal only resurfaces in discussions about Latina/o literature in the ...

Central American-American feminisms, or what might alternately be called US Central American feminisms, are still in their emergent phase, having originated within the recent span of the last twenty to thirty years as communities of Central Americans have become more established within the United States and multiple generations of US Central American women have come of age....

Within the last forty years the term Central American has emerged as a tactical pan-ethnic social identity in the United States. It is an identity that has been fostered by an amalgamation of several historic, economic, and political factors including imperialism, migration, globalization, neoliberalism, the racialization immigrants encounter in the United States, and hegemonic understandings of Latinidad. The creation and deployment of this isthmian-based identity is an act of both imposition and volition. On the one hand, it is an effect of larger structural forces externally imposed on subjects, while on the other hand it can be seen as a self-conscious act on behalf of communities navigating US cultural politics. In this manner, Central American identity in the United States operates similar to other pan-ethnic, pan-national, and pan-racial identitarian terms such as ...

Eusebio Chacón, whose career extended over parts of two centuries from 1892 to the 1920s, represents one of the early Chicano writers....

Post–World War II Chicana/o literary production begins with such significant works as José Antonio Villarreal’s Pocho.¹ Villarreal’s text marks an important shift in the literary representations of Chicana/os as inhabiting both rural and urban worlds. His novel is also notable for the inclusion of Chicana/o pachuco figures such as “Rooster.” ...

Contrary to its earlier uses, mulataje is conceived as the antithesis of mestizaje, the archetype of the “racially mixed” or “degenerate” that has historically served to uphold over the rest of the human species the supremacy of a European “Ideal” subject as the representative embodiment of the analogical principle of the perfect correspondence of the parts to the whole that has informed the concept of beauty in the Western world since the Renaissance....

In the early 1990s, Sandra Cisneros’s author biography in the Vintage Contemporaries editions of her books declared, “The daughter of a Mexican father and a Mexican American mother, and a sister to six brothers, she is nobody’s mother and nobody’s wife.”...

Midwestern Latinx literature encompasses work generated from each of the groups that predominate on either coast of the United States (Chicanx literature in the Southwest and Puerto Rican, Cuban American, and Dominican American in the East) as well as other Latinidades, and it often incorporates explicit attention to a multi-Latinx regional experience in its pages. The interaction among different Latinx groups is addressed by Cuban American author Achy Obejas in an interview with Eduardo del Rio, in which she states that “Chicago is a city unlike any other city in the United States, in terms of the Latino population. It’s not overwhelmed by any one group. You know how New York is pretty much overwhelmed by Puerto Ricans, Miami by Cubans, and Los Angeles by Mexicans? Chicago just doesn’t work that way, especially in the 1980s … There’s a theater group, for example, who are all Latinas. They sold tee-shirts after their first show with names on them that sort of really captured this whole spirit of bizarre integration we have in Chicago in the Latino community. It said things like Chicano-Riqueño, Guaterican, Mexiyorian, etc. It hyphenated, and merged, and fused all these different Latino identities.”...

Writer Gil Cuadros (1962–1996) gave voice to the beautifully transformative and darkly ambivalent experiences of gay Chicano life in the age of AIDS. He is the author of a single and increasingly influential book, ...