Latinos in America: A Response
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Dialogue and criticism are essential to philosophy. Indeed, perhaps no other discipline depends so much on them as our discipline. In part this may be the result of the fact that philosophy is not an empirical study and is often influenced by our subjective biases and prejudices. Thus, as philosophers we need to be challenged by other perspectives; we need to confront sharp criticism; and we need to face tough objections to the views that we value. For this reason I particularly welcome the careful and objective criticisms offered by Renzo Llorente, María Cristina González, Nora Stigol, and Howard McGary of Latinos in America. I am deeply grateful for their comments and hope that my responses are taken not so much as a partisan defense of my views as efforts to deepen our common understanding of the issues at stake. And I am also very grateful to Susana Nuccetelli for organizing the stimulating and animated session of the American Philosophical Association in which these exchanges were presented, on December 28, 2008. I think that the results effectively illustrate the value of dialogue and criticism in our discipline.
The issues raised by my critics are complex and rich, whereas my space is limited, so I have had to focus and select those aspects of their criticisms that seem to me more substantial and challenging. I have gathered them thematically into two parts. The first part addresses my views of Latinos, Hispanics, and Latino/Hispanic philosophy; here is where questions of identity and labeling are discussed. The second part is concerned with practical questions of language rights and affirmative action; in it the discussion turns in particular to the rights of Latino children to be taught in the language of their parents and to the justification for affirmative action for Latinos. In each case I formulate the objections raised by my critics and then provide responses. [End Page 95]
I. Latinos, Hispanics, and Philosophy
In this section I address criticisms articulated by Llorente, González, and Stigol of the views I defend concerning four specific topics: (A) the relation between Latino and Hispanic, (B) the unity and boundaries of the Latino ethnos, (C) the use of the "Latino" and "Hispanic" labels, and (D) Latino philosophy. I take each of these separately, formulating their most salient arguments first and then providing brief answers to them.
A. Latinos Versus Hispanics
The difficulties Llorente finds with my view of the relation between Latinos and Hispanics may be summarized in one general argument:
It is not clear whether in Latinos in America I hold the same view of this relation that I maintained in Hispanic/Latino Identity. The reason: in the earlier work I treated Hispanics as a larger ethnic group of which Latinos is a smaller ethnic subgroup and in general argued against a cultural conception of ethnicity, whereas in the later book I point to culture as a factor to be reckoned with in the choice of label to use.
My answer to this criticism is that the views I present in Hispanic/Latino Identity and Latinos in America are not different and that what I say in these books is consistent. There are two key points that need to be kept in mind to understand this but which Llorente neglects to consider. The first is the distinction between ethnos and ethnicity; the second involves the particular conceptions that I have proposed of these. An ethnos (plural ethne) is a group of people; ethnicity is a second-order property shared by members of an ethnos that is in turn based on various first-order properties. On the one hand, we have a group of people, say, Latinos, and on the other, we have the property of being Latino shared by Latinos, which is itself based on first-order properties such as genealogy, location, language, and so on. The second point is that in my view the first-order properties that constitute the basis of the second-order properties of ethne depend on the familial-historical complexes of the particular ethne.
This means that when we think of Hispanics and Latinos as ethne, there...
