by Nelson Maldonado-Torres

about Nelson Maldonado-Torres

Nelson Maldonado-Torres is Professor of Latino and Caribbean Studies and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. He is the author of Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity.

Sovereignty

Whether implicity or explicity, questions of sovereignty haunt Latina/o consciousness, Latina/o identity, and Latina/o studies. The same is arguably true of all other colonized and racialized forms of consciousness, identities, and studies. The reason is that part of what it means to be a colonial and/or racial subject is to lack the conditions of possibility to successfully achieve full recognition and full participation as a member of a sovereign people and of a sovereign state in the modern world. Being sovereign is considered to be, in turn, a central feature of what is to be modern, which means that belonging to or exclusion from modernity is at stake in the claim to be sovereign. Latinas/os lack the possibility of claiming (modern Western) sovereignty because, among other considerations, they overwhelmingly experience forms of second-class citizenship or are not U.S. citizens while living, working, and having families in the United States. They are perceived as perpetual foreigners whose “real” habitat or place of origin is seen as a kind of failed state in a region of the world where people lack the capacity to govern themselves. And it is not the case that living in the United States overwhelmingly gives Latinas/os some...