Latinidad (Latina/o/x Identity in the United States) Ethnic studies

Article

INVENTING THE RACE: L ATINOS AND THE ETHNORACIAL PENTAGON

Silvio Torres-Sai l lant Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY

Abstract

This essay suggests a link between the insufficient strides for full citizenship

Latinos have made in American society and their reticence to define themselves

in contradistinction to the dominant white majority. Tracing the centrality of

race in historical constructions of Americanness, the author contends that,

because of the survival of white supremacist values in the discourses of cultural

identity informing the US Hispanic population, Latino scholarly spokespersons

display excessive zeal in the attempt to show that the racial experience of their

‘community’ defies the existing official categories used in this country to classify

the ethnoracial segments of the population. He insists that attention should be

paid to strengthening the panethnic constitution of the ‘community’ and

proposes a fusion of race and ethnicity as a way out of the current anxiety over

names. Punctuated by an effort to address intra-Latino racism and injustices,

such a stress can bring about the emergence of galvanizing discourses, voices,

and structures capable of offering a vision of Latino empowerment that speaks

persuasively to each subgroup.

Keywords

amalgamation; white supremacy; negrophobia; panethnicity; race;

civil rights movement

Latino Studies 2003, 1, (123–151) �c 2003 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1476-3435/03 $25.00

www.palgrave-journals.com/lst

Introduction

Race is no longer the ‘relatively intelligible,’ stable, natural phenomenon

that it was generally taken to be around the years prior to World War II,

according to the chronology suggested by Howard Winant, who posits as

the principal ‘task facing racial theory today’ to zero in on ‘the continuing

significance and changing meaning of race’ (Winant, 2000: 181–182). As

he muses on the possibility of our parting once more with ‘our familiar

ways of thinking about race,’ Winant finds ‘some occasion for delight’

in the conceivable advent of ‘yet another view of race, in which the con-

cept operates neither as a signifier of comprehensive identity nor of

fundamental difference,y but rather as a marker of the infinity of

variations we humans hold as a common heritage and hope for the future’

(2000: 188). Given the wide ranging and far reaching scope of that

aspiration, the yearning for a moment when we can imagine ‘the race’

without necessary associations with specific external markers might seem

reachable by comparison. In the pages that follow, I would like to entertain

this idea as a sound approach to the ethnoracial predicament of Latinos. It

strikes me as rather uncontroversial to speak of Latinos as a panethnicity

insofar as the ‘subgroups of ethnic collectivities’ that make up the US

Hispanic population are ‘often regarded as homogenous by outsiders,’

encouraging among them the development of internal structures of

solidarity (López and Espı́ritu, 1990). For David López and Yen Espiritu,

the construction of panethnicity, while it assumes a specific concept of race,

has the potential for ‘supplanting both assimilation and ethnic particular-

ism as the direction of change for racial/ethnic minorities’ (1990: 198).

As a ‘hybrid category’ that entered ‘the ethnoracial imagination of

American social life’ just over a quarter of a century ago, the

classification ‘Hispanic’ remains as pliable as the very texture of race

has proven to be (Goldberg, 1997: 64). Thus, in the current discursive

atmosphere surrounding the debate on race and ethnicity no existing

knowledge or truth claim commands such authority that it can

categorically prohibit the proposal of a fusion of race and ethnicity as

units of analysis. David Theo Goldberg has highlighted the extent to

which the ‘category ‘Hispanic’y problematizes certain prevailing

assumptions about racial definition and formation,’ serving ‘not so much

as a third race, a category of mixed race – black and white melding into

brown – as an evidencing that race is politically fabricated and contested,

that the very conception is elastic and transformable’ (1997: 65–66). His

useful formulation – exception made for his inability to see the Indian and

the Asian too, not just the black and the white, as inhabiting the sphere of

the ‘Hispanic’ – contemplates no conceptual impediment for the further

manipulation of the concept of race to become one with ethnicity.

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I believe such a fusion can help Latino scholars overcome what appears

like an aggravated anxiety over the official classifications of the US

population into differentiated ethnoracial groupings. Current theoretical

developments in the human sciences have no doubt interrogated the

conventional paradigms used to classify the human family into distinct

racial branches, but I argue that American society still needs the existing

racial classifications to implement programs of compensatory justice. To

seek to disband the only classification that the society has at its disposal,

before it has developed the necessary proficiency in the handling of a

replacement, might have deleterious consequences. I dread the possible

outcomes of a deracializing of the field that is not preceded by a leveling

of the field in American society. I fear the unintentional collusion of

Latino spokespersons with the scary backlash unleashed by affirmative

action programs and the widespread efforts of conservatives to reverse

the gains that oppressed minorities made in the wake of the Civil Rights

movement. By the mid-1990s several attempts to dismantle affirmative

action programs had had their way. California Governor Pete Wilson’s

Executive Order to End Preferential Treatment and to Promote Individual

Opportunity Based on Merit sizeably curtailed state affirmative action

programs in 1995, the same year that the University of California Board

of Regents voted to end affirmative action in admission, hiring, and

contracting (Anthony, 2001: 26). Unless Latino scholars can devise a way

to abandon the thinking bequeathed by the Civil Rights movement in

matters of addressing this country’s history of racial wrongs that does not

simultaneously play into conservative agendas in public policy, prudence

would advise that we think twice before tampering.

Salient among the subsidiary claims of my argument is that ethnoracial

ontology lies firmly at the core of the construction of Americanness. In

their foundational statements, the early ruling elites imagined the United

States as a white, European-descended, monolingual nation, leaving

outside the contours of Americanness those segments of the population

that diverged from the imagined profile. The excluded in time came to

wield the banner of their difference as a means to demand inclusion.

Racialized collectivities turned the affirmation of their otherness with

respect to the marginalizing center of power into a tool to challenge their

exclusion. Paradoxically, they flaunted their racial difference to combat

racism. Out of that effort of self-differentiation in time came the Civil

Rights movement and the subsequent classification of the US population

into five distinct lines of descent, namely whites, blacks, Indians,

Asian Americans, and Hispanics, a taxonomy that David Hollinger has

called ‘the ethnoracial pentagon’ (Hollinger, 1995: 8, 13). The gains of

the Civil Rights movement – the voting rights act, affirmative action,

open admissions, and the other legislative measures devised to address

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discrimination and social inequity – speak volumes to the success of the

strategy of self-differentiation that cohered in the ethnoracial pentagon.

The success, however, tended to be less discernible for those communities

less assertive of their alterity vis-à-vis the dominant white core.

I contend that Latinos have made insufficient strides in the quest for

full citizenship in American society largely because of their ambivalence

regarding their difference from the white majority. By full citizenship, I

mean merely having socially unobstructed possibilities to use their talent

and energy to lead productive lives in the present and build a safety net

for the future. In the language of the New Deal, achieving full citizenship

meant for people to become free ‘from fear’ as well as ‘from want,’

having had their ‘economic rights’ acknowledged (Roosevelt, 1950:

32–44). Today’s language requires a larger coverage of well-being,

encompassing the right to one’s difference or ‘cultural citizenship’ (Flores

and Benmayor, 1997). I contend further that the hesitation of Latinos to

assert their ethnoracial alterity by contradistinction to the dominant

white core is politically debilitating to the larger US Hispanic population.

Besides, it leaves unaddressed the white supremacist legacy that the

community inherits from its tributary cultures on both sides of the Rio

Grande. Harboring white supremacist assumptions renders Latinos less

able to contribute to the goal of dismantling racism, a goal without which

no project of social transformation deserves to be taken seriously in the

United States.

