Like Professor Hernandez-Truyol, Professor Wiessner calls on Latina/o communities to practice anti-subordination principles internally. ⁽¹⁾ His essay opens by recounting a vision of a world order based on human dignity, inclusion and respect for diversity. In this imagined order, the anti- subordination agenda articulated by Latina/o communities raises compelling claims of justice. Nevertheless, he finds fault in the fact that LatCrit scholarship has seemingly turned a blind eye to the plight of indigenous peoples. ⁽²⁾ This asserted failure to engage the struggles of indigenous peoples jeopardizes the legitimacy of Latina/o demands for equal treatment and respect. In Professor Wiessner's words, "If we do not respect the legitimate claims of others, we forfeit our own."⁽³⁾ Indeed, the struggles of indigenous peoples are particularly appropriate matters for LatCrit attention precisely because they implicate a whole array of current and historical discrimination and exploitation by Hispanic Latinas/os, both in Latin American countries, where Hispanic Latinas/os constitute a dominant class, and elsewhere and everywhere Latinas/os display the conscious and unconscious racism that is endemic in Latina/o cultural sayings and practices toward indigenous peoples. ⁽⁴⁾ Just as Latinas/os resist our subordination within Anglo society, Professor Wiessner's objective is to challenge the subordination of indigenous peoples within Latina/o society.
 

Professor Weissner makes his case by examining the legacy of Hispanic conquest in Latin America. This legacy is a history of physical and cultural genocide. From the initial encounter with the Spanish Conquistadors through the more recent history of military dictatorships, *618 indigenous peoples in Latin America have been tortured, massacred, robbed, enslaved and displaced from their communal lands by the brutality of scorched earth military campaigns, international development projects, U.S. sponsored drug enforcement search and destroy missions, and multinational companies seeking free access to their natural resources. Theirs is a struggle for physical and cultural survival, for self-determination and for land. Their current legal status in countries like Brazil, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Mexico reveals the legal legacy of the Hispanic conquest as well as the increasing influence and impact of neo- liberal hegemony in Latin America. In Brazil, for example, Professor Wiessner notes that indigenous peoples are still subject to a special regime of tutelage, which casts them as "relatively incapacitated" and places them under the guardianship of the Brazilian state. Government decrees initially promulgated to protect indigenous rights to their ancestral lands have been rolled back by more recent decrees designed to afford private commercial interests the right to contest Indian land demarcations in an adversarial process. By outlining the present day legal struggles of indigenous peoples in the various countries of Latin America, Professor Wiessner reveals the continued complicity of Latin American elites in the expropriation of these subjugated, but resurgent Indian nations, even as he notes with approval the legal advances being made in some countries like Colombia and Chile.
 

This is not to say that Professor Wiessner's analysis is beyond criticism. Perhaps to underscore the compelling need for Hispanic Latinas/os to recognize their own complicity in the subordination of indigenous peoples, Professor Wiessner structures his argument around a comparison of the treatment indigenous peoples have received from Anglo and Hispanic conquerors. In this comparison, Hispanics fair poorly. According to Professor Wiessner, Anglo conquerors were more civilized and less brutal than Hispanic conquerors. ⁽⁵⁾ To support this brash generalization, Professor Wiessner quotes the work of Professor Steven McSloy. ⁽⁶⁾ The problem is that nothing in Professor McSloy's text supports *619 Professor Wiessner's comparative assessment. The fact that the "the wars, massacres, Geronimo and Sitting Bull . . .[were] really just clean up," hardly suggests that the colonization of the Northern parts of the American continent was any more humane than the conquest of the South. If anything, the comparison Professor Wiessner activates suggests instead that the "British colonizers" were more unitary and less internally conflicted about their colonizer status. While Spanish colonizers struggled against internal opposition by Spanish religious elites, who deployed "the natural law theories of St. Thomas Aquinas" to compel recognition of indigenous peoples as subjects with inalienable rights under the law of nations, the "British" colonization was total--in the law, as much as in the flesh. ⁽⁷⁾
 

My point is not to defend the Spanish conquest of Latin America, or to suggest that the treatment of indigenous peoples was, or continues to be, anything but brutal. My point is rather to use Professor Wiessner's analysis as a reference point for further reflection on the commitments implicit in the LatCrit aspiration to promote an anti-subordination politics that is broadly inclusive and relentlessly anti-essentialist, as well as to reflect further on the politics and practice of intergroup comparisons. From this perspective, there is no question that Professor Wiessner's essay activates a problematic that often is organized around an inside/outside dichotomy and is most immediately apparent in debates over who has standing to criticize the practices of oppression and internal hierarchies within a subordinated community. This is because Professor Wiessner's pointed and comprehensive account of the way indigenous peoples have been exploited, marginalized and oppressed "within the Latino-Latina midst" is in no sense a self-critical intervention, as Professor Wiessner at no point claims a Latina/o identity. Thus, his contribution provides a valued opportunity to reflect not only on the substance of his criticisms, but also on the way LatCrit theory should position itself in debates over standing to criticize the reproduction of hierarchies within Latina/o communities. To this end, a LatCrit response to these sorts of criticisms needs to take note that the practice of coding criticism as external interventionism, like the discourses of cultural relativism, privacy, sovereignty and the individualization of guilt and innocense, are standard tropes, routinely invoked by elites the world-over to deflect criticism from their abusive and exploitative practices, *620 as well as from their unearned privileges. ⁽⁸⁾ Thus, it is imperative that LatCrit scholars resist the tendency to dismiss external criticisms automatically, even as we reflect critically both on the difference between internal and external criticism and on the way we draw the internal/external line in responding to those particular criticisms we might want most to suppress.
 

At the same time, the analytical and empirical imprecision with which Professor Wiessner juxtaposes the colonization of North and South America, as well as his mere passing reference to the substantial efforts currently underway to incorporate indigenous peoples into LatCrit discourse should give self-constituted "outsiders" reason to pause before launching their well- intentioned criticisms. At a minimum, such criticisms need to avoid inflammatory over-generalizations that cast their comparisons in broad, ambiguous and unsubstantiated terms. Such comparisons do little to enlighten, though much to confuse the issues and inflame the politics of reaction and division. Nevertheless, the underlying truth of Professor Wiessner's broader argument warrants serious LatCrit attention. Indeed, read through the heuristic of the insider/outsider dichotomy already thematized in the preceding essays by Professors Padilla, Abreu and Hernandez-Truyol, his essay calls attention to, and prompts reflection on, the fact that none of these essays address the way their analysis might be relevant to the particular experiences of indigenous peoples, nor for that matter of Black Latinas/os and Asian Latinas/os--though these group experiences would certainly enrich our understandings of the social-psychological processes of internalized oppression as well as expanding our analysis of the way "difference" is used to configure insider/outsider positions within and between Latina/o communities.
 

To give just one brief example of the way attention to the particular realities of indigenous peoples might substantially enrich the analysis, even as it helps clarify the scope and meaning of LatCrit commitment to anti- essentialist anti-subordination theory consider the following: When Professor Padilla writes of internalized racism, she speaks specifically of the practices through which Chicanas/os undermine themselves and each other. The very concept of internalized oppression is activated around an imagined inside/outside. Internalized racism is not external oppression because it occurs within a delimited community, amongst its members, pitting insider against insider. Asking how this analysis might be relevant *621 to articulating a LatCrit perspective on the anti-subordination struggles of indigenous peoples means asking how the histories of enslavement, exclusion and extermination, as well as the current marginalization of indigenous peoples, both beyond and within the United States, would figure in a theory of Chicana/o internalized oppression? The discourse of Latina/o hybridity and mestizaje offers one ready response. ⁽⁹⁾ In this response, the subordination of indigenous peoples figures centrally in the dynamics of internalized oppression because it is the indigenous aspect that makes Chicana/o identity a source of self-hatred and self-doubt.
 

The important point, however, is to see how this response falls short of the anti-essentialist commitments that ground the LatCrit project, even as it perhaps misses the mark of Professor Wiessner's criticism, for Professor Wiessner is not talking about the subordination of indigenous identities, but of peoples. Grounding LatCrit concern for their struggles in the discourse of Latina/o hybridity suggests that indigenous peoples are inside the Latina/o construct, and important to the LatCrit project, not in and for themselves, but rather because their experiences and realities have been important to the construction of Latina/o identities. To be sure, recognizing the indigenous and other racial mixtures that oftentimes are repressed in the constitution of Latina/o self-identifications has been one of the important advances achieved through the discourse of mestizaje; nevertheless, the anti-essentialist commitments underlying the LatCrit movement's aspiration to articulate a politics of intergroup justice will eventually require even further progress.
 

Indeed, fully recognizing and embracing the struggles for justice of indigenous peoples challenges the LatCrit movement to develop the critical discourses and implement the intergroup practices that will enable the LatCrit community to pursue three important objectives, simultaneously and in tandem: to continue articulating an anti-essentialist critique of the way the institutionalization and cultural performances of white supremacy marginalize different Latina/o communities in different ways, to de-center Hispanic identity in our conceptualization of Latina/o communities so that we can better understand the particular experiences and perspectives of minority groups within our communities, and ultimately to recognize and embrace the universal claims of right--to equality and dignity--that are everywhere constituted in the demand for justice and desire for inclusion expressed by every group oppressed by the articulation of white supremacy, both within and beyond the United States. Ultimately, the struggles of indigenous peoples, *622 like the struggles of Black and Asian peoples, are matters of LatCrit concern, not so much because Latinas/os are a hybrid people composed of all these elements, but because recognizing and transforming the particularities of injustice is the only viable strategy for achieving substantive justice. ⁽¹⁰⁾
 

Read through the prism of these three objectives, the essays by Professors Padilla and Abreu make significant contributions to the LatCrit project, understood initially as a movement to articulate the particularities of Latina/o perspectives and experiences within the regime of white supremacy and to promote a pan-ethnic Latina/o political identity that can mediate and transcend the politics of division that is too often activated around the differences between Cuban-Americans, Puerto Ricans and Mexican-Americans. ⁽¹¹⁾ They want to make Latinas/os "insiders" even as they make "the inside" a place worth inhabiting. But, as Professors Hernandez-Truyol and Wiessner remind us, "the inside" we create must aspire always and everywhere to provide a home for those at the bottom of their particular contexts because the logical and political implications of the LatCrit commitment to anti- essentialist intergroup justice, both encompass and transcend the politics of Latina/o pan-ethnicity and hybridity.
 

