Affective communities and millennial desires: Latinx,or why my computer won’t recognize Latina/o

Historicizing the X

Earliest uses of the “x” come on the front end of Nahuatl-inspired writing of the word Chicano/Chicana as Xicano or Xicana. While the x in the Nahuatl language is pronounced as a sh, vernacular pronunciation of the ch sounds very much like the sh and thus the Nahuatl x was substituted for the Ch in Chicana to both indigenize the word and radicalize its politics. These earliest iterations of an indigenized x were an extension of Chicano nationalism. In recuperating the narrative of empowered raza de bronce, or the bronze race, indigeneity and the deployment of Xicano venerated an Aztec past to empower a politically disenfranchised present in the 1960s and 1970s for radicalized Mexican Americans. As I have argued elsewhere, the Mexican national Aztec past as grafted onto a US-based Mexican American context, while a rallying cry to unify all oppressed peoples of this national origin, nonetheless was not only accompanied by attendant sexism, but also alleviated Chicano/as from being implicated in the colonial structures of violence and racism against Indigenous peoples (Guidotti-Hernández, 2011: 17). Thus, the X became a means of mapping the Indigenous mythical homeland of Aztlán in the US Southwest, including claims to land during the Mexican period, even though those lands were occupied by native peoples before the Spanish arrived and established the colonial empire that would eventually produce the Mexican nation-state. As part of the civil rights movement for empowering Mexican origin peoples in the United States, Xicano often became an androcentric discursive sign of exclusion until feminists began to reappropriate the appropriation.

For example, artist Esther Hernandez, in a 1976 Aquatint etching La Virgen de Guadalupe Defiendiendo Los Derechos de Los Xican@s, stages use of the x in feminist terms. When Hernandez did her print, it was immediately following the death of her grandmother and she wanted to memorialize her in a way that recognized how Chicanas “were working on being chingonas. Self-empowerment and all that” (Blackwell, 2018: 223). The image, influenced by the movimiento and Chicana feminists, was a “rallying cry for women to get involved, to kick ass, and to take care of business” (Blackwell, 2018: 223). As such, Hernandez’s iconic image of La Virgen’s illumination surrounding herself karate-kicking out of the print’s grainy frame uses the “X” to break boundaries around gender, proper femininity, self-defense, the defense of a people in a woman-centered fashion. Quite contrary to male-centric nationalist iterations of the movement that are staked exclusively on an Aztec genealogy, Hernandez’s karate-kicking feminist literally pushes out of the illumination’s frame to posit liberation that is defiant and exemplified by syncretic training of both the spirit (harkening to la Virgen de Guadalupe and Catholicism) and martial arts principles of truth, good character, etiquette, and courage. The X that defines women’s self-determination, in Hernandez’s visual field, pushes against masculinized Chicano nationalist formulations by incorporating gender and religious non-conforming representations that still have Mexican nationalist underpinnings. There are three competing nationalism in the print: Mexican, Chicano, and Chicana Feminist.

Ana Castillo’s (1995) Massacre of the Dreamers also returns to nationalism in feminism with the idea that “Xicanisma” called for a politically active social feminism that relied on the recuperation of Mexic-Amerindian women’s experiences. ² In her reclamation of indigeneity through feminism, Castillo develops the theory of self to achieve balance and wholeness, beginning with the self, in reclaiming indigenismo as well as the “forsaken feminine” (p. 13). It is an expression of feminism in nationalism. Part spiritual treatise and part feminist manifesto, Castillo’s Massacre of the Dreamers accounts for what happened to Chicanas between 1968 and 1990 in the struggle for political recognition in an Anglo-dominated society and in their own communities as political and sexual equals (p. 34). Early nationalist deployments of Xicano and feminist reappropriations in the visual field by Esther Hernandez or in theory by Ana Castillo all have one thing in common: personal experience is privileged as the site of feminist identify formation. While early nationalist articulations assumed a male subject, the gendering of Xicana interlocks indigeneity with gender, sexuality, and class to disidentify with male and Anglo-feminist perspectives. But as Rosaura Sánchez (1997) pointed out, “there is always the danger of reifying miscegenation and foregrounding ‘consciousness’, spirituality, and cultural representation as the necessary political acts granting legitimacy and emancipation,” to which all of the early deployments of the X in Xicana/o subscribe (p. 356).

Such self-fashioning is key to how identitarian politics of naming are central to Chicano and Latino Studies. For Nuyorican activists and writers during the 1950s and 1960s, they countered ethnic/racial and institutional invisibility of New York City and mainland Puerto Ricans by documenting the reality of their communities. Also spelled “neorrican,” “neorrriqueno,” and “newyorquino,” utterance of those words on the island were a form of cultural slur, that distanced the racialized and classed masses that migrated to the mainland from those who stayed on and formed part of the island’s ruling class. Reappropriating a slur, much like Chicanos did (this too was a cultural slur like pocho when Mexican Americans encountered Mexican nationals), Nuyorican was an affirming reaction to denigration. It was a response to misrepresentation of a people and their anti-colonial struggles through literature, film, poetry, and activism. (Bernard-Carreño, 2010: 78). In what Urayoán Noel (2014) has termed Nuyorican CounterPolitics, performance as much poetry itself became the grounds by which New York diasporic Puerto Ricans captured and politicized the “complex circulation of bodies” and words that made up a distinct discourse about national identity (p. 9).

