This book historicizes the ways that Latina/o/x people challenge the Black/white racial binary in the United States. Laura E. Gómez unpacks the racialized identities of Latinos as a broad ethno-racial group that actually encompasses various racial groups, including Black, white, and indigenous, as a result of the enslavement of Africans and European settler colonialism in the Americas. This work builds on the prior sociological studies of Omi and Winant (Racial Formation in the United States) and Bonilla-Silva (Racism without Racists), as it provides a nuanced analysis of race in the United States from a hemispheric perspective, through the lens of Latinidad. The theoretical and analytical framework is also anchored in Latino immigration studies via Leo Chávez's “Latino threat” narrative (The Latino Threat).

Gómez summarizes the argument of Inventing Latinos as follows: “This book's central focus is explaining how the common sense of anti-Latino racism has come to exist today, to be taken for granted as natural in the cosmology of American racism. That includes understanding why ‘Latinos’ as a distinctive racial category came into being at a particular time and putting that moment in the broader context of earlier history and contemporary events” (6). The argument structure of the book combines critical race theory with an overview of the historical interventions of the United States in Latin America from the nineteenth century to the present, all in the service of racial capitalism. Gómez presents a compelling argument to prove how enslavement, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism interlock in the construction of the US racial hierarchy, a hierarchy from which ‘Latino’ has emerged as an intermediary category between Black and white, and as harbinger to the future of racial formation in the United States.

The constituent chapters unpack the nuances and complexities of Latino racial construction from a perspective that combines blackness, whiteness, and mestizaje. Chapter 1, “We Are Here Because You Were There,” provides a historical overview of US intervention in the politics and economies of Latin America. US intervention creates conditions that favor migration to the United States, due to its economic power in the region, depletion of labor opportunities in Latin America, and the pull of low-wage work in the United States, particularly in the industrial and agricultural sectors. Chapter 2, “Idealized Mestizaje and Anti-Black and Anti-Indian Racism,” takes up the meanings of blackness and indigeneity from a transnational perspective. It focuses on country case studies in Latin America to understand the origins of anti-blackness, anti-indigeneity, and the uses of mestizaje as a means to create national identities that occlude the violent histories of colonization and enslavement that have been perpetuated by racial inequality in Latin America and the United States into the present.

Chapter 3, “The Elusive Quest for Whiteness,” explains the ways that Latinos have and continue to try to approximate whiteness, as they are aware that this is the avenue to access and privilege in the United States. This chapter contributes to our understandings of anti-blackness and colorism within Latino communities. Chapter 4, “To Count, We Must Be Counted,” outlines the evolution of census categories and US Census data to argue how and why racial categories imposed by the US government do not capture the lived racial identities of Latinos, instead serving the political agendas of the presidential administrations that create them.

This book presents a compelling argument that the racial formation of the category Latino challenges and changes the historical Black/white binary in the United States. This relevance and the timeliness of this work cannot be overstated. Using examples from the nineteenth century to the Trump Administration, Gómez demonstrates the ways that racial capitalism continues to shape the economic and political trajectory of the United States, and she convincingly asserts that the historical oppression of Latinos, like that of Afro-descendant peoples, merits reparations. Until the United States reckons with this history of oppression and white supremacy, racial inequality will persist.