Call for Papers (CFP): “Caribbean & Latinx Geographies: Shared Pasts, Converging Presents, & Solidarity Futures”
Latinx Geographies, as an interdisciplinary field of study at the intersection of Latinx Studies and Geography, is experiencing an extraordinary period of intellectual growth. With its emphasis on peripheries, margins, and elsewheres, the field explores, grapples with, and illuminates how Latinx people “write the earth” across diverse geographic contexts with their knowledges, stories, embodied experiences, languages, cultural practices, creativity, struggles, and more. The field emerged in 2018 in close relation to Black Geographies, Indigenous Geographies, and Queer and Trans Geographies, which has shaped its commitment to an intersectional queer feminist, anti-colonial, and social justice politics. Scholarship in Latinx Geographies is therefore not just able to name the multiple forms of violence that afflict Latinx people in both the global north and south but also to identify pathways of resistance against those oppressive structures. To do so, Latinx Geographies draws on a wide range of disciplinary traditions and knowledge communities to more effectively narrate the capaciousness and complexities of Latinx people. With the 2027 American Association of Geographers (AAG) annual meeting in New York City—home to more than 1 million people of Caribbean descent and lovingly known by many Latinxs as “Nueva Yol”—we invite participants to explicitly reflect and expand on the connections between Caribbean Geographies and Latinx Geographies.
Since its emergence nearly a decade ago, Latinx Geographies has primarily drawn theoretical and methodological inspiration from Chicanx and Latinx Studies (Latinx Geographies Collective et al. 2023). Chicano/a/x Studies came out of student-led movements in the 1960s and 1970s to demand access and greater representation in schools and higher education. Chicano/a/x Studies has since become a rich interdisciplinary field that accounts for the diverse experiences of Mexican and Mexican American people across the United States. Latino/a/x Studies, on the other hand, similarly developed to narrate the experience of all Latinos/as/x, regardless of ethnic origin, as they traverse the contested cultural, political, and economic landscapes of their new destinations across the diaspora. As a panethnic field, however, Latinx Studies can at times minimize and/or obscure the particular histories and intellectual traditions that constitute the study and experience of specific Latino ethnic groups in North America. To grapple with and begin to address these gaps in Latinx Geographies, this Call for Papers asks scholars convening at the AAG in Nueva Yol to draw on the fields of Caribbean Studies and Caribbean Geographies to highlight the specific contributions of those intellectual traditions on Latinx Geographies.
We start from the premise that Caribbean Geographies can further push Latinx Geographies to ask new questions and complicate existing conversations. We ask participants to consider:
- Given the Caribbean’s ongoing colonial and imperial relationship with the United States and Europe, what can Caribbean Studies’ rich historical and contemporary critical analyses of colonialism, imperialism, coloniality, and decoloniality contribute to existing debates in Latinx Geographies about the structures that continue to define the lived experiences of Latinx people in the diaspora?
- Relatedly, what can Latinx Geographies learn from the unique experiences of Caribbean people’s incorporation in North American societies as they navigate various exclusionary technologies such as border control and citizenship?
- Lastly, the Caribbean’s complex racial formations and its rich Afro-Caribbean traditions have led to sophisticated studies on race and racism. How can Caribbean Studies analyses of race challenge and contribute to existing conversations about race and racism within Latinx Geographies?
We invite empirical or theoretical research papers that take up these questions and/or examine existing and new engagements between Caribbean and Latinx Geographies. Those papers may also examine any of, but not exclusively, the topics listed below. We are particularly interested in interventions that explicitly seek to relate Latinx and Caribbean Geographies either at the empirical, thematic, or theoretical level. We especially encourage undergraduate, graduate and early career-scholars to apply. Please submit your 250 word abstract on Google Forms by October 8, 2026 at 5:00 pm PST. If you have any questions about this call for papers feel free to contact Joaquín Villanueva (jvillanu@gustavus.edu) or Alana de Hinojosa (alanadehinojosa@txstate.edu) with questions about the AAG conference application process.
- Interventions into “Latin America” from the Caribbean, including Caribbean islands and mainland countries in North, Central, and South America;
- Caribbean archipelagic studies: how the Caribbean islands and mainland countries connect through water, culture, history, and place-based knowledges, narratives, and struggles;
- Amplifying Caribbean worldviews, experiences, and struggles across Nuestra America;
- Racialized, gendered, and classed lived experiences in the Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora;
- Engaging Puerto Rican, Boricua, and Nuyorican experiences, spaces, places, place-making, and place-keeping on the island and in the diaspora; Engaging Dominican experiences, spaces, places, place-making, and place-keeping on the island and in the diaspora; Engaging Cuban experiences, spaces, places, place-making, and place-keeping on the island and in the diaspora;
- Race and racial formations: Blackness, Indigeneity, Asianness, and Whiteness in the Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora;
- Historical and contemporary tensions and solidarities among Caribbean Latinxs;
- Interrogating hegemonic Latinidad and mestizaje, reckoning with the legacy of slavery, indenture, anti-Blackness, and conquest;
- Movement, creolization, and miscegenation;
- Colonialism, settler colonialism, imperialism, and empire; coloniality and decoloniality;
- Migration, borders, borders within the Caribbean, border formations, state formations, militarization, citizenship, undocumented experiences, deportation, and border abolitions;
- Climate change, environmental racism, reparations, ecology, ecological futures, and disaster recovery;
- Health, mental health, disability, trauma, bodily autonomy, reproductive care, reproductive justice, healing, and geographies of care;
- Place-based activism, community building, and grassroots organizing;
- Literature, storytelling, oral histories, and memory as geographic sites of resistance, agency, and imagination;
- Art, aesthetic practices, poetry, sound, music, dance, and popular culture in the Caribbean and beyond;
- Queer and trans Caribbean experiences, aesthetics, spaces, places, and sites of struggle, liberation, and otherwise worlds;
- Urban studies, organized abandonment, housing, and struggles against removal, displacement, gentrification, and place-annihilation;
- Tourism, labor and exploitation in tourism industries, resource extraction (oil, bauxite, etc), food security, and food sovereignty;
- Intellectual traditions: Édouard Glissant, Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Derek Walcott, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Stuart Hall, and José Martí, Walter Rodney, CLR James, the Plantation School (e.g. Lloyd Best, George Beckford), Marcus Garvey, Aime Cesaire, Audre Lorde, Eric Williams, Claude MckKay, Claudia Jones, Maryse Conde, Jamaica Kincaid, Dionne Brand, M. Jacqui Alexander, among many others.
* This CFP is sponsored by the Latinx Geographies Speciality Group, the Caribbean Geographies Speciality Group, and the Black Geographies Speciality Group.
