In their essay "Is Latino/a Identity a Racial Identity?" Linda Martín Alcoff cites philosopher Ofelia Schutte who argues that Latinx identity "may be a means to disaffiliate us from our nations of birth or ancestry" to create greater affinity to US empire.

And I'm like:

The implication of Schutte's intervention is that the construction of Latinidad is a strategic project of US empire designed to manage immigrants from Latin America by disassociating them from their country of origin and creating greater association within the US nation-state.

Alcoff pushes back on Scutte's claim for two reasons. 1) Latinidad was an idea that emerged from Latin America from [white] revolutionaries like Bolivar, Martí, and Guevara. 2) In their quotidian lives, people make meaning/find empowerment in claiming Latinidad.

Alcoff cautions us from giving the US nation-state too much power that it limits the agency of individuals (especially minoritized individuals) as they make meaning in their own lives with the categories presented to them.

Alcoff's point in raising Scutte's critique (as I read it) is to note the debates and complexity of Latino/a/x identity. Alcoff (in this essay at least) does not seem fully convinced by Scutte's claim. Nonetheless, *I* really think Schutte's argument is something to chew on.

I, as always, want to hold space for the ways people re-appropriate terms and ideas that were used to control or manage them for their own empowerment and towards decolonization. Indeed, I maintain that border-thinking is a thing people do in their quotidian lives.

As I result as I keep doing critical thinking on Latinidad I don't want to all out reject or throw away the concept. There is a reason so many of our community members find it empowering. And I want to sit with them in their empowerment before I reject the idea all together.

*And also,* race is a constitutive feature of colonial modernity constructed and maintained to manage populations. Put differently, empire thrives on controlling/policing populations, race is one way they do it, so our analysis must be attentive to that.

All of which is to say, don't take this thread as "Jorge thinks x" but more as an invitation to think with me as we're figuring it out.

And also, Schutte makes a compelling ass point....