A Working Paper on the Mask of Law: Montoya's Mask and the Un/Masking of Legal Discourse

Abstract

When I first read Margaret E. Montoya’s revolutionary article, Máscaras, Trenzas, y Greñas: Un/Masking the Self While Un/Braiding Latina Stories and Legal Discourse, I was a young law student at West Virginia University College of Law actively seeking to expand my doctrinal readings with theoretical readings in critical race theory and critical legal studies. I came across this article by chance; it was one of those random LexisNexis searches that many law students conduct. When I read the article, I drew several connections that guided my exploration of the idea of the mask. The first was to The Fugees’s “The Mask” from The Score. The second came a little later after I had seen the movie, Heading South, where one of the characters says, “Beware, sir. It’s hard to tell the good masks from the bad, but everybody wears one.” In this article, I will discuss the importance of Montoya’s mask, her máscara. I first explain the importance of the mask for Montoya and in the literature that I see as necessary to comprehending the complexity of Montoya’s mask. To do this I draw on several disparate sources to extract the meanings of the mask and the implications for legal scholars and activists. This piece helps position Montoya not only as contributing to LatCrit scholarship and feminist jurisprudence, but also as contributing to an intellectual tradition of theorizing the mask by expanding the rules of the game, by taking the work scholars have completed for years to theorize the intersections of performance, subjectivity, and identity and making it relevant and compassionate for current social justice struggles. Throughout this article I am also concerned with Montoya’s lasting LatCrit legacy, which has been evident at the most basic level in the tremendous number of citations her article has garnered inside the legal academy and beyond. Lastly, I discuss the ways in which Montoya’s mask remains a relevant consideration for critical race and feminist legal theory. Montoya’s article is central to the pantheon of critical race/latina/o critical theory scholarship and it is an honor and indeed a necessity to take account of it twenty years later.

Keywords: LatCrit, Margaret Montoya, gender, identity, critical race theory, Nick J. Sciullo, mask