She’s beauty, she’s grace. She’s an interdimensional being with a fondness for the American flag, and in this week’s issue of Marvel’s America, we finally learn how America Chavez came to identify herself as a Latinx woman.
Marvel
America Chavez’s origins have always been a little bit difficult to explain given the scant amount of information about her past that’s been made public since her creation in 2011. During Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s run of Young Avengers, it’s revealed that America spent her childhood in the Utopian Parallel, a paradise dimension populated entirely by women, somewhat similar to DC’s Themyscira.
Princess America, it turns out, was destined to become the saviour of her people, but she ran away from her home dimension when she learned of her two mothers’ deaths. Up until now, it wasn’t clear what happened to young America after she tore a hole in reality and left the Utopian Parallel, but in America #3, writer Gabby Rivera presents us with the most logical of answers: America ended up in the Bronx.
Randomly, America stumbles onto a Puerto Rican family’s barbecue and, even though she’s a stranger to them, they immediately accept her into the family and begin to help America define who she is. Eventually, America leaves the Bronx and begins to seek out other communities established by the earth’s Latinx diaspora who, little by little, contribute to the unique ethnic identity that America now claims.
When I spoke with Rivera last month about the nature of America’s ethnicity, she told me that she wanted to use the character to unpack some of the ideas at work when people identify them as “Latinx”. Typically, people use Latinx as a gender-neutral alternative to “Latino” and “Latina”, but here, Rivera’s taking the signifier a step further and turning it into a unique state of being.
America Chavez, though she’s always read as a Latina on the page, technically has no biological roots in Latin America (see: From another dimension). But it’s in Latin American communities from the across the world that America finds acceptance and a fictive kinship through things like language and food. In her own way, America is Latinx in the truest sense of the world — an amalgam of cultures that can’t be defined by one static identity.
Comments
7 responses to “Why Marvel’s America Chavez, Who Comes From An Alternate Dimension, Identifies As Latinx”
Yeah ok. Clark Kent was raised an American, so I can believe this.. I think the comic is complete garbage, but this doesn’t bother me.
The term ‘Latinx’ is not used by Latinos – its unpronounceable in Spanish and disrespectful to the way the language works. Just more well-intentioned imperialist bullshit made up by white people. Fine in a comic book, not in real life.
I agree that it’s incredibly stupid, but they do use it.
“College students in particular have taken to using the word, especially within Latino student organizations.”
http://pulatinx.wixsite.com/pulpo
“College students in particular have taken to using the word, especially within Latino student organizations.”
It is something specific to western academia rather than an ethnic group, it’d be like saying English speaking people use CIS when only the small, very privileged few, that go to university\college use it.
Also “imperialist bullshit made up by white people” is tarring a lot of people with the same brush, it is usually a particular group within Academia that try and brute force these social conventions through culture and other means. Last I checked they were a pretty diverse group too.
Man show me where I said “made up by ALL white people”
Sorry I need to ask, are you Latino/Latina? Or just taking offence in their behalf? If so, you are just as bad as the evils you condemn. I actually am and while I don’t feel inclined to use the term, I don’t see a problem with it nor I have any problem pronouncing the word. Latincs latincs. Easy peasy.
White enough not to get profiled until someone sees my surname, but yeah. Cool if you don’t see a problem with it.