Abstract
The introduction to the special issue of JAF “Redirecting Currents: Theoretical Wayfinding with Latinx Folkloristics and Women of Color Transnational Feminisms” approaches Latinx folklore studies from transnational feminist perspectives. The issue engages with folklore key terms used by researchers, community members, public sector workers, artists, and activists. By using an extended metaphor of aquatic movements, the introduction elucidates how lexical discontinuities and connections allow for a transparent conversation of intellectual and/or ethnographic distortions, and it acknowledges the power of writing as process and the politics of remapping the field of contemporary folklore studies. In this model, a metaphor of affective transcultural cartographies is employed to frame ideas in and of racialized spaces. The authors also discuss the poetics and historical entanglements of folklorists and postcolonial thought with the Enlightenment, and how these vexed and intimate relations are situated in language, culture, and power. The introduction summarizes the keyword essays that follow and also poses some questions about future work in folklore studies based on similar approaches.
long considered the basis for the development of hemispheric postcolonial and queer theory, volumes like This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color illustrate the power of bringing together women of color to speak their truth and deeply question assumptions about epistemology, progress, and activism.1 Much of the creative, public, and critical work of seminal Latinx feminist figures like Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, and Pura Belpré engage folklore as a resource for fighting xenophobia, patriarchy, homophobia, and racism. The reconceptualization of nomenclature and terminology serves as an important tool for those of us working in the spirit of these and many other transnational feminist ancestors.
This special issue of the Journal of American Folklore (JAF) features Latinx2 folklore studies from transnational feminist perspectives. The work presented here is timely and necessary. Stemming from our own established works on Latinx folklore that move away from Eurocentric, patriarchal, and heteronormative modes of producing knowledge and subjects,3 this issue on Latinx folklore, with an emphasis on Women of Color Feminisms, provides alternative roots and routes that can continue expanding and shifting folklore's epistemological paths and currents. In framing this conversation for the journal and its audience, we also necessarily engage with previous studies by folklorists interested in associating Latinx studies with folklore research, like Norma E. Cantú and Olga Nájera-Ramírez's Chicana Traditions (2002) and Debra Lattanzi Shutika's Beyond the Borderlands (2011). Thus, “Redirecting Currents: Theoretical Wayfinding with Latinx Folkloristics and Women of Color Transnational Feminisms” connects emerging theories and practices found in Latinx studies and folklore studies through an exploration of nomenclature by denotational and affective means. Here, we see the reframing of terminology as an important act of intellectual decolonization through purposefully anti-racist, queer, and feminist work in both of these fields. Therefore, this special issue of JAF engages with folklore key terms used by researchers, community members, public sector workers, artists, and activists.
Following the discussion of lexical discontinuities and connections, we bring to the table a transparent conversation about intellectual and/or ethnographic distortion, where we acknowledge the power of writing as process and the politics of remapping the field of contemporary folklore studies. In this model, we employ a metaphor of affective transcultural cartographies to frame ideas in and of racialized spaces. Such a model foregrounds the way feeling exchanges within intellectual fields of both writers and readers who are then forced to recognize their interconnections.4 Incorporating this acknowledgment in the research process, in turn, serves to redraft maps of theoretical currents. What does it mean to create discourse in order to re-center the margins at the presumptive center? The texts in this special issue are meant to serve as a functional remapping of key discourses in the field of folklore studies organized around a flipped map, one where “el sur es nuestro norte,” and directional language is an intermediary between the normalization of intellectual imperialism and postcolonial cultural studies. The goal then, in following Fernando Ortiz’ Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar ([1940] 2002), is to expose “erosion of local knowledge in theoretical discussions of subaltern or peripheral cultures” (Santí 2005:170).5 Originally published in Spanish as “Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar” (1940), Ortiz’ term transculturation addresses “the complex processes of exchange—linguistic, economic, racial, gendered, and cultural—involved in these [intellectual and social] exchanges” (Arroyo 2016:133).6 Proposed as a counterpoint to Bronislaw Malinowski's introduction of the term “acculturation” into US and British anthropology, “transculturation” was framed as a process of exchange that produces a subject rooted in a “more heterogeneous subject formation based in re-conciled difference” (Arroyo 2016:134). Rather than assuming cultural loss (as the term “acculturation” did), a transcultural ideology assumes that waves of change will produce a different cultural-citizen subject in the process of movement and resettlement. Transculturalism in the face of transnational contexts implicates the hybrid admixture of culture and politics that allows for engagement over observation and an ability to see oneself in others, practices that have the capacity to lead to methods of counter-fetishism in the study of communities.
