Cristina Beltrán Quotes

"Hispanic" and "Latino" are terms whose descriptive legitimacy is premised on a startling lack of specificity. The categories encompass any and all individuals living in the United States who trace their ancestry to the Spanish-speaking regions of Latin America and the Caribbean; Latinos hail from Colombia, Mexico, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, and beyond-more than twenty countries in all. Such inclusivity is part of the problem: "Hispanic" and "Latino" tell us nothing about country of origin, gender, citizenship status, economic class, or length of residence in the United States. An undocumented immigrant from Guatemala is Hispanic; so is a third-generation Mexican American lawyer. Moreover, both categories are racially indeterminate: Latinos can be white, black, indigenous, and every combination thereof. In other words, characterizing a subject as either "Hispanic" or "Latino" is an exercise in opacity-the terms are so comprehensive that their explanatory power is limited. When referring to "Latinos in the United States," it is far from immediately clear whether the subjects under discussion are farmworkers living below the poverty line or middle-class homeowners, urban hipsters or rural evangelicals, white or black, gay or straight, Catholic or Jewish, undocumented Spanish monolinguals or fourth-generation speakers of English-only.

The movement's institutional legacy can also be seen in the realm of higher education: Chicano and Puerto Rican studies programs are the product of these movements and continue to play a key role in providing Latinos with a "civic education" that both politicizes and produces particular conceptions ofLatino identity and subjectivity.

Before Trump, conservatives seeking to appeal to Latinos typically embraced the politics of conservative multiculturalism. Politicians such as George W. Bush reached out to Latino voters by showing a familiarity with their language and history, emphasizing the values of diversity and inclusion. Depicting Latinos as a distinct and valuable part of America’s democratic mosaic, conservative multiculturalism connected Latino culture to Republican values, emphasizing conservative approaches to faith, patriotism and the traditional family. Trump, by contrast, knows nothing of the history of Latinos in the United States and rarely even pretends to find value in Latinos’ distinct identities. Rather than offering his non-White voters recognition, Trump has offered them multiracial whiteness.

As someone who studies race and the right, I have found that Democrats and progressives, expecting demographic change and rising diversity to tilt the country leftward, have failed to take seriously how that change is not at all a given...Communities of color are simultaneously victims of, participants in and practitioners of the violence practiced within and beyond our nation’s borders...Communities of color have an intimate history with violence, from massacres of Native Americans and chattel slavery to anti-Asian violence, police killings and the deaths of migrants on the border. But communities of color are not monolithic, and their responses and relationships to that violence mirror that very diversity.

I think that one of the things that's interesting about the politics of multicultural conservatism, for example, is that multicultural conservatism - which is the kind of conservative politics of reaching out to other racial minorities practiced by folks like Jack Kemp or George W. Bush - was an effort to recognize the specific histories and backgrounds of particular racial populations and to say that they could be part of the GOP. And I think that one of the things that's interesting is that there's a segment of people of color who don't necessarily want to be recognized at all. They don't want to be recognized for their racial distinctiveness-that for them, the very act of sort of identifying them as Latino, as African American - that they themselves have a certain discomfort with that very logic. They want to be understood as simply Americans outside of those kinds of identity categories.

The Puerto Rican movement of the 1960s and 1970s can be defined by its consistent calls for a radical transformation of U.S. society while simultaneously promoting the independence of Puerto Rico. Known as El Nuevo Despertar, this "New Awakening" of Puerto Rican radicalism was inspired and shaped by the growing militancy abroad and at home. Black Power, youth unrest (particularly against the Vietnam War), the War on Poverty, national liberation struggles in the Third World, Chicano and Native American militancy, gay and lesbian rights, and second-wave feminism are all part of the context that shaped the movement.

Rather than speaking in terms of specific and distinct subgroups (Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, etc.) ‘Latino’ and ‘Hispanic’ have become the shorthand designation of choice among journalists, politicians, advertising executives, academics, and other influential elites.

During the late 1960s and 1970s, Mexican American and Puerto Rican activists put forward a politically charged critique of American politics. Bringing together a paradoxical mix of cultural nationalism, liberal reformism, radical critique, andromantic idealism, the Chicano and Puerto Rican movements created a new political vocabulary, one emphasizing resistance, recognition, cultural pride, authenticity, and fraternity (hermanidad). The movements-organizations, issues, and events left a profound legacy.

Emphasizing standing and status rather than political participation and collective action, white citizenship continually constrains the meaning of both democracy and political freedom. (p 118)

What I actually find helpful about theorizing and talking about whiteness as understanding that the politics of whiteness is distinct from white people is I think it actually opens up and expands our political possibilities going forward because we're not actually trapped in our identities or our demographics. It means that white citizens can - and many are - rejecting the politics of whiteness and working with communities of color to forge a multiracial democracy. But we have to understand this complicated and tragic and also beautiful shared inheritance we have. If we want to build something new together, we have to understand where we've come from.

1980s feminism focused on questions of difference and making the category of women more inclusive

What are we to make of [Enrique] Tarrio — and, more broadly, of Latino voters inspired by Trump? And what are we to make of unmistakably White mob violence that also includes non-White participants? I call this phenomenon multiracial whiteness — the promise that they, too, can lay claim to the politics of aggression, exclusion and domination.

I think that one of the big political divides we face right now is people who find the very act of talking about those histories of racial exclusion as divisive because the act of talking about it and acknowledging it produces a kind of defensiveness or anger - and even discussing it, the idea that unity should be practiced from sort of not engaging with our history, not - sort of celebrating the best stuff and not really acknowledging that we have a complicated, beautiful, tragic, inspiring inheritance that we have to understand to go forward.

Today, the variability of white identity is visible in the growing rupture between white citizens who support the politics of white democracy and those increasingly appalled by racist and xenophobic appeals to whiteness. (p 21)

Poetry such as "Puerto Rican Obituary" highlights another significant aspect of movement thought: the shift from cultural shame to ethnic pride. Unlike earlier critiques of prejudice and discrimination, movement rhetoric and writings often focused on the emotional and psychic damage of racism, exploring the need toovercome internalized shame and self-hate.