Document Type

Article

Publication Date

7-1999

Abstract

This essay explores the multiple margins that Latinas inhabit both within majority society and their comunidad Latina because of their compounded outsider status in all their possible communities. Exploring the concept and theme of "Between/Beyond Colors: Outsiders Within Latina/o Communities" elucidates both the challenges and the possibilities the young LatCrit movement presents for Latinas.

From its inception, LatCrit has broadened and sought to reconstruct the race discourse beyond the normalized binary black/white paradigm -- an underinclusive model that effects the erasure of the Latina/o, Native, and Asian experiences as well as the realities of other racial and ethnic groups in this country. Primarily because of Latina/o panethnicity and diversity, the LatCrit challenge should not, and can not, stop with the black/white racial binary. LatCrit's interrogation of the black/white paradigm, dating to the movement's beginnings, has invited us to contest other sites of normativity such as the socially constructed catego ries of foreignness, proper sex/gender roles, and sexuality -- both within the majority culture and our cultura Latina.

This essay thus addresses those insights that LatCrit theorizing offers to the Latina experience looking through the lenses of cultura, (en)gendered fronteras, and sexuality. This cuento of the multifaceted-ness and complexity of the Latina experience reveals how such site is an essential counter-narrative to the either/or formulae that colonize so much scholarly and jurisprudential discourses. The cuento normativo obscures and denies.

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