Latina and Latino Critical Legal Theory: LatCrit Theory, Praxis and Community/Latina e Latino Teoria Legal Critica: LatCrit Teoria, Praxe e Comunidade.
| Autor | Gonzalez, Marc Tizoc |
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Introduction
Twenty five years ago a small group of committed scholars agreed to invest in a new project to produce critical sociolegal knowledge that would initially center on the multiply-diverse conditions and experiences of Latinas and Latinos in the United States and critique how those communities suffered injustice under the color of U.S. law and hegemony. Latina and Latina Legal Theory (LatCrit) since then has sought to develop an intellectual and political program founded on the anti-subordination principle (1). The professors, lawyers, students, activists, and other social justice workers who have traverse LatCrit theory, community, and praxis continue to pursue the shared goal of critiquing the contemporary legal framework in order to help create a legal order where the aspiration of equal justice for all can become social reality. For the past twenty-five years, LatCrit has programmatically critiqued a myriad of manifestations of the sociolegal constructions of sex, gender, and sexuality, together with race, ethnicity, national origin, language, culture, and class relations, as multidimensional, interlocking, and co-synthetic categories and systems.
To ensure that transnational critical legal thinking does not inadvertently omit LatCrit's systematic development beyond the original Critical Legal Studies movement, this paper overviews LatCrit's foundational propositions, key contributions, and ongoing efforts to cultivate new generations of ethical advocates who can systemically analyze the sociolegal conditions that engender injustice and intervene strategically to help create enduring sociolegal, and cultural, change. This paper seeks to serve and as an
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LatCrit Theory
LatCrit theory is the analytical framework developed over twenty five years by the sustained scholarly production and activism of activist scholars that have sought to develop functions, guideposts, values and practices that sharpen the social relevance of critical theorizing. It aims to promote theory as a catalyst for lasting social transformation from an anti-subordination perspective. (2) In these twenty five years LatCrit has also become an institution committed to the anti-subordination principle that seeks to give concrete and substantive meaning to this commitment. (3)
LatCrit was born as a result of the conversations started at a colloquium on how Latinas and Latino legal scholars in the United States related to Critical Race Theory. (4) It stemmed as a response "to the long historical presence and general sociolegal invisibility of Latinas/os in the United States." (5) The LatCrit innovation in critical outsider jurisprudence developed as a movement related to Critical Race Theory (CRT) and as part of the reaction to the related experiences of subordination under the color of U.S. law and hegemony, and both evolved in resistance to, and critique of, the evolving ideologies and practices of Euroheteropatriarchy marked by capitalism, colonialism, homophobia, nativism, patriarchy and white supremacy that had been left mostly unchallenged by the initial Critical Legal Studies scholars. (Valdes et all) Furthermore, the combination of longstanding occupancy and persistent marginality of Latinas/latinos fueled an increasing sense of frustration among contemporary Latina/o legal scholars, some of whom already identified with CRT [(Critical Race Theory)] and participated in its gatherings." (6) (Valdes, 1999)
Critical Legal Studies emerged as a loosely aligned and radically progressive network of scholars working in the American legal academy in the latter half of the 1970s. Early CLS scholars sought to inject these diverse theoretical perspectives into the production of legal scholarship as part of a broader political project to reveal the role of law in the social production of class hierarchies and human alienation. As Professor Iglesias has explained the critical analysis brought forth by the Critical Legal Studies scholars involved a wide range of legal fields and launched "a wholesale and highly controversial critique of American style liberalism". (7) The critiques of CLS scholars interrogated and challenged the transformative potential of liberal rights, they highlighted the concept of indeterminacy of law and the impartiality of judicial interpretation. Critical Legal Scholars played an important role in challenging the public/private rights hypocrisy in American Law. CLS paved the way for the critical legal movement but it also had its short comings. Critical Race Theory scholars challenged CLS practices and theoretical approaches that failed to account for laws complicity in the marginalization of people of color in the United States. (8) At the level of practice, they questioned the whiteness of CLS (as well as the elite maleness of it) and the way these social positionings affected, and potentially limited, CLS analyses. At the level of theory, race crits questioned CLS proposition to abandon the "rights discourse" without taking into consideration the African American experience and the way in informed for example the Civil rights Movement in important ways. (9)
