Latinos and society: Culture, politics, and class

AbstrAct: This essay considers how globalized capitalism affects Latino communities in the United States and suggests implications for Latino studies. Contextualizing US Latinos within a restructured economic system and the current neoliberal policy regime provides a lens for understanding their conditions. The essay examines structural dynamics based on the logic of economic imperatives, including the inexorable pressure to accumulate capital by cutting costs and expanding markets, and highlights impacts on Latino labor, immigration, and neighborhoods. An ideological apparatus of social messaging and mechanisms of social control support these imperatives and shift the blame for poor economic conditions to Latinos themselves. Values, principles, and research-based analyses stemming from the foundations of Chicano and Puerto Rican studies can help challenge the dominant discourse and address contemporary issues facing Latino communities. The call for renewed emphasis on the political economy and on research-based solutions is intended to place the output of Latino studies scholarship into discourse and policy debates and to make Latino presence in universities true to the social movements that brought them there. In the United States and globally, the poles of opulence and misery are becoming more extreme, the mechanisms of social control more brutal, and the destruction of natural, cultural, and social resources more widespread and nearly irreversible. Meanwhile, the state continues to be undermined as a means of protection for the collective good. Human dignity and democracy are at stake, making ever more urgent the role of the engaged citizenry and of Latino studies scholars in particular. Those of us concerned with the impacts of these forces might ask, " What is to be done, and what is the role of Latino studies scholarship in addressing the critical issues facing

