Latina/o Social
Ethics: Moving Beyond Eurocentric Thinking. By Miguel A. De La Torre. Waco,
TX: Baylor University Press, 2010. Pp. xii + 157.
In Latina/o Social
Ethics, a vital and urgent book written with clear, crisp prose, Miguel A.
De La Torre engages the problematic of ethics, which he defines as a privileged
and privileging discourse that, as it has operated in Western history,
constantly finds itself between those with power and those without power. By
situating his analysis in the perspective of marginalized and oppressed people,
De La Torre frames his book as a “corrective measure” (xi) that aims at two
levels of liberation—the liberation of Latina/o people from the limits imposed
by normative, Eurocentric ethics and, to ensure that he cannot be accused of
narrow perspectivism, the ultimate liberation of all oppressed people from the
crippling power of the modern nation-state and world capitalism. De La Torre
performs admirably in pursuit of this noble, essential goal.
De La Torre’s task is two-fold: first, he must expose and
exploit the fissures in the totalized ethics of the dominant culture by
deconstructing ethics from the inside; then, he must reconstitute the
discipline of ethics for the occupants of heterogeneous space and time. Therefore,
the first half of De La Torre’s book, “Deconstructing Ethics,” inches the
reader out from under the limits of ethics as it has come to be constituted in
“ivory towers” (122) as a dry, abstracted, and exclusivist discipline. (Later,
I will return to the issue of “Eurocentric ethics” and the validity of De La
Torre’s critique of some of its practitioners.) It should be noted that De La
Torre’s use of the word “deconstruction” is not strictly Derridean; while his
analysis serves to destabilize the dichotomous thinking of the West, it
nevertheless presupposes an “outside,” which, in this book, is symbolically
identified with the subaltern figure of the Latina/o. De La Torre’s project,
interested as it is in power dynamics and epistemological regimes, might fall
more accurately under Foucault’s anti-modernist notion of critique as an
investigation into the processes and techniques through which the modern
subject has come to constitute him or herself relationally and ontologically.
This terminological misidentification notwithstanding, the
radical project De La Torre undertakes in the first half of the book constitutes
only half of his contribution. Thus, in the second half of the book, having
realized that his own task of reconstituting an ethics of and for the oppressed
cannot terminate with the “deconstruction” of Eurocentric ethics, he returns to
the perspective of the subaltern to reconstruct a praxis-based,
“Christocentric” (79) form of fallible ethics drawn especially from Latina/o “scholarship,
customs, and traditions” (67)—an ethics that is contingent (en lo
cotidiando), liminal (de nepantla),
engaged (para la lucha), collectivist
(en conjunto), and focused on
solidarity (de acompañamiento)—and pushes
Latina/o ethics forward by advocating “an ethics para joder”—an ethics that “screws with the prevailing power
structures” (92). For De La Torre, the marginalized Latina/o, who in popular
and political discourse is often configured as “alien,” as that which is
literally on the threshold between human and inhuman, can find a positive,
productive mirror for her/his own situation in the ambiguous trickster figure
of Hispanic folk tradition. Therefore, the basis for a new ethics is not in any
empowered figure but originates precisely in the one whose powerlessness continuously
creates radical, unpredictable possibility.
