Forging a Path: Past and Present Scope of Critical Race Theory and Latina/o Critical Race Theory in Communication Studies

Abstract

This article summarizes the theoretical progression of critical Latina/o communication studies as a framework that can potentially speak to the material, verbal, visual, and discursive experiences of Latinos in a globalizing 21st century. Examining the trajectory of a critical inquiry of race in communication studies offers a meaningful entry point for which to trace the past, present, and future of Latino/as in the discipline. The essay outlines the scope and state of Latina/o communication research, noting how Latina/o theorizing paved a way into the National Communications Association particularly through the Latina/o Communication Studies Division (LCSD) and La Raza Caucus (LRC). We argue that the scholarly landscape needs to disrupt the conditions of Latina/o invisibility, and point to how critical Latina/o communication studies is in fact an integral part of the communication studies epistemology.

Keywords:

• Latina/o communication studies
• race and ethnicity
• critical race theory
• Latino/a critical race theory

Notes

[1] Mark H. Lopez, “In 2014, Latinos will surpass whites as largest racial/ethnic group in California,” Pew Hispanic Research Center, January 24, 2014, http://pewrsr.ch/1ejysts. It should be noted that since the 1980s census, Latina/os have been singled-out as the fastest growing ethnic/racial group in the United States and stand to become the largest minority group in the United States, but only in California and New Mexico will Hispanics be the largest racial or ethnic population. For more about demographics, see: Anna Brown, Mark H. Lopez, “Mapping the Latino Population By State, County and City,” Hispanic Trends Project (Washington, DC: Pew Research, 2013).

[2] For general overview, see: Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: an Introduction (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2001).

[3] Bernadett Marie Calafell et al., “Envisioning an Academic Readership: Latina/o Performativities Per the Form of Publication,” Text and Performance Quarterly 29 (2009): 123.

[4] Despite the numerous relevant studies of Latina/o beyond in an international cultural context, as part of NCA's centennial, we purposefully feature a narrow scope of work that is mostly focused in the U.S.

[5] For more on Latinidad and scholarship of Latina/os as social actors, see: 2009 Special Issue on Latina/o Performativities in Text and Performance Quarterly, Volume 29.

[6] Molefi Kete Asante, “The Ideological Significance of Afrocentricity in Intercultural Communication,” Journal of Black Studies 14, no. 1 (1983): 3–19; Also, see: Jackson, R.L., “Afrocentricity As Metatheory: a Dialogic Exploration of Its Principles,” Jackson, R. L. & Richardson, E.B. (eds.), Understanding African American Rhetoric: Classical Origins to Contemporary Innovations (2003): 115–29.

[7] Gloria Ladson-Billings, “Just What Is Critical Race Theory and What's It Doing in a Nice Field Like Education?” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 11, no. 1 (1998): 7–24.

[8] Karen L. Ashcraft and Brenda J. Allen, “The Racial Foundation of Organizational Communication,” Communication Theory 13 (2003): 5–38; Ronald Jackson and Thurmon Garner, “Tracing the Evolution of “Race,” “Ethnicity,” and “Culture” in Communication Studies,” Howard Journal of Communication 9 (1998): 44–55.

[9] Lisa Flores and Dreama Moon, “Rethinking Race, Revealing Dilemmas: Imagining a New Racial Subject in Race Traitor,” Western Journal of Communication 66 (2002): 186.

[10] Brenda J. Allen, “Theorizing communication and race,” Communication Monographs, 74 (2004): 259–64; Brenda J. Allen, “Critical communication pedagogy as a framework for teaching difference and organizing.” Reframing Difference in Organizational Communication Studies: Research, Pedagogy, and Practice (2010): 103–25; Thomas K. Nakayama and Judith N. Martin. Whiteness: The Communication of Social Identity. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1999.

[11] Michael G. Lacy and Kent A. Ono, Critical Rhetorics of Race (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2011).

[12] Mark P. Orbe and Brenda J. Allan, “‘Race Matters’ in the Journal of Applied Communication Research.” Howard Journal of Communications 19 (2008): 201–20.

[13] Michelle A. Holling “Retrospective on Latin@ Rhetorical-Performance Scholarship: From Chicano Communication to Latina/o Communication?” The Communication Review 11, no. 4 (2008): 293–322.

[14] For example, see Arlene Dávila.“Latinos Inc: The Marketing and Making of a People.” Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 2002 and the collection of articles edited in Angharad N. Valdivia's, Latina/o Communication StudiesToday (New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing, 2008).

