Defining US Latinx Science Fiction Latinx Speculative Literature, Altermundos, Chicanafuturism, and more....
1) NOT A SUBGENRE, BUT A GENRE THAT intersects sf. "Fictive kin" to AFROFUTURISM
We can define US Latinx SF first by what it is NOT. And one of the things it is not, exactly, is sf. It is. But it isn't. Not science fiction as it has been. This is a revolution.
Afrofuturism--defined in the 1990s as a futuristic literature from the perspective of Black authors--offers what Catherine S. Ramírez calls "fictive kin," providing a successful example, a template, for sf by POC. If you look up the term "Afrofuturism" in the online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, a mainstay resource for genre study, you find it defined as "a literary and cultural treatment of the African diaspora in terms of, or incorporating tropes from, the genres of sf, fantasy and magic realism, as seen from a Black cultural viewpoint; not a subgenre of sf but a genre that intersects sf." This is fine as far as it goes...which isn't very far, really. We might ask for more detail: what tropes? what genre elements? But still: the last phrase is crucial. And applies to US Latinx SF as well. Latinxfuturisms are:
NOT A SUBGENRE BUT A GENRE THAT INTERSECTS SF.
US Latinx SF is not a trend or a subgenre of a larger field, but the arrival of a cultural position, a new viewpoint. If you look up "US Latinx Science Fiction" in the ESF you get nothing. Try "Altermundos," "Latinxfuturism," "Chicanafuturism," and on? Nada. This is an EMERGENT literature, on the verge of becoming. Informed by and informing what science fiction is and should be. Both not sf as we know it and committed to it, at its very heart, speculating new possibilities for what the future must be.
So the first thing is: we have new worlds here.
A NOTE: this is ALSO NOT Magical Realism
"Magical Realism" is an overwhelmingly influential Latin American literary movement. That's the problem. Here's how Matthew David Goodwin puts it in his groundbreaking U.S. Latinx sf anthology, Latinx Rising:
For better or worse, magical realism (in which fantastical elements are included in the narrative in such a way that they seem unsurprising)... formed the boundaries of Latinx literature....[T]oo many writers have been pushed...to write in a magical realist style...[and] it has been common among readers to unthinkingly categorize a story written by a Latinx as magical realist when there is just a hint of something strange or even when the story is flat out science fiction....At its worst, this imposed magical realism is a way to relegate U.S. Latinos and Latinas to the realm of the irrational, the mythological, effectively cutting off the ability to engage science and technology.
U.S. Latinx SF stories are influenced by and often have elements of magical realism, drawing on what Goodwin calls "a wonderfully rich genre with great political potential." But they are not simply or only magical realism. Where the one is conceived as largely rural, rooted in tradition and place and the dignity of the ways people exist there, the other is ON THE MOVE into the future, often urban, engaging with our technologically- and progress-obsessed U.S. culture in order to actively colonize and exist in the future and MAKE IT HABITABLE for those often considered "alien" or left behind as relics of the past.
SO, NOW WE KNOW IMPORTANT THINGS IT IS RELATED to, BUT ISN'T: WHAT IS US LATINX SF?
2) BUILT from many traditions and homelands, US Latinx sf embraces the Diversity of the Latinidad
US Latinx SF brings its past into the future, often expressing the importance of families and communities existing both in the US and abroad. With a shared border, the influence of Mexican and Chicano/a culture is prominent, but there are many regions and countries of Latinx peoples with traditions and customs that demand to be accounted in any summation of a pan-Latinx U.S. literature. And there is more diversity within these countries than is usually realized from a U.S. point of view, especially in relation to indigenous populations and their status. These rich "traditions found in diversity" join with a shared experience of life in the US to make US Latinx SF unique.
To go further, US Latinx SF draws on the many strong and varied, yet larger unknown in the US, science fiction traditions of the wider international Latinx community to rethink the present US tradition. These varied and vital traditions inform the themes, values, and form of US Latinx SF.
3) KEY THEMES INCLUDE IMMIGRATION, RACE, and the COLONIAL LEGACY.
The hopes and fears of the immigrant are often foregrounded, emphasizing ENDURANCE in the face of racism and the suffering caused by the colonial legacy (which often brought about, immediately or distantly, the need to move on).
U.S. Latinx SF is a literature of "immigration" to the future--frequently in transit from place to place--with a focus on the obstacles and experiences that lie between, and the struggles of the newly arrived....
U.S. Latinx SF is an aspirational literature, dreaming of a better place and focused on social justice. Social justice movements share with science fiction an imagining of worlds that do not yet exist...but just might...making sf an important literature of change.
US LATINX SF IS NOT JUST A LITERATURE OF REPRESENTATION, BUT OF HOPE and CHANGE.
4) US Latinx SF often emphasizes "Inbetweenness." "nepantla." All that is "Ni De AQUí, NI De Allá."
"Nepantla" is a Nahuatl word which means "in the middle." Gloria Anzaldúa, in her commentary on the alienness of her modern queer feminist latinx existence, coins the term "Nepantlera" to describe those who are always caught between worlds:
"Nepantleras are threshold people; they move within and among multiple, often conflicting, worlds and refuse to align themselves exclusively with any single individual, group, or belief system."
