APA Newsletters

Spring 2001
Volume 00, Number 2

Newsletter on Hispanic/Latino Issues in Philosophy

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Latin American Social Thought and Latino/as American Studies*

Walter D. Mignolo
Duke University

Introduction

The topic here are the relationships between social critical thought in Latin America and Latino/as Studies in the U.S. The focus is on the former. I make an effort to look, first, at Latino/as Studies and Latin American Studies (in the U.S.) from the perspective of social and critical thought in Latin America. Secondly, I try to show the similarities of the social and critical thoughts in Latin America and Latino/as Studies. Thirdly, I argue that the transformation of Latin American (Area) Studies would require not only that knowledge production in the "areas" to be studied be recognized. It would be imperative for displacing the "scientific" principles (the distinction between the geopolitical location of the knower and of the known) that inform Latin America and Area Studies and that organize the scientific distribution of labor in a planetary scale. Finally I look at the intersections of the three mentioned domains from the perspective of someone who has some investments in all of them and that believes in the epistemological potentials of critical thought (Lander 2000, Zemelman 2000) in Latin America and of Latino Studies in the U.S. The best possible future I can imagine is the productive tri-logue (or dialogue between three participants) between the three epistemic locations, avoiding the universalistic temptation of subsuming two of them under the third and "right" one. This is the basic principle under which I will make a claim for diversality or epistemic diversity as universal project. That is, A project with many owners with the same amount of shares.

The Problem and the Argument

The argument I would like to advance here is the following. The emergence of Latino/a Studies is forcing scholars and intellectuals interested in geo-historically defined fields of knowledge to start thinking about the end of Latin American Studies (and by extension about Area Studies) as we knew them until today. But in order to advance this argument it is necessary to bring a third party into the conversation. Someone that doesn't have a proper name in the family of "studies" (and as we will see it is not by chance that this is the case), and that can be called knowledge production or social and philosophical thought in Latin America. There is not, there cannot be such a thing as Latin American Studies in Latin America because of the very foundation and raison-d'etre of Area Studies. There were and still are, of course, "institutional branches" or at least institutional connections of LASA (Latin American Studies Association) in several Latin American countries. And journals like Latin American Perspectives and NACLA have been and are important avenues for intellectuals in Latin American, particularly for the possibility of publishing in English. The journals offer also a wonderful place of encounter between intellectuals and social scientists in Latin America and Latinamericanists in the U.S. However, Area (and Latin American) Studies, as its inceptions responded to the needs of the Cold War and the needs of the U.S. to link knowledge of the world with national security (Cline 1966; Rafael 1994; Berger 1995, 66-101; Hilbrunn 1996). Consequently, Area Studies is essentially an invention of the United States of America and it is embedded in the genealogy of Occidentalism and Orientalism, its predecessors in the imaginary of the modern/colonial world. For that very reason it is at odds with intellectual production in Latin America.

Latin American Studies, however, occupies a particular position that shall be kept constantly in mind. The general frame of mind of Area Studies is that after World War II higher education in the U.S. devoted time, effort and money to train scholars on parts of the world that had been remote both geographically and intellectually, from mainstream academic concerns. Latin America, however, wasn't remote in neither of these two aspects. First of all, the Americas, from the extreme north to the extreme south, have one important history in common: they are constitutive of the modern/colonial world and the extension of the West or the Western Hemisphere as Thomas Jefferson labeled it. Therefore, when Latin America becomes part of "the areas to be studied," its epistemic location was different from the one occupied by Africa and Asia. The establishment of Area Studies placed Latin America in a double bind in relation to the U.S. On the one hand, the common history of colonialism and nation building; om the other, the differential history of Europe (e.g., Catholics and Protestants; Anglos and Latins; the North and the South) was being reproduced in the former colonies. The emergence of a Latino population in the U.S. and of Latino/as scholarship is embedded in this double bind.

