Adopting a hemispheric perspective, this essay problematizes the construct of latinidad by foregrounding how it reproduces Black erasure. I argue that “Latin America,” rather than being a geographical designator, is an imagined community that is Eurocentric to the degree that its conceptual boundaries exclude African diaspora spaces. I then turn to understandings of whiteness across borders, contrasting perceptions of racial mixture in the United States and the Hispanophone Americas. Lastly, I examine works by (Afro-)Latinx artists whose nuanced views on race demonstrate the potential of visual representation to provide insight into this complex topic beyond the black-white binary.

This article follows the history of the Tira of don Martín, also known as the Codex Saville, from its creation to its preservation in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. A document concerning migration, altepetl (polity) foundation, and rulership, it provided a living record of Nahua chronology from 1402 to 1545, through the arrival of Europeans on horseback, the conquest of Tenochtitlan in 1521, and the foundation of a local Christian church. Little studied since the 1920s when acquired by the Museum of the American Indian/Heye Foundation, it is a completely Nahua document with older pictographic text as well as Nahuatl written in Latin characters. The very form of the tira suggests continuity rather than rupture in the course of European colonization and evangelization. New approaches to Mesoamerican history and materiality at the conquest’s quincentenary mean the time is ripe for a new touchstone analysis of this document that emphasizes specificity, locality, and continuity rather than rupture driven by European invasion. This article integrates diagnostic imaging, scientific and ethnohistorical analyses, and provenance research with a renewed focus on the Nahuatl language and pictographic communication.

This research aims to understand the process that led to the consecration of the butt as a cultural product at a time when the mass culture in Brazil was expanding and the military-corporate dictatorship consolidated the political regime of heterosexuality. The transformations in the visibility status of the city of Rio de Janeiro, which followed the strengthening of mass tourism, allowed that the female body incarnated in a carioca incorporated new models of Brazilianness. In this context, the butt emerged as a possible sign as well as an agent of history, since it mediated an economy of gender, race, class, and sexuality that circulated through consumption. This visual economy favored new biopolitical models that negotiated the evolution of national “nature” through the perfect body. In this sense, this article seeks to map out regulatory models and to expose the structures of power and knowledge that sought to produce regimes of truth about the national body. Supported by elements of mass culture (goods, images, services, etc.) this work investigates the ways through which the butt was co-opted by power as a part of Brazilian visual culture, supporting the global commercialization of Brazilian bioesthetics.

Fotonovelas , or photo-based comics, are a form of popular visual culture with a long history within Latin America and US Latinx communities. In 2016, I was part of a cross-disciplinary team of scholars from University of California, Los Angeles, who partnered with the East LA Community Corporation (ELACC)—through an Urban Humanities Initiative funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Based in Boyle Heights, ELACC is a community-driven development organization focused on building affordable housing for local residents and improving quality of life in the neighborhood. Given the lack of engagement of residents in large-scale development projects, ELACC urged us to develop an urban humanities pedagogical and political tool for a campaign promoting just transit-oriented development (TOD). Our team draws on the fotonovela medium in a community-driven TOD campaign due to its ability to bridge multiple epistemological and praxis divisions in urban struggles, community organizations, and marginalized communities. I present the resulting fotonovela and examine how it politicizes narratives that challenge current urban development processes.

This essay analyzes the viceregal Mexican artist Juan Correa’s painting The Conversion of St. Mary Magdalene , from the late seventeenth century. A depiction of a woman explicitly displaying traits of her sensuality and sexuality in a Mexican viceregal artwork, the painting visually conveys symbolic embodiments of the feminine condition. These embodiments refer to religious penitence, self-reflection, mysticism, and the vita contemplativa. Moreover, I examine the episodic nature of the painting, associating it with feminine devotional practices. The painting’s pictorial configuration apparently relates to the Jesuit theological tradition, specifically to the spatial and embodied representations expressed in the engravings contained in the Adnotationes et meditationes in evangelia (1595), by Jerónimo Nadal. The essay underscores how Correa represented, spatially, a series of notions related to feminine affections, sensibilities, religiosity, and spirituality. Finally, this investigation puts forward the thesis that the painting, as an artifact, prompted devotional prayer, fostering notions such as penitence and self-reflection, and aiming to help its worshippers achieve reformatio or spiritual conversion.

Curated by Yelaine Rodriguez and edited by Tatiana Flores, this Dialogues stages a series of conversations around Afro-Latinx art through interventions by Afro-Latina cultural producers. Black Latinxs often feel excluded both from the framework of latinidad as well as from the designation “African American.” The essays address blackness in a US Latinx context, through discussion of curatorial approaches, biographical reflections, art historical inquiry, artistic projects, and museum-based activism. Recent conversations around Latinxs and Black Lives Matter reveal that in the popular imaginary, Latinx presupposes a Brown identity. In their contributions to “Afro-Latinx Art and Activism,” the authors argue for a more inclusive and nuanced understanding of Latinx that does not reproduce the racial attitudes of the Lusophone and Hispanophone countries of Latin America, nor the black-white binary of the United States. They look forward to a time when the terms Afro or Black might cease to be necessary qualifiers of Latinx.