Mixed Race Studies

Sociology Professor Chronicles Rising Latino Culture

Inside Fordham Online
Fordham University
In Focus: Faculty and Research
2010-11-15

Patrick Verel

Already the largest minority group in the United States, Latinos will be an even bigger presence in the years to come, according to demographic studies. Clara Rodriguez, Ph.D., professor of sociology in Fordham College at Lincoln Center, is making sure their stories are told.

Through 10 books, dozens of papers and consulting projects with Dora the Explorer and Sesame Street, Rodriguez has developed a deep knowledge about a group that now accounts for 15 percent of the population.

Her analyses of United States census data have resulted in papers such as “Contestations Over Classifications: Latinos, the Census and Race in the United States” (Journal de la Société des Américanistes, 2009) and “Implications and Impact of Race on the Health of Latinos,” a chapter in Health Issues in Latino Males: A Social and Structural Approach (Rutgers University Press, 2010).

As part of her study of census data, Rodriguez cast a critical eye on racial classifications in the decennial censuses. Examining how respondents who identified themselves as Hispanic or Latino reported their race, she found that 40 percent chose “some other race,” and many of them wrote in what is known as a Latino identifier, such as Dominican, Panamanian or Chicano.

This happened in the last three decennial censuses, despite the fact that the census allowed them to choose more than one racial category in the last census…

…“People who could choose more than one race didn’t choose white and black; they still chose the category ‘some other race.’ This 40 percent has increased—I think this time it was 42 percent—even though the Census Bureau has really tried to discourage this response,” she said.

“This raises the question, ‘What is race?’ Science was raising that question. Children of mixed-race families were raising that question. So are people from all over the world who came here with very different identities and are now being folded into one of our five major groups.”…

Read the entire article here.

La China Poblana and Other Constructions of Asian Latinos/as

Clave: Counterdisciplinary Notes on Race, Power & the State
A Project of LatCrit Inc. and Universidad Interamericana de Puerto Rico
Summer 2006
22 pages

Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Professor of History, and Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America
Brown University

She is the same image that moves and captivates us in all the national celebrations, the same one who in foreign lands has inspired waves of enthusiasm, the same one who has made tears of intense emotion stream from our eyes, seeing her in North America or in Europe in festivals or in theaters marvelously execute the steps to the jarabe tapatío [Mexican Hat Dance] in her silk slippers conclude by finishing her typical dance with the ingenious steps of “El Palomo,” under the proud wing of the braid-trimmed sombrero of her charro [her male counterpart].

She is la china poblana (the Chinese woman of Puebla), “the national archtype for Mexican women,” a legend whose creation began in the twilight years of the nineteenth entury, accelerated during the 1920s in the immediate aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, quickly became institutionalized and even memorialized by a national monument in 1941. She is now widely recognized throughout Mexico and wherever Mexican people and commerce have ventured in the diaspora. How the national emblem of Mexican womanhood was linked to a china (read Chinese woman for now) is a question that begs to be asked. And when asked, most Mexicans can summon something about an Oriental princess who embroidered and wore the colorful blouses worn by their iconic symbol. Few seem aware, however, that the legend can be traced back to a seventeenth century immigrant/exile/expatriate (she could fit any of these categories of “outsider”) from Asia, a unique flesh-and-bone historical personality known as Catarina de San Juan. Although this figure from Asia had lived in New Spain during the early colonial period, and centuries later informed the construction of Mexico’s post-Revolutionary female national symbol, her place in the Mexican imagination has not led to general recognition of the Asian Latina as a cultural or social formation in Mexico. We shall return to this story and explain this strange paradox…

Read the entire article here.

Familial Ethnic Socialization Among Adolescents of Latino and European Descent: Do Latina Mothers Exert the Most Influence?

