{"id":37985,"date":"2014-10-28T17:22:36","date_gmt":"2014-10-28T17:22:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=37985"},"modified":"2014-10-28T17:22:36","modified_gmt":"2014-10-28T17:22:36","slug":"why-latinos-wont-become-white","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=37985","title":{"rendered":"Why Latinos won\u2019t become white"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why Latinos won\u2019t become white<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Al Jazeera America<\/a>
\n2014-10-22<\/p>\n

Gabriel Arana<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Assuming Latinos will join the white majority ignores the stark divisions in a racially diverse group<\/em><\/p>\n

In the lead-up to the midterms, President Barack Obama<\/a> has been parroting the conventional wisdom about the GOP\u2019s<\/a> future: Republicans are doomed if they keep up their opposition to immigration reform<\/a> and continue the inflammatory anti-immigrant rhetoric. \u201cIt\u2019s anybody\u2019s guess how Republicans are thinking about this,\u201d he said<\/a> during a town hall event in Santa Monica, California<\/a>. \u201cIf they were thinking long term politically, it is suicide for them not to do this.\u201d<\/p>\n

Latinos make up 14 percent of the population, and their share is projected<\/a> to grow to 29 percent by 2050. This demographic traditionally identifies with the Democratic Party<\/a>; the toxic immigration debate in Washington, fueled by xenophobes in the GOP, will only increase that tendency. In 2006, 49 percent of Latino eligible voters identified as or leaned Democratic. By 2011, that number jumped<\/a> to 67 percent. With the United States projected to become a majority-minority country by 2043, Republicans\u2019 chances of winning the White House on the backs of white voters will grow ever slimmer.<\/p>\n

But a counternarrative, one that would put Latino votes back in contention for the GOP, has begun to emerge. In the coming decades, Latinos could become \u201cwhite\u201d \u2014 a process in which cultural assimilation would presumably be followed by political realignment \u2014 opening them up to affiliation with the Republican Party. It\u2019s a theory espoused most prominently by Slate<\/em> political writer Jamelle Bouie<\/a>, who argues<\/a> in the winter issue of Democracy that \u201cthe future won\u2019t be majority-minority; it will be a white majority, where Spanish last names are common.\u201d But this vision of complete assimilation ignores the stark racial divisions in Latin American societies, in which socioeconomic status and skin color, as in the U.S., tend to fall along parallel lines<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ethnic attrition<\/strong><\/p>\n

The idea of Latinos becoming white in the American sense \u2014 a vision of racial and cultural assimilation independent of self-identified race \u2014 isn\u2019t a new one. Economists Brian Duncan <\/a>at the University of Colorado and Stephen Trejo<\/a> at the University of Texas at Austin call it ethnic attrition. As Latinos intermarry and climb the socioeconomic ladder, the theory goes, they are less likely to self-identify as Hispanic. Duncan and Trejo\u2019s research shows<\/a> (PDF) that while virtually all first- and second-generation Hispanic immigrants identify as Hispanic, in the third generation, those of mixed heritage start to self-select out of this group. Among third-generation immigrants with only two Hispanic grandparents, 79 percent identify as Hispanic. Among those with only one Hispanic grandparent, the number falls to 58 percent. Think of Republican Sen. Ted Cruz<\/a>, whose father is Cuban and whose mother is white, or comedian Louis C.K.<\/a>, whose grandmother is Mexican and whose other grandparents are Irish and Hungarian…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why Latinos won\u2019t become white Al Jazeera America 2014-10-22 Gabriel Arana Assuming Latinos will join the white majority ignores the stark divisions in a racially diverse group In the lead-up to the midterms, President Barack Obama has been parroting the conventional wisdom about the GOP\u2019s future: Republicans are doomed if they keep up their opposition […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,33,14647,14646,8,26,394,20],"tags":[15078,14639,17841,9223],"class_list":["post-37985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-census","category-economics","category-latino","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-al-jazeera-america","tag-brian-duncan","tag-gabriel-arana","tag-stephen-trejo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37985"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37985\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}