Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttps://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rrmx20

Rethinking MarxismA Journal of Economics, Culture & Society

ISSN: 0893-5696 (Print) 1475-8059 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rrmx20

Nuestro Gramsci: Notes on Antonio Gramsci’sTheoretical Relevance for the Study of SubalternLatino Politics Research

Alfonso Gonzales

To cite this article: Alfonso Gonzales (2018) Nuestro Gramsci: Notes on Antonio Gramsci’sTheoretical Relevance for the Study of Subaltern Latino Politics Research, Rethinking Marxism,30:4, 546-567, DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2018.1552049

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2018.1552049

Published online: 22 Jan 2019.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 147

View Crossmark data

Nuestro Gramsci: Notes on AntonioGramsci’s Theoretical Relevance for theStudy of Subaltern Latino PoliticsResearch

Alfonso Gonzales

This essay draws on Antonio Gramsci’s theoretical and philosophical insights to provide analternative approach to mainstream Latino politics research that also introduces studentsto Gramsci. It contends that Gramsci provides a framework both for rigorously thinkingabout the challenges facing Latinos living in the United States and also for advancing anoppositional democratic politics in the face of the authoritarian turn in contemporaryneoliberalism. Gramscian thought provides a theory and method for studying politicsthat can account for the structural conditions in which Latinos engage in politics,permitting the identification of dominant groups’ methods of building consensus forauthoritarian rule. Moreover, Gramscian theory provides analytical tools forconceptualizing an alternative approach to Latino politics research that is oppositional,theoretically driven, and grounded in a praxis focused explicitly on the empowermentof subaltern Latinos, such as the undocumented, refugees, indigenous “Latinos”, Afro-Latinos, and LGBT Latinos, among others.

Key Words: Antonio Gramsci, Neoliberalism, Philosophy of Social Science,Political Theory, Subaltern Latino Politics

The field of Latino politics is in crisis after the election of Donald Trump. Some ofthe leading scholars in the field predicted that Latinos would help tip the scales infavor of the Democratic Party candidate, Hillary Clinton. Like political science ingeneral, most scholars in the field of Latino politics did not think that Trumpcould possibly win the 2016 election. The dominant view being reproduced inthe media before the election assured us that the Latino vote would save usfrom Trump being elected. Leading voices in the field were writing that “thefuture is ours” (Segura and Bowler 2012) and that Latino voters were counteringTrump’s proposed border wall with a “wall of Latino voters” that would blockTrump at the polls (Pantoja 2016), yet their predictions fell flat.The crisis is not simply that they failed to predict the results of the election. Even

if they had gotten their predictions right—much like Anglo-American politicalscience in general—the field suffers from empiricism and an impoverished

RETHINKING MARXISM, 2018Vol. 30, No. 4, 546–567, https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2018.1552049

© 2019 Association for Economic and Social Analysis

philosophy of social science that prevents it from asking critical questions aboutthe nature of the conjuncture that we are facing and from envisioning an alterna-tive future outside of the logic of racial capitalism and liberalism. In the case of theUnited States, I am referring to a capitalist economy that emerged out of settler co-lonialism, an economy in which the maximization of profits and the maintenanceof white supremacy has been the normative goal and central organizing principleof politics as well as of social and labor relations. Liberalism is the idealization ofindividual rights and a belief in a basic fairness of government in which all of themajor conflicts in society and in the polity can be resolved through institutions,democratic deliberation, and elections. Any field of study that assumes that themajor conflicts in society can be resolved within the framework of liberalism,without forging a critical consciousness and an alternative to capitalism and colo-niality, is a liberal field.The need for an alternative approach to understanding contemporary political

struggles in Latino communities could not be more pronounced given the currentclimate under the Trump presidency. The administration has rolled out draconianpolicies in every realm of government, from environmental regulation to education,health care, and immigration. Trump’s immigration policies, which have discontin-ued protections for undocumented youth and for people with Temporary ProtectedStatus (TPS), and which have further restricted migration and asylum policies inother ways, have hit Latinos especially hard. His policy of separating the childrenfrom their asylum-seeking Central American parents, and most recently the banon Central American asylum seekers mark a low point, with the administrationwilling to deploy authoritarian policies. As low as these policies might appear toanyone who values human rights, we must recall that the Obama Administrationused family detention policies to deter asylum seekers, temporarily suspendingbond and threatening to take children away from mothers who were on a hungerstrike to protest their detention. Indeed, the election of Trump is symptomatic ofa much deeper organic crisis that started long before the 2016 election.Theorists such as Ian Bruff, Cemal Tansel, and myself, among others, have con-

ceived of an authoritarian neoliberal turn that is facing the liberal democracies ofthe West (see Bruff 2014; Gonzales 2013, 2017; Tansel 2017). Authoritarian neoliber-alism is marked by a reconfiguration of the state into a more repressive, less dem-ocratic, unaccountable entity that is insulated from popular demands and socialmovements. In the context of the United States, I would add that it is characterizedby a blatant rightist desire to break with liberalism and with the politics of so-called“colorblindness” and by a resurgent racism that moves society toward a moreopenly authoritarian political posture that targets racial and social minorities, mi-grants/refugees (even children), women, members of the LGBT community, andnearly all political dissenters.Authoritarian neoliberalism is not about personalities or mainstream partisan-

ship; it is a structural response to the contradictions of the restructuring ofglobal capitalism and the failure of liberalism to be able to contain these

Gramsci and Unclear Boundaries 547

contradictions. This should give us a sense of urgency for thinking about how toconduct Latino politics research in a way that tries to understand the conjuncturethat we are living in and that envisions an oppositional Latino politics capable ofushering in a real alternative to authoritarian neoliberalism.It is in this spirit that this essay turns to the insights of the early twentieth-

century theorist Antonio Gramsci, with two goals: first, to illustrate how Gramscianthought could be used to expand the boundaries of what we consider to be “Latinopolitics” research; second, to introduce Gramscian thinking to students of Latinopolitics and Latino studies more broadly—students who otherwise may not be fa-miliar with Gramsci. Though much of the analysis here will focus on literaturecoming out of political science, the critique is of liberalism and mainstreamsocial-science research on Latinos, and it could be expanded to other fields atthe intersections of Latino and Latin American studies, sociology, education,public policy, and anthropology, among others.Though it has been more than 100 years since Gramsci’s first publication, there

could hardly be a more relevant theorist for understanding the politics of ourtime. Gramsci’s primary concerns were to develop a theory that could explain theemergence of Fascism in Italy and to explicate why the Italian Left was incapableof providing an alternative. As Stuart Hall (1987) noted in “Gramsci and Us,” oneof the seminal essays on Gramsci and the rise of Thatcherism in the 1980s: “Wecan’t pluck up this Sardinian from his specific and unique political formation,beam him down… and ask him to solve our problems for us.” Rather, Hall proposesthat we think in a Gramscian way. Indeed, Gramscian thinking compels us to have aself-reflexive debate about the nature of the moment that we are living in and toquestion the same old electoral strategies that are built on the liberal assumptionthat all Latinos need to do is vote and get the right politicians elected to resolvethe contradictions of authoritarian neoliberalism and of coloniality more broadly.I contend that Gramsci developed an approach to the study of politics that can