Journal of Family Issues
Volume 27, Number 2 (February 2006)
Pages 184-207
DOI: 10.1177/0192513X05279987

Andrea G. González
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Adriana J. Umaña-Taylor, Associate Professor, School of Social and Family Dynamics, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Arizona State University

Mayra Y. Bámaca-Colbert, Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Studies
Pennsylvania State University

This article examines gender and family composition differences in 98 biethnic adolescents’ reports of familial ethnic socialization and ethnic identity. Using analysis of variance, four groups (i.e., adolescent males with Latina mothers and European American fathers, adolescent females with Latina mothers and European American fathers, adolescent males with European American mothers and Latino fathers, and adolescent females with European American mothers and Latino fathers) are compared on the above measures. Results indicate that sons of Latina mothers reported the highest levels of familial ethnic socialization. No significant differences emerge between groups on a measure of ethnic identity.

Read or purchase the article here.

Rubén Trejo: Beyond Boundaries / Aztlán y más allá

University of Washington Press
Published with Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture
April 2010
160 pages
110 color illus., notes, bibliog., 9 x 10 in
Paperback ISBN: 9780295990040

Edited and Introduced by:

Ben Mitchell, Senior Curator of Art
Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, Spokane, Washington

Essays By:

Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, Former Professor of Spanish and Portuguese
Stanford University
Former Associate Director for Creativity and Culture
Rockefeller Foundation

John Keeble, Professor Emeritus
Eastern Washington University

“Multiple backgrounds can form such two- and three-dimensional ideas that they take you to the brink of lunacy, but I have used this rich background and ethnic landscape for creating art. As a student at the University of Minnesota, I often wondered what the study of Russian history, Shakespeare, English literature, or Freud . . . had to do with cleaning onions in Hollandale, Minnesota, picking potatoes in Hoople, North Dakota, or visiting relatives in Michoacán. This diversity of ideas can produce a three-headed monster or an artist, and I chose the latter.” –Rubén Trejo

Rubén Trejo: Beyond Boundaries / Aztlán y más allá is the first comprehensive survey of Trejo’s art and career. It focuses on more than fifty works from 1964 through the present, including pieces from his delightful life-size, puppet-like Clothes for Day of the Dead series; works from the Calzones series – cast bronze underwear and jalapenos – that challenge the Spanish machismo culture; seminal examples of his lifelong exploration of the cruciform image; and much more. The volume includes biographical and interpretive essays, as well as a chronology, list of exhibitions, and bibliography.

Rubén Trejo (1937-2009) was born in a Chicago, Burlington and Quincy railroad yard in St. Paul, Minnesota, where his father, a mixed Tarascan Indian and Hispanic from Michoacán, Mexico, and his mother, from Ixtlan in the same Mexican province, had found a home for the family in a boxcar while his father worked for the railroad. Trejo became the first in his family to graduate from college, and in 1973 he moved to the Pacific Northwest, where he began a thirty-year association with Eastern Washington University as teacher and artist.

His isolation from major centers of Chicano culture led him to search for self-identity through his art. Influenced and inspired by such writers and artists as Octavio Paz and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, he explored a dynamic, multidimensional worldview through his sculpture and mixed-media pieces and created a body of work that deftly limns his identity as an artist and a Chicano. Throughout his long teaching career, he worked tirelessly to create opportunities for young Chicanos through tutoring and mentoring.

Table of Contents

• Preface by Ben Mitchell
• In a Garden of Ideas / Ben Mitchell
• Beyond Boundaries, Aztlán y más allá / Tomás Ybarra-Fraust
• Plates
• Trejo’s Perfect Havoc / John Keeble
• Chronology for Rubén Miguel Trejo
• Selected Exhibitions
• Selected Bibliography
• Patrons
• About the Authors

Oye Como Va! Hybridity and Identity in Latino Popular Music

Temple University Press
December 2009
238 pp
6×9
1 figure 5 halftones
Paper EAN: 978-1-43990-090-1; ISBN: 1-4399-0090-6
Cloth EAN: 978-1-43990-089-5; ISBN: 1-4399-0089-2

Deborah Pacini Hernandez, Associate Professor of Anthropology and American Studies
Tufts University

Listen Up! When the New York-born Tito Puente composed “Oye Como Va!” in the 1960s, his popular song was called “Latin” even though it was a fusion of Afro-Cuban and New York Latino musical influences. A decade later, Carlos Santana, a Mexican immigrant, blended Puente’s tune with rock and roll, which brought it to the attention of national audiences. Like Puente and Santana, Latino/a musicians have always blended musics from their homelands with other sounds in our multicultural society, challenging ideas of what “Latin” music is or ought to be. Waves of immigrants further complicate the picture as they continue to bring their distinctive musical styles to the U.S.—from merengue and bachata to cumbia and reggaeton.