In this vein, Professor Roberts' contribution appropriately closes this cluster of essays. ⁽¹²⁾ Her essay is based on remarks she delivered at LatCrit III in a colloquy programmed to open the focus group discussion entitled From Critical Race Theory to LatCrit to BlackCrit? Exploring Critical Race Theory Beyond and Within the Black/White Paradigm. ⁽¹³⁾ The purpose of this focus group was to expand the parameters of LatCrit discourse by triggering a critical analysis of the different ways in which the Black/White paradigm of race truncates and essentializes the liberation struggles of Black peoples, for example, by deflecting attention from the intra-group hierarchies and diversity that divide "the Black community," as well as by obstructing the cross-racial and multiracial solidarities that might otherwise coalesce around issues of imperialism, colonialism, national origin discrimination, language rights, immigration policy, gender and sexual orientation. The hope was that *623 by creating a space and intentionally focusing attention on the sorts of intra-Black particularities constituted in and through the different histories, perspectives, political ideologies and transnational identities of Black Latinas/os and Caribbeans, we might begin the process of conceptualizing the critical methodologies, thematic priorities and substantive areas of law and policy that might form the center of a post-essentialist 'BlackCrit" discourse, which is just to say, a critical discourse that engages the particularities of Black subordination from an anti-essentialist perspective.
 

LatCrit stakes in such a project are high, for while LatCrit theory was itself born of the critical need to move beyond the essentialism of the Black/white paradigm toward a more inclusive theoretical framework that focuses, broadly and comprehensively, on the way the institutionalization and cultural performance of white supremacy affect all peoples of color, though in different ways, still the political impact of uncritically abandoning the Black/white paradigm would be indefensibly regressive.⁽¹⁴⁾ To be sure, Asian and Latina/o communities have been marginalized by the Black/White paradigm and our increasing and mutual recognition of the commonalities that construct Asian and Latina/o subordination are among the most powerful new insights enabled by the anti-essentialist movement in Critical Race Theory. ⁽¹⁵⁾ Nevertheless, the inter-group solidarities this knowledge enables us to imagine and pursue cannot be promoted at the expense of our theoretical and political commitments to combating the particular forms of racism experienced by Black people, both in this country and abroad. If LatCrit theory were to abandon uncritically the Black/White paradigm, it would marginalize a substantial portion of the Latina/o community and betray our aspirations to substantive intergroup justice. Thus, the objective must be to move our understanding of white supremacy progressively beyond the Black/White binary of race, even as we acknowledge the *624 particular and virulent forms of anti- Black racism that are institutionalized and expressed in virtually every society across the globe, including Latina/o communities. Doing so requires that we center the particularities of Black subordination long enough to recognize the way anti-Black racism operates in Latina/o communities and the way the struggles of Black peoples, who are not Latina/o, are also implicated in the LatCrit project.
 

From this perspective, Professor Roberts essay makes two points worth further reflection. Her first point is to challenge a common misunderstanding of the meaning of "essentialism" in the anti-essentialist critique. White feminist legal discourse, for example, has construed this critique as an attack on any analysis that focuses exclusively on the experiences of one group of women without also addressing the experiences of other groups of women or, indeed, of all women in general. This misunderstanding may be genuine or opportunistic, but in either case, it makes it easier to deflect the impact of any analysis that focuses on the particular forms of oppression experienced by any particular group of women of color. Thus, when Professor Roberts writes or talks about the particular experiences of pregnant Black women in a racist criminal justice system, her analysis is at times discounted on the grounds that it does not discuss the experiences of other pregnant women in analogous situations. But, as Professor Roberts argues, the anti-essentialist critique, which launched Critical Race Feminism as a reaction against the exclusive attention feminist legal discourse was then giving the problems of white women, did not attack the practice of studying the problems of a particular group of (white) women, but rather the practice of assuming that this particular group represented all women. ⁽¹⁶⁾ As Professor Roberts puts it, "[w]riting about Black people is not essentialist in and of itself. It only becomes essentialist when the experiences discussed are taken to portray a uniform Black experience or a universal experience that applies to every other group." ⁽¹⁷⁾
 

This important insight has profound implications for the way the LatCrit movement should understand and pursue the practice of producing anti- essentialist, anti-subordination critical legal scholarship and was, in fact, a driving force behind the initial decision to organize the "BlackCrit" focus group discussion at LatCrit III. The purpose of this focus group was to operationalize, within the LatCrit community and conference setting, a vision of intergroup solidarity and substantive justice that is categorically different from the vision that currently links the anti-essentialist critique to a particular, and ultimately unsatisfactory, *625 representation of both the meaning and the practical and political implications of a commitment to "multiculturalism." This alternative vision is referenced in, but not fully explained by, the call for "rotating centers" because the aspirations embedded in the practice of rotating centers are too easily confused with and overshadowed by an ingrained tendency to hear the call for critical attention to the particularities of subordination experienced by different groups as a call that can only be answered through the Balkanization of the universals that might otherwise bind us in solidarity. ⁽¹⁸⁾
 

Against this backdrop, the decision to feature a focus group discussion exploring the necessity and possibilities of launching a new intervention in outsider scholarship provisionally styled "BlackCrit Theory," was to perform a public event that, thereafter, would provide a meaningful point of reference for articulating a different vision of the way the anti- essentialist critique can (and should) mediate the relationship between universal and particular. The easiest way to explain this is to contrast the structure of the BlackCrit focus group at LatCrit III with the paradigm model through which the commitment to multiculturalism has been performed in other contexts. ⁽¹⁹⁾ Rather than organizing LatCrit III as a conference dedicated to Hispanic Latina/o issues and relegating discussion of the particularities of Black subordination to one of a number of concurrent sessions, in which different subgroups separate to discuss "their own" particular issues, the BlackCrit focus group was designed to center the problem of Black subordination in LatCrit theory and to invite all participants to focus on these particular problems, with the implicit understanding that these particular problems are of universal concern for all LatCrit scholars committed to an anti-subordination agenda based on substantive intergroup justice, and with the further understanding that future LatCrit conferences would, in similar fashion, seek to center the *626 particularities of subordination confronting other marginalized and intersectional minority identities.
 

This latter point is crucial. By linking critical analysis of the particularities of subordination experienced by different groups to the practice of "rotating centers," the BlackCrit focus group at LatCrit III clearly illustrates why the production of anti-subordination theory and praxis must be conceptualized and performed as a collective project, reflected in and strengthened by our mutual commitment, across our many differences, to remain engaged in each other's issues over time. As Professor Roberts rightly notes, no one need, nor ever can, focus on everything at once, but the struggle against white supremacy requires that we--each individually and all collectively--increasingly learn to see and combat the multiple structures and relations through which the practices and ideologies of white supremacy have constructed the particular forms of subordination confronted, in different ways, by all peoples of color, both within and beyond the United States. Thus, the common project to transform the realities of white supremacy can only be realized through a collective and collaborative effort, in which we teach each other about the similarities and differences in the way white supremacy operates in our various communities. This by necessity requires a practice of "rotating centers," even as this practice, in turn, requires a mutual commitment to remain engaged over time. Only members of a community committed to fostering an inclusive and collaborative anti-subordination project for the long haul can afford to decenter their own compelling problems to focus, instead, on the problems confronting people other than themselves.
 

It follows, therefore, that the practice of rotating centers can operate effectively only in the context of a genuine community, whose members' commitment to remain engaged for the long haul can foster the kind of continuity needed to ensure that "the center" does, in fact, rotate from year to year and from venue to venue. It is this kind of community that the decision to feature a BlackCrit focus group at LatCrit III was designed to perform and promote. However, despite these seemingly unobjectionable intentions, the BlackCrit conference event generated significant controversy from two distinct perspectives, each of which sheds substantial light on the many challenges awaiting our collective attention. From one end, the critique was that, in centering Black subordination, LatCrit III was on the verge of taking "the Lat" out of LatCrit Theory. ⁽²⁰⁾ From the other end, the critique was that, by centering Black subordination, LatCrit III was on the verge of assuming an umbrella position that was more appropriately left to the more universal and *627 inclusive venue of Critical Race Theory. ⁽²¹⁾ Both of these critiques, however, miss the point of featuring the BlackCrit focus group at LatCrit III--though they do so in different ways.
 

The first critique misses the point because it essentializes Latina/o identity in a way that threatens to reproduce, within LatCrit theory, the racial and ethnic hierarchies that pervade Latina/o communities and culture and that are fundamentally at odds with any anti-essentialist commitment to anti- subordination politics. Latinas/os, to repeat yet again, come in every variety of race and ethnicity. LatCrit theory cannot marginalize the particular experiences of Black subordination, without presupposing, among other things, that Black Latinas/os are somehow less fully Latina/o, than Hispanic Latinas/os, and that therefore their problems are somehow less central to the LatCrit project.
 

The second critique misses the point because it tends to reinscribe the project of generating anti-subordination theory and praxis within a model of multiculturalism that continues to cast Black subordination as primarily "a Black thing," Hispanic subordination as "a Hispanic thing," Asian subordination as "an Asian thing," and so on and so forth. This structure has been tried, and the consciousness it simultaneously reflects and constructs has failed to enable the kinds of intergroup engagement and solidarity necessary for the task at hand: the deconstruction of white supremacy and reconstruction of a sociolegal reality grounded on a commitment to substantive intergroup justice. Indeed, it is all but obvious that this kind of structure and consciousness can promote little intergroup understanding and collaborative progress precisely because the "discussions" it generates are hardwired to flounder in arguments about whose particular subordination ought to be addressed first: in the initial instance, when the particularities separate into groups that inevitably will include multiple and intersectional identities, like the Black Latina/o or the Japanese Peruvian; and in the second instance, when these separate particularities regroup to articulate a universal agenda in a common setting.
 