help us move beyond liberalism and the theoretical and epistemological assump-tions underlying the neo-positivist paradigm that dominates research in Latinopolitics and in American politics more broadly. Whereas the neo-positivist ap-proach to Latino politics is focused on measuring outcomes and opinions thattake place primarily in the electoral realm, Gramscian theory gives us a conceptof the political that allows us to study how Latinos engage in politics at thenexus of the state, civil society, culture, and economy. One such Gramsci-inspiredapproach—which theorist Raymond Rocco and I call subaltern Latino politics—starts from certain assumptions: first, that politics, broadly conceived, is aboutthe struggle for power, and second, that the structural foundations of liberaldemocracy—such as settler colonialism, coloniality, capitalism, patriarchy, andracism, among other markers of difference—shape and limit the conditions andpossibilities for Latino communities to engage in politics.Such an approach provides an analysis of the state and a concept of the political

that allow us to account for how Latino communities engage in politics not only

548 Gonzales

through traditional behavior (voting and other forms of civic engagement) but alsothrough quotidian practices (cultural production, social maneuvering, etc.) and op-positional politics (grassroots organizing and social movements). The latter formsare especially salient to the ways that Latinos living on the margins engage in pol-itics, and these forms often take place within what Rocco (2014) calls the “sub-merged networks of everyday life.” Such an approach allows us to study thecomplex relationship between the nation-state and the distinct class and socialforces within Latino communities under a historically specific moment in the cap-italist mode of production. Though subaltern is a term often associated with thewritings of Guha and Spivak and the postcolonial studies working group more gen-erally, it was first used by Gramsci as an intersectional term to describe peoples “onthe margins of history”: the most oppressed sectors of society, including those whowere racially, ethnically, and religiously distinct from the dominant society ofItaly’s industrial North (Green 2013).Gramscian thinking compels us both to develop an approach to Latino politics

research that is theoretically sophisticated and grounded in a critique of capitalismand liberalism and also to advance an oppositional Latino politics in the context ofauthoritarian neoliberalism. It also gives us tools for understanding the currentmode of governance within the broader structures of power emerging fromracial capitalism. A subaltern Latino politics research agenda pushes againstneo-positivism in political science (and the social sciences more broadly) andalso the idea that we should reject Gramsci as helpful for understanding the pol-itics of race in the case of blacks and in Latin America because he is only concernedwith the liberation of “white workers” (Wilderson 2003) or because there are otherLatin American thinkers such as José Carlos Mariátegui that we should privilegeover a Western European thinker (Mignolo 2012).1

In the spirit of the Marxist tradition coming out of the thinking of both blacks(Robinson 2000) and Chicanos (Barrera 1979; Rocco 2014), I suggest that Gramsciprovides us with tools that could be applied for understanding the politics ofrace and for forging an oppositional scholarship and politics. Moreover, ratherthan uncritically discounting Gramsci for being “just another European,” Ipropose that we read Gramsci from the perspective of the South. From this per-spective, Gramsci has much in common with Chicanos in the United States,Turks in Germany, the Senegalese in France, or any other subaltern groupsliving in the “South” of the Global “North.” Indeed, Gramsci was a Marxist theoristwho grew up with a distinct culture, ethnicity, and language that was on theborders of Europe and that was marginal to the project of the Italian nation-state. Yet Gramsci, who was once a Sardinian nationalist, had to transcend his re-gional ideology to become a global thinker and to revolutionize the only land he

1. Walter Mignolo (2012) argues that Marxism is still useful for advancing a decolonial critique.Some students, however, have tended to read Mignolo’s work as a way to argue that Gramsci,and Marxism more generally are incompatible with decolonial thinking.

Gramsci and Unclear Boundaries 549

ever knew, in the face of naked Fascism. This reading of Gramsci is most relevantfor understanding the politics facing Latinos, a constellation of people who are notfully Western and whose customs, national origins, language, and skin color areoften distinct and have been pathologized in the United States since the early nine-teenth century.In the next section, I present a brief overview of the evolution of the field of

Latino politics and discuss some of the theoretical assumptions and intellectuallimits of the neo-positivist school. The subsequent section will discuss how Grams-ci’s theory of hegemony and the integral state provide conceptual insights thatcould help us move our analysis of politics in Latino communities beyond theneo-positivist paradigm. I illustrate how Gramscian concepts liberate us from lib-eralism, pluralism, and the narrow conception of the state and power that hauntmost neo-positivist Latino politics research. In the following section, I lay out a dis-cussion of Gramsci’s writings on the subaltern and the philosophy of praxis.Finally, in the last section I identify some key works that I think are representativeof an emergent subaltern Latino politics research agenda, and I synthesize some ofthe key points that should characterize this approach.

Latino Politics and Pluralism

The study of Latino politics has a radical origin in the United States. The first gen-eration of Latino scholars, who were primarily Mexican American, had a self-awareness about their work being Chicano politics, and they had an organic rela-tionship to the major social movements of their day. Adaljiza Sosa-Riddell,Mario Barrera, Carlos Munos Jr., and Raymond Rocco were among the first gener-ation of Chicano political scientists. These scholars were trained in Marxism, fem-inism, and other critical paradigms and produced work against the grain ofmainstream political science. Sosa-Riddell (1974) wrote on women in theChicano movement, Barrera (1979) wrote on the political economy of race andclass in the Southwest, Munoz (2007) wrote on the Chicano student movement,and Rocco (1983) was among the first to question the neo-positivist turn inLatino politics research.As pointed out by Rocco (1983), Latino politics research began to avoid questions

of power and of social movements as scholars in the field moved to embrace neo-positivist paradigms in order to move into the mainstream of political science re-search. With this conservative turn in political science in general and in Latino pol-itics research in particular, many radicals within the discipline began to be pushedout, become isolated, or operate in a self-imposed exile in other fields and depart-ments outside of political science. In the 1980s and 1990s, foundations and main-stream Democratic Party politics began to take an interest in the Latino vote. Agroup of scholars had positioned themselves to advance their research agendaswithin the discipline and within the funding stream of major foundations.

550 Gonzales

Perhaps the most representative scholar of this generation was Rodolfo de LaGarza, who later went on to be president of the Latino Caucus of the American Po-litical Science Association and a member of the political science faculty at Colum-bia University. De La Garza produced a scholarship that used traditional methodsand paradigms in political science and was better suited to advance within thetenure and promotion structure that characterizes the discipline. In his essay enti-tled “Latino Politics,”De la Garza (2004) essentially limited the scope of Latino pol-itics research to the realm of the electoral in an effort to explain partisanship andlow voter turnout among Latinos. This approach to research was followed by ageneration of his students, such as Luis Desipio (1996), who has published a vastamount of literature around Latino voters and partisanship since the 1990s. Elec-tions are certainly important, but this concept of Latino politics erases the deepand vast tradition of social movement organizing and acts of quotidian resistancethat have characterized the relationship between Latinos and the Anglo-Americanstate since 1836.A new generation of Latino political scholars working within the neo-positivist

tradition established paradigmatic hegemony in the field of Latino politics by theearly 2000s. Scholars such as Matt Barreto, Gary Segura, Gabriel Sanchez, andRicardo Ramírez are excellent representatives of this new generation of neo-posi-tivist scholars. When compared to previous generations of positivist Latino politi-cal scholars, these scholars have a broader understanding of what constitutesLatino politics beyond explaining low voter turnout and questions around parti-sanship. Scholars such as Matt Barreto and Ricardo Ramírez have an interest inunderstanding the relationship between the anti-immigrant political context andLatino voter mobilization, among other questions (Barreto and Segura 2014;Ramírez 2013). Additionally, to their credit, they have recognized other approachesto Latino politics, have engaged questions around transnational political participa-tion among Latinos (Barreto 2017), have trained students who do nontraditionaland critical research, and have created the Latino polling firm Latin Decisions.The firm has been the leading source of data for political parties and other orga-nizations interested in Latino public opinion and electoral behavior.2

