Front Cover Flap

The art in this issue is reproduced from Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art, a touring exhibition from the Smithsonian American Art Museum on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, October 27, 2016-January 22, 2017. It features work created since the 1950s by artists of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban and Dominican descent, as well as pieces by others with Latin American roots, who have helped define American art since Abstract Expressionism. Their vibrant visions suggest experiences we share as we reach for common cultural and historical experiences and struggle with perspectives of marginalization, dislocation, estrangement, and detachment from assumptions about what values and beliefs are—or should be—at the heart of U.S. life and culture.

Danahy Fiction Prize winner Anne Ray opens the issue with “Please Repeat My Name,” a story whose very title cries out with a plea for identity and recognition. Audrey lives alone—her mother dead, her father cruel and distant—and creates a fragile self-comfort by collecting small, odd items which she keeps in a box under the bed, but she is often mocked for her peculiar habits and routines. The story becomes all the more poignant as she finds herself in the midst of an institutional setting being considered as a juror—to sit in judgment of others—seeking meaningful connections with desperation and irony amid the trappings of the American justice system.

Freddy Rodríguez, Danza de Carnaval, 1974, acrylic, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment. © 1974, Freddy Rodríguez

Much of the work in this issue resonates with the fundamental desire to have one’s humanity affirmed, one’s individual value recognized. At the same time, we are intrigued by the dynamics created as people, objects, and values contact, influence, and change one another, producing unexpected dynamics and new identities. A parent exerts such “civilizing” influences on her child as she teaches and responds to her behavior in “We Don’t Throw Sand.” Spanish diseases and warfare change life for Florida Gulf Coast Native Americans as Thomas Hallock realizes in “Into the Swamp.” The humanizing and saving power of work bookends the contents of this issue with the gathering of valued memories in “My Great Grandfather’s Altar” by Muriel Hasbun, and the moving story it faces, “Two Floors above the Dead” by Michael Amos Cody, in which the physical work of grave-digging gives meaning and voice to an extended family alive and taking care within the mind and heart of a unique narrator.