War Echoes: Gender and Militarization in U.S. Latina/o Cultural Production

Abstract

Warfare, Ariana E. Vigil argues, is “a significant catalyst for social, political, and artistic developments” (3). Without obscuring the devastating effects of armed conflict, War Echoes: Gender and Militarization in U.S. Latina/o Cultural Production shows how histories of US state violence and ongoing processes of militarization reverberate through Latina/o cultural productions and inspire creative strategies for forging collective identities and transnational solidarity. In this literary cultural studies project, Vigil approaches the texts in her archive not as static “products” to be comfortably consumed but as dynamic “productions” in which artists and audiences join in a “continual process of creating and enacting” (7). She situates these war narratives with respect to particular cultural and political contexts to “offer a more complex account of the ways U.S. Latinas/os have participated in, protested against, and formed relationships with U.S. militarism” (2). By placing gender and sexuality at the center of her analysis, she understands these texts as “vehicles for thinking about” the linkages between oppressive state regimes, heteropatriarchal nationalisms, and intimate relations (21). In her introduction, Vigil describes her archive as providing a “glocal” perspective. She positions her work as building on the traditions of transnational Latina feminism and transnational feminist literary and cultural studies (8); yet, she takes issue with what she perceives as the failure of transnational approaches to address the interplay between local experiences and global structures (5). Glocal, she believes, allows her to advance a multi-scalar analysis of everyday life’s entanglement with political and economic realities while also attending to the militarized regulation of race, gender, and sexuality in different US Latina/o and Latin American spaces. In doing so, she not only answers the call for a transnational Latina/o studies that engages how US Latina/o identities are “a consequence of U.S. militarism and neoliberalism” (10) but also resists the