But even the best researchers within the neo-positivist tradition fall short of acritique of the current conjuncture that could move us beyond the superstructuralor basic liberalism. In a special issue on Latinos and the 2016 election in the journalAztlan, edited by Matt Barreto (2017), nearly all of the political scientists—with theexception of the work of Gonzales (2017)—used data-driven methodologies to eval-uate some dimension of the election. The essay by Gabriel Sanchez and BarbaraGomez-Aguinaga (2017) uses data on likely voters to show that “an overwhelmingmajority of Latino voters felt that Trump was ‘hostile’ toward Latinos,” whereas in

2. Matt Baretto has supported scholars who do qualitative and theoretical work in Latino politics,including my own work and that of scholars such as Ricardo Ramírez. Ramírez also trainedAdrián Felix, whose research is qualitatively driven and transnational in nature.

Gramsci and Unclear Boundaries 551

previous elections Latinos saw candidates such as Mitt Romney or John McCain assimply “out of touch or ignoring Latinos.” In the same special issue, RicardoRamirez and Romelia Solano (2017) push back against the notion that Trumprode a national wave to victory. Rather, they illustrate how Trump did significantlybetter than Romney in only a handful of strategic states. Scholars Matt Barreto,Tyler Reny, and Wilcox-Archuleta (2017) advance a critique of polling methodsas being culturally incompetent for bilingual and bicultural electorates. Not tooverlook questions of gender, the special issue includes an essay by Jessica Lavar-iega Monforti (2017), who evaluates the differences in voting patterns among menand women of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Cuban origin. She findsthat, although women were generally more supportive of Hillary Clinton duringthe 2016 election, interesting variations existed among groups of different nationalorigins.These scholars use sound quantitative methodologies to help understand impor-

tant aspects of the 2016 election. Such methodologies are a hallmark of the neo-pos-itivist approach to Latino politics research, but this is dialectically its strength andweakness. The neo-positivist approach is good at testing causal relationships and iswell respected by political scientists. In some cases, it is used by government andpolitical strategists to influence elections, policy, and lawsuits in Latino voter-dis-crimination cases, among other practical matters. This literature’s weakness is thatit fails to go beyond the superstructural, and it takes many of the assumptions atthe heart of modern liberalism for granted. It often teaches what is alreadyknown about politics. For instance, that Latinos thought Trump was “hostile” asopposed to being “out of touch” with Latino voters is rather intuitive. To such ar-guments, neo-positivists usually respond that “now we have the data to prove it.”But this type of counterargument rests on the liberal assumption that both the stateand public policy decisions are guided simply by rational argument and facts.These are classic hallmarks of liberalism, in which the state is seen as a fair arbi-trator of disputes based on deliberation and logic. From a Gramscian perspective,the state is not the neutral arbitrator of disputes but rather a classed and, I wouldadd, racialized set of institutions that does not respond to the logic of fact-basedrationalism—especially in these authoritarian times. Politics is about power, notabout who is right. From the Gramscian and materialist view, more broadly, theleading ideas in society are not the leading ideas because of their veracity butbecause of their relationship to power in a capitalist economy.Though the neo-positivists are primarily concerned with politics in the electoral

realm, they generally fail to take seriously the study of the state, political economy,history, culture-ideology, and the nature of the crisis facing Latinos in the wake ofthe authoritarian turn. Even the neo-positivist research on gender by scholars suchas Christina Bejarano (2013) reduces gender to a variable within a model in order topredict or analyze political success in elections rather than to see gender and sex-uality as categories emerging from fifteenth-century conquest and coloniality morebroadly, as the decolonial feminists see it (Lugones 2008 and Sandoval 2000).

552 Gonzales

The underlying assumption within the neo-positivist paradigm of Latino politicsresearch is the idea that one can understand politics by studying only the realm ofgovernment in the narrow sense, as if it were detached from history, economy, andcivil society. This idea takes for granted the concept of pluralism. Pluralism has putpolitical science in a conceptual straightjacket by suggesting that research of thepast belongs to history, civil society belongs to sociology, culture to anthropology,capitalism to economics, and that we can understand politics by studying inputs atthe superstructural level. Hence, most Latino politics research is focused on study-ing Latino political behavior in the traditional channels of political incorporation,naturalization, voter registration, and mobilization—as if these activities weretaking place in a vacuum detached from the long and brutal history of settler co-lonialism, capitalism, and its liberal-democratic masquerade. In the followingsection, we will see how Gramscian theory can liberate us from these conceptualstraightjackets.

Beyond Pluralism: Hegemony, State-Civil Society, and the Role ofthe Intellectual

I turn to Gramsci because he provides a method for understanding how politicsworks under the conditions of liberal capitalist democracy, a method for studyingthe politics of power in a way that gets us out of the straitjackets of liberalism andpluralism. Gramsci developed a Marxist method for the study of politics that noMarxist thinker before him had been able to articulate. Gramsci was the first tomove away from instrumentalism and to think about the state as a field ofpower that not only contains the interests of the dominant classes but also re-sponds to the interests of fractions of the working classes through both consentand coercion.3 This is especially important for thinking about how Latinos aretargets of state violence through deportation, detention, and mass policing whilesimultaneously being incorporated into military, police, and other middle-classstructures of white supremacy.In developing his theory of the state, Gramsci confronted some of the basic

tenets of liberal democracy and pluralism. One of these is the idea that a separationof powers and constitutional rule of law can ensure that no one branch of govern-ment can dominate the state or society. For Gramsci (1971, 246), “All three powersare also organs of political hegemony.” In other words, Gramsci subverted the ideathat political institutions are autonomous from economics and from social classes.For him, the liberal state is a field of power that corresponds to the rise of capital-ism. Hence, he wrote: “The State is the entire complex of practical and theoreticalactivities with which the ruling class not only justifies and maintains its

3. In the instrumentalist approach, the state is treated as a unified and undifferentiated set of in-stitutions that is nothing but the instrument of class domination.

