Vol. 84 No. 3 – Summer, 2025

Special Issue: Latina Body Art

Editorial Preface by Rachel Gonzalez-Martin

A Mother, a Daughter, and Earrings: an Autohistoria-Teoría of Guatemalan American Femininity

Regina Marie Mills

ABSTRACT: Part memoir, part analysis, this article examines the place of earrings in developing a sense of Latina feminine identity, from the context of a Guatemalan American of ladina heritage in the United States. Surprisingly little has been written about the role of earrings in Latina culture. For Guatemalans and Guatemalan Americans especially, research on earrings has been confined to scholarship on Indigenous peoples and Indigeneity, rather than mestizxs/ladinxs. Using Gloria Anzaldúa’s conception of autohistoria-teoría and The Latina Feminist Group’s “papelitos guardados,” Mills connects the conflict with her mother regarding ear-piercing and wearing earrings to larger ideas of how Latina daughters of immigrants navigate their sense of identity, especially Latinidad and femininity. KEYWORDS: earrings, adornment, Latina, femininity, Guatemala, ladino

Homegirl Aesthetics Inside and Outside of the Ivory Tower: Chicana Adornment as an Infrapolitical Archive

Marisa D. Salinas

ABSTRACT: Using storytelling of experiences with aesthetics and adornment throughout the course of life, this article examines the aesthetic practices of women of color, with an emphasis on Latinas. As they construct their bodies as living archives, I invoke Robin Kelley’s (1993) “infrapolitics” to demonstrate how (despite continual attempts by outside forces to control and contain them) Latinas use their bodies and aesthetic expression to resist white, middle-class, and feminine constructs both inside and outside of the academy and the community. KEYWORDS: storytelling, storytellers, witnessing, translating, no one “Chicana+” story, respectability, politics, intersectionality

Aretes, Adornment, and Autobioethnography

Domino R. Perez

ABSTRACT: Autobioethography and slow disciplinary approaches share similar concerns, primarily in their preoccupation with transformation,

an urge to disrupt the status quo. Chicanx/e and Latinx/e authors and scholars have long experimented with form to create mixed- genre or genre-bending works that represent creative and intellectual possibilities for critical inquiry. The intersection of personal narrative, photographs, text messages, cultural practice, and prose poetry informs the structure of this autobioethography, rooted in slow theory, as it considers the relationship between earrings, familial practice, adornment, and gender. KEYWORDS: slow theory, adornment, material, artifacts, fashion, culture, identity construction.