American Diaspora Research Articles

Review: Citizens, Immigrants, and the Stateless: A Japanese American Diaspora in the Pacific, by Michael R. Jin

Review: <i>Citizens, Immigrants, and the Stateless: A Japanese American Diaspora in the Pacific</i>, by Michael R. Jin

American Diasporas, Homeland Human Rights Conduct, and the Onset of Human Rights-Based Economic Sanctions

Why does the US government choose to initiate human rights-based economic sanctions against some highly repressive target countries, but not others? And, under what conditions does it do so? In this paper, I posit an interactive theory wherein I argue that diaspora size moderates the relationship between target human rights conduct and the onset of human rights-based economic sanctions. I contend that as the size of a diaspora increases, its capacity to influence the onset of human rights-based economic sanctions strengthens, as it can more effectively (1) lobby decisionmakers in Congress and the White House directly as well as (2) indirectly via using contentious action to mobilize public opinion, which intensifies the pressure on Congresspersons and the President to act. To test my contention, I combine US sanctions data with data on American diasporas and homeland human rights conduct and find that while diaspora size strongly and consistently moderates the relationship between homeland human rights conduct and the onset of Congressional sanctions, its moderating impact on Presidential sanctions is inconsistent and, moreover, negligible when addressing endogeneity and other concerns. ¿Por qué el Gobierno de los Estados Unidos elige iniciar sanciones económicas basadas en los derechos humanos contra algunos países objetivo altamente represivos, pero no contra otros? y, ¿en qué condiciones lo hace? En este artículo, postulamos una teoría interactiva en la que sostenemos que el tamaño de la diáspora modera la relación entre el comportamiento en materia de derechos humanos en los países objetivo y el inicio de sanciones económicas relacionadas con los derechos humanos. Sostenemos que a medida que aumenta el tamaño de una diáspora, su capacidad para influir en el inicio de sanciones económicas basadas en los derechos humanos se fortalece, ya que puede ser más eficiente en materia de: (1) presionar a los tomadores de decisiones en el Congreso y en la Casa Blanca directamente, así como (2) indirectamente mediante el uso de acciones contenciosas para movilizar a la opinión pública, lo cual intensifica la presión sobre los congresistas y el presidente para que actúen. Con el fin de demostrar esta afirmación, combinamos los datos de las sanciones de los Estados Unidos con los datos sobre las diásporas estadounidenses y la conducta en materia de derechos humanos del país de origen y concluimos que, si bien el tamaño de la diáspora modera fuerte y consistentemente la relación entre la conducta en materia de derechos humanos del país de origen y el inicio de las sanciones por parte del Congreso, su impacto moderador en las sanciones presidenciales es inconsistente y, además, insignificante cuando se abordan la endogeneidad y otras preocupaciones. Pourquoi le gouvernement américain choisit-il d’appliquer des sanctions économiques en fonction du respect des droits de l’Homme seulement contre certains pays extrêmement répressifs? Et à quelles conditions le fait-il? Dans cet article, je postule une théorie interactive dans laquelle j’affirme que la taille de la diaspora modère la relation entre la conduite vis-à-vis des droits de l’Homme du pays cible et l’instauration de sanctions économiques en fonction du respect de ceux-ci. J’affirme que lorsque la taille de la diaspora augmente, sa capacité d’influencer l’instauration de sanctions économiques fondées sur le respect des droits de l’Homme se renforce, car elle est en mesure d’efficacement (1) faire pression sur les décideurs politiques au Congrès ou à la Maison-Blanche directement, mais aussi (2) indirectement, en agissant de manière controversée pour mobiliser l’opinion publique, ce qui intensifie la pression sur les membres du Congrès ou le Président. Pour vérifier mon hypothèse, je combine des données sur les sanctions américaines avec des données sur les diasporas aux États-Unis et les droits de l’Homme par pays d’origine. J’observe que, bien que la taille de la diaspora modère toujours fortement la relation entre la conduite vis-à-vis des droits de l’Homme dans le pays d’origine et l’apparition de sanctions par le Congrès, son effet de modération sur les sanctions présidentielles est fluctuant, en plus d’être négligeable dans la réponse à l’endogénéité et d’autres préoccupations.

