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Despite our long historical presence, there is a general sociolegal invisibility of Latina/os in the United States. As with other traditionally subordinated communities within this country, the combination of longstanding occupancy and persistent marginality has fueled an increasing number of contemporary Latina/o legal scholars to engage with and try to define the contours of what it means to be Latino in the United States, as well as questions of what is our place/space now and in the future of this nation, which, as the author highlights, “thinks of itself as the conscience of the world.”

Inventing Latinos by Professor Laura Gomez is an invaluable contribution to the growing literature on Latino studies because it not only tackles the question of how Latinos came to be in the context of the United States but also looks forward and asks: “What is at stake?” and “What is to be done?” This book is important because it looks for the answers to these questions by interrogating the complicity of colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy in inventing and maintaining hierarchies of ethnicity and race as a central part of the American project.

As a Latina who sometimes struggles with the label, I appreciated the fact that, from the outset, Professor Gomez made it clear that Latinos exist only in the context of the United States; no one outside of the United States has the need to self-identify as a Latino. We just exist within the complexities of our national, or, as in my case, colonial, identities. I became a Latina when I moved to Pittsburgh 12 years ago; before then, I was mainly a Puerto Rican, a Latin American, or even an American, depending on where I was traveling.

Latino/Latina/Latinx are also contested designations within the very communities that they seek to encompass because they center around colonialism as a binding thread in exclusion of Indigenous communities. These terms are an imposition of the racial taxonomy of the United States that negates the complex cultures and histories of each country, as well as Anglicizing the Spanish language, just to name a few of the issues. Nonetheless, the Latino and Latinx designations have also been adopted by critical theorist and social movements that seek to empower all of us in an intersectional way and have become an important tool to garner political gravitas.

In her first chapter, “We Are Here Because You Were There,” Professor Gomez begins the book by thoroughly documenting the long history of intervention of the United States in Latin American, an intervention that predates the adoption of the Monroe Doctrine.1 Before the Monroe Doctrine established the United States as protector and owner of interests and resources in Latin America, the United States had engaged in a corporate colonialism that exploited the resources of the newly independent nations in ways not dissimilar to the colonial extraction by Spain.

The United States’ dominance and influence in Latin America would not have been sustainable for more than a century without a combination of public and private enterprise. American imperialism and interventionism throughout the Americas via military force, political maneuvering, and economic policy imperatives catalyzed the Latino’s presence in the U.S.—it is no coincidence that Latino groups in the U.S. hail mostly from the places in which the U.S. has most interfered, such as Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Nicaragua, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, and most recently Venezuela. Different countries in Latin America have served and continue to advance different United States agendas. As the author expertly puts it, “today and for the past several decades” the United States “has reaped what it sowed.”

In the following chapters, “Idealized Mestizaje and Anti-Black and Anti-Native Racism” and “The Elusive Quest for Whiteness”, the author engages with the complexities of race in both the formation of identities in Latin America and those of Latinos in the United States. Both the initial colonial project forged by Spain in Latin America and the foundation of the United States are based in a racial project: white supremacy. As Cheryl Harris has taught us: “proximity to whiteness confers tangible and economically valuable benefits, and it is jealously guarded as a valued possession, allowed only to those who met a strict standard of proof.” Proximity to whiteness opens a whole set of privileges that materially and permanently guarantee basic needs, and therefore, survival.

The author posits that Latinos have held on to the concept of mestizaje to traverse a middle racial category of “other” affirming historical expressions of colorism and blanqueamiento to effectively distance themselves from African Americans and remain in the buffer zone between whiteness and blackness in a way that holds that boundary in place. As one of those Latinas that often finds herself outside the binary, I value that the author also incorporates the perspectives of sociologists like Eduardo Bonilla Silva and Raquel Z. Rivera and recognizes that there is also a possible space of transgression and affirmation in rejecting the binary in favor of “a wide variety of intermediate racial possibilities.”

In “To Count We Must Be Counted” Professor Gomez tackles the role of the US Census in promoting and upholding white supremacy by creating and manipulating categories of people. She recounts the history of how in 1980, Latinos came to be counted as an ethnic group rather than a racial category and how this served both the interests of conservative Latino leaders and of other racial minorities, since it continued to allow Latinos to identify as white, black or even Asian without affecting the total numbers in those categories. In practice though, the 1980 Census count gave visibility to Latinos. Latinos had arrived; the next step after visibility is representation.

Perhaps the most important contribution this book makes is that it brings the above-mentioned conversation regarding history, colonialism, and race as the build up to a call for action. The author answers her questions, “What is at stake?” and “What is to be done?”, with a specific call to action. She proposes doing away with the so-called Hispanic ethnicity question and instead incorporating the Latino/Latina/Latinx signifiers among the race questions. She further proposes that space be allowed for national origin information to be collected and that a comprehensive education campaign be conducted to explain how colonialism has operated and that Latinos, as well as everyone else, be able to self-identify with more than one category. La Raza is here and occupies multiple categories, and we could all agree with the author that this information should be counted and represented a way that represents the “lived reality of race” in a way that makes it visible as an influential political actor that should be counted.

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  1. In his December 2, 1823, address to Congress, President James Monroe declared that it would be the foreign policy of the United States to curtail the European nations’ “footprint in the Americas.” The United States declared itself “sovereign of the Americas,” and by the end of the nineteenth century had established an imperialistic foreign policy towards Latin America. See Sam Erman, The Constitutional Lion in the Path: The Reconstruction Constitution as a Restraint on Empire, 91 S. Cal. L. Rev. 1197, 1213 (2018).
Cite as: Sheila Vélez Martinez, How Latinos Came to Be, What Is at Stake, and What Is to Be Done, JOTWELL (January 23, 2023) (reviewing Laura E. Gomez, Inventing Latinos: A New Story of American Racism (2020)), https://equality.jotwell.com/how-latinos-came-to-be-what-is-at-stake-and-what-is-to-be-done/.