This is a transformative book that moves the discussion of “race” to another (fascinating) level. Well researched, with extensive notes to each chapter, and with a clear research design, the work focusses on the question how immigration affects the way people – both in the receiving and the sending countries – think about race and classify themselves and others. Her sample consists of 120 Dominicans and Puerto Ricans, half of whom lived in their respective countries and had never migrated to the US, the other half of whom were first-generation migrants to the New York City area. Using a creative combination of photos, country visits, and in-depth interviews, she examines how immigration changes the concepts of race in the US, as well as in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico; the macro and micro transnational connections that link both the sending and the receiving societies; the multiple forms of racial stratification in all three countries; and how immigrants learn to strategize their racial performances in the US, depending to some degree on their phenotypes. In the last of her seven chapters she addresses the question whether Latinos are becoming a race in the US. She also provides an appendix describing her methodology. My one recommendation here is that a foreshadowing of how the book would progress would have further improved an already excellent contribution to the literature.

The book's themes are also major contributions to our current thinking about race. For example, while some may think of race as being constructed in particular countries, and specific to those countries, she states that there are many different ways of cognitively and culturally classifying race within a particular country (she refers to these as racial schemas) and that individuals often have and use more than one racial schema. For example, she notes that “individuals can change which set of categories or rules for sorting people they use, and while there are many factors that may influence this change, immigration is a significant one” (4). She explores how immigration changes concepts of race for the immigrants, for their host society, and for those who stay in the sending countries. Moreover, she argues that new migrants arrive already having incorporated premigration concepts of race that have been shaped by the experiences of earlier migrations from their countries. As she notes, it is today's “transnational migration practices and the globalization processes that typically accompany large-scale mass migration … [that] produce a cultural diffusion of racial schemas” (14–15). Concepts of race and culture are diffused in large part through social networks, the mass media, and institutions. She finds that migrants (as well as nonmigrants) add these new concepts of race and use them depending on the context, questions asked, presence of interviewer, etc.

Asking her respondents to racially classify twenty photos of phenotypically very different Latinos, she finds that they tend to use three major racial schemas (she refers to these as “Ideal Types”). She also finds that many of her (migrant and nonmigrant) respondents also use more than one racial schema, depending on the context and the question asked. The basic types are: (1) race is viewed in terms of a continuum that includes intermediate terms, such as trigueño, mulatto, and indio. (2) Nationality racial schemas are identified which include only particular nationalities and ethnic groups, e.g. Puerto Rican, Dominican, Italian, American or panethnic nationalities (i.e. Hispanic, Latino). (3) US racial schemas are identified, where the individuals in the photos are classified either within (a) the Binary US schema, where people are either white or black and the one-drop rule determines the categories, or within (b) a Hispanicized US schema, in which the photos are classified as white, black, or Hispanic/Latino. An important question to address in future research is whether similar results would be found among non-Caribbean Latinos. In other words, are the experiences or racial schemas of Latino migrants that come from countries that had larger, and have surviving, indigenous populations, e.g. Ecuador, Guatemala, different?

The volume also makes other important points that have not been sufficiently explored in the literature. For example, Roth notes that racial terms are relational, e.g., within the family, terms such as el negro or la rubia (the blond) suggest race classifications as black or white (respectively), but these members may not be viewed as such outside their families. For example, they may only be negro relative to their even lighter-skinned siblings. In addition, she finds that racial schemas can be added, but not necessarily replaced, and that immigrants can reinterpret new schemas, blending them with old concepts or infusing them with new meaning. These are also new and real contributions that Roth makes. Perhaps most important is her conclusion that how migrants use racial schemas, and what variants they create, may also influence the native-born in the US. Finally, I applaud the attention (and follow-up) that she paid to her presence (as a non-Latina) in the interviews and how this might have influenced the responses.

With this book, Roth has moved the research a major step forward. But when Roth moves from description and analysis to prescriptions for policy, the reader is left not quite sure of the path she used to get there. Roth advances the policy recommendation that the census should include “Latino” as a category in the race question and add an additional question asking about “color.” As others writing in this area have argued, this raises other issues. For example, does such a policy change further reify the increasingly discredited concept of race that her book interrogates? Might these findings be better used to deconstruct the race construct and show how similar what we think of as “race” is to what we know as ethnicity? Despite this policy position, it is still, however, an excellent contribution to the literature.