University of Miami Law Review Volume 53 Number 4 Article 12 7-1-1999 iEsa India! LatCrit Theory and the Place of Indigenous Peoples Within Latina/o Communities Siegfried Wiessner Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.law.miami.edu/umlr Recommended Citation Siegfried Wiessner, iEsa India! LatCrit Theory and the Place of Indigenous Peoples Within Latina/o Communities, 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 831 (1999) Available at: https://repository.law.miami.edu/umlr/vol53/iss4/12 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at University of Miami School of Law Institutional Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in University of Miami Law Review by an authorized editor of University of Miami School of Law Institutional Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. iEsa India! LatCrit Theory and the Place of Indigenous Peoples Within Latina/o Communities SIEGFRIED WIESSNER* I. THE PROMISE OF A POLICY-ORIENTED PERSPECTIVE LatCrit, as I understand it, stands in a great tradition. With Ameri- can Legal Realism, it shares the focus on the empirical rather than the normative. Transcending, however, the Realist emphasis on analysis, and harnessing the sensitivities of the outsider, the LatCrit movement has formed around a powerful policy objective: the goal of overcoming structures of oppression and patterns of injustice encountered by Latinas/os in the United States and beyond. LatCrit theory is, as Frank Valdes has explained, "embryonic."' It attempts to produce critical knowledge, create material social change, and build coalitions as well as scholarly community. Beyond those activities, LatCrit is "a project perpetually under construction, but one whose construction .