Latino Race Ethnicity and Place in the USA
Progress report
Race and ethnicity: Latino/a immigrants and emerging geographies of race and place in the USA
Progress in Human Geography
36(6) 800–809
ª The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav 10.1177/0309132511427229 phg.sagepub.com Patricia L. Price
Florida International University, USA
Abstract
Over the past 20 years, Latino/a immigration to the USA has transformed how place and race are lived. The scale of the city-region has emerged as key to understanding these changes. Latino/a immigrants challenge the stark black-white binary that has long shaped race relations in the USA. Labor relations, racial stereotyping, and Latino/a alliances with other demographic groups have emerged as provocative themes in the recent scholarship on Latino/a immigration. Because race and place work iteratively to shape one another, geographic thought on place may be used to sophisticate our conceptual understanding of race. In particular, the fluidity of race is challenged through its close relationship with place.
Keywords
immigration, Latino/a, place, race, scale
I Latino/a immigration and the
(re)making of place in the USA
Contemporary geographies of race and ethnicity, which provide the umbrella topic for these progress reports, is nothing if not a big subject.
While a focus solely on Latino/a immigration to the USA handily provides a feasible unit of analysis for the purposes of this report, there are as well quite substantial arguments for these particular emphases. First, the USA provides particularly fertile ground in which to view the landscape of racialization and immigration inasmuch as we are currently in the throes of a heated debate over the social place of immigrants that, while by no means settled, has been longer entrenched in Europe (Bonilla-Silva,
2002; Leitner, 1997; Winant, 2002). Second, my focus on Latinos/as, as opposed to other mobile groups, particularly Asian immigrants
and black Americans, is warranted due
Race and ethnicity: Latino/a immigrants and emerging geographies of race and place in the USA
Progress in Human Geography
36(6) 800–809
ª The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav 10.1177/0309132511427229 phg.sagepub.com Patricia L. Price
Florida International University, USA
Abstract
Over the past 20 years, Latino/a immigration to the USA has transformed how place and race are lived. The scale of the city-region has emerged as key to understanding these changes. Latino/a immigrants challenge the stark black-white binary that has long shaped race relations in the USA. Labor relations, racial stereotyping, and Latino/a alliances with other demographic groups have emerged as provocative themes in the recent scholarship on Latino/a immigration. Because race and place work iteratively to shape one another, geographic thought on place may be used to sophisticate our conceptual understanding of race. In particular, the fluidity of race is challenged through its close relationship with place.
Keywords
immigration, Latino/a, place, race, scale
I Latino/a immigration and the
(re)making of place in the USA
Contemporary geographies of race and ethnicity, which provide the umbrella topic for these progress reports, is nothing if not a big subject.
While a focus solely on Latino/a immigration to the USA handily provides a feasible unit of analysis for the purposes of this report, there are as well quite substantial arguments for these particular emphases. First, the USA provides particularly fertile ground in which to view the landscape of racialization and immigration inasmuch as we are currently in the throes of a heated debate over the social place of immigrants that, while by no means settled, has been longer entrenched in Europe (Bonilla-Silva,
2002; Leitner, 1997; Winant, 2002). Second, my focus on Latinos/as, as opposed to other mobile groups, particularly Asian immigrants
and black Americans, is warranted due