Latina and Latino Critical Legal Theory: LatCrit Theory, Praxis and Latina and Latino Critical Legal Theory: LatCrit Theory, Praxis and Community Community

LatCrit theory is a relatively recent genre of critical “outsider jurisprudence” – a category of contemporary scholarship including critical legal studies, feminist legal theory, critical race theory, critical race feminism, Asian American legal scholarship and queer theory. This paper overviews LatCrit’s foundational propositions, key contributions, and ongoing efforts to cultivate new generations of ethical advocates who can systemically analyze the sociolegal conditions that engender injustice and intervene strategically to help create enduring sociolegal, and cultural, change. The paper organizes this conversation highlighting Latcrit’s theory, community and praxis.


I. Introduction
Twenty five years ago a small group of committed scholars agreed to invest in a new project to produce critical sociolegal knowledge that would initially center on the multiply-diverse conditions and experiences of Latinas and Latinos in the United States and critique how those communities suffered injustice under the color of U.S. law and hegemony. Latina and Latina Legal Theory (LatCrit) since then has sought to develop an intellectual and political program founded on the anti-subordination principle 1 . The professors, lawyers, students, activists, and other social justice workers who have traverse LatCrit theory, community, and praxis continue to pursue the shared goal of critiquing the contemporary legal framework in order to help create a legal order where the aspiration of equal justice for all can become social reality. For the past twenty-five years, LatCrit has programmatically critiqued a myriad of manifestations of the sociolegal constructions of sex, gender, and sexuality, together with race, ethnicity, national origin, language, culture, and class relations, as multidimensional, interlocking, and co-synthetic categories and systems.
To ensure that transnational critical legal thinking does not inadvertently omit LatCrit's systematic development beyond the original Critical Legal Studies movement, this paper overviews LatCrit's foundational propositions, key contributions, and ongoing efforts to cultivate new generations of ethical advocates who can systemically analyze the sociolegal conditions that engender injustice and intervene strategically to help create enduring sociolegal, and cultural, change.
This paper seeks to serve and as an 1 The term "Latina/o" encapsulates an amalgam of persons and groups, who in turn embody multiple diversities. See generally Francisco Valdes, Latina/o Ethnicities, Critical Race Theory and Post-Identity Politics in Postmodern Legal Culture: From Practices to Possibilities, 9 La Raza L.J. 1, 8 n.31 (1996) (Foreword to Symposium, Representing Latina/o Communities: Critical Race Theory and Practice). This term therefore necessarily oversimplifies and centers identity in the colonial relationship while also lacking in gender inclusivity. While fully cognizant of these limitations, we have continued use "Latina/o" generally to signify persons with nationalities or ancestries derived from countries with Hispanic cultures; in the United States, these persons or groups are primarily (but not exclusively) Mexicans or Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans and Cubans or Cuban Americans as we continue to have these conversation and convene in better/different more inclusive ways to refer to ourselves and our communities. We are cognizant that progressive communities in the United States and Latin American have been using Latinx/Latine as a common denominator we welcome authors within the community to use the term they are most comfortable with. Cf. Luis Noe-Bustamante, Lauren Mora and Mark Hugo Lopez Pew Research Institute, About One-in-Four U.S. Hispanics Have Heard of Latinx, but Just 3% Use It Young Hispanic women among the most likely to use the term. August 11. 2020. https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in-four-u-s-hispanics-have-heard-of-latinxbut-just-3-use introduction to LatCrit theory and organizes the conversation highlighting Latcrit's theory, community and praxis.

