Inventing Latinos : a new story of American racism

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Title:

Inventing Latinos : a new story of American racism

Author:

Gómez, Laura E., 1964- author.

ISBN:

9781595589170

Physical Description:

255 pages ; 23 cm.

Contents:

We Are Here Because You Were There -- Idealized Mestizaje and Anti-Black and Anti-Indian Racism -- The Elusive Quest for Whiteness -- To Count, We Must Be Counted.

Subject Term:

Hispanic Americans -- Race identity.

Hispanic Americans -- Government policy.

Hispanic Americans -- Social conditions.

Racism -- United States -- History.

Geographic Term:

Latin America -- Emigration and immigration -- History.

United States -- Race relations -- History.

Summary:

In an unprecedented demographic shift, Latinos will comprise a third of the American population in just a matter of decades. While their influence shapes everything from electoral politics to popular culture, many Americans still struggle with two basic questions: Who are Latinos, and where do they fit in America's racial order? Laura E. Gómez, a leading expert on race in America, argues that it is only recently that Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, Central Americans, and others are seeing themselves (and are being seen by others) under the banner of a cohesive racial identity. And the catalyst for this emergent identity, she argues, has been the ferocity of anti-Latino racism. In a bold effort to reframe our often-confused discussions over the Latinx generation, Gómez argues that everything from Trump's toxic rhetoric and anti-immigrant laws like Arizona's SB1070 to DACA and sanctuary cities have indelibly changed the way race functions in this country. Part history, part guide for the future, Inventing Latinos argues that all Americans must grapple with Latinos' dynamic identity--an identity that is impacting everything we think we know about race in America. --

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Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake)	305.868073 GOM	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Park Grove Library (Cottage Grove)	305.868073 GOM	Searching... Unknown
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury)	305.868073 GOM	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

Named One of the Best Books of the Year by NPR

An NPR Best Book of the Year, exploring the impact of Latinos' new collective racial identity on the way Americans understand race, with a new afterword by the author

Who are Latinos and where do they fit in America's racial order? In this "timely and important examination of Latinx identity" (Ms.), Laura E. Gómez, a leading critical race scholar, argues that it is only recently that Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, Central Americans, and others are seeing themselves (and being seen by others) under the banner of a cohesive racial identity. And the catalyst for this emergent identity, she argues, has been the ferocity of anti-Latino racism.

In what Booklist calls "an incisive study of history, complex interrogation of racial construction, and sophisticated legal argument," Gómez "packs a knockout punch" (Publishers Weekly), illuminating for readers the fascinating race-making, unmaking, and re-making processes that Latinos have undergone over time, indelibly changing the way race functions in this country.

Building on the "insightful and well-researched" (Kirkus Reviews) material of the original, the paperback features a new afterword in which the author analyzes results of the 2020 Census, providing brilliant, timely insight about how Latinos have come to self-identify.

Author Notes

Laura E. Gómez is the Rachel F. Moran Endowed Chair in Law at UCLA and also a professor in the departments of sociology and Chicana/Chicano & Central American studies. She is a member of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Latino scholarly advisory committee and the author of Manifest Destinies, Mapping "Race," and Misconceiving Mothers, as well as Inventing Latinos (The New Press). She lives in Los Angeles.

Reviews (4)

Publisher's Weekly Review

In this lucid and economical chronicle, UCLA law professor Gómez (Manifest Destinies) explores "how and why Latinos became cognizable as a racial group" in the U.S. She traces the roots of Latino identity to Spanish colonization of the New World, and the importation of enslaved Africans to make up for labor shortages caused by the decimation of indigenous populations. The legacy of American imperialism in Mexico, Central America, and the Spanish Caribbean in the 19th and 20th centuries, she contends, means that migrants from those regions deserve a path to U.S. citizenship. She examines how geographical separation (Cubans in Florida, Mexican Americans in the Southwest, Puerto Ricans in the Northeast) and cultural differences forestalled the emergence of a Latino civil rights movement until the 1970s, and notes the "seismic reverberations" on American politics and popular culture of counting Latinos in every U.S. census since 1980. Noting projections that Latinos will make up 30% of the population by 2060, Gómez celebrates the rise of political figures including Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, and hopes that Donald Trump's anti-immigration policies and rhetoric will "galvaniz Latino consciousness." Though Gómez's prose tends toward the academic, she exposes the racism that underlies representations of Latinos as "perpetual foreigners" in the U.S. with precision. This incisive survey of Latino history packs a knockout punch. (Aug.)

