The Accidental Crit II: Culture and the Looking Glass of Exile

The current Latin Music Craze in United States mass media demands critical analysis from the LatCrit community. LatCrit scholars have engaged in the serious discussion of cultural production -- of culture generally and popular culture in particular. LatCrit theory has analyzed cultural production mostly by others, that is, cultural production internal to outsider communities. LatCritters also have studied how United States mass media portrays Latinas/os, African-Americans and Filipinas/os. This article will examine the competing narratives of Puerto Rican cultures in Puerto Rico and in the United States that are illuminated by the current Latin Music Craze. It will then explore how LatCritical praxis can counter the problems of discrimination against and internalized oppressions within the colonized Puerto Rican peoples

The Accidental Crit II: Culture and the Looking Glass of Exile

The current Latin Music Craze in United States mass media demands critical analysis from the LatCrit community. LatCrit scholars have engaged in the serious discussion of cultural production -- of culture generally and popular culture in particular. LatCrit theory has analyzed cultural production mostly by others, that is, cultural production internal to outsider communities. LatCritters also have studied how United States mass media portrays Latinas/os, African-Americans and Filipinas/os. This article will examine the competing narratives of Puerto Rican cultures in Puerto Rico and in the United States that are illuminated by the current Latin Music Craze. It will then explore how LatCritical praxis can counter the problems of discrimination against and internalized oppressions within the colonized Puerto Rican peoples

Literature and the Arts as Antisubordination Praxis: LatCrit Theory and Cultural Production: The Confessions of an Accidental Crit

I attend LatCrit conferences to be educated on what I regard as the most exciting legal scholarship being produced today. Therefore, I naturally jumped at the opportunity to help organize the Fourth Annual LatCrit Conference and to chair one of its Plenary Panels. I have penned this Essay for the purpose not only of joining Critical Race Theory ( CRT ) discourse, but also to create a recorded history of LatCrit travels. In Part I of this Essay, I will describe the process that led the Planning Committee to include the Literature and Arts as Antisubordination Praxis: LatCrit Theory and Cultural Production ( Arts Panel ) on the program, as well as the selection of the participants. Later, I will discuss the substantive content of the Arts Panel by describing each presentation in detail. Finally, I will give my own reactions to the presentations and will seek to place them within the planned description and the written questions submitted to the panel. I conclude by discussing my own, reluctant, difficult and ultimately accidental gravitation towards LatCrit theory generally

LatCritical Encounters with Culture, in North-South Frameworks

A critical introduction of a group of articles in the LatCrit VI Symposium issue, discussing the authors\u27 diverse approaches to Latin American legal cultures and contextualizing the publications in the growing body of LatCrit scholarship. The Essay discusses how the other essays in the issue fit within or challenge the themes of the specific roundtable, plenary, or workshop in which they were presented, and then locates the cluster within the present and the future of LatCrit Theory generally, and LatCritical praxi in particular. This Essay addresses each presentation, the specific conference context(s) in which it was delivered, and how the essays produced by the presenters develop these ideas

Puerto Rico: Cultural Nation, American Colony

This Article articulates a theory of Puerto Rican cultural nationhood that is largely based on ethnicity. In linking ethnicity and citizenship, it is imperative, however, to avoid the evils of ethnic strife and balkanization, while celebrating rather than imposing difference; community consciousness cannot degenerate into fascism

The Inconvenience of a “Constitution [that] follows the flag … but doesn’t quite catch up with it”: From Downes v. Bidwell to Boumediene v. Bush

Boumediene v. Bush, resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court in June of 2008, granted habeas corpus rights, at least for the time being, to the persons detained at Guantanamo Bay Naval Station. The majority partially based its ruling on the doctrine of the Insular Cases, first set forth in the 1901 decision in Downes v. Bidwell. Additionally, the four dissenting justices agreed with the five in the majority that the plurality opinion of Justice Edward Douglass White in Downes – as affirmed by a unanimous court in 1922 in Balzac v. People of Porto Rico – is still the dominant interpretation of the Constitution’s Territorial Clause, abandoning the rule set forth in 1856 in Dred Scott v. Sanford. The Boumediene majority labels this a “situational” standard that allows it to pick which provisions of the Constitution will be enforced in the U.S. Territorial Possessions and now extraterritorially as well. This article provides historical context and analysis of the Insular Cases, that series of decisions on the power of the U.S. government over territory and people under the Territorial Clause, and criticizes the Boumediene majority’s use of it to justify the “situational” application of constitutional rights to subjects of United States law, especially to those who are most “inconvenienced”: the territorial U.S. citizens. The article also points out the fallacy that these legal situations are temporary and transitional given that most of the current territorial possessions have been continuously occupied since the end of the Spanish American War in 1898. I began work on this article a few weeks after the Boumediene decision was issued in an attempt to greatly expand a short contribution to an anthology into an article, and to discuss the Supreme Court’s most recent citation of the Insular Cases. But unforeseen circumstances forced me to move on to other projects and delay its publication. Luckily, this delay has given me the opportunity to revise the draft and to review the literature produced in response to the case. A LEXIS search of published law review articles found 506 articles that referenced Boumediene in their text. When that search was refined to articles referencing Boumediene and the Insular Cases together, it produced 48 article results. The study of the published articles leaves me almost as disappointed as I was in the Fall of 2008 with the level of study of the Insular Cases by the U.S. legal mainstream

The Constitution Follows the Flag...but Doesn\u27t Quite Catch Up with It : The Story of \u3ci\u3eDownes v. Bidwell\u3c/i\u3e

Some may consider a 1901 case to be ancient history, but Downes v. Bidwell and its progeny still govern all of these regions. This chapter will explore the Insular Cases as a way to understand the role of race in articulating the relationship between American territorial expansion and American citizenship-between American empire and American democracy. The chapter begins by historicizing the Downes opinion. My aim here is threefold: (1) to provide a brief description of the effects of Spanish colonial rule on Puerto Rico; (2) to set forth the circumstances leading up to the Spanish American War; and (3) to illustrate how the outcome of that war helped to shape America\u27s identity as a colonial power. Next, the chapter tells the story behind the Downes opinion itself, showing how the law reflected an uneasy balance between declaring the island to be both a U.S. possession, and one with a separate, not entirely American population. As this story and its aftermath will reveal, Downes and other early cases made clear that Puerto Rico did not enjoy the same status as states when it came to matters of commerce and trade