Alejandro Arango (Gonzaga University) & Adam Burgos (Bucknell University), "Neither race nor ethnicity: Latinidad as a social affordance"
Forthcoming, Journal of Social Philosophy
By Alejandro Arango (Gonzaga University) & Adam Burgos (Bucknell University)
In the late Summer and early Fall of 2020, as the presidential election loomed, the national press engaged in a conversation that it seems to repeat, as if by muscle memory, every four years (and sometimes every two), about the so-called “Latino vote.” A very small sample, all from the New York Times:
● How to Win the Latino Vote (Sept. 11, 2020)
● This Is How Biden Should Approach the Latino Vote (Sept. 18, 2020)
● Examining the Latino vote on the ground in Florida (Nov. 3, 2020)
And one for the 2022 midterms:
● The Latino Voters Who Could Decide the Midterms (Oct. 3, 2022)
Despite the sincerity with which these articles are written, what becomes most apparent when reading them with a critical eye is that there is a difficulty built into the assumptions that undergird them. Namely, what it means to be Latinx in the United States, to partake in Latinidad here, is not at all a settled issue. Whether we are speaking philosophically, socially, culturally, linguistically, politically, racially, or ethnically, there is significant disagreement about not only what constitutes being Latinx, but also whether it is meaningful to speak of such a generic term in the first place, given the diversity of the group in question.
Reading these sorts of articles got us thinking about how best to explain, on the one hand, the confusion surrounding the use of the term, and on the other hand, attempt to capture what might remain meaningful within it while jettisoning any unnecessary conceptual baggage. Our paper, “Neither race nor ethnicity: Latinidad as a social affordance”, was published recently in Journal of Social Philosophy. We look to the framework of social affordances, initially developed within ecological psychology, to understand the variations we see within Latinidad.
A note is due here: this work does not engage in the discussion about the right label for those who identify themselves or are identified by others this way, whether the right term is Latino/a, Latinx, Latine, Hispanic, etc. As significant a question as it may be, it is not our focus, so while we have opted for Latinx, nothing in our argument hinges on this choice.
The simplest way to describe an affordance is that it is a possibility for action that a given environment offers to an organism. Understood specifically within the social world, a social affordance is then a possibility for action or interaction a given social environment offers to an individual, or group of individuals, in virtue of the structure of the social world and the positionality of those involved.
Our contribution to the affordances literature is to tailor the concept specifically to social identities. In doing so, we highlight the possibilities for action and interaction that are determined by taking oneself or somebody else to be a member of a given social group, in a given social setting. Thinking about Latinx persons through this lens, we argue, is better able to illustrate the possibilities inherent in contemporary manifestations of Latinidad.
As we put it in the introduction to our essay:
We contend that it is mistaken to understand Latinidad as a race or ethnicity, or as the more comprehensive ethnorace. None of these captures the complexity of Latinidad, the myriad ways that it is lived, known, dealt with, and understood by both ingroup and outgroup members. Latinidad as a social affordance is meant to replace the characterization of Latinidad as a race, as an ethnicity, or as an ethnorace as the primary descriptor of the group: the plasticity and multi-dimensionality of Latinidad overflows those extant categories. We do not argue that ethnicity, race, or ethnorace are unnecessary or useless for understanding Latinidad, only that no combination of them is sufficient. We retain them as necessary categories under the umbrella of social affordances, as they remain helpful (sometimes indispensable) as secondary qualifications of Latinidad.
A different sort of category is needed: social identity affordances. Latinidad is anchored in the things that Latinxs do because of our Latinidad, as well as those things that others do to us, with us, and upon us because of our Latinidad. We approach the topic from a broadly pragmatist perspective, rejecting the need for a set of extensional criteria to define who “Latinx” refers to (Vidal-Ortiz & Martínez, 2018). We begin in media res with those already broadly participating in and engaging with Latinidad – understanding themselves (or others) as, acting (or acting upon others) as, or being treated as Latinx in the United States. We speak of Latinidad, not as “Latin culture,” but as that which Latinxs have, so to speak.1 With Latinidad we name that which is common to those identified as Latinx, Latine, Latina, Latino, Latin@, or Hispanic.
After canvassing the extend literature on Latinidad as race, ethnicity, and ethnorace, as well as how affordances can help us better understand the concept, we round out the paper by exploring four dimensions of Latinx social reality that our approach helps to understand and tie together: the fact of mestizaje and hybridization, a vexed relation to the land, the political horizons and histories of this population, and the multiplicity of sensory-based cultural practices of Latinxs.
What’s next for us and this work? At least two lines of research are involved. First, this is the beginning of a much larger project, a book manuscript under contract with Columbia University Press, in which we further develop our analysis of those four dimensions, dig deeply into the history of Latinidad as forged within colonialism and conquest, and better situate Latinidad in terms of Blackness and Indigeneity. Second, this work proved to be methodologically useful for proposing the social identity affordance theory of social identities, a novel form of social constructionism, which we have defended in a paper recently published in The Southern Journal of Philosophy.