The opening essay by Professors Bill Bratton and Drucilla Cornell is based on a collaborative project in which they join the anti-nativist struggle against initiatives to suppress the use of languages other than English. ⁽¹⁾ Their objective is to make an economic and moral case for treating language based discrimination as an equal rights violation. Interestingly, they develop their arguments using two very different forms of discourse. Professor Bratton uses law and economic analysis to challenge key assumptions about the way English-Only laws and employment regulations affect the incentive structures through which individual language acquisition and group assimilation are mediated in this country. Professor Cornell articulates a moral theory of rights that casts respect for language rights as fundamental to "the basic moral right of personality," thereby moving the articulation of equality rights beyond the truncated formalism of an anti-discrimination framework to ground it, instead, on the concept of self-determination.
 

More specifically, Professor Bratton's objective is to use economic analysis to destabilize the nativist political project by challenging the assumption that English-only laws and workplace regulations will promote assimilation to the English-speaking norm that, for the nativist, defines "the essence" of American identity. He acknowledges that English-only laws and policies are, at least superficially, supported by a plausible economic argument that language regulation maximizes social utilities by increasing communicative efficiency and reducing barriers to social interaction otherwise associated with the Tower of Babel *649 cacophony of multiple languages. ⁽²⁾ To be sure, Professor Bratton also challenges the initial assumption that "sameness" lowers costs.⁽³⁾ However, his major contribution is in showing why English- only laws are unlikely to achieve their purported "efficiency" objectives. He does this through a detailed analysis of the incentive structures Spanish speakers confront in acquiring English language proficiency.
 

In a nut shell, Professor Bratton's economic analysis suggests that if nativists are really serious about promoting Latina/o assimilation into American society, they should focus on eliminating discrimination against Latinas/os, rather than suppressing Spanish. This is because the suppression of Spanish is neither necessary nor sufficient to achieve its purported objective of fostering Latina/o assimilation. Spanish suppression is unnecessary because Latinas/os have strong economic incentives to learn English. ⁽⁴⁾ Those incentives only increase when non-discriminatory practices enable English language acquisition to produce upward social mobility. Conversely, Spanish suppression is insufficient to promote assimilation precisely in those instances in which the reality Latinas/os confront in American society is discriminatory and exclusionary. From this perspective, enclave settlement, employment and commercial practices are simply a rational response to the discrimination experienced when Latinas/os venture outside the Spanish-speaking enclave.⁽⁵⁾
 

Professor Bratton's law and economics analysis of English-only is particularly interesting and valuable because it creates the point of departure for a more general and far-reaching attack on the oft-repeated assertions made by law and economics practitioners that civil rights and anti-discrimination laws constitute unwarranted "special interest" interventions in the otherwise efficient private ordering of American society. ⁽⁶⁾ It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see the ready uses of this discourse for the nativist project. Bilingual education programs and other public policies aimed at mitigating the exclusionary impact of language *650 difference on non- English speakers are either manifestations of the concrete steps needed to give meaning and effect to the vision of inclusion underlying the promise of equal protection and non-discrimination--or they are manifestations of the capture of public policy by special interests. Framed this way, it is clear that the initial debate is over the meaning of bilingual programs, on the one hand, and English-only, on the other.
 

In this debate, law and economics discourse gives the nativist substantial meaning-making power because the language of costs and efficiency is so readily wrapped in the mantle of purported objectivity and value-neutrality: English- only laws are not discriminatory because they are efficient, or so goes the argument. Against this backdrop, Professor Bratton's contribution maps the economic arguments that can effectively turn the tables to reveal English-only laws as special interest legislative interventions. Since--in the absence of discrimination--private ordering already ensures that non-English speakers will have strong incentives to acquire English language proficiency, there is no regulatory need to create such incentives through English-only laws. There being no regulatory need, English-only laws constitute the use of state power to reaffirm the exclusionary political project embedded in the presumption that Anglo culture defines what it means to be "an American," and, more specifically, to promote higher levels of English language acquisition and usage than the market would produce-- in the absence of discrimination.
 

By laying out these arguments, Professor Bratton arms the anti- nativist struggle with a valuable meaning-making resource: the language of law and economics, but his analysis also demonstrates the indeterminacy and normative vacuity of law and economics analysis. Ultimately, cost-benefit analysis cannot tell us how public policy should respond to the skewed incentive structures currently obstructing Latina/o assimilation. This is, at least initially, because discrimination is not "absent" from the incentive structures mediating language acquisition. Given the presence of discrimination, the public policy issue cost-benefit analysis cannot answer is precisely the question whether state interventions should attempt to counteract these skewed incentive structures by promoting language assimilation through anti-discrimination enforcement and bilingual initiatives or through the imposition of policies like English-only. Indeed, cost-benefit analysis not only cannot tell us how to promote language assimilation in a discriminatory social context, it also cannot justify why assimilation to an English language norm should be the objective, given that efficiency is only one of many compelling values at stake in the formulation of public policy.
 

*651 Professor Bratton is not unaware of the normative problems inherent in any discourse that measures language rights through a cost-benefit analysis. Thus, a fair assessment of his efforts requires that we read it as it was intended to be read--as part of a larger collaborative project in which Professor Cornell's role is to articulate the normative framework which gives moral content to the task of articulating public policies that otherwise are rendered profoundly indeterminate by Professor Bratton's creative subversion of the nativist economic arguments. Professor Cornell proceeds in this way to ground the case against English-only in the basic moral right of personality of non-English speaking and bilingual Americans.
 

As I read Professor Cornell, this basic moral right of personality is not just a right to be treated as an end-in-oneself rather than a disposable means in some project to maximize social utilities, nor does it simply refer to the right to be treated as a free and equal subject whose rights of self- determination and self-expression are non-negotiable imperatives. It is all this and more, for in Professor Cornell's formulation, the moral right of personality is a right to be recognized--in one's very difference-- as an equal and legitimate perspective. This formulation, correctly understood, constitutes a profound and compelling call for a fundamental gestalt shift in our current interpretations of the meaning of equal protection because it clearly marks the difference between "equal treatment" and "treatment as an equal." Treatment as an equal does not always mean equal treatment, precisely because the expectations imposed and benefits conferred by equal treatment may have a substantially different impact on one's human dignity and self- determination depending on the circumstances of one's difference. Conversely, it would be a mistake, in my view, to confuse the call for an equality norm based on the treatment of others as equals with earlier calls for an equality of results rather than of treatment.⁽⁷⁾ The objective in treating others as equals is not to make everybody equal by eliminating differences, but rather to recognize that everybody is already equal in their very differences and to design our social and legal institutions in ways that respect that reality. ⁽⁸⁾
 

*652 The implications of Professor Cornell's way of understanding the meaning of equality are profound and far-reaching. It entirely changes the public policy issue, for the issue is not whether public policy effectuates equal treatment among the similarly situated, but whether it treats those who are differentially situated as equally worthy of the respect and deference to which equals are entitled. Applying this framework to the analysis of English- only laws, it is immediately evident that the impact of English-only on the self-determination and self-expression of non-English speakers and bilingual or multilingual Americans cannot be reconciled with the imperative to treat all others as equals--each having the right of self-determination as defined and effectuated from their particular and altogether different perspectives. Thus, in this context, it is clear that the legitimacy of English-only laws depends on the projection of an equality norm that presupposes sameness as the predicate for equal treatment. Professor Cornell's great contribution is to show the profound inadequacy of this approach and to offer a more meaningful normative framework through which to resolve the indeterminacies otherwise generated by the instrumental analysis of public policy.
 

Though Professor Wells' reading of Professor Cornell's analysis is different from my own, ⁽⁹⁾ her essay does offer a clear and compelling account of the reasons why Professor Cornell's call for an equality norm based on the treatment of others as equals would constitute a major evolution in the moral fabric of human society. In this vein, Professor Wells' argument begins by noting the advantages a Kantian perspective offers over the utilitarian perspective underlying law and economics discourse: "while the economist thinks of human beings as aggregations of preferences backed by dollars, the Kantian conceives of them as non-*653 negotiable subjects of respect and value." ⁽¹⁰⁾ Indeed, as Professor Bratton's essay illustrates, in a world ordered by law and economics, a person's interest in speaking a particular language will, like any other interest, be measured against the efficiency costs of protecting that interest so that, if the cost is too high, the individual's right will be sacrificed for the "greater good" of the whole. By contrast, in a Kantian moral universe, a fundamental right of personhood cannot be sacrificed at any cost.
 

The non-negotiable status given to rights of personhood makes Kantian moral discourse a more appropriate language than law and economics for articulating the meaning of equal protection. Nevertheless, in Professor Wells' view, the Kantian framework is ultimately inadequate because it grounds respect for others on the notion that human beings share an essential sameness--that the imperative of doing onto others as you would have done onto you is based on the recognition of a common humanity and a reverence for the things that make all human beings the same-- rather than a recognition of the value of the differences between us. In Professor Wells' words, "[w]hat we can't get from Kant is the notion that what is sacred in you is fundamentally different from what is sacred in me; that someone who differs is--for that very reason-- especially worthy of respect." ⁽¹¹⁾
 

This is a brilliant insight, clearly and simply articulated in a way that makes evident the profound challenge awaiting LatCrit theory and practice. By linking respect for difference to the experience of one's own particularity, contingency and finitude, Professor Wells articulates a profoundly revolutionary perspective on the reasons why respect for difference is, always and in every respect, a moral, existential and epistemological imperative. The suppression of difference and enforced assimilation are not only attacks on the dignity of another, but acts of self-destruction that confine us even further in the limitations of our own contingency, for it is precisely through the other that our finite ways of being and knowing are expanded and enriched. ⁽¹²⁾ The implications are profound. Otherness and difference are a gift, an avenue of insight beyond our own particularities, a window on the world we might behold if ever we could see beyond our own contingency and live beyond our finitude--a glimpse of God. An equality norm based on the imperative of treating others as equals operationalizes this understanding in ways *654 that the norm of equal treatment neither does nor can, for it is only by treating others as equals that we activate an equality norm that enables us to focus, as Professor Wells suggests, on "the gift of otherness, the opportunities of multi-lingualism and the possibility that through difference we can find wholeness." ⁽¹³⁾
 

