On 28 January 1917, a group of women led by seventeen-year-old Carmelita Torres defied quarantine orders at the US-Mexico border, where Mexican-heritage people were required to undergo delousing. According to local and national coverage of the protest, rumors that United States Public Health Service officials had photographed women in the nude ignited what would come to be known as the Bath Riots.

Undocumented college students face several threats to their well-being and mental health. Different social locations, including whether students have Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) status, students’ gender, and family factors may shape students’ ability to be well. How these factors work together to shape mental health outcomes among undocumented Latinx college students is not well understood

In this article, I argue that folk singer Lydia Mendoza’s musical and lyrical imagination of the Mexican diaspora enables important avenues of working through the complications of belonging and nostalgia as communal processes. Leaning on the affective and kinesthetic valences of the word “moving,” I use “moving homelands” to name the sense through which this negotiation of belonging and nostalgia occurs

This article explores the world of the “on2” salsa dance scene in New York today. Building on long-term participant observation and interviews, I argue that Latinx salsa dancers contest and reconfigure the racialized commodification of salsa dance as a marketable product. They do this by foregrounding Nuyorican and Afro-Caribbean cultural identity and by strategically claiming grassroots urbanity in

We compare unemployed and underemployed Mexican and Colombian immigrants in the United States with people in the countries of origin in similar conditions, to better understand differences in psychological distress, thereby deviating from the literature on the Hispanic health paradox. We designed and conducted a survey that enabled us to capture aspects not broadly available in general surveys. Mexican

Drawing on surveys and in-depth interviews with trans Latinxs in Los Angeles, I argue that spirituality is a source of resilience when trans immigrants face marginalization stemming from racism, xenophobia, and transphobia precipitated by factors rooted in cisgendered policy and social norms. Trans Latinxs embrace spirituality by (1) identifying as Christian or Catholic and/or engaging in Latino popular

Based on ethnography conducted during the height of anti-military struggle in Vieques, Puerto Rico, in the early 2000s, this article examines Viequense women’s intense forms of suffering and correspondingly powerful forms of collective action. It explores how the affective dimensions of Vieques women’s dolor (suffering) and rabia (indignation) became catalysts for their politicization. The article

This article chronicles the strategies and efforts Chicana/o and Latina/o student activists employed in the demand and creation of the César E. Chávez Center for Higher Education (CECCHE) at Cal Poly Pomona (CPP) between 1990 and 1995. We situate the center’s establishment as the result of student activism. CPP served as a stage whereon students resisted negative campus racial climate by institutionalizing

Paño art consists of elaborate ink drawings on fifteen-by-fifteen-inch cotton handkerchiefs produced by incarcerated Latinos. Paños are private expressions of love, devotion, and resilience made artifacts for public scrutiny at art galleries and museums. Although more than two dozen art exhibitions dedicated to paños have been held from Santa Fe to France since 1996, few scholars have published on

Within the United States, sport has historically been a site for public struggles about equality. Despite the benefits of athletics, US Latinx youth (especially teenage girls) are less likely than other ethnoracial groups to participate in sports. Previous research has shown that gender, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and language affect sport participation. This study examines those influences on

The Dominican Republic and its relationship with Dominican America have often been studied in relation to the brutal regime of Rafael Trujillo, tíguere masculinity, and the political sphere. Writers like Julia Álvarez and Junot Díaz, as well as anthologies of Dominican women’s writing, form a literary archive that conceives of women’s writing as a perpetual act of rebellion, mostly against Trujillo

It may feel like we are living through unprecedented times, but the unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly the toll it has taken on Black, Brown, and Indigenous lives, and the national uprisings around police violence and anti-Blackness, are evidence, once again, of foundational and enduring structural inequities in the United States. Historians remind us that the US has always been marked

In this paper, we investigate controlling images of Latinx immigrants in the US press. Our paper expands theory within this literature in two new directions. First, we look at the controlling image of the “illegal” as well as the conventional controlling images of the immigrant described in the literature. Second, we investigate whether controlling images of Latinx immigrants remain prevalent outside

Anthologies are fundamental in the formation of literary canons. In order to explore the process of Latino literary canon formation, first, I analyze the nature of anthologies and their role as discourses that contribute to the construction of latinidad. I then present a brief overview of the historical, academic and publishing context that enabled the publication of the anthologies surveyed. A comparative

Due to an unfortunate oversight a mistake occured in the reference section.

