Jones’s main argument is that context matters—place, class, racial composition of the area—all of these play a role in shaping migrants’ social and racial adjustment. [...] Jones shows how Latinx immigrants were welcomed at first and then, as the local economic and political context shifted, were abruptly un-welcomed. The term she uses to describe this un-welcoming is “reverse incorporation”. The two dimensions of reverse incorporation are: institutional closure and the souring of public opinion (69). As Latinx immigrants find themselves in the antagonistic process of being formally unwelcomed, they begin to cement ties with black Americans.
It is indeed striking how Janus-faced was the reception/rejection whites in Winston-Salem meted out to immigrant community members, most of whom were from Mexico. When immigrants first began to arrive, the welcome could not have been more enthusiastic: businesses were ready and willing to hire them—with or without documentation; a local bank engaged in a concerted campaign to make it as easy as possible for the newcomers to use their services; non-immigrant community members were profiled in the press as going the extra mile to ease the transition of newcomers into the community; and it was easy to obtain a driver license even without legal papers. In addition to all of this, Winston-Salem’s leaders took a trip to Guanajuto, Mexico with the expressed purpose of gaining ‘a deeper understanding of the culture of Mexico’s immigrants’ (58).
Then, beginning about 2005, the welcome mat began to be slowly and then rudely yanked from beneath the feet of these immigrants. Key changes included the emergence of the post-9/11 state after 2001 and the drastic weakening of the economy beginning in 2008 with the recession. The drying up of the labor market made the presence of immigrants far less attractive than it had been when employers were scrambling for workers. In addition, the post-9/11 state introduced new legal restrictions and a heightened amount of surveillance that was devastating to the immigrant community—both documented and undocumented. As this process of reverse incorporation proceeded, Latinx immigrants engaged in conscious attempts to join forces with black Americans who they knew to have suffered ongoing discrimination at the hands of the white majority. Churches and non-profit agencies held meetings and events to foster the strengthening of these ties between Latinos and blacks. In addition, Jones found that most of her interviewees held very positive views of blacks but harbored relatively cool feelings toward whites who they perceived to be socially distant. On the whole, Jones’s findings are compelling: blacks and Latinos did band together in what she terms ‘minority linked fate’ and it is clear that the local context mattered quite significantly in shaping the ways Latinos evaluated and responded to the racial terrain of Winston-Salem. [...].
First, the moderate critique. Early on Jones enjoins us to be sensitive to the varieties of local context immigrants find when they settle into different parts of the United States. She notes that while there are some broad patterns, important differences between the configuration of settlement in Los Angeles and New York versus Charlotte and Atlanta, should lead us to an analysis that frames racial change as a rapidly shifting patchwork of race relations, rather than a unifying framework .... how groups relate to one another and access resources is fluid and context dependent. (8). While all of this is certainly true, one suspects that it would be possible to advance a working analytical framework that would help us to test out in future research which factors may be more or less likely to result in distancing from blackness, and which might be more likely to result in the strategy of minority linked fate Jones finds in Winston-Salem. Although the book is based on one in-depth case study, Jones has a command of the literature conducive to drawing some stronger conclusions about which patterns are likely to lead to one outcome and which to another. As it is, we are left with an analysis of one case that challenges the mainstream immigration literature but does little to help us to understand how her case might be profitably linked to others. Indeed, even in the closing pages of the book she continues to assert that “new racial formation patterns will not be represented by national color lines, but by patchwork quilts of race relations determined by local conditions” (196). These opening and closing declarations make it seem that racial formations will be completely random. I do not think, however, that Jones believes this. Even in the four cases she mentions above: Los Angeles and New York versus Charlotte and Atlanta, we see clear distinctions between major coastal cities with an established immigrant history compared to smaller southern cities that are newer immigrant destinations. Distinct regional racial histories may, perhaps, be part of the patterned difference we should examine. There are, moreover, other axes of difference that could be used to at least tentatively propose a useful comparative framework to guide our thinking about immigrants’ racial integration into various kinds of communities.
In addition to this request for greater boldness in proposing patterns that could be examined comparatively by future researchers, I also propose an alternative reading of Jones’s Winston-Salem data. I must state at the outset that this alternative reading makes no challenge to the research findings per se. Rather, it suggests a way of looking at the data that reveals a different kind of picture— much like the classic case of a drawing that can be seen either as a vase or as two people in profile facing each other.
As the argument is currently framed, Jones counter-poses narratives of incorporation versus reverse incorporation and immigrant distancing versus immigrant bonding with black Americans. According to the mainstream account in the literature, immigrants of all kinds find it advantageous to distance themselves from black Americans. If they have capital in light skin, they may invest this in whiteness, if not, then they engage in cultural options that symbolically distance them from blackness. Jones claims that this is only one option and that, in certain contexts, friendly relations between blacks and Latinx immigrants is quite possible and even likely.
The alternative reading proposed here, however, is that both the mainstream account and the one Jones offers in her book are but two sides of the same coin where immigrants respond carefully to the default settings of racism and white supremacy they encounter in the United States. In some cases, the tools that sustain these twin rails are latent, lying in wait beneath the surface of everyday life, while in others they are aggressively deployed. Immigrant responses to the racial terrain vary based on the latency/deployment of the tools. When, for instance, entering a setting such as Winston-Salem in the 1980s–1990s, racism and white supremacy are largely latent and immigrants can embrace aspirational whiteness or maintain neutrality in race relations and racial positioning because the stakes were relatively low. But then, as economic and security crises shake the white community, these latent tools are taken out and deployed. Under these new conditions, Latino newcomers find it much more difficult to avoid the question of race or to engage in aspirational whiteness and distancing from blacks. At such a time, cross-racial linkages became more important and are advantageous. If this alternative reading is correct, then Jones’s findings are not as far from the mainstream account as she thinks they are. It would still be the case that the default position for most Latino immigrants is to aspire toward the privileges of whiteness and to distance themselves from blackness when conditions allow for this.
It is, admittedly, difficult to be certain that this alternative reading works in Jones’s case. While she presents plenty of data from Latinx interviewees that is favorable to blacks, it is difficult to know how much of this favoring is due to enduring the difficulties of reverse incorporation and how much of this friendly sentiment was long-standing even before the difficulties emerged. In the end, however, whether the alternative reading does or does not apply, Jones presents a strong case that shows us that place and context matter and that the racial future cannot be read simplistically from the racial past.
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