Professor Wells makes another point worth further reflection. The power of self-expression is crucial to self-determination. Both presuppose access to language, not just any language, but a language in which the world, as one sees it, and one's own self-understandings can be meaningfully formulated and expressed. The language of law and economics has not been popular among critical legal scholars. Part of the reason is, as Professor Wells indicates, its failure to incorporate precisely those values, interests and cultural processes that resist translation into a cost-benefit analysis. The not-so implicit suggestion is that LatCrit theory should avoid speaking the language of law and economics. ⁽¹⁴⁾ Some might dismiss this suggestion out of hand: not only are the costs and benefits of any proposal substantively relevant to its proper assessment, but law and economics is the language of choice among policy-making elites and, increasingly, evident in the interpretative practices of many judges. ⁽¹⁵⁾
 

Speaking the language of power is, from this perspective, imperative precisely because, and so long as, power is power. Indeed, there is no question that Professor Bratton's efforts to recast the debate over English- only laws in terms that destablize the economic justifications routinely invoked to support the nativist agenda constitute a major contribution to the anti-nativist struggle precisely because law and economics analysis is the language of power. More importantly, however, the indeterminacy revealed by Professor Bratton's creative subversion of the law and economics analysis underlying English-only suggests that law and economics discourse may have become such a ready conduit for regressive and elitist political agendas precisely because critical legal scholars have rarely contested its articulation on its own terms. ⁽¹⁶⁾ Learning and using the language of power may thus be the best way to combat the legal production of subordination. Though not all LatCrit scholars need use law and economics analysis, certainly this suggests there is *655 room for, and value in, counting it among the repertoire of critical methodologies through which we expand the scope of our anti-subordination agenda and enhance the depth of our analysis. ⁽¹⁷⁾
 

Nevertheless, Professor Wells' cautionary words give me reason to pause--not because I doubt the possibility or apparent usefulness of strategically deploying a language whose basic assumptions one does not embrace. Instead, my concern stems from the way increased fluency in the language of law and economics tends to reaffirm and consolidate its dominant position within the legal academy and profession. In Language & Symbolic Power, Pierre Bourdieu writes incisively of the way linguistic hierarchies are created and the way these hierarchies operate in the organization of social power. ⁽¹⁸⁾ Two points are particularly pertinent here. First, he argues that linguistic hierarchies are produced through "the dialectical relation between the school system and the labour market--or more precisely between the unification of the educational (and linguistic) market, . . . and the unification of the labour market." ⁽¹⁹⁾ He further argues that "recognition of the legitimacy of the official language . . . [is] impalpably inculcated, through a long and slow process of acquisition, by the sanctions of the linguistic market, and which are therefore adjusted, without any cynical calculation or consciously experienced constraint, to the chances of material and symbolic profit which the laws of price formation characteristic of a given market objectively offer to the holders of a given linguistic capital." ⁽²⁰⁾
 

There is no question that a cost/benefit analysis would suggest, at least at first glance, that acquiring fluency in the language of law and economics makes for a better career investment than acquiring fluency in the methodologies, references and critical frameworks of outsider jurisprudence. Those who master the dominant language reap the rewards of assimilation. In this case, those rewards are directly linked to the labor market. Law and economics aficionados get hired by elite law schools, appointed to the federal bench, recruited for high-level policy-making positions and published in prestigious law journals at higher rates than exponents of any of the major strains of critical legal discourse. ⁽²¹⁾ By contrast, legal scholars working to articulate critical perspectives *656 and promote legal transformation in and through the discourses of Critical Legal Studies, Critical Race Theory, Critical Race Feminism, Queer Theory, LatCrit Theory and even of Law and Society are channeled into the "interesting visitor" circuit, cast as "too political" for judicial appointment and "too abstract and theoretical" for the nitty-gritty of policy-making. For young scholars, the choice of an academic discourse can make the difference between being cast as "an insider" or "an outsider," and that difference can cost you tenure.
 

The stakes are high. Understanding their full scope requires understanding not only that legal education is training for hierarchy, ⁽²²⁾ but also the extent to which those hierarchies can, consciously and unconsciously, infuse everything we do and aspire to achieve. It can infuse our assessments as to who should be our audience--whether we write to impress the powerful and well-positioned or to engage, enlighten and empower each other and thus to consolidate our otherwise dispersed and diverse community. It can also infuse our assessments as to where and how to publish our works--whether we seek to acquire prestige through fancy placements in top-ten law journals or, rather, seek instead to confer prestige by submitting our best works to the "secondary" journals run by minority law students eager to work with, and learn from, us.
 

Certainly, these matters would not concern me so much if I believed that the language of law and economics was infinitely indeterminate such that it really could, with sufficient effort, be made to formulate, communicate and construct the world as I, and other others, see it and, perhaps more importantly, as we aspire to imagine and transform it. It cannot--for the reasons Professors Bratton, Cornell and Wells have each alluded to in different ways. At the same time, critical legal discourses, that might, won't ever develop their full potential unless we collectively invest our human capital and professional careers in their further development and dissemination. The stakes are high indeed. The pay offs are higher, for rather than speaking the language of power--to tinker at the margins and to shift ever so slightly the points of pervasive disequilibrium--the articulation and effectuation of an anti-essentialist, anti-subordination vision and politics requires that we empower other languages by speaking them as much, as well and as often as we can. There is definitely a place for law and economics analysis in LatCrit theory, but, in my view, it is, and should remain, at the margins of our *657 efforts to understand and reconfigure the structures and ideologies of subordination.
 

Professor Plasencia's comment introduces yet another dimension of the anti- subordination agenda awaiting future LatCrit analysis at the intersection of language rights, meaning-making power and the struggle for self-determination. Focusing on the awesome technological breakthroughs that continue to revolutionize the structure and content of global communications, Professor Plasencia notes the frustrations non-English speakers often encounter in attempting to use the new means of communication that increasingly will mark the difference between "information haves" and "have nots" in the new world information order:
 

In composing e-mail in Spanish, for example, one cannot readily find the symbols necessary to communicate fully in Spanish. Of the various templates made available for computerized language production, Spanish accents and other symbols often do not match the font of the original text in which the document was composed. The e-mail I have drafted in Spanish often arrives to its addressee with circles where I had placed accents. Therefore, I look like some sort of chaotic writer.⁽²³⁾
 

While the personal embarrassment experienced when one's communicative efforts are distorted into gibberish may seem, to some, a minor frustration, the issues it raises are profound. The Internet and the World Wide Web have been heralded as engines of a new world information order and as the most recent advances that increasingly are making the dream of universal communications a reality. They may be all this, but they also constitute a major challenge for the critical task of giving substantive meaning and anti-subordination content to the international and historical commitment to cultural pluralism and universal service. ⁽²⁴⁾ From fiber optics to cyberspace networks, new communications technologies are speeding the flows of information. Being plugged into these flows means having the power of virtually instantaneous communications: the power to send and receive messages, to and from multiple audiences, instantaneously, to transfer documents, to reallocate capital, to purchase goods, to download and print out the world of information, it previously took hours or days or weeks to compile. Not being *658 "plugged- in" can mean knowing too little too late. For some this is a personal choice. Others have no choice.
 

These developments suggest the pressing need for LatCrit theory to examine the ongoing communications revolution and its impact on the reproduction of Latina/o subordination, both domestically and internationally. This is because taking self-determination seriously means taking seriously the information inequalities that link the issue of meaningful access--to the historical development and future evolution of the legal regimes that regulate international and domestic communications technologies, information infrastructures, services and networks. The compelling social and racial justice issues implicated by the recent privatization and increasing monopolization of the broadcast spectrum by large multinational corporations,⁽²⁵⁾ by the redlining practices of for-profit telecommunications companies, ⁽²⁶⁾ by the struggle for minority access to media ownership,⁽²⁷⁾ as well as the struggles of Third World states for access to the geo-stationary orbit for satellite communications-- all these suggest the broad field of critical analysis awaiting LatCrit attention in ensuring that Latinas/os and other peoples of color are not shut out of the information age.
 

In pursuing this line of inquiry, LatCrit scholars would, as always, do well to draw on the writings and analyses of other Third World peoples and peoples of color, for example, by excavating the economic and political claims underlying earlier proposals to create a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) and the various reforms NWICO articulated for the information and communications regimes governed by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and the Universal Postal Union (UPU) ⁽²⁸⁾ as well as by subjecting to critical anti-*659 subordination analysis the more recent trend to shift decision-making authority formerly delegated to these international organizations to venues like the World Trade Organization (WTO). ⁽²⁹⁾ From another perspective, this inquiry might entail mapping and deconstructing homologies in the way the discourse of "politicization" has been used to delegitimate Third World peoples as a legitimate perspective on the way international communications should be structured for the common good and the way the ideology of "free market competition" has been used to legitimate legal reforms and public policies that channel the achievement of universal service through the market imperatives of profit maximization, rather than the promotion of democratic governance and equal access norms. These brief observations demonstrate some of the wide range of issues and methods of analysis that will become increasingly relevant to the LatCrit project and our efforts to understand the relationship between the struggle for self- determination, for meaning-making power and for access to, and control over, the new means of communication.
 

The last three essays in this cluster by Professors Tamayo, Hom and Hayakawa Torok focus LatCrit attention on the complex and varied problems confronted by any project aimed at communicating across cultural differences and translating the untranslatable. Professor Tamayo's essay takes up these issues through a critical analysis of the arguments proffered by English-only advocates in Yniguez v. Arizonans for Official English. ⁽³⁰⁾ In that case, English-only advocates argued that laws mandating use of English as a common language were appropriate and necessary means of combating the social disunity, political instability and public distrust and suspicion purportedly triggered when the English-speaking majority hears public business conducted in a language they do not understand. In addition to recounting the reasoning that ultimately persuaded the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to strike the Arizona Language *660 Initiative as an invalid regulation violating the rights of Arizona public employees to speak and of non-English speaking Arizonans to hear public information spoken in Spanish, Professor Tamayo makes a point of linking her analysis to a narrative account of her own difficulties in attempting to translate meanings across Spanish and English. It is precisely these difficulties, and the "untranslatability" of certain meanings, that make the suppression of languages other than English a direct assault on the personal identity and self-expression of those persons, whose means of effective communication are thereby contracted solely in order to maintain English as the privileged and dominant means of communication in this country. Rather than fostering genuine integration based on mutual respect for, and accommodation of, these different means of self-expression, English-only laws seek to coerce a false sense of unity through the enforced silence of non- English speakers in, and their ensuing exclusion from, the public realm of American social life.
 

