Chican@ Sociogenics, Chican@ Logics and the Development of Chican@ Philosophy: Rupturing the Black-White Binary and Western Anti-Latin@ Logic

Abstract

The aim of this project is to create a conceptual blueprint for a Chican@ philosophy. I argue that the creation of a Chican@ philosophy is paramount to liberating Chican@s from the imperial and colonial grip of the Western world and their placement in a Black-white racial binary paradigm. Advancing the philosophical and legal insight of Critical Race Theorists and LatCrit scholars Richard Delgado and Juan Perea, I show that Chican@s are physically, psychologically and institutionally threatened and forced by gring@s to assimilate and adopt a racist Western system of reason and logic that frames U.S. institutions within a Black-white racial binary where Chican@s are either analogized to Black suffering and their historical predicaments with gring@s or placed in a netherworld. In the netherworld, Chican@s are legally, politically and socially constructed as gring@s to uphold the Black-white binary and used as pawns to meet the interests of racist gring@s.

Placing Richard Delgado and Juan Perea’s work in conversation with pioneering Chican@ intellectuals Octavio I. Romano-V, Nicolas C. Vaca, Deluvina Hernandez, Alfredo Mirandé and Chicano movement leaders Rodolfo Gonzales, Reies Tijerina and José Ángel Gutiérrez, I show this amalgamation provides the essential pieces for a paradigm shift and the construction of a Chican@ philosophy. I argue that Chican@ philosophy is the development of a worldview and system of thought that is centered in the knowledge, rationality, logic and culture of the Chican@ people. Chican@ philosophy is guided by the axiom that Chican@s are creators of knowledge, history and their own logical principles and systems of rationality independent of Western reason and logic.

Toward this end, I turn to the insight of Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter and Tommy Curry to show that Chican@ philosophy is framed in a Chican@ sociogenics where the Chican@’s social world is used as a point of departure to examine and understand the lived experience of being Chican@ and a Chican@ logic that contours the world in such a way that Chican@s become creators of their epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy and vanguards of their own systems and institutions.