Race and ethnicity

I Latino/a immigration and the (re)making of place in the USA

Contemporary geographies of race and ethnicity, which provide the umbrella topic for these progress reports, is nothing if not a big subject. While a focus solely on Latino/a immigration to the USA handily provides a feasible unit of analysis for the purposes of this report, there are as well quite substantial arguments for these particular emphases. First, the USA provides particularly fertile ground in which to view the landscape of racialization and immigration inasmuch as we are currently in the throes of a heated debate over the social place of immigrants that, while by no means settled, has been longer entrenched in Europe (Bonilla-Silva, 2002; Leitner, 1997; Winant, 2002). Second, my focus on Latinos/as, as opposed to other mobile groups, particularly Asian immigrants and black Americans, is warranted due to sheer volume. As of 2003 Latinos/as surpassed black Americans as the most numerous ‘minority’, and stand today at 16% of the US population. They are also the fastest-growing demographic sector, accounting for half of the growth in the total US population between 2000 and 2010 (Humes et al., 2011). The demographic force of Latinos/as does more than simply rearrange the pecking order among racialized categories, it has the potential to rework how race and place are manifest in the USA.

I thus set this article’s sights on the literal and figurative reworking of race and place in light of contemporary Latino/a immigration in the USA. Scale, too, though a problematic organizing metaphor in key ways (Marston et al., 2005), does provide a heuristic for understanding different kinds of places (Smith, 1992). As racialized dimensions of belonging and exclusion become profoundly rescaled – i.e. negotiated at different levels of geographic aggregation – the importance of place in a scalar sense is revealed. For instance, the movement of citizenship away from the scale of the nation state toward both the more-local scales of the urban and the supranational scales of world region and globally, is illustrative of the importance of scale in the negotiation of belonging (Bakker, 2011; Coleman, 2007; Ehrkamp and Leitner, 2006; Staeheli, 2011; Walker and Leitner, 2011). Race itself can be understood as a politics of location or emplacement; one has only to note the heavily taxonomic framing of even scholarly attempts to theorize race – as hierarchy, as relative social location, as matrix, as map – to grasp this notion (Sundstrom, 2003; Wright and Ellis, 2006). Last but not least, the color line, itself a geographic ‘border’ metaphor, plays a vital role in the demarcation of race in specific places, at key junctures across levels of geographic aggregation, and in both the theoretical understanding and political engagement of race. The singular starkness and durability of the US black-white biracial system (Bonilla-Silva, 2002; Howard, 2003; Sue, 2009) provides then yet another substantive motive for situating this analysis in the USA. Echoing W.E.B. DuBois’s oft-quoted words, that the color line constituted the problem of the 20th century, recent scholars of race and immigration have remarked on the color line’s durability over a century after the original assertion in 1903, noting once more that ‘racial and ethnic difference remains definitive of our times’ (Alexander and Alleyne, 2002: 541; see also Frank et al., 2010; Hall, 1997; Hero, 2005).

II Permutations of place and race

For as long as humans have lived in cities, the daily confrontation with difference has been part and parcel of the inherent relationality predicated by urban life. Social scientists working on topics related to difference have insisted that while these everyday encounters have occasioned regressive, even violent, stances, cities have also had emancipatory tendencies, among them fostering tolerance, increasing knowledge, and encouraging democracy (Amin and Thrift, 2002; Hero, 2005; contributions to Lees, 2004; Liggett, 2003). In her work on South African cities, for instance, Robinson (2004) argues that ‘city spaces can help to make freedom, to emancipate people from domination and poverty’ (p. 161). Indeed, scholars are fond of claiming that there is a catalytic aspect to cities that makes them vital sites for the elevation of the human experience (Soja, 2011; Storper and Venables, 2004).

Because immigration policy is, in the USA, at least nominally executed at the federal level, traditional scholarship on immigrant incorporation has tended to focus on the national scale at the expense of examining the closer scales of lived lives through quotidian interaction, or what Winders (2005: 689) has termed ‘the microgeographies of racialized social interactions’. This has had the consequence of overlooking the importance of cities in general, and of specific cities, thereby:

underestimate[ing] the significance of local microcultures of inclusion and exclusion, influenced by such factors as local class relations and associated ethnic settlements, the politics of local authorities on housing, education, planning and culture, and the balance of play between minority, majority and fringe organizations such as racist groups. (Amin and Thrift, 2002: 291–292)

