This chapter explores the newspapers anarchists used to create and disseminate an anarchist Latinidad that was a radical, transnational, anti-capitalist, anticlerical, anti-imperial, and Spanish language-based identity forged initially by US-based migrant anarchists from Spain and Cuba. Using the anarchist press in Florida and New York, anarchists rejected the importance of identifying themselves as “Spanish” or “Cuban” and instead forged a cross-border working-class identity. In creating this identity, anarchists focused on their encounters with US capitalism and republican democracy from 1886 to 1898. Such encounters conditioned their perspectives on what an independent Cuba could look like and what it should avoid. Anarchists also debated whether or not to support the Cuban War for Independence. Was it just another nationalist project that would usher in a new, exploitative ruling elite, or could an independent, non-nationalist anarchist society be constructed? These latter debates began in mid-1891– three and a half years before the mambises launched their uprising against Spanish colonialism.

This chapter traces the recent turn to form in Latinx literary studies. While the field has long privileged the historical in shaping debates and organizing Latinx cultural production, there is a growing group of scholars taking the formal as their point of departure by studying components that range from genre to word choice, from page layout to punctuation. Concerned less with the who, what, and where of literary texts, this new approach focuses more on how. That is, how our privileged objects of study – race and racism, community and coalition, gender and sexuality – are represented on and off the page. Linking these recent approaches to a longer tradition of queer Latinx performance studies, a branch of scholarship long attuned to the importance of gesture, corporality, and affect, this chapter models formal analysis by taking works by Carmen María Machado and Justin Torres as representative case studies.

This chapter explores Latinx speculative fiction – the capacious term for genres that include anything from science fiction, fantasy, and apocalyptic fiction to horror, alternative histories, and supernatural fiction and their vast array of subgenres – and asks why Latinx writers turn to speculative tropes to tell their stories, and what unique narrative possibilities genre fiction offers. The chapter argues that Latinx speculative fiction offers a powerful tool for examining race, ethnicity, national belonging, and diaspora, revealing how Latinx identities and Latinidad have been shaped by violent historical forces that veer on the otherworldly, and how reading through this lens uncovers tropes and narratives that might otherwise remain hidden. The chapter illustrates the importance of Latinx speculative fiction as a paradigm for reading, one that exceeds national boundaries, establishes thematic networks across time and space, offers new avenues for discussing identity formations, and, moreover, requires a redefinition of Latinidad as a speculative endeavor.

This chapter proposes that the English-language Latinx melodrama of the twenty-first century owes much of its rise in visibility and market viability to the transnational success of the Latin American telenovela in the late twentieth century. The chapter traces the notable influence that the telenovela genre has had on Latinx melodrama and highlights the way telenovelas have mobilized and attracted Latinx audiences as well as registered the political intensities of Latinx life in the twenty-first century. The chapter includes a brief overview of how Latin American telenovelas first came to the attention of English-language television producers and a definition of the genre as a melodramatic vehicle informed by José Muñoz’s “brown feeling.” Ugly Betty and Jane the Virgin offer examples of how adaptations have recognized their telenovela origins and influences. East Los High (2013–2017) stands out as one of the few successful English-language telenovelas. Party of Five (2020) – a reboot of the 1994 dramedy – leans into a telenovela-style melodrama that emphasizes the stakes of the story. The chapter ends with a brief overview of several recent shows that are influenced by the telenovela genre.

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.

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.

Debates about Latinx literary representations of war tend to emphasize either how Latinx literature offers a means of repair for war’s ravages or, alternatively, that violence is constitutive of latinidad itself. This chapter charts a middle course through both positions by arguing that US Latinx literature highlights both irresolute, unreconciled wars and, what Jesse Alemán describes as Latinx “micro-wars” within major conflicts; such micro-wars, furthermore, often involve clashes and negotiations around the racialized boundaries of Latinx communities. Here we survey a range of Latinx representations of the Civil War, World War II, the Korean War, and wars of revolution and counterinsurgency in Viet Nam and Central America. Rather than waging war on an irredeemable enemy, we conclude, Latinxs lay siege to the imperial relationship championed by the US in most of these conflicts.

This chapter argues that the terms “Latinx” and “latinidad” are messy signifiers that allow us to contend with Latinx’s complicated racial history. While the term Latinx continues to be controversial, and scholars such as Tatiana Flores have examined the case for cancelling latinidad, “Racing Latinidad” points to how latinidad can signify particular political commitments and affinities. Through readings of Manuel Muñoz’s What You See in the Dark (2011) and Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa’s Daughters of the Stone (2009), this chapter illuminates how excavating racial histories outside the logic of the state is a way to summon a politics to imagine a people. Within this framework, “Racing Latinidad” ultimately argues for embracing the incoherence of latinidad as term that resists legibility and visibility and thus institutionalization and state management.

This comprehensive review of Chicanx poetry considers the lyric poetry of Greater Mexico as an ongoing evolution of and conversation with varied poetic traditions at the crossroads of geopolitical, cultural, and expressive exchange. This chapter addresses this arc, beginning with oral forms such as the corrido, and examines the ascendency of poetry in the early borderlands press, which was anchored by colonial New Spanish lyric poetry. The focus then turns to the flourishinging of Chicano/a/x poetry in the 1960s through the 1980s via the establishment of Chicano/a/x publication outlets and independent printing presses as well as through Chicano/a/x-specific literary prizes. The chapter concludes by considering the form’s coevolution with Chicano/a/x identity and politics to the present day, including a return to oral forms such as slam poetry, and its evolving relationship with other Latino/a/x cultural productions.

This chapter presents the history of essayistic writing by Latinas and Latinos in the United States from the nineteenth century to today. Latinx writers have long recognized the power of the essay for personal and polemical expression, despite the genre’s relative neglect in the literary marketplace and among critics. Encompassing work by writers who have migrated or are descended from Latin America or the Caribbean (including writers who identify as Hispanic, Chicana/o/x, Nuyorican, or Afro Latino), the Latinx essay reflects this heterogeneity, as authors have used the form for everything from personal recollection and spiritual reflection to cultural affirmation and aesthetic evaluation. However, Latinx writers often use even their most personal essays to engage social and political debates. At the same time, these authors take advantage of the essay’s dialogic nature in their explorations of contentious issues, opening a dialogue with the reader as they show their thought processes on the page. While Latinx authors blur the boundaries among different types of essays, this chapter explores three broad strands: the crónica, the personal essay, and the radical feminist essay.

This chapter follows the bachata from its earliest beginnings in Dominican Republic to its current position on the global stage, specifically investigating what happens when a music – made by and for local, rural audiences – crosses geographic borders and is suddenly performed by and for global, urban audiences; and what occurs when a music traditionally tied to place-specific experiences suddenly assumes contrasting positions of meaning.

The exceptionalism of New Orleans from the perspective of the United States is reversed when considered from the perspective of major cities along the southern rim of the Gulf of Mexico, cities that, as New Orleans once did, formed part of the Spanish empire. Though this legacy has not been foregrounded in recent decades the way the city’s ties to France have been, major literary activity in Spanish has been associated with New Orleans since the career of Eusebio Gómez in the 1840s, perhaps reaching a peak in the first decades of the twentieth century with the rise of the New Orleans–based magazine, El Mercurio, which served as an important incubator of Modernism in the Spanish-speaking world.