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At the the 2019 ASTR Conference, I presented as part of a Working Session entitled, “Latinx Publics.” The organizers for the workshop were Jon D. Rossini from the University of California at Davis and Patricia Ybarra of Brown University. I was fortunate to get feedback on my US Latinx Twitter project from Dennis Sloan of Bowling Green State University, Lilianne Lugo Herrera from the University of Miami, and Marcos Steuernagel from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The Working Session’s abstract acknowledges how the “current U.S. public discourse around Latinx bodies continues to invoke threat, limits, celebration, and appropriation” and as a result, “we must find different ways of thinking about the historical intimacies of Latinx performance (onstage, in the street, in everyday life) and consider the geographies and geometries of Latinx publics.” Panelists “examine[d] and reimagine[d] the intersections of performances and publics (in regional theater, commercial tours, experimental interventions, and in the streets) in a world shadowed by the continued failed response to Hurricane Maria, family separation, anxiety over migrant caravans, and increasing recognition of shifting class, national origin, linguistic and regional demographics of Latinx populations.” The following questions oriented the Workshop papers and discussions: “how can we understand Latinx performance and reception in the present, and how might alternative conceptions of Latinx publics be excavated from our pasts?”

The “Latinx Aftershocks” panel proposed for the 2020 MLA convention in Seattle has been approved as a Special Session! This panel is sponsored by MLA’s LLC Latina and Latino (G100) Forum.

Check out the complete panel abstract, presenters, and presentation abstracts here:
https://elenamachado.blogs.bucknell.edu/latinx-aftershocks-mla-2020

Panel Abstract: “Latinx Aftershocks” explores how US Latinx cultural production responds to states of emergency, human rights crises, and disaster capitalism. The panel highlights the dialogue between US Latinx populations and their communities of origin to process the reverberations of such crises. Taking its inspiration from Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007), the panel considers how the condition of being “disaster-shocked” not only refers to collective devastation by hurricanes or war, but also to neoliberal terms of recovery that require exploitation and dehumanization. The presenters situate their research at the fault lines of disaster capitalism, interrogating who is considered human and how the rights of the citizen are delimited.

I was fortunate to take the course, “Race, Social Justice, & DH: Applied Theories and Methods v. 2.0” at DHSI, which was held at the University of Victoria.

The course instructors were Dorothy Kim (Brandeis University) and Angel David Nieves (San Diego State University) and my fellow course members included: Jes Lopez, Michigan State University; Ravynn Stringfield, College of William & Mary; Rebecca Dobkins, Willamette University; Akane Okoshi, NYU; Victoria Maxwell-Turanski, Ryerson University; Kristen Hackett,  CUNY Graduate Center; Stefan Higgins, University of Victoria; Marjorie Salvodon, Suffolk University; Janet Nalubega Ross, Arizona State University; Randa May Tawil, Yale University; Adam Griggs, Mercer University; Faith Smith, Brandeis University; Melissa Click, Gonzaga University.

Our final class project was a document that outlines a set of recommendations to DHSI as an institution as well as “Guidelines for Designing and Producing a Project in DH,” a list of “Questions to Consider” when embarking on a digital humanities project, and selected readings on the intersection of race and DH studies.

If you’re interested in citing this collectively authored document, please use the following model for bibliographic entries:

• Click, M., and R. Dobkins, D. Kim, A. Griggs, K. Hackett, S. Higgins, J. Lopez, E. Machado Sáez, V. Maxwell-Turanski, A.D. Nieves, A. Okoshi, J. N. Ross, M. Salvodon, F. Smith, R. Stringfield, R. M. Tawil. “DHSI_2019_Race_and_SJ_Final_Presentation_050719.” June 2019. Google Docs Slide File.

At the CUNY John Jay 4^th Biennial Latina/o Literature Conference, I presented as part of a panel dedicated to the 2018 edited collection, Dialectical Imaginaries: Materialist Approaches to U.S. Latino/a Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism, published by the University of Michigan Press.

The panel was moderated by Marcial González from the University of California at Berkeley and my fellow panelists included Michael Dowdy from the University of South Carolina and R. Andrés Guzmán from Indiana University at Bloomington. I provided an overview of the chapter I contributed to the Dialectical Imaginaries collection, entitled, “Bodega Sold Dreams: Middle-Class Panic and the Crossover Aesthetics of In the Heights.”

In her review of the anthology, Angels of the Americlypse: An Anthology of New Latin@ Writing, edited by Carmen Giménez Smith and John Chávez, Rachel Galvin cites the essay that Raphael Dalleo and I wrote for the Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature.

Galvin helpfully summarizes the central argument of our chapter: “Since the sixties, Latin@ anthologies have tended to claim to present ‘new’ work and seek to supplement and ultimately supplant previous anthologies. Raphael Dalleo and Elena Machado Sáez point this out in their essay ‘The Formation of a Latino/a Canon,’ asserting that the one constant is precisely the ‘counter-canon impulse.” They attribute this to the desire of Latin@ writers and editors to remedy the systematic exclusion of Latin@ writing.”

