The multiple significations of modernity are nowhere more evident than in the disjunction between conventional designations of modernism. In the US context, modernism has long been regarded as the experimental, literary-artistic response to technological innovation, mass urbanization, and global warfare, a movement reaching its apex in the 1920s and 30s. In Latin America, on the other hand, modernismo denotes the literary movement looking to French Parnassianism and Symbolism for a language of pure poetic refinement and musicality. It expresses a different sense of modernity altogether, one aspiring to the cultural capital of world literature. Late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Latinx literatures in the United States respond to all of these modernities: the coloniality of US domination, the rapid and often traumatic social changes brought on by technological innovation, and the innovation of literary forms commensurate with the spiritual yearnings of people who move in the margins of society.

However, the forms of Latinx modernism have been rendered largely illegible by national and linguistic traditions that fail to account for their complexity. As one example of this complexity, we might note the difficult fit of this session in existing MLA convention categories. Is it American Literature by virtue of the writers located within the borders of the contemporary United States? Latin American literature by virtue of modernismo’s northward circulation and influence? Maria Cristina Mena and William Carlos Williams published their most well-known work in English, but what about Salomón de la Selva, Julia de Burgos, and other Spanish-language writers? The heterogeneity of Latinx modernism emblematizes the heterogeneity of Latinidad, and anticipates present-day critiques of Latino as a monolithic identity category.

The three papers in this session offer novel but intersecting ways of approaching Latinx modernism, beginning with Kelley Kreitz’s examination of Spanish-language print culture in early twentieth-century New York. Mapping and investigating a range of periodicals—including Las Novedades, Gráfico, and Pueblos Hispanos—Kreitz argues that these and other publications that sought to unite New York City’s Hispanophone readers developed notions of community, identity, and the possibilities for social and political change that focused on participation in cultural production. Understanding the engagement of those publications with no-longer new media, such as the telephone, the telegraph, and mid-size cylinder printing presses—and with new possibilities represented by radio—increases our understanding of modernism in relation to the small presses of early twentieth-century New York City and to the emergent notions of participatory culture they helped to create.

Modernismo connects Kreitz’s paper and María del Pilar Blanco’s study of poetic mobility and inter-American engagement. Blanco looks at three figures that span the history of pan-Americanism in the first half of the twentieth century who are three iterations of early-twentieth century Latinx identity: Salomón de la Selva, active within the poetry scene in New York in the 1910s; half-Puerto Rican and modernist in the American grain, William Carlos Williams; and Puerto Rican Julia de Burgos, who lived in New York and Washington, DC in the 1940s and early 50s. De la Selva’s English poetry; Williams’s search for the “American idiom,” often informed by his translations from Spanish; and Burgos’s “universal” feeling in Spanish-English linguistic crossovers reveal the intellectual, political, and lyrical dimensions and possibilities of a Latinx tradition at a time in which increasing US interventions spelled out new political frontiers for the pan-Americanist project.

Renee Hudson’s paper offers an alternative to modernismo in its attention to brownness as a ligament binding Latinx literature of the early and late twentieth century. By historicizing what José Muñoz calls “the sense of brown” as emerging during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) and especially as part of the Mexican post-revolutionary nationalist project, Hudson considers how María Cristina Mena conceptualizes brownness well before José Vasconcelos’s conception of a bronze people in “La Raza Cósmica” (1925). Hudson argues that Mena’s treatment of indigeneity and her critique of U.S. imperialism theorizes brownness as not only an aesthetic project of modernity, but also a critique of hegemony. Hudson then examines how Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) extends Mena’s modernist project by radically revising Vasconcelos’s conception of la raza cósmica to a new mestiza consciousness in which ruptures in the here and now offer visions for a more liberatory future.

Each of the presentations will take fifteen minutes, and as a respondent, John Alba Cutler will offer brief remarks and some framing questions for the panelists before opening up for questions from the audience. Taking introductions into account, we anticipate 20 minutes of unstructured discussion in a 75-minute session.