Latinos
Latinos
The rapid growth of the Latino population was one of the key features of the American landscape in the last part of the twentieth century. All population projections show that the Hispanic population will continue to grow rapidly. Latinos do not fit easily into the racial framework as it is socially constructed in most of the United States, especially outside the Southwest and California. Most of the country has a bipolar racial structure—black and white. Secondarily, the bipolar structure is white and nonwhite (the latter including Asian, Native American, and African American, in that order from highest to lowest status). The construction of race differs between the United States and Latin America in terms of fluidity, degrees and social recognition of race mixture, and the mitigation of racial discrimination by social class. Many Latinos are mestizos—the result of the mixture of European colonizers and the indigenous population. Phenotypically, their appearance ranges from light “white” skin with European hair types and facial features to very dark skin with indigenous characteristics. Many Latinos have African ancestors and a few have immediate Asian ancestors. Many Latinos can phenotypically be distinguished from Anglos (white non-Latinos) on the basis of their physical appearance, as well as other identity markers.
THE RACIALIZATION OF LATINOS
Michael Omi and Howard Winant define racial formation as “the process by which social, economic and political forces determine the content and importance of racial categories, and by which they are in turn shaped by racial meanings” (1994, pp. 61–62). “The meaning of race is defined and contested throughout society… . In the process, racial categories are themselves formed, transformed, destroyed and re-formed.” Importantly, race is a social and historical construct. The term racialization describes “the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice or group” (1994, pp. 64–65). This process describes the racial situation of Latino immigrants in new receiving areas. Even though they exhibit a range of appearances, birthplaces, and legal statuses, through the process of racialization they are lumped together as “Mexicans’—a subordinate, nonwhite group who, because of their frequently presumed illegal status, have been denied claims to the rights and privileges that Anglos take for granted. The label Mexican appropriately applies to Mexican citizens, and the fact that many Latinos have had this label applied to them even if they were U.S. citizens or the U.S.-born children of U.S.-born parents confirms their racialization. The meanings attached to their distinguishing characteristics have been key in determining where they lived, what work they could do, their privileges as citizens, and the educational opportunities available to their children.
DISCRIMINATION
Latino civil rights have faced severe restrictions since the mid-nineteenth century. Observers of that period found that the Mexican-origin residents of Texas were subject to prejudice and contempt. This ignominious beginning of restricted Latino civil rights in the United States was the foundation for other gross civil rights violations in the twentieth century, such as blocked access to the ballot box, de jure segregation into inferior schools, residential segregation, and widespread employment discrimination.
Such violations of civil rights are not only part of Latino history. There are several instances of late-twentieth-and early-twenty-first-century social science research that provide very strong evidence of present-day discrimination against Latinos in many areas. For example, researchers have found that among defendants, sentences of Hispanics resemble those of blacks and tend to be harsher than the sentences of whites (Demuth and Steffensmeier 2004; HRW 1997). A number of matched-pair “audits” where Anglos and Latinos with substantively identical credentials apply for jobs, housing, or mortgage loans convincingly show a high degree of discrimination against Latinos (Bendick et al. 1992; Cross et al. 1990).
Latinos are far from attaining equal access to higher education. Since the early 1970s, the Latino proportion of the U.S. college-aged population—those between eighteen and twenty-four years old—has more than doubled. However, the proportion of Latinos among all B.A. degree recipients has increased at a much lower rate. Jorge Chapa and Belinda De La Rosa found, for example, that in 2002, 43 percent of all Latino adults had less than a high school education, compared with 16 percent of all adults. Similarly, 8 percent of Latino adults had a bachelor’s degree and 3 percent had an advanced degree, compared to 18 percent of the total population with a bachelor’s and 9 percent with advanced degrees (Chapa and De La Rosa 2004). Similarly, the percentage of Latino high school graduates ever enrolled in college has decreased since the mid-1970s. In 1975 the proportion of Latino high school graduates attending college was within 2 percent of that for the total U.S. population. Since that time, the Latino proportion has decreased so that among high school graduates, 15 percent fewer Latinos went to college. At each successive step or level, the higher education pipeline is increasingly leaky, and it is losing and leaving out larger numbers and proportions of the rapidly growing Latino population. In spite of increased opportunities that may have resulted from earlier lawsuits to increase Latino access to public education, like the Edgewood and League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) suits, the low levels of Hispanic parental educational attainment, high poverty levels, and a number of other demographic characteristics all work to create severe educational barriers. The low levels of attainment and high school completion are not merely artifacts of high levels of immigration. U.S.-born Latinos have much lower educational levels than non-Latinos. This is true even when different generations among the U.S.-born are distinguished and analyzed separately. While de jure segregation of Latinos may have been eliminated, de facto segregation in public education has continued to grow. In many states, Latinos are the most segregated group.
