Nicholas De Genova

Latino Crossings: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and the Politics of Race and Citizenship, co-authored with Ana Yolanda Ramos-Zayas, is centrally interested in the possibilities for, as well as obstacles to, the emergence of a shared sense of “Latino” identity.  The book is a collaborative ethnography crafted from two discrete studies conducted independently in Chicago during the mid-1990s.  Breaking out of the constraints of a thematic focus on a single group in isolation, Latino Crossings identifies the contradictory politics of racialization and the substantive inequalities of U.S. citizenship and immigration law as crucial fault lines shaping the intersecting histories of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Chicago.  Rather than presuppose the inevitability of Latino identity formation along the axes of presumed commonalities of language and culture, the book explores an agonistic urban terrain of difference, division, and antagonism in order to critically examine precisely how and when incipient formations of Latinidad nevertheless emerge.