Troubling the Waters: Unmooring Theory amid the Currents of Latino Politics – Beltrán’s The Trouble with Unity

For quite some time, an ironic situation has existed in the discipline of political science. Critical interest in the experiences and circumstances of racially dominated groups has inspired some of the most novel recent work in political theory, motivating scholars to re-envision what democracy, representation, freedom, and other elemental concepts mean. Yet the empirical study of politics among Latinos, African Americans, and other racial minorities in the United States mostly has remained the province of political scientists who apply positivist approaches and whose norm regarding critical reflection on key concepts remains insufficiently rigorous by the standards of political theory.

Into this professional and intellectual chasm (not to say mine field) steps Cristina Beltrán with her widely acclaimed book The Trouble with Unity. The task she sets for herself is daunting: to mobilize the conceptual resources of political theory as a way to generate new critical insights into Latino politics. On the one hand, Beltrán thereby challenges theorists to turn up the volume on their engagements with the empirical, making these encounters sustained and thorough rather than settling for off-hand gestures to political movements or events as mere examples of precious concepts. On the other hand, she also wants to shake up the self-satisfied consensus among empiricist scholars of Latino politics about certain core assumptions – above all the article of faith that political success, whether measured as the number of Hispanic voters who cast their ballots, the passage of legislation favorable to Latinos, or anything else, depends on discovering the bedrock of identitarian unity beneath a surface of destructive and needless discord.

As one might anticipate, readers from various camps will likely hold critical views on different aspects of this ambitious project. Some may find themselves wanting more sturdy support behind certain empirical or historical claims in the book. Others might desire more of a critical synthesis among the diverse and extensive range of theoretical perspectives the author employs. Beltrán should take ample satisfaction from knowing that if critics on both sides find something to grumble about, then she must have done something right – and, indeed, she most certainly has. This book offers a prime model of why vaulting over the invidious sub-disciplinary barricades that bedevil “political science” is worth the trouble. It shows that the trouble with our own unities, whether as “theorists,” “Latino politics” experts, or something else, is that they keep us from exactly the kinds of politically rejuvenating insights this text brings into view.

Beltrán artfully begins by critically interrogating the popular catchphrase that labels the Latino electorate as America’s “Sleeping Giant.” For Beltrán, this suspect image, which pundits’ mouths emit ever more compulsively with the onset of every new election season, epitomizes faulty presuppositions held by Latino leaders and racists/xenophobes alike. Both “advocates and adversaries of Latino power” assume not only that Latinos actually do “share a common collective consciousness” but also that “this pan-ethnic collective ought to behave politically” only in ways that reflect the self-knowing presence of “a united community” (5). This approach, Beltrán contends, expresses a “limited vision of Latino empowerment” (9). More is to be gained by dispensing with this “homogenizing logic” and reconceiving of Latinidad “as a site of permanent political contestation,” and hence “as a site of ongoing resignifiability – as a political rather than merely descriptive category” (8-9).

Content to “let sleeping giants lie,” Beltrán then stages a series of juxtapositions between selected events in the history of Latino politics since the 1960s and theoretical texts that illuminate the ways those episodes unleashed contestative energies only to restrain them through the call to unity. The book embarks on this expedition by providing an account of the Chicano and Puerto Rican movements of the sixties. The brief but effective accounts of the Chicano Movement and the Young Lords emphasize their common impulses to...