This symposium marks and celebrates the proceedings of the LatCrit Third Annual Conference, which took place on Miami Beach in May 1998. Preceded by LatCrit I in La Joya and LatCrit II in San Antonio, the LatCrit III gathering marked a watershed event in the evolution of the LatCrit movement, both as the most recent intervention in outsider jurisprudence and as a community of scholars and activists. ⁽²⁾ *576 If LatCrit I reflected the enthusiasm of a new found commonality and unprecedented dialogue among a diverse group of scholars coming together for a first time, LatCrit II demonstrated the profound challenges facing any movement seriously committed to exploring and transforming the realities of inter- and intra group injustices from an anti- essentialist and anti-subordination perspective. If LatCrit I marked the excitement of a first encounter and the enthusiasm of a party, LatCrit II demonstrated the speed with which any party can end. In a sudden crash or steady line of departures, a party based on suppositions of solidarity and feelings of community can quickly unravel when confronted with substantive difference. When things "get too heavy," parties tend to dwindle and disperse. ⁽³⁾
 

From this perspective, LatCrit III was a watershed moment because it marked a key act of continuity and perseverence despite ruptures and disruptions. Viewed in hindsight, this act of continuity was a definitive moment in the survival of the LatCrit movement as a community of scholars and collective political intellectual project. ⁽⁴⁾ Viewed against the backdrop of prior LatCrit conferences, LatCrit III also offers a welcomed opportunity to reflect anew upon the objectives and methods of our community-building efforts. If LatCrit II counsels the need to remain ever-vigilant lest we be confused, seduced and ultimately *577 betrayed by the human tendency to seek community in the sentimentality and pseudo-security of sameness, the intellectual and political advances made at LatCrit III show us the substantial pay-offs to be gained by resisting the impulse to seek or settle for sentimentalist communities. By this I mean communities where solidarity is more an image conjured through superficial feelings of identity and hence of momentary closeness, rather than a lived commitment, in solidarity, to relentlessly reveal and steadfastly dismantle relations of dominance and subordination that subvert the potential for authentic human sharing and connection--not just outside, but also within the LatCrit community we aspire to construct. ⁽⁵⁾
 

To recognize the limited life expectancy of sentimentalist communities is to take a first step down a long and difficult path that challenges us, at every instance, to seek affirmatively and self-consciously to produce something different in our midst. That difference is a community of scholars and activists that can intellectually engage, politically negotiate and collectively absorb the kinds of internal controversies and external assaults that have, in other contexts, shattered communities built on the fragile bonds of sentimental feeling, strategic alliance, individual careerism or simple self-interest, however mutual such interests may be said to be--in short, on any bond other than an inter-subjective commitment to seek and manifest objective justice in a caring and careful manner. ⁽⁶⁾
 

The excellent work and important advances, the conceptual breakthroughs, the interpersonal relationships and political solidarities that were further strengthened or newly born at LatCrit III are, indeed, substantively significant--as reflected in the proceedings of this symposium. The fact that none of these things might have ever seen the light of day, at least not in their current configurations and certainly not, as they are now, embedded in and enhanced by our memories of the shared community and collegiality that made LatCrit III such an enlivening experience--this fact should give reason to pause. Indeed, the achievements of LatCrit III offer ample evidence that LatCrit community-*578 building must walk a careful path between the tendencies to rely, on the one hand, on the feel-good emotions of superficial identifications and, on the other hand, the tendency toward a kind of packing behavior that is sometimes indulged because it appears to enable spontaneous, though fleeting and often problematic, alliances to converge around a slash- and-burn, hold-no-prisoners, hypercritical attack upon some unfortunate and often unsuspecting target. Neither tendency serves the purposes of a community determined to foster for the long-haul a collaborative project that continuously enables ever-more demanding engagements in the sort of substantive critical analysis that was the aspiration and, to an unprecedented degree, the achievement of LatCrit III.
 

LatCrit III definitively demonstrated that even highly controversial topics and proposals can advance our intellectual development and strengthen our political and solidaristic commitments if organized and actually conducted in a respectful and inclusive manner. Thus, while there was significant controversy generated by a programmed event proposing to launch a jurisprudential intervention styled "BlackCrit theory" as an experimental way of centering the particularities of Black Latina/o and Caribbean peoples in and against the Black/White paradigm, ⁽⁷⁾ this pre-event controversy did not disrupt the conference, but was instead identified and negotiated through extensive substantive discussions, conducted late into the evening, in good-faith and mutual concern to resolve the misconceptions that might otherwise disrupt the next day's event. The payoff was that rather than an explosive emotional disruption followed by the scrambling (of some) to mediate the hurt feelings and unnecessary misunderstandings that routinely follow such explosions, we had a very fruitful discussion that has since spawned substantial advances by raising important questions about the relationship between LatCrit and other critical jurisprudential movements, most notably Critical Race Theory, ⁽⁸⁾ and about the particularities of Black experiences and the significance of those particularities to the LatCrit project. ⁽⁹⁾
 

*579 There is no doubt that solidarity, understood as an anti- essentialist commitment to inter and intra-group justice, presents continual challenges and demands tremendous work. This work is not always fun. At the same time, there is no question that LatCrit III was fun. The conference was graced with the sunny springtime beauty, the pastel colored sounds and Caribbean skies that make Miami beaches a tropical paradise for wealthy tourists and gave us an opportunity to enjoy each other's company and to share some sensual displacements amid much privilege and luxury, even as we confronted the daunting challenges of our work. In fact, the conference was a lot of fun, and the fun we had was a positive energy in our efforts to build community across our differences. ⁽¹⁰⁾ Thus, in myriad ways, LatCrit III demonstrated that the LatCrit project can and should engage profoundly controversial positions and proposals without indulging community-destroying disruptions that undermine, rather than enable, our efforts to explore substantive disagreements and to learn from our differences of position and perspective in the spirit and expectation of lively and lasting friendship.
 

In retrospect, it also bears noting that our collective efforts to self- consciously build the LatCrit community, and by implication any community, upon a commitment to anti-essentialist anti-subordination politics, is an unprecedented project of millennial proportions. Questions pending today on the LatCrit agenda will emerge tomorrow as definitive questions of the 21st century. This is because the human community must find ways to construct identities that do not depend on the activation of essentialized differences or the reproduction of sociolegal hierarchies. There is no sustainable alternative. In the 21st century, controversies that today are triggered by LatCrit's theoretical determination to reveal essentialist assumptions and traverse, in solidarity, such inherited boundaries as mark the distinctions of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation and nation will tomorrow erupt the discursive *580 boundaries of sociolegal theory and confront the world community as the wo/man-in-the-local/global streets, trodding the electronic highways for news of how, when and where the human flows in motion will be set or let to rest. Borders busted by new configurations of freedom and compulsion are producing new social realities in need of new identities, beyond the essential-isms of the modern that currently, and not so tenuously, still organize so much the conscious and unconscious of so many. ⁽¹¹⁾
 

It is precisely because LatCrit theory has taken up the challenge of producing knowledge and performing community for the purpose of manifesting and advancing an anti-essentialist commitment to anti-subordination politics that the LatCrit community stands as microcosm of the many challenges that will face the global community in ever more pressing degrees. Our in/ability to negotiate the differences amongst us, to link identities to histories, histories to the articulation of an ethical and future-oriented vision, and our visions to the consolidation of effective and transformative political coalitions--on this-- the stuff of dreams--depends the future of such weighty 21st century imperatives as world peace, social justice, and human liberation. ⁽¹²⁾
 

With this in mind, this Foreword seeks to contextualize the LatCrit III symposium essays in relation to four basic points of reference: the first is LatCrit's evolving substantive agendas; the second is the impact of our discourse and interactions on our community-building objectives and on alternative trajectories for institutional development of the LatCrit project; the third is the broad array of issues and many fields of substantive inquiry that have not yet been addressed in LatCrit theory. These three points create a dialectical frame of reference linking past, present and future, thereby enabling us, more meaningfully, to assess where we have been and to project a vision of where we should go. The fourth point of reference refers back to the pre-conference objectives as delineated in the substantive program outline; ⁽¹³⁾ it injects a fourth *581 dimension of intentionality into our understanding of LatCrit dynamics because what we actually achieve at any LatCrit gathering means different things and offers different lessons depending on its coherence with, departure from and/or expansion of the objectives we intended to achieve. Using this four-part frame of reference to contextualize the essays in this symposium enables us to assess the evolution of LatCrit theory and praxis in ways that engage the multiple dimensions of a project that is always and everywhere both about producing knowledge and about performing community.
 
 

The rest of this Foreword divides in three parts. This three part structure reflects, but does not directly track the live-events of the conference, which are detailed both in the LatCrit III Substantive Program Outline and the LatCrit III Program Schedule. ⁽¹⁴⁾ The live-events were programmed to effectuate the conference planners' self-conscious and concerted commitment to push LatCrit theory into new substantive areas, to encourage dialogue across jurisprudential and disciplinary boundaries, to bridge the gap between theory and practice, to experiment with new discussion formats, to include newcomers, to accommodate the many responses to our initial call for papers and to provide a forum for works-in-progress. To this end, the program featured four plenaries, two focus-group discussions, four keynote addresses, five concurrent panels and a concurrent works-in-progress session. However, as in previous LatCrit conferences, the energy, richness and synergies of our discourse exceeded the pre-established structure of our program--a phenomenon reflected, this time, in the many thematic interconnections evidenced across the keynotes, plenaries and concurrent panels, as well as by the fact that a number of essays submitted for this symposium volume were inspired by, but not delivered at, the LatCrit III conference. Organizing this abundance into a coherent final product has been a border-busting project in its own right precisely because the expedient of tracking the live-events was simply untenable. Instead, the objective in this symposium, and therefore in this Foreword, has been to cluster the various essays around the substantive themes most directly salient to our discussions at LatCrit III.
 

Part I, entitled Beyond/Between Colors: De/Constructing Insider/Outsider Positions in LatCrit Theory, takes up the essays in the first two clusters. These essays demonstrate the continued centrality of identity politics in LatCrit discourse, making questions of intra-group hierarchy and inter-group justice of special salience in any LatCrit gathering and *582 their exploration a critical dimension of the continuity we seek to maintain. They also demonstrate that each time the LatCrit community takes up these issues in our formal gatherings, we approach them with a heightened awareness of the broader context in which we articulate the political implications of Latina/o identity. Using a variety of critical methodologies, including doctrinal deconstruction, policy-based political analysis of current affairs, personal narratives and social psychology, these essays take up the challenge of articulating how the anti-essentialist anti-subordination aspirations of the LatCrit project are implicated in struggles over such relatively theoretical matters as judicial power, interpretative objectivity and personal identity, as well as in the more immediate political struggles over immigration policies, minority access to legal education, the delivery of legal services to the poor, the ongoing expropriation of indigenous peoples in Latin American countries and the particularities of intergroup relations in South Florida, the site of the LatCrit III conference. ⁽¹⁵⁾
 

Both individually and cumulatively, these essays challenge LatCrit scholars to deconstruct essentialist representations of the Latina/o condition by attending to the particularities of subordination as experienced by different groups at different junctures of historical time and trans/national space. As critical methodology, attention to the particular helps unpack intra and intergroup hierarchies, enables critical analysis to resist the suppression of intra-group diversities and exposes instances in which representations of a common good or shared imperative are manipulated and monopolized to configure relations of intra and intergroup privilege. This attention to the particularities of subordination can, however, generate its own problems--most notably the problem of comparing subordinations both within and between groups. Such intergroup comparisons activate identifications that can dis/organize alliances and can therefore have profound and varied impact on the future viability of any coalition project--depending on the kinds of political positioning a particular mode of comparison tends to promote. ⁽¹⁶⁾ At the same time, *583 attention to the particularities of subordination makes intergroup comparisons practically inevitable.
 

LatCrit theory thus faces the formidable task of articulating an ethic and politics through which the practice of comparing the different realities of subordination that are increasingly revealed through our particularized analyses can be made to foster, rather than destroy, the possibilities for intergroup solidarity and genuine understanding across our many differences of experience and position. We need to learn how to articulate our intergroup comparisons in ways that energize new solidarities and promote more fluid and inclusive political identities by revealing new interconnections and commonalities among the oppressed despite and perhaps because of our differences. Indeed, understood specifically as a way of learning about and engaging our differences, intergroup comparisons can enable the affirmative valuation and embrace of the differences that make us both ourselves and not each other. ⁽¹⁷⁾ The essays in these first two clusters provide a valuable point of departure for this important task because their attention to the particularities of subordination across different contexts also illustrates a variety of instances of intergroup comparison.
 

Part II, entitled Substantive Self-Determination: Democracy, Communicative Power and Inter/National Labor Rights reflects the rapidly expanding agenda marked for LatCrit attention. This Part takes up three clusters of essays. The first cluster seeks to articulate a LatCrit perspective on the disjunctures between reality and rhetoric in the transition and practice of democracy. The second cluster focuses on communicative power, and the third and final cluster focuses specifically on the way LatCrit antisubordination theory and practice is implicated in and activated by the sociolegal structures of labor and employment in an increasingly globalized society. Cumulatively, the essays in these three clusters reflect a concerted and self-conscious effort to expand the substantive concerns of the LatCrit movement beyond the familiar fare of *584 "Latina/o issues." This is an appropriate and timely development because the struggle to articulate an anti- essentialist theory and practice of coalitional politics and transformative legal intervention implicates LatCrit scholars in a project that must concern itself with issues not peculiarly or exclusively of interest to Latinas/os in this country.
 

