Latino Studies (2020) 18:301–325 https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-020-00271-7 SPECIAL ISSUE INTRODUCTION Reimagining US Colombianidades: Transnational subjectivities, cultural expressions, and political contestations Lina Rincón1 · Johana Londoño2 · Jennifer Harford Vargas3 · María Elena Cepeda4 Published online: 3 August 2020 © Springer Nature Limited 2020 On 2 February 2020, while we were in the process of composing this introduction, more than a hundred million global television viewers witnessed perhaps the most hotly discussed Latina/o/x live musical event since the electrifying 1999 Grammy performance of “Livin’ La Vida Loca” by Puerto Rican entertainer Ricky Martin. The Latinidad on display in 2020 was distinctly female, Colombian, and Puerto Rican: Shakira and Jennifer Lopez headlined the Super Bowl halftime show, making them the first two Latinas in history to perform on it together. Juxtaposed against the racial tensions of the post–Colin Kaepernick National Football League; white middle-class viewers’ concerns about the ostensibly “vulgar” spectacle of two unapologetically sexy and talented Latinas; critiques regarding the show’s centering of white Latinidad1; and the rampant anti-Latina/o/x sentiment of the Trump era, the 2020 1 We note here the strong critiques of the show’s privileging of Latina/o/x whiteness that quickly emerged from Latina scholars, such as Petra Rivera-Rideau (2020), who questioned the effectiveness of the artists’ calls for Latina/o/x unity within a context in which only a small fraction of the community was racially represented, and Zaire Dinzey-Flores (2020), who stated, “I’d suggest that the performance exhibits the seduction of whiteness and the continual ability for non-Black Latinas/os/xs to imagine a world where Blackness is part and parcel of their community and not a root or influence.” * Lina Rincón [email protected] Johana Londoño [email protected] Jennifer Harford Vargas [email protected] María Elena Cepeda [email protected] 1 Framingham State University, Framingham, USA 2 University at Albany, SUNY, Albany, USA 3 Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, USA 4 Williams College, Williamstown, USA Vol.:(0123456789) 302 L. Rincón et al. halftime show offered many insights into the fundamental nature of US Colombianidades. It was, we argue, a critical moment in the potential rebranding of Colombian identity in the global popular imagination, in which US Colombians and Latina/o/xs become central, not peripheral, to the collective celebrations and histories of US cultural touchstones such as the Superbowl, as problematic as they may be. Together, Lopez and Shakira underscore the inherently relational, dynamic character of Latinidad. When read comparatively, we can note the more overt and legible political stances adopted by Lopez in her performance (such as her use of the Puerto Rican flag; the sampling of Bruce Springsteen’s classic “Born in the USA,” which was performed by children emerging from prop cages that evoked the detention of migrant children, led by Lopez’s own daughter; and her exhortation for “Latinos” to “get loud” against respectability politics) in contradistinction to Shakira’s less legible identity markers and physical postures (the incorporation of various uniquely Colombian and specifically costeña/o/x musical genres and references2; Barranquilla carnival culture and the inclusion of the zaghrouta and other markers of diasporic Lebanese identity; and the use of Colombian backup dancers and Colombian reggaetón megastar J. Balvin). As a Puerto Rican from the Bronx and as a member of a much larger, more visible, and historically established Latina/o/x community, Jennifer Lopez’s relationship to Latinidad is unquestioned. In contrast, the Colombian-born Shakira, and the US Colombianidades she was associated with on that emblematic stage of US sport culture,3 is hyper-visible yet unseen in her complexity and specificity because of a dominant global imaginary regarding Colombians that is limited to images of Juan Valdés coffee, drugs, masculinist violence, corruption, war, and normatively beautiful women. Some Latina/o/x viewers critiqued the traces of Colombianidad recognizable in the spectacle (especially of Shakira’s light-skinned body) as yet another instance of a white-presenting South American celebrity employed to market and signify a racially diverse US Latinidad, while key aspects of her performance, such as the Colombian and costeña/o/x facets, were unreadable to many, including other Latina/o/xs. One example of the illegibility that surfaced in public responses to Shakira’s performance was the erroneous reading of the high-pitched, warbling cry (otherwise known in the Arab world as a zaghrouta) that she released at a key point in the show. Many viewers interpreted the sonic gesture, captured in an endless series 2 “Costeño, “costeña” or the less commonly used “costeñx” are the colloquial referents for the natives of Colombia’s northern Caribbean coast, popularly known as “La Costa.” We assert here as well as later on in this introduction that the need to familiarize oneself with the specificities of Colombian regionalisms in order to fully capture the subtleties of Shakira’s performance highlights the saliency of regionalized perspectives within studies of transnational Colombian culture. Moreover, by designating Shakira’s performance as more subdued, we do not wish to suggest that Shakira’s performative choices were somehow less “political,” but rather that they were more coded and therefore ostensibly less recognizable to non-Colombian viewers. For a distinctly US Colombiana perspective on the show, see Varela Rodríguez (2020). 3 We use “US Colombian” and not “Colombian American” because we agree with scholars who have pointed out that adding “American” to the nation of origin or region (i.e., Colombian American or Central American American) plays into the US co-optation of the term “American” and because it is also redundant, since Colombia is in the Americas (Oboler 1995; Gruesz 2007). Reimagining US Colombianidades: Transnational… 303 of memes picturing Shakira with her tongue out and peering into the camera, as a form of sexual display. Those familiar with Colombian regional cultures, however, quickly recognized the zaghrouta as emblematic of Shakira’s deep roots in the large Lebanese-origin population of Barranquilla, the largest city of the country’s northern Caribbean coast (see Barron 2020; Celis 2012; Cepeda 2003, 2008, 2010; Fuchs 2007; Gontovnik 2010; Iskandar 2003). We attribute this particular instance of misrecognition on the part of viewers as evidence of the enduring power of hypersexualized imagery and its historic association with Latina and gendered, racialized bodies in general.4 Some public reaction to Shakira’s performance also reignited stereotypes about US Colombianidades and US South Americans in general, such as the notions that they uniformly enjoy class privilege, are white, and are “new” migrants mostly categorized as Latin Americans. While this may be true of Shakira, it is not true of all US Colombians. Moreover, as María Elena Cepeda (2003, 2010) has argued, Shakira’s Latinidad underscores—though rarely is acknowledged as such—the centrality of transnational ties in any consideration of the dynamic relationship between the categories of “Latina/o/x” and “Latin American.” These popular interpretations of Shakira’s performance in the Super Bowl emphasize the ways that US Colombians are simultaneously hyper-visible yet unseen in US society, which powerfully resonates with the ideas and vision that motivate this special issue. This special issue moves beyond and at times challenges dominant assumptions about Colombians: that they are a “new” group in the US; that they are an “other” within the broader Latina/o/x imaginary; that Colombians (and South Americans in general) are more privileged middle- and upper-class migrants; and that the community can be comprehensively understood through the paradigms of narco-trafficking and hypersexualized femininity. We believe that the extant frameworks for understanding the US Colombian experience do not fully account for the distinct intricacies of Colombian diasporic lives. At this fruitful cultural, historical and political moment, we therefore invite scholars to explore the central thematics, analytical lenses, and driving preoccupations of US Colombianidades within a resolutely interdisciplinary, transnational, and relational Latina/o/x studies framework. Our vision for this special issue arose out of an interdisciplinary symposium organized by the US Colombianx Editorial Collective (comprising María Elena Cepeda, Jennifer Harford Vargas, Johana Londoño, John Mckiernan-González, Michelle Nasser De La Torre, and Ariana Ochoa Camacho) at Williams College in October 2017. Twenty-seven scholars from US colleges and universities and Colombia- and US-based community groups gathered to present research on an array of topics including US Colombian artists, US electoral politics, Colombian diasporic novelists, Colombian global cultural productions, US Colombian communities, US tourists in Colombia, and Colombian beauty pageants in the United States, among 4 Shakira thus constitutes a vivid example of how, as Jesús Estrada asserts, hypervisibility