This Provocation reflects on Renee Hudson’s Latinx Revolutionary Horizons: Form and Futurity in the Americas. Latinx Studies practitioners have long grappled with our field imaginary, and Hudson’s book offers one of the richest elaborations of what the field might become. As the provocations included in this forum attest, Hudson’s book expands the geographical, cultural, and historical range of Latinx Studies, including forcefully defending the “X” in Latinx. One of the most important moves the book makes, however, is to define latinidad, not as a destination, but as a horizon that includes “the shifting imaginaries of what latinidad could mean across” authors, historical periods, and disciplines (2).
Kenneth Warren, Stephen Hong Sohn, Jace Weaver, and others have long asked important questions about what counts as an African American, Asian American, or Native American text.1 These scholars are attentive to qualifying such designations, including how to disrupt understanding their respective fields solely in terms of author biography or community identity. But outside of calls to (in Tatiana Flores’s words) “cancel latinidad,” or to reluctantly embrace the pan-ethnic orientation of Latinx Studies (as scholars like Marta Caminero-Santangelo2 do), a solid vision of Latinx Studies has yet to emerge.3
This is where Hudson’s book provides a model for constituting a Latinx Studies field imaginary. As she puts it, it is important to understand the field in relation to its emergence from “fraught histories” that “reveal themselves in disruptions and departures” rather than through essentialized notions of latinidad (2–3). Hudson argues that the field’s periodization ignores the historical evolution of Latinx racialization. She contends that it is crucial to consider how Latinx Studies often roots the field in presentist histories, particularly cultural nationalism: “Latinx literature . . . emerged well before conventional periodizations that locate it as stemming from the Civil Rights Movement” (2).
Hudson’s work uses the metaphor of the horizon to articulate the stakes of Latinx Studies. Latinx Revolutionary Horizons builds on the historical and geographical work of scholars including Raúl Coronado, Carmen E. Lamas, Alberto Varón, Priscilla Solis Ybarra, and John Alba Cutler who have mined 18th and 19th century texts to understand the contemporary roots of latinidad.4 By comparing 19th century texts with contemporary cultural productions, however, Hudson advocates for a complex understanding of how key historical moments resonate in the present.
Although the temporal dimensions of Hudson’s work are impressive, she also expands latinidad’s geographical horizons. To be sure, there is a long tradition of thinking about Latinx Studies as a hemispheric formation along north/south binaries. But Latinx Revolutionary Horizons disrupts these hemispheric coordinates to gaze East and West, reshuffling how latinidad operates in terms of its African and Indigenous margins, as well as the legacies of Spanish, US, and European empires in Asia, the South Pacific, and beyond. As Indigenous scientist Jessica Hernandez explains, a main function of empire is fragmenting diaspora populations.5 Understanding these fragmentations along complex axes provides a better account of the machinations of racial capitalism and empire. In pairing authors not normally associated with Latinx traditions or trajectories like Jessica Hagedorn, José Rizal, Leslie Marmon Silko, and others, Hudson generates a more expansive and complete conception of latinidad. Hudson thus reorients latinidad as a more capacious—and indeed a revolutionary—concept capable of opening speculative possibilities for the future.
In what follows, scholars from Asian American Studies, Latinx Studies, and Cultural Studies respond to Hudson’s book through the familiar keywords paradigm, pioneered by Marxist cultural studies critic Raymond Williams in the mid-1970s. The Provocation concludes with a response from Hudson, pointing readers toward current events, particularly the calamitous fallout of the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
: :
Provocation #1: Constance Von Igel De Mello. Keyword: “X”
How is Latinidad forged, and what bodies does it exclude in order to make itself? In other words, how does it draw its borders, and how might we consider ways of subverting these exclusions? In Latinx Revolutionary Horizons, Renee Hudson’s X exerts more than transformational power—it pierces through the limitations of previous definitions of latinidad, becoming a concept unto itself. In Hudson’s conceptualizing of the word, the X begins to speculate new ways of understanding latinidad beyond identity, setting up terms of futurity by constructing a scope of possibility in drawing from the past. For Hudson, the Latinx world spans more than one language and one hemisphere, opening up room for new revolutionary futures beyond the hegemonic notions attached to Latinidad. The geographic understanding is moved into a relational one, challenging national borders as the foremost site of meaning-making. Latinx, here, becomes a term that functions structurally, re-composing it into one that opens room for an expanded possibility of latinidad, one that considers Asianness, Blackness, and Indigeneity more thoroughly. With this expansion, locations such as Haiti, the Philippines, and Brazil become fertile analytical grounds whose precarious positions within a hegemonic concept of Latinidad expand considerations of colonial formation and relation.