Until relatively recently, the trials and tribulations, for example, of the international peace movement, the labor movement, the environmental movement and the international movement for human rights, like the deconstruction of U.S. national security ideology or the critical analysis of the legal regimes organized by antitrust, tax and corporate laws have, for the most part, been cast as matters of universal concern, not particularly relevant to Latina/o and other minority communities, whose primary focus of attention has been thought to center on issues of discrimination and the meaning of equal protection. ⁽¹⁸⁾ LatCrit theory, by contrast, claims an interest in matters of universal concern, precisely because it rejects the metaphysical and epistemological assumptions that underpin the bifurcation of universal and particular. ⁽¹⁹⁾ By taking up and subjecting to critical anti- essentialist analysis such matters as the rhetoric and realities of the democratic project, the legal structures of communicative power and the future of the labor movement in and beyond the United States, these essays demonstrate how attention to the particularities of Latina/o experiences and perspectives can produce a richer and more contextual understanding of the broader contexts and multiple dimensions of the human struggle for justice and peace.
 

Finally, Part III takes up the essays in the cluster entitled, Mapping Intellectual/Political Foundations and Future Self-Critical Directions. Though only three years old, LatCrit theory reflects a rich and varied intellectual inheritance because of the wide diversity of scholars who have chosen to self- identify as LatCrit scholars or participate in LatCrit conferences. Thus, LatCrit Theory finds its intellectual roots in Critical Race Theory, Critical Race Feminism, Chicano/a Studies, Law and Society, and Critical Legal Studies precisely because these various strains of critical discourse are the intellectual roots of the individuals whose energy drives the LatCrit project and secures its continued evolution. On the other hand, formations of scholarly communities do not spontaneously generate; and, in this respect, LatCrit theory is a project with a particular institutional history that reflects the efforts and visions of particular *585 individuals responding to and reacting against the perceived limitations of each of the various strains of critical discourse that precede it.
 

The essays in Part III reflect this rich and varied intellectual inheritance even as they raise important questions about the purpose, history and future trajectories of the LatCrit project. In this vein, the one definitive lesson to be gleaned from the three years of LatCrit conferences that culminated in LatCrit III is that there are major differences between the kind of intellectual work that aims at articulating new critical insights in individually authored law review articles and the kind of work required to operationalize new possibilities of thought and action in ways that can effectively reorganize the dynamics of group interaction and generate a shared theoretical discourse with common points of reference and principles of engagement. Learning to understand and negotiate the vast spaces between the individual conceptualization of new possibilities and the collective processes that must be activated to translate these new insights into shared understandings, and to then manifest these shared understandings in new forms of interaction and institutional arrangements, is a crucial imperative in the further evolution of LatCrit theory and community.
 

This learning is crucial and central precisely because the practice of LatCrit conference organizing has been self-consciously and intentionally aimed, since its inception, at transforming the production of legal scholarship from an experience of intellectual isolation into a practice of collective engagement and empowerment. ⁽²⁰⁾ Once this collective project becomes the imagined purpose and desired objective of our gatherings, the value of our work can no longer be measured simply by the breadth of any individual's vision or the depth of any one analysis, but by the degree to which our gatherings are effective fora for communicating and operationalizing the abstract ideas we so ably articulate in our individual work. Because the energies, efforts, errors, strengths, limitations and evolving visions of embodied human beings are such central components of this collective learning process, this Foreword also takes up the important challenge of recounting the historical development and institutional trajectories of the LatCrit project.
 
 

A. Centering Particularities and Comparing Subordinations: Toward an Ethic of Inter-Group Comparisons
 

The four essays in this first cluster provide different perspectives on the possibilities and obstacles confronting any project to promote inter-group solidarity. ⁽²¹⁾ Professor Luna's opening essay seeks to identify points of commonality between Blacks and Chicanos by forwarding a deconstructive analysis of the legal doctrines through which judicial interpretation facilitated both the institution of Black slavery and the dispossession Mexican landowners. The other three essays focus on the particularities of inter-group relations in South Florida. Attorney Cheryl Little's essay on intergroup coalitions, immigration politics and the Haitian experience uses the recently enacted Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act (NACARA) as the point of departure for a historical account of the discriminatory treatment Haitian refugees have been singly and systematically subjected to over the last 30 years, in contrast specifically to the treatment Cuban refugees have received during this same period. Attorney Lyra Logan provides a narrative account of the intergroup conflicts and convergence of interests among Black and Cuban-American political constituencies that enabled Florida to enact this country's first and only statewide state-funded affirmative action program aimed at increasing access to legal education for Black, Latina/o and other minority groups, whose members are grossly under-represented in the Florida State Bar. Finally, Attorney Virginia Coto recounts the objectives and assesses the initial achievements of an innovative project to provide legal services to battered immigrant women in the South Florida community.
 

Cumulatively, these four essays provide a rich and varied perspective on the role of law in mediating or exacerbating intergroup tensions and divisions, as well as facilitating or obstructing the possibilities for achieving intergroup justice. The narratives are of law and legal institutions. Though the deconstruction of white supremacist legal ideology may initially seem far and away from the more immediate political struggles for immigration relief, access to legal education and the practice *587 and politics of designing and running an alternative legal services program, each essay provides a unique perspective on the challenge of promoting inter-group solidarity in theory and practice. Theory without practice is a hollow luxury only the privileged can indulge; however, practice without theory too readily collapses complexity into a unidimensional struggle that can be counterproductive in the struggle for inter-group justice. Indeed, the complex social, political, cultural, economic and legal dimensions of the different struggles recounted in each of these essays is precisely the reason why theory and practice must remain in dialectical engagement.
 
 

Professor Luna's essay on the complexities of race aptly opens the first cluster of essays on inter-group solidarity by exploring points of commonality and difference across two otherwise disconnected fields of legal doctrine. ⁽²²⁾ The first is constituted by the antebellum legal struggle of emancipated Blacks to obtain the status and privileges of U.S. citizenship, a struggle that culminated in the infamous Dred Scott v. Sandford decision of 1856, which propelled the United States into its bloody civil war. In Dred Scott, the Supreme Court declared that all Blacks, whether free or slave, were ineligible for U.S. citizenship because of the inherent inferiority of the African race. The court also accorded the property rights of southern slave owners a privileged constitutional status, denying both Congress and the free- states the legal authority to confine the institution of slavery to the territorial boundaries of the slave-states. The second field is marked by the legal struggles of Mexican-Americans to retain their lands in the territories ceded by Mexico after the Mexican War of 1846. These struggles generated a long line of cases in which Mexican landowners were systematically dispossessed of their lands for the benefit of white settlers, land speculators and gold- diggers.
 

By juxtaposing the historical tribulations of Blacks and Chicanas/os across these two very different sociolegal contexts, Professor Luna strikes three themes worth further comment and reflection. First, Professor Luna's essay makes historical reality a central concern in the articulation of anti- subordination legal theory. The history she recounts is of legal interpretation. It is a history of the arbitrary and inconsistent adjudication of rights asserted by different outsider groups across different *588 points in time and space. ⁽²³⁾ It is also a history, the telling of which is designed to reveal how the internal coherence of legal doctrine has been repeatedly subordinated to the external imperatives of white supremacy--a history that can only be told by deconstructing the judicial decisions that constitute this history. Through this deconstructive analysis, Professor Luna's essay is able to link the distinct histories of free Blacks and Mexican landowners both to each other and to a critical analysis of the legitimacy of legal interpretation and the role of law in the re/production of subordination. Second, her essay also opens new avenues of critical analysis into the way white supremacist ideology articulates the legal meaning of U.S. citizenship, a recurring theme in LatCrit scholarship and throughout this symposium. ⁽²⁴⁾ Finally, her analysis offers a valuable point of departure for developing an ethic and assessing the political implications of intergroup comparisons.
 

Professor Luna locates her historical analysis in the field of legal discourse. Her objective is to reveal otherwise invisible similarities, demonstrating that free Blacks and Mexican land owners confronted a common context of struggle despite apparent differences in their particular experiences of subordination within white supremacy. Professor Luna reveals these similarities by deconstructing the interpretative strategies and legal arguments used to rationalize the judicial decisions that produced these different experiences. The differential treatment of property rights across these two contexts provides a particularly valuable point of comparison. By invoking the concept of due process, the Dred Scott decision afforded slaveowner's rights of property a constitutional status that simultaneously contracted Congressional power and projected the legal effect of slave-state laws beyond their territorial jurisdiction. The Dred Scott decision was so immediately explosive because it cast slaves as property subject to constitutional protection everywhere in the country. In then Chief Justice Taney's view, slave owners were entitled to travel through and reside within the free states and territories with their slaves and were further entitled to have their property rights in slaves protected by due process despite the fact that slavery was illegal *589 in the free states and territories. ⁽²⁵⁾ Since Dred Scott's claim to U.S. citizenship was premised on his status as a freeman emancipated by the act of residing in free territory, the Court's constitutional analysis stripped him of his legal claim to freedom, and hence to the citizenship status upon which his right to invoke federal diversity jurisdiction ultimately depended. ⁽²⁶⁾
 

Professor Luna contrasts the costly protection granted the property rights of slaveholders to the treatment of Mexican property owners, whose land title claims purportedly were protected by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Read through the lens of legal precedent, the history of land adjudication in the ceded territories is a history of arbitrary rulings and of blatant disregard for established precedent. It is a history of nothing less than judicial lawlessness. While the United States was treaty-bound to grant U.S. citizenship to Mexican nationals choosing to remain in the ceded territories and to respect their property rights as established under Spanish and Mexican law, neither the implementing legislation, nor the process of land adjudication complied with these obligations. Under the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Spanish and Mexican land titles were to be given legal effect in northamerican courts, yet reference to Hispanic law was, at best, inconsistent. In some instances, courts applied Hispanic law, demonstrating their familiarity *590 with its requirements and with their own duty to apply it; yet, in other cases, Hispanic law was inexplicably ignored or blatantly misrepresented. ⁽²⁷⁾ In a similar vein, even a minimalist interpretation of due process would eschew arbitrary and inconsistent adjudication; yet Mexican land title cases are rife with such inconsistencies as border the irrational. Cases applied shifting burdens of proof, in some instances requiring documentary evidence of title, while, in others, mere parole evidence was allowed to suffice. In some cases, actual physical residence on the claimed property was required to confirm title despite the claimant's valid documentary evidence. In other cases, title was confirmed solely on the basis of documentation of doubtful authenticity. Indeed, through this morass of arbitrary adjudication, Professor Luna finds only one regular and predictable consistency: Anglo claimants tended to win title to land, while Mexican claimants tended to lose.
 

Certainly, Dred Scott and the long line of Mexican land title cases occupy very different sociolegal fields and might therefore be readily distinguished. The Mexican land title cases might be read as just another example of the United States repeated failure to respect customary international law and honor its treaty obligations. Dred Scott, by contrast, might be dismissed as aberration, an idiosyncratic moment of judicial lapse-- like a handful of equally infamous Supreme Court decisions. ⁽²⁸⁾ However, the value of Professor Luna's analysis is that it nevertheless reveals a common context of struggle shared by Blacks and Mexicans and otherwise obscured by the fact that these instances of dispossession are coded in the abstractions of legal discourse and articulated across very different sociolegal contexts. In particular, Professor Luna's search for commonalities challenges LatCrit scholars to think critically about the way the doctrinal evolution of Anglo American property rights regimes is directly implicated in the material dispossession and economic marginalization of communities of color both within and beyond the United States. ⁽²⁹⁾ Her point, after all, is that the elevated constitutional *591 status and due process protections accorded the property rights of slaveowners in Dred Scott were nowhere seen when the property rights at issue were the rights of Mexican nationals to retain the lands to which they were entitled under customary international and federal treaty law, thus suggesting that the protection of property depends more on the racial identity of the property owner, rather than the abstract elements of property law.
 