Professor Hom's essay also takes up the problem of "untranslatability." However, she substantially expands our analysis by providing concrete examples of the kinds of words and meanings that do not easily translate across language differences and the political implications of these barriers for cross-cultural understanding and exchange. Drawing on her experiences co-editing the first and only English-Chinese Lexicon on Women and Law,⁽³¹⁾ Professor Hom describes the process of identifying and collecting a list of English terms that have been central to the development of feminist legal theory and political activism, but that Chinese women report to be particularly confusing, unclear or incoherent when presented in Chinese translation. Terms such as Affirmative Action, Empowerment, Gender and Sex defy ready translation into Chinese because these terms refer to particular social, political and historical contexts and/or because they are embedded in particular theoretical frameworks. Translating these terms is not impossible, but it does require an in-depth explanation of the broader context that gives each term its particular meanings within feminist legal discourse and politics.
 

Through her concrete examples and detailed explanations of the interpretative processes through which she and her collaborators sought to identify appropriate Chinese terms that could effectively be made to signify the new and foreign meanings embedded in English feminist terminology, Professor Hom provides an extremely valuable and fascinating avenue of insight into the way language is both the constructed repository and the unfinished instrument of the social and political transformations we have achieved in the past and might seek to imagine in *661 the future. This is because the terms, whose meanings she struggled to convey through this English-Chinese Lexicon, are linguistic artifacts of particular historical struggles and conceptual breakthroughs. These struggles and breakthroughs generated a need for new ways of signifying new meanings which did not previously, and would not now, exist but for the intellectual and political efforts through which women's struggles for equality and dignity gave birth to the newly shared consciousness referenced in and by the new feminist terminology which developed to express it. Our present ability to convey these meanings quickly and easily by uttering a simple word like "gender" or "empowerment" is a tremendous political resource, whose historical contingency and inestimable value are often invisible--except in precisely those instances where the effort to produce a common political consciousness "goes international" or cross-cultural. Only then can we see the real and material costs of not having the words to reference the ideas we seek to express or the consciousness we seek to construct. ⁽³²⁾
 

Professor Hom's essay would have been a major contribution to the future evolution of LatCrit theory if it had simply stopped here. It goes even further. Like her brilliant performance at LatCrit III, Professor Hom's essay is an imaginative and multiply nuanced interrogation of the normative and political implications embedded in the practice of cultural and intellectual appropriation. ⁽³³⁾ In particular, her essay links an engaging narrative of a playful mother-son exchange, in which her son asserted that her use of his life stories might be a copyright infringement, to her own thoughts about the way she should interpret and respond to the massive underground xeroxing and distribution inside China of her copyrighted Lexicon. Linking these two instances of "copyright infringement" enables her, on a more serious note, to reflect critically on the possessive individualism that underlies western copyright and intellectual property regimes. To this end the linkage is entirely successful. The conjured image of a son proposing to charge his mother "by the story" provides a compelling backdrop against which to critically question the appropriateness of seeking to enforce copyright restrictions against a continent of Chinese women. In both instances, the assertion of copyrights ruptures bonds of solidarity and interconnection *662 because it operates, in effect, to commodify the interpersonal experiences and shared political objectives that produced, and are otherwise embedded in, the copyrighted "product." Only someone completely ensconced in the (lack of) values of possessive individualism would seek to commodify these artifacts of a shared reality and a common cause.
 

Not surprisingly, Professor Hom continues to use her son's life stories even as she expresses hope that her copyrights in the Lexicon will continue to be violated by women in China. However, her reflections beckon further inquiry because they raise the question whether there are any instances in which LatCrit scholars should resist the appropriation of our intellectual work and the erasure of our individual authorship. For example, many scholars of color, in private discussions and public fora, have criticized the network of self-referential cross-citations through which majority scholars exclude minority authors, even as they appropriate and seek to preserve their dominant positions, in producing "the normal science" of mainstream legal scholarship, by ignoring any critical analysis they cannot rebut. ⁽³⁴⁾ Beyond these instances of exclusion, scholars of color have also noted instances in which their intellectual work has been cannibalized in subsequent works by majority scholars, whose analysis uncannily tracks the same sources and articulates the same, or related, observations and conclusions with no citation, or a mere see generally, to the original work from which they have lifted the major theoretical insights or chain of analysis they present as their own.
 

From any objective standard of scholarship, the failure to reference and engage major critical works directly pertinent to the issues under discussion is at best poor scholarship and often reflects the intellectual dishonesty of either an ideologue or, more often, an imposter. However, when confronted with evidence that their work has been appropriated without appropriate citation or acknowledgment, many scholars of color flounder in the very sorts of internal conflict Professor Hom's essay conjures. To assert one's authorship and demand individual recognition for ideas whose purpose is to transform the world seems self-promoting and counter to the political aspirations underpinning the production and dissemination of critical scholarship. Put differently, too often minority scholars find themselves caught between the sense of being individually wronged by the unacknowledged appropriation of our intellectual labor *663 and a deeper sense that our individual authorship is simply not the issue that matters.
 

It is precisely because LatCrit theory seeks to transform the production of legal scholarship from an experience of individual isolation into a practice of collective engagement and empowerment that LatCrit scholars should theorize the difference between the kinds of intellectual appropriations we should permit or encourage and the kinds we should challenge and resist. We should also explore different strategies for identifying instances of, and collectively implementing appropriate responses to, the erasure of minority authorship. Certainly, one ready response is to self-consciously practice a politics of mutual recognition by reading and citing the works of other LatCrit scholars as often, and in as many venues, as possible. It is politically significant when we choose, for example, to cite the works of dead European philosophers rather than living LatCrit colleagues. This is because who we cite (or fail to cite) reflects and defines the participants we acknowledge and engage as our intellectual and political community.
 

Beyond this practice of mutual recognition, LatCrit scholars might explore other strategies through which collective action might effectively be marshaled to combat the erasure of minority authors. For example, LatCrit scholars might consider the possibility of "outing" works by majority legal scholars that inappropriately ignore or appropriate theoretical insights and analysis previously forwarded by minority scholars. Collectively compiling and publishing a list of such works, with appropriate commentary, might go a long way toward revealing the extent of erasure and appropriation individual minority scholars too often suffer in silence. On the other hand, this particular strategy might be more work than it's worth. Perhaps a different strategy is in order. Rather than seeking recognition from the legal academy's "normal scientists" and gatekeepers of the status quo, LatCrit scholars might work, collectively, proactively and self-consciously, to foreswear the elitist pretensions too often evident in the politics of citation and commit ourselves, instead, to a politics of mutual recognition through which the persistent dissemination and consistent cross-referencing of LatCrit scholarship may, thereby, actually trigger the paradigm shifts already embedded in the critical insights of LatCrit theory and discourse.
 

The final essay by John Hayakawa Torok closes this cluster with reflections on language acquisition and loss drawn from his experiences as a participant observer at the LatCrit III conference. Like the other essays in this cluster, his comments focus on the role of language in the construction and expression of personal and political identities. Reflecting on the many distinct and diverse perspectives articulated during the *664 conference, he raises fundamental questions about the possibility of inter-group translation and cross-cultural recognition. Through personal narrative, he highlights the processes of individual language acquisition and challenges the wisdom of enforcing language uniformity. Read in tandem with the other essays in this cluster, his reflections reassert the centrality of language in the de/construction of communities, the affirmation of identity, the organization of power and the demarcation of insider/outsider relations.
 

C. Inter/National Labor Rights: Class Structures, Identity Politics and Latina/o Workers in the Global Economy
 

The essays by Professors Romero, Corrada and Cameron constitute the third and final cluster in Part II. ⁽³⁵⁾ Like the essays in the first two clusters, these essays explore the relationship between regimes of il/legality, identity politics and the struggle for individual and collective self- determination. While the first two clusters examine these relationships through a critical analysis of the disjunctures between democratic theory and the realities of anti-democratic practices and institutions, on the one hand, and the ongoing struggle over language rights and communicative power, on the other, these last three essays focus LatCrit attention on the struggle for worker rights. In doing so, they explicitly center the issue of class in the articulation of LatCrit legal theory.
 

Attention to class issues has been acknowledged as a pending, but as yet underdeveloped, trajectory in the further evolution of LatCrit theory and the consolidation of LatCrit social justice agendas.⁽³⁶⁾ Class-based analysis is a particularly pressing matter for LatCrit attention precisely because so much ink has been spilt and so much intergroup solidarity has been squandered in abstract theoretical debates about the relative priority of class and "identity," particularly racial, ethnic and gender identity, in the subordination of peoples of color, as well as by *665 the counter- positioning of race and class in more concrete debates over the future of public policies like affirmative action, minority business set-asides, public assistance eligibility rules, trade liberalization and immigration policies.
 