Urban life in New York City is structured in ways that accentuate the affective dimensions of migration experiences for Colombianx migrants, who describe soledad as an integral quality of their life, despite being surrounded by the second largest group of Colombianxs in the United States. This ethnographic study draws on more than 8 years of fieldwork to describe the social forces at work in the normalization

The published biography of Prof. Wilson Valentín-Escobar is incorrect. Please find the correct one below: Wilson Valentín-Escobar is Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell where he also directs Bachelor of Liberal Arts.

Although scholars theoretically acknowledge the diversity of the Latina/o/x vote, few studies have investigated similarities or differences beyond those of the largest Latina/o/x groups. To better understand the nuance of the Latina/o/x vote, this article examines the political preferences of Colombian Americans relative to those of other Latina/o/x subgroups in the United States. We pool data from

Intra-Latina/o/x dynamics are fundamental to the negotiation of Latina/o/x identity, especially as Latina/o/xs communities in US cities become increasingly diverse. How Latina/o/xs try to differentiate themselves from one another is a salient, but often overlooked, part of their lived experiences. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Philadelphia, this article explores articulations of Colombianidades

Interwoven with a textual analysis of Colombian electronica band Bomba Estereo’s viral music video “Soy yo” (2016), here I offer an autoethnographic perspective on the experience of Latina feminist media identification for a US Colombiana/Latina viewer unaccustomed to encountering herself in popular media. I trace the numerous moments of what I term “Latina feminist recognition” in “Soy yo,” with an

This article analyzes Patricia Engel’s Vida (Grove Atlantic, New York, 2010) as a groundbreaking novel that narrates the US Colombian diasporic experience. The article argues that becoming and belonging evolve across the intricacies of the transdiasporic journey of class, race, and gender presented throughout the novel. Through a close reading of Vida, the article asserts the importance of this group’s

This article examines the investments of Justin Torres’s debut novel, We the Animals (2012), with Latinidad, queerness and masculinity under the framework of opacity proposed by Edouard Glissant. I argue that Torres’s novel employs opacity—the refusal to be legible to the gaze of a dominant Other—as a way of grappling with the tensions between Latinx and queer identities and textualizing the relationship

This essay details some of the challenges I encountered in the fall of 2016, during my class on contemporary migration flows at Queens College, CUNY. The impending national elections, with Donald Trump as the front-runner in the Republican primaries, made for a tense classroom climate. Early in the semester, a handful of my students began voicing opinions that ran counter to the pro-immigrant principles

This essay examines the transnational racial and ethnic politics of Marie Arana’s American Chica and Braulio Munoz’s The Peruvian Notebooks, two literary writings that feature characters who navigate Peruvian, US American, and Latinx connections. As each text’s characters migrate between Peru and the United States, they perform a range of regional, ethnic, and cultural identities that are circumscribed

This article investigates the relationships between immigrant integration and agricultural, environmental sustainability. We provide evidence that ranchitos (Mexican-immigrant owned small rural ranches) serve as an important mechanism for immigrant integration as they regenerate place and belonging via their sustainable agricultural practices. Hence, understanding ranchitos’ roles in rural communities

This comparative analysis of Latina immigrant mothers’ experiences in “Squire Town,” a farmworker community in Northern California, and Williamsburg, a recent Latina/o destination in Eastern Virginia, employs a gender lens to analyze how these women make claims to place, belonging, and inclusion through their sustained individual and collective struggles to ensure the well-being of their families.

In April 2016, the documentary Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four premiered to critical acclaim at the Tribeca Film Festival. The film explores the strange series of events that led to the 15-year wrongful incarceration of four queer Latina women for child sexual abuse during the course of “satanic rituals” in San Antonio, Texas, in 1994. This article unpacks the relationship between

Classical paradigms of research often follow a tradition that leaves out the lives of many minoritized and racialized communities. Many Research I universities exist as social bubbles, with little interaction with the communities that surround them. The research that these universities conduct often objectifies communities and does not address the important questions they have. This article shares

This article presents the stories of two groups of transnational language educators of Mexican origin currently working in Mexico and the United States. The stories of the two groups are presented as part of the ongoing circular nature of the US-Mexico migration dynamics. Through life-history research data, we explore the role played by the circumstances and conditions under which the migratory movements