Even when mediated by the conundrum of mestizaje, white suprema-

cist practices stifle the aspirations of the darker segments of the Latino

population. They allow for the existence and continuation of intra-Latino

injustices. At the same time, they interfere with the emergence of a viable

integrated image of ‘the community’ by which all subsections of the US

Hispanic population can feel adequately represented. Panethnic instru-

ments of representation matter because they might permit the Latino

political and intellectual leaderships to help forge agendas of upliftment

aimed at benefiting the population across the board. If the desirability of

galvanizing the energies of over 35 million people toward common

objectives of collective sociopolitical advancement does not seem self-

evident, one could think of pan-Latino cohesion as an antidote against

the deleterious consequences of intra-Latino fractious dissolution.

Witness the stifling inability of Cornell University Chicano and Puerto

Rican faculty and students to agree on a shared vision for the Latino

Studies Program for over a decade. At this writing, the Puerto Rican

community in New York City’s Spanish Harlem is tenaciously advocating

the preservation of a Boricua focus for Museo del Barrio in the face of

forces apparently wishing to Latin-Americanize it. The ‘battle of the

virgins’ that Juan González describes would suggest that even in the

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spiritual realm we face the possibility of clashes among subsections of the

US Hispanic population (González, 2000: xvi–xvii). On 7 June 2002,

the Latino Network brought me to Lawrence, Massachusetts, to join an

effort aimed at addressing the political disunity that keeps the various

Latino subgroups there from bringing a Latino to local office despite their

having the numbers to do so.

During the panel ‘The Changing Roles of Latinos in the United States’

on 20th September 2002, in the program of the seventh triennial ‘Coming

Back Together’ reunion of black and Latino alumni at Syracuse

University, the students, faculty, staff, and alumni participating had little

to celebrate. They grieved the insufficient gains Latinos have made over

the last three decades even as compared with African Americans. A

column had appeared a few days before in the Detroit Free Press, in

which social work scholar Alejandro Garcı́a urged Latinos to beware of

politicians wearing sombreros and brandishing their ‘smattering of

Spanish.’ Garcı́a exhorted Latino readers to ‘demand more than symbolic

attention from politicians’ (Garcı́a, 2002). Recent US census data show

Hispanics earning considerably less, suffering greater rates of unemploy-

ment, falling below the poverty line in larger numbers, and having poorer

educational attainments than the rest of the US population (Suárez-

Orozco and Paez, 2002: 25). Such a scenario gave the panel participants

the shared sense that Latinos could boast meaningful advancement

mostly, if not solely, in the symbolic realm. Aware of the ‘Latinization’ of

New York City and other occurrences of the culturally transformative

dynamics brought about by globalization and transnational relations, a

development well mapped in the collection Mambo Montage (Laó-

Montes and Dávila, 2001), they still voiced their yearning for concrete

indicators of betterment in the community’s material condition.

While valuing the achievements of Andy Garcı́a, Gloria and Emilio

Estefan, Jennifer López, Sammy Sosa, Alex Rodrı́guez, Shakira, Oscar de

la Hoya, and other Hispanics who enjoy recognition as household names

with audiences nationwide, the Syracuse panelists spoke cautiously about

the enhanced visibility of Latinos. They recognized the risk of mistaking

increased visibility in the media and the entertainment industry for

community empowerment. They noted the place assigned to Hispanics

in the August 2000 Republican National Convention, where African

Americans Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice’s crucial speeches voiced

the Party’s vision of the future of the nation, while Ricky Martin’s ‘La

Vida Loca’ merely made the ambience festive for the arrival on stage of

George W. Bush to deliver the party’s presidential nomination acceptance

speech. One could interpret that disparity as the assumption that while

black voters required concrete inclusion in the political agenda, symbolic

inclusion sufficed for Latinos.

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An undergraduate student finally encapsulated the panel’s collective

plaint by stating that ‘we’ have lacked a major leader ‘like a Martin

Luther King or a Malcolm X who could help us advance our cause.’

Another speaker added the name of Jesse Jackson. Having only the week

before been moved by the continued vitality of Dolores Huerta during

the Fourth Conference of the National Association of Latino Arts and

Culture in Austin, Texas, I invoked her leadership and that of César

Chavez. However, I immediately recanted, realizing that the comparison

does not hold. Except for the learned and the politically engaged, Chávez

and Huerta belong in the West Coast and they matter primarily to

Chicanos and Mexicans. The naming of a street in homage to Chávez in

Washington Heights or El Barrio would seem as unlikely as the hiring of

a Dominican or a Puerto Rican to head a Latino Studies Program at a

major university in California or Texas. Reformulating the Syracuse

student’s claim, I would contend that lacking a collective voice entails the

failure to articulate agendas that matter equally across the various

subsections of the US Hispanic population.

There are several reasons for that failure, including the differing

durations of each of the subgroups in what is now the United States.

Comparing the plight of a Latino whose ancestors came to New Mexico

four centuries ago as part of the entourage of Juan de Oñate with that of

a New York City Latina born in 1970 to recent Dominican immigrant

parents or a Chicana whose indigenous roots in the Texan soil stretch

back 25,000 years might require a somersault of the imagination. The

subgroups have distinct national histories, and their ancestral homelands

may have interacted differently with the United States. The list can

continue, but, to return to my argument, I will privilege the ethnoracial

reason, the most abstract variable, hence the most susceptible to

productive manipulation. The Latino reticence to embrace a distinct

ethnoracial identity by contradistinction to whites diminishes the group’s

power of negotiation with the dominant core and fails to combat the

community’s white supremacist legacies. Latinos often boast their

comfort with hybridity, proclaiming their potential to liberate the United

States from the conceptual throes of racial binarism. At the same time,

the 2000 US Census shows Latinos hesitant to distinguish themselves

racially from whites. I fear that hesitation might presage the triumph of a

sort of ethnoracial suicide effectuated by the amalgamation ideology.

Perspective, method and language

I tread the territory of race and ethnic identity in relation to Latinos fully

aware of the futility of speaking with authority on the matter. Hardly

fathomable units of analysis, the floating signifier of race, and the

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construction of identity seem to resist containment by the resources of

any individual discipline. I approach the subject as a humanist, and, as

such, my inquiry will lack a display of massive quantitative data. I will

not shun the possibility of extracting insights from a literary passage, a

political speech, a televised image, or empirical observation of my own.

Given the hazy boundaries of the evasive subject at hand, we have to cope

with inevitable epistemological discomfort. We lack the luxury of a

physicist like Lawrence Krauss, who can urge ‘journalists and scholars to

state openly that some viewpoints are not subject to debate: they are

simply wrong’ (Krauss, 1996). Physicists can verify or falsify a truth claim

by means of an experiment. Human science scholars, however, must often

rely on the good will of their peers in heeding the established wisdom. A

chameleon-like entity susceptible to external stimuli, ethnoracial identity,

especially as applied to Latinos who view it ambiguously, is contextual

and situational. As the subject defies measure, the knowability of Latino

ethnoracial identity must remain unsettled. The scholar treading this

indeterminate territory, therefore, must dispense with the assurance that

familiarity with ‘the latest research’ in the field will entail accessing the

truest findings, the current data having indisputably falsified formerly

existing scholarly knowledge.

Since, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak recommends, it behooves

scholarly speakers to mark their own positionality as investigating

subjects, I should disclose my compulsions regarding intellectual

authority and language (Spivak, 1994: 92). This paper will not attempt

to comb the field for every single related publication to date, given

precisely the difficulty of discerning the outermost bounds delimiting

the territory of our inquiry. Though not unmindful of the respectability

or currency of authors in ‘the field,’ I have allowed the logic of my

reflections to determine which scholarly interventions to reference.