II. LatCrit Theory
LatCrit theory is the analytical framework developed over twenty five years by the sustained scholarly production and activism of activist scholars that have sought to develop functions, guideposts, values and practices that sharpen the social relevance of critical theorizing. It aims to promote theory as a catalyst for lasting social transformation from an anti-subordination perspective. 2 In these twenty five years LatCrit has also become an institution committed to the anti-subordination principle that seeks to give concrete and substantive meaning to this commitment. 3 LatCrit was born as a result of the conversations started at a colloquium on how Latinas and Latino legal scholars in the United States related to Critical Race Theory. 4 It stemmed as a response "to the long historical presence and general sociolegal invisibility of Latinas/os in the United States." 5 The LatCrit innovation in critical outsider jurisprudence developed as a movement related to Critical Race Theory (CRT) and as part 2 Sarudzayi M. Matambanadzo, Francisco Valdes, and Sheila Velez, Afterword: Kindling the Programmatic Production of Critical and Outsider Legal Scholarship, 1996, 37 Whittier L. Rev. 439 (2016 (Valdes, 1999) Critical Legal Studies emerged as a loosely aligned and radically progressive network of scholars working in the American legal academy in the latter half of the 1970s. Early CLS scholars sought to inject these diverse theoretical perspectives into the production of legal scholarship as part of a broader political project to reveal the role of law in the social production of class hierarchies and human alienation. As Professor Iglesias has explained the critical analysis brought forth by the Critical Legal Studies scholars involved a wide range of legal fields and launched "a wholesale and highly controversial critique of American style liberalism". 7 The critiques of CLS scholars interrogated and challenged the transformative potential of liberal rights, they highlighted the concept of indeterminacy of law and the impartiality of judicial interpretation. Critical Legal Scholars played an important role in challenging the public/private rights hypocrisy in American Law. CLS paved the way for the critical legal movement but it also had its short comings. As its origins indicate, this Latina/o-identified genre of outsider jurisprudence was conceived as a movement closely related to CRT. "Because it was born of the CRT experience, LatCrit theory views itself as a '"close cousin'" to CRT, a cousin that always welcomes CRT, both in spirit and in the flesh, to its gatherings." 14 But these roots include a critical assessment of CRT. This birthing reflects both the strengths and intersectional challenges of CRT. 15 LatCrit theory from its very inception has been determined to embrace CRT'"s original anti-subordination vision, CRT "methodologies, stances and emphases" remain integral to LatCrit: the social construction of race, the relationship between traditional legal scholarship with power and politics, the creation of a project of social justice and transformation, and the importance of embracing subjectivity. 16 LatCrit theory also departs from CRT in important ways, namely the inclusion of queer theory  (1996) 15 .
Francisco Valdes, Theorizing "OutCrit" Theories: Coalitional Method and Comparative Jurisprudential Experience-RaceCrits, QueerCrits and LatCrits, 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 1265Rev. (1999. 16  and post-colonial theory as an integral part of the LatCrit discourse. 17 LatCrit has benefited greatly from, and built substantively upon, the pioneering work of critical feminist legal theories and critical queer approaches that fundamentally challenged the jurisprudential architecture for traditional institutions like the family (assumed to be heterosexual and patriarchal) and the putatively objective and universal perspective of Law, and its "rational" actors (assumed to be white and cis-male). The influence of these sister critical postures became key to the theory, community, and praxis that LatCrit academics and activists have continuously sought to expand and develop. As Athena Mutua has highlighted the emergency of sister theoretical stances has actually deepened and broadened the Critical Race Theory project by providing the necessary intellectual expansion and theoretical bridges between identity politics and a politics of solidarity based on difference.
