This framing chapter focuses on the nation’s founding and the salience of inequality and race that is baked into our founding documents. It also discusses the concept of democracy that prevailed at the time of the founding and why it represented a radical departure from the past influences of Anglo and French political thought. It introduces the concept of multiple political traditions within American democracy.

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.

College access does not begin or end with an acceptance letter; it continues throughout students’ college experiences, especially for first-generation, working-class Latinx students who are experiencing many college milestones for the first time. It is predicted by scholars that the rapid growth of the Latinx population will make them a large college applicant pool in the near future. These predictions show that retention efforts for Latinx students are an important investment for institutions of higher education. However, support for Latinx first-generation, working-class college students is often lacking at universities. In this conceptual chapter, we center on first-generation, working-class Latinx students of immigrant origin and the identity intersections experienced by individual students to equip administrators, academic advisors, and university data analysts with the knowledge to improve Latinx student success efforts through an overview of (1) academic advising, (2) data analytics, (3) social class, and (4) theories and frameworks related to the identity intersections of Latinx students.

This chapter examines complex interplays of utopia/dystopia in the context of European colonization through two works: Alberto Yáñez’s postcolonial zombie narrative, “Burn the Ships,” and Yuri Herrera’s dystopian Signs Preceding the End of the World. These works grapple with biopolitical dialectics between utopia and dystopia, belonging and exclusion, and competing identities and epistemologies of mestizaje hybridity. Using as a starting point codices produced by mestiz@ scribes in the dystopian post-Conquest society of sixteenth-century New Spain, analysis draws from Damián Baca’s Mestiz@ rhetoric to demonstrate how these texts exemplify what he defines as a “powerful Mestiz@ rhetorical strategy” of nepantlism – “a strategy of thinking from a border space.” By self-reflexively engaging this Mestiz@ rhetoric through diegetic elements, these texts subvert hegemonic narratives of assimilation in the context of imperialism and the border.

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 examines the birth and development of Latinx comics from the early 1980s to the present. It places the Hernandez Brothers (Los Bros Hernandez: Mario, Gilbert, and Jaime), their long-standing series Love and Rockets, and their alternative publisher Fantagraphics (with editor Gary Groth at the helm) at the center of this expansion. They opened new avenues of expression, production, and distribution of Latinx comics and graphic novels and influenced subsequent generations of Latinx authors. Under the generic umbrella of the series, the Brothers produced unique, single-authored narratives, whose threads were woven across individual volumes, forming a complex story world and creating wide story arcs of a novelistic nature. Stories set in the United States and south of the border portray multiple members and generations of the Latinx community, reflecting the lives and experiences of Latinx readers, left unrepresented in graphic fiction to that point. The chapter argues that today’s vibrant Latinx comics production (e.g., Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing Is Monsters) followed in the Hernandez brothers’ footsteps, with similar stories about everyday life, immigration, racism, and survival.

Is modernism the most apt term for the literary efflorescence that took place in the first decades of the twentieth century across a range of regional and cultural contexts? What are the advantages and disadvantages of considering the heterogeneous collective of the Americas together? This essay spotlights significant Latinx writers, texts, and exchanges seldom included in conversations about American modernism, as it discusses the development of Latinx literature and Spanish-language literatures within the geographical bounds of what is now the US. Doing so reveals the crucial contributions of Latinx poets and the role of translation in fueling literary innovation.

Racial discrimination explains a large proportion of the racial differences in wages and employment. Native-born Non-Latinx African American men have a 20 percent weekly wage penalty and 9 percentage point employment penalty relative to native-born Non-Latinx White men; other groups of Black men have similar outcomes. Non-Latinx African American women have a 2 percent weekly wage penalty and 2 percentage point employment penalty relative to native-born Non-Latinx White women; other groups of Black women have similar outcomes.

Chapter 1 answers the question of what citizens perceptions of the school closure policy are and how these attitudes vary by race. It reveals that African Americans and Latinx citizens – the majority of those affected by the policy – have highly negative attitudes toward public school closures. Whites express the most supportive attitudes toward closure, despite rare experiences with the policy. To explain these disparities, it highlights how African Americans and Latinx shared experiences with previous education policies and shared status as minorities contribute to the development of a shared target identity. Their identification as shared targets result in similar assessments of the closure policy, regardless of whether they are directly affected by it. Whites, in contrast, adopt a viewpoint akin to the purveyors of the policy. These findings have implications for understanding the challenges associated with working across racial lines, toward improved race relations and thus democratic progress.

Against the backdrop of 2020’s global pandemic, we witnessed the brutal murder of George Floyd. His words “I can’t breathe” hang heavy in the air, haunting our contemporary moment, as the white police officer squeezes his breath out of him. It is with this urgency in mind that this chapter turns to Sonia Sanchez’s methodology of breath and breathing. The breath and breathing practice, as Sanchez explains, helps us to “be much more healthy and ... maintain this climate the way it needs to be maintained.” This essay aims to not only garner a greater understanding of the resonances among people of color across time and space but also moves toward coalition-building as a methodology for today’s time of crisis.

In this chapter we explore the perceptions and practices of US bilingual or multilingual families with young children, focusing mostly on research with families from Latin American backgrounds and paying close attention to the intersection of language, culture and emotion. We describe who is bi or multilingual in the US, examine why and how US families choose to raise children bi or multilingually, and explore how families use their multiple languages as a child-rearing strategy.

In this essay, I show how Chicanx and Latinx writing critiques assimilation sociology for failing to account for histories of racialization that defy the telos of integration and harmonious coexistence. In addition, a range of Latinx writing demonstrates a different blind spot in assimilation sociology: namely, the way it neglects the inextricability of gender and sexuality from cultural identity. Finally, as I show in the concluding section, Latinx writing encourages us to attend to the role of the state in facilitating or impeding the integration of immigrant and racialized groups. In the last thirty years, immigration policy has been a particular, often violent obstacle for the integration of Latinx migrants, resulting in a situation where many migrants paradoxically assimilate without being assimilated. Assimilation sociology was once a discourse centering primarily on cultural citizenship, but in the absence of legal citizenship, contemporary Latinx writing suggests that cultural citizenship is not enough.

The present state of the locations of contemporary Latina/o poetry is destabilizing. Latina/o literary legacy, tracing the lines from heritage nationalities to anti-US imperialist ancestors to civil rights–era forebears and into the twenty-first century, has always been rooted in place. Latina/o life in the United States, on the cusp of the third decade of this century, is one that accepts the fact that where we are from is more and more an internalized state of being. Bonafide Rojas’s Notes on the Return to the Island reflects a post-transnational diasporic Puerto Rican identity in which contact zones, not nationality, are sovereign. Hugo García Manríquez’s conceptualist book Anti-Humboldt: A Reading of the North American Free Trade Agreement offers radical experimentation in both aesthetics and geopolitics. Valerie Martínez’s Each and Her is rooted in the borderlands of Ciudad Juárez. Francisco Aragón’s “To Madrid” examines the touristic shame of a Latina/o visiting an ancestral place. Aracelis Girmay’s debut collection Teeth (2007) situates further aspects of the complexity of touristic experience into a range of locales. The work of Rodrigo Toscano and Edwin Torres embodies a latinxfuturism speculating on what it will mean to be Latina/o.