Abstract

Abstract In this essay-review, Paula Moya discusses three recent scholarly books by T. Jackie Cuevas, Marissa López, and Roberto Hernández that react to the negative racialization of Mexican origin people in the US by analyzing a variety of strategies employed by Chicanx writers and artists in literary and cultural artifacts produced from the 19th century to the present. Cuevas argues that Chicanx scholars need to better acknowledge the wide variety of types of Chicanx people living in the US, including those who are gender variant. López charts how some writers rebuff limiting ethnic stereotypes by engaging in a politics of performative, aggressive abjection as a way of refusing to perform institutionally recognized latinidad. And in his focus on two transnational sites along the US-Mexico border, Hernández seeks to analyze the historical causes and underlying logic of our modern/colonial world system by articulating the not always evident relationship of local eruptions of violence to the global flows of racial capitalism. Together, they unite in fighting the forces of dishistoricization by recovering the history of Chicanx people in the US and imagining for the community a decolonial future that can elude the violent constraints of racial subordination.

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