Latinx Studies: Notes From An Emerita
An event for Salvadorean/Los Angeles poet Yesika Salgado hosted by the Latina and Latino Studies Program at Northwestern University.
I conceptualize Latinx Studies not as a discipline but as a field of study and intellectual community that, inspired by the political and social mobilizations from the 1960s and 70s, produces decolonial and alternative knowledges that aim to relocate the lives and struggles of U.S. Latinx communities at the center of our epistemologies. Many scholars who approach Latinx communities in the United States as the study of a specific population from the vantage point of their own disciplinary methodologies have contributed significantly to the field, but, at its core, Latinx Studies proposes alternative and multiple methodologies that challenge traditional disciplinary approaches to understanding our communities. Latinx Studies also invites us to explore critical pedagogies in the classroom and to approach knowledge as emerging from the lives of our students, to dismantle hierarchies and privileged authority as instructors, and to allow our students to engage learning as an embodied process. Like Chicano and Puerto Rican Studies during the 1960s and 1970s, our knowledge emerges from our communities and our scholarship models collaboration rather than competition. While these goals are ideals that have been long challenged by institutional policies and neoliberal values, they should remain central to our work as we witness the field’s transformation, expansion, and institutionalization. In the following pages, I share some of my own reflections on the long-term struggles and tensions that I experienced as I witnessed the contradictions inherent in integrating our alternative vision for higher education into traditional and elite academic institutions.
In 1980-81, as a third year PhD student at Harvard University, I was invited to teach a second section of Spanish for Bilinguals, as it was called then, a new course proposed by a Mexican-American assistant professor that aimed to address the academic needs of our growing, yet unacknowledged Latinx student population. When I received the call from the department, I was thrilled and honored to have been considered to teach this new course yet remained unaware at that moment of what it would mean for the rest of my professional life as an academic. As my first incursion into addressing the emerging pedagogical needs of U.S. Latinx students, this course propelled me into Latinx Studies at a time when the field per se did not exist in the undergraduate catalogs of universities. In the early 1980s, Puerto Rican Studies and Chicano Studies constituted the academic spaces that served as alternative decolonial pedagogies, but there were very few attempts, if any, to engage not only in comparative ethnicities but in the teaching of Latinidad as a space for decoloniality. When I first faced the group of students in that Spanish for Bilinguals class, and realized that this was a new classroom experience for both students and instructor, I was inspired by the possibilities of an alternative pedagogical space that would bring together Latinx students from diverse ethnicities, racial identities, socioeconomic status, geocultural regions, migration histories, gender and sexualities, and linguistic proficiencies, and facilitate a mutual learning that would be based on their inter-latinx differences and similarities. In those early years, my students embodied Mexican-Americans from California and the Southwest, Puerto Ricans from the East Coast, and Cuban-Americans from Miami, clearly demarcated communities that today have been significantly transculturated by other Latinx ethnicities. I was personally inspired and challenged to create structures, exercises, and discussions to promote student learning about culture, identity and language. Centering on Spanish proficiency was, in some ways, an excuse to engage in the critical analysis of the horizontal hierarchies within Latinidad. For instance, witnessing the power struggles over lexical choices and preferred vocabularies allowed me as the instructor to facilitate a critical awareness of the rich heterogeneity of Latinx within the United States while decentering the ethnocentric and nationalist values into which we were socialized. This was, in brief, my first incursion into what we now call Latinx Studies. Like me, numerous other Latinx professors across the country were experimenting in the classroom and producing knowledges that would pioneer the field.
The Canon Wars and the Struggle for Interdisciplinarity
I have previously argued that interdisciplinarity in Latinx Studies scholarship remains, in most cases, an aspiration, an ideal, rather than an academic practice. Given prevailing hiring practices that privilege disciplines over interdisciplinary scholarship, our units and programs remain mostly multidisciplinary rather than inter- or trans-disciplinary. As a scholar who distanced myself from my disciplinary training in Latin American literary studies, for decades I have grappled with the tensions between the demands of the discipline of Hispanic Studies and my impulse to transform my scholarship methodologically. While numerous universities have embraced interdisciplinarity in the marketplace of higher education, transgressing methodologies was profoundly painful for many of us who dared to experiment with new methods and trespass the boundaries of the elite literary canon handed to us by traditional departments. As a Latina scholar working within Spanish or Modern Languages Departments, these long-held tensions were never truly resolved for me. Even when I worked at University of Illinois at Chicago, where my appointment was 100% in the Latin American and Latino Studies Program, I still struggled with the rigid canonical frameworks of the Spanish Department that excluded the corpus, texts, and theories which many of my PhD students were proposing to study.
In Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latino Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures, 1998, I examined gender politics in Salsa music and explored listening as a critical concept for understanding the social meanings of Latinx popular music.
