Mixed Race Studies

Census Race Change For Hispanics Sparks Criticism

The Huffington Post
2013-01-09

Tony Castro

Some Latino civil rights groups are questioning the U.S. Census consideration of designating Hispanics a race of their own, fearing the loss of national original designations.

The change, making “Hispanic” a racial instead of an ethnic category, would eliminate the check-off boxes for national origins such as Mexican, Cuban and Puerto Rican.

“There is no unanimity on what any of this stuff means,” says Angelo Falcón, director of the National Institute for Latino Policy and co-chair of a coalition of Latino advocacy groups that recently met with Census officials.

“Right now, we’re very comfortable with having the Hispanic (origin) question… Hispanic as a race category? I don’t think there’s any consensus on that.”

Scholars oppose “Hispanic” being considered a race

Fordham University law professor Tanya Hernández, author of the new book Racial Subordination in Latin America, is among the scholars opposing the proposal to join race and ethnicity as a “Hispanic” category.

“Census data is used in very important ways, for example to monitor compliance regarding civil rights and racial disparities,” says Hernandez, who fears that eliminating existing racial categories would have a negative impact…

Read the entire article here.

The Democrats’ Demographic Dreams

The American Prospect
2012-06-14

Jamelle Bouie, Staff Writer

Liberals are counting on population trends to doom 
Republicans to a long-term minority. They shouldn’t.

If Democrats agree on anything, it’s that they will eventually be on the winning side. The white Americans who tend to vote Republican are shrinking as a percentage of the population while the number of those who lean Democratic—African Americans and other minorities—is rapidly growing. Slightly more than half of American infants are now nonwhite. By 2050, the U.S. population is expected to increase by 117 million people, and the vast majority—82 percent of the 117 million—will be immigrants or the children of immigrants. In a little more than 30 years, the U.S. will be a “majority-minority” country. By 2050, white Americans will no longer be a solid majority but the largest plurality, at 46 percent. African Americans will drop to 12 percent, while Asian Americans will make up 8 percent of the population. The number of Latinos will rise to nearly a third of all Americans.
 
It’s become an article of faith among many progressives that these trends set the stage for a new Democratic majority. A decade ago, Ruy Teixeira and John B. Judis popularized this argument in their book The Emerging Democratic Majority. More recently, Jonathan Chait in New York magazine made a similar case: “The modern GOP—the party of Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes—is staring down its own demographic extinction,” he wrote. “Conservative America will soon come to be dominated, in a semi-permanent fashion, by an ascendant Democratic coalition hostile to its outlook and interests.”
 
At the moment, Democrats have a powerful hold on nonwhite voters. African Americans routinely vote Democratic by huge margins; 95 percent cast ballots for President Barack Obama, and on average 88 percent have voted for Democratic candidates since 1964, the year Lyndon Johnson guided the Civil Rights Act through Congress. Over the past decade, Latinos have also become a reliably Democratic constituency; 67 percent voted for Obama, and 60 percent supported Democrats in the 2010 congressional elections, when Republicans triumphed otherwise. Asian Americans are only a bit less enthusiastic about the Democrats.
 
At the same time that Democrats won the overwhelming support of African Americans, white voters began to make a corresponding shift into the Republican Party. With the help of racist appeals to the former Confederacy (the “Southern Strategy”), Republicans built on their advantage with white voters to earn a decisive share of their support. In 1972, Richard Nixon won nearly 70 percent of white voters, and in 1984, Ronald Reagan won 64 percent of whites. In the last decade of presidential elections, Republicans have won, on average, 56 percent of the white vote. If whites were the only people who voted in presidential elections, Democrats could not win.

For many Democratic activists, Obama’s surprising 2008 wins in Virginia, Indiana, Colorado, and North Carolina proved that the party can now win toss-up states with high support and turnout from minorities. As the nonwhite population grows, Democrats are expected to win national elections as long as they keep a healthy portion of the white vote. If Republicans represent the ethnic majority of today’s America, then Democrats represent tomorrow’s—a coalition of black, brown, and Asian Americans, along with liberal and moderate whites, that will become the “permanent majority” that Karl Rove once dreamed of for the GOP.

At least that’s the story. In reality, however, it’s not clear that Democrats can count on the inexorable march of demographics to secure a majority. Assimilation and shifting notions of racial identity could change the equation, and political affiliations—to say nothing of parties—can change dramatically over the course of a generation. Adrian Pantoja, a political scientist who studies Latino political behavior and racial politics, is skeptical. “This is all based on the assumption that the GOP is going to continue to be hostile to minority voters,” he says, “and that minorities will continue to identify as minorities or nonwhite.” Neither is certain.