Hudson brings disavowed connections to the foreground, creating a baseline structured around revolutionary histories and goals, one that centers the potential of the term Latinx instead of relegating it to marginalization. Here the floor is open to new national and cross-national imaginaries, ones that tie colonial structures—and resistance to them—together across space and time. Hudson resists Latin America as a project of mestizo elites in their search of conglomerate power and proposes a political project of latinidad that expands horizontally, diffusing power among different racialized groups while still considering the relational intersections among them. We might press her work forward to more thoroughly consider how foundational stories—I think here of Brazil’s Iracema or Haiti’s Stella, for example—might serve as grounds of analysis for the understanding of the mythological constraints of indigeneity for the formation of hegemonic Latinidad. In other words, if we are to puncture the horizon, the very foundation of the colonial structure must be punctured, meaning a thorough engagement with the interlaced relationship between Indigenous genocide and Latinx identity as it stands today.
Academia is often a tightrope one walks while attempting to balance both theoretical scope and real-life impact, and Hudson understands this. This book weaponizes the arbitrariness of hegemonic concepts like “nation” by acknowledging their historical and revolutionary potential, attaching meaning to the hegemonic while simultaneously deconstructing it. If we are to think revolutionarily, we might need to think of new horizons to puncture, ones that might consider an existence outside or preceding of colonial relations. One need only find the X.
: :
Provocation #2: Tara Fickle. Keyword: “Filipinx”
Latinx Revolutionary Horizons spans geographies, histories, and disciplines. That scope is a testament to author Renee Hudson’s knowledge, intellectual courage, and generosity. Hudson is radically inclusive in her method and her archive, bringing fields like mine—Asian American Studies—into the fold at the same time as myriad literary works that might now be considered “bad texts” and “cancelled terms” of the field.
Chapter 2, “Romancing Revolution: The Queer Future of National Romance in Rizal, Rosca, and Hagedorn,” substantially expands conversations in Asian American Studies. While Asian American Studies and Latinx Studies have not been hostile, interchange has been limited. Prior work—by Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Sarah D. Wald, and Junyoung Veronica Kim, for example—has addressed Asians in Latin America or hemispheric differences in policies like wartime incarceration. Hudson instead asks: what do we gain by reading the Philippines, and Filipino literature, through the lens of latinidad?
This move is especially welcome for scholars like me, who do not specialize in Filipinx Literature but whose introduction to Asian American Studies came through Filipino literature and the history of the Philippines. Filipinx literature and culture remain cornerstones of Asian American Studies, as they have since the late 1960s. In fact, the earliest visions of Asian American literature articulated in anthologies like Aiiieeeee! were as a trinity composed of Filipino, Chinese, and Japanese American Literature. Yet there has for decades been ambivalence among Filipinx scholars about their place in Asian American Studies and its primarily East Asian focus, ambivalence shared by other fields like Southeast Asian and Pacific Islander Studies.
Hudson’s work doesn’t smooth over these tensions but reframes them as openings: possibilities for new, relational horizons. Hudson challenges the standard Asian American literary studies narrative that dates the beginnings of Filipino literature to U.S. empire and English-language writing. By returning to José Rizal, writing in Spanish and long peripheral to Asian American Studies, she builds a literary genealogy connecting Rizal, Ninotchka Rosca, and Jessica Hagedorn through a “guerrilla conversion narrative,” one in which non-heteronormative kinship replaces heterosexual romance as a vehicle for national allegory. She also complicates our understanding of figures like Carlos Bulosan, who is often read as a key nationalist voice of the Filipino diaspora in America, by pointing out how complexities of class, whiteness (in its Latin rather than Anglo-Saxon variant), and indigeneity inform our reading of Filipino sovereignty.