Sandra María Esteves is one of the few women poets who performed at the male-dominated and now defunct performance space of the New Rican Village in New York during the 1970s. She is also considered one of the founders of the Nuyorican Poetry movement, most notably linked to Miguel Alaragín and the Nuyorican Poets Café in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Challenging her peers on gender and race issues, she has dedicated her career to representing a Latina/o experience in a diasporic context. More specifically, her poetics engage the crossing of Afro-Latino, Indigenous histories and identities formed by and through migration, often confronting the gender and sexual aspects of the brutal reality of racism. While Nuyorican, in all of its various spellings, does not use an x to denote difference in the way Xicano does, it nonetheless marks an anti-institutionalized means of signifying radical politics for Puerto Ricans living on the mainland mobilizing a self-made linguistic variation.

Both Nuyorican and Xicana/o are field and linguistic formations created by the baby boomer generation, those born right after World War II. Both formations critique colonial legacies, of Spanish Empire and US imperialism. Boomers are also the group who institutionalized Ethnic Studies curricula as student activists and, eventually, the faculty who populated these departments after their creation in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Over the last 40 years, many colleges and universities across the country have created undergraduate programs that reflect the baby boomer-led social movements that institutionalized ethnic studies via national identity paradigms, including Hunter College (Department of Africana and Puerto Rican Studies, 1969); Florida International University (Cuban Research Institute, 1991); Rutgers (Puerto Rican Studies Program, 1970); The University of Arizona (Mexican American Studies); University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) (Chicano Studies Research Center, 1970); and The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) (Center for Mexican American Studies, 1970). Departments and fields founded as Chicano, Cuban American, or Puerto Rican and Black Studies were created as a result of social protest by particular ethnic groups due to their wholesale exclusion from the curriculum and institutional structures in higher education. Because of contemporary student pressure, many of these historic units have been rethinking not only the names of their units but also the ethno-nationalist paradigms that predate contemporary demographic and generational shifts that influence the current scholarship in the field. Latinx is the perfect example.

Baby boomers are the intellectual predecessors of both Generation X and Generation Y (millennials). Feminist baby boomers and Generation Xers began to institutionalize feminism, gender, and queer studies as a part of Chicano Studies, Cuban American, and Puerto Rican Studies, which is why we saw a debate about gender carried out most explicitly in the conversation about using Latino and o/a, a/o, and @ to signify gender equality in the 1990s. For both Frances Aparicio and Juan Flores, this 1990s Latino conversation about pan-ethnicity was fraught with tensions. Aparicio (1999) cites the strain that played out “between mainstreaming and identity politics, community-based research and theoretical incursions, and nationalism and pan-latinidad,” all of which have formed uneven growth of the Latino/a Studies field in universities (p. 4). Wholesale acceptance of Latina/o became of intellectual currency in the field in the 1990s, especially with the formation of new programs (the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign Latina/o Studies, Cornell University Latina/o Studies, The University of California, Irvine Chicano-Latino Studies, Northwestern University Latina/o Studies, and Vanderbilt University Latino Studies). The dialectic tension between very strong nationalisms, as Aparicio describes them, and demographic diversification have resulted in the institutional formations mentioned above.

As a result of student activism in places like Cornell, and Northwestern, student hunger strikes, sit-ins, and demands for the hiring of Latina/o faculty at these elite institutions were the direct result of diversity recruitment plans at the graduate and undergraduate levels. Juan Flores (2003) also demonstrated that while students occupied buildings during the 1990s in the Ivy League or near peer institutions, City University of New York (CUNY) Ethnic Studies Programs were being downsized (p. 192). The disjuncture between public institutions that should directly reflect the populations that inhabit the state they serve and private schools that must recruit diversity are both a direct result of neoliberal restructuring of both the university and global economies at large (Flores, 2003: 195).

And while restructuring, emerging migration patterns that resulted from North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) have pushed Latina/o Studies to be even more critical of the ways in which Dominican, Salvadoran, Nicaraguan, Guatemalan, and Indigenous Mexican populations have been excluded with the gravitational pull toward whiteness with the three largest historic demographic groups (Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans) dominating the field of meaning and intellectual production. As part of these historic reasons, the late 2000s still yielded what Sandra Soto (2010) describes as capacious linguistic play within an ethno-nationalist paradigm. In using the @, they express “fatigue with the clunky post-1980s gender inclusive formulations: ‘Chicana or Chicano’, ‘Chicana and Chicano’, or ‘Chicana/o’ … that at first sight looks perhaps like a typo and seems unpronounceable” (p. 2). And with gender fatigue, located in an ethnic nationalist paradigm, the @’s ao sound with an unpronounceable form was not just a gesture that debunked control of signifiers but it also expanded the possibility for linguist formations that were as messy as muddled the shorthand of identitarian formations and politics they represented.

