Mixed Race Studies

Coming Out As Black, When You Were Hispanic

Tell Me More
National Public Radio
2013-06-06

Celeste Headlee, Guest Host

High school senior Elaine Vilorio wrote that she started seriously contemplating her blackness when she stopped straightening her hair.
Elaine Vilorio

Teen Elaine Vilorio spent years trying to make sense of her racial identity. She describes herself as Hispanic, but other people see her as black. Vilorio speaks to guest host Celeste Headlee about her recent HuffPost Teen blog, ‘Coming Out As Black.’

This is Tell Me More from NPR News. I’m Celeste Headlee. Michel Martin is away. Coming up, a celebrity chef shares some tasty summertime recipes and juicy stories about his clients. But first, we’ll turn to the issue of race and identity. The question of, what am I, is one that a lot of teens ask themselves and the answer can be quite complicated for multiracial kids.

It’s something that Elaine Vilorio has thought a lot about. She’s a high school senior, originally from the Dominican Republic. Over the course of her life, people assumed she was black and that bothered her. But two years ago, after she stopped chemically straightening her hair, the change in her appearance made her rethink her roots. She wrote about that in a Huffington Post piece titled “Coming Out as Black,” and Elaine Vilorio is now here to tell us more. Welcome to the program, first of all.

ELAINE VILORIO: Thank you, I’m happy to be here.

HEADLEE: First of all, let me ask you, why did you phrase it that way, coming out as black?

VILORIO: Well, people have always asked me, you know, like you said, you know, if I was black consistently, and I’ve always denied that. So I thought that was a very fitting way, a very dramatic way to say that I finally have admitted, you know, this Afro identity, so to speak, when it’s always been there. Coming out, I finally can say it out loud, and I can finally explain to people, yes, I have African roots in me and that’s okay.

HEADLEE: Well, when you talk about racial identity, it’s something you’ve written about quite a bit as well.

VILORIO: Yes.

HEADLEE: What is racial identity for you? Is it about the way you see yourself or how others see you?

VILORIO: I mean, it’s a combination of both. I think people perceive me and they separate Afro-descendancy from, you know, the Hispanic identity. Hispanic identity doesn’t really take into account that African racial root. You know, I see myself as a predominantly black Hispanic. And then other people, you know, they just see a mixed person, just mixed. Blackness isn’t really, you know, acknowledged…

Read the transcript here.  Listen to the interview here.  Download the interview here.

Coming Out As Black

The Blog
The Huffington Post
2013-05-24

Elaine Vilorio, High School Senior
Northern New Jersey

I’m Black. After many years in the closet, after many years of breathing that stale air of self-denial, I can finally say this.

Growing up, I dreaded the question “What are you?” I always proudly answered that I was Hispanic. In fact, I made it a point to emphasize my Hispanicity simply because I knew what was coming next. “I’m Hispanic; I speak Spanish; my parents come from Dominican Republic. I’m Hispanic. And, just to clarify, I’m Hispanic.” To this, the other person confessed: “Oh… I thought you were Black. You definitely look Black.” The problem was I perceived the identification of “Hispanic” outside the realm of Blackness; but then, I wasn’t the only one. Take note that the other person in my scenario thought the same thing. Right after my declaration of Hispanicity, he/she stripped away the “Black” label with the phrases “I thought” and “You definitely look.”

The conventional definition of “Black” completely leaves out Hispanics, and this is because the latter is ashamed of African ancestry. As a result of this shame, American society has excused Latinos from identifying themselves as Black or African American. I recently read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Black in Latin America, and I’m amazed at what I learned. Eleven million Africans survived the Middle Passage and came to the Western Hemisphere. Out of this almost unfathomable number, only 450,000 Africans came to the United States. Gates expresses the significance of these numbers nicely: “The ‘real’ African American experience…unfolded in places south… of Texas, south of California, in the Caribbean islands and throughout Latin America.” [1] Why, then, has the stereotypical Hispanic comprised mostly European and Indigenous features? Where did the Black go? It was buried under unofficial segregation, under whitening campaigns of populations and national histories, under racism…

Read the entire article here.

I’m a kosher burrito, says new mixed-race LA mayor

The Jewish Chronicle Online
London, England
2013-05-30

Tom Tugend

Eric Garcetti, the first Jewish mayor elected by Los Angeles voters, jokingly refers to himself as a “kosher burrito”, the latter word referring to a popular Mexican dish.

The son of a Jewish mother and a father of Mexican and Italian descent, the hip, good-looking Garcetti, 42, was a popular figure at Oxford’s L’Chaim Society when he attended the university as a Rhodes Scholar between 1993 and 1995.

LA, incorporated as a municipality in 1850, has had Mexican-American, African-American and lots of Anglo mayors, but in this year’s race the top three contenders all had strong Jewish ties…

Read the entire aritcle here.