On the one hand, calls to ground the articulation of social justice reforms in a class-based analysis have too often ignored the very real impact of racism and sexism as strategic instruments in the material dispossession and anti-competitive exclusion of women and minorities. From this perspective, class-based legal reforms and empowerment strategies cannot eliminate the impact of racism or sexism precisely because they do not really engage the reality of racism and sexism.⁽³⁷⁾ Conversely, however, calls to emphasize the centrality of racial subordination, rather than class or gender- based subordination, have too often ignored the material realities of intra- racial stratifications and hierarchies that are organized around relations of gender and class privilege within minority communities, while calls to focus on gender-based subordination have often ignored the problems of class and racial hierarchies among women. ⁽³⁸⁾
 

Against this backdrop, the three essays by Professors Romero, Corrada and Cameron illustrate the analytical power gained by articulating an anti- essentialist, anti-subordination analysis of the complexities of class subordination within and between Latina/o communities. This is because all three essays locate the economic dispossession of Latina/o workers at the intersection of national and international legal regimes and the ongoing transformation and restructuring of an increasingly internationalized global economy. They reveal, in different ways and from different perspectives, the failure of domestic and international labor law regimes to establish a fair and just framework for preventing the exploitation of Latina/o labor and the expropriation of the real value it creates. They also challenge us to further examine and more clearly articulate the relationship between the class biases reflected in these *666 legal regimes, their politics of (non)enforcement and the reproduction of racial and gender subordination both within and beyond the United States.
 

Professor Romero's essay opens the cluster with a narrative of her personal experiences at the home of a colleague who employed a Latina domestic servant. Professor Romero contextualizes this story of class privilege and gendered exploitation by linking it to a critical analysis of the unfair labor standards regulating domestic labor in the United States, as well as to a sophisticated critique of the theoretical assumptions that undermined, and ultimately betrayed, the anti-subordination potential otherwise embedded in early feminist efforts to recast the unpaid domestic labor performed by women in the home as a form of class exploitation. Professor Romero's analysis provides a particularly valuable point of departure for articulating an anti- essentialist class analysis in LatCrit theory because it shows how the material dispossession of Latina domestic servants is effected through a complex interaction of race, class, gender and immigrant status-based subordination-- even as it reveals the methodological limitations of neoliberal micro-economic analysis.
 

In a nutshell, Professor Romero criticizes the fact that feminist efforts to cast women as an economic class and to theorize the economic value of women's unpaid labor structured the so-called "domestic labor debate" in ways that completely ignored the experiences of the women of color, who oftentimes must bear the burden of domestic work both within their own homes and in the homes of other (upper-class) women who hire them as domestic servants. Though early feminist theory sought to establish the value of women's unpaid domestic labor and to thereby reveal the full extent of unjust enrichment conferred on men through the cultural circulation and performance of patriarchal norms casting housework as "women's work," these early feminist efforts ignored the realities of "the market" for domestic service. In this reality, immigrant women of color often work long hours, at less than minimum wage, with no employment benefits, and under personally intrusive and otherwise exploitative working conditions. Instead of confronting this reality, feminists turned to the fantasy world of micro-economic analysis. They sought to establish the monetary value of the many services women render in their own homes by calculating the costs of securing these same services through the voluntary arms length transactions of a *667 market exchange. This analysis revealed that the vast majority of household units would be completely priced out of the market for domestic services because few could afford the accumulated costs of acquiring the services of a cook, a house cleaner, a teacher, a nurse, a chauffer, a babysitter (and one might now add--of a surrogate mother) in the market. In this way, the economic viability of every patriarchal family was clearly linked to the exploitation and uncompensated expropriation of women's labor.
 

This domestic labor debate eventually erupted into public consciousness, as the "Nannygate" controversy, when President Clinton's woman nominee for Attorney General was discovered to have illegally employed undocumented workers as domestic servants in her home. The Nannygate affair, as recounted by Professor Romero, brings into sharp relief the contradictions in the way (some) white feminists have engaged the problem of domestic labor. On the one hand, the earlier feminist efforts to establish the "market value" of domestic labor cast women's services as ultimately priceless. On the other hand, the dominant feminist response--to the public controversy over Nannygate--was to minimize the criminal aspects of employing undocumented domestic workers by insisting that current immigration restrictions were out of step with "women's needs" for stable and affordable domestic help--meaning low wage workers owed no expensive benefits obligations.
 

But, as Professor Romero's analysis suggests, if the reproductive labor involved in maintaining a home is "priceless" when performed by white women in their own homes, certainly it should also be priceless (or at least remunerative) when performed by women of color in the homes of other women. The fact that it is not shows that wages for domestic service are determined not by "the market value," let alone the use value, of the services rendered, but rather by the asymmetrical power relations that are constructed through the compulsion of economic necessity, the vulnerability of being "illegal" or undocumented, and the cultural and racial prejudices that devalue the labor value produced by immigrant women of color. The fact that dominant feminist discourse has yet to acknowledge and address its internal contradictions reveals the essentialist assumptions through which feminist theory delimits the category of "women's interests" to privilege the particular interests of upper- class white women, while neglecting the "women's interests" of lower class immigrant women of color. By revealing this contradiction, Professor Romero's analysis enables us to see the full extent of unjust enrichment conferred on upper-class household units through the cultural circulation and performance of elitist classist and *668 racist norms that legitimate the uncompensated material expropriation of the labor value of immigrant women of color.
 

Against the backdrop of Professor Romero's critical analysis of the asymmetrical power relations that "distort" the supposedly voluntary exchange transactions upon which micro-economic analysis builds its house of cards, the essays by Professors Corrada and Cameron further develop and expand the theoretical parameters and thematic concerns of an anti-essentialist class analysis in LatCrit theory. They also offer additional insights into the role of law in facilitating the material expropriation of Latina/o labor value as well as the poverty, marginality and economic dispossession this expropriation visits upon Latina/o families and communities.
 

Professor Corrada offers these insights by focusing LatCrit attention on the labor dispute between a Mexican labor union and Sprint Corporation after Sprint purchased La Connexion Familiar (LCF). This dispute is particularly noteworthy because it became the subject of the first complaint ever filed by a Mexican labor union against the United States under the NAFTA Labor Side Accord. LCF was a small Hispanic telephone company based in San Rafael, California. Its business involved marketing long distance telephone services to recent immigrants who speak mainly Spanish and who frequently make long distance calls to friends and family in Mexico. After the purchase, Sprint discovered that a large majority of LCF's employees were undocumented workers and sued to recind the purchase. Though Sprint eventually went through which the deal, they paid substantially less money for the company and canceled the employment contracts in which they had agreed to retain the former Hispanic owners of LCF.
 

According to Professor Corrada, there was no further information about the fate of the undocumented workers whose employment at the company triggered Sprint's efforts to recind the purchase. In particular, there was no information as to whether these workers were kept on or replaced by "legal" Spanish-speaking employees, though as Professor Corrada notes, this information would have been relevant to determining whether Sprint's efforts to recind were pretextual. Alas, the fact that Sprint's scruples about buying a company staffed by undocumented workers might have been pretextual and strategic was not directly relevant "within the four corners" of the labor dispute at issue in the NAFTA complaint. Nevertheless, what is evident is that Sprint initially *669 decided to purchase LCF based on projections that increasing immigration by Spanish speaking persons into the United States would make LCF's niche market a growing profit center. Thus, Sprint's apparent scruples about employing undocumented workers did not affect its readiness to make a calculated business decision based on the expected profits to be earned from the consumption practices of illegal immigrants.
 

This point is key. Read in tandem with Professor Romero's analysis of the under-enforcement that makes the (unfair) employment of undocumented workers a low-risk white collar crime, it shows that the politics of immigration enforcement is not so much about stopping illegal immigration, but rather about who will be allowed to profit from the increased migration flows that are all but inevitable given the push-pull factors of an increasingly interconnected and global economy.⁽³⁹⁾ The fact that U.S. companies can with impunity profit from, and proactively plan their business projections around, the labor influxes and consumption patterns of illegal immigrants is a field of sociolegal analysis crying out for further exploration by LatCrit scholars interested in theorizing the political economy of Latina/o subordination.
 

But Professor Corrada's story goes on. After Sprint purchased LCF, the company started to perform below projected profit levels. At about the same time, the Communications Workers of America began an organizing campaign at the company in response to worker complaints of unfair treatment and failure to pay promised sales commissions. An administrative law judge issued a cease and desist order, finding that Sprint managers had violated Section 8(a)(1) of the NLRA by interfering with union organizing activity through threats of plant closure and employee interrogations. Just before the union election was to be held, Sprint closed LCF and terminated the employees. Part of LCF's customer base was transferred to Dallas, Texas, where Sprint hired additional Spanish speaking employees to deal with the influx of new business. There is no information as to whether these additional workers were documented or unionized. After an administrative law judge and a federal district court judge both ruled that Sprint's course of conduct in closing LCF did not violate federal labor laws, a Mexican labor union filed a submission under the NAFTA labor side accord alleging that United States was not enforcing its own labor laws as required by its commitments under the accord.
 

It was at this point that Professor Corrada was asked to testify as an *670 expert witness for Sprint at a U.S. NAO hearing on the Mexican submission. He agreed and ultimately testified that U.S. labor laws had been properly enforced. Much of his essay is a searching, honest, self-revealing and self-critical effort to explore the broader implications of his decision to testify on Sprint's behalf. His essay is structured as a dialogue between himself and an inquiring Latina law student, perplexed by the seeming contradictions between his classroom discourse, his Latino identity and his decision to testify in support of a major U.S. company charged with the flagrant violation of Latina/o workers rights. It is, in fact, a moving demonstration of the way the intersectionalities of Latina/o identity can trigger the sorts of existential crises that expand political identity and enable new ways of seeing and being.
 

The more immediate point stems, however, from the fact that Professor Corrada's legal conclusion, that the United States government had properly enforced its labor laws in the Sprint case, was, on its face, a legally correct and entirely defensible expert assessment. After all, the NLRB had vigorously prosecuted the case up to and including its efforts to secure a district court injunction. The district court and the ALJ, for their part, were enforcing labor laws that have systematically and increasingly expanded the realm of employer business prerogatives and of unreviewable discretion in making "core entrepreneurial decisions" such as whether to close or relocate a plant-- regardless of the foreseeable and profoundly negative impact of such decisions on union organizing and collective bargaining.⁽⁴⁰⁾ The fundamental un/fairness of U.S. labor laws is, however, simply not an issue relevant to the resolution of a labor dispute under the NAFTA labor side accord. The only issue there is whether the U.S. government enforced them properly, and that, therefore, was the only issue Professor Corrada was called to address.
 

