2.5: Conclusion

Summary

“Identity” is two-faced. It is used to represent both intrapsychic states and relational processes: It can be claimed to be both socially constructed and transhistorically essential, a being and a doing, ascribed and attained, made in language and exceeding language, simultaneously intensely private and biographical, a locus for political struggle, and the focus [of] state power. It is formed along multiple historically formed social vectors we call gender, class, race, sexuality, and so on, but it is also, simply, about one's own experience here and now. ––David Valentine

The epigraph above by cultural and linguistic anthropologist David Valentine, succinctly captures what identity is and what identity does, which has been the focus of this chapter.⁶⁶ Latinx demographics and the factors that impact them were reviewed, including various historical, political, and social processes. These processes have also shaped the racialization of Chicanxs and Latinxs impacting their experiences, life outcomes, and self-identification. This chapter also introduced Chicanx/Latinx studies identity concepts, theories, and frameworks, which provide a foundation for understanding the Chicanx/Latinx communities who are the subject of this textbook. 

Ancillary materials for this chapter are located in Section 11.2: Chapter 2 Resource Guide, which includes slides, media, writing and discussion prompts, and suggested assignments and activities.  

Key Terms 

Race: A social construct created by European colonists and revised by American pseudo-scientists which sorts people by phenotype into global, social, and political hierarchies. It is both an organizing principle and an identity, both individual and collective. Race is unstable and evolves due to social, historical, political, and legal processes, but is often misrecognized as natural and fixed.  

Ethnicity: Meanings, values, practices, and expressions of a group that understands itself to be linked by a shared way of life. Ethnicity often involves fictive or actual bonds of kinship and/or a related widespread sense of common collective origin, ancestry, homeland, and history and may include a common language and cultural system or customs such as religion, mythology, ritual, food, dress, and style. 

Social identities: The ways in which a person understands themselves as belonging to a social group. Examples of social identity categories include race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, socio-economic status, religion, and the like. The ways an individual self-identifies within these categories––the labels that one uses––is a personal choice and may shift depending on the context. 

Social construct: When meaning is contextual and changes over time and place as a result of social, political, and historical processes. 

Intersectionality: A mode of analysis developed by feminists of color that examines how power structures (ideologies, discourses, institutions, systems) shape particular subject positions, access to resources, experiences, and life outcomes and how these vary based on the intersecting dynamics of gender, class, language, religion, ability, sexuality, tribal affiliation, nationality, and immigration status. 

Hispanic: People in the U.S. with heritage from Spanish-speaking countries. Federal, state, and private agencies and organizations that collect demographic data define Hispanic as an ethnicity, even though many who identify with this term define it as a race as well as an ethnicity, due to the fact that those who are understood as belonging to this group have been racialized. 

Latino: People in the U.S. of Latin American descent, acknowledging a shared complex historical experience of colonization, oppression, and resistance. 

Chicano: A once denigrated term, was resignified in the late 1960s and 1970s by students and community activists into an empowering alternative to “Mexican,” “Mexican American,” “Hispanic,” or “Spanish” as part of a larger cultural nationalist movement. 

Boricua: A term derived from Borikén, the Indigenous Taíno name for the island of Puerto Rico. Boricua is an empowering group identification that people of Puerto Rican descent took on in the 1970s as a part of a larger cultural nationalist movement. 

Panethnicities: “Confederations created when several distinct ethnic groups come together in alliance for social, economic, or cultural advantage, thereby augmenting their numeric power and influence around issues of common concern.”⁶⁷

Latinidad: A shared subjectivity among disparate Latin American ethnic and national groups with shared attributes, experiences, and realities among its members.

Interlatino subjectivities: The result of cultural contact and mixing between different Latinx national identity groups resulting in the creation of new hybrid cultural productions from music, food, clothing, aesthetics, and language that coalesce from the multiple cultures in their families and neighborhoods.

Latinidades: An extension beyond the singular Latinidad, referring to “the shared experiences of subordination, resistance, and agency of the various national groups of Latin American in the United States.” It is “a conceptual framework” that can be used “to document, analyze, and theorize the processes by which diverse Latinas/os interact with, dominate, and transculturate each other.” Latinidades also calls for the examination of “power differences, conflicts, tensions, and affinities between and among Latinas/os of diverse national identities.”