Latino Dreams: Transcultural Traffic and the U.S. National Imaginary (Amsterdam and New York; Rodopi BV, 2002) http://www.rodopi.nl/functions/search.asp?BookId=PORTADA+14 A welcome addition to the fields of Latino and (trans-)American cultural and literary studies, Latino Dreams focuses on a selection of Latino narratives, performances and films, published or produced between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, that may be said to traffic in the U.S.A.’s attendant myths and governing cultural logics. The selection includes novels by authors who have received little academic attention—Abraham Rodriguez, Achy Obejas, and Benjamin Alire Sáenz—along with underattended works from more renowned writers—Rosario Ferré, Coco Fusco, and Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Latino Dreams takes a transcultural approach in order to raise questions of subaltern subordination and domination, and the resistant capacities of cultural production. The analysis explores how the selected narratives deploy specific narrative tactics, and a range of literary and other cultural capital, in order to question and reform the U.S.A.’s imaginary coordinates. In these texts, moreover, national imperatives are complicated by recourse to feminist, queer, panethnic, postcolonial, or transnational agendas. Yet the analysis also recognizes instances in which the counter-narrative will is frustrated: the narratives may provide signs of the U.S.A.’s hegemonic resilience in the face of imaginary disavowal. Contents: Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1. The transcultural contours of Latino U.S.A. Chapter 2. Rosario Ferré’s trans-“American” fantasy, or subalternizing the self Chapter 3. Abraham Rodriguez’s boy-zone romance of “American” escape Chapter 4. Cuban memory, “American” mobility, and Achy Obejas’s lesbian way Chapter 5. Coming out of the “American” nightmare with Benjamin Alire Sáenz Chapter 6. Coco Fusco, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and “American” cannibal reveries Afterword: Notes on transcultural traffic from across el charco pacífico Bibliography Index Reviews: From Claire Fox, “Review Essay: Comparative Literary Studies in the Americas.” American Literature 76.4 (December 2004): 871-85. “Latino Dreams invokes theoretical concepts from twentieth-century Latin American criticism in order to chart the way in which U.S.-based Latino narratives diversely engage the American Dream. The book thus inverts the common pattern in which metropolitan critics summon U.S. and European theories in order to decode Latin American texts. At the center of Allatson’s methodology is ‘‘transculturation,’’ a concept associated with Cuban ethnographer Fernando Ortiz, who elaborated it as a countertheory to the English-language concepts of acculturation and assimilation. For Ortiz, cultural contact implied not only cultural acquisition but several simultaneous processes, including ‘‘cultural destruction, uprooting, and loss (deculturation), and the productions of ‘new cultural phenomena’ (neoculturation) . . .’’ (32). Subsequent authors and critics, such as José María Arguedas and Angel Rama, recognized the concept’s potential to describe the manner in which Latin American regional literatures channeled the multifocal perspectives and competing signifying systems characteristic of the continent’s interracial and neocolonial societies (33–34). For the purpose of his study, Allatson further submits transculturation to critiques by the U.S.-based Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, which cautions against self-subalternizing maneuvers on the part of national elites (39), and by Marxist critics, who deride transculturation as an accommodating culturalism that depends on dependency, as it were (41). These caveats in place, Allatson’s use of the term transculturation signifies neither seamless hybridization nor textual resistance; rather, the concept’s heuristic value lies in its intrinsic attention to polyvalence and contradiction, which enables the critic to move beyond a hegemonic-resistant binary to distinguish the ‘‘complex, mutable, and often surprising logics of domination, subordination, and resistance’’ that mark Latina(o) literary interactions with the United States (53). ... Latino Dreams is remarkably successful at keeping the myriad identity categories associated with cultural studies in constant play, while pausing frequently to problematize each phase of its own argumentation. Its readings are meticulous yet imaginative. ... Latino Dreams’s brief afterword, about the circulation of Latina(o) texts in the author’s native Australia, is another important critical intervention. Through his discussion of the 1992 Sydney Biennale, in which Gómez-Peña and Fusco staged their well-known performance, ‘‘Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit Sydney, ’’ Allatson highlights several problematic examples of cross-cultural identification between Latinas(os) and Australians. The Biennale’s curator, for example, constructed an analogy between Latina(o) ‘‘border crossers’’ and the historical figure of the Australian boundary rider, ‘‘an icon mythologized from an Australian colonial era and frontier ethos’’ (307) in an apparent effort to claim migrancy as the universal human condition for the postmillennium. Here Allatson is attentive to questions of translation, even in cases where English is the primary language of communication. The afterword further points to an exciting direction for future research inherent in Allatson’s project—if Latino literature somehow exceeds the boundaries of the United States, then it can also be studied from other geographical and national perspectives. ... The work ... under review use[s] race, ethnicity, and aesthetic movements as analytic bridges to link North and South, Europe and the Americas; and in so doing, ... extend[s] the pioneering projects of scholars such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Paul Gilroy, both of whom have had a profound impact on the transnational turn in contemporary U.S.-based American studies.” -------------- From David William Foster, "Review Essay: Recent Latin American Cultural Studies." Chasqui: Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana 33: 2 (November 2004), pp. 157-68. "...this is an important critical contribution to Latino Studies."

Sociology Compass, 2009

Although Latinas/os have a long history in the United States and represent a growing percentage of the population, they remain largely invisible or stereotyped in popular images and discourses. Ahistoric, fragmented, and individual-level perspectives often frame Latina/o migration, education, and activism and thus negatively influence public perceptions and policy. Fortunately, over the past 30 years, scholars in disciplines such as sociology, history, Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies, and Latin American Studies have done much to remedy these gaps and misperceptions. However, for a broad and inclusive approach to understanding the structures influencing Latina/o lives and communities, we believe that more work is needed to connect these scholarly developments which are often separated by academic divisions. Thus, we recommend the following materials that together offer a multidisciplinary and multifaceted framework that highlights the significance of global capitalism and white supremacy on Latina/o immigration, education, and activism. Key to this framework is a movement away from individual-level arguments and assimilationist perspectives to an emphasis on US imperialism, economic exploitation, and schooling within capitalism. By broadening the frameworks for analysis and linking together the factors shaping Latina/o migration, education, and activism, we emphasize the systems of power and inequality that influence the lives of marginalized communities, without losing sight of the legacy of resistance in Latin America and the United States.

