Where in the world is Juan-and what color is he? the geography of Latina/o racial identity in Southern California

American Quarterly

Volumn 65, Issue 2, 2013, Pages 309-341

  Pulido, Laura ^a   Pastor, Manuel ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84880881214     PISSN: 00030678     EISSN: 10806490     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/aq.2013.0020     Document Type: Review

References (127)

1. Ian Haney-Lopez, Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003);
2. George Martinez, "The Legal Construction of Race: Mexican Americans and Whiteness," Harvard Latino Law Review 2 (Fall 1997): 321-47
3. Frances Winddance Twine and Charles Gallagher, "The Future of Whiteness: A Map of the Third Wave," Ethnic and Racial Studies 31 (2008): 4-24.
4. Jorge Duany, "Reconstructing Racial Identity: Ethnicity, Color, and Class among Dominicans in the United States and Puerto Rico," Latin American Perspectives 25 (May 1998): 147-72;
5. Wendy Roth, Race Migrations: Latinos and the Cultural Transformation of Race (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012);
6. Anulkah Thomas, "Black Face, Latin Looks: Racial-Ethnic Identity among Afro-Latinos in the Los Angeles Region," in Latino LA, ed. Enrique Ochoa and Gilda Ochoa (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005), 197-221.
7. Jennifer Lee and Frank Bean, "Reinventing the Color Line: Immigration and America's New Racial/Ethnic Divide," Social Forces 86 (2007): 561-86.
8. For an excellent discussion of how this diversity also allows for the possibility of sanitizing Latinas/os through whiteness, see Arlene Davila, Latino Spin: Public Image and the Whitewashing of Race (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 8.
9. Jessica Vasquez, Mexican Americans Across Generations: Immigrant Families, Racial Identities (New York: New York University Press, 2011);
10. Ruben Rumbaut, "Pigments of Our Imagination: On the Racialization and Racial Identities of 'Hispanics' and 'Latinos,'" in How the U.S. Racializes Latinos: White Hegemony and Its Consequences, ed. José A. Cobas, Jorge Duany, and Joe R. Feagin (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2009), 15-36.
11. See, for example, Daniel Rochmes and G. A. Elmer Griffin, "The Cactus That Must Not Be Mistaken for a Pillow: White Racial Formation among Latinos," Souls 8 (2006): 77-91.
12. For work on Latinas/os generally, see Sonia Tafoya, Shades of Belonging (Washington, DC: Pew Research Hispanic Center, 2004);
13. John Logan, How Race Counts for Hispanic Americans (Albany, NY: Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research, 2003);
14. Clara Rodriguez, Changing Race: Latinos, the Census, and the History of Ethnicity in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 2000);
15. Michael Joseph and Jeffrey Timberlake, "Are Latinos Becoming White? Determinants of Racial Self-Identification in the US," in Racism in Post-Race America: New Theories, New Directions, ed. C. A. Gallagher (Chapel Hill, NC: Social Forces, 2008), 107-22;
16. Tanya Golash-Boza and William Darrity, "Latino Racial Choices: The Effects of Skin Colour and Discrimination on Latinos' and Latinas' Racial Self-Identifications," Ethnic and Racial Studies 31 (2007): 899-934.
