An excellent reference book for scholars and students alike. Aldama and Gonzlez hit it out of the park! Team Latinx Keywords: Home Run!
Lisa Snchez Gonzlez
University of Connecticut, USA
With so many Latinx ancestral genealogies, we are like Magellan adrift in a sea of languages and place names, a diaspora whose history is complex and destiny off the charts. Leave it to the sage prolix wisdom of our prolific Latinx savant Aldama, and his trusty scholarly partner in crime, Gonzlez, to provide us a compass in book form to guide us all.
William A. Nericcio
San Diego State University, USA
Given the historical moment and the widespread denigration of Latinx peoples across the US today, it is so important to understand and locate diverse Latinx perspectives in national, international, and global contexts. This wonderful book does just that. A great contribution to a vital field of scholarship, cultural production, and political action.
Paul Allatson
University of Technology Sydney, Australia
Aldama and Gonzlez achieve a remarkable feat. This ambitious, incisive, compact, and well-informed book vitally captures the ever-expanding field of Latinx Studies.
Silvio Torres-Saillant
Syracuse University, USA
Latinx Studies
Latinx Studies: The Key Concepts is an accessible guide to the central concepts and issues that inform Latinx Studies globally. It summarizes, explains, contextualizes, and assesses key critical concepts, perspectives, developments, and debates in Latinx Studies. At once comprehensive in coverage and detailed and specific in examples analyzed, it provides over 25 key concepts to the field of Latinx Studies as shaped within historical, social, cultural, regional, and global contexts, including:
- Body
- Border Theory
- Digital Era
- Familia
- Immigration
- Intersectionality
- Language
- Latinidad/es
- Latinofuturism
- Narco Cultura
- Popular Culture
- Sports
Fully cross-referenced and complete with suggestions for further reading, Latinx Studies: The Key Concepts is an essential guide for anyone studying race, ethnicity, gender, class, education, culture, and globalism.
Frederick Luis Aldama is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English and University Distinguished Scholar at the Ohio State University where he is also founder and director of LASER and the Humanities & Cognitive Sciences High School Summer Institute. He is author, co-author, and editor of over 36 books, including the Routledge Concise History of Latino/a Literature and Latino/a Literature in the Classroom, and recently won an Eisner award for Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics.
Christopher Gonzlez is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Latinx Cultural Center at Utah State University in Logan, Utah. His research and teaching focus on twentieth- and twenty-first century Latinx literature, film, television, comics, and narrative theory. He is the author of Reading Junot Daz (2015) and Permissible Narratives: The Promise of Latino/a Literature (2017).
First published 2019
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
2019 Taylor & Francis
The right of Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher Gonzlez to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Aldama, Frederick Luis, 1969- author. | Gonzlez, Christopher, author.
Title: Latinx studies : the key concepts / Frederick Luis Aldama & Christopher Gonzlez.
Other titles: Latino/a studiesDescription: New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Series: Routledge key guides | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018033533 (print) | LCCN 2018037782 (ebook) | ISBN 9781315109862 (Master) | ISBN 9781138088436 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781138088443 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Hispanic Americans--Encyclopedias | United StatesCivilizationHispanic influences--Encyclopedias.
Classification: LCC E184.S75 (ebook) | LCC E184.S75 A77 2019 (print) | DDC 973/.0468dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018033533
ISBN: 978-1-138-08843-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-08844-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-10986-2 (ebk)
First, we want to mention that we use the term Latinx throughout this book to be inclusive of all genders and sexual orientation as well as to embrace a term generated and deployed by new generations of Latinxs in the US. By no means does this mean that we erase the history and politics that inform the term, Latino/a. However, we side with those who consider this a powerful bottom-up claiming of language in ways that demonstrate inclusivity. As Sandra L. Soto-Santiago succinctly states: The x, the @, and whatever may come after this, are an invitation to question language and those who impose those rules upon us (p. 91). She concludes how the category Latinx dis-mantle[s] what exists and invites us to re-think how individuals with different ideologies, perspectives, and identities are included or rejected from different spaces or communities through language (p. 91).
Latinx Studies is made up of scholarship in all disciplines (and multi-directionally across all disciplines) that seeks to enrich understanding of the history, culture, politics, socioeconomics, policies, and much more that have informed the shaping of US Latinxs with ties to Dominican, Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Caribbean, Central, South American, and African ancestry and heritage.
This is to say, the category Latinxalong with its orthographic variants Latino/a, Latin@, Latin/o American, among othersis capacious. In The Norton Introduction to Latino Literature, Ilan Stavans identifies Latino/a as the tension between double attachments to place, to language, and to identity (p. liii). For Stavans, it is language and cultural ancestral heritage that provides the common ground. Its a category that seeks to acknowledge a common hemispheric experience (culture, language, and history) of those inhabiting the North, Central, and South Americasas well as those with African origins and indigenous roots. It is a category that captures a history of shared struggle in the struggle against colonial and capitalist material inequities and oppressive ideologies that have led to violence against those in our communities, especially the most vulnerable: children and those discriminated against in terms of gender and sexuality. Its a category that, as Suzanne Bost and Frances Aparicio rightfully point out, is contested, sometimes fluid, and always relational (p. 2). Contested because as a fluid category thats meant to be all-encompassing, it can also lose the particularities of important differences that inform