“Redirecting Currents” brings together what we as editors have identified as transcultural properties of cultural currents that bridge women of color transnational feminist perspectives to folklore studies. Built initially from the work of Black feminist thinkers in the mid-twentieth century, the phrase “women of color” speaks directly to woman-identified individuals who also identify as a member of an ethno-racial minority group. Collaboratively theorizing from this vantage point allows us to (1) privilege the stories of ordinary people and their right to self-directed representation, (2) acknowledge that academic studies of folklore can function as a type of “controlling image”7 that can inadvertently alienate communities from their practices, and (3) accept that expressions and receptions of gender (and other personal) identities are inextricable from conditions of race, economics, citizenship status, and other social factors. Such perspectives recognize and prioritize transforming relationships by embracing adaptive intellectual malleability. Transculturation becomes a sociocultural process that is also subsumed in the act of discourse creation.
The terms included in this issue are presented in a polylingual manner to underscore the difference in valence, meaning, and intent of the words. This frame of code-switching invites readers to experience some of the complexity and differences in the conceptualization, process, and execution of folklore as both living tradition and a scholarly practice in transnational Latinx contexts. We are particularly interested in spaces where key terms clash and converge, continuously developing in meaning and impact. These lexical discontinuities and connections, we believe, allow us to look frankly at how US folklore practices in the academy, public sector, and on the ground do and do not speak to each other. In doing this comparative and generative work, this special issue addresses ongoing concerns over the lack of representation, visibility, and voice by folklorists of color in the institutional structures that support the field.
Before furthering this discussion, it is crucial to mention that while this issue seeks to highlight the work and contributions of Latinx folklorists, the work that we do is not done in isolation, but directly engages with the work of multiple fields of study (such as literature, anthropology, history, performance studies, critical race and ethnic studies, gender and queer studies, religious studies, and media studies, among others), theoretical approaches, and with scholarship coming from different racial, ethnic, historical, gender, sexuality, class, and differently abled body experiences and backgrounds. Therefore, it is not possible or correct to encase Latinx folkloristics into one particular niche, as we are in conversation with a diverse body of intellectual interlocutors who aid in strengthening and enriching our work. And this work, in turn, opens additional paths for folklore studies. In addition, we would like to clarify that these interventions do not seek to supplant nor impose themselves onto other ways of unpacking or approaching these terms. Erasing and supplanting is a practice of colonialism, which is the opposite of what we wish to accomplish. What we offer here is an addition, an invitation to incorporate ideas and approaches that are not considered mainstream or part of the canon. The nomenclature provided here serves as a starting point for future conversations.
We would like to dwell in the swell and create a rhetorical space where the processes of mutual influence are acknowledged to be actively at work. We find the metaphor of water, particularly for migrants and legacy migrant communities to the United States, to be affectively engaging, but also a fitting representation of the living, indeed slippery nature of scholarship produced in uncertain, choppy waters. Water is a vehicle of movement, transporting and relocating subjects to, at times, uncertain destinations. It is a conduit for change because it is constantly shifting its state and moving through cycles of liquid to gas or solid. Water has no definite shape but is not regarded as unstable. In its liquid form, it borrows the shape of the container it occupies. As waves in the ocean lap against the shoreline, they change it, carving new contours onto familiar structures. Transcultural affective cartographies illustrate the most apt ways to gauge complex cultural and social terrains that are, like the sea, constantly in motion, and that refute solid barriers or boundaries. By reassessing previous vessels that shaped discursive routes and epistemologies, such as the Enlightenment, this issue of JAF is an invitation to explore alternate waves of thought, and possibly reform the vessels in which our works take shape and flow.
