Postcolonialism, Racial Political Fields, and Panethnicity: A Comparison of Early “Asian American” and “Hispanic” Movements

Abstract

Recent work has called for sociologists to incorporate postcolonial theory into their toolkits to better understand the mechanics of race in the United States. The authors answer this call by showing how postcolonial and field theories can be bridged to explain how movements of the 1970s developed distinct visions of panethnicity. Drawing on published case studies, as well as a unique data set of pioneering “Asian American” and “Hispanic” movement magazines from the 1970s, the authors systematically compare how community leaders framed panethnic identities before they became widely institutionalized. The authors show that although Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans could have developed a panethnic narrative centered on American imperialism, it was Asian Americans who constructed a postcolonial panethnic politics. In contrast, “Hispanic” stakeholders of the 1970s framed panethnicity more conservatively and at times patriotically. The authors contend that the different visions of panethnicity reflect the distinct colonial and imperial history of Asians and Hispanics in the United States as well as the position of Asian American and Hispanic panethnic leaders within and across the racial fields of the 1970s. This study suggests that panethnicity as a mobilizing identity narrative is politically flexible and amenable to different visions of racial equality. Moreover, the authors show how postcolonialism and field theory can be further synthesized to advance the study of panethnicity.