## 1. Current Issues



Current work on Latinx philosophy tends to cluster into several
subject matters: (1) accounts of group identity, including accounts of
the phenomenology and senses of self in Latinxs; (2) broadly social
and political questions about Latinxs, with a special eye towards
citizenship and immigration issues; and (3) a range of
metaphilosophical issues, including efforts to identify or expand the
canon of Latinx philosophy, and efforts to speak to various concerns
about the status of Latinxs in the profession of philosophy.


### 1.1 Group Identity



A recurring issue within Latinx philosophy is the characterization of
Latinxs. US and Latin American social identity categories are
oftentimes distinct, and products of different racial and social
categories. *Latinx* is a term used exclusively within the
United States, or nearly so, such that people from Latin America would
not ordinarily think of themselves as Latinxs, unless or until they
reside in the United States. Within the United States, the social
category has had various labels, including "Hispanic",
"Latino", "Latina/o", "Latin@".
The adoption of particular labels has served varied roles in response
to interests in self-identification, coalition building, marketing
pressures, and government bureaucratic interests (Alcoff 1999; Gracia
2000).



In the first decade of the twenty-first century philosophers began to
offer systematic accounts of the social category of Hispanics or
Latinxs, the way the category functions as an identity category, and
how Latinxs fit in (or don't) within the racial and ethnic
matrix of the United States. Three approaches emerged: an
*ethnoracial* account, a *cultural ethnic group*
account, and a *familial-historical* view.



Linda Alcoff (2000) has maintained that Latinxs are best understood as
an ethnoracial group--i.e., a group whose identity in some
contexts functions as a racial group, and in others as an ethnic
group. As a group, Latinxs do not neatly fit within US racial and
ethnic matrix, she has argued (Alcoff 1999, 2000, 2003, 2006). The
racial diversity of peoples descended from Latin America, which span
the full set of standard US racial categories, make Latinxs an
unstable category in US social identity categories. Thus, how the term
"Latinx" works in ordinary discourse--and its
significance in lived experience--tends to vary in light of the
interaction of locally predominant Latinx group (i.e., Mexicans,
Dominicans, Cubans, etc.), with US racial categories. The only way to
do justice to this complexity, she thinks, is to recognize Latinxs as
occupying a hybrid social category, i.e., an *ethnorace*.



On J. Angelo Corlett's (2003) account, Latinxs constitute an
ethnic group unified by broadly cultural features, including such
features as language competence in a "Latino" language,
possession of a traditional "Latino" last name,
self-recognition, and in- and out-group recognition. However, for
public policy purposes, Corlett maintains that to be Latinx is a
matter of genealogy or descent from certain Latin American groups. On
this approach, in public policy contexts the category *Latinx*
functions in a manner more typical of a racial group, and not like a
group unified historically contingent cultural practices (cf. Blum
2009).



In contrast to the cultural ethnic group account, Jorge Gracia's
*familial-historical* view grounds ethnic group membership in
historical ties, such that members of the group need not share any
other features, cultural or otherwise (2008). Apart from the very
general constraint of a suitable historical tie to the post-1492
events involving the Iberian Peninsula and the Americas, Latinxs in
one time and place can have some characteristics in common that are
lacked by Latinxs in another time and
 place.[2]
 Depending on the local norms that configure contingent (and often
scalar) understandings of group membership, one can be Latinx without
speaking Spanish or Portuguese, without partaking in various cultural
practices associated with the identity, and so on. Gracia thus rejects
both the cultural continuity account and the public policy
genealogical account emphasized by Corlett.



Beyond attempts to characterize the category of Latinx, and efforts to
identify how it does (or should) operate in discourse, philosophers
have also considered the distinctive challenges and puzzles of Latinx
identity in the face of US social identity categories (e.g., Lugones
1987; Mendieta 1999; Schutte 2000; Alcoff 2000; see also Lewis
forthcoming and Spencer 2018). One important strand of this
literature--largely grounded in the reflections of Latina
feminist philosophers--has focused on the idea that the condition
of being Latinx (and, especially, Latina) has tended to produce
distinct senses of self-identity that resists easy integration into a
unified self (Lugones 1987, 1994; Schutte 2000; Barvosa 2008; Ortega
2016). These works frequently take up and explore particular forms of
marginalization, as well as strategies of response to them in light of
the varied but distinctive social positions of Latinxs.


### 1.2 Social and Political Philosophy



If the first decade of twenty-first century work on Latinx philosophy
was dominated by questions of identity--in particular, of
specifying the nature, experiences, and even preferred term for
Latinxs--the second decade might best be characterized as
involving the arrival of questions in political philosophy (including
citizenship and immigration) and the development of a more pronounced
metaphilosophical sensibility. 



Writ large, a good deal of recent Latinx philosophy has centered on
the consequences of demographic changes in the United States, and on
reactions to them. Philosophers have argued that Latinxs constitute
distinctive challenges for conventional understandings of social and
political theory in the United States (Mendieta 2003; Gracia 2005;
Alcoff 2006). In particular, the "browning" of America
(Sundstrom 2008) and the implications of these demographic
transformation for whiteness (Alcoff 2015; Mendoza 2017) have been
subjects of important discussions.



