Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies

Latinx DNA, Admixed Genomes & Other Science Fictions

Karina Vado, Assistant Professor of Latinx Studies, FAU

March 23rd, 2023 at 4pm

Ustler Hall Atrium

In December 2014, computational biologist Lior Pachter put forth a seemingly anti-racist proposition: that the closest “‘nearest neighbor to the ‘perfect human,’” is a “female who is…Puerto Rican.” Pachter’s science fictional speculations on the “perfect human,” of course, hinge on what I call the “myth of Latinx genomic exceptionalism.” The substantiation of this myth is, one that renders the Latinx body as always already racially “admixed” and thus ripe for genomic excavation is demonstrated, for instance, in epidemiological findings concerning the “Hispanic Paradox” and in recent epigenetic claims regarding the “fountain of youth” and “time traveling” qualities of Latinx biological clocks. In this talk, I examine the centrality of “mixedness” in the scientification of Latinx identity and how it is increasingly coloring cultural representations and social constructions of Latinidad. Taking as my focus Afro-Dominiyorkian hip-hop journalist and documentary filmmaker Raquel Cepeda’s speculative memoir, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina, I consider the implications of Latinx cultural and social experimentations with (bio)scientific concepts and ideas for popular (mis)understandings of Latinx racialization, particularly in a post-genomic era captivated by (science) fictions of post-raciality and molecular conceptions of identity and self-hood.