US Central Americans: Representations, agency and communities
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U S Ce n t ra l Am e r i c a n s : Rep r e s e n t a t i o n s , agen c y a n d communities Latino Studies (2013) 11, 131–149. doi:10.1057/lst.2013.1
This special issue’s analytic attention to US Central American populations brings about a dialogue with – and a reworking of – the locations and experiences framing the practices of the wide spectrum of Latino/a communities. This scholarly conversation and cultural interchange is of paramount importance, considering the continuous growth, visibility and significance of Central Americans in the US and Latino/a landscape. At present, Salvadorans are the sixth largest immigrant group. They are also the country’s fourth largest Latino/a group. Central Americans, including indigenous populations, are burgeoning in “new” destination regions such as the Midwest and the South (Loucky and Moors, 2000; Fink, 2003; Tobar, 2006; Foxen, 2008). It cannot be disregarded that Central Americans are making and marking their presence. By now, some consider, in Ruben Castaneda’s words, “the MacArthur section of Los Angeles [as] Little El Salvador, and Mount Pleasant,” a neighborhood in Washington DC’s Northwestern quadrant, as “its East Coast counterpart” (191). Likewise, Miami hosts Little Managua. US Central Americans, to be sure, often reside in neighborhoods characterized by regional interaction rather than national separation. The Westlake-Pico Union area of Los Angeles is known as “Little Central America.”1 Its counterparts can be found in Houston, Boston and other metropolitan centers. Central America is no longer restricted to a small amalgamation of remote, nation-states “over there,” south of Mexico. Since the last decades of the twentieth century, the region has become a complex, entangled temporality. It is increasingly “over here,” in the United States. Central America is a real site and a sight, a working representation of a place that has gained visibility and significance in the United States vis-a`-vis discourses, cultural productions and visual practices. Far from presenting Central Americans as a complete and coherent terrain, these pages aim to provide a shifting blueprint, a reparative r 2013 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1476-3435 Latino Studies Vol. 11, 2, 131–149 www.palgrave-journals.com/lst/
1 Consult Teresa Watanabe (2007) for an account of community efforts to officially recognize a “Historic Central America Town” in the MacArthur Park area.
Introduction
2 Arturo Arias (2003) originally defined Central AmericanAmerican as “an anadiplosis that sounds more like a redundancy, a radically disfigured projection of what ‘Latin Americanness’ has been assumed to be…. [T]he clumsiness of the sound itself, ‘Central AmericanAmerican,’ underlines the fact that it is an identity which is not one, since it cannot be designated univocally as ‘Latino’ or as ‘Latin American,’ but is outside those two signifiers from the very start” (171).
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discourse for the dynamic ways in which Latinoness is a simultaneous presence and articulation even for subjects that are typically o
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