While cities are by no means the only sorts of places of racialized everyday encounters (Cravey, 2003; Jarosz and Lawson, 2002; Nelson and Hiemstra, 2008), they remain key loci for the interactive negotiation of racialized difference (Bonnett, 2002; Sibley, 1995), particularly for immigrants to the USA given their predominantly urban destinations and their higher propensity for living in cities as compared to the native-born population (Waldinger and Lee, 2001). Also, though the traditional immigrant gateway cities of the mid-20th century – New York, San Francisco, Miami, Los Angeles, and Chicago – remain important immigrant destinations, US cities that have not traditionally received large numbers of foreign-born, such as non-coastal urban centers (contributions to Jones, 2008), suburbs (contributions to Singer et al., 2008), and, most notably for Latino/a immigrants, Southern cities and towns (Kochhar et al., 2005; Mantero, 2008; contributions to Odem and Lacy, 2009; contributions to Smith and Furuseth, 2006), have become increasingly important.

Along with the city, the scale of the region has emerged as central for understanding how new immigrants ‘fit’, or not, into US society. Noting that perceptions and representations, as well as realities, of racialized discrimination in large part drive immigrant destinations, and that US regions remain notably distinct from one another with regard to racial-ethnic identity, Wright and Ellis (2000) have suggested that traditional scholarship on immigrant incorporation has focused too exclusively on intra-urban residential patterns, when in reality the scale of the region is vital ‘because the regional scale is pivotal as both a representational practice and an ideological strategy in the discursive struggle of what it means to be “American”’ (p. 199). Frank et al. (2010) found that the racial identification of Latino/a immigrants varies significantly (in the statistical sense) across the USA by region, as ‘not only do Latino immigrants confront new racial boundaries, but they may also be subject to the effects of the existing [regionally specific] racial boundaries’ (p. 391).

The US South looms large in the emerging importance of the region for questions of immigration and race. Scholarship on Latinos/as has traditionally focused on cities located along the US-Mexico border and throughout the US Southwest region, and continues in some measure to do so (e.g. contributions to Arreola, 2004; Sundberg and Kaserman, 2006; Taylor, 2010). However, though Latino/a presence in this region has been long-standing, pre-dating the very border between these two countries, significant Latino/a presence in the South, immigrant or otherwise, is a feature solely of the last 20 years (Cravey, 2003). While southward and eastward migration of the native-born black population from cities like Los Angeles and Philadelphia over the past decade has been significant enough to label Atlanta ‘the Black Mecca’, with just over one in three Atlantans identifying as black, and more black Americans residing in the South since 1960, most of the South’s population growth – 45% – is due to the influx of Latinos/as, whether through in-migration from other locations in the USA or new arrivals from abroad, while only 19% of the region’s growth is accounted for by black arrivals. Latinos/as contributed more than blacks to the latest decennial population increases in 13 of the 16 Southern states, increasing the momentum of a trend already underway from 1990 to 2000. Thus changes in regional demographic profiles, particularly in the South, are most importantly attributable to the impact of Latino/a newcomers.

It is not only the South’s sheer rapidity of growth in the Latino/a population that has put the region on the map with respect to discussions of racialization in the USA; indeed, several regions – the Midwest, the Pacific Northwest, and the Western interior – are also experiencing rapid growth in Latino/a immigrant populations. It is also the particular place identity of the South, ‘different in so many ways for so much of its history’ (Kochhar et al., 2005: i), that makes the region so intriguing and important for the contemporary racial debate centered on immigrants. Southern exceptionalism, including the region’s political and Christian conservatism, strong identification of its native-born population with the region’s rural roots, and its history of defeat and reconstruction in the Civil War, is seen to set the South apart as a region unlike other US regions. And it is the brightly drawn color line between black and white, ‘that tyrannically drawn boundary’ (De Genova, 2006: 1), that has played a central role in shaping the South’s real or imagined economic, political, cultural, historical, and landscape peculiarity (Dwyer and Alderman, 2008; Hoelscher, 2003; Inwood, 2009). Slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and the Civil Rights movement all have an identificational if not a literal historical location in the South, to the extent that race relations limned in stark black-white terms have in a major way produced the South as a scaled place. As Winders (2005) puts it, ‘the South has been unthinkable without its complement of “race”’ (p. 686, emphasis in original). And it is along the lines of race that the new (‘Nuevo’) South promises to intersect most interestingly with the Old South. For in the same way that cities are palimpsests of sorts, with the vestiges of old structures bleeding through to help shape the newer ones overlaid, so too are regions composites of old and new. The South has historically been the most insulated of US regions from the arrival of Latino/a immigrants, and the African American presence is greater here than in any other region (Marrow, 2009). Given the preeminence of the black-white binary to the historical realities and imaginaries underlying the Old South, one of the key questions with respect to this region’s racial identity today involves how Latinos/as will negotiate their place, and how place itself will be (re)negotiated in the process.

