Diaspora

The following discussion tests out the viability and even pliability of “diaspora” as both critical concept and descriptive category for a decidedly varied set of historical formations, especially as they appear at this moment in the material and intellectual unfolding of the field of U.S. Latina/o studies, a field that appears finally to be experiencing a kind of institutional consolidation and stabilization. The fluid volatility of economic, political, and social conditions in the inter-American scene in the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century both complicates and challenges the efforts of the field of U.S. Latina/o studies to make coherent historical and cultural sense of all of the processes of mass movement and settlement from Latin America and the Caribbean to the United States since the nineteenth century, and in whatever collections of formations the field takes to be its primary object(s) of knowledge. From its early history as a field, from the 1960s and into the early 1990s, U.S. Latina/o studies could divide its attention between work on historic communities of Latin American and Caribbean descent annexed by the United States in the course of its project of imperial expansion from the early 1800s on, and immigrant communities from a small collection of sending countries or spaces that seemed to account for the vast majority of Latina/o immigrant communities in the United States, including in order of prominence: Mexican Americans, mainland Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans. In these decades, the majority of U.S. Latina/o studies work conformed fairly readily to the methodologies and practices of immigrant studies. By the 1990s, it found itself both expanding its scope to include more newly arrived immigrant populations from the Dominican Republic, Haiti, El Salvador, and Guatemala, and complicating its analytical work on immigration by deploying newly activated critical concepts such as the borderlands, mestizaje, and (multi) cultural hybridity. And, thanks to the contributions of many scholars and theorists of diaspora working in the course of the early 1990s (Hall 1990; Safran 1991; Boyarin and Boyarin 1993; Clifford 1994), what Juan Flores (2009) has called “the explosion of diaspora- speak” began in that decade to exert its own critical conceptual influence on the work of the field.