In turn, Critical Race Theory emerged to challenge the very foundations of the liberal legal order. (10) CRT moved beyond the non-critical liberalism that often cabined civil rights discourses and a non- racial radicalism that was a line of debate within CLS. (11) Professor Krenshaw has emphasized that he eruption that served as a point of departure in CRT's trajectory was the institutional struggle over race, pedagogy, and affirmative action at America's elite law schools. That debate set the stage for a broader inquiry into the relationship between race and law, and for a critical interrogation of traditional legal education more broadly. (12) As CRT continued to develop as a theoretical movement it made abundantly clear that despite the great victories of the civil rights movement, liberal legal thought had consistently failed to engage the experience of African Americans and other outsider groups in the United States. (13)
As its origins indicate, this Latina/o-identified genre of outsider jurisprudence was conceived as a movement closely related to CRT. "Because it was born of the CRT experience, LatCrit theory views itself as a '"close cousin'" to CRT, a cousin that always welcomes CRT, both in spirit and in the flesh, to its gatherings." (14) But these roots include a critical assessment of CRT. This birthing reflects both the strengths and intersectional challenges of CRT. (15) LatCrit theory from its very inception has been determined to embrace CRT'"s original anti-subordination vision, CRT "methodologies, stances and emphases" remain integral to LatCrit: the social construction of race, the relationship between traditional legal scholarship with power and politics, the creation of a project of social justice and transformation, and the importance of embracing subjectivity. (16) LatCrit theory also departs from CRT in important ways, namely the inclusion of queer theory and post-colonial theory as an integral part of the LatCrit discourse. (17) LatCrit has benefited greatly from, and built substantively upon, the pioneering work of critical feminist legal theories and critical queer approaches that fundamentally challenged the jurisprudential architecture for traditional institutions like the family (assumed to be heterosexual and patriarchal) and the putatively objective and universal perspective of Law, and its "rational" actors (assumed to be white and cis-male). The influence of these sister critical postures became key to the theory, community, and praxis that LatCrit academics and activists have continuously sought to expand and develop. As Athena Mutua has highlighted the emergency of sister theoretical stances has actually deepened and broadened the Critical Race Theory project by providing the necessary intellectual expansion and theoretical bridges between identity politics and a politics of solidarity based on difference.
These important contributions from critical feminists, critical queer approaches and CRT have been taken by LatCrit theory in a direction that facilitates the development of an incipient big tent for all Outcrit legal studies. Outsider scholars have embraced of foundational commitment to anti-subordination praxis reinforced antiessenialism's call for serious, substantive consideration of the linkages between racial and other forms of injustice. (18) LatCrit theory proceeded from the understanding that "identity" is always a constitutive element of law and policy, and that multiple identities are always implicated in the adoption and imposition of any particular legal or policy regime. It acknowledges the centrality and relevance of "difference" in the understanding of the multiple identities embodied by all individuals, and messily present in every social group. LatCrit theory is presently firmly grounded in anti-subordination, as a normative anchor and substantive successor to the anti-discrimination principle, as elaborated by outsider scholars in previous years. The anti-subordination principle highlights intersectionality, anti-essentialism, and multidimensionality. Anti-subordination refers to a positionality that challenges practices and policies that by intent or effect enforce the secondary social status of historically oppressed groups. It also strives to develop practices and policies capable of redressing entrenched structures of inequality. (19) Further, the anti-subordination principle grounds the substantive insights and gains of "OutCrit" by framing an enduring social justice that achieves systemic and cultural transformation as the ultimate marker of relevance in the articulation of theory and the production of knowledge. (20)
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LatCrit Values, Functions and Guideposts
The development of LatCrit theory has been a deliberate effort. in more than one way. It had to be intentional because...
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