The Conclusion to the book introduces two new metaphors that force readers to consider their own personal and collective responsibility in addressing the relationship between race and the law in the United States. Students should leave the text with a clearer personal understanding of the national dynamics around racial discourse in the United States and, ideally, a better understanding of both the potential and limitations of the law in solving societal problems within a democratic system.

The article studies the war artifacts and military symbols, particularly bullets and tattoos, in Héctor Tobar’s novel about the Guatemalan civil war, The Tattooed Soldier (1998) and Salomón de la Selva’s testimonial poetry about World War I, El soldado desconocido (1922). Although the texts were written more than seven decades apart, the two authors’ treatments of these objects demonstrate ligatures between soldiering, disability, and the frailty of the Global North’s patriotism in Latinx narratives. They depict the effects of war on vulnerable bodies as well as the central value of the figure of the soldier. In his novel, Tobar builds on de la Selva’s poetic explorations, from the soldiers in the European trenches to the soldier turned immigrant. Their narratives capture how soldiers in global and local conflicts look for a sense of masculinity and patriotism, but instead expose the atomization and dark side of contemporary American cultures across borders. For both authors, war creates physical and psychological wounds that go unrecognized and for which the US is never held responsible. Tobar and de la Selva reveal war artifacts and militaristic symbols as original, tangible sites that expose this reality.

This chapter imagines potential and as yet unexplored rapprochements between William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) and Julia de Burgos (1914–53), two contemporaneous writers on the brink of Latinx identification, as it is currently conceived. Observing their generically and linguistically diverse writing practices – marked by distinct introspections about Puerto Rican, Caribbean, pan-Hispanic, Anglo-American, and European identities – I open a discussion of the authors’ experiences of everyday spaces (the city street, the hospital ward, the intergenerational home). What I call “lyrical mobilities” constitutes the process of imagining Williams’s and de Burgos’s movements through hemispheric histories as well as geographic and linguistic spaces. It is also a critical attempt to read these two canonical authors in terms of the spaces they had in common, which, in turn, helps extend our understanding of Latinx lives across disciplines that have contained Williams and de Burgos within discrete silos.

This chapter asks how religion has been understood in Chicanx literature by connecting the performance of syncretic spiritual labor with the task of telling stories about the exploitation of Chicanx labor. It takes Tomás Rivera’s 1971 … y no se lo tragó la tierra (Tierra) and Denise Chávez’s 1994 novel Face of an Angel (Angel) as test cases. By closely revisiting a work of criticism that is emblematic of the way Chicanx literary criticism approaches the role of religion in literature, this chapter shows how reproductive labor, service labor, and syncretic religious labor are inadvertently obscured by the urgency of attending to class identity and farm labor in the case of Tierra, or non-religious spirituality and fetishized indigeneity in the case of Angel. In particular, the chapter returns to Ramón Saldívar’s germinal reading of Rivera’s novel and Theresa Delgadillo’s incisive interpretation of Chávez’s novel to explore how subtly and entirely certain subjectivities become illegible. Drawing inspiration from scholars such as Judith Butler, the chapter scrutinizes notions of agency within gender performance and advocates for a paradigm shift that acknowledges the deeper significance found in seemingly menial tasks, such as washing dishes or clearing used plates.

Writing in the US in the early twentieth century, Leonor Villegas de Magnón was a Mexican American activist, educator, nurse, and founder of La Cruz Blanca Constitucionalista, a group of nurses established during the Mexican Revolution. Her most comprehensive text is her autobiography, which chronicles the contributions of La Cruz Blanca and which she essentially writes twice, once in Spanish for the Mexican and Mexican American reader, and then in English for the English-speaking readers of the US. What becomes apparent as she shifts audiences, in her writing and in her archive, is a preoccupation not only with the preservation of history and culture, but with its translation. This chapter proposes that this question of translation (across languages, generations, nations, and cultures) is one equally applicable to the task of digitizing archival material. In making the physical archive digitally accessible, digital humanists are enacting translation and must wrestle with questions regarding the responsibilities of the translator. Guided by the question of the ethics of translation, this chapter outlines the process of creating an online exhibit of Villegas de Magnon’s archive, finally claiming that the project of Latinx Digital Humanities is itself an urgent but complex task of translation.

