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Open research questions in Latin American and Latino Studies

37 unresolved questions extracted from the limitations and future-work sections of 3,097 Latin American and Latino Studies papers in our library. Each links back to the study that raised it.

What the literature leaves open

  • Addressing a gap in the literature that reveals the limited attention paid to how students who left high school before graduating generate and use community cultural wealth (Burciaga & Erbstein, 2012), this investigation explores the vibrant role and contribution of community cultural wealth in literacy development.

    Southwest Borderland Voices and Stories: Community Cultural Wealth as Living Literacies · 2020 · DOI

  • In this article, I take up the underrecognized and almost unstudied literacy work of Maria Varela, a Latinx Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) staff member in charge of developing literacy materials for African Americans in the South during the 1960s.

    Maria Varela’s Flickering Light: Literacy, Filmstrips, and the Work of Adult Literacy Education in the Civil Rights Movement · 2020 · DOI

  • Vastly understudied yet featured in California’s K-12 school curriculum, they are the object of much romantic mythologizing, much of which upholds visions of a Spanish fantasy heritage past.

    Rethinking Mission Studies · 2020 · DOI

  • Resulting from an ethnographic research conducted from 2014 to 2015 in the city of Austin, Texas, the text explores the uses, expressions and meanings of two fundamental moral emotions in collective action, which have not been studied much in a migration context.

    Indignación y compasión. Sentires apropiados e inapropiados en la participación política de mujeres migrantes · 2020 · DOI

  • While much scholarship has paid attention to the novel as historiographic metafiction, its depiction of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo’s regime (1930-61), and its feminist perspective on the Dominican Republic, its racial politics are under-studied.

    Unauthorized Storytelling: Reevaluating Racial Politics in Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies · 2020 · DOI

  • Despite recording over one hundred songs and earning the moniker “la reina de los mariachis” (the queen of mariachis), very little is known about the life and career of the Mexican ranchera singer Lucha Reyes (1906–1944).

    Queening/Queering Mexicanidad: Lucha Reyes and the Canción Ranchera · 2016 · DOI

  • Since little is known of the Chickasaw between the Soto expedition and the arrival of the French voyageurs over a century later in the 1680s, Ethridge deploys her familiarity with the historical record to interpolate the Chickasaw into a detailed consideration of political and social change as it affected a wide range of cultural entities throughout the South.

    From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, 1540–1715 (review) · 2012 · DOI

  • Important work is being done on women in Atlantic, transatlantic, and hemispheric studies, often framed by caveats much like my own: A great deal remains to be done, both because the enterprise is necessarily labor intensive and because the neglect of women within current discussions of global studies during the colonial period persists, except among specialists.

    Women in Early America: Recharting Hemispheric and Atlantic Desire · 2011 · DOI

  • Harris What do critics mean when they use the phrase post-recovery? It is a paradoxical term in many ways—valid, because we have moved so far beyond the simple recovery of forgotten or understudied women writers to asking far more critically challenging and culturally significant questions about these writers and their texts; but the term is also invalid because it suggests an end to the necessity of recovery.

    "Across the Gulf": Working in the "Post-Recovery" Era · 2009 · DOI

  • I define the Madres de Plaza de Mayo as a "social movement community" ( 23 Buechler 1990 ) because their composition is not limited to the existence of formal, bureaucratic, and centralized organizations that are known in the social movement literature as social movement organizations (SMOs).

    The Madres de Plaza de Mayo and Three Decades of Human Rights' Activism: Embeddedness, Emotions, and Social Movements · 2006 · DOI

  • It is argued that in a transnational Latino context, it might be more fruitful to base solidarity and hospitality not exclusively on similarity and pre-determined Latino identities but on 'asymmetrical reciprocity' (Iris Marion Young), partial knowledge and mutual recognition between Latinos whose cultures, origins and identifications vary widely.

    Host and guest in the 'Latino contact zone':<i>Narrating solidarity and hospitality</i>in Mother Tongue · 2004 · DOI

  • The representation of short-haired women, also called pelonas, in the work of Diego Rivera is a subject that has not been studied much when compared to the numerous critical studies of the murals where they represent the mythical bodies of indigenous women.

