Although María Irene Fornés is recognized by her peers as one of the great avant-garde innovators of her time, her absence from many critical and mainstream accounts of American playwriting suggests that her experimental techniques were not easily intelligible as part of a movement, even one fabled for the unintelligibility of its creative effects. As a corrective critical gesture, Roy Pérez looks to Art (a short and sparsely documented play from 1986) to understand the role of the avant-garde in Fornés’s larger body of work. Pérez argues that – even as the avant-garde earned a reputation for being fixated on unpragmatic political ideals, aesthetic difficulty for its own sake, or humorless alienation – Fornés wrote plays plays that danced their characters and viewers through spellbinding thought experiments, making lofty questions seem like everyday ruminations, that we might pursue with a sense of play, or at least with authentic feeling.

Carla Della Gatta considers the relative abundance of the Fornésian archive – several dozen published scripts, very few “lost Fornés plays,” and an artistic practice that is nearly as documented as the productions and plays themselves – in tandem with the disproportionate lack of scholarship on someone so influential to the American theatre. To explain, Della Gatta evinces the challenges posed to documentarians by a bilingual, bicultural artist such as Fornés and argues that the task of documenting Fornés requires an unusually comprehensive sense of her entire canon in order to develop meaningful analysis, context, and criticism. Della Gatta also details the emerging tradition of Fornésian documentation that has evolved since the 1990s, and that not only includes the balance of archive formation, critical analysis, and artmaking necessary to draw forward the integration of Fornésian styles, forms, and perspectives, but also prioritizes a distinctive ethics of care.

María Irene Fornés is likely the most well-known Latiné playwright in the US. It is also widely known that Fornés is a lesbian, yet, her sexual orientation is rarely, if ever, at the forefront of her plays. Fornés also famously resisted these labels, which she considered limiting and reductive. The authors argue that challenges in labeling Fornés stem not only from her personal resistance to limiting categories, but also her specific biography, aesthetics, and politics as well as her active resistance to sanitized institutional multicultural frames adopted by predominantly white mainstream cultural institutions that attempted to categorize these experiences in ways convenient for social scientists, policymakers, and the market. The authors query whether and how Fornés prompts contemporary readers to resist the desire to read her work as ethnographic portraiture or testimonial literature and instead as an articulation of creative worlds within and through a distinctively Latiné sensibility.

This chapter attends to contemporary Latinx adaptations of early modern English drama and theater to theorize how a hegemonic playwright such as Shakespeare can be adapted as Latinx theater Cuban-American playwright Carlos-Zenen Trujillo’s 2019 play, The Island in Winter or, La Isla en Invierno (an adaptation of The Winter’s Tale), serves as a case study of the multimodal process of transnational theatrical bilanguaging, or the experience of living between languages. I argue that the currency of adapting Shakespeare for Latinx today is in the possibility of moving from a historical memory that recolonizes Latinx to an active site of Latinx temporality as worldmaking. Trujillo’s The Island in Winter as a process of epistemic disobedience disenfranchises anti-Black racism from theatrical representations of Cuban culture by integrating African Indigenous rituals into one of Shakespeare’s stories. It is through this process that cultural narratives are redrawn and reenacted, while gaps in the Western canon are exposed.

This chapter “listens in detail” to hybrid Latinx literary forms, including drama and spoken word poetry, as they respond to neoliberal anti-immigrant policy, whiteness, and homophobia from 1992 to our current global pandemic moment. The chapter registers how Latinx literature turns to hybrid texts that perform sound (language, accents, music), utilizing the sonic an agentive site to respond to neoliberal constructions of citizenship and to articulate new forms of belonging. Josefina López’s play Detained in the Desert (2010) shows the affective experiences of a second-generation Chicana tuning into border language, Spanish-language radio, and musical soundscapes to resist the racist and sexist profiling of her body in the aftermath of Arizona’s SB 1070. Tanya Saracho’s El Nogalar (2013) demonstrates how Latinx border communities wield silence as a strategy to survive narcoviolence. Virginia Grise’s Your Healing Is Killing (2021) amplifies the intersectional and structural traumas that shape BIPOC communities’ access to health care. These inequities speak to the continued need for collective self-care.

Can a reading of romantic conflict as social realism in the United States and Mexico help recenter proto-Latinxs in the history of decolonial thought? In this chapter, I turn to María Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don (1885) and Manuel Altamirano’s El Zarco (1900) to investigate how each turned to social realism to make sense of their respective country’s transition from the colonial to the independent eras. In doing so, I argue two main things. First, that these authors turn to sentimentality as a vehicle for political critique, given how a deeper understanding of the romantic conflict yields a deeper sensitivity to the lived realities of marginalized subjects. Second, that, by making the romantic conflict a racialized one, the inevitable resolution of the romantic conflict in either novel necessarily also produces proto-Latinx models for how to leave problematic expressions of white supremacy behind. By thus engaging with the romantic and realist elements of each of these novels at once, I gesture toward a repositioning of the Latinx nineteenth century as a key moment in history for decolonial thought.

