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.