17. For work on the Mexican-origin population, see Carlos Blanton, "George I. Sanchez, Ideology, and Whiteness in the Making of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement, 1930-1960," Journal of Southern History 72 (August 2006): 564-604;
18. Laura Gomez, Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race (New York: New York University Press, 2007);
19. Thomas Guglielmo, "Fighting for Caucasian Rights: Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and the Transnational Struggle for Civil Rights in World War II Texas," Journal of American History (March 2006): 1212-37;
20. Ariela Gross, What Blood Won't Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), chap. 8;
21. Neil Foley, "Partly Colored or Other White: Mexican Americans and Their Problems with the Color Line" (paper presented at the Labor and Working Class Historical Association Luncheon at the Organization of American Historians, St. Louis, April 30, 2000);
22. George Martinez, "The Legal Construction of Race: Mexican Americans and Whiteness," Harvard Latino Review, 2 (Fall 1997): 321-347;
23. Edward Telles and Vilma Ortiz, Generations of Exclusion (New York: Sage, 2008), chap. 9;
24. Julie Dowling, "The Lure of Whiteness and the Politics of 'Otherness': Mexican American Racial Identity" (PhD diss., University of Texas, 2004);
25. Carleen Basler, "White Dreams and Red Votes: Mexican Americans and the Lure of Inclusion in the Republican Party," Ethnic and Racial Studies 31 (2008): 123-66;
26. Vasquez, Mexican Americans across Generations;
27. Julie Weise, "Mexican Nationalisms, Southern Racisms: Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the US South, 1908-1939," American Quarterly 60 (2008): 749-77;
28. Martha Menchaca, Recovering History, Constructing Race (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001).
29. Menchaca, "Chicano Indianism: A Historical Account of Racial Repression in the United States," American Ethnologist 20 (August 1993): 583-603.
30. See also Maria Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, "How Many Mexicans [Is] a Horse Worth?": The League of United Latin American Citizens, Desegregation Cases, and Chicano Historiography," Southern Atlantic Quarterly 107 (Fall 2008): 809-31.
31. See www.pewhispanic.org/2011/05/26/country-of-origin-profiles/ (accessed March 14, 2012).
32. Mestizaje looms large in the Mexican racial formation. The Mexican state embraced mestizaje, which further marginalized both indigenous people and Afro-Mexicans. See Tanya Hernandez, Racial Subordination in Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
33. While Mexico cloaked itself in mestizaje, Americans found Mexicans' mixed-race status reprehensible and the needed ideological justification for their subordination and US conquest (John Michael Rivera, The Emergence of Mexican America: Recovering Stories of Mexican Peoplehood in US Culture [New York: New York University Press, 2006]).
34. However, as Tomás Almaguer has shown, mestizaje has also protected Mexican Americans from some of the most egregious elements of white supremacy (Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008]). Others have suggested that Mexican immigrants bring ideas of mestizaje, as part of the Mexican racial formation, with them to the United States.
35. Haney-Lopez, Racism on Trial.
36. Foley, "Partly Colored or Other White".
37. Brian Behnken, Fighting Their Own Battles: Mexican Americans, African Americans, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Texas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
38. Saldaña-Portillo, "How Many Mexicans [Is] a Horse Worth?".
39. Steve Wilson, "Brown over 'Other White': Mexican Americans' Legal Arguments and Litigation Strategy in School Desegregation Lawsuits," Law and History Review 21 (2003): 145-94.
40. Gross, What Blood Won't Tell;.
41. Guglielmo, "Fighting for Caucasian Rights."
42. Martinez, "Legal Construction of Race".
43. Menchaca, Recovering History.
44. Weise, "Mexican Nationalisms, Southern Racisms."
45. Laura Pulido, "Checkered Choices, Political Assertions: The Unarticulated Racial Identity of the Asociación Nacionál México-Americana," in Critical Ethnic Studies: An Anthology, ed. Jodi Kim, David Hernandez, Dylan Rodríguez, Andrea Smith, Shana Redmond, Sarita See, and Dean Spade. Forthcoming.
46. Jonathan Warren and Frances Winddance Twine, "White Americans, the New Minority? Non-Blacks and the Ever-Expanding Boundaries of Whiteness," Journal of Black Studies 28 (1997): 200-218;
47. George Yancy, Who Is White? (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003);
48. Mia Tuan, Forever Foreigners or Honorary Whites? (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998).
49. Lee and Bean, "Reinventing the Color Line."
50. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, "'From Bi-racial to Tri-racial': Towards a New System of Racial Stratification in the USA," Ethnic and Racial Studies 27 (2004): 931-50;
51. see also Christine O'Brien, The Racial Middle (New York: New York University Press, 2008).
