Introduction: Latinidad, Memory, and Literature

Abstract

On the day these words were written, the director of the Pan American Health Organization, Dr. Carissa Etienne, announced that "Latin America has surpassed Europe and the United States in the daily number of reported Covid-19 infections," noting it "has become the epicenter of the COVID pandemic" (Darlington et al., 2020). The Los Angeles Times recently reported that "Latinos comprise about 40% of California's population but 53% of positive cases" of COVID-19, perhaps due to exposure risks endemic to Latinos providing high-contact essential labor, comprising 53% of food service workers, 59% of construction workers, and 85% of agricultural workers in California (Branson-Potts et al., 2020). [...]what is just as certain is that the nature of their memories will be altogether different in kind from the stories told by the World Health Organization or their governments' respective departments and ministries, and hence will have a different truth. Works such as José Vasconcelos's The Cosmic Race (1925), Octavio Paz's The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950), Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America (1971), José Luis Gonzalez's Puerto Rico: The Four-Storeyed Country (1980), and Gloria Anzaldúa's Bor der lands/La Frontera (1987) have explored a range of ideas on the topic of latinidad that have paved avenues of inquiry for modern scholars.