I am the mixed-race child of a Mexican man and an Eastern European woman. When they meet me, most people are momentarily confused by both my name and my job as a professor of English and Chicanx studies. People see me all the time without really seeing me, without understanding all the history, conflict, and migration that makes an identity like mine possible. Although it is often difficult to grasp what is at stake when a white-passing Chicana like me refuses to be read as white, I expect more from my profession. Three new books—Robert Con Davis-Undiano’s Mestizos Come Home! Making and Claiming Mexican American Identity (2017), Karen Roybal’s Archives of Dispossession: Recovering the Testimonios of Mexican American Herederas, 1848–1960 (2017), and Mar ıa Josefina Salda~na-Portillo’s Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States (2016)—help explain why such expectations are so rarely met. Taken together, they illuminate key issues in Latinx literary studies today that also bear on American studies more broadly. The differences among them, however, are far more interesting and allow for some straight talk about the place of non-Anglo cultural production in the US academy and what it would mean, really, to see me. By focusing his book on “six ways that Mexican Americans have changed the country,” Davis-Undiano takes a liberal, multicultural approach to these issues (xvi). Beginning from the premise that “the influence of the colonial era is still shaping racial and social practices across the hemisphere,” he traces a genealogy of Mexican American cultural production through the twentieth century (xii). He understands his primer on Chicanx history and culture as having “practical goals,” which include “embolden[ing] Latinos to refine

中文翻译：

---

latinidad 的不同之处

我是一个墨西哥男人和一个东欧女人的混血儿。当他们见到我时，大多数人都会对我的名字和我作为英语和 Chicanx 研究教授的工作感到困惑。人们总是看到我，却没有真正看到我，也不了解使像我这样的身份成为可能的所有历史、冲突和迁移。虽然当像我这样的白人奇卡纳人拒绝被视为白人时，通常很难掌握什么是利害关系，但我对我的职业抱有更多期望。三本新书——罗伯特康戴维斯-Undiano 的混血儿回家了！制作和声称墨西哥裔美国人的身份（2017 年），Karen Roybal 的剥夺档案：恢复墨西哥裔美国人 Herederas 的证词，1848-1960（2017 年），以及 Mar ía Josefina Salda~na-Portillo 的印第安人给予：墨西哥和美国的种族地理（2016 年）——有助于解释为什么很少能满足这种期望。综上所述，它们阐明了当今拉丁文学研究中的关键问题，这些问题也对更广泛的美国研究产生了影响。然而，它们之间的差异要有趣得多，并且可以直接谈论美国学院中非盎格鲁文化生产的位置以及与我见面意味着什么。通过将他的书重点放在“墨西哥裔美国人改变国家的六种方式”上，戴维斯-昂迪亚诺对这些问题采取了一种自由的、多元文化的方法 (xvi)。从“殖民时代的影响仍在影响整个半球的种族和社会实践”的前提出发，他追溯了整个二十世纪墨西哥裔美国人文化生产的谱系（xii）。