Citizens but Not Americans: Race and Belonging among Latino Millennials by Nilda Flores-González (review)

Citizens but Not Americans: Race and Belonging among Latino Millennials investigates the ways in which Latino millennials make meaning of racialized experiences. In her work with Latino youth, Nilda Flores-González uses an intersectional lens to explore how self-understandings of race are shaped by aspects of identity, including national origin, generation, sex, educational level, color, and age. Using narratives collected through in-depth interviews, Flores-González weaves the voices of Latino millennials into a conversation about the ways in which race functions as a social marker for inclusion in or exclusion from the US imagined community.

Citizens but Not Americans looks at how belonging and cultural membership function within the binary racial order of the United States. Building on Omi and Winant's work on race as socially constructed, Flores-González provides a framework for thinking about political and cultural membership in the nation-state. She proposes that, based on racial and cultural attributes, including language, family values, foodways, music, and Latin American ancestry, Latinos can be categorized in terms of ethnoracial citizenship. She argues that being born in the United States makes one a citizen with legal rights; however, ethnorace impacts whether one is treated as a citizen with full cultural membership in the US imagined community. According to Flores-González, politics of othering and failures to recognize Latino political subjectivity characterize experiences of belonging among Latino millennials, and, in light of this, her work expands on current conceptualizations about how Latinos fit into the US racial structure.

The monograph opens by situating the experiences of Latino millennials within the US imagined community, with a focus on historical and social conditions, notions of belonging, and the racialization of citizenship, more generally, while also providing background information about the social context of the study. The research for Citizens but Not Americans emerged from a previous study of US-born, Latino millennials, which was completed during the 2006 and 2007 immigration rights marches. The youth described themselves as being US born, but not American, and they identified the exclusion that their families experienced as a motivating factor for their political participation. Out of this study, Flores-González developed a second set of interviews focused on identity and belonging. The subsequent study, which provides the foundation for Citizens but Not Americans, was conducted in 2009 and included interviews with ninety-seven Latino millennials in Chicago.

In chapter 2, Flores-González lays the groundwork for thinking about the racial politics of othering and of visibility wherein features that make a Latino youth identifiable as Latino lead to either hypervisibility or invisibility. In the United States, places are permeated with racial meanings, and the youth described being treated as a disruptive presence that transgressed social boundaries when in white spaces (e.g., being heavily surveilled in a store or having one's right to attend college questioned). Latino millennials in the study described experiencing the informal and formal policing of color lines through surveillance, practices of exclusion, and unequal access to resources.

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 build upon each other, starting with establishing the case for viewing Latinos as an ethnorace, followed by a framework that explains the positioning of Latinos within the US racial landscape based on physical and cultural markers, such as language, and finally, moving into a discussion of what it means to be an "American." Flores-González examines how feelings of racial exclusion from the US imagined community, which is defined by a binary racial order, were amplified by being classified within a racial middle. The US Census recognizes five races: White, Black, American Indian/Alaska Native, Asian, and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander. Phenotypic heterogeneity among Latinos impacts systems of classification based on biological characteristics, and the Latino millennials in her study tended to see themselves as a group situated somewhere within a racial middle tilting toward White, tilting toward Black, or solidly in the middle...