Angie Chabram-Dernersesian’s work functions as a transition between linguistic capaciousness, ethnic nationalist paradigms of being and trans Latina/o formations. Regarding the expression of gender fatigue and its attendant embattlement, Chabram-Dernersesian (1999) argues that the Chicano location, a

masculine construction around whose body, social location, and ideological purview these particular multiethnic constructions converge and are diluted, can be read as a “Chicano” rendition of pluralism even though it is framed within a nationalist perspective that opposes assimilation and white melting-pot-ism … [M]estizaje also furnished a way of containing ethnic pluralities within selected brown masculinities. (p. 267)

Mestizaje as a form of ethnic pluralism always already is prepared to subsume ethnic difference, in the name of nationalism. The fact that mestizaje gains its force from a masculinized ethno-nationalist Chicano pluralism ultimately ends in a singularity that prevents such categories like “Chicana, Riqueña” from being fully articulated, according to Chabram-Dernersesian (1999: 267). In identitarian practices and in the fields of study, such linguistic invention and defiance of ethnic nationalism is often punished and policed so that trans-Latino formation is rarely expressed. Chabram-Dernersesian’s essay from 1999, along with new work by Frances Aparicio and Nilda Flores-González, accounts for a historic reality of pan-Latino or trans-Latino ethnic formations.

Nonetheless, the linguistic “ao” sound or even to some degree “Chicana, Riqueña!” still does not address another problem in Latino Studies, what scholars like Maritza Cardenas (2018) have described as the ways in which Central American subjects, irrelevant of nationality, are constituted through an Other Than Mexican (OTM) ideology, rendering them unintelligible. Thus, while the “ao” sound within a Chicano Studies context does much to open up the field of meaning to queerness, it does so for the minority majority population. Cardenas ( 2018), on the other hand, accounts for inter-ethnic forms of discursive violence and the self-policing that ensues, by calling attention to Central American American as a discursive category of analysis that is “tactical and often translocal” shifting in “form and content depending on the rural and local locations in which diasporic subjects find themselves” (p. 8). Claudia Milian (2013) also focuses on Central American erasure, but through the abjecting lens of blackness and the neglect of African ancestral legacies within Latina/o studies. All theorize (mis)representation and elision with their theories of field and identity formation, the @ and double American (following Arturo Arias’ (2003) intervention), but the historic ethnic nationalism and trans-Latino multi-racial formations remain in constant tension even though Latino faculty and studies programs remain a mere fraction of overall faculty at US universities and academic programs offered by these institutions. ³ The unevenness between representation and discourse, population and resources, singular ethnic national versus multi-ethnic national diversity continues to be the main issue that prevents institutionalization. The early use of x, as an indigenizing, ethnic nationalist impulse, alongside its other cognates like Nuyorican or Xicana, creates an extended engagement with nationalisms in linguistic formations that are related in the claims that they make but not necessarily in the content. For each ethnic nationalist linguistic identify signifier marks difference, and yet, the differences they generate serve the same purpose. Sounding ethnic national difference with language (ao, x, or nuyro) self-consciously maintains loose coalition of identity-in-difference through critiques of colonialism and racial difference but this is not the same as critical pan or trans Latinx gestures. Particular gestures, mechanisms, practices, or rituals within these early deployments of Latinx should be more closely interrogated to understand why we’ve arrived at Latinx as a solution to nationalist exclusions, gender inequities and normativities, sexist practices, and the domination of whiteness as a default racial position of privilege within the field.

Toward the X, or why the X is feminist

Even though the OED entered Latinx as a real word with meaning and common usage in the English language in 2015, Latina/o millennials have been using the word since the late 2000s. ⁴ In these deployments, according to Lexographer Kathrine Sangaster, “the –x ending is intended to stand for an unspecified or variable quantity, and a rejection of the binary choice between –o or –a (or some sort of typographical combination of those two)” (Sangster, July 2016). In the negation of gender choice and the pan-ethnic signifier Latin, Latinx encompasses the unknown, the diverse, the queer as it defies Spanish language norms of gender in language and previous nationalist articulations of identity. “Lat-een-ecks,” as it is pronounced phonetically, circulated through social media, the main mode of millennial communication and speech acts first. Latinx is now making its way through the academy, showing up in university handbooks, websites, event titles, student group names, and published scholarship. Digital sharing of personal posts that deploy Latinx, news stories that use Latinx, and academic scholarship have ramped up common everyday usage, especially given that, according to the Pew Research Center, 68% of all Americans use social media, and of that 68%, 88% of millennials aged 18–29 use Facebook and 59% of millennials use Instagram (Greenwood et al., 2016). Latinx has been cultivated and/or used in spaces other than the university and in the digital realm to the extent to which one might argue that the digital sphere has pushed the slow-ambling, reluctant academy to catch up with the lingua franca of contemporary self and world making. Hundreds of op-eds, individual blog posts, visual art from the Undocuqueer movement, Redit, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and Facebook posts all indicate that the proliferation of Latinx occurred through these outlets more so than in the academy. And because millennials dominate these platforms, other institutions like the Smithsonian or National Archives use the #Latinx hashtag to reach this audience of meaning producers. ⁵ Therefore, unlike the baby boomers who protested for and wrote the terms Xicana/o and Nuyorican into being with social activism that took to the streets and produced chap books, flyers, and newspapers or the generation Xers who helped institutionalize these terms and fields of study by taking courses in the subject areas and using print culture and protest to move the conversation to Latina/o Studies, millennials have, by virtue of digital media’s speed of delivery, instantaneously transformed discourse over the last 10 years in their use of Latinx. Their digital media usage has made Latinx the affective juggernaut it is today. Speed of delivery and the ability to immediately, within seconds, redistribute the content, like a post, or pin a photo has had profound effect on Latinx being used first in common language and then filtering into the academy. Reuse and reposting builds meaning in a continuous cycle of circulation. Instead of the public, take to the streets activist routes of early self-naming, millennials use social media plus protest and social media as protest to redefine the terms of Latinx identity.

