Critical Latinx Indigeneities: Love Letters to Chicanx and Latinx Studies

ABSTRACT

Migration and global displacement of populations in Latin America and the Caribbean have increased US Latinxs intergroup diversity, propelling fields like Chicanx Studies and Latinx Studies (CSLS) to question the taken-for-granted homogeneity of Latinidad and Chicanismo. Inter-group oppression within these imagined collectives has also shed light on overlapping colonial systems, specifically launching critiques of Latinidad that include the historical centering of cisheteronormativity within Chicanismo, AfroLatinxs, AsianLatinxs, and Indigenous erasure, as well as anti-Blackness and anti-Indio sentiments. Such critiques are pushing CSLS into a moment of reckoning. This article provides a “loving critique” of CSLS with an emphasis in education where innovative analytics like Critical Latinx Indigeneities (CLI) and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP) are pressing these fields into unpacking and reorienting in ways that challenge the very narratives and discourses that in previous generations were empowering. A “loving critique” of CSLS is taken up by asking, what does CSLS need to re/think given the current diversity of “Latinx” communities? What can CSLS learn from CLI and CSP without appropriating or romanticizing them? How can CSLS not just survive but thrive and endure by engaging and learning from the opportunity that change brings?

KEYWORDS:

• Critical Latinx Inigeneities
• latinx studies
• chicana/o/x studies
• latinidad
• culturally sustaining pedagogy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Education is central to the formation of CSLS, thus Chicanx and Latinx Education are essential subsets of CSLS.

² Abiayala or Abia/Abya Yala, is the Guna Peoples’ word for the fourth and current era of creation (Aiban Wagua, 2011). Some Indigenous Peoples in parts of the Americas have adopted this word to affirm their identity, for political mobilization, and/or to refer to Latin America.

³ We are not the first to write love letters to Chicanx Studies providing a critique of the field so that it measures up to its intent of working from the epistemological origins and for the political commitments of the communities it purports to embody (Vasquez et al., 2021).

⁴ Proposition 187 was passed on the California ballot in 1994. This proposition demanded that “illegal aliens” be denied social services and painted a picture of undocumented people as leeches of limited state funds. Included in these services to be denied were emergency medical assistance, especially to expectant mothers, and schooling to those “suspected” of being “illegal.” Although the measure was passed by California voters, it was declared unconstitutional by the California courts after successful litigation by organizations like the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund. Similarly, Proposition 209 eliminated all affirmative action in California, including in higher education (Murillo, 2021). According to this proposition there are to be no criterion to discriminate against any (implying whites) group, or to provide preferential treatment to any individual or group (implying minorities).

⁵ An exception to this in the field of education is early work by Suarez-Orozco (1988) on Central American refugees and high school students.

⁶ Aztlán refers to the territory that Chicana/o/xs believe they originated from, located in the Southwest of the US. While scholars from diverse disciplines debate the existence of Aztlán as a territory, Aztlán is vital to Chicana/o/x identity, in part, because it serves as a source of belonging in a settler colonial nation that seeks their erasure (Pulido, 2018; Saldaña-Portillo, 2001)

⁷ I do not name these scholars out of respect for their work.

⁸ Recent work to broaden this reach are found in the Handbook of Latinos and Education (Murillo et al., 2021) and the special issues in Latino Studies (2017) and the Association of Mexican American Educators Journal (2019) on Critical Latinx Indigeneities.