This is where Professor Robert's second major point makes her essay a welcomed and timely intervention. Professor Robert's second point illustrates the otherwise suppressed realities that make Black identity an intersectional space, where group affiliation can be seen as a matter of political choice. She describes three different contexts in which her self-identification was fluid and in flux: in choosing to identify as African American, rather than as West-Indian; in choosing to identify as *628 Black, rather than as bi-racial or multi-racial; and in choosing to identify as the daughter of a Jamaican immigrant during a debate with Peter Brimelow.⁽²²⁾ To Professor Robert's credit, each of these acts of self-identification reflects and performs, in different ways and from different perspectives, a commitment to anti-subordination solidarity. This is because the West-Indian identity has often been embraced by Caribbean Blacks as a mark of distinction that separates them from and seeks to raise them above the subordinated status of Black Americans in the United States; ⁽²³⁾ the bi-racial or multi-racial identity category has sometimes operated to privilege whiteness and other non- Black identities in the configuration of Black identity among people marked by non-Black racial mixtures; and finally, because claiming an immigrant identity can, in some contexts, position Black Americans in solidarity with the victims of the virulent nativism that seeks to consolidate a supposedly "multicultural" American identity by purchasing inclusion for Black Americans at the expense of precisely those immigrants most vulnerable to exclusion: the racialized and impoverished peoples of the Third World.
 

Professor Robert's discussion of the different political identity choices she has made in different contexts challenges the notion of a unitary Black identity and thereby strengthens the case for the practice of "rotating centers," not only at LatCrit conferences, but at every gathering committed to the production of anti-subordination theory and practice through identity-based critique--whether those gatherings are organized under the auspices of the Critical Race Theory workshop or in other venues such as those emerging from the recent development of Asian Pacific American Critical Legal Scholarship. ⁽²⁴⁾ Viewed from this perspective, the practice of rotating centers is, indeed, a move to claim a universal perspective for LatCrit theory, but only as an expression of the profoundly revolutionary possibilities embedded in the anti-essentialist critique. These new possibilities of thought and action will fully emerge only when enough us learn to see that every particular identity group constitutes a universal because every particular group includes members whose multiple and intersectional identities link each group to every other group. Just as Latina/o identity includes Blackness, certainly the converse is equally true that Black identity includes Latinidad; just as *629 Latina/o identity includes Asian, Indigenous and European identities, so too it is true that each of these identities include all the others.
 

This realization has profound implications for the future development of identity politics and positions the anti-essentialist critique beyond rather than, as often is charged, at the center of the political fragmentation and Balkanization that threatens to sunder every universal into a proliferation of increasingly atomized and ineffectual particularities. This is because the anti-essentialist critique makes it possible to see that all the particular groups into which we might possibly separate are inhabited by multiple and intersectional identities. Any particular group that purports to practice anti- essentialist politics internally will, by necessity, have to treat the distinct problems of group members marked by intersectional identities as equally valid and central to the anti-subordination agenda defined by the group. This is simply to say, for example, that just as LatCrit theory must engage the problems of Black subordination because Latina/o identity includes Blackness, so too an anti-essentialist BlackCrit theory would have to confront the problems of Latina/o subordination because Black identity includes Latinidad. And yet, by doing so, each group would find that its pursuit of a genuinely anti-essentialist politics promises, always and everywhere, to reconstitute the group as a universal that contains all particulars. This would, however, be a very good thing. Indeed, the "only" thing still blinding us to the reality that every particularity constitutes the universal, albeit from a different perspective and in a different configuration, is the essentialist assumptions embedded in the imperatives of organizing hierarchical power relations through practices of inclusion and exclusion and the ingrained tendency, both within and between our various communities, to construct our collective identities and solidarities around an inside/outside dichotomy. ⁽²⁵⁾
 
 

Part II takes up three clusters of essays that appear at first glance to have little in common: the first cluster focuses on the transition to and consolidation of democracy in regions as diverse as the Caribbean and Eastern Europe; the second cluster centers the struggle over language rights and communicative power, while the third cluster takes up a broad range of issues exploring the way Latina/o identities and lived realities should figure in the transformation of domestic and international labor rights regimes. Despite their differences, these essays reveal a common tension. In each instance, the struggle for self-determination confronts a seemingly irreconcilable and pervasively articulated antagonism between freedom and order, stability and plurality, uniformity and chaos. This antagonism has been most clearly articulated in democratic theory as the so-called "crisis of governability." ⁽²⁶⁾ But this underlying antagonism is revealed everywhere the claim to individual or group self-determination threatens inherited patterns and identities. It is evident, for example, in the political struggle over language rights and the paranoid nativism of the English-Only movement, in which the domestic proliferation of languages and cultures is cast as threat to the unity and integrity of the American national identity. ⁽²⁷⁾ It is evident also in the anti-political structure of the labor rights regime established in this country.⁽²⁸⁾ By taking up these various issues, the essays in these three clusters illustrate how the universal struggle for self-determination is reflected in and *631 advanced by the anti-essentialist commitment to anti- subordination politics at the heart of the LatCrit movement.
 

A. Democracy in Anti-Subordination Perspective: Global Intersections
 

The meaning of democracy and its role in the struggle for liberation present formidable conceptual and political challenges for LatCrit legal scholars and activists. As sociologist Max Castro aptly suggests, these challenges are born of the many profound and apparent disjunctures between democratic theory, or rather, the strategic manipulations of democratic rhetoric, on the one hand, and the reality of "democracy" as we live it, on the other. It is this disjuncture between rhetoric and reality that makes the struggle over the meaning of democracy a crucial political space for LatCrit theory to occupy, even as it makes the actualization of democracy, an aspiration and objective that, approached from an anti-subordination perspective, positions us against the injustices and beyond the hypocrisies of the "really existing democracies" we currently inhabit. ⁽²⁹⁾ By critically examining the disjuncture between democratic rhetoric and the trans/national power structures that coopt and subvert the self-determination struggles of so many peoples in so many different contexts, all five essays in this cluster make significant contributions to articulating an anti- essentialist perspective on the meaning and practice of a real and substantive democracy both within and beyond the United States. ⁽³⁰⁾
 
 

The opening essay by Professor Griffith provides an excellent point of departure for a LatCrit analysis of democracy. His objective is to show how "the drug problem" impacts the democratic project in small countries throughout the Caribbean. By locating his intervention in "the Caribbean," Professor Griffith situates our analysis of democracy in an imaginary region whose multiple dimensions exceed the boundaries of *632 any particular term. ⁽³¹⁾ Like "the drug problem" or "democracy," "the Caribbean" is a signifier with no stable, uncontested referent. It is, at first glance, a sea, not a territory--its boundaries marked by water, not by land. It is at second glance a clustered string of geographically isolated islands governed by weak and often corrupt little states, politically fragmented, but strikingly similar in their economic vulnerability to and dependence on the foreign aid and so- called preferential trade arrangements of their former colonizers and current day masters. ⁽³²⁾ On a triple take, the Caribbean might be found beating to the rhythms of mambo, reggae, salsa, merengue and the cha-cha-cha--somewhere in, and yet beyond, a complicated overlay of transplanted cultures that emerge from, and have flourished despite, the last 500 years of colonial penetration, intervention and relentless expropriation-- a history we would have to tell in Spanish, English, French, Dutch and Portuguese. ⁽³³⁾ Pull back a bit, redraw the map a moment, and the Caribbean rises yet again--this time from a sea of blood, a theater of war zoned for the low-intensity conflicts that submerged it in waves of broken, burnt and butchered bodies, bleeding to the pulse of state sponsored terror and super-power contestations.
 

Embedded in this controversy over where "the Caribbean" begins and ends is the dialectic of universal and particular--as well as of the many diverse and conflicting political projects emerging from and targeted at this region. ⁽³⁴⁾ Whether any universal term can unify these *633 politically fragmented, culturally distinct, and multi-lingual particularities is an open question, but whether we seek "the Caribbean" in the regional similarities that transcend the diversities of language and history or, alternatively, in the struggle to imagine a future beyond the political fragmentation and economic uniformity that keeps these small countries dependent and weak, we will certainly not find it in any substantive meaning of the term democracy. On the contrary, as the first three essays in this cluster demonstrate, the Caribbean offers a particularly compelling starting point for an anti-subordination analysis of "democracy," precisely because democracy has been, for so long and for so many different reasons, as elusive in this region, as the dream of self-determination and the hope of peace. By focusing LatCrit attention on "the Caribbean," Professor Griffith challenges us to configure a broad and multidimensional vision of the democratic project--one that genuinely engages the anti-subordination struggles of peoples beyond the United States, even as it requires LatCrit scholars to think more critically about the U.S. role, both in promoting and obstructing the democratic project in this hemisphere.
 

Professor Griffith's story of the Caribbean is of democratic possibilities held hostage to an international drug war. Though U.S. popular rhetoric casts the problem primarily in terms of drug traffickers and pushers, "the drug problem," as Professor Griffith argues, is a fully integrated multi-billion dollar transnational industry that--from production to consumption to the recycling of drug profits--cuts across all regions of the hemisphere, penetrates all sectors of society and implicates all levels of government. ⁽³⁵⁾ Assessing the impact of "the drug problem" on democracy requires a clear understanding of the divergent problems triggered by the different stages of this industry. It also presupposes some working definition of what democracy is. Drawing on the classic work of Joseph Schumpeter, Professor Griffiths defines democracy as a political form in which the contestation over state power operates through free and regular elections, where a high degree of participation is admitted and where there exist effective institutions to guarantee respect for civil and political rights and enhance social justice. Thus, when we speak of democracy "we are talking about contestation for *634 power, participation, and institutions." ⁽³⁶⁾
 

Given this definition of democracy, Professor Griffith develops a multidimensional analysis of the way the international drug industry and the war it has spawned operate in different ways to undermine the democratic project in the Caribbean. It is a story of corruption engendered by the circulation of billions in illegal profits that skews the logic of political contestation and makes state power unaccountable to the democratic electoral process, as well as a story of private business and financial elites, seduced into money laundering schemes that disrupt ordinary market forces, undermine the viability of legitimate economic activities and facilitate the consolidation of power and wealth in the hands of drug lords and their cronies. It is also a story of law enforcement run amok in its increasingly futile efforts to stamp out the drug trade through repressive and anti- democratic assaults on precisely those fundamental civil and political rights without which no democracy can flourish.
 