Gramsci and Unclear Boundaries 553

dominance, but manages to win the active consent of those over whom it rules”(244). The focus on the role of classes having to justify and winning activeconsent for their rule is especially salient for understanding how culture and ide-ology play a central role in politics. Gramsci’s definition of the state forces us torecognize the class dimensions of the modern capitalist state and the dialecticalnature of power at the nexus of the state and civil society.Gramsci (1971, 243) located the rise of capitalist liberal democracy “with the co-

lonial expansion of Europe.” With this expansion, he asserted, “The internal andinternational organizational relations of the State become more complex andmassive… The massive structures of the modern democracies, both as State orga-nizations, and as complexes of associations in civil society, constitute for the art ofpolitics as it were the trenches and the permanent fortifications.” Gramsci arguedthat capitalism gave rise to the modern nation-state as a field of power that isdeeply rooted in capital and in the “fortifications” of civil society. To account forthis relationship between the state and civil society, he deployed the concept ofthe integral state. Gramsci distinguished between this and a narrower conceptionof the state, which he called political society to refer to the juridical and politicalinstitutions of governance. The latter includes both political society and civilsociety, the sphere of power located outside of the formal apparatus of governmentand economy. This is the realm where most Latinos engage in the politics of every-day life. One of Gramsci’s (1994, 67) best and most succinct explanations of the in-tegral state is to be found in a letter that he wrote to his sister-in-law, Tatiana, towhom he explained:

My study also led to a certain definition of the concept of State that is usuallyunderstood as political society (or dictatorship, or coercive apparatus meant tomold the popular mass into accordance with a type of production andeconomy at a given moment) and not as a balance between the politicalSociety and civil Society (or hegemony of a social group over the entire na-tional society, exercised through the so-called private organizations, such asthe Church, the unions, the schools, etc.).

In short, the integral state is political society plus civil society. In this view, civilsociety is not a neutral public sphere—as it is for liberalism—but rather ahighly contentious site of political and ideological struggle where the rulingclass, through its cadre of intellectuals, organizes its hegemony.In Gramscian theory, intellectuals play a central role in maintaining this dynamic

and unstable equilibrium of power between the state and civil society. In doing so,they produce and reproduce the hegemony of one of society’s “fundamental socialgroups” (Gramsci’s dialectical term to describe either the capitalist class or the pro-letariat). Gramsci did not think of intellectuals in the narrow sense as simply men orwomen of letters but rather as anyone who has the function of producing knowledgein society. He distinguished between two kinds of intellectuals: traditional and

554 Gonzales

organic. Traditional intellectuals are those who conceive of themselves as above orimpartial to politics, while the organic are those who give their class homogeneityand self-awareness. Thus, in the Gramscian tradition there can be organic intellec-tuals of the ruling or working classes. Intellectuals play a principal role in the capi-talist state and in its component parts in civil society. Indeed, in the aforementionedletter to his sister-in-law, Gramsci noted that “it is within the civil society that theintellectuals operate” (quoted in Green 2002, 5).Within this framework of the integral state and intellectuals, hegemony should

be understood as an ideological power that allows for class actors to exert theirmoral and intellectual leadership over the direction of both the state and civilsociety. Hegemony should be distinguished from brute force. Concretely, hegemo-ny is consensual domination that is always backed up by the armor of the state orthe threat of force. Rulers, in Gramsci’s view, maintain their power over the gov-erned through leadership rather than sheer force. Because hegemony is main-tained in dynamic societies in the face of crises and of demands from dominantand popular classes, it must constantly be reproduced in the context of an unstableequilibrium of forces. Thus, Gramsci asserted that hegemony thrives on theconsent and active support of people, including the subaltern classes, whose inter-ests must be taken into account within both the state apparatus and civil society.“The fact of hegemony presupposes that account be taken of the interest andthe tendencies of the group over which hegemony is to be exercised,” Gramsci(2000, 424) wrote. Indeed, the reproduction of hegemony, for Gramsci (1971, 186),must take place in multiple sites of power—ranging from the law to schools,churches, presses, the arts, and state bureaucracies—without losing the class di-mensions of the liberal capitalist state.Gramsci’s unique view of the state ascribes an educational function to all of the

organs of the capitalist state, from the judicial, legislative, executive, and legal in-stitutions and bureaucracies right up to the schools and universities. From thisview, state functionaries and bureaucrats also have an intellectual function.Gramsci (1971, 186) remarks that “the problem of functionaries partly coincideswith that of the intellectuals.” In other words, functionaries or state bureaucratsalso produce knowledge in the service of the capitalist state and the hegemonyof the dominant classes. Gramsci writes that the function of law is “always thatof creating a new and higher type of civilization; of adapting the ‘civilization’and the morality of the broadest popular masses to the necessities of the continu-ous development of the economic apparatus of production” (242). He also writes,“This is precisely the function of law in the State and in society; through ‘law’the State renders the ruling group ‘homogenous,’ and tends to create a social con-formism which is useful to the ruling group’s line of development” (195). This is anovel concept of the law, viewing the law’s role as forming a particular type of sub-jectivity that arises with the ascendency of capitalism.This is a very different view of the law when juxtaposed to the pluralist view that

underlies most Latino politics research. Much of this work takes for granted that

Gramsci and Unclear Boundaries 555

the law represents the objective codification of the norms and rules of society orthat the study of the law is somehow limited to criminology or legal studies.Thus, politics for Gramsci is not something limited to elections and the traditionalinstitutions. Rather, politics takes place in a broad field of power that includes thelaw, the halls of Congress, the union hall, the theater, the music scene, and themost rudimentary artistic and literary forms, such as romantic novels or magazinesfor popular consumption.This framework of an integral state as a field of power is more insightful for

thinking about politics in Latino communities, both historically and in thecurrent conjuncture, because it allows us to think of the state and politics as some-thing beyond elections and political institutions. Gramsci’s work on the education-al role of the state and the law would allow, for instance, the study of the history ofeducation among Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Central Americans, or anyother Latino group. All these groups have been marked by the integral state’s at-tempts to mold into them a certain type of Anglo-American political subjectivity,with various levels of success and failure (García Bedolla 2009). And this hastaken place not only in the traditional educational institutions but throughoutthe integral state. This molding of a new subjectivity that needs to create patrioticbrown bodies with loyalty to capitalism and to the Anglo-American nation-statetakes place in multiple sites of power: at all levels of the educational system; inthe strategies of the major political parties and their allied intellectuals; in thecourts; in foundations; in the repressive institutions of the state (police, borderpatrol, military, etc.); on Univisión, the radio, and in the blogosphere; in religiousinstitutions, from the Catholic Church to evangelical churches; and so on. Thisdoes not always register as political in the field of Latino politics research, butthis is the form of the politics of everyday life under the integral state, a formthat a subaltern Latino politics must be able to grapple with.

The Subaltern Classes, Hegemony from Below, and thePhilosophy of Praxis

If the power of the dominant classes is inscribed in the state and in its ability toproduce intellectuals capable of waging ideological battle in the state and in civilsociety, then for Gramsci there is no more important task than the formation oforganic intellectuals from the subaltern classes who can disarticulate the hegemo-ny of the dominant classes. To understand this, we must understand the dialecticalrelationship between the integral state and the subaltern classes. Gramsci not onlycritiques leftist political strategy, hegemony, and the authoritarian tendencies inliberal democracy but also provides an alternative political strategy for the subal-tern to create fundamental social change.In “History of the Subaltern Classes: Methodological Criteria,” Gramsci (1971, 52)

gave a sense of the nature of the problem and pointed to potential solutions. First,

