Abstract
This essay offers a literary history that corrects the notion that Latinx writers are exempt from cosmopolitan preoccupations. I address the undertheorized internationalism with Africa of two renowned Latinx writers: Víctor Hernández Cruz and Elizabeth “Betita” Martínez. Building from the critical analysis in Latinx studies that renders legible the liberationist pursuits of late twentieth-century Latinx writing, this intervention shows how African geopolitical tensions also become prominent spaces of engagement. For Cruz, I focus on the ways in which North Africa has featured prominently in his poetry since 1991. Internationalist activist Martínez, on the other hand, advocates for an international education, following Frantz Fanon’s pleas, implemented in her political autobiography De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views for a Multi-Colored Century (1998). Her archival documents likewise speak to her immersion in African politics. The transatlantic links these authors make ultimately serve to challenge anti-black attitudes in the Latinx population. Both writers engage in a curiosity about and empathy for different African regions that reconceptualize south-south engagement while challenging normative idealizations of cosmopolitan theory.
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Notes
See Marta Caminero-Santangelo’s reading of Cristina García’s worldly A Handbook to Luck as displaying a cosmopolitan disregard for the nation-state model.
I clarify that definitions of internationalism well pre-date the Cold War era, the temporality attached to internationalism in the context of this essay. Early definitions of the term include the notion of “a new conception of the advantages of rational cooperation” or when “the human understanding is freed from the shackles of provincialism and grasps the possibility of a practical world unity” (Faries 1915, p. 11). For my purposes, I mean internationalism as a political commitment to aid the fight for liberation against imperialism. A case that is relevant to the context I discuss in this essay is Cuba’s internationalist mission to aid the independence movements in the Congo, Guinea, and Angola.
See Marie Ostby’s “Cosmopolitanism” (2018, p. 263).
For an astute reading regarding the acquisition of Martínez’s papers and the politics of archival institutionalization, see Maria E. Cotera’s “In Betita’s Garage: Tracing the Archival Afterlives of Elizabeth ‘Betita’ Martínez.”.
Personal interview, January 2022.
Personal interview, January 2022. See also Urayoán Noel’s In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam for a detailed explanation on Cruz’s background in New York and the ways he complicates what Noel terms his “diasporic reality” (2014, pp. 8–17).
It should be noted that although The Mountain in the Sea was written after 9/11, Red Beans precedes it.
See Peter Mark and José da Silva Horta in The Forgotten Diaspora: Jewish Communities in West Africa and the Making of the Atlantic World (2011), and Linda Heywood and John Thornton’s Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 (2007), on hybridity occurring prior to the Middle Passage in Africa.
Birgit Neumann and Gabriele Rippl define “world-making” as the potentiality that “construes imaginative worlds and configures new worldly spaces, alternative geographies, contact zones and transitory spaces that, thriving on both transcultural entanglements and local difference, may offer readers new visions of the world” (2017, p. 9).
Personal interview, January 2022.
Luciano’s prominence as a poet and radical organizer is connected to a Third World leftism. In her study on the Young Lords, Johanna Fernández links their Third World discourse to a radical global left (2020, p. 59). Fernández explains that Luciano, specifically, attributes his experience of “psychological imperialism” to Fanon and Martin Luther King Jr. (2020, pp. 208–209).
Personal interview, January 2022.
Personal interview, January 2022.
Oropeza, Dionne Espinoza, and Maylei Blackwell, to name a few, have all specified the international regions of Martínez’s work (2018).
See Fanon: “The peoples of the Third World are not interested in news about (Belgian) King Baudoin’s wedding.... What we want to hear are case histories in Argentina or Burma about the fight against illiteracy or the dictatorial behavior of other leaders. This is a material that inspires us, educates us, and greatly increases our effectiveness” (2004 [1961], p. 143).
She discusses California’s “Enhanced Enforcement Strategy” policy and Texas’s “Operation Blockade” of 1993, both racist legislations designed to deter undocumented immigration.
As Moroccan writer and Goncourt-award winner Tahar Ben Jelloun notes, despite the former receptivity of France toward immigrants, the brutal aftereffects of a bitter war have spurred violence against racialized North African immigrants (qtd. in Scullion 1995, p. 31).
Martínez’s record in support of Black civil rights must be noted, chiefly her many years dedicated to the SNCC (Blackwell and Quesada 2022, p. 1045).
I am referring to the debates initiated by Melville Herskovits in The Myth of the Negro Past (1941) and E. Franklin Frazier’s The Negro Family in the United States (1951) regarding the presence or absence of African retentions in African Americans but also the historical discussions at the center of African studies about of creolized societies in colonial Africa. For more on these debates, see “An Inclusive Black Atlantic” (2015).
In a 2022 Modern Languages Association (MLA) Newsletter (52, no. 3), Christopher John Newfield points out the abysmal state of international education and languages in the US as of late. In 2019–2020, “microscopic figures”—only 106 positions for tenure-track positions in Spanish or eleven in Arabic for 4300 higher-education institutions in the United States—“mark a de facto policy rejection of language competency and global scholarship outside of a tiny elite. They should inspire outrage and action, not consent to further PhD cuts” (p. 3).
Martínez does, however, include the slave trade in the constructions of Chicanidad. She notes that the Chicano encapsulates “the indigenous (from pre-Columbian times), European (from the Spanish and Portuguese invasions), and African (from the many slaves brought to the Americas, including at least 200,000 to Mexico alone)” (De Colores 1998, p. 2). This interest is line with the work of Chicana historian Martha Menchaca, one of the few scholars to trace the significant history of slavery in the Southwest since 1598 (2006, p. 22).
I am referring to the October 2022 disparaging remarks about Oaxaqueños from Nury Martinez, an influential Latina politician who was president of the City Council in Los Angeles, California.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Víctor Hernández Cruz for letting me speak to him about his inspiring poetic corpus. I thank Vanessa Pérez-Rosario, Ralph Rodríguez, Josie Saldaña-Portillo, John Alba Cutler, and Rachel Galvin for generative conversations that strengthened this essay.
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Quesada, S.M. On Latinx Globalities: the case of African cosmopolitanism in Elizabeth “Betita” Martínez and Víctor Hernández Cruz. Lat Stud (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-024-00459-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-024-00459-1