Theresa Delgadillo, "Geographies of Relation: Diasporas and Borderlands in the Americas" (U Michigan Press, 2024)

Dec 2, 2025

Theresa Delgadillo, a Vilas Distinguished Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, explores the intricate ties of race, ethnicity, and gender in her work on Afro-Latinx and borderlands cultural production. She discusses the significance of Toña La Negra in Mexican cinema and the evolution of mestiza consciousness through Gloria Anzaldúa. Delgadillo also highlights the interconnectedness of the African diaspora across the Americas, emphasizing the crucial role of local solidarities in cultural memory and activism.

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ANECDOTE

Film Hunt That Sparked The Project

Theresa Delgadillo began this project by hunting down Golden Age Mexican films so her mother could watch them in Wisconsin.
Watching Angelitos Negros revealed hidden racial histories that sparked her long research into diasporic relations.

INSIGHT

Radical Relationality Reframes The 'We'

Radical relationality asks who composes the 'we' across race, ethnicity, gender, and nation.
Delgadillo shows cultural texts negotiate an expansive, contested we rather than fixed national or racial borders.

INSIGHT

Toña La Negra And Mexican Multiculturalism

Toña La Negra's prominence in film and music complicates Mexican narratives of mestizaje and whitened national identity.
Delgadillo argues cinema and nightclub culture brought Caribbean and African diasporic influences into Mexican national life.

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Geographies of Relation: Diasporas and Borderlands in the Americas (U Michigan Press, 2024) offers a new lens for examining diaspora and borderlands texts and performances that considers the inseparability of race, ethnicity, and gender in imagining and enacting social change. Theresa Delgadillo crosses interdisciplinary and canonical borders to investigate the interrelationships of African-descended Latinx and mestizx peoples through an analysis of Latin American, Latinx, and African American literature, film, and performance.

Not only does Delgadillo offer a rare extended analysis of Black Latinidades in Chicanx literature and theory, but she also considers over a century’s worth of literary, cinematic, and performative texts to support her argument about the significance of these cultural sites and overlaps. Chapters illuminate the significance of Toña La Negra in the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, reconsider feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa’s work in revising exclusionary Latin American ideologies of mestizaje, delve into the racial and gender frameworks Sandra Cisneros attempts to rewrite, unpack encounters between African Americans and Black Puerto Ricans in texts by James Baldwin and Marta Moreno Vega, explore the African diaspora in colonial and contemporary Peru through Daniel Alarcón’s literature and the documentary Soy Andina, and revisit the centrality of Black power in ending colonialism in Cuban narratives. Geographies of Relation demonstrates the long histories of networks and exchanges across the Americas as well as the interrelationships among Indigenous, Black, African American, mestizx, Chicanx, and Latinx peoples. It offers a compelling argument that geographies of relation are as significant as national frameworks in structuring cultural formation and change in this hemisphere.

Theresa Delgadillo is a Vilas Distinguished Professor of English and Chicanx/e and Latinx/e Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is also Director of the Chicanx/e and Latinx/e Studies Program. She is a founder and editor for the online publication Latinx Talk.

Shodona Kettle is a PhD candidate at the Institute of the Americas, University College London. Website here

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