For all of the racial disparities that still characterize the American experience, it’s also true that race is declining in cultural significance. Interracial relationships—romantic or otherwise—are more common than they’ve ever been. In 2010, 15 percent of all new marriages were intermarriages, and 86 percent of Americans approved of them. The large majority of these marriages occurred among whites, Latinos, and Asians: Forty-three percent were between white and Latino partners, while 14 percent were between white and Asian partners.
 
This has profound implications. If whites are the “mainstream” of American life, with overwhelming representation in politics, business, and culture, then intermarriage with Latinos and Asians has the potential to bring those groups into the mainstream as well. Put another way, the wildly popular comedian Louis C.K. is understood to be white, even though his father and grandfather are Mexican and his first language is Spanish. More important, his children will be perceived as white, despite their Latino heritage. In effect, C.K. and others like him are expanding the definition of “white.”
 
To Pantoja, this bears a strong resemblance to the pattern of the 19th and early 20th centuries, when the U.S. saw massive immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. “Latinos seem to be on a similar trajectory as Italians,” he says. “At the turn of the century, the Italians were seen as a stigmatized minority group that could not be assimilated into the American mainstream.” It was common to describe Italians as “dark,” “swarthy,” and—in language that also has characterized African Americans—prone to crime and poverty. But as Italians rose out of working-class professions and joined a burgeoning middle class, they and other “nonwhite” immigrants assimilated. Eventually, the New Deal, along with unions, service in World War II, and the G.I. Bill, brought Italians fully into American life…

Read the entire article here.

Catching Up With Black in America’s Soledad O’Brien

Clutch Magazine
2012-12-14

Zettler Clay

A while ago, I took my little cousins to Toys “R” Us. Three of them. 8 years old, 6 years old, 4 years old. It was going smoothly enough until we came across a row of dolls.

There were two on the end. A fully-adorned Black doll on the left. A fully-adorned white doll on the right. She picked the one on the right.

My radar immediately went off. I gently suggested the melanated doll.

No dice. I strongly suggested this doll. Nothing. We weren’t getting anywhere and I was met with the confused look of a little girl whose older cousin had a problem with what she wanted. After he said she could get what she wanted.

I was short on time. She was short on understanding. So I relented.

I haven’t been able to shake this experience. The notion of colorism — the lighter the skin, the better the “doll” — hits us early in life and never leaves. It’s endemic in our community, a point brought to the surface by CNN’s latest addition to the Black in America series, Who is Black in America?

“It’s nothing wrong with seeing color,” said CNN anchor and special correspondent Soledad O’Brien. “It becomes a problem when people limit and define you by it.”…

…Classification creates forms. Forms create separateness, which leads to competition. Colonization. And a wondering lot of people left to discover who they are because of who they’re not.

But why the focus on defining minorities? What about a White in America? It is this criticism that O’Brien hears. And agrees with…

For a few candid moments, I caught up with O’Brien about defining “blackness,” future of Black in America, white supremacy’s effects on Black women and self-identification.

Me: This is a huge subject to tackle.

Soledad O’Brien: You think! (laughs)…

Me: How much has this series helped in your self-identification?

SO: I’ve always had a very strong self-identification. I’ve never struggled with my racial classification. I was very lucky. My mom used to always tell me, “don’t let anyone tell you you’re not Black. Don’t let anybody tell you you’re not Latino.” My parents instilled a very strong sense of identity. Even in the recent doc as I was talking to the young women, I kept thinking, “this is soooo not my experience.” I found that other people had many more challenges about racial ambiguity. I find it fascinating to learn about different communities and geographic history. Black people in Atlanta vs. Black people in Minneapolis (where we’re shooting now). Black people in Philly vs. Black people in New York. Just the history of these communities. I have found it rewarding to see the differences in us and how similar we are…

Read the entire interview here.

No longer your father’s electorate

The Los Angeles Times
2012-11-08

Paul West, Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — Even more than the election that made Barack Obama the first black president, the one that returned him to office sent an unmistakable signal that the hegemony of the straight white male in America is over.

The long drive for broader social participation by all Americans reached a turning point in the 2012 election, which is likely to go down as a watershed in the nation’s social and political evolution — and not just because in some states voters approved of same-sex marriage for the first time.

