From Veronica Melendez’s “Iconic” series.

Melendez has been featured in venues such as Remezcla, Mitu, and NPR’s Alt Latino for casting light on Central American artistic production in the D.C. metropolitan area––​or, in shorthand, “the D.M.V.,” the acronym for D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. ​

She is co-founder of La Horchata Zine, a seasonal publication printed and bound in Washington, D.C., which promotes Central American artists. 

Melendez’s communal forms of artistic production are also evinced through her pop culture sensibility. Her digital illustrations project––entitled “Iconic”––is informed by the familiar logos, graphic representation, and typography that bring Latin American staples to life.

The food brands one may find recognizable in coffee, black beans, or even arepa flour, take us, under her artistic vision, to a new form of communication––a new visual landscape of Central American and LatinX creation.

Her series “Le pido a Dios que no me olviden”––or, “I Ask God They Don’t Forget Me”––won the 2018 Award for Documentarians of The American South. This prize is conferred by the Archive of Documentary Arts, part of Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which now houses Melendez’s color inkjet prints.

Zoe Litaker Photography.

Her visuality juxtaposes Central American everyday lives at the center––and at the margins––of power, their displacement under gentrification, and their invisible labor.

Melendez exposes underexamined questions on how Central Americans in D.C., which is generally conceptualized as a “northern city,” also fall under the “Nuevo South” framework and its sociocultural dynamics––ushering in important contexts about the remaking of place and diaspora.

​In this segment, Melendez speaks of growing up in Wheaton, Maryland, which her white classmates dubbed “Little Mexico,” even though there is not much of Mexican population in that part of the state, since “it’s mostly Salvadoran and Guatemalan.”

Growing up in this “Salvadoran-Guatemalan bubble,” she adds, didn’t really lead to an otherization of her Central Americanness, and by extension, her LatinXness. Wheaton was also a place where you would find a noticeable Central American middle class as well as homeowners.

These kinds of experiences led to her arts trajectory and her desire to visually record a Central American community that was not being documented enough in the art world, especially given the strong presence of these migrants in the D.M.V.

Melendez’s venture into the zine world was her way of “almost sticking it to the art school world,” she notes.

“I definitely feel like all the rules and the strict structure of ‘this is what you’re supposed to do and this is what you’re not supposed to do in a printed publication form’ kind of go out the window with the zine.”

This mini-magazine’s flexible format makes La Horchata more approachable and appealing. It allows for more Central Americans creatives to share their work, not just from the D.M.V. but also from other geographies where one doesn’t typically expect to find them.

From Veronica Melendez’s “Iconic” series.

Melendez’s artistic practice is a way to “find other people, like us, out there, because I knew we had to exist.”

“It couldn’t just be a handful of Central American creatives that I knew in D.C. There had to be more us. And just creating this little, kind of humble, publication has really created this platform for everyone to find each other and build a sense of community, even if it’s just via the Internet and a zine.”

Melendez studied abroad at the Glasgow School of Art, earned her B.F.A. in Photojournalism from the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design as well as an M.F.A. in Photography from the University of Hartford. 

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“Podcasts from the South” ​are a series of conversations ​​created ​and hosted by María DeGuzmán at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Claudia Milian at Duke University.

Zoe Litaker Photography.

Special thanks to Fernando Rocha and Compare Foods on Avondale Drive in Durham, N.C. for making us feel welcome and generously allowing us to photograph in this space.

Elizondo Griest is also Assistant Professor and Margaret R. Shuping Fellow of Creative Nonfiction at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of three memoirs: Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana; Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines; and All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands.

Topics under discussion range from the boundaries of the United States North and South, Canada and Mexico, and in-between-ness, to South Texas and environmental justice.

Elizondo Griest takes us to the key aspect of her biographical formation: Corpus Christi, Texas, a city that spurred her nomadic inclinations and destinations.

“My whole life I always knew that I wanted to wander. I wanted to travel,” she says. “I wanted to go far and I wanted to go wide. The only question for me was just how, where, and with whose money? Really.”

Her writing, she adds, “is a reflection of what it means when an international borderline cuts right through you.” Her narrative form takes on a particular fusion that simultaneously advances her literary form.

I fuse everything, don’t I? I am biracial, bicultural, bilingual. And I also fuse form. So all three of my books are written in a fusion of a literary journalism, travel writing, and memoir writing. And it’s pretty evenly split, I would say, between the three. That, to me, is really a dynamic way of writing. That’s also just the way I increasingly process the world.

And, just as her latest nonfictional work turns to environmental degradation, urgency, and forms of survival and recovery, Elizondo Griest also speaks of learning about her ovarian cancer diagnosis during her 40-city book tour of All the Agents and Saints.

