ABSTRACT
Latinidad, a keyword in the growing field of Latino/a Studies, is both a complex and contradictory strategic practice historically “constituted through the homogenizing effects of racism” encountered by Latin Americans, Latinas/os in the United States, and other people of color in the Americas. Though highly contested and never agreed upon among Latin Americans, the possibility of a transnational and translocal latinidad is “a debate that Latin American intellectuals have waged since the nineteenth century” as a consequence of national struggles of independence from Spain and as an expression of Latin American resistance and solidarity to the domination of the United States in the region. Since the late 1970s in the United States, latinidad has been institutionally associated with a unified US Latina/o identity straightforwardly linked to a Latin American heritage that in some fundamental way binds together various disparate groups such as, for instance, Chicanos/as, Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans, Mexican Americans, Dominican Americans, and Brazilian Americans.
