Is Rosalía Latina? Toward a new framework for understanding Latinidad and power

The controversy about whether the Spanish-born artist Rosalía is “really” Latina is an example of normative disputes over Latinidad. Responding to the criticisms, Rosalía has claimed that genres “don’t really exist”—a strategy that shares many assumptions with the way some scholars approach questions of Latinidad, authenticity, and social categories more generally. In this essay, I use Rosalía’s controversy to highlight a range of conceptual problems related to Latinidad. I argue that, although social categories are historically and culturally situated, they are not mere fictions; they have real sociocultural and political implications. Thus, an adequate theory of Latinidad needs to account for how they affect human power relations. By drawing on theories of social ontology, I approach the question of Latinidad in terms of “institutional facts.” This framework, I argue, allows us to account for how Latinidad is socially constructed without making essentialist claims or dismissing its existence altogether.