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?

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