‘Las Caras Lindas’: To Be Black And Puerto Rican In 2013

Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
National Public Radio
2013-05-25

Jasmine Garsd

I am a black man
Who was born café con leche
I sneaked into a party, to which I had not been invited.
And I got kicked out. They threw me out.
When I went back to have fun with the black girls
All together they said ‘Maelo, go back to your white girls’
And they kicked me out. They threw me out.”

– Ismael Rivera, “Niche“

In “Niche” (“Black Man”), iconic Puerto Rican singer Ismael Rivera navigates the labyrinth of race and ethnicity in the Caribbean. A light-skinned “café con leche” black man, he wanders through his island like a ghost of a colonial Spanish past, shooed off by both blacks and whites uncomfortable with his presence and what he represents.

In another iconic and deeply melancholy song, “Las Caras Lindas” (or “The Beautiful Faces”), Rivera sets aside the discomfort and pens an ode to his people: “The beautiful faces of my black race, so much crying, pain and suffering, they are the challenges of life, but inside we carry so much love.”

I was recently in Puerto Rico reporting on the island’s troubled economy and reignited diaspora. During that time, I had the chance to visit legendary rapper Tego Calderón. In his studio in Santurce, Puerto Rico, I found the entire place wallpapered with photographs of Ismael Rivera…

Read the entire article here.

Latino racial choices: the effects of skin colour and discrimination on Latinos’ and Latinas’ racial self-identifications

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 31, Issue 5, 2008
pages 899-934
DOI: 10.1080/01419870701568858

Tanya Golash-Boza, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Merced

William Darity, Jr., Arts & Sciences Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics
Duke University

Are predictions that Hispanics will make up 25 per cent of the US population in 2050 reliable? The authors of this paper argue that these and other predictions are problematic insofar as they do not account for the volatile nature of Latino racial and ethnic identifications. In this light, the authors propose a theoretical framework that can be used to predict Latinos’ and Latinas’ racial choices. This framework is tested using two distinct datasets – the 1989 Latino National Political Survey and the 2002 National Survey of Latinos. The results from the analyses of both of these surveys lend credence to the authors’ claims that Latinas’ and Latinos’ skin colour and experiences of discrimination affect whether people from Latin America and their descendants who live in the US will choose to identify racially as black, white or Latina/o.

Read or purchase the article here.

Latino Racial Reporting in the US: To Be or Not To Be

Sociology Compass
Volume 7, Issue 5 (May 2013)
pages 390-403
DOI: 10.1111/soc4.12032

Clara E. Rodríguez, Professor of Sociology
Fordham University

Michael H. Miyawaki
Fordham University

Grigoris Argeros, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Mississippi State University

This review focuses on how Latinos report their race. This is an area that has recently experienced a major surge of interest in both government and academic circles. This review of the literature examines how and why Latinos report their race on the census, in surveys and in more qualitative studies. It reviews the vibrant and growing scholarly literature relevant to the questions of the placement—by self or others—of Latinos along the US color line, what determines it and how the Census has coped and is coping with it. We begin with a brief review of the history of Latino classification in the census and then discuss the factors influencing racial reporting. These include national origin and skin color, acculturation and generational status, socioeconomic status, perceived discrimination and identification with others who have experienced actual discrimination, location, and question format. We end with a discussion of the implications of the recent 2010 Alternative Questionnaire Experiment conducted by the census, and conclude with suggestions for future research.

Read or purchase the article here.

Changing Race: Latinos, the Census and the History of Ethnicity

New York University Press
July 2000
283 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780814775479

Clara E. Rodríguez, Professor of Sociology
Fordham University

Latinos are the fastest growing population group in the United States. Through their language and popular music Latinos are making their mark on American culture as never before. As the United States becomes Latinized, how will Latinos fit into America’s divided racial landscape and how will they define their own racial and ethnic identity?

Through strikingly original historical analysis, extensive personal interviews and a careful examination of census data, Clara E. Rodriguez shows that Latino identity is surprisingly fluid, situation-dependent, and constantly changing. She illustrates how the way Latinos are defining themselves, and refusing to define themselves, represents a powerful challenge to America’s system of racial classification and American racism.

What Is Your Race? The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans

Princeton University Press
June 2013
296 pages
6 x 9; 5 line illus. 3 tables.
Cloth ISBN: 9780691157030
eBook ISBN: 9781400846795

Kenneth Prewitt, Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs
Columbia University
Also former director of the U.S. Census Bureau from 1998 to 2001

America is preoccupied with race statistics–perhaps more than any other nation. Do these statistics illuminate social reality and produce coherent social policy, or cloud that reality and confuse social policy? Does America still have a color line? Who is on which side? Does it have a different “race” line—the nativity line—separating the native born from the foreign born? You might expect to answer these and similar questions with the government’s “statistical races.” Not likely, observes Kenneth Prewitt, who shows why the way we count by race is flawed.

