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This chapter focuses on the Latino identity. It calls for the understanding Latino identity as an ethnic identity. This option could allow for more internal heterogeneity and resist the racializing that brings racism as well as the mischaracterization of the Latino's sense of self. However, it is also argued that the “ethnic option” is not fully adequate for contemporary social realities, and may inhibit the development of useful political strategies for diverse Latino communities. The main argument in this chapter will take the form of a negative: the ethnic option is not adequate. The very failure of the ethnic option will establish some of the necessary criteria for such an alternative.

This introductory chapter discusses the possibility of a single, identifiable “Latino” identity. It looks at the role of Latino literature in helping with the understanding of the multitude of ways in which people of Latin American heritage have answered the question, “Who are we?” It also provides a brief rundown of the contents of the following seven chapters, which deal with different Latino authors and novels.

In this chapter, Jorge J. E. Gracia responds to criticisms of his views about the question of Hispanic/Latino identity and its impact in the United States. In his book Hispanic/Latino Identity (2000), Gracia offers the first systematic philosophical attempt at coming up with a theory that is not descriptive of the views of Latin Americans on topics under the rubric “Hispanic/Latino identity,” in the process eliciting a considerable number of criticisms and comments. Gracia defends his position against these criticisms, some of which relate to the very legitimacy of the notion of ethnic identity and its application to Hispanics; his historiographical claim concerning the importance of 1492 for Hispanic identity; his alleged neglect of certain factors that are deemed essential to ethnicity, such as race, history, language, and culture; and his thesis that the perception of being foreign explains to a great extent the marginalization of Hispanics in American philosophy today.

This book is a collection of important exchanges between Jorge J. E. Gracia and other prominent philosophers who have engaged him in dialogue on issues relating to race, ethnicity, nationality, and Hispanic/Latino identity in the United States. These philosophers include Lucius T. Outlaw Jr., Linda M. Alcoff, K. Anthony Appiah, Robert Gooding-Williams, Richard J. Bernstein, Gregory Pappas, Eduardo Mendieta, Susana Nuccetelli, and Lawrence Blum. The book is divided into three parts. Part I deals with race, ethnicity, nationality, and the meta-philosophical question of the value of a philosophical inquiry of these topics. Part II addresses Hispanic/Latino identity and related questions. Part III focuses on Hispanic/Latino philosophy and philosophers in Latin America and the United States.

In this chapter, Jorge J. E. Gracia responds to various criticisms of his notion of ethnic philosophy, the use of the label “Latino philosophy” to refer to the philosophy produced both in Latin America and in the United States, the understanding of this philosophy as an ethnic philosophy, and linguistic rights and affirmative action for Latinos. Gracia refers to his two books, Latinos in America (2008) and Hispanic/Latino Identity (2000), to defend his position regarding these issues, including the controversy surrounding the use of the labels “Hispanics” versus “Latinos.” He comments on the distinction between ethnos and ethnicity, the political advantages of the use of “Latino,” the difference between Latin American philosophy and Latino philosophy, and the nativism and nationalism that seem to be behind much of the discussion of linguistic rights.

Because neighborhood identity is closely bound up with ethnic identity it is important to understand the demographics. Through an analysis of the Spanish-language press, the geography of Spanish-language churches, and commercial geography the chapter establishes that existing studies have greatly underestimated Latino, particularly Mexican immigration into the Mission District in the 1930s. In order to assess how this influx changed the Mission, it is also necessary to consider what it meant to be Latino in 1930s San Francisco. In fact this identity was profoundly fluid. Both the Anglo majority and indeed Latinos themselves ascribed to Mexicans, Central Americans, and South Americans a wide range of subject positions, from upper class to poor, and from white to explicitly racialized. This meant that some Latinos were excluded from the real estate market, while others were not.