What I once thought was “easy and uncritical transition in discourse with the term,” which I stated in September of 2016, I now read as public, millennial-led, well-documented, public usage that has forced a reluctant academy to recognize the legitimacy of Latinx in light of the embattled nature of Ethnic national struggles that founded Chicano, Puerto Rican and Cuban American Studies in the first place. In other words, my response as a Gen Xer was conditioned by the generational and regional battle that we engaged in at UT Austin in founding and naming what eventually became the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies. It was suffocating. In the quote with which I began my essay, “I don’t feel Latino, I feel Mexican,” a graduate student, along with many senior colleagues with 30 plus years experience in Mexican American Studies, the Américo Paredes founded milder version of Chicano Studies at UT Austin, raised staunch opposition to the idea that the new department be named Latino Studies because, somehow, it would marginalize Mexican Americans. Thus affect, or rather the idea of feeling Mexican or feeling Latino, is akin to José Esteban Muñoz’s (2000) notion of feeling brown as a kind of alternative to how the “theoretical incoherence of the identity demarcation ‘Latino’ is linked to the term’s failure to actualize embodied politics which contest the various antagonisms within the social that challenge Latino/a citizen-subjects” (p. 67). To feel Mexican is to firmly entrench oneself in the affect of a singular location from which to fight the antagonisms Muñoz described. To feel “Latino,” as he puts it, would internalize an array of ethnic national positions from which one experiences the antagonisms, and therefore would operate from the burden of pan-ethnic excess and affects accordingly. The claim about feeling Mexican is about Latino being “too much” because, from an ethnic nationalist perspective, the erasure of Mexicanidad or Mexican Americans as a minority majority group is too much of a sacrifice many are willing to take on in the name of solidarity. Thus, not only does, according to Muñoz (2000), “the presence of Latina/o affect puts a great deal of pressure on the affective base of whiteness,” but it also puts pressure, much like Latinx does, on categories like Mexican American or Puerto Rican, not because they are impoverished or underdeveloped, but because they are so developed (over 40 years developed) that people are not willing to abandon feeling Mexican for feeling Latina/o or Latinx (p. 70). With regional and generational aspects that we cannot ignore, the ways in which Latina/o has been contested, let alone scarce use of Latinx in certain regional contexts, are still affectively tied to what Muñoz described as “incoherence” for those unabashedly wed to ethnic nationalist paradigms, and those policed for using Latina/o and Latinx.

Muñoz was on to something important, and this links back to digital and social media. He argued that we should “move beyond notions of ethnicity as fixed (something that people are) and instead understand it as performative (what people do), providing a reinvigorated and nuanced understanding of ethnicity” (Muñoz, 2000: 70). Feeling Mexican instead of feeling Latino is a stated notion of performance in affect, but it is tied to a static notion of ethnic nationalism, even in the staging of public feeling. This is not to say that feeling Mexican is wrong, but rather, to quote Muñoz (2000), it is a way to prioritize how “emotion’s ‘magical’ nature [operates] within a historical web” (p. 72). The historic density of Mexican origin peoples in Texas cannot be denied in purveying an affect of feeling Mexican instead of feeling Latino. Such emotions are historical, especially given well-documented systematic exclusions from public life, governance, education, and other institutions. Nonetheless, we need to go back to Muñoz’s notion of ethnicity as performance because it foregrounds the idea that such categories are not static.

This is why the currency of Latinx is in fact critical in its deployment—it is the public, digital media performances of affect and affinity, through the visual field, that an affective shift from the gender fatigue of the a/o and national fatigue of exclusion experienced by say, Central American Americans, gets shifted in the performance. Affectively and sonically acting improperly, defying gender, ethnic national, generational, and sexual norms in the field and in relationship to whiteness, the x in Latinx uses language to register and make meaning of these categories in their difference. The x in Latinx carries the affective overload for that which is not recognized fully, fully articulated, or that defies static ethnic national conceptions of being.

As scholars have become increasingly invested in carrying the affective overload, we see how, for example, the editors of Las Américas Quarterly used Latinx to describe the state of the field: “We wanted to attend to space and place in Latinx studies as well through work that discusses, in Jacques Rancière’s terms, “the distribution of the sensible.” Given the vast demographic shifts in the United States and the indelible presence of Latinx populations in global cities,” their performative and textual gestures of 2014 account for why there has been a proliferation of Latinx, especially in queer, feminist, and sexuality studies (Gómez-Barris and Fiol-Mata, 2014: 493).

