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n 183 CHAPTER 6 Critical Theory and the Politics of Solidarity Contradictions, Tensions, and Potentiality One of the major claims I have made is that an incipient or prefigurative stage of an alternative notion of associative citizenship has been advanced in certain sectors of Latino communities. The rights claims emerging out of experiences rooted in everyday life are types of prefigurative, existential expressions of, and strategies for, negotiating the conditions of marginalization—rights claims that I believe are the empirical expression of associative citizenship. While I believe the informal rights claims are a viable option for the most marginalized sectors of Latino communities , they do not necessarily function in the same way for other sectors of Latino communities. As with most ethnic and racial groupings, the level of incorporation and inclusion in the dominant institutions, including economic, political, and civil society, vary by a number of factors, including class differences (income, occupation, education) and immigrant status. So the feasibility of political strategies that can be used effectively will vary accordingly. The double challenge presented in the effort to overcome Latinos’ history of exclusionary belonging is how to balance the need for societal cohesion with the need to develop strategies of political cohesion or solidarity among Latinos. This challenge is implied in the way that James Cohen summarized the choices that the 184 n Chapter Six United States as a society will have to make because of what he calls the Latinization of major parts of the country (James Cohen 2005, 169). My claim throughout this book is that a politics built around the notion of Latino citizenship may provide a way to balance these two seemingly opposite goals. This is because a strong, normative sense of inclusiveness and full membership as an organizing principle has the potential to cut across some of the differences that separate Latino groups from others, providing a means of mobilization that strengthens the internal connections between different Latino groups by demonstrating, through strategies of praxis, the commonalities that these different groups share in the new context of the United States. At the same time, it is possible to promote a level of cohesion with the larger society based on a form of inclusion founded on normative principles of justice, equality, and tolerance. While there may be very substantial differences between different Latino groups, the one thing they have in common is a history of being ideologically constructed and represented in relatively similar terms. Given the long history of being homogenized, the politics of citizenship can build on combating that reductionist perception—internally different, externally the same—a variation of the “difference as sameness” theme. However, developing this type of common political agenda is a challenge that often involves opposing tendencies because of the differences within Latino groups on the one hand, and between Latino communities and the white majority on the other. The focus of my discussion here, then, is to delineate what is involved in this dual tension, and to explore ways to balance them. First I want to examine the political significance of the intra-Latino group differences and deal with the possibilities of establishing common political agendas, and then follow with a discussion of what this common political solidarity implies for the issue of societal cohesion. The first aspect of this challenge results from the all-too-common tendency in the political discourse of the last two decades to assume that Latinos are a relatively homogeneous group with similar interests, values, and perspectives. So, for example, speculation about the potential of Latinos to affect local, state, and even national elections has become a staple feature of each electoral season for the past two decades. Politicians , academics, and media analysts have created a discursive field that includes a number of often competing and even contradictory themes. Some commentators focus on the increasing significance of the “Latino” vote, while others note the low turnout rate of Latino voters; studies argue that the demographic changes of the last thirty years have positioned Latino voters to play a broker role, while others point to a legacy of continued marginalization. What often seems to underlie otherwise differing interpretations is an unproblematized assumption that “Latino” refers to an empirically identifiable, unified group. One finds the same kind of assumption operative in the ways that “Latino” is deployed in marketing strategies and campaigns Critical Theory and the Politics of Solidarity n 185 (Dávila 2001). But an increasing number of scholars have critiqued and...

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