From the Editor: Race, Contamination, and Rage

We live in a time of distressing social and political division. It's an age marked by violence and vitriol directed at any number of groups: Black and Brown and LGBTQ communities, Muslims, Jews, immigrants, and asylum-seekers, to name a few. And the moment is not uniquely American. There is a groundswell around the globe of white nationalist groups and individuals, linked through social media and bonded by a longing for the perceived grandeur of the past. The glory days, when the social order was more orderly. When blood was thicker than water.

Evidence of that movement abounds in the headlines. The most recent episode of hate, on March 15, 2019, left fifty worshippers dead at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. A 28-year-old Australian man, described as a white supremacist who traveled extensively, had issued a manifesto calling for the removal of nonwhite immigrants from Europe. Investigators have uncovered his connections to nationalist groups the world over. Closer to home, the litany of violence is painfully familiar. Last year, the nation witnessed the horrific killing of seventeen students in Parkland, Florida, and of eleven worshippers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, by "lone gunmen" espousing hate.

Much as we might believe recent events to be aberrations, they derive from supremacist beliefs that underpinned Manifest Destiny, the one-drop rule, the Black Codes, Jim Crow, legal whiteness, and any number of criteria for inclusion in the body politic. Grounded in an age-old fear of contamination and social disorder, racializing practices today are complicated by dimensions of ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, sexuality, ability, language, and legal status.

This issue of Chiricú Journal reflects upon those intersecting dimensions. It explores ways that Latinx individuals have responded to racializing practices even as Latinx communities possess deep entanglements in whiteness dating back centuries. The cover of this issue reminds us that Spain's obsession with "pureza de sangre" (and concomitant fear of contamination) gave rise to an ornate language of blood that preserved privilege, honor, and power for ruling families in the colonies. Encoded in such casta paintings are the norms and values and aesthetics of a complex social order. Similarly, each of the contributions that follows is a canvas depicting Latinx lived experiences and forms of resistance, adaptation, and survival.