This engagement with questions in political philosophy is not entirely
new, of course. For example, there has been ongoing philosophical
debate about the status of Latinxs with respect to affirmative action
(Corlett 2003; Gracia 2008; McGary 2013; Gracia 2013). Within the
recent expansion of work in political philosophy, however, two issues
have emerged as particularly salient: citizenship and immigration
ethics.



Citizenship, and its entanglement with race, has a long and
complicated history within Latin America (Quijano 2000, von Vacano
2012). The same is true in the United States, where the boundaries of
citizenship of oftentimes been carved with an eye towards the racial
consequences of those boundaries (Silva 2015a). The upshot of these
complex but distinct histories is that Latinx populations sometimes
stand in systematically produced situations of unorthodox citizenship.
For example, Puerto Ricans are US citizens, but those living on the
island cannot vote in US presidential elections. The Tohono
O'odham Nation, recognized by the US Bureau of Indian Affairs,
is a tribal group divided by the US/Mexico border. Members born from
those enrolled in the tribe on the US side are US citizens, even if
they are born in Mexico and live with their fellow tribe members who
are Mexican citizens (Luger 2018).



More generally, immigration rights, border politics, and the status of
populations that move across national boundaries have been the subject
of particularly sustained discussions within Latinx philosophy
(Cisneros 2013; Mendoza 2016; Reed-Sandoval 2016a; Orosco 2016a).
Mendoza (2016), for example, has argued that even if we suppose that
nation states have some right to control their borders, it does not
follow that immigration enforcement is permissible or ethically
desirable. Reed-Sandoval (2016b) has argued that some populations
within the larger web of immigration patterns (specific Oaxacan
communities, in particular) have distinctive rights of migration,
given their nature as a transborder community.


### 1.3 Metaphilosophical Issues



Beyond political philosophy, a number of philosophers have taken up
questions about the relationship of Latinxs to the discipline of
philosophy. One preoccupation concerns the relatively low numbers of
Latinx philosophers in the US academy (Gracia 2000, 2008; R. Sanchez
2013). Others have written about whether Latinxs are subject to bias
of some or another sort (Madva 2016). Several philosophers have argued
that the particular cultural practices of the discipline of philosophy
create special barriers for Latinxs (Gracia 2000: 159-188; C.
Sanchez 2016, 135-140; see also essays in Yancy
2012).



A different family of broadly metaphilosophical endeavors has focused
on the identification of conceptual continuities and historical ties
between Latinxs, Latinx philosophy, and other philosophical movements.
For example, Gregory Pappas (2011), Carlos Sanchez (2016:
93-112), and Jose-Antonio Orosco (2016a) have taken up
the question of whether philosophical pragmatism is continuous with,
useful for, or particularly representative of Latinx thought and
culture.



Another notable interest for some philosophers working within Latinx
philosophy has been the expansion of what figures are canonical for
philosophy, and in particular, for Latinx philosophy, or more
specifically, a Mexican American philosophy. Orosco (2016b) has argued
that important figures in the Chicano Civil Rights
movement--Cesar Chavez and Armando Rendon, among
others--ought to count as philosophers. In a different direction,
Carlos Sanchez's work in the history of Mexican
philosophy--including translations and discussions of Mexican
existentialism (2012, 2016)--has been animated by the goal of
expanding the philosophical canon in ways that might helpfully speak
to contemporary Mexican American people and their circumstances (see
the introduction and conclusion of Sanchez 2016).



Surveying the state of contemporary work in Latinx philosophy suggests
an initial taxonomy of the field. First, there is a distinct set of
questions about *who* is Latinx, the nature of the category,
and whether it makes sense to speak of there being any interesting
unity to the category. We can characterize this first set of issues as
*categorical* or *identitarian*.



Second, as we have seen, there is a set of relatively "first
order" or *substantive* philosophical questions within
Latinx philosophy. These include questions about racialization of
citizenship; the ethics of immigration; matters in political and
social philosophy that impinge upon and that are structured by
Latinxs; the peculiar features of transnational identities for some
Latinx groups; the nature of intersectionality in the Latinx case;
epistemic injustice concerning Latinxs; social, moral, and political
questions about, for example, the role of Latinxs within the academic
discipline of philosophy.



Third, there are questions about whether a Latinx philosophy
essentially involves--or ought to involve--aspirations for
liberation, whether Latinx philosophy is ultimately a form of identity
politics, whether it makes sense to talk of ethnic philosophies at
all, and even questions about what sort of work regarding Latinxs
(scholarly or otherwise) properly counts as philosophy. Call these
*metaphilosophical* questions about Latinx philosophy.



Roughly, categorical questions (the first cluster) concern how we
ought to understand the *Latinx* part of Latinx philosophy.
Metaphilosophical questions (the third cluster) concern how we ought
to under the *philosophy* part of Latinx
 philosophy.[3]
 Together, the presumptions one has about these questions structure a
good deal of the shape of what constitutes substantive Latinx
philosophy. Some of these issues are canvassed in
 SSSS3-4.


