Not only has the word “Latin” migrated northward but, historically speaking, so have multiethnic racialized subjects. Latining America: Black-Brown Passages and the Coloring of Latino/a Studies examines how multidirectional processes of Latinness travel, break, and alter at the level of meaning, geographies, and peoples. Through a Latin, Latin-American, Latino, and Latina triangulation, I seek to chart a different but coeval path and lexicon for how cultural signifiers for the U.S. Latino or Latina have been accessed by an unexpected circle of Latin participants: U.S. African Americans and “problematic” subgroups like Central Americans.¹ No theoretical language or sustained academic endeavor in...

This chapter delves into the challenges and contradictions that emanate from U.S. African American, Latino, and Latina boundaries in discourses of the U.S. South and its place across an untrammeled Global South. I trace the articulation of these identifications and differences in a twofold manner: (1) seemingly intact ethnoracial bodies tied to specific landscapes and (2) the distinct means and extensive array through which southernness and Latinness run out of their “naturalized,” confined spaces. The exigencies that arise as these proliferating bodies open up to Latinities and encounter the limits of the fields that examine the southern, the black, the...

If the reader has accompanied me through chapter 1, it should by now become apparent that this project is observant of cross-cultural, passing acquaintances. My topic of study pursues altering scripts of working ambiguities that involve coming to, getting to, or turning to a new appreciation for quotidian attributes of arriving at Latinities from conflicting geographies and alternative entryways. I inquire into “Passing Latinities” through what William Anthony Nericcio has devised as “‘miscegenated’ semantic oddities” that codify not just brown folk but black folk too (2007: 16). This blackbrown point of intersection reorients black-white passages beyond this dualdirectional schema and...

The previous two chapters touched on the copious Latined elements in the casting and negotiation of blackness and brownness. A black-brown reprisal follows, extending the ways that bodies exist beyond the boundaries and discourses that subject them. This chapter attends to Latino and Latina articulations of and adjustments to configurations of dark brownness and blackness, which get subsumed under a U.S. semiotic of amalgamated brownness. But U.S. Latino and Latina brownness, as a system of ethnoracial and cultural referentiality, is not in gridlock. It houses the corresponding colorings of dark brownness (lo prieto) and blackness (lo negro)—a portfolio that...

Up to this point this volume has demonstrated a link in the semiotic lines of race, culture, movement, and geography. These markers have been scrutinized in ways that exceed the black-white and brown-white dyad, centering on the interchangeable and unsettled presence of blackness, brownness, and dark brownness. I have explored these concerns through the grids of the U.S. Southwest and Southeast (chapter 1); South-South black-brown reciprocal Latin passages in Central America, Mexico, and Cuba (chapter 2); North-South dynamics of problematic blackness through brownness and dark brownness (chapter 3); and now through Central America as an intellectually unmappable South in Latino/a...

Latining America: Black-Brown Passages and the Coloring of Latino/a Studies has endeavored through the economies of blackness, brownness, and dark brownness. These colorings have marked the necessity for an au courant set of questions and language, as these interrelated Latinities have resonances within and beyond Latino, Latina, and African American domains. Latinoness, Latinaness, and African Americanness are not for “members of the club” only. Their residues and sojourns provide a critical energy for new articulations, signs, color lines, and assemblages of bodies that pass through the apodictic character of U.S. Latino and Latina brownness and dark brownness as well as...