556 Gonzales

he linked the history of the dominant class to the rise of capitalism and the nation-state, writing that “the historical unity of the ruling classes is realised in the State,and their history is essentially the history of States and of groups of States.” Herehe indicated that because the capitalist class is also the leading intellectual force, ithas developed an approach to documenting its history through the history of thenation-state. He juxtaposed the history of the dominant classes with that of thesubaltern. For instance, “The subaltern classes, by definition, are not unified andcannot unite until they are able to become a ‘State’: their history, therefore, is in-tertwined with that of civil society, and thereby with the history of States andgroups of States.” In other words, subaltern people—those who live on themargins of the capitalist state, those without a history—are at a disadvantage forforging their own history because they live under the capitalist state, whose intel-lectual institutions favor a certain type of historiography that values nationalhistory and international relations. Because the subaltern is often of a racializedgroup with a distinct culture and religion from those national groups under thehegemonic leadership of the dominant classes and their intellectuals, the historyof the subaltern is most often left at the margins. This can be seen in most intro-ductory college course on the history of the United States, Mexico, the BritishEmpire, or Spain, wherein the history of the white national is always privilegedover that of Chicanos, Indigenous Mexicans, “Indians,” or “Gypsies.”These were not simply academic concerns for Gramsci. He despised dominant

approaches to history and positivist approaches to the social sciences because hesaw them as conserving the relations of domination between the dominantclasses and the subaltern. As noted by Joseph Buttigieg (1992, 52), Gramsci criticizedthe positivists for a lack of “seriousness and rigor” that was “camouflaged by afacade of scientificity.” As an alternative to the positivist approach, Gramsci(1971, 52) proposed his own method for the study of the subaltern. He arguedthat such an approach must look at the following:

1. The objective formation of subaltern social groups by the developments andtransformations occurring in the sphere of economic production; their quan-titative diffusion and their origins in pre-existing social groups, whose men-tality, ideology and aims they conserve for a time; 2. Their active or passiveaffiliation to the dominant political formations, their attempts to influencethe programs of these formations in order to press claims of their own, andthe consequences of these attempts in determining processes of decomposi-tion, renovation or neo-formation; 3. The birth of new parties of the dominantgroups, intended to conserve the assent of the subaltern groups and to main-tain control over them; 4. The formations which the subaltern groups them-selves produce, in order to press claims of a limited and partial character;5. Those new formations, which assert the autonomy of the subalterngroups, but within the old framework; 6. Those formations which assert theintegral autonomy.

Gramsci and Unclear Boundaries 557

Gramsci was laying out the different stages of development of political activityamong subaltern groups. He recognized that there are some subaltern groups somarginalized that they never realize any degree of self-awareness and organization.But among those that do develop some level of homogeneity, this often varies some-where between a passive, complete affiliation with the dominant classes (e.g., patri-otic Tejanos or right-wing Cubans or Puerto Ricans) and an active assertion ofcomplete autonomy (e.g., indigenous “Latinos”; certain Afro-Latino communities;or decolonial, socialist, or anarchist Latinos who seek to break with the dominantclasses). It is clear, however, from Gramsci’s schematic that any attempt by the sub-altern to organize must be performed in relation to the state and dominant classes.Latinos in the United States today run a gamut between stage one (complete activeor passive affiliation at best) and stage four (the formation of groups that seek topress claims of a limited character). There has been very little autonomous organiz-ing, and in the moments when such has existed, it has been absorbed by new forma-tions, created by the dominant fractions of capital via foundations, in order toincorporate elements of the subaltern into the institutions of the integral state andto pacify them (Gonzales 2013, 121–51; Fernandez 2018).Any honest conversation with oppositional organizers and intellectuals who

come from subaltern Latino communities, or with allies who want to see funda-mental social change, will reveal a great frustration with the state of affairs definingthe political terrain today. Conditions are such that they rarely allow for the sub-altern to go beyond making limited demands of the state. Gramsci accepted thatthe subaltern classes in Italy had been defeated and therefore may never getbeyond stage four. In fact, this is exactly the obstacle he was theorizing from hisprison cell in order to overcome it. A careful reading of his notes will reveal thathe proposed a series of polemics that can get beyond this immobilizing dialecticbetween the capitalist state and the subaltern. Gramsci pointed to a potential sol-ution that has great relevance to the study of politics in Latino communities today.For Gramsci, the only way that the subaltern can go beyond the limits of liberal

democracy and the hegemony of the dominant classes is to form a particular typeof intellectual who can develop and implement the philosophy of praxis, Gramsci’sunique reading of Marxism. Such an intellectual could wage a war of position pow-erful enough to pull the rug of civil society from under the capitalist state. This iswhat Gramsci was chipping away at throughout the corpus of his work, practicallyuntil his last days in 1937. As a solution to the problem of intellectuals formed inItaly being removed from the people and demobilized by a kind of intellectual pa-ralysis brought about by the intellectual leadership of the positivists, he proposedan intellectual strategy in his writings on the philosophy of praxis.The strategy for the development of organic intellectuals laid out by Gramsci in

these sections of the notebooks is essential for thinking about the development ofcritical intellectual work in general and the development of intellectuals in Latinocommunities specifically. Some scholars have argued that the philosophy of praxisis simply Gramsci’s code word for Marxism, which he used to get his notes past the

558 Gonzales

prison censors. But his writings on this topic reveal a very specific reading ofMarxism and a philosophy of social science. His thoughts here are linked to hiscritique of positivism and an elitist Marxism that was imposed from above and de-tached from the subaltern. He wrote, “One of the greatest weaknesses of the imma-nentist philosophies in general consists precisely in the fact that they have not beenable to create an ideological unity between the bottom and the top, between the‘simple’ and the intellectuals” (Gramsci 2000, 330). More than an ethnography,Gramsci was calling for a sense of solidarity between scholar and subject as a re-quirement for the philosophy of praxis. This is not simply a philosophical interven-tion but is also a methodological one. Gramsci is largely concerned withdeveloping a historiography of the subaltern classes: that is, a history of thepeople who have no history or who are on the margins of history. This is especiallysalient to the formation of intellectuals to come from the subaltern classes of Latinocommunities.For Marxism to make this unity between the “top” and the “bottom,” it must

grapple with the subaltern’s common sense. Common sense refers to the contradic-tory consciousness, held by everyday people, that contains deposits or elementsfrom the dominant society and from older formations, such as paganism in Italy,but that also contains elements of good sense. Gramsci (2000, 343) describescommon sense as the “‘philosophy of non-philosophers,’ or in other words a con-ception of the world that is uncritically absorbed by the various social and culturalenvironments in which the moral individuality of the average man is developed.”Always focused on the particular, he notes that common sense is “not a singleunique conception, identical in time and space”; rather, he maintains, “it is the folk-lore of the philosophy, and like folklore, it takes countless different forms.” Goodsense refers to a critical awareness or consciousness that always exists withinordinary people’s common sense.A challenge for a subaltern Latino politics research agenda would be to capture

these moments of common sense, or the philosophy of the nonphilosophers, inLatino communities. It could be about a variety of issues, such as race and classconsciousness through a portrayal of the U.S. Border Patrol as abusive in corridosor in literature. The possibilities of good sense in Latino communities are endless.An example of good sense can be seen in the chants that were popular during the2006 marches, such as, “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us,” or, “SiZapata viviera con nosotros estuviera” (If Zapata were alive he would be here withus). Most likely dismissed as marginal to mainstream Latino politics research, suchchants are rights claims, and they reveal a popular consciousness about history thatrepresents certain objective facts even if the people chanting them do not alwayshave a coherent ideology or scholarly grip on history. But the contradictory andnuanced common sense of Latino communities cannot always be captured by tra-ditional methods or even survey data per se. In order to get to the common sense ofdistinct Latino communities, one must use ethnographic or other qualitativemethods.

