Together, the papers in this panel re-imagine social movement, comunidad, rebellion, and joy through collective, un/disciplined scholarship-in-dialogue. With a focus on sound, affect, emotion and aesthetics, we perceive unruly... [ view full abstract ]
Together, the papers in this panel re-imagine social movement, comunidad, rebellion, and joy through collective, un/disciplined scholarship-in-dialogue. With a focus on sound, affect, emotion and aesthetics, we perceive unruly Latinidades and resistant grammars as modes of politics and possibility.
Alarcón, in “’El Grito Can Still Be Heard In Space’: A Chicana/o Keyword Style Essay,” traces the sounds that have marked histories and moments of rebellion across the Américas. She asks: How do we listen to other everyday, expressions of el grito that urge us to life? What do we make of a single playful, irreverent grito heard over a solemn national ceremony? Or of a mournful wail that ends in laughter? This keyword style paper considers how el grito-as-repertoire sounds important disruptions to dominant narratives of nation, race, and gender in Jenni Rivera’s performance of the “Star Spangled Banner” and the short story “Woman Hollering Creek” by Sandra Cisneros. Considering the playful notion that el grito can still be heard in space, she suggests that what we hear is a resistant grammar against multiple erasures that has particular sense-making possibilities in the Chicana/o – Latina/o sonic imaginaries.
Figueredo follows with, “Latina/o Political Moods/Modes: Inhabiting Vulnerability in Manuel Muñoz’s What You See in the Dark and Undocumented Immigrant Activism.” Drawing on affect theory, vulnerability-based ethics and decolonial thought, this paper discusses the various moods and modes of politics that they each generate. Figueredo considers these critical approaches in relation to the tender fiction of Chicano writer Manuel Muñoz and the public performances of undocumented citizenship by activists in recent campaigns against the deportation and dehumanization of unauthorized immigrants. Muñoz’s stories of tense socio-spatial attachments and immigrant activist performances of undocumented citizenship, Figueredo argues, inhabit social and affective vulnerability (or openness) as sites for resisting oppressive logics. They place critical pressure on the distinctions between emotions, corporeal sensations and political-personal spaces, all of which are critical to imagining and mobilizing Latina/o subjects.
Next, Morales & Ambriz in “Mobilizing Cultura and Becoming Latina/o in a New England College Town: Promiscuous Narratives of Latinidades” draw on ethnographic interviews with 15 community leaders to explore how accounts of local radio activism, advocacy efforts, and community celebrations reflected an urgency for Latinidad and comunidad. Across diverse class, gendered, raced bodies, multiple identities and experiences of exclusion and inclusion, “cultura” was leveraged in “promiscuous” ways, reconfiguring Latinidad as an ambiguous, elastic and blurred site of identity-making practice.
Lastly, Villenas in Pedagogies of Food, Fun and Fiesta: Citizenship Practices in an Emergent Latino Community, draws on ethnographic research exploring the teaching and learning of cultural citizenship through festivals, workshops, mural projects, and film screenings. Latino cultural programming may be rightfully scrutinized for serving as safe cultural practices not demanding of social and political rights. However, looking beneath the surface, this paper examines pedagogies of Latinidad as political, performative and aesthetic. FFF was mobilized in seemingly non-political, heritage terms and simultaneously in emotive and politically charged ways propelled by a migrant imaginary (Camacho, 2008) and people of Color politics.
