Latinx philosophy is philosophical work substantively concerned withLatinxs, including the moral, social, political, epistemic, andlinguistic significance of Latinxs and their experiences.^[1] Although its emergence as a distinctive, self-identified field isrelatively recent, Latinx philosophy includes a substantial body ofwork that draws from a variety of philosophical traditions, includingcritical race theory, Latina feminist philosophy, Latinx and ChicanxStudies, various strands of Latin American, Continental, analytic,Caribbean, and Africana philosophy.

This entry focuses on the nature, history, and recent developments ofLatinx philosophy in the United States. It discusses current work inLatinx philosophy, the various origins of Latinx philosophy, disputesabout the nature and scope of the field, and ongoing developments.

• 1. Current Issues
  • 1.1 Group Identity
  • 1.2 Social and Political Philosophy
  • 1.3 Metaphilosophical Issues
• 2. Origins
  • 2.1 Chicano Thought
  • 2.2 Latin American Precursors
  • 2.3 Latina Feminism
  • 2.4 Self-Consciously Latinx Philosophy
• 3. Defining Latinx Philosophy
  • 3.1 Wide vs. Narrow Scope
  • 3.2 Source vs. Subject Matter
• 4. Ongoing Developments
• Bibliography
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Current Issues

Current work on Latinx philosophy tends to cluster into severalsubject matters: (1) accounts of group identity, including accounts ofthe phenomenology and senses of self in Latinxs; (2) broadly socialand political questions about Latinxs, with a special eye towardscitizenship and immigration issues; and (3) a range ofmetaphilosophical issues, including efforts to identify or expand thecanon of Latinx philosophy, and efforts to speak to various concernsabout the status of Latinxs in the profession of philosophy.

1.1 Group Identity

A recurring issue within Latinx philosophy is the characterization ofLatinxs. US and Latin American social identity categories areoftentimes distinct, and products of different racial and socialcategories.Latinx is a term used exclusively within theUnited States, or nearly so, such that people from Latin America wouldnot ordinarily think of themselves as Latinxs, unless or until theyreside in the United States. Within the United States, the socialcategory has had various labels, including “Hispanic”,“Latino”, “Latina/o”, “Latin@”.The adoption of particular labels has served varied roles in responseto interests in self-identification, coalition building, marketingpressures, and government bureaucratic interests (Alcoff 1999; Gracia2000).

In the first decade of the twenty-first century philosophers began tooffer systematic accounts of the social category of Hispanics orLatinxs, the way the category functions as an identity category, andhow Latinxs fit in (or don’t) within the racial and ethnicmatrix of the United States. Three approaches emerged: anethnoracial account, acultural ethnic groupaccount, and afamilial-historical view.

Linda Alcoff (2000) has maintained that Latinxs are best understood asan ethnoracial group—i.e., a group whose identity in somecontexts functions as a racial group, and in others as an ethnicgroup. As a group, Latinxs do not neatly fit within US racial andethnic matrix, she has argued (Alcoff 1999, 2000, 2003, 2006). Theracial diversity of peoples descended from Latin America, which spanthe full set of standard US racial categories, make Latinxs anunstable category in US social identity categories. Thus, how the term“Latinx” works in ordinary discourse—and itssignificance in lived experience—tends to vary in light of theinteraction of locally predominant Latinx group (i.e., Mexicans,Dominicans, Cubans, etc.), with US racial categories. The only way todo justice to this complexity, she thinks, is to recognize Latinxs asoccupying a hybrid social category, i.e., anethnorace.

On J. Angelo Corlett’s (2003) account, Latinxs constitute anethnic group unified by broadly cultural features, including suchfeatures as language competence in a “Latino” language,possession of a traditional “Latino” last name,self-recognition, and in- and out-group recognition. However, forpublic policy purposes, Corlett maintains that to be Latinx is amatter of genealogy or descent from certain Latin American groups. Onthis approach, in public policy contexts the categoryLatinxfunctions in a manner more typical of a racial group, and not like agroup unified historically contingent cultural practices (cf. Blum2009).

In contrast to the cultural ethnic group account, Jorge Gracia’sfamilial-historical view grounds ethnic group membership inhistorical ties, such that members of the group need not share anyother features, cultural or otherwise (2008). Apart from the verygeneral constraint of a suitable historical tie to the post-1492events involving the Iberian Peninsula and the Americas, Latinxs inone time and place can have some characteristics in common that arelacked by Latinxs in another time and place.^[2] Depending on the local norms that configure contingent (and oftenscalar) understandings of group membership, one can be Latinx withoutspeaking Spanish or Portuguese, without partaking in various culturalpractices associated with the identity, and so on. Gracia thus rejectsboth the cultural continuity account and the public policygenealogical account emphasized by Corlett.

Beyond attempts to characterize the category of Latinx, and efforts toidentify how it does (or should) operate in discourse, philosophershave also considered the distinctive challenges and puzzles of Latinxidentity in the face of US social identity categories (e.g., Lugones1987; Mendieta 1999; Schutte 2000; Alcoff 2000; see also Lewisforthcoming and Spencer 2018). One important strand of thisliterature—largely grounded in the reflections of Latinafeminist philosophers—has focused on the idea that the conditionof being Latinx (and, especially, Latina) has tended to producedistinct senses of self-identity that resists easy integration into aunified self (Lugones 1987, 1994; Schutte 2000; Barvosa 2008; Ortega2016). These works frequently take up and explore particular forms ofmarginalization, as well as strategies of response to them in light ofthe varied but distinctive social positions of Latinxs.

