A Politics to Conjure a People

Carmen E. Lamas reviews Renee Hudson’s “Latinx Revolutionary Horizons: Form and Futurity in the Americas.”

By Carmen E. LamasSeptember 25, 2024

• Nonfiction

• Cultural Studies

RENEE HUDSON’S NEW BOOK Latinx Revolutionary Horizons: Form and Futurity in the Americas begins by proclaiming that “latinidad is cancelled.” Hudson is referencing a popular meme/artwork/social project by Alán Peláez López as well as recent scholarship claiming that, at its very origins, latinidad is white supremacist and must be canceled—an argument I’ll unpack shortly—and she turns this polemic into an urgent, perhaps even reparative series of cascading questions: Can latinidad be salvaged from its violent and genocidal origins? For what purpose? And for whom?

Hudson’s answer to this foundational question is an emphatic yes, positing that “the complexities of latinidad are not reducible to cancellation.” One need only read Latinx literature transhistorically and transgeographically to see such vital complexities, in which Hudson recovers for us a liberatory potential pulsating at the heart of latinidad—a potential emergent in spite of and even because of the concept’s racist and imperialist origins. The key, for Hudson, is to turn our gaze to the figure of revolution as it manifests in this unruly and diverse canon.

Latinidad is indeed a complex term. In Latin America, it emerged when criollos—Spaniards born in the Spanish Americas—were driven to create their own national identity after winning independence from Spain in the early 19th century. This identity cohered around the conception of the nation-state, one in which people became Mexican, Argentinian, Chilean. This form of latinidad explicitly excluded Indigenous and Afro diasporic peoples from the national imaginary, or else only included them in a romanticized fashion—the “indio” becoming part of a mythic Aztec or Inca legacy rather than a recognized, “real” presence in Latin America. Latinidad was also fashioned, in various ways, in the United States, the only recently historically emergent borders of which “claimed” Latinx peoples who had been living there long before US colonization and political rule: Californios, Nuevomexicanos, and Tejanos. (Tejanos crossed no border but were themselves crossed and circumscribed by the borders invented with the resolution of the US-Mexico War of 1848, when the United States stole over half of Mexico’s land—land already stolen by the Spaniards from the many Indigenous peoples in the region.)

Latinx is a term that brings all these various concepts and sources of latinidad together. It is a central concern of Hudson’s book. But along with its promise to unify the inchoate agglomeration of geography, struggle, and politics, one locates in the term, too, a central problem: how to make, out of many, one?

Adapting Jacques Derrida’s theorization of revolution as an event that punctures and exceeds the possibilities of what would emerge from the revolutionary event itself, Hudson explores the various ways depictions of revolution in Latinx literature pierce the possible, fomenting a variety of realizable Latinx revolutionary horizons. The “x” in Latinx embodies these horizons, she argues, if read as a “metaphorical piercing” that allows readers of contemporary Latinx literature to imagine an alternative politics, one that includes the Indigenous and Afro-Latinx people and cultures cleaved from traditional conceptions of latinidad. Rather than a mere textual or literary phenomenon (though Hudson argues revolutionary horizons are themselves constitutive of Latinx literary works representing revolutions), these horizons also constitute a methodology—“a hemispheric project in which contemporary Latinx authors return to earlier moments of revolution to theorize a liberatory latinidad that is not yet here,” but which is possible, nascent, on the cusp of arriving.

Hudson is right that revolutions constantly erupt into Latinx literature. Across genres, Latinx literature repeatedly narrates the many historical revolutions in Latin America and the United States—ruptures and apertures that fill the metaphorical and representative landscape of a literary latinidad. Those revolutions enter these texts, Hudson argues, because Latinx literature is “preoccupied by history.” To prove her point, she provides a list of examples with a wide geographic and temporal range. The second French invasion of Mexico (1861–67) is present in Who Would Have Thought It? (1872) by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton (1832–95), and Caramelo (2002) by Sandra Cisneros. The homosociality necessary for revolution and found in Noli Me Tángere (1887) and El Filibusterismo (1891), novels by the father of Filipino independence, José Rizal (1861–96), also enters Ninotchka Rosca’s State of War (1988) and Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters (1990) as they represent and interrogate the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship and the People Power Revolution (1986). The Afro-Dominicana Salomé Ureña (1850–97), considered the 19th-century poet of Dominican independence, frequently appears as a citation or presence in contemporary Dominican American works depicting Rafael Leónidas Trujillo’s dictatorship (1930–61) and its impact on contemporary diasporic communities via its disavowal of Blackness, as narrated by Julia Alvarez in In the Name of Salomé (2000) and Junot Díaz in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). The failed Cuban Ten Years’ War (1868–78) for independence is foretold by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda in her abolitionist novel Sab (1841), just as it is when we read her diary alongside her novel, and it is revisited nearly two centuries later in Monkey Hunting (2007), Cristina García’s retelling of Miguel Barnet’s Biography of a Runaway Slave (1966), each of them putting pressure, directly and indirectly, on the raceless society that the agents of the Cuban Revolution (1952–59) claimed to have created. Finally, the countless Black revolutions that erupted in the Caribbean before the Ten Years’ War and the many revolutions that occurred in the Latin American 19h-century postindependence period course through Martin R. Delaney’s Blake; or the Huts of America (1859–62) and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991), even while the authors of these novels are not themselves Latinx.

