Gracias Mujer

Throughout my life, my relationship to womanhood has been an ever-changing phenomenon. In reflecting on the instances that have come to define this relationship, I wrote “Gracias Mujer,” an homage to the women who have shaped my womanhood and a simultaneous rejection of all that has burdened me. In light of the gendered dynamics within Latino culture, this piece reflects on my complex relationship with my parents and my desire to find healing from personal experiences. Incorporating themes of womanhood, memory, childhood, and family, “Gracias Mujer” is an acknowledgement of my traumas, a love letter to my mother, and a validation of my desires as a Latina woman within an often-confined space. In this poem, without romanticizing them, I try to honour the sacrifices the women and ancestors in my life have had to make, expressing a gratitude for their contribution to my personhood, but also explicitly stating that the trauma that has resulted stops within me.

Finding Home in Memory: Stories of Immigration, Diaspora, and Dis/location

I chose poetic performance narratives for writing up stories shared with me. I follow J. Brunner’s (2002) proposal that, literary narrative [poetry], “subverts familiar expectations while respecting, even vivifying reality [thus poetic] narrative ‘subjunctivizes’ a subjunctivized world, though it may not be comfortable, is provocative.” (51). The poetic performance narratives create a provocative reading to seduce the reader into the “uncomfortable” Other’s world. As R. Rosaldo understands, the highest task of writing, “is not to represent the event […] but to be the event itself” (2014:102). From the perspective of a resilient Latina woman—who in the USA is also an immigrant, academic, and non-native English-speaker—this decolonizing project is a celebration of struggles, difference, agency and multiplicity. As Bhabha (2005) indicates, the mestizo is a witness who has a different take on what s/he calls decoloniality.

The Progressive Struggle with the Courts

This chapter analyzes the conflict between conservative and progressive judicial philosophies. In a century-long battle over the courts, conservatives are defenders of the rule of law, while progressives are the champions of justice. This difference has created an asymmetry: conservatives occupy the rhetorical high ground, and progressives struggle to square their position with the judicial duty to apply the law. Justice Scalia's textualism-originalism, Justice Thomas' originalism, and Justice Roberts' claim that judges call balls and strikes—all emphasize fidelity to the law. In contrast, Justice Breyer pragmatically views judging as a means to social ends. Justice Sotomayor (when still a circuit judge), has said that, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better [judicial] conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life”.

New Forms of Subjectivity: Theorizing the Relational Self with Foucault and Alcoff

Taking seriously Linda Martín Alcoff's suggestion that we reevaluate the extent to which poststructuralist articulations of the subject are truly socially constituted, as well as the centrality of Latina identity to her own account of such constitution, I argue that the discussion Alcoff and other Latina feminists offer of the experience of being Latina in North America is illustrative of the extent to which the relational and globally situated constitution of subjects needs further development in many social‐constructionist accounts of selfhood. I argue, however—contra Alcoff—that Michel Foucault's mode of investigating subjectivation, particularly as it is articulated in his later work, has room for just such an account, especially when it is supplemented by postcolonial theory. With this end in mind, I take as a case study the public discourse surrounding Sonia Sotomayor prior to her confirmation as the first Latina woman to serve on the United States Supreme Court, suggesting that an analysis of this discourse (including its position within and contribution to wider discourses of ethnicity, race, gender, and class) shows why the accounts of relational subject‐constitution offered by both Foucault and Alcoff are indispensable.