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G. Cristina Mora University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 2014, 256pp., $27.50,
ISBN: 978-0226033839 (paperback)
Four or five decades ago, this journal and the broader academic field to which it corresponds would have been - to some extent - unintelligible. At that point, the categories "Latino" and "Hispanic" did not have the reach and resonance that they command today, and, in some sense, were not even in currency. Yet now, we inhabit an intellectual and social milieu saturated by images, data and articulations of Latino/a panethnicity. How do we account, historically and sociologically, for the rapid popularization of these categories and their uptake across social, economic, political and cultural spheres? Sociologist Cristina Mora's Making Hispanics provides an important answer to this foundational question.
Making Hispanics is a thoroughly researched yet surprisingly compact book on the historical formation of the category "Hispanic" between 1960 and 1990. As Mora readily acknowledges, central parts of this history have been uncovered by past research. In the work of Clara Rodríguez and Harvey Choldin, for instance, the role of the state, and in particular, the Census Bureau, has been documented. Other researchers, such as John García and Arlene Dávila, respectively, have emphasized the work of political and media entrepreneurs. Mora builds on this scholarship, but suggests that the focus on disparate institutional sites has unintentionally obscured "the inherently relational and interdependent aspect of history" (10). Drawing on sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's notion of "classification struggle," Mora argues that increasingly synergistic relations between state officials, activists and media entrepreneurs made possible the development and institutionalization of the category "Hispanic."
Mora...