Read, however and once again, in tandem with Professor Romero's analysis of the lack of enforcement that makes the employment of undocumented workers a low-risk white collar crime, these two essays reveal the many and profound inadequacies of domestic and international labor law regimes. Not only are domestic labor law violations routinely unenforced-- even when enforced, these laws fail to establish a fair and just framework for preventing the exploitation of labor and the expropriation of the real value it produces. This is precisely because the hyper-technicalities, of which Professor Corrada writes, are simply the *671 masks that hide the asymmetrical power relations these anti-labor laws and interpretative rulings are designed to institutionalize, preserve and enforce. The resulting consequences are well documented in Professor Cameron's essay linking the decline in union organization to the increasing impoverishment of labor and the simultaneous increase in business profitability.
 

Focusing specifically on Los Angeles County, Professor Cameron notes that in communities experiencing 20% or higher poverty rates, "over 15,000 manufacturing firms were generating annual revenues of over $54 billion, due largely to the low-wage labor of 357,000 Latino employees."⁽⁴¹⁾ Moreover, three enormous construction projects, totaling 12-14.5 billion dollars in investment, are currently in the works for the region. Professor Cameron asks whether anything could be done to help Latina/o workers share more equitably in this enormous wealth. Certainly, he is right to suggest that a larger share of the value their labor produces would go a long way toward ending, or at least substantially mitigating, the destitution that keeps so many Latinas/os at the margins of the social and political life of this country. This is just as surely certain as the fact that if poor immigrant Latina domestic servants were paid the fair "market value" of their labor in upper-income households, they would make enough money to lift themselves and their families out of "the culture of poverty" and criminality they purportedly are so wont to inhabit. Certainly, Professor Cameron is also right to suggest that securing a fair and equitable share of the value Latina/o workers produce depends ultimately on Latina/o self-determination through collective action and solidarity. No employer, union boss, labor board, ALJ, or district court is going to solve the problem. Only the concerted action and mutual assistance of Latina/o workers will do the job. ⁽⁴²⁾
 

In this vein, Professor Cameron's essay reviews a number of recent examples of successful union activity by Latina/o workers. His thesis is that the future of Latina/o workers and the American labor movement are intricately interconnected. Just as the increasing "Latinization" of the U.S. workforce makes Latina/o organizing power an important resource for revitalizing the American labor movement, the significant wage gaps between union and nonunion jobs, particularly when analyzed by race and ethnicity, make it clear that Latinas/os have a lot to gain from unionization. Professor Cameron also offers a valuable analysis of the kinds of collective action and strategies most likely to work, *672 for example, strategies involving non-strike alternatives--like corporate campaigns and community based boycotts-- and, not surprisingly, strategies that do not depend or rely on the vindication of worker rights through legal process.
 

The six essays in Part III appropriately close the LatCrit III symposium by raising important questions about the purpose, history and future trajectories of the LatCrit project.⁽⁴³⁾ These essays reflect the rich and varied intellectual heritage of the many different scholars and activists who have committed their energies to finding, or planting, their roots in the LatCrit community. The unprecedented and rapid expansion of LatCrit discourse over the last three years reflect the synergies embedded in these diverse perspectives and constitute the substantial pay-offs of our concerted, self-conscious and collective efforts to release these synergies through respectful and inclusive intergroup discourse based on our shared commitment to an anti-essentialist vision of substantive justice. At the same time, the rapid expansion and many diversities of position and perspective coalescing in the LatCrit movement raise substantial questions about the future trajectories and sustained viability of this imagined, and still very young, community of scholars and activists.
 

To my mind, that future depends, both theoretically and politically, on the degree to which the LatCrit community is able to forge a common consciousness and generate a shared discourse for articulating and manifesting, in concrete ways, a new vision of the relationship between the universal and the particular. It depends, ultimately and in other words, on the degree to which each of us is able to see the many different ways in which the relationship between the LatCrit community and the many particularities of which it is composed and into which it might at any point fracture--is not a relationship between "the universal and the particular," but rather is, at every moment and in every instance, a relationship *673 of the universal to itself. ⁽⁴⁴⁾ What this means, in effect, is that the challenge we confront, directly and immediately over the next few years, is a challenge that most of us cannot even really imagine. This is, in no small part, because there are simply no words, no readily accessible sound-bites, no immediately obvious and easily recognized formulations that convey the conceptual implications, political parameters, ethical substance and practical consequences, as yet to be manifested in and as--an anti-essentialist vision of human interconnection.⁽⁴⁵⁾ Not only are we challenged to imagine the ineffable and make manifest the unimaginable, but to do so concretely and effectively,--not at some unspecified time in some distant and abstract future, but rather--in the here and now of this moment, as it reflects itself in our collective efforts to further the objectives and foster the growth of a particular and historically contingent group of scholars and activists, who have chosen to coalesce around this imagined community and its aspirations for a new way of seeing and being in the world.
 

It is with these thoughts in mind that I take up the last six essays of the LatCrit III symposium. The first section focuses on the theoretical dimensions and directions of the LatCrit project as reflected in these particular essays. The second section takes up the practical challenges involved in ensuring the continued institutional and programmatic evolution of the LatCrit project.
 

A. Of Intellectual Debts, Theoretical Directions and the Challenge of Anti- Essentialism
 

From its title, the opening essay by Professors Johnson and Martinez would seem to suggest that the LatCrit movement originates, and is rooted, in the history of Chicana/o activism and scholarship.⁽⁴⁶⁾ A fair and fully informed historical account of the initial beginnings and subsequent evolution of the series of conferences, publications and related events that now constitute the historical record of the LatCrit project would not support such a claim. ⁽⁴⁷⁾ However, a close reading of their essay quickly reveals a very different and altogether appropriate message. Indeed, the opening paragraphs of their essay make it quite clear that Professors Johnson and Martinez are not claiming that the LatCrit movement is, in fact, historically rooted in Chicana/o studies. Not only do they acknowledge the central importance LatCrit theory has, *674 since its inception, accorded the project of promoting a discourse and politics of pan-ethnic solidarity among Latinas/os, but the recorded history, thus far developed, unequivocally illustrates the degree to which LatCrit theory has also, from its inception, aspired to articulate an inclusive anti-essentialist politics of intergroup justice and solidarity that goes far beyond the politics of Latina/o pan- ethnicity. ⁽⁴⁸⁾
 

Rather, Professors Johnson and Martinez's claim, as I understand it, is that LatCrit theory should be rooted in Chicana/o studies or, more precisely, that LatCrit scholars should view the long history of Chicana/o activism and scholarship as a rich resource worth further study and serious engagement. It is to this end that they append the bibliography of Chicana/o history compiled by Professor Dennis Valdes, and it is in this respect that their claims are entirely appropriate and consistent with the historical development and the theoretical and political aspirations of the LatCrit project.
 

LatCrit scholars should indeed study and learn from the significant body of scholarship and history of activism reflected in and recorded by a long tradition of Chicana/o studies. The particular perspectives and experiences of Chicanas/os are as central to the LatCrit project as the perspectives and experiences of any other multidimensional and intersectional collective political identity group committed to the struggle against white supremacy and the articulation of a substantive vision and political practice of social justice and solidarity. Only an unfortunate regression to the failed politics and limited consciousness of an ethnic or racial essentialism would view Professor Johnson's and Martinez's call for attention to the particularities of Chicana/o histories and experience as a threat to the LatCrit project. As Professor Roberts noted in her own contribution to this symposium, an anti- essentialist commitment to anti-subordination politics does not mean a commitment to an abstract universalism stripped forever of any particular content. ⁽⁴⁹⁾ It is, instead, a commitment to see and respect the universal claims of justice and dignity reflected in and asserted by every particularity, as well as by the multidimensional and intersectional identities that oftentimes are suppressed *675 within each particularity. ⁽⁵⁰⁾
 

What this means, more concretely, is that Professors Johnson and Martinez are right on point when they assert the need for a distinctive emphasis on the particularities on Chicana/o perspectives and experiences, both within and beyond the institutional and programmatic parameters of the LatCrit project. They are also right to suggest that Chicana/o Studies and LatCrit theory may ultimately converge if, and as, Chicana/o Studies become more inclusive and LatCrit theory continues to encourage a theoretical and political attention to the particularities of subordination experienced by the many different Outgroups that have coalesced in the LatCrit movement. ⁽⁵¹⁾ LatCrit III sought to operationalize precisely this theoretical and political commitment to addressing the particularities of subordination by self-consciously and intentionally organizing the BlackCrit focus group discussion as a programmatic event through which a tradition of "rotating centers" might be definitively launched and effectively institutionalized in the organization of LatCrit conferences.⁽⁵²⁾ Within this context, a Chicana/o Studies focus group discussion would not be difficult to imagine or to organize for a future LatCrit conference.
 

Conversely, of course, Chicana/o activists might likewise effectuate and expand upon Professors Johnson's and Martinez's call for attention to and respect for Chicana/o particularities, for example, by centering the experiences and perspectives and listening to the stories of Chicanas/os, who have experienced Chicana/o activism from positions located outside the parameters of identity and relations of solidarity defined and delimited by Chicana/o intellectual and political elites. ⁽⁵³⁾ Beyond that, Chicana/o Studies activists and scholars might, as Professors Johnson and Martinez suggest, invite the comments and perspectives of non-Chicana/o Latinas/os, who share their commitment to an anti-subordination social justice agenda. Making these and other similar moves might indeed produce the ultimate convergence of Chicana/o Studies and the *676 anti-essentialist, anti-subordination agenda that, thus far, has defined LatCrit theory as the collective and collaborative project of a diverse group of critical scholars and activists.
 

In this vein, the essays by Professors Mutua and Mahmud offer very different, but equally appropriate, reference points for the future development of LatCrit theory. Professor Mutua draws on her experiences at LatCrit III, and particularly her reflections on the BlackCrit focus group featured at the conference, in order to develop a deeply moving analysis and theoretically sophisticated framework for comparing the racialization of Latinas/os and Blacks. Professor Mahmud's essay, by contrast, draws upon, and introduces for the first time ever in a LatCrit symposium, the rich discourse of post-colonial theory and scholarship. Both essays acknowledge and explore the broader political implications of the fact that white supremacy operates through the ideological articulation and legal machinery of multiple racial systems. Both essays thus call upon LatCrit scholars to focus attention and deepen our comparative analysis of the various and varied modalities through which these different racial systems produce the subordination of peoples of color, both within and beyond the United States.
 

