When you check a box on the US Census identifying your race, what stories can others tell about who you are? What stories have been concealed? Julie A. Dowling sets out to trouble the perceived narratives of assimilation and resistance associated with Mexican Americans who check “white” or “other race” on the Census form, revealing the fissures between “public and private articulations of race” (3) and bearing witness to these more complicated stories.

Dowling demonstrates through her interviews with US and foreign-born Mexican Americans in Texas the variety of factors that motivate individuals to check these boxes, including a very strong tension surrounding the question of audience: the distances between the label one is “expected” to supply and the label one wishes to supply are often markedly wide. In turn, Dowling establishes a “racial ideology continuum” that suggests the meanings behind asserting one's whiteness, on the one hand, or asserting one's status as “other race” (with labels like “Hispanic,” “Mexican” and “Mexican American”) on the other, are also complicated by individual perceptions of and reactions to racism and discrimination in American society.

After introducing her argument and establishing her theory of the racial ideology continuum in the first chapter, Dowling in her second and third chapters proceeds to investigate in more detail the stories of those Mexican American individuals who would select “white” on the Census and those who would select “other race” respectively, using this continuum as a guide. Providing detailed analyses of her subjects’ responses to questions about how they perceive themselves, how they believe others perceive them, and how they have responded to incidents of discrimination in their lives, Dowling paints a convincing portrait of the complexities at the heart of both choosing a racial label and having a racial label chosen for you. She skillfully argues that those who choose “white” on the census and express beliefs that “racism is no barrier” (one of the points on the continuum she has defined) “do not report less discrimination than ‘other’ race respondents. They simply frame these racial encounters differently” (27).

In Chapter 4, Dowling contrasts the responses offered by immigrants with the US-born respondents of the previous chapters, highlighting the way racial constructions formed in Mexico come to compete with differing constructions in the United States. In Chapter 5, Dowling writes more broadly about the complexity of racial labels as they are used in daily life. The final chapter makes suggestions for how this information might shape the way we collect data on race and ethnicity, tending to the complicated stories that undergird every choice to assert a public identity that may or may not match a private one.

Dowling's work is most compelling in her presentation of the responses of her interviewees, perhaps most especially in those moments when she begins to unravel the story beneath the story they are telling. She carefully identifies contradictions and reads them closely, with both sensitivity and purpose, making her arguments about the racial ideology continuum all the more compelling. For example, she does not ignore it when respondent after respondent shares specific experiences of individual and institutional racism, but then replies to questions of whether he or she has personally experienced discrimination in the negative.

Dowling's continuum is a useful guide to understanding the complexities of the labels, but its very strength contributed to what I considered to be a minor weakness of the chapter on immigrant perceptions. Dowling explains that the differences are vast enough that “Mexican immigrants’ narratives do not conform to the racial ideology continuum” (83), which briefly caused me to wonder whether it is the narratives that do not conform to the continuum or whether the continuum is in need of expansion or reconfiguration. This observation, however, does not diminish the significance of Dowling's argument and her book, but in fact highlights the reasons that Dowling advocates we take great care in reading the stories revealed and concealed in the checking of a box.