Hispanic Nation: Culture, Politics, and the Constructing of Identity

by Geoffrey E. Fox

Book Overview

A new ethnic identity is being constructed in the United States: the Hispanic nation. Overcoming age-old racial, regional, and political differences, Americans of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and other Spanish-language origins are beginning to imagine themselves as a single ethnic community-which by the turn of the century may become the United States' largest and most influential minority.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0816517991
• ISBN13: 9780816517992
• Release Date: August 1997
• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 0.76 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.6" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

How racism has turned a statistical fiction into a social and cultural Reality (or A white American

A new ethnic identity has been constructed "in place" in America, one that could not have occurred -- and indeed has not occurred in any other place in the world. In no other country in the world have Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Haitians, South Americans of all stripes, and other peoples of Spanish language origins been forced together into a single shared "non-white identity." The consequence is the demographic nightmare that rightwing columnist and author, Pat Buchanan (and his sympathizers) have been warning weak-kneed Americans and those Americans predisposed towards racism, about all along: The coming (non-white) hordes storming the gates from the south. This book tells how this new identity has come about and why it says more about America than it does about the people being corralled into an unwanted identity, themselves. Based on extensive interviews, observations, and extensive research, this book examines why diverse peoples of Spanish speaking origins, are beginning to imagine themselves as one new whole non-white identity and ethnicity, rather than as ordinary Americans: For people that are neither black nor white, there is no existential category for them on a fatally race-based American social grid and culture. By insisting that all people be divided into either blacks or whites - meaning that most are inadvertently classified as black -- America is losing all of its immigrants who do not recognize such racial divisions and boundaries, and thus all those who do not see themselves as fitting into America's sacred racist dichotomy. To most of them, but not all, racism is a special and peculiar kind of irrational false consciousness, into which they find it difficult and unnecessary to fit themselves into, or even to conform to. Most, do not make a big deal of it, they just don't do it, period. While it would be naïve to suggest that there is no racism among Hispanics, the difference between the way it is practiced in most Spanish-speaking countries and the way it is practiced in the U.S. almost amounts to a difference in kind rather than just in degree. Typically for them class distinctions are much more salient than racial distinctions, but even here, it is difficult for them to get their minds around having themselves being labeled as "black", and having to be considered black by U.S. standards, as soon as they reach American shores, and having to do so no matter what their class distinctions may have been before arrival. Not inconsequentially, Middle Easterners and Orientals have made the same complaints against America society and its built-in racist code and "false racial consciousness." It is as much for this peculiarity of American folkways, as for any other, that they find American society a bit "cock-eyed," and its coded and invisible racist rules difficult to negotiate: The alternative is to eschew American folkways and mores altogether. And establish "in place" little, non-American, non-white, Hispanic (and to

The Color of our Future seems to be brown...

I found this book to be very informative, with a lot of perceptive insights as to what it meant, what it now means, and what it will mean to be Hispanic American in the US. The dichotomy of race in the US is about to shift drastically with the growing Latino/Hispanic population. However few Hispanics think of themselves as such. We tend to think of ourselves in terms of nationality. Once, we go beyond individual nationalities and unite as one voice, we can then truly impact on the politics in this nation and change the "Face of this Country"! Bravo