frequently decontextualizes Latina bodies (Jesús Estrada, personal communication with María Elena Cepeda, 3 May 2020). Moreover, Shakira is best understood as a diasporic subject two times over (Cepeda 2003, 2010): she is the daughter of two migrants and a migrant herself, a specific positionality frequently witnessed in Colombia’s Caribbean port cities, yet one that may also go mis- or unrecognized in studies of US Colombianidades that fail to account for regional and transnational perspectives. Deeply problemat ic for the Colombia n tradition that sees internatio nal roots and ethnicities (nonblack) as ideal additions to the nation 304 L. Rincón et al. others. All the articles for this special issue were presented and workshopped at the symposium or at a number of panels on US Colombianidades we have organized at the last two Latina/o Studies Association conferences and at the last two annual meetings of the American Studies Association. Through this sustained collaboration across multiple disciplines, we have begun to build the interdisciplinary subfield of US Colombian studies, and we view this special issue as an integral part of imagining the futures of US Colombianidades. This special issue foregrounds overlooked instances of Colombianidades in the United States and centers US Colombian community formations, transnational imaginaries, media representations, involvement in electoral politics, and queer activism in relation to other (not “other”) Latina/o/xs. In thinking of US Colombians alongside Latina/o/xs of multiple national, racial, gender, sexual, and socioeconomic identities, we collectively unveil the uniquely Colombian stories that have shaped and continue to shape Latina/o/x cultures, politics, and lives. Our goal for this introduction and for all of the articles included herein is to contribute to an interdisciplinary archive of US Colombian scholarship, to intentionally deploy citational politics in the service of helping scholars pursue research on US Colombianidades, and to provide readers with a sense of the various experiences and narratives of Colombianidad. The archive of references, texts, and examples we offer in this special issue is not exhaustive; rather, it is a selective offering and an opening for future work. Our hope is that we can move beyond the currently delimited and limiting vision of Colombians toward a richer, more complex understanding of US Colombianidades in all its plurality, contradictions, and transnational and intra-ethnic complexities. In the sections that follow, we illustrate how the presence of Colombians in the US has been characterized by the same tension between invisibility and hypervisibility that we observed in public commentary regarding Shakira’s appearance in the Super Bowl. We then discuss the impacts of Colombia’s political history and of its regional dynamics and trace the transhistorical presence of Colombians in the US to contextualize their nuanced transnational experience. Finally, we lay out our vision for centering US Colombian studies within the parameters of Latinidad and the larger field of Latina/o/x studies. Contesting representational paradigms The relative paucity of published materials on US Colombians has prompted specialists in the field to become adept scholars in the histories, cultural production, and politics of other Latina/o/x national-origin populations in order to better understand the contexts that shape the US Colombian community. The study of diasporic Colombians necessitates a relational approach vis-à-vis other Latinidades, while it simultaneously demands careful attention to place (Londoño 2016) and a transnational scope (Cepeda 2003, 2010; Harford Vargas 2017b; Porras Contreras 2017). As our introduction and each of our contributors to this special issue demonstrate, US Colombian studies is relational, local, and transnational in orientation, driven both by the norms of Latina/o/x studies as it has Reimagining US Colombianidades: Transnational… 305 developed as well as by the unique demographic characteristics of US Colombians and Colombia’s historic relationship to the United States. US Colombians have been an understudied group in the field of Latina/o/x studies, erroneously depicted as “new” or “other” Latinos. The language positing “new” and “other” Latina/o/xs is both historically inaccurate (Colombians have been in the US since at least the nineteenth century) and limiting. Built into the field of Latina/o/x studies is a critique of normative postures and categories; therefore, it is necessary to contest the norms that are subtly, even if unintentionally, invoked and reinscribed with the use of “other”/“new” Latina/o/xs. Moreover, the idea of being an “other” Latina/o/x is based on the presumed norm of the triumvirate national-origin populations in the field—Chicana/o/x/Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and US Cuban. These three groups and their distinct migration histories and sociopolitical relationships to the US have shaped the historical development of the field of Latina/o/x studies and are often understood based on their own national-origin specificity (Aparicio 2017, 2019). More recent studies of previously understudied national-origin groups, such as US Dominican studies, and regional studies, such as US Central American studies, have expanded Latina/o/x studies. Our attention to US Colombianidades parallels and intersects with these recent field expansions, and this special issue is our call for the field to understand US Colombians in their own right. As US Colombian academics invested in the study of the Colombian diaspora and its cultural production, political dynamics, and ethnographic particularities, we are keenly aware of how a general lack of knowledge about the Colombian diaspora among US- and Latin America–based academics reflects the manner in which hierarchies of knowledge and beliefs about what is “worth knowing” are shaped by financial considerations and other institutional objectives, themselves molded by ideology (Lippi-Green 2012, p. 283). The recent publication of the text Latina/o Studies (2018) by Ronald L. Mize, designed as a brief introduction to Latina/o/x studies, proves a case in point. Unlike other texts in the same vein, Mize includes a discussion of US South American studies, although it totals less than one page. He attributes US South American studies’ lack of visibility to several nebulous factors, most notably the South American diaspora’s failure to embody Latinidades in the quotidian context. As such, the illegibility of US South American studies more broadly, and US Colombian studies more specifically, is associated with a nebulous communal deficit model. Moreover, Mize includes no consideration of the actual structural issues affecting knowledge production, encompassing issues such as ingrained Colombian communal norms regarding “proper” career paths (read, not an ethnic studies professor); the pervasive desconfianza (mistrust) within Colombian diasporic communities born of the narco-trafficking stigma and generalized violence in Colombia (Guarnizo et al. 1999; Guarnizo and Espitia 2007), which has led to a lack of communal cohesion; and the difficulty in obtaining institutional funding to conduct transnational fieldwork in a country deemed too “dangerous” by those outside of the field. Mize also provides no citations of the existing literature on US Colombians, giving the impression that no such publications exist. In his superficial recognition of the field, Mize thereby ultimately unwittingly erases South American 306 L. Rincón et al. identities, enacting the very epistemological violence that the inclusion of the paragraph on US South American studies was likely intended to contest.5 The politics of recognition in the neoliberal academy demands that, in order to be recognized within current Latina/o/x studies, subfields must be “re-cognized,” or (re)fashioned in the image of existing—and thereby legible—academic cultural scripts (Cardenas 2017, p. 87). Not only does the “other”/“new” Latina/o/x label historically decontextualizes US Colombian presence, it also leads many faculty and administrators—including those in Latina/o/x studies—to believe that, since our numbers must be few, there is not a pressing need to teach the subfield, much less hire diasporic Colombians. This fetishization of demographics as razón de ser is a key element driving the invisibility of US Colombian studies within the hierarchies of worth that define Latina/o/x studies. It is from within this charged context, or the ongoing institutionalization of Latina/o/x studies within US neoliberal systems of higher education, that we posit that the study of US Colombianidades facilitates a much-needed aperture in the existing Latina/o/x studies canon, particularly at a political moment marked by a global rise in xenophobia and ethno-nationalisms. An estimated five million Colombians live abroad, or approximately one-tenth of the country’s population.6 According to the 2010 United States census and a 2013 Pew Research Center estimate, between one million to 1.1 million of these individuals live in the United States, a figure that almost certainly represents an underestimate (LaRosa and Mejía 2017, p. 216). Indeed, Ochoa Camacho employs an amalgam of Colombian and US data to determine that, by the year 2020, the US will be home to approximately 2.2 million individuals of Colombian origin (Ochoa Camacho 2016, pp. 167, 168).7 Sixty percent of the contemporary US Colombian community is foreign-born, and 40% is “established,” or has lived in the United States for more than 20 years. Fifty-six percent of US Colombians are US citizens (a figure that has grown since the opportunity to hold dual citizenship was enshrined in Colombian law in 1991), but roughly 40% of the population is undocumented (Cepeda 2010; Ochoa Camacho 2016, p. 168); and, as recently as 2000, Colombians constituted the fourth-largest undocumented population in the US (Guarnizo and 5 Falconi and Mazzotti’s edited book The Other Latinos: Central and South Americans in the United States 2008) similarly includes only brief data on Colombians in the United States. Other scholars have attended to US Colombians under the framework of US South American studies (Oboler 2005a, b, and Heredia 2013, 2018). A more robust development of US South American studies remains to be developed in Latina/o/x studies, and our hope is that our study of US Colombians will further the development of this national-origin subfield and of a regional US South American subfield. 