LatCrit scholars can usefully follow Professor Luna's lead in many directions, for example, by comparing the way abstract legal principles requiring just compensation in instances of expropriation have been applied when the expropriated are foreign direct investors in third world countries as compared to indigenous peoples separated from their communal lands and livelihoods by forced relocation. ⁽³⁰⁾ Indeed, once the search for commonalities leads us to center the interpretation of property rights regimes in our critical analysis of white supremacy, a whole range of familiar questions are rendered all the more compelling: we might ask not only how relations of subordination have been historically constructed through the differential legal protection afforded white property owners as compared to non-white property owners, but might also begin to develop a critical analysis of the way some economic interests are accorded the legal status of a property right, while others are not. ⁽³¹⁾
 
 

Professor Luna's comparative analysis also provides important insights into the way the search for commonalities through inter-group comparisons can expand the opportunities for intergroup identification and solidarity. For example, Taney's reasoning denied Dred Scott U.S. citizenship on the grounds that he was Black and that Blacks were so inherently inferior that they could never constitute a part of "the people of the United States." ⁽³²⁾ It is not hard to see how the brutal racism of this decision might easily be configured around a discourse of fundamental and irreconcilable difference. ⁽³³⁾ Such a discourse would, however, offer very little room for comparative projects of the sort Professor Luna has forwarded here because, in a discourse of absolute difference, the only thing that matters is that there is a fundamental difference between losing one's property through theft, corruption and racial bias and being altogether denied the self-possession of one's own body and mind, one's labor and sexuality. ⁽³⁴⁾ A discourse of absolute difference destabilizes the search for intergroup commonalities, or rather rejects the project out of hand. In this discourse, Black and Chicana/o histories are positioned within a hierarchy of dispossession, with one group cast as "more dispossessed" than the other. Indeed, the experience of African American slavery is cast as so profoundly unbridgeable--an abyss so separate and apart from the experiences of Chicanas/os in the ceded territories--that there is no meaningful point of reference or departure for constructing a common identity or forging a common agenda around these different histories of dispossession. The wrongs can never be compared; therefore the boundaries of difference can never be traversed, and inter-group solidarity is that much more ephemeral. ⁽³⁵⁾
 

By contrast, in juxtaposing the Dred Scott decision to the Mexican land title cases, Professor Luna challenges LatCrit scholars to seek the commonalities of oppression without collapsing these two distinct histories into one false norm. ⁽³⁶⁾ The payoff is a new perspective on the way *593 law is implicated in the present day configuration of white supremacy. Read through the discourse of Black exceptionalism, Dred Scott is about slavery--a form of oppression uniquely experienced by Blacks in this country. Being about slavery, the decision is dead precedent, thoroughly discredited and consigned to historical infamy. Read, by contrast, through a discourse of common oppression, Dred Scott is about the configuration of state power around a citizen/non-citizen dichotomy. Indeed, the language Professor Luna quotes from the Dred Scott opinion makes it abundantly clear that the decision not only denied free Blacks citizenship, but in doing so, transfigured a representative government of limited powers into an imperial state. This is because the constitutional framework of government underpinning the Dred Scott decision reveals a state that claims the power to govern, without any legal limitations, a class of persons whose interests it does not even pretend to represent. ⁽³⁷⁾ These persons are the non-citizens, who do not constitute part of "the people of the United States," do not "hold the power," do not "conduct the government through their representatives," and therefore do not "enjoy the rights and privileges" that the constitution secures only to its citizens. ⁽³⁸⁾ Unlike slavery, the forms of oppression that have been organized around the citizen/non-citizen dichotomy and effectuated through the exercise of imperial power, both domestically and internationally, are common to many, including Blacks who have never been enslaved. ⁽³⁹⁾ *594 Read through this discourse, the reasoning of Dred Scott is still alive and well in the present day configuration of white supremacy. Its present day target is no longer the Black American, as such, but the foreign, ⁽⁴⁰⁾ the poor, ⁽⁴¹⁾ and those who are cast as "national security" threats. ⁽⁴²⁾
 
 

By juxtaposing the struggles of Blacks and Chicanas/os across these two very different sociolegal contexts, Professor Luna demonstrates the potential value of inter-group comparisons. These comparisons reveal the kinds of structural interconnections that can help LatCrit scholars articulate a common agenda despite the different histories of dispossession. At the same time, she also recognizes that inter-group comparisons can be dangerous. She is therefore, careful to disclaim any essentialistic intent "to collapse the histories of people of color into one false norm." Instead, her stated purpose is "to demonstrate how law from one historical period established the[ ] subordinate status [of these two different groups]." ⁽⁴³⁾For this reason, Professor Luna's essay provides a valuable point of departure for reflecting on the ethics and politics of intergroup comparisons.
 

*595 The key objective, viewed through a LatCrit normativity, is to ensure that our inter-group comparisons are performed in ways that promote the commitments and alliances that strengthen a community of solidarity. Indeed, my point is even more dramatic. Not only can different group histories and lived realities be compared in many different ways, but it is precisely for this reason that the value of any comparison turns on the kind of collective identifications and inter-group alliances such comparisons engender. Comparisons that undermine the possibilities for anti-essentialist solidarity and derail the anti-subordination imperatives of our theory and praxis ought to be rejected outright precisely because they are not true in any way that matters. Conversely, comparisons that promote these objectives ought to be embraced for further exploration and centered in our collaborative projects. ⁽⁴⁴⁾
 

If this position seems to play fast and loose with inherited notions of "historical truth," that too is untrue--in any way that matters. On the contrary, this position simply attaches a political imperative to the interpretative choices we make in telling our histories and comparing our subordinations. One happy truth of our otherwise decidedly unhappy era is that the once-upon-a-time illusion of a unitary history has been oh-so utterly destabilized by a proliferation of our discourses and perspectives. Rather than bemoaning the fact that as finite social beings, we each access history, like any other reality, through the contingencies of discursive orders that are always in flux, ⁽⁴⁵⁾ LatCrit scholars need to understand this discursive flux--and the multiplicity of perspectives it generates--as precisely the reason why the histories we should tell are the histories of the future we are determined to create together. ⁽⁴⁶⁾
 

*596 Attorney Cheryl Little's essay provides a valuable counterpoint. Her essay is based on years of committed advocacy on behalf of Haitian refugees. Hers is a story of an uphill battle on behalf of a vulnerable and disdained minority. Her point of departure is a critical analysis of NACARA, otherwise known as the Victims of Communism Relief Act. ⁽⁴⁷⁾ This immigration legislation provides substantial immigration relief for nationals of Nicaragua, Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, the former Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries. Haitians are noticeably missing. Attorney Cheryl Little links their absence to a historical pattern of discrimination and exclusion, dating back to the initial wave of Haitian refugees fleeing the right wing brutality of the Duvalier regime and continuing through a series of instances in which Haitians have been singled out for differential treatment. This differential treatment is all the starker when juxtaposed against the treatment accorded Cuban refugees. Though both groups came to the United States fleeing dictatorship in their countries of origin, Haitians fleeing the political repression of the Duvalier regime received a very different reception than Cubans fleeing Castro in the freedom flotillas of the 1960s. This differential treatment has also generated significant intergroup tension and unrest. Haitians, subject to indefinite detention at Krome, have engaged in hunger strikes to protest the double standard that keeps them imprisoned, even as Cuban hijackers have been promptly released upon arrival in Florida. Haitians, intercepted at sea, have been repatriated to Haiti despite their claims of well-founded fear of persecution, while Cubans, rescued by the Coast Guard, have been flown to Miami and paroled into the community. Attorney Little sums up the differential treatment like this:
 

In many ways, immigration practices toward Cubans and Haitians have represented the extremes of United States policy. While immigration policy toward Cubans tends to be generous and humanitarian, even with recent repatriation, immigration policy toward Haitians tends to be stringent and inhumane. ⁽⁴⁸⁾
 

Because so much of Attorney Little's argument is organized around a juxtaposition of Haitian and Cuban refugee experiences, her essay provides an appropriate moment to reflect anew and with greater precision on the political implications of the way intergroup comparisons are *597 articulated in LatCrit theory. It enables us to move from abstract discussions of the normative aspirations and commitments that ought to inform the practice of intergroup comparisons to the more difficult task of articulating a methodology for assessing such comparisons from a LatCrit perspective. The first step is to recognize that intergroup comparisons impact the formation of collective solidarities and political alignments by structuring the perception of similarities and differences within and between the varied and various groups that might potentially coalesce around any particular political project--in this case the politics of refugee policy. Comparing comparisons means assessing the way different intergroup comparisons tend to structure different political alignments and subjecting these alternative political alignments to anti-essentialist critical analysis informed by LatCrit commitments to anti- subordination politics. ⁽⁴⁹⁾
 

Applying this methodology, it is worth noting that unlike Professor Luna, whose effort is to reveal suppressed commonalities in the legal construction of Black and Chicano subordination, Attorney Little's narrative account is organized around a discourse of absolute difference that emphasizes the uniqueness of the Haitian refugee experience by contrasting it to the experience of Cuban refugees. In doing so, her narrative marks the lines of similarity and difference along a racial schemata that casts Cuban refugees as racially white and Haitian refugees as racially Black. This racial dichotomization, though profoundly essentialized, may nevertheless further some anti-essentialist political realignments at least insofar as it destablizes discourses used to pit domestic minorities against recent immigrants. Black Americans, in particular, have often been cast as the group most directly and negatively affected by the influx of immigrants. ⁽⁵⁰⁾ Reading the treatment of Haitian refugees through a discourse that links their differential treatment to the fact that a large majority of Haitians are Black can be an effective way of combating the articulation of anti-immigrant politics among Black Americans. By showing how Haitian refugees have been singled out for particularly restrictive immigration exclusion, the discourse of absolute *598 difference makes a clear link between exclusionary immigration policies and domestic racism. The domestic anti-racist agenda is thereby challenged to become more inclusive precisely because a politics of racial justice cannot ignore the differential oppression and exclusion of Black immigrants without invoking and/or activating a particularly problematic form of intra-Black hierarchy that privileges Black Americans over Black immigrant refugees. Thus, reading the Haitian immigration experience through the discourse of absolute difference may help expand and consolidate a pro- immigrant political coalition by foregrounding a perspective from which achieving justice for immigrants can be seen as a part of a broader struggle for racial justice in this country.
 

Although Attorney Little's discourse of absolute difference may help redefine the treatment of Haitian refugees as a matter of racial justice, the pro-immigrant political realignments fostered by this discourse can become truncated in two important respects. First, Haitians are not the only racialized immigrant group that has been treated unfairly and restrictively by U.S. immigration policy, and Black Americans are not the only domestically subordinated group that have cast themselves as particularly victimized by immigrant entry. ⁽⁵¹⁾ The discourse of absolute difference can truncate the coalitional solidarity that might otherwise be organized around these intergroup commonalities precisely because its account of racial injustice is based on the claim that harsh treatment received by other immigrant groups pales in comparison to the treatment Haitian refugees have received because they are Black. Rather than fostering a comprehensive and inclusive political agenda in opposition to racist immigration policies based on the substantive merits of each group's particular claims of injustice, intergroup comparisons articulated through a discourse of absolute difference tend to provoke intergroup competition over which group has received the harshest treatment.
 

Equally important, articulating a discourse of absolute difference forces Attorney Little to overlook intergroup commonalities and emphasize intergroup differences in ways that suppress other significant dimensions of U.S. refugee policy. While refugees from Cuba, Haiti, Guatemala and El Salvador have come to this country seeking refuge from dictatorship and persecution in their countries of origin, in Attorney Little's account, the totalitarian repression experienced in Cuba is reduced to the "relatively mild mistreatment of Cubans in their homeland (which results in a grant of asylum), while gross mistreatment of *599 Haitians does not." ⁽⁵²⁾ This juxtaposition helps articulate a discourse of racial difference, but only by minimizing the degree of repression in communist Cuba and suppressing the fact that, Guatemalan and Salvadoran refugees, who like Haitians experienced gross mistreatment and death squad activities in their countries of origin, also have been routinely denied political asylum. ⁽⁵³⁾ These facts do not fit neatly into a discourse of absolute difference because the totalitarian repression in Cuba, like the systematic denial of political asylum to Guatemalan and Salvadoran refugees, both suggest factors other than race are operative in the differential treatment of Cuban and Haitian refugees. These other variables include the articulation of U.S. national security ideology, ⁽⁵⁴⁾ the doctrinal structure of U.S. refugee law, particularly its economic/political dichotomy, which justifies the exclusion of "economic refugees" even as the indeterminacy of the dichotomy renders every racialized immigrant group vulnerable to exclusion regardless of the objective merits of their claim to political asylum, and the unsettled controversy over the conditions and principles that justify international intervention in the "internal affairs" of repressive regimes. ⁽⁵⁵⁾
 

To be sure, Attorney Little's narrative account notes these variables, but only in passing. Her objective is to center the reality of racial discrimination in the way we understand the politics of refugee policy, and in this respect, she is entirely successful. Her compelling narrative leaves no doubt that eliminating racial discrimination from U.S. refugee policy is a compelling objective; nevertheless, her narrative does trigger doubts as to whether the kinds of intergroup coalitions needed to advance this objective are likely to coalesce around a political agenda defined by a discourse of absolute difference, particularly if this discourse is articulated through intergroup comparisons that minimize the substantive claims of justice of one group in order to buttress claims of discrimination made by another group. The challenge is to move beyond these kinds of intergroup comparisons. The question is how. *600 The answer is to articulate a broader perspective from which the particular experiences and various claims of different groups can be seen as part of a common struggle for justice.
 

A moment's reflection on the variables marginalized by Attorney Little's narrative account may provide some direction. These variables give reason to doubt whether a political agenda defined by the objective of eliminating racial discrimination from U.S. refugee policy would be enough to achieve justice for Haitian refugees--even as they suggest a variety of perspectives from which all refugees inhabit a common context of struggle. All refugees, including Haitians, inhabit a world in which U.S. policy responses to human rights violations, both at home and abroad, are filtered through an aggressive and self-serving national security ideology, ⁽⁵⁶⁾ in which restrictions on mobility and exclusionary policies can be directed with legal impunity at the world's poorest peoples, and in which the international community has not yet developed the legal norms and enforcement mechanisms to empower and protect peoples against the repression and abuses of internal elites. ⁽⁵⁷⁾ Reading the differential treatment of Cuban and Haitian refugees through these variables, rather than the discourse of absolute difference, would activate very different political agendas and foster very different intergroup coalitions precisely because these variables link the critical analysis of U.S. refugee policy to a critical analysis of the U.S. imperial state, the production of poverty in the international political economy, and the failures of the interstate system of sovereign nations to sustain a world order based on respect for international human rights. These dimensions of domestic and international law and politics bear directly on the project of achieving substantive justice for Haitian refugees; however, their transformation implicates a fundamental reconfiguration of power relations and requires a discourse of mutual recognition and intergroup respect, not of absolute difference articulated through intergroup comparisons that minimize the substantive claims of one group to enhance those of another.
 