Professor Mutua's immediate objective is to articulate a theoretical framework that can effectively ensure that the LatCrit practice of "rotating centers" will trigger meaningful substantive analysis of the different ways in which white supremacy configures relations of relative privilege and oppression among different non-white groups and the intergroup rivalries that are thereby activated--as much by an uncritical embrace of the privileges conferred on one's own group, at the expense of another--as by an uncritical emphasis on the oppression endured by one's own group, but not the other. Focusing specifically on the intergroup tensions between Blacks and Latinas/os, Professor Mutua shows how the notion of "shifting bottoms" provides the necessary theoretical framework for linking the practice of "rotating centers" to a careful and critical analysis of the different racial systems through which Blacks and Latinas/os are relegated to their respective "bottoms." Once these different racial systems are identified and deconstructed, LatCrit scholars will be better able to understand the many obstacles confronting our hopes of achieving genuine intergroup solidarity and justice. These hopes confront profound challenges because Latinas/os, Blacks and Asians are privileged and oppressed by different racial systems. Dismantling one racial system, will not necessarily dismantle the others. On the contrary, it may actually reinscribe the remaining systems and enable their more virulent entrenchment in American society. Thus non-white groups are really and always potentially in conflict--absent a genuine and self-*677 conscious commitment to anti-essentialist intergroup justice. ⁽⁵⁴⁾
 

To this end, Professor Mutua's analysis makes three distinct, yet interconnected, theoretical moves of particular salience to the future development of LatCrit theory. The first is to recognize that the practice of "rotating centers" is not about "celebrating diversity." LatCrit organizers want to institutionalize the practice of rotating centers because it offers a valuable lens through which to examine, among other things, the different ways in which white supremacy configures relations of privilege and subordination within and between non-white groups. By articulating the notion of "shifting bottoms" Professor Mutua offers a valuable guidepost for deciding where the center should rotate next. This is because, as her analysis suggests, the practice of rotating centers will maintain its critical edge and effectuate its anti-subordination objectives only so long as it remains relentlessly committed to seeking and asserting the perspectives of those at the bottom of any particular context in which white supremacy is present and operative. ⁽⁵⁵⁾
 

Professor Mutua's second move links the notion of "shifting bottoms" to a detailed and comparative analysis of the different racial systems operating in the United States. Through a detailed analysis of these different systems, Professor Mutua makes a compelling case for concluding that Blacks, Asians and Latinas/os are racialized in different ways--such that Blacks are raced as "colored," Asians are raced as "foreign," and "Latino/as when they are not raced as black or white are 'raced' as hybrid (being "raced" both as partially foreign and partially colored in a way that racializes their ethnicity and many of its components.)" ⁽⁵⁶⁾ These different racial systems structure intergroup relations in ways that produce "shifting bottoms" between Blacks, Asians and Latinas/os, so that "different faces appear at the bottom of the well depending on the issue analyzed." ⁽⁵⁷⁾ Thus, while (some) Latinas/os may be relatively privileged by the "racial mobility" of putative whiteness in the racial system that marks Blacks as colored, (some) Blacks may be relatively privileged by the presumption of an American national and cultural identity in the racial system that marks Latinas/os as hybrids and foreigners.
 

Her third and final move links the intergroup tensions between Blacks and Latinas/os, over such issues as language rights, immigration *678 policies and affirmative action, to the shifting configurations of privilege and oppression created by these different racial systems. The aspiration underlying the theory and practice of coalitional politics has repeatedly been cast as a collective struggle to move beyond the divide and conquer dynamics of inter-group competition within white supremacy to a collaborative project aimed, instead, at eliminating white supremacy through a politics of intergroup solidarity and a commitment to intergroup justice. Professor Mutua's detailed analysis of the different racial systems organizing Black and Latina/o subordination furthers this project by revealing how tensions between Blacks and Latinas/os reflect the different configurations of privilege and oppression visited upon these different groups by the particular dynamics of different racial systems. Even more importantly, it clearly and powerfully drives home the point that achieving intergroup justice is not simply a matter of eliminating oppression, but also of giving up privilege. This means that each group will have to confront and foreswear the privileges conferred on them by the racial systems that oppress groups other than themselves-- if there is ever to be genuine solidarity based on a shared commitment to objective justice.⁽⁵⁸⁾
 

At the same time, however, it is important to recognize the limitations of Professor Mutua's theoretical framework--not so as to undermine or discount the substantial advances it makes in the articulation of LatCrit coalitional theory, but rather so as to mark future directions for LatCrit analysis. More specifically, I wonder how the experiences of Black Haitians, and other immigrant Black identities would be mapped within and across the various racial systems delimited by Professor Mutua's framework. ⁽⁵⁹⁾ More generally, I wonder what focusing specifically on marginalized and intersectional identities of Black Latinas/os, Black Asians, Asian Latinas/os and so on and so forth, would teach us about the interconnections and disjunctures between the various racial systems and other racial systems, we have yet to identify and deconstruct. Indeed, in this respect, Professor Mahmud's essay closes this section as if by design.
 

Focusing specifically on the various racial systems constructed in and through the British colonial project in India, Professor Mahmud illustrates the tremendous mileage to be gained from of a serious LatCrit encounter with post- colonial theory and discourse. Like Professor Mutua, his essay offers a detailed analysis of the discourses and practices through which different racial systems were constructed in the past *679 and are reflected in the present conflicts and tensions among different racialized groups. By locating this analysis in the particularities of European colonialism, Professor Mahmud provides a valuable framework for expanding the critical analysis of racialization beyond the territorial boundaries, cultural ideologies and domestic concerns of the United States. There is no question that his essay marks a future trajectory for LatCrit theory.
 

B. Institutionalizing Solidarity and Practicing Mutual Recognition
 

The cluster afterword submitted by Professor Montoya in conjunction with her cluster introduction, as well as the essays by Professor Phillips and by Professors Ortiz and Elrod provide an appropriate occasion to shift the focus of attention from the theoretical foundations and future trajectories of LatCrit theory to the more concrete and practical challenges of ensuring the continued institutional and programmatic evolution of the LatCrit project. Some of the challenges thus far confronted, as well as the various strategies LatCrit organizers have implemented to meet these challenges, are detailed in Professor Valdes' Afterword. ⁽⁶⁰⁾ Nevertheless, these last three essays each raise important issues concerning (1) the internal dynamics, historical development and future evolution of LatCrit conferences and the organizational practices and structures needed to sustain this movement; ⁽⁶¹⁾ (2) the relationship between LatCrit and other networks and organizations of critical scholars; ⁽⁶²⁾ and (3) the overarching necessity of ensuring that these concerns are mediated in ways that preserve and enhance a common ethic of authentic human sharing, inclusivity and connection. This last point is key. The LatCrit community can and should continue to grow and expand, even as we continue also, rigorously and honestly, to explore our substantive differences of position and perspective in the spirit and expectation of lively and lasting friendship based on a shared commitment to an anti-essentialist anti- subordination vision and politics. ⁽⁶³⁾
 

To these ends, Professor Montoya's cluster afterword features interviews with two Chicana scholars involved in the National Association for Chicana/Chicano Studies. Through a candid and detailed narrative of the problems confronted in that particular context, these interviews offer valuable insights into the difficulties any collective project can eventually encounter as its participants confront the consequences of their own success. One such consequence, noted in these *680 interviews, is the activation of an all- too-human tendency to abandon the ethic of mutual recognition and the aspirations it embodies, and to jockey instead for positions of individual prominence, whether real or imagined. This cannot be allowed to happen again. Too much is at stake in the here and now of this moment of retrenchment and hostility to the cause of social justice and genuine human interconnection. ⁽⁶⁴⁾
 

Operationalizing an ethic of mutual recognition, in this context, means recognizing the efforts and contributions of particular individuals, rather than attributing current collective achievements to impersonal historical forces or to the heroes (or heroines) of a distant past. Though there can be no question that the LatCrit movement draws its energy and substantive value from the many scholars, who have chosen to find, or to plant, their roots in the LatCrit community, it is also true that the organization of appropriate venues, the construction of appropriate contexts for performing community and producing a collective learning process and the negotiation of publication commitments that enable these efforts to be recorded and broadly disseminated do not happen automatically without the efforts and energy of particular individuals, who at specific points in time, take up the burdens and challenges of creating the opportunities that enable community. The history of these efforts in the development of LatCrit theory has yet to be told. As Professor Montoya's afterword suggests, much could be learned from the telling. That history, in its full detail, has much to teach about the meaning and value of perseverence, solidarity and intellectual, professional and personal generosity. That history, in its full detail, will have to await another moment and venue, but the lessons embedded in Professor Montoya's cluster afterword underscore the necessity and value of recorded history. ⁽⁶⁵⁾ With that in mind, a few notes for the record are highly in order.
 

Though the future of the LatCrit movement has yet to unfold, its history began, without question or doubt, in the Critical Race Theory Workshop. It began there because, in its most proximate and concrete form, LatCrit began with the vision and efforts of my friend and colleague Francisco Valdes. That vision is reflected in Frank's *681 Afterword, ⁽⁶⁶⁾ but his many efforts on behalf of the LatCrit community are not. From the initial gathering of law professors which produced the first ever Colloquium seeking to locate Latinas/os in the discourse of Critical Race Theory and, in doing so, gave birth to the "LatCrit" movement, ⁽⁶⁷⁾ and ultimately to this LatCrit III conference, Frank's efforts to build an inclusive community of scholars and activists, to promote a theoretically sophisticated and analytically rigorous anti-essentialist critical legal discourse and, above all, to combat the marginalization of Latina/o communities in American legal culture have been a driving force behind, and an unselfish source of energy and practical assistance to, the organization of LatCrit conferences, the publication of LatCrit scholarship and the consolidation of the LatCrit community. To locate the roots of LatCrit theory in any other venue, history or project, without accounting for the efforts of this particular man and the immediate context that inspired these efforts, would be an unfortunate distortion of the unrecorded history of the LatCrit movement.
 