In Oye Como Va!, Deborah Pacini Hernandez traces the trajectories of various U.S. Latino musical forms in a globalizing world, examining how the blending of Latin music reflects Latino/a American lives connecting across nations. Exploring the simultaneously powerful, vexing, and stimulating relationship between hybridity, music, and identity, Oye Como Va! asserts that this potent combination is a signature of the U.S. Latino/a experience.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• 1. Introduction: Hybridity, Identity, and Latino Popular Music
• 2. Historical Perpectives on Latinos and the Latin Music Industry
• 3. To Rock or Not to Rock: Cultural Nationalism and Latino Engagement with Rock ‘n’ Roll
• 4. Turning the Tables: Musical Mixings, Border Crossings and new Sonic Circuitries
• 5. New Immigrants, New Layerings: Tradition and Transnationalism in the U.S. Dominican Popular Music
• 6. From Cumbia Colombiana to Cumbia Cosmopolatina: Roots, Routes, Race, and Mestizaje
• 7. Marketing Latinidad in a Global Era
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index

Married to a Daughter of the Land: Spanish-Mexican Women and Interethnic Marriage in California, 1820-1880

University of Nevada Press
2007
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-87417-697-1
Hardcover Pages: 272
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-87417-778-7
Paperback Pages: 280

María Raquél Casas, Associate Professor of History
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

The surprising truth about intermarriage in 19th-Century California

Until recently, most studies of the colonial period of the American West have focused on the activities and agency of men. Now, historian María Raquél Casas examines the role of Spanish-Mexican women in the development of California. She finds that, far from being pawns in a male-dominated society, Californianas of all classes were often active and determined creators of their own destinies, finding ways to choose their mates, to leave unsatisfactory marriages, and to maintain themselves economically. Using a wide range of sources in English and Spanish, Casas unveils a picture of women’s lives in these critical decades of California’s history. She shows how many Spanish-Mexican women negotiated the precarious boundaries of gender and race to choose Euro-American husbands, and what this intermarriage meant to the individuals involved and to the larger multiracial society evolving from California’s rich Hispanic and Indian past. Casas’s discussion ranges from California’s burgeoning economy to the intimacies of private households and ethnically mixed families.  Here we discover the actions of real women of all classes as they shaped their own identities. Married to a Daughter of the Land is a significant and fascinating contribution to the history of women in the American West and to our understanding of the complex role of gender, race, and class in the Borderlands of the Southwest.

How Did You Get to Be Mexican? A White/Brown Man’s Search for Identity

Temple University Press
1999
264 pages
6×9
EAN: 978-1-56639-651-6
ISBN: 1-56639-651-4

Kevin R. Johnson, Dean and Mabie-Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o Studies
University of California, Davis

This compelling account of racial identity takes a close look at the question “Who is a Latino?” and determines where persons of mixed Anglo-Latino heritage fit into the racial dynamics of the United States. The son of a Mexican-American mother and an Anglo father, Kevin Johnson has spent his life in the borderlands between racial identities. In this insightful book, he uses his experiences as a mixed Latino-Anglo to examine issues of diversity, assimilation, race relations, and affirmative action in contemporary United States.

Read the introduction here.

Table of Contents

Preface
1. Introduction
2. A “Latino” Law Student? Law 4 Sale at Harvard Law School
3. My Mother: One Assimilation Story
4. My Father: Planting the Seeds of a Racial Consciousness
5. Growing Up White?
6. College: Beginning to Recognize Racial Complexities
A Family Gallery
7. A Corporate Lawyer: Happily Avoiding the Issue
8. A Latino Law Professor
9. My Family/Mi Familia
10. Lessons for Latino Assimilation
11. What Does It All Mean for Race Relations in the United States?
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Puerto Rican Phenotype: Understanding Its Historical Underpinnings and Psychological Associations

Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences
(2008)
Vol. 30, No. 2
pages 161-180
DOI: 10.1177/0739986307313116