Professor Stotzky's essay tells a second story of the Caribbean. Measured against the aspirational imperatives of what he calls "deliberative democracy," ⁽³⁷⁾ the transition to democracy in Haiti is a story of the democratic project held hostage to internal corporative political structures and external financial elites. These internal corporative structures suppress the emergence of a genuinely deliberative democracy by excluding "the people" from effective participation in the political process--in different ways, depending on whether the corporative structures are organized from the top down or the bottom up. When imposed from the top down, the state controls, coopts and to a large degree incorporates the organization of interest groups into state sanctioned monopolies, whose agendas are then confined to the politics of the possible as determined by the state; when organized from the bottom up, private power blocks so dominate the political process that the state is captured and subordinated to the articulation of their special interests. In either case, these corporatist variations leave little room for the expression of the popular will of the people.
 

In Haiti, as elsewhere throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, factions of the military, the Catholic Church, the business class, trade unions and even the press have all, at different times, cooperated in the institutionalization of corporatism by trading support for authoritarian regimes in exchange for special privileges. Because these privileges are threatened, as much by the rise of a genuine and popular sovereignty as by the extremism of a military dictatorship run amok, the legacy of corporatism *635 is a network of organized power blocks hostile to any project of social, political or economic change that might force them to relinquish their special privileges or hold them accountable to the people whose families they have murdered or whose patrimony they have expropriated and squandered. In such a context, the consolidation of a democracy requires dismantling these corporative power blocks precisely because a genuinely participatory democracy presupposes and would undoubtedly trigger vast changes in the socio-economic and political structures these corporatist groups are most invested in maintaining.
 

Indeed, one need only consider Professor Stotzky's description of the objectives of "the Aristide Plan" to see how constructing the conditions for participatory democracy might threaten vested interests. ⁽³⁸⁾ Demilitarization, an independent judiciary, empowered labor unions, grass roots organizations, cooperatives and community groups, progressive taxation and human rights prosecutions are all political objectives certain to put any democratic project on a collision course with precisely those sectors that have most benefitted from the repression and demobilization of the impoverished majority. Add to these internal obstacles, the externally imposed austerity measures dictated by the structural adjustment policies through which international financial organizations like the World Bank and the IMF have projected their neo-liberal agenda onto the international political economy,⁽³⁹⁾ and the obstacles confronting the democratic project in Haiti are nothing less than daunting. ⁽⁴⁰⁾
 

*636 However, the Haitian story only brings into starker relief the extent to which the democratic project in poor countries throughout Latin America and the Caribbean is caught between the internal rock of corporative political monopolies and the external hard place constituted by international financial organizations. Based on past history and the short-term interest analysis these two sectors tend routinely to exhibit, it is reasonable to predict that the former will continue opposing the progressive tax policies, antitrust regimes and educational programs through which Professor Stotzky would reform the neoliberal agenda to help the poor majority live a dignified life, the latter will continue to oppose any state intervention in the economy that impinges on foreign exports and direct investments or restricts the expatriation of profits, and neither will be much interested in actually implementing Professor Stotzky's vision of deliberative democracy. Thus, this second story of the Caribbean is not heartening. ⁽⁴¹⁾
 

Mr. Martinez's essay on the rise and fall of the socialist project in Nicaragua provides yet a third perspective on the problem of democracy in the Caribbean. Though Nicaragua is geographically located in Central America, its position in "the Caribbean" is a function of the geopolitical rhetoric through which the Reagan Administration chose to respond to the "communist-in-our-own- backyard" problem. ⁽⁴²⁾ The will to view the Nicaraguan revolution in terms of Cold War politics, rather than as a response to the legacy of terror and expropriation imposed on this small country by a U.S. sponsored dictatorship, is testament to the self-serving myopia that enabled former President Reagan to tell the Wall Street Journal in 1980 that '[t]he Soviet Union underlies all the unrest that is going on. If they weren't engaged in this game of dominos, there wouldn't be any hot spots in the world.' ⁽⁴³⁾
 

Contrary to Reagan's suggestion, the Nicaraguan revolution ousted the Somoza dictatorship in 1979 through "the organized, militant participation *637 of Nicaraguan citizens in a 'people's war' against a brutal and ruthless tyranny." ⁽⁴⁴⁾ Mr. Martinez's objective is to explain why the Nicaraguan people initially supported this revolution and how the Sandinistas ultimately lost the people's support. ⁽⁴⁵⁾ He tells this story through a critical analysis of the Somocista property regime that preceded the revolution, as well as the promises made and later betrayed by the Sandinista government's failure to legally institutionalize its agrarian reforms in a viable property rights regime. ⁽⁴⁶⁾ This failure to establish a new legal order facilitated the rapid re-concentration of land ownership, through privatization, Sandinista self-dealing, and the rush of former landowners to reclaim their expropriated properties after the Sandinistas lost the 1990 election to Violeta Chamorro.
 

These three stories of "the Caribbean" provide different perspectives on the profound challenges confronting the articulation of democratic theory in LatCrit scholarship. They tell of the democratic project held hostage to drug traffickers, domestic corporative elites, international financial organizations and the self-interests of defeated revolutionaries. What they do not mention is the role played by U.S. government agents in facilitating the growth of international drug trafficking through their collaborations with, protection of and assistance to, known drug traffickers involved in this government's "anti- communist" crusades; ⁽⁴⁷⁾ they do not tell of the millions of U.S. tax payer dollars spent supporting the Duvalier and Somoza dictatorships, as much as the corporatist elites in post-dictatorship Haiti and Nicaragua; ⁽⁴⁸⁾ they do *638 not tell of the CIA complicity in, and financial support for, the terror unleashed by the Haitian military and the Nicaraguan contras in their efforts to "restore order" and demobilize the masses for a more "governable democracy." And yet, these missing elements are crucial to any anti-essentialist, anti-subordination analysis of the challenges facing the democratic project in the Caribbean precisely because, and to the increasing extent that, the democratic project everywhere is ultimately hostage to the policies of the only remaining superpower. The United States cannot continue "to promote democracy" with one hand, even as it undermines it with the other.
 

Thus, from an anti-subordination perspective, it makes sense for LatCrit scholars to begin our foray into democratic theory by focusing on the nature and impact of U.S. policies and politics. Beginning this way locates the problems of democracy at the center, rather than the peripheries, where LatCrit sensibilities should counsel us to tread rather carefully, lest we are too quickly seduced or reduced to thinking in terms of the readily available blame- the-victim discourses of Third World corruption, authoritarian traditions, and bureaucratic impotence. ⁽⁴⁹⁾ These factors are certainly obstacles to the consolidation of democracy in the Caribbean and elsewhere, but they are embedded in an ongoing, centuries-long process of interventions, transactions and exchanges between Third World states and peoples and a multitude of "foreign intervenors," whose resources, objectives and ideologies are profoundly implicated in the scourge of corruption, dictatorship and underdevelopment that has visited these regions. Thus the problems of democracy in the Caribbean or elsewhere cannot be fairly assessed, nor effectively resolved without detailed and particularized attention to the anti- democratic impact of U.S. foreign and domestic policies. Indeed, revealing and combating these policies may be the best way for LatCrit scholars to get to "the bottom" of the problems of democracy, both beyond and within the United States. ⁽⁵⁰⁾
 
 

The last two essays in this cluster by Professors Mertus and Roman *639 shift our focus and expand our analysis of the problem democracy. ⁽⁵¹⁾ Professor Mertus's essay launches a new trajectory of analysis by offering a preliminary comparison of the transition process in the countries of Eastern Europe and Latin America. In articulating these comparisons, she notes four particularly significant differences worth further reflection: (1) the different attitudes and relationships foreign intervenors have adopted towards the governing elites of the pre-transition regimes in these two regions; (2) the logically incoherent rhetorical structures generated by the biased and uninformed manner in which foreign observers tend to assess the meaning of, and allocate blame for, the internal conflicts and atrocities committed by competing groups in Eastern Europe and Latin America; (3) the different way foreign intervenors in these two regions have prioritized market and electoral reforms in the transition from dictatorship; and (4) the degree of internal conflict over the so-called "stateness problem" within these different regions. By identifying these four points of comparison, Professor Mertus provides a valuable analytical framework for a critical comparative analysis of the substantive content of "the democratic project" now circling the globe, as well as for assessing the degree to which this neoliberal project coheres with the right of self-determination, understood from an anti-essentialist, anti- subordination perspective.
 

In this vein, Professor Mertus notes that western intervenors have generally been more willing to work with the remnants of pre-transition regimes in Latin America than those in Central and Eastern Europe. This she finds unsurprising, given that the U.S. government actually established and substantially maintained the military dictatorships in some countries, like Haiti, Guatemala and Nicaragua, and remained a steadfast ally of, and apologist for, the military dictatorships in others, like Argentina and Chile--even as these regimes waged dirty wars of inconceivable brutality against their own people. ⁽⁵²⁾ These regimes, though homicidal and corrupt, were friends and clients of the U.S. national security state. The need to legitimate U.S. complicity in their criminal practices and repressive policies gave birth to the totalitarian/authoritarian state dichotomy. In Reaganite doublespeak, the kind of human rights violations and political and economic repression perpetrated by the military dictatorships in Latin America were of a lesser evil than the *640 kind committed by Eastern block regimes because the latter were "totalitarian states," while the former were only "authoritarian." Totalitarian states were always, everywhere and in every way, repressive and evil. Authoritarian dictatorships, by contrast, were not nearly so bad, and sometimes even necessary to ensure the governability of impoverished and uneducated masses too readily duped by international communists. ⁽⁵³⁾ By organizing her comparison of the transition process in Latin America and Eastern Europe around a critical analysis of the relationships and attitudes foreign intervenors adopt toward pre-transition regime elites, Professor Mertus thus reveals how the neoliberal democratic project is still embedded in the doublespeak legacy of cold war politics.
 

