This chapter reads María Cristina Mena’s “The Birth of the God of War” (1914) alongside Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of the Coyolxauhqui imperative in Light in the Dark/Luz in lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality (2015) to theorize brown modernism. Building on the work of José Esteban Muñoz, who theorizes a “sense of brown” that emerges from a felt community based on brownness,” I contend that Mena’s and Anzaldúa’s engagement with Aztec myths allows them to theorize brownness by centering indigeneity through a feminist lens. In this way, both authors illuminate the divergent modernities that attend their depictions and engagement with indigeneity. Focusing on brown modernism over white modernism illuminates how different modernisms have their own temporalities as brown modernism drags modernist aesthetics deeper into the twentieth century. Moreover, this chapter shows how, in taking up an explicit engagement with indigeneity, brown modernism stresses the importance of having such conversations, particularly when such engagements are uncomfortable and problematic. Doing so allows for a deeper accounting of the kinship between Chicanxs – and Latinxs more broadly – and indigeneity.

This chapter attends to the formal and cultural function of Latinx racial passing in Who Would Have Thought It? (1872) by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton. Critical conversations about the orphan protagonist of the novel, Lola Medina, interrogate her rescue from Indian captivity and the gradual “whitening” of her dyed skin as a form of aspirational assimilation into Anglo-American society. Scholars have also studied the ways in which Lola’s captivity story is informed by the historical precedent and publications surrounding the repatriation of Olive Oatman to white American society after her five-year captivity among the Mohave in the 1850s. This contribution reads Lola’s performance of Latinx racial passing alongside the captivity narrative, newspaper articles, and visual culture from the Oatman case to argue how the idea of “passing” operates in the novel as a form of political critique and a catalyst for modernist, formal innovation. Lola’s narrative of Latinx racial passing not only illuminates an early discourse of Latinx racialization, but also catalyzes a modernist satire of Anglo-American imperialism.

This chapter examines the implications of mapping Latinx theater history through a singular narrative of race and cultural resistance. Scholars have written the history of Latinx theater as the story of minoritarian struggles for representation against the dominant white gaze since the 1960s. I assess how the narrative of overcoming racial oppression has taken a decidedly romantic form since it tells the story of how Latinx communities move from oppression toward an emancipatory future, and how, in turn, this romance’s linear temporal plot defines Latinidad as brown and as antithetical to whiteness. The “romance of Latinidad,” I argue, has served generations of Latinxs artists to craft an aesthetic and a cultural politics of resistance. However, the story of brown resistance consolidates a post-1960s brown/white racial binary that erases non-brown Latinxs from Latinx theater history. After tracing the generations of artists included in the resistance narrative, the chapter turns to Latinidad’s pre-1960s past and discusses the biography and racial ideologies of Josefina Niggli (1910–83), the Mexican American playwright whose whiteness and folkloric representations of Mexicans trouble the romance of brown resistance. Indeed, the analysis seeks to account for Latinidad’s antiracist possibilities by reckoning with Latinx theater’s collusions with racism.

This chapter theorizes social reproduction as one of the material processes that sustains collective wellbeing in democracies. Through a historical genealogy of racialized labor recruitment among Mexican and Mexican-American families, I identify the brown family as both a central unit of support of social reproduction of the US economy and society and a target of destructive measures that made it abject and decimated its own resources for self-care and reproduction. I trace how conquest, settlement, and immigration control in the US Southwest operated subsequently as regimes of domination that guaranteed access to cheap social reproduction for white waged labor. Building upon recent work on capitalism and social reproduction and Black, Indigenous, and Latinx feminist writings, I reconstruct the segmentation of labor that relegated brown workers to physically strenuous work outside and inside the home, while white workers accessed relatively more skilled and less exploitative conditions of labor. Eventually, white women left the home to access paid work. This process entailed attachments to a normative white privatized family, whose existence depended both on the social reproductive work of racialized others, and on its construction in opposition to the active creation of abject nonwhite families, which were posited as deviant and unassimilable.

This chapter extends the argument of anticolonial critics, such as Ania Loomba and Sylvia Wynter, to suggest that we think of race less as a distinct, autonomous category and more as an underpinning force contributing to the destabilizing elements of the fin-de-siècle social world. By expanding our theoretical framework to consider late-nineteenth-century manifestations of anti-Blackness, the chapter argues that we can enrich our mapping of the ways that “race” as an expansive category both propped up and disordered the British empire and thereby build on earlier critical interpretations of the workings of empire and difference in fin-de-siècle narratives. To help write toward this reframing, the author turns to Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Story of the Brown Hand” (1899). This short tale about the ghost of an Afghan hillman haunting a British surgeon upon his return from Mumbai (“Bombay”) to Wiltshire teaches us how the brownness of Asians took shape through biocentric terms against the period’s longstanding anti-Blackness in ways that are historically specific but also ongoing in the present.