Latinization, Race, and Cultural Identification in Puerto Rican Orlando

Florida and, specifically, the Central Florida region, has become the most frequent destination for Puerto Ricans in the United States, and that is changing what Latinization means in Florida. Puerto Rican family at the Miami airport, 1952, courtesy of Eva Pagán Hill, from the collection "Puerto Ricans in Central Florida from 1940s to 1980s: A History."

The Latinization of the U.S. South has inspired a body of literature examining economic, political, social, and cultural changes in the South in recent decades. Amidst discussions of migration, assimilation, and resistance, there is frequent reference to the South's biracially coded past and its implications for what Raymond Mohl has called the "Nuevo New South." For Mohl and others, Hispanic immigration to the U.S. South presents significant questions about how new forms of diaspora in new places challenge existing paradigms for reading social dynamics. In particular, the historical constructions of race as a black/white binary in the U.S. South leave both newcomers and longtime residents at a loss as to how to read their contemporary reality.¹

An examination of the racialization of Orlando, Florida's Puerto Rican population reveals one way this is playing out. In Racial Situations, anthropologist John Hartigan Jr. has argued for the importance of thinking about race in terms of "the local settings in which racial identities are actually articulated, reproduced, and contested, resisting the urge to draw abstract conclusions about whiteness and blackness." Building on this, I argue here that the particularities of place, read from both the present and the past, are an important component of understanding how racial codes are being redrawn in the contemporary South. This article uses the questions that follow from Jamie Winders and Barbara Smith as guidance for examining Latinization and racialization in Orlando, Florida:

How do we make sense of these entanglements of a South contoured by a historical black/white binary, de-jure segregation and de-facto racism, and a South stretched into transnational flows of bodies, cultures, and capital? In the contemporary South, who can invoke and be part of its past, and to what ends? How do and should the interpretations of southern history affect present actions, and who can access these meanings to interpret and intervene in the present?²

At first look, the choice of Puerto Ricans in Orlando may seem an odd case study for exploring the impact of new Hispanic populations on the social and cultural formations of the U.S. South. Florida's Spanish past combines with the decades-old Cuban presence there to suggest that the recent southern phenomenon of Latinization is not new at all. What's more, neither Orlando nor Florida is referenced as "typically" southern, and Puerto Ricans are not often mentioned in the literature on Hispanics in the U.S. South.³

Of the top eighteen metropolitan destinations for Hispanics in the United States between 1980 and 2000, however, nearly two-thirds of these are in the South and four are in Florida. Of those four, Orlando easily takes the lead. Following the 2010 census, Florida gained two new congressional seats, due in large part to the growth of the Hispanic population. This growth is especially noticeable in Central Florida, where Puerto Ricans make up by far the largest number of Hispanics, as demonstrated in the table in the following section. Indeed, Florida and, specifically, the Central Florida region, has become the most frequent destination for Puerto Ricans in the United States, and that is changing what Latinization means in Florida.⁴

Welcome to the New Orlando

Since Disney World opened in 1971, the Central Florida economy has undergone a dramatic shift from oranges and cattle to theme parks and tourism. This shift transformed Orlando from a biracial town into a multiracial city in the space of a few decades, as the area became a destination for visitors and migrants from around the globe. Examining faces on the street, it seems clear that the racial history of a black/white binary has given way to a modern...