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.

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.