1.2 Social and Political Philosophy

If the first decade of twenty-first century work on Latinx philosophywas dominated by questions of identity—in particular, ofspecifying the nature, experiences, and even preferred term forLatinxs—the second decade might best be characterized asinvolving the arrival of questions in political philosophy (includingcitizenship and immigration) and the development of a more pronouncedmetaphilosophical sensibility.

Writ large, a good deal of recent Latinx philosophy has centered onthe consequences of demographic changes in the United States, and onreactions to them. Philosophers have argued that Latinxs constitutedistinctive challenges for conventional understandings of social andpolitical theory in the United States (Mendieta 2003; Gracia 2005;Alcoff 2006). In particular, the “browning” of America(Sundstrom 2008) and the implications of these demographictransformation for whiteness (Alcoff 2015; Mendoza 2017) have beensubjects of important discussions.

This engagement with questions in political philosophy is not entirelynew, of course. For example, there has been ongoing philosophicaldebate about the status of Latinxs with respect to affirmative action(Corlett 2003; Gracia 2008; McGary 2013; Gracia 2013). Within therecent expansion of work in political philosophy, however, two issueshave emerged as particularly salient: citizenship and immigrationethics.

Citizenship, and its entanglement with race, has a long andcomplicated history within Latin America (Quijano 2000, von Vacano2012). The same is true in the United States, where the boundaries ofcitizenship of oftentimes been carved with an eye towards the racialconsequences of those boundaries (Silva 2015a). The upshot of thesecomplex but distinct histories is that Latinx populations sometimesstand in systematically produced situations of unorthodox citizenship.For example, Puerto Ricans are US citizens, but those living on theisland cannot vote in US presidential elections. The TohonoO’odham Nation, recognized by the US Bureau of Indian Affairs,is a tribal group divided by the US/Mexico border. Members born fromthose enrolled in the tribe on the US side are US citizens, even ifthey are born in Mexico and live with their fellow tribe members whoare Mexican citizens (Luger 2018).

More generally, immigration rights, border politics, and the status ofpopulations that move across national boundaries have been the subjectof particularly sustained discussions within Latinx philosophy(Cisneros 2013; Mendoza 2016; Reed-Sandoval 2016a; Orosco 2016a).Mendoza (2016), for example, has argued that even if we suppose thatnation states have some right to control their borders, it does notfollow that immigration enforcement is permissible or ethicallydesirable. Reed-Sandoval (2016b) has argued that some populationswithin the larger web of immigration patterns (specific Oaxacancommunities, in particular) have distinctive rights of migration,given their nature as a transborder community.

1.3 Metaphilosophical Issues

Beyond political philosophy, a number of philosophers have taken upquestions about the relationship of Latinxs to the discipline ofphilosophy. One preoccupation concerns the relatively low numbers ofLatinx philosophers in the US academy (Gracia 2000, 2008; R. Sanchez2013). Others have written about whether Latinxs are subject to biasof some or another sort (Madva 2016). Several philosophers have arguedthat the particular cultural practices of the discipline of philosophycreate special barriers for Latinxs (Gracia 2000: 159–188; C.Sánchez 2016, 135–140; see also essays in Yancy2012).

A different family of broadly metaphilosophical endeavors has focusedon the identification of conceptual continuities and historical tiesbetween Latinxs, Latinx philosophy, and other philosophical movements.For example, Gregory Pappas (2011), Carlos Sánchez (2016:93–112), and José-Antonio Orosco (2016a) have taken upthe question of whether philosophical pragmatism is continuous with,useful for, or particularly representative of Latinx thought andculture.

Another notable interest for some philosophers working within Latinxphilosophy has been the expansion of what figures are canonical forphilosophy, and in particular, for Latinx philosophy, or morespecifically, a Mexican American philosophy. Orosco (2016b) has arguedthat important figures in the Chicano Civil Rightsmovement—Cesar Chavez and Armando Rendon, amongothers—ought to count as philosophers. In a different direction,Carlos Sánchez’s work in the history of Mexicanphilosophy—including translations and discussions of Mexicanexistentialism (2012, 2016)—has been animated by the goal ofexpanding the philosophical canon in ways that might helpfully speakto contemporary Mexican American people and their circumstances (seethe introduction and conclusion of Sanchez 2016).

Surveying the state of contemporary work in Latinx philosophy suggestsan initial taxonomy of the field. First, there is a distinct set ofquestions aboutwho is Latinx, the nature of the category,and whether it makes sense to speak of there being any interestingunity to the category. We can characterize this first set of issues ascategorical oridentitarian.

Second, as we have seen, there is a set of relatively “firstorder” orsubstantive philosophical questions withinLatinx philosophy. These include questions about racialization ofcitizenship; the ethics of immigration; matters in political andsocial philosophy that impinge upon and that are structured byLatinxs; the peculiar features of transnational identities for someLatinx groups; the nature of intersectionality in the Latinx case;epistemic injustice concerning Latinxs; social, moral, and politicalquestions about, for example, the role of Latinxs within the academicdiscipline of philosophy.

