Márquez, Cecilia

Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation

UNC Press (Chapel Hill)

2023

OUR SYNOPSIS: Cecilia Márquez illuminates the experiences of Latino people in the U.S. South, emphasizing how local circumstances impacted how Latinos were treated regarding race. She argues that during Jim Crow, Latinos were lumped in with either the Black or white side of racial segregation, depending on their skin tone. However, “The acceptance of non-Black Latino people into white spaces was not a reflection of a racially progressive approach to Latinidad(or Latinoness). Instead, it was a deep commitment to the preservation of the anti-Blackness at the heart of Jim Crow.” (19) Moving forward in time, she argues that in the second half of the twentieth century “non-Black Latino people lost their access to white privilege,” and were increasingly alienated. (20) The book thus focuses on the social construction of the category Latino in the U.S. South from the mid-twentieth century into the twenty-first, while emphasizing the role of Blackness in race-making.

BIG QUESTIONS:

How did the inclusion or exclusion of Latino southerners impact Black experiences?
What do the experiences of Latino southerners reveal about the process of U.S. race-making?

FEATURE QUOTES:

“By examining the evolving racial position of Latino people in the South between 1945 and 2010, Making the Latino South uncovers a very different timeline of Latino identity and community formation than elsewhere in the country. While most histories of Latino people put the development of Hispanic or Latino identity as early as the 1920s or 1940s, Making the Latino South shows that many parts of the South did not have coherent ‘Hispanic’ racial categories until the 1980s.” (20)
“Examining Black and non-Black Latino people side by side lays bare the extent to which Latino subjectivity was defined not in relation to whiteness but instead to Blackness. In this book, therefore, I demonstrate how Latino people in the South were always understood through the register of Blackness.” (30)

PRIMARY SOURCES:

Harry Keelan “Voice in the Wilderness,” Baltimore Afro-American, May 27, 1947, 3, https://books.google.com/books?id=gGVGAAAAIBAJ.

BALTIMORE CONNECTIONS: