Read on Twitter
In their essay "Is Latino/a Identity a Racial Identity?" Linda Martín Alcoff cites philosopher Ofelia Schutte who argues that Latinx identity "may be a means to disaffiliate us from our nations of birth or ancestry" to create greater affinity to US empire.
And I& #39;m like:
And I& #39;m like:
The implication of Schutte& #39;s intervention is that the construction of Latinidad is a strategic project of US empire designed to manage immigrants from Latin America by disassociating them from their country of origin and creating greater association within the US nation-state.
Alcoff pushes back on Scutte& #39;s claim for two reasons. 1) Latinidad was an idea that emerged from Latin America from [white] revolutionaries like Bolivar, Martí, and Guevara. 2) In their quotidian lives, people make meaning/find empowerment in claiming Latinidad.
Alcoff cautions us from giving the US nation-state too much power that it limits the agency of individuals (especially minoritized individuals) as they make meaning in their own lives with the categories presented to them.
Alcoff& #39;s point in raising Scutte& #39;s critique (as I read it) is to note the debates and complexity of Latino/a/x identity. Alcoff (in this essay at least) does not seem fully convinced by Scutte& #39;s claim. Nonetheless, *I* really think Schutte& #39;s argument is something to chew on.
I, as always, want to hold space for the ways people re-appropriate terms and ideas that were used to control or manage them for their own empowerment and towards decolonization. Indeed, I maintain that border-thinking is a thing people do in their quotidian lives.
As I result as I keep doing critical thinking on Latinidad I don& #39;t want to all out reject or throw away the concept. There is a reason so many of our community members find it empowering. And I want to sit with them in their empowerment before I reject the idea all together.
*And also,* race is a constitutive feature of colonial modernity constructed and maintained to manage populations. Put differently, empire thrives on controlling/policing populations, race is one way they do it, so our analysis must be attentive to that.
