Central American-Americanness, Latino/a Studies, and the Global South

This article addresses the meaning of the “Latin” as well as “America” in the fields of Latino/a Studies, Latin American Studies, and American Studies. The rubric of the global south is used to inspect contemporary subject articulations like Central American-American for groups that have yet to arrive within the signifiers of U.S. Latinoness and Latinaness and Latin Americanness. Frameworks like Central American-American transport an identity-in-the-making that is engendered by displacement across the North/South divide in the Americas. The author examines the new linguistic fluencies that emerge out of the abridged identificatory language of “Latino/a Studies” and point to subjects standing out of place, alienated from the representative but too precarious ethnoracial signifier Latino and Latina. At stake are the politics of naming in the U.S. global south and the presumed situatedness and modi operandi of Latino/a Studies.