Similarly, I must admit my own reticence to parrot the received lexicons

that have become staple in contemporary discourse in the human

sciences. I draw insight from Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s refusal to use

scientizing terminologies. Bakhtin rejected the tendency of specialized

terms to stabilize the meanings of words, diminishing their metaphoric

potential, sacrificing polysemy and the overall play of significations. He

decried ‘the extreme monotonality’ of such terms, recalling that ‘ancient

Greek philosophical and scientific thought’ shunned words that could not

participate ‘with the same meaning in ordinary speech’ (Bubnova, 1997: xv).

As someone who trained initially as a literary scholar, I cannot

approach language without a measure of suspicion. In the linguistic

demeanor that I exhibit here I do not mean either to renege or dismiss the

discursive protocols that obtain in the profession. Rather, I wish to

safeguard the clarity of my meaning and to make evident the profile of

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my own ‘subject position.’ By the same token, while insisting that race

matters, I will take as a given its social constructedness. I will embrace an

understanding of race closely resembling the definition offered by Ian

F. Haney López, an articulate proponent of critical race theory. This

colleague defines it as ‘a vast group of people loosely bound together by

historically contingent, socially significant elements of their morphology

and/or ancestry. I argue that race must be understood as a sui generis

social phenomenon in which contested systems of meaning serve as the

connections between physical features, faces, and personal character-

istics. In other words, social meanings connect our faces to our souls.

Race is neither an essence nor an illusion, but rather an ongoing,

contradictory, self-reinforcing, plastic process subject to the macroforces

of social and political struggle and the microeffects of daily decisions. As

used here, the referents of terms like Black and White are social groups,

not genetically distinct branches of humankind’ (Haney López, 1995:

193).

Racial Americanness

Latinos cannot escape the preponderance of race in the United States. The

history of the discourse on Americanness and national belonging consists

largely of episodes featuring the dominant white core racializing marginal

groups and the latter responding in varied ways. The rise of what

Hollinger calls the ethnoracial pentagon marked a pivotal moment in that

history. At the start of the 21st century, it still seems too soon to wish to

do away with the pentagonal paradigm, as Hollinger yearns. Hollinger

would wish us to expand conceptually the epistemic ‘we’ beyond racial

classifications. He recalls the enlightened anti-racist concerns that led to

the ‘manufacturing of today’s ethnoracial pentagon out of the old, racist

materials’: the issuing in 1977 of the Office of Management and Budget’s

Statistical Directive 15 that classifies people racially came to address the

need for reliable statistics that could enable the government to enforce the

mandate of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and Title VII of the Civil Rights

Act (33). It saddens Hollinger, however, that the racial thinking of the

original initiative has fostered in the country’s imaginary a ‘transition

from species to ethnos’ (65). Although one might share his concern that

the stress on ethnos eschews the essential humanity we all share

irrespective of pigmentation, phenotype, and ancestry, he too naively

posits that this country’s ‘national ideology is non-ethnic by virtue of the

universalist commitment – proclaimed in the Constitution and the

prevailing political discourse – to provide the benefits of citizenship

irrespective of any ascribed or asserted ancestry affiliations’ (19). Some

historical references will come in handy here.

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The founding fathers did not transcend the racial imaginary. Witness

a 1751 article by Benjamin Franklin in which the old sage decried the

increasing presence of Germans on the land and expressed anxiety over

the disruptive effect of their influence on the nation. Franklin feared that

they would not learn English and that they would impose their ethnic

traits on the population, Germanizing ‘us’ rather than ‘our Anglifying

them’ since they could not change their culture any more than they could

shed their ‘Complexion’ (Franklin, 1961: 234). His attribution of an

‘alien’ complexion to German immigrants suggests not only that from the

outset whiteness stood out as a fundamental prerequisite to national

belonging but that originally European descent alone did not constitute

sufficient basis for attaining whiteness. Franklin mourned the ‘propor-

tionably very small’ number of ‘purely white People in the World,’ with

‘black or tawny’ folks inhabiting Africa and Asia, while people with ‘a

swarthy Complexion’ predominated throughout Europe. Only the

Saxons and the English made up the ‘principal Body of White People

on the Face of the Earth,’ asserted Franklin, and he voiced the belief that

this country had ‘so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and

Tawnys, of increasing the lovely White and Red’ (234). European

immigrants had to conform to the demands of the normative Anglo

model. In a 4 June 1819 letter, John Quincy Adams tellingly described the

attitude he judged advisable for prospective German immigrants, namely

that ‘They must cast off the European skin, never to resume it. They must

look forward to their posterity rather than backward to their ancestors,’

meaning that they had to embrace Anglo ways (cited in Sollors, 1986: 4).

The 1790 Naturalization Act restricted citizenship to white land-

owning males. When they ceased to be property, blacks became a

problem in the United States. Public policy condemned the vast majority

of blacks to generations of poverty and excluded them from ‘the

industrial activity taking place in the rapidly growing cities of the North

and West in the aftermath of the Civil War,’ even while European

immigrants found here a land of opportunity (Steinberg, 1981: 198). For

the so-called persons of color, to speak about race in the United States has

meant necessarily to locate oneself in relation to normative whiteness. We

might recall the two Frenchmen who famously evoked the harmony that

this country had attained despite the diverse origins of the population.

Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, and Hector St-John de

Crèvecouer in his Letters of an American Farmer marveled at how

disparate elements had so efficiently ‘welded together into one people’

(Hollinger, 1995: 3). Significantly, while both noted the conditions of

Indians and blacks, who clearly did not go into the mix of origins they

admired, they somehow did not allow that contradictory empirical reality

to alter their image of the harmonious fusion of difference in America.

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The official definition of Americanness did not intend to cover

everybody. The foundational discourse rested largely on protocols of

exclusion. Not only was the nation imagined white, but also mono-

lingual, despite what Francisco de Miranda observed when he visited in

1783–1784, nearly 50 years prior to the better remembered visit by

Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave Baumont (1831–1832). When

Miranda came to Central New York, he found it curious that women

walked around without shoes, that the number of blacks was high, and

that the predominant language was Dutch among blacks and whites alike

(Miranda, 1928: 70). The nation continued to regard itself as

monolingual even after the 1848 takeover of what we now call the

American Southwest. The French of Louisiana, the German of other

places, and the Spanish of Texas, to say nothing of the myriad languages

spoken by 500 nations that had forged long histories here prior to the

arrival of the Europeans, did not earn consideration in the minds of the

architects of the discourse on Americanness. When they imagined

the United States, they saw linguistic and racial homogeneity despite

the evidence that glared to the contrary.

Israel Zangwill (1864–1926), the author of the play The Melting Pot

(1905), spoke ardently about interethnic fusion and his work provided

the lasting image that describes the country’s assimilationist ideal.

However, he did favor America’s ‘scrupulous’ and ‘justifiable’ avoidance

of physical ‘intermarriage with the Negro,’ preferring to limit the

intermixture to what he called ‘spiritual miscegenation’ (Zangwill, 1922:

207). Although Zangwill advocated inter-racial understanding and felt

negrophobia had reached a ‘barbarous pitch,’ he nonetheless accepted

as true that ‘the prognatheous face is an ugly and undesirable type of

countenance’ and that it ‘connotes a lower average of intellect and

ethics,’ suggesting further that ‘Melanophobia, or fear of the black, may

be pragmatically as valuable a racial defense for the white as the counter-

instinct of philoleucosis, or love of the white, is a force of racial uplifting

for the black’ (206). A British Jew, Zangwill embodied the contradiction

inherent in a racist cultural regime that preached the ideal expressed in

the integrationist motto e pluribus unum. Not all European observers,

however, failed to see the gravity of the problem. Wells (1906: 186)

noted the explosive nature of the race question in America. The

philosopher Maritain (1958: 57), for his part, noted that the contra-

diction made for ‘the spectacle of a nation struggling obstinately against

itself.’ The foregoing scenario illustrates the serious ‘conflict between

contractual and hereditary, self-made and ancestral, definitions of

American identity – between consent and descent – as the central

drama of American culture’ (Sollors, 1986: 6). However, it also illustrates

the resilience of race in the conceptual arsenal deployed by the wielders

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of the official discourse delimiting the contours of the nation in American

society.

