Available for purchase at the University of Chicago Press
"Studies of immigration to the United States have traditionally focused on a few key states and urban centers, but recent shifts in nonwhite settlement mean that these studies no longer paint the whole picture. Many Latino newcomers are flocking to places like the Southeast, where typically few such immigrants have settled, resulting in rapidly redrawn communities. In this historic moment, Jennifer Jones brings forth an ethnographic look at changing racial identities in one Southern city: Winston-Salem, North Carolina. This city turns out to be a natural experiment in race relations, having quickly shifted in the past few decades from a neatly black and white community to a triracial one. Jones tells the story of contemporary Winston-Salem through the eyes of its new Latino residents, revealing untold narratives of inclusion, exclusion, and interracial alliances. The Browning of the New South reveals how one community’s racial realignments mirror and anticipate the future of national politics."
Cecilia Menjívar, University of California, Los Angeles
"Jones offers a dynamic, complex, compellingly argued account of the remarkably understudied black-Latinx alliances, an account that will surely resonate far beyond Winston-Salem. At this political moment, she shines a bright light on the possibilities for powerful minority coalitions, which can be key for necessary social change. The Browning of the New South is insightful, timely, and inspiring. I cannot recommend it highly enough."
David FitzGerald | co-author of Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas
“This provocative book upends the conventional wisdom about relationships between Latinos and African-Americans. Jones shows in vivid detail how shared experiences of hostility from the white majority generate new forms of solidarity and organization. The Browning of the New South has important implications for the future of American politics and scholarly understandings of cross-ethnic coalitions.”
"Studies of immigration to the United States have traditionally focused on a few key states and urban centers, but recent shifts in nonwhite settlement mean that these studies no longer paint the whole picture. Many Latino newcomers are flocking to places like the Southeast, where typically few such immigrants have settled, resulting in rapidly redrawn communities. In this historic moment, Jennifer Jones brings forth an ethnographic look at changing racial identities in one Southern city: Winston-Salem, North Carolina. This city turns out to be a natural experiment in race relations, having quickly shifted in the past few decades from a neatly black and white community to a triracial one. Jones tells the story of contemporary Winston-Salem through the eyes of its new Latino residents, revealing untold narratives of inclusion, exclusion, and interracial alliances. The Browning of the New South reveals how one community’s racial realignments mirror and anticipate the future of national politics."
Cecilia Menjívar, University of California, Los Angeles
"Jones offers a dynamic, complex, compellingly argued account of the remarkably understudied black-Latinx alliances, an account that will surely resonate far beyond Winston-Salem. At this political moment, she shines a bright light on the possibilities for powerful minority coalitions, which can be key for necessary social change. The Browning of the New South is insightful, timely, and inspiring. I cannot recommend it highly enough."
David FitzGerald | co-author of Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas
“This provocative book upends the conventional wisdom about relationships between Latinos and African-Americans. Jones shows in vivid detail how shared experiences of hostility from the white majority generate new forms of solidarity and organization. The Browning of the New South has important implications for the future of American politics and scholarly understandings of cross-ethnic coalitions.”
Available for purchase at Palgrave MacMillan
Through a collection of theoretically engaging and empirically grounded texts, this book examines African-descended populations in Latin America and Afro-Latin@s in the United States in order to explore questions of black identity and representation, transnationalism, and diaspora in the Americas.
Through a collection of theoretically engaging and empirically grounded texts, this book examines African-descended populations in Latin America and Afro-Latin@s in the United States in order to explore questions of black identity and representation, transnationalism, and diaspora in the Americas.
SELECTED JOURNAL ARTICLES
2023. (With Reanne Frank). “Making Minorities or Honorary Whites? Examining Multiracial Self-Concept. Social Psychology Quarterly. Vol. 8 No. 3 (219-240). Available for download at SAGE Publications.
