Full Citation
Title: To Be or Not To Be (Hispanic or Latino): Brazilian Racial and Ethnic Identity in the United States
Citation Type: Journal Article
Publication Year: 2003
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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 socio-economic 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 re-assessment of African American/Latino positions and relations in the US ethno-racial hierarchy.
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Authors: Marrow, Helen B.
Periodical (Full): Ethnicities
Issue: 4
Volume: 3
Pages: 427-464
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Migration and Immigration, Race and Ethnicity
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