Citizens, Immigrants, and the Stateless: A Japanese American Diaspora in the Pacific by Michael R. Jin (review)

Citizens, Immigrants, and the Stateless: A Japanese American Diaspora in the Pacific by Michael R. Jin (review)

British-LatinX writers: Self-representation of the new Latin American diaspora in the UK

This article analyses the first major anthology of English-language British LatinX writers published in the UK, Un Nuevo Sol. British LatinX Writers (flipped eye publishing, 2019). The texts included in this anthology of poetry, short fiction and drama explore the configurations, manifestations and representations of the LatinX experience within the contemporary British canon. The multi-layered texts that form this book illustrate how the British LatinX community represents itself through literature in a distinctive way which also questions existing stereotypes and expectations. Un Nuevo Sol is a good example of the diversity of the literary techniques used by British LatinX authors. These techniques cover from code-switching to magical realism, although realism and experimental writing seem to dominate most of these texts. This is representative of the way in which the literary production of this super-diverse community in the UK results in a super-diverse literary style, as illustrated in this anthology.

Across the Pacific Divide: Latin American Experiences of Integration and Well-Being in Canada and Australia

ABSTRACT There has been a paucity of comparative research regarding social inclusion for the Latin American diaspora worldwide, and this is particularly the case for scholarly work that connects countries in the Americas with nations across the Pacific. Rather than recognise the growing number of Latin Americans who travel throughout the regions of the Pacific Rim, scholarship has remained heavily dominated by works relating to the Latin American population in the United States of America and Europe. In this paper, we shift the attention to Canada and Australia, where both countries increasingly interrogate what have historically been comparable models of multiculturalism and interculturalism. Drawing on data from more a survey of 1600 respondents, we argue that personal and social ties are key to cultivating positive post-migration subjective well-being. In so doing, we highlight the effects of subjective well-being and barriers to integration and belonging. We further illustrate the implications of the intersections of gender, class, and ethnicity in relation to migrants’ well-being and inclusion. Such research demonstrates the need for a better contextualised understanding of migrant inclusion, and for detailed analysis of the situated relationships that constitute Latin American migrant identities across the Pacific Rim.

Illusions of Empire: The Civil War and Reconstruction in the US-Mexico Borderlands

Illusions of Empire: The Civil War and Reconstruction in the US-Mexico Borderlands

‘Memories I want to remember, memories I want to forget’: Desire-centred Memory Work with Latin American Migrants in Australia

ABSTRACT Latin American migration to Australia spans over five decades. Despite growing Latin American diasporas in Australia, little is known in public imaginaries about the difficult histories, desires and struggles that have shaped those who fled their countries due to conflict and dictatorships. This article draws from fifteen in-depth interviews with Spanish-speaking migrants from post-conflict and dictatorial Latin America living in Australia. Engaging with decolonial knowledge and scholarship in Latin American memory studies, the article argues for desire-centred memory work in which trauma, damage and deficit narratives are decentred. Through theorising with ambiguity and participants’ voices, I reveal the potential of taking seriously everyday memories of joy, care, and desire to unsettle and nuance normative understandings of difficult histories, including Latin American migration to Australia. In doing so, I also emphasise the importance of engaging with people as epistemic subjects who are doing the difficult memory work by choosing how, when, and where to narrate and share their stories. Ultimately, this article contributes to decolonial, feminist and Southern epistemologies and understandings of memory in the wake of violence that are desire-based (Tuck, E., 2009. Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities. Harvard Educational Review, 79 (3), 409–427) and transformative.

Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical by Shaul Magid

Reviewed by: Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical by Shaul Magid Nancy Sinkoff Shaul Magid. Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021. 296 pp. When Rabbi Meir Kahane (1932–1990) founded the militant Jewish Defense League (JDL) in 1968 as a response to the showdown between advocates of community control in New York City’s public schools, who were mostly Black—as were the students—and the union membership of the United Federation of Teachers, who were mostly white and Jewish, in the legendary Ocean Hill-Brownsville strike of that same year, the slogan “Never Again!” became the organization’s rallying cry. This call to arms, which directly invoked the destruction of European Jewry to galvanize American Jews to reject the communal politics that Kahane considered feckless, pathetic, and emasculating, was not merely symbolic. Rather, Kahane hoped, American Jewish activists would take one page out of the confrontational playbook of the Black Panthers and Young Lords and another out of the performative playbook of the Yippies and embrace a politics that expressed hadar (Jewish [End Page 231] pride) through physical toughness to defend Jews in their neighborhoods and to counteract the lure of assimilation, in short, to write a script for Jewish survival in urban America. In Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical, Shaul Magid seeks to restore Kahane and his ideas to the postwar American landscape, to explain his militancy, and, in so doing, to unsettle the narrative of American Jewish history that has been characterized by a preoccupation with the “cult of synthesis”—Jonathan Sarna’s phrase—the belief that the American Jewish experience has been a triumph of consensus between liberal American and Jewish values. Magid also wants to redress the misconception that American Jewish radicalism only lived among activists on the Left. In fact, it was postwar America that nurtured Kahane’s right-wing radicalism. Though Kahane was disavowed by most, but not all, American Jewish leaders before his immigration to Israel in 1971, and though his party, Kach, was ultimately barred from the Knesset, his views, argues Magid, have had a profound afterlife in contemporary Jewish life. (The fact that Otzmah Yehudit/Jewish Power, the heir apparent to Kach, won six seats in the 2022 Knesset elections, proves Magid’s point.) Meir Kahane is thus not only a cultural biography of Kahane, but also a cautionary exposé of his ideas’ lasting influence. A scholar of Jewish thought, Magid chose to narrate Kahane’s life by examining his somewhat unsystematic, even contradictory, ideas through six chapters, “Liberalism,” “Radicalism,” “Race and Racism,” “Communism,” “Zionism,” and “Militant Post-Zionist Apocalypticism.” In Magid’s analysis, their overarching consistency was Kahane’s critique of postwar American Jewish “liberalism,” and the book successfully roots Kahane’s preoccupations with Jewish survival in the American Diaspora and his program for transforming what he viewed as a doomed secular Zionist project in Israel as a response to this critique. Born in 1932, reared in an Orthodox home, and educated until he was thirteen at a Mir yeshiva, Kahane’s childhood was informed by the Holocaust consciousness that pervaded his Borough Park survivor neighborhood. Kahane studied law at New York University, worked as a journalist, founded a Jewish summer camp that taught martial arts, and, engaging with the issues that rocked American and Jewish society in the 1960s (civil rights and racial reckoning, anticommunism, Israel’s victory in 1967, the plight of Soviet Jewry, and urban decay), fashioned himself as an activist prophet against the American Jewish establishment. Kahane embraced violence as a necessary means to effect social change. “Every Jew a .22” was his brand (8) and he and his squad of disenfranchised street Jews reacted to the political crises of their day by creating citizens’ patrols to protect elderly, poor Jews on Brooklyn’s streets, threatening to meet a Black nationalist activist demanding reparations at Temple Emanu-El with lead pipes, disrupting performances of Soviet dancers, breaking into Jewish communal leadership meetings, and taking out hyperbolic ads critical of the Jewish establishment’s alleged failure to defend...

Motherwork, Daughterwork

Abstract This article explores how young women born in Sweden, or arriving in Sweden as toddlers, who belong to the Latin American diaspora give meaning to and act on their experiences of being the daughters of migrant mothers, whose political activism shapes their views and practices of mothering and migration. The analysis is inspired by feminist/antiracist methodologies and consists of eight in-depth interviews with young adult women, all of them daughters of political refugees who came to Sweden to escape persecution by the military dictatorships in Latin America in the late 1970s. The interviews are combined with two focus groups that took place in the two largest Swedish cities. The category we will bring to light is that of the daughters; adults now, aged between thirty and forty-five (six of them mothers themselves). The central question in this article is what perceptions of mothering can be articulated from the perspective of daughters of Latin American migrant mothers, in a context where memories of political persecution and exile and experiences of institutional and everyday racism shape the conditions of motherwork for both the migrant mothers and their daughters.