[15] Mari Castañeda, “Sí, Se Puede: Teaching Latina/o Studies in Predominantly White Universities,” Latino Studies 7, no. 2 (2009): doi:10.1057/lst.2009.10; Fernando Delgado, “Reflections on Being/Performing Latino Identity in the Academy,” Text and Performance Quarterly 29, no. 2 (2009): 149–64.; Mitchell A. Holling and Amardo Rodriguez, “Negotiating Our Way Through the Gates of Academe,” Journal of Latinos & Education 5, no. 1 (2006): 49–64.

[16] Bernadette M. Calafell, Latino/a Communication Studies: Theorizing Performance (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2007).

[17] Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, “The Critique of Vernacular Rhetoric,” Communication Monographs 62 (1995): 19–46.

[18] See: Claudia A. Anguiano and Karma R. Chávez, “DREAMers' Discourse: Young Latino/a Immigrants and the Naturalization of the American Dream,” in Latino/a Discourse in Vernacular Spaces, edited by Michelle A. Holling and Bernadette M. Calafell (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011), 81–99; Michelle A. Holling, “Forming Oppositional Social Concord to California's Proposition 187 and Squelching Social Discord in the Vernacular Space of CHICLE.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3, no. 3 (2006): 202; Stacy K. Sowards, “Rhetorical Agency As Haciendo Caras and Differential Consciousness Through Lens of Gender, Race, Ethnicity, and Class: An Examination of Dolores Huerta's Rhetoric,” Communication Theory 20, no. 2 (2010): 223–247. Darrel Enck-Wanzer, “Tropicalizing East Harlem: Rhetorical Agency, Cultural Citizenship, and Nuyorican Cultural Production,” Communication Theory 21, no. 4 (2011): 344–367.

[19] Michelle A. Holling and Bernadette M. Calafell (eds.). Latina/o Discourse in Vernacular Spaces: Somos de Una Voz? (Boulder, CO: Lexington Books, 2011).

[20] Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2013), 2–3.

[21] Kimberlé Crenshaw et al., “Introduction.” Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement (New York, NY: New York University Press, 1996), xiii–xxxii.

[22] Crenshaw, Key Writings, xiii.

[23] Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, 43.

[24] Rachel A Griffin, “Critical Race Theory as a Means to Deconstruct, Recover and Evolve in Communication Studies: A Special issue of Communication Law Review.” Communication Law Review 10, no. 1 (2010): 1–9

[25] Marouf Jr Hasain and Fernando Delgado, “The Trials and Tribulations of Racialized Critical Rhetorical Theory: Understanding the Rhetorical Ambiguities of Proposition 187,” Communication Theory 8, no. 3 (1998): 245–70.

[26] Audrey P. Olmsted, “Words Are Acts: Critical Race Theory As a Rhetorical Construct,” Howard Journal of Communications 9 (1998): 339; 74.

[27] Flores and Moon, “Rhethinking Race,” 181.

[28] LeiLani Nishime, “The Case for Cablinasian: Multiracial Naming From Plessy to Tiger Woods.” Communication Theory 22, no. 1 (2012): 92; Elizabeth Dickinson, “Addressing Environmental Racism through Storytelling: Toward an Environmental Justice Narrative Framework,” Communication, Culture & Critique 5 (2012): 57–74.

[29] Delgado and Stefancic. The Cutting Edge, 2–3.

[30] Keith Aoki and Kevin R. Johnson, “An Assessment of LatCrit Ten Years After,” Indiana Law Journal 83 (2008): 1151–95; Berta Hernandez-Truyol, Angela Harris and Fransisco Valdes, “LatCrit X Afterword: Beyond the First Decade: A Forward-Looking History of LatCrit Theory, Community and Praxis,” Berkley La Raza Law Review 17 (2006): 169–216.

[31] Kafi D. Kumasi, “Critical Race Theory and Education: Mapping a Legacy of Activism.” In Beyond Critique: Critical Social Theories and Education (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2011); Gloria Landson-Billings and William F Tate, “Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education,” Teachers College Record 97, no. 1 (1995): 47–68.

[32] Dolores Delgado-Bernal, “Critical Race Theory, Latino Critical Theory, and Critical Raced-gendered Epistemologies: Recognizing Students of Color As Holders and Creators of Knowledge,” Qualitative Inquiry 8, no. 1 (2002): 109–10.

[33] No overt treatment of LatCrit in exist in the current body of communication literature, outside of Anguiano et al., “Connecting Community Voices: Using a Latino/a Critical Race Theory Lens on Environmental Justice Advocacy,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 5 (2012): 124–43.

