Just as Song of Solomon and Down These Mean Streets inspired Junot Díaz to become a writer, Youngblood (1954), a novel by the radical African American author John Oliver Killens, inspired Piri Thomas to write Down These Mean Streets (1967). What does Thomas’s personal relationship with Killens reveal about the intertextual relationship between DTMS and Youngblood? What can we learn from reading DTMS as a coming-of-age memoir rather than as a coming-of-age novel? What can be gained by reading DTMS from a child-centered perspective? Inspired by Ralph Ellison’s concept of literary ancestry, Harold Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence, Gerard Genette’s definition of intertextuality, and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s theory of signifying, I argue that the shared themes of racial, sexual, and gendered trauma intertextually bind the homosocial coming-of-age narratives in DTMS and Youngblood. I examine how the coming-of-age narratives in each of these texts explore the entanglement of homosocial camaraderie and ethnic, racial, and sexual identity formation. In critically explicating these themes, this chapter expands Latino American and African American literary history and reveals new insights about the intertextual genealogy of influence between DTMS and Youngblood.

Before the categories of Latino/a or Hispanic were adopted in academia and literary criticism in the United States, Latinx writers were often (mis)placed within a wide and ambiguous “Spanish” literary scene. This chapter explores how this tendency also extended to Filipinx American writers. It centers on José Garcia Villa’s early years in the United States, in particular the semi-autobiographical short stories in Footnote to Youth: Tales of the Philippines and Others (1933), wherein he reflects on his experience as a young Filipino American writer and finds continuities between the Philippines and New Mexico.

Debates about Latinx literary representations of war tend to emphasize either how Latinx literature offers a means of repair for war’s ravages or, alternatively, that violence is constitutive of latinidad itself. This chapter charts a middle course through both positions by arguing that US Latinx literature highlights both irresolute, unreconciled wars and, what Jesse Alemán describes as Latinx “micro-wars” within major conflicts; such micro-wars, furthermore, often involve clashes and negotiations around the racialized boundaries of Latinx communities. Here we survey a range of Latinx representations of the Civil War, World War II, the Korean War, and wars of revolution and counterinsurgency in Viet Nam and Central America. Rather than waging war on an irredeemable enemy, we conclude, Latinxs lay siege to the imperial relationship championed by the US in most of these conflicts.

This chapter focuses on examples of Rivera’s “brown noir” that use noir conventions to draw into critical relief the intersection of anti-Mexican racism, labor exploitation, and patriarchy. Rivera’s brown noir dramatizes the pitfalls of taking vicarious pleasure in film and related representations where work, heterosexual romance, or education inexorably leads to happy endings. Experiences of vicarious pleasure, Rivera suggests, can be contradictory, toggling between appeals to incorporation and the recognition of exclusion and subordination. On the one hand, he was interested in how cinema as an ideological state apparatus encourages farmworkers to take vicarious pleasure in images that are hurtful and oppressive. On the other hand, in his literary and cultural essays, Rivera also analyzed contexts in which farmworkers turned such cinematic appeals into opportunities for critical thinking about the disjuncture between film representations and their own lives. He suggests that, because Hollywood films formally appeal to farmworkers while practically excluding them from representation (or incorporate them as minor, subordinate characters), appeals to vicarious pleasures can generate insights into the construction of social hierarchy and inequality. Rivera dramatized his theories about vicarity in his brown noir film treatment for his story “La mano en la bolsa”/“Hand in His Pocket.”

This chapter locates an important constellation of Latinx literary modernities in the editorial offices and print shops of New York City’s late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spanish-language press. In contrast to familiar expressions of literary modernity in Spanish and English centered on literary autonomy, those of interest in this chapter pursued the possibilities of an expanding and increasingly interconnected world of print for achieving democracy and social justice. In New York City, that pursuit began in the context of Cuba’s and Puerto Rico’s anticolonial struggle against Spain – in the form it took in the 1880s and 1890s as José Martí built the coalition that organized Cuba’s final independence war with Spain. Some of his collaborators, including Rafael Serra and Sotero Figueroa, made Cuba’s revolutionary movement a source of ambitious thinking about the interrelationship of modern media, democracy, and social justice. Their ideas help to reveal continuities that run through early twentieth-century Spanish-language periodicals in New York City and their late nineteenth-century predecessors – including those associated with the literary movement of modernismo. Across those periods, Latinx editors and writers launched visionary and largely understudied innovations designed to make modern media a means of enabling participation in creating just democracies.

This chapter interrogates the South–South internationalism of renowned US Nuyorican poet Miguel Algarín. It argues that the abjection in Morocco featured in his poem “Tangiers” reacts to French coloniality. More specifically, Algarín’s Orientalist evocations of underage child prostitution operate under a French hegemony, coming into crisis when a Third World alliance fails. Although his engagement with African self-determination exhibits residues of a French hegemony undergirding and undercutting what I term a poetic Latin-African solidarity, his South–South approach enriches postcolonial studies, in which Latin American – and, by extension, Latinx – identities have been sidelined.

This volume approaches Latinx literatures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the prismatic lens of modernity. Foregrounding from the outset that there is no single Latinx experience, we understand Latinx modernities as multiple and multiplying. Latinx literary modernities constellate the coloniality of US domination, the rapid and often traumatic social changes wrought by new technologies, the displacements associated with domestic revolutions and international warfare, and the innovation of literary forms commensurate with the spiritual yearnings of people on the margins of society. Our volume assumes an organization based on conceptual categories of US and Latin American modernities with the intent of highlighting emergent approaches to Latinx literatures. These conceptual categories – space, being, time, form, and labor – allow scholars working on different national groups across different time periods to be in more direct conversation with one another without assuming that they are telling the same story. Our categories make visible surprising connections, illuminate new methods, and push back against the coloniality of aesthetic models that limit the conditions of possibility for Latinx literature.

Environmental policies and enforcement pose fundamental corruption issues relating to the tensions between economic self-interest and the public good. By directing our attention to the challenges of collective action, they also highlight the importance of state-level institutional and political characteristics – notably, the political clout of industrial and environmental lobby groups. High levels of corruption and low levels of trust both weaken the stringency and enforcement of environmental policies and affect levels of emissions, although as levels of trust in a state increase, the effects of corruption weaken or vanish. Our environmental findings closely parallel those in other chapters having to do with COVID policies – not surprising, as they raise similar questions of policy and compliance – and support our argument that thinking solely in terms of specific acts of rule- or law-breaking is an incomplete understanding of corruption, its causes, and its consequences.