Disability, Intersectional Agency, and Latinx Identity

Theorizing LatDisCrit Counterstories

Alexis Padilla

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000413984
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Handicaps en sociologie

This interdisciplinary volume links dis/ability and agency by exploring LatDisCrit's theory and activist emancipatory practice. It uses the author's experiential and analytical views as a blind brown Latinx engaged scholar and activist from the global south living and struggling in the highly racialized global north context of the United States.

LatDisCrit integrates critically LatCrit and DisCrit which look at the interplay of race/ethnicity, diasporic cultures, historical sociopolitics and disability within multiple Latinx identities in mostly global north contexts, while incorporating global south epistemologies. Using intersectional analysis of key concepts through critical counterstories, following critical race theory methodological traditions, and engaging possible decoloniality treatments of material precarity and agency, this book emphasizes intersectionality's complex underpinnings within and beyond Latinidades. Through a careful interplay of dis/ability identity and dis/ability rights/empowerment, the volume opens avenues for intersectional solidarity and spaces for radical transformational learning.

This book will be of interest to all scholars and students working in disability studies; intersectional disability justice activists; critical Latinx/Chicanx studies; critical geographies; intersectional political philosophy; and political and public sociology.

1 Introducing Latinx identity

LatDisCrit’s radical alterity

DOI: 10.4324/9781003084150-1

Introduction: On identity and alterity

Identity talk is alterity talk. Even sketching our identity means a fluid engagement with the contours of othering things, things related to identities other than our own. This book relies a great deal on counterstories. Counterstories are dialectical narratives where identity and alterity play a pivotal role. Thus, I am opting to start everything up in the book by introducing Arturo. I think it is crucial to do so, even before we dive into further conceptual considerations. This will help ground the book’s counterstories in their flow as identity/alterity tools, which make sense through one’s acquaintance with their dialectical origins. Arturo is a blind brown Latinx scholar and activist. He is old enough to have gone through the energy crisis of the 1970s. Arturo is now in his fifties, so he remembers clearly how his oil-producing home country was bursting with pie-in-the-sky hopes during those years. As usual, there was a lot of corruption in politics, but the possibilitarian spirit was undeniably there. This was even true among lower-class brown mestizo families such as Arturo’s. Our starting global south context in this first chapter of the book is Venezuela, where the oil industry was nationalized right in the middle of the 1970s energy crisis. Their founding membership in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)¹ was sold as a big deal, as a strategic advantage with an eye toward “non-aligned”² development prospects at a time when Cold War powers controlled so many postcolonial contexts. In most third-world cases back then, collective territoriality was aspiring to some sort of precarious recognition and to a unique sense of emerging nationhood³ beyond the shadow of post-World War II and other imperial-tradition superpowers such as England and France.⁴

Yet, although the possibilitarian spirit is conspicuously present in the following pages, this is not a typical macro-level Latin American Studies book. It is not an eclectic memoir of Arturo’s experiences either, at least not in the purely descriptive or literary meaning of the word memoir. In this book, I am much more interested in setting an invitational border-crossing tone. I want activists and various types of scholars to talk, think, and imagine with one another. I want this interdisciplinary volume to help them forge new, practical ways to weave the intersectional textures of alterity and identity, particularly with regard to the subaltern decoloniality of disability and race. I want to explore with you, with each and all of you, innovative ways to theorize, apply, and understand together the intersectional agency dimensions of disability as a mode of what Du Bois called a century ago “double consciousness,”⁵ which in its interplay with race, gender, and class makes up a powerful multilayered consciousness of subalternity, creative resistance, and emancipation. I target the big-picture implications of microlevel experiences of Latinx folks like Arturo. These are folks at once self-identified and othered as disabled. They, by clinging to the political identity implications of this intersectional label (especially as people of color with disabilities), are bridging both global south and global north contexts. They are the embodiment of radical solidarity and emancipatory learning.

