chances.
Because racial categorizations determined access to resources, US federal and state governments had to come up with schemes in order to determine the “race” to which individuals belonged. Often referred to as the “one-drop rule,” these schemes attempted to define who was white and who was not. The “one drop” refers to the fact that, in much of the country and particularly in the south, having as little as one drop of non-white blood made it impossible by law to claim “whiteness.” For example, in California, in 1849, having half or more of “Indian” blood would lead to one’s being considered not “white,” and half or more of Black blood made a person mulatto. In 1851, the law was changed so that only one quarter of Indian blood would make a person not “white.” Yet many of these laws were challenged, leading the courts to have to determine what constituted being “white.” An especially good example of this is that of the prerequisite cases. These were cases brought by individuals who wanted to contest the 1790 law barring non-whites from being naturalized in the United States.15 Looking at petitions by Asian Indians from 1909 to 1923, we see that in 1909 the court in Balsara ruled that Asian Indians were probably not white, because the people on the jury thought it unlikely that Congress intended for Asian Indians to be considered white under the 1790 law. Yet, in 1910, the court ruled in two cases that Asian Indians were white, on the basis of the petitioner’s skin color and of scientific evidence regarding the origins of the Caucasian race. This ruling was reaffirmed in 1913, with appeal to legal precedent. Yet, in 1917, the court ruled that Asian Indians were not white, on the basis of common knowledge and congressional intent. The same court reversed this position in 1919 and 1920, deciding again that the Asian Indians involved in those cases were white. Then, in 1923, the Supreme Court ruled again, on the basis of common knowledge, that Asian Indians were not white. From that point on, on the basis of the 1923 legal precedent, the court ruled that Asian Indians were not white and therefore ineligible for naturalization. The Asian Indian case shows how difficult it was for the courts to maintain these kinds of ethnoracial categorizations in the face of any sort of systematic scrutiny. Yet that is exactly what the US government did; and its actions had important consequences for those US groups which were considered non-white. Latinos were one of those groups.
When Latinos became part of the United States, either through immigration or through conquest (as in the case of Puerto Ricans, or of Mexican Americans in the nineteenth-century southwest), they were inserted into an established racial order. Even though many Latinos are recent immigrants, it is important to realize that this historical racial hierarchy continues to influence the playing field upon which their community sits today. For example, one complication for Latinos was that one-drop rules presupposed a strict, biological understanding of what race is. Under those regimes, a person was Black, white, or Indian, and there was no legal representation for intermediate categories like mulattos (people of combined Black and white ancestry). Latinos, on the other hand, come from a variety of ethnoracial backgrounds. When the Spaniards arrived in Latin America, that continent had an indigenous population which numbered millions of inhabitants. Although a large proportion of this native population perished through disease and wars of conquest, a significant part survived, particularly in Mexico, Central America, Colombia, Perú, and Bolívia. The Spanish mixed with these groups, as did enslaved Africans, creating what are called mestizos – individuals of mixed European, African, and indigenous descent. In the Caribbean, little of the indigenous population remained, which made it necessary for Spaniards to import enslaved Africans to use as the bulk of the labor force. Those Africans mixed with the Spaniards and with the indigenous groups who remained on the islands, creating a new racial admixture; this is often called mulatto. After the end of slavery, Caribbean plantation-owners imported hundreds of thousands of Chinese laborers to work in the fields. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, large numbers of Asians from other countries, including Japan, settled in other parts of Latin America, adding to its racial admixture. This is why, in the early twentieth century, José Vasconcelos called Latin Americans la raza cósmica (the cosmic race) – one made up of the blood of all the world’s races.
During the colonial period, the Spaniards developed a complex casta system, which laid out the racial hierarchy according to how much European, Black, or indigenous blood a particular individual had. Like the American system, the Spanish system placed the white Europeans on top; but the remainder included many more racial options than were available in the United States at that time. Most Latin American countries abolished the Spanish casta system after independence. But they still maintained the racial hierarchies. The difference was that their understanding of race included mixed race as a possibility, which was not true in most parts of the United States after the late nineteenth century.16 Thus, when Latinos arrived in the United States, they had to fit into a relatively rigid racial hierarchy, where it was very important whether a person was defined as “Black” or “white.” Yet many Latinos are of mixed race. Those of Mexican or Central American origin tend to be of mixed indigenous background, and those from the Caribbean are more likely to have African origins. But are they “Indian”? Or are they “Black”? Or something else? The problem with people of mixed race is that often there can be significant differences in skin color even within the same family. One sibling can be quite dark-skinned, another one quite light-skinned. Since the US racial structure did not allow for the possibility of admixture, what often happened was that the lighter-skinned sibling would be treated as “white,” the darker as “Black.” At the height of segregation, this meant that they could go to separate schools, get to use separate bathroom facilities, and in general would have a very different set of opportunities, simply because one was seen as white and the other was not. Latinos, then, complicated the US racial structure and did not fit neatly into any of its racial categories. This racial ambiguity meant that the location they chose to settle in, and the particular racial history in that place, had an important impact on the kinds of opportunities open to them. There was no one uniform response to, or treatment of, Latinos as a “race.”
For example, there were large numbers of Latinos, mostly of Mexican origin, living in the state of Texas during the nineteenth century. Many had been there originally when Texas was part of Mexico. Texas turned into a slave state once it became part of the United States, and after emancipation it developed and enforced strict Jim Crow laws, requiring racial segregation in neighborhoods, schools, and public facilities. Like the rest of the south, Texas also passed laws to keep Blacks from voting. Yet, in Texas, African Americans were not the only large minority group; there were Mexican Americans as well. Jim Crow laws were applied to the Mexican population because they too were seen as non-white, despite their legal categorization as white under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. This was not true in New Mexico, however, where Latinos of Mexican origin remained in the majority until the twentieth century: in New Mexico, segregation was not as extreme as in Texas. Mexican Americans were allowed voting rights there. Moreover, they held public-office positions and much of the political power until the mid twentieth century. Thus, local context had an important impact on racial definitions and racial restrictions, even in the case of the same national-origin group. These differences were possible because of Latino racial ambiguity.
Thus, race is not “real” in a biological sense, but racial categories still have important implications for the opportunities which various groups have in our society. Without an understanding of the historical legacy of race, it is difficult to understand the current distribution of resources and opportunities within American society. Being white gave individuals access to citizenship; access to land under the Homestead Act in the nineteenth century (which was restricted to whites); access to legal protection and the right to organize unions, which significantly increased unionized workers’ wages and benefits (many unions prohibited non-white membership, and many people of color worked in industries not covered under the National Labor Relations Act); access to subsidized federal home loans (the Federal Housing Administration [FHA] program redlined and excluded African American, Mexican American, and mixed-race neighborhoods); and access to public education of adequate quality.17 Recent studies have shown that whites and African Americans with similar levels of income and education still have very different levels of total wealth because whites are much more likely to inherit real estate and other funds from their parents.18 That inheritance is the fruit