6 As LaRosa and Mejía note in their commentary on Colombians abroad, we should consider this figure while keeping in mind that, in other highly populated South American nations such as Argentina, a little more than one million citizens live abroad, or roughly 2% of Argentina’s forty-four million residents. For further comparison, only slightly more than 2% of US residents live outside the nation’s political boundaries (LaRosa and Mejía 2017, p. 215). 7 See Cepeda (2010) and Ochoa Camacho (2016) for further discussion of this persistent undercounting and its attendant consequences. Cepeda (2010) and Ochoa Camacho (2016) rely on various sources for their data because errors in the US Census have repeatedly resulted in a very inaccurate count of the US Colombian population. Unfortunately, the 2010 US Census and more recent studies, such as those released by the PEW Research Center (2017, 2019) and the Migration Policy Institute (2015, 2017, 2018), still appear to underestimate the number of US Colombians. For a comprehensive wave-based overview of Colombian migration to the United States, see Cepeda (2010). Reimagining US Colombianidades: Transnational… 307 Espitia 2007, p. 375). Although the New York metro area and specifically Queens have historically been the areas most closely associated with the Colombian diaspora, 33% of US Colombians now live in Florida, where their numbers are second only to those of US Cubans in terms of population size in major urban centers like Miami, which has emerged in recent years as the primary locus of studies of the Colombian diaspora alongside New York (see Avivi, this issue). Other significant sites of Colombian diasporic settlement include northern New Jersey, California (primarily Los Angeles), Boston, Houston, New Orleans and, more recently, Atlanta. Outside these spaces, the US Colombian diaspora remains notably geographically dispersed, a factor that can be accounted for by the gradual nature of Colombian settlement in the United States (with the exception of periods such as the 1990s and early 2000s, when violence tied to the civil conflict markedly increased in Colombia and drove out-migration) and by the impact of drug-trafficking stereotypes on intraColombian communal cohesion (LaRosa and Mejía 2017, p. 216; Guarnizo et al. 1999). Although we are tempted to assert that Colombians are an important national-origin group to consider in Latina/o/x studies because they are the largest population of South American origin in the United States, we are wary of making a demographic argument for their inclusion. Demographics, or the capitalistic assumption that “in order to count one must be counted,” also deeply informs the intellectual hierarchies of worth in Latina/o/x studies. In an analogous case, Cardenas observes, Using demographics as a justification for representation has also been deployed as a form of silencing. … The labels constantly attached to Central Americans such as “recent immigrants” or “other Latinos” is one that is often explained by their demographic presence within the US’s social ordering of minority subjects. Demographics are also used to explain why Latino studies must almost exclusively focus on certain larger or historical communities in the US. (Cardenas 2017, p. 92). In this sense, the invisibility of US Colombians in current demographic data indicates the urgency of imparting the experiences of those whom “we don’t see” or “can’t see.” Demographic presence does not explain, for example, experiences of soledad, as discussed by Ariana Ochoa Camacho in this issue, or the auto-ethnographic rendering of Latina feminist media recognition included in María Elena Cepeda’s article in this volume. At the same time, we recognize the importance of demographics for understanding the experience of US Colombians. In this issue, for example, Angie N. Ocampo and Angela X. Ocampo compiled data from six different national datasets to construct the first nationally representative sample of US Colombians in order to understand the political attitudes of US Colombians during the 2016 presidential election. Their analysis brings light to the crucial importance of class and racial dynamics, as well as US Colombians’ transnational experience, as catalysts of divergent political leanings and experiences. When not ignored, recognized very briefly, or categorized as “new” or “other,” Colombians are often depicted in stereotypes, most particularly in exaggerated gender roles along a hyperfeminine and hypermasculine heteronormative binary. As scholars such as Cepeda (2003, 2008, 2010, 2018, 2019, forthcoming), Nasser 308 L. Rincón et al. (2012), Nasser De La Torre (2013), Schaeffer (2012) and Porras Contreras (2017) have traced, in the US popular imagination Colombianidad is persistently filtered through gendered, sexualized imagery, as the ubiquitous figures of Sofía Vergara, Shakira, Kalis Uchis, and Colombian beauty queens underscore. These feminized representations are starkly juxtaposed against the images of masculinist violence, corruption, and illicit drug activity that mark the other half of the Colombian representational binary. The narco genre and the accompanying stereotype of Colombians as drug lords and drug smugglers has been widely pervasive in the US from the 1980s to the present in films and television shows such as Scarface (1983), Miami Vice (1984–1990), Clear and Present Danger (1994), Blow (2001), Maria Full of Grace (2004), Colombiana (2011), and Narcos (2015–present), to name just a few. But the most salient and pervasive example of this in the narco genre is the Pablo Escobar narrative, a mediated rendering of Colombia mired in the dramatically violent period during the 1980s and 1990s marked by the rise and spectacular fall of the narcotics kingpin. Informed by the discursive stylings of a heavily commodified magical realism, the cultural industry built around the Escobar narrative is a source of distress and resentment for Colombians around the globe, yet the endless accumulation of tell-all books, films, and television series rooted in it provide a significant source of capital for many. Significantly, this stereotypical association of Colombia with drug lords and drug smuggling has emerged from within as well as from without the transnational Colombian community (Cepeda forthcoming, 2018, 2019; Harford Vargas 2019; Herrero-Olaizola 2007; Nasser 2008; Ochoa Camacho 2016; Pobutsky 2013, 2017, 2020). Cultural scripts such as the sexy Colombian female and ruthless male Colombian narco-trafficker narrative act as epistemological disciplinary mechanisms that diminish our understanding of US Colombianidades and delimit the possibilities of US Colombian studies in the academy and beyond. This special issue seeks to contest the predominant yet severely limited representational frameworks that mark US Colombianidades, just as it simultaneously addresses the relative invisibility of US Colombians within the broader contours of Latina/o/x studies. Indeed, Yamil Avivi’s essay in this special issue interrogates this invisibility, in its vivid account of the asylum process for Miami-based transsexual Colombian Andrés that provokes valuable questions regarding the heterosexist, first world orientation of US immigration law and scholarly accounts of migratory populations. Archiving the transhistorical presence of Colombians in the United States For a population commonly, though inaccurately, described as “new” arrivals to the United States, US Colombians appear scattered across space and time in various books, cultural texts, and social movements, and often immersed among long-standing Latina/o/x communities. It may come as a surprise to learn that the first documented Spanish-language US Latina/o/x novel on the theme of immigration, Lucas Guevara, was written in 1914 by Alirio Díaz Guerra, a well-heeled Colombian exile living in New York City (Kanellos and Hernández 2003; Torres-Saillant 2007). The 1961 film West Side Story, an icon of Puerto Rican representation in popular media, Reimagining US Colombianidades: Transnational… 309 