In the Shadow of Race: Jews, Latinos, and Immigrant Politics in the United States (review)

In this engaging study of how race and ethnicity in America have evolved during the last century, Hattam examines an ambitious range of topics: the shift from the Lamarckian understanding of the heritability of acquired characteristics to the biologically determined genetics of Men-del, “the invention of ethnicity” by New York Zionists writing in the 1910s and 1920s, debates about the meaning of race within the 1911 Dillingham Immigration Commission, changes in the racial and ethnic categories used by the Census Bureau throughout the twentieth century, recent mayoral contests in New York and Los Angeles, and the contemporary debate about immigration. Prophetically, Hattam even offers an insightful analysis of the rhetoric of Barack Obama, contrasted with that of Al Sharpton, at the 2004 Democratic convention.

What connects these topics is Hattam’s preoccupation with how race- and ethnicity-based discourse lead to divergent understandings of difference and disadvantage in America. As she puts it, “Ethnicity has served to reinscribe, rather than challenge, the enduring inequalities that accompany racial difference” (11). Hattam’s approach is to analyze the “discursive formations” that inevitably frame how political actors conceive of their interests (11). She is particularly focused on the “associative chains that permeate the discourse and continue to link ethnicity with pluralism and openness and race with inequality and power” (12).

A potential hazard with this approach is to neglect, or just to simplify inordinately, the interaction of such abstractions with material or institutional interests. Hattam avoids this problem when exploring how race ideology collided with reality in the wake of America’s conquest of Mexico in 1848. Since 1790, Congress had restricted citizenship to free whites. Yet the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo afforded Mexican citizens residing in annexed territories eligibility for U.S. citizenship. By any conventional understanding, such Mexicans were not white, and therefore arguably ineligible for citizenship. But the federal courts eventually affirmed that these Mexicans were entitled to citizenship even though they were not white, thereby helping to forge an ambiguous group identity for them that persists to this day.

A similar example highlights how during the 1920s, employers prevailed against race-based immigration restrictions and kept the borders open to nationals from within the Western Hemisphere—especially Mexican workers. Again, interests trumped ideology and consequently shaped immigration policy for generations to come.

When Hattam turns to recent events, her analysis is much less cogent. She is notably evasive about the divergent interests of African Americans and Latino immigrants. Highlighting how Jesse Jackson addressed antirestrictionist Latino protesters on May 1, 2006, Hattam neglects to point out how few blacks joined those marches. More generally, she simply ignores the social and economic differences resulting from voluntary migration (Latinos) and involuntary migration (blacks).

This oversight is not hard to explain. As Hattam notes, she regards “dismantling the race-ethnicity distinction” and “reconfiguring the associative chains” as “a prerequisite for building a robust antiracist coalition in the years ahead” (17).

This explicit ideological agenda leads Hattam to neglect an obvious and intriguing alternative interpretation of U.S. racial and ethnic politics. Hattam looks to a racialized class politics to transcend the race-ethnicity divide that she bemoans. Yet, contrary to her argument, ethnicity in America has at various times and places—not unlike race—been the basis of challenges to exclusion and inequality. This history complicates the analysis and makes Hattam’s preoccupation with forging a black-brown coalition much more problematical. But surely we have to understand history before we can change it.