ABSTRACT: Since the 1990s, scholars have speculated on the role of multiracials in shaping race relations in the twenty-first century. Drawing from a purposive sample of roughly 600 self-identified multiracials of partial white origin, we examine race making among multiracials through what we are calling self-concept, a conceptualization that runs along two dimensions—identity and closeness—by which we assess the extent to which multiracials align more closely with a white self-concept, more closely with a minority self-concept, or equally. We find that while there is variation, multiracials of partial white ancestry are more likely to express a self-concept that is more aligned with minorities than with whites. Moreover, we find that despite what the literature suggests, variation in self-concept is less associated with ascription than with social/familial context and racial attitudes. These findings suggest that while ascription matters, racial self-concept is primarily shaped through experience.
2023. (With Hana Brown, Zhongze Wei, Michelle Lazaran, and Christopher Cates). “Rebuilding without Papers: Disaster Migration and the Local Reception of Immigrants after Hurricane Katrina.” Social Currents. Vol 10(2): 121-141. Available for download at Sage Publications.
ABSTRACT: After Hurricane Katrina decimated the Gulf Coast in 2005, thousands of Latinx immigrants arrived in the region to work in reconstruction, one case of the growing and global phenomenon of disaster migration. Drawing on newspaper content analysis, in-depth interviews with immigrant service providers, and archival materials from Mississippi for the years surrounding Hurricane Katrina (2003-2009), we ask what reception these disaster migrants encountered upon arrival and how that reception changed as they settled permanently in the state. We find that public discourse about immigrants became markedly more positive when disaster migrants arrived en masse, with the media and public characterizing immigrants as valuable, hard workers. Negative characterizations shifted to portray immigrants as drains on public resources. However, these changes were temporary. By 2009, public debate about immigrants reverted to pre-disaster trends with only one exception. Across our study period, we find a steady rise in claims that immigrants faced racism and discrimination. Our findings suggest that disasters may briefly transform the social and cultural bases of material inequalities but are unlikely to produce lasting change.
2022. (With Hana Brown). "Cultural Effects of Social Movements: Racial Formation and the Immigrant Rights Struggle in the Deep South." Mobilization: An International Quarterly. 27(4): 409-428. Available for download at Mobilization.
ABSTRACT: This article uses a comparative analysis of immigrant rights movements in Mississippi and Alabama to examine racial formation as a cultural consequence of mobilization. Drawing on archival, media, and interview data, we demonstrate that the Mississippi movement fueled shifts in public racial discourse beyond the movement itself; however, the Alabama movement engendered no such changes, despite its efforts. These outcomes emerged despite the movements’ common origins and the states’ similar political and racial contexts. We trace these outcomes to the guiding racial orientations of each movement. While Mississippi organizers embraced an interracialist organizing approach, Alabama organizers grounded their work in an assimilationist approach. These orientations led the movements to develop different racial framings and different networks, creating pathways of broader cultural influence for the Mississippi movement and closing off pathways in Alabama. These findings speak to enduring questions about movements’ cultural impacts and about the mechanisms driving racial formation.
2022. “‘They are There With Us’: Theorizing Racial Status and Intergroup Relations.” American Journal of Sociology. Vol. 128 No. 2. Available for download at University of Chicago Press.
ABSTRACT: Working from a case study of Latinx immigrant settlement in a Black-White community in North Carolina, this article draws on social psychology, racial formation theory, and intersectional theory to produce the theory of racial status. This integrative theory better accounts for how race relations are formed and transformed, particularly among non-Whites. Racial status theory proposes that groups are most likely to get along when they believe their racial status is shared. In conceptualizing race as a status rather than a category, the author theorizes shared racial status as the product of three mechanisms: contact, discrimination, and external threat. These three mechanisms determine whether or not the boundaries of racial status shift and, when they do, in what direction. Moreover, in retheorizing intergroup relations dynamics through racial status, the author posits that collective racial status building is the process by which linked fate occurs on the one hand and assimilation on the other, suggesting new frameworks not only for understanding intergroup relations, but also for revealing dynamics of integration among immigrant newcomers and racial politics.
