Lat Stud (2017) 15:99–103 DOI 10.1057/s41276-017-0049-z ´ GOGICAS REFLEXIONES PEDA

What are Central American studies? Arturo Arias1

 Macmillan Publishers Ltd 2017

The title of this essay of course underlines the fact that, well into the second decade of the twenty-first century, Central American studies, in all their variants and possibilities, remain still a marginal enterprise in most US campuses, when not altogether invisible. I would argue that the first generation of Central Americanists born in the United States are still mapping the broad conceptual parameters of this field. The Central American wave of immigrants to the US is far from ending, even if in recent years it has consisted more of underage children than of past political refugees fleeing from the nightmarish civil wars of the 1980s, which in turn devastated local economies and enabled the subsequent enfranchising of drug cartels in collusion with some local governments, thus generating the newer immigrant economic waves of the late 1990s. When the Institute of Latin American Studies and the Center for Mexican– American Studies of the University of Texas at Austin jointly sponsored a conference titled Central Americans and the Latino/a Landscape: Imaginative Reformulations and New Configurations of Latina/o America, in February 2012, the premise was that, by focusing on populations whose role had been critical in the reconfiguration of Latino/a studies in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the scholarly conversation and cultural exchange would consolidate the field, given the importance, continuous growth, visibility, and significance of Central Americans in the United States. The conference explored Central American subjects as a geographically displaced phenomenon with complex connections of commodities, people and cultural production, intertwining with other members of the Latino/a communities in the United States. As conference organizers, English professor John Moran Gonzalez and I argued that Latina/o America had gained prominence in the US through the demographic changes charted by the 2010 US Census, and by the & Arturo Arias [email protected] 1

University of California, Merced, CA, USA

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contentious, ongoing political debates over migration, undocumented and otherwise. We further claimed that, while theoretically committed to analyzing the necessarily transnational dimensions of US Latina/o communities, Latino/a studies in practice had previously focused on the experiences of three specific Latina/o subpopulations to define their field for the previous forty years: Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans. While valuable for its insights into key experiences, Latino/a studies had sometimes fetishized land loss (in the case of Mexican Americans), the loss of an authentic ‘‘island’’ (Puerto Rico), or political exile (Cuban Americans) as the defining characteristics of Latino/a studies. How Latino/a communities, and therefore Latino/a studies, might be transformed by new migrations had been seriously overlooked. Our conference meant to augment and expand fields of inquiry within Central American studies that would, in turn, impact Latino/a studies as a whole. We were interested in alternative, transversal conversations, and in acknowledging the mobility and multiple interactions of a broad range of immigrant peoples, cultures, histories and texts, blurring the traditionally constituted line between Latino/a studies—of which Central American issues form part—and other immigrant experiences. To this day, degrees of resistance still remain to a reconfiguration of Latino/a studies. Certainly two of the most innovative efforts breaking with previous paradigms have been Nicole Guidotti-Herna´ndez’s Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries (2011) and Rau´l Coronado’s A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture (2013). But much remains to be done. One specific example: there is still little work on immigrant indigeneities, despite the high percentage of Central American immigrants of indigenous origin. As indigenous subjects move more and more toward migrant spaces, they are racialized more, clearly marking the end of any remnant of multiculturalism in the United States. Indigenous migrants are exposed to the racism manifested by other US Latino/a communities as well. This situation shifts those cartographies, always in need of being redrafted, as Claudia Milian stated in her book Latining America: Black-Brown Passages and the Coloring of Latino/a Studies (2013) when speaking of ‘‘Central Americanness as a site of neglected multiple subjectivities and geographies that move and alter’’ (148). Identitary categories inevitably mutate in manifold directions. They can even slide beyond Latinidad itself, toward other identitary directions whose shared connectivity is still the heritage of colonialism. Indigenous subjects remain more vulnerable not only to US sovereign power but also to its deployment by racialized others as a form of structuring violence that has internalized the ontological naturalization of racism by virtue of colonialism’s enabling even those others located at the bottom of the heap—brown Guatepeorians, in Milian’s terms—to conceive of them as residual nonsubjects condemned to social forms of nonexistence, abandoned by the law, exposed and threatened on the threshold of entering the political body, treated as mere biological residues bereft of legal protections of citizenship. Their very existence enables Guatepeorians to articulate that other common Guatemalan saying, ‘‘mejor pobre que indio’’ (better a poor Mestizo than an Indian). This because, as Mary Weismantel observed in a different context, ‘‘whiteness is

