Abstract
Studies showing that lighter phenotypes are associated with better socioeconomic outcomes among Latinos attribute this pattern to color discrimination. Yet surveys consistently find low levels of Latinos reporting discrimination experiences. Drawing on 120 qualitative interviews and participant observation in New York, San Juan, and Santo Domingo, I explore this paradox by examining how Dominicans and Puerto Ricans subjectively understand discrimination. Cultural narratives in the sending societies create obstacles to recognizing discrimination by: (a) limiting the definition to its overt, institutional forms; and (b) portraying the victims of discrimination as culpable for their failure to have “improved their race.” Although migrants bring these narratives to the U.S., these views are challenged by exposure to American perspectives, both before and after migration. Transnational contact serves a potential means for those in the sending nations to perceive colorism in their own societies.
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Notes
- 1.
2005 American Community Survey. This figure does not include Puerto Ricans born on the island of Puerto Rico.
- 2.
Although Puerto Rico is part of the U.S., I adopt the terminology used by Puerto Ricans themselves and refer to the mainland U.S. simply as “the U.S.”
- 3.
The authors speculate that Puerto Ricans may benefit from their regional concentration in New York City, an area that a 1990 General Account Office report showed to have lower levels of discrimination against Latinos than regions with large Mexican populations. However, the discrepancy between their findings and those of Gómez may also lie in their failure to test for gender effects.
- 4.
The association between racial self-identification and racial appearance is unreliable in Puerto Rico, however, where 80% of the population identified itself as White in 2000 (Duany 2002).
- 5.
I excluded migrants who had lived anywhere beside the mainland U.S. and their country of origin, as well as those who had returned to their home country for more than six months after migrating.
- 6.
High occupational status includes managerial and professional specialty occupations. Medium occupational status includes technical, sales, and administrative support occupations. Low occupational status includes service occupations; production, craft, and repair occupations; operators, fabricators and laborers.
- 7.
In cases where the named second-generation contact had moved, current residents who were Puerto Rican or Dominican were also allowed to refer first-generation contacts or to participate if they met the study criteria.
- 8.
In two cases, the respondent preferred to conduct the interview in English.
- 9.
Most migrants identified their race as Puerto Rican, Dominican, or Latino in an open-ended question. For further discussion of the meaning of race for Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, see Roth (2006), Chapters 3–4.
- 10.
To anchor my observations, I previously applied this rating scale to a set of photographs in an instrument used during the interview to explore the racial schemas respondents use.
- 11.
Respondents used the same scale during the interview to rate their own color, as well as the color of individuals in the photographs, and their friends and acquaintances mentioned in their social network. Interviewer observations do not always correspond with self-classifications (Rodríguez et al. 1991, Rodríguez & Cordero-Guzman 1992), nor did they always here. For this paper, observed color is a more appropriate measure than self-identified color because it is on the basis of observations that color prejudice is acted out.
- 12.
In contrast to an urbanización, or planned neighborhood, barrios are neighborhoods that are typically not planned, which developed as people assembled housing structures on land they did not own. These are mostly very poor neighborhoods.
- 13.
A “tigre” refers to someone who is tough, streetwise, macho. One respondent translates it as “thug.” A colloquial English equivalent of how Marco uses the expression here might be a “bad-ass.”
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Roth, W.D. (2008). “There Is No Racism Here”: Understanding Latinos’ Perceptions of Color Discrimination Through Sending-Receiving Society Comparison. In: Hall, R.E. (eds) Racism in the 21st Century. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-79098-5_12
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