"Latinos" are the largest group among Americans of color. At 59 million, they constitute nearly a fifth of the US population. Their number has alarmed many in government, other mainstream institutions, and the nativist right who fear the white-majority US they have known is disappearing. During the 2016 US election and after, Donald Trump has played on these fears, embracing xenophobic messages vilifying many Latin American immigrants as rapists, drug smugglers, or "gang bangers." Many share such nativist desires to build enhanced border walls and create immigration restrictions to keep Latinos of various backgrounds out. Many whites’ racist framing has also cast native-born Latinos, their language, and culture in an unfavorable light.
Trump and his followers’ attacks provide a peek at the complex phenomenon of the racialization of US Latinos. This volume explores an array of racialization’s manifestations, including white mob violence, profiling by law enforcement, political disenfranchisement, whitewashed reinterpretations of Latino history and culture, and depictions of "good Latinos" as racially subservient. But subservience has never marked the Latino community, and this book includes pointed discussions of Latino resistance to racism. Additionally, the book’s scope goes beyond the United States, revealing how Latinos are racialized in yet other societies.
Table of Contents:
List of Contributors. Acknowledgments. Introduction. Part I Racial Oppression: Historical and Contemporary Patterns. 1. Linchamientos: Mob Violence against Persons of Mexican Descent in the United States. 2. All Means at Its Disposal to Limit Latino Political Power: The White Supremacy Political Agenda at the Beginning of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. 3. How a Showboat Sheriff Institutionalized Racially Profiling Latinos in Arizona. 4. "Pro-Latino" Racial Framing: How White Employers Justify their Exploitation of Latino Laborers. Part II Hemispheric and Global Racialization. 5. The Racialization of Dominicans in the United States and Switzerland. 6. Racial Nationalisms in the US Territory of Puerto Rico. Part III Surviving and Countering Racial Oppression. 7. What I Want to Pass onto the Children: How Latinos Talk about Race and Culture. 8. A Guiding Text for Latino Racial Identity Research and Theory. 9. Racialization and Strategies of Resistance among Undocumented Latino Young Adults in the United States.10. White Supremacy, Racial Epistemologies, and the Creation of the Tejano Monument in Austin, Texas. 11. The Latino Future in the US: A Latina Political Scientist's Perspective on the Importance of Descriptive Representation
About the Author :
José A. Cobas is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Arizona State University. His recent publications include (with Jorge Duany and Joe R. Feagin) How the United States Racializes Latinos: White Hegemony and Its Consequences (Routledge/Paradigm, 2009), and (with Joe Feagin) Latinos Facing Racism: Discrimination, Resistance and Endurance (Routledge/Paradigm, 2014).
Joe R. Feagin is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Texas A&M University. Among his books are The White Racial Frame (Routledge, 2013) and (with J. Cobas) Latinos Facing Racism (Routledge/Paradigm, 2014). He is the recipient of the American Association for Affirmative Action’s Fletcher Lifetime Achievement Award, the American Sociological Association’s W. E. B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award, and the American Sociological Association’s Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award. He was the 1999-2000 president of the American Sociological Association.
Daniel J. Delgado is Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University at San Antonio. He is writing a book on the everyday racial politics of middle-class Mexican ancestry people. He has published in edited volumes and in the Journal of Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, and in the Journal of Critical Sociology.
Maria Chávez is Associate Professor and Chair of the Political Science department at Pacific Lutheran University. She is author of Everyday Injustice: Latino Professionals and Racism (2011). Her new book Latino Professional Success in America: Public Policies, People, and Perseverance is scheduled for publication (Routledge, 2019).
Review :
Latino Peoples in the New America is a "must-read" contribution for many fields concerned with understanding past and present American racialization of Latinos through conquest, exploitation, and repression. Central to the analyses of several of the chapters is the White Racial Frame that relegates Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Tejanos, Dominicans, and others of Latin American descent to the lower sectors of society. As the volume illustrates, Latino struggles for inclusion, equality, and survival continue against social actions that subordinate Latino populations, especially state policies that create insecurity and fear among many Latino immigrant families, and hurl millions of Latinos out of the country.
Nestor Rodriguez, The University of Texas at Austin
Latino Peoples in the New America is a timely, incisive, and illuminating collection of essays from multiple disciplinary perspectives, focusing on various time periods and geographic locations. This edited volume dwells upon the persistent disadvantages affecting Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and other people of Latin American origin in the United States, due to racial profiling, violence, stereotyping, discrimination, labor exploitation, and political disenfranchisement. The book’s contributors, who include well-known authors as well as younger scholars, extensively document ways in which the dominant ideology of white supremacy continues to subordinate Latinos and other racialized minorities in the United States.
Jorge Duany, Florida International University
The tens of millions of "Latinos" in the US today form at once a new and an old population, made up of diverse newcomers and old timers with deeper roots in this soil than any other except for the indigenous peoples of the continent. This valuable and timely volume looks to their past, present, and future, with penetrating and multi-faceted essays that hone in on their history of racialization, as well as on their persistent resilience and resistance at a time of newly unleashed and untrammelled bigotry.
Rubén G. Rumbaut, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, University of California, Irvine
This edited volume captures a broad swath of experiences Hispanics and selected national-origin groups in the United States face as racialized peoples. Rich in empirical evidence and interpretative accounts from highly-regarded scholars, Latino Peoples in the New America provides unique substantive contributions to the body of work on race and ethnicity in the United States. Wide ranging in its scope of analysis, alternatively historical and contemporary, this book will provide readers with unequivocal accounts pertinent for the day and age we live in. It could not be more timely.
Carlos Vargas-Ramos, Hunter College
