Ilona Katzew and Susan Deans-Smith (Eds.), Race and Classification: The Case of Mexican Americans. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009, 384 pages, ISBN 978-0-8047-6141-3. Paper, $24.95.

Evelyn Nakano Glenn (Ed.), Shades of Difference: Why Skin Color Matters. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009, 312 pages, ISBN 978-0-8047-5999-1. Paper, $24.95.

Much has been written lately in both the popular and academic press about the “Browning” of America and the changing nature of race and ethnic relations in the United States. This has been largely the result of the precipitous increase in the Latino population and its profound change on the demographic landscape in the United States. For example, the U.S. Bureau of the Census (2010) has shown the Latino population grew from 35.3 million in 2000 to over 50 million in 2010 (p. 3). The Latino population now represents 16% of the total U.S. population and has surpassed African Americans as the largest racial-ethnic population at the turn of the century. Recent demographic projections calculate that by 2050 the Latino population will increase to an estimated 128 million or 29% of the national total. As Rumbaut (Reference Rumbaut, Cobas, Duany and Feagin2009) writes, in that year it will exceed the combined total of all other racial minorities (primarily African American and Asian) in the United States (p. 17).

Discourse on the “Browning of America” is also a product of transformative structural changes in U.S. race relations since the 1960s. Key among them has been the momentous change in U.S. immigration policy in 1965 (which shifted the focus away from Western Europe and toward Latin America and Asia), the hard-won victories of the Civil Rights Movement (that arguably extended meaningful, first-class citizenship rights to communities of color), and the overturning of antimiscegenation laws (Loving v. Commonwealth of Virginia, 1967). That Supreme Court decision put an end to over three hundred years of legal prohibitions on interracial marriages in the United States and directly contributed to the recent rise of a multirracial population. That mixed race population grew by 32% in the ten-year period from 2000 to 2010, and now composes nearly 3% of the total U.S. population according to statistics presented by the U.S. Bureau of the Census in 2010 (p. 4).

The two welcomed and timely collections under review are the product of academic conferences devoted to exploring these recent changes in race and ethnic relations in the United States. Illona Katzew's and Susan Deans-Smith's (2004) Race and Classification: The Case of Mexican Americans has its origins in a conference and exhibition held in Los Angeles in May 2004. A collection of casta paintings made in Mexico were curated by Ilona Katzew and put on public display under the title “Inventing Race: Casta Paintings and Eighteenth Century Mexico” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The goal of both the conference and the exhibit was to reassess the meaning of race in the Spanish colonial world and assess how these complex racial classifications continue to have relevance into the present. Central to this undertaking was an exploration of how “concepts of place and selfhood” among Mexican Americans have roots in their Iberian colonial past and continue to profoundly impact their lives today. How constructions of race were socially defined, hierarchically deployed, and how they structured the lives of the Mexican population in the American Southwest was at the center of these undertakings. This colonial regime and racialized world were the products of over three hundreds of years of racial mixing (mestizaje) among the Spanish, Indigenous, and African populations in what is now the American Southwest. The graphic ways in which this racial hierarchy was visually represented in these casta paintings captured the essence of the sistema de castas (caste system) that the Spanish colonial world put into place and set in motion in this colonial context.

Ramón Gutierrez's brilliant essay “Hispanic Identities in the Southwestern United States” offers a magisterial overview of the way this racial hierarchy was deployed. In it, Gutierrez (Reference Gutierrez and Asencio2010) unravels “the history of racial and ethnic classification in what is now the Southwestern United States, looking simultaneously at self-generated identities as well as those imposed from without, paying particular attention to the role that language plays in issues of dominance, subordination, and resistance” (p. 175). The Spanish colonial project transformed the culturally and linguistically diverse indigenous populations of the region into indios. According to Gutierrez (Reference Gutierrez and Asencio2010), “In 1491, on the eve of the Columbian voyages, there were some 123 different indigenous language families spoken in the Americas, with over 260 different languages in Mexico alone. In the Valley of Mexico itself perhaps as many as 20 million people lived in a complexly stratified theocracy. But there were then no Indians in Mexico. Christopher Columbus invented them in 1492 by mistakenly believing he had reached India, thus calling them indios” (p. 177).

