Race, Space, and the Reinvention of Latin America in Mexican Chicago

Abstract

While fashionable but facile invocations of transnationalism and globalization have proliferated in recent academic discourse, scant attention has been paid to the more radical implications of these new socio-spatial formations. This article will adopt a critical transnational perspective derived from my ethnographic research among Mexican/migrant' workers in Chicago to dislodge some of the dominant spatial ideologies that undergird a prevailing common sense about the United States and America. Through the lens of what I would like to call Mexican Chicago, and revisiting some of the crucial presuppositions of Chicano studies, I will suggest a critical reevaluation of the conceptual foundations of Latin as it has conventionally been construed as an object of spatial for American studies in the United States-which is really to say, from the epistemological standpoint of U.S. imperialism. To state the problem more generally, I want to render an orthodox spatial knowledge more accountable to a regime of spatial power and inequality, and this transformed conceptualization of America will enable-and require-a rethinking of the space of the U.S nation-state itself. Thus, this article will also seek to revise some of the principal concerns at stake in the project of Chicano studies, motivated by

Cite this

Nicholas De Genova (1998). Race, Space, and the Reinvention of Latin America in Mexican Chicago. Latin American Perspectives. https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582x9802500506

@article{de1998race,
  title  = {Race, Space, and the Reinvention of Latin America in Mexican Chicago},
  author = {Genova, Nicholas De},
  year   = {1998},
  journal = {Latin American Perspectives},
  doi    = {10.1177/0094582x9802500506}
}

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