Seaweed: Postcolonial Poetics and Historical Entanglements with the Enlightenment
Much of this special issue is influenced by poetics. This relationship is twofold in that both folklore studies and postcolonial studies develop their reaction, in different ways and to distinct ends, to the Enlightenment through poetics. This section of our introduction briefly parses out the historical entanglements of folklore studies and postcolonial studies with the Enlightenment. As our authors grapple with the ways that nomenclature can both elucidate and occlude the very experiences that they are meant to describe, poetics is at the heart of how to challenge universalizing approaches to meaning, truth, and reality. Working against the current, in the (sea)weeds and on the margins (shores), are all elements that bind the kind of theoretical and embodied world-making that “subjects” of folklore studies and colonial regimes utilize. Indeed, these navigational strategies of creating meaning, place, and personhood illustrate sophisticated and evasive forms of communication that the terminology explored in this issue elucidates.
Folklore's engagement with the Enlightenment is embedded in a complex historical and philosophical context where the field's German ancestors took issue with some aspects of the movement's rationalist determinism. In situating a poetics where the romanticization of the “folk” created a push for nationalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, proto-folklorists like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann Gottfried Herder turned to folk song and the representation of nature as sources for locating an “authentic” German identity (Bendix 1997:42–3). Of note here is the anti-Enlightenment movement Sturm und Drang (storm and desire) that emphasized sentimentality, especially in poetry. Roger D. Abrahams describes Romanticism's influence on folklore studies in this way: “As Romanticism participated in the sentimentalization of the folk, these powerless outsiders (the Celtic bard, the Gypsy dancer or singer, and, in America, the old slave separated from family) were employed as surrogate figures for the antiauthoritarian poet” (1993:4). By eliding the figure of the poet with the noble “Other,” who also represented a link to the land, the Romantics created a palette with which to paint themselves as the “folk” while still maintaining their elite status as communicators and creators of those representations and projections. However, these poets worked with affective drives that acknowledged important aspects of individual and community expression, like desire and wonder, that seemed to be in danger of becoming irrelevant in the face of “pure” reason (Bendix 1997:28–9). The deep roots of Romanticism in folklore studies continue to fuel a vexed and perhaps also productive tension between the pull of both poetry and science in the field.
Postcolonial theorists from the Caribbean also pushed against the Enlightenment's promises and effects in their worlds through poetics that resemble the undertows we are highlighting in this special issue. Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Édouard Glissant provide searing critiques of how the Enlightenment's discourses of reason and universality, which created avenues for freedom for certain populations, reinforce modes of ordering the world that serve to justify the colonialism of other groups (Césaire [1955] 2000; Fanon [1952] 2008; Glissant 1990). The hypocrisy and tenuousness of the relationship between the idea of progress and the act of violent suppression aided by the ideals and justifications born of the Enlightenment are eloquently addressed in Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism. He writes:
My turn to state an equation: colonization = “thingification.” I hear the storm. They talk to me about progress, about ‘achievements,’ diseases cured, improved standards of living. I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out. ([1955] 2000:42–3; emphasis in original)
Historian Robin Kelley aptly characterizes Césaire's counter-discourse as “a poetics of anticolonialism,” one that acts as “a kind of historical prose poem against the realities of colonialism” (2000:17). As such, we see that thingification, the dehumanization of populations deemed unenlightened or un-enlighten-able,8 is not a by-product of this system of thought, but the point. It is interesting that Césaire also uses the image of the storm in shaping his own response to the effects of Enlightenment thinking and actions on colonized populations. Here, the storm sensorially evokes visions of water and wind as rage and resistance to the violence of colonialism in its many guises. Yet, unlike the German Romantics, Césaire clarifies that his critique does not call for an idyllic return: “It is not a dead society that we want to revive. We leave that to those who go in for exoticism” ([1955] 2000:52). Thus, Césaire's poetics is forward-looking, charting a path in unexplored waters. Césaire's Discourse offers us a justifiably outraged and satirical diatribe that reveals the many ways that politics, religion, science, anthropology, and the arts are manipulated to deny humanity to populations of color around the globe.