Teaching Central American Literature in a Global Context ed. by Gloria Elizabeth Chacón and Mónica Albizúrez Gil

Reviewed by: Teaching Central American Literature in a Global Context ed. by Gloria Elizabeth Chacón and Mónica Albizúrez Gil Adrian Taylor Kane Chacón, Gloria Elizabeth, and Mónica Albizúrez Gil, editors. Teaching Central American Literature in a Global Context. MLA, 2022. Pp. 364. ISBN 978-1-60329-588-8. Gloria Elizabeth Chacón and Mónica Albizúrez Gil’s collection of essays Teaching Central American Literature in a Global Context contains twenty-eight essays by scholars teaching at universities in Central America, the United States, Canada, and Europe. The volume is well organized into seven sections. Part I: “Locating Central American Literature” situates Central American cultural production in a global context from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century by offering approaches to modernista and vanguardista cultural production and analyzing documentaries and crónicas as “imagetexts” that lend visibility to the history of Central America. Part II: “Visual Technologies and Understanding Central America” contains five essays that suggest specific films, shorts, photography, Google Maps, and travel as tools to provide deep context for Central American cultural production. Part III: “Mayan Literatures beyond the Local” emphasizes how indigenous literature engages with global issues such as colonialism, genocide, resistance, and migration by describing lessons on texts ranging from the Popol Wuj to the contemporary poetry of K’iche’ Mayan author Humberto Ak’abal. Part IV: “Black and Jewish Literatures from the Isthmus” contains lessons on works that treat the topic of Black experiences in Central America by authors such as Francisco Gavidia (El Salvador), Quince Duncan (Costa Rica), and Zee Edgell (Belize) as well as transnational Jewish Guatemalan authors Francisco Goldman, Eduardo Halfon, and Victor Perera. Part V: “Representations of Violence” examines cultural production centered on representations of and reflection on the theme of violence, with a primary focus on postwar literature such as that of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Insensatez. Part VI: “Diasporas, Memory, and Deterritorialization” includes descriptions of units on gender, sexuality, violence, and migration; the migrant journey through Mexico; the issues of intergenerational trauma, historical memory, and impunity in Central American diaspora communities; and teaching students to interrogate deficient journalism on Central American migration. The final section, “Environmental and Social Justice,” suggests theoretical approaches, classroom activities, and primary and secondary readings for incorporating social justice units and the environmental humanities into courses on Central America. Central historical figures in this section include Archbishop Óscar Romero and environmental activist Berta Cáceres, both of whom were murdered for their commitment to social and environmental justice issues. The focus on literature in the volume’s title does not do justice to the breadth of approaches described in many of the essays. For example, M. Emilia Barbosa’s chapter focuses on the political performance art of Guatemalan Regina José Galindo, while Rita M. Palacios and Margarita Hernández de Polaczyk propose approaches that incorporate analysis of visual art. The chapter “Many Central Americas: Approaches to the Films Ixcanul and El regreso” offers anthropological and linguistic concepts useful for teaching feature-length films. Similarly, Guadalupe Escobar’s essay discusses analytical approaches to the documentary films Children of the Diaspora and Finding Óscar, and Aaron Lacayo describes a lesson that incorporates two contemporary short [End Page 141] films to teach Nicaragua’s political and cultural history. Julio Quintero’s essay “Peace and Reconciliation: Decoding Belonging in Guatemalan Photography” suggests incorporating photography as a tool to understand how society constructs and contests notions of citizenship. The inclusion of such chapters provides readers with a multitude of resources for creating a culturally rich classroom that goes beyond the exclusive study of literary texts. One of the volume’s strengths is its wide variety of theoretical approaches such as feminism, postcolonialism, cultural studies, gender and queer studies, critical race theory, and ecocriticism, among others. Its attention to indigenous forms of cultural production and other marginalized communities reflects the heterogeneity of the isthmus and moves well beyond canonical authors. The inclusion of the US Central American diaspora follows the recent expansion of Central American studies beyond the confines of the isthmus and further underscores the volume’s focus on the region’s global interconnectedness. Another practical component of many of the chapters...