Racial reticence and the nation

With the advent of post-modernism and the vigorous emergence of such

dark-skinned derivations as post-colonial cultural studies, demands for

specifications of racial or ethnic identity have become suspect in the

current wisdom of the academy. Concomitantly, approaches that seem to

validate the nation state as a social field within which to understand

human agency and interaction have faced challenges from proponents

of transnational dynamics. The current disfavor of the nation as a unit of

analysis accords with a prevailing suspicion about race and ethnicity,

because these categories are largely intertwined. The black British scholar

Paul Gilroy owes his celebrity to his critiques of both the nation and

ethnic identity. Gilroy has denounced African-American cultural projects

that embrace ‘narrow nationalist perspectives,’ which he characterizes as

incurably committed to ‘the spurious invocation of ethnic particularity’

(Gilroy, 1993: 29). Gilroy offers as an alternative to those projects the

‘image of the ships in motion across the spaces between Europe, America,

Africa, and the Caribbean’ as an organizing principle of the ‘rhizo-

morphic, fractal structure of the transcultural, international formation’

that he calls ‘the black Atlantic,’ a formulation that in his view transcends

‘both the structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity

and national particularity’ (4,19). The Latino counterpart of the scholarly

climate that Gilroy exemplifies is perhaps well summarized by Antonia

Darder and Rodolfo D. Torres’ (1988: 7) description of the emergence of

‘an unproblematized ‘common sense’ acceptance’ of race in a way that

appears to veil its social constructedness.

I would argue, however, that the yearning for a paradigm that would

help us escape the throes of race, ethnic particularity, and nation–state

formations stems from an academic desire to reach an elusive cutting edge

rather than from a down-to-earth assessment of what has worked in the

overall effort to elevate the condition of oppressed ethnic minority groups

in the history of the United States. Having endured their duress on

account of their ethnic and racial difference vis-à-vis a cultural and

political center of power within the national confines of the United States,

marginalized minorities have little chance of asserting their human

dignity outside the ethnoracial and national frameworks wherein their

disempowerment occurred. Ultimately, the objective of their struggle has

historically been no other than to have their ethnoracial difference

accepted as well as respected and to carve a space of stability inside the

entity called the American nation. Only the nation at this point provides

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US ethnic minorities with the context within which to fight for material

improvement, equality, and justice.

Communities of color in the United States have fought to attain full

citizenship, and we cannot belittle the fruits that their effort has yielded.

Lynchings and Jim Crow prohibitions no longer figure in the menu of

sorrows that blacks in this country have to endure. The overall society no

longer condones public aggression against minority groups to the degree

that it did forty years ago. Today a police spokesperson would feel

compelled to repress in public the expression of contempt evinced in the

testimony of the officer who appeared before the LaFollete Commission

in the 1930s with these words: ‘We protect our farmers here in Kern

CountyyThey are our best peopleyThey keep the country goingyBut

the Mexicans are trash. They have no standard of living. We herd them

like pigs’ (cited in Trumpbour and Bernard, 2002: 128). Apartment

owners would hesitate to post signs that say ‘No Pets, No Kids, No

Cubans,’ which appeared in the 1960s in Miami Dade County (Stepick

and Stepick, 2002: 81). The nation has indubitably come closer to living

up to the true meaning of its creed. We still have serious challenges that

cry for urgent redressing: alarming numbers of black and Latino males in

the state penitentiaries; overrepresentation of ethnic minority children

among the unschooled, the unfed, the hopeless; and severe under-

representation of blacks and Latinos in centers of knowledge production

and policy making. However, at this point there is in sight no post-

national, transracial, cross-cultural, and post-ethnic structure that can

help Latinos or blacks correct their remaining social ills more efficiently

than those that enabled them to make the aforementioned progress.

Rather than wrestling with the anxiety over finding a way out of race, we

might do better by seeking to improve the artifice of race to enhance

its political utility. By constructively manipulating the concept, we ought

to perfect the construction of Latino ethnoracial identity to make it

less complicit with white supremacist paradigms, more inclusive of

intra-Latino diversity, and, consequently, more suitable as a vehicle of

empowerment.

Racial assert ion and cit izenship

We continue to live in a racial world. Although Hispanics have lived in

the United States since before the first English settlement at Jamestown,

Americans with Spanish surnames will be taken for foreigners a lot more

frequently than citizens of German, Irish, or Italian ancestry. The US

publishing industry still wonders whether the number of Dominican,

Puerto Rican, or Colombian readers is large enough to make the

publication of a book authored by a member of one of those communities

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worth the investment. The publishers remain persuaded that the book in

question will not automatically elicit the interest of the general reader.

Certainly, we should have the vision necessary to help reconfigure the

society we live in to help it liberate itself from the prevailing schemes of

thought, promoting a deracialization of the collective imaginary.

However, such a project will not thrive before the advent of racial

equality, before the leveling of the racial field, before the equitable

sharing of power by each of the groups that make up the ‘ethnoracial

pentagon.’ We do not dismantle racism by simply renouncing the

ethnoracial designations born of the Civil Rights movement.

African Americans have made the political gains they currently possess

because of a racial self-assertion that galvanizes the community, lending

them a sense of wholeness. Their sense of a common history and a shared

destiny often extends to black immigrants whose ancestors experienced

their slavery past elsewhere. Nancy Foner has described the extent to

which West Indians in Brooklyn have developed the ability to occupy

racial (black) and ethnic (Caribbean) identity spaces interchangeably as

required by the given agenda (Foner, 1997). Latinos currently face the

challenge of imagining themselves as a composite race that encompasses

an assortment of diverse national origins, various cultural heritages, and

disparate phenotypes. The most difficult component of that act of

imagining will be making conceptual room for comfortably accommo-

dating the great internal diversity represented in the over 35 million

members of the US Hispanic population without falling under the spell

cast by the conundrum of mestizaje. The operative concept of the race to

be imagined could follow the lineaments suggested by Jorge J.E. Gracia,

specifically insofar as he regards Hispanics as ‘a group of people who

have no common elements considered as a whole,’ and envisions their

coming together due to ‘not a unity of commonality’ but ‘a historical

unity founded on relations’ (Gracia, 2000: 50). Only by coming together

and confronting the discomfort of their internal difference, the

negrophobia and anti-Indian sentiments in their midst, might Latinos

be in a position to fight external racism, while empowering themselves

holistically in relation to the dominant majority.

We could recall for a moment the big night of 29 February 1940, when

the Academy Award to the Best Supporting Actress for the role of

Mammy in Gone with the Wind went to Hattie McDaniel, making her

the first black person ever to win an Oscar. Tears came to the performer’s

eyes as she approached the stage to accept the distinction and to thank

her fellow members of the trade in a speech that near the end spoke thus

about the recognition she received: ‘ I shall always hold it as a beacon for

anything that I may be able to do in the future. I sincerely hope that I shall

always be a credit to my race and to the motion picture industry’

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(Jackson, 1990: 52). Today, McDaniel’s words may strike an odd cord.

They smack of self-effacement in the willingness to cast her personal

achievement in the form of quantified worth that gets automatically

computed into her racial group’s repository of value. Implicit in this

notion is the understanding that just as individual accomplishments will

add merit to the collective record of one’s community, individual failure,

or misbehavior will conversely detract from the community’s account.

