Negotiating Latinidad

Frances R. Aparicio is a professor emerita at Northwestern University. She is the author of Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures.

"A valuable and welcome addition to the literature in Latina/o studies. I commend Aparicio on this important work. It will be a significant contribution to thinking about multicultural identities in immigrant-descendant generations, and about the traditional paradigm of American assimilation."--Rina Benmayor, coeditor of Memory, Subjectivities, and Representation: Approaches to Oral History in Latin America, Portugal, and Spain"Aptly interweaving humanities and social science approaches to identity, Aparicio sets up some of the building blocks for what Latino Studies will become in the twenty-first century. Her compelling engagement with storytelling by Latinos articulating intraLatina/o identities in Chicago is a groundbreaking intervention in the study of U.S. Latinidad that transcends while honoring cultural nationalist models that may not always serve to capture our realities. Her use of the concepts 'horizontal hierarchies' and 'affective essentializing' to analyze co-existence, competition, love, conflict, and solidarity leaves us rethinking our lives in inter-Latino communities and how we describe them. While reading about linguistic battles between parents, grandmas seeking to win over their intraLatina/o children through food, and college students trying to find a sense of belonging to inter-Latino families, communities, and college settings, the reader witnesses intimate spaces of kinship building by intraLatina/os and is deeply engaged by the courageous truths of our communities."--Alaí Reyes-Santos, author of Our Caribbean Kin: Race and Nation in the Neoliberal Antilles

• CoverTitle PageCopyrightContentsLatinidad in the Flesh: An Intimate PrefaceAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Horizontal Hierarchies: The Transnational Tensions in LatinidadFamilia2. Chicago Encounters: Loving the National Other3. The Motifs of Latinidad: Negotiating Nationalities and Struggling for Multiple Belongings4. Of Fathers and Mothers: Gender and National (Dis)IdentificationsRace and Language5. Relational Racializations: Skin Color as Other6. Negotiating Spanish: Linguistic Boundaries and TransculturationsPassing and Performance7. Passing for Mexican: Relational Identities in Latina/o Chicago8. Performing the National Other: Visual and Sonic PassingRewriting Labels9. The "New" Americana/os: Intralatina/os and the Utopia of National Hybridities10. Toward a New Research AgendaAppendix: Interview QuestionsNotesWorks CitedIndexBack cover