The X is queer

In talking with students at several US universities and collecting data for this essay, most locate the genesis of Latinx in critiques of Latinidad and Latina/o beginning around 2004 in queer contexts. Starting in queer punk circles in Europe and the United States, millennials use the x to express their dissatisfaction with gender binaries while seeking (gender) visibility and racial equality. But the discourse has also become particularly potent in Trans communities, which explicitly use Latinx to best represent their complicated relationship to gender, irrelevant of generation. Understood as a queering of language, Latina Magazine writer Raquel Reichard noted in 2015 that “The ‘x’ makes Latino, a masculine identifier, gender-neutral.” It also moves beyond Latin@—which has been used in the past to include both masculine and feminine identities—to encompass genders outside of that limiting man–woman binary. Despite previous articulations of the ampersand (@) being capacious, the fluidity of gender, announced by the x, accounts for new gender locations outside of traditional notions of the sex–gender dyad. For many, the x indicates living on a border, not a geographical nation-state border, but the thin line dividing between what historically have constituted gender expressions. For Trans*gressive Genderqueer Latinx scholar Robyn Henderson-Espinoza, dey “embrace[s] living on the border of fe/male and the constant crossing over and disruption of normative masculinity” (Reichard, 2015). With destabilization of normative masculinity and the embodied practices of being trans, Henderson-Espinoza posits crossing and fluidity of gender as the main reasons why the x in Latinx does the proper, performative signifying work. To go back to Muñoz, the x can carry the affective load of being trans, and of gender fluidity in a way that the @ or a/o cannot.

There is also a very important race-gender component that the x is affectively load-bearing and this registered in the intersections of Afrolatinidad. As Flores and Jimenez-Román have argued, “throughout the hemisphere, ‘afro’ serves to link struggles and declare a community” because “the prefix establishes the foundational historical and cultural connection to Africa, an affirmation that simultaneously defies the Eurocentric logics that have characterized Latin America and the Caribbean” (Flores and Jimenez-Román, 2009: 3). The afro prefix has hemispheric connotations for centralizing black subjects and the ancestral connection to Africa, not as a romanticized return to pan-African nationalism with generic longing for Africa, but for the politics and oppressions that come with black embodiment in the Americas. Nancy Raquel Mirabal (2017) has pointed out that whiteness is embedded in territoriality, which made racialized projects of empire and what she calls diasporic blanqueamiento all the more fixated on embodiment that the spread of US versions of slavery to Cuba, for example (p. 15). Moreover, that black embodiment is historically bound to the institution of slavery and its attendant surveillance of sexuality and reproduction, also looms as a heavy affective charge bore by Latinx and Afro-Latinx in particular. This is not to essentialize the relationship between Afro-Latinx and sexuality; rather, I am pointing out the ways these categories have institutionally been linked to police a particular population’s sexual expressions, encounters, and reproduction. As many queer and trans Afro-Latinx folks have stated, they use the term to resignify sexuality and black embodiment theorizing their own experience. The ways in which Latinx, when paired with the Afro prefix, is a performative declaration of community also provide the space for expressing gender and sexual fluidity through racialization. For Jack Qu’emi Gutiérrez, “the ‘x’ in Afro-Latinx serves as a nod to my gender neutrality and my commitment to a lack of participation in the gender binary”(Reichard, 2015). The interlocking systems of race that pervade the discourse of Latinidad often erase African origin Latino peoples and reinscribe normative gender categories. The affective load of Afro-Latinx further destabilizes meaning because “‘AfroLatino/a’ as a term confronts anti-Black racism among Latino/a communities” while putting gender fluidity, neutrality, and sexuality on the table simultaneously (Donawa, 2014:6). Racial ideologies that stem from Spanish, British, and US colonial systems of slavery and their links to racialization historically have distinguished both white Latina/os and African Americans from their Afro-Latinx counterparts. While the historic entrenchment of mestizaje in the Spanish colonial system privileges Spanish-Indigenous mixtures as the ideal for distilling racial “savagery” in the casta system, “hair texture, eye and skin color, along with culture, education, and class” are the modicum by which Afro-Latinx peoples have been marginalized (Bonilla-Silva and Foreman, 2000: 182). As a push-back against historic privileges for non-Black Latinos, the benefits of white privilege for Latinos are rooted in colonial-centric notions of whiteness ideologically and politically, and therefore Afro-Latinx is both a reminder of how violent systems of racial exclusion have been and, further, how entrenched sexuality is essentialized and in need of reappropriation in relationship to Blackness. As Jennifer Loubriel (2016) has pointed out, “Even though you can be marginalized because you are Latinx, that does not erase the systemic white privilege you have because of your race.” While it may seem that I am reconstructing a Black–White binary within Latinx, I want to refocus the conversation toward the ways in which Latinx, in all the White, Brown, Black racialization positions, can bear the brunt of the historical burden because policies like blanqueamiento, mejorar la raza, and mestizaje, all of which were predicated on reproductive practices, regulations, and often genocide that targeted Black and Indigenous groups in sending, receiving, and territories. While the history of sexual-racial control in the Americas was policy designed to regulate reproduction and family formation, study of the regulation of sexuality in general by scholars like Zeb Tortorici (2012) and Marcia Ochoa (2014) has argued that regulations of sodomy and “homosexuality” in Colonial Latin America should focus on “the ‘unnatural’ (contra natura)” rather same-sex sexuality (2012). And, while this notion of the unnatural kind in sexual practice during the colonial period informs historic narrations of non-Western notions of gender and sexuality, it nonetheless has become the reason why the X in Latinx allows for the simultaneous reassertion of queerness and blackness to challenge oppression. As an iteration of queer of color critique embodied in one word, Afro-Latinx takes on the racism in queer theory’s whiteness along with the whiteness that governs Latinidad to evidence, for a generation of people, their presence, survival, and entrenchment in empire, globalization, and neoliberalism.

