Culture

Book Review: Competition or Cooperation? The Blossoming Black-Latino Alliances in Today’s America

By América Magazine / December 17, 2019

Editor’s note: The following is a book review by Gabriella Coehlo, a student of the University of Central Florida in Orlando.

Race relations in the United States have often been painted with a broad brush. Jessica Jones’s The Browning of the New South offers a more nuanced perspective. Her counter-narrative provides fresh insight into the racialization of Latinos in the American Southeast, a region relatively understudied when compared to the American Southwest in this regard.

Jones draws from her fieldwork in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, which includes interviews of Latino residents and archival research on regional immigration policy. Her findings indicate an emerging solidarity between Latinos and African Americans, an interdependence she labels “minority linked fate.” The links she discovers challenge conventional understandings that tend to depict Black-Latino relations as strained by conflict and competition.

Jones illustrates the processes that produce a minority linked fate in the wake of earlier postures of welcome and exclusion of Latinos in the Southeast.

Winston-Salem exemplifies the patterns of biracial to multiracial demographic changes occurring throughout the South: since the 1990s, it has become a major destination for Latino immigrants.

In the past three decades, intensified anti-immigration rhetoric and restrictive changes in local law enforcement have compelled Latinos to reconsider their ranking in the “racial hierarchy” of the South. Perceiving themselves as subjects of discrimination, Latino immigrants developed a mutual sense of identity with African Americans, inspiring the solidarity Jones observes in Winston-Salem.

For their part, African American community leaders have taken notice of discrimination directed against Latinos and have taken active measures to form alliances for better conditions in employment and housing. The shift demonstrates that race is not solely based on genotype but can be relationally constructed through individual experiences.

These developments in the New South, Jones argues, are indicative of broader changes throughout the country. Jones calls for further qualitative studies into racialization and interracial coalition building in the American South at the local level. Her research proves that microcosmic, individual relationships and experiences have the power to shape local attitudes with national impact. Closer, sustained attention to these evolving relationships is imperative for understanding the evolution of Black-Latino relations today.

The Browning of the New South makes a splendid addition to those curious about blossoming rainbow coalitions in the Southeast.

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