Puerto Rican writer Giannina Braschi’s 2011 novel, The United States of Banana, although brilliant and insightful, has been largely under-examined by literary critics. This may be partially attributed to the complexity of her writing and her predilection for utilizing a dizzying array of avant-garde literary techniques at the service of her trenchant critiques of social issues. In this essay I combine

This article critiques the idea of Puerto Rico as a raceless nation by tracing its sources and looking at the discourses of intellectual and political elites during the “nation-building” process in the first half of the twentieth century, discourses in which race was generally either distorted or overlooked. I first analyze three incidents in which black Puerto Ricans were denied entrance to elite

This paper argues that the United States’ occupation of Puerto Rico is a colonial state of exception. By examining the case of Downes v. Bidwell , I demonstrate the role that race played in the establishment of the state of exception. This unprecedented legal situation and the United States’ inequitable policies toward the island led to the emergence and growth of the Partido Nacionalista de Puerto

The American dream narrative advances the idea that any citizen can achieve success through hard work, but research shows that meritocracy is continually denied to minorities both systemically and through acts of gatekeeping. ABC’s Cristela (2014–2015) presents a quintessential American dream narrative, and we are invited to cheer for the legal intern protagonist because she is hardworking, well-educated

Mexican immigrants to the United States increasingly migrate to relatively new places such as Washington state, which now places in the top eight destination states. States wield increasing power to manage migration and negotiate residency at local scales. Although studies focus on migration debates in national and alternative media, little analysis has been done on newspapers in rural communities

Transnational students constitute a growing population in Mexico. They are part of the returning flow of immigrant families moving from the United States back to Mexico. As students, transnational children represent a challenge to Mexico’s education system as they encounter major identity and linguistic barriers in school settings. Drawing on the literature of bilingualism and positioning theory, we

El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras account for some of the most consequential migration streams in the Western Hemisphere. They are some of the largest contributors to Latino migration in the United States. Fleeing political persecution, gang violence, poverty and natural disasters, migrants are often desperate for social and economic stability. As migration from the region continues, legislation

In 2014, Enrique Iglesias shattered Latin music records with his hit song, “Bailando,” in collaboration with Afro-Cuban artists Descemer Bueno and Gente de Zona, thereby firmly planting himself within the Latin urban music scene. “Bailando” ushered in a new wave of reggaeton-pop fusions that have since dominated the Latin pop market. In so doing, it follows a larger historical trajectory of white Latino

Unfortunately “meter” was replaced by “miles” in the whole article. We apologize for this mistake.

This article explores Martin Espada’s poetic reflection on the photographic legacy of his photographer father as it takes place in the poem “Mad Love” from the collection Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016). The eerie moment when the corneas Frank Espada donated are being extracted triggers in the poet the need to write a poem to, once again, advocate for others; only this time, the poet interrogates

As exemplified by Junot Diaz in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Angie Cruz in Let It Rain Coffee, Dominican diaspora authors grapple with the question of what happens when a central part of a people’s lived experience and embodiment is suppressed by hegemonic national discourses. I argue that in their novels they show that, when blackness is removed from Dominican national discourse and representation

This article is based on in-depth interviews with deferred action for childhood arrivals (DACA) beneficiaries from California and Arizona who traveled to Mexico, their country of origin, for the first time since they had immigrated to the US as small children. Although DACA travelers have acculturated to the US, this article begins to uncover the complexities of national identification and belonging

This article analyzes the visual linguistic “accent” of Mexican film actor Lupe Velez in US English-language fan magazines from 1928 to 1941. The form in which Velez was quoted in fan magazines, with a Spanish-inflected English (SIE) “accent,” is telling of how language can racialize, exotify, and gender bodies by representing linguistic differences through text. Some visual techniques used to emphasize

In the previously published version of this article an error appears in the bibliographic citation (Jiménez-Román, G. 1995). The author cited should be Jímenez-Muñoz, G.

