Mexican Americans and the Question of Race

Mexican Americans and the Question of Race makes an important contribution to the ongoing debates about race and immigration. Based on interviews in Texas, Julie A. Dowling shows us that even though many Mexican Americans identify as white when answering the Census, that does not mean they are necessarily considered white or assimilated or even understand themselves as such, despite the facile observations of some scholars.  Rather, self-identification as white in official statistics often involves a situational identity based on ideologies and discursive strategies regarding citizenship, aspirations and other non-phenotypical and non-cultural traits. For Mexican Americans and Latinos in general, race is clearly more complex than how it is traditionally understood in the United States. ~Edward Telles, Professor of Sociology, Princeton University

No scholar of Latino racial identification or of contemporary race thinking in the U.S. more generally will want to miss this book. It is an eye-opening, subtle, and incisive brief that neatly debunks some popular assumptions and offers a compelling new account in their stead. ~Ann Morning, Associate Professor of Sociology, New York University

I believe that this book is essential reading for an understanding of Mexican origin racial identity. Dowling’s qualitative approach sheds much-needed light on this central question in race relations. . . . Her conclusion about the centrality of racial ideology in racial self-identification among Latinos will become, I predict, standard in the field of Latina/o Studies. ~Edward Murguía, Professor of Sociology, Texas A&M University, and author of Assimilation, Colonialism, and the Mexican American People

Dowling’s text is a much needed addition to and intervention in the conversation of Latino racial identification that should be required reading for Sociology of Race and Latino Studies courses. ~Sociology of Race and Ethnicity Journal