2022. (With Hana Brown). "Chasing Respectability: Pro-Immigrant Organizations and the Reinforcement of Immigrant Racialization." American Behavioral Scientist. Vol. 66 No. 13 (1737-1757). Available for download at Sage Publications.
ABSTRACT: In this article, we investigate the role that pro-immigrant organizations play in immigrant racialization. Drawing on a critical case study from the longest standing immigrant rights organization in North Carolina, we demonstrate how immigrant rights organizations can racialize new Latinx arrivals even as they advocate for them. We interrogate the organization’s multi-year, state-wide campaign to counteract mounting public characterizations of Latinx immigrants as drunk drivers. Analyzing a critical juncture in this campaign, we demonstrate how El Pueblo, in their effort to contest the mainstream racialization of Latinxs, unintentionally doubled down on that same racialization, buying into respectability politics and reinforcing derogatory stereotypes of Latinxs. We outline three central maneuvers that grounded this particular respectability politics campaign and demonstrate the utility of respectability politics as a framework for understanding organizational racialization processes. These findings suggest the need to shift focus toward community organizations as key sites of immigrant racialization and highlight the need for inquiry into the racialized assumptions of pro-immigrant forces.
2019. (With Hana Brown) “American Federalism and Racial Formation in Contemporary Immigration Policy: A Processual Analysis of Alabama's HB56.” Ethnic and Racial Studies. Available for download at www.ingentaconnect.com
ABSTRACT: Racialization scholarship identifies the state as a primary site of racial formation. Most of this research envisions the state as a uniform entity, with race-making occurring at a single level of political action. Analysing Latino racialization in immigration debates in Alabama, we argue that state-driven racialization occurs at multiple levels of governance. Although Alabama’s 2011 HB56 is widely recognized as state-enforced Latino racialization, we find that the bill resulted from mutually reinforcing racialization practices and policies that played out at multiple levels of immigration governance. These findings not only present a revisionist history of HB56, they suggest that any account of states and racialization requires a nuanced and complex understanding of the state, its institutional structure, and its operations. Individual state institutions may do different work as race makers, but race-making efforts by federal, state, and local actors interact to produce both racialized subjects and racial hierarchies.
2019. "From Open Doors to Closed Gates: Intragenerational Reverse Incorporation in New Immigrant Destinations." International Migration Review. Vol. 53(4): 1002-1031. Available for download at https://doi.org/10.1177/0197918318791982
ABSTRACT: Existing paradigms of immigrant incorporation fruitfully describe immigrants’ upward or downward mobility across generations. Yet we know very little about intragenerational change. Drawing on a case in which upwardly mobile Latino immigrants see their gains reversed, I model what I call intragenerational reverse incorporation. In doing so, I theorize how incorporation gains can be undone through institutional closure and shifts in reception attitudes spurred by securitization and intensified immigration enforcement. Drawing on data gathered in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, I show how these changes both marginalized and racialized Latino immigrants, who in turn internalized and politicized their new status.
2018. (With Hana Brown and Andrea Becker). “The Racialization of Latinos in New Immigrant Destinations: Criminality, Ascription, and Counter-Mobilization.” Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences. Available for download at https://www.rsfjournal.org/content/4/5/118.short.
ABSTRACT: This article analyzes patterns in Latino immigrant racialization in the U.S. South. Drawing on a unique dataset of more than 4,200 news stories from the region, we find that Latino immigrants face multifaceted racialization in the news media and that this racialization shares substantive similarities with African American racialization processes. The most dominant negative characterizations of Mexican and Latino immigrants focus on their perceived criminal tendencies. Claims of Latino criminality apply implicitly coded racial language about black criminality to new Latino arrivals. A close qualitative analysis of these trends reveals an ongoing cycle of racialization in which immigration foes challenge Latino or Mexican immigrants as criminal elements and immigration advocates respond with charges of racism and discrimination. Supplemental analyses from four African American newspapers suggest that black elites perceive Latinos as sharing a common experience of racial discrimination at the hands of whites.
