Chapter 7 queries how the law addresses evolving concepts such as intentionality, intersectionality, and multiracial identities. In a common law system, legal precedents are static even though public understanding of race in society has expanded dramatically. This chapter explores the historic requirement to demonstrate evidence of an intent to discriminate to justify intervention by the law, which emerged from a traditional understanding of racism as personal and purposeful. Despite the potential harm of neutral policies creating disparate damages in racialized communities, this barrier to governmental action and its concomitant justification for neglect, matters. Students will explore the inability of the law to address multiple racial identities simultaneously and the legal consequences of ignoring intersectionality. The text considers a proposed constitutional amendment to address this limitation. Finally, the law’s hesitance to address multiracial identities is explored, questioning whether current legal structure is adequate to address contemporary understandings of racism and racial discrimination.

Chapter 4 examines the consequences when the state does not protect the security of people within its realm because of their race, and how this negligence intersects with the contemporary criminal justice system. The chapter focuses on current arguments surrounding Black Lives Matter and similar movements in Latino and Native communities regarding state violence against communities of color. The primary sources examine several criminal justice protections provided under the Constitution, consider the Fourteenth Amendment’s requirements of state and federal governments, and question how the government protects the people against itself and from White majorities. Readers may engage with the continuing debates around the responsibility of governments to ensure that policing is not racialized and consider the most just specific policies or legal interpretations focusing on the accountability of state actors. The chapter conncludes by exploring the potential of the constitutional requirement of a jury of peers for criminal prosecution may hinder the exercise of state-sanctioned racialized violence.

Chapter 6 investigates the legal options to ameliorate historic approaches to race, allowing the United States to more closely align with its national ideals. Over time, different branches of government developed strategies to ameliorate the damage caused by institutionalized racism. However, courts have wrestled with the question of how these remedies might reify race – making it more central to American life – or destroy the unique aspects of communities, forged by their shared experiences fo race, in an effort to provide greater equality. The chapter asks if the law and Constitution require public institutions to be color-blind in their treatment of race, or does the racial history of the nation demand color-conscious remedies. The text traces the evolution of affirmative action, especially in education, as a means of compensating for generational exclusion and the Supreme Court’s changing perception on color blindness as a constitutional principle.. The treatment of those U.S. territories that have not been granted statehood, where the majority of the population are people of color is explored. Finally, recent expansions to Native sovereignty are examined and the reader is asked to consider the impact of such protections on Native equality.

Chapter 5 queries how cultural and community identities legally intersect with issues of race. Here readers explore how the law wrestles with the relationship between laws and cultural customs and norms within racialized communities. The text asks the reader to determine if the law should treat discrimination against cultural expressions frequently connected to race, such as hair style or language, with the same scrutiny as racial discrimination. Scholars and the courts have disagree about the relationship between the two and the text engages this debate by presenting different scholarly attempts to resolve this conflict. In this chapter students will explore the statutorily protected capacity of Native communities to privilege the adoption of children of indigenous descent into Native families over White families. Another significant question emerges from the excerpted cases of whether Native tribal communities in the United States are racial or political entities. The answer to this question impacts core questions of political autonomy and sovereignty, as well as the social constructions of other racial identities.

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.