## 2. Origins



Accounting for the origins of Latinx philosophy is a difficult
business, both because of the messy, slowly-emerging nature of
academic fields and because of special puzzles about how to
characterize the field (see
 SS3,
 below). Philosophers have only recently begun to speak of *Latinx
philosophy* (and/or *Latino* and *Latina/o
philosophy*) (Gracia 2008; Mendieta 2011; R. Sanchez 2013;
Llorente 2013; Millan & Deere 2017). However, prior to the
currency of the term, philosophers were already doing philosophical
work that recognizably constituted Latinx philosophy, i.e., philosophy
concerned with Latinxs.



Although a wider and more detailed history is still waiting to be
told, what follows is a provisional and partial reconstruction of
several intertwined origins of Latinx philosophy. This account focuses
on four sources of contemporary Latinx philosophy: the Chicano
movement, the history of Latin American philosophy, Latina feminism,
and recent efforts at philosophy that is explicitly conceived of as
Latinx philosophy.


### 2.1 Chicano Thought



One way to reconstruct the origins of Latinx philosophy goes through
the history of the Chicano
 movement.[4]
 The Chicano movement was never any one thing, but in broad
brushstrokes, it tended to be distinguished by a kind of cultural
nationalism that identified a people--a Chicano
*raza*--with a homeland--Aztlan--while
also emphasizing an imperative of liberation for those people and,
sometimes, for that land (I. Garcia 2015). If we think of early
Chicano thought as a species of Latinx philosophy, then early Chicano
thought is a natural candidate for one origin of Latinx
philosophy.



Important articulations of the movement's
aspirations--including *El plan espiritual de
Aztlan*--employed concepts borrowed from twentieth
century Mexican philosophy. Prominently among these was Jose
Vasconcelos' *La raza cosmica*. In the prologue to
*La raza cosmica,* Vasconcelos claimed that Latin
America had the opportunity to be the future birthplace of a new and
final race that would integrate the best cultural features from the
rest of the world. The work's emphasis on seeing humankind as
divided by race, its articulation of a glorious indigenous past in the
Americas, its assertion that the age of the White race was coming to
an end, and its prophetic tone of racial uplift rooted in the peoples
of Latin America provided a ready framework for articulating some of
the Chicano movement's early aspirations (cf. Romano 1969).



There is some evidence that syllabi of the period included work by the
Mexican philosopher Samuel Ramos, and by Patrick Romanell, an
important English-language discussant of Mexican philosophy
(Soldatenko
 1996).[5]
 Moreover, Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset's
perspectivism--roughly, the idea that knowledge is perspectival,
and frequently structured by features of culture, time, and
place--may have filtered into the self-understanding of parts of
the movement, in part because of his putative influence on Mexican
figures, the availability of translations of his work, and some
discussion of him in the work of Octavio Paz. Nevertheless, systematic
attempts to pursue anything like a Chicanx philosophy in a form that
might be recognized as academic philosophy was rare. In general, the
Chicano movement was not marked by frequent or sustained attempts to
elaborate an explicit theoretical foundation in philosophical terms
(I. Garcia 2015).



Nevertheless, there were some attempts at doing philosophy in a
distinctively Chicano vein. Perhaps the most notable example was Elihu
Carranza's *Chicanismo: Philosophical Fragments* (1978).
It is an unusual text. It owes its structure and sensibility in part
to Kierkegaard's *Philosophical Fragments*, and each of
the main chapters has a pseudonymous author. At the same time, its
concern and motivations openly draw from Mexican philosopher Samuel
Ramos' critical investigation into a supposedly shared
"Mexican" psychological profile. In Carranza's case,
Chicanxs (and Chicano Studies) are the
 subject.[6]



Despite some threads of influence from Mexican philosophy (for an
overview, see Soldatenko 1996), philosophical work on Chicanxs (and
Latinxs more generally) seems to have been limited to work by those
outside the discipline of philosophy, at least until the later
renaissance of Latina feminist philosophy. Moreover, the nature of
early Chicanx thought presents an ambiguous case for the origins of a
Latinx philosophy.



First, especially in the early period of the Chicano Movement there
was comparatively little systematic concern for articulating a
theoretical framework that encompassed Latinos more generally. Second,
a good deal of the symbolic framework of the movement did not readily
generalize to other groups of Latinxs. For example, the mestizo racial
narrative has proven to be problematic in a variety of ways and it
does not readily extend to all Latinx groups (cf. Velazco y Trianosky
2009; Gallegos forthcoming). Moreover, documents like the Treaty of
Guadalupe, and the appeal to an indigenous--especially
Aztec--past, cannot be used in the same way to anchor a shared
identity with other Latinx groups (or even those groups of
Mexican-descended people who cannot trace their ancestry to the
Aztecs). Third, it would be something of a cold irony for one strand
of the cultural-nationalist (and sometimes separatist wing) of the
Chicano movement to be thought of as having constituted the origins of
a broader, pan-Latinx intellectual project. Those strands of the
Chicano movement were often animated by a resistance to anything that
failed to recognize the cultural specificity of Chicanxs. On such
views, acceptance of a Latinx identity necessarily entails a risk of
cultural dissociation from the specifically Mexican roots of Chicanx
identity, and brings with it an impermissible homogenization via a
pan-Latinx
 category.[7]
 For that reason, it would sound strange to some activists and
theorists to frame Chicanx thought as an early exemplar of Latinx
philosophy.



