This panel proposes to explore Latinx modernism(s) as a set of challenges both to modernist studies broadly construed and to Latinx studies internally. Despite notable efforts by such scholars as José Limón, Ramón Saldívar, and Laura Lomas to put Latinx cultural production in conversation with modernism, Latinx cultural production continues to occupy a marginal place in modernist studies. Our panel seeks both to account for and counter this marginalization by limning the boundaries of Latinx modernism(s). How do Latinx texts challenge traditional periodizations of modernism, or challenge our assumptions about modernity and the avant-garde? What productive sites of textual circulation, human migration, and artistic influence can put US Latinx cultural production into generative relation with Latin American modernismo and vanguardismo, Anglo American modernism, and other ethnic or racialized modernisms? What are the important forms of Latinx modernist cultural production (referring both to material production in newspapers, books, magazines, films, etc., and to matters of form at the level of individual texts and genres)? The goal of this panel is not to provide definitive answers to these questions, but to begin a conversation that registers at various scales the thorough imbrication of Latinx studies with theories and histories of modernism and modernity. Thus, each paper in the panel balances attempts to flesh out particular sites of modernist cultural practice to reflections on “macro” issues of periodization, canon formation, and transnational movement.

The panel will begin with a paper by Marissa K. López titled “Cecile Pineda and the Racial Violence of Modernist Studies.” Cecile Pineda’s novel Face (1985) is widely admired by critics for its experimentalism, but scholars have a difficult time thinking about it as a Chicana novel. Pineda is often compared to such paragons of high modernism as Proust and Joyce and seen as an outlier to a Chicana canon defined by the likes of Moraga, Cisneros, and Anzaldúa. In this paper López explores that ethnic, aesthetic impasse. In Face, the protagonist, Helio Cara, loses his face in a tragic accident. The novel documents the aftermath of his misfortune, as Helio grapples with his changing social world and strives to remake himself, piecing together both his face and the story of his life bit by painstaking bit. What, Face asks, does it mean to look and see? How does a person physically respond to these things and how are they community building actions both of and about the human body? Reading Face alongside the works of two contemporary photographers—Stefan Ruiz and Ken Gonzales-Day—López argues that the novel both undermines assumptions about and builds a politics around reading, writing, and looking. Gonzales-Day’s work unmasks the racial violence of modernity, which López defines, not uniquely, as the rapid industrialization and the accelerated pace of technological and social change at the turn of the last century in Europe and North America. The spectacle of modernity occludes people of color just as modernism, as a literary phenomenon associated with these developments, renders voices of color inaudible except insofar as they reflect recognizably modernist qualities.

In contrast to López’s critical salvo against modernist studies, the next paper asks after the status of modernity and modernism within Latinx studies, examining the idea of Latinoamericanismo (Latin Americanism) as it appears in US Spanish-language print culture in the early twentieth century. In “Latinx Modernism, Latinoamericanismo, and Aesthetic Enchantment,” John Alba Cutler proposes a new genealogy for US Latinidad. Most accounts of Latinx Studies peg the formation of the field to corporate and academic attempts to subsume the heterogeneity of Chicanx, Puerto Rican, and other people of Latin American descent in the United States under a single, transparent rubric. Long before the ethnonationalist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, however, Spanish-language newspapers and magazines in the United States promulgated a version of literary modernism founded on Latinoamericanismo, a hemispheric critique of the materialism and imperialist appetites of the United States. As these writers and editors understood Latinoamericanismo as a spiritual alternative to crass North American modernity, this paper argues that accounts of Latinx modernism and Latinx Studies more generally must reckon with a set of texts that values aesthetic enchantment over political critique.

The final paper, by Laura Lomas, proposes that modernist studies consider how colonial violence carried out by the United States in Hispanic Caribbean “territories” relates to the emergence of Latinx and American modernist literary form. This paper builds upon Lomas’s discussion of José Martí’s writing in New York at the dawn of the twentieth century and brings into focus a literary genealogy that extends from Martí definition of a “modern” poem to consider the emergence of Puerto Rican poetry of the diaspora to later poets born in Puerto Rico who emigrated to New York during the great migration of the 1940s and 1950s. As part of this migratory flow, Julia de Burgos engages in radical and daring modernist poetic experiments with a splitting or doubling of the poetic persona in her two books of poetry, Poema en veinte surcos (1938) and Canción de la Verdad Sencilla (1939). Puerto Rican poet Víctor Fragoso refers to this splitting as “desdoblamiento,” or the introduction of a psychic division, internal to the poetic persona, in his unpublished essays on Julia de Burgos. Reading Fragoso’s essays alongside his staging of Burgos’s poetry and epistolary writings, Lomas posits desdoblamiento in Julia de Burgos’s poetry as a response to trauma associated with colonial, racial and sexual violence. Fragoso’s consideration of Julia de Burgos’s desdoblamiento contrasts with the US state’s diagnosis in texts that document her psychic and physical subjection during several hospital stays, and in her FBI file. Lomas aims to show that we cannot understand the emergence of modernist literary forms apart from the colonial violence carried out by the U.S. in its “territories.” This paper contributes to thinking about the relationship between twentieth-century Latinx literature and modernism, and about how Puerto Rico writing in particular challenges the theory and practices of American modernism.

Each paper will last 17-18 minutes, leaving at least 20 minutes for discussion at the conclusion of the panel.