Call for Submissions: Healing Wounds: Justice, Creativity, and Joy in the Borderlands and Beyond

Label Me Latina/o is an online, refereed international e-journal that focuses on Latina/o/x Literary Production in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The journal invites scholarly essays focusing on these writers for its biannual publication. Label Me Latina/o also publishes creative literary pieces whose authors self-define as Latina, Latino, or Latinx regardless of thematic content. Interviews of Latino, Latina, or Latinx authors will also be considered. The Co-Directors will publish creative works and interviews in English, Spanish, or Spanglish whereas analytical essays should be written in English or Spanish.

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In the often-quoted line from her groundbreaking Borderlands/la frontera, Gloria Anzaldúa identifies the US/Mexico borderlands as a site of pain and creation: “The U.S-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country — a border culture” (25). While Anzaldúa uses the geo-political border as a means of illustrating the unnatural divides governments impose on peoples, she also recognizes that we create many borderlands within ourselves and our own communities: psychological, sexual, and spiritual. Each of these borderlands has the potential to be una herida abierta, marked by contradiction.

Borderlands writers have long understood and echoed Anzaldúa’s claims about the border as a site of pain, wounding, and indeterminacy, while also appreciating the joy, creative fecundity, dynamism, and resilience of the border. In line with this, we invite creative, critical, critically creative, and creatively critical submissions that explore the tensions and fears that mark this current moment against our sites of joy, of justice, of community, and of creation. We are particularly interested in works that emphasize decoloniality, indigeneity, resistance, and justice-oriented claims.

Some questions writers may think about:

• How do literature, art, and culture sustain identity and community in the face of systemic inequalities?
• To what degree does this dyadic formulation (i.e. pain and creation) of mestizaje and our many borderlands illuminate other aspects of Latina/o/x communities?
• What stories or essays do we have where our many communities and identities intersect? Clashing at funerals, dancing at bailes, ordering at restaurants?
• Where are our poems that shrink the space between individuals, calling for an end to borders between you and me? She and them? Us and we?

Submissions are due January 15, 2025.

For more information see:  Call for Submissions: Healing Wounds