Migrants and Race in the US
This book explains how migrants can be viewed as racial others, not just because they are nonwhite, but because they are racially alien. This way of seeing makes it possible to distinguish migrants from a set of racial categories that are presumed to be indigenous to the nation. In the US, these indigenous racial categories are usually defined in terms of white and black. Kretsedemas explores how this kind of racialization puts migrants in a quandary, leading them to be simultaneously raced and situated outside of race.
Although the book focuses on the situation of migrants in the US, it builds on theories of migrants and race that extend beyond the US, and makes a point of criticizing nation-centered explanations of race and racism. These arguments point toward the emergence of a new field visibility that has transformed the racial meaning of nativity, migration and migrant ethnicity. It also situates these changing views of migrants in a broader historical perspective than prior theory, explaining how they have been shaped by a changing relationship between race and territory that has been unfolding for several hundred years, and which crystallizes in the late colonial era.
Philip Kretsedemas is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. His research and writing has examined the dynamics of immigrant racialization, policy outcomes for immigrant populations and the regulation of migrant flows by the state. Some of his journal articles have appeared in American Quarterly , International Migration and Stanford Law and Policy Review . He is also the co-editor of Keeping Out the Other: A Critical Introduction to Immigration Enforcement Today (with David Brotherton; 2008, Columbia University Press) and is the author of The Immigration Crucible: Transforming Race, Nation and the Limits of the Law (2012, Columbia University Press).
Routledge Research in Race and Ethnicity
1 Racial Discrimination
Institutional Patterns and Politics
Masoud Kamali
2 Black Masculinity and Sexual Politics
Anthony J. Lemelle, Jr.
3 Represent
Art and Identity Among the Black Upper-Middle Class
Patricia A. Banks
4 Blackness and Transatlantic Irish Identity
Celtic Soul Brothers
Lauren Onkey
5 Music, Difference and the Residue of Race
Jo Haynes
6 Black Citizenship and Authenticity in the Civil Rights Movement
Randolph Hohle
7 Migrants and Race in the US
Territorial Racism and the Alien/Outside
Philip Kretsedemas
Migrants and Race in the US
Territorial Racism and the Alien/Outside
Philip Kretsedemas
First published 2014
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the UK
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
2014 Taylor & Francis
The right of Philip Kretsedemas to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kretsedemas, Philip, 1967
Migrants and race in the US : territorial racism and the alien/outside/ by Philip Kretsedemas.
pages cm. (Routledge research in race and ethnicity ; 7)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. United StatesEmigration and immigrationGovernment policy. 2. Americanization. 3. Race discriminationUnited States. I. Title.
JV6483.K743 2013
305.800973dc23
2013008377
ISBN13: 978-0-415-65839-3 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-203-07606-4 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by IBT Global.
For Myrtises patience and Analises laughter.
Contents
An Introduction
One afternoon in the spring of 1999, I was having a conversation with a friend about the challenges of community organizing in Miami, Florida. We ended up trading stories about what it was like being a source of racial confusion for many people. She explained that in the course of doing outreach work, she had become used to having people ask her, Where are you from? This was a question that I was also accustomed to being asked, and I understood what she meant when she observed, What they really want to know is, what are you?
This brief exchange has stayed with me over the years. I suppose Ive been drawn to these experiences because they describe a kind of difference that is not so easy to pin down. Where are you from? tends to be viewed as an ethnicity question, and What are you? is often assumed to be race question. This is what starts to happen when the Where are you from? question becomes a surreptitious way of asking someone, What are you?
To make this situation more understandable for the reader, it may help to know that I am person of Jamaican and Greek parentage who comes from a widely traveled immigrant family. My community organizer friend is of Cape Verdean ancestry. Despite the differences in our cultural heritage, our racial appearance is fairly similar. We are both brown-looking persons with straight-ish black hair, who fit the racial profiles that people in the US often associate with South Asian, Latino or Middle Eastern minorities. When I was growing up in England in the 1970s, I learned to see myself as black, because this was how I was racially categorized by most of the people that I
When my family migrated to south Florida in the late 1970s, I was forced into a very different field of racial politics. In England, I was unambiguously black. In south Florida, I became a nonwhite minority who was ambiguously located between blackness and nonblackness. More often than not, I was mistaken for Latin Americantypically Cuban.
Sometimes, being mistaken for Latino buffered me from anti-black racism. But it also made me more vulnerable to hostilities that people harbored toward racialized foreigners. In the early 1980s, I would occasionally run across strangers who assumed that I was Latino and who felt very comfortable venting the frustrations they had about my people. Of course, this didnt happen every day; the racial confusion that I provoked in people was usually more innocuous. The Where are you from? question that I described earlier is a good example. Other examples include strangers in the street who would begin speaking to me in Spanish, or grade school teachers, who assumed that my inattention in class was due to my limited English proficiency.
These experiences shed some light on why multiracial identity has never been very meaningful to me. The racial ambiguities Ive had to contend with have more to do with the difference that lies between black and nonblack than between black and white. And in my experience, being nonblack has much more to do with being racialized as a foreigner than with being seen as a half-white person (although these racial categories overlap in some important ways, as I explain later in the book). I learned, for example, that being brown-looking doesnt necessarily mean you are being placed in a racial category that sits in-between white and black. When brownness becomes a symbol of the undesirable foreigner, it turns into a kind of racial difference that is alienated from both white and black (which are associated with a national field of race relations).
