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Gendering “Latino Public Intellectuals” Personal Narratives in the Ethnography of Elena Padilla Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas Academic discussions concerning the role of “public intellectuals” have proliferated in the last decade or so, especially among scholars of color.1 These discussions have particularly considered the “crisis of black public intellectuals” in the United States.2 Some scholars have argued that intellectuals no longer exist and that the end of the Cold War, the opening up of the mainly U.S. university to legions of scholars, the age of specialization, and the commercialization and commodification of everything in the newly globalized economy have simply done away with the public intellectual.3 Some scholars such as Russell Jacoby and Richard Posner, for instance, have insisted that the public intellectuals as a group are in decline or have altogether disappeared, or at least that the quality of their work is getting worse.4 Such claims of decline rely on a particular understanding of who and what we mean by “intellectuals,” in general, and “public intellectual,” in particular. The term “public intellectual” traces to Russell Jacoby’s 1987 book, The Last Intellectuals, but it has outgrown its origins.The bare term“intellectual” is used to describe the sort of prominent individual engaged in social criticism. Some find the term “public intellectuals” tautological since all intellectuals are by definition public.5 The public intellectual is generally some sort of specialist, most likely an academic, who finds a way of engaging in public, as opposed to exclusively academic, debates. It is the intellectuals’“publicness,” their intervention into the public sphere, that defines the category.6 Tim Dunlop, for instance, argues that the traditional understanding of public intellectual needs to be challenged and replaced with “a more demo- cratic, less elitist model, one that specifically ties the title to participation and citizenship.”7 Likewise, Edward Said stresses that “the absence of any master-plan or grand theory for what intellectuals can do” in fact “enables intellectual performances on many fronts, in many places.” Hence, all the arts and all forms of writing can be considered intellectual endeavors and should be represented.The goal of the intellectual, then, is not only to define a situation but also to discuss the possibilities for active intervention and to sense that other people have a similar stake in a common project. These conversations about the roles of “public intellectuals” have oftentimes excluded the role of women in general and women of color in particular in the production of knowledge and intervention in civic life. A Black-white racial binary prevails in these discussions, and when addressed, gender is subsumed under other social categorizations.8 The role of Latino public intellectuals has been suspiciously absent from any discussions of intellectual production and community involvement in the United States, even when their Latin American and Caribbean counterparts have played active roles in their countries’ politics and social life. An exception to this absence of Latinos in discussions of“public intellectuals”appeared in 2003 in the form of a theme issue in the journal Napantla: Views from the South (volume 4, issue 2). Published by Duke University Press, this theme issue consisted of a central article by Eduardo Mendieta titled “What Can Latinas/os Learn from Cornel West? The Latino Postcolonial Intellectual in the Age of the Exhaustion of Public Spheres,”followed by a series of individual responses to the Mendieta article. It was particularly revealing that most of the response articles were celebratory of Mendieta’s proposition that Latinos needed to follow Cornel West’s model of intellectual practice, in particular West’s appeal to religious faith, presence in multiple sites of intellectual production, and ability to synthesize the great intellectual traditions of all time (from “romantic Marxism”to literary criticism). Few respondents in fact question the very choice of Cornel West, a scholar who has been notorious for his general silence on issues of gender and patriarchy, as Mendieta’s proposed “guide” for Latinos into the road toward public intellectualism.9 Likewise, very few respondents challenged Mendieta’s vague understanding of“public spheres” as spaces that needed to be generated by creating “a new transnational and hemispheric agenda able to include not just Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans or Cubans, but also the broader group of Latinas /os that constitutes now over 12 percent of the U.S. population.”10 The unproblematic assumption of the existence (or desirability) of a “Latino” identity was only worsened by Mendieta’s insinuation that we have already...

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