Finally, Hudson’s framing of latinidad as constituted by both whiteness and Blackness opens up a new way to think about Afro-Asianness: not only as a political alliance or rupture, but as a structural condition. Her reading of Joey Sands, the queer mixed-race hero of Hagedorn’s novel Dogeaters, offers a vision of community as well as scholarly solidarity rooted in “both/and” rather than “either/or.” For Asian American Studies, this is a challenge and an aspiration: to build a field, and a body politic, greater than the sum of its parts.
: :
Provocation #3: Douglass S. Ishii. Keyword: “LatAsian”
The night of the 2024 election, cable news told me to blame the “Hispanic vote”—despite the number of white men and white women who swung right, including the associates of the white supposed radicals who preach ending colonial racial capitalism and decolonizing everything. The week after, minority conservatisms (which then included Asian Americans), leftist skepticism of so-called “identity politics,” and attempts to take the onus off white people again converged. Commentators rehearsed a familiar narrative: “Chicano” and “Asian American” emerged from the radical movements of 1968. However, the subsequent migration of ethnic elites and interventionist wars across Asia and the Americas and the nuclearization of the Pacific led to additive appellations like Chicano/Latino and Asian American Pacific Islander. People do not identify using these terms, and as such panethnic consciousness has failed us in Times Like These.
Renee Hudson’s magisterial Latinx Revolutionary Horizons rebuts this narrative by diagnosing “a paradox of actually existing Latinidad”: that “Latin American-descended people in the U.S. most consistently choose to align their interests with whiteness, despite the fact that our ancestors are African, Indigenous, Asian, and white,” which “consistently disrupts the potential for solidarity and coalition-building” (4). Hudson echoes Roderick Ferguson and Grace Hong’s 2011 critique that racial comparison often presumes discreteness and the idealization of whiteness—which, I further argue, inheres in many Latinx and Latine and Asian American claims as the “new immigrants” obscured by the “black/white binary.” Hudson illustrates how 1968 is not the origin of our “failed” struggle but “a turn, a revolving and evolving idea of a people that becomes a politics” (6), in which “the x in Latinx has the power to cross out the Latin that precedes it” as “a visual marker of opposition to [its] genealogy of whiteness” (5).
For Latine and Asian American solidarities beyond 1968, I am drawn to the fourth chapter’s engagement with the speculative turn through retconning, or the retrospective revision of a narrative that alters its coherence. “To render explicit the formation of history as ideology while tracking how historical events could have been otherwise” (135), Hudson reads Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda’s 1841 Sab through Cristina Garcia’s 2003 Monkey Hunting. Hudson does not merely add Garcia’s fictional indentured Chinese laborer Chen Pan to Cuban independence in the Spanish-American War (though such archival work is still vital). Instead, Chen Pan enables “a theory of the ‘x’ in Latinx” (138) by “revealing the narrative cracks that let in other histories” (157) against enclosed state narratives of Black and mestizx inclusion. Hudson resonates with Viet Thanh Nguyen’s unpacking of the paradox of actually existing Asian America, as he identifies how the activists of 1968 idealized the Vietnamese as revolutionary consciousness, only to be disappointed by refugees after 1975—and yet, his 2024 essay, “Palestine is in Asia,” refuses to give up on panethnicity’s expansive sense of peoplehood. What narrative cracks in the miseries of settler-colonial racial capitalism and actually existing disappointments can reveal a revolution and evolution of relationalities in Times Like These?
: :
Provocation #4: Evelyn Soto. Keyword: “Legacy”
For this provocation, I offer the keyword “Legacy” to thread along the intertwined questions of revolutionary temporality and colonial histories that inform Renee Hudson’s Latinx Revolutionary Horizons. In its etymological root across multiple romance languages, the term “legacy” refers to a delegate of religious authority or political sovereignty. In a conservative sense of the word, to leave a “legacy” refers to a bequest, something transferred or bestowed by the will and the authority of a predecessor often vested with power, who may convey monetary riches, noble lineages, and familial titles. In extended usage, legacies refer to ghostly yet persistent remainders, to things left over from a previous era but still in active yet indeterminate existence. The colonial legacies that undergird the struggles of hemispheric revolutions inform the Latinx revolutionary horizon’s double register, shaping the horizon as a limit to be “punctured” and as an “opening, an expansion of a previously delimited world” (28).
