Moving Forward with Hope

It’s hard to know where to begin to introduce this issue of Diálogo, which was conceived in the autumn of 2019, before the dramatic and world-altering events through which we have lived in 2020. In the midst of the unprecedented nationwide reckoning, with white supremacy and structural racism taking place in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, we have seen mass protests across the world, finally demanding justice for long-lasting systemic racism and police brutality. Despite this powerful movement, however, our grief and frustration continue to grow as new evidence of racial violence and antagonism continues to shake us every day. This violence has especially been directed against people of African descent—although immigrants, women, and transgender people have frequently also been renewed targets of hatred.

Besides the pandemics of racism, misogyny, and transphobia, we’ve also been living through a global health pandemic due to the COVID-19 virus that has devastated lives across the planet, killing more than 200,000 Americans (disproportionately people of color), and fundamentally altering the texture of social life. Many universities have had to move to remote learning, we’re buying our groceries cautiously wearing masks, and we fearfully maintain six feet of distance between ourselves and others. Environmental disasters add tremendous anxiety to our current social climate. After a spate of hurricanes on the East Coast, the West Coast is currently experiencing the worst wild-fires on record and enduring what some say is the worst air quality in the world, while US government leaders continue to deny scientific evidence of climate change. And while the Trump administration has continued to shock, outrage, and disgust people on both the Left and the Right of the political spectrum, grave concerns about the fairness and accessibility of voting in the upcoming presidential election of 2020 have commentators openly expressing their anxieties about saving our democracy from collapse or pulling it back from the edge of catastrophe.

These days, it’s a cliché to say that we live in “unprecedented” times. But in many ways, the times are completely precedented: Many of these problems are the result of long-standing historical and systemic inequities, or of a habitual failure to pay attention as things keep getting worse (or both!). And yet everything also seems to be screaming anew, demanding our attention in a state of urgency and emergency.

What can we do? Emergency also evokes the possibility of new things emerging. We are in the space of a quickening, of urgent decisions, of calculated risks. We may be in a space of endings, but it is also a space of beginnings: new paths lie ahead—maybe not the ones we had been planning on, but these are points of departure, invention, and transformation, nevertheless. The previously unthinkable is being thought; what was impossible may now be approachable. Things are changing, people are mobilizing. Young people are demanding better. Perhaps this is a chance to seize the moment, to bring about a new way. Normal was simply . . . the norm. We already knew it wasn’t working. So— what can we do?

This issue of Diálogo emerges as a testament to working together. It contains contributions from scholars across the Americas, from Argentina to Illinois. The articles contained in this issue bear witness to unspeakable violence, including state-sponsored violence against Indigenous communities, but also to the will to break historical silences and allow new voices to speak and demand justice. I want to extend my gratitude to the scholars whose work appears in this issue, not only for their excellent contributions, but also for their patience and perseverance against the odds. They delivered their articles, produced revisions, and signed contracts while universities, offices, and libraries closed, and many of us had to reroute our operations through our homes. I also want to extend deep gratitude to Stacey Salling and her team at the University of Texas Press. They have been the soul of patience and have never been anything less than 110% supportive, kind, and understanding.

As we overcome ongoing disruptive times, I hope we stay attuned...