Chicana/o Latina/o Law Review

From their inception, names—including first names, surnames, names of groups, and even story, book, and academic article titles—are embedded with meaning and coded with identity, and over time, they become layered with nuance and memory. In 1992, when I wrote my original article, I named it “Máscaras, Trenzas, y Greñas,” using Spanish to embed a rhetorical signal to the reader that s/he was being invited into the lived experiences (and legal reasoning) of a Latina. The first of several narratives begins with me as a seven-year-old child in Las Vegas, New Mexico. Thus, the article begins in “Brown space”—that is, the location, the perspective, the idioms, and the cultural references are intentionally racially and ethnically “Brown,” with skin color and phenotype serving as a synecdoche for the Latina/o racial category.