Project MUSE®: Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/713
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (2016) through current issue
Latest Articles: Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and CulturesTWOProject MUSE®Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures2472-45210277-7223Latest articles in Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures. Feed provided by Project MUSE®From the Editor
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987724
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There are moments (sometimes minutes, sometimes hours, sometimes longer) when the world seems to be spinning too fast. We reach out to stabilize ourselves against the onslaught, to take hold of something solid, but it’s just outside our reach, whirling seemingly past our control, vertigo inching in. In those moments, art can ground us, reconnect us, sustain us. I (and, reader, I invite you to) take solace in the artistic encounter to remind us that despite the tempest, art and its critical reception fuel possibility, remind us that otherwise is possible, and affirm our shared humanity.Still, the moment weighs heavily over many of our Latinx communities, as new political and social realities challenge longstanding
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/713/image/coversmallFrom the Editor2026-04-09text/htmlen-USFrom the Editor2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®51592026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09Mapping Cuban Affective Landscapes: Storytelling and White Cuban Women’s Affect in Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina García
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987725
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In this article, I analyze how Cristina García’s novel Dreaming in Cuban (1992) questions the Cold War logic that rules over Cuban emotionalities, including its portrayal of anti-Blackness and the processes of blanqueamiento that support Cuban identities on the island and the United States. The novel tells the story of three generations of the Del Pino family throughout exile and separation. My analysis proposes understanding García’s book as a map that guides readers through affective landscapes that determine the identities of white Cuban women from different generations. Dreaming thus constitutes an affective map that shows how white Cuban women negotiated their identities with dominant ideological and emotional
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/713/image/coversmallMapping Cuban Affective Landscapes: Storytelling and White Cuban Women’s Affect in Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina García2026-04-09text/htmlen-USMapping Cuban Affective Landscapes: Storytelling and White Cuban Women’s Affect in Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina García2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®1021362026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09“One Day We Will Fly Back Home”: Posthumanism in Aida Salazar’s Land of the Cranes
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987726
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In honor of Jocelynn Rojo Carranza, may she rest in powerBetita Quintero, the protagonist of Aida Salazar’s Land of the Cranes, is in the fourth grade when her father is deported, and she and her mother are imprisoned in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility in Southern California. At the heart of this story is a reference to Mexica folklore and Aztlán, the land of the cranes. Betita imagines herself and represents those around her as cranes in their native land in what is presently known as California. Throughout the story, Betita use picture poems, a combination of words and illustrations, to recount the trauma she and other “cranes” experience in detention. Cranes is a powerful
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/713/image/coversmall“One Day We Will Fly Back Home”: Posthumanism in Aida Salazar’s Land of the Cranes2026-04-09text/htmlen-US“One Day We Will Fly Back Home”: Posthumanism in Aida Salazar’s Land of the Cranes2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®887402026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09On Necropolitics and the Precarious Border Subject
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987727
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The dead do not like to be forgotten.When I told you that I will probably haunt you, you made it about you, but it is about me.The opposite of dispossession is not possession.It is not accumulation. It is unforgetting. It is mattering.While the scope of border literary studies has primarily engaged im/migration and citizenship from within the United States, scholars across the field certainly understand the porousness and transnational positioning of borders beyond the United States and Mexico. Even when framed intersectionally, literary scholarship has attended broadly to the state of border subjectivity almost exclusively from a Western positioning through our engagement with Latine and Chicane authors writing
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/713/image/coversmallOn Necropolitics and the Precarious Border Subject2026-04-09text/htmlen-USOn Necropolitics and the Precarious Border Subject2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®875842026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09Josefina Báez: Life and Work, Photo 1
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987728
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Original
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/713/image/coversmallJosefina Báez: Life and Work, Photo 12026-04-09text/htmlen-USJosefina Báez: Life and Work, Photo 12026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®19232026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09ArteSana, the Curatorial Arts of Josefina Báez: Introduction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987729
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On October 5, 2023, Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library (RBML) held a packed and spirited gathering to celebrate the acquisition of artist Josefina Báez’s archives. Titled ArteSana: A Celebration of the Life and Work of Josefina Báez, the event also marked the occasion of Báez’s papers becoming the tenth archive of the Latino Arts and Activisms (LAAS) collection. One of the most consulted in the library, LAAS’s purpose is to preserve and make accessible the records of Latinos and Latino organizations that work at the intersection of arts and activism in New York City and related geographies.The first acquired papers were those of writer and community activist Jack Agüeros, whose poem “Psalm for