This chapter explores developments in hemispheric and transamerican studies by grounding discussions of colonialism and incommensurability in narrations of place-names. It moves from the Pacific to the Midwest, using Commodore David Porter’s Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean, from the War of 1812, as a case study. Porter is of note not only because he was an important source for Herman Melville’s Pacific writings but also because his military travel writings sought to make the Marquesas part of the US political and popular imaginary. In renaming-to-claim the islands, Porter worked to undermine Indigenous epistemologies and histories. The chapter then turns to the Midwest, examining the Latin American place-names across the region – names that offer a nineteenth-century prehistory to accounts of widespread Midwestern Latinx presence. Surprisingly, stories of Porter’s battle off the coast of Chile in Journal of a Cruise have fed an imperialist “Latin American mapping” of Indiana through the naming of the city of Valparaiso, in Porter County. Using stories of place naming from the Indigenous Pacific and Latinx Midwest, the chapter highlights the vital necessity of hemispheric and transamerican literary studies for the nineteenth century.

Francisco Javier Vingut was a nineteenth-century Latino educator who dedicated his life to teaching Spanish while living in the United States. Vingut also produced Spanish-language textbooks, compiled a bilingual literary anthology, and published the complete works of such important figures of his day as José Antonio Saco, José María Heredia, and the poet Plácido (Gabriel de la Concepción). This chapter demonstrates how his textbooks and compilations are an integral component of US American literary history. Influencing such US intellectuals as George Folsom and Herman Melville, Vingut’s works also established a series of Latina/o legacies that extend beyond his lifetime. They include Vingut’s impact on the Latina/o educator Luis Felipe Mantilla and his translation of Peter Parley’s Universal History, a translation distributed throughout the Americas. Vingut’s wife, Gertrude Fairfield, has a Latina/o legacy of her own: her novel Naomi Torrente: History of a Woman (1864) is a thematic precursor of the Latinx novels of the 1990s with their focus on the challenges faced by second-generation Latina/o/xs. This chapter contends that Spanish-language textbooks continue to be literary and political in nature. In light of the current book banning across the country and the concurrent attacks on educators, this study is particularly urgent.

US Latinx adolescents strongly endorse familism, a salient cultural value characterized by close family relationships, interdependence between family members, and the prioritization of family over self. Cultural values, like familism, can serve as cultural scripts that inform behaviors, such as Latinx adolescents’ routine and self-disclosure. In this chapter, we examine routine and self-disclosure and/or domains of disclosure to parents among US Latinx youth while attending to parent and youth gender. Further, we explore associations between familism values and Latinx adolescents’ routine and self-disclosure and/or domains of disclosure to parents and siblings. Based on this literature review, we identify limitations of the current literature. We also recommend future research directions, for example, examining how associations differ based on involvement in US mainstream culture, exploring Latinx youth’s disclosure to extended family members, and investigating Latinx cultural values beyond familism.

Substance use (SU) and substance use disorders (SUDs) are prevalent public health problems among emerging adult populations. Emerging adulthood is a time when young people are growing in their independence and exploring their identities, social connections, and future opportunities. It is also a developmental period characterized by experimentation and engagement in alcohol and drug use. The aim of this book chapter is to discuss and provide examples of prevention research to address SU/SUD among emerging adults. We utilize ecodevelopmental and multicultural frameworks to discuss approaches to prevention research. Next, we describe prevention research in the following areas: risk and protective factor research and intervention development. In the area of risk and protective factor research, we will review studies testing risk and protective factors for SU/SUD among Latinx emerging adults. Finally, we also share the development of two intervention studies designed to address alcohol-related sexual assault and a cognitive-behavioral model for mild-to-moderate substance use disorder. Implications for future prevention research are also discussed.

In this chapter, I synthesize the findings from the study presented in the book. Reflecting on these findings, I then identify and discuss recommendations for instantiating the translanguaging imaginaries of all youth through a reinscribing of semiolingual innocence, sans white gaze, as a potentially vibrant literate characteristic of Black Caribbean immigrant students specifically, and also, of all humans. The scholarly recommendations proposed outline future directions for research that invite intersectionally and transdisciplinary driven investigations into how youth’s holistic literacies across geographies, languages, races, and cultures function as disparate pieces of one interdependent puzzle in the problem-solving necessary to flourish and to design imaginary presents and futures, using the meaning-making undergirding their translanguaging practices. I outline also practical recommendations useful for researchers, teachers, administrators, and policymakers who wish to support Black Caribbean immigrant youth’s holistic literacies. The recommendations proposed also allow all youth whose language and raciosemiotic architecture can allow them, through these holistic literacies, to design translanguaging futures as new beings engaging transraciolinguistically, in solidarity. I conclude with a painting of liberatory Caribbean imaginaries as a version of what this notion of literacy and language teaching and learning might look like and of what it means to embark on a collective return to inonsans jan nwè.

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.