Publishers Weekly
06/01/2020
In this lucid and economical chronicle, UCLA law professor Gómez (Manifest Destinies) explores “how and why Latinos became cognizable as a racial group” in the U.S. She traces the roots of Latino identity to Spanish colonization of the New World, and the importation of enslaved Africans to make up for labor shortages caused by the decimation of indigenous populations. The legacy of American imperialism in Mexico, Central America, and the Spanish Caribbean in the 19th and 20th centuries, she contends, means that migrants from those regions deserve a path to U.S. citizenship. She examines how geographical separation (Cubans in Florida, Mexican Americans in the Southwest, Puerto Ricans in the Northeast) and cultural differences forestalled the emergence of a Latino civil rights movement until the 1970s, and notes the “seismic reverberations” on American politics and popular culture of counting Latinos in every U.S. census since 1980. Noting projections that Latinos will make up 30% of the population by 2060, Gómez celebrates the rise of political figures including Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, and hopes that Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policies and rhetoric will “galvaniz Latino consciousness.” Though Gómez’s prose tends toward the academic, she exposes the racism that underlies representations of Latinos as “perpetual foreigners” in the U.S. with precision. This incisive survey of Latino history packs a knockout punch. (Aug.)
From the Publisher
Praise for Inventing Latinos:
"This incisive survey of Latino history packs a knockout punch."
—Publishers Weekly
"In this thoughtfully argued study . . . Gómez provides much-needed insight into the true complexity of Latinx identity while revealing the ways in which the dominant culture continues to mask the many racist currents within American society. An insightful and well-researched book."
—Kirkus Reviews
"A[n] incisive study of history, complex interrogation of racial construction, and sophisticated legal argument, this title proves especially timely, what with the controversial 2020 census on its way, and expands brilliantly on the work Gómez began in Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race."
—Booklist
"A rigorous and provocative study of the liminal zone Latino/as inhabit in America's racial continuum. Required reading."
—Library Journal (starred review)
"[A] timely and important examination of Latinx identity."
—Ms.
"[Inventing Latinos] offers a significant and fresh examination of a topical subject—racism in our country."
—Albuquerque Journal
"In her pioneering book, Laura Gómez puts racism, colonialism, white dominance, and community resistance exactly where they should be: at the heart of the conversations about Latinos today, and the nature of race in the United States tomorrow."
—Ian F. Haney López
“Gómez reveals that history is not past. Instead, she shows us that as racism evolves, the U.S. commitment to racism remains steady, creating, but never quite controlling, Latinos as a distinct racial group. But if racism’s allure continues to tug powerfully at some segments of the United States, Inventing Latinos reveals that creative resistance is never far away.”
—César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, author of Migrating to Prison
“The critically important story of Latinx racial formation told here requires the impressive skills and knowledge of a scholar like Gómez. Inventing Latinos is informed by a hemispheric sweep centered on U.S. empire, an ability to trace history over centuries, and an appreciation of class relations and power.”
—David Roediger, author of How Race Survived U.S. History
“Written with exceptional clarity and drawing on deep research, Inventing Latinos presents not only a brilliant account of the changing position of Latinxs, but also a nuanced understanding of racism in the U.S. today.”
—Howard Winant, co-author of Racial Formation in the United States
“Inventing Latinos offers a unique road map for understanding how Latino identity came to be, and where it might be going. Gómez’s discussion of how Latin America’s mestizaje, or mixed-race ideology, is both perpetuated and sometimes re-purposed in the U.S. is one of the book’s many strengths.”
—Ed Morales, author of Latinx and Fantasy Island
Library Journal
★ 08/01/2020
"Race isn't real, but racism is." So affirms Gómez (law, Univ. of California Los Angeles; Manifest Destinies) in this bold, incisive interrogation of "the how and why of Latinx identity becoming a distinctive racial identity" from 1848 to 2020. Gómez documents how U.S. violence against Latin America led to today's large Latino/a population. The U.S. annexed half of Mexico in the 1840s, turned Puerto Rico into a glorified colony, quashed Latin American reform movements, and ruthlessly exploited the region for cheap labor and natural resources. She also unpacks Mexico's and the Dominican Republic's lionization of mestizaje (racial mingling), which tended to erase Black and Indigenous identities. Gómez then turns to the U.S. By "strategically claiming whiteness as a shield against racism," Latinos enacted "complicity in enforcing White-over-Black racial logic." Formally white but treated as a racially subordinate group based on phenotype and language, Latinos suffered segregation, disenfranchisement, poverty, and violence—six hundred Mexican Americans died by lynching between 1848 and 1928. VERDICT While not all Latinos agree with Gómez's call for censuses to treat "Latino" as a race and not an ethnicity, she delivers a rigorous and provocative study of the liminal zone Latino/as inhabit in America's racial continuum. Required reading.—Michael Rodriguez, Univ. of Connecticut, Storrs
Kirkus Reviews
2020-06-03
A vigorous argument that Latinx people from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean exist as “racially subordinated” groups in a "multi-race hierarchy in which Whites continue to be dominant.”
Gómez begins by examining the exploitative American colonialist projects in Central America and the Caribbean that resulted in large migrations of people across southern U.S. borders. She then explores the concept of “mestizaje,” "the social and sexual mixing of Indigenous peoples, Africans and Spaniards" that helped shape attitudes among Latino people regarding their identities. In the 1940s, for example, the light-skinned Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo played up the Indian/Spanish (mostly white) ancestry of Dominicans to distinguish them from and elevate them above their mostly Afro-European (mostly black) Haitian neighbors. Such efforts to privilege whiteness laid the foundation for a Latinx acceptance of racism that followed them into the U.S. and, as Gómez shows later on, forced many multiracial Latinx people to seek "protection" from American racism by identifying as white wherever possible. The 1980 census marked the first time that multiethnic/racial/cultural Latinx peoples were grouped together under one identity. The author argues that attempts to categorize Latinos ethnically rather than racially is actually part of a dominant culture strategy to keep different Latinx groups apart from each other and apart from blacks and enlist Latinos in efforts to police the “the White-over-Black color line.” In this thoughtfully argued study, which draws from historical and sociological sources, Gómez provides much-needed insight into the true complexity of Latinx identity while revealing the ways in which the dominant culture continues to mask the many racist currents within American society.
An insightful and well-researched book.