However, it would be hard to imagine how McDaniel could have

possibly stepped out of the logic that induced her self-representation as a

specimen and her success as having inevitable consequences for her

‘kind.’ On the night when the event took place at the Coconut Grove in

the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, she became not only ‘the first of

her race’ to receive an Oscar but also ‘the first Negro ever to sit at an

Academy Banquet’ (Jackson, 1990: 104 et passim). Socially, economic-

ally, and culturally African Americans in the 1940s had little say

regarding the ways of naming the contours of their identity. Jim Crow

reigned supreme then, and just as blacks in the South could not vote, their

counterparts in the North knew they had little for which to vote. They

endured a condition of collective marginality with respect to white

America, and they had to regard themselves in stark contradistinction to

the dominant population. They had sound grounds for believing that

their virtues or shortcomings mattered less to their individual subjectiv-

ities than to their status as a group. White America did not see each black

person as an isolated unit but as a mere representative of the plurality

called ‘the Negro.’ It would, therefore, have been ludicrous for McDaniel

to think of herself strictly as an individual talent whose success had

implications primarily for the command of her craft. She simply lacked

the unproblematic claim to unencumbered individuality that power

confers in the relationship between groups holding unequal positions in

society (Torres-Saillant and Hernández, 1992: 5).

We cannot assume, of course, that African Americans achieved their

sense of racial wholeness without contention. Certainly, the Civil Rights

agenda did not spring from a ‘spontaneous’ mass mobilization, stemming

rather from ‘the deliberate efforts of organizers’ (Morris, 1986: 66). A

scholar looking at the early 20th century observes that ‘civil rights

organizations’ then did not have ‘the support of most blacks’ (Sitkoff,

1978: 11). Another examines a scenario wherein ‘some Blacks’ harbor

doubts as to whether their situation resembles the life experiences of

‘other Blacks’ closely enough ‘to warrant collective political action’

(Crenshaw, 1988: 1384). However, we can conjecture that history has

conspired to give credence to the persistence of a discourse of oneness

from the time of the abolitionists, to the slave narratives, to the

pronouncements of such pivotal 19th-century figures as Frederick

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Douglass and Frances Ellen Harper (1825–1911). As a result, W. E. B.

Dubois would invoke ‘the Negro’ with the same all-inclusive assumption

displayed later by Martin Luther King. A George Meredith, for instance,

could insist on defining his struggle against segregation in the South

independent of the leadership of the Civil Rights movement, but no

African American maverick that I know of would seek to locate his

struggle outside the sphere of the overall black liberation movement.

Latinos in the 1940s did not have nor have they since had the kind of

historical experience that would have enabled them to invoke as clear

a frame of reference as Hattie McDaniel had at her disposal when she

expressed the hope of being a credit to her race. Latinos have too

inconsistently articulated their alterity vis-à-vis the dominant white

population, which is arguably the ultimate source of racial meaning since

it is primarily in relation to it that the other portions of this country’s

inhabitants attain their racialized differentiation. While watching the

Republican National Convention on 3 August 2000 on CNN, I was taken

by a brief off-stage interview with Bob Martı́nez, a native of New Mexico

who represented the Colorado Delegation. A successful businessman,

flag waving patriot, Martı́nez used the moments of his appearance on

worldwide TV to vaunt his Americanness and pay tribute to the greatness

of ‘what we have accomplished in only two hundred years.’ It followed

from the rest of his words that ‘we’ referred not to Hispanics, but more

abstractly to ‘Americans.’ His enthusiastic utterance also looked forward

to the future, though saying nothing about the place Latinos would

occupy in the America imagined by Republicans. Phenotypically as white

as the Anglos surrounding him, Martı́nez probably harbored no

compulsion to highlight ethnoracial difference-nor did the speaker

introducing George W. Bush, his nephew George Prescott, the son of

Jebb Bush and his Mexican wife. George Prescott referred to his pride

about coming from a ‘diverse’ background, but he never got to naming

the non-Anglo heritage that accounted for his ‘diversity.’ I will not

attempt to flesh out the myriad implications of the young man’s reticence

to call the Hispanic component of his background by name. I will simply

offer his case and that of Martı́nez, atypical though they might appear, as

instances of US Hispanic ethnoracial indecision.

The ambivalent rapport of Latinos with this country’s existing racial

categories, though often grounded in earnest epistemological preoccupa-

tions, suggests an idea of themselves as non-racial selves. Among other

likely consequences, such a hesitant self-definition has the potential for

nurturing the resilience of the white supremacist ideals that historically

have influenced the ways Latinos construct their identity. I would

reiterate that white supremacist reflexes have a debilitating impact on the

chances of the various subsections of the US Hispanic community to

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achieve a politically salutory sense of panethnic wholeness. By the same

token, one could conjecture that their insufficient delinking from white

supremacist reflexes diminishes their ability to help advance programs of

social transformation in American society, to assist in the necessary goal

of forging a nation where all can realistically expect to have their full

citizenship honored. Latinos have the challenge of devising a composite

ethnoracial identity that convincingly includes every Hispanic subgroup.

While helping to address intra-Latino racisms, such a construct could

bring about instruments of representation permitting the community to

speak as a solid block with the other differentiated segments of the US

population.

Formulations of their community’s ethnoracial identity by Latino

spokespersons often boast a superior understanding of the complexity of

racial codification, stressing the extent to which our historical experience

challenges the black–white binary that has informed thinking on race

matters in the United States. Latino scholars often claim that ‘while

‘‘race’’ distinctions and prejudice exist in Spanish America, they do not,

nor ever have they, taken the form of institutionalized discrimination as

in the United States’ (Kanellos, 1998: 178). At the same time, the

elevation of mestizaje as a third space of ethnoracial identity – a

presumably more enlightened space that Latino voices often seem to

ascribe exclusively to themselves as a special feature of a certain Hispanic

condition – often appears as a potential solution to the race question in

American society. The conceptual panacea of mestizaje has insufficiently

addressed its own white supremacist assumptions. Nor has it confronted

the unaddressed tensions in de facto assumptions about the US Hispanic

population as one differentiated group.

The history of US Hispanics does not lack pivotal moments of

sociocultural and political clash that have fostered polarization, causing

them to situate themselves in stark opposition to white Anglos. The

snatching of Texas by Anglo encroachment with the backing of the US

government in the 1830s brought about a climate of reciprocal hostility.

The 1846 invasion of Mexico by the US army culminated in a treaty

whereby the old Hispano landed gentry in the Southwest had to make

way for Anglo power, descending to a rank of subaltern alterity. Not too

dissimilarly, the outcome of the war of 1898 created conditions that

would shape the entrance of Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Dominicans into

the US domain as scions of a conquered people. That general context

explains the oppositional stance that informs a good deal of the corrido

tradition, as exemplified by the ‘Ballad of Gregorio Cortez’ that Américo

Paredes studied in his classic work on the titular folk hero (Paredes,

1958). The polarization herein described manifests itself most graphically

in the Texas Mexican rebellion of 1915 known as Plan de San Diego. Led

latino studies - 1:1 138 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

by political activists Aniceto Pizaña and Luis de la Fuente, the separatist

movement envisioned the creation of the Republic of the Southwest, and

its ranks included blacks, Japanese, and Indians, pointing to the non-

white orientation of its agenda. The Chicano movement drew substan-

tially from the foregoing oppositional climate in their formulation of a

Latino us vs. a gringo them, hence the reference to the ‘foreign

Europeans’ and the affirmation of the indigenous heritage in El Plan

Espiritual de Aztlan, the ‘cultural nationalist manifesto’ written by the

poet Alurista for the 1969 First Chicano National Conference in Denver

(Arteaga, 1997: 12–13).