These important contributions from critical feminists, critical queer approaches and CRT have been taken by LatCrit theory in a direction that facilitates the development of an incipient big tent for all Outcrit legal studies. Outsider scholars have embraced of foundational commitment to anti-subordination praxis reinforced antiessenialism's call for serious, substantive consideration of the linkages between racial and other forms of injustice. 18 LatCrit theory proceeded from the understanding that "identity" is always a constitutive element of law and policy, and that multiple identities are always implicated in the adoption and imposition of any particular legal or policy regime. It acknowledges the centrality and relevance of "difference" in the understanding of the multiple identities embodied by all individuals, and messily present in every social group. LatCrit theory is presently firmly grounded in anti-subordination, as a normative anchor and substantive successor to the anti-discrimination principle, as elaborated by outsider scholars in previous years. The anti-subordination principle highlights intersectionality, antiessentialism, and multidimensionality. Anti-subordination refers to a positionality that challenges practices and policies that by intent or effect enforce the secondary social status of historically oppressed groups. It also strives to develop practices and policies

a. LatCrit Values, Functions and Guideposts
The development of LatCrit theory has been a deliberate effort. in more than one way. It had to be intentional because it required recognition of how the law had failed outsider groups and has drifted away from justice as an aspiration. It has also been deliberative, as it has required an ongoing conversation whithin outsider groups towards the construction of the big tent of OutCrit Theory. LatCrit theory also aspires to be un ejercicio de liberar (of liberation) in the sense that it seeks to promote anti-subordination as a goal. 21 Through the years LatCrit scholars have effectively prompted an explicit collective listing of values describing the foundations of LatCrit theory, praxis, and community: intergroup justice, antisubordination, anti-essentialism, multidimensionality, praxis/solidarity, community-building, critical/self-critical, ethical, transnational, and interdisciplinary. (  LatCrit theory also recognizes the need to accommodate "rotating centers" and "shifting bottoms." 24 This requires recognizing the existence of diverse marginalities, which are sometimes the center of the struggle and should take a leading role, while at the same time recognizing that, depending on the circumstances, an outsider group might LatCrit theory is constructed, in part, through the above discussed functions, guideposts, and postulates that serve to reflect the ways in which some of the earliest adherents of this enterprise viewed the larger jurisprudential, societal, and political moment, during which the LatCrit subject position was conceived. Although not aspiring to constitute any sort of a canon or metanarrative, the accumulation of twenty five years of experiences, community praxis, and knowledge production, these early anchors still serve as substantive and structural grounding for our collective initiatives in community- The body of scholarship brought into existence during these past twenty five years is the organic product of "personal collective praxis" 31 in the form of consistent, sustained programmatic action designed to nurture and inter-connect the OutCrit initiatives of diverse individuals across borders, disciplines, and decades. 32 It must be noted that the LatCrit community proceeded to make its own intellectual contributions in the ongoing elaboration of critical and outsider scholarship from within the legal academy of the United States. In a retrospective of the first twenty years of LatCrit theory, Bender and  REV. 177, 187 (2011). 32 LatCrit theorists have, in more recent years, begun to describe and define the sum total of our efforts as a collective commitment to practice critical "outsider democracy" as a form of rebellious knowledge-production and antisubordination academic activism.
. Of course, this still-developing conception of LatCrit theory, community, and praxis as a form of outsider democracy dedicated multidimensionally to social and systemic justice remains, as always, under construction. 33  Second, LatCrit theorists have sought to advance critical outsider jurisprudence by developing and calling for analyses and projects that encompass both intra-group and inter-group issues-that is, analyses and projects that promote both intra-and inter-group understanding. This approach to scope has facilitated a more detailed and accurate mapping of the patterns formed across groups by the particularities reflected in each, and invited comparative inter-and intra-group studies of common categories, like "race" or "culture," relevant to the subordination of "different" social groups. Over time, this effort has helped produce a better comprehension and critique of the interlocking nature of the "different" systems of subordination, which jointly and severally allows for existing identity-related hierarchies of injustice and inequality to remain in place, both within and across cultures.
Third, LatCrit knowledge-production projects consistently have emphasized critical approaches to internationalism and comparativism in the on-going evolution of outsider jurisprudence from the United States legal academy in programmatic and collective terms. Transcending "domestic" constructions of race, ethnicity, and other categories relevant to law and policy, this expansion has helped not only to deepen and broaden critical and comparative understandings of those categories as exercises of systemic power, but has also helped expose how those "different" exercises of power, using the "same" categories, are tailored in myriad ways to local circumstances and varied regions or locales. This third contribution, akin to the effort to examine law and power in crossgroup contexts, has helped bridge what used to be a gulf between the "local" and  (1996). 39 . See generally Francisco Valdes, Queers, Sissies, Dykes, and Tomboys: Deconstructing the Conflation of "Sex," "Gender," and "Sexual Orientation" in Euro-American Law and Society, 83 CALIF. L. REV. 1 (1995) (1996). 2740, 2744 n.6 (2015) (defining social movements in the context of "contentious politics," which include a focus on mobilizing] popular will., building on networks of social solidarity, and finding sites for narrative resistance in which to transpose/transport grievances into causes that resonate with the larger cul-ture's narratives of justice"). on inter-or counter-disciplinarity, like the cross-group and internationalist initiatives of the past two decades, aims to refine and develop the core categories or concepts of critical outsider jurisprudence. The proactive effort to make other disciplines integral to the elaboration of LatCrit theory, while not always successful, has helped both to bolster and texture our approaches to, and understandings of, "identity" as a legal tool of power deployed for particular purposes in particular places at particular times.
