Gracia on Hispanic and Latino Identity

Jorge J. E. Gracia's Latinos in America is a spirited, informative, immensely enjoyable work and a remarkably successful combination of applied philosophy, metaphysics, and metaphilosophy, to name just a few of the many fields covered in Gracia's exploration of Latino identity. The overall thematic cohesion that Gracia achieves in treating a formidable range of topics—for example, the nature of identity, the meaning of ethnic labels, the sociology of American philosophy, individuation, and linguistic rights—is likewise remarkably successful, as is his attempt to treat these and other topics in a way that will engage and satisfy professional philosophers without rendering his text inaccessible to nonspecialists.

For all its virtues, however, Latinos in America is not without its ambiguities, and some of the positions that the book defends appear rather questionable, as does the way in which it addresses certain problems. In my brief remarks, I would like to focus on four aspects of the book that strike me as problematic in one way or another: (1) Gracia's treatment of the relationship between Latino and Hispanic; (2) his defense of Latino, as opposed to Hispanic, as a group label; (3) Gracia's conception of Latino philosophy; and (4) his treatment of the debate over language rights. As Latinos in America invites comparison with one of Gracia's previous books, Hispanic/ Latino Identity: A Philosophical Perspective (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), I will be making occasional references to the earlier text in the course of my discussion.

I

Let me begin with the first problem that I mentioned, namely, the relationship between "Latino" and "Hispanic." Simply stated, the question is the following: What exactly is the relation between the two groups named by these terms? If we consult Gracia's account in Hispanic/Latino Identity (HLI), his earlier book, the answer to this question would seem to be relatively straightforward, for in that work Latinos are said to constitute a subset of Hispanics, the latter being defined as "the group of people comprised by the inhabitants of the countries of the Iberian peninsula after 1492 and what were to become the colonies of those countries after the encounter between Iberia and America took place, and by descendants of these people who live in other countries (e.g., the United States) but preserve some link to those people" (HLI, 48; cf. 52). According to this earlier account, the class of Latinos excludes Iberians (Spaniards and the Portuguese) but includes their children born in Latin America and may or may not include the children of Iberians who emigrated directly to the United States (HLI, 5; cf. Latinos in America [LIA], 38). (This kind of indeterminacy does not pose a problem for Gracia's theses, for he stresses that "identities need to be conceived as flexible, contextual, historical and relational" [LIA, 16].)

Does Gracia assume the same view of the relation between Latinos and Hispanics in Latinos in America, a book whose arguments are based on the proposition that Latinos constitute a distinctive ethnos (i.e., ethnic group)? It is hard to say. To be sure, there are certainly good reasons to assume that Gracia also conceives of Hispanics as a distinct ethnos, in keeping with the thesis of his earlier book. For one thing, it is clear that Gracia (still) regards "Hispanic" as an ethnic name, and the function of ethic names is to refer to ethne (see LIA, chap. 3, 58). For another, Gracia's conception of the Latino ethnos—based on what he calls the "Familial-Historical View of Latino -Identities"—rests on the same kind of explanation as Gracia had proposed for making sense of Hispanic identity in his earlier book (see HLI, chap. 3, for a discussion of the Familial-Historical View, and LIA, 17, for a brief restatement of this concept). Moreover, in Latinos in America Gracia characterizes ethnicity as follows: "Ethnicity has to do with historical relations of various sorts that contingently tie people" (LIA, 23). If this is the case, then it would...