This chapter argues that the terms “Latinx” and “latinidad” are messy signifiers that allow us to contend with Latinx’s complicated racial history. While the term Latinx continues to be controversial, and scholars such as Tatiana Flores have examined the case for cancelling latinidad, “Racing Latinidad” points to how latinidad can signify particular political commitments and affinities. Through readings of Manuel Muñoz’s What You See in the Dark (2011) and Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa’s Daughters of the Stone (2009), this chapter illuminates how excavating racial histories outside the logic of the state is a way to summon a politics to imagine a people. Within this framework, “Racing Latinidad” ultimately argues for embracing the incoherence of latinidad as term that resists legibility and visibility and thus institutionalization and state management.

This comprehensive review of Chicanx poetry considers the lyric poetry of Greater Mexico as an ongoing evolution of and conversation with varied poetic traditions at the crossroads of geopolitical, cultural, and expressive exchange. This chapter addresses this arc, beginning with oral forms such as the corrido, and examines the ascendency of poetry in the early borderlands press, which was anchored by colonial New Spanish lyric poetry. The focus then turns to the flourishinging of Chicano/a/x poetry in the 1960s through the 1980s via the establishment of Chicano/a/x publication outlets and independent printing presses as well as through Chicano/a/x-specific literary prizes. The chapter concludes by considering the form’s coevolution with Chicano/a/x identity and politics to the present day, including a return to oral forms such as slam poetry, and its evolving relationship with other Latino/a/x cultural productions.

This chapter presents the history of essayistic writing by Latinas and Latinos in the United States from the nineteenth century to today. Latinx writers have long recognized the power of the essay for personal and polemical expression, despite the genre’s relative neglect in the literary marketplace and among critics. Encompassing work by writers who have migrated or are descended from Latin America or the Caribbean (including writers who identify as Hispanic, Chicana/o/x, Nuyorican, or Afro Latino), the Latinx essay reflects this heterogeneity, as authors have used the form for everything from personal recollection and spiritual reflection to cultural affirmation and aesthetic evaluation. However, Latinx writers often use even their most personal essays to engage social and political debates. At the same time, these authors take advantage of the essay’s dialogic nature in their explorations of contentious issues, opening a dialogue with the reader as they show their thought processes on the page. While Latinx authors blur the boundaries among different types of essays, this chapter explores three broad strands: the crónica, the personal essay, and the radical feminist essay.

This chapter follows the bachata from its earliest beginnings in Dominican Republic to its current position on the global stage, specifically investigating what happens when a music – made by and for local, rural audiences – crosses geographic borders and is suddenly performed by and for global, urban audiences; and what occurs when a music traditionally tied to place-specific experiences suddenly assumes contrasting positions of meaning.

The exceptionalism of New Orleans from the perspective of the United States is reversed when considered from the perspective of major cities along the southern rim of the Gulf of Mexico, cities that, as New Orleans once did, formed part of the Spanish empire. Though this legacy has not been foregrounded in recent decades the way the city’s ties to France have been, major literary activity in Spanish has been associated with New Orleans since the career of Eusebio Gómez in the 1840s, perhaps reaching a peak in the first decades of the twentieth century with the rise of the New Orleans–based magazine, El Mercurio, which served as an important incubator of Modernism in the Spanish-speaking world.