Migrants and Race

One afternoon in the spring of 1999, I was having a conversation with a friend about the challenges of community organizing in Miami, Florida. ¹ We ended up trading stories about what it was like being a source of racial confusion for many people. She explained that in the course of doing outreach work, she had become used to having people ask her, “Where are you from?” This was a question that I was also accustomed to being asked, and I understood what she meant when she observed, “What they really want to know is, what are you?”