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Postcolonial Witnessing argues that the suffering engendered by colonialism needs to be acknowledged more fully, on its own terms, in its own terms, and in relation to traumatic First World histories if trauma theory is to have any hope of redeeming its promise of cross-cultural ethical engagement.

The term “Latinx” has become a site of contention, like “Latino” once was. Our goal is to propose an articulation of Latina/o/x populations through the term Latinx as a site of possibilities, while clarifying its potential use and the reasoning behind it. Rather than seeing the use of Latinx as a trend, or a rupture, in linguistic usage, we see its use as a continuity of internal shifting group dynamics and disciplinary debates. Complicating the argument that the term Latinx is an imperialist imposition on the Spanish language is possible by reclaiming the “x” history of (racial and ethnic) resistance as a marker of nonwhiteness (for example, in Xicana feminism), while turning to the “x” usage by Latin American and Spanish-speaking activists. Latinx foregrounds tensions among self-naming practices and terms that encompass all members of a diverse and complex ethnoracial group: Latinx acts as a new frame of inclusion, while also posing a challenge for those used to having androcentric terms serve as collective representational proxies.

This special issue emerges out of a need to examine how Indigenous migrants from Latin America are transforming notions of Latinidad and indigeneity in the US. The articles gathered in this issue collectively consider how the growing presence of an Indigenous diaspora from Latin America is shifting and raising questions about transnational meanings of race, place, and indigeneity. We have come together to call attention to the ways Indigenous Latinx communities mobilize particular forms of activism and scholarship that require new conceptual framing. As a step in that direction, we propose Critical Latinx Indigeneities as a framework produced through our collective conversations with the contributors to the special issue as well as many other colleagues. Together, we are conceptualizing Critical Latinx Indigeneities as an interdisciplinary analytic that reflects how indigeneity is defined and constructed across multiple countries and at times, across overlapping colonialities. This includes thinking through the colonial legacies at play across the transregions created by Indigenous migration (Jonas and Rodrı́guez 2015). Too many studies of migration collude with the myth that the United States is a nation of immigrants which replicates, even if unwittingly, the settler colonial logic of erasure and elimination of Indigenous peoples. These studies reproduce the discourse of terra nullius whereby occupation and settlement are justified through the myth that the land is vacant of Indigenous people and therefore, a blank slate on which immigrants remake their lives and transnational communities. This discourse (re)produces a logic of elimination that becomes part of a settler commonsense whereby Native Americans are either nonexistent or disappearing. We challenge this view by calling on scholars in Latina/o studies to follow the lead of Asian settler colonialism scholars in Hawai’i (Fujikane and Okamura 2008) by recognizing that im/migrants arrive on the homelands and nations of Indigenous peoples and that this awareness brings with it responsibilities and the possibility of new relationships of tension and solidarity (Aikau 2010; Boj Lopez 2015). Further, we build on the work of Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Okamura (2008) and the Asian settler colonialism scholarship that argues against another extension of the logic of elimination that posits that when Indigenous people migrate, they cease to be Indigenous. Thus, Critical Latinx Indigeneities, as a lens of analysis, understands the co-constitutive relationship of multiple contexts of power and multiple colonialities (Blackwell, this issue) and begins the difficult conversation about the role of Indigenous people who are settlers in the homelands and nations of other Indigenous people.

This article reviews how US deportations ballooned between 1997 and 2012, and underscores how these deportations disproportionately targeted Latino working class men. Building on Mae Ngai’s (2004) concept of racial removal, we describe this recent mass deportation as a gendered racial removal program. Drawing from secondary sources, surveys conducted in Mexico, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security published statistics, and interviews with deportees conducted by the first author in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Brazil and Jamaica, we argue that: (1) deportations have taken on a new course in the aftermath of 9/11 and in the wake of the global economic crisis – involving a shift towards interior enforcement; (2) deportation has become a gendered and racial removal project of the state; and (3) deportations will have lasting consequences with gendered and raced effects here in the United States. We begin by examining the mechanisms of the new deportation regime, showing how it functions, and then examine the legislation and administrative decisions that make it possible. Next, we show the concentration of deportations by nation and gender. Finally, we discuss the causes of this gendered racial removal program, which include the male joblessness crisis since the Great Recession, the War on Terror, and the continued criminalization of Black and Latino men by police authorities.

