TY - JOUR
T1 - “Doing Race”
T2 - Latino Youth’s Identities and the Politics of Racial Exclusion
AU - Flores-González, Nilda
AU - Aranda, Elizabeth
AU - Vaquera, Elizabeth
N1 - Funding Information:
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Partial support from the University of Illinois at Chicago’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy, Great Cities Institute, the Office for Social Science Research, and the University of South Florida’s College of Arts and Sciences.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2014 SAGE Publications.
PY - 2014/12/26
Y1 - 2014/12/26
N2 - For most Latino youth, Latinos constitute a separate, while diverse, racial group. Our study demonstrates that, when asked about their identities, Latino youth do not follow conventional U.S. racial categories. Although they prefer to identify by national origin or panethnicity, they consider themselves to be part of a racial group rather than an ethnic group, as the U.S. Census designates them. Using findings from in-depth semistructured interviews with two samples of young adults in Chicago and Central Florida, this research joins the long-standing debate on the conceptual division between race and ethnicity arguing that there is a mismatch between existing sociological understandings of race and ethnicity and the current racial ideas and racial practices among Latino youth. There is also a mismatch between institutional measures of “race,” such as those found in the U.S. Census, and Latinos’ self-understandings of where they belong in the U.S. racial hierarchy. We suggest that not being officially designated as a racial group leads to the erosion of perceptions of belonging among Latinos to a nation in which being a member of a racial group allows for visibility and claims-making in a multiracial society.
AB - For most Latino youth, Latinos constitute a separate, while diverse, racial group. Our study demonstrates that, when asked about their identities, Latino youth do not follow conventional U.S. racial categories. Although they prefer to identify by national origin or panethnicity, they consider themselves to be part of a racial group rather than an ethnic group, as the U.S. Census designates them. Using findings from in-depth semistructured interviews with two samples of young adults in Chicago and Central Florida, this research joins the long-standing debate on the conceptual division between race and ethnicity arguing that there is a mismatch between existing sociological understandings of race and ethnicity and the current racial ideas and racial practices among Latino youth. There is also a mismatch between institutional measures of “race,” such as those found in the U.S. Census, and Latinos’ self-understandings of where they belong in the U.S. racial hierarchy. We suggest that not being officially designated as a racial group leads to the erosion of perceptions of belonging among Latinos to a nation in which being a member of a racial group allows for visibility and claims-making in a multiracial society.
KW - Latino youth
KW - U.S. Census
KW - ethnicity
KW - identity
KW - panethnicity
KW - race
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U2 - 10.1177/0002764214550287
DO - 10.1177/0002764214550287
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84921473446
SN - 0002-7642
VL - 58
SP - 1834
EP - 1851
JO - American Behavioral Scientist
JF - American Behavioral Scientist
IS - 14
ER -