In her new book, Arlene Dávila advances a groundbreaking analysis of Latinx art in the way she centers on matters of race, class, and nationality as primordial to understanding this category. Latinx artists encompass transnational cultural backgrounds and social experiences located between their US context and their Latin American backgrounds that cannot be neatly narrowed down aesthetically or conceptually. Most identify as people of color, and many focus on the migrant experience, Afro-descendance, indigeneity, or other suppressed aspects of identity in the categories of “Latin American art,” “American art,” and “contemporary art.” Although these traditional art categories are not fully fixed, they often disavow race, while Dávila’s definition of Latinx art indexes race. Indeed, the replacement of the final o in “Latino” by an x is a recent development indexing an openness to gender, sexual, and racial inclusivity, and for some a new consciousness that recognizes structural absence and marks...

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