Latino/A Studies

A special issue of Studies in Musical Theatre offering a range of new critical perspectives on Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton, including:

“Is It Like a Beat Without a Melody?”: Rap and Revolution in Hamilton | Jeffrey
Severs

Rise Up: Nuyorican Resistance and Transcultural Aesthetics in Hamilton | Gabriel
Mayora

Hamilton’s Women | Stacy Wolf

Blackout on Broadway: Affiliation and Audience in In the Heights and Hamilton |
Elena Machado Sáez

Staging a Revolution: The Cultural Tipping Points of John Gay and Lin-Manual
Miranda | Tiffany Yecke Brooks

Miranda’s Les Miz | Jeffrey Magee

Hamilton Meets Hip-Hop Pedagogy | Alison Dobrick

“Hey Yo, I’m Just Like My Country”: Teaching Miranda’s Hamilton as an
American Chronicle | Timothy J. Viator

Lin-Manuel Miranda and the Metamyth of a Nation’s Founding | Helen M. Whall

“What If This Bullet Is My Legacy?”: The Guns of Hamilton | Meredith Conti

Hamilton and Class | Matthew Clinton Sekellick

A Conversation Rewound: Queer and Racialized Temporalities in Hamilton |
Shereen Inayatulla and Andie Silva

US Central Americans are destabilizing, reconceiving, and revitalizing the US Latina/o canon, and in doing so, they are forcing us to reconsider hegemonic ideas about Latinidad. The cultural production of Latinos/as of Central American descent has engaged in a critical denunciation of the violence that characterizes not only the history, but also the current situation, of the Central American isthmus. This essay examines the strategies used by US Central American poet William Archila and visual artist Alma Leiva to (re)construct the past and memorialize the victims of violence across Central America. I argue that Archila’s poetry collection The Art of Exile and Alma Leiva’s installation-photography series Celdas are examples of the “art of witness.” As such, their works play a key role in the reconstruction of Central American collective memory from the diaspora.

El presente trabajo llena el vacío sobre la literatura cubanoamericana que se evidencia en el abarcador Cuban Studies Since the Revolution (1992). Poco antes de esta fecha empezaron a aparecer textos que se distanciaban, por su sensibilidad, de la literatura de exilio y que respondían a otras inquietudes. Más allá de contemplar esta laguna, este ensayo gira en torno a la naturaleza intersticial de la literatura cubanoamericana en el sentido de que responde y se asocia a más de un ámbito, incluido el cubano de la Isla. Pese a dicha conexión, se señala la carencia de publicaciones, traducciones y crítica acerca de este corpus literario en Cuba, falta que habría que subsanar.

Designed to encourage critical thinking about history, the Major Problems in American History series introduces students to both primary sources and analytical essays on important topics in US history. This collection is designed for courses on Latina/o history.

By 2050, Hispanics will represent 20% of older adults (or 17.5 million) in the United States. Studies among Hispanic populations have found high rates of disability and depression. Depression is an independent risk factor for mortality, as well as higher health care utilization, reduced quality of life, and memory impairment. This study used cross-sectional data from community-dwelling Hispanics 65 and older in Miami-Dade County, FL. We analyzed the relationship between select social factors: loneliness (UCLA Loneliness Scale), social support satisfaction (Duke Social Support Scale) and Social Function (SF-36) and high depressive symptoms (using the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Scale for Depression – CESD). The median age of the participants was 76, with 62% female. Two-thirds were Cuban (67%), 11% South American, and 10% Central American. Twenty-five percent are unmarried and 62% live alone. Fifty-one percent are not high school graduates; 49% reported incomes under $10,000/year. Self-reported health: 48.6% fair or poor; 53% reported pain and 31% reported a fall in the past year. Overall prevalence of CESD≥16 was 33%. Depressive symptomatology (CESD >=16) is independently associated with self-reported health, diabetes, visual impairment, osteoarthritis, urinary incontinence, as well as satisfaction with social support, loneliness and social functioning. Out of the 40 who screened positive for depressive symptoms, only 50% had been ever told by a doctor that they had depression. Strong significant associations were found between higher satisfaction with social support (OR=.18, 95%CI: .04-.81, p=.025), higher social functioning (OR=.32, 95%CI: .11-.89, p=.030), and less loneliness (OR=.14, 95%CI: .35-.59, p=.007) with lower likelihood of depression, adjusting for age, gender, disability, income, disease status, and self-reported health status. There is a high burden of depression in this population, which may be under diagnosed. Results suggest the need to better understand this higher prevalence, the role of social factors, as well as education on depression and screening.