 

At the same time, the essay by Attorney Little effectively foregrounds *601 the difficulties of translating abstract assertions of intergroup commonalities into a practical politics of coalitional justice. In Attorney Little's narrative, the noticeable exclusion of Haitian refugees from the amnesties enacted by NACARA is significant, not only because it is linked to and informed by a long history of differential and discriminatory treatment towards Haitians, but because it represents an intergroup political betrayal in the corridors of Congress. Though a bipartisan and intergroup coalition, including leaders of the Black and Hispanic Congressional Caucuses, has been coalescing in response to growing community opposition to the continued and blatantly discriminatory exclusion of Haitians, Haitians still lack the political representation and committed advocacy other immigrant groups enjoy. The fact that Republican members of Congress supporting NACARA were willing and able to perform a so-called "jihad" for the benefit of Nicaraguan, but not Haitian, refugees raises profound questions about the practice of coalitional politics, ⁽⁵⁸⁾ particularly in light of another part of the story. Confronted with assertions that including Haitians in NACARA would kill the bill, Haitian advocates might, nevertheless, have decided to press the point. They might, in effect, have chosen to perform their own "jihad" on behalf of the excluded Haitians. According to Attorney Little, they did not. ⁽⁵⁹⁾ As a result, thousands of refugees and immigrants from Nicaragua, Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, the former Soviet Union and Warsaw pact countries are enjoying the benefits of NACARA, leaving Haitians to wonder whether their self- restraint and self-sacrifice in this instance will be remembered and reciprocated in the next.
 

Told as a story of sell-outs and sacrifices, the story of NACARA tracks a familiar problematic in the practice of coalitional politics. Years ago, Professor Derek Bell gave us the theoretical framework for understanding this problematic in the context of Black/White civil rights coalitions. Professor Bell forwarded an "interest convergence" theory of the way white people practice coalitional politics. ⁽⁶⁰⁾ In this practice, intergroup unity and solidarity are grounded, not in any commitment to objective justice nor in any substantive vision of inter-racial equality, but rather in the contingencies of converging group interests. Inter-racial *602 civil rights coalitions were viable only so long as white people saw their own particular self-defined group interests furthered by supporting Black civil rights struggles. The much discussed collapse of the civil rights coalition, and increasing reactionary retrenchment aimed at affirmative action policies, minority business set-asides, entitlements programs, read against the backdrop of economic problems, provide ample evidence in support of Professor Bell's initial thesis. ⁽⁶¹⁾
 

Attorney Little's narrative reveals the way Haitian refugees were cast as politically expendable in the coalitional politics that achieved the enactment of NACARA. It thus raises the significant question whether minority groups, their political representatives and legal advocates are destined to replay the interest convergence politics through which the white majority has strategically maintained its privileges. It challenges LatCrit theory, in particular, to struggle with the problem of articulating a more meaningful foundation for our coalitional theory and praxis. ⁽⁶²⁾ Can we move the practice of intergroup coalitional politics beyond the pseudo solidarity and fleeting alliances of contingent convergence of interests? Of course, this question, itself, presupposes a level of perceived commonality that may have yet to be imagined in the local politics of South Florida.
 

In this context, the question asked by Attorney Lyra Logan in her essay in this symposium is whether Black and Cuban-American legislators, and the communities they purport to represent, can set aside their differences to establish common cause.⁽⁶³⁾ She believes they can, and this belief is based on her experiences directing Florida's Minority Participation in Legal Education Program. The MPLE is a statewide, state-funded affirmative action program designed to increase minority participation in legal education through annual funding of scholarships for 200 minority law school students and 134 undergraduate pre-law students. Attorney Logan's express purpose in recounting the history of the MPLE Program is to reflect critically on the conditions that enabled Black and Cuban-*603 American state legislators to transcend a politically partisan and racially divisive competition over the creation and location of "a minority law school" in Florida to develop the intergroup, bi- partisan coalition that succeeded in enacting the MPLE Program.
 

Attorney Logan explains that the MPLE program was proposed by Florida's State University System as an alternative to competing proposals to establish a new law school at Florida International University (FIU), which is 50% Hispanic and 11% Black, or to reopen a law school at the historically Black Florida A&M University (FAMU). FAMU's all-Black law school was closed by Florida's all white legislature in 1965 in order to open another white law school at Florida State University. The decision was purportedly made to enable Florida to meet an expected increase in the demand for lawyers, since FAMU's law school was reportedly failing to graduate sufficient numbers of lawyers that would later be admitted to the Florida Bar. The recent controversy over whether a new law school should be located at FIU, a proposal favored by Florida's Cuban legislators, or reopened at FAMU, the alternative supported by Florida's Black legislators, was sparked by various reports indicating that minorities are seriously under-represented throughout the legal profession in Florida. Indeed, in 1990, the Florida Supreme Court Racial and Ethnic Bias Study Commission concluded that a critical shortage of minority law students, attorneys and judges was a major factor contributing to the denial of equal justice for minorities in the State.
 

According to Attorney Logan, the MPLE program aptly illustrates the value of intergroup coalitions. The proposal to establish the scholarship program was introduced in 1994 by a Black representative in the House and a Latino Senator, as a bi-partisan, biracial compromise bill. This bi-partisan, bi-racial support has enabled the program to survive the transfer of power between Democrats and Republicans in the various elections since 1994. Rather than continuing a partisan and racially divisive competition for a law school that the State had no intention of funding, the Black and Hispanic legislators were able to put aside their differences and find common cause in a program that would help both groups achieve the objective of increased minority participation in legal education and the legal profession.
 

The problem is that, as her account indicates, this successful coalitional initiative is a case study in interest-convergence politics. Indeed, the success of the coalition was grounded in the contingencies of the moment, most particularly on the fact that the State could not justify giving either group the law school it wanted. If the State had decided to give a school to one group, this bi-racial, bi-partisan coalition would never have coalesced. Because the State did not, the two groups had to *604 cooperate or walk away with nothing. This coalition is, however, fragile and unstable. Each group still wants "its own" law school, and both FIU and FAMU have indicated that a law school is among their top priorities for 1998-2003. The stakes are as daunting as the coalition is fragile. As Attorney Logan observes, "[i]f that battle reheats and intensifies, chances for future alliances on any issue will become more and more remote. Also, if one group gets a school, the other group may well find its under-representation left inadequately addressed."⁽⁶⁴⁾ The fragility of this coalition is directly attributable to the fact that it is based on a contingent convergence of interests, rather than a substantive vision of and commitment to intergroup social and racial justice. Thus, while Attorney Lyra Logan views the MPLE as evidence of progress in intergroup coalitional politics, a LatCrit sensitivity must demand more from both groups.
 

At a minimum, a substantive vision of intergroup justice would eschew any political move to cast the problem of equal justice as a simple matter of increasing the number of Blacks and Latinas/os enrolled in Florida law schools or admitted to the Florida Bar, particularly when number-counting can operate to pit Blacks and Latinas/os against each other in a zero-sum competition. From the perspective of the Black and Latina/o residents of Florida seeking equal justice and affordable legal services, the crucial question is not who is going to control any proposed minority law school, nor how many Blacks and Latinas/os are admitted to the Bar, but how that control will be exercised and whether those attorneys will be trained, committed and enabled to practice law for social, racial, and ethnic justice.
 

The current structure of the legal profession in Florida, as in many places, is hardwired for inequality and injustice. ⁽⁶⁵⁾ Despite the supposed over-supply of lawyers in South Florida, low and middle income individuals and families, as well as many small businesses, are literally priced out of the market for private legal services to such a degree that their legal needs go unattended or they resort to pro se representation. ⁽⁶⁶⁾ State supported legal services for the poor are grossly underfunded. ⁽⁶⁷⁾ *605 Recent law school graduates inspired by a vision of social justice and a desire to practice law in the public interest are hard-pressed finding any public interest jobs, and certainly any that pay a living wage after accounting for law school loan repayment obligations. ⁽⁶⁸⁾
 

Rather than empowering minority students to become effective advocates on behalf of the poor and the marginalized or even to achieve individual fulfillment through personally meaningful work, many minority students experience their legal education as a socialization process that numbs their sense of justice, subjects them to relentless microaggression, triggers profound identity crises, ignites their appetites for status and money, distances them from the communities they initially wanted to help and, if they are successful by mainstream standards, condemns them to slave away for years at any job that allows them to repay their student loans, while they take solace in the fact they are making more money than they have the free time to spend. ⁽⁶⁹⁾ Integrating minorities into this pre-existing status quo without serious attention and proactive efforts to reform the way legal education, the legal profession and the delivery of legal services are currently structured may provide Black and Latina/o students with a well- deserved opportunity for individual advancement through professional education, but it will not in and of itself ensure that low and middle income Blacks and Latinas/os, not to mention the poor of any race, will enjoy equal justice, nor that these new attorneys will be ready and able to practice law for social justice.
 

Clearly, the MPLE program is a remarkable feat in an era of backlash and retrenchment. The question that Attorney Logan's essay effectively raises for LatCrit theory and praxis is this: how can we use the contingencies of interest convergence as a stepping stone toward, rather than a restriction upon, the achievement of social justice. Both the civil rights and the MPLE experiences show that coalitions based on interest-convergence can be put to good use, but those two experiences also counsel LatCrits to transcend the limitations and fragilities of these strategic *606 alliances. With this critical account of the MPLE experience, Attorney Logan usefully reminds LatCrit scholars that our challenge is to imagine and implement coalitions based on a vision of and commitment to substantive justice.
 

In this context, Attorney Coto's essay is a particularly instructive counter-example. ⁽⁷⁰⁾ Like many students of color, Attorney Coto experienced her Latina identity as a compelling source of empathy for and commitment to the marginalized communities with whose struggles and suffering she could in many ways identify. Unlike most law students, however, Attorney Coto was able, with the help of an Echoing Green Fellowship and the sponsorship of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, to translate her empathy into an innovative legal services project, which she founded upon graduating from the University of Miami School of Law in 1997. This project is called LUCHA. Its mission is to serve battered immigrant women by providing critical legal assistance under "VAWA," the Violence Against Women Act, a federal law that makes the prevention of violence against women "a major law enforcement priority" and includes provisions enabling battered immigrant women to self- petition for permanent resident status without the cooperation or participation of their abusive spouse. VAWA also provides suspension of deportation relief; however, without access to effective legal services, the vast majority of battered immigrant women lack the information and resources necessary to obtain this relief. Like other immigrants, these women face barriers of language, culture and social economic marginalization, but they face additional barriers because they are trapped in relationships with men who abuse them and manipulate their fears of deportation in order to exert power and maintain control.
 

The LUCHA project is especially noteworthy because it reflects a self- conscious and self-critical effort to implement an alternative model of legal services that is less focused on traditional litigation and more focused on reducing the dependency and isolation that make battered immigrant women so desperately vulnerable. While the traditional legal services model constructs the client as passive beneficiary of the benefits secured and rights vindicated through the agency of the lawyer advocate, LUCHA seeks to relocate and inspire agency in and among the battered immigrant women themselves. Formed as a grassroots membership organization, its strategy is to enable and promote self- determination by involving battered immigrant women in a larger community where mutual engagement and assistance become the vehicles of individual empowerment. LUCHA members are eligible for free legal services on immigration matters; however, to become a LUCHA member, *607 women must take a six-part educational program and commit a portion of their own time to assisting other women. The educational component raises women's consciousness and provides them with necessary information on relevant topics in immigration law, workers' rights, domestic violence, public benefits, victim's rights, community resources and lessons on how to be heard by government. The mutual assistance creates community and organizes social networks otherwise disrupted by the dislocations of the immigrant experience and the isolation of domestic battery.
 

Despite its many strengths, the LUCHA project faces two significant sets of obstacles. The first is that the structure and philosophy of LUCHA run counter to elitist attitudes that currently structure the delivery of legal services to the poor. The second is that the project is primarily supported by a terminal fellowship. These two obstacles illustrate the difficulties or conundrums facing even the most creative and entrepreneurial minority law students committed to doing public interest work. On the one hand, their identification with their client communities can make them highly critical of the way traditional legal services operate and eager to innovate new approaches; on the other hand, established legal services are resource strapped and hardly interested in, nor often able, to hire recent graduates to develop and implement untested innovations. As a result, even the most innovative projects and ideas are increasingly dependent on terminal fellowships and grants, making these projects fragile, unstable and vulnerable to sudden termination, even after tremendous efforts have been invested in their success. The unsurprising result, too often, is a disillusioned disengagement and retreat to well-trodden paths of career development. Thus, Attorney Coto's story reflects the range and structure of possibilities and obstacles confronting recent law graduates determined to translate anti-subordination theory into meaningful practice. The reforms needed to alter this picture are systemic and profound--and attest to the fact that a struggle to increase minority participation in legal education, unconnected to a project of systemic reform in the delivery of legal services to disadvantaged communities, may fall short of the mark.
 