denounced for having only one Puerto Rican actor in its cast, Rita Moreno, had, it turns out, two Latina/o/x actors: José De Vega Jr., born in San Diego to a Colombian mother and a Filipino father, played Chino in the film (Fojas 2014, p. 140).8 At the height of Puerto Rican struggles for space in 1960s New York City, Colombian Edmundo Facini led Barrio Nuevo, an organization that challenged urban expansion plans (Aponte-Pares 1998, p. 413). Colombians at the time also joined the Young Lords Party (Morales and Oliver-Velez 2010, p. xi). Meanwhile, José Julio Sarria, a Colombian Nicaraguan Californian, is believed to have been the first drag performer and gay rights advocate to run for public office in the United States, in 1961. Sarria, known as the “first Empress of San Francisco,” founded what eventually became The International Court System, a North American organization for gay men, crossdressers, and drag queens (Erickson-Schroth 2014, p. 514). Colombians have also been elected officials in US politics since at least the 1990s, if not earlier (Cepeda 2010). Colombians in the United States cannot be labeled as “new” when their stories are tied to, and constitutive of, the histories, cultures, politics, and communities of some of the most legendary eras, populations, and spaces in Latina/o/x studies. By the same measure, the ordinary lives of thousands of Colombian immigrants and refugees who have arrived since the early twentieth century to pursue middle-class professions and/or work for low wages in factories, agriculture, and service industries in Florida, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island, for example, cannot be considered “new” when they have helped, alongside existing Latina/o/x populations, boost local economies and emerging Latina/o/x communities. Indeed, Colombians have a long, rich, and variegated historical and cultural presence in the United States that merits further study. Moreover, US Colombian cultural production is flourishing, with a number of recent authors and artists emerging on the scene in the last few years and with US Colombian actresses and actors gaining more prominent roles in recent years. We provide a robust list of writers, artists, and actors in order to make visible these achievements and to provide Latina/o/x studies scholars with an array of US Colombians they can incorporate into their courses and consider as they develop their research projects. US Colombian writers include Jaime Manrique, Tatiana de la Tierra, Patricia Engel, Daisy Hernández, Sergio de la Pava, James Cañón, Silvana Paternostro, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Anika Fajardo, Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Grisel Acosta, Julianne Pachico, Mary Angélica Molina, Diane Guerrero, Rosa Boshier, and Juliana Delgado Lopera, who work across genres and move between fiction, memoir, and nonfiction. As exemplified by Daisy Hernández’s epigraph to A Cup of Water Under My Bed (2014), which references Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros querying, “What does a woman inherit/that tells her how/to go?,” these authors figure US Colombianidades in dialogue with traditional Latina/o/x literary tropes. At the same time, their writings are often shot through with references to or scenes set under the civil war in Colombia, making their representations of US imperialism and state support of right-wing counterinsurgency forces similar to representations 8 US Colombianas also have starring roles in the new versions of West Side Story: Yesenia Ayla is playing Anita in the Broadway revival, while Rachel Zegler will play Maria in the Hollywood remake. 310 L. Rincón et al. of the Cold War, militarization, and dictatorship by Latina/o/x novelists and artists of a number of different national origins. They simultaneously also differ because US Colombian literary production is not post-conflict, whereas the work of their Latina/o/x contemporaries is post-dictatorship (see Harford Vargas 2017a; Ortíz 2016; Vigil 2014). Though scholars have studied some of this literary production, and Catalina Esguerra in this special issue analyzes Patricia Engel’s Vida (2010), evocatively demonstrating how Engel provides a dynamic vision of diaspora as a condition in process formalized in the novel’s scattered story structure, most of it remains to be substantively examined, underscoring the need for a more comprehensive study of US Colombian literature as a whole. Contemporary US Colombian artists, like the writers, exhibit visual imaginations that share the concerns of their Latina/o/x counterparts, especially in relation to shifting anti-immigrant discourses, interrogating systems of oppression, and celebrating Colombianidades, Latinidades, and folks of color more generally. Jessica Sabogal became nationally visible while collaborating with Amplifier’s “We the People” posters for the Women’s March following the 2017 Trump inauguration by producing the “We the Indivisible” and “Women Are Perfect” pieces that celebrated queer Latina/x love and Afro-Latinidad while the muralist GLeo painted “The Original Dream” across grain silos in Wichita, breaking the world record for the largest single-artist mural and celebrating Latinidades in the Midwest in vivid tones on a grand scale. Michelle Angela Ortíz has monumentalized undocumented migrants who have been detained and deported through her murals, site installations, and documentaries, and Mónica Enríquez-Enríquez has used video installations to capture the experiences of queer migrants and asylum seekers. From Fanny Sanin’s geometric abstracts and Diana Restrepo’s abstract paintings of disrupted territories to Sandra Parra’s Frida Kahlo-like self-portraits that incorporate Colombian food products and Carlos Motta’s use of newsprint to represent US interventions in Latin America, US Colombian artistic mediums and thematic concerns are wide-ranging, and their work has been shown in galleries and art museums around the United States, in Colombia, and globally. Finally, a number of US Colombian performers are important for considering how US Colombianidades have shaped the cultural landscape of Latinidades. From Sofia Vergara, John Leguizamo, Diane Guerrero, Isabella Gómez, and Stephanie Beatriz to “Mo” (Maurice Alberto) Rocca, Odette Annable, and Wilmer Valderrama, US Colombians (some of whom are intra-Latina/o/x such as the US Colombian Puerto Rican Leguizamo) have acted in popular movies and television shows. The fact that they most frequently play characters of different, or even vague, Latin American origins speaks to Hollywood’s representational imprecision when it comes to national origins as well as its attempt to construct an audience so it can appeal to and profit from the so-called Hispanic market (Dávila 2012). Yet, these performers are also evidence of the importance of US Colombianidades in shaping contemporary television and film, even when they are not known generally for their national origin. These descriptive lists of US Colombian historical, artistic, and cultural figures we have provided indexes the necessity of archiving the rich historical and contemporary presence of Colombianidades within Latinidades. Reimagining US Colombianidades: Transnational… 311 Contextualizing the transnational experiences of US Colombians To understand US Colombians, it is imperative to understand the political history and regional dynamics that centrally shape Colombians both in Colombia and abroad. For more than 50 years, Colombia was engaged in a protracted civil war, the longest of any nation in the Western Hemisphere.9 As LaRosa and Mejía (2017, p. 232) observe, the duration of the Colombian conflict is directly tied to its ability to adjust to shifting historical conditions within Colombia as well as globally. Since the 1990s, Colombia has also held the dubious distinction of being the most violent country in the region, with the worst human rights record, the highest number of murdered trade unionists, and the world’s largest population of internal refugees.10 On November 24th 2016, the country signed an official peace agreement. Although generalized violence has abated since its signing, targeted assassinations—specifically of social leaders and human rights activists, many of them indigenous or AfroColombian—have increased, rendering it impossible to speak yet of a “post-conflict” Colombia. Both of the two most prominent warring factions in Colombia’s dirty war—the various guerrilla groups and paramilitary forces—have committed grave human rights violations. Yet, notably, since their emergence as US-trained counterinsurgency forces in the 1960s, the paramilitary forces alone have enjoyed intimate ties to the Colombian ruling establishment and are responsible for approximately 80% of all human rights violations. Akin to many other Latin American nations, Colombia has also been shaped by US Cold War politics and imperialist military influences, which in turn has affected migratory flows and transnational communal formations. In this regard, the US Colombian diaspora is, to borrow Nadine Naber’s phrase, “a diaspora of empire” (Naber 2012, p. 197). One prominent recent example of the profound influence of US interventionism is Plan Colombia (2000–2015), a US-backed, $10 billion counter-narcotics initiative first championed by the governments of Andrés Pastrana (1998–2002) and Bill Clinton (1993–2001). Under Plan Colombia, US taxpayers funded the mass aerial fumigation of coca crops in Colombia, a strategy that was ultimately halted because of widespread reports of communal displacement, serious health concerns, environmental havoc, and damage to food crops. Plan Colombia also enabled the Colombian government to siphon money to paramilitary death squads responsible for many of the era’s most egregious human rights violations under the guise of counterinsurgency efforts. President Juan Manuel Santos (2010–2018) ended the program in 2015 because of its devastating health and environmental effects. However, under pressure of decertification by the Trump 9 For comprehensive, English-language monographs analyzing the Colombian conflict, US-Colombian relations, and contemporary Colombian history in general, see Appelbaum (2003), Bergquist et al. (2001), Bushnell (1993), Farnsworth-Alvear et al. (2017), LaRosa and Mejía (2017), López-Pedreros (2019), Palacios (2006), Paternostro (1998, 2007), Rappaport (1990), Roldán (2002), Safford and Palacios (2001), Stanfield (2013), and Wade (1993, 2000). 