III Emergent themes: labor, racism, and solidarity

Several themes arise in the literature with respect to the mutual (re)construction of place and race in light of contemporary Latino/a immigration. First, the structure of the black-white binary is inexorably being challenged by Latinos/as, particularly with respect to labor relations. Given the centrality of labor to the Civil Rights movement, the position of black Americans vis-a-vis other racialized minorities has for several decades been a primary point of contention with respect to racial social justice in the USA. Will Latinos/as be discriminated against in the labor market in the same way as blacks? Will they eventually be accepted as de facto whites in the labor market, as with previous waves of European immigrants? Or will a tri-racial structure emerge? What Marrow (2009) found in a study of 129 whites, blacks, and Latino/a immigrants, in workplaces, elementary schools, courts, and political venues situated in eastern North Carolina, is that Latinos/as distantiate themselves in terms of both identification and interaction from black Americans, viewing the boundaries between themselves and native-born white Americans to be more permeable than those between Latinos/as and native-born black Americans. This has labor market repercussions, as ‘Hispanics, including many poor, dark-skinned, and undocumented Mexican and Central American labour migrants, are neither self-identifying as nor perceiving that they are treated equally to “collective blacks” in everyday lived experience’ (Marrow, 2009: 1053). Marrow also found a ‘strong and hostile racial hatred’ held by whites towards blacks, versus what she terms ‘a more ambivalent cultural xenophobia’ directed toward Latinos/as; a marked preference for Latino workers on the part of white employers; and the perception of stronger anti-Latino/a discrimination enacted by blacks as compared to whites (‘horizontal exclusion’, p. 1050; see Maldonado, 2009, for similar findings in an agricultural labor setting).

Similar concerns were uncovered by Drever (2008) in her study of post-Katrina reconstruction in New Orleans, whereby Latino/a immigrants were perceived as threatening the black and Creole identity of the city, as well as competing for housing and jobs with black New Orleaneans. Yet Drever found the news media played a large role in inciting racialized conflict among blacks and Latinos/as, whereas the history of New Orleans reveals a shared Afro-Caribbean port heritage among Latino/a immigrants (most of whom are from coastal Central America, not Mexico). On the basis of their shared economic and racial history, Drever views real potential for collaboration among native New Orleaneans and Latino/a newcomers.

Finally, tensions among black and Latino/a workers are manifest at day labor sites. Because these sites socially and spatially concentrate precariously situated workers, it is not surprising that tensions among them, including racialized tensions, erupt. In their study of laborer interactions at the Pacific Beach Worker’s Center in San Diego County, Crotty and Bosco (2008) found that the men self-segregate by broad racial category (black, white, Latino/a) while awaiting work, that ‘conflict between laborers almost always occurs along racial lines’ (p. 234), and the men believe that racial stereotypes influence who was and was not hired. Specifically, and resonating with the findings discussed above, black day laborers felt discriminated against vis-a-vis Latino/a workers by employers. Employers assumed Latinos/as ‘to be honest, hard workers’, while black (and homeless white) laborers were viewed as ‘drug users or alcoholics … to be dishonest, dangerous, and to have a poor work ethic’ (p. 237). Indeed, Crotty and Bosco claim that racial stereotypes have ‘a much greater effect on hiring practice than any other factor’ (p. 237) in their study site, given the laborers’ highly similar age, gender, class, and work experience.

The specific ways that racism and racial stereotyping are expressed with respect to Latino/a immigrants – the second theme emerging in the literature on Latino/a immigrants and racialization – is related to the first theme of racialized labor dynamics, which frequently invoke and can act to produce racial stereotypes. Several scholars have underscored that racism directed toward Latino/a immigrants does not have the same terms or tenor as that directed toward black Americans. As noted above, there is in part a question of degree, whereby, for instance, in the Marrow (2009) study mentioned previously, ‘mild xenophobia’ regarding Latino/a workers is juxtaposed with ‘strong and hostile racial hatred’ directed toward black workers, with asymmetrical material outcomes for these two groups following suit.

