Race, space, and the reinvention of Latin America in Mexican Chicago

This article will adopt a critical transnational perspective derived from my ethnographic research among Mexican/migrant workers in Chicgo to dislodge some of the dominant spatial ideologies that undergird a prevailing 'common sense' about hte United States and Latin America. Through the lens of what I would like to call 'Mexican Chicago', and revisiting some of the crucial presuppositions of Chicano studies. I will suggest a critical reevaluation of the conceptual foundations of 'Latin America' as it has conventionally been constructed as an object of spatial knowledge for Latin American studies in the United States - which is really to say, from the epistemological standpoint of U.S. imperialism. To state the problem more generally, I want to render an orthodox spatial 'knowledge' more accountable to a regime of spatial power and inequality, and this transformed coneptualization of Latin America will enable - and require - a rethinking of the space of the U.S. nation-state itself. Thus, this article will also seek to revise some of the principal concerns at stake in the project of Chicano studies, motivated by a concomitant responsibility to Latin America. Furthermore, I will try to elucidate the ways in which the spatial topography of the Americas is intrinsically racialized and involves a continuous work of reracialization that is manifest in the dialectical articulations of global processes with the localities where the global takes place. Chicago will serve as a pivot that can orient the agonistic (typically centrifugal) triangulation of Latin American studies, Chicano studies, and the rather less cohesive field concerned in some way or another with the United States that is regrettably glossed as American studies. From the critical standpoint of a Mexican Chicago (one that belongs to Latin America), I want to suggest a critical theory of transnationalism from some of the constructions of 'race' and 'space' that intersect in the imagining and enforcement of the boundaries of the U.S. nation-state. For this it will be necessary to defamiliarize the nation-state's artifice and artifacts even as we remain confined by them.