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/713/image/coversmallArteSana, the Curatorial Arts of Josefina Báez: Introduction2026-04-09text/htmlen-USArteSana, the Curatorial Arts of Josefina Báez: Introduction2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®472722026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09Brief Notes on Josefina’s Journey, Bliss, Silence, and Love
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987730
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As I prepared for today, October 5, a day when we celebrate Columbia University’s acquisition of the Josefina Báez’s papers as part of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library’s Latino Arts and Activisms collection, a collage of quotes from Josefina’s texts as well as many memories shared with her in this city, our beloved New York, filled every corner of my head, soul, and heart. Reflecting on how to pay fitting tribute to Josefina and her legacy, I was reminded of the numerous ways in which she, her work, and the community of love she fostered have influenced me and shaped me into the scholar and person I am today. Josefina and the women with whom I share this roundtable, in one way or another, have “brush[ed] sorrows
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/713/image/coversmallBrief Notes on Josefina’s Journey, Bliss, Silence, and Love2026-04-09text/htmlen-USBrief Notes on Josefina’s Journey, Bliss, Silence, and Love2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®170612026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09Josefina Báez: From Theory to Praxis
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987731
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When I grow up, I want to be a SundayI have known Josefina since I was fifteen years old. We met when I was just beginning my first semester as an undergraduate at Rutgers University in New Jersey and a little less than three years since my family had uprooted me from my native Santo Domingo and brought me to what would be my new home in the capital city of New Jersey. I was homesick and in search of community as I navigated life as a first-gen university student, a teenager, and an immigrant. So, when I encountered a flyer announcing a Dominican performance, I was thrilled and excited. It was a production of Lo mío es mío performed by Josefina and her then theater partner, Claudio Mir. As I sat in the auditorium
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/713/image/coversmallJosefina Báez: From Theory to Praxis2026-04-09text/htmlen-USJosefina Báez: From Theory to Praxis2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®199802026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09Josefina Báez: Life and Work, Photo 2
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987732
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Original
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/713/image/coversmallJosefina Báez: Life and Work, Photo 22026-04-09text/htmlen-USJosefina Báez: Life and Work, Photo 22026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®19232026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09“Yo apuesto en los diálogos”: Conversational Aesthesis in Josefina Báez’s Work
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987733
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I have known Josefina Báez for almost twenty years now. Back in 2006, I was starting to write a PhD thesis on theatrical representations of Dominican migration experiences in the city of New York, and although I had been following her work for a while, our first face-to-face encounter took place that year, after I contacted her for an interview. She kindly accepted my request and invited me over for lunch at her home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. During our shared meal, the conversation—parts of which were later incorporated into one of my first publications on her work (Durán-Almarza 2011)—touched upon issues of home, language, identity, and creative processes. This meeting inaugurated a dialogue that has
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/713/image/coversmall“Yo apuesto en los diálogos”: Conversational Aesthesis in Josefina Báez’s Work2026-04-09text/htmlen-US“Yo apuesto en los diálogos”: Conversational Aesthesis in Josefina Báez’s Work2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®320292026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09Unfinished Notes for a Dress Rehearsal: Josefina Báez’s Papers at the Butler Library
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987734
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What does the dance of life move towards anyway?Photographing, writing, drawing, flying, cooking, eating, dressing up, dancing . . . then the actual moving of objects: photo prints, hand-drawn images, flyers, plane tickets, restaurant menus, manuscript proofs, workshop outlines, newspaper clippings, sketches for dramaturgy, “performance partitures,” and many, hundreds of handwritten or typed-up pages were collected by Josefina Báez between 1970 and 2000. Moving, flying sheets were selected and moved by expert archivists to Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library on the top floor of the Butler Library in the winter of 2023. Josefina Báez turns sixty-three and is one of the few living authors currently
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/713/image/coversmallUnfinished Notes for a Dress Rehearsal: Josefina Báez’s Papers at the Butler Library2026-04-09text/htmlen-USUnfinished Notes for a Dress Rehearsal: Josefina Báez’s Papers at the Butler Library2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®290762026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09“Invisibility Gave Me Time”: Twelve Questions for Josefina Báez
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987735
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Josefina Báez is one of the most innovative Afro-Latina artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. However, her work remains relatively unknown even though Baez’s contributions are essential in challenging traditional teaching and performance methods, as well as in creating new narratives about Latina migration. She has a long history of breaking barriers in the arts, starting with the founding of Latinarte/Ay Ombe Theatre in 1986 and continuing with her development of the creative practice known as “Performance Autology,” which she still practices today. Throughout her trajectory, Báez has carved out a space for herself in a noise-filled world that often refuses to listen.1What is your name, broadly
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/713/image/coversmall“Invisibility Gave Me Time”: Twelve Questions for Josefina Báez2026-04-09text/htmlen-US“Invisibility Gave Me Time”: Twelve Questions for Josefina Báez2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®238682026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09Un Amigo: Equus Diaboli