Critical Latinx Indigeneities: A framework that emerges at the intersections of Latinx studies, Latin American studies, and Indigenous studies to examine how Indigenous migrants from Latin America are transforming notions of Latinidad and Indigeneity in the U.S.

Indígena: A pan-ethnic Spanish term of empowerment to refer to an Indigenous person from Latin America. 

AfroLatinidad: A term that centers Blackness as an analytic, acknowledging the particularities of Latin American peoples of African descent, from their racialized experiences in their countries of origin to the shifting meanings in the U.S., as well as their experiences of colorism within the larger Latinx community.

Queer Latinidad: A concept that considers queer identity in relation to Latina/o/x subjectivity, questioning the construction and validity of normative identity categories.

Translatina/o/x: A neologism that combines trans/transgender and Latina/o/x, while also encapsulating Latin American and latinoamericana/o identities. 

Chicana, Chicana/o: Terms that intentionally place the feminine word-ending “a” at the end of Chican- to challenge the colonially gendered Spanish language masculine/feminine dichotomy by substituting Chicano for Chicana, Chicana and Chicano, and Chicana/o. 

Xicana/o, Xicana/o/x Indígena: Terms that replace the “Ch” in Chicana/o/x signaling a reclamation and reconnection with Indigenous ancestry and identity. 

Indigenistas: A constituency of Indigenous Xicana/o/xs who practice a transnational or hemispheric mode of Indigenous political solidarity.

Xicanisma: A retrofitted form of Chicana feminism developed in the late 1980s and 1990s intended to create an avenue for mestizas and Indigenous women to “not only reclaim our Indigenismo––but also to reinsert the forsaken feminine into our consciousness.” Xicanisma is a practical way for retribalizing peoples of any gender to express an Indigenous sensibility, reconnect spirituality with the body/sexuality, and to (re)claim and (re)construct their traditions in ways that serve their present needs. 

Chican@, Latin@: Terms that came into usage around the turn of the twenty-first century as a way to signify the fluidity of gender and to acknowledge a spectrum of identities and expressions rather than a rigid masculine/feminine binary. The technological ending has been described as “part aesthetic response to the cumbersome punctuation of [Chicana and Chicano], part recognition of emergent digital identities, and part as an instance of queering or making queer.”

Chicanx, Latinx: Terms that are another feminist and queer disruption to the gender binary. The “-x” “signifies fluidity and mobility, setting aside the conventions of ideological, philosophical, and medical binaries that assign humans to one gender identity out of two when they are born. The ‘x’ in ‘Chicanx’ is nonbinary; it acknowledges self-determinations that refuse immovable assignments of identity.” 

Latine: A term that has come into usage in Spanish-speaking countries through the work of feminist, nonbinary, and genderqueer activists and academics. Advocates call attention to its uncomplicated pronunciation. 

Régimen de castas: A system of racial classification laid out by Spanish settlers in the mid-eighteenth century to categorize the resultant mixing between Spaniards, Indigenous, and African peoples. The casta system was not abolished until Mexico’s independence in 1821, however racial and ethnic social stratification remain prevalent even today, echoing colonial conceptions of identity.

Mestizaje: The term for the biological and cultural blending that often occurred through sexual violence and exploitation against Indigenous and African women in the colonial era. 

Paradigm: “A shared set of understandings or premises which permits the definition, elaboration, and solution of a set of problems defined within the paradigm. It is an accepted model or pattern…. Paradigms of race shape our understanding and definition of racial problems.” U.S. settler colonialism is built on Indigenous elimination and a black/white racial paradigm of white supremacy, intertwined with neoliberal capitalism and heteropatriarchy.

Mestiza consciousness: A framework developed by queer Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa, which is a cognitive decolonization process of racialized, gendered, and sexed subjects wherein la mestiza becomes aware of the Borderlands and makes conscious decisions regarding the construction of her multiple and often contradictory identities.

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Footnotes

⁶⁶ David Valentine, “Identity,” TSQ 1 (May 2014): 103–106.

⁶⁷ Ramon Gutiérrez, “What’s in a Name,” 20.