This is not to suggest that increasing minority participation in legal education and the profession is not a compelling social justice objective. ⁽⁷¹⁾ It is to say that the struggle to achieve equal justice for Blacks, *608 Latinas/os and other marginalized groups in Florida requires more comprehensive reforms, reaching deep into the heart of legal education and forward into the structure of the legal profession. ⁽⁷²⁾ These reforms can barely be imagined, let alone achieved, without the kinds of sustained, collaborative, bi-racial and bi-partisan alliances that the MPLE coalitional initiative conjures, but has not yet fully delivered. By this, I mean alliances that are grounded in a substantive vision of justice and of the role of law and legal education in effectuating that vision, rather than a contingent convergence of interests among two factions that choose to position themselves in a racially marked, politically partisan, zero-sum competition for control of a non-existent law school at the expense of the collaborative intergroup political alliances needed to achieve more comprehensive and systemic reforms in the structure of legal education and the organization of the legal profession--to the detriment of the minority interests they purport to represent and, more generally, to the cause of social, racial justice through law in this State. ⁽⁷³⁾
 

B. Inside Outside: Mapping the Internal/External Dynamics of Oppression
 

The second cluster of essays maps the dynamics of internal and external oppression within Latina/o communities, even as it illustrates a rich multiplicity of perspectives from which the theory and practice of anti- subordination politics can be mapped around the inside/outside metaphor. ⁽⁷⁴⁾ Professor Padilla first activates the inside/outside metaphor by focusing our attention on the phenomenon of internalized racism. Acknowledging that Latina/o subordination is not just a function of external oppression, but also of internal acquiescence in the negative stereotypes that undermine individual self-confidence and destroy collective solidarity, challenges LatCrit scholars to theorize the relationship *609 between internal and external oppression, to familiarize ourselves with the psychologies of liberation ⁽⁷⁵⁾ and to put into practice the affirmation of self that Professor Abreu's essay so effectively displays.
 

The four essays by Professors Abreu, Hernandez-Truyol, Wiessner and Roberts in very different, though complementary and synergistic, ways introduce a second problematic that is also usefully analyzed through the heuristic lens of the inside/outside dichotomy. LatCrit theory has from the beginning sought to articulate an inclusive and multidimensional critical legal discourse, aimed at centering the previously marginalized experiences of Latinas/os, even as it continuously aims toward an ever more inclusive vision and practice of anti- subordination politics and intergroup justice. The initial birth and current trajectory of LatCrit theory has in some instances been celebrated as a natural outgrowth of the intersectionality and hybridity that characterizes Latina/o identities. Latinas/os are said to be uniquely positioned to bridge the hierarchical divisions of race, ethnicity, class, immigration status, linguistic marginality, gender and sexual orientation because Latina/o identity constitutes the intersection of all of these terms. ⁽⁷⁶⁾
 

It is by now, for example, a LatCrit mantra that Latinas/os come in all races and colors: we are of African, Asian, European and Indian heritage. "We speak Spanish, English, Spanglish, regional dialects and indigenous tongues." ⁽⁷⁷⁾ Latinas/os are, in this respect, a universal that contains all particulars, and whose liberation is therefore intricately intertwined and directly implicated in the liberation of all particulars.⁽⁷⁸⁾ Against this backdrop, Professor Abreu's reminder that LatCrits must avoid essentializing our intersectionality sounds a helpful note of caution, even as Professor Hernandez-Truyol's account of the multiple forms of subordination experienced by Latina lesbians within their own communities, Professor Wiessner's emphasis on the oppression of indigenous peoples within every Latina/o community across the globe, and Professor Robert's discussion of the particularities of Black experiences and political identity, all challenge LatCrit scholars to examine how Latinas/os construct insiders and outsiders within the very midst of Latina/o communities. Our aim must be to avoid the practices and *610 assumptions that would replicate these insider/outsider configurations in the articulation of LatCrit theory, the consolidation of the LatCrit community and the organization of LatCrit conferences.
 
 

By invoking the notion of internalized oppression, Professor Padilla's essay offers a valuable point of reference from which to explore the role of individual psychological and spiritual agency in the process of anti- subordination liberation praxis. Read in tandem with Professor Abreu's account of her experiences as a Cuban immigrant, these two essays center the psychological processes through which outsider groups both participate in and transcend their own marginalization, as well as the way individual experiences of inclusion and exclusion are mediated by culturally specific narratives of identity and community. As narratives of Latina/o group identity, these two essays project very different accounts of the way the constitution of Latina/o identities is experienced by members of different Latina/o groups.
 

Professor Padilla's essay calls Latinas/os to begin our anti-subordination theory and praxis by acknowledging the reality of internalized racism in Latina/o communities, a phenomenon in which, according to Professor Padilla, "'Mexicans internalize the Anything But Mexican' mind set." For Professor Padilla, exposing instances of internalized oppression is an important first step in any liberation struggle because internalized racism is the primary reason why Latinas/os collaborate in their own denigration, sabotage the opportunities and undermine the positive efforts of other Latinas/os. She cites numerous examples: the fact that significant numbers of Latinas/os in California voted to deny immigrants access to many benefits they had previously enjoyed (Prop. 187), to end affirmative action in government contracting and public colleges and universities (Prop. 209), and to end bilingual education (Prop. 227). Latinas/os who have internalized the negative stereotypes promulgated by the white majority are alienated both from themselves and from each other. Thus, they experience even their substantial achievements through the insecurity of an imposter and project their self-doubts and self-hatred onto other Latinas/os.
 

Overcoming subordination requires overcoming this internalized racism, and to this end, Professor Padilla offers numerous suggestions as to how Latinas/os can develop more positive self-identities and more empowered and empowering relations with other Latinas/os, both within *611 and beyond the legal academy. ⁽⁷⁹⁾ These practices have the common elements of collective solidarity, mutual assistance and sustained engagement in each other's struggles and aspirations--over time and across the many different social, political and professional settings where Latinas/os can make common cause in promoting each other's achievements and development--including LatCrit conferences.
 

Professor Abreu's essay, by contrast, offers a narrative in which Cuban identity has been experienced as a source of pride, privilege and unique opportunities. She describes her own experience of being Cuban as an experience of being "where it was at." ⁽⁸⁰⁾ Cuban identity most certainly marks a whole constellation of differences between her and the Anglo majority, but in Professor Abreu's narrative, these differences are experienced of a piece with the talent of a Luciano Pavarotti or the intellect of an Albert Einstein. "Difference," she notes, "is negative only when it is constructed as such." ⁽⁸¹⁾ Being Cuban never felt like a negative thing, nor did she ever feel inferior because she was Cuban. This is not to say that she never felt excluded, stereotyped or pressured to conform to the roles and positions the majority culture allots to immigrants in general and Latinas in particular. It does mean that these instances of exclusion produced no permanent damage in her sense of self because she, like many of the first and later waves of Cuban refugees, experienced their presence in this country as a temporary phenomenon triggered by the disruptions of the Cuban revolution. For many Cubans, the memory of a privileged pre-revolutionary status in Cuba and the dream of return, not to mention the human capital and economic resources some Cubans were able to take into exile, provide the social psychological resources through which many in the Cuban-American and "Ameri-Cuban" community combat their "minoritization." ⁽⁸²⁾
 

These two essays provide a unique opportunity to explore the wide range of discourses through which Latina/o identity is mapped across the multiplicity of differences and similarities that constitute us as individuals marked by, or invested in, a Latina/o identity. Their focus is internal, self- critical and self-reflective. Though they perform the project of constituting a Latina/o identity in very different ways, each does so undeniably from the inside of a discourse, consciousness and community that are as internal to the Latina/o construct, as they are external to each other. The differences are striking. Where Professor Padilla reflects now on the broader significance of the fact she never dated any of the Chicanos *612 with whom she went to college, Professor Abreu remembers dating only Cuban boys in high school; where Professor Padilla speaks of Chicanas/os distancing themselves from the Spanish language, Professor Abreu recounts the concerted and assuredly draconian efforts through which her parents ensured she would grow up bilingual; and where Professor Padilla speaks of Chicana/o feelings of inferiority at the margins of a dominant white society, Professor Abreu recounts the decidedly critical perspective her Cuban upbringing gave her on Anglo culture--a perspective that shielded her from ever feeling excluded by a society into which she never wanted to assimilate.
 

Read in counterpoint, these two essays give substantive content to the general observation that the way individuals and groups respond to experiences of oppression and exclusion is both central to the development of personal and social agency and informed by the different cultural narratives we internalize. ⁽⁸³⁾ They also demonstrate how the project of Latina/o liberation implicates existential questions of universal significance, in this instance provoking a critical analysis of the relationship between the internal experience of one's own agency and will to flourish and the external structural constraints that might otherwise determine our fate by consigning us to the margins. ⁽⁸⁴⁾ Poised between the discourses of free will and determinism, between the constraints of structure and the possibilities of agency, is a subtextual conflict between those who construct Latina/o identity through a discourse of victimization and those who eschew any connection to a victim identity. ⁽⁸⁵⁾ Read in counterpoint, the essays activate this tension because they challenge LatCrit scholars to reconcile Professor Padilla's "reconstructive paradox" *613 with Professor Abreu's celebration of self and assertions of indomitable agency.
 

The reconstructive paradox refers to the difficulties of enacting one's liberation from within a society that barely notices "the most insidious types of social evil because those evils tend to be so ingrained." ⁽⁸⁶⁾ If Latina/o marginality and inferiority are so pervasive in our society, where or how, as Professor Westley asks, do Latinas/os find the resources to resist acquiescing in the very power that constructs us? ⁽⁸⁷⁾ Professor Abreu responds that Latinas/os should seek these resources of self-affirmation and personal agency in the fact Latinas/os are always both insiders and outsiders all at once. Drawing energy and affirmation from those contexts in which we are insiders prepares us to combat the power that, in other contexts, would cast us as outsiders. The problem, as Professor Abreu acknowledges, is that, unlike herself, not all Latinas/os know the experience of being inside a group that is privileged by class, education, or social status. Not having access to an inside that is materially privileged or socially valued means having to create a self- and other-affirming identity from the bottom or the outside.
 

To be sure, Professor Abreu recognizes that "[r]efusing to acknowledge victimization does not transmute a victim into a non-victim." ⁽⁸⁸⁾ Her point, as I see it, is that the impact of victimization is, in many though not all instances, fluid and indeterminate. There is always some avenue of agency. And even if there isn't really, the individual who always believes there is a way forward (or out) is more likely to flourish than an individual who internalizes the discourses and credits the practices that cast her as inferior or inadequate. Personal agency, like any great achievement or failure, is from this perspective a manifestation of the will to be and believe. ⁽⁸⁹⁾ But even here, engaging Professor Padilla's reconstructive paradox means confronting the question: where does the outsider, one lacking access to the sorts of material, educational or social privilege Professor Abreu admits to enjoying, or one, who--like the Latina lesbian of whom Professor Hernandez- Truyol writes--finds herself multiply rejected, despised and excluded from all the identity groups or communities with which she might otherwise identify and align herself, where does someone so positioned--at the bottom and on the outside--find the will and resources to manifest an alternative vision from the bottom or the outside?
 

*614 Read in this context, Professor Hernandez-Truyol's essay contributes a particularly valuable critical perspective on the significance of internalized oppression as well as on the configuration of insider/outsider positions within Latina/o communities. Tracking earlier accounts of the profoundly sexist constructs through which Latina/o culture structures heterosexuality and consolidates familial interdependence around the images of female sexual purity and maternal self-sacrifice, Professor Hernandez-Truyol notes how Latina/o culture routinely invokes the strictures of Catholic religiosity to regiment a form of heterosexuality that empowers men and smothers women. Under the weight and burden of the virgin/whore dichotomy, heterosexuality is constituted as a practice of male dominance and female self- negation, while the expression of female sexual agency or autonomy is cast as a dangerous step toward a rapid and ineluctable free fall into a life of sin, perversion and vulnerability to male sexual dominance. ⁽⁹⁰⁾ And yet, however oppressive these cultural constructs may be for straight Latinas, Professor Hernandez-Truyol is right to insist that Latina/o culture is even more virulent in its oppression of lesbians as lesbians.
 

Though all Latinas must negotiate the rigidity of the virgin/whore dichotomy every time and everywhere it is invoked to confine Latina assertions of autonomy and self-determination within the parameters of permissibility dictated by heteropatriarchal normativity or to bully Latinas into doing and being only those things a Latina can do or be without being labeled "a whore," nevertheless, in this context, Latina lesbians must, in addition, negotiate a cultural reality that sums itself up like this: Mejor puta que pata. As Professor Hernandez-Truyol indicates, this cultural adage says it all: "The social and religious factors and influences that render sex taboo for mujeres in the cultura Latina are intensified, magnified and sensationalized when imagining lesbian sexuality." ⁽⁹¹⁾ As bad as the whore is, the lesbian is worse. The fact that Latina lesbians have nonetheless found ways to develop and express a self- and other-affirming identity reflects the power and resilience of *615 humanity asserting "I am and I count" against all odds, ⁽⁹²⁾ but it does not change the fact that the homophobia that marks her a lesbian also makes her an alien outsider--marginal and irrelevant, perverted and unnatural--everywhere and anywhere, but most painfully within her own Latina/o family and community. ⁽⁹³⁾
 

By centering the experiences of Latina lesbians, Professor Hernandez- Truyol projects a perspective from which the anti-subordination imperative now pending on the LatCrit agenda far exceeds the anti-subordination potential of any strategies that would reduce this imperative to a struggle against internalized oppression or would ground Latina/o liberation on the identification and reclamation of some insider position we have all purportedly experienced at sometime, somewhere or another. This is not to say that these strategies, as articulated by Professors Padilla and Abreu, have no anti- subordination potential. It is just to suggest that the anti-subordination potential of these seemingly different strategies is limited by a common element that, but for Professor Hernandez-Truyol's intervention, might be easily overlooked. This common element is that neither strategy really addresses the problem of outsiders within the Latina/o community.
 

