With Us or Without Us: The Development of a Latino Public Sphere

I want to thank the editors of Nepantla for giving me the opportunity to read and comment on Eduardo Mendieta's thought-provoking piece about the need for Latino postcolonial intellectuals. I learned a great deal from the first part of the essay, where Mendieta lays out a typology of the different kinds of public intellectuals, and I appreciated his critique of the provincialism of those thinkers who bemoan the “demise” of the Eurocentric public intellectual. However, I had trouble at first understanding his motivation for focusing on Cornel West in the second part of his article. Although I admire much of West's work, I found it curious that Mendieta would single out West as the one model of a public intellectual from whom Latinas/os can learn. For one thing, West is far too silent on issues of gender and patriarchy. This silence is not, to my mind, incidental, and it seriously impedes my ability to see him as a model public intellectual. For another, proposing West as a model for Latino public intellectuals presupposes an analogy between the African-American and the Latino communities that does not obtain (I'll say more about this later). It was only after I followed up on Mendieta's comment in the endnotes that his piece had been motivated by his “utter dissatisfaction” with a conversation published in Harper's Magazine that the focus on Cornel West began to make sense to me. That roundtable of West, Jorge Klor de Alva, and Earl Shorris on the “uneasiness between Blacks and Latinos” points to the absence of a highly articulate, politically astute, academically grounded, and visible Latino spokesperson who can hold his or her own in a conversation with someone like Cornel West.¹ The piece also suggests that however questionable the attempt to find “a” spokesperson for a community as diverse as our own, the political logic of our society (which is fundamentally also a racial logic) continually demands that we produce one. In the case at hand, it is worth noting that Klor de Alva and West were invited to converse with each other as representative members of their respective groups. The conversation in Harper's is introduced thusly: “Knowing that questions of power and ethnicity are no longer black-and-white, Harper's Magazine invited three observers—a Black, a Latino, and a White moderator—to open the debate.” So, whether we Latino intellectuals actively cultivate spokespersons from our own ranks, or whether we sit back and let them emerge on their own, the one thing we can all be sure of is that they will emerge. And so I take Mendieta's effort in this forum seriously—he is making a powerful effort to create a Latino public intellectual sphere where we can begin to discuss the myriad issues that affect us as “Latinas/os.”

It is to this effort to represent—in the triple sense of speak for, speak about, and embody—a highly diverse and divided group of people that I turn now. The difficulty of this task stems in part from the fact that, unlike African Americans, Latinas/os do not yet constitute a cohesive, or even a readily identifiable, national minority community.² The different national/ethnic groups (Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Salvadoran, etc.) that are even now being hailed by the U.S. government, corporate advertisers, television executives, print media, and the entertainment industry as constitutive members of this not-yet-quite-there umbrella ethnic group, “Hispanic” or “Latino,” are still very different from one another. Their histories of entry and incorporation into the economy and body politic of the United States diverge greatly. To illustrate my point, let me briefly consider the three largest groups—Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Mexicans.

Ever since Puerto Rico was incorporated into United States as a commonwealth its citizens have been born...