10 This translates into nearly 15,000 civilian deaths at the hands of paramilitary groups at the height of the violence between 1988 and 2003. By 2009, the number of political murders in Colombia had exceeded those of any overt Latin American dictatorship (Hristov 2009). 312 L. Rincón et al. government,11 by October 2018 the Iván Duque administration (2018–) had initiated a pilot program of aerial fumigation in the Antioquia region, a long-standing seat of paramilitary power (King and Wherry 2018). As in other Latin American countries, race and institutional racism are part of the structure of Colombian society. Although Colombia is a racially diverse country (10% of the total population identifies as Afro-descendant, the second-largest population in South America after Brazil, while 4.4% identifies as indigenous) (DANE 2019; La población indígena 2019),12 racial dynamics and relations have been historically dominated by discourses and practices that hold light skin and European culture in higher regard (Leal 2010; Wade 2012). This ideology stems from a colonial racial project that aimed to unify the nation and its regions. In this project, Colombia embraced a hierarchy that conflated high status and social class with whiteness, and this conflation was a condition for accessing political and economic power (Appelbaum 2003). Race, however, is not widely discussed or recognized as a central aspect of social relations (Bonilla-Silva 2002; Wade 2012). As a result, an important part of the experience of Colombian migrants in the United States is to learn to navigate and make sense of their place in the racial hierarchy. Within this context, it is critical to acknowledge the potency of Colombian regionalism and its impacts on the specific hierarchies of race, nation, language, and sexuality within both Colombia and the diaspora. The US Colombian community is replete with profound regional differences (Williams 2018, p. 68). As in much of the Americas, regionalist discourse in Colombia has historically been framed in oppositional terms (Appelbaum 2003, p. 39). For example, natives of the Caribbean and Pacific coasts are most frequently associated with blackness—framed as stereotypically less inclined toward hard work—whereas inhabitants of the nation’s highlands are “naturally” industrious. These epistemological frameworks span time and space, informing intergenerational and diasporic understandings of Colombianidad. Shaping not only local but, ultimately, also global constructs of race, gender, nation, and desire, “in Colombia, history gave race a regional structure such that race cannot be simply understood as a social construction around phenotype, but must also be seen as a social construction around region” (Wade 1991, p. 46). To cite but one example, the identity of Antioquia highlands natives has long been closely associated with civilization, capitalism, labor, and, ultimately, whiteness (Tubb 2013, p. 627), a discursive correlation notably present in local narratives about the late Pablo Escobar. Within Colombia, the raza antioqueña (or the “Antioquian race” of the Antioquia department) has therefore historically been considered superior, premised 11 In 2017, the Trump government threatened to decertify Colombia, effectively placing the country on a black list of nations not deemed to be combating the global drug trade effectively enough. Under decertification, a country forfeits all US foreign aid not directly tied to anti-narcotics measures. In the case of Colombia, this would entail ceasing all aid related to the 2016 peace accords. The Trump administration has also supported a return to aerial fumigation and forced eradication such as deployed under Plan Colombia, despite their well-documented negative impacts. 12 Although we cite these statistics, we recognize that they are not necessarily an entirely accurate reflection of how Colombians not claiming indigenous or Afro-diasporic identities are racialized on the ground, both in Latin America and within the diaspora. Reimagining US Colombianidades: Transnational… 313 on a supposed mixture of Jew, Creole, and Spaniard and corresponding stereotypes of hardworking, astute, and entrepreneurial populations (Rojas 2001, p. 30). “The white legend” or the myth of paisa whiteness thus boasts an extensive history born of racialized regionalism and is rooted in the profound sense of regional exceptionalism undergirding Antioquia’s racial claims (Appelbaum 2003, p. 12; Tubb 2013, p. 633), as well as those of other highlands spaces within Colombia. Regionalism in Colombia is therefore of paramount importance to the transnational study of Colombian communities because it upholds the specific ethnoracial imaginaries that inform inter-Colombian and intra-Latina/o/x dynamics at home and abroad. As Garbow’s analysis in this special issue underscores, regional and racial dynamics inform the understanding diasporic Colombians have of where they stand in the US racial hierarchy and the place of other Latina/o/x migrants in that framework. US Colombian political participation and transnational involvement is varied and at times disparate from other Latina/o/x groups. Although US Colombians have not been as politically active in their home country and in the United States (Jones-Correa 1998; Guarnizo et al. 2003), they are one of the groups with higher naturalization rates in the United States (Liang 1994; Sierra et al. 2000). Because US Colombians have been able to hold dual citizenship since 1991, naturalization allows them to maintain social and emotional ties in their home country while providing them with tools to overcome the restricted social rights imposed by temporary and permanent resident legal statuses (Escobar 2004). In this issue, Ocampo and Ocampo reveal how these patterns of political participation develop as Colombians settle permanently in the United States. They show that this more permanent settlement leads to an increased involvement in US politics, with orientations that vary largely by class and by the region where US Colombians live and where they come from, as well as by their immigration status. They demonstrate that the political attitudes and experiences of US Colombians challenge the assumption of the so-called Latino vote as a homogeneous, unified category. Although Colombians in the United States are generally depicted as a group that is relatively successful socially and economically in comparison to other Latina/o/x national-origin groups, their experience of racialization and their unstable legal status leads to an experience of “privileged marginality” (Rincón 2015). Indeed, many still face economic, legal and social constraints that delay their economic and social incorporation experience in US society. This experience of privileged marginality is important for Latina/o/x studies to consider in order to further nuance the field’s understanding of class and race relations within and across Latina/o/x nationalorigin populations. For example, highly educated Colombians can often land a relatively good job, but racial and legal marginalization can hinder their ability to achieve occupational and economic upward mobility. Colombians in high-skilled occupations have also confronted marginalization and delayed economic mobility as a result of their accents and origins (Rincón 2015). Middle-class Colombians have reported working two to three low-paying jobs because of limitations imposed by temporary visas (Rincón 2017) and skills transferability in the US job market (Meyer et al. 1997). Working-class Colombians tend to be undocumented and subject to exploitation (Collier and Gamarra 2001). Colombians in the United States, for the most part, experience downward mobility and economic marginalization, This is what they are asking What does it mean? 314 L. Rincón et al. regardless of the socioeconomic status they held when they arrived to the country. Legal barriers and discrimination on the basis of race, origin, and accent are at the root of economic marginalization. When analyzed as a whole, however, US Colombians are more likely to assimilate to mainstream US ways socially and