Citizens, Immigrants, and the Stateless: A Japanese American Diaspora in the Pacific by Michael R. Jin

In examining records from the U.S. Census Bureau and from the Japanese Consulates General in the United States, Jin estimates that 50,000 Nisei Japanese (citizens born in the United States) departed the United States for Japan or the territories of the Japanese Empire in the first half of the twentieth century—approximately one-fourth of the Nisei Japanese in the United States during this era. The scholarly and popular historical works about the Nisei Japanese, which are hardly numerous, generally discuss these people as an Asian American minority rooted within the United States. Jin’s use of sources from both sides of the Pacific, however, discovers that for the Nisei Japanese, transpacific migration was more “the norm rather than the exception.” The diversity of their experiences is the major theme throughout this well-researched study.Some of the Nisei Japanese went to Japan to join their families and others to study the Japanese language, to find work, or to find a spouse. Most were also driven from the United States by anti-Asian immigrant movements, especially in the American West. Asian-exclusion sentiment was often supported by state and national laws, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act, the 1924 Immigration Act, and various alien land laws. Executive Order 9066 was eventually to confine first-generation Japanese and Nisei Japanese to interment camps in the American West, following the Japanese military attack on Pearl Harbor.Although Jin often uses the concept of diaspora effectively as a framework to interpret the transpacific experiences of Nisei Japanese, the individual stories about various Nisei Japanese experiences in the first half of the twentieth century are particularly engaging. For example, Toshiko Inaba’s American citizenship was revoked after his marriage and divorce in Japan. David Akira Itami, who was held at the Manzanar internment camp after the attack on Pearl Harbor, joined the U.S. Army as a language specialist during the war and afterward at the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. Kanji Kuramoto and Kaz Tanaka Suyeishi somehow managed to survive the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Such are just a few of the book’s many stories that demonstrate the legal, social, and personal hardships faced by transpacific Nisei immigrants.Citizens, Immigrants, and the Stateless is an important contribution to the fields of immigration and Asian American history due in no small part to Jin’s polished writing skills. His combination of clear historical description, context, and analysis with just the right amount of sociological and interpretive language helps to make book both readable and informative. The endnotes and bibliography demonstrate his significant bilingual and transnational research of primary, secondary, and popular source material.Citizens, Immigrants, and the Stateless is not simply a study of a marginalized immigrant group “caught between two worlds.” It portrays a diverse people who had to exercise considerable initiative to navigate multiple social, legal, national, and geopolitical contexts. Although complex factors, such as racism in the American West and the deteriorating geopolitical relations between Japan and the United States, affected the Nisei immigrants as a group, Jin demonstrates that they were more than capable of making decisions on an individual basis whenever the opportunity arose. On a broader scale, the Nisei Japanese experience is directly related to the issues of racism, immigration, imperialism, and war that are fundamental in any discussion of twentieth-century history.

Sing and Sing On: Sentinel Musicians and the Making of the Ethiopian American Diaspora

Review of "Sing and Sing On: Sentinel Musicians and the Making of the Ethiopian American Diaspora. Kay Kaufman Shelemay, 2022. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 57 b/w illustrations, bibliography, index, 432 pages."

Supposing the moral state: Japan and historical justice under liberal internationalism

Abstract Diplomatic spats over history between two of the United States' allies, Japan and the Republic of Korea, continue to simmer under the post-1945 liberal international order. The antagonism between the former colonizer and its colony has become a detriment not only for US security interests in the region, but also a challenge to the US claims to stand for human rights, as the issue of military sexual slavery has become tethered to the global human rights discourse by Korean American diaspora activists. Yet, when the US attempts to mediate between the two, it is rebuffed by its two allies because the US often acts as a neutral third party, rather than the major actor responsible for the making of post-1945 order in east Asia and the current impasse over history. This article asks how the entangled relation between order and justice in the making of the hub-and-spokes system in east Asia, mainly engineered by the United States, casts a long shadow over how to deal with history in Japan. This matters because questions of moral possibility in world politics always suppose a sovereign agentic state, and for Japan this creates a gap between the ideal moral state and the reality of being a semi-sovereign state. Thus, the persistence of Japan's ‘history problem’ must be understood not solely in terms of whether the empirical facts are accepted or not, but also in the sense of how being a sovereign matters when it comes to moral possibility in global politics.

