In Search of the Latino Public Sphere: Everywhere and Nowhere

What are we to do about the fact that we live in the “age of the exhaustion of public spheres”? Eduardo Mendieta suggests that Latino intellectuals provide a way out of this exhaustion by “articulating a new set of problems that can guide the development of a new transnational and hemispheric agenda,” a process that involves “recognizing a panethnic Latino public sphere that overlaps with a transnational, postcolonial, diasporic public sphere in and of the Americas.” I would argue, by contrast, that there's little to be accomplished by “recognizing” such a public sphere, since the very notion of a “public sphere,” whether Latino or transnational, at least as proposed by Mendieta, is so general as to provide little insight into how power functions specifically across different sites at different times. Because Mendieta's “public sphere” is so shifting and amorphous, the postcolonial intellectual who finds his identity through attachment to this space can always base his claims to politics on an equally placeless set of moralisms and predictable assertions about the ongoing oppression of marginalized peoples.

Of course, Latinos and African Americans are still marginalized in many ways, and perhaps Cornel West does have something to teach Latinos. What he has to teach, however, is in no way obvious, and it does not follow directly from the fact that both groups of people have been the victims of various kinds of structural discrimination in the United States. Although Mendieta does acknowledge differences in the conditions shaping the lives of Latinos and African Americans, he seems more invested in the similarities of the oppressed; thus, the question begged is how marginalization happens, unevenly, unpredictably, and complexly, both between and within these groups, an analysis that would require a specific, geographical, historical account. Such an analysis would produce a theory of agency that shows how subjects can move into positions of power so as to be able to effect change at different sites.¹ And it would require that postcolonial intellectuals situate themselves among those subjects, unable to stand outside power in transcendent positions of moral critique. It might even require us to engage in governmental policy realms (including the corporate university), something Mendieta would dismiss as being “at the service of the state.”

The lack of geographical specificity is apparent in Mendieta's various characterizations of spatial phenomena. He says, for example, that “globalization is not the same thing as transnationalism, and these two in turn are not the same as postcolonialism.” Yet never does he offer an explanation of how these processes differ—for example, how they affect Latinos and African Americans differently. He urges us to “take up José Martí's idea of the greater ‘America,' analogously to the way Europeans have developed a discourse as well as institutions for the European Union.” Yet clearly history and geography would suggest that the transference is not so simple. All postcolonial intellectuals operate in a vast “global, postcolonial, public sphere,” everyone ranging from Edward Said to Rigoberta Menchú. Yet it's hard to see what work can be accomplished by such conflations of different conditions, even if at some point—after working through, for example, the different conditions of Palestine and Guatemala—a claim could be made for contingent alliances. It's not surprising that Mendieta asks the question “Where are our public spheres?” and then makes little attempt to answer it. It turns out, finally, that the public sphere doesn't really exist anywhere—it's rather an “ideal projection.” Mendieta asserts that the power of the notion of a public sphere “lies in its formulation of a social project.” Yet how can a social project be formulated with no specific attention to social sites? If the public sphere is purely an ideal projection, then the power obviously lies in the critic's ability to articulate the idea, an ability that seems to rest on the critic's distance from power, his or...