This chapter considers the promises and potential pitfalls of the digital era for Latino/a/@/x/e literature. It begins with an exploration of the multiple iterations of the virtual project/website El Puerto Rican Embassy over the last twenty-nine years as a way to think with evolving attitudes about Puerto Rican nationalism and its relationship to Nuyorican identity. The conversation then shifts to think about the potential dangers of relying on digital archives as safe repositories for Latino/a/@/x/e history. After all, with these new forms of digital power, come new responsibilities, including the need for a steady stream of resources. As exciting as the possibilities for redefining Latin@s online may be, the precarity that Adela Vázquez, Jaime Cortez, and Pato Hebert’s queer, Cuban comic Sexile (2004) currently faces makes clear that the expectation that cyberspace serve as a catchall for the margins may foster a false sense of security that risks reproducing new forms of digital exile.

This chapter links Haiti’s ambivalent place in the Latinx literary imaginary to deep-seated anxieties about race, nation, and belonging entangled in representations of Haiti since the Haitian Revolution and the formation of the Latinx literary canon. It argues that in last thirty years the historical exclusion of Haitian American literature from the Latinx literary canon has come increasingly under pressure due to shifting terminology, the broad turn toward recuperating legacies of the Haitian revolution across academic disciplines, and the institutionalization of Dominican American Studies in the United States. The chapter concludes with close readings of Julia Alvarez’s memoir A Wedding in Haiti (2012), Félix Morisseau-Leroy’s poem “Tourist,” and Loida Maritza Pérez’s novel Geographies of Home (2000) to illustrate both the possible pitfalls and promising potential of transnational approaches linking the literatures of the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and their diasporas.

This chapter provides a preliminary Latinx literary history of both the representation of Latinxs in video games and how games shape narratives of Latinidad in the twenty-first century. The chapter first examines how non-Latinxs have dominated Latinx narratives and representation, shaping a narrow concept of who is Latinx and what it means to live as a Latinx person. While AAA games continue to circulate stereotyped images of Latinxs, more recent game narratives authored by Latin American and Latinx creators and distributed through independent publishers challenge these representations. The chapter provides close readings of Guacamelee! and Guacamelee! 2 from Drinkbox Studies and Minority Media’s Papo & Yo, both created by Latin American immigrants to North America. These games subvert gaming tropes and use characterization and worldbuilding to showcase the diversity of Latinidades. Finally, the chapter assesses video games that expand representation (including AfroLatinidades and trans Latinidades) as well as narratives that use ludic structures, such as Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House: A Memoir and Nona Fernández’s Space Invaders.

Latinx children’s and young adult literature offers Latinx children opportunities to step into another world and also see themselves represented in what they read. By giving Latinx child readers, in particular, worlds unlike and like their own, authors like Lilliam Rivera, Edwidge Danticat, and Marcia Argueta Mickelson also challenge dominant national narratives about Latinx experiences in the United States. In the stories these writers tell, young protagonists are confronted by various symptoms of US imperialism, such as racism, xenophobia, and homophobia. The protagonists’ journey often includes learning more about the oppressions that plague them and their communities and finding ways to dismantle said oppressions. Recognizing the role that the United States had in the forced (im)migration of many people of Latin American descent allows for a narrative shift away from the “immigration story” to a story of US imperialism and its consequences. Examining race and empire in Latinx children’s literature creates possibilities for alternative ways of knowing and existing where Latinx children can step in and out of worlds unlike and like their own.

This chapter looks at the interplay between Latinx literature written in Spanish or English, and discusses translanguaging and the complexities of translating an accented or bilingual text into either Spanish or English. The chapter also discusses the vicissitudes of self-translation and the global dimension of Latinx literatures as well as the translation of Latinx literature into languages other than English or Spanish, specifically into German. These aspects of translation promote a reading of Latinx literature beyond the merely representational, highlighting the critical roles of cultural production, distribution, and the literary marketplace instead.

Some key dates in recent US history help us understand the paths of Latinx literature since 1992. This chapter considers five key years: 1992, 1994, 2001, 2008, and 2016. The Columbian quincentenary catalyzed decolonial thinking as writers think about the shared histories of colonization that unite Latinx groups. The events of 1992 help frame NAFTA’s 1994 enactment as a form of neocolonialism that rewrote the terms of national belonging. 9/11 further tears the social order asunder as the US violently reacted. While some writers provide accounts of the persistent grief and trauma experienced by Latinxs after 9/11, others critique US militarism and consider Latinx complicity in state violence. Ramón Saldívar poses the election of Barack Obama in 2008 as inaugurating a period in which Latinx writers turn to speculative forms to articulate new racial imaginaries. If Obama’s election produced possibility, the 2016 presidential election stimulated Latinx writers to contest the administration’s anti-immigration policies, while other writers examine the white supremacy that underlies the administration and festers in some quarters of Latinidad.

This chapter provides an overview of the emergence of a body of literature that emplots Indigenous material realities and forms of knowledge into Latinx literature’s representational horizon. These texts mark a significant transition, moving away from an understanding of Latinx identity rooted in a mythological Indian past, and focusing instead on a diverse array of issues grounded in Indigenous identities, experiences, and epistemologies. These include explorations of the liberatory potential in transnational feminist solidarities, the thematization of contemporary manifestations of settler colonialism, the foregrounding of land-based knowledge, and the celebration of the creative power and insurgent force of the erotic. Focusing on works by Graciela Limón, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Natalie Diaz, and Alan Pelaez Lopez, the chapter argues that these writings collectively depict Latinx Indigeneity at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and colonialism, raising complex issues with respect to overlapping and ongoing histories of colonization and fostering an opportunity for centering Indigenous experiences while interrogating the multiracial character of Latinidad.

This chapter attends to Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019) as an exemplary text in the burgeoning corpus of Latinx solidarity narratives in the United States in the twenty-first century. The chapter focuses on the narrative innovations that Luiselli orients toward the task of envisioning new terms for pan-ethnic solidarity. The chapter shows how, at a time of renewed Latinx literary attention to the experiences of Central Americans fleeing violence in the isthmus, Lost Children Archive stylizes a narrative of pan-ethnic solidarity through strategies of scrupulous narratorial self-awareness and an ethical refusal to represent the experiences of ethnic others. In spite of these innovations, however, the chapter also demonstrates how the novel reiterates and amplifies certain essentializing expressions of unity that characterize Sanctuary Movement–era narratives from the 1980s and 1990s.