Racial Transformations

Racial Transformations

Latinos and Asians Remaking the United States

  • Author: De Genova, Nicholas; Okihiro, Gary Y.; Molina, Natalia; Jew, Victor; Robinson, Toni
  • Publisher: Duke University Press
  • ISBN: 9780822337041
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780822387619
  • Place of publication:  Durham , United States
  • Year of digital publication: 2006
  • Month: April
  • Pages: 248
  • DDC: 32.17309
  • Language: English
Moving beyond the black-white binary that has long framed racial discourse in the United States, the contributors to this collection examine how the experiences of Latinos and Asians intersect in the formation of the U.S. nation-state. They analyze the political and social processes that have racialized Latinos and Asians while highlighting the productive ways that these communities challenge and transform the identities imposed on them. Each essay addresses the sociopolitical predicaments of both Latinos and Asians, bringing their experiences to light in relation to one another.

Several contributors illuminate ways that Latinos and Asians were historically racialized: by U.S. occupiers of Puerto Rico and the Philippines at the end of the nineteenth century, by public health discourses and practices in early-twentieth-century Los Angeles, by anthropologists collecting physical data—height, weight, head measurements—from Chinese Americans to show how the American environment affected “foreign” body types in the 1930s, and by Los Angeles public officials seeking to explain the alleged criminal propensities of Mexican American youth during the 1940s. Other contributors focus on the coalitions and tensions between Latinos and Asians in the context of the fight to integrate public schools and debates over political redistricting. One addresses masculinity, race, and U.S. imperialism in the literary works of Junot Díaz and Chang-rae Lee. Another looks at the passions, identifications, and charges of betrayal aroused by the sensationalized cases of Elián González, the young Cuban boy rescued off the shore of Florida, and Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos physicist accused of spying on the United States. Throughout this volume contributors interrogate many of the assumptions that underlie American and ethnic studies even as they signal the need for a research agenda that expands the purview of both fields.

Contributors. Nicholas De Genova, Victor Jew, Andrea Levine, Natalia Molina, Gary Y. Okihiro, Crystal Parikh, Greg Robinson, Toni Robinson, Leland T. Saito

  • Contents
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction: Latino and Asian Racial Formations at the Frontiers of U.S. Nationalism / Nicholas De Genova
  • Part One: Racial Science, Social Control
    • 1. Colonial Vision, Racial Visibility: Racializations in Puerto Rico and the Philippines during the Initial Period of U.S. Colonization / Gary Y. Okihiro
    • 2. Inverting Racial Logic: How Public Health Discourse and Standards Racialized the Meanings of Japanese and Mexican in Los Angeles, 1910–1924 / Natalia Molina
    • 3. Getting the Measure of Tomorrow: Chinese and Chicano Americas under the Racial Gaze, 1934–1935 and 1942–1944 / Victor Jew
  • Part Two: Contradictions of Coalition
    • 4. The Limits of Interracial Coalitions: Méndez v. Westminster Reexamined / Toni Robinson and Greg Robinson
    • 5. The Political Significance of Race: Asian American and Latino Redistricting Debates in California and New York / Leland T. Saito
  • Part Three: Perils of Inclusion
    • 6. Joining the State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Junot Díaz and Chang-rae Lee / Andrea Levine
    • 7. The Passion: The Betrayals of Elián González and Wen Ho Lee / Crystal Parikh
  • Bibliography
  • Contributors
  • Index

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