The constantly shifting terrain of Latinx also bears the affective load for the centrality of feminist critique as well. Historically, the problem with Latino or Chicano is inability or outright refusal to acknowledge gender inequality. In this case, solving gender inequality in the field of practice and in the Spanish language itself is not the end game. Here, the x accomplishes a critique of gender centrality in gender-neutrality or fluidity. When gender falls outside of the woman–man binary or agender (without a gender), we don’t have a language to capture the spectrum (Reichard, 2017). And while feminist preoccupations have centered on gender equality, when feminism focuses itself on complete liberation with and intersectional analysis of race, ability, gender, and sexuality, it has the capacity to carry that excessive affective load for Latinx identified peoples who seek the freedom of self-determination. Centralizing gender spectrums of being and performance also uncover violent systems of policing, especially for millennials, when boomers who do not identify gender fluidity (see Texas’ Transgender Bathroom law) as a real thing, and attempt to codify normativity in law and language. ⁶ In other words, even on a spectrum,

[i]f gender is seen as less central, the very complexity of gendered relations—for instance, as intersectional, fluid, relational, situated, performative—along with insights about the manner in which institutions and practices are gendered and gendering, may be set aside or lost. (Stubbs, 2015) ⁷

The spectrum, while not completely gender-neutral, nonetheless is an attempt to curtail gender-based forms of violence and policing of fluid gender positions. This desire for inclusiveness, especially for trans and gender non-conforming Latinx, links the material (mental health and social being) with the more abstract theorizations of self-making.

Inclusion, in particular, is a core value for millennials. The fact that Latinx signals inclusion for this generation is paramount because their self-concept is about tolerance, belonging, and making a difference. What is meaningful to millennials is their active capacity to be heard, be involved, and trying to make a difference. When I spoke with a third-generation Mexican American woman who uses Latinx to describe herself, she cited specific cases of injustice her undocumented peers experience, and stated that quitting in the cause for equality is not an option. Citing highly personal acts versus systematic oppression was the mode of understanding one’s role in changing society. A male participant in the same discussion was concerned about bias in research, and wanted to discuss fairness and factuality as part of how this generation should be judged and understood. His desire to balance conservative and liberal issues in decision-making and public self-presentation is a reflection of another millennial core value, which is avoiding conflict. All the students in the group discussion agreed they don’t like being yelled at and they want to foster care for all sides of things, which shapes a sense of belonging. Thus, Latinx’s both political neutrality and political malleability are ultimately what make the term so appealing for community building. The ethic of care for others makes the affective bond between millennials, cultivated primarily in the digital realm, predicated on previous experiences of exclusion based on race, social class, skin color, or other presumptions made about them because they are Latinx. The affective and bodily excesses are redirected into positive coalition building where they actively take on Latinx as an identity position that is not about assimilation, but rather, a collective assertion of the very thing that has made them feel excluded. In caring for others, they don’t want peers to experience the same exclusion they’ve known. Instead, they work against the idea of the body as a stable thing with the idea that this can build coalition.

Digital Latinx community building also embraces that ethical sense of responsibility, which is furthered by the sharing of information, information as a resource, and monetary resources as well. The proliferation of Latinx in the digital world has resulted from the idea that the affect attached to the term itself is a resource for survival. Twitter commentary is one of the main ways the critique of ethnic nationalism is replicated, debated, and shifted to Latinx, mostly by queer interlocutors. For example, Queer Xicano Chisme @QueerXiChisme has almost 6000 followers and 20K tweets, that mock nationalisms for their ridiculous gatekeeping around authenticity versus affective communities. In a 20 March 2017 thread about chisme and its life saving potential for queers and Latinx more broadly, el uses Latinx to get at the core of differences in both the perspectives on what constitutes the purpose of chisme and what constitutes communal diversity.

In this debate about nationalism, @QueerXiChisme (2017) disavows the essentialist state (“henny” and “drag me again bitch”), and el’s response insists not on speaking for everybody but allowing everybody, from the 22 Latin American countries, the space to speak their own truths (March 2017). While some might argue that the tone is of public shaming, I would argue that the rhetorical strategies deployed in the name of Latinx and a Xichisme push a greater public to grapple with the nationalist blind spots folks are not willing to let go of. To be a part of the affective community that recognizes the survival power in chisme is antiessentialist because it bears the load of recognition and diversity simultaneously. Latinx represents the power of inclusion without speaking for everyone.