There is, additionally, a difference in the substance of anti-Latino/a racism as opposed to anti-black racism. According to Winders (2007), contemporary anti-Latino/a immigrant sentiment is generally framed in patriotic terms, a basis for racialized anxieties that has gained significant traction since the terrorist attacks of 9/11. In the South, anti-Latino/a racism additionally manifests as cultural rather than biological, in a way that references the aforementioned Southern exceptionalism, ‘protecting “Southern hospitality” and ways of life, avoiding a language of race by embracing a discourse of culture’ (p. 934). In a parallel observation of Op Ed newspaper articles discussing Latino/a immigration to Southern California, Pulido (2004) asks, ‘why is it acceptable to be anti-immigrant versus racist’ (p. 157)? Shockingly hostile comments published in the Los Angeles Times, decrying California’s perceived over-tolerance of Latino/a immigrants, stereotypes this demographic as dependent, poor, unable or unwilling to assimilate, and criminal. Yet what would in another context be seen as open racism is published ‘without a wince. Criticism of Latino immigration is seen as distinct from racist language and acts, which are presumably reserved for native-born nonwhites’, and this disarticulation of anti-immigrant sentiment from outright racism has ‘created an “open season” on discrimination and racism directed towards all brown-skinned people’ (p. 156; see also Nevins, 2010).

The undocumented status of some Latino/a immigrants has provided particular emphasis for anti-Latino/a nativism. Having a precarious or non-existent legal status in the USA has, on the one hand, enhanced the desirability of Latino/a immigrants as laborers, through what employers perceive as vulnerability leading to a willingness to work harder and without objection, as compared to native-born or second-generation workers (Maldonado, 2009; Marrow, 2009). On the other hand, however, the all-too-ready elision of ‘undocumented’ with ‘illegal’ implies criminality, thus constituting a hardening of the boundaries of exclusion vis-a-vis Latino/a immigrants. Furthermore, when ‘illegal’ is coupled with ‘alien’, the Latino/a immigrant is placed irrevocably outside the spaces of belonging at all scales (global, national, regional, and urban) and as such becomes immanently removable and expendable. Finally, because the status of ‘illegal alien’ tends to be ascribed to ‘all brown-skinned people’ regardless of place of birth or actual legal status, nativism squarely treads the terrain of racism, whether or not the tenor or terms of that racism share the biological basis of the racism directed at native-born black Americans, whether or not it is called racism.

The third theme to emerge in scholarship on Latino/a immigration and race, one which is frankly in need of further exploration, is the potential not just for conflict among Latino/a immigrants and other excluded groups, but of alliance. Several scholars referenced here mention the possibilities, for instance Drever (2008) with respect to the shared Creole and circum-Caribbean histories of black New Orleaneans and Latino/a immigrants to post-Katrina New Orleans; Cravey’s (2003) work on leisure spaces and activities of Mexican immigrants in central North Carolina, where – thanks mainly to a shortage of Spanish-speaking women – dance hall interactions include Mexican immigrant men as well as non-Mexican Latinos/as, black and Anglo-Americans; and Winders (2008), who documents the ambivalent interface of Latino/a newcomers and Nashville’s black community and political leaders. In these examples, recognition of a shared history of oppression, geographic origin, and quotidian interactions provide the bases for interracial solidarity, which can in theory constitute a vehicle for reworking boundaries among racialized groups and thereby racialized boundaries themselves.

Yet these and other discussions of potential alliances among Latinos/as and other groups focus almost exclusively (with the exception of Cravey) on black Americans as the ‘other group’. It would seem that alliances among white native-born Americans, other immigrant groups such as Asians, and native-born Latinos/as would also constitute potential solidarities. One that has been somewhat explored involves the massive rallies held in cities across the USA in the spring of 2006, protesting proposed nativist immigration legislation (specifically, HR 4437). While labor has traditionally constituted the common ground for inter- as well as intra-ethnic political coalitions, in this instance activism focused on the politics of citizenship and belonging. Using a combination of interview and survey data, Barreto et al. (2009) found that, though media coverage of the events portrayed the protests as largely ‘Mexican’ affairs, in fact a broad swath of US-resident Latinos/as – immigrants from diverse national ancestry groups, documented and undocumented, native-born – united in protest. In addition, Benjamin-Alvarado et al. (2009) found that new immigrants in new immigrant destination areas were just as likely to be involved in the protests as were more-established Latinos/as in heavily Latino/a urban areas.