In reading these disparate works, Hudson regularly pairs contemporary Latinx literature with what can properly be described as canonical 19th-century writings. A pattern emerges in these transhistorical and transgeographic pairings: each bears witness to a Latinx revolutionary consciousness, a Latinx revolutionary pedagogy, and Latinx revolutionary imaginaries. Combined, these three dimensions “illuminate” the political potential articulated in the novels. Hudson contends that a pedagogy percolates through them, compelling the reader to imagine a new and more inclusive political future for the Americas. This future, she argues, transcends the nation-state’s long-historical use of violence and ideological exclusion to police the boundaries that give it identity and destiny, generating a form of belonging predicated on the exploitation and exclusion of “undesirables” deemed unfit for the nation’s imagined ideal: whiteness. Seeing (and themselves living) these histories, Hudson claims, readers are made aware of their own construction as racialized subjects, as well as their participation in the racialization of others. And these moments of self-recognition can, in turn, trigger a revolution: a new way of thinking about one’s place in society that transcends the nation-state, the self-perpetuating ideology of white supremacy, and the violence and limitation it places on all subjects marked inside and outside its imagined borders. Might this revolutionary consciousness hold within it a different future—and a different society to organize it? Are we, as readers, up to the task?

Hudson begins her analysis with Ruiz de Burton, who penned the first Latinx novel written in English, Who Would Have Thought It? When the book’s protagonist, Lola Medina, the daughter of a Mexican woman, is rescued from her Mohave captors by Massachusetts geographer Dr. Norval, her skin has been dyed black. As the novel progresses, Lola’s dye fades, revealing a whiteness paler than that of the New England women who racialize and torment her. Lola ultimately marries Dr. Norval’s son, Julian, and they return to Mexico at the end of the novel to live happily ever after. Of course, the racist dimension of this narrative is clear: Lola’s journey to whiteness ends in romance and happiness. Yet, Hudson pushes her reader to recognize that even such a problematic text can contain a positive, even if unintended, revolutionary horizon of possibility. Hudson links Lola’s gradual transformation, the fading of the dye that racializes her, to the second French invasion of Mexico. She suggests that in making Lola’s father and grandfather supporters of the European intervention on the Mexican state, Ruiz de Burton accidentally opens an aperture through which we see Lola’s whiteness as a Franco-Latin whiteness not aligned with the predatory, morally decrepit Anglo whiteness tied to the United States, though still deeply tied to Indigenous genocide and to slavery. This accidental aperture enables the reader to figure Mexicans not as a race but as an ethnicity. As Lola’s color gradually returns to its white purity, Hudson argues, an unintended liberatory latinidad appears in which Mexicanness, as an ethnicity, can include different races, encapsulating different histories and futures.

Hudson observes a similar vision of race yoked to the second French invasion percolating through Cisneros’s Caramelo, this time in a footnote and with very different results. The novel tells the story of the Reyes family as they travel between Mexico and Chicago. In Caramelo, the protagonist Lala’s half sister, Candelaria, is the focus of Lala’s reflections on Mexican history, race, and Chicanidad. Candelaria’s skin is like a brown caramel candy, giving the novel its title. Hudson argues that Cisneros, in highlighting Lala’s obsession with Candelaria’s skin, enters a dialogue with Ruiz de Burton, who is similarly obsessed with Lola’s skin color and its meaning. Yet, instead of a Franco-Latin whiteness, Brownness as an ideal repeatedly arises in Cisneros’s novel, in a footnote and throughout the novel when Cisneros makes allusions to Archduke Maximilian—the Austrian prince sent to rule Mexico—his wife Carlota, and his Indigenous lover la India Bonita. Aligning Candelaria with la India Bonita, Hudson claims that Cisneros references the rhetoric of the Indigeneity central to pre- and postrevolutionary Mexican legacies that locate Indigeneity in a romanticized past, but marking them out of the country’s future. To recognize an Indigeneity arrested in history and denied any present or future, Hudson observes, is to affirm Brownness in a manner that allows no affinity with other continuously present Indigenous peoples. She further stresses that the cultural nationalist imaginary of the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and ’70s, in its claim of a mythic homeland such as Aztlán, has done the same. That is, it reduces Indigeneity to the history of the nation-state, real or imaginary. Cisneros, though “deeply tied to the political commitments articulated during the Chicano Movement,” partakes in a conservative racial politics that excludes Indigenous futurity. Readers must engage this absence by “filling in the gap” left empty by Ruiz de Burton and Cisneros, by bringing Indigenous reality into the present and future of latinidad.