These legacies take multiple forms in Hudson’s thinking. In the introduction to Latinx Revolutionary Horizons, for example, Hudson asserts that “analepsis” is the structuring principle of revolutionary imaginaries in her book’s archive of nineteenth-century and contemporary Latinx literary forms. Such forms offer spaces where “authors look to past revolutionary histories to imagine Latinx futurities” (5). These disruptive returns to the past may reckon with the ongoing legacy of Spanish colonial rule and religious conquest or with the burden of blood purity known as limpieza de sangre that shaped the racial order of the Spanish colonial casta system and, later, the post-independence ideology of mestizaje—a racial history that informs Chapter 1 especially. Hudson notes that such violent imperial legacies were recycled into masculinist forms of revolution and, ultimately, national independence projects that cut across the nineteenth century Americas. But the Latinx revolutionary horizons of Hudson’s book also open an altogether different kind of possibility, as those “unrealized revolutions that are resurrected to imagine a liberatory latinidad that is yet to come” (6). The Latinx revolutionary horizons that animate Hudson’s book tend not to consolidate into the kinds of national politics that have reproduced, in different costume, the presence of old colonial powers, orders, and forms. Contrary to the failures of revolutionary imaginaries that dissolved into statist independence movements, there are unrealized liberatory forms and politics embedded within our pasts, and which we need to reanimate in order “to imagine a latinidad that is not yet here” (253).
For future scholarship, Hudson’s book makes clear how revolutionary histories haunt Latinx literary and cultural production not only because old authorities and imperial powers persist—as in the failed nineteenth-century revolutions truncated by nominal statist “independence”—but also because Latinx literary and cultural texts glimpse meaningful solidarities from shared colonial histories and ongoing decolonial efforts across the Americas. To forge vital solidarities in the ruins of failed revolutions is also to shape a lively politics of latinidad. A speculative and political practice of latinidad reanimates the ghostly remainders, the unheralded legacies of our past that demand the kinds of trans-historical, trans-period reading methods Hudson models in Latinx Revolutionary Horizons.
: :
Response: Renee Hudson. Keyword: “Commons”
In lieu of a traditional response to these provocations, I want to conclude with a provocation of my own. I am writing this response the day after the No Kings demonstrations of June 14, 2025, and over a week after the continuous occupation of Los Angeles by the Trump administration as Angelenos fight against ICE’s disappearing of our neighbors. This moment is a fraught one, but it also an inspiring one. I close my book by building on the work of José Esteban Muñoz and Lázaro Lima to imagine a Brown commons; what we are seeing in LA and in other places where communities are rising up to defend their neighbors is one iteration of such a Brown commons. I note that the stories that have been excluded in the revolutionary movements I examine are those of undocumented Latinxs and queer Latinxs.
These untold stories that are unfolding in real time are part of the reason why it has been so meaningful to see how my fellow Angelenos are fighting back against the immigration raids, how the No Kings protests aligned with Pride demonstrations, illuminating how the political moment we’re in is one that is replicating Latin American dictatorships, yes, but it is also one in which the people know the playbook and are fighting back. A version of the solidarity I dream of is encapsulated in one of the signs during the No Kings protest that quotes Tupac’s “To Live and Die in LA”: “It wouldn’t be LA without Mexicans / Black love, Brown Pride [in the sets again].” This quote is a statement of solidarity that acknowledges the centrality of Mexicans to Los Angeles and California as a whole. The reference to Mexicans is a metonym for Latinxs, particularly those who are undocumented. Read in this way, this quote resonates with the larger coalition-building that resistance to Trump necessitates.
Yet another image stands out to me: that of a flag comprised of both the U.S. and Mexican flags. I am currently examining the Vallejo family papers at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, and seeing this flag recalls that famous Californio family. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo argued in favor of U.S. annexation as he imagined that in doing so, “we shall become not subjects, but fellow citizens, possessing all the rights of the people of the United States.” While Trump and his minions continue to cast all undocumented immigrants, regardless of country of origin, as foreign invaders, this quote reminds us that it is in fact the Americans who are the foreign invaders; it is Americans who broke their promises to the Californios about equal rights. The combined U.S. and Mexican flag raises the specter of this truth while also reminding the Trump administration that we who are Mexican, Mexican American, Chicanx, Latinx, have not been conquered.
