Latina/o Social Ethics: Moving Beyond Eurocentric Moral Thinking

A groundbreaking corrective work, Latina/o Social Ethics strives to create a liberative ethical approach to the Hispanic experience by using its own tools and materials. First explaining why Eurocentric ethical paradigms are inadequate in their attempts to liberate oppressed communities, Miguel De La Torre looks with Hispanic eyes at three major ethicists of the twentieth century–Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Stanley Hauerwas–and how ethics is presented in U.S. culture wars, from the Religious Right to the Religious Left. He deconstructs these ethical paradigms and demonstrates why all are detrimental to and irreconcilable with the Hispanic social location.

With a clean slate, then, De La Torre moves to constructing a new Hispanic-centered ethical paradigm that is rooted in the Latino community way of being. Reviewing the field of Hispanic ethical thought, De La Torre pays special attention to specific concepts ripe with potential that have been developed over the past generation. In the final chapter, De La Torre offers his own constructive paradigm–an ethics para joder, which is rooted in the Latina/o experience, and by which, he argues, the Hispanic community can survive within U.S. culture.