Hispanic Heritage Month: Reflections on Family and Autonomy

Meghan Schrader

By Meghan Schrader

Meghan is an autistic person who is an instructor at E4 - University of Texas (Austin) and an EPC-USA board member.

Hispanic Heritage Month has a unique significance for me, and I think that celebration is an opportunity for opponents of assisted suicide to critique the hyper-individualistic American understanding of autonomy that underpins pro assisted suicide advocacy. The “aid in dying” movement’s conception of autonomy is not the only way of experiencing autonomy, nor should it always be the basis for laws that impact everyone.

I’m an adoptee, and when I reunited with my biological father’s side of my bio family ten years ago, I was excited to learn that I am half Latina. Our reunification provided an edifying look into a part of my heritage that I had never known existed; a culture rich with its own language, music, traditions and food. This side of my biological family includes relatives who fought hard to resist oppression and pursue the American Dream. My biological grandfather fled Cuba in the early 1960s just before Fidel Castro started forbidding residents to leave the island. On the day that he fled my biological grandmother sat outside a Florida USCIS office for 24 hours so that she could help him get an immigrant visa. After my biological grandfather moved to the United States, he studied horticulture at the University of Miami, became a US citizen and built a highly successful real estate business.

Meeting my biological family helped me understand the role of family in the Latino culture. When I met him, my biological grandfather embraced me with tears in his eyes and said, “You have two families now.” My biological family threw me a “welcome home” party in my grandfather’s sumptuous tropical garden, where about fifty bio family members told me how much they had always wanted to meet me. My biological grandfather and step grandmother attended my first masters degree graduation, and in 2014 we went on a cruise to the Bahamas. Because even though I didn’t grow up knowing them, these biological relatives identified me as a family member who they needed to love and include.

One of their reasons for welcoming me was that in contrast to the conception of autonomy that proponents of assisted suicide operate from, the Latino culture is based on valuing family and interdependence. An article on the work of Chicano/Latino Studies professor Belinda Campos notes:

“Her findings make clear distinctions among how European Americans and Latino Americans view and conduct relationships.

‘In the first group, they’re thought of in terms of independence – the idea that the self is separate from others and you rely on yourself in order to do well,” Campos says. “In Latino culture, there’s more emphasis on interdependence, being connected to others in a more fundamental way. You draw support from relationships, especially the family, and think of yourself as more ‘in it’ with someone else than forging your own path.’”

Yes. The Latino culture recognizes that although individual’s right to make choices is important, personal choices happen in the context of our relationships with others. That is one of the reasons why groups like LULAC oppose assisted suicide.

The Latino culture’s awareness of how individual choices intersect with personal relationships is also a mainstay of disability justice culture. Disability justice culture involves a deep awareness that interpersonal relationships shape individual choices. That is one reason why so many disability justice advocates oppose assisted suicide. In Why I Burned My Book And Other Essays on Disability, disability studies scholar Paul Longmore wrote:

‘Some people with disabilities have been affirming the validity of values drawn from their own experience. Those values are markedly different from, and even opposed to, nondisabled majority values. They declare that they prize not self-sufficiency but self-determination, not independence but interdependence, not functional separateness but personal connection, not physical autonomy but human community. This values-formation takes disability as the starting point. It uses the disability experience as the source of values and norms. The affirmation of disabled values also leads to a broad-ranging critique of non- disabled values. American culture is in the throes of an alarming and dangerous moral and social crisis, a crisis of values. The disability movement can advance a much-needed perspective on this situation, It can offer a critique of the hyperindividualistic majority norms institutionalized in the medical model and at the heart of the contemporary American crisis.’

Yes. Because so many disabled people rely on others for help and because disabled people live in a world that is structurally incompatible with our ability to make the choices that we would prefer, disability justice culture welcomes rebellion against the Western world’s romanticization of rugged individualism. This has resulted in a Latino-like focus on interdependence. The assisted suicide movement’s conception of autonomy is based on the experiences of able-bodied upper middle class white people, but the Latino and disability justice movement’s understanding of autonomy considers the impact of personal choices on the human community.

Hispanic Heritage Month is an opportunity to celebrate the overlap between the Latino and disability justice culture’s approach to autonomy, and to view this focus on interdependence as the most just basis for forming social policy. Instead of privileging the individual autonomy of people who desire assisted suicide, society’s leaders should learn from the Latino and disability justice movement’s emphasis on interdependence and enact laws that promote the well-being of everyone.