How Latino populations are racialized in the United States?

As a person unfamiliar with racialized Latino population in the United States, the readings, and the discussion that we had in our class this week, were very educational for me. To answer how Latino populations are racialized in the United States I summarize what I learned from the chapter Race, Racialization and Latino Population In the United States by Tomas Almaguer and our class discussions.

The publication of Racial Formation in the United States by Michael Omi and Howard Winant in 1986 significantly transformed the long-standing "black-white" binary in the United States. Latinos account for almost 19% of the U.S. population, so they have a unique position in the racial and ethnic hierarchy of the United States and investigating how they have been racialized over time influences the way we think about race.

Based on the chapter Race, Racialization and Latino Population In United States by Tomas Almaguer, the difficulty in unambiguously racializing the Latino population has a long and complex history in this country starting from the middle of the nineteenth century when the United States seized control of the American Southwest through the U.S.-Mexico War. This chapter explains that after this war, the U.S. changed Mexican racialization several times.

"Clear codification of the racial status of the Mexican population can be seen in the the1850 decennial U.S. census; when the newly conquered Mexican population in the American Southwest was enumerated as "White," as it remained until 1930. That year, they were removed from the white category and placed in a separate racial designation as Mexican.[…] By 1940, however, the Mexican population was once again redefined as part of the "white" population and marked as speaking the "Spanish mother tongue" […] The federal censuses of 1950 and 1960 continued to enumerate Mexicans as "white persons of Spanish surname" (P: 213).

Before 1970 there were four main categories for racial standards: "American Indian or Alaska Native," "Asian or Pacific Islander," "Black," and "White"— and the delineation of two "ethnic" groups— "Hispanic origin" and "not of Hispanic origin." "Hispanic" is used to capture the tremendous internal diversity of the various Latino nationalities in the United States. "Common culture" rooted in the Spanish language, and the Catholic religion were the critical ethnic signifiers that bound these diverse nationalities into one category, which is very different from other racialized groups.

In 1970, These race and ethnic standards were revised. It was the product of intense political criticisms from various quarters, which led to the formalization of five "racial" groups rather than four. In essence, the "Pacific Islander" population was disaggregated from the "Asian American" population and placed in a separate racial category. Between 1970 and 2000, the U.S. Census Bureau increasingly attempted to define and count the diverse ethnic origins of residents with ancestral roots in Spain and Latin America and did so by slowly introducing identity categories in widespread everyday use. In different years they sent questionnaires with different racial census categories asking people about their ethnicity. "Spanish" had long been employed to enumerate persons born in Spain. Finally, in the 2000 census, adding "Latino" to "Spanish/Hispanic" further expanded the country's official understanding of the unity and diversity of these ethnic groups.

Census 2000 offered respondents for the first time the option of selecting more than one racial designation and reworded the two existing "ethnic" categories as "Hispanic or Latino" and "not Hispanic or Latino." Based on the 2010 census, many had difficulty placing themselves in the discrete racial categories used in the federal census, and there are still too many debates about these categories. Moreover, It appears that Latino immigrants are racialized in one particular way in the Spanish colonial context and then racialized under the cultural logic of another racial order when they come to this country.

Almaguer argues, "While this ambiguity in how Latinos racially identify themselves is understandable given that they have straddled two very different racial regimes, they have far less trouble racializing one another. Nowhere is this more apparent than how the two largest Latino populations have increasingly come into conflict in ways traced to how each group racializes the other. In other words, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans have increasingly come to racially define each other through the lens and logic of the Spanish racial regime that previously ensnared them. They apparently rely on this cultural logic after immigrating to the United States."

The fact that people didn't want to talk about how Mexicans and Puerto Ricans treat each other, at the expense of forgetting what is happening in the United States and what is happening at the border, proves how racial projects are complicated. The way that Mexicans and Puerto Ricans racialized each other and how Iranian people racialized Afghan, Turk, and Arab people prove that racism toward other people is not American or Eurocentric issue. As mentioned in class, it's not just white versus; it's like everyone has their own biases toward people from different groups. I interpret that these biases come from a desire to otherize people. Through racial projects, we otherize people because we need to create enough excuses to take power over them.

Resource:

HoSang, Daniel, et al. “‘Race, Racialization, and Latino Populations in the United States” Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2012.