When I began my research about Salsa music in Puerto Rican literature, a theme that long emerged from my undergraduate training in Comparative Literature, or as a case study of the postmodernist theories trending in the late 1980s and during the 1990s, my colleagues in Spanish departments refused to validate the project. Comments such as “this must be a fun research project”, “Are you an anthropologist?” and “Why study Salsa music and not Don Quijote?”, were abundant in my professional interactions and conversations; these were aimed at undermining the ways in which analyzing Salsa music provocatively acknowledged the humanity and artistic agency of working-class urban brown musicians. At the time of writing Listening to Salsa, I grappled with the ways in which my writing was clearly breaking boundaries methodologically as well as socially, racially, and gender-wise. When colleagues undermined the seriousness or sophistication of my research project, I would remind them that it was eminently academic, for it was inspired and framed by postmodernism, discourse analysis, and theories of feminism.
My ongoing struggles with Spanish departments over the boundaries of the literary canon and the possibilities of teaching popular music, next to literature, continued for decades and across universities. As a mentor for graduate students who were also interested in studying popular music, I had to challenge graduate committees who had established reading lists and rigid curricula that too easily excluded the sorts of authors, musics, and texts required for their dissertation projects. I clearly remember the debates around the canon at University of Michigan during the 1990s. When graduate students, many of them Latinx, complained about the traditional reading list required for the Master’s Exam, which included 40 books, 30 of which were Spanish Peninsular, and ten were Latin American, the Spanish colleagues formed a committee to evaluate the situation and concluded, at the end, that there was no need for a list and that each student should submit a portfolio for the Master’s Exam. While this transformation was a real victory that dismantled an archaic reading list, I was disheartened at the fact that not all students would have access to the writings of Gloria Anzaldúa, Pedro Pietri, Tato Laviera and other canonical Latinx writers. I confess that I perceived the new policy as an utter unwillingness to include U.S. Latinx writers as a part of the literary canon. Ironically, PhD students from other specialized areas in Hispanic Studies were not expected to read Latinx writers, but Latinx PhD students had to cover the traditional canon first before engaging in their own reading lists. Yet, while virulently resisting the canonization of Latinx writers or the inclusion of popular music as a site of analysis, some departments would publicize our scholarly projects to market themselves to prospective students as innovative and interdisciplinary units without truly transforming the canon itself. Their disciplinary anxieties transformed us, the dissidents, into commodities. I feel gratified that today the academic analysis of Latinx popular music, dance, and other forms of popular cultural practices have become an integral part of our canons.
In Negotiating Latinidad: Intralatina/o Lives in Chicago, 2019, I introduce the concept of horizontal hierarchies to analyze the power asymmetries among Latinx ethnicities and national communities in the United States.
Interdisciplinarity is about experimenting with methods. Choosing methodologies needs to be based on the nature of the intellectual questions, topics, and issues we pose in our writing. I grappled with this challenge myself when I was writing Negotiating Latinidad: Intralatina/o Lives in Chicago (2019). After having completed and transcribed the twenty interviews with young Intralatinx individuals in Chicago, I began to organize the contents into coherent narratives of their lives. As a scholar who was initially trained to examine, read, and analyze literary and cultural texts, I had no idea about the difficulties and dilemmas I would face in writing about real people, about social subjects, about human lives. I struggled with the possible ways I could organize the chapters without cleaning up or deleting the contradictions and affective realities of their family dynamics. My difficulties with methodologies led me to approach the interview contents as personal narratives, as testimonios, rather than as categorizable evidence. My focus on experience as a site for analysis, and on affect and trauma, ultimately offered me the frameworks for organizing the book. This dilemma reminded me of the true challenges that interdisciplinarity proposes and, moreover, of the ways in which our initial disciplinary training continues to inform our work. While I feel pride in defining myself as an interdisciplinary Latina scholar, I realized that my training as a literary and cultural critic ultimately helped me to select the theoretical frameworks for my book. Indeed, our knowledge production is decolonial as we continue to experiment with methods in the interstices of, and in the tensions among disciplinary methodologies.
Scholarship and Community
Latinx Studies scholarship places Latinx individuals and communities at the center of our narratives. In contrast to traditional disciplines, in which U.S. Latinx communities serve exclusively as research subjects and as sources for compiling data, Latinx Studies scholars grapple with respecting, legitimizing and honoring the agency of U.S. Latinx voices, experiences, bodies, and lives. As an intellectual community, however, we have much work to do ahead in terms of disseminating our alternative knowledges to a larger public. How do we share, in democratic and equitable ways, the knowledge we produce with the members of our communities outside of academia? Given that higher education, as an institution, does not always validate or reward off-campus interventions, how can we engage equitably with our communities and go beyond the well-established “service-learning” models?