Still, if one did think it plausible that Chicanx thought was an
origin for Latinx philosophy, it might seem natural to find the origin
of Latinx philosophy still further back in Latin American philosophy.
Indeed, there is a case to be made for that more distal origin.


### 2.2 Latin American Precursors



Philosophy within Latin America was, for many centuries, undertaken
with a sense of its general continuity with European philosophy.
However, by the second half of the nineteenth century a number of
prominent thinkers in Latin America began to speak of the possibility
or need of a distinctively Latin American philosophy (Magallon
1991: 212; Gracia 1995: 462). In his "Ideas for a Course in
Philosophy" ["Ideas para un curso de filosofia
contemporanea"] Argentinian Juan Alberdi
(1812-1884) called for the creation of national philosophies in
Latin America. The idea was that these philosophical theories were to
be responses to local social and political circumstances, expressing
"the most vital and highest needs of these countries"
(1842 [1978: 14] translation by entry author). Similarly,
Andres Bello (1848) and Francisco Bilbao (1856) called for
philosophical work to be responsive to national and broadly Latin
American circumstances, and to separate itself from mere imitation of
European thought.



It is unclear how influential any of these proposals were (Nuccetelli
2017: SS2.2.3), and whether they were really understood as calls
for radical originality in Latin American thought, as opposed to
invitations to be more attentive to local circumstances when deploying
philosophical proposals that largely originated elsewhere. Still,
these gestures came to be regarded as early canonical statements of
the need for an autochthonous Latin American philosophy.



Proposals to develop an autochthonous Latin American philosophy
figured prominently in the early to mid-twentieth century
philosophical scene of Mexico, subsequently spreading to other parts
of Latin America. The concerns for a distinctively Mexican and Latin
American philosophy figured in the work of Jose Gaos, Leopoldo
Zea, Emilio Uranga, and Octavio Paz. In their concern for the
particular circumstances of Mexico (and less frequently, Latin
America), this work extended threads already present in earlier work,
e.g., that of Jose Vasconcelos, Samuel Ramos, and Ortega y
Gasset. However, mid-twentieth century concerns for articulating
features of a putatively Mexican circumstance, and subsequent efforts
by Zea to articulate a broadly pan-Latin American philosophical
picture, ultimately gave rise to several generations of critical
reactions concerning the proper nature and aspirations of philosophy
in Latin America (for discussion, see Nuccetelli 2017; Gracia &
Vargas 2018).



As we saw in the prior section, invocations of Latin American
philosophers sometimes played a role in the articulation of the
ideological aspirations of the Chicano movement. So, it is tempting to
read at least some early efforts at a Latinx philosophy as inheritors
of a prior Latin American tradition of efforts at a self-consciously
autochthonous body of philosophical
 work.[8]
 This narrative is not unproblematic, however. It is unclear how
systematic and serious the philosophical influence of Mexican
philosophy was on the Chicano movement. It was sporadically present,
to be sure, and there were various attempts to appeal to Mexican
philosophers as antecedents or intellectual forerunners of the
movement. Nonetheless, apart from providing a sense of intellectual
forerunners and a license for advocating for curricular changes, there
is only sporadic evidence of efforts at engagement with that work in a
way continuous with Mexican and US academic philosophy.



What makes those tenuous connections to Latin American philosophy
somewhat more intriguing as an origin story for Latinx philosophy is
that the mainstream of current work in Latinx philosophy reflects at
least some familiarity with the history of Latin American philosophy
(cf. R. Sanchez 2013; Millan & Deere 2017). Beyond
familiarity with the history of Latin American philosophy, there is
also a variety of more recent strands of influence from Latin American
philosophy of liberation, postcolonial, and decolonial philosophy into
the work of several Latinx philosophers (e.g., those in Alcoff &
Mendieta 2000, also, Maldonado-Torres 2008, Lugones 2010, Silva 2015b,
Ruiz
 2016).[9]
 So, even if early strands of Latinx philosophy were not
intellectually connected to impulses for an autochthonous Latin
American philosophy, or otherwise systematic engagements with themes
and concerns in Latin American philosophy, later strands clearly came
to have those
 connections.[10]
 For this reason, is not entirely unreasonable to locate the origin of
at least some important forms of Latinx philosophy in impulses to
autochthonous philosophy within Latin American philosophy.


### 2.3 Latina Feminism



Richard Bernstein once declared the following:



> 
> 
> Let me be fully explicit. I am not questioning that there is Hispanic
> philosophy or Latin American philosophy, or even that some Hispanic
> Americans in the United States are concerned with their history and
> traditions. I am questioning whether there *now* exists
> something that we can identify as Hispanic American philosophy. (2001:
> 50)
> 
> 
> 



At the time, such skepticism was plausibly the standard view among
those who entertained the question of whether Latinx or Hispanic
American philosophy existed. However, there is a compelling case to be
made that such a philosophy already existed when Bernstein wrote those
words, albeit pursued under another name. That body of work is Latina
feminist philosophy. It constitutes perhaps the best proximal
candidate for the formation of a distinctively Latinx philosophy.
Unlike the philosophical gestures of the Chicano movement, the
development of Latina feminist philosophy constituted (and continues
to constitute) a substantial body of disciplinarily recognizable
work--albeit one that has had to fight for its recognition. And,
unlike Latin American philosophical work, which has a more tenuous
link to US Latinxs, Latina feminism is centrally focused on US
Latinxs.



