Grappling with Latinidad: Comments from Frances R. Aparicio

Let me begin by thanking Ms. Gabriella Martínez-Garro for her engaging review of Negotiating Latinidad:  Intralatina/o Lives in Chicago. I am responding not to debate her, but to clarify the scholarly and academic contexts from which I understand the term Latinidad. I truly appreciated her dynamic and positive comments about the content of the book and the need to publicly acknowledge the multiple identities of Intralatinx that have remained hidden in our research and teaching about Latinx communities in the United States. My public acknowledgment and documentation of Intralatinx lives in Chicago has meaningful consequences for the larger, public debates around Latinidad as a “highly contentious word,” as Martínez-Garro describes this term. 

As a feminist Latina scholar who has assumed leadership in advocating for Latinx Studies as an autonomous interdisciplinary field of study, my explorations of Latinidad are informed and influenced by numerous colleagues in the field. Since the 1980s, I have witnessed the long and complicated turns and directions that this term has taken. In the early years, most scholars like me accepted the term Latino/a and named our field after it, only because it stood in contrast to the more conservative term “Hispanic,” which competed for our national attention by prioritizing the Spanish language and our ancestry from Imperial Spain exclusively. The term “Latina/o” embraced a wide variety of identities, ethnicities, racial groups, and communities within the hemispheric framework of the Americas as a signifier of collective identity. “Latina/o” was the democratic option then: despite its imperial origins as well, the term was associated with a wider, more democratic inclusion of black and indigenous identities and communities.  While each of these umbrella terms was not perfect, we were determined to continue theorizing and debating the pros and cons of this powerful, yet highly contested signifier. 

For years, the term was deployed for marketing purposes that allowed us to sell more books, as literary publishers were creating a niche in the industry by conflating the writings of Latin American authors such as Borges, Neruda and García Márquez with the Chicana fiction of Sandra Cisneros and the Nuyorican verses of Pedro Pietri. The suspicion we all held about the term “Latina/o” continued for decades. A profound academic ambivalence characterized that suspicion: many scholars included the term in the titles of their books, but then wrote against its homogenizing impulses and how they felt editors, agents, and publishers had imposed it. While we perceived it as imposed from above by the media and the literary industry, we also strived to tease out its potential as a term for collectivity and belonging.

In contrast to Martínez-Garro’s definition of Latinidad as “a term meaning attributes shared by Latinx people,” I define it using Merida Rua’s phrase, “a shared sense of identity” that Latinx communities experience as colonial subjects. The distinction between using the term in reference to a subject (Latinx) instead of referring to an experience (Latinidad) is most crucial. By highlighting the shared conditions of colonialism, such as racialization and stigmatization in the United States, the term Latinidad becomes a decolonial concept that acknowledges and denounces the racialization of our communities. More recently, many Latinx individuals use the word as a racial label (rather than ethnic) as a way of speaking out against the criminalization and subordination of our peoples. Defining the term as “attributes” runs the risk of essentializing our communities as being one way or another and diminishes our understanding of the acts of resistance that inform the term’s rich history. Rethinking Latinidad as a critical concept allows us to take ownership of the term and to deploy it in liberating and decolonial ways.

In the book, I exhort readers to familiarize themselves with the dynamic contributions of scholars who have reflected on the term Latinidad, rewriting it and reinvesting it with social and political power. In Chapter 1, “Horizontal Hierarchies:  The Transnational Tensions in Latinidad,” I trace the numerous definitions and uses of this term among a variety of Latinx scholars, including queer scholars such as Juana Rodríguez and Ramón Rivera-Servera, political scientists such as Cristina Beltrán, and sociologists such as Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz who proposes Latinidad as a site for political activism and solidarity among various ethnic and national communities. These voices have built and departed from the pioneering ideas of Félix Padilla, who first proposed the concept of Latino ethnic consciousness in his 1985 book.

My defense of Latinidad as a critical concept that cultural workers, social activists, and individual voices, can carve, rewrite and rethink, does not elide the meaningful critiques that have been articulated by Afro-Latinx and LGBTQ communities. As Martínez-Garro writes, Latinidad discredits the diverse struggles of Afro-Latinos and LGBTQ communities. As she quotes Janel Martínez, it is “Anti-Black” and serves “a very narrow audience.” I believe that the term acquires new meanings as more voices imbue it with specific meanings throughout history. If in the 1980s and 1990s Latinx Studies was populated by mostly white Latinx academics, the field in 2020 is being reinvigorated by a community of well-established Black Latinx scholars who are theorizing, rejecting, and rewriting these terms. For instance, the powerful writings of Petra Rivera-Rideau, who places Blackness at the center of her study of Reggaeton in Puerto Rico, or the brilliant scholarship of Yomaira Figueroa on the global frameworks of African diasporas. In the social sciences, the foundational writings by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva on structural racism, and the lucid analysis of race, housing and urban space by Zaire Dynzey are most notable. By now, the foundational work of Afro-Dominicanx scholars such as Silvio Torres-Saillant, Lorgia García Peña, Dixa Ramírez, and many others, constitute brilliant interventions into our understanding of race, society, and the Caribbean. If cultural workers such as Alan Peláez-López have publicly denounced the racist underpinnings of the terms Latino and Latinidad and are willing to dismiss the term altogether as a signifier of “white supremacy,” I honor and respect this gesture of resistance.

Yet I also honor the many Intralatinx subjects interviewed for my book who embraced the term Latina/o/x because they embody multiple nationalities and ethnicities. In the context of its gender politics, the shifts in the morphology of Latino from the dominant masculine -o to the -a/o and now the -x exemplify the continued gestures of resistance embodied in language. Despite conservative voices that advocate for keeping Spanish grammar intact, the debates about the need to unsettle gender binaries have clearly enriched the term Latina/o/x. As a feminist myself, I decided to use the a/o as a way of honoring the long legacies of Latina feminists that have influenced my scholarship and that have long opposed patriarchy in all of its articulations. I acknowledge that “Latinx” now constitutes the latest iteration of resistance that unsettles gender binaries. Indeed, the transformations of the term have been fueled by the LGBTQ communities themselves. 

It is within the tensions and conflicting approaches to these terms that we can find the real social values and meanings that the community associates with them. In brief, these signifiers are only meaningful when we reflect on their limitations and potentialities. This process, in the end, is what will liberate us, as a cultural community, from the colonized homogenizing effects that languages—both English and Spanish—have held on us. The terms, on their own, can only empower us as we claim them and invest them with our own meanings.  If, as Martínez-Garro concludes the review, “Latinidad is a term best left in the past,” then we dismiss a term that has been discussed, deployed, and interpreted in richly heterogeneous and liberating ways across the vast spectrum of identities that we embody—and, crucially, we reject the intimate ways in which Intralatina/os embrace that term as a way of claiming their multiplicities. My goal in Negotiating Latinidad was precisely to highlight the inner tensions and the affective realms that constitute Latinidad in the intimate everyday family lives of Intralatinx.

Image credit: Shaggy Flores , “¿WHAT’S IN A NOMBRE? Writing Latin@ Identity in America”