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INVENTING THE RACE: L ATINOS

AND THE ETHNO R ACI A L
PENTAGON
S i l v i o To r r e s -Sa i l l a n t
Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY
A b s t ra c t
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.
Ke y wo rds
amalgamation; white supremacy; negrophobia; panethnicity; race;
civil rights movement
c 2003 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1476-3435/03 $25.00

Latino Studies 2003, 1, (123151)
www.palgrave-journals.com/lst
latino studies - 1:1

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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: 181182). 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 concept 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 (Lopez and Espritu, 1990). For David Lopez and Yen Espiritu,
the construction of panethnicity, while it assumes a specific concept of race,
has the potential for supplanting both assimilation and ethnic particularism 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 Hispanicy 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: 6566). 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 Wilsons
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 countrys 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-a`-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:
3244). Todays language requires a larger coverage of well-being,
encompassing the right to ones 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 supremacist 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 instruments 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 selfevident, 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 Citys 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 Gonzalez 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 (Gonzalez, 2000: xvixvii). 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 Garca urged Latinos to beware of
politicians wearing sombreros and brandishing their smattering of
Spanish. Garca exhorted Latino readers to demand more than symbolic
attention from politicians (Garca, 2002). Recent US census data show
Hispanics earning considerably less, suffering greater rates of unemployment, falling below the poverty line in larger numbers, and having poorer
educational attainments than the rest of the US population (SuarezOrozco 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 (LaoMontes and Davila, 2001), they still voiced their yearning for concrete
indicators of betterment in the communitys material condition.
While valuing the achievements of Andy Garca, Gloria and Emilio
Estefan, Jennifer Lopez, Sammy Sosa, Alex Rodrguez, 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 Rices crucial speeches voiced
the Partys vision of the future of the nation, while Ricky Martins La
Vida Loca merely made the ambience festive for the arrival on stage of
George W. Bush to deliver the partys 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 panels 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 Cesar
Chavez. However, I immediately recanted, realizing that the comparison
does not hold. Except for the learned and the politically engaged, Chavez
and Huerta belong in the West Coast and they matter primarily to
Chicanos and Mexicans. The naming of a street in homage to Chavez 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
students 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 Onate 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 groups
power of negotiation with the dominant core and fails to combat the
communitys 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 a nd 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. Bakhtins 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 Lopez, 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 characteristics. 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 Lopez, 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 todays ethnoracial pentagon out of the old, racist
materials: the issuing in 1977 of the Office of Management and Budgets
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 countrys 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 countrys 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 proportionably 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 landowning 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
Cre`vecouer 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 monolingual, despite what Francisco de Miranda observed when he visited in
17831784, nearly 50 years prior to the better remembered visit by
Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave Baumont (18311832). 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 (18641926), the author of the play The Melting Pot
(1905), spoke ardently about interethnic fusion and his work provided
the lasting image that describes the countrys assimilationist ideal.
However, he did favor Americas 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 counterinstinct 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 contradiction 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.
R a c i a l r e ti c e n ce an d th e na t i o n
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 rhizomorphic, 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 nationstate
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-a`-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 underrepresentation of blacks and Latinos in centers of knowledge production
and policy making. However, at this point there is in sight no postnational, 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 asser t ion and citizenship

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 accommodating 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 performers
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, McDaniels 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 groups repository of value. Implicit in this
notion is the understanding that just as individual accomplishments will
add merit to the collective record of ones community, individual failure,
or misbehavior will conversely detract from the communitys 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, economically, 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 subjectivities 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 Hernandez, 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 (18251911). 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-a`-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 countrys
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 Martnez, a native of New Mexico
who represented the Colorado Delegation. A successful businessman,
flag waving patriot, Martnez 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, Martnez 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 mans reticence
to call the Hispanic component of his background by name. I will simply
offer his case and that of Martnez, atypical though they might appear, as
instances of US Hispanic ethnoracial indecision.
The ambivalent rapport of Latinos with this countrys existing racial
categories, though often grounded in earnest epistemological preoccupations, 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 communitys 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 blackwhite 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 Americo
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
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by political activists Aniceto Pizana 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 nonwhite orientation of its agenda. The Chicano movement drew substantially 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: 1213).
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 societys
dominant white core. The language of their 13-point program accentuates 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 Joaqun,
which embraces the persona of the inherently oppositional figure of the
outlaw Joaqun Murrieta, the 1967 Chicano epic poem by Rodolfo
Corky Gonzales very emphatically evoked the plight of La Raza
Mejicano!/Espanol!/Latino!/Hispano!/Chicano in the inhospitable
whirl of a/gringo society, in terms of a sustained sociopolitical and
cultural polarity (Gonzales, 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 persons

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, ones ethnic identity is variable and subject to construction of
the individual (Rodrguez, 2000: xxi). Probably, the most radical
intervention in a post-modernist discursive mode is that of Gloria
Anzaldua, 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. Anzaldua claims she inhabits the space she has famously
termed the borderlands, which means the speaker is neither hispana
India negra espanola/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 (Anzaldua, 1999:
217). Also, occupying that space articulated by Anzaldua 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
speakers conclusive recommendation to live sin fronteras/be a crossroads, as a way to survive, by transcending, the crossfire of multiple
identities (216217).
I would submit that in upholding the radical porosity of Latino identity
assuming that Anzaldua 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 (Suarez-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: 182183). The
pervasive Hispanic predilection for whiteness as a self-identification often
co-exists with a certain reticence to specify or affirm ones ethnoracial
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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 subsections 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 constructedness, 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 Hansberrys 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 Charlies 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 doesnt 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.
L a t i n o s a s ra c i a l l y e x c e p t i o n a l
Latinos face a troubling dilemma. For while this countrys 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, Danas 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. Perez 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 narrators 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
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Heritage, which evokes a glorious past while omitting mention of former

inequities. Perez reads their texts not as pronouncements of cultural
resistance but as artifacts that show nuevomexicanas as simultaneously
participating in and resisting Anglo oppression (Perez, 2002).
Similarly, in the 1885 novel The Squatter and the Don by the
California author Mara 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 Marquez 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 (Marquez, 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 (Rodrguez, 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-a`-vis the dichotomy
(Rodrguez, 1994: 131132). 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 Ro Grande. Suffice it to
mention that prior to the arrival of Jose Mart and Antonio Maceo on the
political scene, the ideologues of Cuban nationalism invariably articulated 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 crossfertilization 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: 149150). 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 nonwhites. 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. Chesnutts 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 Jose 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,
Anzaldua has embraced this idea of amalgamation as one that champions
inclusivity and offers an alternative to the racial purity that white
America practices (Anzaldua, 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 mixedbloods 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: 1011). 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 Oodham, 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
Oodham 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 o f t he ethnoracial i mpasse

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 communitys 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 selfrepresentation 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
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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 Obolers 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: 8993). 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 ones 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-desac. 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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148
A b o u t t he a ut h o r
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
Gonzalez 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 Houstons 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 Hernandez. With Jose 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 Hernandez) is forthcoming in
2003.
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INVENTING THE RACE: L ATINOS

c 2003 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1476-3435/03 $25.00

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

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Douglass and Frances Ellen Harper (18251911). As a result, W. E. B.

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

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

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thought of the decentered and epistemologically unstable self. A persons

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

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

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Out o f t he ethnoracial i mpasse

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constituencies and (2) to hearken the scholarly communitys contention

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