US Central American relational identity formation in Maya Chinchilla’s and Leticia Hernández-Linares’s poetics

Taking up interconnected concerns about the hierarchies that exist within Latinidad and what I call Latina/o/x relational identity formation, this article focuses on the complexity of US Central American identity formation through an analysis of Maya Chinchilla’s and Leticia Hernández-Linares’s representation of US Central Americanness as it intersects with Chicana/o/x cultural influences. My discussion focuses on the poems “Homegirl” from Chinchilla’s poetry collection The Cha Cha Files: A Chapina Poética (2014) and “Cars That Go Boom” from Hernández-Linares's collection Razor Edges of My Tongue (2002). Through a relational and polycultural framing and in conversation with US Central American studies and cultural identity scholars, my analysis centers the agency and dynamism that characterizes US Central American relational identity formation, while simultaneously grappling with the unequal power dynamics that exist within Latinidad through an intersectional lens that centers questions of race, gender, sexuality, nation, and language.