How the United States Racializes Latinos: White Hegemony and Its Consequences

Up until recently, members of Congress, major newspapers, and entrepreneurs in the United States openly racialized Latinos and Latin Americans. Latinos and Latin Americans were inferior mongrels that had to be saved from their ways. Such ideology justified armed invasions of sovereign nations, dispossession of land, and economic exploitation.Noted Latin American, Latino, and U.S. social scientists address the extent and costs of U.S. hegemony. Immigration restrictions, instauration of U.S.-style racism, violence, and suppression of Spanish and intergroup conflict are some of the developments they analyze.

Jos A. Cobas is Professor of Sociology in the School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University and author of Cubans in Puerto Rico: Ethnic Economy and Cultural Identity (University Press of Florida 1997). Jorge Duany is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras, He is the author of The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and in the United States (University of North Carolina Press 2001). Joe R. Feagin is Professor of Sociology at Texas AM University. He is author of fifty-two books, including Black in Blue: African-American Police Officers and Racism {Taylor and Francis 2007); Two-Faced Racism: White in the Backstage and Frontstage (Routledge 2007); and most recently, The Myth of the Model Minority: Asian Americans Facing Racism (Paradigm 2008).