Discourse about a specifically Latina feminism extends at least as far
back as the late 1970s. However, the idea of a self-consciously Latina
theorizing by philosophers (and philosophically-minded theorists
working outside of philosophy departments), began to emerge in the
late
 1980s.[11]
 If there is a founding text of Latina feminist philosophy, it is
plausibly Gloria Anzaldua's *Frontera/Borderlands*
 (1987).[12]
 Anzaldua was not herself trained as an academic philosopher,
but her writing inspired generations of more traditionally trained
academic philosophers, many of whom continue to reflect on, revisit,
and draw from the distinctive phenomenology, vocabulary, concerns, and
methodology expressed in her
 work.[13]
 Anzaldua's work pulled together threads of feminist,
queer, and Chicana thought, and situated them the US/Mexico border
context. In doing so, she gave expression to a distinctive range of
experiences and concerns that had, until that point, been mostly
invisible to academic work in Chicano studies, feminism, and academic
philosophy.



Other self-consciously Latina feminist writing by academic
philosophers followed. Important work in this vein includes essays by
Lugones (1994, 2003) and Schutte (1998, 2000), and monographs by
Alcoff (2006) and Ortega (2016). Much of this work emphasizes the
importance of lived experience, the significance of the social ties
and the norms governing them, and the unique ways in which gender
interacts with Latina-hood. In recent years, this literature has been
marked by a reinvigoration of a broadly phenomenological approach to
identity, selfhood, oppression, alienation, and marginalization.



The case for thinking of Latina feminist philosophy as plausibly the
most important origin of Latinx philosophy is straightforward: from
the 1980s onward, self-identified Latina feminist philosophers were
exploring a wide range of philosophical issues concerning agency,
epistemology, and politics, especially as structured by gender. Within
that matrix of issues, a central recurring issue in that literature
was (and continues to be) the lived consequences of
*latinidad*, or the property of being Latinx. As such, this
work has as much a claim to being Latinx philosophy as any
philosophical work that has been produced under the label.



To be sure, given the focus on gender, Latina feminist philosophy has
not always been explicitly concerned about the global status of
Latinxs *qua* Latinxs (as opposed to, for example, being
focused on Latinas *qua* Latinas). For example, Lugones'
observations about the emergence of different selves in the context of
world-traveling (1987) as well as her thoughts about the tacit
metaphysics presupposed by the discourse of purity (1994) are intended
to offer particular insight into the condition of Latinas. However,
the central insights in these works plausibly generalizes to Latinxs
in general, and perhaps beyond. Similarly, Schutte's (1998)
reflections about the peculiar dilemma of visibility for
Latinas--they must either erase their Latinidad or be able to
show that their facility with multiple cultures is beneficial in the
Anglo-American public sphere--is not unfamiliar to many Latinxs
more generally, and indeed, to a variety of other social identity
groups.



At this stage, it is difficult to do extensive work within Latinx
philosophy without engaging with the work of Latina feminist
philosophers. In light of these considerations, and the relatively
direct connections in motivations and subjects of theorizing, it is
otiose to resist the idea that Latina feminist philosophy is a main,
if not *the* main proximal origin to what we now recognize as
Latinx philosophy.


### 2.4 Self-Consciously Latinx Philosophy



There is a final thread to the origin of Latinx philosophy that merits
attention: the emergence of a self-aware field, a field that thinks of
itself as engaged in explicitly Latinx philosophy. At roughly the end
of the twentieth century, a group of US-based academic philosophers
began to frame their work in terms of its significance for Latinx
populations in the United States. For example, Eduardo Mendieta (1999)
explored the complexities of US citizenship and the "becoming
Hispanic" that is sometimes involved in Latinx identity. Alcoff
(2000, 2006) explored the difficulty of thinking of Latinxs as simply
a race or simply an ethnic group, and in general, the complexity of
lived social identities in the US context. Gracia (2000, 2008) and
Corlett (2000, 2003) each offered accounts of the nature of group
membership, and explored the consequences of these things for concrete
political questions, such as affirmative action.



All of this work was explicitly about Latina/os, and is now rightly
thought of as squarely in the ambit of Latinx philosophy. It was also
true that when it was written, it was not regularly thought of as a
contribution to Latinx philosophy, per se. As we saw above, to the
extent that scholars considered the possibility, they tended to deny
that such a field existed (cf. Bernstein 2001). So, even when
Latinx-focused work was undertaken partly in conversation with
developments in Africana philosophy, Asian-American philosophy, and
various developments in ethnic studies, the work of Latinx-specific
philosophy was typically understood as a contribution to, for example,
the philosophy of race, or as a piece of social and political
philosophy.