In US Latinx SF, a "liminal" space opens up, where multiple, perhaps contradictory, forms of reality can be apprehended at the same time. It explores beings that exist as both human and other...and often what or who is not allowed to be quite either.
5) IT IS THE LITERATURE OF "RASQUACHISMO," of juxtaposition, integration, Hybridity, AND the Emergence of Mestiza Consciousness
In discussing art, the critic Tomás Ybarra-Frausto coined the term "rasquachismo" to describe "an underdog perspective, a view from los de abajo" (those below) that uses “'hybridization, juxtaposition, and integration' as a means of empowerment and resistance." Ybarra-Frausto had redeployed the term "resquache," which can have negative connotations of class condescension, into a positive aesthetic for Chicano and Mexican art movements that reused what came to hand to make things new. This is the US Latinx SF approach to science and technology--often treating it as something that must be taken, repurposed, redesigned to fit.
To describe the groundbreaking "circuitboard art" of Marion C. Martinez, in which an image of, say, Guadalupe, Queen of Heaven, might be designed from circuits, wires, and resistors, Catherine S. Ramírez originated the term "Chicanafuturism" in an attempt to describe a remaking of what is found into something else, something fresh, that points to the future and making new. This "hybridity" is not just a byproduct but a source of power in US Latinx SF.
As Gloria Anzaldúa writes, deploying the term "alien" that belongs to both the border region and to science fiction:
"From this racial, ideological, cultural, and biological cross-pollinization, an "alien consciousness" is presently in the making--a new mestiza consciousness, una conciencia de mujer. It is a consciousness of the Borderlands."
It is no accident that the term is "chicanafutursim," or that what is being created is "una conciencia de mujer." The emergent Latinx “mundos alternos” (alternative worlds) movement is fundamentally a literature of "otherness" that speaks from the margins. It brings “newness” to culture and acts as catalyst for change.
As Ernest Hogan, who published the first Latinx sf novel, Cortez on Jupiter (cover image right), writes.
"I seem to be a Chicanonaut. A Chicano who's always going out of bounds, crossing borders, trespassing new frontiers, going beyond conventional understanding of the barrio. One small step for a Chicano...And of course, when I am somewhere else, I bring the barrio with me. And when I come back home from my explorations, the barrio is transformed yet again.
"It is my belief that when the barrio is transformed, it goes on to transform the rest of the universe."
Anzaldúa explains the transformation from the margins this way:
"En unas pocos centurías, the future will belong to the mestiza. Because the future depends on the breaking down of paradigms, it depends on the straddling of two or more cultures. By creating new mythos—that is, a change in the way we perceive reality, the way we see ourselves, and the ways we behave—la mestiza creates a new consciousness."
US Latinx SF is a literature of hybridity, of the mestiza, of creating new mythos, new ways to see ourselves, bringing new visions in order to light the road ahead.
6) Finally, US LATINX SF IS A LITERATURE of wordplay, of what is "found in translation," of Poetry and play, and of joy
US Latinx SF is a literature of the unexpected, the voice that has not but must be heard. It is aware that it must make do with materials at hand; it must overcome limitations. But along with the importance of endurance, such a striving is often accomplished with a great sense of PLAY, of rising to the challenge with exuberance and laughter.
As Matthew David Goodwin writes: “Latino speculative fiction brings humor to fantastical, futuristic, comedic, and bleak political subjects, offering readers strange new concepts such as: los cosmos azteca, shape shifting robots, pre-Columbian holobooks, talking sardines and gun toting reptiles, and cybernetically wired patron saints.”
US Latinx SF juxtaposes cultures and mixes languages for startling effect. Its interest in language goes beyond matters of code-switching or "just" moments of "Spanglish." Instead, it evinces an intense interest in language at the sentence level, not infrequently reaching for poetry or turning beautiful lines or startling phrases in order to demonstrate that what is too often thought of as things "lost in translation" can turn out instead to be "what is found" there. As some have pointed out, "Spanglish," for example, has its own grammar. The “accents” of much US Latinx SF do more than represent their Spanish-speaking heritage; in their sf setting, they suggest a future history for our evolving shared languages, a way of speaking the world that we have not yet arrived at but will.
There is often playfulness and joy in the way different cultures are placed side-by-side, and in the cracking of funny cross-cultural jokes and puns that can only be understood on the borderlands between languages. In US Latinx SF, science fiction can be a “funhouse mirror” that stretches, elongates, or distorts in order to show us ourselves back to ourselves. The genre has a characteristic funny streak that uses sf to present the absurdity of life, the strangeness of existence, and sometimes a specifically Latinx dark irony--and other times an unexpected joy.
THERE IS CERTAINLY MORE TO SAY, BUT it's time to stop. HERE WE HAVE SIX KEY ELEMENTS TO DEFINE AN EMERGENT GENRE. EXPLORE OUR TIMELINE TO LEARN MORE.
There you have it. A definition. Or at least a catalog of half a dozen characteristics that apply across an unruly, new literature of the borderlands....
US Latinx Science Fiction is an emergent literary form with distinctive characteristics and themes. It expands and transforms what sf has been and should be. In celebration of the founding of the first ever US Latinx Science Fiction Collection in Special Collections of the Pollak Library at CSU, Fullerton, come explore our timeline: the untold story or "secret history" of Latinx speculative literatures.