Eleventh Global Studies Conference

Abstract

Europe has always occupied a vexed yet complex status in the Chicanx and Latinx literary imagination. Yet even the early Chicanx cultural nationalist poetry by Alurista involved an eclectic blend of the Spanish Golden Age literary mode of desengaño (or demystification) and the Nahuatl ritual poetics of transcendence. Contemporary Latinx literature, especially life writing genres, have returned to this paradoxical antithetical filiation with Europe in unique and provocative contrapuntal migration narratives that portend new spatial ontologies extending far outside dominant borderlands, mestizaje, and transnational frameworks in the field of Latinx studies. In this paper, I examine select Latinx autobiographical fiction, memoir, and testimonio from the mid-twentieth century to the present to show how these reverse migrations to Europe inevitably involve expected as well as unlikely encounters, exchanges, and alliances with subaltern Europeans that ultimately have a profound impact on Latinx literary self-fashioning. Significantly, these uniquely globalized Euro-Latinx syntheses, or Euro-Latinidades, involve a wide array of ideological trajectories that further pressure teleological models of Latinx ontology.