OPEN IN VIEWER

The digitally palimpsestic nature of #Latinx usage also is registered in self-representation on Facebook. Artist-scholars like Ricardo Gamboa rely on the ways in which Latinx allows for layering, political critique, and playfulness with language and self-presentation. In his regular commentary about how he looks and how he feels about self and politics, his often-humorous proclamations riff on historically present iconographies to drive home his sexualized, racialized, position as Latinx.

In one of my favorite status updates, Gamboa’s tied bandana, woke face, and queer, brown sensibilities all mobilize affect to name proximity to Rosie the Riveter, historic feminist icon, but with difference at the core of the representation. The “hood, queer, Latinx” performativity hails feminism, working class female icons of empowerment and imbues them with what Muñoz (2000) would describe as a “theatricaliz[ation of] a certain mode of ‘feeling brown’ in a world painted white, organized by cultural mandates to ‘feel white’” (p. 68). The working class, sexualized spin on an icon that makes history “feel white,” and therefore affectively neutral, is part of the play in Gamboa’s self-referential commentary. The affective load of Latinx Rosie the Riveter puts the emphasis on the queering history with the queer brown self-embodied in the X and its palimpsest intersection with mainstream American feminist working women’s history. His deployment of hood sensibilities is particularly important in layering meaning and feeling on top of White feminist iconographies. Gamboa writes,

hood to me is important in terms of positioning myself as a US subaltern subject that embraces their economically disadvantaged roots in a culture that fetishizes wealth and belonging to “Latinos” that often aspire to accumulation and normative “success.” It also is a way to counter distinguish myself from the many homonormative gay Latino men that similarly align themselves with classism and capitalist markers of the good life. (March 2017)

OPEN IN VIEWER

Latinx hood, therefore, claims space while layering affect to decenter homonormativity and the category Latino as representative of aspirational social climbing.

So even though the image and words attached to it are playful, Gamboa’s desire for “scrambling my sense with it to account for what white feminism has not” puts pressure on the ways in which Anglos American feminisms’ radical character has been questioned and disputed in the face of excluding women and queers of color (March 2017). With his long-standing critiques of White feminisms and homonormativity produced in capitalism, Gamboa uses the performative force of feeling brown and therefore feeling Latinx is outright defiance of national affect and nationalist forms of affect with a feminist core, especially in the era of Trump, where so much public feeling is anchored in disenfranchised anger directed at people of color, immigrants, and Latinos in particular. He further states,

As a gender-queer person, it is important to identify as “Latinx” for me because how it amends and/or fractures the presumed totality or unity of Latino identity and literally marks it. I think we really saw increased visibility of the identity in the wake of the Pulse massacre and it forced us to have to recognize a people within a people who were exposed to precarity and violence differently than the whole. We are a part apart. (March 2017)

Such queer brown hood feminist queer articulations of Latinx are shared to generate public feeling that counter the contemporary culture of hate. With visibility gained through the violent massacre of queer Latinx peoples in Orlando, Latinx hails exclusion within inclusion in the sense that Latino presumes political and social unity, which is a fallacy. The fact that Latinx ruptures and stages precarity as part of its performative force is an invitation to share affects, bodies, and histories that exceed the bounds of homo and hetero normativities.

Students at Amherst College; Harvard University; University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB); and UT Austin have also began to use Latinx to describe everyday interactions of student populations, student-led social protest movement, the scholarly field, and their relationship to national discourse more broadly. For example, UT Austin student Bianca Zepeda stated that “the Latinx community is so broad — there’s so many cultures, so many backgrounds,” to underscore how diversity is the key element of why students invest in creating safe spaces to discuss their concerns about inclusion and equity (Altury, 2017). At Harvard, the conversation about global Latinidad has been vital to how students deploy Latinx to change the language and adjust to a new paradigm of what race and language mean in the contemporary period. For many, the x is a framework that highlights the anomaly of where Latinos are geographically in the United States and how they negotiate space. While the Harvard group agreed that tensions have emerged from how to incorporate Latinx, the political moment of students striking with dining hall workers in the Fall of 2016, a historic coalition in and of itself, forced many of the organizers to think through their politics in labor struggles in relationship to their classroom experience of the newly formed Latinx Studies minor for graduate and undergraduate students housed in the Department of Romance Studies. While most would prefer to have a free-standing program or department, the fact is that the institutionalization of this geopolitical term reflects Latinx student diversity at Harvard and the regional, racial, and class differences that emerge at particular institutions. Students don’t see Latin as a total break from institutional histories but rather as a generational evolution that has transformed the genealogy of communities with new migration and the stakes of transforming the field.

