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Reimagining US Colombianidades: Transnational subjectivities, cultural expressions, and political contestations

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  • 28 September 2020

    Due to an unfortunate oversight a mistake occured in the reference section.

Notes

  1. We note here the strong critiques of the show’s privileging of Latina/o/x whiteness that quickly emerged from Latina scholars, such as Petra Rivera-Rideau (2020), who questioned the effectiveness of the artists’ calls for Latina/o/x unity within a context in which only a small fraction of the community was racially represented, and Zaire Dinzey-Flores (2020), who stated, “I’d suggest that the performance exhibits the seduction of whiteness and the continual ability for non-Black Latinas/os/xs to imagine a world where Blackness is part and parcel of their community and not a root or influence.”

  2. “Costeño, “costeña” or the less commonly used “costeñx” are the colloquial referents for the natives of Colombia’s northern Caribbean coast, popularly known as “La Costa.” We assert here as well as later on in this introduction that the need to familiarize oneself with the specificities of Colombian regionalisms in order to fully capture the subtleties of Shakira’s performance highlights the saliency of regionalized perspectives within studies of transnational Colombian culture. Moreover, by designating Shakira’s performance as more subdued, we do not wish to suggest that Shakira’s performative choices were somehow less “political,” but rather that they were more coded and therefore ostensibly less recognizable to non-Colombian viewers. For a distinctly US Colombiana perspective on the show, see Varela Rodríguez (2020).

  3. We use “US Colombian” and not “Colombian American” because we agree with scholars who have pointed out that adding “American” to the nation of origin or region (i.e., Colombian American or Central American American) plays into the US co-optation of the term “American” and because it is also redundant, since Colombia is in the Americas (Oboler 1995; Gruesz 2007).

  4. Shakira thus constitutes a vivid example of how, as Jesús Estrada asserts, hypervisibility frequently decontextualizes Latina bodies (Jesús Estrada, personal communication with María Elena Cepeda, 3 May 2020). Moreover, Shakira is best understood as a diasporic subject two times over (Cepeda 2003, 2010): she is the daughter of two migrants and a migrant herself, a specific positionality frequently witnessed in Colombia’s Caribbean port cities, yet one that may also go mis- or unrecognized in studies of US Colombianidades that fail to account for regional and transnational perspectives.

  5. Falconi and Mazzotti’s edited book The Other Latinos: Central and South Americans in the United States 2008) similarly includes only brief data on Colombians in the United States. Other scholars have attended to US Colombians under the framework of US South American studies (Oboler 2005a, b, and Heredia 2013, 2018). A more robust development of US South American studies remains to be developed in Latina/o/x studies, and our hope is that our study of US Colombians will further the development of this national-origin subfield and of a regional US South American subfield.

  6. As LaRosa and Mejía note in their commentary on Colombians abroad, we should consider this figure while keeping in mind that, in other highly populated South American nations such as Argentina, a little more than one million citizens live abroad, or roughly 2% of Argentina’s forty-four million residents. For further comparison, only slightly more than 2% of US residents live outside the nation’s political boundaries (LaRosa and Mejía 2017, p. 215).

  7. See Cepeda (2010) and Ochoa Camacho (2016) for further discussion of this persistent undercounting and its attendant consequences. Cepeda (2010) and Ochoa Camacho (2016) rely on various sources for their data because errors in the US Census have repeatedly resulted in a very inaccurate count of the US Colombian population. Unfortunately, the 2010 US Census and more recent studies, such as those released by the PEW Research Center (2017, 2019) and the Migration Policy Institute (2015, 2017, 2018), still appear to underestimate the number of US Colombians. For a comprehensive wave-based overview of Colombian migration to the United States, see Cepeda (2010).

  8. US Colombianas also have starring roles in the new versions of West Side Story: Yesenia Ayla is playing Anita in the Broadway revival, while Rachel Zegler will play Maria in the Hollywood remake.

  9. For comprehensive, English-language monographs analyzing the Colombian conflict, US-Colombian relations, and contemporary Colombian history in general, see Appelbaum (2003), Bergquist et al. (2001), Bushnell (1993), Farnsworth-Alvear et al. (2017), LaRosa and Mejía (2017), López-Pedreros (2019), Palacios (2006), Paternostro (1998, 2007), Rappaport (1990), Roldán (2002), Safford and Palacios (2001), Stanfield (2013), and Wade (1993, 2000).

