The panel consists of three formal presentations: Frank García’s “Affording Familia in Chicana and African American Gang Narratives” reconsiders two prominent axioms in critical gang studies: (1) gang membership is a predominantly Black and Latino male phenomenon, and (2) Black and Latino men join gangs to compensate for dysfunctional family. While gangs are often male-dominated subcultures, gang life is always a shared experience that affects gang members’ female kin, many of whom, contrary to scholarly claims, are supportive of the men in their families prior to them joining gangs. Working from this observation, this paper studies two autobiographical books by daughters of gang members: Ana Castillo’s My Father Was a Toltec (1995) and Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped (2013). Reflecting on their childhood experiences of their fathers in gangs, Ward and Castillo reveal how gang life can offer Black and Latino men a liberating freedom but in a way that hinges on their female kin experiencing the nuclear family as a colonial burden. In doing so, the two women unveil how the systemic racism of a patriarchal nation-state destroys working-class Black and Latina/o/x families by compelling Black and Latino men to abandon their families, inevitably transmuting the family into a place of “slow violence” for Black and Latina women.
Alexandrea Pérez Allison’s presentation, “Family Ties and Domesticana Archives in Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints”, focuses on Nelly Rosario’s first novel Song of the Water Saints (2002). The novel is a multi-generational family saga centered around four Black women living in the Dominican Republic, beginning in the early 1900s and ending at the turn of the twentieth century. Throughout this span of time, the novel narrates different forms of family separation: a mother leaving her home and children; grandparents immigrating to the United States for a new life; a granddaughter running away to find her “American” independence. Although these acts of separations occur at varying levels of relationship, power, and agency, the novel suggests that these moments of physical—and emotional—separation occur as long-term consequences of U.S. imperialism and military occupation of the Dominican Republic. Allison argues that Rosario’s women protagonists construct alternative archives as a method by which to strengthen family ties across time and space, as well as heal the generational wounds of separation that persist until the novel’s end. In this manner, the novel proposes archival practices as a way to engender healing from the trauma of family separation as well as a means to foster familial bonds in the midst of cyclical, long-term, or permanent separation.
In the final presentation of the session, Hazel Gedikli turns to Leslie Marmon Silko’s epic novel Almanac of the Dead (1991) to explore family separation as a gendered form of colonial violence. In “Absent Mothers, Missing Children: Dispossession through Family Separation in Almanac of the Dead,” Gedikli demonstrates that the novel compels us to reckon with the violence of family separation, through Native and racially/economically marginalized mothers’ intertwining narratives from all walks of life. From the 1970s and 80s’ “war on drugs” and the state’s forceful efforts to separate children from their addicted and allegedly abusive parents to land dispossession and exploitative extractivism in the valley of Rio Yaqui, Mexico, Silko covers an expansive spatiotemporal terrain to reflect on dispossessive economies of colonialism and harms of the neoliberal world order on systems of intimacy within marginalized communities. The novel shows that family disintegration has been a destructive repercussion of colonial legacies and continues to afflict tribes, families, and communities pushed to the margins in the Americas.