The Geohistorical Scenario

Let me prepare the scenario by making present the shadow of an absence. In none of the Latin American and Caribbean countries you would be able to find an institutional locus of knowledge named "European or United States of America Studies", that would be the equivalent of Latin American Studies in the U.S. Or, if you were be able to find such institutions, their function would not be equivalent to the functions of similar institutions in Europe or in the U.S. On the other hand, the emergence in the U.S. of centers or institute labeled North American Studies (that includes the U.S., Mexico and Canada), are interesting new developments in the tradition of Area Studies. However, I cannot pursue this issue here. I would limit myself to point out that this phenomena shall be analyzed in the new configurations of capitalism and the geopolitics of knowledge related to emerging regional configurations (e.g., NAFTA) prompted by the last stage (e.g., after the fall of the Soviet Union) of globalization. In general, institutions such as the British Academy or l'Alliance Francaise, say in Argentina, Bolivia or Brazil, are institutions promoting British or French "culture" in the Third World, and not research institutions to study Europe, Britain or France. The study of French, British or German in Latin American universities is not related to say Argentina's, Brazil's or Bolivia's national security! Furthermore, there has not been massive migrations, including intellectuals, from Europe and the U.S. to Brazil, Bolivia and Argentina that will take European or U.S. studies in Brazil, Bolivia and Argentina and transform them from the perspective of the immigrants or of the European or U.S. ethnic minority. There are then some connections between geo-historical locations and knowledge production on the one hand, and the ratio that links the history of capitalism with the history of Western scholarship on the other. The latter is the issue that will be explored here, taking one particular example. That is, the trilogy of Latino/as and Latin American Studies in the U.S. and social and philosophical thoughts in Latin America. Loci of enunciations are not so much a question of the modern subject as it is a question of coloniality of power and the structure of power and knowledge in the modern/colonial world.

I suspect that this scenario would sound strange to the reader. The fact is that if such scenario doesn't exist and it is difficult to imagine, it is because the very imaginary of the modern/colonial world built into cultures of scholarship and the configuration of areas as fields of studies make it look strange and difficult to imagine. The scenario is beyond the "normal" conceptualization and the assumed location of knowledge. I will explain, first and consequently, how Occidentalism, Orientalism and Area Studies can be understood as a foundational paradigm of the imaginary of the modern/colonial world; that is to say, of modernity/coloniality. And, secondly, I will explore how this imaginary run parallel to the growth and displacement of capitalism from northern Italian city states, to the Iberian Peninsula, to the Netherlands and England and lately to the U.S.

There is a straight, albeit complex, connection between Area Studies (and particularly Latin American Studies) and Occidentalism, a connection that cannot be cast in the same terms than Orientalism, although all of them belong to the same paradigm (Mignolo 1995; 1996). And this is one of the consequences of the place of Latin America within the frame of Area Studies I just mentioned. Let me explain. Occidentalism became a foundational component of the imaginary of the modern/colonial world with the emergence, from the perspective of historical capitalism, of the Atlantic commercial circuit (identified as the discovery of America from the perspective of Castilian ideology) (Mignolo 2000, 91-126; 49-60). After the crusades and up to the fifteenth century, what would become Europe was the land of Japheth, the land Christendom or of the Western Christians. That the destiny of Japheth was to "enlarge" what fell under his influence was already inscribed in the Bible. Thus, with the emergence of Indias Occidentales in the consciousness of Western Christians, the expansion of the West that was already inscribed in the Holy Scripture became a reality. Since English was not a hegemonic language in the 16th century, the current vocabulary was Latin; or vernacular languages derived from Latin. So, Occidentalis and Occidente were the words inscribed in the imaginary of an emerging modern/colonial world. Occidentalism was grounded and grew out from the writing of Spanish and Portuguese chroniclers to the criticism of French intellectuals in the eighteenth century, about Indias Occidentales and America.