Just as Professor Montoya's cluster afterword counsels LatCrit organizers to negotiate the future growth and the institutionalization of structures and procedures for the LatCrit project with care and fidelity to the ethic of mutual recognition, the commitment to unequivocal inclusiveness and the aspirations of collective solidarity and transformative social justice praxis that initially gave it birth, Professor Phillips's contribution counsels LatCrit organizers and scholars to attend to the needs and concerns of other networks and organizations of critical legal scholars. Whether her institutional proposal to coordinate LatCrit conferences and Critical Race Theory Workshops through an every-other-year rotation, or some other appropriate variation, is ultimately adopted, the objectives, concerns and aspirations that inform her proposal warrant serious LatCrit attention and consideration. Working out the programmatic and institutional details of the relationship between LatCrit conferences and activities and the Critical Race Theory Workshops, as well as the details of LatCrit participation in venues like APACrit conferences, Law and Society, People of Color Conferences, the NAIL and TWAIL networks focusing on New and Third World Approaches to International Law, INTEL's International Network on Transformative Employment & Labor Law and the Critical Legal Studies Network, to name but a few, are pending matters of increasing importance. Ultimately, taking seriously the commitment to social transformation through law means taking *682 seriously the coordinated synergies that only our collaborative efforts can produce.
 

Finally, the essay by Professors Ortiz and Elrod provides a vivid image of the community spirit, collegiality and cultural ethos the LatCrit movement must not ever lose. Though the LatCrit project aspires to the serious objective of producing transformative anti-essentialist legal theory and praxis, it aspires also to the realization of the human need for genuine community, solidarity and friendship. Whether LatCrit conferences and activities will continue to provide an intellectual and political home for scholars and activists committed to the project of social justice depends on the degree to which we continue to structure our gatherings as spaces where the personal and professional are equally valued and accommodated.
 

LatCrit III undoubtedly marked a watershed event in the evolution of the LatCrit movement, both as the most recent intervention in outsider jurisprudence and as a community of scholars and activists. This Foreword has sought, in a caring, careful and analytically rigorous manner, to highlight the advances and engage the problems embedded in the essays that now constitute the only record of this wonderful event. Heeding prior calls and applying the methodologies advocated in earlier LatCrit scholarship, this Foreword has worked to situate the contributions of this symposium within the broader discursive background that has already been developed through substantial efforts, and at great cost, by other critical scholars. ⁽⁶⁸⁾ This positioning, as previously explained and once again repeated, "requires a broad learning and caring embrace of outsider jurisprudence and, in particular, of the lessons and limits to be drawn from its experience, its substance and its methods."⁽⁶⁹⁾ It also counsels LatCrit scholars to recognize the importance of critical engagement and mutual recognition. Through our critical and focused engagement in each other's work and ideas, we will ourselves, grow intellectually and politically, even as we foster each other's growth and development. Through our commitment to mutual recognition, we will promote the dissemination of LatCrit anti-essentialist, anti-subordination theory and, thereby--with a little luck and a lot of hard work--trigger the paradigm shifts that are imperative for the 21st century. The future is as bright as we make it together.
 

1. See Drucilla Cornell & William W. Bratton, Deadweight Costs and Intrinsic Wrongs of Nativism: Economics, Freedom and Legal Suppression of Spanish, 84 Cornell L. Rev. 595 (1999).

2. Bratton, supra note 170.

3. According to Bratton, "at some point, [this assumption] has to be qualified by the counter-assumption that diversity leads to creative interaction." Id. at 974.

4. Professor Tamayo further buttresses this argument by noting the unmet high demand for English classes among immigrant populations. Tamayo, supra note 170, at 998-99 (5,000 immigrants turned away from ESL classes in Washington D.C.; 40,000 wait-listed in Los Angeles).

5. See, e.g., Alex Stepick et al., Brothers in the Wood, in Newcomers in the Workplace 145, 148 (Louise Lamphere et al. eds., 1994) (recounting how Cuban construction workers excluded from Anglo dominated unions in Miami responded by creating their own non-union firms and ultimately taking over the industry: "When the unions finally recognized that excluding Cubans was a mistake, it was too late.").

6. Bratton, supra note 170, at 974.

7. See, e.g., Owen M. Fiss, A Theory of Fair Employment Laws, 38 U. Chi. L. Rev. 235 (1971) (discussing difference between equal treatment and equal results in context of fair employment laws)

8. For further reflections on this important theme, see, for example, Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love 72 (Howard & Edna Hong trans., Harper Torchbook 1964). Kierkegaard puts the thought like this:

One's neighbor is one's equal. One's neighbor is not the beloved, for whom you have passionate preference, nor your friend, for whom you have passionate preference ... Your neighbor is every man, for on the basis of distinctions he is not your neighbor, nor on the basis of likeness to you as being different from other men. He is your neighbor on the basis of equality with you before God; but this equality absolutely every man has, and he has it absolutely.

Id. (emphasis added). Like many male philosophers, Kierkegaard's otherwise expansive vision was truncated by the gender myopia of his times. That, however, would be another article.

9. Professor Wells' critique notes the limitations of grounding the equality norm in a Kantian framework. Wells, supra note 16, at 987. A close reading of Professor Cornell's argument reveals, however, that her analysis draws as much on Franz Fanon's insistence on the right to be recognized "as a legitimate point of view" as it does on Kant. See Cornell, supra note 170 (reflecting on meaning of Fanon's observations that evil of racism is in being "denied existence as a legitimate point of view."). The claim embedded in the demand the I be recognized as a "legitimate point of view" is precisely the claim that my difference be respected and my different perspective be recognized as an equally valid point of reference in defining the common good. See, e.g.,Iglesias, Structures of Subordination, supra note 5, at 468, 473-78 (challenging "the complete and total absence of women of color as a legitimate agent or remedial reference point and the structure of power that is thereby established and maintained," and developing account of "the inter-subjectivity of equals" as "a moral imperative and institutional blue print"). Thus Professors Wells and Cornell are not as far apart as an initial reading of Professor Wells' critique might suggest.

10. Wells, supra note 16, at 987.

11. Id. (emphasis added).

12. See, e.g., Iglesias, Structures of Subordination, supra note 5, at 478 ("Through the suppression of the other, we are all denied the opportunity to transcend the limitations of our contingent perspectives. We are denied, in short, the opportunity for authentic self-determination grounded on the objectivity of a collective truth.").

13. Wells, supra note 16, at 988 (emphasis added).

14. Id. (suggesting that we avoid getting caught up in "the cost of multilingualism").

15. See, e.g., Carrasco, LatCrit Theory and Law and Development, supra note 102, at 331 (challenging LatCrit scholars to become fluent in the language of law and economics analysis, in part because that is the language to which policymakers respond).

16. See also Frank J. Garcia, NAFTA and the Creation of the FTAA: A Critique of Piecemeal Accession, 35 Va. J. Int'l L. 539 (1995) (demonstrating that law and economics analysis can be made to further anti-subordination objectives).

17. See, e.g., Iglesias, Foreword, supra note 161, at 177, 182, 187, 191 (noting the critical methodologies embraced or advocated by LatCrit scholars).

18. Pierre Bourdieu, Language & Symbolic Power (Raymond & Adamson trans., 1991).

19. Id. at 49.

20. Id. at 51.

21. Owen M. Fiss, The Death of the Law, 72 Corn. L. Rev. 1, 2 (1986) (contrasting critical legal studies and law and economics in terms of their representation within faculties at elite schools and on federal bench); Ian Ayres, Never Confuse Efficiency with a Liver Complaint, 1997 Wis. L. Rev. 503, 504-05 (noting that economic analysis has been dominant social science in analyzing legal issues and that economists and J.D.s with Ph.Ds in economics are more likely to be hired to teach in law schools than J.D.s with Ph.Ds in other social sciences).

22. See Duncan Kennedy, Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy (1983).

23. Plasencia, Suppressing the Mother Tongue, supra note 170, at 994.

24. See, e.g., Arturo Gandara, Equity in an Era of Markets: The Case of Universal Service, 33 Wake Forest L. Rev. 107 (1998) (critiquing rupture of telecommunications social compact based on universal service by Federal Communications Commission's Universal Service Order); Margaret Chon, Radical Plural Democracy and the Internet, 33 Cal.W. L. Rev.143 (1997) (mediating cultural pluralism and liberal normativity in cyberspace).

25. See Herbert I. Schiller, Information Inequality: The Deepening Social Crisis in America (1996).

26. See Plasencia, Video Dialtone Redlining, supra note 168.

27. Schiller, supra note 195, at 84 (noting that FCC permitted large corporate investors to acquire 75% of the equity and 49.9% of voting stock of minority businesses receiving set-asides in sell-off of publicly owned broadcast spectrum to private interests). Cf. Adarand Constructors v. Pena, 515 U.S. 200 (1995) (overruling Metro Broadcasting, Inc. v. FCC, 497 U.S. 547 (1990) on grounds that enhancing broadcasting diversity through minority ownership set-asides is not compelling government interest); see generally Marcelino Ford-Livene, The Digital Dilemma: Ten Challenges Facing Minority- Owned New Media Ventures, 51 Fed. Comm. L. J. 577 (1999).

28. See, e.g., Alleyne, supra note 169, at 118-53 (explaining how each of these regimes advantaged first world interests at expense of third world interests and the reform proposals propounded by third world representatives); see also Ingrid Volkmer, Universalism and Particularism: The Problem of Cultural Sovereignty and Global Information Flows, in Borders in Cyberspace (Brian Kahin & Charles Nesson eds., 1997) (re-mapping the center/periphery of the global informatics world around the "spillover environments" marked by in/access to major satellite systems and telecommunications infrastructure and noting that "Africa has "12% of the world's people, but just 2% of the world's main telephone lines").

