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

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.

Formatting Requirements

All scholarly articles must be written in English or Spanish and should be between 2,000-6,000 words, double-spaced, 12-point font following the most recent MLA Style Manual. Please use End Notes rather than Footnotes and place page numbers in the upper right-hand corner. Scholarly articles under consideration should not be submitted elsewhere.

Creative submissions may be written in Spanish, English, or Spanglish. Poetry submissions may be formatted as needed up to 10 pages. Creative nonfiction and fiction should be double-spaced up to 25 pages. Creative submissions should be formatted in 12-point, Times New Roman font. We do accept simultaneous submissions for creative pieces. Please note that we’re not able to pay contributors.

All submissions should be saved as a Word document with the title as “Last Name_Abbreviated Title”. Send your email with the subject line ‘Submission for Healing Wounds–Your Genre’. Please make sure that the actual manuscript bears no reference to the author’s name or institution.

Important!! Include the following information in the body of the email for all submissions:

• Full name
• Institutional Affiliation (if applicable)
• Telephone number
• Email address
• Regular mail address
• Title of the submission
• A brief biography to be included with publication should your submission be selected (50-200 words)

Email questions and proposals to the special issue editors: Lee Bebout (lee.bebout@asu.edu), Gionni Ponce (gionni.ponce@asu.edu), and Lorna Perez (perezll@buffalostate.edu).

Submissions are due January 15, 2025.

About

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.

Label Me Latina/o is an academic journal and as such follows the parameters of definitions set by the academic community. In that community when we refer to Latina/o/x Literature, we are referring to writers of Latin American heritage that live and write in the United States. These can be first-generation Latina/o/x or fifth but they live and work here in the U.S. Some of these writers write in Spanish, others write in Spanglish like the Nuyorican poets and many of them write in English with a little Spanish thrown in (or not). Scholarly essays should address the work of these writers. The authors of these scholarly essays may be of any ethnicity or nationality. Creative works should be authored by writers who self-define as Latina/o/x and live and write in the United States.

Label Me Latina/o is indexed by the MLA International Bibliography, is listed in the MLA Directory of Periodicals and is a member of Latinoamericana: Asociación de revistas académicas en Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales. Our articles are discoverable on EBSCO host research databases. ISSN 2333-4584

Lee Bebout is a professor of English at Arizona State University, where he teaches and researches in the areas of race, social justice, and political culture. His articles have appeared in Aztlán, MELUS, Latino Studies, and other scholarly journals. His book, Mythohistorical Interventions: The Chicano Movement and Its Legacies (Minnesota 2011), examines how narratives of myth and history were deployed to articulate political identity in the Chicano movement and postmovement era. His second book, Whiteness on the Border: Mapping the US Racial Imagination in Brown and White (New York University Press 2016) examines how representations of Mexico, Mexicans, and Mexican Americans have been used to foster whiteness and Americanness, or more accurately whiteness as Americanness. He has also co-edited (with Philathia Bolton and Cassander Smith) Teaching with Tension: Race, Resistance, and Reality in the Classroom (Northwestern UP), a volume on the challenges of and strategies for teaching about race.

Gionni Ponce is a prose writer living in Tempe, Arizona. She is a proud alumna of Macondo, Tin House, and VONA. She has been awarded fellowships to the Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers’ Conference, the Community of Writers Workshop, and the Fine Arts Work Center. In 2018, she was named a Writer in South Asia Fellow by Indiana University. In 2024, she was selected as a Poesiæuropa Fellow to travel to Italy to present on Octavia Butler’s influence on women of color writing sci-fi.

She’s organized workshops for young writers, assistant-directed national writing workshops, and continues to host readings, workshops, and collaborative projects as an arts administrator. Wherever she goes, she aims to create storytelling space for traditionally marginalized stories as a writer, artist, cultural curator, and creative writing instructor. Her work is published in Iron Horse Literary Review, Kenyon Review Online, South Carolina Review, and forthcoming from The Seventh Wave. She is currently working on a short story collection centered on bilingualism and multi-generational conflict in Mexican-American families. You can learn more on X: @gpisme.