But of course, there was no such a thing as social sciences in the sixteenth century. However, there was a discipline named history that was part of the canonical curriculum in any university of the renaissance (Mignolo 1981; 1982). As a matter of fact, history did not have a crucial place within the trivium, whose fundamental parts were logic (or dialectics), rhetoric and poetics (Kiefer Lewalski 1986). When the question of narration was at stake, History was a subsidiary discipline attached to rhetoric and related to poetics. Indeed, it was in the sixteenth century that historiography began to occupy a central role and a significant amount o treatises defined and branded history as an autonomous discipline. This process was simultaneous and parallel to the writing of the numerous chronicles and histories of Indias Occidentales. Thus, Indias Occidentales was the stamp that introduced Occidentalism as a fundamental aspect of the modern/colonial world. Indias Occidentales or America was considered from the very inception of this imaginary as the West, the colonial west. The colonial west was described, but no one expected descriptions of the European Christendom from the colonial West. As a matter of fact the description of the colonial West was at the same time a description and self-definition of European Christendom, per genus and differentia specifica. The people of the colonial West where judged as people without history, that is, without disciplinary foundation for knowledge and without past events relevant in the Christian world history. For that reason, philosophy in its theological/legal version, was responsible for defining and describing the people of the Indias Occidentales according to the Christian chain of being; and history the discipline responsible for telling the story of people without history.

The reader may be asking at this point what does all of this has to do with Latin American Studies? The situation was different, of course, when in the second half of the twentieth century Area (and Latin American) Studies took the place occupied fourth centuries ago by Occidentalism. In between both, Orientalism from the eighteen to the end of the nineteenth century, was the dominant epistemic paradigm, as Edward Said has eloquently shown. There are several interesting aspects that deserve to be mentioned at this intersection before moving to the emergence of Area Studies.

While Occidentalism was built upon the disciplinary formation of the Renaissance, mainly philosophical theology, law and historiography, Orientalism was built upon the disciplinary formation of the Enlightenment and the application of philology to the understanding of "oriental" languages and histories. The larger picture upon which Orientalism was built was no longer the Christian distribution of people and land according to religion. Instead the Enlightenment's secular classification of people by color (Eze 1997) became the new version of coloniality of power as practiced by the new emerging colonial powers (England and France) and a new foundation and distribution of knowledge (Serequeberhan 1997). Northern European countries, Protestant rather than Catholic were taking over Asia and Africa. The Americas had been already colonized and, furthermore, there were obvious evidences since the last quarter of the eighteenth century that the era of colonial domination was arriving at its end. This feeling was going to be intensified by the independence of the U.S. from England, Haiti from France and of several Iberian colonies from Spain and Portugal. However, the emergence of Orientalism presupposed the existence of Occidentalism in the imaginary of the modern/colonial world. They were the opposing ends of the same imaginary that made of the world a place to be described and spoken. In between both was the invisible locus of enunciation, the knower organizing and naming the known.

The emergence of Area Studies produced two interesting displacements although within the same paradigm. The first was geo-political. The U.S., formerly a part of Indias Occidentales and, consequently, of the known object of Occidentalism, became the locus of the knower, of the locus of enunciation. While the locus of enunciation of Occidentalism was situated in the Iberian Peninsula, and that of Orientalism in France, England and Germany, the locus of Area Studies was situated in the U.S. Once again, the displacement of the locus of enunciation within the same paradigm, run parallel to the history of the displacement of capitalism from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. As a consequence, the geo-political field of forces changed. Area Studies contributed to the affirmation of the image of the South that had already emerged in Europe in the eighteenth century as the location of that to be known. One of the missions linked to Area Studies was to develop and modernize the known, the underdeveloped South. This mission was parallel to the missions associated to Occidentalism and Orientalism respectively. That is, to Christianize the Occident, the extension of Japheth as well as the world, and to civilize the Orient.

Thus, the new mission that accompanied Area Studies was to develop and modernize the South. As far as Latin America and the Caribbean were concerned, its inhabitants were no longer and only Amerindians (as they set the stage for Occidentalism in the sixteenth century). They were Creoles (whites and blacks), immigrants (mainly from European descent), and a wide range of "mestizos." Thus, Latin American Studies had plenty of subjects to deal with and to conjugate with modernizing and developing projects. Furthermore, the world had changed due to the emergence of socialism in the imaginary of the modern/colonial world and its implementation in the Soviet Union and, by the time of the institutionalization of Area Studies in Latin America, in Cuba. In spite of the distance in time, one element in common remains between Occidentalism in the sixteenth century and Latin America (Area) Studies in the second half of the twentieth century: the difficulties to recognize the intellectual and epistemic values of the known subjects. There is a long story to sustain this claim. First, none of the Amerindian intellectuals (Pachacuti Yamki, Alvarado Tezozomoc, Alva Ixtilxochitl), with the exception of Garcilaso de la Vega, were published and considered as part of the knowledge being produced in/about Indias Occidentales. In the eighteenth century, creole intellectuals in Mexico, like Eguiara y Eguren raised their voices to dispel the accusations of Spanish men of letters about the lack of intellectual sophistication in the New World (Mignolo 1995a, 163-169). The nineteenth century and up to the 70s, roughly speaking, Latin American intellectuals played into that game by mirroring themselves on the scholarship and intellectual achievements of France, England and Germany. Why did this happen?