52. See Richard Wright, Serin Houston, Mark Ellis, Steven Holloway, and Margaret Hudson, "Crossing Racial Lines: Geographies of Mixed-Race Partnering and Multiraciality in the United States," Progress in Human Geography 27 (2003): 457-74;
53. Zoltan Hajnal and Mark Baldassare, Finding Common Ground: Racial and Ethnic Attitudes in California (San Francisco: Public Policy Institute of California, 2001).
54. Geoffrey Fox, Hispanic Nation: Culture, Politics, and the Constructing of Identity (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997).
55. See Campbell J. Gibson and Emily Lennon, "Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-Born Population of the United States: 1850-1990," Population Division Working Paper No. 29, February 1999, US Bureau of the Census, Washington, DC. Experts believe that there was at least a 5 percent undercount that year, even after the Census Bureau tried to compensate for the low response to the Hispanic-origin question by including individuals with Spanish surnames, who indicated that Spanish was spoken in their household or who indicated birth or parentage in a Latin American country or Spain.
56. See also Jeffrey Passel, Census History: Counting Hispanics (Washington, DC: Pew Research Hispanic Center, 2010).
57. Suzanne Oboler, Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives: Identity and the Politics of (Re)Presentation in the United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
58. Paul Taylor, Mark Hugo Lopez, Jessica Hamar Martínez, and Gabriel Velasquez, When Labels Don't Fit: Hispanics and Their Views of Identity (Washington, DC: Pew Research Hispanic Center, 2012).
59. Steven Hitlin, J. Scott Brown, and Glen H. Elder Jr., "Measuring Latinos: Racial vs. Ethnic Classification and Self-Understandings," Social Forces 86 (2007): 587-611.
60. Rodriguez, Changing Race.
61. Hitlin, Brown, and Elder, "Measuring Latinos."
62. Further evidence that the 2000 census did not actually signal a movement toward whiteness can be seen in a recent national study that found only 36 percent of US Latinas/os identified as white, while 61 percent of the sample chose nonwhite identities (Taylor et al., "When Labels Don't Fit," 9).
63. There are also important issues of causality. For example, Tafoya found that white Latinas/os were more integrated and economically successful than SOR Latinas/os - but do they identify as white because they experience less discrimination, or does their integration lead them to identify as white? Similarly, there are wage penalties for darker Latinas/os as compared with their lighter-skinned counterparts - and darker-skinned Latinas/os who have experienced discrimination are probably more likely to not identify as white not simply because of phenotype but because of experience. In short, cause and effect are challenging to tease out, meaning that statistical assertions must be tempered by the awareness of theoretical complexity. On wage penalties, see Margaret Hunter, "If You're Light You're Alright: Light Skin Color as Social Capital for Women of Color," Gender and Society 16 (2002): 175-93;
64. Golash-Boza and Darrity, "Latino Racial Choices".
65. Reanne Frank, Ilana Redstone Akresh, and Bo Lu, "Latino Immigrants and the US Racial Order: How and Where Do They Fit In?," American Sociological Review 75 (2010): 378-401.
66. Tafoya, "Shades of Belonging," 12.
67. Michael and Timberlake, "Are Latinos Becoming White?," 115.
68. Dowling, "Lure of Whiteness," chap. 3.
69. Telles and Ortiz, Generations of Exclusion, chap. 9.
70. Logan, "How Race Counts," 4.
71. Rumbaut, "Pigments of Our Imagination," 17.
72. Frank, Redstone Akresh and Lu, "Latino Immigrants and the U.S. Racial Order.".
73. Golash-Boza, "Dropping the Hyphen-Becoming Latino(a)-American through Racialized Assimilation," Social Forces 85 (2006): 33.
74. Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines.
75. Telles and Ortiz, Generations of Exclusion, 93.
76. Douglas Massey, "Ethnic Residential Segregation: A Theoretical Synthesis and Empirical Review," Sociology and Social Research 69 (1985): 315-50.