    Diego Rivera · 2023 · DOI

  • The project centers on those with social identities traditionally excluded from homogenous conceptualizations of latinidad, including, but not limited to Afro/Black, Indigenous, Asian, Central American, Muslim, Queer, Trans, and multi-racial/ethnic identities.

    Piloting the Counter-Memorias Digital Testimonio Project · 2023 · DOI

  • Though some studies acknowledge the racism suffered by villeros, how this racialization has unfolded and transformed over time remains a question rarely examined.

    Race and the shantytown in a race-less country:<i>negros villeros</i>, whiteness and urban space in Argentina · 2023 · DOI

  • Few studies have addressed how Spanish nationals who are racialized as Black challenge essentialist and ethnic notions of Spanish identity and create spaces of enunciation from which to tell their stories as minorities in a majority culture.

    On Blackness and Belonging in Contemporary Spain: Desirée Bela-Lobedde’s Ser mujer negra en España · 2022 · DOI

  • The study of their linguistic experiences sheds light on the social and political effects that language ideologies have by bringing about such consequences as physical aggression and family separation in underexplored institutions articulated by neoliberal policies.

    Una lengua, una nación. Fronteras lingüísticas, sociales y políticas en dos casos de la migración latinoamericana al Reino Unido · 2022 · DOI

  • If cultural historian Gail Bederman asks scholars to consider manhood as a gender script that changes in relation to new experiences, Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora shows us how gender and masculinities need to be studied not just in context, but over space and time.

    Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora · 2022 · DOI

  • 5 Numerous other Latinx artists remain to be documented and studied—Judithe Hernández, Patssi Valdez, Barbara Carrasco, Alfredo de Batuc, Antonio Bernal—to name only a few fundamental but understudied names from the history of Chicana/o art.

    Why <i>Latinx</i>? · 2021 · DOI

  • Besides contributing to Canarian decolonization, this text enriches the corpus of decolonial studies, as complex Canarian coloniality continues to be an understudied…

    Cuerpo y territorio : conversaciones desde el feminismo descolonial canario. · 2021 · DOI

  • Thus, by the use of decolonial aesthetics theory, the author delves into Latin America's extensive production decade from the 1960s and 1970s, which has not been studied exclusively from a decolonial perspective.

    Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts by Juan G. Ramos · 2020 · DOI

  • The essay locates little-explored scholarship, oral testimonials, and archives that can be used for further investigation into the experiences of Gitanos in a period that needs to be documented with greater rigor.

    The memory of Spanish Gypsies: Scholarship, oral history, and archive research · 2020 · DOI

  • 2 Under this rubric Latinx plays are evaluated solely by their success or failure to instantiate loosely defined Aristotelian principles; or alternately, read as representative of one of two broadly and poorly defined "Latinx" genres: magical realism or the telenovela.

    How to Read a Latinx Play in the Twenty-first Century: Learning from Quiara Hudes · 2017 · DOI

  • The essay thereby highlights underexplored aspects of Lugones's texts, identifies continuities between Lugones's philosophy and (Latina) feminist work that comprehends address as a carrier of aesthetic and political meanings, and illuminates the resources of a remarkably fruitful concept.

    Navigating Frames of Address: María Lugones on Language, Bodies, Things, and Places · 2016 · DOI

  • Documentation is sparse, so Rappaport employs what she calls an “ethnographic history” based on thick description and a careful reconstruction of individual life narratives (p.

    The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Granada · 2015 · DOI

  • I suggest that the friction between these conflicting models is both contentious and generative, producing new possibilities for engagement even as the interstices between them may hide possibilities not yet explored.

    Why X doesn’t always mark the spot: Contested authenticity in Mexican indigenous language politics · 2015 · DOI

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37 open questions have been extracted from the limitations and future-work passages of 3,097 Latin American and Latino Studies papers in our library. Each one below links back to the study that raised it, so you can read the original claim in context.

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