Since the mid-2000s, queer activists at UCSB began using Latinx to signify tensions within the Chicana/o Studies department about student population diversity and representation, especially with queer and Indigenous origin Latin American students. For students at UCSB, Latinx includes the voices of often excluded indigenous, queer, and trans students. Since UCSB was named by the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities in January 2015 as a Hispanic Serving Institute (HSI) upon reaching the 25% enrollment threshold, students have stepped up institutional pressure to have the university offer services and resources and curtail racial profiling, for example. Moreover, public student meetings solidify millennial organizing strategies in naming them “Latinx Town Hall” (Yanga, 2015). The fact that public gathering hails the students at an HSI Latinx, first, is a push-back against the government-generated term from the Nixon administration identifying the population through an emphasis on the connection with the Spanish-speaking world and, second, an Association of American Universities (AAU) school that had one of the first Chicana/o Studies Departments in the country now has a student population that exceeds the affective and historical boundaries of what the term can produce in terms of solidarity and inclusion. Even though students spoke of how “Classes like Chicano studies, spaces like El Congreso and spaces for people of color is something our campus needs to pay more attention to and possibly get more funding [for],” they still have ethnic nationalist ties within the context of using both Latinx and Latina/o: “Tinajero said she thinks Latino/a students are represented better at UCSB than on most campuses, but there is still progress to be made” (Yanga, 2015). The context of UCSB matters greatly, for the institutionalized role the Chicana/o Studies Department plays in facilitating student comfort levels and community building at the same time that the actual student demographics shift to include more out queer Latinx students, especially as recent Indigenous migrants and undocuqueers who can identify with or challenge the ways in which Chicana/o is constituent of a particular historical time and place.

Students at Amherst College have also maintained a protracted struggle for Latino and now Latinx Studies since the early 2000s. While students have had access to Latina/o Studies through the 5 colleges certificate in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latina/o Studies, Amherst requires that they have a primary major and that the certificate be used to supplement a traditional degree field. In addition, students are concerned that they do not have a standalone major with faculty dedicated exclusively to Latinx Studies. Having their interests in US-based Latinx populations grouped along with Latin American and Caribbean studies is counterintuitive to their protest in the 2015 protests of #AMHERSTUPRISING. Their sit in at the Frost library fostered a public politics of racial compassion, responding both to Black Lives Matters activism and the exclusion students of color and undocumented students face at this particular liberal arts college and at universities across the nation. La Causa, a student organization also presented the administration with a set of demands, which included a plea for diversity:

Often times Latinx identities are viewed as a monolithic mass that is overrepresented by Chicanxs. Coming to recognize the importance and value of our identities as Latinx students begins with understanding the complexities and diversity of our identities, ethnically, culturally, racially, economically, and linguistically. (Yanga, 2015)

The turn to Latinx as capable of bearing the work of diversity, especially in light of Chicano over-representation, reminds of why this generation is invested in thorough, affectively attentive, and politically sound recognition that public political sentiment is important, but it also needs to be accompanied by institutionalization. This Latinx is the textualization and political enactment of a dream for something more that pre-existing affective and institutional categories that millennials do not feel account for their experiences. Instead of affective normativity, the move to Latinx is the millennial generation’s radical gesture that exceeds the bounds of previous formations. Because millennials share everything via social media, they revel in and are dependent upon forms and linguistic expressions that reproduce in affective excess.

Conclusion, or why I’m all in with X

Upon my first encounters with Latinx, I started out highly skeptical of the term especially because it appeared out of nowhere, or so I thought. As I wrote and researched for this essay, I decided to heed the words of Joshua Guzmán and Christina León (2016), where they propose “Lingering as a verb, [which] demands a kind of languor, a dwelling that inhabits the spaces of ambivalence and ambiguity” (p. 271). I sat with my discomfort in what I perceived to be an abrupt about face in terminology, especially in light of the contested public debate about naming UT Austin’s new department, which professionally, I was so close to. My initial response was triggered by the trauma of nationalism and its institutional entrenchment over that affective battle in feeling Mexican versus feeling Latino. Lingering or dwelling upon how trauma often shapes our relationship to ideology, especially in ethnic studies, the shift to Latinx, once well researched and sat with, was not a complete answer but an alternative to reliving trauma. All of the queer and trans interlocutors that form the backbone of this affective load-bearing terminology use the x as an expression of freedom. In lingering, I too see the possibility for freedom.

In speaking with the generation who has digitally inscribed the term into the online world, I’ve discovered that what I once thought to be an uncritical turn to be exceedingly self-conscious in its discursive strategies to centralize queers, trans, ability, and racial-ethnic diversity. Latinx, in the digital realm, creates visual intimacy and virtual community, for seeing, liking, and retweeting is like being there in the moment. The capacity for Latinx to carry the excessive affective overload and political responsibility for all Latinos is the most appealing and striking reason for why such a move is decisively post-nationalist in a world that is highly protectionist and nationalist. Protectionism, nationalisms based in majority or minority–majority rights, are not all that appealing to millennials—they appear more like yelling and exclusion than civil rights claims. This is not to say that their rejection of boomer created nationalism is ahistorical; rather, they want to understand these histories as broadly, as blackly, as queerly, as transly, and as openly as possible. They feel left out and they don’t want anyone else to experience that failure to belong syndrome that plagues their existence. To break out of the oppressive yoke of sexist, nationalist regionalism that clings to the social mores of harassment and whispered truths without consequence or the acknowledgement that trans, queer, Afro-Latinx use of Latinx provides a window to imagine something else besides gender normativity and repression. Suddenly, I feel free.