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Tanya Hernandez is a Professor of Law and the Justice Frederick Hall Scholar at Rutgers University School of Law in Newark, where she teaches Race and the Law, Property, and Trusts & Estates. She received her A.B. from Brown University, and her J.D. from Yale Law School. Her scholarly interest is in the study of comparative race relations and her work in that area has been published in the Cornell Law Review, Yale Law & Policy Review, the U.C. Davis Law Review, and other publications. Professor Hernandez is a Senior Editor for the Oxford University Press Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States (forthcoming, 2004).
In his article 'Inventing the Race: Latinos and the Ethnoracial Pentagon,' Silvio Torres-Saillant, unpacks the 'conceptual panacea of mestizaje' to reveal the extent to which the pride Latino/as take in being enlightened about race relations as a mixed people1 is accompanied by the resilience of White supremacist ideals. Torres-Saillant persuasively argues that many Latino Studies scholars have thus far been content to focus on the mestizaje pride2 without thoroughly interrogating the subtext of White supremacy. Indeed, one area that is often overlooked in Latino Studies is the treatment of Afro-Latino/as within the Latino/a community, and a complete examination of Latino/a relations with Anglo-Blacks.3 Yet, if the mestizaje race relations mindset were indeed such an enlightened space one would expect relations with Afro-Latino/as and Anglo-Blacks in the United States to embody the fantasy of racial democracy so often touted in Latin American countries. (Yet even in Latin America, the racial democracy premise is challenged as pure myth in ways that are made particularly relevant in the few racial discrimination cases that are brought by Afro-Latino/a plaintiffs. Hernandez (2002).)
Instead, an examination of the Afro-Latino/a context reveals a racialized treatment of Afro-Latino/a identity as foreign. (Neil Gotanda is the scholar who has usefully articulated the ways in which persistent perceptions of being foreign are an aspect of the racialization process. He describes the racialization of Asian Americans and 'the persistence of the view that even American-born non-Whites were somehow 'foreign.'' (Gotanda, 1995: 1188).) To be more specific, Afro-Latino/a identity is a contested terrain in which self-identified Afro-Latino/as are visually viewed as Anglo-Blacks and hence...