Latino Studies, Latino/a/X futures: Provocations toward a prospectus

Abstract

Is there a future for Latino/a/X Studies? This question – alternately anxious or ambitious – seems to have been haunting the field for many years. If it can be affirmed with reasonable confidence that the answer to this question is yes, the relative assuredness of the future of Latino Studies as an institutionalized area of academic inquiry may nonetheless be a sign of our domestication. After all, Latino/a/X Studies is a field that has emerged as the site of a potentially subversive and inherently insurgent form of knowledge. This field was always intrinsically an intrusion into the hegemonic and disciplinary organization of knowledge within the university. The more that our collective yet diverse critical project has been assigned its “proper” place, albeit still a diminutive one, within the university, the more that its critical purchase is necessarily at risk of being rendered safe for the dominant epistemic and political projects that govern higher education and its reproduction. Therefore, it seems judicious and productive to posit the question of the future of Latino/a/X Studies as a problem. Scholarship in our field has always been most compelling and relevant when it can illuminate something about the historically specific relationalities that situate Latino/a/Xs at the veritable center of larger processes of social and political formation and transformation, rather than retreating into culturalist insularity and parochialism. Arguably, this has never been so evident as in our present moment of danger during the Trump presidency.