New Diasporic Subjectivities and Transcultural Resistance in North American

My article examines a particular kind of representation of collective subjectivity in recent Latin American writings of the diaspora and the North American Hispanic community, namely, a subjectivity figured both as resistant and as transcultural. This new post-ethnic subjectivity explicitly transcends the cultural borders of Hispanic, Latino, or Latin American identity in order to embrace multicultural groups and spaces in a practice of resistance to various forces and situations seen as threatening, such as globalization, the hegemony of English, urban decay and violence. My first main example involves the notion of friendship reformulated in the context of a multicultural community in California by Leticia Hernandez-Linares in an autobiographical text from 2002, while the second, a short essay by Ricardo Ortiz, goes beyond the borders of the United States to invoke a transnational and translinguistic space including the Latino population of North America as well as francophone inhabitants of Quebec in Canada. In both cases, the spatial imaginary is crucial. It functions as a complex symbolic figuration of sociality and alternative forms of subjectivity and deconstructs traditional forms of belonging based on ethnicity or the nation. These new subjectivities do not float in a transcendent, globalized space, but are closely linked to specific locations and types of movement through concrete