https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=31989
Crossing distinct literatures, histories, and politics, Giving Form to an Asian and Latinx America reveals the intertwined story of contemporary Asian Americans and Latinxs through a shared literary aesthetic. Their transfictional literature creates expansive imagined worlds in which distinct stories coexist, offering artistic shape to their linked political and economic struggles. Long Le-Khac explores the work of writers such as Sandra Cisneros, Karen Tei Yamashita, Junot Díaz, and Aimee Phan. He shows how their fictions capture the uneven economic opportunities of the post–civil rights era, the Cold War as it exploded across Asia and Latin America, and the Asian and Latin American labor flows powering global capitalism today.

Read together, Asian American and Latinx literatures convey astonishing diversity and untapped possibilities for coalition within the United States' fastest-growing immigrant and minority communities; to understand the changing shape of these communities we must see how they have formed in relation to each other. As the U.S. population approaches a minority-majority threshold, we urgently need methods that can look across the divisions and unequal positions of the racial system. Giving Form to an Asian and Latinx America leads the way with a vision for the future built on panethnic and cross-racial solidarity.

Cesar Chavez is widely considered to be the most prominent Latino civil rights icon in the United States.  In this talk, I will present several lessons that we can take from La Causa, the struggle of the farm workers, for doing social justice organizing today.  I will also consider several warnings about the kind of leadership we ought to avoid in doing social justice work, based on the conflicts within the United Farm Workers union toward the end of Chavez’s life.

Offers a fundamental model of intersectionality, and applies it to complex consciousness.  Class in an abstract sense is the relationship through which labor is mobilized into specific relations of production,  But the means through which such labor is categorized and mobilized  is historically diverse, and includes nationality/citizenship, race, gender, class in a more superficial sense, and so forth.  Thus, class in the setting of the U.S. southwest is enacted through race (Mexican/Anglo) and more recently nationality/immigration status (citizenship).  This helps to understand empirical material that borderlanders (most but not all U.S.-side in origin) tend to merge their class understandings of the border into a discourse of labor and poverty being Mexican (as previously documented by Pablo Vila).  Yet they do have some penetrations of deep class processes.  The notion of a simultaneous view of abstract labor mobilization (abstract class) and empirical, social organization of such labor (surface inequalities) thus enriches the study of intersectionality and consciousness.

With a foreword by renowned novelist Rolando Hinojosa-Smith and comprised of personal essays about the impact of drug violence on life and culture along the U.S.-Mexico border, the anthology combines writings by residents of both countries. Mexican authors Liliana Blum, Lolita Bosch, and Diego Osorno write riveting, first-hand accounts about the clashes between the drug cartels and citizens' attempts to resist the criminals. American authors, including José Antonio Rodríguez and José Skinner, focus on how the corruption and bloodshed have affected the bi-national and bi-cultural existence of families and individuals. Maria Cristina Cigarroa shares her poignant memories of life in her grandparents’ home now abandoned in Nuevo Laredo.

In their introduction, editors Sarah Cortez and Sergio Troncoso write that this anthology was “born of a vision to bear witness to how this violence has shattered life on the border, to remember the past, but also to point to the possibilities of a better future.” The personal essays in this collection humanize the news stories and are a must-read for anyone interested in how this fragile way of life between two cultures, languages and countries has been undermined by the drug trade and the crime that accompanies it, with ramifications far beyond the border region.