Professor Mertus also contrasts the attitudes reflected in the way western intervenors have treated the process of political reform in Latin America and Eastern Europe. She notes, for example, that the 1988 Chilean plebiscite that ousted the Pinochet dictatorship was observed by thousands of western election observers, while fewer than thirty western observers were sent to oversee the 1992 Presidential elections in which Slobodan Milosevic defeated challenger Milan Panic. ⁽⁵⁴⁾ This differential treatment raises profound questions about the "really existing agenda" driving the neoliberal project to promote "democratic" transitions across the globe. Certainly, Professor Mertus is right to suggest that western intervention projects of the 1990s in Eastern Europe have tended to prioritize the institutionalization of transnational capitalist economic relations over the consolidation of democratic accountability and the self-determination of peoples. However, the apparent emphasis on political reform in Latin America may not reflect different priorities, so much as the fact that Latin America has already been dancing to the tune of neoliberal market reform projects since the sovereign debt crisis of the early 1980s and its aftermath shifted the balance of power between Latin American debtor states and international financial organizations. ⁽⁵⁵⁾ Indeed, if anything, the ready willingness with which the U.S. government embraced and supported the Pinochet dictatorship, which even today is lauded as a poster-child for the neoliberal model of economic development in the Third World, ⁽⁵⁶⁾ suggests the degree to *641 which U.S. foreign policy in the region has subordinated democratic reform to the imperatives of transnational capitalism.
 

By focusing LatCrit attention on the relative priority accorded democratic political and neo-liberal economic reforms in these different regions, Professor Mertus's comparative analysis maps out a rich field of inquiry for examining and assessing, from an anti-subordination perspective, the increasing convergence between current projects to promote "democratic transitions" through market reform in Eastern Europe and the structural adjustment policies and agendas that have ravaged much of Latin America. ⁽⁵⁷⁾ At the same time, by situating her comparative analysis in the perennial debate over the relationship between capitalism and democracy, Professor Mertus challenges LatCrit scholars to reflect more deeply on the way LatCrit anti-essentialist, anti-subordination objectives are impacted by the economic and political outcomes of this debate.
 

In the dominant neoliberal narrative, capitalism and democracy are cast as complementary and mutually reinforcing processes: capitalism promotes democracy, and democracy promotes capitalism in a happy embrace of economic abundance and political freedom. In some variations of the narrative, this is because competitive markets prevent the concentration of economic power, thereby preserving the people's freedom by dispersing and decentralizing private power; ⁽⁵⁸⁾ in others, ironically, it is because capitalism enables the consolidation of private power blocks large enough to counter- balance the power of the ever-embryonic totalitarian state. ⁽⁵⁹⁾ This narrative of the happy relationship between *642 capitalism and democracy exists in direct competition with accounts of their mutual incompatibility. In these alternative accounts, each domain threatens always and everywhere to overrun and subsume the other: Capitalism threatens democratic freedom, and democratic politics threaten capitalist freedom. The threat to democratic freedom arises from the growth of economically powerful private firms, whose significance to the national economy renders the state, and the political possibilities it can pursue, hostage to the policy preferences of these corporate giants. ⁽⁶⁰⁾ Conversely, since democracy creates the space through which demands for redistributive interventions are expressed and imposed upon private economic elites, the institutionalization of democratic accountability to the people always threatens to contract the realm of capitalist freedom. ⁽⁶¹⁾
 

Given the degree to which racial, ethnic and other forms of subordination are organized around both the political marginalization and the economic dispossession of peoples of color, Professor Mertus's essay suggests the profound challenges and wide range of questions awaiting LatCrit attention in the field of democratic theory. Though a LatCrit perspective might certainly shed valuable light on the rhetorical instability created by these abstract theoretical debates about the "real" relationship between capitalism and democracy, our legal training makes us particularly well situated to pursue a project more immediately relevant to the objectives of promoting anti- essentialist, anti-subordination social transformation through law. This project would focus critical analysis on the way the relationship between the state and the market is articulated in the interpretation of legal doctrine-- particularly in litigated cases and legislative debates where the struggle for racial justice has confronted and sought to render the monopolization of both economic and political power democratically accountable. ⁽⁶²⁾ The outcome of such *643 cases and legislative debates raise fundamental questions about the relationship between racial inequality and the institutional structures and processes of the neoliberal political economy.
 

At stake, ultimately, is the question whether racial, ethnic and other forms of subordination can be eliminated within the institutional arrangements of a neoliberal political economy, structured around the strategic separation of economics and politics.⁽⁶³⁾ The answer LatCrit scholars give to this question may determine whether the imperatives of racial equality are to be satisfied by a project that achieves for minority communities the reproduction and transposition of the same class hierarchies pervasive in white society or whether the struggle for racial equality will eschew institutional arrangements that perpetuate the economic dispossession and political marginalization of the world's vast majorities and engage, instead, in the search for alternative arrangements that can actualize a more real and substantive democracy throughout both the political and economic institutions of the inter/national political economy.
 

Finally, by focusing her comparative analysis of the transition processes in Latin America and Eastern Europe on "the problem of stateness," Professor Mertus raises one of the most vexing problems confronting any project aimed at articulating a substantive vision of self-determination--that is, in Professor Roman's formulation, the problem of defining "the self" whose right of self- determination is to be protected and enabled through the construction of democratic regimes. ⁽⁶⁴⁾ While Latin American states have enjoyed substantial international support in resisting the legal recognition of self- determination movements operating in this hemisphere, ⁽⁶⁵⁾ Professor Mertus notes that "the state" in Eastern Europe has been systematically weakened by recent developments both at the international and subnational levels. At the international level, the driving engine of the neoliberal project has been the perceived imperative of weakening the totalitarian state. Indeed, the weak state, *644 with limited authority to intervene in the economy and power fragmented across a system of checks and balances is at the heart of the liberal democratic vision of freedom. ⁽⁶⁶⁾ However, in weakening the state to free the market, foreign intervenors have perhaps unwittingly contributed to the reactivation of ethnonationalist divisions at subnational levels throughout the region. These ethnonationalist group identities each claim the right of self-determination, undermining the power of the state and thereby triggering the so-called "stateness problem," precisely because the right of self-determination is legally effectuated through the international community's recognition that a particular group has the right to pursue self-government through the organization of their own state.
 

The final essay by Professor Roman takes up the international right of self-determination as if by design. While the preceding essays reveal, in different ways, the disjuncture between democratic rhetoric and the anti- democratic realities produced by the history and ongoing fallout of cold war politics, Professor Roman's essay links this disjuncture to the structure of international law and, more specifically, to the strategic manipulations through which the doctrine of the right of self-determination of peoples has been interpreted in international law. According to Professor Roman, despite the supposed underpinning of the right to self-determination in the universal norms of human freedom and the equal right of all peoples to control their own destinies, the right of self-determination has been hostage to three stages in the organization of the current world order. These three stages are marked by the era of geopolitical militarism; the era of racial tutelage, in which the self-determination for non-self-governing and trust territories was to proceed, under the Trusteeship System, "at a pace dictated by the colonial administrators"; and the era of global disinterest marked by the tolerance of first world powers towards the alien domination of some third world peoples by other third world peoples.
 

In each era, the right to self-determination has been hostage to the political calculations of the most powerful states in the international community as well as to the indeterminacy surrounding the scope and limits of the right of self-determination. In its most restrictive formulation, the right is not recognized outside the decolonization context; in its most expansive formulation, the right of secession might be asserted by any distinct minority group. Thus, in Professor Roman's view, articulating a substantive content for the right of self-determination of peoples requires the formulation of objective criteria by which to determine whether a group constitutes "a self" or "a people."
 

*645 Professor Roman's search for the objective criteria that make a group a people, like Professor Mertus's comparison of the stateness problem in Latin America and Eastern Europe, raise manifold questions for LatCrit theory. The Eastern European experience under the ethnonationalist governance structures established by the Dayton Peace Accords counsels grave caution in conflating the right of self-determination with the project of having "a state of one's own." ⁽⁶⁷⁾ As with any complex and multidimensional problem, the substantive and methodological commitments already articulated in prior LatCrit scholarship provide a useful point of departure. At a minimum, this record counsels that the problem of defining the meaning of, and designing the institutional structures to give substantive content to, the right of self- determination should be approached from an anti-essentialist, anti- subordination perspective. From this perspective, the problem of self- determination is the same vis-a-vis any collectivity that purports to represent the interests of individuals, who are always and everywhere constituted as multidimensional beings marked by distinctions of class, gender, race, ethnicity, language, sexual orientation, and national origin. That problem, as Professor Mertus notes, is the problem of developing institutional arrangements that can sustain the commitment to social justice, both between and within states, by recognizing the importance of group membership and identities, on the one hand, and the value of personal autonomy and individual rights, on the other. ⁽⁶⁸⁾
 

From this perspective, the anti-subordination agenda implicated in the struggle for self-determination reaches far beyond the parameters delimited by the problems of constituting a state. Indeed, I have argued before, and still believe, that the demise of the interstate system of sovereign nations is a potentially progressive development for the struggle against subordination. ⁽⁶⁹⁾ Not only has the structure of the interstate system figured prominently in enabling both the processes of uneven development and the practice of war, ⁽⁷⁰⁾ but as the essays by Professor Mertus and Roman illustrate, the very project of delimiting the parameters of a state must inevitably essentialize the identities and suppress the multiplicity *646 of interests that simultaneously converge and diverge in the configuration of any group.
 

