Race Migrations: Latinos and the Cultural Transformation of Race

Race Migrations: Latinos and the Cultural Transformation of Race By Wendy D. Roth Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. ISBN: 978-0-804777-96-4 268 pages; $24.95 [paper]"Rather than acculturating to an Americanized view of race, Latino migrants have transformed it." So tells us Wendy D. Roth in her recent book Race Migrations: Latinos and the Cultural Transformation of Race. She states further that Latinos "have helped create a new American racial schema, moving their host society away from a dominant binary U.S. schema-which would classify them all as White or Black, based on the one-drop rule-to a Hispanicized U.S. schema that treats White, Black, and Latino as mutually exclusive racialized groups" (p. 177). The mechanism through which this momentous cultural change has operated is the process of mass migration through which "many migrants, their host society, and those leftbehind think about race and classify themselves and others."In Race Migrations, Roth makes very sophisticated arguments in a rather simple and straightforward fashion. The book consists of seven chapters that address how race (and ethnicity or national origin) is conceptualized in the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and the United States as well as the mechanisms by which these understandings of race, racialization, and racial identity are communicated between these countries. In addition, Roth describes how race, ethnicity, and their accompanying racialization operate in the stratification of these societies, and how in turn social stratification structures racialization, on the one hand, and how Latinos use their physical appearance and cultural assets to navigate the racialization process.The theoretical perspective grounding the argument is cognitive science, relying heavily on the concept of racial schemas, which Roth explains as the "bundle of racial categories and the set of rules for what they mean, how they are ordered, and how to apply them to oneself and others" (p. 12). Roth takes this useful and fruitful approach as a reaction to the persistent focus on racial identity in sociological research, which, while certainly not unimportant, is but one aspect of race in social relations. A pervasive focus on racial identity, Roth states, "says less about people's understandings of what races are and which ones exist."Critical to her understanding of race and the racial schemas people have is the understanding that people hold a variety of these ideas, opinions, and dispositions about race at any given point, with some becoming more salient at particular junctures. Holding these multiple racial schemas provides dynamism and variability to social interactions that turn on race or in which race plays a role.Given the role of migration in changing the categories people use to relate to others according to physical characteristics, sorting them and the rules for engaging in such sorting, the acculturation of immigrants, and cultural diffusion between societies play crucial roles in Roth's account of how racial understandings change. The experience of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans moving between their respective countries in the Caribbean and the United States has exposed all three societies to changes in their understandings of race. The primary subjects of change are the immigrants themselves who live through the process of having to adapt to new customs and usages. But the host society also changes with the incorporation of these migrants with different understandings of race.Roth therefore travels between New York City, San Juan, and Santo Domingo to conduct her in-depth interviews and her ethnographic work, engaging both migrants and non-migrants. A great deal of her data and insights comes from having people she interviewed identify racially people shown in color photographs. Roth notes that, in the process of classifying and defining race, Dominicans and Puerto Ricans were heavily influenced by, primarily, education and, correspondingly, social class. …