economically; they also tend to maintain their membership and network connections in their home country (Guarnizo et al. 2003; Escobar 2004). Their high levels of education have allowed Colombian migrant professionals to achieve relative socioeconomic success in the United States. This success has led high-skilled Colombian migrants to stay in the United States in higher numbers than those with lower educational levels (Medina and Posso 2009). Despite the relatively privileged conditions of US Colombians, many face economic, legal, and social constraints that delay their economic and social incorporation into US society (Meyer et al. 1997; Banarjee and Rincón 2019). Though middle-class descriptors are often used to discuss Colombians, such as, they are “entrepreneurs,” “well-educated,” and speak “good Spanish,” Colombians also work in low-wage sectors and exhibit working-class characteristics. While empirical observations of Colombian working-class experiences throughout the United States are abundant, scholarly evidence of this working-class presence can largely be found in research about the old industrial centers of the northeast. Regarding New England, Aviva Chomsky notes that Central Falls, Rhode Island, and Lowell, Massachusetts, two of the oldest textile towns in the region, attracted a chain migration of Colombian textile workers from Antioquia starting in the 1960s (Chomsky 2008, pp. 159–168). Using census data, the Boston Redevelopment Authority found that by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century only 8% of the Colombian population living in Boston held a graduate or professional degree and nearly half of the foreign-born Colombian population worked in food preparation and serving occupations or building and grounds cleaning and maintenance occupations.13 Colombian factory workers have also been present in New Jersey and Long Island, especially after deindustrialization in New York City forced industry to move to the outskirts starting as early as the 1950s (Fernandez-Kelly and Sassen 1995; Londoño 2015). Several of our contributors focus on the working class: Ochoa Camacho and Garbow examine Colombian low-wage earners in New York and Philadelphia, while María Elena Cepeda examines the cultural significance of the young US Colombian girl who “effortlessly moves through workingclass space” in the streets of Brooklyn in Bomba Estéreo’s “Soy yo” music video. Working-class US Colombianidad is observable in other cultural representations, such as in the overblown personality and personal aesthetics of Sofía Vergara’s character Gloria in the sitcom Modern Family (2009–2019); in Daisy Hernández’s memoir A Cup of Water Under My Bed, which documents her family’s experience in working-class northern New Jersey; in the abjection of a Colombian immigrant child corralled in a detention center in HBO’s film Icebox (2018); and in a single 13 BRA Research Division and the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Advancement, “Imagine All the People: Colombians,” 2016, accessed 9 January 2020. http://www.bostonplans.org/getattachment/5facd1a3-2ec24e59-ac33-995cd365a6e0. The authors use data from the 2009–2013 American Community Survey. Reimagining US Colombianidades: Transnational… 315 mother and her children’s efforts to survive in Queens by collecting trash cans in the film Entre Nos (2009). Attending to experiences of undocumented migration expands our understanding of the socioeconomic locations US Colombians occupy, and it opens up rich avenues of inquiry and conceptual tropes for Latina/o/x studies. Colombians colloquially describe crossing undocumented into the United States as going por el Hueco, which translates as “through the Hole” or “through the Gap.” As Harford Vargas has theorized, this Colombian metaphor of el Hueco provides a fruitful new trope for Latina/o/x studies, one that is directly rooted in the experience of undocumented migration and that complements “the guiding metaphor of Latino studies: ‘la frontera,’ the border” (Harford Vargas 2017b, 2019; Flores 2000, p. 212). To gain entry into the United States, Colombian undocumented migrants use multiple routes that extend throughout South America, Central America, and Mexico, as well as the Caribbean, which is key, since studies of undocumented migration primarily focus on the routes through Central America and Mexico and rarely consider South America and the Caribbean. As a conceptual metaphor for undocumented migration rooted in this extended geography, el Hueco captures both the time and place where migrants cross geopolitical borders undetected, as well as the entire complex process of entering into and subsequently navigating life as undocumented subjects in the United States, since subjects do not simply pass through el Hueco when they enter the US but rather live in el Hueco as they navigate gaps in the state’s surveillance apparatus and holes in access to social services and employment. Given the dominant focus on the US-Mexico border in the US political imaginary, and the stereotypical assumption in the public sphere that undocumented migrants are impoverished Mexicans (or, more recently, Central Americans), it is pressing that Latina/o/x studies contest these oversimplified views by considering Latin American migration from a relational perspective that accounts for different national groups, modes of crossing, socioeconomic classes, and geographic sites of entry (see Castaño 2017). Attending to US Colombians facilitates a more comprehensive understanding of Latina/o/x experiences of undocumented migration while also providing a vocabulary for articulating these realities. Moreover, a more nuanced socioeconomic panorama of US Colombians emerges when we take into account the environments that they produce and inhabit. The majority of Colombians migrate from urbanized areas in Colombia and settle in major metropolises of the United States. In this way, they resemble many other Latina/o/x migrants. Nonetheless, in important ways, US Colombianidades move beyond what has traditionally preoccupied scholars studying urban Latinidad. Though certain urban communities are hubs of Colombian culture and life, such as Queens (discussed in Ochoa Camacho’s article) or Philadelphia (discussed in Garbow’s article), it would be difficult to take on a study that focuses exclusively on a Colombian urban community or Colombian “barrio,” to use the scholarly term that is often applied to Latina/o/x neighborhoods (Londoño 2015). In contrast to Latina/o/x studies texts on Mexican/Chicana/o/x or Puerto Rican barrios, for example, it is difficult to locate a Colombian barrio in the United States. Indeed, patterns of Colombian urban settlement in the United States may be most in need of what Gina Pérez and colleagues call moving “beyond the barrio” (2010). Most Colombians who settled 316 L. Rincón et al. in US cities in the 1970s and through the 1990s arrived when other, diverse groups of Latina/o/xs were also arriving. These immigrants transformed what were once Mexican or Puerto Rican barrios into nationally and racially diverse communities. Moreover, Colombians, like many other Latin American immigrants who arrived in large numbers in the late twentieth century, settled in metropolitan areas that were changing because of gentrification in cities and the increased suburbanization of people of color (Jones-Correa 2006). Some Colombians who immigrated in the late twentieth century settled in the outlying semi-suburban or suburban areas of cities rather than in the “inner-core” (Aparicio 2014). This spatial dispersion contributes to the invisibility of Colombians in a Latina/o/x studies field that has focused predominantly on inner-city barrios. The difficulty of studying a “Colombian barrio” challenges scholars to study multiple places—a multi-nodular approach—and their networks and/or to do comparative ethnic, intra-Latina/o/x studies of place.14 In his “Páginas Recuperadas,” John Mckiernan-Gonzalez takes the other spaces of Colombianidad even further by directing his gaze at the inside of the Museum of Natural History in New York City. There, he homes in on a mural depicting the signing of the Panama Canal, a visual he reads as a site of Colombianidad obscured. Framing the futures of US Colombianidades within Latinidad When a national group is entirely subsumed within the established frameworks of Latinidad, particularities and complexities are obscured, but a grounding in US Colombian studies can nuance our understanding of different Latina/o/x positionalities. As we have discussed, the logics of inclusion and visibility in the field of Latina/o/x studies have often been dictated by historical presence, demographic data, and oppressed/resistant subjectivities, all of which are useful but also incomplete frameworks for understanding US Colombians. If Latinidades has been used by scholars to capture “the shared experiences of subordination, resistance, and agency of the various national groups of Latin Americans in the United States,” how do we account for subjects who have been left out of a scholarly narrative about working-class and marginalized Latinidad (Aparicio 2017, p. 115)? As this introduction and the articles in this special issue demonstrate, US Colombianidades are neither “new” nor strictly comprise marginalized and/or