Chapter 25.There Is No Such Thing as Latinx
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British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott (1965/2018) is often quoted as stating that “there is no such thing as a baby” outside the context of a caregiving relationship. More broadly, there is no parent-infant relationship and no family outside their constitutive social, cultural, economic, and political power relations (Dalal 2013). It is in that spirit that I approach the issue of clinical work with Latinx populations—and the question of the term Latinx itself—through a critical lens that raises questions and highlights context. Chapters of this kind often aim to serve as a “handbook” on working with a specific racial/ethnic group, an “alien other” who must be rendered intelligible to a clinical audience (Brown 2009). Although well intentioned, this approach risks homogenizing the diversity of specific groups in a way that masks not only cultural differences but also underlying power relations, commodifying that population in a manner that can be “consumed” by the mental health disciplines, with no complexity or interiority (Viego 2007). Although cultural competence is multidimensional (Sue 2001), in practice clinicians often interpret it as implying that one lacks specific skills, knowledge, and awareness related to specific cultures that, once acquired, lead to “competence,” a discourse that masks white supremacist ideologies of mastery and control (Fisher-Borne et al. 2015; Moncayo 1998; Tascon and Gatwiri 2020).
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