Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Wendy Roth is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. She is coauthor of Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings (2004).

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Race Migrations

Stanford University Press

Contents

List of Illustrations......................................................................viAcknowledgments............................................................................vii1 How Immigration Changes Concepts of Race.................................................12 Beyond the Continuum: Race in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.....................323 Migrant Schemas: Race in the United States...............................................624 Transnational Diffusion..................................................................975 Multiple Forms of Racial Stratification..................................................1286 Performing Race Strategically............................................................1517 Is Latino Becoming a Race? Cultural Change and Classifications...........................176Appendix: Notes on Methodology.............................................................203Notes......................................................................................221Index......................................................................................245

Chapter One

SITTING ON THE FRONT STEPS OF HIS STUCCO HOUSE IN SANTO DOMINGO, Agustín is surrounded by the bustle of activity. His house serves as an informal gathering place for neighbors, his teenage children, and volunteers for the various political activities he organizes. The group huddled around him today, awaiting direction for the latest campaign event, looks like a cross-section of the Dominican population: there are people with light skin, dark skin, African features, European features, and almost every mixture in between. Later, Agustn confidently describes the racial categories that exist in the Dominican Republic:

Here there's a mix of negro and blanco—that's the majority, the ones that are mulato. There are some that are a minority, which is a minority that almost doesn't exist, which are the sambos.... The ones they call sambos are Indian and negro.... You can find some in some regions of Yamasa, around there, and Sabana Grande de Boya, some individuals that have Indigenous and negro characteristics.

He concludes that there are primarily three races in the Dominican Republic today: mulatos, blancos, and negros. In the past, there used to be mestizos, those who are a mixture of White and Indigenous, as well as sambos, but these races barely exist now because the Indigenous race was wiped out by European colonizers. The vast majority of Dominicans today—more than 80 percent of the population, he estimates—are mulatos.

A 53-year-old man with dark skin and African features, Agustn places himself within that mulato majority. He explains, "I understand that I'm a mix of blanco and negro, of Spanish and African origin.... [I'm] mulato, ... not totally negro but instead a mix." For him, the term mulato represents any mixture of White and Black heritage, and so it incorporates people with a wide variety of appearances. In fact, without hesitating, Agustín classifies the people around him as blanco, negro, and mulato. But almost everyone, whether light or dark, he labels as mulato. "Dominicans are a mix of races," he claims, and anyone who has any visible evidence of racial mixture can be considered the same race.

* * *

Raquel was born in the Dominican Republic and moved to New York when she was a young adolescent. Now in her mid-30s, she is an assistant principal in the Dominican enclave of Washington Heights. Amid the cinder-block walls and fluorescent lighting of her small high school office, Raquel's decorations—a screen saver of a tropical beach with clear blue water and palm trees, and paintings of the flowering red flamboyan trees common in the Dominican Republic—allow her to dream of escaping from her urban routine. Raquel has pale, light skin, straight black hair, and looks mostly European. At first glance, many people in New York would probably see her as White. Yet Raquel identifies her race as Black. She explains how she came to understand what race means and how to classify herself and others:

There was a confusion, at least for [me] ... about what race is, what ethnicity is, what nationality is. So, for me, it was an experience like an epiphany one day when I found out that there are only three races ... and you have to decide which you belong to. So not only by the color of the skin, but there are a lot of other factors.... There would be your ancestry—you need to look at your grandparents, your great-grandparents. You need to look at the shape of your mouth, the size of your ears, how your nose is, the texture of your hair. There are a lot of other things: the color of your eyes, the color of your hair, all those things. But in the Dominican Republic, as soon as you're a little light or medium light, already, you can't say that you're Black. No, that's like a sin. So, after you educate yourself and after you accept that there are either three or, if you want to be more specific and talk about the Indigenous people ... then there would be four [races], but you need to choose one of these three or four. You can't invent a new one. So I don't have any other option than choosing Black because I'm not White or Asian. So I must be whatever is left.

Q: Could you say a little about your epiphany? How did that happen? ...

I was in college ... taking a sociology class. I was reading in the book and it said that there were three races: Asian, White, and Black. I kept looking for my race because there wasn't a race for me. And I was talking with my teacher and so, during the conversation, he explained it to me. Sincerely, I tell you, with all the experience that I had, before that day it was one thing and after that day is another.

Before this experience, Raquel might have identified her race as White. But because she feels that the texture of her hair and some of her features reveal some African heritage, she realized that she did not have the option of choosing White. Now she sees others this way too, even people back in the Dominican Republic. Through her experience in college, Raquel now adopts a more historically "American" way of classifying race—that anyone with any Black ancestry should be seen as Black.

* * *

Isandro, a 38-year-old Puerto Rican man with medium-brown skin, works as an income tax auditor in San Juan. He identifies his race—and that of practically everyone around him in Puerto Rico—as Latino:

To me, I'm Latino. A lot of people say that Latino doesn't exist as a race. In case that one day it's defined or it's excluded [as a race], then I'd be Black. But I understand that I'm Latino because I'm ... neither White nor Yellow. I'm Latino.

Q: And what is the Latino race? What does it include?

Okay, the Latinos, I think ... they're not Whites, but they would be something like the mix of maybe White and Black. They tend to usually be shorter in height than the Whites. They tend to have features ... that are more lengthened, features that are finer than those of Blacks.... If someone asks me what I am, I say that...