The Class Matrix: Social Theory after the Cultural Turn

Abstract

this manner, we can envision such Latinx anthropology by merging the intellectual habitus of trained Latinx ethnographers with that of marginalized community members. This is how we would normalize a genuine decolonial praxis, one that goes beyond the self-reflexive turn in ethnography— having sublimated the colonial instinct into theoretical innocence—to now centering the norms, beliefs, and creative practices of written-in Latinxs. In this way, Latinidad functions as a categorical representation of agency, dissent, and resilience to creatively imagine a more just and equitable world. To do so, one must defy the categorical impositions that stem from colonial institutions and recognize how marginalized knowledges are valid. To be Latinx is redefined as a cultural innovation regarding gender, sexual, and multiple racial identifications, such that we recover identities from an erased past and move toward a more comprehensive and open-ended Latinx future—one that poses fewer limits on what it means to belong, whether in the nation-state of the United States or within our own transnational Latinx communities.