The second displacement took place at the level of epistemology. While Occidentalism was founded on the Renaissance distribution of knowledge, and Orientalism on the secularization of philology and hermeneutics (no longer a tool for interpretation of the Holly Scriptures), Area Studies was founded on the social sciences that indirectly contributed to their consolidation (Heilbron 1996). But once the social sciences were institutionalized and began to replace the role occupied by the humanities-less connected with the conflictive social issues of the Cold Ward period, they began to be exported/imported to the Third World. The problem native /vrs/ foreign social sciences emerged as social scientists in the Third World became aware that dependency was not only economic but also intellectual (Fals Borda 1970). One of the dubious outcomes of this attitude was the overt links established between science and nationalism (Ramos 1995); a debate that has been re-opened (Akiwowo 1999) after the publication the Gulbenkian Report on the social sciences (Wallerstein et. al. 1995). However, the dubious reactions had their reasons. The creation of social sciences departments in Latin American universities only happened toward the end of the 50's. Of course there were "catedras" of sociology or of social sciences in general, with a person "representing" the field but not programs or departments in the contemporary sense of the word. Therefore, if the issue may not be properly framed by talking about foreign and native social sciences, the fact remains that the social sciences movedChundred years later-from the industrial countries where they were born to the colonial or ex-colonial countries during the Cold War. Once this happened, the standards, criteria and norms of the social sciences in the First World became the measuring stick for the practice of the social sciences in the Third World.

But let's go back to the double scenario prompted by area studies. On the one hand, there were the debates in the U.S. between disciplines and areas; on the other, the "absence" of former third worlds intellectuals in those debates. The second scenario produced an interesting phenomenon. The social sciences in the (former) third world and, by extension social scientists living in the situation they were reflecting upon, were not allowed the same level of "objectivity" that was allowed to area studies scholars. As social scientists, they were "observers" and, as such, did not "belong" to the socio-historical realities he or she was studying. And of course this perception from the social scientist in the North about the social scientist in the South was in a sense correct. The most innovative social thought and knowledge in the South were produced at the intersection of socio-personal interests (which doesn't mean to be individualistic and subjective) and disciplinary norms. In other words, the most innovative works in social sciences, in the South, were produced precisely by departing from the disciplinary control of the social sciences imposed in and from its place of origin. That the perception social scientists in the North had about social scientists in the South was "correct" (that is what happened) doesn't mean that it was "right" (what happened was bad). The destiny of dependency theory in the U.S. as opposed to its impact and influence in Latin America is a case in point.

The classical article by Fernando Henrique Cardoso "O consumo da teoria da dependencia nos Estados Unidos" (1977) is a case in point. Cardoso pointed out that while, in Latin America, dependency theory was the outcome of a political concern and of a dialectical way of thinking, in the U.S. it was reduced to method, to constants and variables equation, and therefore interpreted and criticized from a "scientific" point of view. All happened as if the critics of dependency theory were not personally invested in what they were saying since they were just were following the authorized norms of scientific procedures. In other words, the political investments of social scientists that in Latin America, engaged themselves in dependency theory, were stripped out, in the U.S., and replaced by the disappearance of the knowing subject in favor of the known. Of course, this is not surprising since we are witnessing now similar arguments within the U.S. against the political bent taken by the social sciences and the humanities, as if the statu-quo was not a political statement in itself. While for Latin American social scientists the social sciences were a starting point and a point of reference to engage in thinking about specific problems, for social scientists in the U.S. the question was centered on method rather than on problems. For this very reason it is quite telling that Frank Bonilla (1998, 217-230) recalls a discussion at Stanford with Fernando Henrique Cardoso and members of the emerging field of Chicano Studies. The fact that Chicano/a scholars found an echo in dependency theory in Latin America is more that a casual encounter at Stanford prompted by a casual visit of a Brazilian sociologist. I believe, and this is a different formulation of my thesis, that the encounter was prompted by the profound ethical, political and epistemic links between Chicano/a (and Latino/a) social scientists, on the one hand, and social scientists and intellectuals in Latin America, on the other. The encounter at Stanford can explain both the tragic destiny of dependency theory among U.S. social scientists and Latinoamericanists and its triumphant reception by a community of Latino/as scholars.

