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Special Feature
INTRODUCTION
The rapid influx of Latino immigrants in the U.S. South is challenging the historically entrenched Black/White categories of race (Winders 2008). This challenge involves the ongoing creation and contestation of new racial categories in a process of "racialization" (Omi and Winant, 1994). In this paper we ask, "How are Latinos 'racialized' in the U.S. Southeast?" We focus on Atlanta, where the Latino population rose by over 780% in the past twenty years, transforming this Black/White "cradle of the Civil Rights Movement" into a multiethnic and multiracial city that has experienced a particularly strong "Latino backlash" at the local and state levels (Jonsson 2006; Myrick-Harris 2006; U.S. Census Bureau 1990, 2011).
We compare Dominican and Guatemalan immigrants in the Atlanta metro area to demonstrate how two countervailing processes are racializing Latinos: 1) the homogenization of Latinos into a single "race" and 2) the diversified understandings of and responses to race and racial categorization among Latinos based on their national origin and ethnicity and the specific Atlanta context (De Genova 2004). We argue that in moving beyond the Black/White binary, state laws that racialize Latinos create a two-dimensional category, with a homogenized "Latino" category as one axis and an illegal/legal distinction as the second axis. Latinos derive distinct meanings from and experience distinct consequences of "race," depending upon their perceived or actual legal status (Jiménez 2010; Marrow 2011).3
Yet, as we show, pushing against the homogenized version of "Latinos" implicated in state policies is the wide diversity among specific national and ethnic groups of Latinos, each with its own understanding and construction of "race." To understand how racialization plays out for specific Latino groups in the face of the homogenizing tendencies of the state, we compare Dominican and Guatemalan immigrants in the Atlanta metro area. We find that the Atlanta context provides unique resources for racialization that are specific to each of these groups.
We rely on Omi and Winant's (1994) conception of "racial formation" when making our analyses (Aranda et al., 2009; Lippard and Gallagher, 2010; Rodriguez and Menjívar, 2009). Rather than understanding race as a fixed characteristic of individuals, Omi and Winant contend that race is continually socially constructed at multiple levels--from individual interactions to...