Though notoriously situational in nature, pan-ethnic and interracial solidarities can potentially, over a longer period, lead to more-durable ‘tissues’ of engagement that in turn encourage further solidarity and activism (Nelson and Hiemstra, 2008; Price et al., 2011). Thus the rallies of 2006 may have begun to form new structures of pan-Latino/a engagement in new places, as well as build upon and strengthen existing structures rooted in minority political movements in the 1960s (for a detailed history of the latter, see Pulido, 2006). This sort of (re)vitalization of place, in this instance of emplaced political, institutional, and identificational tissues, exemplifies the positive impacts that Latino/a immigrants can and have had on the communities in which they live. Though there are scattered discussions of the revitalization of economically and demographically moribund places by new immigrants (e.g. Driever, 2004; Kraly, 2008; Oberle and Arreola, 2008), there is precious little scholarship on the positive contributions of Latino/a immigrants to place and community.

IV Conclusion: unbinding race and place?

Cities and regions, in particular, are newly being conceptualized and researched as city-regions, with implications territorial and scalar, but also – and perhaps most importantly of all – conceptual and political.

These new regional approaches are not an alternative to a focus on cities, but build into our understanding of the urbanization process and the changing modern metropolis a powerful and more explicit regional dimension, to the point that we can now speak of a regional urbanization process that is radically reshaping existing metropolitan structure. (Soja, 2011: 453, emphasis in original)

As Soja and others have pointed out, immigration of racially diverse populations to non-traditional gateway cities, and locations within city-regions other than the classic immigrant enclave neighborhood, play a key role in this radical rescaling toward city-regions. The emergence of the city-region might be seen as part and parcel of an unbounding of place and scale, whereby ‘a world of nested or jostling territorial configurations’ gives way to ‘spatial configurations and spatial boundaries [that] are no longer necessarily or purposively territorial or scalar’ (Amin, 2004: 33; see also Massey, 2005). By thinking and experiencing place differently we loosen the ties of taxonomic thinking about places and their relationship to each other. Geographically informed theory and analysis of race, however, has lagged, in part due to a dearth of intentionally place-comparative work on racial formation, and in part due to insularity with regard to insights from other disciplines engaged in the critical study of race (Price, 2010).

Racialized negotiations over belonging and exclusion have in a certain sense produced the places and scales that matter, and in their emergence these places and scales that matter have shaped contemporary racial formation. In this article I have noted a shift from the scale of the nation state to the scales of everyday encounters, cities, and subnational regions – to the city-region, if you will – as important for understanding the contemporary dynamics of race in light of Latino/a immigration to the USA. At different historical moments, different (sorts of) places matter more or less for critically understanding the dynamics of power, including race. At the same historical moment that ‘those with different interests fight to shape processes and institutions into scalar configurations that best suit their purposes and to legitimate desired constellations of power’ (Varsanyi, 2011: 298), those who contest and rework these constellations of power are also fighting to shape processes and institutions into particular scalar configurations. That the scale of daily encounters and non-traditional regional immigrant destinations has emerged so forcefully as important for the contemporary understanding and experience of race in the USA points to the shifting primary loci of belonging and exclusion.

Geographers and others have begun to rethink place in exciting ways. Place, along with scale understood as a sort of place, is constantly being produced, contested, and reworked. In addition, place is a relational phenomenon that does not exist in absolute terms, rather only in constant engagement with other places and scales. Because it is so intimately bound up with place, race can be understood in similar terms. Place and race are in important part produced through one another. They are at least partially inseparable from one another (‘the South is unthinkable without its complement of “race”’) and at least partially always in dynamic and relational tension with one another. Contemporary critical scholarship on race emphasizes its dynamic, relational, representational, and profoundly emplaced aspects. Omi and Winant’s (1994) much-employed notion of racial formation, for instance, is defined as ‘the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed’ (p. 55). Hence race is often discussed in terms of fluidity by contemporary critical scholars of race. Yet, as geographers have long underscored, any spatially imbricated social formation – and race is nothing if not spatially imbricated – is subject to the ‘stickiness’ of place (Markusen, 1996). Thus racial formation might, too, be productively viewed as ‘sticky’, or as Saldanha (2007) has put it, viscous. Though race is a malleable social formation, it is never divorced from place and is therefore never entirely divorced from the frictions of place, nor place from the frictions of race. Race, like place, is never totally fluid.