BY CHRIS CAMPANIONI

When we began the folio series—launching, coincidentally, with the Latinx/Latinidad folio in March of 2019—our aim was not just to continue producing spaces to celebrate a rich multitude of voices, but to respond to the often-superficial “diversity” initiatives embedded in the fabric of our institutions, the diversity-as-a-goal instead of as a starting point to further address issues of inequality ranging from programming and access to care and support. Specifically, we wanted to continue to produce spaces in which the editorial process itself could become democratized and open to the public. Anyone—regardless of education or experience—could submit an idea, proposal, or question, from which to develop a call, review submissions, and curate a volume. What we wanted, what we still want, is to address the startling lack of diversity in the literary and publishing community, an ecosystem that often feels like an establishment with a not-so-secret passcode: the metric of white and male and cisgender. During one of our early Zoom calls prior to the launch of this summer-long “live” folio, Ruben enthusiastically spoke of the work undertaken by M. Bartley Seigel, Roxane Gay, and their staff of readers, the debuting of so many luminous writers in this space beginning in 2006, a time well before I could even dream of having work in publication, let alone publishing the work of others. Our conversations provided me with a renewed appreciation of this growing folio series, as well as the privilege to be able to contribute to a reorientation of the publication-as-scarcity model. We want to publish more writing, to celebrate more writers, to open up the possibilities for more kinds of writing: texts that straddle genres or destabilize and re-write generic conventions and hierarchies by their very nature.

We should remind ourselves that the work of representation so often has to be imagined before it can be concretized. I often remind myself that Latinx scholars are not visible in the academy—by the time I finished my coursework for the PhD, I encountered exactly one Latinx writer on the syllabi handed to me every fall, every spring, throughout four years of graduate school—but also: we’ve been made invisible: among all represented groups, we have the lowest undergraduate and graduate program enrollment. Ruben Quesada has here assembled a celebration that doubles as a testament: to our history—and moreover—to our future, to where we are going, which so often is a response to where we have been. To remark upon and remake our own colonized past, our own history of racialization and acculturation, and to make beauty out of that traversal, in so many forms, through bodies of experience that, in so many ways, transcend the cartographic purview of empire, the spatio-temporal landscape of nation. What is the Latinx experience but an experience of displacement that dissolves all boundaries, and yet the power of harnessing such a fracture, to turn the wound into a mark of healing, compassion, and renewal?

Here we find persons of the Latin American diaspora navigating the complex issues of everyday experience in a world that claims to be “postcolonial,” not the least of which involve negotiating colonial languages, origin stories, unreturnable exile, migratory flows, assimilation practices, and the perils of all categorical constructions, particularly ones that flatten differences among members of such a vast community, a people that, as José Martí once proclaimed, come from everywhere … and are going everywhere.

It’s this last bit that has been an especial light as the people of the Americas and beyond continue to grapple with the “novel” Coronavirus, and the virus of white supremacy that has long shaped our culture and institutions. Among the myriad content that Ruben has here shepherded to publication, readers will find newly-published poets alongside celebrated novelists, and celebrated novelists-turned-newly-published poets; stories about sorrow and joy and resilience and strength. We are only at the halfway point; this introduction wants to herald, to set in motion or divulge, but it also wants to reflect upon. It is my hope that throughout this past month, and in the month to follow, readers can take this celebration of Latinx literature as a starting point, to imagine a radically different canon, a radically different discipline from which we continue to produce knowledge and literature, an alternative Latinx imaginary that moves beyond the representations of our community that have so often been produced by people outside of it. This is a starting point, which is a celebration, and a celebration, which is, in many ways, unlocatable on any map. And still—we are here.