While religious differences between the colonizer and colonized factored centrally at the beginning of this colonial project, Gutierrez (Reference Gutierrez and Asencio2010) writes, “Starting in the 1760s, and stretching into the 1820s, racial classification took on a greater importance to the legal order, and increasingly a precise legal color code known as the sistema de castas was broadly invoked both by the church and the state. Access to marital partners and honorific posts, to desirable occupations, and even the Roman Catholic priesthood, was based on one's ability to prove one's genealogical racial purity by the categories of the code” (pp. 177–178). In other words, race became a central vector and basis of defining one's social status, societal location, and life chances in the Mexican American Southwest.

Gutierrez's essay draws from his award-winning Reference Gutierrez1991 book When Jesus Came the Corn Mothers Went Away and other scholarly work (Gutierrez Reference Gutierrez and Asencio2010) on the Mexican population in the Southwestern United States. His 2009 essay in Race and Classification is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the complex way that race and racial categorization were historically deployed among the largest nationality within the Latino population (Mexicans make up approximately 65% of the total U.S. Latino population). Gutierrez illuminates the complex meaning of racial mixing between the indigenous and Spanish populations as well as how the intermediate, mixed race populations located between them were socially defined. This history has its parallels in the way that African slaves, who replaced indios as the principle colonial workforce in the Caribbean and elsewhere in Latin America, were similarly relegated to an inferior social status in those regions of the Spanish colonial empire. It is the triangulation of race mixing between the Spanish colonizers and subjugated indigenous and African populations that provide the key protagonists in this colonial drama. This history dates from the initial incursion in Hispanola in 1492 to the early 1800s when many of the Spanish colonies successfully secured their independence. This three-hundred-year history of mestizaje (race mixing) in the Spanish colonial world stands in sharp contrast to the three-hundred-year history of antimiscegenation laws that prohibited racial intermarriage in the United States from the late seventeenth century to the late twentieth century.

In a similar way, Evelyn Nakano Glenn's (2009) Shades of Difference: Why Skin Color Matters is also the product of a national conference on “Hierarchies of Color: Historical and Transformative Perspectives on the Significance of Skin Tone” held at U.C. Berkeley in December, 2005. It, too, was devoted to assessing historical and contemporary changes in how racial hierarchies have been socially defined in the United States and in a global context. What is so fascinating and provocative about Nakano Glenn's welcome collection is the notion that race relations in the United States have increasingly taken a decidedly Latin American form. At the heart of Nakano Glenn's (2009) collection of scholarly works is an appreciation of the changing racial landscape in this country and the increasing role of colorism or skin tone in contemporary life . It is here, in the role of racial signifiers such as skin color (and other phenotypic markers such as texture of hair, shape of nose and lips) that the primary foci of these two collections converge. They both reverberate with insights about the symbolic and material underpinnings of race hierarchies and the discussion of skin color that have made their way into both academic publications and the popular media.

This convergence is most clearly reflected in Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and David R. Dietrich's (2009) “The Latin Americanization of U.S. Race Relations: A New Pigmentocracy” in Professor Nakano Glenn's anthology. Bonilla-Silva and Dietrich offer a provocative and compelling argument that “racial classification and the rules of racial (re)cognition in the United States are becoming Latin American-like” (p. 40). Rather than the Black-White racial binary that has largely shaped our perceptions of race in this country, the United States' racial hierarchy is becoming increasingly a more fluid and gradational continuum. Bonilla-Silva and Dietrich (2009) argue that is has now become a “triracial system with whites at the top; an intermediary group of honorary whites, similar to the colored in South Africa during formal apartheid; and a nonwhite group or the collective black at the bottom” (p. 41). This emergent hierarchy, like the one that has long existed in Latin America, is also rife with status differences based on perceptible somatic or phenotypic differences. It is this key issue and convergence that are at the heart of the timely collection of articles in Nakano Glenn's Shades of Difference. This collection is devoted to exploring the increasing role that colorism or skin color has in the contemporary United States and in other societal contexts.

While Latino Studies specialists prefer to speak of this racial hierarchy as a pigmentocracy, race-relations scholars in the United States have often invoked the term colorism to reflect this troubling reality. The term pigmentocracy was initially coined by Chilean sociologist Alejandro Lipshultz (Reference Lipshultz1944) in his book El Indioamericanismo y el problema racial en las Américas. The coinage refers to the construction of a status hierarchy based on skin color and other key racial signifiers such as hair texture. In the Spanish colonial worlds in Mexico, Latin America, and the Caribbean, those defined as White occupied the top tier of this racial hierarchy, while Native Peoples and Blacks were relegated to the bottom tiers. These three hundred years of race mixing have also resulted in a large intermediate status within the pigmentocracy, where individuals of mixed ancestry are placed from lighter to darker skin color within the racial continuum. The amount of honor, status, and prestige one can accrue in a pigmentocracy is largely dependent upon one's physical appearance and social location within the hierarchy.