These profound links and differences could be briefly described as follows. The relationship between Chicano/a and Latino/a scholars on the one hand and Latin American scholars (e.g., living and working in Latin America) on the other, one thing in common: the incorporated epistemic relations with their subject matter. Contrary to their Area Studies counterpart, the subject matters of Latino/as and Latin American intellectuals (that is, working in Latin America and "studying" Latin America) is not "remote" but, quite the opposite it is right under their feet. It should be clear that I am not talking here about identity politics but of the politic of identities managed from above by Occidentalism, Orientalism and Area Studies. I am neither talking about "essences", but about historical living conditions in a planetary distribution of wealth, power, social conditions and social identities. That is, the politics of identity of Occidentalism, Orientalism and Area Studies worked by identifying people by religions and colors with geographical locations from above. Identity politics has been and still is a reaction and an effort toward disidentification (Muñoz 1999), of moving away from the politics of identity. I am aware that even if I'm successful in dispelling the phantom of essentialism (that is very much a creation and an imposition of modernity itself and not an invention of colonial subalterns), I may still run the risk of creating the suspicions of subjectivity. Particularly to those scholars who prefer the security of disciplinary norms and to see knowledge dissociated from history and from the body. That is, those scholars who prefer maintaining a locus of enunciation removed from the geopolitical organization of a capitalist economy. These were the assumptions, I am suggesting, of those scholars who re-framed the dialectical and political dimensions of dependency theory to the parameters of scientific and disciplinary norms and were successful in dissociating the knower from knowledge and from the known. The subaltern in fact cannot speak in his/her own terms, although the "right" to speak shall not be con-fused with the "truth" of the spoken.

Furthermore, while the epistemic choices of Latin American and Latino/a scholars impinged directly on ethical and political issues in their own countries and regions, Latin American Studies scholars found themselves in a different position. They were somewhat removed from the ethical and political situations of the country or area in Latin America they were studying and their ethical choices and political decisions in the U.S., and at odds in the country where they lived and pursued their research. This quarrel has indeed requested from some Latin Americanists to take a more invested stance toward the "remote" subject matter of their investigation. At the same time, social scientists and intellectuals in Latin America after the seventies were less interested in establishing dialogues with social scientists in the U.S., be they Latin Americanists or not. There was a change in relation to the first seventy years of the twentieth century. From the time of the consolidation of the social sciences in Europe and the U.S. (at the turn of the century) intellectuals in Latin America were proud of adopting the sociologist of the day in Europe or in the U.S.(Romero Pittari 1997). This move was part of the ideal of civilization and of the emerging project of modernization. Around the 70s, however, with the wage of decolonization in Africa and Asia and the work of Frantz Fanon, sociologists began to call for a "decolonization of the social sciences" (Fals Borda 1970, 15-86), rather than for an adaptation of civilized or modern theories. This was also the time when Latin American intellectuals directly critiqued "area studies" in the U.S. (Fals Borda 1970, 77-82).

From Occidentalism to Genealogies of Thougths in Latin America and to Latino/as Studies

Pedro Cabán has described the institutional and political location of Latin American and Latino/as Studies in a very useful way. I reproduce here an illuminating paragraph:

The field of Latino Studies occupies a distinct niche in the academic hierarchy and is characterized by a profoundly different set of analytical and political concerns. Latin American Studies was a top-down enterprise promoted by government agencies, university administrations and large foundations. In contrast, ethnic studies programs were interested in studying the "Third World within" the United States and linking these studies to the "Third World without." The genesis of Puerto Rican and Chicano Studies departments was virtually the polar opposite of that of Latin American Studies. The field came into being during a period of social ferment and where parts of an attempt to "uncover the occluded and submerged, to liberate the repressed in the process of shaping people's history. Their project was to redraw the boundaries, to affirm the autonomy of the internal colonies (barrio, reservation, inner cities) and thus recover the space for the exercise of popular democracy" (Caban, 1998, 202).

