This chapter reads presentations of maternal loss and infanticide in colonial and contemporary texts to demonstrate how kinship and structures of feeling can expand a potential Latinx archive beyond the borders and timeframes of the US nation-state. It looks to La Llorona, a ghost of Latin American and Latinx legend, to bring two bodies of texts and temporal moments into contact: (1) Chicanx works from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that look to the colonial past, and (2) early modern codices and colonial documents that reach towards an uncertain future. This chapter does not suggest that these two periods meet seamlessly. Instead, it shows how present-day texts and authors who engage La Llorona’s past wrestle with the historical specificity of Mesoamerican codices and colonial documents that present their own timelines and hopes for the future. Ultimately, this chapter contends that La Llorona’s past demands attention to historical loss and discontinuity. La Llorona helps reveal the productive possibilities of a Latinx archive that emphasizes affiliation rather than origins, one best based on resonance and irresolution.

This chapter “listens in detail” to hybrid Latinx literary forms, including drama and spoken word poetry, as they respond to neoliberal anti-immigrant policy, whiteness, and homophobia from 1992 to our current global pandemic moment. The chapter registers how Latinx literature turns to hybrid texts that perform sound (language, accents, music), utilizing the sonic an agentive site to respond to neoliberal constructions of citizenship and to articulate new forms of belonging. Josefina López’s play Detained in the Desert (2010) shows the affective experiences of a second-generation Chicana tuning into border language, Spanish-language radio, and musical soundscapes to resist the racist and sexist profiling of her body in the aftermath of Arizona’s SB 1070. Tanya Saracho’s El Nogalar (2013) demonstrates how Latinx border communities wield silence as a strategy to survive narcoviolence. Virginia Grise’s Your Healing Is Killing (2021) amplifies the intersectional and structural traumas that shape BIPOC communities’ access to health care. These inequities speak to the continued need for collective self-care.

This chapter argues that the terms “Latinx” and “latinidad” are messy signifiers that allow us to contend with Latinx’s complicated racial history. While the term Latinx continues to be controversial, and scholars such as Tatiana Flores have examined the case for cancelling latinidad, “Racing Latinidad” points to how latinidad can signify particular political commitments and affinities. Through readings of Manuel Muñoz’s What You See in the Dark (2011) and Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa’s Daughters of the Stone (2009), this chapter illuminates how excavating racial histories outside the logic of the state is a way to summon a politics to imagine a people. Within this framework, “Racing Latinidad” ultimately argues for embracing the incoherence of latinidad as term that resists legibility and visibility and thus institutionalization and state management.

In this essay, I show how Chicanx and Latinx writing critiques assimilation sociology for failing to account for histories of racialization that defy the telos of integration and harmonious coexistence. In addition, a range of Latinx writing demonstrates a different blind spot in assimilation sociology: namely, the way it neglects the inextricability of gender and sexuality from cultural identity. Finally, as I show in the concluding section, Latinx writing encourages us to attend to the role of the state in facilitating or impeding the integration of immigrant and racialized groups. In the last thirty years, immigration policy has been a particular, often violent obstacle for the integration of Latinx migrants, resulting in a situation where many migrants paradoxically assimilate without being assimilated. Assimilation sociology was once a discourse centering primarily on cultural citizenship, but in the absence of legal citizenship, contemporary Latinx writing suggests that cultural citizenship is not enough.