Although Latinas/os have a long history in the USA and represent a growing percentage of the population, they remain largely invisible or stereotyped in dominant images and discourses. Such representations are often ahistorical, and they camouflage the effects of US power and inequality. However, the spring 2006 immigrant rights demonstrations disturbed dominant conceptions. The demonstrators called attention to the contradictory US practices that disrupt home countries, recruit labor migrants, and deny immigrants full participation. Likewise, the role of students in these demonstrations spurred reflections on why youth would walk out of their schools for immigrant rights. Inspired by these demonstrations, we combine materials from multiple disciplines to emphasize the significance of US imperialism, exploitation, and exclusion on Latina/o migration, education, and activism. Key to this article is a reframing of how the media, K-12 curriculum, and popular discourse often engage in a cultural cover-up that sustains inequality.

Although Latinas/os have a long history in the United States and represent a growing percentage of the population, they remain largely invisible or stereotyped in popular images and discourses. Ahistoric, fragmented, and individual-level perspectives often frame Latina/o migration, education, and activism and thus negatively influence public perceptions and policy. Fortunately, over the past 30 years, scholars in disciplines such as sociology, history, Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies, and Latin American Studies have done much to remedy these gaps and misperceptions. However, for a broad and inclusive approach to understanding the structures influencing Latina/o lives and communities, we believe that more work is needed to connect these scholarly developments which are often separated by academic divisions. Thus, we recommend the following materials that together offer a multidisciplinary and multifaceted framework that highlights the significance of global capitalism and white supremacy on Latina/o immigration, education, and activism. Key to this framework is a movement away from individual-level arguments and assimilationist perspectives to an emphasis on US imperialism, economic exploitation, and schooling within capitalism. By broadening the frameworks for analysis and linking together the factors shaping Latina/o migration, education, and activism, we emphasize the systems of power and inequality that influence the lives of marginalized communities, without losing sight of the legacy of resistance in Latin America and the United States.

A theoretical framework that describes the basic processes of racialization is proposed by analyzing how Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans were racialized during the first decades of the twentieth century. This was a significant time because of the rise and saliency of the ideologies of scientific racism and imperialism became part of the popular culture and Puerto Ricans and Mexicans were being colonized both in their nations of origin and in their diasporic homelands. While there is some significant descriptive work on contemporary racialization in the Chicano and Boricua experience, very little comparative and theoretical work underpins these efforts. By looking at the process of racialization if we understand the particularities and similarities of racialization within various ethnic components of the Latino community. Flores (2000) reminded us in his article, APan-Latino/Trans-Latino@:

The introductory chapter to the book Dangerous Curves. It provides a theoretical framework for analyzing the field of contemporary representations surrounding popular Latinas such as Jennifer Lopez, Salma Hayek and America Ferrera.

Ethnicities Vol. 15(2) 234-254, 2015

In the last 30 years, the mass transnational migration of Salvadorans and Mexicans to the U.S. from their countries due to changes in the world capitalist system, and its specific effects on their homelands, has made Los Angeles the most Mexican and Salvadoran populated city in the United States. Within the everyday struggles of the working class in Los Angeles, an internal antagonism between these two Latina/Latino communities has developed that has divided them yet, dialectically, a sense of solidarity between them vis-a`-vis the dominant racialized regime of the U.S. has also emerged. This paper investigates this dialectical interplay of tension and solidarity between Salvadoran and Mexican communities in Los Angeles through qualitative interviews with 20 young adults who are children of mixed Salvadoran–Mexican migrant families. This paper will contextualize their families’ experiences within a larger theoretical, analytical, and historical framework of the global capitalist system and recent transnational processes, including neoliberalism, migration, and the racialization of Latina/Latinos in the U.S. The exploration of the participants’ families and their relationships to a series of structural and cultural factors that ground both communities, such as racialized labor market competition, migration, and national belonging, may assist in explaining this dialectical interplay of tension and solidarity.

UC Davis L. Rev., 1999