Kirkus Review

A vigorous argument that Latinx people from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean exist as "racially subordinated" groups in a "multi-race hierarchy in which Whites continue to be dominant." Gómez begins by examining the exploitative American colonialist projects in Central America and the Caribbean that resulted in large migrations of people across southern U.S. borders. She then explores the concept of "mestizaje," "the social and sexual mixing of Indigenous peoples, Africans and Spaniards" that helped shape attitudes among Latino people regarding their identities. In the 1940s, for example, the light-skinned Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo played up the Indian/Spanish (mostly white) ancestry of Dominicans to distinguish them from and elevate them above their mostly Afro-European (mostly black) Haitian neighbors. Such efforts to privilege whiteness laid the foundation for a Latinx acceptance of racism that followed them into the U.S. and, as Gómez shows later on, forced many multiracial Latinx people to seek "protection" from American racism by identifying as white wherever possible. The 1980 census marked the first time that multiethnic/racial/cultural Latinx peoples were grouped together under one identity. The author argues that attempts to categorize Latinos ethnically rather than racially is actually part of a dominant culture strategy to keep different Latinx groups apart from each other and apart from blacks and enlist Latinos in efforts to police the "the White-over-Black color line." In this thoughtfully argued study, which draws from historical and sociological sources, Gómez provides much-needed insight into the true complexity of Latinx identity while revealing the ways in which the dominant culture continues to mask the many racist currents within American society. An insightful and well-researched book. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

When it comes to questions of race and ethnicity for peoples variously called Hispanic, Latino, Latin@, and Latinx, generations of demographers, politicians, cultural critics, and laypeople have espoused a wide array of names and labels. In this rigorously academic treatment of the topic, lawyer-sociologist Gómez unpacks the history of how this ethnicity intersects with nationality, language, and culture to manifest as a distinct racial identity. To do so requires confronting the brutal legacies of Spanish colonization and American imperialism and the resulting creation of a mestizaje population, the social and genealogical mixing of indigenous, African, and Spanish peoples. Gómez employs this fascinating, problematic history to present a compelling case for granting citizenship to all Latino immigrants and for legally authorizing the unqualified entrance into the U.S. of future immigrants. At once incisive study of history, complex interrogation of racial construction, and sophisticated legal argument, this title proves especially timely, what with the controversial 2020 census on its way, and expands brilliantly on the work Gómez began in Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race (2007).

Library Journal Review

"Race isn't real, but racism is." So affirms Gómez (law, Univ. of California Los Angeles; Manifest Destinies) in this bold, incisive interrogation of "the how and why of Latinx identity becoming a distinctive racial identity" from 1848 to 2020. Gómez documents how U.S. violence against Latin America led to today's large Latino/a population. The U.S. annexed half of Mexico in the 1840s, turned Puerto Rico into a glorified colony, quashed Latin American reform movements, and ruthlessly exploited the region for cheap labor and natural resources. She also unpacks Mexico's and the Dominican Republic's lionization of mestizaje (racial mingling), which tended to erase Black and Indigenous identities. Gómez then turns to the U.S. By "strategically claiming whiteness as a shield against racism," Latinos enacted "complicity in enforcing White-over-Black racial logic." Formally white but treated as a racially subordinate group based on phenotype and language, Latinos suffered segregation, disenfranchisement, poverty, and violence--six hundred Mexican Americans died by lynching between 1848 and 1928. VERDICT While not all Latinos agree with Gómez's call for censuses to treat "Latino" as a race and not an ethnicity, she delivers a rigorous and provocative study of the liminal zone Latino/as inhabit in America's racial continuum. Required reading.--Michael Rodriguez, Univ. of Connecticut, Storrs

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Summary

Author Notes

Reviews (4)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Kirkus Review

Booklist Review

Library Journal Review

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