Prewitt calls for radical change. The nation needs to move beyond a race classification whose origins are in discredited eighteenth-century race-is-biology science, a classification that once defined Japanese and Chinese as separate races, but now combines them as a statistical “Asian race.” One that once tried to divide the “white race” into “good whites” and “bad whites,” and that today cannot distinguish descendants of Africans brought in chains four hundred years ago from children of Ethiopian parents who eagerly immigrated twenty years ago. Contrary to common sense, the classification says there are only two ethnicities in America—Hispanics and non-Hispanics. But if the old classification is cast aside, is there something better?

What Is Your Race? clearly lays out the steps that can take the nation from where it is to where it needs to be. It’s not an overnight task—particularly the explosive step of dropping today’s race question from the census—but Prewitt argues persuasively that radical change is technically and politically achievable, and morally necessary.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Part I What Are Statistical Races?
  • Chapter 1 Introduction and Overview
  • Chapter 2 Classification before Counting: The Statistical Races
• Part II Policy, Statistics, and Science Join Forces
  • Chapter 3 The Compromise That Made the Republic and the Nation’s First Statistical Race
  • Chapter 4 Race Science Captures the Prize, the U.S. Census
  • Chapter 5 How Many White Races Are There?
• Part III When You Have a Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail
  • Chapter 6 Racial Justice Finds a Policy Tool
  • Chapter 7 When You Have a Hammer: Statistical Races Misused
• Part IV The Statistical Races under Pressure, and a Fresh Rationale
  • Chapter 8 Pressures Mount
  • Chapter 9 The Problem of the Twenty-first Century Is the Problem of the Color Line as It Intersects the Nativity Line
• Part V What We Have Is Not What We Need
  • Chapter 10 Where Are We Exactly?
  • Chapter 11 Getting from Where We Are to Where We Need to Be
• Appendix: Perspectives from Abroad–Brazil, France, Israel
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego [FitzGerald Review]

Journal of American History
Volume 99, Issue 4 (2013)
pages 1285-1286
DOI: 10.1093/jahist/jas672

David FitzGerald, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, San Diego

Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego. By Rudy P. Guevarra Jr. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012. xiv, 239 pp.)

I recently bought a house in San Diego whose records included a 1945 racial covenant stating that houses in the neighborhood would never be sold or occupied to “persons not of the white or Caucasian race.” The original owners would have been distressed to learn that the house was sold to me by a Jewish and Vietnamese American couple and that one of the Mexican kids on the block boasts of learning Amharic from his Ethiopian classmates. Rudy P. Guevarra Jr.’s book helped me understand the historical changes on my own street and draw broader lessons about U.S. immigration and ethnicity.

Guevarra, a fourth-generation Mexipino from San Diego, makes major contributions to scholarship on the history of immigration to California and the history of San Diego as he tells the forgotten story of ethnic mixing of thousands at Filipinos and Mexicans. Drawing on oral histories, census data, newspapers, and public records, he explains how a hostile racial atmosphere anchored in discriminatory law and hiring practices brought these two marginalized populations together. After the U.S. colonization…

Read or purchase the review here.

Results from the 2010 Census Race and Hispanic Origin Alternative Questionnaire Experiment

U.S. Census Bureau
Technical Briefing
2012-08-08
62 pages

What is the AQE?

The 2010 Census Race and Hispanic Origin Alternative Questionnaire Experiment (AQE) focused on improving the race and Hispanic origin questions by testing a number of different questionnaire design strategies…

Overview of Technical Briefing

• (AQE) Goals and Research Strategies
• Methodology
• Race and Hispanic Origin Questionnaires
• Reinterview Study
• Focus Groups
• Major Findings
• Recommendations

Goals and Research Strategies

• Increase reporting in the standard Office of Management and Budget (OMB) race and ethnic categories
• Lower item nonresponse to the race and Hispanic origin questions
• Improve the accuracy and reliability of race and ethnic data
• Elicit the reporting of detailed race and ethnic groups

…Detailed Approach

• Includes examples and write-ins for all OMB race and Hispanic origin categories
• Maintains all original race and Hispanic origin checkboxes

…Streamlined Approach

• Includes examples and write-ins for all OMB race and Hispanic origin categories
• Removes specific national origin checkboxes; presented as example groups
• Streamlined presentation of OMB race and Hispanic origin categories…

…Very Streamlined Approach

• Part 1 – Very streamlined presentation of OMB race and Hispanic origin categories
• Part 2 – Examples for all OMB race and Hispanic origin categories
• Write-in areas for specific race(s), origin(s), or tribe(s)

…

Read the entire report here.