Rather than investing further in a bankrupt system of nation-states, LatCrit theory might chart a new agenda to imagine and articulate the kinds of institutional arrangements and rights regimes that can promote the right of self-determination, both at the international and sub-national levels where the neoliberal project is, even now, reconfiguring and consolidating new regimes of freedom and compulsion. At an international level, this agenda might take up the pending project of promoting the full recognition of individuals as subjects of international law, for example, through the incorporation of international human rights into the institutional structures, substantive norms, and decisional procedures currently regulated by international economic law. ⁽⁷¹⁾ At a subnational level, this agenda might begin by rejecting the neoliberal paradigm that confines democracy to the political realm, and pursue the institutionalization of democratic governance structures throughout the inter/national economy as well. ⁽⁷²⁾ Both trajectories provide a meaningful way out of "the stateness problem," even as they expand the parameters and meaning of democracy in ways that more readily cohere with the anti-essentialist, anti-subordination commitments that are the heart of the LatCrit movement.
 

B. Language, Technology and Communicative Power: From Language Rights to the Struggle for Control of the Means of Communication
 

Language rights have been a central issue in LatCrit theory since its inception. ⁽⁷³⁾ LatCrit III was, however, the first time that LatCrit conference organizers sought intentionally and self-consciously to link the *647 struggle against English-Only to a broader struggle for communicative power. This imagined project was forwarded to expand LatCrit theory's substantive agenda by encouraging a collaborative effort to develop a critical analysis of the way differential access to the means of communication is legally constructed across different sociolegal contexts and the way the resulting structures of communicative power/lessness should be addressed in LatCrit theory.⁽⁷⁴⁾ In this expanded critical project, the struggle over language rights reflects only one instance in a more general struggle against relations of domination organized by and effectuated through the legal production of differential access to the means of communication. This is because the compelling personal and collective interests at stake in the struggle against the suppression of non-English languages are equally implicated in the such matters as the regulation of political speech ⁽⁷⁵⁾ and the ownership and control of new technologies of communication. ⁽⁷⁶⁾
 

Indeed, in each of these contexts, the matter at stake is the power to communicate--to express oneself--meaningfully and effectively. Increasingly, the power to communicate is determined by access to, control of, or authority over the means of communication. ⁽⁷⁷⁾ Indeed, the "means of communication" have become as central to the structure of power/lessness in our postmodern, hyperlinked, globalized, mass media society as the "means of production" were central to the class struggles of modernizing industrialism. Individuals and communities shut out of the information age and out-spent in a political system that casts the expenditure of money as protected political speech--such that effective speech comes to depend increasingly on the ability to spend money--are just as certainly robbed of the instruments of self- determination and *648 the power of self-expression, as workers separated from and denied control over the means of production. By thematizing the linkages between language, meaning-making power and the struggle for self- determination, the essays in this cluster go a long way toward delimiting a broad field ripe for anti-subordination theory and practice. ⁽⁷⁸⁾

                                                                                                                                                                                              CONTINUE

1. Wiessner, supra note 73.

2. Professor Wiessner bases this assertion on the fact that "a recent 'Annotated Bibliography of Latino and Latina Critical Theory' manages to painstakingly describe seventeen distinct 'themes' of 'critical Latino/a scholarship,' and fails to mention the indigenous condition in any one of them." Id. at 838. But see Luz Guerra, LatCrit y la Des-colonizacion: Taking Colon Out, 19 Chicano-Latino L. Rev. 351 (1998); Iglesias & Valdes, supra note 2, at 568-73 (reflecting on themes inspired by plenary panel on indigenous peoples at LatCrit II).

3. Wiessner, supra note 73, at 837.

4. Professor Wiessner recounts an incident in which a Chilean friend responded to an automobile incident in Miami by hurling an anti-Indian epithet at the other driver. Other LatCrit scholars have noted the anti-Indian prejudices expressed in Latina/o cultural practices. See, e.g., Elvia Arriola, Voices from the Barbed Wires of Evil: Women in the Maquiladoras, Latina Critical Legal Theory and Gender at the U.S.-Mexico Border, 49 De Paul L. Rev. 3 (forthcoming 2000) (recounting anti-Indian references invoked to deter childhood conduct deemed inappropriate for a muchachita).

5. Wiessner, supra note 73, at 840. "By contrast [to Hispanic colonization], the British colonization relied much less on brute force and the destruction of indigenous political structures and society; its subjugation strategies included to a much larger degree the mechanisms of negotiation and persuasion." Id.

6. Id. at 840 n.38 (citing Steven P. McSloy,"Because the Bible Tells Me So": Manifest Destiny and American Indians, 9 St. Thomas L. Rev. 37, 38 (1996)). More specifically, he quotes McSloy's account of the way American Indian lands were taken:

How were American Indian lands taken? The answer is not, as it turns out, by military force. The wars, massacres, Geronimo and Sitting Bull - all that was really just cleanup. The real conquest was on paper, on maps and in laws. What those maps showed and those laws said was that Indians had been "conquered" merely by being "discovered."

Id.

7. For an alternative perspective on the relative virulence of anti- Indian racism in Latin American and U.S. cultures, see, for example, Martha Menchaca, Chicano Indianism, in The Latino/a Condition, supra note 49, at 387 (recounting how racial caste system was dismantled in Mexico by the 1812 Spanish Constitution of Cadiz, only to be reinstated by U.S. racial laws in the territories ceded by Mexico after the Mexican War of 1846).

8. See, e.g., Adrien K. Wing, Critical Race Feminism and the International Human Rights of Women in Bosnia, Palestine and South Africa: Issues for LatCrit Theory, 28 U. Miami Inter-Am. L. Rev.337 (1996-97) (noting that male elites often resist compliance with basic human rights laws prohibiting discrimination against women by declaring their sexist customs and traditions essential elements of their culture).

9. See Wiessner, supra note 73, at 832 n.5 (quoting Margaret Montoya, Masks and Identity, in The Latino/a Condition, supra note 49, at 40).

10. See Iglesias & Valdes, supra note 2, at 555-61 (noting attention to particularities critical to actualization of substantive justice); Enrique R. Carrasco, Opposition, Justice, Structuralism and Particularity: Intersections Between LatCrit Theory and Law and Development Studies, 28 U. Miami Inter-Amer. L. Rev. 313 (1997) [hereinafter Carrasco, LatCrit Theory and Law and Development] (emphasizing the importance of particularity in LatCrit theory).

11. See Johnson, Latino Legal Scholarship, supra note 50; Ediberto Roman, Common Ground: Perspectives on Latino-Latina Diversity, 2 Harv. Latino L. Rev. 483 (1997).

12. Roberts, BlackCrit Theory, supra note 8.

13. For a description of the substantive themes of the focus group, see <http://nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu/<tilde>malavet/latcrit/archives/lciii.htm>.

14. See Iglesias & Valdes, supra note 2, at 562-74 (urging LatCrit scholars to remain cognizant and vigilant lest in rejecting the Black/White paradigm, we uncritically equate Black and white positions within a paradigm that emerged from the very real oppression of whites over Blacks, as well as by non-Black minorities who have sought their own liberation in the delusions of a white identity); Chris Iijima, The Era of We-construction: Reclaiming the Politics of Asian Pacific American Identity and Reflections on the Critique of the Black/White Paradigm, 29 Colum. Hum. Rts. L. Rev. 47, 50 (1997) (warning that moves beyond the Black/White paradigm may be coopted by racist status quo); Taunya Lovell Banks, Both Edges of the Margin: Blacks and Asians in Mississippi Masala, Barriers to Coalition Building, 5 Asian L.J. 7 (1998) (articulating critique of "the middle position" as constituted by pervasiveness of Black/White paradigm in both dominant and minority consciousness and practices and advocating coalition-building among minority groups as alternative); see also Mutua, supra note 8.

15. See, e.g., Iglesias, Out of the Shadow, supra note 30, at 351-72 (exploring points of commonality between emerging Asian Pacific American Critical Legal Scholarship and LatCrit theory).

16. See Wing, Critical Race Feminism, supra note 89.

17. Roberts, BlackCrit Theory, supra note 8, at 857.

18. See, e.g., Cho, Essential Politics, supra note 15 (expressing concern that the "anti-essentialist critique" may undermine collective solidarity and political engagement); see also A. Sivananda, All that Melts into Air Is Solid: The Hokum of New Times, Race & Class, Jan.-Mar. 1990 (expressing concern that the post-modern politics of proliferating subject positions forsakes commitment to universality and solidarity); cf. Iglesias, Structures of Subordination, supra note 5, at 486-502 (challenging notion that proliferation of political identities undermines pursuit of "common good" and arguing, instead, that the genuine common good can only be discovered and achieved through the reconfiguration of anti-democratic institutional power structures that suppress the self-representation and expression of multidimensional and intersectional identities).

19. For example, in the labor context, the commitment to racial and/or gender equality has sometimes been expressed through the formation of separate racially marked or gender based caucuses within the broader collectivity, where members of the subgroup meet separately to discuss their particular problems and needs. For a critical analysis of the pros and cons associated with different institutional structures or arrangements that might be used to operationalize a commitment to anti-essentialist intergroup justice, see Iglesias, Structures of Subordination, supra note 5, at 478-86.

20. See, e.g., Mutua, supra note 8 (reporting discussions at LatCrit III).

21. See, e.g., Phillips, supra note 7, at 1256 (representing Critical Race Theory Workshop as "a place where, among other things, the experiences of all groups of color are articulated and where narrow conceptions of group interest are critiqued").

22. See Peter Brimelow, Alien Nation (1995) (articulating a nativist agenda).

23. See, e.g., Marvin Dunn, Black Miami in the Twentieth Century 99 (1997) (noting that Black Bahamians, proud of their British roots, "thought themselves to be less servile than American-born Blacks in Miami").

