Regina Marie Mills
Regina Marie Mills is Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University, affiliated with the Africana Studies and Latino/a and Mexican American Studies programs, who specializes in U.S. Multi-Ethnic Literatures, specifically Latinx and African Diaspora literature and media. She earned her MA/PhD at the University of Texas at Austin (2018) as well as an MEd at Arizona State University (2011) while teaching at Agua Fria High School.
Her first book, to be published in June 2024 with University of Texas Press, will be part of the "Latinx: The Future Is Now" series. "Invisibility and Influence: A Literary History of AfroLatinidades" examines a century worth of AfroLatinx life writing to examine how AfroLatinxs have used life writing to navigate distorted visibilities and write against narratives of mestizaje. She is also working on her second book project, tentatively titled "Gaming Latinidad: Latinx Representation, Narrative, and Experimentation in Games." Her work has been published in The Black Scholar, Latino Studies, Chiricu Journal, Latinx Talk, Black Perspectives, Teaching Games and Game Studies in the Literature Classroom (Bloomsbury), Oxford Bibliographies in Latino Studies, and The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives, among others. Alongside Trent Masiki, she guest co-edited the special issue of The Black Scholar, "Post-Soul Afro-Latinidades" (52.1, 2022).
Her research and teaching interests include Latinx literature, African Diaspora literature, U.S. immigrant literature, game studies, human rights and literary studies, and refugee studies. She currently teaches courses on Latinx Literature, Black Public Intellectuals, Latinx Life Writing, AfroLatinx Literary Studies, and Games and/as Literature.
Supervisors: John Moran Gonzalez
Address: 4227 TAMU
College Station, TX 77843
Her first book, to be published in June 2024 with University of Texas Press, will be part of the "Latinx: The Future Is Now" series. "Invisibility and Influence: A Literary History of AfroLatinidades" examines a century worth of AfroLatinx life writing to examine how AfroLatinxs have used life writing to navigate distorted visibilities and write against narratives of mestizaje. She is also working on her second book project, tentatively titled "Gaming Latinidad: Latinx Representation, Narrative, and Experimentation in Games." Her work has been published in The Black Scholar, Latino Studies, Chiricu Journal, Latinx Talk, Black Perspectives, Teaching Games and Game Studies in the Literature Classroom (Bloomsbury), Oxford Bibliographies in Latino Studies, and The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives, among others. Alongside Trent Masiki, she guest co-edited the special issue of The Black Scholar, "Post-Soul Afro-Latinidades" (52.1, 2022).
Her research and teaching interests include Latinx literature, African Diaspora literature, U.S. immigrant literature, game studies, human rights and literary studies, and refugee studies. She currently teaches courses on Latinx Literature, Black Public Intellectuals, Latinx Life Writing, AfroLatinx Literary Studies, and Games and/as Literature.
Supervisors: John Moran Gonzalez
Address: 4227 TAMU
College Station, TX 77843
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Peer-Reviewed Articles by Regina Marie Mills
Recovery, expansion, and the visibilization of power have been at the heart of Latina/o/x archives. Latinx people, when identified as a pan-ethnic category, are frequently viewed in hegemonic media and literature as uniformly oppressed, with shared politics, and similar (lack of) access to power. The study of Latinx archives provides three major conclusions that should be essential to Latinx studies as a whole: (1) physical archival spaces privilege light-skinned, colonial-empowered Latinx voices; (2) popular culture and other non-state-sponsored sources provide the opportunity to see the heterogeneity of Latinx experience and history; and (3) definitions of Latinidad are frequently determined by which archives one privileges. The term archives is itself fraught. According to the Society of American Archivists, definitions of the term are fiercely debated, usually in ways that narrow what counts, such as focusing on organizational models and chain of custody or whether an archive has gone through a selection process. However, those who study and create Latinx archives are more interested in expanding the term archive. Latinx archival studies generally agrees that the primary documents of history are skewed toward colonial, imperialist, and hegemonic power structures. The kind of Latinx history that comes from official and state-sponsored archives erases Black, Asian, and Indigenous Latinidades. These archives justify anti-immigrant and racialized violence and privilege white Latinxs who embraced white supremacy or found ways to play its game. However, the selections in this entry also argue for the radical potential of archive-building by Latinx communities as well as the ability for memoir, testimony, oral history, and ethnography to challenge shallow understandings of the Chicano Movement or Puerto Rico’s colonial legacy, for example. The scholarship and curation projects sampled here fill lacunae, provide models for future scholarship and anthologies, and read against the archival grain to recast and recenter marginalized and understudied peoples and histories. This bibliographic entry focuses on providing a general overview of the texts that have influenced Latinx archives and archival studies. In addition, key scholarship that uses Latinx archives as well as texts and projects that create and curate new archives are provided. This entry ends with a section on important Latinx archives, both traditional (physical) and digital.