Professor Abreu's reflections on the insider/outsider dynamic conjure but do not really engage the problem because she intentionally conflates the difference between outsider status and difference itself. While she may be quite right to insist that "difference" is negative only when it is constructed as such, there is still a vast difference between being "different" in the way of a Luciano Pavarotti and being different in the way of a Latina lesbian. The difference between these ways of "being different" *616 is precisely the fact that some differences, like sexual orientation, race and gender are in fact constructed as negative. As a result, the proposal to ground Latina/o liberation on the self-valorization of one's difference rings a little hollow precisely because the project of self-valorization smacks of other-world psycho-spiritual realization, rather than the material and institutional transformation of the real-world configurations of power and privilege that are currently invested in maintaining these negative constructions of difference-- precisely because these constructions help reproduce and legitimate hierarchical relations, both within and against Latina/o communities, in profound and material terms.
 

Professor Padilla's discussion of internalized oppression skirts the same problem in a different way. This is because the deconstruction of internalized oppression addresses a pycho-cultural dynamic in which the self is pitted against itself. In the case of Latina lesbians, overcoming internalized oppression may help the Latina lesbian, like other victims of relentless oppression, to resist the practices and discourses of subordination and exclusion and may thus enable her to revalue and respect both herself and other lesbians, but it does not eliminate the reality of homophobic oppression in la cultura Latina precisely because, and to the extent, this oppression is embedded in the very different dynamic of the self against its "other."
 

In this context, what Professor Hernandez-Truyol's intervention suggests is that anti-subordination theory and praxis must make a clear distinction between internalized and internal oppression within Latina/o communities: the first dynamic targets sameness; the second targets difference. The first is activated by self-hatred and self-doubt, the second by hatred or fear of the Other. Overcoming the first, requires that we learn to value ourselves. Overcoming the second requires that we learn to value others. Learning to value ourselves does not automatically translate into the valuing of others, particularly "Others," in whose difference Latina/o culture has inscribed its most virulent prejudices and whose acceptance and full inclusion within the Latina/o community would threaten and profoundly destabilize the routine practices and ingrained ideologies through which traditional relations of power and dominance are culturally performed and legitimated. It therefore follows that self-valorization can be only part, though--as Professors Abreu and Padilla powerfully demonstrate--an important part, of the anti- subordination agenda that drives LatCrit theory and practice. The other part requires that, in learning to value Others, who are at the bottom or on the outside of their particular contexts, we learn to value ourselves in a different way--in a way that does not reproduce the *617 prejudices and hierarchies of the various supremacies we seek to transform.
 

                                                                                                                                                                                                       CONTINUE

1. Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Center for Hispanic and Caribbean Legal Studies, University of Miami School of Law. Thanks to Sam Thompson for unfailing support, both financial and personal; to the University of Miami Law Review and the Texas Hispanic Law Journal; and particularly to the two University of Miami Law Review editors-in-chief, Tad Dee, for his good faith and, Sabrina Ferris, for seeing this project through at the end. Thanks also to Max Castro, Drucilla Cornell, Kevin Johnson, Guadalupe Luna, Athena Mutua, Dorothy Roberts, Celina Romany, Greg Stewart and Robert Westley, for discussions that have in one way or another enhanced the thoughts expressed in this Foreword. Special thanks to my friend and colleague, Frank Valdes, for friendship, inspiration and solidarity.

2. LatCrit scholarship has virtually exploded in the last three years. In addition to the published proceedings of LatCrit I, see Symposium, LatCrit Theory: Naming and Launching a New Discourse of Critical Legal Scholarship, 2 Harv. Latino L. Rev. 1 (1997) and LatCrit II, see Symposium, Difference, Solidarity and Law: Building Latina/o Communities Through LatCrit Theory, 19 Chicano-Latino L. Rev. 1 (1998), LatCrit scholars have also produced a first- ever symposium exploring major issues in international law and international human rights from a critical race perspective. See Symposium, International Law, Human Rights and LatCrit Theory, 28 U. Miami Inter-Am. L. Rev. 1 (1997). LatCrit scholarship has also been published in a stand-alone volume, see Symposium, LatCrit Theory, Latinas/os and the Law, 85 Cal. L. Rev. 1087 (1997), 10 La Raza L. J. 1 (1998). For proceedings of the gathering of Latina/o Law Professors that gave birth to the LatCrit project, see Colloquium, Representing Latina/o Communities: Critical Race Theory and Practice, 9 La Raza L. J.S 1 (1996). For a particularly insightful overview of the purposes and commitments of the LatCrit movement, see Francisco Valdes, Under Construction: LatCrit Consciousness, Community and Theory, 85 Cal. L. Rev. 1087, 93-96 (1997), 10 La Raza 1, 7-10 (1998) [hereinafter Valdes, Under Construction]. For proceedings of the LatCrit IV conference, see Symposium, Rotating Centers, Expanding Frontiers: LatCrit Theory and Marginal Intersections, 33 U.C. Davis L. Rev. (forthcoming 2000).

3. For a sense of the substantive issues that triggered the eruptions at LatCrit II, see Elvia R. Arriola, Foreword: March!, 19 Chicano-Latino L. Rev. 1, 26-7 (1998) [hereinafter Arriola, Foreword: March!]; Nancy K. Ota, Falling From Grace: A Meditation of LatCrit II, 19 Chicano-Latino L. Rev. 437 (1998); Reynaldo Valencia, On Being an Out Catholic: Contextualizing the Role of Religion at LatCrit II, 19 Chicano-Latino L. Rev. 449 (1998); Emily Fowler, Disturbing the Peace, 19 Chicano-Latino L. Rev 479 (1998); Margaret E. Montoya, Religious Rituals and LatCrit Theorizing, 19 Chicano-Latino L. Rev 417 (1998); Elizabeth M. Iglesias & Francisco Valdes, Afterword: Religion, Gender, Sexuality, Race and Class in Coalitional Theory: A Critical and Self-Critical Analysis of LatCrit Social Justice Agendas, 19 U.C.L.A. Chicano-Latino L. Rev. 503, 539 (1998) (declining to engage in retrospective accounts of events, in favor of reflecting instead on the substantive issues raised by the clash of perspectives).

4. The eruptions at LatCrit II raised substantial doubts about the continuity of the project. Communities may form spontaneously, but they do not evolve automatically, particularly not communities of choice and will that are little more than an imagined act of solidarity amongst people separated by so many differences. The organization of appropriate venues for performing community is critical to its evolution, but this also does not happen automatically. It falls to particular individuals at specific points in time to create the venues that enable community. Thus these communities are as fragile as the individuals upon whose energy, initiative and good will they depend. LatCrit II drained us.

5. See Elvia R. Arriola, LatCrit Theory, International Human Rights, Popular Culture, and the Faces of Dispair in INS Raids, 28 U. Miami Inter-Am. L. Rev. 245 (1996-97) [hereinafter Arriola, INS Raids] (emphasizing the importance of LatCrit community building); Arriola, Forward: March!, supra note 2 (same).

6. See Elizabeth M. Iglesias, The Inter-Subjectivity of Objective Justice: A Theory and Praxis for Constructing LatCrit Coalitions, 2 Harv. Latino L. Rev. 467-71 (1997); Elizabeth M. Iglesias, Structures of Subordination: Women of Color at the Intersection of Title VII and the NLRA. NOT!, 28 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 395, 476-78 (1993) [hereinafter Iglesias, Structures of Subordination] (the intersubjectivity of equals: moral imperative and institutional blueprint); id. at 493 n.324 (intra-feminist solidarity must be based on more than "touchy-feely" sentiments); id. at 475- 78 (solidarity among women of color based on justice, not sentimentality).

7. See infra note 105 and accompanying text (discussing objectives and drawing lessons from the LatCrit III focus group discussion entitled From Critical Race Theory to LatCrit to BlackCrit? Exploring Critical Race Theory Beyond and Within the Black/White Paradigm, see <http://nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu/< tilde>malavet/latcrit/archives/lciii.htm>).

8. See, e.g., Stephanie L. Phillips, The Convergence of the Critical Race Theory Workshop with LatCrit Theory: A History, 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 1247 (1999); Francisco Valdes, Afterword: Theorizing "OutCrit" Theories: Coalitional Method and comparative Jurisprudential Experience-RaceCrits, QueerCrits and LatCrits, 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 1265 (1999) [hereinafter Valdes, "OutCrit" Theories].

9. See, e.g., Dorothy E. Roberts, BlackCrit Theory and the Problem of Essentialism, 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 855 (1999) [hereinafter Roberts, BlackCrit Theory]; Athena Mutua, Shifting Bottoms and Rotating Centers: Reflections on LatCrit III and the Black/White Paradigm, 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 1177 (1999); see also The Meanings and Particularities of Blackness in Latina/o Communities, LatCrit IV Substantive Program Outline (reflecting the intellectual growth and theoretical development generated by the BlackCrit focus group discussion), < http://nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu/<tilde>malavet/latcrit/lcivdocs/lcivsubs.htm>.

10. To be sure, lounging on the pool deck of the luxurious Eden Roc Hotel, I did experience a moment of cognitive dissonance, which I was quickly able to resolve because I've never bought the line that our commitment to anti- subordination might be rendered any less authentic by sharing some moments of privilege. To my mind, that view reflects a crabbed and myopic misunderstanding of the ethical substance, political objectives and emotional dimensions of the practice of liberation politics. See, e.g., Jose Miranda, Marx and the Bible: A Critique of the Philosophy of Oppression (John Eagleson trans., 1974) (distinguishing the structural concept of "differentiating wealth" from the individual ownership of property). Like John Hayakawa Torok, I think LatCrit scholars need to find ways to provide ourselves and each other respite from the conflict and controversy to which our anti-subordination commitments routinely expose us--precisely so that we never give up or burn out. See John Hayakawa Torok, Finding the Me in LatCrit Theory: Thoughts on Language Acquisition and Loss, 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 1019 (1999).

11. See, e.g., Charles R. Lawrence III, The Id, The Ego and Equal Protection: Reckoning with Unconscious Racism, 39 Stan. L. Rev. 317 (1987) (unconscious racism pervasive); Angela J. Davis, Prosecution and Race: The Power and Privilege of Discretion, 67 Fordham L. Rev. 13 (1998) (unconscious racism in criminal justice system); Sylvia R. Lazos-Vargas, Democracy and Inclusion: Reconceptualizing the Role of the Judge in a Pluralist Polity, 58 Md. L. Rev. 150, 263-64 (1999) (unconscious racism in interpretation of affirmative action); Susan Sturm, Race, Gender, and the Law in the Twenty-first Century Workplace: Some Preliminary Observations, 1 U. Pa. J. Lab. & Emp. L. 639 (1998) (unconscious racism in labor and employment policies and practices).

12. See Francisco Valdes, Outsider Scholars and 'OutCrit' Perspectivity: Postsubordination Vision as Jurisprudential Method, 49 De Paul L. Rev. 3 (forthcoming 2000).

13. The LatCrit III Substantive Program Outline can be found by visiting the LatCrit webpage at <http://nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu/<tilde> malavet/latcrit/archives/lciii.htm>.

14. See id. (for webpage address).

15. This emphasis on the local politics in South Florida is consistent with prior practice of planning LatCrit conferences to use the location of our conferences to increase our collective knowledge of the particularities of Latina/o realities across geographical areas. See Iglesias & Valdes, supra note 2, at 574 n.185 (discussing the economic tour of San Antonio as another instance of engaging the particularities of the areas in which the conference is held).

16. Elizabeth M. Iglesias, Human Rights in International Economic Law: Locating Latinas/os in the Linkage Debate, 28 U. Miami Inter-Am. L. Rev. 361 (1996-97) [hereinafter Iglesias, International Economic Law] (exploring the way different intra-Latina/o collective identities and political alliances-- some more progressive than others--are triggered by the discourses of development, dependency and neo-liberalism and the very different impact these alliances would have on the project to link enforcement of human rights to trade and finance regimes regulated by international economic law). My point here is that the configuration of collective identities and political alliances is not "naturally" given. Nor do they flow directly from our position within any particular "group." Instead, these identities and alliances are constructed in and through the discourses we deploy. Historical comparisons are precisely the kinds of discourse that organize political alliances and construct collective identities, for better or worse. It is therefore critical to subject any inter-group comparisons to the kind of political alignment analysis I am again suggesting here. For a different, but allied, vision of the kind of political impact analysis that is needed, see Sumi Cho, Essential Politics, 2 Harv. Latino L. Rev. 433 (1997) [hereinafter Cho, Essential Politics ].

17. See Catherine Peirce Wells, Speaking in Tongues: Some Comments on Multilingualism, 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 983 (1999) (providing a clear and beautiful account of the way our ethic of inter-group relations needs to progress beyond a level where mutual recognition and regard depends on the identification of commonalities to a level where we learn to value difference itself).

18. See, e.g., Alice Abreu, Lessons from Latcrit: Insiders and Outsiders, All at the Same Time, 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 787 (1999) (critiquing tendency to channel Latinas/os into fields deemed particularly relevant to Latinas/os).

19. See infra notes 108-117 and accompanying text (reconstructing relationship between universal and particular in the articulation of anti- essentialist critical legal theory).

20. Francisco Valdes, Latina/o Ethnicities,Critical Race Theory, and Post Identity Politics in Postmodern Legal Culture: From Practices to Possibilities, 9 La Raza L.J. 1, 11-12 (1996) (noting that the publication of LatCrit conferences serves "to build relationships among and between Latina/o legal scholars and journals; [and] in this way ... foster the work and success of both.").

21. Guadalupe T. Luna, On the Complexities of Race: The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and Dred Scott v. Sandford, 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 691 (1999) [hereinafter Luna, Complexities of Race]; Cheryl Little, Intergroup Coalitions and Immigration Politics: The Haitian Experience in Florida, 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 717 (1999); Lyra Logan, Florida's Minority Participation in Legal Education Program, 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 743 (1999); Virginia P. Coto, LUCHA, The Struggle for Life: Legal Services for Battered Immigrant Women, 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 749 (1999).

