Racial Transformations

Moving beyond the black-white binary that has long framed racial discourse in the United States, this collection of essays examines how the experiences of Latinos and Asians intersect in the formation of the U.S. nation-state. The contributors analyze the political and social processes that have racialized Latinos and Asians at the same time that they highlight the productive ways that these communities challenge and transform the identities that are 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 in the late nineteenth century; public health discourses and practices in early-twentieth-century Los Angeles; 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, 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 Diaz and Chang-rae Lee. Another looks at the passions, identifications, and charges of betrayal aroused by the sensationalized cases of Elian Gonzalez, the young Cuban boy rescued off the shores of Florida, and Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos physicist accused of spying on the United States. Together the essays 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.