This chapter focuses on how the political right in the United States, particularly in California, has propagated a highly charged political rhetoric in which Third World migrants, Mexicans in particular, are deemed to present a threat to the welfare of the nation. This sort of rhetoric has given rise to and legitimated numerous efforts to exclude the immigrant from the body politic. One way to interpret these practices of exclusion is in terms of what Michel Foucault called biopower. This term describes the operating logic of modern forms of government, whose main concern is the welfare of the population, the improvement of its condition, the increase of its wealth, longevity, health, etc. There is an underside to biopower however, since it is often the case that entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity. Thus the counterpart of the power to secure an individual’s continued existence is the power to expose an entire population to death. Using the Foucauldian notion of biopower, this paper explores how the state, in order to fortify the health of the population, aims to eliminate those influences that are deemed harmful to the biological growth of the nation. It thus shows how the exclusion of the immigrant is codified as an essential and noble pursuit necessary to ensure the survival of the social body.

The Sustainability and Social Inclusion Research Project is meant to articulate with the City of Fort Collins' own emphasis on social sustainability by investigating patterns of citizen participation in (and assessing who appears to benefit from) the social, economic, and environmental “goods” that are imagined to be the desired outcomes of local sustainability planning and development.

Objective. In this article, we develop and test a model of competing theoretical explanations of Latino attitudes toward immigration; specifically examining their policy preferences on legal immigration, illegal immigration, and a proposed policy for dealing with illegal immigrants. We also consider whether Latino attitudes toward legal and illegal immigration are related and comprise a single coherent structure. Method.

In the spring of 2006, millions of Latinos across the country participated in the largest civil rights demonstrations in American history. In this timely and highly anticipated book, Chris Zepeda-Millán analyzes the background, course, and impacts of this unprecedented wave of protests, highlighting their unique local, national, and demographic dynamics. He finds that because of the particular ways the issue of immigrant illegality was racialized, federally proposed anti-immigrant legislation (H.R. 4437) helped transform Latinos' sense of latent group membership into the racial group consciousness that incited their engagement in large-scale collective action. Zepeda-Millán shows how nativist policy threats against disenfranchised undocumented immigrants can provoke a political backlash - on the streets and at the ballot box - from not only 'people without papers', but also naturalized and US-born citizens. Latino Mass Mobilization is an important intervention into contemporary debates regarding immigration policy, the immigrant rights movement, and racial politics in the United States.

An ideal collection of articles for English-speaking pastoral ministers and parishioners looking to become familiar with the traditions of Spanish-speaking communities, an ever more vital and vibrant part of church life in the United States. Written in both English and Spanish, each of these articles focuses on a different tradition or custom of the Catholic Church, especially as celebrated in the Spanish-speaking cultures of the world. Each section of the book provides reflection questions that can also be used in classes or discussion groups.

Th is article examines Tânia Cypriano’s 2007 documentary,
Grandma Has a Video Camera. The one-hour film, recorded by members of the Lalau-Cypriano family using a home video camera, depicts the twenty-year story of their transnational movement and adaptation. The film, however, is much more than the story of one family; it is also emblematic of Brazilians’ immigration experiences in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s. The family’s back-and-forth movement between countries and cultures generates a range of perceptions, longings, and sentiments about their “homeland” and “Brazilianness.” It also provides us material to think about a new kind of contemporary immigration: transmigration. Applying a hemispheric (trans-American) perspective, this article complicates and deepens our understanding of transmigration, as well as of Brazilians’ relationship to other Latina/o communities.