 On Tuesday, Obama received the votes of barely 1 in 3 white males. That too was historic. It almost certainly was an all-time low for the winner of a presidential election that did not include a major third-party candidate.

“We’re not in the ’50s any more,” said William Frey, a Brookings Institution demographer. “This election makes it clear that a single focus directed at white males, or at the white population in general, is not going to do it. And it’s not going to do it when the other party is focusing on energizing everybody else.”…

… “Obama lost a lot of votes among whites,” said Matt Barreto, a University of Washington political scientist. “It was only because of high black turnout and the highest Latino turnout ever for a Democratic president that he won.”

Obama planted his base in an America that is inexorably becoming more diverse. If left unchecked by Republicans, these demographic trends would give the Democrats a significant edge in future presidential elections.

Latinos were an essential element of Obama’s victories in the battlegrounds of Nevada and Colorado. States once considered reliably Republican in presidential elections will probably become highly competitive because of burgeoning Latino populations, sometimes in combination with large African American populations. North Carolina, where Obama won narrowly in 2008 and came close this time, is one. The Deep South state of Georgia is another. Texas and Arizona in the Southwest are future swing states — by 2020, if not sooner…

Read the entire article here.

Eric Garcetti invokes Latino-Jewish ancestry in mayor’s race

The Los Angeles Times
2013-01-02

Michael Finnegan

Working a recent breakfast gathering of business owners in Northridge, Los Angeles mayoral contender Eric Garcetti introduced himself in Hindi when a Sikh businessman approached.

A few hours later, Garcetti donned a colorful Peruvian headpiece with ear flaps as he spoke Spanish with immigrants on the steps of City Hall, part of a show of solidarity for designating a stretch of Hollywood’s Vine Street as “Peru Village.”

After lunch, Garcetti joined rabbis at a City Hall menorah lighting. Wearing a yarmulke, the Hollywood-area councilman sang Hanukkah songs in Hebrew, English and Spanish. “Toda la familia,” Garcetti said as the group huddled for a photo.

A top contender to succeed Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Garcetti prides himself on his ease with the city’s diverse cultures. He sees his mixed ancestry (“I have an Italian last name, and I’m half Mexican and half Jewish,” he says) as a powerful part of his appeal in a city where voters for decades have split along racial and ethnic lines in mayoral elections…

Read the entire article here.

Forging People: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in Hispanic American and Latino/a Thought

University of Notre Dame Press
2011
376 pages
ISBN 10: 0-268-02982-2
ISBN 13: 978-0-268-02982-1

Edited by:

Jorge J. E. Gracia, Samuel P. Capen Chair; SUNY Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature
State University of New York, Buffalo

Forging People explores the way in which Hispanic American thinkers in Latin America and Latino/a philosophers in the United States have posed and thought about questions of race, ethnicity, and nationality, and how they have interpreted the most significant racial and ethnic labels used in Hispanic America in connection with issues of rights, nationalism, power, and identity. Following the first introductory chapter, each of the essays addresses one or more influential thinkers, ranging from Bartolomé de Las Casas on race and the rights of Amerindians; to Simón Bolívar’s struggle with questions of how to forge a nation from disparate populations; to modern and contemporary thinkers on issues of race, unity, assimilation, and diversity. Each essay carefully and clearly presents the views of key authors in their historical and philosophical context and provides brief biographical sketches and reading lists, as aids to students and other readers.

Contents

• Contributors
  Preface
• 1. Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in Hispanic A merican and Latino/a Thought—Jorge J. E. Gracia
• Part I. The Colony and Scholasticism
  • 2. The New Black Legend of Bartolomé de Las Casas: Race and Personhood—Janet Burke and Ted Humphrey
• Part II. Independence and the Enlightenment
  • 3. Men or Citizens? The Making of Bolívar’s Patria—José Antonio Aguilar Rivera
  • 4. Andrés Bello: Race and National Political Culture—Iván Jaksica
  • 5. Undoing “Race”: Martí’s Historical Predicament—Ofelia Schutte
• Part III. New Nations and Positivism
  • 6. Sarmiento on Barbarism, Race, and Nation Building—Janet Burke and Ted Humphrey
  • 7. Justo Sierra and the Forging of a Mexican Nation—Oscar R. Martí
• Part IV. Challenges in the Twentieth Century
  • 8. Rodó, Race, and Morality—Arleen Salles
  • 9. Zarathustra Criollo: Vasconcelos on Race—Diego von Vacano
  • 10. The Amauta’s Ambivalence: Mariátegui on Race—Renzo Llorente
  • 11. Mestizaje, mexicanidad, and Assimilation: Zea on Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality—Amy A. Oliver
• Part V. Latinos/as in the United States
  • 12. Latino/a Identity and the Search for Unity: Alcoff, Corlett, and Gracia—Elizabeth Millán and Ernesto Rosen Velásquez
  • Bibliography
  • Index