22. Luna, Complexities of Race, supra note 20; see also Guadalupe Luna, Chicana/Chicano Land Tenure in the Agrarian Domain: On the Edge of a Naked Knife, 4 Mich. J. Race & L. 39 (1998).

23. I follow Professor Luna's terminology, which itself follows Professor Matsuda's earlier rejection of the term "minority" in favor of the term "outsider" on the grounds that the former terminology contradicts "the numerical significance of the constituencies typically excluded from jurisprudential discourse." Luna, Complexities of Race, supra note 20, at 695 n.20 (citing Mari Matsuda, Public Response to Racist Speech: Considering the Victim's Story, 87 Mich. L. Rev. 2320 (1989)).

24. See Arriola, INS Raids, supra note 4; Kevin R. Johnson, "Aliens" and the U.S. Immigration Laws: The Social and Legal Construction of Nonpersons, 28 U. Miami Inter-Am. L. Rev. 263 (1997); Enid Trucios-Haynes, The Role of Transnational Identity and Migration, 28 U. Miami Inter-Am. L. Rev. 293 (1997).

25. See Stuart A. Streichler, Justice Curtis's Dissent in The Dred Scott Case: An Interpretive Study, 24 Hastings Const. L.Q. 509, 534 (1997) (noting Taney's position that "[a]n act of Congress which deprives a citizen of the United States of his liberty or property, merely because he came himself or brought his property into a particular Territory of the United States, and who had committed no offence against the laws could hardly be dignified with the name of due process of law.").

26. Dred Scott's substantive claim was that he was a free man by virtue of his years of residency in Illinois, a free state, and in the territories of the Louisiana Purchase that were designated free by the Missouri Compromise. Scott had traveled to these areas from his original place of residence in Missouri, a slave state, in the company and with the permission of his owner, John Emerson. Scott had married and resided in free territory for a number of years before returning to Missouri with his wife and children at Emerson's request. Back in Missouri, Emerson died and Scott sued for his freedom in state court. Settled precedents at the time held that slaves who traveled to and resided within the jurisdiction of a free state or territory, with permission of their owners, were automatically free. Residence within these jurisdictions effected this emancipation precisely because slavery was not legally recognized in these areas. It was further settled that once emancipated by residence in a free state or territory, the free individual was not re-enslaved by mere act of returning to or residing within a slave state, but was rather entitled to have her/his free status legally recognized within the slave state. When the Missouri Supreme Court reversed the jury verdict rendered in Scott's favor and, in the process, reversed these established precedents, Scott brought suit in federal court, invoking the court's diversity jurisdiction, which applies to cases "between Citizens of different States." Scott asserted Missouri citizenship in his suit against John Sanford, who was the brother of his owner's widow and was, at the time of the lawsuit, a citizen of New York. See Jane Larson, A House Divided: Using Dred Scott to Teach Conflict of Laws, 27 U. Tol. L. Rev. 577 (1996); Mark A. Graber, Desperately Ducking Slavery: Dred Scott and Contemporary Constitutional Theory, 14 Const. Comment. 271 (1997).

27. See Peter L. Reich, Western Courts and the Privatization of Hispanic Mineral Rights Since 1850: An Alchemy of Title, 23 Colum. J. Envtl. L. 57 (1998); Robert V. Urias, The Tierra Amarilla Grant, Reises Tijerina, and the Courthouse Raid, 16 Chicano-Latino L. Rev. 141 (1995).

28. See Symposium, The Long Shadow of Korematsu, 40 B.C. L. Rev. 1; 19 B.C. Third World L. J. 1 (1999).

29. See, e.g., Adrienne D. Davis, The Private Law of Race and Sex: An Antebellum Perspective, 51 Stan. L. Rev. 221 (1999) (examining the impact of slave/master sexual relations through lens of antebellum wills and estate cases); Margalynne Armstrong, Race and Property Values in Entrenched Segregation, 52 U. Miami L. Rev. 1051 (1998) (exploring the impact of racism on value of Black-owned property and the interpretation of the anti- discrimination mandate in the struggle for fair housing); Keith Aoki, No Right to Own?: The Early Twentieth-Century "Alien Land Laws" As a Prelude to Internment, 40 B.C. L. Rev. 37; 19 B.C. Third World L. J. 37 (1998) (laws barring agricultural land ownership by Asians); Gloria L. Sandrino, The NAFTA Investment Chapter And Foreign Direct Investment in Mexico: A Third World Perspective, 27 Vand. J. Transnat'l L. 259 (1994) (providing critical analysis of First/Third World battles over scope of duty to compensate expropriation).

30. See, e.g., Jose E. Alvarez, Critical Theory and the North American Free Trade Agreement's Investment Chapter Eleven, 28 U. Miami Inter-Am L. Rev. 303 (1996-97) (critical analysis of investor rights regime established by NAFTA reveals how economic and political interests of privileged are given priority of over economic and political rights of poor); Keith Aoki, Neocolonialism, Anticommons Property, And Biopiracy in The (Not-So-Brave) New World Order of International Intellectual Property Protection, 6 Ind. J. Global Legal Stud. 11 (1998) (new wave expropriation of indigenous peoples through "biocolonialism"); Iglesias, International Economic Law, supra note 15, at 386 (noting that the rights of property so centrally featured in the Cuban Liberty and Democracy Act are not equally respected when the property rights at issue are the rights of indigenous peoples displaced from their communal lands without just compensation).

31. For an analysis calling for critical legal scholarship that centers the legal structures of political economy in the analysis of white supremacy, see Elizabeth M. Iglesias, Out of the Shadow: Marking Intersections In and Between Asian Pacific American Critical Legal Scholarship and Latina/o Critical Theory, 40 B.C. L. Rev. 349; 19 B.C. Third World L. J. 349 (1998) [hereinafter Iglesias, Out of the Shadow]. To this end, a critical comparative analysis of the way economic interests have/not been recognized as property rights across different sociolegal contexts might provide significant insights in developing an anti-essentialist anti-subordination analysis of the legal structure of American political economy. Compare, Reich, supra note 26 (recounting the doctrinal manipulations that integrated subsurface mineral rights into ownership of surface lands), with Local 1330 United Steel Workers of America v. United States Steel Corp., 631 F.2d 1264 (6th Cir.1980) (refusing to recognize community property rights as basis for enjoining management to sell factory it had decided to close despite evidence of profitability, and devastating impact of closure on community that had assisted company with public subsidies and other "giveback").

32. Luna, Complexities of Race, supra note 20, at 710.

33. See Claud Anderson, Black Labor, White Wealth: The Search for Power and Economic Justice (1994).

34. See, e.g., Dorothy Roberts, Racism and Patriarchy in the Meaning of Motherhood, 1 Am. U. J. Gender & L. 1, 7-10 (1993) (recounting brutality of slave system); see also Sumi K. Cho, Multiple Consciousness and the Diversity Dilemma, 68 U. Colo. L. Rev. 1035, n.103 (1997) (arguing for a unified racial critique of white supremacy based on commonalities in the racial trauma of slavery visited upon indigenous peoples and Blacks).

35. See Angela P. Harris & Leslie Espinoza, Afterword: Embracing the Tar-Baby: LatCrit Theory and the Sticky Mess of Race, 85 Cal. L. Rev 1585; 10 La Raza 499 (1997) (exploring the tensions between the rhetoric of Black exceptionalism and multiracial coalitions).

36. Luna, Complexities of Race, supra note 20.

37. See Ediberto Roman, The Alien-Citizen Paradox and Other Consequences of U.S. Colonialism, 26 Fla. St. U. L. Rev. 1 (1998); Efren Rivera Ramos, The Legal Construction of American Colonialism: The Insular Cases (1901- 1922), 65 Rev. Jur. U.P.R. 225 (1996).

38. Luna, Complexities of Race, supra note 20, at 713, quoting Dred Scott opinion:

The words 'people of the United States' and 'citizens' are synonymous terms, and mean the same thing. They both describe the political body who, according to our republican institutions, form the sovereignty, and who hold the power and conduct the Government through their representatives. They are what we familiarly call the "sovereign people," and every citizen is one of this people, and a constituent member of this sovereignty. The question before us is, whether the class of persons described in the plea in abatement compose a portion of this people, and are constituent members of this sovereignty? We think they are not, and that they are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizen' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them.

Id.

39. For example, a discourse of common oppression might reveal otherwise invisible interconnections in the denial of political rights to non-citizens and the felony disenfranchisement laws that operate defacto to construct many Blacks as non-citizens. Compare Nora V. Demleitner, The Fallacy of Social "Citizenship," or The Threat of Exclusion, 12 Geo. Immigr. L. J. 35 (1997) (arguing that permanent residents have a compelling claim to political representation and participation), with Virginia E. Hench, The Death of Voting Rights: The Legal Disenfranchisement of Minority Voters, 48 Case W. Res. L. Rev. 727 (1998) (noting that "[o]f a total voting age population of 10.4 million Black men in the United States, approximately 1.46 million have been disqualified from voting because of a felony conviction. Of these, 950,000 are in prison, on probation, or parole, and more than 500,000 are permanently barred by convictions in the 13 states that disenfranchise prisoners for life.").

40. Thus, for example, in United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, 494 U.S. 1092, 110 S. Ct. 1839 (1990), the present-day court reasoned that the 4th Amendment did not apply extraterritorially to U.S. enforcement activities taken abroad against non-U.S. citizens because the latter did not constitute part of "the people" protected by the Constitution. Though the majority at no time cited the Dred Scott decision, its reasoning reveals the legacy of Dred Scott: a discursive order that can be readily reactivated to consolidate an imperial state. Because noncitizens are not part of "the people," they can, at any moment, be made the objects of unlimited state power.

41. Saenz v. Roe, 119 S. Ct. 1518 (1999), illustrates another way the "dead hand" of the Dred Scott decision reaches into present day legal controversies. In Saenz, a majority of the Supreme Court struck down a California statue imposing durational residency requirement by limiting Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) benefits through the recipients' first year of residence on the grounds it violated 14th Amendment right to travel. In dissent, Clarence Thomas cites the Dred Scott decision to support his contention that the rights and privileges of U.S. citizenship do not include welfare rights. Id. Cf. Dorothy E. Roberts, Welfare and the Problem of Black Citizenship, 105 Yale L. Rev. 1563 (1996) (exploring the implications of racism through analysis linking welfare rights to a substantive vision of social citizenship).

42. See Gil Gott, A Tale of New Precedents: Japanese-American Internment As Foreign Affairs Law, 40 B.C. L. Rev. 179; 19 B.C. Third World L. J. 179 (1998) (arguing national security ideology legitimates deployment of imperial power to enforce white supremacy both within and beyond the territorial jurisdiction of the United States); Natsu Taylor Saito, Justice Held Hostage: U.S. Disregard for International Law in the World War II Internment of Japanese Peruvians - A Case Study, 40 B.C. L. Rev. 275; 19 B.C. Third World L. J. 275 (1998) (same).

43. Luna, Complexities of Race, supra note 20, at 711.

44. See Iglesias, Out of the Shadow, supra note 30 (calling for more collaborative projects organized self-consciously around the exploration and comparison of particular histories). These kinds of comparisons show us commonalities even as they challenge us to confront and overcome our internal racisms, sexisms, etc. They do not constitute a war of positions because the point is not to establish which group is more oppressed, but to understand how they are/were oppressed in order to change the way we are in community.

45. See David Harlan, The Degradation of History at xx-xxii (1997). Lamenting the impact of postmodern thought on historical practice, Harlan asks "What now becomes of the "historical fact," once so firmly embedded in its proper historical context--firmly embedded rightly perceived, and correctly interpreted from a single immediately obvious and obviously appropriate perspective? The overwhelming abundance of possible contexts and perspectives, the ease with which we can skip from one to another, and the lack of any overarching metaperspective from which to evaluate the entire coagulated but wildly proliferating population of perspectives--all this means that the historical fact, once the historian's basic atomic unit, has jumped its orbit and can now be interpreted in any number of contexts, from a virtually unlimited range of perspectives. And if the historical fact no longer comes embedded in the natural order of things ... then what happens to the historian's hope of acquiring stable, reliable, objective interpretations of the past? Id. at xx.

46. See Jerome McCristal Culp, Jr., Latinos, Blacks, Others & The New Legal Narative, 2 Harv. Latino L. Rev. 479 (1997); Elizabeth M. Iglesias, The Inter-Subjectivity of Objective Justice: A Theory and Praxis for Constructing LatCrit Coalitions, 2 Harv. Latino L. Rev. 467 (1997); George Martinez, African-Americans, Latinos, and the Construction of Race: Toward an Epistemic Coalition, 19 Chicano-Latino L. Rev. 213 (1998).

47. Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act (NACARA), Pub. L. No. 105-100, 111 Stat. 2160 (1997). NACARA is part of the Fiscal Year 1998 appropriations bill for the District of Columbia (H.R. 2607).

48. Little, supra note 20, at 732. The interdiction, detention and parole policies aptly call attention to the disparities in our treatment of Cuban and Haitian refugees.