Irene López, Assistant Professor of Psychology
Kenyon College

The following is a historically informed review of Puerto Rican phenotype. Geared toward educating psychologists, this review discusses how various psychological issues associated with phenotype may have arisen as a result of historical legacies and policies associated with race and racial mixing. It discusses how these policies used various markers to demarcate an “authentic” Puerto Rican identity, and how we continue to reference these variables when defining Puerto Rican identity, despite the fact that identity is contextual and fluid. In reviewing the historical underpinnings and contextual nature of phenotype, it is hoped that the reader will gain a greater appreciation of the role of phenotype in the lives of Puerto Ricans and understand how phenotype, and, most importantly, historical trauma can be related to a host of psychological concerns.

Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Third Edition)

Aunt Lute Books
1987
ISBN 1879960125

Gloria Anzaldúa

• Chosen one of the “Best Books of 1987” by Library Journal.
• Selected by Utne Reader as part of its “Alternative Canon” in 1998.
• One of Hungry Mind Review’s “Best 100 Books of the 20th Century”

Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa’s experience as a Chicana, a lesbian, an activist, and a writer, the groundbreaking essays and poems in this volume profoundly challenge how we think about identity. Borderlands/La Frontera remaps understandings of what a “border” is, seeing it not as a simple divide between here and there, us and them, but as a psychic, social, and cultural terrain that we inhabit, and that inhabits all of us.

New to this edition:

Includes an Introduction by Sonia Saldívar-Hull; an interview with Gloria Anzaldúa; and contributions by Norma Alarcón, Julia Alvarez, Paola Bacchetta, Rusty Barcelo, Norma Elia Cantú, Sandra Cisneros, T. Jackie Cuevas, Claire Joysmith, and AnaLouise Keating.

Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self

Oxford University Press
2006
344 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4
ISBN13: 978-0-19-513735-4
ISBN10: 0-19-513735-3

Linda Martín Alcoff, Professor of Philosophy
Hunter College/CUNY Graduate Center

Winner of the 2009 Frantz Fanon Prize

In the heated debates over identity politics, few theorists have looked carefully at the conceptualizations of identity assumed by all sides. Visible Identities fills this gap. Drawing on both philosophical sources as well as theories and empirical studies in the social sciences, Martin Alcoff makes a strong case that identities are not like special interests, nor are they doomed to oppositional politics, nor do they inevitably lead to conformism, essentialism, or reductive approaches to judging others. Identities are historical formations and their political implications are open to interpretation. But identities such as race and gender also have a powerful visual and material aspect that eliminativists and social constructionists often underestimate.

Visible Identities offers a careful analysis of the political and philosophical worries about identity and argues that these worries are neither supported by the empirical data nor grounded in realistic understandings of what identities are. Martin Alcoff develops a more realistic characterization of identity in general through combining phenomenological approaches to embodiment with hermeneutic concepts of the interpretive horizon. Besides addressing the general contours of social identity, Martin Alcoff develops an account of the material infrastructure of gendered identity, compares and contrasts gender identities with racialized ones, and explores the experiential aspects of racial subjectivity for both whites and non-whites. In several chapters she looks specifically at Latino identity as well, including its relationship to concepts of race, the specific forms of anti-Latino racism, and the politics of mestizo or hybrid identity.

Table of Contents

• Part One: Identities Real and Imagined
  • Introduction: Identity and Visibility.
  • 1. The Pathologizing of Identity.
  • 2. The Political Critique.
  • 3. The Philosophical Critique.
  • 4. Real Identities.
• Part Two: Gender Identity and Gender Differences
  • 5. The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory.
  • 6. The Metaphysics of Gender and Sexual Difference.
• Part Three: Racialized Identities and Racist Subjects
  • 7. A Phenomenology of Racial Embodiment.
  • 8. Racism and Visible Race.
  • 9. The Whiteness Question.
• Part Four: Latino/a Particularity
  • 10. Latinos and the Categories of Race.
  • 11. Latinos, Asian Americans, and the Black-White Binary.
  • 12. On Being Mixed.
• Conclusion.
• Notes.
• Bibliography.
• Index.