Conversations from around the coffee table: Exploring subaltern leadership

Moving towards social justice requires a deconstruction of the current work and leadership systems that contribute to and are rooted in oppression. (Re) visioning leadership must exist outside to dismantle the dominant discourses. In the community, social justice work has the opportunity to use love and hope to guide the processes. This article presents the findings from our, the coauthor’s convivio – we are a group of women living in Canada, members of the Central American and South American diaspora. We gathered around a coffee table to discuss how leadership currently operates and the possibilities for a more collective future. What we term “subaltern leadership” represents the how we navigate our positions as leaders amidst marginalization as newcomers and as women. What evolved in this dialogue was the question of “can the subaltern lead in the current structure and nature of work?”. The findings support the notion that representation is only the beginning and can mirror tokenism when the same structures remain. To truly support subaltern leadership, a more radical shift must occur.

Reimagining Chinese American Identity: Postcolonial Perspectives on Cultural Negotiation and Transformation in Laurence Yep’s Dragonwings

The Chinese immigrant and Chinese American communities have faced a long history of stigmatisation and misrepresentation due to racial bias and discrimination. This article explores the transformative growth narrative of the child protagonist in Laurence Yep’s novel Dragonwings, set against the backdrop of historical anti-Asian sentiment in the early 1900s. By adopting Said’s “imaginative geography” and Bhabha’s “third space” as analytical perspectives, the study aims to shed light on how the child protagonist’s growth challenges passive Chinese stereotypes and confronts deeply ingrained adversities within the Asian American diaspora by offering an active anti-Oriental perspective. We argue that the transformative journey of the protagonist, Moon Shadow, contests racial biases and cultural boundaries, contributing to a reflective perspective that liberates writers of colour from complicit interrogations. The analysis underlines the transgressive aesthetic within the Chinese American diaspora, showcasing Dragonwings as a quintessential postcolonial bildungsroman that embraces compromise and accommodation in selfformation. Furthermore, the exploration of the child protagonist’s growth in the context of historical realist narrative and the postcolonial lens emphasises the transgressive enjoyment that subverts established norms and identities. The study thus acknowledges the resilience and agency exhibited by the characters in the face of adversity and by understanding the emancipatory potential of growth narratives, it contributes to the broader theme of overcoming adversity and embracing change in the context of language and culture in Asia.

Collective Memory in Immigration to the USA: Shaping the American Diaspora

Collective Memory in Immigration to the USA: Shaping the American Diaspora

The Latin American Diaspora in Canada today

The author examines the parameters of the Latin American diaspora in modern Canada. Various aspects are investigated: quantitative and qualitative components, as well as the history of its formation. Difficulties are noted with the unification of terminology used when counting immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean. Difficulties with the self-identification are also pointed out. Particular attention is paid to the assimilation of Hispanic immigrants from Latin America in the francophone province of Quebec and immigration from Mexico.

Dictionary of Latin American Identities ed. by John T. Maddox IV and Thomas M. Stephens