There is however another aspect that distinguishes Latin American from Latino/a Studies, and this is the epistemic one. Latin American Studies (and Area Studies in general) were constructed on the disciplinary foundation offered by the social sciences. Which meant that it operated on disciplinary norms and on the principles of modern epistemology that detached the knower from the known. In more concrete terms, while Latino/as scholars were linking scholarship with Latino/as social and political issues, Latinamericanists in the U.S. were far away from the place where social and political issues required the attention of their scholarship. Their best political move was, and has to be, directed toward the U.S. government foreign policy in Latin America (Schultz 1998). There was and still are connections within Latin American (Area) Studies and Latin American intellectuals, as it can be witnessed in the journals NACLA and Latin American Perspectives. But the dissidence within the main paradigm is not the same than the emergence of a new paradigm, like Latino/as Studies. Let me put it differently. While Latin American (and Area) Studies are part of the larger paradigm of the modern/colonial world, together with Occidentalism and Orientalism, Latino/as Studies are part of a paradigm today identified as Ethnic Studies, which is precisely not the location of the knower but the location of the known. Latino/as Studies, in other words, is accomplishing the formidable task of turning the place of the known into the location of the knower. And that was also the achievement of social and philosophical thought, in Latin America, particularly as formulated by dependency theoreticians, philosophers of liberation and critics of internal colonialism. That is why there is so much in common between Latino/as Studies and social and philosophical thoughts in Latin America, as it is clear in the narrative offered by Bonilla (1998).

This is the moment to return to my early claim about the epistemic location of Latino Studies in the frame of capitalism and the geopolitics of knowledge. Juan Flores (1997) has clearly traced the two stages in the formation of Chicano/a/Latino Studies and Agustin Lao-Montes (in this issue) offered a detailed history of these developments. The bottom line is that what we called today Latino Studies began as a form of social activism, if not a social movement, while today is becoming institutionalized. This turn of events shall not taken, in my view, neither as a cause for celebration nor for a nostalgic remembrance of good things past. That is, simply, the way it is. Ethnic and Latino Studies (as well as the social sciences and area studies) did not escape the transformations of the global order after the fall of the Soviet Union. And why shouldn't they not? Or can't they? Can indeed postcolonial or cultural studies make a different claim? Or is it that the geopolitics of knowledge under capitalism created different expectations for the social sciences and area (of cultural) studies on the one hand and for ethnic studies on the other? How are race and epistemology being played down at the institutional level, under global capitalism and in the corporate structure of the university, in the U.S., in Europe or in the former third world? Regarding Latino/as Studies Flores summarized the situation in the following words:

The main shift that has occurred between the present context of Latino Studies and its previous manifestation twenty-five years ago is perhaps best summed up in the words "global" and "globalization," with all due caution to what Robert Fitch has aptly called "globaloney." The economic restructuring of world capitalism that took off in the mid-1970s, along with the telecommunications revolution, has created radically new levels of interactions and interconnectedness among populations. The growing mass migrations generated by these changes are also affected by them, and in their circular and transnational character they differ markedly from the migratory experiences of the early 1970s (Flores 1997, 212).