Preface

The discussion of race in the United States reflects to a great extent the situation in the country. The adoption of the one-drop rule, according to which anyone who has a drop of black blood is considered black, has too often been taken for granted, resulting in a polarization that characterizes both the formulation of problems related to race and the purported solutions to those problems: a person is either black or white but not both; there is no in between. It also has tended to move to the background the visible dimensions of race and to pay undue attention to biological and genetic conceptions of it; heredity, rather than appearance, has often been regarded as most significant. Finally, it has contributed to the widespread use of the metaphor of purity associated with whites and of impurity associated with blacks: to be white is to be uncontaminated, whereas to be black is to be contaminated. That a mixture is generally different from the elements that compose it but partakes of them, that races involve gradation and fuzzy boundaries, and that visible appearance plays an important role in racial classifications are facts too often neglected.

This model of race takes insufficient note of what much of the world thinks and illustrates the insularity that characterizes some segments of the U.S. community. Indeed, it is seldom that proper attention is paid to the views of other societies. Although the views on race of some European philosophers, such as Kant and Hume, have been studied in some detail, treatments by Latin Americans or Africans, for example, are generally ignored by North American philosophers concerned with race.

The inadequacy of this parochial approach becomes clear when one considers how conceptions of race vary from place to place. In Cuba, for example, to be black entails a certain kind of appearance. A person who appears to have mixed black-white ancestry is not usually considered black or white but mulatto. In the United States, according to the one-drop rule, to be black requires only one black ancestor, even if physical appearance tells another story. But in Cuba persons of mixed black and white ancestry who look white are generally taken as white, whereas those who appear black are considered black. Clearly the criteria of racial classification used in the United States and Cuba are different. Similar differences can be found between the views of race in the United States and elsewhere in the world.

This neglect of points of view in other parts of the world also applies to ethnicity and nationality. Societies differ substantially in how they establish and think about ethnicity or nationality. Some societies use skin color and physical appearance to establish ethnic and national distinctions; others use lineage or culture. Indian is a racial term generally associated with ancestry in the United States, but in some contexts in South America it is used to refer to culture: to be an Indian indicates that one has not adopted the ways of Europeans, thus carrying with it the disparaging connotations that this entails in the eyes of those who are European or have adopted European culture. Nationality is taken in some cases to be a legal marker—whether involving birthplace or ancestry—and in others to be an indicator of kinship, race, or culture. As in the United States, in some parts of Latin America blacks and mulattoes were denied citizenship because of their race or racial mixture, whereas in other parts of that region it was denied on other grounds, including culture.

Considering these differences in conception, it would seem to make sense that theories of race, ethnicity, and nationality need to take into account as many of the various ways in which different societies use these notions as possible. But the tendency in the United States has been to concentrate on Western European views. This has resulted in inadequate theories, based on cultural and social biases. If U.S. thinking is to make any progress toward an understanding of these phenomena, it needs to go beyond parochial boundaries and consider other societies where race, ethnicity, and nationality also play important roles. How are these notions used in the East, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America?

Latin America is especially important because it is the place where Africans, Amerindians, and Europeans first came together in substantial numbers. Indeed, some scholars have made the argument that the concept of race in particular developed in the context of the encounters between these peoples in the sixteenth century. The details of the story have still to be worked out, but one thing is clear: Latin America is significant in this development. And the significance is not restricted to the fact that Latin America is a meeting place of Europeans, Amerindians, and Africans; it involves also the complex subsequent history of racial, ethnic, and national mixture in the region. Scholars who have studied the pertinent populations do not tire of repeating that Latin America is one of the places in the world where mixing has been most prevalent…

Read the Preface and Chapter 1 here.

Review: Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego

Southern California Quarterly
Volume 94, Number 4 (Winter 2012)
pages 492-494
DOI: 10.1525/scq.2012.94.4.492

Alex Jacoby

Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in Sun Diego. By Rudy P. Guevarra Jr. (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2012. 256 pp.)