resistant subjects. One of the salient contributions of US Colombian studies to Latina/o/x studies is that attending to US Colombianidades enables us to examine nonnormative subjects in Latina/o/x studies, thereby expanding the kinds of subjects Latina/o/x studies scholars typically examine. US Colombians as a group experience Latinidad similarly but also differently because the community is simultaneously unseen and hyper-visible: it is rarely the focus of scholarly studies or media representations, and when US Colombians do 14 For more on examining Latina/o/x spaces that go beyond contiguous barrio concentrations, see Mike Davis, Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US Big City (New York: Verso, 2001) and Johana Londoño, Abstract Barrios: The Crises of Latinx Visibility in Cities (2020). US colombiani dades complicate s the field of Latino Studies Reimagining US Colombianidades: Transnational… 317 constitute an area of scholarly focus, it is almost exclusively within a binary of being either criminalized or privileged. That is, US Colombians are most often depicted as drug traffickers, beautiful women, and elite migrants. Despite needing to contest these stereotypes, we would argue that scholars also need to attend to this array of less “likable” subjects.15 The transnational drug trafficker and the middle- or upperclass professional migrant are not categories that are usually examined in the critical literature, yet this more diverse array of both critiqued and celebrated subjects shape US Colombianidades, impelling us to deal with these contrasts. Attending to the full range of US Colombianidades allows us to foreground these subjects who Latina/o/x studies has usually not examined while also continuing to attend to the subjects who have been represented (i.e., low-income individuals/communities, colonial agents, the transnational subject, the hyperfeminine Latina). We thus offer the term “US Colombianidades” to provide a paradigm for understanding the plurality of US Colombian experiences and identities that the term capaciously embraces. The term is shifting and complex, is bilingual and bicultural, is produced by nation-states and by the community, and is influenced by the way various Latinidades have been conceptualized. As Lorgia García-Peña uses the term dominicidad, we are interested in employing a term that encompasses the power relations of transnational movement and the “dictions–stories, narratives, and speech acts–” that they produce (García-Peña 2016, pp. 1, 2).16 And like Frances Aparicio’s framing of the term “Latinidad/es” as rooted in “semantic messiness … and numerous and contradictory iterations,” US Colombianidades is generative, messy, and, at times, contradictory in the set of experiences and identities the term seeks to capture (Aparicio 2017, p. 113). It indexes the diverse range of people and “multiplicity” of experiences in terms of race, color, gender, sexuality, class, regional location (both in the United States and from Colombia), citizenship status, type of migration, residence, language usage, political affiliation, ideology, religion, age, ability and even national origin without collapsing these distinctions (HamesGarcía 2011). We include national origin here because it encompasses those who are mixed-origin US Colombians, or “intra-Latina/os,” as Aparicio terms those who are “of mixed and/or multiple nationalities” (Aparicio 2019, p. 2).17 Indeed, the “es” in 15 This is true of illicit subjects deemed unlikable or unsavory, like the drug trafficker and the coyote/human smuggler, as well as middle- and upper-class Latina/o/xs, who are often accused of being “sellouts” for being economically privileged. For studies of middle-class Latina/o/xs, see Elda María Román’s Race and Upward Mobility (2017) and Jody Agius Vallejo’s Barrio to Burbs (2012). Shakira, an elite migrant, is also often thought of as a Latin American rather than a Latina, in part because of her class status, light-skinned privilege, and the unclear temporality of when a Latin American migrant becomes “Latina/o/x” (Cepeda 2010). 16 Although we are reminded of García-Peña’s focus on the contradictory dictions, or “contradictions” as she writes it, that produce Dominican subjectivities, spaces, and ethnoracial identifications from the top-down and bottom-up and across spaces, we find it necessary to pair Colombianidades with “US” to underscore the paucity of research on Colombian migrants in the United States and to include the “es” to emphasize the plurality of the term (García-Peña 2016, p. 1). 17 In her study, Frances Aparicio (2019) interviews a “ChileanColombian,” an “IrishMexiColombian,” and “MexiColombians” in Chicago. She even opens her introduction by citing US Colombian Cuban writers Grisel Acosta and Daisy Hernández, formally embodying in her scholarship what we see as the 318 L. Rincón et al. US Colombianidades seeks to emphasize this plurality and diversity of identifications and subject positions. We also employ the terms “Colombianidades” and “Latina/o/x” to evoke and invoke terminological developments in the field. We retain the “a” in particular in recognition of historic Latina feminist struggles and contributions, as Nicole Trujillo-Pagán has cogently asserted (Trujillo-Pagán 2018); we use the “x” to disrupt the gender binary as well as to mobilize the rich set of additional connotations that the “x” conjures and the conceptual possibilities it opens up.18 Most salient for this special issue, we conceive of the “es” in Colombianidades functioning similarly to the “x” in marking discursive fluidity, as well as the heretofore underexamined presence of US Colombianidades in Latina/o/x studies. Reflecting on her underrepresented Central American background in the field, Claudia Milian suggests that the “x” offers a representational space to those sidelined by “the conventional understandings of what it means to be Latino or Latina” (Milian 2019, p. 2). As a national-origin group that has also been understudied and underrepresented, our use of “es” likewise articulates a space of presence and here-ness for US Colombians. Moreover, the “speculative” nature of the “x” parallels our future-oriented vision of US Colombianidades contributing to the field of Latina/o/x studies as well as our use of this special issue to open up a space to curiously theorize US Colombianidades in a generative manner that invites future research on US Colombian experiences and cultural production (Milian 2019, p. 6). As a subset of Latinidad, we also consider US Colombianidad as open-ended, ongoing, and contingent on affinities and building alliances. Cristina Beltrán conceptualizes Latina/o/x identity as “something we do rather than as something we are,” asserting that the term “is a verb” (Beltrán 2010, pp. 19, 157). As Aparicio observes of the term “Latinidad,” “the semantic transformations in the scholarship about Latinidad reveal a morphological shift from noun to action” such that it is no longer solely a description of national origin and ethnic identity but also a means of coalition-building and strategic group identification between and among people from the same and different national-origin groups (Aparicio 2019, p. 33). We position our use of US Colombianidad in this bilingual modal verb sense of the term in order to highlight the linkages (and the dissonances) with other US Latina/o/x national-origin populations and the non-static process of constructing group identity. The essays in this special issue likewise take as their point of departure an understanding of US Colombianidades that intersects with conceptualizations of Latinidad in a recognition of the powerful shared commonalities between national-origin groups and a healthy skepticism toward the flattening of difference that Latinidad can portend. More in-process than “found object,” and explicitly plural as opposed Footnote 17 (continued) central importance of US Colombianidades for Latina/o/x studies. Unlike Aparicio, we choose to separate the names of countries and include “US” when we designate national origin for ease of reading. 