HISPANIC/LATINO IDENTIFIERS
The U.S. Census concept of Hispanic ethnicity and the various identifiers by which the conceptualization was made concrete have changed many times since the first crude effort of the 1930 Census to conceptualize and identify Hispanics who were not immigrants or the children of immigrants. These changes reflect the substantial shifts in the composition of this population that occurred over the course of the twentieth century. They also reflect the increase in Latino population size and in the Census Bureau’s and the nation’s awareness of this group. During the early part of the twentieth century, almost all of the population now identified as Hispanic were people of Mexican origin who were largely concentrated in a few southwestern states. In contrast, the 2000 Census reports data on more than twenty categories of national origin groups of Hispanics who are to be found in increasingly large numbers in all fifty states.
Conflating Immigrants, Race and National Origin. The U.S. Census has counted by race since its inception and has kept track of immigrants since 1850, and their children from 1880 to 1970, by the use of nativity and parentage questions. Censuses from 1910 through 1970, excluding 1950, determined the language spoken by respondents at home as a child, also known as their mother tongue. The mother tongue questions were typically reported only for immigrants or the children of immigrants. Thus the enduring Census concerns with race and immigration excluded many U.S.-born Hispanics from enumeration. The first significant population of Hispanics in the United States was found among the residents of Texas when it became a state in 1845. The lands annexed in 1848 as a result of the Mexican War added substantially to the total Hispanic population. This population grew again when many Mexicans came to the United States as refugees from the Mexican Revolution (1910).
The current Census concept of race (black or white) has not worked well. Motivated by generally xenophobic concerns, the 1930 Census attempted to enumerate Hispanics by using the concept of a Mexican race. There were many serious problems with this approach. Many Hispanics were U.S. citizens and the U.S.-born children of U.S.-born parents. The Mexican identifier appropriately applies to citizens of Mexico. Additionally, many Hispanics did not want to be identified as members of a socially subordinate group commonly referred to as Mexicans, regardless of their nativity or how many generations their ancestors had resided in the United States. The preferred and polite term used as an alternative at the time was Latin.
For example, the name of the organization known as LULAC, the League of Latin American Citizens (founded in Texas in 1929), is an example of this preference. The name also emphasizes the U.S. citizenship of many Hispanics. One of the clear indications of the inadequacy of the Mexican race approach is that many people were identified as being of Mexican birth or parentage, but not of Mexican race. This highlights another problem, that this identifier depended on the judgment of the enumerator, which apparently was neither consistent nor reliable. Finally, and perhaps most important, being racially designated as Mexican excluded the possibility of being classified as white. At the time, many rights and privileges, including the right to become a U.S. citizen, were explicitly available to whites only. Because of these problems and in response to protest and litigation, the Census Bureau dropped the use of the Mexican race identifier after 1930. This experience also set the precedent for the current practice of separating race and Hispanic ethnicity into two items on the census questionnaire.
Standardizing Subjective Self-Identification as Spanish/Hispanic Origin. The 1970 Census long-form questionnaire, administered to five percent of the population, asked, “Is this person of Spanish/Hispanic origin?” The possible responses were “Mexican,” “Puerto Rican,” “Cuban,” “Central or South American,” “Other Spanish,” and, “No, none of these.” Extensive analysis of several Hispanic identifiers used in 1970 showed that this identity question produced the most consistent responses and distinguished between Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and other major Latino populations as well as included Latino respondents who were neither foreign born nor of foreign parentage. The demographic advantages of this question coincide with political and legal considerations. In 1976, Congress passed Public Law 94–311, known as the Roybal Resolution, requiring the use of a self-identified Hispanic question on federal censuses and surveys. The use of such a question was further promulgated in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Directive 15, first released in 1977. However, it is worth noting that Directive 15 permits the use of a combined race and Spanish origin question. The data collected from a combined question are significantly different from data collected using separate race and Hispanic questions. Self-identification has now become the accepted standard for determining Hispanic origins. Slightly modified and improved versions of the question were part of the standard Census questionnaire in 1980, 1990, and 2000. One modification in these subsequent censuses was to make the “Mexican” origin response category more inclusive by changing it to “Mexican, Mexican American, Chicano.”
