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t w o ฀ h o m e l a n d s ฀ h av e ฀ i ฀ • ฀ 2 4 5 conclusion two฀homelands฀have฀i:฀ “america”฀and฀the฀night Night works among Latina/o cultural producers demonstrate that “assimilation ” does not have one meaning but several, some of them opposed to one another. “Assimilation” is a commonly used term in U.S. society and has been both an expectation for and practice of the society’s construction since the mid to late nineteenth century, between the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848 and the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898, during which time the United States became a world empire. Being so central to U.S. culture (at least thus far), it is an under-examined term and concept because it has been taken for granted by U.S. culture at large and even within academia. Latina/o studies, however, has a history of questioning insufficiently critical uses of the term “assimilation ” and its companion term “immigration.” Take, as a salient example, the conceptually astute introduction on “the decolonization of the U.S. empire in the twenty-first century” to a book on Latina/os in the “world-system” by a cluster of Latina/o studies scholars: Ramón Grosfoguel, Nelson MaldonadoTorres , and José David Saldívar. They critically deconstruct expectations about assimilation in relation to immigration as well as the equal-opportunity myth of “America” as “immigrant nation” by pointing out the “complex ways in which race and ethnicity combine with colonization and migration” to produce many conflicting kinds of immigrant experiences and positionalities.1 They posit, If we apply the coloniality perspective to the history of U.S. migration studies we would need to distinguish between three types of transnational migrants: “colonial /racial subjects of empire,” “colonial immigrants,” and immigrants (Grosfoguel 2003). Latin@s are no exception to this history. Within the Latin@ category there are multiple experiences of incorporation inside the United States. (8) ฀ 2 4 6 ฀ • ฀ c o n c l u s i o n From my perspective, not only have Latina/os had multiple and diverse experiences of incorporation inside the United States but, moreover, Latina/os, despite differences among ethno-racial and socioeconomic groups under the umbrella rubric “Latina/o,” have been both subtly and blatantly resisting a traditional model of assimilation. As mentioned in my introduction to this book, assimilation under the sign of night entails a far more multi-layered exchange between various minority or sub-cultural groups that challenges the dominant and the normative. I do not foresee any contemporary or near-future abatement of tropes of night in Latina/o cultural production. Rather, I see an increasing accumulation of those tropes, particularly in relation to the Latina/o-phobia that many Latina/os face in the United States on account of the xenophobic, anti-immigrant feelings of the general population who fear that their “American” (read Anglo-oriented) culture is being hybridized, diluted, and even destroyed by the increasing presence, on account of births as much as immigration, of Latina/os everywhere in the United States and not just in the expected places such as the Southwest, California, and southern Florida. Night is a way for Latina/os to represent and talk about what I term their/our simultaneous “invisibilization ” and “hyper-visibility” in all kinds of genres and media. Invisibilization and hyper-visibility occur because people are cued to not see or not imagine through the grid of over-determined stereotypes that rely on certain patterns of physical and mental visualization. Postcolonial psychoanalytic critic Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks reminds us of feminist philosopher, socio-political theorist, and activist Teresa Brennan’s association (in her book History after Lacan) of “the dominance of the visual” with the objectification and dominance of others. Seshadri-Crooks writes of racialization and its imbrication in the visual, Perhaps we can consider race itself as a symptom of what Brennan terms the “ego’s era,” when objectification and dominance of others and of the environment are paramount. Among the many insights she offers about the historicity of such a subject of knowledge, Brennan suggests that the dominance of the visual is a symptom of such “social psychosis”: “Visualization, whether in the form of hallucination or visual perception, observes difference rather than connection.”2 Resisting and confounding certain visualizations, turning invisibilization against dominant visualizations, night is, I have argued, a way for Latina/os to express the complexities of being considered and being the Other Americans, los...

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