Claudia Milian, LatinX

Abstract

Reviewed by: LatinX by Claudia Milian Ariana E. Vigil (bio) Claudia Milian, LatinX. University of Minnesota Press, 2019. Pp. 116. Claudia Milian's most recent book, LatinX, is a short but thorough meditation on terminology, cultural production, and social and ecological movements. The author explains that her scholarship has been guided by the question of how one can "theorize the contested terms of Latino/Latina when … there [are] no academic or cultural concepts" applicable to her own subject formation (2). As a "Salvadoran child brought to the United States by her mother," she and many others, including but not limited to the millions of Central Americans who migrated to the US in the last half century, have fallen through the "Latin cracks" of the terms "Latino" and "Latina" (1, 2). While she briefly defines the term "LatinX"—explaining that the gender-inclusive denomination for US Latina/os arose in queer electronic spaces in 2004—she wisely side-steps the question of "correct" definitions. Rather, Milian is concerned with how the term marks "how one navigates the world" and in exploring the "possibilities" and "pathways" of LatinX peoples and movements (77, 39). Following up on her 2013 book, Latining America: Black-Brown Passages and the Coloring of Latino/a Studies, in which Milian sought to interrogate and understand the varied geographies of Latinness, LatinX explicitly moves away from the slash (/) and grounds its investigations in three pillars of thought. These three pillars—LatinX, the Global South, and ecological devastation—offer linguistic, social, historical, cultural, and political contexts for entering into discussions of [End Page 111] LatinX while remaining closely attuned to the coming future. The first chapter, "Articulations," traces the discursive emergence of LatinX, guiding readers through the deployment and manifestation of LatinX subjects and ontologies in spaces as diverse as families made possible through assisted reproductive technologies and individual engagements with hypercommodification. The second chapter, "Forms," turns to the figure of the Central American migrant child to demonstrate how LatinX can capture "the emergence of uprooted subjects thrown into an unexpected array of circumstances" (35). This chapter, which draws from and furthers Milian's significant contributions to the field of US Central American studies, is a highlight of the book and valuably grounds theoretical discussions in the material realities of contemporary migrants. The last chapter, "Numerosities," offers a sophisticated connection between the previous two, articulating the need for new language to understand the impending global climate disaster while illustrating the connection between climate change and migration. This chapter also illustrates the book's larger focus on unknown futures. LatinX is theoretically innovative and draws from a range of fields and disciplines—including contemporary Latinx studies, US Central American studies, and security and migration studies. The two chapters devoted to Central American migration and ecological devastation assure that the work speaks to contemporary and visible manifestations of a changing world. Her discussion of the Central American migrant child in "Forms" engages with Tell Me How It Ends, Valeria Luiselli's account of translating questionnaires administered by Citizenship and Immigration Services to migrant children. Milian offers a larger perspective on the migration of Central American children, invoking the history of two Salvadoran children taken from their parents in the mid-nineteenth century and put on tour as part of US and European interest in the "natural history" of the Western hemisphere (45). These abused and exploited children foreshadowed "the grotesqueries of the Central American future," manifested more recently in the "unresolvable question" that starts off Luiselli's questionnaire: "Why did you migrate?" (46, 45). Milian is careful to not apply the label of "crisis" to the Central American children who migrate to the United States, instead asserting that the Central American minor/the minor Central American "is disruption embodied" and a "sign of repetitive crisis and failure" (44, 54). "Crisis," however, is a term appropriate to discuss the accelerated pace of global climate change and ensuing ecological disaster. This crisis is inextricably connected to Central American migration, which has been fueled by US imperial policies and exacerbated by climate change, in which US industries and the US military especially play an outsized role. The last chapter of the book looks at environmental...