Overview

In this groundbreaking study of Puerto Rican and Dominican migration to the United States, Wendy D. Roth explores the influence of migration on changing cultural conceptions of race—for the newcomers, for their host society, and for those who remain in the countries left behind. Just as migrants can gain new language proficiencies, they can pick up new understandings of race. But adopting an American idea about race does not mean abandoning earlier ideas. New racial schemas transfer across borders and cultures spread between sending and host countries. Behind many current debates on immigration is the question of how Latinos will integrate and where they fit into the U.S. racial structure. Race Migrations shows that these migrants increasingly see themselves as a Latino racial group. Although U.S. race relations are becoming more ""Latin Americanized"" by the presence of Latinos and their views about race, race in the home countries is also becoming more ""Americanized"" through the cultural influence of those who go abroad. Ultimately, Roth shows that several systems of racial classification and stratification co-exist in each place, in the minds of individuals and in their shared cultural understandings of ""how race works.""

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9780804777957

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Reviews

Wendy Roth has produced an important book on how Dominicans and Puerto Ricans transform their own understandings of race with immigration to the United States and, in the process, also transform American racial realities. In addition, our understanding of race as culture reaches a new level in Roth's insightful analysis. --Edward Telles, Princeton University, author of Race in Another America

Author Information

Wendy Roth is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. She is coauthor of Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings (2004).

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