URBAN EROTICS AND RACIAL AFFECT IN A NEOLIBERAL “RACIAL DEMOCRACY”: BRAZILIAN AND PUERTO RICAN YOUTH IN NEWARK, NEW JERSEY

Abstract

This essay examines the power-evasive reduction of “race,” racial conflict, and racial subordination from the terrain of the social, material, and structural to the “private” realm of affect and emotions, in an effort to explain how neoliberalism operates in the everyday lives of U.S.-born Latino and Latin American migrant youth, particularly, young, working-class Puerto Rican and Brazilian women in Newark, New Jersey. A main argument of this project is that urban neoliberalism has been complicit in generating new racial configurations in the United States and that, in the case of populations of Latin American and Spanish-speaking Caribbean backgrounds, such articulations of difference have deployed a variation of “racial democracy” ideologies. This “cartography of racial democracy” gives credence to denunciations of racism or racial subordination as long as they are launched in the realm of intimate relationships and attraction—as aspects of “affect” or an “urban erotics”—that frequently overshadows and flattens the structures of urban neoliberalism that require that individual worth is measured in relation to how one “packages” oneself culturally to be profitable.

Key Words:

• Race
• neoliberalism
• Brazilians
• Puerto Ricans
• youth culture
• racial democracy
• Newark

This essay benefited tremendously from the careful reading, incisive suggestions, and genuine excitement I received from Carlos Alamo, María Elena Cepeda, Carlos Decena, Edgar Rivera-Colón, and Mérida Rúa. I also want to thank Micaela di Leonardo for the magic wand. I am indebted, as usual, to my stellar colleagues and participants of the Faculty Workshop in the Department of Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University.

Notes

1. The interlocutors cited in this work were students and staff at two public high schools in Newark, one in the Ironbound and the other one in North Broadway. Public education is, of course, also a premiere site of citizen-subject making and neoliberal projects, but these discussions merit an attention that is beyond the scope of this article. This essay also heavily privileges the experiences of young women over those of young men, and I can see the limitation of engaging discussions of affect, emotion, and race from this perspective.

2. The Latin American concepts of “racial democracy” and racial “mixing,” generally deployed in contradistinction to a U.S. Black-white racial binary, have been source of academic and political interest since the early decades of the twentieth century (Telles 2004). Contemporary examinations of “race” in the United States have challenged that earlier bifurcation, by noting how the United States has become more “multicultural” or even suggesting that the racial binary might have been historically overstated or regionally specific all along (e.g., James Loewen 1988). Likewise, contemporary studies of “race” in Latin America have acknowledged that “racial democracy,” or comparable racial triad narratives in other regions of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, was a nation-building myth that did not reflect harmonious social relations (Silverstein 2005; Skidmore 1993; Wade 2004; Warren and Twine 1997, 2002; Winant 2004). Rather than “compare” or even determine if these systems still exist as discrete ideologies, or have even converged, my goal is to examine how “racial democracy” exists as a folk theory of race among Latin American migrants and U.S.-born Latinos; how “racial democracy” is imagined in a different context and what purposes it is intended to serve or any cartography it might produce to navigate a new racial formation.

3. The literature on “the anthropology of emotions” is quite diverse, including extensive work on the linkages of emotion with power and social structure (see Lutz and White 1986). I am particularly inspired by Raymond Williams (1973), who argues that “structures of feelings” arose out of a given state of the productive forces and relations of productivity and the pursuit of a hegemonic cultural configuration to justify and organize these forces and relations. For Williams, structures of feelings are never static, but they constantly unfold as economic forces develop and political balances shift (see also Reddy 1999).

4. It is not my intention to reify notions of “the private” in opposition to “the public;” I realize that the extent to which such spheres are recognized as discrete, separate categories constitutes a socially and contextually contingent process. In fact, an aspect of the potency of neoliberalism in cities is precisely its reliance on the separation of “public” and “private” (see Lutz 1988).

5. I distinguish between “U.S.-born Latino” and “Latin American migrant” to highlight how, at times, being a U.S.-born racial “minority” and being an “immigrant” partly accounted for distinct positionalities vis-à-vis the U.S. nation-state, in general, and Newark in particular. Given the specifics of my work, the “U.S.-born Latinos” whom I am referencing here were mostly Puerto Ricans born and/or raised in the United States and most of the “Latin American migrants” were Brazilian.

