Hyphen
by
Like many in the United States I identify as Latino. Yet, if we put slight pressure on this identity category, it falls short. I’m Mexican-American, Guatemalan-American, and Irish-American. I’m GuaMex-Irish U.S. American. I’m of the hyphen. I create the hyphen. I activate the hyphen—a hyphen that signals how Latinas/os actively and constantly transform U.S. American identity categories themselves. Millions of Latinas/os in the United States are the product of multiple cultural identity categories (Allatson 2002; Caminero-Santangelo 2013). Whether one identifies as Latina/o, Hispana/o, Chicana/o, Nuyorican, Cubana/o, Juban (Jewish Cuban-American), and so on, one way or another Latinas/os inhabit in-between identity spaces. We inhabit the hyphen as Mexican-Americans, Dominican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, and as Central American-Americans, to use Arturo Arias’s (2003) term. And these hyphens splinter and multiply: Porto-Mexes, Cubo-Bolivians, Mex-Pakistanis, Black-Latinos, Luso-Latinos, among others. Each has a seeming infinite number of further variations. Each has its own history as a term. Mexican-Americans who want to foreground a politicized identity silence and displace the hyphen. For self-proclaimed Chicanas/os or Xicanas/os, the Nahuatl root sound of “ch” celebrates a new hyphenated relationship—one with our Indigenous ancestral past. We see the same move happen with Boricua, but this time to embrace the Taino ancestral roots...
This essay may be found on page 89 of the printed volume.