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n xxv Introduction Latino communities have faced a broad range of challenges and obstacles in their long struggle to achieve equality, social justice, and equal membership in the major institutions of U.S. society. These have in fact been the primary normative goals that have animated and provided direction for the many different facets and forms of Latino politics. These efforts have been part of a broader pattern of transformative, oppositional politics seeking to democratize U.S. “democracy”— contesting a system of white supremacy based on wide-scale exclusion, repression, and subordination of communities of people of color that did not fit the ideological, normative vision of the national imaginary adopted by the elites who sought to extend their power and dominance throughout the hemisphere. The contradiction between the principles of equality and justice for all, and the reality of systematic forms of excluding large sectors of U.S. racialized populations, was embraced and justified without any sustained sense of shame or lament for what was at its core a politics of hypocrisy. This systematic racialization also led to the establishment of a form of incorporation based on practices of “exclusionary inclusion” of racialized populations. This book is a study of the processes of exclusionary inclusion of Latinos based on racialization, and of how these have determined their marginalized xxvi n Introduction citizenship status; it also offers a framework for studying this dynamic. Contesting this fundamental condition has been at the core of Latino politics for more than 150 years. Pursuing the goal of achieving full, equal, and just inclusion or societal membership has been a constant in Latino politics, and it has thus been a major force in the struggle to realize democratic normative principles. I engage this problematic by examining the inherent limitations of the citizenship regime in the United States for incorporating Latinos as full societal members, and then offer an alternative conception that I refer to as “associative citizenship,” which I argue already exists in embryonic form in Latino communities and which provides a way to account for and challenge the pattern of exclusionary belonging that has defined their position in U.S. society. While there has always been a body of critical literature produced by Latinos advancing and justifying the principle of full and equal membership, these have until recently received scant attention within the orthodox, dominant academy. This is not surprising given that the academy not only shared but also was a principal source of developing ideological justifications for the forms of Latino exclusion and subordination.1 But the civil rights struggles of racialized minorities in the United States made it impossible to ignore these contradictions, and provoked an engagement with the normative foundations of the system of “democracy” that exposed its often cruel and violent legacy. This was especially true in the field of political theory, which focuses precisely on normative discourse about the nature of political community. Theorists were slow to grasp the significance of these challenges to racialized forms of exclusion and its effect on the issue of political membership; initially they completely misunderstood what was in fact occurring. Thus one of the preeminent postwar political theorists, Robert Dahl, could state at the end of his influential book Preface to Democratic Theory, published in 1956, that the issue of racial conflict and division had been all but resolved. The events of the next fifteen years were to prove how deeply wrong he was. This inability to grasp the nature of the contestation, to engage the problematic, was perhaps why political theory became politically irrelevant until the publication of John Rawls’s Theory of Justice in 1971, which has been credited widely with reviving the field of political theory in the contemporary period.2 The constellation of concepts marshaled by Rawls to advance his argument—social contract, utilitarianism, intuitionism, good vs. right, principles of justice, efficiency, priority rules, the difference principle, the veil of ignorance, and civil disobedience—and the relationship between them—provided generations of political theorists with grist for their scholarly mill. Along with his substantially revised Political Liberalism (1993), Rawls provided one of the first efforts in political theory to deal with the contemporary condition of a deep cultural diversity that reflected strongly held, competing worldviews and values. Introduction n xxvii Yet strangely, but perhaps not unexpectedly given the isolated nature of the academy, Rawls never engaged or incorporated the processes of racialization as a fundamental constitutive factor or issue in...

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