6. Like William Reddy, I am understanding “emotion” to be a category of exclusion that overlaps and forms other such categories, including race, gender, and sexuality, so that “what is emotional is not rational, and persons categorized as incapable of reason have invariably been seen as especially emotional” (1999: 257). In this sense, feelings change over time in tandem with projects of hegemony, while emotional speech, formally descriptive, is implicitly exploratory, shaping, and contractual. A normative style of emotional management is a fundamental element of every political regime, of every cultural hegemony” (Reddy 1999: 271).

7. See di Leonardo (1984) di is not capitalized in bibliography. Which is correct?- lower case for an excellent critical discussion of the problematic concept of the “ethnic enclave,” particularly its reliance on “women's work” and patriarchal ideologies to sustain notions of “culture” and “tradition” among Italian-Americans in Northern California.

8. A detailed discussion of the forces that contributed to Brazilian migration to the United States, in general, and to Newark, in particular, deserves more attention than I can give here and are the subject of another project. Other works offer excellent discussions of Brazilian migration to various cities in the United States, including Boston (Fleischer 2002; Martes 2000); Framingham (Sales 1998); San Francisco (Ribeiro 1997); Los Angeles (Beserra 2003); New York (Margolis 1994; Meihy 2004); South Florida (Souza Alves and Ribeiro 2002); and Washington, DC (Botelho 2004).

9. The Henry Kaiser Family Foundation. Pew Hispanic Center. Survey Brief: Latinos in California, New York, Florida, and New Jersey, March 2004. According to the report, 21 percent of South American immigrants live in New Jersey compared to 13 percent, respectively, in New York and Florida, the second-largest states with the highest concentration of South Americans. After New York, New Jersey is also the state where most Puerto Ricans (30 percent) and Dominicans (21 percent) reside.

10. In “Roth, Race, and Newark,” Larry Schwartz (2005) eloquently argues that the stereotype of post-1965 Newark as crime-ridden, burnt-out city of Blacks contributes to a liberal, racist mentality about Newark as an unlivable city especially when contrasted to the “good old days” of the 1940s and 1950s. This Newark “golden era” is never examined as one built on long-term, cynical exploitation, racism, and deep, pervasive political corruption. Critical here, then, is Lefebvre's assertion, with specific regard to the city and the urban sphere, that space may be “the setting of struggle,” but it is not only this: it is also “the stakes of that struggle” (Lefebvre 1991[1974]: 386). Moreover, as Appadurai claims: “The capabilities of neighborhoods to produce contexts … and to produce local subjects is profoundly affected by the locality-producing capabilities of larger-scale social formations” (1996: 187).

11. The proposition of “doing” race was eloquently examined by Robin Sheriff, who noted two tendencies articulated regarding racism in Brazil: On the one hand racism was viewed as an overwhelming, inevitable force, that resided abstractly in society or was executed by people in power and authority; on the other hand, there was a perception that one could be able to avoid racist mistreatment by controlling one's self-presentations—by “behaving well, serving others, wearing neatly pressed, conservative clothes and modest hairstyles” (Sheriff 2001: 73). See also John Jackson (2006).

12. “Racial mixture” was probably viewed very differently by Central and South American students whose racial cosmologies rendered indigenous populations as more visible and at times claimed an absence of African. For Brazilians and Puerto Ricans, the indigenous aspect of a racial triad appeared more as a symbolic component. Likewise, African Americans, both those from the U.S. South and Caribbean and African continentals, had different perspectives on colorism (based on degrees of “shades” of color under an overarching Blackness), while the Portuguese have historically subscribed to other ideas of “racial democracy” premised on the influence of the Moors in the Iberian peninsula (cf. Lubkemann 2002). Regardless of these particularities, it is important to emphasize that Blackness has never existed independent of United States, Latin American, or European nation-building projects. In the context of Latino Newark, miscegenation ideals were not only not incompatible with segregation but were in fact fundamental to sustaining notions of “difference” and a key feature of anti-Black beliefs and practices (cf. Dzidzienyo and Oboler 2005). These are the editors of a multiple-author book. Oftentimes, African American men were included even in intimate family settings, particularly if they were married to a Puerto Rican woman, partly because they validated a version of the Latina-woman-as-seductress trope that I have discussed elsewhere (Ramos-Zayas, forthcoming). The Portuguese in the Ironbound or the Italians in North Broadway figured prominently in discussions of racial intolerance partly because they were presumed to “never date Black people,” as a Puerto Rican student once explained. Some researchers have eloquently argued that inter-racial dating is not evidence of a lack of racism, but that it is actually possible because racism exists (cf. Warren and Twine 2002).