Folklorists, especially those whose work appears in this special issue where hemispheric and Latinx postcolonial contexts are emphasized, are thus left with a complicated and messy history regarding the Enlightenment (Ivey 2017). As indicated, we inherited several modes of poetics that urge us to look at various ways of knowing that include the senses and sentiment. These epistemologies necessarily ask us to think through the body and through felt observations to create a moral compass that questions and storms against systems of power that render difference as an aberration. Postcolonial poetics as a counter-analytic to the Enlightenment, like Glissant's notion of thinking through “errantry,” allows for “the search for freedom within particular surroundings” (Glissant 1990:20). His conception of how fluidity and rootedness can work together is useful to folklorists as it recognizes broader notions of cultural expressions while still emphasizing the importance of the particular. An errant individual is capable of recognizing the totality of some aspects of culture, history, and art, but also “willingly renounces any claims to sum it up or to possess it” (Glissant 1990:21). Thus, Glissant sees the enormity of human creative expression, and like a great body of water, it cannot be contained or owned. The best way to experience it is to dwell in its currents, its mutable body, its ebb and flow. This creates an opportunity for reflection upon cultural work from a position of deep situatedness. The keyword articles in this issue stem from this place of entanglement and reflexivity.
Notes on Transcultural Possibilities in the Field of American Folklore, or The Shape of Water
The following body of essays has been curated to disrupt recurrent trends in the history of our field. Each piece is structured as a critical meditation on terms familiar in the field of folklore but filtered through a lens of feminist critical inquiry. Each essay derives from the interdisciplinary location of the author to offer a metanarrative of intertextual richness in and of the field of inquiry. Our goal in taking on a Latina feminist methodology through the collaborative editing of this special issue is to temporarily reshape this research vessel to allow for new forms to take shape.
Authors in this issue of JAF draw on scholars and scholarship from across the hemispheric Americas, bound by the shared oceanic and archipelagic seascapes. We invited contributors based on their research and experience. We then asked them to define the term, provide a disciplinary context of its use and principal voices, and speculate key connections with the current field of American folklore studies. In some cases, we invited multiple contributors for the same keyword and asked them to engage in the practice of contrapunteo, which is a traditional verbal art form of playful banter and competition. Each contrapunteo in this issue has a different format based on the creative processes of the contributors. Instead of imposing a homogeneous format, and as a way to reflect the diversity of experiences, writing styles, and ways of conveying knowledge, we encouraged our contributors to experiment with their writing style, so that each could unpack their keyword in their own way. This multiplicity of styles and formats invites the reader into the rich, complex, and fluid nature of knowledge production that is not rooted in Western Enlightenment ideals of order and homogeneity.
This collection foregrounds experiences in and of diasporic traditions, bound by crossing shared waters—oceans, gulfs, rivers, and seas. While our authors understand the inextricable connections between diasporic communities and their transnational networks, this work is meant to speak from a perspective of US Latinx studies as distinct from Latin American studies. This is the work of American folklore. While its depths may seem murky, this body of essays represents an invitation to explore new waters of thought, and possibly re-form the vessels in which our works take shape. Therefore, this issue is not just about providing a theoretical impersonal guide into Latinx folkloristics, but it seeks to offer an experience on how to read, engage, move, and flow. We have provided an order to our keywords based on how they relate and build on each other; however, we also encourage our readers to find their own route and to explore the different ways in which this compilation of keywords flow, merge, and crash into or recede from one another.
We start our journey with “Commemoration.” Building, and departing from, the existing literature on commemoration, Rachel V. González-Martin defines commemoration as “a material and ideological practice of remembering in community” (González-Martin 2022:142–9). González-Martin frames their piece with memory and legends and invites us to think beyond the commemoration performance and to focus on the meaning and importance of commemorative acts. For communities that suffer the violence of white supremacy, acts of remembering and not forgetting become a central feature of survival and resistance. Through commemoration, Latinx communities and other Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities in the United States are able to “recuperate a loss, to piece together a presence by evoking absence.” And in consequence, this process of not forgetting helps to start healing wounds and to, maybe, “transform old bones into new life” (González-Martin 2022:142–9).
