Reflections on Being/Performing Latino Identity in the Academy

Abstract

This essay explores the issue of Latino performance and performativity in a personal and self-referential analysis. By locating Latino performance in the academy, the author explores the contours of identity and image in an environment that often marginalizes Latinas/os. The auto-ethnographic voice employed affords the opportunity to engage how certain tactics and strategies of standing out and fitting in occur in the academy and how some responses to the academy may be complicit in the continuity of expectations. The author makes no claims to generalizability but does invite the reader to dialogue with the issues of marginalization, contingent identity, the performance of a racialized self.

Keywords:

• Auto-ethnography
• Brown
• Latino
• Other
• Performance

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Carlos Alemán, Manuel Ávalos, Bernadette Marie Calafell, Lisa Flores, Alberto González, Shane Moreman, Tom Nakayama, Kent Ono, and Jermaine Singleton, each of whom contributed to this essay in ways they cannot fathom and for which they cannot be held responsible

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fernando Delgado

Fernando Delgado is Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Hamline University, Saint Paul