Latinx Studies by Frederick Aldama Christopher González

Author:Frederick Aldama, Christopher González [Frederick Aldama, Christopher González]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, Hispanic American Studies
ISBN: 9781351614351
Google: 6GN8DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-12-07T03:44:28+00:00

Latinidad/es

Latinxs in the US have a rich variety of ancestral and cultural roots, including deep ties to Mexico, Central and South America, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Cuba, among others. There are important cultural, historical, and political legacies and contexts that differentiate these groups. For example, the various groups that inform the umbrella concept of Latinidad have different histories and experiences with migration. For instance, because of US immigration policies that wanted to put a good face on the US in contrast with the bad face of Cuba, those migrating from Cuba in the 1980s had a different experience to those migrating from Central America and Mexico; today, Puerto Ricans can move freely between the US mainland and Puerto Rico. However, there’s also a sense of commonality: long histories of conquest, colonization, and today’s neoliberal policies that continue to discriminate and oppress Latinxs of all ancestral origins. Latinx Studies scholars seek to at once acknowledge the differences as well as the commonalities. The umbrella term used to identify this sense of a shared history and inter-ethnic belonging is Latinidad.

For Latinx Studies scholars, the concept of Latinidad recognizes the need to overcome inter-group differences as a survival tactic within regions and communities where Latinxs are underrepresented. For instance, Mario T. García’s ethnographic work at UC Santa Barbara (2002–2010) determined that ancestrally different Latinx groups forged bonds on campus, leading to cross-cultural influences and the forging of a pan Latinidad. Indeed, already in 1971 Wayne State University established The Center for Chicano-Boricua Studies to clear a space for the forming of a translatinidad among students. And, Felix Padilla’s ethnographic work in Chicago (1965–1975) determined that to gain “access to American urban systems” (p. 64), Latinx workers put aside differences of national origin to form pan-Latinx coalitions and a pan-ethnic consciousness. Thus Latinidad (or what Padilla identifies as Latinismo) grew from a need to stand in solidarity against racial discrimination and exploitation in the work place.

For other Latinx Studies scholars, the concept recognizes inter-group commonalities based on shared conquest and colonial legacies (Euro-Spanish genocides of indigenous peoples and slavery) as well as decolonial histories, origin languages, and cultural practices. For these scholars, identifying shared experiences across the different Latinx groups (Mexican, Central American, Dominican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, and so on) of racialized violence—slavery, exploitation, surveillance, incarceral practices, linguistic discrimination—is important for the emergence of a resistant pan-Latinx identity and political solidarity. The use of the concept stands against other models for understanding US ethnoracial configurations, including the melting pot and assimilationist ones that seek to erase racial and ethno-cultural differences into a dominant, homogenous monolithic US culture and people. The melting pot and assimilationist ideologies assume Latinxs offer only a deficient, primitive culture in need of erasure for the full realization of a better “American” (mainstream) life. It’s this ideology constantly pressuring Latinxs in all parts of daily existence that leads author and critic Richard Rodriguez to characterizes his sense of self as “mixed, confused, lumped, impure, unpasteurized” (Brown 197).

For some Latinx

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