In the collaborative keyword essay “Testimonio/Personal Narrative,” Domino Renee Perez and Norma E. Cantú dialogue about the use and value of the Latin American cum Latinx genre of testimonio writings. Parsing out testimonio into conversations of genre, form, and function, the authors weave together a critical conversation about the ways in which people not only witness everyday life but circulate their truths as a force for social good. Utilizing Gerald Vizenor's concept of native “survivance” theory (1998), testimonio advances a concept of a collective “I” that temporally and affectively stretches the boundaries of observational life writing, where social actors use storytelling to advance margins of cultural geographies of difference.
In their thought-provoking and wise contrapunteo focusing on “Documentation,” Selina Morales and Maribel Alvarez generously analyze their experiences in the field of folklore to gift us ten lessons for decolonial documentation. In their “plática” (conversation), Morales and Alvarez highlight the power dynamics associated with documentation, and especially with which stories are collected, how they are told, and by whom they are told. As women of color public folklorists, they share stories of their work among communities of color in the United States and expound on how folklife methodologies can be used as a liberatory tool. At the end, Morales and Alvarez call us to action, and to consider documentation as praxis that can help end inequality and injustice.
In “Campo/Field,” Mintzi Auanda Martínez-Rivera explores the contours of the words “field” and “campo” in relation to the different valences connotated by the latter word. In Spanish, campo can be the countryside or a field of study, depending on the context in which the word is used. The piece situates this continuum of meanings through the notion of fieldwork as a process that creates sites and subjects. Reciprocity and collaboration, as well as their inverse, appropriation and objectification, are historicized within Latinx and BIPOC ethnographic practices in ways that suggest future methodologies based on ethical engagement and reflexivity. The auto-ethnographic reflection offered as an entry into the piece is one powerful example of how this work can be done.
“De Aquí y De Allá: Fluid, Boundless, and Excessive Género” reflects upon the keywords of “Género/Gender/Genre.” As with other keyword essays found in this collection, the Spanish equivalent of the English term holds multiple meanings. Alexandra Sanchez illustrates how the translation of género into both “gender” and “genre” helps to reveal classificatory practices and consequences attached to each sense of the term. This article discusses the taxonomic work of encasing human subjects and modes of expression into categories dependent on racial, cultural, and geographic reductionism. By including feminist Latinx creative practices like altar-making, as well as an overview of the Latinx folklore scholarship that resists classificatory violence, Sanchez also asks us to consider performative and fluid forms of inquiry that open up notions of género as gender and genre.
In Ana-Maurine Lara's “Quír/Queer/Raza/Race. An Auto-Ethnography of Relational Knowledge Production,” the author demonstrates how classificatory etymologies are both fraught and powerful through their development within systems of relational knowledge production. Locating themselves in folklore as a historically marginalized social discourse, they use the medium of auto-ethnographic narrative to unpack the ontological and epistemological premises under which terms like “quír/queer” and “raza/race” have developed academically as rhetorical tools for presencing racialized, classed, and gendered subjects.
We provide two separate works on the terms “Latinx/Latine,” one by Eric Mayer-Garcia and one by Eric César Morales, as contrapunteos, or interconnected discourses held in productive tension. They tackle the polemical subject of naming the diverse communities, nationalities, and races of Latin American origin that reside primarily in the United States. The first contrapunteo, “Latinx: Intersectionality and Genealogies of Third World Feminist Thought,” recognizes the complexity of the geopolitical positioning of terminologies like Latinx and Latine. Mayer-Garcia investigates how the term “Latinx” holds an important historical formation by queer feminists of color that embraces difference as a “a connective tissue and vitalizing force” (Mayer-García 2022:211–9). The piece also weaves insights on cultural identity by Stuart Hall and differential consciousness by Chela Sandoval as a way of navigating how folklore studies, theater, and social activism all contributed to the development of the contexts preceding the use of these terms. “Latinx/Latine. Contrapunteo 2: Embrace the Messiness,” similarly recognizes the limits of both Latinx and Latine in encapsulating the multiplicity of those with Latin American origins. In turning to discussions of linguistic inclusion based on Indigenous and Spanish registers, Morales argues against terminology that has roots, albeit nascent, in settler colonialism. The article encourages academics and cultural workers to accept being productively uncomfortable with the difficult conversations on ethnicity, gender, and sexuality that each term produces.