By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, this
presumption began to change. A body of self-described Latinx
philosophy began to emerge, with all the usual academic apparatus
surrounding it, along with more frequent usages of the term
"Latinx philosophy" and its variants (R. Sanchez
 2013).[14]


## 3. Defining Latinx Philosophy



This entry has relied on a particular conception of Latinx philosophy,
namely, philosophy focused on (primarily) US Latinxs. In the
terminology that follows, this is a *narrow scope* and
*subject-based* characterization of the field; narrow in terms
of how "Latinx" is understood, and subject-based in topic,
as opposed to a construal of the field based on the identity of the
authors. Each of these presumptions--about scope and whether a
subject-based characterization is apt--is subject to dispute.
First, there is a disagreement about whether "Latinx"
ought to be understood expansively (as including both Latin Americans
and US Latinxs) or whether it ought to be understood narrowly (as
focused on US
 Latinxs).[15]
 The second axis of disagreement concerns whether Latinx philosophy
should be thought of as philosophy produced *by* Latinxs
(Gracia 2008) or as philosophy *about* Latinxs (cf.
Reed-Sandoval 2016a: 11).


### 3.1 Wide vs. Narrow Scope



On the question of scope, a more expansive conception of the field
tends to take its cue from the work of Jorge Gracia. Gracia
characterizes Hispanic/Latinx philosophy as an *ethnic
philosophy*, that is, the philosophy produced by an ethnic group.
In his groundbreaking *Hispanic/Latino Identity* (2000), Gracia
argues for the idea of a Hispanic philosophy, understood as philosophy
produced by members of the ethnic group *Hispanics*. On
Gracia's account--the "Familial-Historical
View"--Hispanics constitute an ethnic group unified by
historical connections to the events following 1492 and the Iberian
peninsula's subsequent role in the Americas. Putting aside some
complexities, he holds that Hispanics include the people of the
Iberian Peninsula, Latin America, and their descendants in, for
example, the United States.



In later work, Gracia explicitly recognizes that, in at least some
contexts, there are important reasons to emphasize the term Latino
rather than Hispanic (see Gracia 2008, esp. 58-9). In
acknowledging this, he does not abandon the idea that "Hispanic
philosophy" picks out an explanatorily important thing. For
Gracia, what makes Hispanic philosophy interesting as a category of
philosophical work is that the underlying historical ties that define
the maximal limits of the ethnic group (recall: roughly, historical
connection to the Iberian-influenced aftermath of 1492) also structure
important features of philosophical work by that group.



Gracia's thought is that these historical connections matter:
one cannot understand the work of Las Casas and Clavijero, for
example, without understanding the significance of scholastic work in
Spain. And, one cannot understand the work of Latin American liberals
and positivists without understanding the web of historical ties that
followed from Iberian colonialism. Certainly, one cannot understand
early twentieth century Latin American philosophy without
understanding the Iberian-to-Latin American intellectual connections
that go through Jose Ortega y Gasset or Jose Gaos. So,
on Gracia's account, the term "Hispanic philosophy"
earns its theoretical keep by organizing our conception of things in a
way that informatively characterizes some contingent but nevertheless
real and informative feature of the world.



In the context of this account of Hispanic and Latin American
philosophy, Gracia introduces the term *Latino philosophy* to
pick out "philosophical work produced by Latinos both in Latin
America and the United States" (2008: 129). This way of
formulating the category is deceptively simple. Gracia accepts a
broadly contextualist understanding of what it is to be Latino, the
consequence of which is that "[w]hat Latino philosophy is, when
it is understood ethnically, can be asked only in the context of the
Latino ethnos" (2008: 141). That is, whether a work of
philosophy counts as a work of *Latino* philosophy is never a
transhistorical fact, as it were, but always something indexed to a
local, historically-specific standard given by the ethnos.



Gracia understands himself to be committed to a kind of
non-essentialism about both Latinxs and Hispanics. Although there is
the general fact of an ethnos-defining set of historical events to
which many people are related, the standards of membership in the
group is always contingent on those facts *plus* local facts
about which particular kinds and degrees of relations matter. So,
whether Frantz Fanon--born in Martinique--counts as a Latino
philosopher depends in part of what a given, historically specific
standard of Latino membership
 specifies.[16]




Gracia's original and distinctive proposal for how to understand
the term Latinx philosophy was perhaps the first account to explicitly
define the term "Latino philosophy". It has the virtue of
being continuous with his well-developed and extensively defended
accounts of ethnic philosophy, Hispanic philosophy, and Latin American
philosophy. It also faces challenges along multiple dimensions.



First, notice that Gracia's account doesn't specify what
Latinx philosophy actually is, *here and now*. Rather, it gives
us a kind of formula for defining it: we are to look to the ethnic
group's conception of Latinx philosophy. Second, putting aside
the various empirical and conceptual puzzles about how we would
determine the ethnic group's views (surveys? conceptual
analysis? patterns of linguistic usage?), it simply unclear there is
anything in the views of the ethnos that would settle the question.
That is, it is entirely unclear that the ethnos has a conception of
philosophy--much less Latinx philosophy--that would settle
the reference of "Latinx philosophy". Perhaps Gracia would
regard this as an adequate result. Nevertheless, it is easy enough to
see why it might be attractive to others to have a more practicable
account of Latinx philosophy, one that tells us something about what
the term does (or ought to) pick out.