24. See Symposium, The Long Shadow of Korematsu, supra note 27; see also Iglesias, Out of the Shadow, supra note 30 (offering one vision of the intellectual and political agenda that might be collaboratively pursued at the intersection of APACrit and LatCrit theory).

25. See, e.g., Guadalupe T. Luna, Zoo Island: LatCrit Theory, Don Pepe and Senora Peralta, 19 Chicano-Latino L. Rev. 339, 341 (1998) (locating Chicana/o subordination in the ideological and rhetorical struggles between universal and particular through which the white perspective is cast as universal in contrast to the particularity of the Chicana/o perspective); Iglesias, Structures of Subordination, supra note 5, at nn. 21 & 22 and accompanying text (implying need for gestalt-shift that would enable recognition of the way women of color constitute a universal perspective). See also generally Francisco Valdes, Queer Margins, Queer Ethics: A Call to Account for Race and Ethnicity in the Law, Theory and Politics of 'Sexual Orientation,' 48 Hastings L.J. 1293 (1997) (urging similar points in the context of Queer legal theory). See also Valdes, "OutCrit" Theories, supra note 7.

26. The theory is that mass political mobilization triggers such undeliverable demands that it causes the democratic political system to internally implode. Thus, the discourse of democratic ungovernability has proven a valuable resource in legitimating political repression by casting mass mobilization as a threat to the democratic political form. Of course, the question this raises is whether a system that represses its people because it cannot meet their demands is really worth preserving. For an overview and critique of the way the problem of "democratic governability" has been addressed by both the left and the right, see Claus Offe, The Separation of Form and Content in Liberal Democracy, in Studies in Political Economy (1980); for an extensive analysis of the reasons why "the liberal democratic state" cannot effectively respond to the demands of a politically mobilized polity, see Clause Offe & Volker Ronge, Theses on the Theory of the State, in Classes, Power, and Conflict: Classical and Contemporary Debates (Anthony Giddens & David Held eds., U.Cal.Press 1982) (linking the political limitations of the democratic state to the material bases of state power in liberal capitalism).

27. See Rachel F. Moran, What if Latinos Really Mattered in the Public Policy Debate?, 85 Cal. L. Rev. 1315, 1328-9; 10 La Raza 229, 242-43 (1998) (noting limitations of traditional race-neutral model of inclusion and advocating alternative model of immigration which recognizes that bilingualism and biculturalism are assets rather than threats to national integrity).

28. See Iglesias, Structures of Subordination, supra note 5 (critiquing impact of labor law doctrine of "exclusive representation" on self- determination of women of color in American workplaces).

29. See Max J. Castro, Democracy in Anti-Subordination Perspective: Local/Global Intersections: An Introduction, 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 863 (1999) (using the phrase 'really existing democracy' to measure the difference between democratic theory and the democracy in which we actually live).

30. Ivelaw Griffith, Drugs and Democracy in the Caribbean, 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 869 (1999); Irwin P. Stotzky, Suppressing the Beast, 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 883 (1999); Mario Martinez, Property as an Instrument of Power in Nicaragua, 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 907 (1999); Julie Mertus, Mapping Civil Society Transplants: A Preliminary Comparison of Eastern Europe and Latin America, 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 921 (1999); Ediberto Roman, Reconstructing Self-Determination: The Role of Critical Theory in Positivist International Law Paradigm, 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 943 (1999) [hereinafter Roman, Reconstructing Self-Determination].

31. See, e.g., Antonio Benitez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective 35-36 (Duke U. Press, 2d ed. 1996) (noting the indeterminacy of "the Caribbean" and observing further that organizing "the Caribbean" construct around the plantation economy would redraw its boundaries to include the Brazilian northeast as well as the southern United States); see also H. Michael Erisman, Pursuing Postdependency Politics: South-South Relations in the Caribbean at 27, n. 1 (1992) (suggesting that "the Caribbean" be conceptualized in terms of three concentric circles: its inner circle comprised only of the English-speaking Caribbean islands, including the Bahamas; the second circle delimited by the Caribbean archipelago, meaning all the islands plus the mainland extensions of Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana (Cayenne) in South America, along with Belize in Central America; and its outer circle constituted by the Caribbean Basin, which would include all the countries in the first two categories as well as the littoral states of South America (e.g. Colombia and Venezuela), all of Central America, and Mexico). These are, of course, only a few of many ways to imagine the meaning and parameters of "the Caribbean."

32. See Modern Caribbean Politics 4-6 (Anthony Payne & Paul Sutton eds., 1993).

33. See generally Benitez-Rojo, supra note 123, at 35 (of course, Benitez-Rojo's construction of "the Caribbean" as "a way of being in the world" incorporates, but is not exhausted by, the musical rhythms that express it).

34. The Caribbean Basin construct was initially forwarded by the United States as part of its project to combat the "leftist threat to the prevailing pro-western ideological order and U.S. influence in the Caribbean Basin." See Erisman, supra note 123, at 132 n.12 (discussing the purpose and scope of the Reagan Administration's Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI) which defined the Caribbean Basin to encompass Central America, Panama, all the independent islands plus Guyana and Belize). But the struggle to delimit a broader map of the Caribbean has also been central to the CARICOM project to promote the kind of regional integration that will enable the small countries of the Caribbean to coordinate the diversification of their otherwise competing economies and to leverage their political objectives by articulating a unified position. See Erisman, supra, at 111-12 (discussing the Pan-Caribbean perspective underlying Mexican and Venezuelan pledges to provide oil at preferential prices to various Central American and Caribbean states, as well as the vision underlying CARICOM itself).

35. United Nations estimates that the international trade in illegal drugs is worth $400 billion--approximately 8% of world trade--more than the trading in iron, steel or motor vehicles. See International Narcotics Control 2 Dep't St. Dispatch 503 (1991).

36. Griffith, supra note 122, at 873.

37. Stotzky, supra note 122, at 890 (explaining the fundamental elements of a deliberative democracy).

38. Id. at 893-903 (describing and critiquing the Aristide Plan).

39. As Professor Stotzky notes, the economic aspects of the Aristide Plan reflect the influence of the World Bank, the IMF and the Agency for International Development in their boilerplate responses to the economic crisis in Haiti. Id. at 899. Trade "liberalization," privatization, reduced social spending and similar policies are a familiar fare served up for Third World consumption by these international agents of transnational capitalism. Unfortunately, these policies have, since the 1980s, only further impoverished and politically destabilized the countries that adopt them. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see this--thus leading anyone with half an open mind to wonder at the relentless insistence with which these failed policies are repeatedly prescribed. See, e.g., Elizabeth M. Iglesias, Global Markets, Racial Spaces and the Role of Critical Race Theory in the Struggle for Community Control of Investments: An Institutional Class Analysis, 45 Vill. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2000) [hereinafter Iglesias, Global Markets, Racial Spaces] (assessing structural adjustment policies through a critical analysis of the institutional class structures of the international political economy).

40. See James H. Street, The Reality of Power and the Poverty of Economic Doctrine, in Latin America's Economic Development: Institutionalist and Structuralist Perspectives 16-32 (James L. Dietz & James H. Street eds., 1987). Street's analysis is particularly interesting because it shows the symbiotic relationship linking authoritarian political regimes and international financial organizations. The call for structural adjustment by institutions like the IMF may well serve the political needs of authoritarian elites. When the people mobilize against the impact of austerity policies, their mobilization is cast as civil disorder (instigated by subversive communist influences) and used to justify the kinds of repression to which these elites are already inclined. Only from this perspective can an authoritarian dictatorship be made to appear a solution rather than a problem for the nation.

41. For a more hopeful perspective on the potential role for Bretton Woods institutions to contribute to the evolution of a more just international political economy, see Carrasco, LatCrit Theory and Law and Development, supra note 102; Enrique R. Carrasco & M. Ayhan Kose, Income Distribution and the Bretton Woods Institutions: Promoting an Enabling Environment for Social Development, 6 Transn'l Law & Contemp. Probs. 1 (1996).

42. See, e.g., Holly Sklar, Washington's War on Nicaragua 57-8 (1988) (noting that "[i]n a March 1979 radio broadcast, Reagan seconded Idaho Rep. Steve Symms' concern that 'the Caribbean is rapidly becoming a Communist lake in what should be an American pond." ' Reagan added: 'The troubles in Nicaragua bear a Cuban label also. While there are people in that troubled land who probably have justified grievances against the Somoza regime, there is no question but that most of the rebels are Cuban-trained, Cuban-armed, and dedicated to creating another Communist country in the hemisphere.').

43. Id.

44. Gary Ruchwarger, People in Power: Forging a Grassroots Democracy in Nicaragua (1987) (noting that the revolution would have been impossible without widespread support and recounting extent of popular participation in the struggle against Somoza).

45. See Jeffrey M. Paige, Coffee and Power: Revolution and the Rise of Democracy in Central America (1997) (explaining role of agro-export elite in consolidating national unity alliance that enabled overthrow of Somoza, even as it laid seeds for eventual failure of Sandinista reform project).

46. For a variety of perspectives on the Sandinista's land reforms and Nicaraguan property law, see generally Symposium: The Nicaraguan Property Regime After Sandinista Land Reform, 22 Cap. U. L. Rev. 833-963 (1993). Compare Jaime Wheelock Roman, Changes in Agrarian Property in Nicaragua, 22 Cap. U. L. Rev. 853 (1993), with O. Herodocia Lacayo, The Current State of Nicaraguan Property Law, 22 Cap. U. L. Rev. 839 (1993).

47. See, e.g., Peter Dale Scott & Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies and the CIA in Central America (1991); Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in The Global Drug Trade (1991).