In the last decade there lias been an increased recognition of the need for multiethnic studies to letter understand the processes of racialization and community formation beyond a simplistic binary. Important works by Peggy Pascoe, Moon-Kie Jung, Scott Kurashige, Laura Pulido, Mark Wild, and others have contributed innovative research, methodological approaches, and theoretical ideas to facilitate this comparative analysis. Joining this wealth of new scholarship is Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego, a social history of the interplay and imbrication of Mexican and Filipino communities in San Diego during the first half of the twentieth century. The author, Rudy Guevarra Jr., is an assistant professor of Asian Pacific Studies at Arizona State University, and this monograph is an extension of his dissertation project. He argues that, as a reaction to being marginalized and facing segregation, both ethnic groups…

Read or purchase the review here.

Silencing Race: Disentangling Blackness, Colonialism, and National Identities in Puerto Rico

Palgrave Macmillan
October 2012
330 pages
DOI: 10.1057/9781137263223
ebook ISBN: 9781137263223
Paperback ISBN: 9781137263216
Hardback ISBN: 9781137263230

Ileana M. Rodríguez-Silva, Associate Professor of Latin American and Caribbean History
University of Washington

In their quest for greater political participation within shifting imperial fields—from Spanish (1850s–1898) to US rule (1898-)—Puerto Ricans struggled to shape and contain conversations about race. In so doing, they crafted, negotiated, and imposed on others multiple forms of silences while reproducing the idea of a unified, racially mixed, harmonious nation. Hence, both upper and working classes participated, although with different agendas, in the construction of a wide array of silences that together have prevented serious debate about racialized domination. This book explores the ongoing, constant racialization of Puerto Rican workers to explore the ‘class-making’ of race.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Racial (Dis)Harmony in Puerto Rico
• I. Slavery and the Multiracial, Racially Mixed Laboring Classes
  • 1. Becoming a Free Worker in Post-Emancipation Puerto Rico
  • 2. Liberal Elites’ Writings: The Racial Dissection of the Puerto Rican Specimen
  • 3. Race and the Modernization of Ponce after Slavery
• II. Changing Empires
  • 4. US Rule and the Volatile Topic of Race in the Public Political Sphere
  • 5. Racial Silencing and the Organizing of Puerto Rican Labor
  • 6. Deflecting Puerto Rico’s Blackness
• Conlusion: The Heavy Weight of Silence
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

INTRODUCTION: Racial (Dis)Harmony in Puerto Rico

It is a theory with no foundation. She does not know what bomba is. Our bomba is a fusion of many races and cultures: Indigenous, Spanish or European, and African. This is the only authentic one. Everything else is just an invention.
—Puerto Rican performer Modesto Cepeda, April 13, 2005

After my first semester in the United States, I was desperate to leave the mainland and return to my home at the urban core of the northern city of Bayamón, Puerto Rico. My family and friends welcomed me with many gatherings, some in the San Juan area and others in my family’s hometown of Yaucoin the southern part of the island. Everyone peppered me with questions about life away from home. On one of these occasions, a relative asked me if I had become friends with other Puerto Ricans. I answered that I had become very close to a Puerto Rican black woman. I did not realize that I had spoken openly about blackness, instead of the customary muffled modalities that many islanders often employ, until my relative responded, “Then she is not Puerto Rican! Only the americanos would make reference to a person’s skin color.” My relative’s response was surprising to me because in our extended family, antiblack racism had been at the heart of many conflicts, despite (or because of) our racially mixed heritage.

After years of archival research on racial struggles in Puerto Rico, I find myself repeatedly recalling this one exchange, one of many others that have a similar pattern. Perhaps I recall it because of the array of important questions my relative’s response elicits about Puerto Rican immigration, US colonialism, national identities, constructions of whiteness/blackness/racial mixture, and gender (all of which I will explore in the pages of this book). But, most probably, this moment is fixed in my mind because I was struck by the quick and effective way in which my cousin silenced me when I acknowledged my friend’s cherished sense of self as a black Puerto Rican woman. There was no better strategy to shut down a possible conversation about the historical and contemporary realities of racialized marginalization than (a) to deem race, racialization, and racism as foreign matters, specifically as US phenomena, and (b) to question one’s commitment and love to the Puerto Rican nation. My own commitment was already in question; I too was quickly becoming an outsider. Given this oft deployed silencing device, this book is particularly attentive not to reify a Latin American paradigm of race relations or a US model. Instead, Puerto Rico’s move from Spanish to US rule provides a unique opportunity to flesh out some of the sociocultural and political processes that made necessary the organization of knowledge about racialized marginalization along the lines of opposite racial paradigms. To do so, it is imperative to look at silencing and racialization practices historically, as well as investigate the many struggles that elicited these practices. In the following pages, I explore a few key historical moments between the 1870s and 1910s when silencing became especially urgent in politics. It is worth noting that the reasons for and the modes of containing race talk have continued to shift and change after the period under scrutiny in this study…