By the same token, the New York-based Puerto Rican leadership that

launched the Young Lords Party constructed Latino subjectivity based on

a very deep sense of self-differentiation with respect to American society’s

dominant white core. The language of their 13-point program accent-

uates the contradistinction of Latinos to ‘amerikkkan [sic] business’ as

well as their joining the war ‘against imperialism’ (Luis, 1997: 279). At

the end the text exults ‘La Raza,’ leaving little doubt as to the ethnoracial

difference implicit in their cause. Beginning with the title I Am Joaquı́n,

which embraces the persona of the inherently oppositional figure of the

outlaw Joaquı́n Murrieta, the 1967 Chicano epic poem by Rodolfo

‘Corky’ Gonzáles very emphatically evoked the plight of ‘La Raza’ –

’Mejicano!/Español!/Latino!/Hispano!/Chicano’ – in the inhospitable

‘whirl of a/gringo society,’ in terms of a sustained sociopolitical and

cultural polarity (Gonzáles, 1997: 266, 279). Yet, the cultural and

political history that the foregoing moments illustrate did not prevail in

the discourse on Latino identity that has come down to us. No pervasive

oppositional stance has thrived. We witness, rather, the lack of a

sufficiently clear frame of reference enabling Latinos to invoke a distinct,

recognizable, and useful ethnoracial space. Beside impeding the rise of

galvanizing voices that might speak compellingly about the plight of the

overall community, helping in the multiethnic fight against racism in this

country, the vagueness and hesitation may disarm in yet another way.

Latinos may fail to curtail corporate and government schemes

orchestrated by transnational partners interested in controlling US

Hispanic agendas on both sides of the Rio Grande.

Identity and its discontents

Scholarly conversations on racial dynamics too often satisfy themselves

with merely problematizing the issue of Latino identity and questioning

the validity of race as a category used to classify people given its lack of

objective correspondence in the empirical world. Often informed by the

phraseologies of post-modern critical theory, they seem to relish in the

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thought of the decentered and epistemologically unstable self. A person’s

identity is, in that parlance, ‘relative and is constantly negotiated through

relationships and situational contexts. Instead of a core of identity, or

self, one has a plurality of selves, each of which surfaces in a particular

situation. Thus, an individual is not committed to only one identity, and

similarly, one’s ethnic identity is variable and subject to construction of

the individual’ (Rodrı́guez, 2000: xxi). Probably, the most radical

intervention in a post-modernist discursive mode is that of Gloria

Anzaldúa, who has become an obligatory reference, along with the likes

of Homi Bhabha, in discussions of identity, although she trades mostly in

metaphor, combining the authority of the theorist with the poetic license

of the artist. Anzaldúa claims she inhabits the space she has famously

termed ‘the borderlands,’ which means the speaker is ‘neither hispana

India negra española/ni gabacha, eres mestiza, mulata, half-breed/caught

in the crossfire between camps/while carrying all the five races on your

back/not knowing which side to turn to, run from’ (Anzaldúa, 1999:

217). Also, occupying that space articulated by Anzaldúa ‘means

knowing/that the india in you, betrayed for 500 years,/is no longer

speaking to you,/that mexicanas call you rajetas,/that denying the Anglo

inside you/is as bad as having denied the Indian or Black,’ hence the

speaker’s conclusive recommendation to ‘live sin fronteras/be a cross-

roads,’ as a way to ‘survive,’ by transcending, the crossfire of multiple

identities (216–217).

I would submit that in upholding the radical porosity of Latino identity

– assuming that Anzaldúa approves of our extending the explanatory

value of her borderlands paradigm beyond the Chicana sphere, across the

larger US Hispanic population – one is also recognizing a certain futility

to the sociopolitical and cultural project of promoting a Latino agenda to

advance the interests of the population conventionally thought of as

constituting ‘the community.’ One cannot persuasively advocate on

behalf of a group one cannot identify. One needs to point it out in order

to defend it. Nearly 50% of all US Hispanics who answered the 2000

census chose to call themselves ‘white,’ thus declining to classify

themselves in a manner that would distinguish them from the dominant

majority (Suárez-Orozco and Paez, 2002: 21). The reticence of Hispanics

to situate themselves outside the sphere of whiteness has a long history.

One must not forget that in the 19th century putative whiteness made

Mexicans eligible for US citizenship, conferring to them a benefit seldom

extended to African Americans. Similarly, in the 20th century some

Mexican American ‘civil rights groups evaded segregation with blacks by

claiming whiteness under the law’ (Kanellos, 1998: 182–183). The

pervasive Hispanic predilection for whiteness as a self-identification often

co-exists with a certain reticence to specify or affirm one’s ethnoracial

latino studies - 1:1 140 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

location. The words of early Dominican immigrant Frank Rebajes, who

came from Puerto Plata to New York in 1923, epitomize a dismissal of

ethnic loyalty as ‘a mistake of Latin Americans.’ They, he complained,

‘settle in quarters only among themselves, neglecting to get to know the

real native-born Americans’ (Alig, 1953: 8, 43). Speaking in the 1950s,

having succeeded in business and married into a white family, Rebajes

most likely used the word ‘Americans’ to mean ‘whites.’

Even among Dominicans, arguably the Latino subgroup displaying the

darkest skin hue, the census reveals an 80.2% of the community choosing

the classification of white against an 18.3% that opted for the

classification of black. The scholars who presented these data would

warn us, however, that the above breakdown reflects Dominican and

Latino racial categories, not the more rigid US racial concepts (Castro

and Boswell, 2002: 10). A question that obtains, of course, is whether

dissimilar racial paradigms can subsist in the American public sphere and,

if so, to what end. We live in a country that came to divide people into

five differentiated lines of descent to resolve the injustices that racist

public policies had committed against the racialized non-white subsec-

tions of the population. I fail to see how one can, on the one hand,

contend that ethnoracial identity is socially constructed, while, on the

other hand, seeking to find, or even hoping for, a formulation that

describes the community with greater ethnoracial accuracy than we have

now. From the recognition of the social constructedness of race it should

follow that, insofar as none can attain precision, any classification would

do, especially one that already exists and has proved fairly useful.

We hardly need to make the case that, despite its social constructed-

ness, race has played a key role in the marginalization that, like African

Americans, Latinos of various national origins have suffered. In that

respect, race has mattered. It has been real. One need not attribute to it an

objective constitution to see its power. One may just call it, as does the

character Tshembe in Lorraine Hansberry’s play Les blancs, ‘a device. No

more. No less. It explains nothing at all’ (Hansberry, 1994: 92). When

asked by his interlocutor Charlie for further explanation, Tshembe

describes it as ‘a means. An invention to justify the rule of some over

others.’ He then has to go on to dispel Charlie’s hurried conclusion, from

the words the latter has just heard, that race does not matter: ‘I am simply

saying that a device is a device, but that it also has consequences: once

invented it takes on a life, a reality of its owny I may recognize the

fraudulence of the device, but y a many who is shot in Zatembe or

Mississippi because he is black – is suffering the utter reality of the device.

And it is pointless to pretend that it doesn’t exist – merely because it is a

lie!’ (92). The dissatisfaction one might feel about the current pentagonal

paradigm has its roots in the contradiction inherent in the juxtaposition

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of reality and lie in the device of race. I propose that pursuing a way out

of the contradiction will only meet with disappointment. Nor is the

intrinsically contradictory nature of the device of concern solely to

Latinos.

Latinos as racial ly exceptional

Latinos face a troubling dilemma. For while this country’s white core has

constructed its subjectivity by relegating the other components of the

population to a space of marginal alterity, Latinos have resisted asserting

their identity oppositionally. This resistance, of course, has complexities

of its own. For one thing, Latinos often partake of the territory of

whiteness in phenotype and in shared prejudices. When young Richard

Henry Dana took a break from Harvard in 1835 to undertake the travels

he narrates in Two Years Before the Mast, he crossed over to Mexican

California and found that many Anglo males had married into Mexican

families in order to qualify for land ownership and to do business there.