On August 29, 1970, Mexican American journalist Rubén Salazar was killed while covering the Chicano Moratorium in East Los Angeles. A gas projectile shot by a Los Angeles sheriff’s deputy ended Salazar’s life inside a local bar, the Silver Dollar Café, where he took a break from the demonstration occurring outside. In death, Salazar became a martyr of the Chicano Movement. And, as this chapter argues, the bar similarly experienced a mythical recasting in Chicanx activist consciousness and cultural production. This chapter traces two such afterlives of the Silver Dollar: first, in the photographic work of Raul Ruiz; and second, through the historical detective novel by Maria Nieto, Pig behind the Bear. I show how each respective text sets in motion a type of site-specific transformative witnessing and call to action that reverberates through time. Specifically, I analyze how this is done through the perspective of women viewing the incident of August 29 outside and inside the bar. I see this focalization as a blueprint in the establishment of the Silver Dollar Café as an ongoing political and cultural site of enduring Chicanx social change.

This chapter examines ideological underpinnings of the Spanish–Indian binary in Mexican and Mexican American indigenism and mestizaje. In a reassessment of Chicanx literary history, it looks at the life and writings of sixteenth-century Dominican cleric, Bartolomé de las Casas, and twentieth-century Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa. Las Casas has long been considered a literary precursor to nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexican American literature, as well as Latinx literature more broadly. Gloria Anzaldúa remains one of the most celebrated and influential late twentieth-century Chicana writers. More specifically, this analysis urges a reconsideration of las Casas’s founding influence, foregrounding his almost lifelong support for the enslavement of African people, as it also explores contemporary vestiges of the anti-Blackness strategically at the center of las Casas’s defense of Indigenous people of the Americas.

This chapter reads María Cristina Mena’s “The Birth of the God of War” (1914) alongside Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of the Coyolxauhqui imperative in Light in the Dark/Luz in lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality (2015) to theorize brown modernism. Building on the work of José Esteban Muñoz, who theorizes a “sense of brown” that emerges from a felt community based on brownness,” I contend that Mena’s and Anzaldúa’s engagement with Aztec myths allows them to theorize brownness by centering indigeneity through a feminist lens. In this way, both authors illuminate the divergent modernities that attend their depictions and engagement with indigeneity. Focusing on brown modernism over white modernism illuminates how different modernisms have their own temporalities as brown modernism drags modernist aesthetics deeper into the twentieth century. Moreover, this chapter shows how, in taking up an explicit engagement with indigeneity, brown modernism stresses the importance of having such conversations, particularly when such engagements are uncomfortable and problematic. Doing so allows for a deeper accounting of the kinship between Chicanxs – and Latinxs more broadly – and indigeneity.

Harkening to parteras’ voices prompts us to reposition ourselves in relation to literature and literary history by looking to the non-literary, the silences, and the interstices of print culture: court documents, folklore, testimonio, peripheral material within Spanish-language newspapers, second- and third-hand accounts, a birth story told year after year but never written down. In this way, the literature of parteras – and Latinx literature in transition more broadly – reflects the betweenness that would come to be theorized in the late twentieth century by Chicana feminists and Latinx literary recovery projects. Parteras, in their role, are not the ones being born nor the ones giving birth; they guide birth, counseling, positioning, and attending to labor. So, too, can their archival traces attend to the transition of Latinx literature into new forms and new consciousnesses.

This chapter examines a US Central American experience at the end of the long nineteenth century, as reflected in Centro America, a newspaper established by the Comité Unionista Centroamericano de San Francisco in support of the final, formal effort to establish an isthmian nation in 1921. A rare literary text, Centro America provides a cultural account of the complexities and contradictions that shaped the transnational lives of an early Central American diaspora in the US. The weekly paper published unionist essays, the latest local and global news, literary reviews, poems, society columns, and passenger arrival and departure notices that catered to an audience composed of primarily Central American coffee and other elites. However, Centro America also published a letter written by Abel Romero, a Salvadoran, working-class machinist, urging the paper to speak out against El Salvador’s authoritarian government. By allowing different forms of writing to cohabitate, a complex imaginative space emerges in the paper wherein clashing political and class interests create conflict among Central American communities. Print culture, I contend, visibilizes ruptures that emerged in Centro America when elites were confronted by the economic precarity that burdened their countrymen in San Francisco, from whom they asked and largely received unionist support.