2021 Speaker Series—Defining Latinx in the U.S.: Language, Race, and Ideology
Becoming Hispanic:
The production and negotiation of ethnoracial identities in the US Census
Jennifer Leeman
George Mason University
[in person – location TBA]
October 21, 2021
4 pm
Critical scholars have investigated the role of censuses in the discursive construction of nations, the reproduction of particular ideologies of racial and ethnolinguistic identity, and the officialization of specific categories such as “Hispanic or Latino.” However, most critical research on census ethnoracial classification has focused on census materials, without examining the practices of census-taking. Researchers, as well as the general public, often seem to assume that official discourses are passively taken up by the populace, despite the fact that the long history of popular criticism of the official categories demonstrates that this is not the case.
All US residents are required to be counted in the census, regardless of age, citizenship, or immigration status. For many newcomers, completing the census is the first time they must explicitly self-identify according to the official US ethnoracial classification system, which differs from official classifications and lived experience in other places. Thus, in addition to source of racial discourse, the US Census is also a key site of socialization into US-based racial identities.
In this talk, I analyze Spanish-language telephone interviews from the 2010 Census and investigate interviewers’ and respondents’ interaction during the completion of the Hispanic Origin and Race questions, paying special attention to contradictions and conflicts among the official classification system, Census Bureau directives to interviewers, the interviewers’ presentation of ethnoracial classification, and the respondents’ explicit statements of their own identities.
Utilizing theoretical frameworks and methods from sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, I analyze how interviewers and respondents alternatively resist and take up the official categories and the identities ascribed to them. My analysis highlights the negotiated nature of ethnoracial statistics, as well as the intersections of place of birth, ethnicity, and language in the co-construction of US racial identity.