Third, there are questions about whether a Latinx philosophyessentially involves—or ought to involve—aspirations forliberation, whether Latinx philosophy is ultimately a form of identitypolitics, whether it makes sense to talk of ethnic philosophies atall, and even questions about what sort of work regarding Latinxs(scholarly or otherwise) properly counts as philosophy. Call thesemetaphilosophical questions about Latinx philosophy.

Roughly, categorical questions (the first cluster) concern how weought to understand theLatinx part of Latinx philosophy.Metaphilosophical questions (the third cluster) concern how we oughtto under thephilosophy part of Latinx philosophy.^[3] Together, the presumptions one has about these questions structure agood deal of the shape of what constitutes substantive Latinxphilosophy. Some of these issues are canvassed in§§3–4.

2. Origins

Accounting for the origins of Latinx philosophy is a difficultbusiness, both because of the messy, slowly-emerging nature ofacademic fields and because of special puzzles about how tocharacterize the field (see§3, below). Philosophers have only recently begun to speak ofLatinxphilosophy (and/orLatino andLatina/ophilosophy) (Gracia 2008; Mendieta 2011; R. Sánchez 2013;Llorente 2013; Millán & Deere 2017). However, prior to thecurrency of the term, philosophers were already doing philosophicalwork that recognizably constituted Latinx philosophy, i.e., philosophyconcerned with Latinxs.

Although a wider and more detailed history is still waiting to betold, what follows is a provisional and partial reconstruction ofseveral intertwined origins of Latinx philosophy. This account focuseson four sources of contemporary Latinx philosophy: the Chicanomovement, the history of Latin American philosophy, Latina feminism,and recent efforts at philosophy that is explicitly conceived of asLatinx philosophy.

2.1 Chicano Thought

One way to reconstruct the origins of Latinx philosophy goes throughthe history of the Chicano movement.^[4] The Chicano movement was never any one thing, but in broadbrushstrokes, it tended to be distinguished by a kind of culturalnationalism that identified a people—a Chicanoraza—with a homeland—Aztlán—whilealso emphasizing an imperative of liberation for those people and,sometimes, for that land (I. Garcia 2015). If we think of earlyChicano thought as a species of Latinx philosophy, then early Chicanothought is a natural candidate for one origin of Latinxphilosophy.

Important articulations of the movement’saspirations—includingEl plan espiritual deAztlán—employed concepts borrowed from twentiethcentury Mexican philosophy. Prominently among these was JoséVasconcelos’La raza cósmica. In the prologue toLa raza cósmica, Vasconcelos claimed that LatinAmerica had the opportunity to be the future birthplace of a new andfinal race that would integrate the best cultural features from therest of the world. The work’s emphasis on seeing humankind asdivided by race, its articulation of a glorious indigenous past in theAmericas, its assertion that the age of the White race was coming toan end, and its prophetic tone of racial uplift rooted in the peoplesof Latin America provided a ready framework for articulating some ofthe Chicano movement’s early aspirations (cf. Romano 1969).

There is some evidence that syllabi of the period included work by theMexican philosopher Samuel Ramos, and by Patrick Romanell, animportant English-language discussant of Mexican philosophy(Soldatenko 1996).^[5] Moreover, Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’sperspectivism—roughly, the idea that knowledge is perspectival,and frequently structured by features of culture, time, andplace—may have filtered into the self-understanding of parts ofthe movement, in part because of his putative influence on Mexicanfigures, the availability of translations of his work, and somediscussion of him in the work of Octavio Paz. Nevertheless, systematicattempts to pursue anything like a Chicanx philosophy in a form thatmight be recognized as academic philosophy was rare. In general, theChicano movement was not marked by frequent or sustained attempts toelaborate an explicit theoretical foundation in philosophical terms(I. Garcia 2015).

Nevertheless, there were some attempts at doing philosophy in adistinctively Chicano vein. Perhaps the most notable example was ElihuCarranza’sChicanismo: Philosophical Fragments (1978).It is an unusual text. It owes its structure and sensibility in partto Kierkegaard’sPhilosophical Fragments, and each ofthe main chapters has a pseudonymous author. At the same time, itsconcern and motivations openly draw from Mexican philosopher SamuelRamos’ critical investigation into a supposedly shared“Mexican” psychological profile. In Carranza’s case,Chicanxs (and Chicano Studies) are the subject.^[6]

Despite some threads of influence from Mexican philosophy (for anoverview, see Soldatenko 1996), philosophical work on Chicanxs (andLatinxs more generally) seems to have been limited to work by thoseoutside the discipline of philosophy, at least until the laterrenaissance of Latina feminist philosophy. Moreover, the nature ofearly Chicanx thought presents an ambiguous case for the origins of aLatinx philosophy.

First, especially in the early period of the Chicano Movement therewas comparatively little systematic concern for articulating atheoretical framework that encompassed Latinos more generally. Second,a good deal of the symbolic framework of the movement did not readilygeneralize to other groups of Latinxs. For example, the mestizo racialnarrative has proven to be problematic in a variety of ways and itdoes not readily extend to all Latinx groups (cf. Velazco y Trianosky2009; Gallegos forthcoming). Moreover, documents like the Treaty ofGuadalupe, and the appeal to an indigenous—especiallyAztec—past, cannot be used in the same way to anchor a sharedidentity with other Latinx groups (or even those groups ofMexican-descended people who cannot trace their ancestry to theAztecs). Third, it would be something of a cold irony for one strandof the cultural-nationalist (and sometimes separatist wing) of theChicano movement to be thought of as having constituted the origins ofa broader, pan-Latinx intellectual project. Those strands of theChicano movement were often animated by a resistance to anything thatfailed to recognize the cultural specificity of Chicanxs. On suchviews, acceptance of a Latinx identity necessarily entails a risk ofcultural dissociation from the specifically Mexican roots of Chicanxidentity, and brings with it an impermissible homogenization via apan-Latinx category.^[7] For that reason, it would sound strange to some activists andtheorists to frame Chicanx thought as an early exemplar of Latinxphilosophy.

