Latinos at the End of the World: An Interspecies Paradigm
Abstract
Accelerated globalization has created a new kind of person, the refugee from neoliberal policy implementation. Fleeing economic, social, and climatological collapse, these displaced, dispossessed, and disenfranchised people... [ view full abstract ]
Accelerated globalization has created a new kind of person, the refugee from neoliberal policy implementation. Fleeing economic, social, and climatological collapse, these displaced, dispossessed, and disenfranchised people hardly find a second home; they become refugees without refuge. The limits on their flourishing extend far beyond the national borders that they cross in search of livable life. Wherever they go, they are discriminated and psychologically segregated by discourses of race nationalism. In the United States, the US-Mexico border is such flashpoint to a racialization that encompasses all Latinos, regardless of social location, national background, or ethnic identification. As sociologists Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Douglas Massey have pointed out, the creation of a Latino identity was problematically ratified by the national public rhetoric against immigration, rhetoric in which Latino personhood signifies underclass criminality. “Immigration enforcement,” Massey writes, “is a race-making institution.” Efforts to deconstruct the negative racialization of Latinos must therefore target not only the border-ideology of nation, they must target also the arbitrary taxonomic discourses of race by which such border-ideology is motivated and routinized. Such efforts must—to rephrase the LSA’s call for papers—disrupt facile constructions of belonging in racial citizenships.
My paper disrupts such nation-based constructions of racial belonging by analyzing unruly moments in Latino literature where unruliness troubles more than just nation, but disorganizes its taxonomic frameworks too. Focusing on moments of encounter between human and nonhuman in novels by Miguel Mendez and Oscar Zeta Acosta, I argue that the messy interspecies subjectivities that emerge from these encounters un-discipline the taxonomic episteme that perpetuates racial classification and national affiliation. In lieu of segregating taxonomies, these writers imagined forms of interspecies kinship by which sociability and political solidarity extend across political borders and conceptual boundaries. Pilgrims in Aztlán and Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo document attempts to think outside structural American institutions, building on the experiences of each author encountering the creative cultural formations of marginalized indigenous groups—respectively Yaqui and Kuna Indians of Mexico and South America. In describing relationships between Mendez’s and Acosta’s literary works and these indigenous cultures, this paper further disturbs familiar paradigms of Latino culture, showcasing its literature's debt to an intercultural collaboration of trans-hemispheric kinship networks. These networks, made in opposition to encompassing neoliberal ideologies, are a horizon of possibility for contemporary political life.
More generally, my work analyzes Latino racialization as a problematic of globalization in order to augment Latino Studies with recent global risk analysis that advocates interspecies and intercultural kinship networks as possible means for reconstituting refuges for a world of human and nonhuman refugees. Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, and Bruno Latour provide its models for critiquing the epistemic boundaries that separate people from people and people from their other-than-human earthly counterparts. With its title meant as a nod to Tsing’s recent work on interspecies kinship, Mushroom at the End of the World, my paper presents an environmental paradigm for Latino unruliness, where mushrooming kinships disorganize our world’s most damaging taxonomies and coordinate personhood across political borders, epistemic boundaries, and orders of being.
Authors
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Edgar Garcia
(University of Chicago)
Topic Areas
Cultural Studies , Gender Studies , Latinidades , Literature and Literary Studies , Sexuality , Transnational , Central American , Chicano/a -- Mexican , Humanities
Session
LIT-2 » Out of the Latin@ Canon: Writers and Texts as Discipline Problems (10:15am - Thursday, 7th July, Altadena)
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