49. See supra notes 15-16 and accompanying text.

50. See, e.g., Anderson, supra note 32 (complaining that immigrants are assisted at the expense of Black Americans); Toni Morrison, On the Backs of Blacks, in Arguing Immigration 98 (Nicolaus Mills ed., 1994) (arguing that hatred of Blacks is a central step in the "Americanization" of immigrants so that "the move into mainstream America always means buying into the notion of American Blacks as the real aliens"); Juan Perea, The Black/White Binary Paradigm of Race, in The Latino/a Condition: A Critical Reader 365 (Richard Delgado & Jean Stefanic eds., 1998) (quoting Morrison and acknowledging that Latinas/os participate in this paradigm of "Americanization" by engaging in racism against Blacks or darker-skinned members of the Latino/a community" but noting that "[c]urrent [anti-immigrant] events ... belie Morrison's notion of American Blacks as "the real aliens").

51. See Kevin R. Johnson, Some Thoughts on the Future of Latino Legal Scholarship, 2 Harv. Latino L. Rev. 101 (1997) [hereinafter Johnson, Latino Legal Scholarship] (discussing Chicano perceptions of Mexican immigrants).

52. Little, supra note 20, at 734.

53. See Ari Weitzhandler, Temporary Protected Status: The Congressional Response to the Plight of Salvadoran Aliens, 64 U. Colo. L. Rev. 249, 252 ("Two factors contributed significantly to the denial rate: the characterization of Salvadoran nationals as economic immigrants, and the Reagan and Bush Administrations' foreign policies toward El Salvador."); Note, Political Legitimacy in the Law of Political Asylum, 99 Harv. L. Rev. 450, 458-64 (1985) (the political dimensions of economic conditions).

54. Kevin R. Johnson, The Antiterrorism Act, The Immigration Reform Act, and Ideological Regulation in the Immigration Laws: Important Lessons for Citizens and Noncitizens, 28 St. Mary's L. J. 833 (1997).

55. Cuban-American leaders in Miami have long called for the kind of intervention in Cuba that was undertaken to dislodge the Haitian military dictatorship that overthrew President Aristide. For statistics on the percentage of Miami Cubans who support military interventions of different sorts in Cuba, see <http://www.fiu.edu/orgs/ipor/cubapoll/index.html>.

56. Gott, supra note 41.

57. For a substantive vision of the way the international legal order might mediate the relation between the sovereignty of states and the self- determination of peoples, see Henry J. Richardson, III, "Failed States," Self- Determination and Preventive Diplomacy: Colonialist Nostalgia and Democratic Expectations, 10 Temp. Int'l & Comp. L. J. 1, 75 (1996) (revealing irrationality and offering alternatives to international legal doctrines designed to uphold concept of sovereignty by ignoring claims of liberation movements within nation-states until they "earn" such recognition through successful military actions- thus constituting civil war as only recourse).

58. According to Attorney Little, "Nicaraguan activists have said that Republican members of Congress carried out a jihad in obtaining legal status for them. They didn't do that for Haitians and others excluded and punished by the new law." Let's hope they do that now. Little, supra note 20, at 741.

59. Attorney Little notes that when it became apparent that there was a powerful effort to exclude Haitians in the legislation, "NACARA's architects maintained that if the Haitians were included the bill would die, and supporters of the Haitians in Congress agreed to permit the Central American refugee relief legislation to move forward without including them." Id. at 740.

60. Derek Bell, Brown v. Board of Education & the Interest- Convergence Dilemma, 93 Harv. L. Rev. 518 (1980).

61. See John A. Powell, An Agenda for the Post-Civil Rights Era, 29 U.S.F. L. Rev. 889 (1995) (linking disorganization of civil rights movement among other things to rise of colorblind ideology); Michael J. Klasman, Brown, Racial Change and The Civil Rights Movement, 80 Va. L. Rev. 7 (1994) (recounting history); Eric K. Yamamoto, Critical Race Praxis: Race Theory and Political Lawyering in Post-Civil Rights America, 95 Mich. L. Rev. 821 (1997) (suggesting strategies for meaningful revival of civil rights agenda).

62. Iglesias & Valdes, supra note 2; Berta Esperanza Hernandez-Truyol, Building Bridges: Latinas and Latinos at the Crossroads, in The Latino/a Condition, supra note 49, at 24, 30-31 [hereinafter Hernandez-Truyol, Building Bridges] (explaining the many ways Latinas/os can tap the experience of intersectionality and multidimensionality to build bridges across differences both within Latina/o communities and between Latina/o and other minority communities); Eric K. Yamamoto, Conflict and Complicity: Justice Among Communities of Color, 2 Harv. Latino L. Rev. 495 (1997).

63. Logan, supra note 20, at 743.

64. Id. at 747.

65. See Where the Injured Fly for Justice, Report and Recommendations of Florida's Supreme Court Racial and Ethnic Bias Study Commission, Part I (Dec. 11, 1990); see generally Jerold S. Auerbach, Unequal Justice: Lawyers and Social Change in Modern America (1976).

66. In 1998, the problems caused by the high number of pro-se litigants in family court prompted the Florida Supreme Court to approve a family law self-help program. See Court Approves Family Law Self-help Centers, Fla.BarNews, Dec. 15, 1998,at 5. The problem, however, remains. See, e.g., Jan Pudlow, Court Asks Family Law Section to Turn Attention to Pro Se Problem, Fla. Bar News, Aug. 15, 1999, at 17.

67. See, e.g., Talbot D'Alemberte, Tributaries of Justice: The Search For Full Access, 73-APR Fla. B.J. 12, 14 (1999) (noting that after Republican Party took control of Congress in 1995, Congressional funding of legal services for the poor dropped, in real dollars, to its lowest level ever - 12% below what it was when Reagan took office in 1981).

68. See, e.g., Bruce A. Green, Foreword: Rationing Lawyers: Ethical And Professional Issues in The Delivery of Legal Services to Low-Income Clients, 67 Fordham L. Rev. 1713 (1999); cf. Lewis A. Kornhauser & Richard L. Revesz, Legal Education And Entry Into The Legal Profession: The Role of Race, Gender, And Educational Debt, 70 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 829 (1995) (advocating scholarships rather than loan repayment assistance based on analysis linking public interest career choices to factors other than debt burden).

69. Margaret E. Montoya, Masks and Resistance, in The Latino/a Condition, supra note 49, at 276; Alex M. Johnson, Jr., The Under- Representation of Minorities in the Legal Profession: A Critical Race Theorist's Perspective, 95 Mich. L. Rev. 1005 (1997); Alex M. Johnson, Jr., Think Like a Lawyer, Work Like a Machine: The Dissonance Between Law School And Law Practice, 64 S. Cal. L. Rev. 1231 (1991).

70. Coto, supra note 20.

71. Enrique R. Carrasco, Collective Recognition as a Communitarian Device: Or, Of Course We Want to Be Role Models!, 9 La Raza L. J. 81 (1996) (arguing that the project of radical reform requires connected critics acting as role models within institutional contexts of legal education and the profession where power is created and distributed); Phoebe A. Haddon, Keynote Address: Redefining Our Roles in The Battle For Inclusion of People of Color in Legal Education, 31NewEng.L.Rev.709 (1997).

72. See Eric K. Yamamoto, LatCrit III: Introduction to Plenary Session Four, 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 683 (1999) (discussing SALT Action Campaign); see also Phoebe A. Haddon, Education for a Public Calling in the 21st Century, 69Wash.L.Rev.573 (1994); Joan Howarth, Teaching in the Shadow of the Bar, 31 U.S.F. L. Rev. 927 (1997).

73. More recently, minority legislators have reportedly put aside their differences and agreed to sponsor a joint proposal to establish two new public law schools in Florida, one at FAMU and the other at FIU. See Mark D. Killian, FAMU/FIU Join Forces for Law Schools, Fla. Bar News, July 1, 1999, at 1. Only time will tell whether this marks the beginning of a more substantive alliance based on mutual commitment to intergroup justice or just another variation on, and instance of, the interest-convergence politics of the past.

74. Laura M. Padilla, Social and Legal Repercussions of Latinos' Colonized Mentality, 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 769 (1999); Abreu, supra note 17; Berta Hernandez-Truyol, Latina Multidimensionality and LatCrit Possibilities: Culture, Gender, and Sex, 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 811 (1999) [hereinafter Hernandez-Truyol, Culture, Gender, and Sex]; Siegfried Wiessner, Esa India! LatCrit Theory and the Place of Indigenous Peoples Within Latina/o Communities, 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 831 (1999); Roberts, BlackCrit Theory, supra note 8.

75. See, e.g., Ignacio Martin-Baro, Writings for a Liberation Psychology (1996); Nancy Caro Hollander, Love in a Time of Hate: Liberation Psychology in Latin America (1997); Geraldine Moane & Jo Campling, Gender and Colonialism: A Psychological Analysis of Oppression and Liberation (1999); A Guide to Dynamics of Feminist Therapy (Doris Howard ed., 1986).

76. Valdes, Under Construction, supra note 1, at 1106 (noting that Latina/o communities are characterized by high degree of mestizaje or racial intermixture and internal diversity).

77. Hernandez-Truyol, Building Bridges, supra note 61, at 30.

78. Iglesias & Valdes, supra note 2, at 557; see also infra at pp. 622-29.

79. Padilla, supra note 73, at 779-84.

80. Abreu, supra note 17, at 794.

81. Id. at 800.

82. Id. (attributing the term minoritized to Celina Romany).

83. See, e.g., Elizabeth M. Iglesias, Rape, Race and Representation: The Power of Discourse, Discourses of Power, and the Reconstruction of Heterosexuality, 49 Vand. L. Rev. 869, 878 n.18 (1996) [hereinafter Iglesias, Rape, Race and Representation] (challenging the characterization of male power in feminist theory as an inescapable force in women's lives by arguing that the content and exercise of agency is guided more by the different cultural narratives we internalize than by "the reality" of the world we inhabit).

84. See Iglesias, Structures of Subordination, supra note 5 (arguing structures may not determine our fate but they do raise the costs of finding ourselves and each other).

85. Professor Abreu asks whether, as a Cuban, she would want to embrace a pan-ethnic Latina/o identity: "If the price of counting [as a Latina/o] is being cast in the role of victim, do I want to count?" Abreu, supra note 17, at 801-02. Cuban-American culture not only eschews any connection to a victim identity, but has also been exceedingly successful at affirming Cuban identity in Miami and everywhere and elsewhere - so much so that Cuban self-affirmation is the subject of internal jokes and external criticism. See, e.g., Earl Shorris, Latinos: A Biography of the People 62-76 (Avon Books, 1992). At the same time, Professor Abreu's narrative provides an additional and often suppressed perspective on the politics of Cuban inclusion in the "Hispanic category" when she recalls being told that, as a Cuban, she didn't really count. Abreu, supra note 17. Her experiences at Cornell University are not unique. Indeed, Cuban-Americans and Ameri-Cubans have long been excluded from the minority category for admissions purposes at the University of Miami School of Law.

86. Padilla, supra note 73, at 779.

87. Robert Westley, Lat Crit Theory and the Problematics of Internal/External Oppression: A Comparison of Forms of Oppression and InterGroup/IntraGroup Solidarity, 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 761 (1999).

88. Abreu, supra note 17, at 801.

89. See U.S. Andersen, Three Magic Words (Melvin Powers Wilshire Book Co. 1954).

90. See Iglesias, Rape, Race and Representation, supra note 82, at 929- 43 (discussing impact of virgin-whore dichotomy on Latina/o sexuality and offering image of sacred prostitution as resource and example of psycho- cultural resistance), and at 918-29 (discussing gender ideology underlying maternal roles in Latina/o culture and arguing for a culturally nuanced psycho- analytical model of identity formation that recognizes the significance of maternal power and the centrality of familial interdependence in Latina/o culture); see also Jenny Rivera, Domestic Violence against Latinas by Latino Males: An Analysis of Race, National Origin, and Gender Differentials, in Adrien K. Wing, Critical Race Feminism 259, 260 (1997) [hereinafter Wing, Critical Race Feminism] (critically analyzing Latina/o cultural constructs of "El Macho" and the sexy latina).

91. Hernandez-Truyol, Culture, Gender, and Sex, supra note 73, at 823.

92. See Mutua, supra note 8 (analyzing white racism as function of obsession with refusal of Black people to accept their dehumanization).

93. See Iglesias, Structures of Subordination, supra note 5, at 488-97 (linking Latina lesbian experience of multiple exclusions/inclusions in different political communities to argument that anti-essentialist institutional arrangements must be designed in ways that effectively mediate and simultaneously enable both individual autonomy and collective action). See also Francisco Valdes, Notes on the Conflation of Sex, Gender and Sexual Orientation: A QueerCrit and LatCrit Perspective, in The Latino/a Condition, supra note 49, at 543 (discussing the strong heteronormativity of Latina/o cultures). For critical discussion of sexual orientation in Miami, the site of LatCrit III, see Francisco Valdes, Below All Radars: An Ethnographic Portrait of Latinas/os Sexual Orientation and the Law in the Making of Miami's 'New Enclave,' 33 Mich. J. L. Reform; 5 Mich. J. Race & L. (forthcoming 2000). See generally Francisco Valdes, Acts of Power, Crimes of Knowledge: Some Observations on Desire, Law and Ideology in the Politics of Expression at the End of the Twentieth Century, 1 Iowa J. Gender, Race & Justice 213, 223-28 (1997) (discussing various strategies focused on increasing sexual minority visibility as central to Queer politics and self-empowerment); Francisco Valdes, Sex and Race in Queer Legal Culture: Ruminations on Identities and Interconnectivities, 5 So. Cal. L. Rev. & Women's Stud. 25 (1995) (proferring 'interconnectivity' as a strategic concept enabling intra- and inter-group coalitions that accept difference and make respect for it integral to antisubordination theory and praxis).

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