A fifth basic contribution is a collective and programmatic insistence that "class" and "identity" not be cast as oppositional categories of analysis and action, but instead be understood as "different" identitarian dimensions of the interlocking systems of oppression always under interrogation in OutCrit analyses. 42 The concept of "class" itself is seen as an axis of sociolegal identity. Therefore it becomes necessary to frame it with intersectional and multidimensional analyses of  52 Aoki, Keith and Johnson, Kevin R., An Assessment of Latcrit Theory Ten Years after (October 17, 2008). Indiana Law Journal, No. 83, 2008 Global South. 58 In addition, as the name likewise denotes, this project is designed to be a conversational exchange not only across region or location but also across discipline and perspective-an exchange on, and of, theory, law and culture, and an ongoing examination of their interplay.
In other words, each of these projects aims to provide a "safe space" for the incubation of inter-American justice networks, studies, and actions. They aim to provide a year-round "zone" of safety where these networks, discourses and efforts can meet, grow, and strengthen. This type of collective personal praxis to produce knowledge programmatically has become a LatCrit hallmark since the mid-1990s. 59 This distinctive combination of individual and communal knowledge production has been a key and continuing contribution of the LatCrit community to the sustainability and advancement of OutCrit studies and networks more generally.
During the past twenty five years, these internationalist/comparativist projects and programs, together with the "domestic" projects, have yielded forty-some publications, most in English and one in Spanish. Today, these texts are indexed by themes and keywords, and are globally accessible through the "Research Toolkit" of the LatCrit website. 60 Cumulatively, the hundreds of authors who have composed these and similar publications have helped to chart the contours of OutCrit scholarship to encourage its continual expansion in multiple, and ideally synergistic, directions. In effect, then, these globalizing initiatives, efforts, and projects amount to a sustained, collective, programmatic undertaking to nurture OutCritical approaches to hemispheric justice studies from and beyond the United States legal academy.

IV. LATCRIT PRAXIS
From an anti-subordination perspective, critical reflection of our praxis as scholar activists has to be constant to avoid the peril of having a discourse that reflects nothing more than

58
.  61 Because LatCrit theory has paid close attention both to knowledge production and to its principled performance, it has been uniquely positioned to develop institutional projects that fuse "theory and action as central to anti-subordination" in academic practice. 62 LatCrit's commitment to praxis in the service of building a world that is free of subordination has led to the growth of projects in the portfolio. Projects like the UN Consultive Status 63 , and the Amicus Appearances 64 in critical ligation cases are projects designed to apply LatCrit theory to action, and to generate theory from practice and experience towards the advancement of social transformation.
One of the central institutional projects of LatCrit in performance of principled practice is the creation of a Critical Justice Coursebook. 65 For the last years LatCrit/OutCrit scholars from coast to coast (and beyond) have worked collaboratively to imagine, and then bring into existence, new means and ways of producing, conveying, and applying the specific knowledges, skills, and attitudes most necessary to producing justice in lived, material terms across diverse social and legal terrains.
