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.

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.