“I had a tumor the size of a basketball that had somehow grown off my left ovary,” she says. “That actually made me feel more connected to my community, because that is a narrative of so many people that I spent ten years of my life working with and being among. My colleges refer to it as random act of violence. But I don’t know how random it is when all of us are getting these cancers. . . . We’re not at the age where these diseases should be happening.”

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“Podcasts from the South” ​are a series of conversations ​​created ​and hosted by María DeGuzmán at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Claudia Milian at Duke University.

Zoe Litaker Photography.

This second podcast features Nancy Raquel Mirabal, Associate Professor in the Department of American Studies and the Director of  the U.S. Latina/o Studies Program at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Professor Mirabal is the author of Suspect Freedoms: The Racial and Sexual Politics of Cubanidad in New York, 1823–1957, which is the focus for this session. How was the project of the Cuban nation narrated, imagined, and crafted not in Cuba, but the island of Manhattan?

She also probes questions such as what makes this particular history “unthinkable” and what makes freedom “unimaginable”? Professor Mirabal identifies three particular insights by which to gauge her scholarly study: Cubanidad as an intellectual and social project; intellectual producers, thinkers, writers; and revolutionary politics.

Tune into their conversation on Latino, Latina, LatinX diasporic politics, notions of hemispheric belonging, the role of the Spanish language, and the circulation of bodies between the United States and Cuba.

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“Podcasts from the South” ​are a series of conversations  ​​created ​and hosted by María DeGuzmán at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Claudia Milian at Duke University.  ​

Zoe Litaker Photography.

R. Galvan. Administrative Care. 2017.

A photograph by artist R. Galvan prominently features a custom rubber stamp from 2017. The piece is titled “Administrative Care” and shows a hand about to continuously imprint this query: “Why did you come to the United States?”

This is one of the haunting questions unaccompanied Central American children fleeing the region’s violence are asked during their intake immigration questionnaire. The survey is conducted to gauge whether the minors can be granted refugee status in the United States, as writer Valeria Luiselli compellingly describes it in Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions.

Galvan’s work inscribes an aesthetics of bureaucracy to the system’s temporary axiom. “Administrative Care” suggests an unstoppable managerial juggernaut recording how Central American children are made into the word and the U.S. world.

The stamp is kept in motion by governing decisions of admissibility and inadmissibility for these mostly unwanted minors in U.S. politics.

Does it really matter to xenophobic America why the children came, when they are always a source of skepticism and a site of “illegality” writ large? The rubber stamp rubber-stamps the nation’s disapproval of Central American child migrants over and over. It chisels a narrative of how the children are marked–forever stamped–in the U.S.A.

Galvan’s device can be used anywhere. It stamps the states of the American world now. It is a background question, a bureaucratic activity that is perpetually “there” with no formal or permanent solution for living in the United States. “Administrative Care” is bureaucratic etiquette, shorthand for the beginning process of being booted out of America.

Galvan’s image, in a manner of speaking, is involved with the hasty but newsworthy affairs of the day, as a New York Times phone notification on 8 January 2018, revealed. On this day, one hundred and thirty-six characters made known: “Nearly 200,000 Salvadorans allowed to live in the U.S. temporarily after 2 earthquakes in 2001 must leave, the Trump administration said.”

Temporary Protected Status (TPS) is dead. These LatinX exits must be arranged by 9 September 2019. After this timetable, Salvadorans will lack legal permission to stay in the United States, and become “illegal.” But as Jonathan Blitzer, a New Yorker staff writer, so well puts it, migrants under TPS consider the United States “as home, and many are unlikely to leave just because the government tells them to.”

TPS was created under the 1990 Immigration Act, and signed into law by President George Bush. El Salvador was one the first nations to receive TPS due to the 1980s civil war and instability in the region. This means that two hundred thousand people, since 2001 or earlier, have been legally living and working in the United States under this federal TPS designation. Recipients pay almost $500 every 18 months to renew their TPS permits, adding up to an estimated $10,000 throughout the course of their U.S. stay.

The Department of Homeland Security stated that it was terminating the humanitarian program for Salvadorans allowed to live and work legally in the United States since “the original conditions caused by the 2001 earthquakes no longer exist.” Homeland Security concluded that El Salvador’s damaged infrastructure has since been reconstructed. Other migrants from Haiti, Sudan, and Nicaragua also saw TPS come to an end. The agency will decide in 2018 whether to extend TPS for these other nations: Syria, Nepal, Honduras, Yemen, and Somalia.

The regulatory question conspicuously made by Galvan has been inverted to a procedural declaration, a clearer administrative denouement: “You are leaving the United States.” The news, the Washington Post added, swept “waves of outrage and anxiety from Washington to Los Angeles and to the Central American nation itself.”

The New Yorker underscored that those with TPS “have established deep roots in the U.S.—buying homes, paying taxes, starting families, and joining the legal workforce.” The magazine elaborated that Salvadoran TPS holders are “parents to a hundred and ninety-three thousand children who are American citizens.”