The book bridges four divides in existing approaches to justice praxis: (1) theory and action, both in law and beyond; (2) law and other disciplines, especially history and economics; (3) class and other categories of identity, such as race, gender, ability, orientation, and the like; and (4) domestic and transnational frameworks of analysis, advocacy, and action. Also, to bridge these four existing divides, the Coursebook uniquely synthesizes four key bodies of contemporary literature focused on (1) social justice activism, including social justice lawyering; (2) critical and outsider jurisprudence, including ClassCrit scholarship; (3) law-and-society studies; and (4) "new" or "third world" approaches to international law (NAIL/TWAIL). 66 The book focuses on "systemic advocacy" that integrates in-court as well as outof-court skills, strategies, and goals. The substantive materials on theory, identity, and inequality equip students to engage in contextual, structural, historical, and intersectional analysis, while the inter-disciplinary materials on social impact advocacy expose the 61 . Vélez Martínez, supra. students to skills and strategies mostly missing from law schools (and other justice studies) today. 67 This special attention to the fusion of OutCrit theorizing with "systemic advocacy" in the innovative practice of law for the material promotion of social justice leads also to a specific focus on knowledges, skills, and attitudes (KSA's) that typically are absent from, or marginal in, contemporary approaches to formal legal education.
Currently, and defying decades of reform, law schools still tend to emphasize "traditional" knowledges and skills tied to appellate opinions, and in-court tools or techniques bounded by technical notions of abstract doctrine or entrenched dogma; 68 in this entrenched traditionalist framing, rules, rights, and remedies are over-theorized in artificially asocial, individuated, and decontextualized terms. 69 In this framing, "real" clients are frequently omitted from consideration, while the inculcation of appropriate professional attitudes is crowded out of serious in-class discussion, and the tools or techniques that center decision-makers other than appellate appointees receive short shrift. Although this educational and professional myopia has been, and continues to be, widely understood as woefully inadequate to the exigencies of a successful law practiceboth in the past century as well as the present one-it persists from coast to coast today, as the longstanding and continuing critiques of United States legal education have made so painfully clear. 70 (Katz 2013) This recurring institutional failure to adequately train law students to function as effective social justice advocates, in turn, facilitates the continuance of law's complicity in unjust systems that substantially violate fundamental norms both of law and society.

V. Conclusion: A Critical Time for LatCrit Theory
As LatCrit reaches its twenty-fifth anniversary, we aspire to continue to share LatCrit's foundational propositions and ongoing efforts to cultivate new generations of ethical 67 . For instance, the Coursebook is designed to teach students how to plan issue campaigns for social change in the context of legal action, and how to plan for community economic development projects that serve material needs of particular localities or populations. advocates who can systemically analyze the sociolegal conditions that engender injustice and intervene strategically to help create enduring sociolegal, and cultural, change.
We live in critical times with a shared unease about the future. A sense of unease coupled by profound disappointment, distrust and espanto towards the way the governments in the Global North and the Global South have handled the Pandemic of our lifetimes. The Covid 19 global pandemic has caused a global disruption only rivaled by a World War. This global emergency will probably remain with us in one way or another for many years to come. Before the emergency is over millions of people will die from Covid-19 and hundreds of thousands more would die from famine, other epidemics that are being sidelined, displacement and war. This is also a historic opportunity to change or political imaginary. A Critical Time for Critical Theory. LatCrit theory looks at law as complicit in furthering systemic inequality from an anti-subordiantion positionality. LatCrit scholars and activists must continue their commitment to challenge all practices and policies that by intent or effect enforce the subjugated social status of historically oppressed communities within our society.
The global pandemic has laid bare the systemic inequality that has contributed to the unnecessary deaths of millions of people without an opportunity to 'stay socially distant', to 'work from home', to have access to medicines and oxygen or to have access to a vaccine. We are seeing the naked distribution of the living in the domain and value of utility in furtherance of capitalism.
Critical outsider jurisprudence illuminates how the sociolegal systems of the status quo produces outcomes like the one the current pandemic makes so transparent.
LatCrit's relies on upcoming generations of activist students and lawyers to implement the critical theory and praxis breakthroughs of the past and future. Through collective action this moment can point toward a postsubordination future-when connected to community projects that build power to change the prevailing culture. LatCrit as a community is committed to that multifold intentionality in all it undertakes.