The Latinx Project at NYU put together an amazing conference on “Digitizing Race: making Latinx in the 21st Century” and I was fortunate to present on a panel moderated by Cristina Beltrán entitled, “Social Media for Social Change.” I shared material from my essay, “Debt of Gratitude: Lin-Manuel Miranda and the Politics of US Latinx Twitter.”

Guadalupe Madrigal from the University of Michigan spoke about “Undocumented Activist Publics & Hashtag Anti-Detention Campaigns,” Rafael Ramirez Solórzano from UCLA discussed “Notes from the Trail: Blogging Across the South,” and Janel Martinez, who founded aintilatina.com, presented on, “From Tumblr, Twitter to Instagram: How Afro-Latinx Women Power Identity Conversations Online.”

We took a break to take a pic to document how we’re creating the future of digital critical studies! #DigitizingRace pic.twitter.com/GhfoaPt7ze

— LatinxProject (@LatinxProjNYU) March 8, 2019

Now Prof. Elena Machado discusses @Lin_Manuel performance in twitter in first panel on Social Media for Social Change #digitizingRace and how tweets build affective alliances

— LatinxProject (@LatinxProjNYU) March 8, 2019

https://twitter.com/shakaz23/status/1104047426145579009

https://twitter.com/shakaz23/status/1104049543950290945

Check out the essay I recently published as part of the collection, Dialectical Imaginaries: Materialist Approaches to U.S. Latino/a Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism, edited by Carlos Gallego and Marcial González.

In “Bodega Sold Dreams: Middle-Class Panic and the Crossover Aesthetics of In the Heights,” I read In the Heights as representative of a middle-class politics that is haunted by the inability to speak for a working-class experience of Latinidad and threatened by the stereotypes of chaos and poverty associated with U.S. Latinx working-class subjectivities. In the Heights is troubled by the work of crossing over and by the history of how U.S. Latinxs have been depicted on the Broadway stage. While it focuses the concerns of a U.S. Latinx business class, the musical also references the ways that the artistic and activist legacy of the Nuyorican community challenges the priorities of cross-over consumption for Latinx culture and history. The nuances of the play’s cross-over aesthetics are flattened out by a reception that is fixated on delimited notions of cultural authenticity. I aim to complicate the expectation of authenticity attached to this play, peeling away the hyper-positive guise of pan-Latinidad celebrated by the reception and even at times the musical itself. In turn, I perform a reading of In the Heights that acknowledges: first, how the musical is in dialogue with a U.S. Latinx Civil Rights generation, and second, how the musical embodies a crisis of imagination and authority on the part of U.S. Latinx middle-class cultural creatives.

Check out the essay I recently published in Latino Studies entitled, “Generation MFA: Neoliberalism and the shifting cultural capital of US Latinx writers.”

This essay describes the emergence of an MFA generation of Latinx writers as a neoliberal phenomenon that offers critics another lens by which to understand the production and critical reception of US Latinx literature. I argue that, with academic institutions training and credentialing authors through creative writing programs, the market and culture of an MFA education informs generational shifts within the US Latinx canon. The disciplinary training of writers such as Ernesto Quiñonez, Rich Villar, Dagoberto Gilb, Julia Alvarez, Junot Díaz, and Sandra Cisneros provides a glimpse into the limited agency of these authors within racist and neoliberal institutions, particularly how they understand their positioning within the academy as writers of color. Looking at the variable and fluid status of authors within the US Latinx canon helps us think through the strengths and weaknesses of critical practices within US Latinx literary studies, as well as open up the possibility of alternative historiographies for contemporary US Latinx literature.

Generation MFA: Neoliberalism and the shifting cultural capital of US Latinx writers by ELENA MACHADO SAEZ @BucknellU

To read: https://t.co/fG6JWszdIN

— Latino Studies (@Latino_Studies) September 18, 2018

The journal CLIO has published a review of Market Aesthetics.

Erin M. Fehskens comments on how Market Aesthetics is “models a pitch perfect method of engaging author intentionality through a robust close reading of the form and content of [the] chosen novels.” She notes that the book “could serve as an invaluable text on the pedagogical challenges that the teacher-scholar of global, postcolonial, multiethnic, and multicultural literature regularly encounters.”

Check out the rest of the review here.

Check out the essay I recently published in a special issue of Studies in Musical Theater entitled, “Blackout on Broadway: Affiliation and audience in In the Heights and Hamilton.”  The special issue dedicated to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical, Hamilton, was guest edited by Peter C. Kunze.

In the essay, I argue that Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights (2008) and Hamilton (2015) find their inspiration in a generative conflict between individualism and community, freedom and property, whiteness and blackness, and empathy and complicity. The contradictory thematic pressures organizing Miranda’s musicals are the product of a complex negotiation with the institution of Broadway and its historic (mis)representation of people of color.