Overview

What does it mean to be Latinx? This pressing question forms the core of Latinx Belonging, which brings together cutting-edge research to discuss the multilayered ways this might be answered. Latinx Belonging is anchored in the claim that Latinx people are not defined by their marginalization but should instead be understood as active participants in their communities and contributors to U.S. society. The volume’s overarching analytical approach recognizes the differences, identities, and divisions among people of Latin American origin in the United States, while also attending to the power of mainstream institutions to shape their lives and identities. Contributors to this volume view “belonging” as actively produced through struggle, survival, agency, resilience, and engagement. This work positions Latinxs’ struggles for recognition and inclusion as squarely located within intersecting power structures of gender, race, sexuality, and class and as shaped by state-level and transnational forces such as U.S. immigration policies and histories of colonialism. From the case of Latinxs’ struggles for recognition in the arts, to queer Latinx community resilience during COVID-19 and in the wake of mass shootings, to Indigenous youth’s endurance and survival as unaccompanied minors in Los Angeles, the case studies featured in this collection present a rich and textured picture of the diversity of the U.S. Latinx experience in the twenty-first century. Contributors AndrÉs Acosta Jack “Trey” Allen Jennifer Bickham Mendez Stephanie L. Canizales Christopher Cuevas Natalia Deeb-Sossa Yvette G. Flores Melanie Jones Gast Monika Gosin Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo Nolan Kline VerÓnica Montes Yvonne Montoya Michael De Anda MuÑiz Suzanne Oboler Gilda L. Ochoa Dina G. Okamoto Marco Antonio Quiroga Michelle TÉllez

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Reviews

In Latinx Belonging, Natalia Deeb-Sossa and Jennifer Bickham Mendez have produced a timely edited volume that brings together an impressive range of contributions from emerging and established scholars in the interdisciplinary field of Latinx studies. Latinx Belonging shines a light on Latinx strategies for community building, belonging, and joy in the face of anti-Latinx, nativist, and white supremacist violence and exclusion. This volume offers historically informed scholarship that highlights contemporary trends in both oppression and resistance, while also attending to the problematic glossing over of inter-Latinx difference and ways that whiteness is often reproduced through Latinidad. This volume will be a great resource for educators in Latinx studies and adjacent fields. --Maurice Magana, University of Arizona The term Latinx has gained additional traction in recent years, given adopters' goals for more inclusive terminology to describe our community. The chapters in this extraordinary and timely collection provide depth in the intersectional identities of Latinx peoples in the United States who are women-identified, queer, trans, undocumented, Black, and/or Indigenous. They offer important insights into the materiality of their experiences as well as abundant hope in considering the resistance and creativity present in the processes of community building. --Francisco Villegas, co-editor of Critical Schooling: Transformative Theory and Practice

Author Information

Natalia Deeb-Sossa is professor of Chicano/o studies at the University California, Davis. Her research focuses on Mexican immigrant farmworker families in California. She is author of Doing Good: Racial Tensions and Workplace Inequalities at a Community Clinic in El Nuevo South. Jennifer Bickham Mendez is professor of sociology at William & Mary. She is the author of From the Revolution to the Maquiladoras: Gender, Labor, and Globalization in Nicaragua.

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