2016. “Immigrant Rights are Civil Rights” (With Hana Brown). Contexts Magazine Vol. 15(2):34-39, Spring. Available for download at Sage Publications.
ABSTRACT: Black-brown coalition activism is changing hearts, minds, and legislation in Mississippi and across the American South.
2016.“Unity in the Struggle: Immigration and the South’s Emerging Civil Rights Consensus.” (With Hana Brown and Taylor Dow). Law and Contemporary Problems (79) 5-27. Available for download at Law and Contemporary Problems.
ABSTRACT: Civil rights and immigration have often constituted distinct legal and advocacy spheres, with the former focusing on racism and discrimination and the latter on legal citizenship. In this article, we document the emergence of an immigration and civil rights consensus in the Deep South. We focus on a particularly compelling case, Mississippi, where the Civil Rights Movement has expanded to embrace immigration as a modern day civil rights struggle. We examine how this new civil rights consensus emerged and contextualize it within a shared legacy of legalized racial exclusion targeting both citizens and non-citizens. In addition to offering a brief history of racial politics in the legal sphere, we identify the political and structural precursors to the civil rights embrace of immigration in the South and document the rise of the immigrant rights movement in Mississippi. We explain two central forces that tie the state’s immigrant rights movement to past civil rights struggles: strategic framing and unity conferences. These efforts forge ties between two historically distinct social movements, promoting a redefinition of immigrant rights as central to the broader goals of today’s Civil Rights Movement.
2015. (With Hana Brown). “Panethnicity and Racialization: An Integrated Framework”. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1 (1). Available for download at Palgrave MacMillan.
ABSTRACT: Although demographic transformations continue to spark interest in the racially transformative effects of immigration, researchers routinely lament the lack of dialogue between race and immigration scholarship. We use recent research on panethnicity to illustrate the conceptual divides that exist between the race and immigration subfields. While panethnicity research has shed new light on the formation of group identities and political mobilization, we contend that it is problematically divorced from research on racialization. Panethnicity scholars largely view racialization and panethnic group formation as separate processes with the latter sequentially following the former. In this article, we argue that this analytical distinction both reflects and reifies the divide between race and immigration research and yields an inaccurate portrayal of the group formation process. We propose an ethnoracialization model to show how the concept of panethnicity can be reconfigured to develop a robust account of group formation and to bridge the much-lamented divide between race and immigration research.
2013. “Mexicans Will Take the Jobs that Even Blacks Won’t Do”: An Analysis of Blackness and Invisibility in Contemporary Mexico. Ethnic and Racial Studies 36 (10). Preview available at Taylor & Francis Online.
ABSTRACT: Mexico’s unique form of mestizaje has successfully excluded Afro-descendants from Mexican national imaginary for decades, treating Afro-Mexicans as though they do not exist. In Mexico however, there is a small population of Afro-Mexicans that reside primarily in Mexico’s two coastal regions. So how do coastal Mexicans understand blackness? Using ethnographic and interview data, I show that while Mexico as a nation does not have systemic racial ideologies that incorporate blackness, distinct local ideas of blackness do exist within rural coastal Mexico, and are constructed, in part, through this national invisibility. Moreover, I argue that these local understandings are subject to transnational processes as Afro-Mexican immigration to the United States grows. The racial meanings produced among Afro-Mexican migrants in the U.S. circulate back to Mexico and reshape racial identities. This process highlights both the persisting role of race and mestizaje in constructing Mexican national identity.
2012. “‘Blacks May Be Second Class, but They Can’t Make Them Leave’: Mexican Racial Formation and Immigrant Status.” Latino Studies, 10 (1-2): 60-80. Available for download at springer.com.
ABSTRACT: In this article, I investigate how race is produced by looking at the reception experiences of Afro and Mestizo Mexican migrants to the new South. Despite the fact that Afro and Mestizo Mexicans are both phenotypically and culturally distinct from one another, they assert a shared racial identity as minorities and as Latinos. On the basis of ethnographic field work in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, I argue that their perceived similarities with African Americans and pervasive discrimination owing to status drives Mexicans to assert a race-based Latino identity that is shaped by their understanding of African American experiences.