This introductory chapter outlines the critical role black and white Cuban musicians played in shaping Cuban ethnic and broader Hispano/a and Latino/a identity in the 1940s and 1950s. During this period, nearly 90,000 black and white Cubans migrated to New York and Florida, two of the most concentrated areas of Cuban settlement. Among the migrants were numerous musicians and entertainers whose stories and perspectives reveal both shared understandings and significant differences in their migration experiences, their participation in the professional entertainment industries, and their construction of white, brown, and black racial identities. The chapter briefly discusses their experiences and uses them as a window into a broader experience of Cuban ethnic identity. It examines how this identity took shape in a “Jim Crow city”—against the backdrop of politics characterized by a constant cycle of reform and revolution, as well as increasingly dominant ideologies and racialized practices of Pan-Americanism.

This chapter examines Latino identity in Mississippi by considering how identity can be understood in terms of demographics, the analysis of differences within the population, and, finally, the “Latino imaginary,” or the self-representations of the group itself. The chapter first provides a brief history of Latino immigration to Mississippi and then uses the three dimensions of the Latino/Hispanic experience to reflect on how Latinos in south Mississippi are becoming an ethnic/racial group in a place where they were relatively invisible until recently.

The Census Bureau proposes to discontinue counting Latinos as an ethnicity and instead to move “Latino”/“Hispanic” to the list of races on its decennial population survey questionnaire. I argue that the proposal has the potential to significantly hinder the demographic count of Afro-Latinos (Latinos of African ancestry) and should be rejected because of how it facilitates the anti-Black bias within Latino public identity, which is unlawful discrimination in civil rights law. Moreover, the proposed census reform will hinder an ability to collect the statistical data (racial statistics) that concretely demonstrates the racism against Afro-Latinos for their Blackness, that is distinctive from broader Hispanic ethnic groups and White Latinos.

Chapter 5 illuminates how Afro-Cubans present a challenge to the exclusionary racializing frames discussed in the previous chapters, and to African American-Latino divisions more broadly. Focusing on in-depth interviews with post-1980 Afro-Cuban immigrants, the chapter forefronts their voices in the Miami scenario, and extends the intellectual conversation beyond it. Analyzing Afro-Cuban stories about their experiences navigating identity and community belonging among white Cubans and African Americans in Miami, and African Americans and Mexican Americans in Los Angeles, the chapter demonstrates how they strategically undermine fixed notions of race and ethnicity and create spaces for coalition. The chapter argues that listening closely to these Afro-Cuban voices allows greater insight into how people situated “in-between” confront dominant racial frames. Furthermore, their negotiations of race help resist “color-blind” celebrations of multiplicity as they also make visible the cost of being raced by challenging the stigma attached to black identity.

This chapter gives a bleak view of the possibilities for panethnicity that suggests that, perhaps inevitably, the interests of one or another national-origin group will take precedence over coalition. It is noted that Latinos have a tendency to prefer organizations that are based on their own groups, which makes it very difficult for Latino coalitions to develop and maintain multi-group organizations. This difficulty is due to the fact that Latino identity and organizational experience is single-group oriented. It also discusses the Sanctuary movement, which was not an “ethnic” movement but primarily a religious one.

This chapter challenges Jorge J. E. Gracia's notion of a Latino philosophy as well as of Latino philosophers. In his book Latinos in America (2008), Gracia addresses three questions that constitute the core of the so-called Latino challenge: What is it to be Latino? What is the place of Latinos in America? And how do Latinos think about themselves and their identity? In his response, Gracia develops and uses a theoretical tool to identify Latinos that he dubs the Familial-Historical View. He examines various conspicuously controversial issues related to Latino identity such as their linguistic rights, the advantages and disadvantages of affirmative action for Latinos, and the place of Latinos in the marketplace within the field of professional philosophy. Finally, he performs an in-depth examination of Latino philosophy. This chapter argues that Gracia fails to take into account the important differences between Latin American philosophy and the philosophers who work in Latin America and in the United States.

For over 150 years, Latinos have not assimilated and disappeared the way European immigrant groups have, but they have not remained isolated and untouched by Atlantic-American society around them. Instead, Latinos have been quietly creating a regional variant of American society and identity, one that is in the process of becoming as distinctive a way of being American as is the Texan regional identity.

