This article examines how transnational feminist activists from Seattle built alliances with women activists in Cuba to challenge the blockade while simultaneously demanding stateside change during the 1990s and early 2000s. Seattle women activists, including Latinx, Asian American, Black, Native American, and white women, formed the Everywoman’s Delegation and the U.S. Women and Cuba Collaboration to reach across borders and racial lines in the quest to pair domestic systemic inequalities with critiques of U.S. foreign policy. Building movements across racial lines to gain numbers and power had a deep history in Seattle, which has always been an overwhelmingly majority white city, 85
This article reconsiders the 1994 FIFA Men’s World Cup in the United States by analyzing it alongside the era’s fierce immigration debates. While remembered for its financial and logistical success—and for launching Major League Soccer—USA’94 was simultaneously shaped by California’s racist, anti-immigrant Proposition 187 campaign. Focusing on Los Angeles—which hosted the most games of any World Cup site, including the final, and was home to the nation’s largest Latino population—this study uses Spanish-language newspaper sources to reexamine the event through a Latino lens. It highlights key moments of resistance, including fans booing Governor Pete Wilson at the Rose Bowl and street celebrations clashing with the police in Huntington Park. Ultimately, in this article I demonstrate how soccer became a battleground for Latino political engagement on immigration and provide historical perspective on the “long shadows” of USA’94 that still resonate.
This article contextualizes the experiences of Belizean immigrants who settled in the U.S. and in Los Angeles during the late 1970s and 1980s. It critically examines their contributions that challenge the often reductive narratives imposed on Central American migrants. Focusing on the distinct experiences of Black Belizeans, I uncover how they employed creative forms of organizing through media and philanthropy, strategically navigating dual identities as both literal and symbolic citizens of both Belize and the United States. These efforts, frequently overlooked by dominant discourses, underscore the complexity of Central American immigrant identities that transcend conventional frameworks of belonging. By positioning media and philanthropy as forms of sanctuary, Belizeans cultivated resilient support networks within their communities, thereby asserting their agency in ways that the broader societal gaze has marginalized. This article contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the strategies employed by Black Central Americans to preserve their histories and identities, enriching the discourse on Black immigrants in California and offering insights into their unique role within a challenging historical context.
In “Plant Based Aztlán: Intersectional Veganism Across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands,” the author utilizes a transnational lens to center the oral histories she conducted with eight intersectional vegans across the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The stories she highlights interrogate how they reimagine their relationships to the more-than-human world, food, land, and animals. She suggests that they are centering ancestral and Indigenous foodways, which have been unacknowledged yet co-opted by mainstream vegans, and in the process forging community and cultural ties across borders. This praxis tends to be more radical in its intersectional approach than mainstream white veganism because it is often informed by an understanding of the hemispheric history of settler colonization, imperialism, and racial capitalism. Examining veganism through a transnational lens is imperative to understanding how it is being conceptualized, negotiated, and redefined as it continues to grow and evolve in the twenty-first century.
Operation Lone Star (OLS), a state-level effort to fortify the México-U.S. border in Texas, marked an escalation in the U.S. “Prevention Through Deterrence” (PTD) policy. How have politicians and government officials justified the escalation of immigration enforcement tactics despite the futility and lethality of these tools? Our theoretical approach relies on Beltrán’s (2020) critical exploration of migrant cruelty to understand how migrant deaths are embedded in practices of Latinx racialization and the productive quality of punishment (Valdez, 2016). This study offers a critical analysis of government documents, news coverage, and official statements concerning migrant deaths to trace the evolution of PTD over the course of 30 years. We find that PTD’s transformation from the weaponization of nature to its increasing reliance on violent technologies and tactics has been facilitated by the rise of what we call the “irrepressible/irresponsible” trap that blames migrants in their life and in their death.
In this article we examine the political and cultural stakes of español ratatá, a term popularized by Cardi B to describe her noncanonical Spanish. Drawing on sociolinguistics, raciolinguistics, cultural studies, and Latinx studies, we analyze how her linguistic repertoire disrupts dominant ideologies of linguistic, racial, and ethnic purity. Through close analysis of Cardi B’s interviews and social media, we argue that her español ratatá functions as an ethnic marker and a political intervention. Her hybrid, diasporic Spanish, rooted in Dominican heritage and her upbringing as an Afro-Latina in the United States, disrupts raciolinguistic ideologies that have denied legitimacy to Afro-Latino speech. Rather than treating her speech as deficient, we read it as a strategic mode of communication that enables solidarity, racial critique, and redefinitions of Latinidad. We conclude that español ratatá exposes anti-Blackness and colonial ideologies that influence how language is perceived and performed, and can serve as a tool for visibility, resistance, and coalition.
This article examines migrant material culture in two fictional works in 21st century U.S.-Mexico borderlands literature: Yuri Herrera’s Señales que precederán al fin del mundo (2009) and Aura Xilonen’s Campeón gabacho (2015). Material objects in the novels are pins dropped on a migratory map left for future crossers, both materially (for border crossers) and conceptually (for readers). These subversive navigational tools provide material counternarratives to the pervasive “trash talk” that pits border crossers against nature amid Prevention Through Deterrence U.S. border policy. Both texts interrogate the archeological typology of things left behind and instead present objects as vibrantly alive signposts that narrate the complexities of crossing and the full, vibrant lives of border crossers. My analysis draws on contemporary dirt theory and the environmental humanities to examine how these texts represent “migrant trash” as deeply signifying, living guideposts. Ultimately, while material objects are threatened by violent erasure, crossing narratives present more enduring counter-stories.
This article examines the improvisational, anticolonial poetics of David Hernández through his groundbreaking 1971 collection, Despertando/Waking Up—likely the first book of poetry published by a Latino in Illinois. It argues that the text is a living artifact of the 1966 Division Street riot, one that perpetually reactivates the event in the present. Central to this argument is Hernández’s practice of word dealing, a streetwise poetics that challenged academic elitism while recasting poetry as a collaborative act. Drawing on his role as bandleader for Street Sounds, the article shows how Hernández engaged musical forms like descarga to blur boundaries between artist and audience. Situating Hernández within Puerto Rican Chicago and Fred Hampton’s multiracial Rainbow Coalition, the discussion frames his writing and performance as radical practices of collective resistance. Ultimately, it proposes an improvisational reading, approaching his formal experimentation and depictions of violence as invitations to co-create meaning and (re)envision freedom.