Edward Telles's (2009) “The Social Consequences of Skin Color in Brazil” in Shades of Difference offers an extraordinarily sophisticated and insightful discussion of the way that pigmentocracy functions as a basis of racial status and privilege in the Brazilian context. Drawing from his award-winning Reference Telles2004 book Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil and other scholarly works, Telles masterfully outlines the complex way in which racial categorization and skin color powerfully impact individual life chances in Brazil. For example, unlike the Black-White binary in the United States, Brazil's racial order is largely structured into three major tiers: White (Blanco), Brown (Pardo), and Black (Preto). It also recognizes ancillary racial categories such as for individuals of Asian ancestry (Amarelo) and the Indigenous population (Indigena).

The large intermediate “Brown” category (Pardo) in the former Portuguese colony functions in ways that parallel intermediate racial categories such as Mulato in Cuba, Trigueno in Puerto Rico, Moreno in Mexico, and Indio in the Dominican Republic (Candelario Reference Candelario2007; De Genova Reference De Genova2005; Duany Reference Duany2002; Menchaca Reference Menchaca2001; Menchaca Reference Menchaca, Flores and Rosaldo2007; Pedraza Reference Pedraza, Pedraza and Rumbaut1996). As in Brazil, these former Spanish colonies also constructed a gradational racial hierarchy with a large intermediate category located between the European and the African and Indigenous populations. In this regard, Telles's (2009) work provides a bridge that spans and connects these two timely contributions to the field. The racial cartography that Telles (2009) so brilliantly maps in his powerful essay on Brazil has parallels in the eighteenth-century Spanish casta paintings explored in the Katzew and Deans-Smith collection. His work helps to forge parallels and symmetries between the historical contours of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial worlds and the contemporary “Latin Americanization” of race relations in the United States.

Colorism, on the other hand, has its origins in the way that African Americans have historically marked and valued skin color differences among themselves. The term has primarily functioned as a way of delineating and conferring status on skin-tone differences. It has generally referred to somatic differences within this racialized population rather than to the overarching racial order or system made up of a number of racialized populations. Verna M. Keith's (2009) “A Colorstruck World: Skin Tones, Achievement, and Self-Esteem Among African American Women” in Shades of Difference is a good example of the way colorism has been used within the African American context. Her works offers a compelling example of how this ranking of phenotypic characteristics has profoundly impacted measures of achievement and self-esteem among African American women. Contributors Taunya Lovell Banks' (2009) “Multilayered Racism: Courts' Continued Resistance to Colorism Claims” and Trina Jones' (2009) “The Case of Legal Recognition of Colorism Claims” also offer insightful discussions of the way skin color provides a basis of discrimination that U.S. courts of law often fail to meaningfully acknowledge in legal proceedings.

While one may quibble over the wisdom of conflating the terms pigmentocracy and colorism, what is not in dispute is the powerful way in which both concepts speak to the arrogation of racial privileges conferred on the basis of skin color. What is particularly interesting about these two collections is the way in which valorizations of ideals of White beauty have been continually redefined. This is a central issue taken up in sections of Shades of Difference that explore the “Meaning of Skin Color: Race, Gender, Ethnic Class, and National Identity.” Here we find an array of insightful articles including Joanne L. Rondilla's (2009) “Filipinos and the Color Complex: Ideals Asian Beauty;” Maxine Leeds Craig's (2009) “The Color of an Ideal Negro Beauty Queen: Miss Bronze 1961–1968;” Aisha Khan's (2009) “Caucasian, Coolie, Black, or White? Color and Race in the Indo-Caribbean Diaspora;” and Christina A. Sue's (2009) “The Dynamics of Color: Mestizaje, Racism, and Blackness in Veracruz, Mexico.”

Taken as a whole, these compelling chapters explore the meaning of skin color for individuals as well as for collective identities in these social contexts. In the case of the Philippines, for example, Joanne L. Rondilla (2009) offers a very insightful analysis of Filipina's skin-color ideals as depicted in skin-lightening advertisements. Rondilla (2009) argues that the use of these products by many Filipinas is not primarily aimed at attaining “Whiteness” as one would immediately suspect; instead, the use of these products is an attempt to emulate ideals of “Asian beauty” that include not only porcelain-white skin, but also straight black hair and almond-shaped eyes (p. 79). In other words, according to Rondilla (2009), rather than valorizations of colonial ideals of beauty based on subjugation under Spanish, U.S., and Japanese colonial regimes, these “Asian beauty” ideals are simultaneously both forms of resistance and a reconfiguration of those Western standards of beauty (p. 79). Rondilla (2009) writes:

Rondilla offers a powerful argument that squarely contests any notion that the history of colonial subjugations in the Philippines has led to the contemporary emulation of all that is marked as White and Western.