13. The spatial dimensions of these intimate, emotive, subjective relations are often taken for granted, although the conversations and justification for dating choices are also referents to what is acceptable, objectionable, or tolerable in a particular space. See also Laumann, Ellington, Mahay, Paik, and Youm (2004) for an empirical study on how sexual partnering is structured by the local organization of social life, the local population composition, and shared norms behind relationships that are sanctioned or supported. For a more in-depth analysis of the particularities of the relationship between Brazilian and Portuguese or Dominicans and Puerto Ricans, see Feldman-Bianco (1992) and Duany (1998), respectively.

14. While Marrow (2003) argues that Brazilians are becoming racialized into the black-white binary of U.S. society, and managing to “escape” the downward mobility of Hispanic/Latino categorization, it is imperative to take into account contextual and class-based variations among the Brazilian population in the United States. For instance, many Brazilians in Newark acknowledged that they were considered to be “uneducated,” “working class,” and “less cosmopolitan” than Brazilians in New York. According to Marrow, successful Americanization for Brazilians means not becoming part of a stigmatized Hispanic/Latino group. However, it is important to recall that most of the populations that have been subsumed under the “Hispanic” or “Latino” categories have attempted to reject it –for finding the label inadequate or outright offensive (Calderón 1992; Oboler 1995)—to no avail. Brazilians may not be an exception to this general ambivalence toward pan-Latino categories. In this work, as in others (De Genova and Ramos-Zayas 2003), I view Latino as a racial category that suggests power inequalities and subordinate status and, to the degree that Brazilians experience these inequalities in the United States, they are likely to be largely racialized as “Latinos.” Processes of categorization such as this illustrate the distinction between “race” and “ethnicity” as paradigms through which to read subordination (cf. Bashi and McDaniel 1997; Pierre 2004). See also Tosta (2004).

15. The concept of “ethnosexual frontiers” is also pertinent here to describe how the race and ethnicity of sexual and romantic partners are frequently transgressed, though oftentimes quite actively inspected and regulated, and how such renderings of sexuality also conspire with “heteronormative ethnosexual stereotypes” (Nagel 2000: 113). A question that deserves more attention, but is beyond the scope of this essay, is to what degrees these youth are subverting and/or reinscribing a “heterosexual imaginary” (Ingraham 1996).

16. The Portuguese whiteness, while oftentimes challenged—particularly by the Brazilians who did not see them as “real Americans” (a coveted term for suburban whites and sometimes, in Newark, for Blacks)—were still viewed as “sort-of-white” by most U.S.-born Latinos around Newark. In the Ironbound, the Portuguese have engaged in a form of ethnic-based commercial development that depended on the deployment of “Portuguese”-ness as commercial strategy, thus increasing the residents' ambivalence toward terms suggesting any form of assimilation into whiteness. Portuguese community and intellectual leaders in the 1970s explicitly requested that “Portuguese” would not be considered, for census and federal assistance purposes, under the “Hispanic” category.

17. This resonates with the “ethnicity concept” in the United States that privileges “culture” and “cultural distinctiveness” in ways that deny the continued significance of race and the special position of “blackness” and repackage “culture of poverty” discourses that perpetuate stereotypes of U.S.-born Black experiences (Bashi and McDaniel 1997; De Genova and Ramos-Zayas 2003; Pierre 2004: 142–43).

18. Relevant here is Cristoffanini's discussion of how “the other” gets to be represented as ideology, so that the behaviors and inclinations highlighted by the stereotype take away any historical referent and “freeze” the representation impeding alternative perspectives (2003: 12). Drawing from the experience of African Americans and African blacks, Jemima Pierre calls for a reinsertion of “race” into proliferating cultural narratives that emphasize the “ethnicity” of Africans and undermine the power struggle in which African Americans are enthralled. These generally prevented discussions of “race” in light of power inequalities.

19. I use the term “Black” in the same way that my interlocutors used it, almost exclusively in reference to African Americans. This term generally excluded “Afro-Latinos” or “Afro-Latin Americans,” who themselves used “Black”—or a Spanish or Portuguese equivalent—to designate African Americans. Very few of the Brazilians in Newark self-identified as “Afro-Brazilians.” For a comparison between African-American and Afro-Brazilian youth views of “embranquecimento” (racial “whitening” and “acting white”) in educational contexts, see Warren (1997). An enormous limitation of this project is that it only includes the experiences of African American youth to the degree that these young people were part of the friendship groups of the Brazilian or, more commonly, the Puerto Rican youth I interviewed. See Dzidzienyo and Oboler (2005). This is an edited volume.

