Modernity

In the context of Latinidad in the United States, modernity is a concept, ethos, and social and cultural border that supports and promotes the differences between a global North and a global South. As such, modernity cannot be easily divorced from its companion Latin American versions like modernidad, lo moderno, modernismo, and so on, or from the successes and failures associated with the wars of independence in the nineteenth century, or from the idealism and excesses associated with the revolutions of the twentieth century, or from the abuses of dictators and the incursions of U.S. imperialism especially. Modernity for Latinas/os is necessarily already hybrid, fluid, and contradictory, as well as a place and space in the material, cultural, and ontological registers that Néstor García Canclini (1995) understands individuals as always in the process of entering or leaving. In essence, living under the sign of modernity has a phantasmagorical quality, not unlike the confusion one intuits when Alice walks through the “looking glass,” and realities and fantasies cease to have reliable differences. Modernity for U.S. Latinas/ os is the accumulation of both fact and fiction, a combination of impulses that can be understood only in terms of powers that continually seek to reinforce what European settler colonialism instituted globally over five hundred years ago.