Gramsci and Unclear Boundaries 559

For Gramsci, Marxism had become too detached from the average person andhad not become a historic movement capable of speaking the common sense ofthe masses. Commenting on the efforts of academics to develop a popular sociol-ogy that could reach the working class, Gramsci (2000, 343) reproachfully notedthat they “should have taken as its starting point a critical analysis of the philoso-phy of common sense.” Central to the formation of a successful subaltern politicalstrategy, Gramsci argues, is that the philosophy of praxis should not simply be“devoted to creating a specialized culture among restricted intellectual groups”;rather, it should elaborate a form of thought that is “superior to common sense”(331). For this to happen, intellectuals must never forget to “remain in contactwith the ‘simple.’” Gramsci further argues that “[o]nly by this contact does a phi-losophy become ‘historical,’ purify itself of intellectualistic elements of an individ-ual character and become ‘life’” (331). For subalterns to successfully seek theirliberation, their intellectual production must become not just an abstract philoso-phy but a vital and living part of social movements if said intellectuals seek tocreate a historic bloc. This historic bloc undoes the relationship between intellec-tuals and nonintellectuals, between the simple and an elite class of intellectuals.Most critically, it is a pedagogical strategy and philosophy of social science thatprivileges the formation of intellectuals who feel the plight and hope of theworker’s movement.4 Only by forming such intellectuals will a movement beable to forge the type of unity necessary to successfully wage a war of positionagainst Fascism and the facade of liberal democracy.In the following section, I will discuss the contours of a subaltern Latino politics

research agenda and discuss how recent publications from scholars working in thisspirit provide an alternative to the neo-positivist approach to Latino politicsresearch.

Toward a Subaltern Latino Politics

Inspired by Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis, subaltern Latino politics is a call forthe study of politics in Latino communities on the margins, an approach thatbreaks with liberalism, pluralism, and mainstream Latino politics research. Itbreaks with the idea that all Latinos need to do is vote in order to elect moreLatino elected officials, and with the notion that Latino demographics will inevita-bly lead to Latino political empowerment. It also breaks with the idea that politicscan only be studied at the superstructural level, within the boundaries of thenation-state, and with the notion that political science has a monopoly on the

4. Like many of his concepts, Gramsci used that of the historic bloc in multiple ways. In somecontexts it refers to the unity between workers, peasants, and intellectuals, and in others itrefers to dominant classes who have asserted their hegemony over the state and civil society tothus form a historic bloc.

560 Gonzales

study of politics. In essence, it breaks with the idea that one can have a truly trans-formative form of Latino political empowerment without challenging racial capi-talism as a source of continued exploitation, inequality, and violence.The possibilities for subaltern Latino politics research are endless. Such a re-

search agenda would engage the politics of everyday life for those on themargins: Latina mothers being racialized when enrolling their children inpublic school; U.S.-born Latino children being denied birth certificates; indige-nous and Afro-Latino communities making demands for recognition, autonomy,and freedom of movement; Latina sex workers organizing for dignity and toassert their rights; subaltern intellectuals being studied historically in thecontext of the formation of states and social movements; refugees organizingalong the migrant trail, in migrant detention, or in the courts; among manyother topics. A subaltern Latino politics research agenda would embrace ethno-graphic and participatory methods. It would listen to, accompany, and maintaindialogue with subaltern Latinos and approach them as having an important com-monsense philosophy of the world. It would take this common sense as a point ofdeparture for launching critical inquiries into the politics of everyday life andwould be open to working with different kinds of data not found in the datasets of governments or polling firms. This is not simply a matter of stayingclose to the ground, but, as Gramsci insisted, there is an intellectual purchasethat comes from the insights of engaging the subaltern in our research. Thoughthe possibilities are wide open, there are many examples of this type of scholar-ship to build upon.A generation of scholars has already contributed to such an agenda over the last

decades. Rodolfo Rosales was one the first scholars in Latino politics research toinvoke Gramsci in his study of the politics of exclusion in San Antonio, Texas.In what could be seen as a microcosm of how politics have played out in manyother localities, Rosales’s (2000) research illustrates that, despite the emergenceof a Latino political elite in the city, working-class Latinos have yet to see any trans-formative social justice victories. There is likewise a Gramscian current among theemergent field of Latino political theory. Scholars have drawn on Gramsci to un-derstand how Latinos engage in politics at the level of civil society (Apostolidis2010, 2019; Gonzales 2014; Rocco 2014; Fernandez 2018). These Gramscian scholarsalong with other theorists, including feminists and other radicals, have begun todevelop an incipient subaltern approach to Latino politics research.The recent book Transforming Citizenship: Democracy, Membership, and Belonging

in Latino Communities, by political theorist Raymond Rocco (2014), advances ananalysis of the politics of citizenship and racialized alterity in Latino communitiesthrough the lens of Gramscian theory and critical theory more broadly. Breakingwith the orthodoxy of traditional paradigms of Latino politics research, Roccokeeps his analysis of Latino citizenship within civil society and the “submerged net-works” of everyday life while maintaining a broader dialogue with critical anddemocratic theory. Rocco develops his theory for talking about politics on the

Gramsci and Unclear Boundaries 561

ground through various ethnographic research projects carried out from 1993 to2008 in connection with Latino immigrant hometown associations, soccerleagues, parent associations, and other networks of everyday life in southeastLos Angeles and the San Fernando Valley. He does this while teasing out the the-oretical implications of marginalized or subaltern Latinos struggling to belong in acity undergoing neoliberal restructuring. He finds that, in the face of the exclusion-ary nature of formal or legal citizenship, Latino communities have built an associ-ative citizenship: that is, they have built another way of belonging that is outside ofthe formal realm of the state. Rocco’s focus on the “submerged networks” of every-day life is precisely a way of understanding how subaltern Latinos engage in pol-itics in a neoliberal urban context.Paul Apostolidis advanced one of the most important and explicitly Grams-

cian interventions in Latino politics in recent years. Apostolidis uses Gramsciand Michel Foucault’s theoretical interventions around biopower to tease outthe ways that immigrant workers struggle to democratize dangerous and precar-ious labor conditions in the meatpacking industry of the Pacific Northwest.Apostolidis conducts interviews with immigrant workers to argue that theycould teach us how to create a robust democracy in the face of coercive statepolicies and precarious labor conditions within a capitalist economy. In hismost recent book, The Fight for Time: Migrant Day Laborers and the Politics of Pre-carity, Apostolidis (2019) uses Freirean theory to develop a critical-popular re-search methodology for studying the politics of day-laborer corners in Seattleand Portland. The book discusses what day laborers could teach us about sur-vival and radical grassroots democracy in the face of the precarity created byneoliberalism. Apostolidis grapples with the common sense of Mexican andCentral American street-corner jornaleros in order to tease out their conceptionof the world and the ways that they build spaces of resistance based on a radicalpolitics of solidarity.Recent scholarship by political sociologist Sujatha Fernandez (2018) and critical

geographer Juan De Lara (2018) advances a Gramscian approach to understandingpolitics at the margins in unique ways. Fernandez’s Curated Stories: The Uses andMisuses of Storytelling provides a critical Gramsican—and more specifically, mate-rialist—analysis of how foundations and Democratic Party operatives deploystories of survival and self-help among Afghan women, domestic workers, and un-documented Latino students to undercut radical social movements and radical cri-tiques of global capitalism. Fernandez uses the Gramscian concept of transformismoto show how corporate foundations and Democratic Party operatives absorb indi-viduals from subaltern classes—individuals with whom these organizations onceappeared to have hostile or irreconcilable interests—and turn their stories intosound bites for mainstream electoral politics.De Lara’s book Inland Shift: Race, Space, and Capital in Southern California provides

an analysis of class struggle under the conditions of racial capitalism in the InlandEmpire. This region just one hour east of Los Angeles went from being a sparsely