…I aim to uncover the ways in which the history of slavery, the processes of emancipation, and the nature of colonialisms in Puerto Rico contributed to the contradictory construction of national and racial discourses at different historical moments since the late nineteenth century. For more than a century after emancipation in 1873– 76, government institutions, academic studies, and cultural organizations have reproduced the idea that Puerto Rico is a unified nation—despite its colonial relation to Spain and later the United States—whose people originated from a mélange of three cultural roots: the indigenous Taínos, Africans, and Spaniards. This national discourse holds that because these races mixed harmoniously to create the Puerto Rican race/nation, racial conflict has never existed on the island. In fact, the lack of racial conflict defines Puerto Ricanness. Therefore, to address issues of racialized exclusion or to express/embrace a racialized sense of self is understood by most Puerto Ricans as antinational. Paradoxically, the Puerto Rican dominant classes have persistently underscored the white, Hispanic experience as the main thread that provides coherence to the history of the Puerto Rican people. In this discourse of the nation, the presumptively racially mixed, harmonious society ensures the unity of all social classes. Yet that discourse also preserves the rights of white Creole men as political and social superiors, and consequently, the struggles and aspirations of those deemed or self identified as black continue to be systematically marginalized.

The attempts to silence discussions about racialized domination (especially the persistent denial of racism) and the corollary suppressions regarding individual and communal racialized histories coexist with Puerto Ricans’ everyday antiblack racist practices and racialized talk. Most Puerto Ricans, however, do not recognize their everyday references to racialized markers of difference— mostly derogatory remarks about blackness— as a product of and form sustaining racialized domination. To explore this tension I have chosen the analytics of silence, where silence means something other than total absence. I am here interested in both the attempts to shape or prevent talk and the partial and fragile silences produced through such endeavors. Hence, as I explain later in this introduction, silence is communicative in nature, comprising a wide array of practices that were, in fact, generative of more talk.12 The many disruptions of silences and the other idioms elaborated to advance mobilization for social justice also fostered talk on race. As such, the practices of censorship shaped (creating gaps, voids, misrecognition, and euphemisms, among others) but did not impede the talk of race. Conversely, efforts at repressing the talk of race have indeed prevented sustained conversations about racialized domination because these could crystallize into projects for sociopolitical transformation. This book seeks to track both the fraught processes through which silences are constantly reconstituted and the overall effect of a plurality of silences, intended and unintended, which have prevented open discussions about racialized domination…

Read the entire Introduction here.

Blacks may be second class, but they can’t make them leave: Mexican racial formation and immigrant status in Winston-Salem

Latino Studies
Volume 10, Issue 1 (Spring/Summer 2012)
pages 60-80
DOI: 10.1057/lst.2012.7

Jennifer A. Jones, SBS Diversity Post Doctoral Fellow
Ohio State University, Columbus

In this article, I investigate how race is produced by looking at the reception experiences of Afro and Mestizo Mexican migrants to the new South. Despite the fact that Afro and Mestizo Mexicans are both phenotypically and culturally distinct from one another, they assert a shared racial identity as minorities and as Latinos. On the basis of ethnographic field work in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, I argue that their perceived similarities with African Americans and pervasive discrimination owing to status drives Afro-Mexicans to assert a race-based Latino identity that is shaped by their understanding of African American experiences.

Read the entire article here.

Parental messages concerning Latino/Black interracial dating: An exploratory study among Latina/o young adults

Latino Studies
Volume 10, Issue 3 (August 2012)
pages 314-333
DOI: 10.1057/lst.2012.24

Erica Morales, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Missouri

Many immigrant groups have racially distanced themselves from Blacks due to anti-Black prejudice and stigma. Racial distancing can be transmitted to children through regulating intimate contact with Blacks. Few studies have examined how Latino young adults receive racialized messages from their immigrant parents about dating Blacks. In-depth interviews reveal that Latino young adults encounter messages regarding mixed race children, perceived cultural differences and the US racial hierarchy. This regulatory process is gendered with Latinas experiencing more explicit sanctioning than Latino men. This study illuminates how Latino parents create racialized and gendered boundaries between their children and Blacks.

Read or purchase the article here.