2011. “Who are We? Producing Group Identity through Everyday Practices of Conflict and Discourse.” Sociological Perspectives, 54 (2): 139–162. Article Available for download on Jstor.
ABSTRACT: Multiracials have the flexibility to opt out of multiracial identity, to shift identities depending on context, and are characterized by in-group diversity. Given this fluid space, how do multiracials come to see themselves as a collective? This article describes an empirical example of collectivization processes at work. Specifically, the author observed the process of collective identity-building through ethnographic research in a mixed-race student-run organization. This case study indicates that group identity formation is a negotiated process involving strategies to achieve a sense of belonging and cohesion. The author shows that over time, by using experiences of social conflict to construct shared experiences, the members of this mixed-race organization developed collective identity. In so doing, their experience underscores how collective identity development is socially constructed and how micropractices are essential components of group formation.
2011. “Intraracial Harassment on Campus: Explaining Between- and Within-Group Differences.” (With Sandra Smith). Ethnic and Racial Studies, 34 (9). Article available for download at Taylor & Francis Online.
ABSTRACT: Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen (NLSF), we examine both between- and within-group differences in the odds of feeling intraracially harassed. Specifically, we investigate the effects of colleges' and universities' racial composition as well as the nature of students' associations with non-group members, including involvement in racially homogeneous campus organizations, ethnoracial diversity of friendship networks, and interracial dating. Our findings suggest that although college racial composition appears to have little effect on experiencing intraracial harassment, the nature of students' involvement with other-race students matters a great deal. For all groups, interracial dating increased odds of harassment. Among black and white students, more diverse friendship networks did as well. And among Asian and Latino students, involvement in any racially homogeneous campus organization was associated with increases in reports of intraracial harassment. Thus, we propose a baseline theoretical model of intraracial harassment that highlights the nature of students' associations with outgroups.
ABSTRACT: Since the 1990s, scholars have speculated on the role of multiracials in shaping race relations in the twenty-first century. Drawing from a purposive sample of roughly 600 self-identified multiracials of partial white origin, we examine race making among multiracials through what we are calling self-concept, a conceptualization that runs along two dimensions—identity and closeness—by which we assess the extent to which multiracials align more closely with a white self-concept, more closely with a minority self-concept, or equally. We find that while there is variation, multiracials of partial white ancestry are more likely to express a self-concept that is more aligned with minorities than with whites. Moreover, we find that despite what the literature suggests, variation in self-concept is less associated with ascription than with social/familial context and racial attitudes. These findings suggest that while ascription matters, racial self-concept is primarily shaped through experience.
2023. (With Hana Brown, Zhongze Wei, Michelle Lazaran, and Christopher Cates). “Rebuilding without Papers: Disaster Migration and the Local Reception of Immigrants after Hurricane Katrina.” Social Currents. Vol 10(2): 121-141. Available for download at Sage Publications.
ABSTRACT: After Hurricane Katrina decimated the Gulf Coast in 2005, thousands of Latinx immigrants arrived in the region to work in reconstruction, one case of the growing and global phenomenon of disaster migration. Drawing on newspaper content analysis, in-depth interviews with immigrant service providers, and archival materials from Mississippi for the years surrounding Hurricane Katrina (2003-2009), we ask what reception these disaster migrants encountered upon arrival and how that reception changed as they settled permanently in the state. We find that public discourse about immigrants became markedly more positive when disaster migrants arrived en masse, with the media and public characterizing immigrants as valuable, hard workers. Negative characterizations shifted to portray immigrants as drains on public resources. However, these changes were temporary. By 2009, public debate about immigrants reverted to pre-disaster trends with only one exception. Across our study period, we find a steady rise in claims that immigrants faced racism and discrimination. Our findings suggest that disasters may briefly transform the social and cultural bases of material inequalities but are unlikely to produce lasting change.
