Inventing Latinos: A New Story of American Racism
Inventing Latinos interrogates the how and why of Latinx identity becoming a distinctive racial identity. To say Latinos have different choices, individually and collectively, is to underline how race reflects two vectors crossing. On the one hand, one can assert, and so essentially choose, a racial identity; but, on the other, racial identities are given to us by others…In other words, one’s “choice” is constrained in many ways, just as it is for other identities. But to accurately describe racial identity as situational does not fully capture the social dynamic at the heart of this book, which has as much to do with how racial conventions and racism make some people’s race less malleable than others…This book explains how and why Latinos became cognizable as a racial group— a racial group that is Other and inferior to Whites.
Excerpted from the Introduction
A timely and groundbreaking argument that all Americans must grapple with Latinos’ dynamic racial identity—because it impacts everything we think we know about race in America.
Latinos have long influenced everything from electoral politics to popular culture‚ yet many people instinctively regard them as recent immigrants rather than a longstanding racial group. In Inventing Latinos‚ Laura Gómez‚ a leading expert on race‚ law‚ and society‚ illuminates the fascinating race-making‚ unmaking‚ and re-making of Latino identity that has spanned centuries‚ leaving a permanent imprint on how race operates in the United States today.
Pulling back the lens as the country approaches an unprecedented demographic shift (Latinos will comprise a third of the American population in a matter of decades)‚ Gómez also reveals the nefarious roles the United States has played in Latin America—from military interventions and economic exploitation to political interference—that‚ taken together‚ have destabilized national economies to send migrants northward over the course of more than a century. It’s no coincidence that the vast majority of Latinos migrate from the places most impacted by this nation’s dirty deeds‚ leading Gómez to a bold call for reparations.
In this audacious effort to reframe the often-confused and misrepresented discourse over the Latinx generation‚ Gómez provides essential context for today’s most pressing political and public debates—representation‚ voice‚ interpretation‚ and power—giving all of us a brilliant framework to engage cultural controversies‚ elections‚ current events‚ and more.
Media for Inventing Latinos
Interview with Tim Farley on Sirius XM P.O.T.U.S.
Interview with Tom Sumner on The Tom Sumner Program
Interview with Dr. David-James Gonzales, for New Books in Latino Studies, part of the New Books Network
Praise for Inventing Latinos
Featured in NPR’s Best Books of 2020
“Gómez shows us that as racism evolves, the U.S. commitment to racism remains steady, creating, but never quite controlling, Latinos as a distinct racial group.“
In politics, our presence is maligned. In culture, our creativity thrives. And in neighborhoods across the United States, our voices and labor push the country toward its next chapter. From Laura Gómez, a leading scholar of Latinas and Latinos in the United States, comes Inventing Latinos: A New Story of American Racism, the insightful analysis of racism that the country needs right now. In a moment in which animus against Latinas and Latinos includes White House diatribes and a mass shooting in El Paso, Gómez reveals that history is not past. Instead, Gómez shows us that as racism evolves, the U.S. commitment to racism remains steady, creating, but never quite controlling, Latinos as a distinct racial group. But if racism’s allure continues to tug powerfully at some segments of the United States, Inventing Latinos reveals that creative resistance is never far away. — César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, author of Migrating to Prison
Laura Gómez puts racism, colonialism, white dominance, and community resistance exactly where they should be: at the heart of the conversations about Latinos today, and the nature of race in the United States tomorrow. — Ian F. Haney López
“Race isn’t real, but racism is.” So affirms Gómez 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
“Inventing Latinos presents not only a brilliant account of the changing position of Latinxs, but also a nuanced theoretical and legally-based understanding of racism in the US today.“
About 20% of the US population is Latinx. As Laura Gómez explains, their identity is a fundamentally racial question, because the Latinx experience in the US includes both racial domination and racial mobilization. Both as colonized peoples and as migrants, Latinx people have built this country. Now more than ever, they are making their voices heard and exercising their political power, challenging White supremacy in numerous ways, and also suffering its violence. This is a process of racial formation. So “inventing Latinos” is also reinventing the United States. As those in power fear, the country’s national identity is called into question: its reliance on White supremacy, its profound Negrophobia, its nativism and colonial origins… In the process, Latinxs’ understanding of themselves is also changing: the “quest for Whiteness” is diminishing, and linkages/overlaps with Black and Indian identities is on the rise. Written with exceptional clarity and drawing on deep research, Inventing Latinos presents not only a brilliant account of the changing position of Latinxs, but also a nuanced theoretical and legally-based understanding of racism in the US today. A must for course adoption! — Howard Winant, co-author of Racial Formation in the United States
Solidly grounded in historical research and critical race theory, Inventing Latinos offers a unique roadmap for understanding how Latino identity came to be, and where it might be going. Professor Gómez’s discussion of how Latin America’s mestizaje, or mixed-race ideology, is both perpetuated and sometimes re-purposed in the U.S., is one of the book’s many strengths. Inventing Latinos is scholarly, but also enriched by the author’s personal testimony, will create much-needed conversations about race and identity in our community and beyond. — Ed Morales, author of Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Fantasy Island: Colonialism, Exploitation and the Betrayal of Puerto Rico
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. From Kirkus Reviews
“Inventing Latinos attends rigorously to how Latinx identity emerged relationally, in dialogue with the histories of anti-black racism, of the invasion of indigenous America and of white supremacy. “
The critically important story of Latinx racial formation told here requires the impressive skills and knowledge of a scholar like Gomez. This engaging study is informed by close reading of the law, a hemispheric sweep centered on US empire, an ability to trace history over centuries, and an appreciation of class relations and power. Inventing Latinos attends rigorously to how Latinx identity emerged relationally, in dialogue with the histories of anti-black racism, of the invasion of indigenous America and of white supremacy. — David Roediger, author of How Race Survived US History
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). — Diego Báez for Booklist
In this lucid and economical chronicle, UCLA law professor Gómez 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] notes the “seismic reverberations” on American politics and popular culture of counting Latinos in every U.S. census since 1980. [Gómez] 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.” — Read more at Publisher’s Weekly