This study examines visual and textual representations of Mexican migrants in English-language photojournalism over the course of a decade. We find three clusters of representations: (1) male laborers portrayed as outside the bounds of society but often unfairly victimized (2) migrants portrayed as criminal in encounters with law enforcement, and (3) all other migrants, often portrayed in ways that

The contemporary transnational dissemination of Texas-Mexican accordion music has corresponded closely with the rise in prominence of the Tejano Conjunto Festival, sponsored by the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio and, since 1982, held annually at Rosedale Park. In modern popular culture, the ease of transnational mobilization—here characterized by global participation in a local music

Ramón Rivero was an immensely popular blackface performer in mid-twentieth-century Puerto Rico known for his character-turned-persona, Diplo. This laughter-inducing negrito created a vehicle for Rivero’s political critiques of US imperialism and humanitarianism. For many in Puerto Rico, this blackface persona was an enactment of Puerto Rican liberation that simultaneously “celebrated” and “included”

This essay brings together the US Supreme Court’s Boutilier v. INS decision and Arturo Islas’s The Rain God to analyze the negation of homosexual and queer experience in the legal negotiation of access to citizenship. The article brings together methodological frameworks from literary, legal, queer, and Latina/o/x studies to argue that citizenship requires a narrative presence, one that immigration

This article examines how Twitter can be used as a pedagogical tool in the Latinx studies classroom to connect students to a more expansive Latinx network beyond the local or campus community. The use of a course hashtag and careful delineation of a class Twitter project allows students to actively engage in national discussions related to Latinx studies and to critically (and virtually) curate an

This paper develops a gender lens to analyze the effects of US deportation policy on immigrant families from Latin America. Whereas most research on deportation focuses on the deportees, we concentrate on their families who remain in the United States. We draw on our qualitative study of 125 families in Los Angeles, California, who have been separated from a close relative because of deportation. Golash-Boza

First known as an organizer of the 1968 East LA walkouts, Moctesuma Esparza has spent a fifty-year career in the film industry engaging in various types of activism to change the representations and treatment of Latina/os. This article traces his life before and during the Chicano movement (1950s–1970s), the development of Chicano and Latino cinema (1980s–1990s), and the increasing visibility of Latina/o

Undocumented immigrants who have grown up in America, often called DREAMers, generally grow up unaware of their lack of legal status, thinking of themselves as equal and legitimate members of the polity—as Americans. Scholars have noted the high levels of political activism of DREAMers, often at personal risk of detention and deportation. Negrón-Gonzales (Lat Stud 12(2):259–278, 2014) attributes this

This essay reflects on teaching college students to use the medium of film/video to explore contemporary issues that affect the everyday lives of Latinx populations in the United States. Drawing on experiences with (mostly Latinx) students in a documentary filmmaking class at Rutgers University, as well as on my own visual, documentary, and ethnographic practice at the intersection of Latinx studies

This article explores the effect of an undocumented status in shaping narratives of resilience, emotional expression and maternal sentiment among undocumented Mexican mothers in the United States. Given the dominant narrative of maternal responsibility that I encountered while conducting ethnographic research among undocumented women in Houston, Texas, this work focuses on the cultural construction

Latinas in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) engage their faith and lived realities through a complicated intersection of religion, race, gender, ethnicity, immigration status, aging, and class. Utilizing oral history, ethnographic interviews, and participant observation, the following analysis explores how LDS Latinas reflected on their experiences in faith, gained leadership skills

Studies of political transnationalism have focused on the rapprochement and increased attention that the Mexican state has directed at the Mexican diaspora in the United States (see Iskander in Creative state: forty years of migration and development policy in Morocco and Mexico, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2010; Délano in Mexico and its diaspora in the United States: policies of emigration since

In this article I examine the history of the popular “Mexican”-themed South Carolina rest stop, “South of the Border,” in the 1950s and 1960s. By turning to the cultural history of this understudied attraction, I demonstrate that, prior to large-scale migration to the “Nuevo South,” white southerners were developing and transforming racial scripts about Mexicanness. While at the rest stop, white southerners

Researchers across disciplines have analyzed the ethnoracial classification of Latinxs in the US census, as well as the ideological, political, and material underpinnings and effects of such classification. In this article, I advance our understanding of the census’ reproduction of racial identities and racial discourse in two ways. First, I demonstrate that sociolinguistic theory and methods can shed

Using Gloria Anzaldúa’s idea of nepantla alongside critical theories of race and citizenship, this article highlights how Latinx undocumented youth and youth of mixed status families navigate, resist, and at times endorse the various and competing discourses around immigration, citizenship, and illegality. The author uses pláticas as a methodological and pedagogical tool with youth who live in a migrant

Operating out of all Mexican consulates in the United States, the Ventanilla de Salud (VdS) program provides patients with health information, counseling, and referrals to available local health services. This article deals with the emergence of the VdS as the main component of Mexico’s strategy to promote the health of its citizens abroad. This form of outreach arose in the context of existing efforts