Editor's Introduction

In the mid-1990s a small group of feminist faculty from women's studies, Latin American studies, and Afro-American studies at Smith College came together to discuss the troubling lacunae in each of their respective fields.¹ Because each interdisciplinary field had a foundational mission to address the biases and assumptions of traditional disciplines that had overlooked—or worse, distorted—the experiences of its particular oppressed and/or exploited community, the fields prioritized one locus of discrimination and generally glossed over others. This paradigmatic weakness extended to each field's otherwise innovative curricula, scholarship, and pedagogy. As a group of Black feminist scholars put it in the title of their groundbreaking anthology more than a decade earlier, within women's studies and race and ethnicity studies it seemed that All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (Hull, Scott, and Smith [1982] 2015). Thus, one of the signature pieces of the Brave collection—the Combahee River Collective Statement—argued that gender, race, class, and sexuality are mutually constitutive systems that must be considered and addressed together as a critical corrective to single-issue agendas and paradigms. Just as these systems of oppression were co-constitutive of what another Black feminist called a "matrix of domination," so too would their dismantling require an "intersectional" strategy in law and society (Collins 1990, 21; Crenshaw 1989, 140). Yet, despite the Combahee Collective's critique of U.S. imperialism and its celebration of Third World/Internationalist affinities—not to mention the long history of Black internationalism in the United States—their radical intervention was still largely U.S. centric, as was the Brave anthology itself.

Likewise, given area studies's origins in the Cold War U.S. anti-communist intelligence community, early Latin American studies scholars (who were predominantly white men) invested minimally in studying race, even less in studying women and gender, and little to nothing in understanding the region's diasporas and its historic presence in North America. This was the case despite the concurrent rise and establishment of Chicano/Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and/or Latino studies. Unlike their contemporary Latin Americanist colleagues, these early Latino studies scholars did articulate what are now called "transnational" analyses and political concerns, including with race and gender, as systems produced by and productive of both geopolitics and domestic power structures. Nonetheless, Latino studies also largely shared with Afro-American studies a U.S. mainland analytical focus on civil rights matters. Similarly, Latina feminists joined Black feminists in insisting on intersectional analyses, but it was the more radical collectives such as Third World Women's Alliance that produced an analysis of the links between U.S. imperialism, European colonialism, and oppressive conditions for Black and brown women around the world.

So it was that although the word trans-nationalism was first coined by U.S. ethnic pluralist Randolph S. Bourne in his 1916 critique of the era's nativism, the term's meaning was radically transformed because of the facts on the ground of the late twentieth century U.S. academy and broader society. The end of fifty years of restrictions on immigration from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia following the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act meant that the turn of the twenty-first century saw tremendous growth in non-European heritage populations. These changing demographics forced a reconsideration of conventional (im)migrant assimilation and acculturation axioms. For example, by 1990 the anthropologist Eugenia Georges argued that Dominicans in the Dominican Republic and the United States should be studied together, as part of a unified social field that transcended national boundaries (Georges 1990). From there it was but a short step to the argument that intersectionality and transnationalism together offered a powerful corrective to the particular paradigms of earlier race and ethnic studies, area studies, and women's studies (Candelario 2017: 236–39).

It was within this historic context that professors Ann Arnett Ferguson, Nancy Saporta Sternbach, and Susan Van Dyne decided to establish Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism at Smith College. They did so in order to center knowledges...