2022. (With Hana Brown). "Cultural Effects of Social Movements: Racial Formation and the Immigrant Rights Struggle in the Deep South." Mobilization: An International Quarterly. 27(4): 409-428. Available for download at Mobilization.
ABSTRACT: This article uses a comparative analysis of immigrant rights movements in Mississippi and Alabama to examine racial formation as a cultural consequence of mobilization. Drawing on archival, media, and interview data, we demonstrate that the Mississippi movement fueled shifts in public racial discourse beyond the movement itself; however, the Alabama movement engendered no such changes, despite its efforts. These outcomes emerged despite the movements’ common origins and the states’ similar political and racial contexts. We trace these outcomes to the guiding racial orientations of each movement. While Mississippi organizers embraced an interracialist organizing approach, Alabama organizers grounded their work in an assimilationist approach. These orientations led the movements to develop different racial framings and different networks, creating pathways of broader cultural influence for the Mississippi movement and closing off pathways in Alabama. These findings speak to enduring questions about movements’ cultural impacts and about the mechanisms driving racial formation.
2022. “‘They are There With Us’: Theorizing Racial Status and Intergroup Relations.” American Journal of Sociology. Vol. 128 No. 2. Available for download at University of Chicago Press.
ABSTRACT: Working from a case study of Latinx immigrant settlement in a Black-White community in North Carolina, this article draws on social psychology, racial formation theory, and intersectional theory to produce the theory of racial status. This integrative theory better accounts for how race relations are formed and transformed, particularly among non-Whites. Racial status theory proposes that groups are most likely to get along when they believe their racial status is shared. In conceptualizing race as a status rather than a category, the author theorizes shared racial status as the product of three mechanisms: contact, discrimination, and external threat. These three mechanisms determine whether or not the boundaries of racial status shift and, when they do, in what direction. Moreover, in retheorizing intergroup relations dynamics through racial status, the author posits that collective racial status building is the process by which linked fate occurs on the one hand and assimilation on the other, suggesting new frameworks not only for understanding intergroup relations, but also for revealing dynamics of integration among immigrant newcomers and racial politics.
2022. (With Hana Brown). "Chasing Respectability: Pro-Immigrant Organizations and the Reinforcement of Immigrant Racialization." American Behavioral Scientist. Vol. 66 No. 13 (1737-1757). Available for download at Sage Publications.
ABSTRACT: In this article, we investigate the role that pro-immigrant organizations play in immigrant racialization. Drawing on a critical case study from the longest standing immigrant rights organization in North Carolina, we demonstrate how immigrant rights organizations can racialize new Latinx arrivals even as they advocate for them. We interrogate the organization’s multi-year, state-wide campaign to counteract mounting public characterizations of Latinx immigrants as drunk drivers. Analyzing a critical juncture in this campaign, we demonstrate how El Pueblo, in their effort to contest the mainstream racialization of Latinxs, unintentionally doubled down on that same racialization, buying into respectability politics and reinforcing derogatory stereotypes of Latinxs. We outline three central maneuvers that grounded this particular respectability politics campaign and demonstrate the utility of respectability politics as a framework for understanding organizational racialization processes. These findings suggest the need to shift focus toward community organizations as key sites of immigrant racialization and highlight the need for inquiry into the racialized assumptions of pro-immigrant forces.
2019. (With Hana Brown) “American Federalism and Racial Formation in Contemporary Immigration Policy: A Processual Analysis of Alabama's HB56.” Ethnic and Racial Studies. Available for download at www.ingentaconnect.com
ABSTRACT: Racialization scholarship identifies the state as a primary site of racial formation. Most of this research envisions the state as a uniform entity, with race-making occurring at a single level of political action. Analysing Latino racialization in immigration debates in Alabama, we argue that state-driven racialization occurs at multiple levels of governance. Although Alabama’s 2011 HB56 is widely recognized as state-enforced Latino racialization, we find that the bill resulted from mutually reinforcing racialization practices and policies that played out at multiple levels of immigration governance. These findings not only present a revisionist history of HB56, they suggest that any account of states and racialization requires a nuanced and complex understanding of the state, its institutional structure, and its operations. Individual state institutions may do different work as race makers, but race-making efforts by federal, state, and local actors interact to produce both racialized subjects and racial hierarchies.