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property: a set of economic and political privileges passed down from generation to generation… whites hold these benefits for themselves, granting them exclusively to one another because they recognise that it is in their collective best interests’’ (136–137). They interpellate Guatemalan Ladino (Mestizo in most of Latin America) urban residents as shumos, a term deployed to injuriously label indigenous subjects who pretend to pass as Ladinos within a more systemic ‘‘repudiation of indigenous people and ordinary mestizos,’’ in Jorge Ramo´n Gonza´lez-Ponciano’s words (2005, p. 22). Shumos are Ladinoized indigenous subjects who have internalized the rejection of indigeneity. In turn, urban shumos interpellate anybody in the provincial areas, including towns and rural communities, as Indian, thereby pushing Indianness away from themselves. Given that Los Angeles has been defined as the shumo capital of the world, in these characterizations transnational elements complicate perceptions about difference and social, cultural and racial stratification with markers that have not appeared historically in the Indigenous–Ladino binary (Gonza´lez-Ponciano 2005, p. 123). They are new embodiments of the space of the non-white Mestizo and of the processing of mestizaje denied by ‘‘white’’ elites in Central America, and by Mestizos themselves in US immigrant communities. I have indicated just one of a plurality of issues that manifest themselves within the broad purview of the critical and interdisciplinary project of Central American studies. As for their application in my home institution, Central America and Central American studies appeared in many ways at the University of Texas at Austin. We claimed with pride that UT–Austin is the research university with the largest number of Central American specialists in the United States, and with the highest number of graduate students of Central American origin. If these studies tended to inevitably cluster more in the Spanish and Portuguese and Mexican American and Latina/o Studies Departments, or in the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS), it was equally true that when we look at other departments or schools such as history, sociology, political sciences, journalism, architecture, the law school, or even the school of medicine still under construction, we found in all of them at least one major Central Americanist scholar. This places our campus in a very unusual situation regarding Central American studies. Indeed, various programs at the university navigated these efforts, in joyful combination with Latina/o studies, Latin American studies, and all other variables that may emerge within these heteroclite fields of knowledge, such as women and gender studies, Native American and Indigenous studies, African and African diaspora studies, and so on, always in interdisciplinary fashion, and working in collaborative fashion. Our Spanish and Portuguese Department held its first retreat to begin curricular reform in 2011. One part of our discussion was how we would train our PhDs as future educators. We agreed that the department—one of the largest and most respected in the nation—should be reimagining the field. Over the course of the academic year 2011–2012, a subcommittee chaired by the graduate adviser, and with representation from every area of research in the department, wrote a draft for a new program. The new mission of the doctoral program was to educate and train graduate students to develop new knowledge of the languages, literatures and cultures of the Latin American and Iberian regions, their related diasporas, and their

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Indigenous, African, and Afro-descendant cultures. Our graduates are now acquiring the competence to engage in critical discussions of major trends in our field of study, and to apply this knowledge in meaningful social endeavors. To help our graduates achieve their goals, our program introduced students to a diverse body of theoretical approaches and methodological procedures that are instrumental to their respective interdisciplinary work. The department now provides a flexible yet rigorous course of study that focuses on engaged scholarship. As such, doctoral students acquire not only a specialist’s knowledge of their subject, but also a range of contextual information and expertise that enables them to apply their acquired knowledges in concrete social efforts, and as validating mechanisms of problemsolving. Ultimately, it is my sense that Central American studies have to cohabit with and within Latin American studies and Latina/o studies. I have serious doubts that, in times of universities’ downsizing and neoliberal models significantly reducing the humanities and social sciences, independent centers specializing on Central American studies stand much of a chance. Our effort should consist of gradually persuading—by means of both our present scholarship and that of newer and future Central Americanists—that it is unconscionable to speak of either field, Latin American studies or Latina/o studies without including a significant Central American component, given the critical role that Central American peoples and societies play, from the isthmus itself—where a multitude of issues, from drug trafficking to femicides to indigenous resistance to Western-center modes of development, are taking place—to the US border crisis and the reconfiguration of immigrant communities in the United States, of which Central American subjects constitute more and more important segments.

References Coronado, R. 2013. A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gonza´lez-Ponciano, J. R. 2005. De la patria del criollo a la patria del shumo: Whiteness and the Criminalization of the Dark Plebian in Modern Guatemala. PhD dissertation, University of Texas at Austin. Guidotti-Herna´ndez, N. M. 2011. Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Milian, C. 2013. Latining America: Black-Brown Passages and the Coloring of Latino/a Studies. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Arturo Arias is John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Professor in the Humanities at the University of California, Merced. He has published Taking Their Word: Literature and the Signs of Central America (2007), The Rigoberta Menchu´ Controversy (2000), The Identity of the Word: Guatemalan Literature in Light of the New Century (1998), and Ceremonial Gestures: Central American Fiction 1960–1990 (1998), as well as a critical edition of Miguel Angel Asturias’s Mulata (2000). Professor Arias was 2001–2003 president of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), co-wrote the film El Norte (1984), and has published six novels in Spanish, two of which have been translated to English (After the Bombs, 1990, and Rattlesnake, 2003). Twice winner of the Casa de las Americas

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Award, and winner of the Ana Seghers Award for fiction in Germany, he was given the Miguel Angel Asturias National Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature in 2008 in his native Guatemala. At present he is working on a three-volume analysis of the decolonial implications of contemporary indigenous written production in Mesoamerica. Prior to coming to Merced, he was Tomas Rivera Regents Professor in Latin American Literature at the University of Texas at Austin.