So, Hudson asks us to turn to the speculative to fill this absented future. What if the “x” in Latinx could stand for a future that includes Indigenous Latinxs and Afro-Latinxs? What might it look like to include Hopi and other tribal communities in latinidad? Can we create a world that realizes the capaciousness of “x”? Though Ruiz de Burton and Cisneros failed, they signaled possible revolutionary horizons. Might we, as readers, have greater success revising them?

Some hope can be found in the Cuban/Cuban American, Dominican/Dominican American and Filipino/Filipinx examples Hudson explores in the rest of Latinx Revolutionary Horizons. These novels are examples of the revolutionary bildungsroman, but unlike the European bildungsroman, in which a character’s coming-of-age is the subject of the novel, the subjects receiving the (textual) education in these stories are the Latinx readers themselves, who learn their own occluded histories while being positioned and prepared by these works to change them. Yet it is in her final analysis where Hudson boldly ventures her revolutionary coup. She places Delany’s Blake in dialogue with Silko’s Almanac of the Dead to suggest that literature bearing Latinx revolutionary horizons need not be written by Latinx authors. Rather, they emerge in any text that engages revolution in the Americas, allowing for multiple revolutionary voices.

For Hudson, Blake is a bildungsroman of Black revolution in which the “secret” of revolution is known by its participants and shared across wide distances by the enslaved and the emancipated. Hudson highlights that “blackness” in the novel “become[s] a political choice rather than an identity marker.” Since Cuba in Blake is the space of revolution, it allows for coalitional conspiracies that include whites and non-whites. She adds that the countless Black revolutions that erupted across the island before the Ten Years’ War—Cuba’s first organized attempt at independence, between 1868 and 1878—are evidence of the centrality of Afro-Cubans to all Cuban independence movements as well as other Black revolutions across the Caribbean and the United States.

Meanwhile, Silko’s Almanac takes to task the violent and therefore limited conceptions of revolution from the past. Hudson argues that it is the figures of El Feo and Wacah, characters who want a pacifist revolution, who counter Angelita, who wants to use shoulder-mounted missiles to achieve the group’s liberatory goal. Juxtaposing the predictive nature of almanacs (the end of the Europeans is prophesied in an almanac at the novel’s beginning) with the novel’s claims that Haitians were the first Black Indians and that all of the maps used in the characters’ revolution campaigns lead to Tucson, Arizona, and thus the border, Hudson contends that “Haiti is the connection that joins together African American and Indigenous struggles. In this way, Silko also ‘browns’ the revolution” and provides a call to action for Latinx studies in which “the actual revolutionary terrain is in thought, in ideology, and in practice."

What is most engaging about this transhistorical reading of Blake and Almanac is that all readers can participate in the “secret,” taking part in a reading practice that unearths speculative what-ifs of Latinx revolutionary imaginaries that are always already present in texts that engage revolution in the Americas.

One of the true achievements of Latinx Revolutionary Horizons is its demonstration of just how far Latinx literary scholarship has come. Hudson’s work here would not have been possible without Jesse Alemán’s groundbreaking argument about how revolutions in the Americas impacted 19th-century Latinx and US literature (I think here of his seminal article on the Cavada brothers), without Sharada Balachandran Orihuela’s work on insurgent afterlives, without the “fugitive latinidades” articulated by John Alba Cutler, without Raúl Coronado’s historical reconstruction of Latinx “worlds not to come,” nor even without my own concept of the Latinx continuum and the Latinx return—transtemporal and transpatial constructs that move beyond the literature we find in the 19th century into the past and into the future. Hudson builds on the work of these theorists of the Latinx experience to provide another horizon for Latinx literary scholarship—one in which the reader takes center stage, in which revolution is possible not only through the works we read but also through the act of reading itself.

The coda that closes the book thereby provides a call to action: How will you, the reader, participate in revolution? When you read Latinx fiction, poetry, or even a manifesto that engages revolutionary pasts, will you read the revolutionary horizon it proposes? Will you imagine, revise, and create “other futures and other worlds where we can summon a politics to conjure a people”? Those reading practices and Hudson’s revolutionary horizons “aren’t necessarily capital ‘R’ revolutions,” she concludes, but instead “are the revolutions in thought, in language, in community that need to take place to imagine a latinidad that is not yet here in a gathering that has yet to take place.” I say, let’s do it—now.