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Cristina Beltran Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010, 226pp., $79.30,
ISBN-10: 0195375904
In The Trouble with Unity , Cristina Beltran places a fascinating new scholarly lens on Latino politics. Instead of simply showing how Latino political opinion differs across national, class, race and gender lines, or, on the other hand, emphasizing the unifying political streams of thought among Latinos, she interrogates what role the focus on unity has played in the development of Latino Politics. She asks why our obsession with unity, as personified by the Latino Sleeping Giant moniker, has come to overpower most of the discourse about Latino politics. This new point of departure provides readers with insight into a relatively unexplored dimension of Latino politics - the struggles, performances and discursive practices that portray unity.
Beltran begins the text by going back in history and starting with the Chicano and Puerto Rican nationalist movement of the late 1960s. She argues that rather than being a contemporary aspect of Latino politics, the emphasis on unity had been at the core of the Chicano and Puerto Rican nationalist projects. Moreover, she contends that the focus on unity blinded Puerto Rican and Chicano leaders to alternative political discourses and...