Introduction

      Santa Anna’s Wooden Leg and Other Things about the Chicanx Body; or, What Are We Really Talking about When We Talk about Chicanx Literature?

      You know, you have a lot of academics and you have a lot of politicians, and you have a lot of people sitting around saying, there’s no such thing as a Latino identity. And then … you look around and you’re like, “Nah that’s nonsense.” I think that I belong, and you all belong, to a moment when our community is knitting a larger identity in a really interesting and nuanced way. It completely escapes the politicians and the intellectuals.

      —Junot Díaz

      In conversation with hosts Felix Contreras and Jasmine Garsd on NPR’s music podcast alt.Latino, Junot Díaz, a Dominican American author, argues that despite diversities of class, race, and geography, there is still a tie that binds US Latinxs. That was not the case in the 1980s, he continues, when he was growing up listening to primarily English-language hip-hop. In 2016, Díaz marvels, his young goddaughters have plenty of Spanish-language music in their collections and feel free to embrace the salsa, merengue, and bachata upon which Díaz and his friends turned their backs in their youth.

      For Díaz this is a sign of something that politicians and intellectuals cannot see, something that transcends market shares and voting blocs. To those, for example, who would argue that a Cuban American politician from Florida could never speak to the concerns of, let alone be embraced by, Chicanx activists in the Southwest, Díaz presents the language of music and the intangible filiations it conjures.1 There is something that unites us all, Díaz asserts, even though Latinxs come from many different places. But what is this thing that evades the intellectual’s grasp? What does nuanced knitting entail, and what is Díaz referring to when he talks about “identity”? What, most importantly, are the stakes of, and what role do the arts play in, pulling “identity” together?

      These questions motivate Racial Immanence. In the following chapters I explore what it means to talk about Chicanx literature in a political and intellectual climate that minimizes at the same time it dangerously maximizes the value of human difference. Despite increasingly visible state violence against people of color as we move further into the twenty-first century, many still believe that the election of an African American president in 2008 heralded the dawn of a post-racial United States, a belief the US Supreme Court reinforced in Shelby County v. Holder (2013). “Our country has changed,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority opinion for that case (Roberts).2 Critical theory has changed, too. Having confronted the internal contradictions of humanism, scholars now explore the posthuman. The planetary consciousness of the anthropocene, cyborgs, technoculture, and the formal utopias of object-oriented ontology are all philosophical domains where race, ethnicity, and inequality appear to have little purchase.

      Alongside these political and intellectual attempts to render raced bodies invisible or insignificant, the number of Latinx bodies in the United States has been steadily increasing. In 2014 Latinxs accounted for 17.3 percent of the total US population, compared to just 6.5 percent in 1980 (Stepler and Brown). Latinxs are currently the largest minority group in the United States, and by 2060 the US Census Bureau expects Latinxs to make up 28.6 percent of the total US population (US Census Bureau). This population growth, moreover, has since the early 2000s been fueled more by US births than by immigration, inflammatory rhetoric notwithstanding. Latinxs are a constitutive and increasingly unavoidable segment of the US population,