Still, if one did think it plausible that Chicanx thought was anorigin for Latinx philosophy, it might seem natural to find the originof Latinx philosophy still further back in Latin American philosophy.Indeed, there is a case to be made for that more distal origin.

2.2 Latin American Precursors

Philosophy within Latin America was, for many centuries, undertakenwith a sense of its general continuity with European philosophy.However, by the second half of the nineteenth century a number ofprominent thinkers in Latin America began to speak of the possibilityor need of a distinctively Latin American philosophy (Magallón1991: 212; Gracia 1995: 462). In his “Ideas for a Course inPhilosophy” [“Ideas para un curso de filosofíacontemporánea”] Argentinian Juan Alberdi(1812–1884) called for the creation of national philosophies inLatin America. The idea was that these philosophical theories were tobe responses to local social and political circumstances, expressing“the most vital and highest needs of these countries”(1842 [1978: 14] translation by entry author). Similarly,Andrés Bello (1848) and Francisco Bilbao (1856) called forphilosophical work to be responsive to national and broadly LatinAmerican circumstances, and to separate itself from mere imitation ofEuropean thought.

It is unclear how influential any of these proposals were (Nuccetelli2017: §2.2.3), and whether they were really understood as callsfor radical originality in Latin American thought, as opposed toinvitations to be more attentive to local circumstances when deployingphilosophical proposals that largely originated elsewhere. Still,these gestures came to be regarded as early canonical statements ofthe need for an autochthonous Latin American philosophy.

Proposals to develop an autochthonous Latin American philosophyfigured prominently in the early to mid-twentieth centuryphilosophical scene of Mexico, subsequently spreading to other partsof Latin America. The concerns for a distinctively Mexican and LatinAmerican philosophy figured in the work of José Gaos, LeopoldoZea, Emilio Uranga, and Octavio Paz. In their concern for theparticular circumstances of Mexico (and less frequently, LatinAmerica), this work extended threads already present in earlier work,e.g., that of José Vasconcelos, Samuel Ramos, and Ortega yGasset. However, mid-twentieth century concerns for articulatingfeatures of a putatively Mexican circumstance, and subsequent effortsby Zea to articulate a broadly pan-Latin American philosophicalpicture, ultimately gave rise to several generations of criticalreactions concerning the proper nature and aspirations of philosophyin Latin America (for discussion, see Nuccetelli 2017; Gracia &Vargas 2018).

As we saw in the prior section, invocations of Latin Americanphilosophers sometimes played a role in the articulation of theideological aspirations of the Chicano movement. So, it is tempting toread at least some early efforts at a Latinx philosophy as inheritorsof a prior Latin American tradition of efforts at a self-consciouslyautochthonous body of philosophical work.^[8] This narrative is not unproblematic, however. It is unclear howsystematic and serious the philosophical influence of Mexicanphilosophy was on the Chicano movement. It was sporadically present,to be sure, and there were various attempts to appeal to Mexicanphilosophers as antecedents or intellectual forerunners of themovement. Nonetheless, apart from providing a sense of intellectualforerunners and a license for advocating for curricular changes, thereis only sporadic evidence of efforts at engagement with that work in away continuous with Mexican and US academic philosophy.

What makes those tenuous connections to Latin American philosophysomewhat more intriguing as an origin story for Latinx philosophy isthat the mainstream of current work in Latinx philosophy reflects atleast some familiarity with the history of Latin American philosophy(cf. R. Sánchez 2013; Millán & Deere 2017). Beyondfamiliarity with the history of Latin American philosophy, there isalso a variety of more recent strands of influence from Latin Americanphilosophy of liberation, postcolonial, and decolonial philosophy intothe work of several Latinx philosophers (e.g., those in Alcoff &Mendieta 2000, also, Maldonado-Torres 2008, Lugones 2010, Silva 2015b,Ruíz 2016).^[9] So, even if early strands of Latinx philosophy were notintellectually connected to impulses for an autochthonous LatinAmerican philosophy, or otherwise systematic engagements with themesand concerns in Latin American philosophy, later strands clearly cameto have those connections.^[10] For this reason, is not entirely unreasonable to locate the origin ofat least some important forms of Latinx philosophy in impulses toautochthonous philosophy within Latin American philosophy.