The pieces in this forum point to the work we still need to do: puncture “the very foundation of the colonial structure” (Von Igel de Mello); build forms of solidarity “greater than the sum of [their] parts” (Fickle); contend with our “actually existing disappointments” (Ishii); and think from “the ruins of failed revolutions” (Soto). This is work that we must continue to do across our fields, but also in the field—by which I mean the street, the detention center, the Home Depot parking lot. Solidarity is a practice.
: :
Contributors
David J. Vázquez is Professor of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies, Program Director of Latina/o/x Studies at American University in Washington, DC, and the current President of the Latina/o Studies Association. He is co-editor of Latinx Environmentalisms: Place, Justice, and the Decolonial (Temple 2019) and author of Triangulations: Narrative Strategies for Navigating Latino Identity (Minnesota 2011). His most recent book, Decolonial Environmentalisms: Climate Justice and Speculative Futurity in Latinx Cultural Production, was published with the University of Texas Press in 2025. During the 2024-2025 academic year, Vázquez was the William C. and Ida Friday Fellow at the National Humanities Center.
Constance von Igel de Mello is a Literature Ph.D. student at the University of California, San Diego. Her work focuses on gender and race as tools of nation-making in the long 19th century. She has published two poetry chapbooks, Swallow the pit (Bottlecap Press, 2022) and Wonderbread (Ghost City Press, 2024). Her first article, “The Domestic Worker in Latinx Fiction: The Discursive Formulation of Latinidad,” was recently published in The Latin Americanist.
Tara Fickle is Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities (2019), and co-editor of the volume Made in Asia/America (2024), More information can be found at tarafickle.com.
Douglas S. Ishii is an assistant professor of Asian American literature & culture at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is currently completing his first book, tentatively entitled Something Real: Metacommentaries on Asian American Mainstreaming After 1968, which takes stock of how the influences of the Asian American Movement can reshape the political horizon of Asian American cultural criticism.
Evelyn Soto is Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Her research and teaching interests bring together hemispheric literary studies, Latinx studies, and histories of race to understand how revolutionary possibilities emerged from the fissures of colonial conflict. Her scholarly work has appeared or is forthcoming at Chiricú Journal, Pasados, and a number of edited collections in Latinx studies.
Renee Hudson is an Assistant Professor at Chapman University who specializes in hemispheric studies, multiethnic literature, speculative fiction, genre studies, and histories of revolution. Her first book project, titled Latinx Revolutionary Horizons: Form and Futurity in the Americas, came out with Fordham University Press in May 2024. She is currently developing a second project on Latinx girlhood.
: :
Endnotes
- See Kenneth W. Warren, What Was African American Literature? (Harvard University Press, 2011); Stephen Hong Sohn, Racial Asymmetries: Asian American Fictional Worlds (New York University Press, 2014); Jace Weaver, That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community (Oxford University Press, 1997).
- Marta Caminero-Santangelo, On Latinidad: U.S. Latino Literature and the Construction of Ethnicity (University Press of Florida, 2007).
- See Tatiana Flores, “Latinidad Is Cancelled,” Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 3, no. 3 (2021): 58–79.
- See Raúl Coronado, A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture (Harvard University Press, 2013); John Alba Cutler, Ends of Assimilation: The Formation of Chicano Literature (Oxford University Press, 2015); Carmen E. Lamas, The Latino Continuum and the Nineteenth-Century Americas: Literature, Translation, and Historiography (Oxford University Press, 2021); Alberto Varon, Before Chicano: Citizenship and the Making of Mexican American Manhood, 1848-1959 (New York University Press, 2018); Priscilla Solis Ybarra, Writing the Goodlife: Mexican American Literature and the Environment (The University of Arizona Press, 2016).
- See Jessica Hernandez, Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes Through Indigenous Science (North Atlantic Books, 2022).
David J. Vázquez