Reviewed by: Dictionary of Latin American Identities ed. by John T. Maddox IV and Thomas M. Stephens Carlos Benavides Maddox IV, John T., and Thomas M. Stephens, editors. Dictionary of Latin American Identities. U of Florida P, 2021. Pp. 890. ISBN 978-1683402008. There are many books on race and ethnicity in Latin America, as well as on gender and sexuality. However, there is only one dictionary that deals with all these topics in a single volume; this is the Dictionary of Latin American Identities, which, as noted by one of its editors in the Preface, is in many ways a third edition of Thomas M. Stephens’s Dictionary of Latin American Racial and Ethnic Terminology. As also noted in the Preface, the editors have added numerous new entries, a theoretical approach, and a new focus on gender and sexuality, as part of identity. The Dictionary of Latin American Identities contains 21,000 terms related to race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality used in the region over the past five centuries. It includes the languages of Spanish, Portuguese, French, and their Creoles. The dictionary makes use of a wide range of interdisciplinary sources, including other dictionaries, encyclopedias, colonial documents, texts from literature, linguistics, cultural studies, and the social sciences, as well as blogs, conversations, personal interviews, and emails among a variety of informants. This rich variety of sources is reflected in its extensive bibliography. By far, the largest section of the dictionary is the one on Spanish-American and Spanish-American Creole Terms, which is almost twice the length of the two other sections combined. In the introduction, John T. Maddox IV provides a wide-ranging historical, cultural, and theoretical analysis to establish context and patterns in the terms of the dictionary. The introduction consists of a general section focused on Spanish America, a specific section on Brazil, a broad section on Franco-America, and recognition of the Latin American diasporas in the United States and Canada. The first section begins with a reflection on the meaning of the term race, noting that the Dictionary of Latin American Identities provides the background on which to base a diachronic and synchronic study of the term. The contemporary concept of intersectionality and its relation to the nature of identity are demonstrated by a chain of concepts, including capitalista, patriarcal, moderno, colonial, and others. It is argued that the terms in the dictionary prove that a link exists between region, race, and ethnicity in Latin America. The second section of the introduction, on Brazil, discusses how the patriarchal family of the colonial period can be considered the root of twentieth-century social structures, gender [End Page 631] roles and racial ideology in São Paulo, with implications for the rest of the country. It is also pointed out how the patriarchal double standard manifests itself in the number of entries and synonyms for particular words, including prostitute. Another important topic in this section is the claim by some groups that Brazil is not a complex color continuum but rather simply a bipolar society—of those who are ‘white’ and those who are not, and this has consequences for the racial and ethnic terms in the dictionary. Finally, the last section, on French and its Creoles, presents an overview of Haitian independence from France, the US invasion and occupation of Haiti, the formalization of the Creole language, and the emergence of three influential movements: Indigenisme, Francophone Négritude, and the Créolistes; and shows how these events are relevant to the dictionary. Maddox describes the dictionary as “a rootless, endless connection and collection of cultural symbols,” and in the closing paragraph of the introduction he notes that “the dictionary tells readers what they are being called and what they call others.” Regarding the format of dictionary entries, a section titled “Anatomy of a DLAI Definition” provides detailed information about the content of the typical dictionary entry. Each entry comprises four main parts: the term, in boldface; a literal or “dictionary” definition in English, given only if the term has a standard meaning in some variety of the languages of the dictionary; the racial, ethnic, gender, or sexuality definition(s), each followed by the country and...

How to make site-specific art when sites themselves have histories

The term “site-specific” is generally used to describe art self-consciously made to exist in a certain place, effectively making the site a static background for the dynamism of art. If we accept this definition, then how are we to account for the fact that sites themselves have histories? This paper addresses this question by analyzing four performances by the Chicano/a collective Asco: Stations of the Cross, First Supper (After a Major Riot), Walking Mural, and Instant Mural. Whittier Boulevard carries a portion of El Camino Real, which once connected the Catholic missions of Alta California. We know Asco was aware of this fact because a member of Asco once “used the phrase ‘el camino surreal’…to describe Whittier Boulevard as the setting where everyday reality could quickly devolve into absurdist, excessive action.” Contextualizing these performances within the geography of colonial California challenges interpretations of Asco as merely opposing contemporaneous events like the Vietnam War and gentrification, whereas Asco had a more nuanced and expansive understanding of oppression linking the Latin American diaspora. Together, these performances show us how a group contests domesticating and folklorizing stereotypes. Although preexisting scholarship explains these gestures as “protest art,” situating them against Whittier Boulevard allows us to appreciate the radicality of Asco. By engaging with Catholic and muralist imagery, Asco draws parallels between their experience as racial minorities and the history of Latin American colonialism, which highlights both the composite nature of Chicano/a identity and how artists might make site-specific work when sites themselves have histories.

(Re)imagining the idea of India: Contestations about Hindutva among the Indian American diaspora

AbstractThis paper explores the motivations and actions of Indian Americans who actively oppose Hindutva, that is, a Hindu nationalist vision for India. Diaspora activists who advocate in favour of progressive values for India tend to be underreported in the media and underanalysed in scholarship. The following study addresses this gap. Based on public records, interviews with activist leaders, and participant‐observation, the paper demonstrates how anti‐Hindutva diaspora actors identify and leverage political opportunities in order to engage in moral signalling in local, national and global spaces. By shining a light on ongoing counternarratives to Hindutva, this study highlights contestations within Indian‐origin communities and challenges monolithic portrayals of diaspora politics.