2.3 Latina Feminism

Richard Bernstein once declared the following:

Let me be fully explicit. I am not questioning that there is Hispanicphilosophy or Latin American philosophy, or even that some HispanicAmericans in the United States are concerned with their history andtraditions. I am questioning whether therenow existssomething that we can identify as Hispanic American philosophy. (2001:50)

At the time, such skepticism was plausibly the standard view amongthose who entertained the question of whether Latinx or HispanicAmerican philosophy existed. However, there is a compelling case to bemade that such a philosophy already existed when Bernstein wrote thosewords, albeit pursued under another name. That body of work is Latinafeminist philosophy. It constitutes perhaps the best proximalcandidate for the formation of a distinctively Latinx philosophy.Unlike the philosophical gestures of the Chicano movement, thedevelopment of Latina feminist philosophy constituted (and continuesto constitute) a substantial body of disciplinarily recognizablework—albeit one that has had to fight for its recognition. And,unlike Latin American philosophical work, which has a more tenuouslink to US Latinxs, Latina feminism is centrally focused on USLatinxs.

Discourse about a specifically Latina feminism extends at least as farback as the late 1970s. However, the idea of a self-consciously Latinatheorizing by philosophers (and philosophically-minded theoristsworking outside of philosophy departments), began to emerge in thelate 1980s.^[11] If there is a founding text of Latina feminist philosophy, it isplausibly Gloria Anzaldúa’sFrontera/Borderlands (1987).^[12] Anzaldúa was not herself trained as an academic philosopher,but her writing inspired generations of more traditionally trainedacademic philosophers, many of whom continue to reflect on, revisit,and draw from the distinctive phenomenology, vocabulary, concerns, andmethodology expressed in her work.^[13] Anzaldúa’s work pulled together threads of feminist,queer, and Chicana thought, and situated them the US/Mexico bordercontext. In doing so, she gave expression to a distinctive range ofexperiences and concerns that had, until that point, been mostlyinvisible to academic work in Chicano studies, feminism, and academicphilosophy.

Other self-consciously Latina feminist writing by academicphilosophers followed. Important work in this vein includes essays byLugones (1994, 2003) and Schutte (1998, 2000), and monographs byAlcoff (2006) and Ortega (2016). Much of this work emphasizes theimportance of lived experience, the significance of the social tiesand the norms governing them, and the unique ways in which genderinteracts with Latina-hood. In recent years, this literature has beenmarked by a reinvigoration of a broadly phenomenological approach toidentity, selfhood, oppression, alienation, and marginalization.

The case for thinking of Latina feminist philosophy as plausibly themost important origin of Latinx philosophy is straightforward: fromthe 1980s onward, self-identified Latina feminist philosophers wereexploring a wide range of philosophical issues concerning agency,epistemology, and politics, especially as structured by gender. Withinthat matrix of issues, a central recurring issue in that literaturewas (and continues to be) the lived consequences oflatinidad, or the property of being Latinx. As such, thiswork has as much a claim to being Latinx philosophy as anyphilosophical work that has been produced under the label.

To be sure, given the focus on gender, Latina feminist philosophy hasnot always been explicitly concerned about the global status ofLatinxsqua Latinxs (as opposed to, for example, beingfocused on Latinasqua Latinas). For example, Lugones’observations about the emergence of different selves in the context ofworld-traveling (1987) as well as her thoughts about the tacitmetaphysics presupposed by the discourse of purity (1994) are intendedto offer particular insight into the condition of Latinas. However,the central insights in these works plausibly generalizes to Latinxsin general, and perhaps beyond. Similarly, Schutte’s (1998)reflections about the peculiar dilemma of visibility forLatinas—they must either erase their Latinidad or be able toshow that their facility with multiple cultures is beneficial in theAnglo-American public sphere—is not unfamiliar to many Latinxsmore generally, and indeed, to a variety of other social identitygroups.

At this stage, it is difficult to do extensive work within Latinxphilosophy without engaging with the work of Latina feministphilosophers. In light of these considerations, and the relativelydirect connections in motivations and subjects of theorizing, it isotiose to resist the idea that Latina feminist philosophy is a main,if notthe main proximal origin to what we now recognize asLatinx philosophy.

2.4 Self-Consciously Latinx Philosophy

There is a final thread to the origin of Latinx philosophy that meritsattention: the emergence of a self-aware field, a field that thinks ofitself as engaged in explicitly Latinx philosophy. At roughly the endof the twentieth century, a group of US-based academic philosophersbegan to frame their work in terms of its significance for Latinxpopulations in the United States. For example, Eduardo Mendieta (1999)explored the complexities of US citizenship and the “becomingHispanic” that is sometimes involved in Latinx identity. Alcoff(2000, 2006) explored the difficulty of thinking of Latinxs as simplya race or simply an ethnic group, and in general, the complexity oflived social identities in the US context. Gracia (2000, 2008) andCorlett (2000, 2003) each offered accounts of the nature of groupmembership, and explored the consequences of these things for concretepolitical questions, such as affirmative action.

All of this work was explicitly about Latina/os, and is now rightlythought of as squarely in the ambit of Latinx philosophy. It was alsotrue that when it was written, it was not regularly thought of as acontribution to Latinx philosophy, per se. As we saw above, to theextent that scholars considered the possibility, they tended to denythat such a field existed (cf. Bernstein 2001). So, even whenLatinx-focused work was undertaken partly in conversation withdevelopments in Africana philosophy, Asian-American philosophy, andvarious developments in ethnic studies, the work of Latinx-specificphilosophy was typically understood as a contribution to, for example,the philosophy of race, or as a piece of social and politicalphilosophy.