562 Gonzales

populated rural hinterland of Southern California in the early 1980s to becomehome to over 4 million people and the largest concentration of warehouses inthe United States. De Lara elaborates on the spatial reorganization of the region,which previously had been mostly farmland and Fordist-era factories butbecame a major hub for the global logistics industry, with tracks of homes thatsignify a certain type of normative middle-class suburban spatial order. He alsowrites about how the transformation of the region depended on low-incomeLatino labor and a reorganization of the racial order, as the once mostly whiteInland Empire grew into one of the largest Latino metro areas in the UnitedStates. In a very Gramscian way, De Lara distances himself from overly deterministarguments that could paint the transformation of the region as being simply thework of capital, and he illustrates how state actors, corporations, and labor and re-sistance movements are all struggling within an integral field of power that cannotbe reduced to the electoral realm or hardcore economic analysis.Although Gramscian thinking has inspired the call for a subaltern Latino poli-

tics, Gramsci does not have to be at the center of the analysis. Specters of Belonging:The Political Life Cycle of Mexican Migrants, by Adrian Felix (2019), is a good exampleof a book that does not use Gramsci as the main pivot in its analysis but that stillbreaks with the dominant neo-positivist approach. Felix looks at the ways thatrural Mexican migrants engage in grassroots social movements and Mexican polit-ical institutions in the United States and in Mexico. Using what he terms diasporicdialectics, Felix provides an ethnographically rich account of the double move-ment between state structures and the social and political movements of subalterntransnational Mexicans.All of these books and scholars give us coordinates for thinking through Latino

communities’ engagement in politics in ways that are outside of the neo-positivistparadigm in Latino politics research. More than simply citing Gramsci or engagingin debates about the proper reading of this or that Gramscian concept or transla-tion, this emerging scholarship pushes the boundaries of what we have normallythought of as Latino politics by focusing the analysis on the politics of poweroutside of the electoral realm. This body of collective scholarship is also bringinga meso-level analysis of politics that includes a critique of capitalism and the stateand that illustrates how real class actors on the ground struggle for power. Whilenot all of these scholars may see their work as being within the subaltern school ofLatino politics, they are all indeed working on an understanding of politics amongsubaltern Latinos, of those who are on the margins of the nation-state, mainstreamelectoral politics, and social movements, and—as in the case of the work of Juan DeLara—of Latinos that are on the margins of global city regions.Another point of convergence is that all of the scholars writing about these

topics and communities are rooted in social movement struggles. Rosales, Rocco,Apostolidis, Felix, Fernandez, De Lara, and others don’t just study social move-ments; they are rooted in social movements through a praxis that took years to cul-tivate. This should be distinguished from work rooted in social movement

Gramsci and Unclear Boundaries 563

literature or what some have called contentious politics, which is often about socialmovements but is not always rooted in social movements.This type of intellectual production, as Gramsci reminded us, requires a certain

type of intellectual, one who feels a certain identification with the “simple” and anorganic connection to movements and to subaltern classes. Moreover, because thistype of intellectual production is often not rewarded or recognized in traditionalacademic spaces, it is critical for Gramscian intellectuals to create spaces or trench-es that could serve as training grounds and outlets for young scholars: spaces suchas research centers, critical journals, and book series organized around a subalternLatino politics. Gramsci would argue that the training and formation of such intel-lectuals from the “south” is a priority for building a hegemony from below that cancompete with the power of the dominant classes on their own terrain.Academia is just once trench within the broader field of power that is the inte-

gral state. No Gramsci-inspired intellectual project could be confined to only aca-demic spaces, nor could it solely serve the usual academic interests such as grants,tenure, and promotion. A Gramsci-inspired subaltern Latino politics must takecritical pedagogical practices seriously and must open intellectual spaces that res-onate with the philosophy of the nonphilosophers. This would require cultivatingand working with organic intellectuals rooted in these subaltern communities; inthe case of Latinos, these intellectuals would be local priests, ministers, folk singers,lawyers, teachers, journalists, artists, radio disk jockeys, leaders of hometown asso-ciations, car clubs, boxing clubs, soccer clubs, equestrian associations, and manymore associations in civil society. This type of critical-popular research, as PaulApostolidis (2019) so aptly calls it, requires that we question the very distinctionbetween academic and community spaces. As in the more recent work of PaulApostolidis (2019) and Adrian Felix (2018), a subaltern Latino politics must lookat subaltern actors as coinvestigators and as organic intellectuals who arecapable of articulating their own realities and teaching scholars something abouthow popular democracy, solidarity, and transnational political subjectivitieswork on the ground.Most critically, a subaltern Latino politics should never be reduced to only

Gramscian theory. I made the case for why Gramsci is useful for thinking aboutLatino politics outside of the traditional electoral realm and political behavior.We must also incorporate historically specific analysis and, by default, strategiesfor resistance and liberation that are unique to the conditions facing Latinos inour present conjuncture. For instance, De Lara (2018, 2) writes that the relationshipbetween racial capitalism, the logistics industry, and millions of Latinos in theInland Empire of Southern California can be “traced back to the fifteenthcentury, when the encounter between European merchant capitalism and theAmericas generated new… identities that were rooted in the confrontationbetween indigenous ways of life and the imperial project of coloniality that en-snared Black and indigenous bodies into the global circuits of profit accumulationand slavery.”

564 Gonzales

The Gramscian thing to do is to always develop a comparative analysis thatmoves dialectically between the general and the particular and then back to thegeneral in order to intervene politically in any unique historical conjuncture.This is especially important today when the conditions facing subaltern Latinos,the working class, migrants/ refugees, indigenous people, Afro-Latinos, LGBTQcommunity, children, and criminalized youth, among others, demand that ouranalysis understands the particularities of what they are facing. We must focuson the particulars without forgetting we are engaged in a prolonged asymmetricalstruggle between racial capitalism, settler colonialism, coloniality, states, dominantclasses, and their allied social classes—some of whom come from subaltern classes,as in the case of Latino migration-control officials, or Mexican nationals comingout against Central American refugees.Like the postcolonial movement founded by South Asian and Palestinian schol-

ars, subaltern Latino politics is inspired by, but not limited to, Gramsci. Indeed, it iswell documented that some of the leading theorists within the postcolonial move-ment were also originally inspired by Gramsci’s notes on the subaltern (Srivastavaand Bhattacharya 2012). These theorists’ intellectual project was to challenge thedominant narratives about what independence after British colonialism meantin South Asia. The dominant narratives celebrated “independence” and thegreat “achievements” of Indian elites, much as present-day Latino politics researchcelebrates the Latino vote and Latino political power. But the postcolonial critiqueattempted to look at independence through the lens of the subaltern. It usedGramsci as a point of departure for producing new theory appropriate to theGlobal South; it advanced another way of writing history that went against thegrain of the dominant narratives. The approach advanced here likewise urges usto consider what politics looks like from the vantage point of subaltern Latinosand to forge another way of doing “Latino politics” research. It is in this spiritthat I propose a subaltern Latino politics approach as an alternative paradigmthat challenges the success narrative about Latinos “making it” in the U.S. politicalsystem, that takes seriously ideas around decolonization, history, freedom of move-ment, and liberation coming from the subaltern among us, and that takes theseideas as points of struggle for a just world beyond what is possible under authori-tarian neoliberalism and liberal democracy. He can’t provide us with the answers,but the Gramsci who helps us think about an alternative to authoritarian neolib-eralism and the masquerade of liberal democracy, and who gives us guidepostsfor struggle, research, and pedagogical practices toward this end, es nuestro (is ours).

