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This book charts an expansive history of Filipino literature in the United States, forged within the dual contexts of imperialism and migration, from the early twentieth century into the twenty-first century. It theorizes and enacts a queer diasporic reading practice that attends to the complex crossings of race and nation with gender and sexuality. Tracing the conditions of possibility of Anglophone Filipino literature to U.S. colonialism in the Philippines in the early twentieth century, the book examines how a host of writers from across the century both imagine and address the Philippines and the United States, inventing a variety of artistic lineages and social formations in the process. The book considers a broad array of issues, from early Philippine nationalism, queer modernism, and transnational radicalism, to music-influenced and cross-cultural poetics, gay male engagements with martial law and popular culture, second-generational dynamics, and the relation between reading and revolution. It elucidates not only the internal differences that mark this literary tradition but also the wealth of expressive practices that exceed the terms of colonial complicity, defiant nationalism, or conciliatory assimilation. Moving beyond the nation as both the primary analytical framework and locus of belonging, the book proposes that diasporic Filipino literature has much to teach us about alternative ways of imagining erotic relationships and political communities.

Remixing and reexamining art of and after the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s, this book brings to light new insights about artists, their cultural production, and the exhibitions that feature their work, but also collectors, curators, critics, and advocates. Using an interdisciplinary method that combines decolonial and feminist theory, art historical analysis, and extensive archival and field research, Karen Mary Davalos explores how narrow notions of identity, politics, and aesthetics have limited debates over Chicana/o art. This comprehensive art history employs vernacular concepts, such as the errata exhibition and the remix, which emerge out of art practice itself, to drive the analysis of over three dozen artists. It rejects familiar narratives that evaluate Chicana/o art in binary terms: political versus commercial, realist versus conceptual, and so on. Each chapter explores undocumented or previously ignored information, such as European aesthetic influences on Chicana/o art or commercial ventures of community-based arts organizations, which are made invisible by conventions of art history or Chicana/o studies. The book illuminates the transnational, borderlands, feminist, and decolonial aesthetic processes and social conditions that expand, not contract, how we consider Chicana/o art. Davalos presents her most ambitious project to date in this examination of fifty years of Chicana/o art production in a major metropolitan area.

This book argues that the transnationalism that is central to Chicano identity originated in the global, postcolonial moment at the turn of the nineteenth century rather than as an effect of contemporary economic conditions, which began in the mid-nineteenth century and primarily affected the laboring classes. The Spanish empire then began to implode, and colonists in the “new world” debated the national contours of the viceroyalties. The book locates the origins of Chicano literature here, which is now and always has been “postnational,” encompassing the wealthy, the poor, the white, and the mestizo. Tracing its long history and the diversity of subject positions it encompasses, the book explores the shifting literary forms authors have used to write the nation from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. It argues that while national and global tensions lie at the historical heart of Chicana/o narratives of the nation, there should be alternative ways to imagine the significance of Chicano literature other than as a reflection of national identity. The book provides a way to think of early writers as a meaningful part of Chicano literary history, and, in looking at the nation, rather than the particularities of identity, as that which connects Chicano literature over time, it engages the emerging hemispheric scholarship on American literature.

Reexamining the Chicano civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, this book brings to light new insights about social activism in the twentieth-century and new lessons for progressive politics in the twenty-first. It explores the ways in which Chicano/a artists and activists used fiction, poetry, visual arts, theater, and other expressive forms to forge a common purpose and to challenge inequality in America. Focusing on cultural politics, the book reveals neglected stories about the Chicano movement and its impact: how writers used the street press to push back against the network news; how visual artists such as Santa Barraza used painting, installations, and mixed media to challenge racism in mainstream environmentalism; how El Teatro Campesino' s innovative “actos,” or short skits, sought to embody new, more inclusive forms of citizenship; and how Sandra Cisneros and other Chicana novelists broadened the narrative of the Chicano movement. The book articulates a fresh understanding of how the Chicano movement contributed to the social and political currents of postwar America, and how the movement remains meaningful today.

Long associated with the pejorative clichés of the drug-trafficking trade and political violence, contemporary Colombia has been unfairly stigmatized. This study of the Miami music industry and Miami's growing Colombian community asserts that popular music provides an alternative common space for imagining and enacting Colombian identity. Using an interdisciplinary analysis of popular media, music, and music video, the book teases out issues of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and transnational identity in the Latino/a music industry and among its most renowned rock enespañol, pop, and vallenato stars. This book provides an overview of the ongoing Colombian political and economic crisis and the dynamics of Colombian immigration to metropolitan Miami. More notably, placed in this context, the book discusses the creative work and media personas of talented Colombian artists Shakira, Andrea Echeverri of Aterciopelados, and Carlos Vives. In an examination of the transnational figures and music that illuminate the recent shifts in the meanings attached to Colombian identity both in the United States and Latin America, the book argues that music is a powerful arbitrator of memory and transnational identity.

This book argues that Ricanness is a continual performance of bodily endurance against US colonialism, unfolding via aesthetic interventions in time. Uncovering what’s at stake politically for the often unwanted, colonized, racialized, and sexualized enduring body, Ricanness moves among theater, experimental video, revolutionary protest, photography, poetry, and durational performance art. Ricanness stages scenes in which the philosophical, social, and psychic merge at the site of aesthetics and temporality. Analyzing the work of artists and revolutionaries like ADÁL, Dolores “Lolita” Lebrón, Papo Colo, Pedro Pietri, and Ryan Rivera, Ricanness imagines a Rican future through the time travel extended in these artists’ and activists’ work, illustrating how they reformulate time itself through nonlinear aesthetic practices. Either stopping or waiting with time, or running from exhaustion, or dragging the spectator through dread and despair, all of these artists and activists live at the horizon of existence. Consequently, Ricanness reshifts the colonization of time and normative assumptions of death through spaces of negation, incompletion, violence, and endurance, alongside moments of pleasure and redemption. Theorizing an existential entry into the Rican future, Ricanness traverses aesthetic strategies and nonlinear time.