By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, thispresumption began to change. A body of self-described Latinxphilosophy began to emerge, with all the usual academic apparatussurrounding it, along with more frequent usages of the term“Latinx philosophy” and its variants (R. Sánchez 2013).^[14]

3. Defining Latinx Philosophy

This entry has relied on a particular conception of Latinx philosophy,namely, philosophy focused on (primarily) US Latinxs. In theterminology that follows, this is anarrow scope andsubject-based characterization of the field; narrow in termsof how “Latinx” is understood, and subject-based in topic,as opposed to a construal of the field based on the identity of theauthors. Each of these presumptions—about scope and whether asubject-based characterization is apt—is subject to dispute.First, there is a disagreement about whether “Latinx”ought to be understood expansively (as including both Latin Americansand US Latinxs) or whether it ought to be understood narrowly (asfocused on US Latinxs).^[15] The second axis of disagreement concerns whether Latinx philosophyshould be thought of as philosophy producedby Latinxs(Gracia 2008) or as philosophyabout Latinxs (cf.Reed-Sandoval 2016a: 11).

3.1 Wide vs. Narrow Scope

On the question of scope, a more expansive conception of the fieldtends to take its cue from the work of Jorge Gracia. Graciacharacterizes Hispanic/Latinx philosophy as anethnicphilosophy, that is, the philosophy produced by an ethnic group.In his groundbreakingHispanic/Latino Identity (2000), Graciaargues for the idea of a Hispanic philosophy, understood as philosophyproduced by members of the ethnic groupHispanics. OnGracia’s account—the “Familial-HistoricalView”—Hispanics constitute an ethnic group unified byhistorical connections to the events following 1492 and the Iberianpeninsula’s subsequent role in the Americas. Putting aside somecomplexities, he holds that Hispanics include the people of theIberian Peninsula, Latin America, and their descendants in, forexample, the United States.

In later work, Gracia explicitly recognizes that, in at least somecontexts, there are important reasons to emphasize the term Latinorather than Hispanic (see Gracia 2008, esp. 58–9). Inacknowledging this, he does not abandon the idea that “Hispanicphilosophy” picks out an explanatorily important thing. ForGracia, what makes Hispanic philosophy interesting as a category ofphilosophical work is that the underlying historical ties that definethe maximal limits of the ethnic group (recall: roughly, historicalconnection to the Iberian-influenced aftermath of 1492) also structureimportant features of philosophical work by that group.

Gracia’s thought is that these historical connections matter:one cannot understand the work of Las Casas and Clavijero, forexample, without understanding the significance of scholastic work inSpain. And, one cannot understand the work of Latin American liberalsand positivists without understanding the web of historical ties thatfollowed from Iberian colonialism. Certainly, one cannot understandearly twentieth century Latin American philosophy withoutunderstanding the Iberian-to-Latin American intellectual connectionsthat go through José Ortega y Gasset or José Gaos. So,on Gracia’s account, the term “Hispanic philosophy”earns its theoretical keep by organizing our conception of things in away that informatively characterizes some contingent but neverthelessreal and informative feature of the world.

In the context of this account of Hispanic and Latin Americanphilosophy, Gracia introduces the termLatino philosophy topick out “philosophical work produced by Latinos both in LatinAmerica and the United States” (2008: 129). This way offormulating the category is deceptively simple. Gracia accepts abroadly contextualist understanding of what it is to be Latino, theconsequence of which is that “[w]hat Latino philosophy is, whenit is understood ethnically, can be asked only in the context of theLatino ethnos” (2008: 141). That is, whether a work ofphilosophy counts as a work ofLatino philosophy is never atranshistorical fact, as it were, but always something indexed to alocal, historically-specific standard given by the ethnos.

Gracia understands himself to be committed to a kind ofnon-essentialism about both Latinxs and Hispanics. Although there isthe general fact of an ethnos-defining set of historical events towhich many people are related, the standards of membership in thegroup is always contingent on those factsplus local factsabout which particular kinds and degrees of relations matter. So,whether Frantz Fanon—born in Martinique—counts as a Latinophilosopher depends in part of what a given, historically specificstandard of Latino membership specifies.^[16]

Gracia’s original and distinctive proposal for how to understandthe term Latinx philosophy was perhaps the first account to explicitlydefine the term “Latino philosophy”. It has the virtue ofbeing continuous with his well-developed and extensively defendedaccounts of ethnic philosophy, Hispanic philosophy, and Latin Americanphilosophy. It also faces challenges along multiple dimensions.

First, notice that Gracia’s account doesn’t specify whatLatinx philosophy actually is,here and now. Rather, it givesus a kind of formula for defining it: we are to look to the ethnicgroup’s conception of Latinx philosophy. Second, putting asidethe various empirical and conceptual puzzles about how we woulddetermine the ethnic group’s views (surveys? conceptualanalysis? patterns of linguistic usage?), it simply unclear there isanything in the views of the ethnos that would settle the question.That is, it is entirely unclear that the ethnos has a conception ofphilosophy—much less Latinx philosophy—that would settlethe reference of “Latinx philosophy”. Perhaps Gracia wouldregard this as an adequate result. Nevertheless, it is easy enough tosee why it might be attractive to others to have a more practicableaccount of Latinx philosophy, one that tells us something about whatthe term does (or ought to) pick out.

