The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
2019 by The University of Chicago
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Published 2019
Printed in the United States of America
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ISBN -13: 978-0-226-60084-0 (cloth)
ISBN -13: 978-0-226-60098-7 (paper)
ISBN -13: 978-0-226-60103-8 (e-book)
DOI : https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226601038.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Jones, Jennifer A., author.
Title: The browning of the new South / Jennifer A. Jones.
Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018024852 | ISBN 9780226600840 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226600987 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226601038 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Winston-Salem (N.C.)Race relations. | Winston-Salem (N.C.)Emigration and immigration. | Latin AmericansNorth CarolinaWinston-Salem. | African AmericansNorth CarolinaWinston-Salem.
Classification: LCC F264. W 8 J 66 2018 | DDC 305.8009756/67dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018024852
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z 39.481992 (Permanence of Paper).
Introduction: Race Relations and Demographic Change
In the world in which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself.
FRANTZ FANON
Moreover, as a competing low-wage workforce, new immigrant waves are doubly incentivized to engage in interminority conflict.
Todays news indicates that little has changed. Conventional wisdom and recent scholarship suggests that Latinos continue to follow previous immigrant waves, in which they engage, at best, in casual distancing from African Americans, and at worst, in blatant anti-black racism. In the 1980s, a series of riots in Miami was attributed to inherent black-Latino tensions after a black man was killed by a Cuban-born police officer.country becomes more and more Latino, we should expect, from these histories, far more open, race-based conflict among minority groups.
The story of white/Latino conflict is just as well-trod. Anti-immigrant sentiment is hardly unusual, especially in periods of crisis, but anti-Latino sentiment is particularly representative of a kind of foreign invasion threatening very core of American culture (see the oft-cited Samuel Huntington book Who Are We: The Challenges to Americas National Identity [2004] for an articulation), and it has been a swelling undercurrent of conservative politics for decades. These arguments often point to structural or economic conflicts with other minorities to broaden their appeal and appearance of reasonability, but in this conception, Latinos are largely constructed as an affront to Anglo-American values, social dominance, and the rule of law. In sum, whether political or academic, these frameworks raise the stakes of demographic change.
And so, the sound of alarm bells, chiming out the browning of America, has intensified. Over the past several decades, Census takers and demographers have written and rewritten demographic projections, advising that racial change is happening faster than anticipated and, given current rates of birth and immigration, the US may be a majority-minority nation by 2045.
These fears are loosely grounded in social fact: Latinos are now the largest minority group in the US, and more than half of the foreign-born growth in the US population between the 1990s and early 2000s was Latino. Their role in shaping such issues as electoral politics, immigration policy, generational change, and a host of other social concerns is transforming the social landscape. Not only has the Latino share of the population increased dramatically, but Latino populations during this period have also spread out faster than any immigration wave in US history (internal or external), including the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North.
While Latinos certainly continued to settle in traditional destinations, such as California, Arizona, and New York, between 1990 and 2000, we have seen shifts in that same period to new destinations like Georgia, North Carolina, Utah, and Colorado. At the same time, the reverse migration of African Americans to places like Atlanta, Raleigh, and Houston ensures that the South (which, as of 2010, was home to 57 percent of African Americans) retains black majorities among its rapidly expanding minority populations. These population shifts raise important questions about racial formation, immigrant incorporation, and intergroup relations. In other words, the US is changingwhat will its emerging racial landscape look like? What will be the on-the-ground impact of demographic change on race relations and state politics?
Treating demographic change like a problem to be solved, howeveroften by choosing derisive framing likening expanding Latino populations to an invasion, a tidal wave, and in some cases, a Reconquistanot only creates unnecessary political tensions and hostile environments, but also puts new political and social forces, such as the criminalization of Latino immigrants, into motion. These processes, in turn, are also reshaping the Latino population, producing unintended social, political, and economic effects.
This book unravels the tangle of social relations that demographic panics about Latinos have created through an ethnographic account of community change in the southern city of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Like other cities in the Southeast, Winston-Salem changed rapidly in the 1990s and 2000s, moving from a nearly perfectly biracial middle-class town of blacks and whites, to a tri-racial city.
When I embarked on this project in 2007, I was certain that I might gather insight into how race works among new Mexican immigrants, particularly in places where they encounter blacks and whites in equal numbers. I looked to Winston-Salem as a natural experiment in racial formation and race relations, where large numbers of whites and African Americans were increasingly joined by significant numbers of Mexicans, as well as some Central and South Americans, and Puerto Ricans, including large minorities of Latinos with significant African ancestry.
From my research and discussions with scholars and experts in the US, I knew that many Afro-Mexicans were migrating from the coastal regions of Veracruz, Oaxaca, and Guerrero to settle in North Carolina, as well as in Santa Ana, California, and in Georgia. In my preliminary research, I learned that Winston-Salem was a key destination, and so I embarked on a study that would examine these new settlement patterns.
in which phenotype would matter most. I expected darker-skinned Latinos to ally with African Americans, while light-skinned Latinos would see themselves more closely aligned with whites. In other words, rather than band together as a single minority group, Latinos would distribute along an existing racial hierarchy, complicating our ideas about Latino integration and race relations, but not necessarily race itself.