This attempt to transcend Western standards of beauty in the Philippines has striking parallels in the way that idealizations of beauty have been constructed among Latinos in the United States. For example, sociologist Ginetta E. B. Candelario (Reference Candelario2007) in her compelling book Black Behind the Ears: Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to Beauty Shops, has made a very similar argument with respect to the Dominican population in New York City. Her ethnographic work on Dominican beauty shops documents the way Dominican women construct ideals of beauty that take on a decidedly “Hispanic” or “Latin look”; when given a choice of White and Black women's hairstyles to choose from, most Dominican women opted for a third option that idealized an alternative esthetic sensibility and standard of beauty (p. 253).

According to Candelario (Reference Candelario2007):

In very similar ways, Clara Rodriguez's (Reference Rodriguez1991) book Latin Looks: Images of Latinas and Latinos in the U.S. Media also echoes a very similar idealization of beauty among the Latino population. Rodriguez (Reference Rodriguez1991) suggests that contemporary media representations of the emergent “Latin look” are generally framed in terms of skin color that is “slightly tan, with dark hair and eyes” (p. 1).

While other articles in Professor Nakano Glenn's Shades of Difference continue to stress the troubling way that Western ideals of beauty still powerfully impact the non-Western world, a perceptible transformation is clearly under way in how those standards are being redefined. It would, of course, be premature to suggest that women of color are no longer victimized and caught in the crossfire of these insidious discourses. So too would it be a mistake to assume that they continue to unproblematically emulate Westernized ideals of beauty. Perhaps the most telling evidence of this is not to be found in these timely scholarly writings but in widely read popular publications.

Two such anecdotal examples of this overlay or convergence are clearly seen in the March 2011 issue of Allure magazine and the April 2011 issue of People magazine. The March issue of Allure provocatively proclaimed that “The American beauty ideal doesn't begin and end with the blue-eyed blond anymore. As our country changes, so do the face and body of our dreams” (p. 185). The People (2011) article goes on to state that twenty years ago the ideal American beauty was Christie Brinkley, “the very embodiment of what was once perceived as the gorgeous all-American look: a high-boned blond with mild, unobtrusive features and a dazzling smile” (p. 186).

Today, based on its survey of over 2,000 men and women, Allure (2011) magazine suggests that the ideal construction of beauty has apparently taken a decidedly Latin turn: “When shown photos of models of various races and ethnicities, women found that the handsomest man in the group happened to be of Indian descent. The most attractive female, in the view of both sexes, was the Latina model (54 percent of all women preferred her looks), followed closely by a model of mixed race” (p. 186). What is also striking is that the Allure (2011) article claims 85% of respondents believed that “increasing diversity in this country has changed what people consider beautiful” and 64% of all respondents think “women of mixed race represent the epitome of beauty” (p. 186). According to Allure (2011)Angelina Jolie (who is of German, Slovak, French Canadian, and Dutch ancestry) was identified most often as the new embodiment of this morphed reconstruction of beauty ideals in the United States (p. 186).

The Allure (2011) survey also found that two thirds of both men and women now believe that a “curvier body type” is more appealing than it has been over the last ten years (p. 193). The “analphobia” in U.S. culture (p. 234) that Latina cultural critic Frances Negron-Muntaner (Reference Negron-Muntaner and Negron-Muntaner2003) so brilliantly interrogated in “Jennifer's Butt: Valorizing the Puerto Rican Racialized Female Body” has apparently lost some of its vibrancy. Evidence for this can be found in the April, 2011 special issue of People magazine where its cover anointed and proclaimed Jennifer Lopez as the “World's Most Beautiful Woman!” In so doing, the People (2011) article extolled her light-complexioned, Latin look as the new “beauty idol” in this country (p. 61).

It is here, in the convergence of the academic and popular discourses about racialized ideals of beauty, that the “Browning” of America and Latinization of race relations in the United States is most palpably in evidence today. The two collections of scholarly work reviewed here provide very sophisticated and insightful discussions of these complex and timely academic issues. But discussions of these contemporary concerns have also found a wide audience and important publication outlet in the magazine racks and check-out counters of your local supermarket.