While he at times evinces a clear conviction of the cultural superiority of

the Anglos over the Hispanic natives of California, as when he observes

that ‘Nothing but the character of the people prevents Monterey from

becoming a great town,’ Dana’s narrative generally lacks explicit

expressions of racial aversion (Dana, 1899: 81). He notes that in

Monterey ‘there are a number of English and Americans, who have

married Californians, become united to the Catholic Church, and

acquired considerable property. Having more industry, frugality, and

enterprise than the natives, they soon get nearly all the trade into their

hands’ (80). One assumes that rabid racism would deter marital union

and religious conversion even for economic gain.

The cultural offspring of European colonial formations, Latinos have

received no less of a negrophobic and anti-Indian education than their

white Anglo counterparts. Some foundational texts of Latino literature

might come in handy here. Sonja Z. Pérez has looked closely at

autobiographical 19th-century texts by Cleofas Jaramillo, Fabiola

Cabeza de Baca, and Nina Otero Warren with an eye on their racial,

class, gender, and cultural biases. Taken together, the narratives of these

founding mothers of Latina letters legitimate their authors by repressing

the Other on the margins: savage Indians, lazy Aztecs, and simple peones.

The three writers practice the sort of autobiography that aims to

represent the larger story of a race, class, or culture. They evince an

aristocratic mode of representation whereby the nuevomexicana narra-

tors claims cultural resistance against Anglo-American hegemony, while

discursively repressing the Indian and Cholo other. They recover the

manners of the cultural elite by subscribing to the ‘Spanish Fantasy

latino studies - 1:1 142 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Heritage,’ which evokes a glorious past while omitting mention of former

inequities. Pérez reads their texts not as pronouncements of cultural

resistance but as artifacts that show nuevomexicanas as simultaneously

participating in and resisting Anglo oppression (Pérez, 2002).

Similarly, in the 1885 novel The Squatter and the Don by the

California author Marı́a Amparo Ruiz de Burton, the Hispano landowner

Don Mariano Alamar, the benevolent and noble main character, has no

greater appreciation for non-whites than his encroaching Anglo nemesis

William Darrell. When the Don looks back nostalgically to his lineage,

the landlords who settled California on territories granted by ‘the Spanish

Government or the viceroys of Mexico,’ he highlights their service as

faithful collaborators in the founding of missions, their efforts to attract

‘population by employing white labor,’ their hiring Indians so as to make

them ‘less wild,’ and, ‘in times of Indian outbreaks,’ to assist in the

defense of the country ‘threatened by the savages’ (Ruiz de Burton, 1992:

176). Latin American societies and the United States were both founded

on the sweat of blacks and the blood of Indians for the benefit of white or

light-skinned elites. The entire hemisphere, in that sense, bought into the

paradigm that Roberto Márquez has called the ‘Society of Race and racial

castes’ as the one principle ‘by which the Americas all have been

historically shaped and socially articulated’ (Márquez, 2000: 13). I can

find, therefore, little justification in the wisdom that would insist on our

presumably more civil understanding of race.

While we may agree that some basic differences exist ‘between the way

that Latinos view race and the way that race is viewed overall in the

United States,’ we might fail to detect any salutary implications in the

claim that the construction of race in Latin American countries ‘has been

more fluid,’ transcending ‘the binary division adopted in the United

States’ (Rodrı́guez, 2000: 9, 123). Racial paradigms in Latin America, we

are told, follow ‘a continuum with no fixed demarcation between

categories,’ and US Hispanics, coming ‘from a culturally and generally

mixed racial background,’ had to enter ‘a biologically based biracial

structure’ that featured European Americans at one end of the pole and

African Americans at the other, with Native Americans and Asian

Americans occupying ‘ambiguous gray positions vis-à-vis the dichotomy’

(Rodrı́guez, 1994: 131–132). One gathers from the distinction herein

proclaimed a marked interest in stressing the exceptionality of Hispanic

racial thought. But, however meaningful we may find the distinction for

inquiries into the epistemology of racial classifications, it will not lessen

the gravity of racial aggression south of the Rı́o Grande. Suffice it to

mention that prior to the arrival of José Martı́ and Antonio Maceo on the

political scene, the ideologues of Cuban nationalism invariably articu-

lated their burning desire to extirpate the black element from the body of

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the nation and that for nearly five decades – until well into the 20th

century – the Mexican State invested itself ardently in a caste war that

sought to erase the Maya presence from any position of social relevance

in the Yucatan peninsula.

Latinos are by no means the sole group in the United States that has

reason to feel dissatisfied with the rigid racial codification that the society

currently espouses. Mary Waters, a student of multiethnic identities,

describes the current situation as one ‘where growing numbers of

Americans no longer fit the categories we currently use to define

Americans’ (Waters, 1998: 44). Nor should we think of blood mixing,

of transgressions of racial borders, as unique to any one single subsection

of the American population. Even the founding fathers, when confronted

with the inexorability of the racial divide, had occasion to ponder the

reality of blood mixture. Thomas Jefferson in 1803 envisioned

amalgamation as a solution to the plight of Native Americans: ‘to let

our settlements and theirs meet and blend together, to intermix, and

become one people. Incorporating themselves with us as citizens of the

United States, this is what the natural progress of things will, of course,

bring on, and it will be better to promote than to retard it’ (cited in

Hilden, 1995: 149). During the mid-19th century, Lewis Henry Morgan,

the renowned anthropologist whose research Marx and Engels so greatly

admired, actually claimed to witness the desirable outcome of the cross-

fertilization of Indians and whites: ‘The color of the Indian women is

quite uniform, and is light. It shows that the white blood infused into

them in the East has been well diffused throughout. The next cross will

make a pretty white child’ (cited in Hilden, 1995: 149–150). Morgan

welcomed the absorption of Indian blood into Anglo veins, because the

genetic transaction would benefit whites given the numerical advantage

of European-descended Americans in the 1850s. He believed the mixture

would ‘improve and toughen our race,’ and that the unmeltable Indian

populations, ‘the residue,’ would be ‘run out or forced into the regions of

the mountains’ (50). He articulated a sort of benevolent eradication of the

Indian.

By 1900, when Charles Chesnutt published ‘The Future American,’ the

idea of amalgamation had captured the imagination even of some non-

whites. A distinguished mulatto essayist and fiction writer, Chesnutt

conceived of a process whereby the ‘one-eighth Negro’ population would

dissolve into the majority white citizenry. As a result of that fusion,

‘There would be no inferior race to domineer over; there would be no

superior race to oppress those who differed from them in racial externals’

(Chesnutt, 1996: 21). Amalgamation envisioned the end of racism with

the disappearance of races. Chesnutt’s conceptualization, of course,

empowers Caucasian blood alone with the ability to provide the

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framework wherein all the other races would dissolve. Twenty-five years

later the Mexican thinker José Vasconcelos would imagine the advent of

the ‘synthetic race,’ born of the absorption of ‘the inferior races’ –blacks

redeeming themselves, ‘step by step, by voluntary extinction’ – by the

superior white, the final product constituting a ‘fifth universal race’ that

he called ‘the cosmic race’ (Vasconcelos, 1997: 32). Strangely enough,

Anzaldúa has embraced this idea of amalgamation as one that champions

‘inclusivity’ and offers an alternative to the ‘racial purity that white

America practices’ (Anzaldúa, 1999: 99). However, for all their stress on

crossing racial boundaries, Chesnutt and Vasconcelos remain captive to

white supremacist paradigms. The two thinkers imagine a scenario in

which the subordinate racial groups – ethnic rivulets at the margins –

spread themselves thinly across the vast sea of superordinate whiteness.