In the institutional transformation of Latino Studies, the links with scholarly discipline was unavoidable. But this is precisely my point. That the intersection between Latino/as Studies and the social sciences has an epistemic configuration that looks quite different from the configuration of area studies. As a matter of fact, it looks very much like the epistemic configuration of intellectual labor in Latin America that had to deal with the introduction of the social sciences, and other disciplinary "novelties" in the humanities (structuralism, poststructuralism, posmodernism, deconstruction, etc.). The end result, in both ends of the spectrum, is the emergence of critical social thoughts merging the ethical and political drives of the intellectual or scholars with the disciplinary rules of the disciplines but from the perspective of the former. In other words, the "problem" precedes the "method" in the social sciences and the "topic" in area studies. These are the possibilities and potentials. Which doesn't mean that possibilities and potential would end in "good" results. Possibilities and potential are there for grab, and they can be used in different ways. That is that. But it is better to have the possibilities and potentials opened up by Latino/as Studies than not to have them. Ethnic, Latino/as Studies in the U.S., philosophy of liberation, pedagogy of the oppresed, dependency theory critique of internal colonialism in critical social thoughts in Latin America have brought to light the epistemic colonial difference. And that is not a small victory under the present circumstances and the colonial structure of power.

Concluding Remarks

I would like to conclude by stressing two points I have been making in my argument.

Latino/as Studies has, I would like to stress, much more in common at this point with Latin American genealogies of thought than with Latin American Studies in the U.S. The genealogies of dependency theory, liberation philosophy and internal colonialism and current reflections on globalization (Santos, Ortiz, Ianni) are bottom-up perspectives, as Caban will have it. Or, if you wish, critiques of capitalism from its very periphery, as dependency theoretician will have it. Or from subaltern space/time as Santos prefers to say. Or of particular subaltern disciplinary memories articulated with the hegemonic (eurocentric) assumptions of the social sciences (Ortiz). On the other hand, Latin American Studies, even when it takes a most radical leftist position, remains a top-down directed enterprise heavily tainted by eurocentric beliefs implied in disciplinary norms;
Current discussions in the U.S. about the links between Latino/as and Latin American Studies are, in the first place, totally alien (at this point, June of 2000) to the Latin American intellectuals I have discussed in this paper. And with good reasons since this is not apparently a business of their concern. Unless the discussion gets beyond the limits imposed by the ideology of "area studies" and becomes guided by the genealogies of social thought in Latin America and Latino/as studies in the U.S., these three worlds will remain detached and suspicious of each other. Latin American Studies can still have its function as a top-bottom academic enterprise in which the "study" of Latin America has as a final destination not the transformation of Latin American society but, mainly, the transformation of the U.S.-Latin American international relations. That is to say that Latinoamericanists would have to assume that the ethical and political implications of their scholarly work should be also directed toward the U.S. (for example, Grandin 2000) or mediating between both Latin American intellectuals and Latinamericanists (Cadena 2000; Stern, ed. 1998; Starn 1999). In the transformation of U.S.-Latin American relations and in the transformation of cultures of scholarship in the U.S., rather than in the transformation of Latin American societies. And, finally, in their own transformation in contact with progressive intellectual production in Latin America (as Frank's self-description illustrates) rather than the other way round.

In certain sections of LASA 1997 mainly, in Guadalajara, there was a heated discussion on whether postcolonial, subaltern or cultural studies were an exportation of ideas in the U.S. by Latin American scholars in the U.S. (Moraña 1998) that sometimes bordered in personal attacks. If you have followed my argument, we can understand that the LASA debate (Cuadernos Americanos 1998) was indeed the symptom of a larger problem. I intended to cast this problem in terms of capitalism and the geopolitics of knowledge and in the triple relationships between social thoughts in Latin America, Latino/as and Latin American Studies in the U.S. The future could be promising in bringing these three kinds of projects in contact and cooperation while maintaining the irreducible differences between them. This could be an example of the possibility of arguing for epistemic diversity and diversality as universal projects instead of a new abstract universal that will replace the "eurocentrism" of the social sciences (including post-colonial and cultural studies). Perhaps the moment has arrived to change the direction of our efforts by taking Latino/as and Latin American intellectuals approaches to knowledge as guidelines for the transformation of Latin American (and Area) Studies.

* This is a section of a longer work entitled "Capitalism and the Geopolitics of Knowledge: Latin American Social Thought and Latino/as American Studies" which is forthcoming in a book edited Juan E. Poblete, entitled Rethinking Area and Ethnic Studies: Latin/o American Scenarios. It was edited for this Newsletter by the editor with persmission of the author and the editor of the book where it will appear in full.

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Spring 2001 Volume 00, Number 2

Spring 2001
Volume 00, Number 2