Gracia on Latino and Latin American Philosophy

In Latinos in America (LIA), Jorge J. E. Gracia, a philosopher with Latino roots, longtime member of the academic professional community, and resident of the United States, expresses concerns involving three queries: What is it to be Latino? What is the place of Latinos in America?¹ And how do Latinos think about themselves and their identity? These questions constitute the core of the so-called Latino Challenge. In his answer, he develops and uses a theoretical tool to identify Latinos that he dubs the "Familial-Historical View." He examines various conspicuously controversial issues related to Latino identity such as their linguistic rights, the advantages and disadvantages of affirmative action for Latinos, and the place of Latinos in the marketplace within the field of professional philosophy. Finally, in the longest section of the book, he performs an in-depth examination of Latino philosophy. This panorama includes a wide range of ideas that Gracia has discussed on other occasions; he revisits and combines them in an overall stance while criticizing alternative theses about particular issues and responding to his critics. In view of the broad scope of the enterprise, we shall restrict ourselves to highlighting our overlapping concerns, emphasizing some issues that we feel are too succinctly discussed, and raising some doubts about the possible consequences of the author's theses when certain issues are overlooked.

Let us start with the notion of Latino identity. In the face of two alternatives, Essentialism-Realism versus non-Essentialism-Eliminativism-Conceptualism, Gracia chooses a (nominalist) stance reminiscent of Wittgenstein. Why does he reject the other two alternatives (LIA, 30)? The first, because it has lost all credibility; the second, because it is unable to solve the problem of individuation.

From the rejection of the approach that holds that it is necessary to have a property or a set of properties to identify denoted entities, it does not follow that Latinos cannot be identified. Lack of an essence does not entail lack of identity (LIA, 21). Latinos share "a certain family resemblance." Gracia applies Wittgenstein's metaphor whereby, instead of asking what may be the common feature among individuals whom we call or classify as Latinos, it may be more fruitful to hold that they simply share a certain family resemblance. The task, in Wittgenstein's words, is to find out this "complex network of overlapping and crisscrossing similarities: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities in details" in this particular case.² Wittgenstein's metaphor is particularly appropriate here, even more so than when applied to games, because Latinos are actually a family, although not a genetically based one. Indeed, a married couple shares no genetic traits but still is the cornerstone of a family (Hispanic/Latino Identity, 50).

The main tenet of Gracia's Familial-Historical View is that Latinos constitute an ethnic group (LIA, 16-19). Ethnicity, which should not be confused with nationality or race, has to do with relations of various sorts—historical and familial, though not in terms of genetic relationships—that contingently tie people.

Although Gracia's strategy is very interesting, it encounters a few difficulties. To begin with, we face some trouble if we apply the thesis to Latinos who live in different regions, in our case, Argentina. It is no easy task to discern in which familial-historical network each person should be placed, as there is an intertwining of histories and families that makes it difficult to recognize a peculiar Latino American. The offspring of Spanish, Italian, Russian, and Swedish parents and grandparents—who constitute the majority of the population—seem to be immersed in at least more than one familial-historical network.

Having said that, it is possible to meet this objection if we remember that the original colonization—of a much extended territory, populated by various ethnic groups with very different cultures and languages, with no interconnections—was Spanish, and their language was Spanish. Consequently, language—in addition to culture and educational tradition, despite later influences during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—seems to be the main feature of Latinos living in Argentina. This applies to Uruguay...