Citizens But Not Americans: Race & Belonging Among Latino Millennials by Nilda Flores-González (review)

The US Census Bureau recently announced that it will use the 2010 Census's separate racial and ethnic category questions for the 2020 Census (Fontenot 2018),¹ disregarding research indicating that a single, combined race/ethnicity question would provide more accurate population data. Though US Census racial and ethnic category decisions are not its main concern, Nilda Flores-González's timely book Citizens But Not Americans offers crucial insight into how such a decision, if approved, would underscore Latino millennials' sense of estrangement from their homeland by miscounting or misrepresenting them. By examining Latino millennials' self-understandings of race and belonging, Flores-González contributes to ongoing debates concerning conceptual distinctions between race and ethnicity, the transformation of the US color line, and the ethno-racial dimensions of citizenship.

To set the stage for these contributions, which emerged from a careful analysis of 97 in-depth interviews with second-, third-, and fourth-generation Latino millennials in the Chicago area, Flores-González first documents how this group experiences exclusion and discrimination in public spaces that continue to be racially segregated. While signals such as dark skin and Spanish language use subjected some youths to more intense experiences of discrimination, all youths experienced exclusion in public white spaces due to a shared Latin American ancestry that marked them as "not white." These experiences contributed to youths' self-understandings of their de jure inclusion but de facto exclusion from full participation in American life. The remainder of the book documents how these self-understandings were manifest in youths' understandings of their ethnoracial identity, their "racial middle" position within the US racial hierarchy, and their strategies to recast themselves as "real" Americans.

First, Latino millennials often used panethnic and ethnic categories interchangeably when describing their racial identities, challenging traditional conceptual distinctions between race and ethnicity and providing evidence for Latinos as an "ethnorace," or a group distinguished not only by physical traits ("the Latino prototype") but also by culture, nationality, and geographic origin. These youths experienced frustration when asked to choose from conventional categories that split race and ethnicity because these classifications did not align with their self-understandings or lived experiences. As Flores-González (64) emphasizes, "the interchangeable, simultaneous, and contextual nature of ethnicity and race for Latino millennials…renders the separation of ethnicity and race, as well as the separation of national origin and panethnic terms, meaningless."

Second, Latino millennials largely understood their position in the US racial hierarchy as occupying the space between whites and blacks. Flores-González enriches previous theorization of the "racial middle" (e.g., Bonilla-Silva 2004) by demonstrating how the placement of specific groups within the US racial hierarchy is a multidimensional, dynamic process in which relative positionality depends on the racial criteria in question. In terms of privilege, for example, Latino youth placed themselves higher than blacks but, in terms of civic ostracism, they placed themselves lower than blacks. Overall, Flores-González finds that only a few youths placed themselves at either the white or black ends of the racial continuum. Instead, the large majority placed themselves in a racial middle, though the specific contours of their placement depended on individual characteristics (e.g., skin color, social class) and experiences with discrimination.

Finally, Flores-González demonstrates how Latino millennials strategically challenged the American ethnoracial ideal and reconfigured what it means to be American. In addition to contesting the white, European-origin, and Christian ideal of American citizenship, they deployed common American ideological tropes, such as freedom and opportunity, and counternarratives like multiculturalism, to emphasize their belonging. Again, this was a dynamic process that depended on individual characteristics such as gender; Flores-González posits that women, for example, more often used the trope of opportunity because they had fewer experiences of discrimination than their male counterparts. Additionally, Latino youths crafted integrated subjectivities that blended their ethnic and American...