20. Although these dating choices were supplied as evidence of Latin Americans and Latinos as “racially mixed” people and were widespread among all the Puerto Ricans and most of the Brazilians with whom I spoke, the idea of “mixture” in the case of U.S.-born Latinos oftentimes referred not only to “phenotypical” variations within a given birth family but also to family compositions that included other kin and friendship networks as well, including intermarriage with African Americans. The insinuation that “allof us have some black in us” was implied in the Brazilian concept of “genipap,” which has an equivalent in Puerto Rico as “la raja.” For an interpretation of the extensive use of the diminutive phrase as a form of evasion of Blackness and mitigating hierarchical distance in relation to race, class or phenotype (see Yvonne Maggie 1988 in Hanchard 1994: 59–60).

21. In her ethnographic study of a Rio de Janeiro shantytown, Goldstein (1999) argues that, even if it is not clear whether Brazilians continue to believe the myth of racial democracy, there was a strongly held belief in a “color-blind erotic democracy” deployed to highlight the considerable line crossing in evaluations of beauty and choice of “ideal partner.” Among Brazilian and Puerto Rican youth in Newark, a form of “erotic racial democracy” also served to claim a higher moral ground, by carving a view of race that rendered it invalid as a category of social difference yet deployed it as a term to describe desirability and attractiveness.

22. In many instances, I heard students commenting on how Puerto Ricans and Dominicans didn't get along and rarely dated. Nevertheless, these instances were not read as “racist” by either group, while not wanting to date African Americans was. The perception was that, while there were some real indicators that a Dominican and a Puerto Ricans might mutually object to dating each other, Blacks would date someone who was Latino (or more commonly Latina). Hence, the avoidance was not mutual, and could not turn into friendly bantering, as was sometimes the case between Dominicans and Puerto Ricans, and even between Brazilian and Portuguese youth.

23. There were critical historical referents that longtime, older Puerto Rican residents deployed to explain their mistrust of African Americans. For instance, Puerto Ricans felt they had been instrumental in a political campaign to get Kenneth Gibson, the first Black major of Newark, elected in 1970s and in the subsequent consolidation of the African American political elite in the city. Yet, they felt that their involvement had not been rewarded, because they felt excluded from the political machine that emerged. This historical moment was supplied as a leading reason why Puerto Ricans, for the most part, avoided alliances with African Americans and regarded Black politicians with suspicion.

24. Blackness becomes valuable only in specific situations when forms of “urban competency” (in contradistinction to the “backwardness” attributed to some Central American migrants) were valorized (Ramos-Zayas 2007). In a more explicitly gendered context, Black female bodies were at times equated with ugliness and lack of femininity, even when they were also representations of black sensuality in the U.S. urban youth media (cf. Goldstein 1999: 567).

25. The image of “Black women” as “churchgoer” was very generation-specific, so that younger Black women were considered aggressive “in the streets” and older Black women were viewed as “conservative” churchgoers. Nevertheless, both images suggested “aggressiveness” to most Latinas, who emphasized how adult African American women who worked as counselors, teachers, or security guards at the schools and in other Newark institutions made moral judgment of them. They pointed to instances when older African American females making comments like “you should get married and then have a child” or “at least all my children have the same daddy.” For a discussion on the politics of “respectability” in the African American community, see White (2001).

26. Although many African American lesbians seemed to be very active in Newark's churches, they escaped the racial affective descriptions of most Latino and Latin American youth. See McCarthy-Brown (1998) and Bates (2001).

27. This image was rearticulated when the media covered the case of a young African American lesbian from Newark who physically hurt a street vendor after the vendor made a pass at the woman's girlfriend in New York's West Village. A fistfight ensued and the young woman ended up being arrested and tried. These images are part of a long tradition of representing Black women as unfeminine, castrating, and sexually and economically demanding. Imus' remarks on the women on the Rutgers University basketball team provides a widely publicized example of this tendency.

