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Nepantla: Views from South 4.2 (2003) 253-256



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On the Possibility of the Latino Postcolonial Intellectual

Jacqueline M. Martínez


We are living in urgent times. The need to identify a new kind of public intellectual—a Latino postcolonial intellectual who can address that urgency—calls our attention to a latent capacity which the world needs desperately to see actualized. On this point we should welcome the work of Eduardo Mendieta for making us more aware of the complex constellations of relationships that mark the geopolitical realities of the world that the Latino postcolonial intellectual emerges from and confronts today. Navigating through these complex constellations requires a certain kind of existence that can generate a presence and a public sphere that heretofore have not been fully realized. The Latino postcolonial intellectual emerges from circumstances of existence that can open space where genuine public debate and advocacy counters the heavy weight of “imperial ignorance” currently driving “American” sensibilities. Let us explore, then, along with Mendieta, some of the terms and conditions under which the Latino postcolonial intellectual might assert a presence “within a larger public sphere” and come to articulate “a new set of problems that can guide the development of a new transnational and hemispheric agenda.”

The Latino postcolonial intellectual can be distinguished from other types of intellectuals in many ways, as Mendieta's typology reveals. At the apex of the configuration that can be posited as the Latino postcolonial intellectual is a “process of social transformation and critical self-reflection” that denationalizes and delocalizes, globalizes and postcolonizes. It is a natural development that the Latino postcolonial intellectual should occupy a central space in this process. Latinas/os are inextricably woven into the economic fabric of this hemisphere. We come from many cultures and many [End Page 253] places. We have cultural interests that simultaneously transcend national borders and complicate the assumed borders within nations. Latinas/os are, moreover, utterly unclassifiable in the abstract. To know that someone is “Latino” is, in fact, to know very little. Only when that label is fleshed out with the particularities of time and place, of history, family, geography, and economy can we understand what is meant by the adjective so invoked. Most significantly of all, perhaps, Latinas/os have an intimate historical link to colonialism and its cultural, political, and economic interests and mechanisms. The decolonizing process must begin here, with an intimate bodied and embodied knowledge of the forces and functions of the histories in which efforts to dominate and control have governed our inter- and intracultural contact. It is precisely because of this that Latinas/os are well-positioned to create a public sphere that cannot, and properly should not, anticipate its evolving or ultimate form.

As a collectivity, Latinas/os carry the markings of colonialism and its many manifestations as they have morphed over centuries. We carry these markings on and in our familial bodies, our social bodies, and our geographical bodies. To direct our conscious awareness toward those very configurations of family, social world, and geography that we have lived provides an instant topography, however sketchy, of the political and economic mechanisms of colonialism. It is not enough to simply map the terrain of our familial, social, and geographical bodies, however, because colonialism, by its very nature, diminishes the strength and resources of the indigenous culture. By their very nature, and by virtue of the transnational capitalism they have fostered, colonial interests have so dominated the world that many Latinas/os simply accept those interests as the normal and correct way things should be. This is certainly the case in many communities within the United States where Latinas/os have assimilated enough into the “American” culture that we have come to believe in the “American Dream” as the one true avenue for progress. When we come to such a belief, our capacity for critical reflection on the mechanisms by which colonial interests continue to dominate and harm Latino people and cultures is severely diminished. A call for critical self-reflection in this circumstance will likely result in...

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