The University of Arizona Press
Latinx Fandoms
What makes one a fan? What’s the difference between cultivating taste for a genre and dedicating time, space, labor, and resources to collecting, practicing, and following in a singularly focused way? What does fandom look like and what does it do when racialized communities embrace media that rarely imagined them?
Latinx Fandoms is the first book to theorize the intersection of fandoms and Latinx identity. This groundbreaking collection examines how Latinx fans create meaning, build community, and imagine new worlds through their engagement with popular culture. From comics, science fiction, and gaming to music, sports, wrestling, television, and fan fiction, the essays demonstrate how fandoms become powerful sites of identity formation, cultural expression, and belonging for communities often overlooked in both media industries and academic scholarship.
Spanning thirty-six chapters organized into eight thematic sections, Latinx Fandoms explores a remarkable range of fan practices and cultural phenomena. Contributors examine topics as diverse as Pokémon, Barbie, Star Wars, Hello Kitty, Taylor Swift, BTS, Bad Bunny, lucha libre, fútbol, Nintendo, cosplay, fan fiction, bodybuilding, and Latinx goth subcultures. Through historical analysis, personal narrative, ethnography, and cultural critique, the essays reveal how Latinx fans transform global media into spaces of creativity, resistance, joy, and connection. The collection confronts enduring questions about race, representation, gender, sexuality, language, and power within contemporary fan cultures.
A foundational volume in the Latinx Pop Culture series, this collection shows that Latinx fans are not simply consumers of culture but active creators of scenes of joy and struggle, memory and invention, resistance, and sometimes complicity.
Contributors
Paloma Ada Aguirre
Frederick Luis Aldama
René X. Arteaga
Ryan Banfi
Lucas Leite Borba
Jennifer Caroccio Maldonado
Melissa Castillo-Garsow
Samantha Ceballos
Nicholas F. Centino
Andrea M. Escalante
Mauricio Espinoza
Laura Fernández
Elena Foulis
Kathryn M. Frank
Jennifer Gómez Menjívar
Christopher González
Rachel V. González-Martin
Itzayana Gutiérrez Arillo
Cristina Herrera
Dan Johnson
Carlos Gabriel Kelly González
Alexander Lalama
Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste
Regina Marie Mills
Guilherme Sfredo Miorando
Josh Mishaw
Meagan Negron
Dante Olivas
Rose Padilla
Domino Perez
Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo
Nayeli Rincon
Jessica Rutherford
Martín Alejandro Salinas
Alexandra Sanchez
Nicholas Villanueva Jr.
Ralph Villanueva
Benjamin Woo
Cassandra Yatron
Irma J. Zamora Fuerte
“Latinx geeks of the world unite and rejoice! Latinx Fandoms is here! Finally, we have a book that showcases our cultural tastes, connoisseurship, and nerdiness in all its rich diversity. Written for both scholars and fans alike, Latinx Fandoms reveals how our gente actively engage with pop culture and mass media in the twenty-first century.”—Mathew Sandoval, author of Día de los Muertos: A Chicano Arts Legacy
“Latinx Fandoms demonstrates that attention to fan engagement is critical to understanding how art, narratives, and cultures form our daily life, as it exhibits the wide variety of ways that academic writing is intersecting with fandom. The Acafan writers (you’ll get the idea soon enough) in this book examine their own fan interests, which gives them unique access to the genealogies and structures of feeling of cultural production, and they also analyze the patterns of language and aesthetics that inform the many fan activities that have received little scholarly attention. Reading Latinx Fandoms is a tremendously eye-opening experience, and the book will certainly push Latinx studies and fan studies into new and adventurous spaces.”—Matthew David Goodwin, author of The Latinx Files: Race, Migration, and Space Aliens
