Lighting the Way: Las Hermanas Iglesias on Identity, Solidarity, and the Wounds of Latinidad

Sisters Lisa and Janelle Iglesias are multimedia artist-educators. Their works (individually and collaboratively) examine transnational identities, social participation, and more. See artists' website here.

A Dialogue of Care

Las Hermanas Iglesias sent me a package with a thank you note acknowledging solidarity and support.

We've been dialoguing about an interview since the fall. I reflect on the local and national shifts taking place since November 2024 that have been affecting so many of us, and-- resonant with my previous interview with Alejandro Heredia-- the artists' expected responsibility across all mediums, and attention to care.

Las Hermanas Iglesias' attention to care has been present since our first conversation. They are more than generous with the resources (both scholarship and news coverage) that shaped their creative praxis. They also introduced me to a colleague who, after one conversation, hosted me while I presented on the roundtable that evolved into a chapter published in Porque Estamos Aquí: Puerto Rican Feminisms In and Against Empire.

Meditations on the Four Wounds of Latinidad

In their meditations on the questions I asked, inspired by Pelaez-Lopez's "The X in Latinx is a

Wound not a Trend," they wrote:

We've been reading together texts including: A Handbook of Latinx Art, edited by Rocío Aranda-Alvarado and Deborah Cullen-Morales; Ayendy Bonifacio's article "Family and Color: The Social and Cultural Roots of Dominican Colorism, published in Insurrect!, an online publication devoted to anti-colonial frameworks and critiques of racial capitalism in Early American Studies; as well as the texts that you mentioned in your email.

We identify with multiple words and phrases, combining places and languages, origins and categorical divisions, collaging nouns and verbs. Our adolescence in 1990s Queens lent to terms like Norwinican, Hispandinavian, mixed. While mixed is a problematic term for some people, we didn't internalize negative associations with this word, rather dwelling in its musical and culinary associations.

We were not objects or things to be mixed, no, but that casual, short-form, quick-to-say, non-clinical word, that expansive word, implied an interstitial complexity that felt more right than other larger and politicized terms and hyphenated phrasing invented by adults.

We were/are not confused or borrowing terms from husbandry, we (like many of our mixed childhood friends) shared this word in kinship—a cultural understanding/term, a shared experiences term—not one of classification.

This quote from A Handbook of Latinx Art also strikes towards Las Hermanas' positionalities:

The state of being a cultural hybrid makes you see the accumulation of transplanted history three-dimensionally. It is the knowledge of diverse cultures and your power of synthesis that describe this idea. When the identity is one, it is flat and superficial, monotonous, the routine of the mirror. When it is three-dimensional, it is multilayered, diverse, and complex, unable to be dissected and traced to specific origins. But it is also more dangerous. Danger and fear are the emotions that you experience when you are a nomad—a hybrid, cultural instigator. You are the unknown, an accident that frees your identity, a cultural option placed in the future.

Las Hermanas further provided a quote from Puerto Rican artist Papo Colo:

In order to describe the trans-, inter-, and multicultural processes that are at the core of our contemporary border experience as Latino artists in the United States, we need to find a new terminology, a new iconography, and a new set of categories and definitions. 'We need to re-baptize the world in our own terms.' The language of postmodernism is ethnocentric and insufficient. And so is the existing language of cultural institutions and funding agencies. Terms like Hispanic, Latino, ethnic, minority, marginal, alternatives, and Third World, among others, are inaccurate and loaded with ideological implications. They create categories and hierarchies that promote political dependence and cultural underestimation. In the absence of a more enlightened terminology, we have no choice but to use them with extreme care.

— Papo Colo, Zero Identity: Third Fragments, 1991

They then included an excerpt from Guillermo Gómez-Peña's 1990 article, "Border Culture: The Multicultural Paradigm," to further reflect on how they've addressed Latinidad's wound of articulation.

We use 'extreme care' and love when we write and embrace the words mixed, Norwinican, Hispandinavian. Instead of erasure, we choose acknowledgement; rather than certainty, we embrace the murky porousness of the paths and relationships that led to who we are.

A tapestry of vulnerability and introspection can be woven from these responses, one that engages with other Latinx artists on both the term Latinidad and on identity in general. In return, I offer the following reflections:

When I read your words, what I see between the lines is how, when talking about having more than one ancestry and, more specifically, more recent lineages from multiple continents, the call to choose can feel/become unsettling. To resist erasure, to center acknowledgement because of the paths we take and the human connections we forge, for me, tie to the wounds we so often need to heal. And, in healing, community members or even politics or history seduce us to believe that it is necessary to choose. These wounds demand we be careful with our words and the way we name ourselves as though naming ourselves, and loving how we name ourselves can be interpreted if not internalized as unsafe or criminal to those who, across the particularities of difference, we love and care for.

Our exchange, what we each had capacity for in our localized commitments to family, community and our jobs, provides clear testament to the crisis of solidarity. They extend Pelaez-Lopez and others' claims on the solidarity behind terms like 'Latinx.' They attend to the terms' national diasporic particularities, seeking to address its limits for those of us mixed under it or multidimensionally connected to it through other regions.

The inability to trace to a specific origin is a consequence of which histories are deemed worthy of preserving. But it is also a testament of how, oftentimes, our ancestors and those who loved us light the way across generations in spite-- or because-- of how much biological genealogy can and will tell us.

Lighting the Way: Concluding Thoughts

In an earlier art review I published on Latinx Pop Mag, I concluded that "the wound of inarticulation transcends cultural boundaries, connecting us in our resistance to feeling out of place," because of how other artists of color resonated with the words of a Vegas-based Latinx poet-activist, Yesenia Moya Garay. I am grateful for Yesenia's meditation and hope responding in solidarity and kinship.

Such tools are vital as we navigate the murky and porous path of who we are and who we choose to be in varied connections to terminology used to mark us in an "Other," terminologies such as the poorly homogenized/beautifully heterogeneous yet still limiting term of Latinidad.

What I love about Las Hermanas Iglesias is the collaboration across coasts and generations that they embody as an articulation of how resisting erasure, of centering acknowledgement with extreme care, demonstrates the strength and determination possible within this state of uncertainty and the full embodiment of the ancestries and lineages we carry.