While US Latinx Studies as a discipline has often viewed the workings of US capitalism with a critical or skeptical eye, literary criticism on US Latinx creative writing has tended to view contemporary texts through the lens of identity politics and US multiculturalism while limiting analyses of social critique to Sixties Era production. This panel strives to connect these divergent approaches by being attentive to both resident and immigrant Latinx subjects (a distinction coined by Juan Flores) and how different experiences of disaster capitalism might intersect. What publics and counter-publics are shared by the refugee and the inner-city dweller? How might US political and economic imperialism in the “Third World” form an important context for rereading race relations and the immigration crisis in the United States? How are forms of political action and advocacy being reimagined?
Together, these presentations speak to the MLA’s Presidential Theme of “Being Human” by drawing attention to the way US Latinx cultural production “bear[s] witness” to “threats to the rights of human beings.” The panel also draws parallels between literary responses to “forms of suffering” and other types of creative expression. This panel focuses on various forms of contemporary cultural production (literature, photography, social media, sports) and pushes the critical discussion of class and race to consider transnational implications. The landscape of the presentations includes US urban centers like Los Angeles, New York, and Miami, as well as Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Venezuela.
Cristina Rodriguez’s presentation is “‘The blackouts of a tiny country’: When US Interventionism in Central America Comes Home.” This presentation reminds us that throughout the 20th century, the US maintains the unhallowed distinction of being on the undemocratic side of most political conflicts in Latin America. In the 21st century, the refugees of these wars begin streaming in, with immigration from Central America to the US growing faster than any other population. Latinx authors of Central American descent are bringing these wars, in El Salvador (William Archila’s The Art of Exile), Nicaragua (Francisco Goldman’s The Ordinary Seaman), and Guatemala (Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier), onto the page and into the spaces of Los Angeles and New York City. Such Latinx literature demonstrates the interconnectedness of the hemisphere, portrays the complex effects of transnationalism tempered by trauma, and requires the US to acknowledge its role in its current immigration “crisis.”
Maia Gil'Adí’s presentation is “‘The Devil’s Recipe’: Apocalyptic Destruction in Hemispheric Venezuelan Imaginaries.” This presentation uncovers how Venezuelan protest spaces such as the highway, the barrio, and the book act as sites of pleasure. The talk investigates how Venezuelan subjects in Miami, Caracas, and beyond incite radical politics of refusal. Additionally, the presentation resituates Venezuela in Latinx studies, attending to the contexts of American imperialism and capitalism. Examining the tradition of apocalyptic demonstrations against government power into the post-Chavez present, the presentation expands common conceptions of latinidad through its attention to manifestations of disturbance, destruction, and the unfinished. Exploring Alberto Barrera Tyska’z novel, La enfermedad, the photography of Alexander Apóstol’s “Skeleton Coast” series, and the dissemination of video of the 2017 anti-government protests in global media outlets, social media, and messaging systems, the talk demonstrates how these cataclysmic sites cohere oppositional publics in Venezuela, the US, and throughout the American hemisphere.
Jennifer Domino Rudolph’s presentation is “From Team Rubio to Maria: Puerto Ricans in MLB Respond to Disaster Capitalism.” This presentation highlights how both the Oversight, Management, and Economic Sustainability Act (PROMESA) (2016), and responses to Hurricane Maria in (2017) cast Puerto Rico and its citizens as undeserving of US fiscal and humanitarian relief. Such portrayals illustrate the contested nature of Puerto Rico’s political identity and rationalize the spread of disaster capitalism on the Island. Between these two events, Puerto Rico arrived at the final game of the 2017 World Baseball Classic (WBC) against the US. Though Puerto Rico lost, this game became a way for Puerto Ricans to assert nationalism and Team Rubio became national heroes, many of whom provided relief and spoke out against the US response to Maria. This presentation analyzes the role of sports celebrity in nationalist performance as advocacy in times of economic and humanitarian crisis.
Kristy L. Ulibarri’s presentation is “Governances of the Dead: Daniel José Older’s Salsa Nocturna and a Necropolitics from Below.” This presentation reads how Cuban-American Daniel José Older’s speculative fiction collection Salsa Nocturna complicates Achille Mbembe’s idea that Third World, mobile, racialized subjects are rendered into “living dead” status by a political economy that deploys “the creation of deathworlds, new and unique forms of social existence.” In Older’s collection, the Council of the Dead rules over the spirit world of New York City, and the stories parody contemporary forms of governance over subjects who do not “fit”: peoples who are subject to some nation-state laws but are outside of “citizen” rights. Drawing on the work of Lisa Marie Cacho and the criminalization of migrant and Latinx subjects in the US, this talk argues that Older’s stories in Salsa Nocturna question the way “living dead” subjectivities are disempowered and imagine ways that they are powerful.
In sum, the panel offers a nuanced perspective on US Latinx creativity and, in so doing, makes an important intervention into contentious public debates over the belonging of US Latinx people and their legibility as subjects with rights.