Why We Founded the Global Latinidades Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara
Who are Latinx people? What does Latinidades signify? And what is the Global Latinidades Project? Well, it’s complicated, very complicated, and controversial, with very many points of disagreement that one might call a general dissensus… and this is a good thing!
Keeping It Real: Reflections on Police Brutality, the Black Lives Matter Movement & Complicated Legacy of Latinx Anti-Black Bigotry
Latinx activists justifiably note that Latinx people—overwhelmingly dark skinned male and working class—make up half of the people killed by police annually, yet they conveniently and consistently efface the empirically verifiable fact that many of the police killers of Latinx and Black civilians are of Latinx heritage.
This demographic reality raises important questions about the increasing Latinx access to power, and also long-standing tensions in Latinx-Black relations grounded in the legacy of Latinx anti-Black bias directed outside the Latinx community, but also inward against its darker-skinned and AfroLatinx members. These localized manifestations of the widespread denial of the Black roots of mestizaje is, in fact, a global historical phenomenon. Indeed, Latinx ambivalence about their Black heritage, and outright antipathy towards African Americans and Black Latinx people, can be fully understood only by examining the dialectical relationship between the local and the global creation, development, and consolidation of Latinx as an anti-Black formation across time and place. It began way before Columbus and Cortez ever set foot in what we now call the Americas...
This Blog Post is Coming in Spring 2022!