Harmonizing Latina Visions and Voices: Cultural Explorations of Entornos

Harmonizing Latina Visions and Voices: Cultural Explorations ofEntornos discursively challenges the erasures, stigma, and silences imposed on women by functioning as a harmonizing choir, a collection of voices to testify on mujerismo, its vision, and its promise for (our) future. This collection puts ＂on the record＂ a pathway toward liberation that pushes back against white supremacist projects unleashed by academia, our families, official narratives of the State, and immigration. This book does not seek to equate the experiences of all Latinas or envision a one-size-fits-all response. We harmonize these diverse voices, understanding that these stories, poems, and essays are invoking different spaces, times, and experiences. We offer them as an intergenerational, intellectual, and spiritual dialogue. As a practice, this work centers and contextualizes how women’s resistance is articulated and expressed. The stories reflected in the chapters that follow are often matricentric, transnational, and queer. Some recurring themes center on the policing, policies, and legislations that govern Latina’s bodies and the entornos (social/environmental worlds) in which they move, are detained, or embodied.

Amarilys Estrella is assistant professor of anthropology and a faculty affiliate for the Center for African and African American Studies and the Center for the Study of Women Gender and Sexuality at Rice University.

Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo is adjunct assistant professor at the Tandon School of Engineering and is medical editor supervisor for the advertising agency Patients and Purpose.