77. Michael Katz, Mathew Creighton, Daniel Amsterdam, and Merlin Chowkwanyun, "Immigration and the New Metropolitan Geography," Journal of Urban Affairs 32 (2010): 523-47;
78. Myron Orfield, American Metropolitics: The New Suburban Reality (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2002).
79. Brian A. Mikelbank, "A Typology of U.S. Suburban Places," Housing Policy Debate 15 (2004): 935-64;
80. Bernadette Hanlon, Thomas Vicini, and John Rennie Short, "The New Metropolitan Reality in the U.S.: Rethinking the Traditional Model," Urban Studies 43 (November 2006): 2129-43;
81. Bernadette Hanlon, "A Typology of Inner-Ring Suburbs: Class, Race, and Ethnicity in U.S. Suburbia," City and Community 8 (Fall 2009): 221-46;
82. Wei Li, "Anatomy of a New Ethnic Settlement: The Chinese Ethnoburb in Los Angeles," Urban Studies 35 (1998): 479-501.
83. Jeffrey M. Timberlake, Aaron J. Howell, and Amanda J. Staight, "Trends in the Suburbanization of Racial/Ethnic Groups in U.S. Metropolitan Areas, 1970-2000," Urban Affairs Review 47 (2011): 218-55.
84. Manuel Pastor, "¿Quién Es Más Urbanista? Latinos and. Smart Growth,'" in Growing Smarter: Achieving Livable Communities, Environmental Justice, and Regional Equity, ed. R. Bullard (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 73-103.
85. Roberto Suro and Audrey Singer, Latino Growth in Metropolitan America: Changing Patterns, New Locations (Washington, DC: Pew Research Hispanic Center, 2002).
86. On early Mexican Los Angeles, see Ricardo Romo, East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983), chap. 2;
87. Antonio Rios-Bustamante and Pedro Castillo, An Illustrated History of Mexican Los Angeles, 1781-1985
88. Antonio Rios-Bustamante, "Nineteenth Century Mexican Californians a Conquered Race: From Landowners to Laborers and 'Tenants at Will,'" in Regions of La Raza: Changing Interpretations of Mexican American Regional History and Culture, ed. A. Rios-Bustamante (Encino, CA: Floricanto, 1993), 237-69.
89. Douglas Monroy, Thrown among Strangers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
90. Leonard Pitt, The Decline of the Californios (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966).
91. Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Los Angeles Barrio, 1850-1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).
92. See, for example, Matt Garcia, A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900-1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
93. See Albert Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).
94. see also William Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), chap. 4.
95. Douglas Monroy, Rebirth: Mexican Los Angeles from the Great Migration to the Great Depression (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999);
96. see also George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), chap. 3.
97. Rios-Bustamante and Castillo, Illustrated History, 132.
98. Francisco Balderrama and Raymond Rodriguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006).
99. On the San Fernando Valley, see Laura Barraclough, Making the San Fernando Valley: Rural Landscapes, Urban Development, and White Privilege (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011).
100. See Jerry Gonzalez, "A Place in the Sun: Mexican Americans, Race, and the Suburbanization of Los Angeles, 1940-1980" (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 2009).
101. Felker-Kantor, "Fighting the Segregation Amendment."
102. Early data on Pico Rivera comes from Gonzalez, "Place in the Sun," 5.
103. Gonzalez, "Mexican American Politics in Suburban Los Angeles," 9.
104. George Ramos, "Latino Middle Class Growing in Suburbia," Los Angeles Times, November 30, 1997.
105. See also Wendy Cheng, "The Changs Next Door to the Diazes: Suburban Racial Formation in Los Angeles's San Gabriel Valley," Journal of Urban History 39 (2013): 15-35.
106. On the restructuring of southeast LA, see James Curtis, "Barrio Space and Place in Southeast Los Angeles, California," in Hispanic Spaces, Latino Places, ed. D. Arreola (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 125-41.