Found in the section, Introduction to “Teaching Writing Across the
English Department Curriculum: A Roundtable” by Matt McKinney
The Dominican Republic and its relationship with Dominican America have often been studied in relation to the brutal regime of Rafael Trujillo, tíguere masculinity, and the political sphere. Writers like Julia Álvarez and Junot Díaz, as well as anthologies of Dominican women’s writing, form a literary archive that conceives of women’s writing as a perpetual act of rebellion, mostly against Trujillo and Trujillista models of masculinity. Starting from Lorgia García-Peña’s conception of “contradiction” (2016) and Kevin Quashie’s The Sovereignty of Quiet (2012), this article argues that Angie Cruz’s Soledad (2001) and Naima Coster’s Halsey Street (2017) are a counter-archive of woman-centered, Dominican American narratives of return dependent on feminized forms of expression and belonging—namely art, quiet, secrecy, surrender, and interiority. These novels reclaim the power of these acts and spaces along a spectrum of quietude, ranging from acts of alienation to tools for bonding, healing, and growth.
Claudia Milian have brought to light the importance of the historical
specificity and traumatic experience of the (largely undocumented)
Guatemalan diaspora in the US in the wake of the Guatemalan civil war.
These and other scholars have generally used a trauma studies framework to read Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier (1998) and Central American migrant characters in Latinx literature in general. This article focuses on the novel’s deployment of human rights language and categories, particularly refugee-ness and statelessness. I argue that the novel, through the representation of refugees, homeless people, and a child soldier, critiques the narrow definition of statelessness provided by governmental bodies and instead reveals the experience of statelessness shared by migrants and other marginalized citizens. In addition, I assert that the novel critiques commonly offered modes of justice in the wake of human rights violations, a topic undertheorized in human rights and literary studies, and encourages new models of justice for victims of state violence.
Special Issues by Regina Marie Mills
Peer-Reviewed Book Chapters by Regina Marie Mills
Taking a capacious view of the genres which U.S.-Central American and Central American refugee narratives employ as well as their relationship to the Latin American testimonio tradition, this chapter traces how the “voice” of Central American refugees has been mediated by non-Central American actors through the collaborative genre of testimonio. However, these testimonios have often been racialized to center ladino (mestizo/non-Indigenous) and non-Black voices, so the chapter also examines refugee narratives that reclaim Black Central American, Indigenous, and gendered voices that do not easily map onto Cold War narratives. The chapter ends with a pedagogical reflection on teaching Héctor Tobar's The Tattooed Soldier.
