Inventing the Race: Latinos and the Ethnoracial Pentagon

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 pan-ethnic 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.