107. On south LA,see Melvin Oliver, James Johnson, and Walter Farrell, "Anatomy of a Rebellion: A Political-Economic Analysis," in Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising, ed. R. Gooding-Williams (New York: Routledge, 1993), 117-41.
108. On white outmigration,see W. Frey and K. Liaw, "Immigrant Concentration and Domestic Migrant Dispersal: Is Movement to Nonmetropolitan Areas 'White Flight'?," Professional Geographer 50 (1998): 215-32.
109. James Allen and Eugene Turner, The Ethnic Quilt: Population Diversity in Southern California (Northridge: Center for Geographical Studies, California State University Northridge, 1997), chap. 3.
110. Amon Emeka and Jody Agius Vallejo, "Non-Hispanics with Latin American Ancestry: Assimilation, Race, and Identity among Latin American Descendants in the US," Social Science Research 40 (2011): 1547-63.
111. Emeka and Agius Vallejo, "Non-Hispanics with Latin American Ancestry." The results are also generated with population weights so that they better reflect the population at hand; to do this, we generate weights for just the observations that are in the regressions themselves, appropriately adjusted for each sample.
112. On the impact of the Cold War on Mexican American political activism in Los Angeles, see Shana Bernstein, Bridges of Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), chaps. 4, 6.
113. This follows Golash-Boza's argument in "Dropping the Hyphen.".
114. See Emeka and Agius Vallejo, "Non-Hispanics with Latin American Ancestry.".
115. On the usage, politics, and racialization of Spanish, see Rosaura Sanchez, "Mapping the Spanish Language along a Multiethnic and Multilingual Border," in Aztlan 21 (1992-96): 49-104;
116. Lisa Garcia Bedolla, Fluid Borders: Latino Power, Identity, and Politics in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), chap. 3;
117. see also Otto Santa Ana, Brown Tide Rising: Metaphors of Latinos in Contemporary American Public Discourse (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), esp. chap. 6.
118. Manuel Pastor, "Looking for Regionalism in All the Wrong Places: Demography, Geography, and Community in Los Angeles County," Urban Affairs Review 36 (July 2001): 747-82.
119. This is an interesting question especially in light of George Lipsitz's concept of "moral geographies of differentiated space," in which he argues that people of color in such residential spaces respond differently than whites ("The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race: Theorizing the Hidden Architecture of Landscape," Landscape Journal 26 [2007]: 10-23;
120. see also Cheng, "Changs Next Door to the Diazes".
121. For an interesting example of identity politics in nonwhite suburbs, see Wendy Cheng, "'Diversity' on Main Street? Branding Race and Place in the New "Majority-Minority' Suburbs," Identities 17 (2010): 458-86.
122. Frances Winddance Twine, "Brown Skinned White Girls: Class, Culture, and the Construction of White Identity in Suburban Communities," Gender, Place, and Culture 3 (1996): 205-24.
123. Jody Agius Vallejo, Barrios to Burbs: The Making of the Mexican-American Middle Class (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012).
124. Deirdre Pfeiffer and Emily Tumpson Molina, "The Trajectory of REO's in Southern California Latino Neighborhoods: An Uneven Geography of Recovery," Housing Policy Debate (2012): 1-29.
125. An exception to their general finding was between African Americans and Latinas/os in South Los Angeles. See Eric Oliver and Janelle Wong, "Intergroup Prejudice in Multiethnic Settings," American Journal of Political Science 47 (2003): 567-82.
126. Manuel Pastor, "Common Ground at Ground Zero? The New Economy and the New Organizing in Los Angeles," Antipode 33 (2001): 260-89;
127. see also Manuel Pastor and Enrico Marcelli, "Somewhere over the Rainbow? African Americans, Unauthorized Mexican Immigration, and Coalition Building," Review of Black Political Economy 31 (2003): 125-255.