Abstract
This chapter engages with the entanglements of (bio)science, futurity, race mixture, and spirituality embodied by Latinx speculative fiction. Latinx speculative fiction writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa repurpose—and strategically distort—racialized biological idioms for utopian ends. Anzaldúa’s simultaneously cultural and genetic, biological and spiritual iteration of a specifically Mexican nationalist version of mestizaje shapes, however problematically, her forward-looking vistas of global struggles for racial justice and queer liberation. The representations of the ever-mutating (his)stories of mixed-race corporeality so endemic to the Americas are nowhere more evident than in the speculative fictions of mestiza writers like Anzaldúa who have had to negotiate biologized and essentialist Latin American discourses of mestizaje or Indo-Hispanic race mixing, all laid over contending models of body and spirit.
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Vado, K.A. (2019). “We Bleed in Mestizaje”: Corporeal Utopias and Mestiza Futurities in Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s Light in the Dark/Luz en Lo Oscuro. In: Ventura, P., Chan, E. (eds) Race and Utopian Desire in American Literature and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19470-3_9
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