A Latinx Folklorist's Love Letter to American Folkloristics: Academic Disenchantment and Ambivalent Disciplinary Futures

A work of creative nonfiction, this essay employs three types of writing styles—ethnographic observation, life-writing, and academic discourse. It weaves a love letter into an emotionally volatile critique of disciplinary futures, highlighting a rejection of false scientism and respectability politics that often keeps minoritized scholars silent. The goal of this work is to illustrate the way in which minority academics, particularly Latinx scholars, navigate the field of American Folkloristics as an area of study dominated by white, cishet male privilege. The author explicitly discusses the burden of minority scholars and scholarship in the discipline while both criticizing and romanticizing the disciplinary present. Guided by the affective reality of academic discourse, the author concludes by pleading for the inclusion of conceptual frameworks that would allow the discipline's collective future to include scholars of color and other minoritized professionals: interdisciplinarity, intersectionality, and translocality.