[34] Daniel Solorzano and Tara J. Yosso,”Critical Race and LatCrit Theory and Method: Counter-storytelling,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 14, no. 4 (2001): 471–95.

[35] Christopher Dunbar Jr. “Critical Race Theory and Indigenous Methodologies,” in Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2008), 86.

[36] Lilia Fernandez, “Telling Stories About School: Using Critical Race and Latino Critical Theories to Document Latina/Latino Education and Resistance,” Qualitative Inquiry 8, no. 1 (2002): 45–65.

[37] Dunbar, Christopher, “Critical Race,” 99. Also, see: Anzaldúa, Gloria, Haciendo caras/Making Face, Making Soul: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color (San Francisco, CA: Spinster/Aunt Lute, 1990); Smith, Luhai T. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London, U.K.: Zed Books, 2012). Madison, S. Critical Ethnography (Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2005); Shome, R., & Hegde, R. S. “Postcolonial Approaches to Communication: Charting the Terrain, Engaging the Intersections.” Communication Theory, 12 (2002), 249–70; Walter D. Mignolo, “The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011) Maria Lugones,” Toward a Decolonial Feminism, Hypatia vol. 25, no. 4 (2010); Spivak. G. C. (2001). Can the Subaltern Speak? In B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths & H. Tiffin (eds.), The Postcolonial Studies Reader (London, U.K.: Routledge), 24–28.

[38] Ladson-Billings, Gloria, and J K Donnor. “Waiting for the Call: The Moral Activist Role of Critical Race Theory Scholarship.” Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies (2008), 64.

[39] Lindsey Pérez Huber et al., “Getting Beyond the ‘symptom’ acknowledging the ‘disease’: Theorizing Racist Nativism,” Contemporary Justice Review 11, no. 1 (2008): 39.

[40] See: Hector Amaya, “Performing Acculturation: Rewriting the Latina/o Immigrant Self.” Text and Performance Quarterly 27, no. 3 (2007): 194–212; Karma, R. Chavez, “Embodied Translation: Dominant Discourse and Communication with Migrant Bodies-as-Text.” Howard Journal of Communications 20, no. 1 (2009): 18; Josue D. Cisneros, “(Re)bordering the civic imaginary: Rhetoric, hybridity, and citizenship in la gran marcha,”Quarterly Journal of Speech97 (2011): 26–49; Anne Demo, “Policy and media in immigration studies.” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 7, no. 2 (2004): 215–57; Robert DeChaine, “Bordering the Civic Imaginary: Alienization, Fence Logic, and the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95 (2009): 43–65; Lisa A. Flores, “Constructing Rhetorical Borders: Peons, Illegal Aliens, and Competing Narratives of Immigration,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 20 (2003): 362–87; Richard D. Pineda and Stacy K. Sowards. Flag waving as a visual argument: 2006 immigration and cultural citizenship. Argumentation and Advocacy 43 (2007): 164–74; Stacey K. Sowards and Richard D Pineda, “Immigrant Narratives and Popular Culture in the United States: Border Spectacle, Unmotivated Sympathies, and Individualized Responsibilities,” Western Journal of Communication 77, no. 1 (2013): 72.

[41] Edward Taylor et al. Foundations of Critical Race Theory in Education (New York, NY: Routledge, 2009).

[42] Carrie Crenshaw, “Resisting Whiteness' rhetorical silence.” Western Journal of Communication, 61 (1997): 268.

[43] Perez Huber, “Getting Beyond,” 46.

[44] Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic. The Latino/a condition: A Critical Reader (New York, NY: New York University Press, 1998).

[45] Anne-Marie Nuñez and Dongbin Kim. “Building a Multicontextual Model of Latino College Enrollment: Student, School, and State-Level Effects.” The Review of Higher Education 35, no. 2 (2012): 237–63. Nuñez specifically notes that, “Latina/o students in particular do have the lowest educational attainment rates of all racial/ethnic groups, but, as of 2010, have status as the largest minority group of color in the United States have surpassed African Americans as the largest minority group enrolled in U.S. postsecondary education” (2011, p. 1).

[46] Full report available at: http//www.edexcelencia.org/research/college-completion/united-states.

[47] Michelle Adam, “Latinas in the Professoriate.” The Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education 22 (2012): 22–24.

[48] Helen Moore, Kathreine Acosta, and Gary Perry. “Splitting the Academy: The Emotions of Intersectionality at Work.” The Sociological Quarterly 51 (2010): 179–204.