ABSTRACT
What role, if any, does race play in Latino communities? How do the constraints of the American system of racial classification affect this rapidly growing ethnic immigrant population? Recognizing the pervasiveness of racialization and persistent power of race as a dynamic social force, this book examines how Latinos construct their identities in light of the racial categorizations prevalent in America and how those identities shape political behavior. Although it is true that racial categories and labels imposed by the state do not correspond to the forms of self identification that most Latinos hold, Latinos’ lived experiences are framed by the categories and labels imposed by the government and by others in society. When forced to self-identify within this framework, most Latinos self-identify as other race. But contrary to the belief that this category is simply a residual category (e.g. Rodriguez 2000), we see here that this label has meaning. For some this choice serves as a collective panethnic identity, whereas for others it is a racialized panethnic identification. Whereas the first choice signals a willingness to transcend traditional national origin boundaries to forge a collective and distinct group identification yet denotes a degree of racial ambiguity, the second signals the adoption of an affirmative non-White identity that acknowledges and challenges the White-Black paradigm. Thus, Latinos’ understanding of race and the process of racialization in the U.S. are working concurrently to produce new racial categorizations (e.g. Golash-Boza and Darity 2008).