2019. "From Open Doors to Closed Gates: Intragenerational Reverse Incorporation in New Immigrant Destinations." International Migration Review. Vol. 53(4): 1002-1031. Available for download at https://doi.org/10.1177/0197918318791982
ABSTRACT: Existing paradigms of immigrant incorporation fruitfully describe immigrants’ upward or downward mobility across generations. Yet we know very little about intragenerational change. Drawing on a case in which upwardly mobile Latino immigrants see their gains reversed, I model what I call intragenerational reverse incorporation. In doing so, I theorize how incorporation gains can be undone through institutional closure and shifts in reception attitudes spurred by securitization and intensified immigration enforcement. Drawing on data gathered in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, I show how these changes both marginalized and racialized Latino immigrants, who in turn internalized and politicized their new status.
2018. (With Hana Brown and Andrea Becker). “The Racialization of Latinos in New Immigrant Destinations: Criminality, Ascription, and Counter-Mobilization.” Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences. Available for download at https://www.rsfjournal.org/content/4/5/118.short.
ABSTRACT: This article analyzes patterns in Latino immigrant racialization in the U.S. South. Drawing on a unique dataset of more than 4,200 news stories from the region, we find that Latino immigrants face multifaceted racialization in the news media and that this racialization shares substantive similarities with African American racialization processes. The most dominant negative characterizations of Mexican and Latino immigrants focus on their perceived criminal tendencies. Claims of Latino criminality apply implicitly coded racial language about black criminality to new Latino arrivals. A close qualitative analysis of these trends reveals an ongoing cycle of racialization in which immigration foes challenge Latino or Mexican immigrants as criminal elements and immigration advocates respond with charges of racism and discrimination. Supplemental analyses from four African American newspapers suggest that black elites perceive Latinos as sharing a common experience of racial discrimination at the hands of whites.
2016. “Immigrant Rights are Civil Rights” (With Hana Brown). Contexts Magazine Vol. 15(2):34-39, Spring. Available for download at Sage Publications.
ABSTRACT: Black-brown coalition activism is changing hearts, minds, and legislation in Mississippi and across the American South.
2016.“Unity in the Struggle: Immigration and the South’s Emerging Civil Rights Consensus.” (With Hana Brown and Taylor Dow). Law and Contemporary Problems (79) 5-27. Available for download at Law and Contemporary Problems.
ABSTRACT: Civil rights and immigration have often constituted distinct legal and advocacy spheres, with the former focusing on racism and discrimination and the latter on legal citizenship. In this article, we document the emergence of an immigration and civil rights consensus in the Deep South. We focus on a particularly compelling case, Mississippi, where the Civil Rights Movement has expanded to embrace immigration as a modern day civil rights struggle. We examine how this new civil rights consensus emerged and contextualize it within a shared legacy of legalized racial exclusion targeting both citizens and non-citizens. In addition to offering a brief history of racial politics in the legal sphere, we identify the political and structural precursors to the civil rights embrace of immigration in the South and document the rise of the immigrant rights movement in Mississippi. We explain two central forces that tie the state’s immigrant rights movement to past civil rights struggles: strategic framing and unity conferences. These efforts forge ties between two historically distinct social movements, promoting a redefinition of immigrant rights as central to the broader goals of today’s Civil Rights Movement.
2015. (With Hana Brown). “Panethnicity and Racialization: An Integrated Framework”. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1 (1). Available for download at Palgrave MacMillan.