In the critical essay, “Rekeying Latinx Performance: Gesture, Ancestors, and Community,” Solimar Otero examines the material and ideological boundaries of performance within the context of Latinx critical theory. The author examines how performance is a process of rematerialization, which laminates social and cultural presencing in space and across time as a marker of cultural resilience. Otero points readers to the uses and political disuse of José Esteban Muñoz’ conceptualization of the “ephemeral” to examine where communities and performances understand the boundaries of performances to be—and where performances become refracted across temporalities such as memory, nostalgia, and the forgotten/erased (Muñoz 1999). In this discussion, performances index the play of bodies that are resurrected each time a performance is enacted, qualifying spaces as emergent zones of memory transfer and corporeal resistance.
In a related fashion, Javier Cardona Otero's artist's statement, “Taxonomía/Taxonomy,” remarks upon how the experiences of race, sexuality, and place of origin confound the domesticating work that classification of subjects in the continental United States seeks to do. Combining multiple identities and experiences into their performance piece, Taxonomía of a Spicy Espécimen, Cardona Otero embodies the violence, silencing, and witnessing of being Black, Latino, Queer, and Puerto Rican in the United States. The piece works through Cardona Otero's own artistic process, responses from audiences in multiple countries, and the embodiment of postcolonial forms of resistance offered by Frantz Fanon and Èdouard Glissant. In embracing opacity as a framework for making art that defies categorization, Cardona Otero forces us to examine our own complicit practices of ordering the world.
We also provide a performance review of Taxonomía of a Spicy Espécimen by Solimar Otero that contextualizes the work with regard to other seminal pieces of Latinx performance art. The review draws upon a live performance of the piece on February 4, 2020, that occurred just weeks before the Covid-19 pandemic closed much of the United States. In addition to a critique, it serves as a companion piece to the artist's statement of their work and art-making process.
Conclusion: Sobre las olas y contracorrientes, Over the Waves and Countercurrents
Some people are afraid of the sea, of its expanse, of how while looking calm on the surface, a deadly undertow roils below. But it is precisely in the vast expanse of its mysterious depths that the sea can foster an incredible level of living diversity. It sustains and creates life. It is home. The sea is change, and to survive it demands that we change and adapt to and soar with its waves, its flow, and its unpredictable fluidity. Scholarship grounded in community experiences must be able to sustain the diversity of life living in its depths, and situated phenomena that emerge directly from its unpredictable flows. Like the sea, living scholarship is always changing, moving, and sharing knowledge along its currents and countercurrents, but also adapting, at times destroying, and always fostering the creation of new life. We must flow with the sea; even if we are afraid of the waters, we have to be brave enough and trust that the sea will take us home. This issue is just one current in the vast sea of knowledge. While it does not provide all the answers, it does offer points of departure from which to redirect the stream. This issue of JAF, and the waves of thought within it, serve as forces, linguistic disturbances pulsing from crest to trough, transforming the currents and amplifying the swell of hemispheric folkloristics.
Notes
Anzaldúa (2015). For evidence of the influence of This Bridge Called My Back, see Muñoz’ Disidentifications (1999); Chambers-Leston's After the Party (2018); Gúzman's Gay Hegemony/Latino Homosexualities (2006); and Alexander's Pedagogies of Crossing (2006).
We use the term “Latinx” as an inclusive term to foreground a gender non-binary inclusive perspective in academic discourse. Where relevant, authors will use Latina/o/x/e as they see fit in their individual essays.
See, for example, González's Quinceañera Style (2019); Otero's Archives of Conjure (2020); Otero and Martínez-Rivera's “Introduction: Poder y Cultura” (2017:6–15); Gonzalez-Martin and Perez’ edited volume Race and Cultural Practice (2018); and Otero and Martínez-Rivera's edited volume Theorizing Folklore (2021).
See also Williams’ treatment of feeling in social movements (1977:128–35) and Muñoz’ adoption of feeling in his concept of the “brown commons” (2020).
See Santí’s Ciphers of History (2005:169–218).
See Arroyo's “Transculturation, Syncretism” (2016).
See Collins (2000:69–97).
See Hegel ([1956] 2004:79–102).