28. Images of the Ironbound as a quaint ethnic enclave have been recently challenged by an increase incidence of crime in the area. However, the Portuguese residents still remained safeguarded from criminalization as local Portuguese authorities have generally attributed the increase crime rates to “people from the outside,” particularly Black and Latino youth presumed to be “from other areas” of Newark or even to the increase migration of Brazilians. The housing projects at the outskirts of the Ironbound, where most African Americans lived, were usually erased in narratives of commercial viability and “cultural richness” (cf. McCracken 1988). See “IBID Hires Off-Duty Police Officers to Address Student Rowdiness on Ferry Street” [April 6, 2006] In www.goironbound.com. See also “City's Portuguese and Brazilians find life is a lesson in tolerance,” Mary Jo Patterson Star-Ledger, May 14, 2000; The Star-Ledger Newark, NJ; FINAL This is an example of regulating rowdy working-class youth of color for the sake of commerce (Rivera-Colón 2004).

29. In the case of the Dominican migrant men with whom Decena spoke, “coming out” was viewed as stating the obvious, so that “relying on the speech act of coming out alone … neglect[ed] a consideration of the social relations established and negotiated as bodies navigate social fields” (2008: 3). The particularity of Mike's case, however, is situated in one of those “social fields”—particularly, one saturated with racial and sexual normativity and state intervention—so that his “tacit subjectivity” was inflicted upon

30. Brazilian entering the United States through the Mexico-U.S. border was a relatively “new” phenomenon in the 1990s. Before then, Brazilians were never really considered part of the “illegal” migrant stream. But by 2004, they constituted one of the largest “Other Than Mexican” or OTM, as the Department of Homeland Security, now classifies them. The “illegal” migration of Brazilians across the Mexico-U.S. border decreased significantly in 2005 as a result of “immediate deportation” laws instituted and a visa requirement for Brazilians traveling into Mexico. The Brazilian case was used by George W. Bush as an example of the “effectiveness” of his immigration policy. See Comissão Parlamentar Mista de Inquérito (Brasilia 2006) and Margolis (2006).

31. Images of the United States as a sexually liberal country prevailed among most “straight-identified” Latin American students. The connections between violence against sexual minorities and immigration to the United States has been considered by Peña (2008) and Puar (2007), among others.

32. The first homosexual to obtain political asylum in the United States because of sexual orientation was Marcelo Tenorio, a Brazilian man who sought and was granted U.S. asylum on the basis of fearing anti-gay persecution in Brazil (Ribeiro 1997: 12). The immigration judge, Philip Leadbetter, said that “the evidence convinced him homosexuals faced persecution in Brazil” and the ruling represented the first time an immigration judge had recognized homosexuals as part of a persecuted group (Ben-Itzak n.d.: 257–273, 319).

33. Another side of this visibility had to do with the exoticization of Brazilians in New York gay communities, as was mentioned by a Puerto Rican and Brazilian college student I once met while giving a talk at a small college in New England: “My mom is Puerto Rican and my dad is Brazilian. I was born and raised in the Bronx and I considered myself Puerto Rican. After I came out, I started playing up my Brazilian identity more. It's a good thing if you're Brazilian, in the gay community.” Brazilian gay men werealso ubiquitous in Newark's “gay scene,” as Emanuel Anzules noted in an undergraduate senior monograph on homosexual life in Newark (Anzules 2006). In his monograph, Anzules interviewed the owner of Brasilia Grill, a family restaurant in the Ironbound during the day that becomes “B Lounge,” a Latino gay club at night. Also in his interviews, Anzules found that Mexican and Central American day laborers in Newark were oftentimes propositioned for sex work.

34. A number of deportation cases involving Brazilians in Newark and the nearby New Jersey town of Riverside were documented in the U.S. and Brazilian presses. See, for instance, Queiroz Galvão, Vinicius. “Ameaçados, brasileiros fogem nos EUA.” Folha de São Paulo, 21 August 2006.

35. Sheriff argues that women tend to be more reluctant to interpret other's behaviors as racist than are men because they tend to encounter racism in intimate contexts that are charged with ambivalent emotions (in Goldstein 1999: 579). Not only are these intimate contexts inherently saturated with emotional ambivalence they are also situated in a political economy that allows and promotes certain interpretations—particularly nation-building mythologies of “meritocracy” and the “American dream”—over others.

City of Newark 1959. Newark: A City in Transition. Volumes I, II, and III. Prepared for the City of Newark, New Jersey, Leo P. Carlin, Mayor; Mayor's Commision on Group Relations, Daniel S. Anthony, Director, Walter D. Chambers, Asst. Director.

Ramos-Zayas, Ana forthcoming. Cartography of “Racial Democracy” and Emotional Common Sense Under Urban Neoliberalism: Brazilians and Puerto Ricans in Newark, NJ.