To be or not to be (Hispanic or Latino)

Abstract

I use 1990 US census data and 22 semi-structured interviews with Brazilian immigrant youth in Boston to show how Brazilians are becoming racialized into the black-white binary of American society, but how over time they manage to escape the downward mobility of Hispanic/Latino categorization by becoming ‘American’ and playing off US natives’ Spanish-centered understanding of Hispanics/Latinos (which does not include them). Successful Americanization for Brazilians means not becoming part of a stigmatized Hispanic/Latino group associated with low socioeconomic status, racial discrimination and, on the heels of massive new immigration from Latin America, disempowered immigrant status - rather than becoming ‘Hispanic/Latino’ as part and parcel of becoming ‘American’. The Brazilian case exposes some of the assumptions behind dominant US racial/ethnic categories (particularly ‘white’ and ‘black’), and it lays bare the complexities and contradictions in the Hispanic/Latino ‘panethnic’ category, pinpointing anew its racial basis and embedded immigrant analogy. That Hispanic/Latino classification continues to conflate race and immigrant status as US-bound immigration from Latin America has increased, expanded, and raised the foreign-born share of the US ‘Hispanic/Latino’ population prompts a re-evaluation of who the group includes (and why or why not), as well as a reassessment of African American/Latino positions and relations in the US ethno-racial hierarchy.