48. See William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (1995). As Blum recounts, the Duvalier family ruled Haiti from 1957-1986, when Jean Claude was forced to take flight for the French Riviera on U.S. Air Force jet. Id. at 370. In Nicaragua, Anastasio Somoza was installed as director of the Nicaraguan National Guard by departing U.S. military forces in 1933. The United States had invaded the country to quash the revolutionary uprising, supported by Augusto Cesar Sandino of the Liberal Party and purportedly financed by the Mexican government. In the years between 1933 and 1979, when Anastasio Somoza II was finally forced into exile by the Sandinista revolution, the Somoza family had amassed a fortune in land and businesses then worth $900 million, even as they left behind a country where two-thirds of the people earned less than $300 a year. Id. at 290.

49. See Ileana M. Porras, A LatCrit Sensibility Approaches the International: Reflections on Environmental Rights and Third Generation Solidarity Rights, 28 U. Miami Inter-Am. L. Rev. 413, 419-20 (1996-97) (urging a LatCrit perspective sensitive to both sameness/difference that can mediate the USLat/OtroLat identities).

50. Iglesias, Out of the Shadow, supra note 30, at 379-83 (examining linkage between U.S. anti-terrorism interventions abroad and the devolution of domestic civil rights).

51. Mertus, supra note 122; Roman, Reconstructing Self-Determination, supra note 122.

52. See, e.g., Sklar, supra note 134, at 61 (quoting several of Ronald Reagan's radio broadcasts in support of the Argentine military dictators and Chile's Pinochet); see generally Blum, supra note 140 (recounting U.S. role in installing and/or assisting the military dictatorships in Guatemala, Haiti, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, Dominican Republic, Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Panama and El Salvador as well as its various efforts to topple the democracy in Costa Rica).

53. See Sklar, supra note 134, at 60-61 (attributing the totalitarian/authoritarian dichotomy to Jeanne Kirkpatrick, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations under Reagan and deconstructing its incoherence and hypocrisy).

54. Mertus, supra note 122, at 939-40.

55. See, e.g., Philip J. Power, Note, Sovereign Debt: the Rise of the Secondary Market and its Implications for Future Restructurings, 64 Fordham L. Rev. 2701 (1996) (providing excellent overview of Latin American debt crisis and legal mechanisms through which balance of power between debtor countries and international financial organizations has since been reconfigured).

56. Cf. Rafael X. Zahralddin-Aravena, Chile and Singapore: The Individual and The Collective, A Comparison, 12 Emory Int'l L. Rev. 739 (1998) (noting and criticizing assumptions embedded in representations of Chile as the "model for necessary authoritarianism"); Enrique R. Carrasco, Autocratic Transitions to Liberalism: A Comparison of Chilean And Russian Structural Adjustment, 5 Transnat'l L. & Contemp. Probs. 99 (1995) (Chile cast as model for Russian transition).

57. Compare, e.g., Kent Klaudt, Hungary After the Revolution: Privatization, Economic Ideology and the False Promise of the Free Market, 13 Law & Ineq. 303 (1995) (documenting the impact of neoliberal economic ideology on the production of poverty, unemployment, massive inequality and crime on a scale previously unknown in the centrally planned statist economies of the former Soviet Union), with Structural Adjustment and the Spreading Crisis in Latin America, (1995) <http://www.igc.apc.org/dgap/crisis.html> (visited August 27, 1999) (providing overview of impact of neoliberal structural adjustment policies on the political instability and economic underdevelopment in Latin America).

58. See, e.g., Walter Adams & James W. Brock, The Sherman Act and the Economic Power Problem, The Antitrust Bulletin, Spring 1990. Conversely, neoliberals argue that democracy promotes capitalism because private companies must be free of state interventions and bureaucratization in order to innovate. See Bob Jessop, Capitalism and Democracy: The Best Possible Political Shell? in Power and the State (Gary Littlejohn et al. eds., 1978); F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1946).

59. See, e.g., Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom 9 (1962):

Viewed as a means to the end of political freedom, economic arrangements are important because of their effect on the concentration or dispersion of power. The kind of economic organization that provides economic freedom directly, namely, competitive capitalism, also promotes political freedom because it separates economic power from political power and in this way enables the one to offset the other.

Indeed, in some versions of this second account, even concentrated markets promote freedom because only large economically powerful private corporations can counterbalance the power of a centralized, bureaucratic, interventionist state. See Jessop, supra note 150.

60. See Adams & Brock, supra note 150, at 44 (discussing the capacity of giant firms (and labor unions) to threaten economic catastrophe if their demands are not met); see also Robert Pitofsky, The Political Content of Antitrust, 127 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1051, 1057 (1979) (excessive concentration of economic power will breed anti-democratic political pressures).

61. See Offe & Ronge, supra note 118; Offe, supra note 118.

62. See, e.g., Elizabeth M. Iglesias, "Confronting Race" by Mapping the Construction of Institutional Power: LatCrit Reflections on Law and the Anti- Political Economy, 33 Mich. J. L. Ref.; 5 Mich. J. Race & L. (forthcoming 2000) [hereinafter Iglesias, The Anti-Political Economy] (tracing interpretative manipulation of the state/market dichotomy through cases adjudicating constitutionality of minority business set-asides and political boycotts seeking racial justice in the market); see also Iglesias, Global Markets, Racial Spaces, supra note 131 (illustrating how economic/political dichotomy is invoked to obstruct democratization of economic institutions).

63. See Iglesias, The Anti-Political Economy, supra note 154 (for deconstructive analyses revealing the strategically manipulated indeterminancy of the purported separation of economics and politics).

64. See Roman, Reconstructing Self-Determination, supra note 122, at 947.

65. L.C. Green, Low Intensity Conflict and the Law, 3 ILSA J. Int'l & Comp. L. 493, 503-04 (1997) (noting that none of the guerrilla movements in Latin America have ever been recognized by the Organization of American States on the theory that they are not national liberation movements, but only "revolutionary groups seeking to replace the local government rather than to overthrow domination, alien occupation or a racist regime").

66. See Offe & Ronge, supra note 118; Offe, supra note 118.

67. See Shelley Inglis, Re/Constructing Right(s): The Dayton Peace Agreement, International Civil Society Development, and Gender in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina, 30 Colum. Hum. Rts. L. Rev. 65, 79-80 (1998) (describing the ethnonationalistic structure of the constitutional regime established by the Dayton Peace Accords, which divide all components of the central government into thirds, ensuring both equal representation of Croats, Serbs, and Bosniaks and the paralysis of a central government mired in ethnic politics).

68. Mertus, supra note 122, at 942.

69. See, e.g., Elizabeth M. Iglesias, Foreword: International Law, Human Rights and Lat Crit Theory, 28 Inter-Am. L. Rev. 206-07 (1996-97) [hereinafter Iglesias, Foreword].

70. See id. (citing references).

71. See, e.g., Iglesias, International Economic Law, supra note 15; G. Richard Shell, Trade Legalism and International Relations Theory: An Analysis of the World Trade Organization, 44 Duke L.J. 829 (1995) (advocating trade stakeholder's model as vehicle to incorporate social welfare and human rights into WTO); Patricia Stirling, The Use of Trade Sanctions as an Enforcement Mechanism for Basic Human Rights: A Proposal for Addition to the World Trade Organization, 11 Am. U. J. Int'l. L. & Pol'y 1 (1996).

72. See, e.g., Iglesias, Global Markets, Racial Spaces, supra note 131 (critical analysis of legal reforms needed to promote community participation in decisionmaking processes through which investment capital is allocated in the inter/national political economy).

73. See, e.g., Steven W. Bender, Direct Democracy and Distrust: The Relationship Between Language, Law, Rhetoric and the Language Vigilantism Experience, 2. Harv. Latino L. Rev. 145 (1997); Christopher David Ruiz Cameron, How the Garcia Cousins Lost Their Accents: Understanding the Language of Title VII Decisions Approving English-Only Rules as the Product of Racial Dualism, Latino Invisibility and Legal Indeterminacy, 85 Cal. L. Rev. 1347; 10 La Raza 261 (1998) (critical analysis of Title VII's anti-discrimination framework given its failure to prohibit the imposition of arbitrary and intrusive restrictions on the use of languages other than English in the workplace).

74. To this end, LatCrit III featured a plenary panel entitled Anti- Subordination and the Legal Struggle over Control of the "Means of Communication:" Technology, Language and Communicative Power. A description of its substantive objectives can be found at <http://nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu/< tilde>malavet/latcrit/archives/lciii.htm>.

75. See, e.g., Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, 435 U.S. 765 (1977) (striking down restrictions on corporate political expenditures on theory that such expenditures constitute speech protected by 1st Amendment); Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (1976) (expenditures of money constitute protected speech).

76. See, e.g., Madeleine Mercedes Plasencia, The Politics of Race on the Electronic Highway: An Analysis of the Video Dialtone Redlining Cases, and the Nynex Consent Decree in Roxbury, 15 Touro L. Rev. 513 (1999) [hereinafter Plasencia, Video Dialtone Redlining] (describing how discriminatory redlining practices of telecommunications companies threaten to shut minority neighborhoods out of communications revolution).

77. See Keith Aoki, Introduction: Language is a Virus, 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 961 (1999) (Long Live Keith Aoki!); see also Mark D. Alleyne, International Power and International Communication 2-5 (1995) (explaining difference between communication, understood as systems and infrastructures for dissemination of information, (e.g. telephones, satellites, news agencies, and languages) and information, understood as 'raw matter' or data, whose content is circulated through the means of communication).

78. William Bratton, The Law and Economics of English Only, 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 973 (1999); Drucilla Cornell, The Imaginary of English Only, 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 977 (1999); Wells, supra note 16; Madeleine Plasencia, "Suppressing the Mother Tongue": Anti-Subordination and the Legal Struggle Over Control of the Means of Communication, 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 989 (1999) [hereinafter Plasencia, Suppressing the Mother Tongue]; Yvonne Tamayo, Literal Silencing/Silenciando la Lengua, 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 995 (1999); Sharon K. Hom, Lexicon Dreams and Chinese Rock and Roll: Thoughts on Culture, Language, and Translation as Strategies of Resistance and Reconstruction, 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 1003 (1999); Hayakawa Torok, supra note 9.