Acknowledgments

This essay is dedicated to my mentor and friend, Raymond Rocco, who taught Gramsciand a critical approach to politics in Latino communities to me and thousands of otherLatinos at UCLA. Much of what I have written here comes from nearly two decades of

Gramsci and Unclear Boundaries 565

conversation and debate about how to advance an alternative approach to mainstreamLatino politics research—conversations with Raymond and with my esteemed colleaguesAlbert Ponce, Raul Moreno, Adrian Felix, Arely Zimmerman, Natasha Bell, Fred Lee,Murrell Brooks, and Parissa I’majedi Clark, among others. This is for Ray, MarkSawyer, and the Los Angeles School of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics.

References

Apostolidis, P. 2010. Breaks in the chain: What immigrant workers could teach America aboutdemocracy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

. 2019. The fight for time: Migrant day laborers and the politics of precarity. New York:Oxford University Press.

Barajano, C. E. 2013. The Latina advantage: Gender, race, and political success. Austin: Universityof Texas Press.

Barrera, M. 1979. Race and class in the Southwest: A theory of racial inequality. Notre Dame, Ind.:University of Notre Dame Press.

Barreto, M., and G. Segura. 2014. Latino America: How America’s most dynamic population ispoised to transform the politics of the nation. New York: Public Affairs Books.

Barreto, M., T. Reny, and B. Wilcox-Archuleta. 2017. Survey methodology and the Latina/ovote: Why a bilingual, bicultural, Latino-centered approach matters. Aztlán: A Journal ofChicano Studies 42 (2): 211–27.

Brown, W. 2015. Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. Brooklyn: Zone Books.Bruff, I. 2014. The rise of authoritarian neoliberalism. Rethinking Marxism 26 (1): 113–29.Buttigieg, J. A. 1992. Prison notebooks. Vol. 1. New York: Columbia University Press.De La Garza, R. 2004. Latino politics. Annual Review of Political Science 7 (1): 91–123.De Lara, J. 2018. Inland shift: Race, space, and capital in Southern California. Berkeley: University

of California Press.Desipio, L. 1996. Counting on the Latino vote: Latinos as the new electorate. Charlottesville:

University Press of Virginia.Felix, A. 2011. Posthumous transnationalism: Postmortem repatriation from the United

States to México. Latin American Research Review 46 (3): 157–79.. 2019. Specters of belonging: The political life cycles of Mexican migrants. New York:

Oxford University Press.Fernandez, S. 2018. Curated stories: The uses and misuses of storytelling. New York: Oxford

University Press.Forgacs, D. 2000. The Gramsci reader: Selected writings, 1916–1935. New York: New York

University Press.Gonzales, A. 2013. Reform without justice: Latino migrant politics and the homeland security state.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.. 2017. Trumpism, authoritarian neoliberalism, and subaltern Latina/o politics. Aztlán:

A Journal of Chicano Studies 42 (2): 147–64.Gramsci, A. 1971. Selections from the “Prison notebooks” of Antonio Gramsci. Ed. and trans. Q.

Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart.. 1992. Prison notebooks. Vol. 1. Ed. J. A. Buttigieg. New York: Columbia University

Press.

566 Gonzales

. 1994. Letters from prison. Vol. 1. Ed. F. Rosengarten. Trans. R. Rosenthal. New York:Columbia University Press.

. 2000. The Gramsci reader: Selected writings, 1916–1935. Ed. D. Forgacs. New York:New York University Press.

Green, M. 2002. Gramsci cannot speak: Representations and interpretations of Gramsci’sconcept of the subaltern. Rethinking Marxism 14 (3): 1–24.

. 2013. Race, class, and religion: Gramsci’s conception of subalternity. In The politicalphilosophies of Antonio Gramsci and B. R. Ambedkar: Itineraries of Dalits and subalterns, ed. C.Zene, 116–28. London: Routledge.

Hall, S. 1987. Gramsci and us. Marxism Today, June, 16–21.Lavieraga Monforti, J. The Latino gender gap in the 2016 election. Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano

Studies 42 (2): 229–48.Lugones, M. 2008. Coloniality and gender. Tabula Rasa, no. 9: 1–29.Mignolo, W. 2012. Mariategui and Gramsci in “Latin” America: Between revolution and

decoloniality. In The postcolonial Gramsci, ed. N. Srivastava and B. Bhattacharya, 191–218. New York: Routledge.

Muñoz Jr., C. 2007. Youth, identity, power: The Chicano movement. London: Verso.Pantoja, A. 2016. Latino voter wall blocks Trump’s path toWhite House. Latino Decisions Blog,

7 November. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/latino-decisions/latino-voter-wall-blocks_b_12842834.html.

Portillo, S. V., E. J. Ma, S. I. Macias, and C. Verela. The good, the bad, and the queer invisible:The Los Angeles Mayday queer contingent. Dialogo 18 (2): 21–35.

Ramírez, R., and R. M. Solano. 2017. How geography trumps alternative facts: Using statecontext and demography to explain presidential vote choice in 2016. Aztlán: A Journalof Chicano Studies 42 (2): 183–94.

Robinson, C. 2000. Black Marxism: The making of the black radical tradition. Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press.

Rocco, R. 1983. Positivism and Mexican identity—then and now. Aztlán: A Journal of ChicanoStudies 14 (2): 359–72.

. 2014. Transforming citizenship: Democracy, membership, and belonging in Latino commu-nities. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.

Rosales, R. 2000. The illusion of inclusion: The untold political story of San Antonio. Austin:University of Texas Press.

Sanchez, G., and B. Gomez-Aguinaga. 2017. Latino rejection of the Trump Campaign: HowTrump’s racialized rhetoric mobilized the Latino electorate like never before. Aztlán: AJournal of Chicano Studies 42 (2): 165–81.

Sandoval, C. 2000.Methodology of the oppressed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Segura, G., and S. Bowler. 2012. The future is ours: Minority politics, political behavior, and the

multiracial era of American politics. Los Angeles: CQ Press.Srivastava, N., and B. Bhattacharya, eds. 2012. The postcolonial Gramsci. New York: Routledge.Tansel, C., ed. 2017. States of discipline: Authoritarian neoliberalism and the contested reproduction

of the capitalist order. London: Rowman and Littlefield.

Gramsci and Unclear Boundaries 567