ABSTRACT: Although demographic transformations continue to spark interest in the racially transformative effects of immigration, researchers routinely lament the lack of dialogue between race and immigration scholarship. We use recent research on panethnicity to illustrate the conceptual divides that exist between the race and immigration subfields. While panethnicity research has shed new light on the formation of group identities and political mobilization, we contend that it is problematically divorced from research on racialization. Panethnicity scholars largely view racialization and panethnic group formation as separate processes with the latter sequentially following the former. In this article, we argue that this analytical distinction both reflects and reifies the divide between race and immigration research and yields an inaccurate portrayal of the group formation process. We propose an ethnoracialization model to show how the concept of panethnicity can be reconfigured to develop a robust account of group formation and to bridge the much-lamented divide between race and immigration research.
2013. “Mexicans Will Take the Jobs that Even Blacks Won’t Do”: An Analysis of Blackness and Invisibility in Contemporary Mexico. Ethnic and Racial Studies 36 (10). Preview available at Taylor & Francis Online.
ABSTRACT: Mexico’s unique form of mestizaje has successfully excluded Afro-descendants from Mexican national imaginary for decades, treating Afro-Mexicans as though they do not exist. In Mexico however, there is a small population of Afro-Mexicans that reside primarily in Mexico’s two coastal regions. So how do coastal Mexicans understand blackness? Using ethnographic and interview data, I show that while Mexico as a nation does not have systemic racial ideologies that incorporate blackness, distinct local ideas of blackness do exist within rural coastal Mexico, and are constructed, in part, through this national invisibility. Moreover, I argue that these local understandings are subject to transnational processes as Afro-Mexican immigration to the United States grows. The racial meanings produced among Afro-Mexican migrants in the U.S. circulate back to Mexico and reshape racial identities. This process highlights both the persisting role of race and mestizaje in constructing Mexican national identity.
2012. “‘Blacks May Be Second Class, but They Can’t Make Them Leave’: Mexican Racial Formation and Immigrant Status.” Latino Studies, 10 (1-2): 60-80. Available for download at springer.com.
ABSTRACT: In this article, I investigate how race is produced by looking at the reception experiences of Afro and Mestizo Mexican migrants to the new South. Despite the fact that Afro and Mestizo Mexicans are both phenotypically and culturally distinct from one another, they assert a shared racial identity as minorities and as Latinos. On the basis of ethnographic field work in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, I argue that their perceived similarities with African Americans and pervasive discrimination owing to status drives Mexicans to assert a race-based Latino identity that is shaped by their understanding of African American experiences.
2011. “Who are We? Producing Group Identity through Everyday Practices of Conflict and Discourse.” Sociological Perspectives, 54 (2): 139–162. Article Available for download on Jstor.
ABSTRACT: Multiracials have the flexibility to opt out of multiracial identity, to shift identities depending on context, and are characterized by in-group diversity. Given this fluid space, how do multiracials come to see themselves as a collective? This article describes an empirical example of collectivization processes at work. Specifically, the author observed the process of collective identity-building through ethnographic research in a mixed-race student-run organization. This case study indicates that group identity formation is a negotiated process involving strategies to achieve a sense of belonging and cohesion. The author shows that over time, by using experiences of social conflict to construct shared experiences, the members of this mixed-race organization developed collective identity. In so doing, their experience underscores how collective identity development is socially constructed and how micropractices are essential components of group formation.
2011. “Intraracial Harassment on Campus: Explaining Between- and Within-Group Differences.” (With Sandra Smith). Ethnic and Racial Studies, 34 (9). Article available for download at Taylor & Francis Online.
ABSTRACT: Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen (NLSF), we examine both between- and within-group differences in the odds of feeling intraracially harassed. Specifically, we investigate the effects of colleges' and universities' racial composition as well as the nature of students' associations with non-group members, including involvement in racially homogeneous campus organizations, ethnoracial diversity of friendship networks, and interracial dating. Our findings suggest that although college racial composition appears to have little effect on experiencing intraracial harassment, the nature of students' involvement with other-race students matters a great deal. For all groups, interracial dating increased odds of harassment. Among black and white students, more diverse friendship networks did as well. And among Asian and Latino students, involvement in any racially homogeneous campus organization was associated with increases in reports of intraracial harassment. Thus, we propose a baseline theoretical model of intraracial harassment that highlights the nature of students' associations with outgroups.