Nepantla Familias brings together Mexican American narratives that explore and negotiate the many permutations of living in between different worlds—how the authors or their characters create, or fail to create, a cohesive identity amid the contradictions in their lives. Nepantla—or living in the in-between space of the borderland—is the focus of this anthology. The essays, poems, and short stories explore the in-between moments in Mexican American life—the family dynamics of living between traditional and contemporary worlds, between Spanish and English, between cultures with traditional and shifting identities. In times of change, family values are either adapted or discarded in the quest for self-discovery, part of the process of selecting and composing elements of a changing identity.

Edited by award-winning writer and scholar Sergio Troncoso, this anthology includes works from familiar and acclaimed voices such as David Dorado Romo, Sandra Cisneros, Alex Espinoza, Reyna Grande, and Francisco Cantú, as well as from important new voices, such as Stephanie Li, David Dominguez, and ire’ne lara silva. These are writers who open and expose the in-between places: through or at borders; among the past, present, and future; from tradition to innovation; between languages; in gender; about the wounds of the past and the victories of the present; of life and death.

Sergio Troncoso, David Dorado Romo, Reyna Grande, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Francisco Cantú, Rigoberto González, Alex Espinoza, Domingo Martinez, Oscar Cásares, Lorraine M. López, David Dominguez, Stephanie Li, Sheryl Luna, José Antonio Rodríguez, Deborah Paredez, Octavio Quintanilla, Sandra Cisneros, Diana Marie Delgado, Diana López, Severo Perez, Octavio Solis, ire'ne lara silva, Rubén Degollado, Helena María Viramontes, Daniel Chacón, Matt Mendez.

Ce texte expose dans sa version longue les résultats d’une brève étude centrée sur les pratiques religieuses des immigrés latino-américains catholiques de première génération à Lyon, réalisée entre le mois d’avril 2019 et de mars 2020.
L’étude fait partie d’une recherche collective dirigée par Valérie Aubourg à l'UCLY: Migrants catholiques dans une société plurielle : ancrage religieux et social (Agence nationale de la recherche, ReligMig), dont les objectifs étaient de répondre à trois questions : (1) la place de la religion dans la démarche d’ancrage social des populations migrantes ; (2) le rôle de l’appartenance à la religion majoritaire en rapport à l’intégration des populations migrantes ; et (3) la façon dont ces populations contribuent à la reconfiguration du catholicisme local. Ces interrogations ont accompagné mes observations et mes analyses.
L’enquête en profondeur a été menée auprès de dix migrants latino-américains fréquentant en majorité l’église de St Pierre-aux-Liens de Vaise, qui fait partie de la paroisse Saint-Gabriel  (9ème arrondissement de Lyon). Les entretiens ont été accompagnés d’une participation régulière aux messes et aux rencontres socioreligieuses prévues tout au long de l’année, qui réunissent les fidèles les plus assidus et leurs familles autour d’apéritifs et de repas festifs organisés à l’occasion des dates catholiques les plus marquantes : Pâques, Corpus Christi, Pentecôte, Toussaints, Noël et Épiphanie.
Pour contextualiser les données recueillies et leur analyse, la première partie est centrée sur la situation de transformation du fait religieux en Amérique latine, où la religion catholique a perdu de son ancienne importance en raison des changements sociaux récents.
Les pratiques religieuses des migrants sont aussi associées aux évolutions des règles de fonctionnement de l’Église catholique, raison pour laquelle il me semble important d’aborder, en second lieu, le renouveau de l’Église amorcé par le Pape François, premier Pape latino-américain de l’histoire.
La situation des immigrants latino-américains en France est traitée en troisième lieu.
La quatrième partie de ce texte présente les résultats de la brève enquête réalisée entre avril 2019 et mars 2020. L’exposé des résultats du questionnaire et des observations réalisées reprend l’ordre des thèmes établis dans cette recherche collective : le profil des migrants, le territoire et la langue, les rites et les pratiques, les circulations, l’intégration au sein du catholicisme local, la relation aux autres religions et le rapport à la société française.