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The Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, is a significant piece of legislation that continues to impact US society and immigration politics today. The act has led to the persistence of nativist beliefs and movements, sparking intense debates on immigration over the past century. Interestingly, the act restricted most overseas immigration while still allowing for the availability of cheap migrant labor for US employers. This contradiction between restrictive policies and economic demands has shaped US immigration politics and policies. The text also discusses the enduring power of xenophobia and the ongoing polarization of American politics surrounding immigration. [Extracted from the article]

This essay analyzes the Havana-based literary weekly La Habana Elegante to consider the hemispheric dimensions of late nineteenth-century media change and the role that writers of Latin American descent played in it. As new electric media and improved print technology powered an expanding and interconnected world of print, La Habana Elegante mediated a hemispheric, Spanish-speaking print culture, especially through its foreign correspondence from New York City. The periodical defined that print culture through a notion of latinidad that bridged Latin America and the United States--and by envisioning a two-way flow of ideas between writers and readers. As US-based English-language newspapers developed emerging mass cultural forms that starkly divided producers and consumers, La Habana Elegante tapped into notions of simultaneity inspired by the telegraph and, especially, the telephone to promote a more interactive modern media system meant to circulate Latin American culture throughout the hemisphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay sketches out a protocol for reading Ren Ellis Neyra's The Cry of the Senses: Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics (2020) from the vantage point of Ellis Neyra's more recent work on Brownness and (non)relation. The essay aims to explore further the tensions that Ellis Neyra has identified across the fault lines of "Black/Brown" racial formations in a post-1492 context by paying specific attention to how these tensions crystalize in Latinx, Latin American, and Caribbean studies. The essay unpacks Ellis Neyra's account of the breakdown of the concept of Brownness as articulated in José Estebán Muñoz's work in order to detect an analogous breakdown in Bolívar Echevarría's influential work on racial modernity. In conclusion, the essay poses a question about the emancipatory potential of abjection by putting Ellis Neyra's compelling reading of Pedro Pietri's The Masses Are Asses in dialogue with the work of the late feminist-deconstructionist thinker Mara Negrón. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay takes on the task of reflecting on the keyword negro from a transnational standpoint that considers how negro/a/x, a sociopolitical identity, falls in and out of AfroLatinidad in Latin American and hispanic Caribbean diasporas. In particular, the author is concerned with re-centering Blacknesss in AfroLatinidad in response to the depoliticized usage of this identity. Through a focus on diaspora, movement, and the embodied fact of Blackness, the author argues that when thinking about negro (Black) and negritud (Blackness) from a transnational Spanish Caribbean context, we should remember that AfroLatinidad, or Black Latinidad, is first and foremost about Black lives, embodied experiences, movement, translatability, and untranslatability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article suggests that the fashionable use of the term Latinx overlooks the historical context of Spanish-language publications in which the gender distinction Latina/o is important. Focusing on the anonymously published Cartas de un Americano (London, 1826), a collection of letters written in New York and Philadelphia, the article notes the importance of male-centered homosocial relations and epistolary form for this transatlantic publication. When considering the history of textual production, should Latinx be viewed as amisnomer created by contemporary US politics? Does Latinx erase particularities of the Spanish language in a country that has never wanted to accept its Hispanophone historical dimensions? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reflects on the materiality of migration with a focus on passports and other kinds of documentary permissions for travel. It argues that throughout the history of the Americas passports have acquired meanings exceeding contemporary associations with national citizenship that are discernible in literary works and in the archival record. It looks to documentary practices in Latin America and the Caribbean to decenter the United States from studies of border crossing and Latinx subjectivities, suggesting intersecting hemispheric practices that delineate the relative importance of being documented or undocumented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Labor: Studies in Working- Class History, Volume 18, Issue 1 DOI 10.1215/15476715-8767326 © 2021 by Labor and Working- Class History Association 38 Rooted in Place, Constructed in Movement: Transnational Labor Solidarities in the Texas-Mexico Borderlands Sonia Hernández Reflecting on the recent transnational turn in the humanities and particularly its influence on the study of labor history, as well as the small but influential early studies shaping the subfield of labor in the US-Mexico borderlands, I take the Texas- Tamaulipas/Nuevo León border region as a point of departure to examine two cases of early twentieth-century transnational labor solidarity. In their petition for their compatriota, workers from Laredo, T exas, and Nuevo Laredo sought funds for his defense and emphasized Cortez's good fortune as he had escaped a lynching, yet knowing that Cortez had been an exception, the workers warned about the frequency with which Mexicans were lynched and urged all to take a proactive stance. In similar fashion, organizing the Comisión Organizadora para Ayudar en su Defensa al Mexicano Gregorio Cortéz, the Sociedad de Obreros and others reached across state and national boundaries and emphasized both Cortez's background as a compatriot appealing to Mexican nationalism as well as his status as a worker in the United States. While nationalism had worked to mitigate violence during the Cortez ordeal and bring workers together, it could also potentially alienate certain workers in these prolabor petitions precisely meant to create a sense of worker unity. [Extracted from the article]

This essay juxtaposes the trial of a prominent Hispanic, Manuel Jesus Castillo, in 1882 with the celebrations of the centenary of St. George's Caye in 1898 to gain a deeper understanding of the methods employed by officials in Belize to impose order on the complex post-Caste War society there in a way that was materially and politically advantageous to colonial rule at the nineteenth century's end. Colonial officials used the language and theme of loyalty to further imperial and class agendas in the context of political, social, and economic contestation. The idiom of loyalty served to simplify the complex reality of an often discordant multiethnic society into a simple binary of loyalty versus disloyalty that determined the Britishness of the colony's subjects and provided beleaguered colonial officials with the vehicle for counteracting the dominance of the unofficial members of the colonial government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the geographies of knowledge on Hispanic Caribbean. Topics discussed include the impact of existential, political, and linguistic borders on Caribbean people, the cultural contexts and language of the Caribbean and Latin American, and the landscape and civilization of the Antilleans.

An essay is presented on the colonialism and contemporary migration in Caribbean and the Latin American colonial studies. Topics discussed include the analysis of early colonial texts about Caribbean, the colonial and decolonial process in the Caribbean confederation in nineteenth century, and the aspects of the textualities during the colonial Spanish Caribbean.

The article focuses on the roles of the intellectuals on the Cuban and Latin American literature, culture, and history and its relation to the future. Topics discussed include the political condition during the government of former Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro, the development of Latin America literature and culture, and the aspects of the essay "Calibán," by Roberto Fernández Retamar which highlights events related to Latin American history and culture.

A literary criticism of several books on American writer William Faulkner such as "The Signifying Eye: Seeing Faulkner's Art" by Candace Waid and "Faulkner and Morrison" by Robert W. Hamblin and Christopher Rieger is presented. Topics discussed include investigation of mother body in relation to art and masculinity, Faulknerian critical history and influence of Faulkner's writings on the Latin American in which writers choosing family over revolution.