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.

This chapter attends to the formal and cultural function of Latinx racial passing in Who Would Have Thought It? (1872) by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton. Critical conversations about the orphan protagonist of the novel, Lola Medina, interrogate her rescue from Indian captivity and the gradual “whitening” of her dyed skin as a form of aspirational assimilation into Anglo-American society. Scholars have also studied the ways in which Lola’s captivity story is informed by the historical precedent and publications surrounding the repatriation of Olive Oatman to white American society after her five-year captivity among the Mohave in the 1850s. This contribution reads Lola’s performance of Latinx racial passing alongside the captivity narrative, newspaper articles, and visual culture from the Oatman case to argue how the idea of “passing” operates in the novel as a form of political critique and a catalyst for modernist, formal innovation. Lola’s narrative of Latinx racial passing not only illuminates an early discourse of Latinx racialization, but also catalyzes a modernist satire of Anglo-American imperialism.

Edited by two Chicana lesbian feminists and formed through commitment to coalitional Third World feminist analysis and practice, This Bridge Called My Back urges us to attend to the conflicts and pleasures that emerge from the radical transformation of the self in relation to others as we struggle for liberation. In the forty years since the anthology’s original publication, we continue to bear witness to the destructive outcomes of neoliberalism and to those who are still consigned to disproportionately bear the brunt of modernity’s violence. We are compelled to address the betrayals of those spaces of solidarity and the use of violence to reclaim difference as an amenity of traditional power. Making domination “make sense” often occurs by recruiting representatives of subordinated populations into normative locations of institutional power. The tokenized investment in women of color as fixed symbols of progressive politics illustrates how even the celebration of racial difference can function as a technology of racist power. I argue that bridge building is also about place making or the radical vision of a space for new social relations and terms of recognition. Radical methodologies for creating art participate in this process of gathering political will to oppose racial power.

Ernesto Galarza’s Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story is a genealogical study of the Mexican migrant farmworker experience in California under the Bracero Program. His study was a direct response to the deaths of thirty-two migrant workers in the Chualar bus crash of 1963. Galarza traces the political-economic origin “story” of this labor force and its role within a historical moment defined by rapid increases in modernization. Of considerable importance are his insights regarding the central characteristics of an emerging neoliberal paradigm, which are brilliantly grounded in his analysis of how Mexican braceros were transformed into a disembodied “labor pool” for US agribusiness. The chapter examines Galarza’s critique of the Bracero Program and his analysis of early farmworker struggles against exploitative labor practices, particularly the manner in which “labor pools” were used to transform the concrete existentiality of the bracero into a commodity abstraction, thus establishing a blueprint for the systemic exploitation of racially marginalized peoples. The chapter concludes by addressing how Chicana/o activists affiliated themselves with the farmworker struggle after the Chualar tragedy, thus bridging the rural–urban divide while calling attention to the movement’s anti-war protests and demands for political reform.

On September 19, 1967, Hurricane Beulah devastated the borderlands of South Texas and Northern Mexico. Tearing across the flat terrain, flooding the Rio Grande/Bravo delta, causing nearly $240 million in property damage, and affecting thousands of residents on both sides of the border, the hurricane was nothing short of a minor apocalypse. In the half-century since it hammered the Gulf coastline, the storm has become a recurring motif in the border region’s long cultural memory, returning to conversation often by way of old photographs, grainy video footage, archived news articles, and unsettling historical analogies. Here, though, I emphasize figurations besides the visual and traditionally textual: the local soundtracks that the storm produced, the narrative folk ballads, or corridos, that it inspired. What might such post-apocalyptic ballads teach us today, amid the immense and interconnected social and ecological difficulties of the present? Uniting literary study with ethnomusicological inquiry, in this chapter I reflect on examples of such corridos to argue for the border ballad’s capacities to unsettle the colonialities of genre, media, and discipline; to bear witness to local catastrophe; and, ultimately, to guide collective memory in the long shadow of colonial encounter.

This chapter examines the implications of mapping Latinx theater history through a singular narrative of race and cultural resistance. Scholars have written the history of Latinx theater as the story of minoritarian struggles for representation against the dominant white gaze since the 1960s. I assess how the narrative of overcoming racial oppression has taken a decidedly romantic form since it tells the story of how Latinx communities move from oppression toward an emancipatory future, and how, in turn, this romance’s linear temporal plot defines Latinidad as brown and as antithetical to whiteness. The “romance of Latinidad,” I argue, has served generations of Latinxs artists to craft an aesthetic and a cultural politics of resistance. However, the story of brown resistance consolidates a post-1960s brown/white racial binary that erases non-brown Latinxs from Latinx theater history. After tracing the generations of artists included in the resistance narrative, the chapter turns to Latinidad’s pre-1960s past and discusses the biography and racial ideologies of Josefina Niggli (1910–83), the Mexican American playwright whose whiteness and folkloric representations of Mexicans trouble the romance of brown resistance. Indeed, the analysis seeks to account for Latinidad’s antiracist possibilities by reckoning with Latinx theater’s collusions with racism.

Just as Song of Solomon and Down These Mean Streets inspired Junot Díaz to become a writer, Youngblood (1954), a novel by the radical African American author John Oliver Killens, inspired Piri Thomas to write Down These Mean Streets (1967). What does Thomas’s personal relationship with Killens reveal about the intertextual relationship between DTMS and Youngblood? What can we learn from reading DTMS as a coming-of-age memoir rather than as a coming-of-age novel? What can be gained by reading DTMS from a child-centered perspective? Inspired by Ralph Ellison’s concept of literary ancestry, Harold Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence, Gerard Genette’s definition of intertextuality, and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s theory of signifying, I argue that the shared themes of racial, sexual, and gendered trauma intertextually bind the homosocial coming-of-age narratives in DTMS and Youngblood. I examine how the coming-of-age narratives in each of these texts explore the entanglement of homosocial camaraderie and ethnic, racial, and sexual identity formation. In critically explicating these themes, this chapter expands Latino American and African American literary history and reveals new insights about the intertextual genealogy of influence between DTMS and Youngblood.

Before the categories of Latino/a or Hispanic were adopted in academia and literary criticism in the United States, Latinx writers were often (mis)placed within a wide and ambiguous “Spanish” literary scene. This chapter explores how this tendency also extended to Filipinx American writers. It centers on José Garcia Villa’s early years in the United States, in particular the semi-autobiographical short stories in Footnote to Youth: Tales of the Philippines and Others (1933), wherein he reflects on his experience as a young Filipino American writer and finds continuities between the Philippines and New Mexico.