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987736
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Emiliano Carranza never wanted to move to Gloucester County. He never planned on it. He spent a good portion of his life in Matamoros working at a local night club cleaning up the bathroom, handing towels to patrons, offering cologne and liquid soap to men who gave him enough tips to make up for the shit compensation the owner paid him. The patrón, a white-haired gordo named Capas Sabater, was a Cuban who moved to Mexico over forty years ago and opened a whiskey and mariachi joint that catered to the locals on the weekends. But Emiliano hated the way that Sabater treated him, and he packed his bags one Thursday afternoon, struck Capas in the stomach after the patrón hurled some ethnic slur, and made the trek to New
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/713/image/coversmallUn Amigo: Equus Diaboli2026-04-09text/htmlen-USUn Amigo: Equus Diaboli2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®166002026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09At a Distance
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987737
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It looked beautiful from the sky. He wasn’t expecting to be so moved. Yet the sight of the coast, a blue mantle merging with stripes of beige and gray and dark green, put him in a sentimental mood.Many passengers applauded when the plane landed. Those who applauded were also eager to get out and were talking on their phones with a rushed speech he could hardly understand. He had noticed several passengers frowning and staring at him during the flight. It happened when he made his way to the bathroom, when he pushed the assistance button to order another black coffee, and when he struggled to stay awake reading his copy of History of Puerto Rico by Fernando Picó.“Just take it easy,” his father had advised when he
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/713/image/coversmallAt a Distance2026-04-09text/htmlen-USAt a Distance2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®318172026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09Anything but Novel: Pushing the Margins in Latin American Post-Utopian Historical Narrative by Jennie Irene Daniels (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987738
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In this short book, Jennie Irene Daniels delivers a complex argument on the relation between past, present, and future, the framing of history, and capitalism in Latin America. Daniels’s object of study is the “post-utopian historical novel,” a subgenre that emerges during the 1980s and stretches into the mid 2000s. This genre, she argues, is a response to the fading away of hopes for socially just futures across the region. More than a temporal category, post-utopia is a contextual one: It refers to the exhaustion of utopian elan in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, when leftist political projects in Latin America were dismantled by military dictatorships, political setbacks, US interventions and, ultimately, the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/713/image/coversmallAnything but Novel: Pushing the Margins in Latin American Post-Utopian Historical Narrative by Jennie Irene Daniels (review)2026-04-09text/htmlen-USAnything but Novel: Pushing the Margins in Latin American Post-Utopian Historical Narrative by Jennie Irene Daniels (review)2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®108712026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09Latinx Revolutionary Horizons: Form and Futurity in the Americas by Renee Hudson (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987739
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Renee Hudson opens Latinx Revolutionary Horizons: Form and Futurity in the Americas by quoting Tatiana Flores: “Latinidad is cancelled.” From the outset, Hudson names an interlocutor that is at once a specific text by a specific author as well as an increasingly widespread view among academics, cultural commentators, and activists. By beginning with this citation, Hudson announces the book’s intent to engage in discussion of a topic whose critical reach extends far beyond the walls of academia, since culture has, in recent years, taken an increasingly critical look at the category of “latinidad.” Social media feeds of artists, activists, and cultural commentators are filled with takes on the potential usefulness of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/713/image/coversmallLatinx Revolutionary Horizons: Form and Futurity in the Americas by Renee Hudson (review)2026-04-09text/htmlen-USLatinx Revolutionary Horizons: Form and Futurity in the Americas by Renee Hudson (review)2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®108692026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09Ancestral Voices, Healing Narratives: Female Ghosts in Contemporary US and Caribbean Fiction by Kristina S. Gibby (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987740
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Kristina S. Gibby’s Ancestral Voices, Healing Narratives: Female Ghosts in Contemporary US and Caribbean Fiction offers a keen analysis of the figure of the female ghost through four novels across time and geographical differences. She examines Erna Brodber’s Louisiana, Zoé Valdés’s Te di la vida entera, Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo: or Puro Cuento, and Maryse Condé’s Victoire. Though ghosts figure prominently in European gothic novels and traditions, Gibby conceptualizes female ghosts as distinctive from their male counterparts. She asserts, “female ghosts tell female stories.” By doing so, she provides a distinct perspective on history that often disrupts the “patriarchal bias of the official archive” (7), which
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/713/image/coversmallAncestral Voices, Healing Narratives: Female Ghosts in Contemporary US and Caribbean Fiction by Kristina S. Gibby (review)2026-04-09text/htmlen-USAncestral Voices, Healing Narratives: Female Ghosts in Contemporary US and Caribbean Fiction by Kristina S. Gibby (review)2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®99462026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09Books Received
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987741
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This list acknowledges recent books received by Chiricú Journal. It does not preclude review at a later
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/713/image/coversmallBooks Received2026-04-09text/htmlen-USBooks Received2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®135512026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09