Defining and making sense of radical solidarity, emancipatory learning, and radical agency as relevant to LatDisCrit

Both radical solidarity and emancipatory learning are long-term existential modes of becoming. This means that they express as nonlinear modes of identity development. In their complex contours, they shape life trajectories of resistance or conformity for intersectionally subaltern/oppressed individuals and groups. They operate in decolonial spaces (e.g., global north tribal reservations, rehabilitation settings, every instance where these people’s embodiment makes a fuss via the transgression of normalcy’s alterity limits and thus gets regulated and controlled).⁶

The substance of emancipatory learning resides in the continuous reflexive unearthing of what and how emancipation becomes possible, sustainable, and/or stifled. Radical solidarity, on the other hand, is about the relational make-up of alliance formation and networking toward collective decolonial modes of resistance and change making. Radical agency is another core concept I will use throughout the book. It alludes to the very heart of the dynamic trajectory of nonlinear change attempts and successes in an interplay between desire and resistance, freedom and unfreedom, learning and unlearning, will, memory, forgetting, and betrayal.⁷ These are things that subaltern intersectional actors undergo as they try to collaboratively subvert the relational, ideological, and systemic status quo elements that keep them at the margins of dignity-granting, embodied modes of social justice and equitable inclusivity.⁸ In his essay “Extension or Communication,” Paulo Freire⁹ stresses that education “is communication and dialogue … it is not the transference of knowledge, but the encounter of subjects in dialogue in search of the significance of the object of knowing and thinking.” In this sense, the collaborative subverting intrinsic to radical agency and radical solidarity involves at once a process of reflexive self-educating and dialectical ways of alterity dialogue with those who challenge our identitarian foundations of sameness.¹⁰

Thus, it could be said that Arturo is a subversive embodiment of LatDisCrit in action. In broad terms, LatDisCrit integrates critically LatCrit¹¹ and DisCrit.¹² These are two very important intersectional bodies of literature. They look at the interplay of race/ethnicity, diasporic cultures, historical sociopolitics, and disability with regard to multiple Latinx identities in mostly global north contexts. Global south/transmodern epistemologies are also firmly incorporated into the LatDisCrit equation, especially among decolonial Latinx and intersectionally grounded critical feminist political philosophers.¹³

I said in the preceding paragraph that Arturo is “an embodiment,” not “the embodiment” of LatDisCrit by any means. First, Arturo’s intersectional disability¹⁴ outlook is restricted to a particular set of existential, hermeneutic, material precarity, performative, and ideological experiences. Second, and most importantly, Arturo is what Chicanx scholar Tara J. Yosso¹⁵ calls a “counter-storytelling” archetype. This does not mean that Arturo is a fictional character invented by the author. Arturo is critically real, to use the onto-philosophical language employed by critical realist thinkers such as Margaret Archer and Roy Bhaskar.¹⁶

Arturo’s critical reality status is associated with the fact that I follow critical race theory (CRT) methodological traditions. In line with these traditions, I filter my intersectional treatment of agency through critical counterstories. These are selected testimonial instances of real experiential occurrences. These counterstories are construed in such a way that they engender (very much in the way that wisdom parables do) metatheory avenues for emancipatory and practice-oriented reflexivity.¹⁷ In other words, I depart from the idea that experientially grounded values and knowledge paradigms make possible emancipatory learning and collective resistance. Emancipatory resistance is not only an external manifestation but an embodiment of values. Therefore, understanding/explaining these underlying values and epistemological components allows for a deeper hermeneutic analysis of the roots of resistance that can lead to emancipation/liberation. Emancipation/liberation should by no means be an outcome that actors achieve once and for all. Thus, counterstories serve to unearth these complex processes, exposing the value and multiple knowledge metanarratives that make them possible and/or hinder their liberation fruits.

Making sense of LatDisCrit through Arturo’s experientially grounded counterstory

The self (Arturo’s just like anybody’s) is historically developed and fluid. Its formation simultaneously contains domination and liberation components. These components get collectively activated through reflexive critique and alterity manifestations.¹⁸ These manifestations are conscious and unconscious. They are often triggered by external dimensions of the very dynamics of oppression and exploitation intended to perpetuate status quo modes of domination, either deepening hegemonic dynamics or awakening emancipation/liberation utopias.¹⁹

Because of this, I use existential becoming in the tradition of Kierkegaard.²⁰ Critical theory thinkers such as Adorno and Marcuse²¹ challenge Kierkegaard’s and other versions of existentialism because they find it incompatible with their Hegelian theory of historical dialectics toward emancipation. I, on the contrary, like precisely the flow of epistemological and axiological ambiguity these approaches to existentialism introduce. Their treatment brings about a sort of proto-postmodern ethos, especially in the political philosophy of “Latinidad,” or what I will often opt to call “trans-Latinidades” throughout the book (to emphasize the many ways Latinxness is embodied, suffered, and/or embraced).²² This kind of existential ambiguity has been intrinsic to Latinx radical agency as it relates the whole tradition to the aesthetics of “el Quixote” with its stubborn utopian character, its transgressive sense of resistance.²³

Getting b...