Beyond Empire: Latinidades, Borders, and the Unmaking of US Exceptionalism

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

This panel interrogates the very logics of US imperialism by tending to the contradictory ways in which the making of “illegal” Latinidad is challenged, contested, and even dismantled all together to give into other possibilities of belonging and connection beyond the technologies of citizenship of the US empire. As such, the papers assembled here attend to the haptic, the affective, the embodied, the aural, and the pedagogical to question the very tenets on which the discourse, practice, and effect of US Exceptionalism rest on, considering the current world stage in which citizenship turns more into a commodity for purchase than as a protection against the legacies of colonialism, indenture, and exploitation.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Insurgent Life/Afterlife - Sharada Balachandran, University of Maryland-College Park

• ChicanoFest 2023: The Deportation of Cholos and the Reproduction of an American Identity in Guadalajara - Perla M Guerrero, University of Maryland-College Park

• The Jotería of LatinMex Masculinities: Queer Norteño Aesthetics in the Borderlands - Manuel R. Cuellar, George Washington University

Chair

• David Tenorio, University of Pittsburgh

Comment

• Perla M Guerrero, University of Maryland-College Park

Biographical Information

Sharada Balachandran Orihuela is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her first book, Fugitives, Smugglers, and Thieves: Piracy and Personhood in Hemispheric American Literature (UNC Press, 2018), examines depictions of illegal trade and makes them prominent in the analysis of American literature and in the construction of minoritarian racial, national, and gendered identities in the US. She is currently at work on her next book-length monograph, which will examine narconarratives, and the international discourse on terrorism and drug prohibition in contemporary literature of the Americas. Her articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in or are forthcoming in Comparative Literary Studies, the Journal of American Studies, Arizona Quarterly, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, the Routledge Companion to Literature & Economics, Early American Literature, American Literary History, Environmental Communication, MELUS, and e-misférica.

Perla M. Guerrero is Associate Professor of American Studies and U.S. Latina/o Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research and teaching interests include relational race and ethnicity with a focus on Latinxs and Asian Americans, space and place, immigration and deportation, labor, and U.S. and Mexican history. She has received multiple awards including a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship and two from the Smithsonian Institution to be a Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Museum of American History (NMAH) to work on her book, Nuevo South: Latina/os, Asians, and Remaking of Place. She’s currently working on her second book, Deportation’s Aftermath: Displacement and Making a Life in Exile, which seeks to understand what happens to different kinds of people after repatriation and the ways in which U.S.-based inequality is reproduced in Mexico.

Manuel Ricardo Cuellar is associate professor of Latin American and Latinx literatures and cultures in the Department of Romance, German, and Slavic Languages and Literatures (RGSLL) at The George Washington University. His research primarily engages questions of performance, especially as they concern dance, indigeneity, and Afro-mestizo imaginaries in Mexico, combining ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and studies of contemporary and classical Nahuatl, Mexico’s most widely spoken and written Indigenous language. Cuellar’s strong background in Mexican traditional dance has led him to explore dance’s role in Mexican national identity, indigeneity, and queerness in Mexico and the United States. His work has appeared in Performance Research, A Contracorriente, Mexican Transnational Cinema and Literature, Ethnohistory, and Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. He is the author of Choreographing Mexico: Festive Performances and Dancing Histories of a Nation (UT Press 2022), winner of the 2023 de la Torre Bueno First Book Award by the Dance Studies Association.

David Tenorio is Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and a faculty affiliate to the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program, the Graduate Program in Cultural Studies, the Center for Ethnic Studies Research, and the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. David is the author of Queer Relajo: Feeling the Nightscapes of Mexicanidad (University of Michigan Press, 2025). At the intersection of Latinx and Latin American cultural studies, transnational feminisms, trans/queer studies, new materialisms and digital humanities, David’s transdisciplinary work examines trans/queer nightlife performance in the Americas, particularly in Mexico, the Caribbean, and the US, and appears in Transmodernity, Lateral, Revista Conjunto, Hispanic Review, Latin American Theater Review, Centro Journal, Chasqui, Revista de Literatura Mexicana Contemporánea, Revista Conjunto, The Global Encyclopedia of LGBT History, A Contracorriente, The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, The Routledge Companion to Gender and Affect and Cuban Studies. David has been a cofacilitator of digital storytelling workshops in Cuba, Mexico, and the U.S. and part of the digital storytelling projects Sexualidades campesinas and Queer Utopias, and also served as Co-Chair of LASA’s Sexualities Section, a Newsletter Editor for the Caribbean Studies Association, as well as executive member of the Cuban and Cuban Diasporic Forum for the Modern Languages Association.