“You feel like you’re up in the air,” Oscar Cortez, a 46-year-old plumber in the nation’s capital, told  the Post upon reading this information on his mobile phone. An NPR lead put it this way: “Many immigrants from El Salvador are in a state of shock.”

Cortez returned to El Salvador in 2016 for the first time since his departure to the United States, and told the Post: “I felt like a foreigner in my own land. Everyone is looking at you like you’re from outer space.”

Can one get past that extreme quantity: 200K? Two hundred thousand Salvadorans who are deracinated and deracinated again. There is a certain newness to this sequence of uprooting, first from El Salvador, next from the United States, and then a displacement of dualism.

Is there a full engagement with anything for this group, a population that because of its “temporariness” in El Salvador as well as the United States, only surfaces in the present time, in their quasi-legal present state of things?

200K—or, 200K X—as in two hundred thousand X’s that are more than just people. This is a LatinX current, an impact that cannot be expressed by people alone.

What does it mean for something to be both contemporary and temporary? To function through a temporary mechanism: the temporary now, the temporary present, the possibility of being not present?

200K as a present in the moment and in a given U.S. location—the temporarily present who are available in this place until this location is no longer available to them?

A present beginning of being phased out, of changing status from being temporarily welcomed to permanently excluded?

TPS as an originator of new problems, a sign of a time that hardly passes, as LatinXs correspond to the deportable present and future?

These seeming LatinX “tempo-rarities” are ushering us into urgent problems of the present: unrestrained LatinX evacuations.

By LatinX evacuations I mean those that are en route to being discharged, that may or may not be prepared, that are largely involuntary but still have a backup course of action.

What is the aftermath of these evacuations, what do LatinX temporary subjects do, and where do they relocate?

LatinX evacuations are part of a new twenty-first century exodus, a flooding in reverse, a LatinX removal of a different kind of “minor” but lawful American.

An opinion column by the New York Times Editorial Board expressed concern about these LatinX removals, petitioning “Don’t Deport the Salvadorans” and citing a triad of gang violence, drought, and poverty as a reason for finding a legal way to allow them to stay in the United States.  “To uproot them is cruel and unnecessary,” the Editorial Board appealed.

Salvadorans who migrated because of a natural disaster are being sent back to environmental chaos, to a region now recognized as the corredor seco, or the dry corridor. The frequent and severe droughts that are creating “food insecurity” in the Northern Corridor of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala are now inducing climate-triggered migrations.

LatinX evacuations summon different kinds of survival. Univision News ​chronicled how ​Veronica Lagunas​’s ​emergency plan​ will be executed: “The first step is to change houses, because [authorities] have our info, our fingerprints, and addresses.” El Salvador is not an option for Lagunas, an office cleaner. Her goal is to move to Canada.

As Salvadorans with expiring TPS authorizations will soon be subject to deportation, they may also opt to join the unknown numerosities of X’s “illegally” dwelling in the United States, working in informal sectors, and not so much living in the shadows, but as Latin American migrants dub this state, estar en negro. This maxim’s corollary in English is “working off the books,” or “working under the table.”

I want to briefly ruminate on this instructive apothegm’s literal meaning: to be in black, to be, in other words, included in darkness, to be simultaneously in and outside of great unknowns and making strategic moves. This does not mean a black monochrome that is completely void or a dismal dead-end.

It foregrounds a cumulative darkness that is the beginning of something else entirely: an X in black that slides in and out of that tenebrosity with distinctive contemplations of being. It could be a weighty and subterranean pile of X’s getting into the shit, shall we say—TPS X’s from “shithole countries,” as the forty-fifth President of the United States referred to migrants from El Salvador, Haiti, and the African continent.

Nicaraguan-American political pundit Ana Navarro rhetorically but perceptively inquired about the blacknening of this U.S. surplus excrement on CNN: “You know what Haitians and Salvadorans have in common? They are in completely different parts of the world … [but] they are black. They are black.” The private matter of the shithole is now a public one. That being the case, that shit must be taken seriously. LatinX is living scatology and cannot be contained. LatinX is something, and it means something, in the world. It does not succumb to the shithouse.

X factors—and certainties like “a clear hostility” toward TPS—compel us to see the forms of life and multiple becomings that LatinXness is taking “in black.” Bertila Parada, whose son is a TPS holder, told the Times from San Salvador that: “When they return to the places where they were born, they’ll be unknowns.”

The contemporary configuration LatinX is simultaneously activating the unknown in the United States and in El Salvador.

These Salvadorans with a deadline—present and future unknowns in their birthplace—are unknowable U.S. LatinXs, too. This LatinXness is unsettled, as is their temporariness, their Salvadoranness, their Americanness.

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Claudia Milian is the author of Latining America: Black-Brown Passages and the Coloring of Latino/a Studies.