Abstract

This dissertation constructs a conversation about the nature of democratic civic practices through an analysis of Latino politics and its theoretical foundations. Drawing on canonical political theory, contemporary democratic theory, literature, social-movement scholarship, feminist theory, and race theory, "A Nation in Your Heart" examines how Latino civic elites in the United States perceive and negotiate the relationship between identity and political agreement. I argue that the political orientation of Latino politics can be more fully understood when characterized as Rousseauian in its criticisms and commitments. ;While both Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Latino civic elites combine a passionate opposition to inequality with a commitment to participatory democracy, they also exhibit the more problematic desire to jettison conflict through their demands for group unity. Both Rousseau and Latino politics display a pervasive anxiety about political speech and the agonism that occurs when citizens deliberate together. The problem of deliberative speech leads both to cultivate civic practices emphasizing identification over public conversation. ;In the dissertation's second half, I look at two recent developments in Latino political discourse that appear to challenge the Rousseauian tendencies of Latino politics: the emergence of a "pan-ethnic" Latino identity and the concept of "the borderlands" and its hybrid Latino inhabitants. I contend that despite the apparent acceptance of diversity within the Latino body politic, pan-ethnic political practices continue to celebrate a Rousseauian definition of membership, emphasizing identification and equating group unity and harmony with civic health. This transformation from diversity to harmony is theorized as a necessary precondition for pan-ethnic politics---without it, Latino elites are unable to invoke the representative "we." Similarly, by tracing a genealogy of hybridity, I show how the supposedly "fluid" and "shifting" hybrid subject of Latino political discourse is actually properly ordered and deeply constrained. ;"A Nation in Your Heart" concludes by contending that the theoretical legacy of Rousseau represents a site of both opportunity and risk for Latino politics. I conclude by proposing a new approach to political identity in which political subjectivity is recognized as inescapably fragmented and in which contestation is understood as foundational to democratic citizenship