Negotiating Latinidad

"A valuable and welcome addition to the literature in Latina/o studies. I commend Aparicio on this important work. It will be a significant contribution to thinking about multicultural identities in immigrant-descendant generations, and about the traditional paradigm of American assimilation."--Rina Benmayor, coeditor of Memory, Subjectivities, and Representation: Approaches to Oral History in Latin America, Portugal, and Spain

"Aptly interweaving humanities and social science approaches to identity, Aparicio sets up some of the building blocks for what Latino Studies will become in the twenty-first century. Her compelling engagement with storytelling by Latinos articulating intraLatina/o identities in Chicago is a groundbreaking intervention in the study of U.S. Latinidad that transcends while honoring cultural nationalist models that may not always serve to capture our realities. Her use of the concepts 'horizontal hierarchies' and 'affective essentializing' to analyze co-existence, competition, love, conflict, and solidarity leaves us rethinking our lives in inter-Latino communities and how we describe them. While reading about linguistic battles between parents, grandmas seeking to win over their intraLatina/o children through food, and college students trying to find a sense of belonging to inter-Latino families, communities, and college settings, the reader witnesses intimate spaces of kinship building by intraLatina/os and is deeply engaged by the courageous truths of our communities."--Alaí Reyes-Santos, author of Our Caribbean Kin: Race and Nation in the Neoliberal Antilles