The Difference latinidad Makes

I am the mixed-race child of a Mexican man and an Eastern European woman. When they meet me, most people are momentarily confused by both my name and my job as a professor of English and Chicanx studies. People see me all the time without really seeing me, without understanding all the history, conflict, and migration that makes an identity like mine possible. Although it is often difficult to grasp what is at stake when a white-passing Chicana like me refuses to be read as white, I expect more from my profession. Three new books—Robert Con Davis-Undiano's Mestizos Come Home! Making and Claiming Mexican American Identity (2017), Karen Roybal's Archives of Dispossession: Recovering the Testimonios of Mexican American Herederas, 1848–1960 (2017), and María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo's Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States (2016)—help explain why such expectations are so rarely met. Taken together, they illuminate key issues in Latinx literary studies today that also bear on American studies more broadly.¹ The differences among them, however, are far more interesting and allow for some straight talk about the place of non-Anglo cultural production in the US academy and what it would mean, really, to see me.

By focusing his book on "six ways that Mexican Americans have changed the country," Davis-Undiano takes a liberal, multicultural approach to these issues (xvi). Beginning from the premise that "the influence of the colonial era is still shaping racial and social practices across the hemisphere," he traces a genealogy of Mexican American cultural production through the twentieth century (xii). He understands his primer on Chicanx history and culture as having "practical goals," which include "embolden[ing] Latinos to refine and finish the process of acculturation, to make still-needed changes, to no longer feel a need to apologize for their U.S. presence, and to 'come home' fully to their American lives" (xvii–xviii). Mestizos Come Home! is particularly interesting when read against Roybal and Saldaña-Portillo, both of whom orient themselves explicitly against the kind of pluralist critique Davis-Undiano embraces.

For Roybal, women's stories of dispossession are crucial to understanding the social history and cultural production of the Southwestern US. Her primary innovation is a "feminist reframing and recovery of archives" pertaining to the land Mexico lost after the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), a perspective that highlights the "matrilineal dimensions of property ownership" (3). Similarly, Indian Given excavates the figure of the indio bárbaro from the Spanish colonial archive and traces that barbarous Indian through a range of more contemporary cultural artifacts including film, landmark court cases, international treaties, and novels. Saldaña-Portillo compares how the US and Mexico imagined Indians within the space of their respective nations, what that has meant for the relationship between the two countries, for Chicanxs, and finally for contemporary geopolitics.

Like Saldaña-Portillo, Davis-Undiano and Roybal are interested in the reciprocal influences of culture and politics and the impact of both on the lived experience of Mexican Americans. Each study, in its own way, forcefully argues for the importance of teaching Latinx literature and culture now in as many fresh and unexpected ways and places as possible. Yet these are works of Chicanx, not Latinx studies. Doubtless, we also need expansive works like Ylce Irizarry's comparative study Chicana/o and Latina/o Fiction: The New Memory of Latinidad (2016), winner of the 2017 Modern Language Association's prize for the best book in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies. The push, however, to frame Latinx rather than Chicanx scholarly questions often adumbrates internecine conflicts over class and citizenship. Latinxs are, in 2018, the largest minority...