In 2001-02, I audited a seminar about The Public Intellectual at University of Illinois at Chicago. Our dean, Stanley Fish, was the professor. The seminar consisted of guest speakers from notable and well-respected newspapers, such as The New York Times and The Chicago Tribune, who recommended best practices in terms of getting an op-ed published, or getting our books reviewed. At the time, however, I was fascinated by, yet also frustrated by the dominant, white definition of public intellectual mobilized during the seminar. Today, social media has significantly expanded our potential to become public as our writings, our blogs and our posts circulate regionally, nationally and globally in a matter of seconds, as illustrated by this essay. For me, being a public intellectual has meant sharing our decolonial knowledge with our own local and regional communities, rather than being included in the major newspapers. Returning to the central role of inter-latinx knowledges as a central purpose in Latinx Studies, my vision for establishing an equitable and respectful dialogue with our communities outside of academia became a reality during my years at the University of Illinois at Chicago. From 2001-2005, the Latin American and Latino Studies Program began to organize and sponsor lectures by scholars, poets, writers, filmmakers, and activists in a variety of community venues in Pilsen, Humboldt Park, and other Latinx neighborhoods in Chicago. With partial funding from the Joyce Foundation, I hired Marta Ayala, a Mexicana/Chicana
The first speaker in the Lectures in the Community Series at University of Illinois, Chicago, was Professor of History, Francisco Scarano, who shared his work with the Puerto Rican community in Humboldt Park.
arts activist who was well connected to community organizers and artists in Latinx Chicago. Her role was pivotal in matching the speaker with specific communities. In this way, the lectures were not structured or presented as a hierarchical way of “teaching” our compatriotas, but as a way of sharing knowledge and engaging in a respectful dialogue that would enhance our common humanity. For our local communities, the joy and pleasure of listening to a presentation about themselves and their histories invited them to fully engage in these dialogues. The Lectures in the Community became the foundation for our programming between 2000-2005. Some events were more intimate in nature, and others were attended by 100 or even 200 people at a time. By selecting speakers who were engaged in current local struggles or social movements, or writers who wrote about our identities or racial challenges, we successfully contributed to the equitable sharing of knowledge with our own neighbors. This was possible, in some ways, given the public mission of UIC, yet it is also entirely possible at private universities given the increased potential for financial support. This was our way of giving back to the communities that nurture our scholarship and that allow us the privilege of producing knowledge and of being a part of higher education. These community events, most significantly, publicly acknowledged that Latinx individuals outside the academy are also important sources for theorizing, questioning, and debating. They are thinkers in their own right and the Lectures in the Community programming beautifully illustrated that acknowledgement. The fact that many of the speakers commented on the unique nature and difficulty of the questions posed to them revealed that these audiences had witnessed and lived the very content of our scholarship and engaged in these issues through their everyday struggles, as embodied knowledge.
Conclusions
I have attempted to share a few of the numerous unresolved tensions that have framed my own experience as a Latinx Studies scholar. Our field of study is constantly changing contingent on the political struggles of the moment, yet overall our scholarship and teaching continue, across decades, to acknowledge and validate the experiences of U.S. Latinx communities. Since the preliminary teaching and writing of the early 1980s until today, Latinx Studies has slowly but surely grown, expanded, and has become integrated, albeit unevenly, into academic institutions. The role of the scholarly awards sponsored by the Latino Studies Section of LASA, the foundation of the Latino Studies Journal in 2003, and the beginning of the Latino Studies Association in 2014, illustrate the gradual institutionalization of Latinx Studies as an official entity in academia. As a part of this growth, our community continues to transform and re-energize itself with the growing scholarship of Central Americans, U.S. Colombianos, Dominicanos, LGBTQ subjectivities and queer studies, and Afro-Latinx thinkers, critical voices that push us to acknowledge our internal power differentials and the privileges of white and heteronormative Latinidades, while consistently expanding our boundaries and internal borders. They also have decentered Chicanx, U.S. Puerto Rican and Cuban-American scholarship as the dominant voices within the field. In this context, Latinx Studies needs to remain fluid and open to new futures.
Administratively, Latinx Studies has always been vulnerable to budgetary limitations and constrained faculty hires. Despite our growth and increased visibility, we need to continue to advocate on behalf of this project: we need substantial resources, full faculty lines that can contribute to the development of these units, funding for more vigorous programming and curricular expansions, and all else that is required to allow this intellectual community to thrive. After all, Latinx Studies has transformed our lives and continues to have the potential to transform, through decolonial pedagogies, the lives of our students. As a Puerto Rican young woman who migrated to the United States for my college education, I had no idea that my life would be enriched socially, culturally and racially by the diverse Latinx communities with which I have interacted. As I realized in my first course on Spanish for Bilinguals, it is in our collective knowledge, in the spaces of Latinidad, where we can find power.
All images courtesy of author.
Frances R. Aparicio is Professor Emerita at Northwestern University, where she taught in the Spanish and Portuguese Department and directed the Latina and Latino Studies Program for eight years. She has previously taught at Stanford University, University of Arizona, University of Michigan, and University of Illinois at Chicago. She participated in the founding of the Latino Studies Journal in 2003 and was a member of the original committee that organized the Latino Studies Association in 2014. Her publications include articles and anthologies on U.S. Latinx literatures, popular music and gender, language and identity, and Intralatinx subjectivities, among other areas of study. She is currently writing a book about Marc Anthony’s Salsa repertoire.