Second, several philosophers have noted that standard usages of“Latino” or “Latinx” is typically understoodto pick out people living in non-Latin American countries who areeither Latin American immigrants or descendants of Latin Americans(Llorente 2013: 73; Millán & Deere 2017; see also Mendieta 2011).^[17] In contrast, Gracia’s conception of Latinos includes LatinAmericans residing in Latin America. An important reason for having aterm to pick out the narrower group—US Latinxs, we might say inan effort at provisional neutrality—is that the social positionof Latinxs in the United States—and thus, of Latinx philosophersin the United States—is very different from the social positionof Latin Americans in Latin America, and the position of LatinAmerican philosophers with respect to philosophy in the United Statesand beyond.^[18] Thus, there is reason to be able to pick out and talk aboutphilosophy that is in some or another way specifically tied to Latinxsas conventionally understood, i.e., as a population of people outsideof Latin America who are themselves either Latin Americans by originor descendants of Latin Americans.

Collectively, these concerns might be put as follows: even if there issome useful category or property picked out by Gracia’s usage of“Latino”, his usage runs afoul of the standard usage ofthe term, a term that reflects important differences betweenLatin-Americans-in-Latin-America and those people (and theirdescendants) who reside outside of Latin America. Thus, if we acceptGracia’s explicitly revisionist proposal^[19] for using “Latino Philosophy”—a proposal accordingto which Latin American nationals doing philosophy in Latin Americaare doing Latinx philosophy—the worry is that it displaces amore natural and explanatorily helpful usage of the term.

Renzo Llorente (2013) has made the striking proposal that thedifficulties with Gracia’s revisionism about“Latino”—particularly the way it departs fromexclusively picking out US Latinos—is grounds for abandoning theterm “Latino philosophy”. In its stead, he recommendssticking with the older and more familiar categories of Latin Americanand Hispanic philosophy.

This proposal has its own difficulties. For example, it would obscurework by US Latina feminist philosophers, as well as other contemporaryphilosophers working on Latinx-connected issues. Those works all havea relatively clear claim on being an instance of Latinx philosophy, ina way that doesn’t do violence to either ordinary or standardspecialist understandings of “Latinx” and“philosophy”. Because there is a discernible body of workthere, united by an interest that we can helpfully and accuratelydesignate with the term “Latinx philosophy”, abandoningthe term would produce no gain, but it would entail a loss ofexpressive precision.

3.2 Source vs. Subject Matter

One might accept a narrower scope for the term “Latinx”,but emphasis that the right understanding of “Latinxphilosophy” is defined in terms of thesource of thephilosophical work, rather than its subject or content. That is, onecould accept that “Latinx philosophy” picks out Latinxs asconventionally understood, and treats Latinx philosophy as thephilosophyproduced by that group, rather than beingphilosophyabout that group. This proposal would respectstandard usage of the term without denying that there can be importantrelationships between Hispanic, Latin American, and Latinx philosophy.Further, it would allow us to think of Latinx philosophy as an ethnicphilosophy, i.e., philosophy (whatever that is) that is produced by aspecific ethnos (whatever that comes to). One appeal to thinking ofLatinx philosophy in this way—as unified by its source (i.e.,Latinxs)—is that it is continuous with other familiar ways ofcharacterizing some parts of philosophy. That is, it is a familiar tothing to characterize some parts of philosophy in terms of theirsource (e.g., Asian philosophy; German philosophy; European philosophyetc.).

However, a source-based characterization of Latinx philosophy remainsat odds with current usage. Consider a Latina philosopher who spendsher life work on the philosophy of quantum mechanics, or on settheory, or on free will. Suppose she has no interest in socialidentity and does not think of her work as in any way informed,connected to, or directly relevant to Latinxs. On a source-basedaccount, she would nevertheless count as doing Latinx philosophy. Thisseems strange. Inverse cases generate infelicitous results as well.Consider a scholar who is not Latinx but who exclusively works onquestions of Latinx identity, the politics of Latinx immigration, andtopics in Latina feminism. On a source-based conception, such ascholar could not be said to be working on Latinx philosophy, at leastnot in the sense under consideration.

Current linguistic convention suggests that a subject-basedcharacterization of the field is preferable. Construing the field asdefined by subject matter—i.e.,philosophy that is concernedwith Latinxs—gets the right results in the cases mentionedabove. That is, non-Latinxs can do Latinx philosophy, and Latinxs cando philosophy that isn’t Latinx philosophy.^[20] Moreover, subject-based approaches to defining a field is alreadyfamiliar from our standard understandings of, for example, ethics,metaphysics, and epistemology. To be sure, the appeal of asubject-based characterization depends in large part on whether itpicks out anything of interest. The body of work gestured at in thisentry makes the case for that conception.

Why not pluralism, allowing for different construals of the scope andcontent of Latinx philosophy? In everyday discourse, we are preparedto allow that any number of terms admit of multiple meanings, pickingout different, if sometimes overlapping things. In SouthernCalifornia, “Mexican” can refer to both Mexican nationalsand tonth-generation US citizens descended from Mexican nationals.^[21] Given the fact that many terms have multiple meanings, perhaps thereis room for both a source-based and subject-based account of Latinxphilosophy? Perhaps there is. Still, there is reason to plump for asingle privileged meaning in disciplinary contexts: labels andcharacterizations of a nascent subject matter are the public face ofthe field. When a field is more mature and there are plenty offamiliar and undisputed exemplars of it, the precise characterizationsof a field is less pragmatically significant and more a matter oftaxonomical fussiness. In light of this, there seems to be at leastsome reason to prefer to think of Latinx philosophy in terms of itssubject matter, i.e., as philosophy concerned in some substantive waywith Latinxs.