WILL LATINOS BECOME WHITE?
Some of the most interesting recent books on the history of European immigrants in the United States are the works that elucidate the process by which European immigrants became white. Many European immigrants were initially seen as outcasts who were not fit to be part of mainstream American society. They achieved white identity as they advanced economically and educationally.
One of the key concerns in the policy debates concerning Latinos focuses on the future incorporation or lack of incorporation of the children of immigrants. Both institutional barriers and perceptions of discrimination may explain the apparent low levels of educational and economic mobility of second- and third-generation Latinos. This lack of mobility and more pronounced indigenous features may prevent many Latinos from ever being accepted as white. In a “country of immigrants,” as the United States has so often been called, achieving the status of white has been the hallmark of the full incorporation into the mainstream of U.S. society. At this point in time, it seems likely that only some Latinos will be accepted as white. The question is, will American society be open to the complete incorporation of a people who are not white?
SEE ALSO Central Americans; Mexicans; Puerto Ricans; Sweatshops.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bendick, Marc, Jr., Charles W. Jackson, Victor A. Reinoso, and Laura E. Hodges. 1992. “Discrimination against Latino Job Applicants: A Controlled Experiment.” Washington, DC: Fair Employment Council of Greater Washington.
Chapa, Jorge, and Belinda De La Rosa. 2004. “Latino Population Growth, Socioeconomic and Demographic Characteristics, and Implications for Educational Attainment.” Education and Urban Society 36 (2): 130–149.
Cross, Harry E., Genevieve M. Kenney, Jane Mell, and Wendy Zimmerman. 1990. Employer Hiring Practices: Differential Treatment of Hispanic and Anglo Job Seekers. Washington, DC: The Urban Institute Press.
del Pinal, Jorge. 1996. “Treatment and Counting of Latinos in the Census.” In The Latino Encyclopedia, edited by Richard Chabran and Rafael Chabran. New York: Marshall Cavendish.
Demuth, Stephen, and Darrell Steffensmeier. 2004. “Ethnicity Effects on Sentence Outcomes in Large Urban Courts: Comparisons Among White, Black, and Hispanic Defendants.” Social Science Quarterly 85 (4): 994–1011.
Feagin, Joe R. 2000. Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations. New York: Routledge.
———. 2006. Systemic Racism. New York: Routledge.
Foley, Neil. 1997. The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hernandez, Jose, Leo Estrada, and David Alivirez. 1973. “Census Data and the Problem of Conceptually Defining the Mexican American Population.” Social Science Quarterly 53 (4): 671–687.
HRW (Human Rights Watch). 1997. “Cruel and Unusual: Human Rights Violations in the United States; Disproportionate Sentences for New York Drug Offenders.” HRW 9 (2 (B)). http://www.hrw.org/reports/1997/usny/.
Ignatiev, Noel. 1995. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge.
Lopez, Ian F. Haney. 1996. White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race. New York: New York University Press.
Millard, Ann V., and Jorge Chapa, et al. 2004. Apple Pie and Enchiladas: Latino Newcomers in the Rural Midwest. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Nieto-Phillips, John M. 2004. The Language of Blood: The Making of Spanish-American Identity in New Mexico, 1880s–1930s. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. 1994. Racial Formation in the United States, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.
Roediger, David. R. 2005. Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs. New York: Basic Books.
Teller, Charles H., Jose Hernandez, Leo Estrada, and David Alivirez, eds. 1977. Cuantos Somos: A Demographic Study ofthe Mexican-American Population. Austin: Center for Mexican American Studies, University of Texas.
Jorge Chapa
Ann V. Millard