This chapter discusses the novel Mother Tongue, which was written by Demetria Martinez. It looks at how the novel tropes on the primordial category of a common language as a cultural unifier in order to disrupt the assumption of an essential Latino identity. It also shows that the novel substitutes a vision of a U.S. Latino/Latina identity based not on essential sameness, but on a carefully forged political solidarity.

Neighborhood groups like the Mission Council on Redevelopment and later the Mission Coalition Organization were eager to collaborate with the SFRA. But under urban renewal law, the SFRA was unable to give neighborhood groups veto power over any specific plan. Primarily for this reason, neighborhood groups came out against the plan, eventually succeeding in blocking it. Soon thereafter, Mayor Joseph Alioto nominated the Mission for a grant under Model Cities, a Great Society program that funded neighborhood-based planning efforts. Thus was created the Mission Model Neighborhood Corporation (MMNC), a local planning authority. Collaborating with the SFRA, the MMNC built public housing, began social programs, and had a number of other successes. Though it was a multiethnic organization, it received some challenges from the Latino left, particularly a group called Los Siete de la Raza. However, the chapter argues that the ultimate failure of the organization is best explained by the Nixon administration's defunding of Model Cities.

This chapter focuses on Chicago Rican poetry. From the beginning, Chicago Puerto Rican poets were to speak of Latin or Latino identity, and Latin or Latino poetry. Indeed, they, more than their Mexicano counterparts, tended to decenter or go beyond national identifications to Latino and third world/minority ones even to the degree that they affirmed their particular parameters of identity. Thus, the question of Latino as opposed to strictly Puerto Rican identity is one of the major contributions of Chicago Puerto Rican writers to an overall national Latino literary scene. The chapter then provides an overview of Chicago Puerto Rican writing and examines the first consolidated wave of Chicago Puerto Rican poetry.

This chapter challenges Jorge J. E. Gracia's particular defense of affirmative action for Latinos. In his book Latinos in America (2008), Gracia evaluates the labels “Hispanic identity” and “Latino identity,” pointing to the difficulties associated with lumping Latinos together under one label. He also explores the justness of the marketplace for Latinos, the policy of affirmative action, and linguistic rights, and situates Latino understandings of who they are within the boundaries of Latino philosophy understood in the context of American and world philosophies. The chapter describes two forward-looking strategies for affirmative action, one based on utility and one based on justice, and one backward-looking strategy, the rectification of past wrongs. It questions Gracia's proposal for dismissing the backward-looking strategy in favor of the two forward-looking ones, arguing that the forward-looking strategies do not provide proper justification for favoring one social group over another—something that is necessary in affirmative action.

This chapter examines how Afro-Cuban Americans identify as mainland Afro-Puerto Ricans in afrolatinidad discourses. Particularly, how such “boricua identifications” appear in the secondary works of major Afro-Cuban American figures. The 1940s publications of anthropologist Rómulo Lachatañeré about Afro-Cuban religion become significant when seen through the archives of their voyage through the peer-review process. With Lachatañeré, an Afro-Latino identity and professional interest become increasingly associated with mainland Puerto Ricans, culminating in the photographic documentation of Puerto Ricans in Harlem and on the island of Puerto Rico itself. The remainder of the chapter looks at how a boricua identification intensifies in Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas, a sign of the need for the 1960s “ethnic-literature” book market and of U.S.-imperial relations between Cubans and Puerto Ricans.

This chapter examines the implications of Puerto Rican pop artists becoming marketed as Latinos. In spite of the U.S. Puerto Rican erasure in the very epistemology of Anglo America, and in spite of the negligible and negative representation of Puerto Ricans in film, Puerto Ricans, ironically enough, have participated significantly in subsuming Mexican and Chicano spaces in the configuration of Latino identities in United States and mainly Hollywood cinema. The chapter then argues that all the manipulations and appropriations labeled Hispanic or Latino are not simply imposed or created but are based on certain commonalities or affinities of identity that result not from some racial or otherwise essentialist base, but rather from the imposition, however uneven, of similar, Iberian-based cultural patterns emanating from the colonial and postcolonial periods.