4. Ongoing Developments

Given how the contents of Latinx philosophy has been partly propelledby the experiences and interests of Latinxs, it plausibly matters thatthe demographics of the philosophers working on Latinx philosophy ischanging. A substantial portion of the early work in Latinxphilosophy, especially work recognized as straightforwardly academicphilosophy, has been done by scholars who were born outside of theUnited States.^[22] Over the past decade, however, there has been a marked increase ofwork on Latinx philosophy by US-born philosophers, and in particular,by Mexican American philosophers. Along with this change has beenincreased attention in the idea of a specifically “MexicanAmerican philosophy”. It remains to be seen the extent to whichthose working on issues within the ambit of Latinx philosophy willcontinue to focus on a broader Latinx landscape, as previousgenerations have done, or whether newer work will tend to focus onmore narrowly circumscribed topics.

Questions about the demographic makeup of the philosophers and itsconsequences for the discipline has been a matter of increasedattention the academy. Presumably, these discussions will continueuntil as long as academics remain concerned about discrepanciesbetween the academy and the populations it serves. However, one threadthat is oftentimes implicit but only infrequently taken up concernsthe possibility of duties (real or imagined, moral or otherwise) thatLatinx scholars have to undertake engagement with Latin American andLatinx philosophy (Gracia 2000: 159–188; J.L.A. García2001: 96–7; Covarrubias 2015). It is imaginable that as Latinxphilosophy grows, questions about who does it, what falls into itsambit, and whether there are obligations to do Latinx philosophicalscholarship in particular ways, will animate discussions within partsof the field.

A third ongoing development involves more explicit ties betweenphilosophical work in Latin America and the United States In thiscontext, a US-based academic field focused on Latinxs risksperpetuating epistemically and morally fraught practices with respectto Latin Americans. As noted above, a number of philosophers workingin Latinx philosophy explicitly draw from and interact with aspects ofLatin American philosophy. Similarly, there is some evidence of LatinAmerican attention on the work of US Latinx philosophy.^[23] Given the differences in comparative support, visibility, and globalprestige of academic work within the United States, it seems plausiblethat academic work on Latinx philosophy in the United States will go along way towards defining the field internationally, including itsterminology and its chief subjects. It is this fact—US academicinfluence on the global academy, and the way it can occlude thecontributions and work of those outside the US scene—thatprovides the background for a worrisome set of possibilities about howwe understand Latinxs and their philosophical significance.

From the standpoint of US-based academics, this risk may not beobvious. After all, the subjectjust is US populations, theirexperiences, and the philosophical issues they raise. However, Latinxsare notjust US populations. Latinxs are also, for example,members of the Salvadoran diaspora, indigenous Oaxacan laborers,Argentinian ex-patriate academics, and so on. Once we recognize thesefacts, it is less obvious that US identity categories and frameworksshould be taken as presumptive, fundamental, or guiding when it comesto understanding the philosophical—phenomenological, conceptual,social, moral, political, etc.—significance of thesepopulations. Moreover, taking US identity categories as presumptivealso threatens to re-enact a tradition ofdomination-and-description-from-without that has plagued Latin Americasince its inception. So, given the fact of a field constructed on USidentity categories, and given the fact of US influence on the globalacademy, the construction of the field’s categories andpractices (and who may speak authoritatively about them) may itselfbecome an important subject matter, especially in Latinx-LatinAmerican academic discussions.

A final development worth noting here concerns methodologicalfrictions. There are philosophers working in Latinx philosophy whosephilosophical work is substantively structured by liberationist,activist, or praxis-oriented methodologies. At the same time, thereare philosophers working on Latinx philosophy who are drawn to otherconceptions of philosophy, including versions committed to somethinglike a putatively disinterested search for truth, and/or philosophy inthe mode of a love of wisdom. Competing visions about what work ismethodologically preferable is a matter of ongoing contestation.

That said, it is not always clear that these differences inphilosophical orientation have the significance they are ordinarilytaken to have. Accounts of the phenomenology of racialized identitiesin the US subject to immigration pressures might speak to broaderfeatures of human beings. At the same time, putativelynon-liberationist accounts of, say, the structure of responsibleagency and how oppression alters it, might be thought to provideresources of its own for more straightforwardly liberationisttheories. So, although the broadly liberationist andtheory-for-its-own-sake threads of the subfield may sometimes findthemselves at cross-purposes, it is unclear that these disagreementsneed to result in a deep fissure in the field. For the field as awhole, one aspiration might be for philosophical work to have“exemplary validity”, i.e., philosophy that teaches ussomething about wider features of humanity without losing its culturalspecificity.

Still, there is reason for caution. Philosophical fights aboutmethodology have consequences for what is viewed as inside and outsideof a field. Moreover, scholars have noted that philosophical bordersare oftentimes particularly vigorously patrolled—and worse, thatthis has been especially so for work in Latinx (Ortega 2016:4–5) and Latin American (Vargas 2007: 61–63) philosophy.For that reason, it is very likely that what counts as“good” work, or even as part of the field, will remain acontested matter.

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Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Francisco Gallegos, Eduardo Mendieta, SofiaOrtiz-Hinojosa, Amy Reed-Sandoval, Carlos Sánchez, and RobertSanchez for feedback on this entry.