Sonic Cultural Citizenship: Listening to Chicanx and Latinx Theater in Times of Crises is an interdisciplinary study of contemporary Chicanx and Latinx theater and performance produced during watershed moments of social activism. The book argues that Chicanx and Latinx teatro has been integral in creating not only new visual representations and stories on stage, but also dramaturgical aural practices that enact lived histories of oppression, resistance, and survival. The book attunes scholars’ to hear Chicanx and Latinx theater as animating and claiming the right to belong through sound-making practices. It is the first book to take a dramaturgical approach to sound in Chicanx and Latinx theater and performance, claiming sound as a performance, where vocality, non-verbal but audible gestures and utterances, the inaudible, onstage and offstage events, instrumentation, among other sound-making practices, come together to mobilize the utopic, or other ways of being (Muñoz 2009). Each chapter tells the story of Chicanx and Latinx performers and practitioners from the last fifty years, beginning with the 1960s political teatro of El Teatro Campesino performed in the agricultural fields and on the picket lines and culminating with Chicanx and Latinx theater practitioners working in regional and national theater spaces today, from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival to Broadway. The book shows how Latinx theater and performance attune audiences’ to the material, affective, and multisensorial experiences of Latinidad, whether through the sounding of huelga (strike) songs, bilingual and Spanish language, American sign language, queer comedy, narco silences, adaptations of classic works, and other sonic registers. Unlike previous work, Sonic Cultural Citizenship: Listening to Chicanx and Latinx Theater in Times of Crises carves out methodologies for listening to sound in performance, how sound is an enactment of the body, and how sound shapes the listening body: how sound acts. Riffing on Cherríe Moraga’s “theory in the flesh” (1981) and theories of affect (Ahmed 2004), the book creates a sound theory in the flesh – one that traces out the political vibrations of Latinx theatrical performances of resistance, survival, critique, negotiation, and world-making that interfere with oppression through revolutions of, and, in sound. With sonic cultural citizenship, the book builds on the concept cultural citizenship, or the demand of disenfranchised communities for full membership in a society despite so-called cultural, racial, or linguistic differences (Casillas 2014; Amaya 2007; Flores and Benmayor 1997; Rosaldo 1994). The book registers sounded bodies in performance that are not aimed toward claiming legal recognition or personhood (that is, represented by the US passport), but toward enunciating the material and affective experiences of what it means to belong, or to choose not to belong, within U.S. society. Building on Jose Muñoz's work on affect as a structure of feeling, the book claims sound as a relational affect, where in various political moments, Latinx bodies have experienced citizenship, not through legal documents, but through looks, feelings, and demeanors, which reverberate through sound. By amplifying sonic performances as central to Latinx performances of citizenship and belonging, the book extends American studies and Latinx studies scholarship on performances of Latinx identity (Casillas, 2014; Krell, 2015; Hernández, 2012; Revill 2000; Rivera-Servera 2009; Vargas 2012) and theories of affect (Ahmed 2004; Berlant 2011, Cvetkovich 2003; Muñoz 2000). The book thus mobilizes an archive of feeling (Cvetkovich 2003) to capture the multisensorial aspects of Chicanx and Latinx theater and performance.

This cross-genre essay examines how Afro-Latinas in general, and Afro- Puerto Rican women in the diaspora in particular, negotiate race, sex, and belonging within Latinx families and communities. Blending fiction with prose to discuss liter- ary poetics, faithful witnessing, and “world”-travelling, this piece enumerates histor- ical and contemporary practices of relating across difference that are part and parcel of women of color feminisms, decolonial feminist politics, and anti-colonial histories of struggle and resistance. The story “Your Lips” follows a young Afro-Puerto Rican girl’s encounter with anti-Black racial logics during a kitchen table conversation be- tween the women in her family. Through prose, artwork, poetry, and short fiction, the essay examines and interrogates the forms of violent intimacies and anti-Black racism that Afro-Latina women and girls experience among their kin, within the academy, and in the world at large.

This study illustrates the radical potential of intersectionality to offer a more deeply critical analysis of hierarchies in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) communities. The author examines how 377 reports from the five most-trafficked LGBTQ websites represented victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida. Findings support previous scholarship that has emphasized Latinx exclusion, as the articles generally failed to present the victims in an intersectional way, focusing on their LGBTQ status and excluding their Latinx identities. At the same time, a significant minority of the reports emphasized Latinx queer people, most frequently in a way that continued to prioritize LGBTQ-identification, sometimes even advancing stereotypical representations of Latinx communities as extraordinarily focused on faith, family, or “machismo.” Moreover, none of the articles considered xenophobia as a potential motivating factor in the shooting, and the reports typically presented policing agencies in a neutral, and sometimes even positive, way.

There are few conceptual frameworks for tarrying with racialized gendered Latinx surface beyond analyses of representation. One entry point could be the beauty mark, the made-up face, and objects/materials such as glitter, nails, and rolos (hair rollers) – those surfaces and things that bind me in memory to my grandmother, and, by extension, to other women in my family as well. This text enacts a performative and theoretical exploration of the ontological contours of femme Latinx beauty practice to craft a poetics about the relationalities, recognitions, and femme generations that these surfaces engender. It juxtaposes authoethnographic prose that conjures the body work of the author’s grandmother with analyses of cultural production by Latinx artists Patricia Zambrano, Mujerista Market (Salina Zazueta-Beltrán), @anythingforselenaaas, Zahira Kelly, and others to evoke how making beauty marks haunts us, makes us possible, and brings us together in becoming, love, and loss.

The term " Latinx " has become a site of contention, like " Latino " once was. Our goal is to propose an articulation of Latina/o/x populations through the term Latinx as a site of possibilities, while clarifying its potential use and the reasoning behind it. Rather than seeing the use of Latinx as a trend, or a rupture, in linguistic usage, we see its use as a continuity of internal shifting group dynamics and disciplinary debates. Complicating the argument that the term Latinx is an imperial-ist imposition on the Spanish language is possible by reclaiming the " x " history of (racial and ethnic) resistance as a marker of nonwhiteness (for example, in Xicana feminism), while turning to the " x " usage by Latin American and Spanish-speaking activists. Latinx foregrounds tensions among self-naming practices and terms that encompass all members of a diverse and complex ethnoracial group: Latinx acts as a new frame of inclusion, while also posing a challenge for those used to having androcentric terms serve as collective representational proxies.

There is a tremendous shift in public digital discourse and the academy more broadly, about the use of Latinx, one that may appear, on the surface, as an uncritical, hip way to shift how we talk about ourselves. While there is a long history of contestation about these categories of naming, my goal in this essay is to chart out the histories of how we went from using Mexican American and Puerto Rican to Chicano and Nuyorican and then the latest iterations, like Latina/o and eventually Latinx. By drawing on specific case studies of millennial digital cultures and the creation of new-phase ethnic studies departments in the 2000s, I demonstrate how millennials use Latinx to transcend gender, racial, class, and regional constraints they see emanating from boomer-generation ethno-nationalist formations. To be a part of the affective community represents a core value for millennials because it is antiessentialist because Latinx bears the load of recognition and diversity and represents the power of inclusion without speaking for everyone. Ultimately, Latinx can carry the excessive and diverse affective load of a population in ways that other ethno-nationalist and pan-Latina/o terms cannot.