18 Among others, see Claudia Milian’s LatinX (2019) and the 2017 special issue of Cultural Dynamics on the term Latinx; for a US Colombiana take on “Latinx,” see Patricia Engel’s article “On Naming Ourselves, or: When I Was a Spic,” in the same special issue. Reimagining US Colombianidades: Transnational… 319 to singularly monolithic, we frame US Colombianidades as subjectivities-in-themaking that emerge from within as well as from outside the various US Colombian communities. As a product of both the transnational cultural industries and popular media, as well as of the lived experiences, cultural expressions, and political practices of US Colombian subjects themselves, the articles in this special issue underscore the often contradictory—and not necessarily exclusively transgressive— nature of US Colombianidades, in addition to some of the key historical and political moments that have informed their construction. Moreover, we recognize that US Colombianidad is rooted in and draws from Latinidad because US Colombians are not understood for their own specificity. Nor do they have access to robust USbased aesthetic and historical traditions and archives like some major national-origin groups do. Given their often marginal presence, US Colombians read US Colombianidades into the sociocultural texts at hand and frequently articulate their identities and histories in dialogic relationship to Latinidad. US Colombian studies share the central concerns of Latina/o/x studies, but this introduction and the following essays demonstrate that a focus on US Colombianidades provides new salient conceptual tropes and methodologies for Latina/o/x studies. The issue offers a rich set of articles rooted in different disciplinary formations that are in interdisciplinary dialogue with one another in a number of ways. María Elena Cepeda and Catalina Esguerra illuminate how US Colombian cultural production enriches our understanding of the class dynamics of diasporic subjectivities. María Elena Cepeda unveils how the non-virtuosic performance of a brown girl in an urban space in the Bogotá band Bomba Estereo’s video of “Soy Yo” offers spaces of intersectional recognition and connection for diasporic and brown Latina/xs along the lines of race, class, and gender beyond national boundaries. These spaces of recognition and connection also come to light in Catalina Esguerra’s analysis of Patricia Engel’s work Vida, as she shows how the choppy narration of an upper-middle-class US Colombian life represents the always fluctuating nature of diasporic realities. Diane Garbow’s discussion of interethnic relations between Colombians and other Latina/o/xs in Philadelphia, Ariana Ochoa Camacho’s ethnographic exploration of Colombian migrants in Queens, and Angela X. Ocampo and Angie N. Ocampo’s analysis of the political participation of Colombians in US electoral politics underscore the intricate ways in which Colombians negotiate their social and political incorporation in the United States. Garbow’s piece highlights how premigration constructions of race and nationality inform how Colombians in Philadelphia emphasize their whiteness and class background to distinguish themselves racially and geopolitically from other Latina/o/xs. Ochoa Camacho’s article aligns with that same effort of distinction from Colombians in the United States and reveals how this distinction leads to isolation embodied in an ever-present experience of soledad; her article thus offers the term soledad as a uniquely US Colombian migrant affect, which is the product of racial and spatial structures of power. Simultaneously, the strong interest US Colombians express in regard to immigration reform and the US economy in the Ocampos’ analysis reveals the crucial centrality of US institutions and discourses in shaping their political incorporation. Collectively, these articles lay a foundation for reflecting on the intricate ways in which transnational 320 L. Rincón et al. understandings of class, race, region, and politics intersect to shape the cultural and sociopolitical experiences of US Colombians as diasporic subjects; they also provide US Colombians with specific repertoires to assert commonalities and differences among themselves and also in relationship with other Latina/o/xs. Building on and extending the articles’ attention to US-Colombian relations, John Mckiernan-González’s “Páginas Recuperadas” and Yamil Avivi’s “Vivencias” unveil how imperial processes have disavowed the Colombianx presence in the United States. Looking at the murals that decorate the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Rotunda in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, Mckiernan-González critically exposes and examines the mural’s obscured depiction of a colonial encounter between US officials and racialized labor on what was once Colombian territory, thereby reminding us that Colombian presence in the United States is entangled in imperial processes. Yamil Avivi confirms the experience of invisibility of queer Colombians through his account of Andrés’s life as an asylum-seeker in the US, revealing the clash between dominant first world sexual liberation narratives and the realities of legal stipulations that prevent Latina/o/xs from achieving their versions of the American dream. The essays in this special issue thus provide a new set of terms and methodologies for Latina/o/x studies. Whether through a particular term like soledad, or methodologically through multi-scalar analyses that are attentive to local, intraethnic, interracial, national, and transnational frameworks, the essays in this issue demonstrate that attending to US Colombianidades prompts a new set of critical questions that enrich our Latina/o/x field imaginaries. As we discuss in this introduction, US Colombian studies is a subfield whose acceptance and recognition within Latina/o/x studies has been persistently tied to an indeterminate future inclusion within the existing literature. The moment for expanding Latina/o/x studies to include a vigorous, nuanced examination of US Colombianidades has been in the making for decades. This special issue reveals the development of US Colombian subjectivities as they respond to transnational and intersectional understandings of race, gender, sexuality, class dynamics, community formations, and imperial exploits, as well as divergent political alignments and contestations. Attending to the nuanced landscape of US Colombian lives and imaginations, and the cultural and sociopolitical exchanges between the United States and Colombia, this special issue tracks common thematic and sociohistorical intersections between US Colombians and other Latina/o/x-origin groups, as well as those uniquely salient for US Colombians. Much as does our opening discussion of the 2020 Superbowl halftime show featuring Jennifer Lopez and Shakira, this special issue traces the ways in which these narratives complicate our understanding of Latinidades in a manner that illuminates inter-Latina/o/x solidarities as well as the uniqueness of US Colombian Latinidades. We thereby invite our fellow Latina/o/x studies practitioners to expand and trouble the boundaries of the field by understanding how US Colombians are integral to the fabric that holds Latina/o/x experiences together rather than understanding the community as an additional, discrete subfield of Latina/o/x studies. We believe that such a relational approach is an underexplored yet critical direction for a future Latina/o/x studies. Reimagining US Colombianidades: Transnational… 321 Acknowledgements Muchísimas gracias to the participants of the October 2017 symposium on US Colombianidades at Williams College and subsequent panels at the Latina/o Studies and American Studies Association gatherings. This special issue is dedicated to these individuals as well as to future scholars of the US Colombian diaspora. References Aparicio, A. 2014. Beyond the City: New Immigrant Gateways in the 21st Century. American Anthropologist 116 (1): 8. Aparicio, A. 2017. Latinidad. 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Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Lina Rincón is Assistant Professor of sociology at Framingham State University. Her scholarly work focuses on the intersections of immigration, race, racism and legality among Latin American and Caribbean highly skilled migrants in the United States. Rincón has published scholarly articles on the legal struggles confronted by Colombian migrant professionals and on scholarly activism in higher education. Her publications have appeared in Latino Studies, Contexts, The Humboldt Journal of Social Relations, and in the edited volume Migrant Professionals in the City. Johana Londoño is Assistant Professor in the Department of Latin American, Caribbean, and US Latina/o studies at the University at Albany, SUNY. Her publications appear in edited volumes, such as Latino Urbanism (NYU Press 2012), and journals including American Quarterly and Social Semiotics. She has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation; Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities; and NYU; among other institutions. Londoño’s book, Abstract Barrios: The Crises of Latinx Visibility in Cities, is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Jennifer Harford Vargas is Associate Professor of English at Bryn Mawr College. She researches and teaches Latina/o/x cultural production, theories of the novel, decolonial imaginaries, undocumented migration narratives, and testimonio forms in the Americas. She is the author of Forms of Dictatorship: Power, Narrative, and Authoritarianism in the Latina/o Novel and co-editor of Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination. She has published in the journals MELUS, Callaloo, and Symbolism, and contributed to the edited books Border Cinema, Monument Lab, and Latina/o Literature in the Classroom. María Elena Cepeda is Professor and co-chair of Latina/o studies at Williams College, where she researches Latina/o/x media and popular culture. Cepeda is the author of Musical ImagiNation: U.S.Colombian Identity and the “Latin Music Boom” and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Latina/o Media. Cepeda has published in Women’s Studies Quarterly, Feminist Media Studies, Women and Performance, and Identities, and her commentary has been featured by National Public Radio, the New York Times, and Rolling Stone, among other media outlets. Reproduced with permission of copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.