29. See, e.g., Taunya L. McKarty, Liberalized Telecommunications Trade in the WTO: Implications for Universal Service Policy, 51 Fed. Comm. L.J. 1 (1998); see also Keith Aoki, (Intellectual) Property and Sovereignty: Notes Toward a Cultural Geography of Authorship, 48 Stan. L. Rev. 1293, 1338-52 (1996) (intellectual property rights under TRIPS/GATT regime).

30. 69 F.3d 920 (9th Cir. 1995) (declaring unconstitutional English- only provision in State constitution), vacated as moot and remanded to district court for dismissal, Arizonans for Official English v. Arizona, 117 S. Ct. 1055 (1997); see also Plasencia, Suppressing the Mother Tongue, supra note 170 (providing further critical analysis of arguments advanced in support of Arizona Language Initiative invalidated in this case).

31. See Sharon K. Hom and Xin Chunying, English-Chinese Lexicon of Women and Law (Yinghan Funnu Yu Falu Cehuishiyi) (1995).

32. The implications for LatCrit theory are profound--not only because so much of LatCrit theory's anti-essentialist agenda is focused on exploring and activating Latina/o transnational identities and international solidarity, but also because, and precisely to the extent that, LatCrit theory seeks to articulate a politics of anti-essentialist, anti-subordination intergroup justice and interconnectivity that defies expression in readily processed sound-bites. See, e.g., infra notes 213-15 and accompanying text.

33. Professor Hom's presentation was, without question, one of the many highlights of the LatCrit III program. As my own son would say, her multimedia presentation rocked.

34. Richard Delgado, The Imperial Scholar: Reflections on a Review of Civil Rights Literature, 132 U. Pa. L. Rev. 561 (1984). For an account describing the practice of "normal science" and the politics through which its practitioners seek to suppress paradigm shifts, see Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (2nd ed.1970). See also Juan F. Perea, The Black/White Paradigm of Race: The "Normal Science" of American Racial Thought, 85 Cal. L. Rev. 1213 (1997), 10 La Raza L.J. 127 (1998) (applying Kuhn's analysis to legal doctrine and theory).

35. Elvia R. Arriola, Introduction: The Value of Our Work, 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 1037 (1999) (introducing the essays); Mary Romero, Immigration, the Servant Problem, and the Legacy of the Domestic Labor Debate: "Where Can You Find Good Help These Days!," 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 1045 (1999); Roberto L. Corrada, Familiar Connections: A Personal Re/Viewing of Latino/a Identity, Gender, and Class Issues in the Context of the Labor Dispute Between Sprint and La Conexion Familiar, 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 1065 (1999); Christopher David Ruiz Cameron, The Labyrinth of Solidarity: Why the Future of the American Labor Movement Depends on Latino Workers, 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 1089 (1999).

36. See Iglesias & Valdes, supra note 2, at 574-82 (mapping historical and regional differences in configuration of class relations and production of poverty among different Latina/o communities and calling for particularized analysis as distinct from generalized and abstract debates); Iglesias, Out of the Shadow, supra note 30, at 368-72, 370 (calling for LatCrit theory to move beyond abstract race/class debates by centering political economy and production of class hierarchies in analysis of white supremacy).

37. See, e.g., Iglesias, Structures of Subordination, supra note 5, 488-92 (projection of universal class-based identity and solidarity ignores fact that racial and gender stratifications within working class make race and gender-based solidarity and collective action equally imperative); see also Iglesias, The Anti-Political Economy, supra note 154 (deconstructing suggestion that racial structure of "market" for government contracts can be transformed through color-blind reforms to assist small businesses in the inter-capitalist competition between small and large firms).

38. See, e.g., Iglesias, Structures of Subordination, supra note 5, 488-97, 493 (exploring how class-based, gender-based and race-based essentialism of different liberation movements has caused each to ignore the perspectives and claims of justice advocated by the others, analyzing negative consequences for intersectional identities of women of color and suggesting reforms needed to construct anti-essentialist institutional arrangements that enable self-determination through more democratic self-representational governance structures and decisional procedures).

39. See, e.g., Alvarez, supra note 29, at 310-11 (noting that investment patterns promoted by NAFTA actually encourage Mexican immigration to the United States and arguing therefore that "the United States is morally obligated to do more than simply build a 'fortress America' in reaction" to push-pull factors it has itself created).

40. See, e.g., Textile Workers Union of America v. Darlington Manufacturing Co. 390 U.S. 263 (1965) (plant closings are matters peculiarly within management prerogative requiring proof of discriminatory intent rather than balancing test); see generally Francis Lee Ansley, Standing Rusty and Rolling Empty: Law, Poverty and America's Eroding Industrial Base, 81 Geo. L.J. 1757 (1993) (analyzing doctrinal devolution expanding scope of employer unilateral control over "core entrepreneurial business decisions"--such as whether to sell, close or relocate a business).

41. Cameron, supra note 205, at 1099.

42. See, e.g., Mary Garcia Castro, What is Bought and Solid in Domestic Service? The Case of Bogota: A Critical Review, in Muchachas No More 105-26 (Elsa M. Chaney & Mary Garcia Castro eds., 1989) (recounting the struggle to gain legal recognition for SINTRASEDOM, a domestic workers union in Colombia).

43. Margaret E. Montoya, LatCrit Theory: Mapping Its Intellectual and Political Foundations and Future Self-Critical Directions, 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 1119 (1999) [hereinafter Montoya, LatCrit Foundations]; Kevin Johnson & George Martinez, Crossover Dreams: The Roots of LatCrit Theory in Chicana/o Studies Activism and Scholarship, 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 1143 (1999); Mutua, supra note 8; Tayyab Mahmud, Colonialism and Modern Constructions of Race: A Preliminary Inquiry, 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 1219 (1999); Phillips, supra note 7; Victoria Ortiz & Jennifer Elrod, Reflections of LatCrit III: Finding "Family," 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 1257 (1999).

44. See, e.g., supra notes 104 & 109 and accompanying text.

45. See, e.g., supra notes 201-03 and accompanying text.

46. See Johnson & Martinez, supra note 213.

47. See, e.g., Valdes, "OutCrit" Theories, supra note 7 (recounting relationship between CRT workshop and emergence of the LatCrit movement); see also Philips, supra note 7 (same).

48. These theoretical and political aspirations have been substantially enriched by the active and continuous participation of a highly diverse and extraordinarily talented assortment of APACrit scholars, RaceCrits, QueerCrits and other OutCrit scholars. See, e.g., Aoki, supra note 169, at 969 (noting extent of APACrit participation in LatCrit conferences and community); Culp, supra note 45 (reflecting on relevance of LatCrit project to African Americans); Barbara J. Cox, Coalescing Communities, Discourses and Practices: Synergies in the Anti-Subordination Project, 2 Harv. Latino L. Rev. 473 (1997) (reflecting on relevance of LatCrit project to white lesbians); Stephanie M. Wildman, Reflections on Whiteness & Latina/o Critical Theory, 2 Harv. Latino L. Rev. 307 (1997) (reflecting on significance of LatCrit project from a white critical feminist perspective).

49. See, supra note 109 and accompanying text.

50. See Iglesias & Valdes, supra note 2, at 556-57 (urging LatCrit scholars to "avoid the essentialist tendency to seek universal truths in generalities and abstractions, rather than seeking universal liberation in and through the material, though limited, transformation of the particular and contingent"); see also, e.g., Iglesias, Structures of Subordination, supranote 5 (criticizing different ways in which intersectional particularity of women of color is oftentimes suppressed in the constitution of class, race and gender based collectivities).

51. Johnson & Martinez, supra note 213, at 1157 (noting that "[u] ltimately, Chicana/o Studies and LatCrit theory may move in opposite directions--with Chicana/o Studies becoming more inclusive and LatCrit theory allowing for focused inquiry when appropriate").

52. See supra notes 105-17 and accompanying text (discussing original purpose and intent behind the BlackCrit focus group discussion and controversies it generated at LatCrit III).

53. See, e.g., Montoya, LatCrit Foundations, supra note 213, at Part III (reporting interviews with two Chicana scholars about their experiences as women within the National Association for Chicana/Chicano Studies).

54. See, e.g., supra notes 46-55 and accompany text (discussing intergroup tensions over racially restrictive immigration policies).

55. See, e.g., Iglesias, Out of the Shadows, supra note 30, at 374-75 (noting how exclusion of Japanese Latin-Americans from 1998 reparations paid by U.S. government to Japanese-American World War II internees reveals a "bottom" not otherwise evident).

56. Mutua, supranote 8, at 1207.

57. Id. at 1178.

58. See, e.g., Iglesias, Structures of Subordination, supra note 5 (solidarity must be based on justice, not sentimental rhetoric).

59. See, e.g., supra notes 46-55 and accompanying text.

60. Valdes, "OutCrit" Theories, supra note 7.

61. Montoya, LatCrit Foundations, supra note 213.

62. Phillips, supra note 7.

63. Ortiz & Elrod, Finding "Family," supra note 213.

64. For a critical discussion of legal scholars and scholarships in this time of backlash lawmaking, see Francisco Valdes, Beyond Sexual Orientation in Queer Legal Theory: Majoritarianism, Multidimensionality, and Responsibility in Social Justice Scholarship, or Legal Scholars as Cultural Warriors, 75 Denv. U. L. Rev. 1409 (1998) (urging progressive legal scholars to use our institutional and intellectual positions to blunt the drive to retrenchment).

65. See Montoya, LatCrit Foundations, supra note 213, at 1135 (quoting Cordelia Candelaria: "Many of the early pioneers in Chicana/o studies have been so used to rolling up our sleeves and just doing what needed to be done without chronicling the process. We just move on to other projects. History is lost is one unfortunate consequence. Another is that later on the history is sometimes re-written in terms of making certain actors look good in ways that are totally unsupported by the facts.").

66. See Valdes, "OutCrit Theories," supra note 7.

67. See Colloquium, Representing Latina/o Communities: Critical Race Theory and Practice, supra note 1.

68. Iglesias & Valdes, supra note 2, at 584.

69. Id.