Second, several philosophers have noted that standard usages of
"Latino" or "Latinx" is typically understood
to pick out people living in non-Latin American countries who are
either Latin American immigrants or descendants of Latin Americans
(Llorente 2013: 73; Millan & Deere 2017; see also Mendieta
 2011).[17]
 In contrast, Gracia's conception of Latinos includes Latin
Americans residing in Latin America. An important reason for having a
term to pick out the narrower group--US Latinxs, we might say in
an effort at provisional neutrality--is that the social position
of Latinxs in the United States--and thus, of Latinx philosophers
in the United States--is very different from the social position
of Latin Americans in Latin America, and the position of Latin
American philosophers with respect to philosophy in the United States
and
 beyond.[18]
 Thus, there is reason to be able to pick out and talk about
philosophy that is in some or another way specifically tied to Latinxs
as conventionally understood, i.e., as a population of people outside
of Latin America who are themselves either Latin Americans by origin
or descendants of Latin Americans.



Collectively, these concerns might be put as follows: even if there is
some useful category or property picked out by Gracia's usage of
"Latino", his usage runs afoul of the standard usage of
the term, a term that reflects important differences between
Latin-Americans-in-Latin-America and those people (and their
descendants) who reside outside of Latin America. Thus, if we accept
Gracia's explicitly revisionist
 proposal[19]
 for using "Latino Philosophy"--a proposal according
to which Latin American nationals doing philosophy in Latin America
are doing Latinx philosophy--the worry is that it displaces a
more natural and explanatorily helpful usage of the term.



Renzo Llorente (2013) has made the striking proposal that the
difficulties with Gracia's revisionism about
"Latino"--particularly the way it departs from
exclusively picking out US Latinos--is grounds for abandoning the
term "Latino philosophy". In its stead, he recommends
sticking with the older and more familiar categories of Latin American
and Hispanic philosophy.



This proposal has its own difficulties. For example, it would obscure
work by US Latina feminist philosophers, as well as other contemporary
philosophers working on Latinx-connected issues. Those works all have
a relatively clear claim on being an instance of Latinx philosophy, in
a way that doesn't do violence to either ordinary or standard
specialist understandings of "Latinx" and
"philosophy". Because there is a discernible body of work
there, united by an interest that we can helpfully and accurately
designate with the term "Latinx philosophy", abandoning
the term would produce no gain, but it would entail a loss of
expressive precision.


### 3.2 Source vs. Subject Matter



One might accept a narrower scope for the term "Latinx",
but emphasis that the right understanding of "Latinx
philosophy" is defined in terms of the *source* of the
philosophical work, rather than its subject or content. That is, one
could accept that "Latinx philosophy" picks out Latinxs as
conventionally understood, and treats Latinx philosophy as the
philosophy *produced* by that group, rather than being
philosophy *about* that group. This proposal would respect
standard usage of the term without denying that there can be important
relationships between Hispanic, Latin American, and Latinx philosophy.
Further, it would allow us to think of Latinx philosophy as an ethnic
philosophy, i.e., philosophy (whatever that is) that is produced by a
specific ethnos (whatever that comes to). One appeal to thinking of
Latinx philosophy in this way--as unified by its source (i.e.,
Latinxs)--is that it is continuous with other familiar ways of
characterizing some parts of philosophy. That is, it is a familiar to
thing to characterize some parts of philosophy in terms of their
source (e.g., Asian philosophy; German philosophy; European philosophy
etc.).



However, a source-based characterization of Latinx philosophy remains
at odds with current usage. Consider a Latina philosopher who spends
her life work on the philosophy of quantum mechanics, or on set
theory, or on free will. Suppose she has no interest in social
identity and does not think of her work as in any way informed,
connected to, or directly relevant to Latinxs. On a source-based
account, she would nevertheless count as doing Latinx philosophy. This
seems strange. Inverse cases generate infelicitous results as well.
Consider a scholar who is not Latinx but who exclusively works on
questions of Latinx identity, the politics of Latinx immigration, and
topics in Latina feminism. On a source-based conception, such a
scholar could not be said to be working on Latinx philosophy, at least
not in the sense under consideration.



Current linguistic convention suggests that a subject-based
characterization of the field is preferable. Construing the field as
defined by subject matter--i.e., *philosophy that is concerned
with Latinxs*--gets the right results in the cases mentioned
above. That is, non-Latinxs can do Latinx philosophy, and Latinxs can
do philosophy that isn't Latinx
 philosophy.[20]
 Moreover, subject-based approaches to defining a field is already
familiar from our standard understandings of, for example, ethics,
metaphysics, and epistemology. To be sure, the appeal of a
subject-based characterization depends in large part on whether it
picks out anything of interest. The body of work gestured at in this
entry makes the case for that conception.



Why not pluralism, allowing for different construals of the scope and
content of Latinx philosophy? In everyday discourse, we are prepared
to allow that any number of terms admit of multiple meanings, picking
out different, if sometimes overlapping things. In Southern
California, "Mexican" can refer to both Mexican nationals
and to *n*th-generation US citizens descended from Mexican
 nationals.[21]
 Given the fact that many terms have multiple meanings, perhaps there
is room for both a source-based and subject-based account of Latinx
philosophy? Perhaps there is. Still, there is reason to plump for a
single privileged meaning in disciplinary contexts: labels and
characterizations of a nascent subject matter are the public face of
the field. When a field is more mature and there are plenty of
familiar and undisputed exemplars of it, the precise characterizations
of a field is less pragmatically significant and more a matter of
taxonomical fussiness. In light of this, there seems to be at least
some reason to prefer to think of Latinx philosophy in terms of its
subject matter, i.e., as philosophy concerned in some substantive way
with Latinxs.


