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Introduction
- NYU Press
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- Additional Information
| 1 Introduction Gina M. Pérez, Frank A. Guridy, and Adrian Burgos, Jr. In The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois notes that a persistent, yet unasked question between him and “the other world” is “How does it feel to be a problem?” A similar question might be posed to contemporary America’s Latina/o populations, who recently have emerged simultaneously as a possible solution to America’s race problem, as well as a pernicious symbol of the nation’s enduring dilemma of citizenship, race, legality, and social membership. Thus the question Latinas/os face today is a similar one posed by Du Bois more than one hundred years ago, about not only the feelings of being defined as a problem, but also the strange experience of looking at oneself and one’s communities “through the eyes of others.”1 For many Latinas/os, media images and popular cultural renderings of their families and communities mirror the anxieties as well as the expectations and hopes of mainstream America, rather than the complex realities characterizing Latina/o lives. Ironically, at a moment in which Latinas/os are increasingly visible in U.S. popular culture, media, public discourse, and community struggles, the material conditions and actual experiences of U.S. Latinas/os are largely unexplored, misunderstood, and frequently trapped in racialized stereotypes. This interdisciplinary volume intervenes in public discourse about Latina/o communities by featuring scholarship that critically interrogates both how Latinas/os are portrayed in media, public policy, and popular culture , as well as the material conditions in which different Latina/o groups build meaningful communities. In the chapters that follow, the authors illustrate how despite the hypervisibility of Latinas/os and Latin American immigrants in recent political debates and popular culture, the daily lives of America’s new “majority minority”—their efforts to build community with other racial, ethnic, and sexual communities; their attempts to lay claim to full citizenship rights; their community activism; their rich array of cultural production—remain largely invisible and, perhaps more important, mischar- 2 | Gina M. Pérez, Frank A. Guridy, and Adrian Burgos, Jr. acterized. Indeed, while dominant political and popular discourses about Latinas/os offer up foreboding images of threat, invasion, and contamination, there is a simultaneous move by some politicians, writers, and marketers to advance a vision of Latinas/os embodying quintessentially American values and behaviors. Anthropologist Arlene Dávila refers to this latter trend as “Latino spin,” which she defines as the “selective dominance” of sanitized and marketable Latina/o representations that are “central to the national conversation about the future of Latinos.”2 While these marketable discourses frequently emerge as important correctives to negative depictions of Latina/o communities, they often do so at the expense of empirical evidence as well as those groups whose marginal economic and social standing are attributed to individual failures and moral shortcomings. These contradictory representations are deeply political constructs that conveniently elide the lived experiences of Latinas/os. They also play a critical role in contemporary politics of exclusion. Moreover, as Dávila observes, “as a group that is at once both living and socially imagined, Latinos continue to occupy a marginal position in society, even when they are joining the ranks of mainstream culture.”3 This anthology moves beyond these dominant representations to offer, instead, nuanced portraits of Latina/o life. In the chapters that follow, writers explore the complexity and diversity of Latina/o communities, both past and present, and provide analyses that not only defy stubborn stereotypes, but also present novel narratives of Latina/o communities that do not necessarily fit within recognizable categories, units of analysis, or topics of research that can, unwittingly, reify and reproduce static images of U.S. Latinas/os. In other words, these chapters help us to move “beyond el barrio”: beyond stereotypes, assumptions, and stigmatizing tropes, as well as nostalgic, reified , and uncritical portraits of complex and heterogeneous Latina/o lives. As we argue in the following section, we recognize “el barrio” to be a fraught material and ideological space that can both sustain and marginalize those associated with it. Thus our intention is not to deny the existence of barrios , nor is it to diminish their importance as a cultural, political, social, and ideological space. Rather, the authors in this anthology invite readers to expand contemporary understandings and representations that can narrowly define, homogenize, mischaracterize, and stigmatize Latina/o lives. The writers do so with research that challenges enduring tropes of...