Research

Research Agenda

Latinx cultural and literary studies · affect theory · identity and belonging in twenty-first-century America

Dissertation Project

Latinx Released

In Progress

My dissertation, tentatively entitled Latinx Released, examines Latinx and American culture of the twenty-first century to understand how Latinidad as a structure of feeling has changed since the turn of the century. Bringing textual analysis into dialogue with robust qualitative research, this project thinks together both texts and their readers and audiences to better understand how meaning is made in relation to contemporary creative projects about and by Latines in the United States.

The project is grounded in a fundamental observation: as of 2021, 68% of Latines are native to the United States, and the median age of U.S.-born Latines is twenty-one. Despite this, the younger cohort of Latines remains underexamined in both American political imaginaries and, of particular concern to me, in academic discourse. I suggest that the prevailing tendency to define Latinidad primarily through the lens of immigration, national origin, and cross-border rupture continues to obscure the very real American experiences of a generation of Latines shaped entirely within U.S. culture.

My central claim is that Latinx identity finds its purchase in the geographical, political, and cultural context of the United States—but that the very Americanness of Latine experiences has been at best undertheorized and at worst neglected by Latinx/Chicanx Studies. The dissertation proposes an alternative critical framework that attends to what happens after the rupture: how people continue to live, and make more life, in and through American cultural forms.

I read a deliberately varied archive—novels, poetry, short stories, young adult fiction, superhero comics, film, and television—asking what happens when we examine Latinidad from squarely within the borders of the United States. What structures of feeling sustain identity when the primary referent is not a country of origin but an American neighborhood, an American school, an American comic book? The texts I have assembled across three preliminary examination lists provide the theoretical and historical foundation for this inquiry.

Research Questions

How does Latinx identity find form in the American cultural imagination of the twenty-first century?

Moving beyond diaspora frameworks, this question asks how Latine writers and cultural producers have crafted new vocabularies of belonging that are rooted in, rather than defined against, the United States.

What role does affect play in the political orientation and cultural identity of second-generation Latines?

Drawing on affect theory, this question examines how feelings of belonging, shame, pride, nostalgia, and ambivalence shape how Latines relate to both American culture and inherited cultural identities.

How do popular forms—comics, YA fiction, television—circulate and contest definitions of Latinidad?

This question attends to the way mass cultural forms serve as sites where Latinx identity is produced, disputed, and reimagined for broad audiences.

Theoretical Frameworks

The project draws on scholarship in Latinx/Chicanx studies (Gloria Anzaldúa, José Muñoz, Richard Rodriguez, Juana María Rodríguez), affect theory (Lauren Berlant, Sara Ahmed, Sianne Ngai), American cultural studies, and comics and media studies. It also incorporates qualitative methodology, attending not only to textual analysis but to the experiential dimensions of reading and reception.

Future Directions

Beyond the dissertation, I am interested in developing work on Latinx digital culture, social media as a site of identity formation, and the politics of popular genre fiction. I am also invested in the pedagogical dimensions of this research, particularly how Latinx texts and cultural studies frameworks can be taught effectively in undergraduate classrooms.

Working paper or chapter excerpt available upon request. Add link or excerpt here when ready.
Archive

Texts and Methods

The dissertation draws on a deliberately varied archive assembled across three preliminary examination reading lists, completed in December 2024. These lists span Latinx/Chicanx studies as a field, contemporary literary and cultural texts, and the theoretical frameworks of affect, identity, and cultural politics.

Primary texts include novels, short fiction, poetry, young adult fiction, superhero comics, and film and television produced in the twenty-first century by and about Latines in the United States. The project reads these texts alongside reception—how they are encountered, discussed, and felt by readers and audiences—bringing qualitative and ethnographic sensibilities to bear on literary analysis.

Optional: Add a selected bibliography or reading list excerpt here. This can be a condensed version of the prelims lists or a list of key primary texts.