As we can see, Hispanics have hardly a monopoly over the

phenomenon of mestizaje. Native Americans, for instance, have had to

contend with vexing questions stemming from the legitimacy of mixed-

bloods or crossbloods in matters of cultural and communal belonging. At

one end, Gerard Vizenor affirms that ‘mixed-bloods are not incomplete,’

not ‘half of something,’ but ‘whole people’ (Vizenor, 1995: 158).

Conversely, Sherman Alexie speaks very unflatteringly of mixed-bloods,

in whom he detects the same inauthentic affectation that he criticizes in

non-Indian commentators on Indian life (Alexie, 2000: 10–11). Native

Americans have occasionally had to deal with issues of blood quanta to

establish reservation membership eligibility. The reservation system

bifurcated the integrity of the Tohono O’odham, the tribe formerly

known as Papago, whose traditional territory extended beyond the

international boundary created by the advent of the Mexico-US border.

The family of Native-American writer Ofelia Zepeda, a Tohono

O’odham who traces her roots to Sonora, Mexico, did not qualify for

admission into the reservation on account of its coming from the

Mexican side of the border despite its blood link to the other half of

the tribe on the US side (Zepeda, 2000: 408). The case of Zepeda may at

the same time alert us to the existence of a number of ‘invisible’ Latinos

who, like her, occupy non-Hispanic ethnoracial identity spaces despite

their important ties to Latin American ancestry.

Out of the ethnoracial impasse

The intellectual conversation on the ethnoracial location of Latinos

appears to have reached an ideological dead end. Skidding on the slippery

mud of accurate definability, the academic debates tend to go two ways

simultaneously. Generated primarily by activists and scholars of color,

they try to serve competing needs: (1) to voice the interests of racialized

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constituencies and (2) to hearken the scholarly community’s contention

about the untruth of race. Compounding the precariousness of that

discursive and political scenario, we witness the emergence of novel ways

of self-representation. We observe as a trend that many people of ethnic

minority descent now shun the traditional language of self-affirmation.

They often choose to configure their subject positions by destabilizing the

logic of self-differentiation upheld by their elders. No longer compelled to

brandish their ethnic or racial selves as a political banner, many Latinos

now seem less willing to assert their otherness by contradistinction to a

dominant white core. It has become customary for them to regard

themselves as biracial or bicultural, stressing individual subjectivities that

partake of multiple identity spaces rather than obediently embracing the

imperative of communal subjectivities that informed standard ethnoracial

agendas during the civil rights era. The frequency with which ethnic

minority respondents chose simultaneously several categories of self-

representation in the 2000 US population census attests to the prevailing

mood. When speaking about themselves today, many people of

color wish to privilege their ontological complexity, their elusive

definability.

I do not wish to belittle the philosophical seriousness of the widespread

fear of definitions. Concerns over the metaphysics of naming do have a

rightful place in the public sphere, the academy included. Yet, we might

derive much enlightenment from research that would look at whether a

similar uneasiness about the existing ethnoracial labels can be discerned

among white Americans. I would conjecture that if ethnic minority

communities alone appear committed to expanding the conceptual

paradigms of self-representation and pursuing greater epistemological

flexibility in delimiting the boundaries of their ethnoracial selves, perhaps

we might have reason to worry. Perhaps we might be witnessing the final

triumph of the logic of amalgamation wherein the subordinate groups

accept the idea of diluting themselves with the hope of erasing the

borderline that separates them from normative whiteness. I fear further

that if over 35 million Latinos decline to define themselves, corporate and

government interests will do it instead. Given the current trend to think of

Hispanics in panhemispheric terms, transcending the focus on Latinos as

a specific US ethnicity, the external definitions may involve political and

economic partners from both sides of the Rio Grande. A time may come

when a shrewd Mexican president like Vicente Fox will command greater

influence in dictating policy for the Mexican-American community than

Chicano intellectuals, Mexican-American legislators, and the National

Council of La Raza put together.

Part of the impasse exhibited by the current conversations on

ethnoracial identity has to do with the difficulty of harmonizing the

latino studies - 1:1 146 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

often fractious rapport between the concepts of race and ethnicity.

Already ‘a great deal of scholarly attention has gone into studying

both race and ethnicity,’ but, as Manning Marable contends, ‘too

often the discussion has been mired in old debates and definitions,’

which leads him to recommend ‘a new and critical study of the

relationship between race and ethnicity’ (Marable, 2000). The

formulation by Michael Omi and Harold Winant that viewed racial

identification as superseding ethnicity among blacks and other

oppressed minorities found much favor in the academy in the years

following their publication (Omi and Winant, 1986: 20). However, as

one looks at Suzanne Oboler’s outline of the state of the race and

ethnicity debate in the mid-1990s, it appears clear that the discursive

camp then lent itself more easily than it does now to attempting the

topological separation (Oboler, 1995: 89–93). I find it telling that Alba

and Nee (1997), who have found that assimilation is taking place despite

the scholarly aversion to the study of the phenomenon in recent decades,

chose a usage whereby ‘racial’ distinctions imply the ‘ethnic’ and vice

versa (1997).

Today, with the death sentence that the scholarly community has

pronounced on the concept of race, the widespread interrogation of the

idea of nation as a stable arena within which to configure one’s identity,

and the general awareness of the fragility of ethnoracial ontology in light

of the disruptive impact of hybridizing crossings, we have little

justification for hoping that a sustained exploration of the relation

between race and ethnicity will break new productive ground. The time

may have come for us to desist from the effort to distinguish between the

two and to accept their conceptual fusion. Using race and ethnicity

synonymously may lead us out of the epistemological and political cul-de-

sac. When it comes to oppressed minorities of color, we do not need to

know the difference if they both translate into a common exclusion and

disempowerment. Ultimately ethnicity is no less a construct than race.

Both are fictitious. Both come from a similar effort to imagine a collective

internally or externally. Their reality occurs only as they translate into

social, political, and economic advancement or retardation. I would

venture to say that we have little to gain from subverting the pentagonal

paradigm bequeathed by the Civil Rights movement. Our mental energies

could best be invested in efforts aimed at fashioning a Latino ethnoracial

identity space devoid of white supremacist assumptions. That way

African-descended, Amerindian, and Asian-descended members of the US

Hispanic population on both coasts might truly identify with statements

that speak collectively about ‘the community,’ a necessary step before

galvanizing voices emerge that can effectively advocate for Latino

empowerment.

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S i lv io Torre s -Sa i l lant

About the author

Silvio Torres-Saillant, Associate Professor of English and Director of the

Latino-Latin American Studies Program at Syracuse University, is the

founder and former director of the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute at

the City College of New York. He is a Senior Editor for the Encyclopedia

of Latinos and Latinas in the United States. (co-edited by Deena

González and Suzanne Oboler, forthcoming, Oxford University Press),

and a member of the advisory board for Latino Studies. He serves on the

Board of Directors of the New York Council for the Humanities, the

University of Houston’s Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage

Project, and the MLA Committee on the Literatures of People of Color in

the United States and Canada. His book-length publications include

Caribbean Poetics (Cambridge University Press, 1997), El retorno de las

yolas (La Trinitaria, 1999), and The Dominican Americans (Greenwood

Press, 1998), co-authored with Ramona Hernández. With José Aranda

he has co-edited: Recovering the US Hispanic Literary. Heritage, Vol. 4

(Arte Publico Press 2002) and Desde la Orilla: Hacia una nacionalidad

sin desalojos (co-edited with Ramona Hernández) is forthcoming in

2003.

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