This essay argues for the centrality and increasing influence of late nineteenth-century US print culture, in the form of printed books, mass-circulation newspapers, and literary magazines, on José Martí’s US-based crónicas (chronicles) that reflect his gradual critical interpretation related to the violence and land dispossession of Indigenous people in the US and their lack of basic rights. Martí’s interest in and writings about US-Indigenous people are connected to the increased advocacy for Native peoples’ rights in US print culture by white reformers, particularly Helen Hunt Jackson. My analysis builds on the works of scholars who have studied Martí’s writings on US-Indigenous people, including his 1887 translation of Jackson’s reform novel, Ramona (2002 [1884]), and draws from Indigenous and Indigeneity scholars’ emphasis on settler colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty. While Martí initially concurred with reformers who advocated for the passing of the Dawes Act of 1887, which offered US citizenship to Native groups who accepted allotment, he came to question US jurisdiction over US-Indigenous populations in part through his realization that Indigenous people and Black people in the South have shared a history of racialization, violence, and disenfranchisement within the confines of the US nation-state.

In 2004, Voces inocentes premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Though the Salvadoran government waged a battle against the film by refusing its production in El Salvador, Voces inocentes brought to the screen an award-winning story with a poignant condemnation of the country’s civil war (1979–1992). Crucially, it was also a story that disrupted the genealogy of representations that Central American migrants have been forced into by US hegemonic media. Focusing on the affective strategies of joy and play that made this film different from others about El Salvador and its peoples, I argue that this film emerges as an important testament to Salvadoran resilience. Notwithstanding the paucity of scholarly work on Voces inocentes , this article urges its recognition as an important cultural product for Salvadorans in the isthmus and in the diaspora.

In this article, I examine a mobilization campaign in Los Angeles meant to legalize street vending and a group of street vendors, known as fruteros, who remained largely outside of it. Based on interviews with fruteros and ethnographic observation at Los Angeles Street Vendor Campaign (LASVC) community meetings and political events, I explain why those with much to gain from the mobilization campaign’s success were notably absent from its development. I argue that the concept of “biographical availability,” central to scholarship on social movements and collective behavior, can be usefully expanded to include a transnational focus when seeking to understand recruitment among first-generation undocumented immigrants. A transnational focus allows us to see the cross-border civic and economic obligations that compromise fruteros’ availability in terms of time, financial resources, and energy. Potential first-generation immigrant recruits can be understood to operate in a transnational context with cross-border constraints that can preclude them from social movement participation in the local context.

This article attends to the objects drifting in the wake of Cuban sea migrations and to the figure of the raft collector who attempts to preserve them. I examine the abject and “makeshift” aesthetics of the raft itself and the public exhibitions during the 1990s that revealed their fraught status as found art objects, maritime refuse, and relics of the dead. From there, I explore connections between the presentation of the rafts in art exhibitions and their re-presentation in literary work by Cuban American writer Achy Obejas. Ultimately, I argue that the rafts’ failed potential as sites of public memorial results from their abject proximity to death, which threatens the preexisting social order of the exile community. I suggest that Obejas’s fiction rewrites the fraught history of the Cuban raft through an act of literary memorial that harnesses abjection’s creative possibility. Resumen Este artículo atiende los objetos que flotan en la estela de las migraciones cubanas por mar y a la figura del coleccionista de balsas que intenta preservarlos. Examino la estética abyecta e improvisada de la balsa en sí y las exhibiciones públicas durante la década de 1990 que revelaron su difícil condición como objetos de arte encontrados, desechos marítimos y reliquias de los muertos. De ahí paso a explorar las conexiones entre la presentación de las balsas en exposiciones de arte y su subsiguiente presentación en la obra literaria de la escritora cubana Achy Obejas. Por último, argumento que el potencial fallido de las balsas como monumentos públicos es producto de su proximidad abyecta a la muerte, que amenaza el orden social preexistente de la comunidad exiliada. Sugiero que la ficción de Obejas rescribe la tensa historia de las balsas cubanas en un acto de conmemoración literaria que aprovecha la posibilidad creativa de la abyección.

Political discourse leading up to the 2020 US presidential election was overwhelmingly negative in its characterization of Latiné immigrant-origin communities. In this qualitative study, we employed critical civic empathy (Mirra, Educating for empathy: Literacy learning and civic engagement, Teachers College Press, New York, 2018) as an analytic framework to explore how Latiné immigrant-origin young adult citizens engaged in civic life amid divisive rhetoric targeting their communities. Findings suggest that, first, our participants recognized the privilege their legal status carries; second, their witness to the experiences of less privileged community members fostered empathy; and, finally, their commitment to justice spurred action. We conclude with recommendations for preparing more youth for civic engagement.