Sexuality, Conflict, Community: Towards a Latine History of the Present

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

How can we write histories of the Latine community that are usable for our present? Over the last several decades, scholars from a wide range of fields–literary critics, historians, anthropologists, postcolonial scholars–have all unpacked Foucault’s aim of writing a history of the present. A history of the present is one in which the past is (re)narrated in order to critically examine power dynamics and social practices in the current moment. They serve to inspire our present by allowing us to imagine different origins, different stories of how we came to be. Simultaneously, historians–not just those working in the discipline of history but also those in the humanities and oppositional studies (e.g., ethnic studies, gender & queer studies, Marxist)--have pivoted from the dominant mode of social history with its traditional focus on class and social structures. Instead, they’ve moved to address different though not unrelated concerns: the making of intimacies, the affective language of belonging, and the circulation of ideas.

Addressing both of these concerns, this panel sets out to answer two questions: why do we engage in the particular kind of history that we do, and how might this kind of history yield a different way of understanding our present? The panelists will each address these questions by turning to their current archival research on nineteenth-century Latine history. Raúl Coronado turns to the buried intellectual history of the pueblo in order to reinvigorate our sense of belonging in our current moment. Bernadine Hernandez tracks the scandalous case of seduction and sexual morality in nineteenth-century California. Citlali Sosa-Riddell examines the heated political debates of Civil War-era Los Angeles to demonstrate how the Mexicans of California drew on Hispanic notions of ethnicity and belonging that often were misunderstood, misinterpreted, or simply maligned by Anglo Californians.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Flirting with Capital: Sexual Mores, the Discourse of Equality, and Seduction in the Nineteenth-Century California Newspaper "El Clamor Publico" - Bernadine Hernandez, University of New Mexico-Main Campus

• Understanding Mexican-American Intellectual Differences in the Age of Civil Wars - Citlali Lucia Sosa-Riddell, California State University, San Marcos

• The Spanish-Mexican Intellectual History of the Pueblo: A Usable Past - Raul Coronado, UC Berkeley

Chair

• Munia Bhaumik, UCLA

Biographical Information

Raúl Coronado
Raúl Coronado is an intellectual and literary historian and associate professor of English, Spanish and Portuguese, and Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. His first book, A World Not to Come: A History of Writing and Print Culture (Harvard), received seven prizes including the American Studies Association's John Hope Franklin Prize for Best Book in American Studies and the Modern Language Association's Best First Book Prize. The inaugural president of the Latina/o Studies Association and inaugural executive committee member of the MLA’s Latina and Latino Literature Forum, Coronado has received international and national funding support, including most recently as a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellow and as the Robert C. Ritchie Distinguished Fellow in Early American History at the Huntington Library. His current project is on the history of the Latinx self from the 1780s to the 1880s.


Bernadine Hernández
Dr. Bernadine Hernández is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of New Mexico. She specializes in transnational feminism and sexual economies of the US-Mexico borderlands, along with American Literary Studies and Empire, border and migration history, Marxist theory, and Chicana/Latina Literature and Sexualities. Dr. Hernández’s 2022 book Border Bodies: Racialized Sexuality, Sexual Capital, and Violence in the Nineteenth Century Borderlands (UNC Press) has won the 2024 NACCS (National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies) Book of the Year Award, the 2024 AAHHE (American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education) Book of the Year Award, and the 2023 Honorable Mention for the NWSA (National Women’s Studies Association) Gloría Anzaldúa Book Award. She is also the co-editor of the first edited collection on Ana Castillo titled New Transnational Chicanx Perspectives on Ana Castillo, published with University of Pittsburg Press in Spring 2021. Her other publications appear in Comparative Literature and Culture, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Women’s Studies Quarterly, among others.

She is also a public facing scholar and works with the artist and writer collective fronteristxs, a collective of artists and writers in New Mexico working to end migrant detention and abolish the prison industrial complex through creative activism. Fronteristxs provides free political education for community and youth throughout New Mexico on transformative justice and abolition. She sits on the City of Albuquerque Public Arts Board and the Working Classroom Board. (233 words)


Citlali Sosa-Riddell
Dr. Citlali Sosa-Riddell is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the California State University at San Marcos. She specializes in the ideas of both U.S. and Mexican thought in the 19th century, along with Ethnic Studies, borderlands history, and post-colonial race and ideology. Dr. Sosa-Riddell is currently working on her book project tentatively titled, Californios and Mexicans Intellectual and Racial Thought; 1850-1880. She is also regularly engaged on her podcast, The Discursive Power of Rock en Español and the Desire for Democracy, a project focusing on the Latin American and Latino rock en español music and the musicians and fans who fight for democracy across the Americas.