## 4. Ongoing Developments



Given how the contents of Latinx philosophy has been partly propelled
by the experiences and interests of Latinxs, it plausibly matters that
the demographics of the philosophers working on Latinx philosophy is
changing. A substantial portion of the early work in Latinx
philosophy, especially work recognized as straightforwardly academic
philosophy, has been done by scholars who were born outside of the
United
 States.[22]
 Over the past decade, however, there has been a marked increase of
work on Latinx philosophy by US-born philosophers, and in particular,
by Mexican American philosophers. Along with this change has been
increased attention in the idea of a specifically "Mexican
American philosophy". It remains to be seen the extent to which
those working on issues within the ambit of Latinx philosophy will
continue to focus on a broader Latinx landscape, as previous
generations have done, or whether newer work will tend to focus on
more narrowly circumscribed topics.



Questions about the demographic makeup of the philosophers and its
consequences for the discipline has been a matter of increased
attention the academy. Presumably, these discussions will continue
until as long as academics remain concerned about discrepancies
between the academy and the populations it serves. However, one thread
that is oftentimes implicit but only infrequently taken up concerns
the possibility of duties (real or imagined, moral or otherwise) that
Latinx scholars have to undertake engagement with Latin American and
Latinx philosophy (Gracia 2000: 159-188; J.L.A. Garcia
2001: 96-7; Covarrubias 2015). It is imaginable that as Latinx
philosophy grows, questions about who does it, what falls into its
ambit, and whether there are obligations to do Latinx philosophical
scholarship in particular ways, will animate discussions within parts
of the field.



A third ongoing development involves more explicit ties between
philosophical work in Latin America and the United States In this
context, a US-based academic field focused on Latinxs risks
perpetuating epistemically and morally fraught practices with respect
to Latin Americans. As noted above, a number of philosophers working
in Latinx philosophy explicitly draw from and interact with aspects of
Latin American philosophy. Similarly, there is some evidence of Latin
American attention on the work of US Latinx
 philosophy.[23]
 Given the differences in comparative support, visibility, and global
prestige of academic work within the United States, it seems plausible
that academic work on Latinx philosophy in the United States will go a
long way towards defining the field internationally, including its
terminology and its chief subjects. It is this fact--US academic
influence on the global academy, and the way it can occlude the
contributions and work of those outside the US scene--that
provides the background for a worrisome set of possibilities about how
we understand Latinxs and their philosophical significance.



From the standpoint of US-based academics, this risk may not be
obvious. After all, the subject *just is* US populations, their
experiences, and the philosophical issues they raise. However, Latinxs
are not *just* US populations. Latinxs are also, for example,
members of the Salvadoran diaspora, indigenous Oaxacan laborers,
Argentinian ex-patriate academics, and so on. Once we recognize these
facts, it is less obvious that US identity categories and frameworks
should be taken as presumptive, fundamental, or guiding when it comes
to understanding the philosophical--phenomenological, conceptual,
social, moral, political, etc.--significance of these
populations. Moreover, taking US identity categories as presumptive
also threatens to re-enact a tradition of
domination-and-description-from-without that has plagued Latin America
since its inception. So, given the fact of a field constructed on US
identity categories, and given the fact of US influence on the global
academy, the construction of the field's categories and
practices (and who may speak authoritatively about them) may itself
become an important subject matter, especially in Latinx-Latin
American academic discussions.



A final development worth noting here concerns methodological
frictions. There are philosophers working in Latinx philosophy whose
philosophical work is substantively structured by liberationist,
activist, or praxis-oriented methodologies. At the same time, there
are philosophers working on Latinx philosophy who are drawn to other
conceptions of philosophy, including versions committed to something
like a putatively disinterested search for truth, and/or philosophy in
the mode of a love of wisdom. Competing visions about what work is
methodologically preferable is a matter of ongoing contestation.



That said, it is not always clear that these differences in
philosophical orientation have the significance they are ordinarily
taken to have. Accounts of the phenomenology of racialized identities
in the US subject to immigration pressures might speak to broader
features of human beings. At the same time, putatively
non-liberationist accounts of, say, the structure of responsible
agency and how oppression alters it, might be thought to provide
resources of its own for more straightforwardly liberationist
theories. So, although the broadly liberationist and
theory-for-its-own-sake threads of the subfield may sometimes find
themselves at cross-purposes, it is unclear that these disagreements
need to result in a deep fissure in the field. For the field as a
whole, one aspiration might be for philosophical work to have
"exemplary validity", i.e., philosophy that teaches us
something about wider features of humanity without losing its cultural
specificity.



Still, there is reason for caution. Philosophical fights about
methodology have consequences for what is viewed as inside and outside
of a field. Moreover, scholars have noted that philosophical borders
are oftentimes particularly vigorously patrolled--and worse, that
this has been especially so for work in Latinx (Ortega 2016:
4-5) and Latin American (Vargas 2007: 61-63) philosophy.
For that reason, it is very likely that what counts as
"good" work, or even as part of the field, will remain a
contested matter.