Introducción
| Autor | Charles R. Venator Santiago |
| Cargo | Assistant Professor, University of Connecticut, Department of Political Science, Institute for Puerto Rican & Latino Studies. |
| Páginas | 4-9 |
Tomo 4 Revista de Estudios Críticos del Derecho
Introduction
By: Charles R. Venator-Santiago
1
The journal CLAVE, Counterdisciplinary Notes on Race, Power and the State
was initially developed during a board and friends retreat in Vieques, Puerto Rico in
December of 2003. This publication sought to give the LatCrit or ganization an
independent voice that broke away from traditional law school journal moulds. CLAVE
was originally conceptualized to explore the ways in which the state, through law,
furthers the production of national, gendered, and racialized subjects. CLAVE was also
conceived to explore the many modes of resistance to state power, symbolized by the
steady beat of the clave through colonialism, imperialism, and diaspora. The journal took
material form in a print version sponsored by the Universidad Interamericana de Puerto
Rico (UIPR) Law School and a short-lived digital version managed and coordinated by
LatCrit board members.
Since then, the UIPR Law School has produced four independent volumes that
capture the spirit of the original project. This fourth volume co ntains a series of student
papers that challenge traditional legal scholars to take a closer a nd critical look at a wide
range of social, cultural, legal and political problems, some which are situated in the
Puerto Rican reali ties, some which intersect within its broader relationship to the United
States, and some which a re global in scope. All of the a rticles contained in this volume
challenge the reader to re-think in critical ways the constitutive relationship between the
law, the state and society. These articles are representative of a critical voice that is
seeking to carve a critical space in the Puerto Rican legal academy.
The main goal of this short foreword is to begin to contextualize the important
student scholarship within a lar ger LatCrit body of knowledge. Part I offers a basic
sketch of the LatCrit project. Part II seeks to contextualize the articles in this volume
within various debates that have been explored by scholars associated with the LatCrit
project.
The LatCrit Project
The Latina and Latino Critical Legal Theory (LatCrit) initiative emerged out of
discussions within t he Critical Race Theory (CRT) annual conferences in 1995. More
precisely, LatCrit emerged out o f an initial meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico under the
auspices of the Hispanic National Bar Association. The fo llowing year, various legal
scholars met in La Joya, California where LatCrit was effectively launched in 1996 as a
critical initiative within the U.S. legal academy to challenge traditional approaches to the
critical study of law and society. For more than a decade, LatCrit has produced a
significant body of knowledge that in some instances has de fined new and innovative
legal debates. Over the years, LatCrit has expanded its institutional scope to encompass
1
Assistant Professor, University of Connecticut, Department of Political Science, Institute for Puerto Rican
& Latino Studies.
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