The whole book is available open-access here: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003131458/routledge-handbook-refugee-narratives-evyn-l%C3%AA-espiritu-gandhi-vinh-nguyen
Book Reviews by Regina Marie Mills
Online Publications by Regina Marie Mills
Recovery, expansion, and the visibilization of power have been at the heart of Latina/o/x archives. Latinx people, when identified as a pan-ethnic category, are frequently viewed in hegemonic media and literature as uniformly oppressed, with shared politics, and similar (lack of) access to power. The study of Latinx archives provides three major conclusions that should be essential to Latinx studies as a whole: (1) physical archival spaces privilege light-skinned, colonial-empowered Latinx voices; (2) popular culture and other non-state-sponsored sources provide the opportunity to see the heterogeneity of Latinx experience and history; and (3) definitions of Latinidad are frequently determined by which archives one privileges. The term archives is itself fraught. According to the Society of American Archivists, definitions of the term are fiercely debated, usually in ways that narrow what counts, such as focusing on organizational models and chain of custody or whether an archive has gone through a selection process. However, those who study and create Latinx archives are more interested in expanding the term archive. Latinx archival studies generally agrees that the primary documents of history are skewed toward colonial, imperialist, and hegemonic power structures. The kind of Latinx history that comes from official and state-sponsored archives erases Black, Asian, and Indigenous Latinidades. These archives justify anti-immigrant and racialized violence and privilege white Latinxs who embraced white supremacy or found ways to play its game. However, the selections in this entry also argue for the radical potential of archive-building by Latinx communities as well as the ability for memoir, testimony, oral history, and ethnography to challenge shallow understandings of the Chicano Movement or Puerto Rico’s colonial legacy, for example. The scholarship and curation projects sampled here fill lacunae, provide models for future scholarship and anthologies, and read against the archival grain to recast and recenter marginalized and understudied peoples and histories. This bibliographic entry focuses on providing a general overview of the texts that have influenced Latinx archives and archival studies. In addition, key scholarship that uses Latinx archives as well as texts and projects that create and curate new archives are provided. This entry ends with a section on important Latinx archives, both traditional (physical) and digital.
Found in the section, Introduction to “Teaching Writing Across the
English Department Curriculum: A Roundtable” by Matt McKinney
The Dominican Republic and its relationship with Dominican America have often been studied in relation to the brutal regime of Rafael Trujillo, tíguere masculinity, and the political sphere. Writers like Julia Álvarez and Junot Díaz, as well as anthologies of Dominican women’s writing, form a literary archive that conceives of women’s writing as a perpetual act of rebellion, mostly against Trujillo and Trujillista models of masculinity. Starting from Lorgia García-Peña’s conception of “contradiction” (2016) and Kevin Quashie’s The Sovereignty of Quiet (2012), this article argues that Angie Cruz’s Soledad (2001) and Naima Coster’s Halsey Street (2017) are a counter-archive of woman-centered, Dominican American narratives of return dependent on feminized forms of expression and belonging—namely art, quiet, secrecy, surrender, and interiority. These novels reclaim the power of these acts and spaces along a spectrum of quietude, ranging from acts of alienation to tools for bonding, healing, and growth.
Claudia Milian have brought to light the importance of the historical
specificity and traumatic experience of the (largely undocumented)
Guatemalan diaspora in the US in the wake of the Guatemalan civil war.
These and other scholars have generally used a trauma studies framework to read Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier (1998) and Central American migrant characters in Latinx literature in general. This article focuses on the novel’s deployment of human rights language and categories, particularly refugee-ness and statelessness. I argue that the novel, through the representation of refugees, homeless people, and a child soldier, critiques the narrow definition of statelessness provided by governmental bodies and instead reveals the experience of statelessness shared by migrants and other marginalized citizens. In addition, I assert that the novel critiques commonly offered modes of justice in the wake of human rights violations, a topic undertheorized in human rights and literary studies, and encourages new models of justice for victims of state violence.
Taking a capacious view of the genres which U.S.-Central American and Central American refugee narratives employ as well as their relationship to the Latin American testimonio tradition, this chapter traces how the “voice” of Central American refugees has been mediated by non-Central American actors through the collaborative genre of testimonio. However, these testimonios have often been racialized to center ladino (mestizo/non-Indigenous) and non-Black voices, so the chapter also examines refugee narratives that reclaim Black Central American, Indigenous, and gendered voices that do not easily map onto Cold War narratives. The chapter ends with a pedagogical reflection on teaching Héctor Tobar's The Tattooed Soldier.
The whole book is available open-access here: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003131458/routledge-handbook-refugee-narratives-evyn-l%C3%AA-espiritu-gandhi-vinh-nguyen