  10. This translates into nearly 15,000 civilian deaths at the hands of paramilitary groups at the height of the violence between 1988 and 2003. By 2009, the number of political murders in Colombia had exceeded those of any overt Latin American dictatorship (Hristov 2009).

  11. In 2017, the Trump government threatened to decertify Colombia, effectively placing the country on a black list of nations not deemed to be combating the global drug trade effectively enough. Under decertification, a country forfeits all US foreign aid not directly tied to anti-narcotics measures. In the case of Colombia, this would entail ceasing all aid related to the 2016 peace accords. The Trump administration has also supported a return to aerial fumigation and forced eradication such as deployed under Plan Colombia, despite their well-documented negative impacts.

  12. Although we cite these statistics, we recognize that they are not necessarily an entirely accurate reflection of how Colombians not claiming indigenous or Afro-diasporic identities are racialized on the ground, both in Latin America and within the diaspora.

  13. BRA Research Division and the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Advancement, “Imagine All the People: Colombians,” 2016, accessed 9 January 2020. http://www.bostonplans.org/getattachment/5facd1a3-2ec2-4e59-ac33-995cd365a6e0. The authors use data from the 2009–2013 American Community Survey.

  14. For more on examining Latina/o/x spaces that go beyond contiguous barrio concentrations, see Mike Davis, Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US Big City (New York: Verso, 2001) and Johana Londoño, Abstract Barrios: The Crises of Latinx Visibility in Cities (2020).

  15. This is true of illicit subjects deemed unlikable or unsavory, like the drug trafficker and the coyote/human smuggler, as well as middle- and upper-class Latina/o/xs, who are often accused of being “sellouts” for being economically privileged. For studies of middle-class Latina/o/xs, see Elda María Román’s Race and Upward Mobility (2017) and Jody Agius Vallejo’s Barrio to Burbs (2012). Shakira, an elite migrant, is also often thought of as a Latin American rather than a Latina, in part because of her class status, light-skinned privilege, and the unclear temporality of when a Latin American migrant becomes “Latina/o/x” (Cepeda 2010).

  16. Although we are reminded of García-Peña’s focus on the contradictory dictions, or “contradictions” as she writes it, that produce Dominican subjectivities, spaces, and ethnoracial identifications from the top-down and bottom-up and across spaces, we find it necessary to pair Colombianidades with “US” to underscore the paucity of research on Colombian migrants in the United States and to include the “es” to emphasize the plurality of the term (García-Peña 2016, p. 1).

  17. In her study, Frances Aparicio (2019) interviews a “ChileanColombian,” an “IrishMexiColombian,” and “MexiColombians” in Chicago. She even opens her introduction by citing US Colombian Cuban writers Grisel Acosta and Daisy Hernández, formally embodying in her scholarship what we see as the central importance of US Colombianidades for Latina/o/x studies. Unlike Aparicio, we choose to separate the names of countries and include “US” when we designate national origin for ease of reading.

  18. Among others, see Claudia Milian’s LatinX (2019) and the 2017 special issue of Cultural Dynamics on the term Latinx; for a US Colombiana take on “Latinx,” see Patricia Engel’s article “On Naming Ourselves, or: When I Was a Spic,” in the same special issue.

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Acknowledgements

Muchísimas gracias to the participants of the October 2017 symposium on US Colombianidades at Williams College and subsequent panels at the Latina/o Studies and American Studies Association gatherings. This special issue is dedicated to these individuals as well as to future scholars of the US Colombian diaspora.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Framingham State University, Framingham, USA

    Lina Rincón

  2. University at Albany, SUNY, Albany, USA

    Johana Londoño

  3. Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, USA

    Jennifer Harford Vargas

  4. Williams College, Williamstown, USA

    María Elena Cepeda

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  1. Lina Rincón
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  2. Johana Londoño
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  3. Jennifer Harford Vargas
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  4. María Elena Cepeda
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Correspondence to Lina Rincón.

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Rincón, L., Londoño, J., Harford Vargas, J. et al. Reimagining US Colombianidades: Transnational subjectivities, cultural expressions, and political contestations. Lat Stud 18, 301–325 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-020-00271-7

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