Techno-Bureaucratic Race-Making: Latino (Mis)Representation in Criminology and Criminal Justice Knowledge Claims

Abstract

We ask: (1) how are Latino-identifying and Latino-identified persons (mis)represented in criminal and immigration systems data? and (2) how do institutions of formal social control, through their measurement systems, contribute to skewed understandings of racial-ethnic disparities in criminological research? We anchor this analysis in Omi and Winant’s racial formation theory to understand how variously situated Latinos are made both visible and invisible in the criminal and immigration systems. We use the term techno-bureaucratic race-making to reflect how bureaucratic institutions and processes contribute to the racialization and criminalization of Latinos in the United States. We argue that techno-bureaucratic nomenclature and data generating processes condition the capacity to identify the existence, scale, and scope of racial-ethnic inequities attributable to the carceral state.

Keywords:

• Latinos
• criminology
• criminal justice
• racial formation
• race-making

Acknowledgements

Thank you to April Fernandes, Janice Iwama, and Anthony Peguero for their leadership in bringing this scholarly collaboration to fruition. Thanks to Zaire Z. Dinzey-Flores, who developed an inaugural advanced undergraduate seminar on the Latina/o/x identities and the U.S. Census, and informed our thinking for parts of this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Government agencies both within and beyond criminal justice settings vary significantly in nomenclature for referencing Latinos or Hispanics, just as Latinos vary in self-identification processes. For readability, we use the word “Latino” unless referencing the specific nomenclature pertaining to organizations, data collection instruments, or individual persons. For more on the use of Latinx in Latino Studies and other academic contexts, see Torres (2018); Trujillo-Pagán (2018). Demographic data on Jefferson Parish are from U.S. Census Bureau (2021a).

2 The 2020 Census speaks to the distinction between self-identifying as Latino and being identified by another person or institution as such (Wang, 2021). Generational distance from immigrant ancestors shapes the likelihood that a person will identify as being Hispanic. Among U.S. residents with Hispanic ancestry, the Pew Research Center found that with each successive U.S.-born generation, survey respondents are more likely to identify as non-Hispanic, but with Hispanic ancestry. In such situations, a person may be identified (by a governmental agency or research instrument) as Hispanic/Latino, but that same person may claim a different subjectivity altogether (e..g, White, Black, “Mixed,” or “Other”). In sections where this technical specificity is especially relevant, we differentiate between “Latino-identifying” and “Latino-identified” subjectivity.

3 Though speculative, the kind of study conducted by Ostfeld and Yadon (2022) can prompt us to think about how individuals choose skin tone emojis and “Zoom reaction” gestures when communicating digitally and through emoji-like symbols (see Janse et al., 2022).

4 In different Latin American nation-state histories, Eurocentric ideologies and intellectual traditions, including the positivist school of criminology, were used to legitimize the criminalization and control of Indigenous and Black people across Caribbean and South American contexts (Olmo 1999, p. 25; see also León 2021a, p. 18).

5 Scholars and everyday people differ in their orientation towards mestizaje as a contemporary identity label. Just like “octoroon,” “quadroon,” and iterative categories in the U.S. Census instruments between 1850-1920, Spanish colonial administrators sought to normalize and track a similar typology. Entirely based on proximity to Spanish “pure blood” (i.e., Whiteness), terms like criollos, peninsulares, mestizos, mulattoes, among others (see Ramos-Kittrell, 2016; Supplee, 2017). In the case of mestizo, this label was designed to center proximity to whiteness, and hedge against identification with Indigenous and Black ancestry.

6 The US Supreme Court unanimously ruled in U.S. v Brignoni-Ponce that a traffic stop on the basis of the driver simply looking Mexican is an unconstitutional violation of the Fourth Amendment. This case was decided in the summer of 1975.

7 There is an erasure of history and an obfuscation of power when such instruments are filtered through the prism of debating the technical merits of whether Hispanic/Latino designations are really a race or an ethnicity, or something else entirely. Few Latinos in the United States would use this technical bifurcation to make sense of lived experiences. We would be hard pressed to find someone who make sense of an experience by saying “that wasn’t racism or racial discrimination… it was technically ethnic discrimination or ethnocentrism because Latinos are an ethnicity, NOT a race.”

8 Though the Revision to the Standards for the Classification of Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity were issued via an Office of Management and Budget (OMB) 1997 directive, the FBI began collecting ethnicity data and expanded the race categories in all FBI UCR Program data collections in 2013. “The ethnicity categories include Hispanic or Latino and Not Hispanic or Latino; the race categories include American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, and White” (FBI CJISD, 2021, p. 148).

9 Publicly available data from FY 2012 show that relative to the civilian labor force, both White and Black persons are under-represented in these industries, whereas as Hispanic, Asian, and Native Americans are over-represented (CBP Office of Diversity and Civil Rights, 2012, p. 7). In 2008, Hispanic persons constituted 16.5% of the personnel at the Department of Homeland Security, whereas Hispanic representation in the broader federal government was at 7.3% (DHS, 2008). At the time of this report, Hispanic representation was highest in Customs and Border Protection, with 30% of CBP personnel coded as such (DHS, 2008, p. 4).

10 “As Hagan et al. (2005, p. 384) explained, other racial/ethnic minorities, such as Hispanic Americans, occupied “a disadvantaged middle ground where they [were] a less comprehensive and intensive focus of criminalization efforts than African Americans, but more at risk than whites.”” (cited in Pickett et al., 2022, p. 5).

11 That is, in essence, what critics of terms like “mestizaje” or being “mixed race” often point to: such terms function to signal proximity to whiteness while distancing oneself from indigeneity and/or Blackness.

12 For a leading example of how skin tone has been incorporated into interval-scale survey measurement, see (Ostfeld and Yadon 2022, p. 1814). For additional examples of operationalizing colorism in social science survey research – and the tradeoffs and measurement challenges therein – see Campbell et al. (2020); Hannon and DeFina (2016); Telles (2014).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kenneth Sebastian León

Kenneth Sebastian León is an Assistant Professor of Latino and Caribbean Studies and Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, where he specaializes in crimes of the powerful and racialized social control. His inter- and multidisciplinary scholarship can be found in Criminology & Public Policy; Critical Criminology; Crime, Law and Social Change; Ethnography; Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology; Journal of Psychoactive Drugs; the Journal of Qualitative Criminal Justice and Criminology; Journal of White-Collar and Corporate Crime; Journal on Migration and Human Security; and Race and Justice; among other refereed and public outlets. For a current CV and more information about Dr. León's research, please visit www.ksebastianleon.com.

Andrea Gómez Cervantes

Andrea Gómez Cervantes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Wake Forest University. Her research interests include immigration, immigration policies, race/ethnicity, gender, Latina/x/os, violence, and families. In her current book project, Illegality in the Heartland, she investigates the effects of immigration policies on Latin American immigrants' everyday lives and ethnoracial relations among Latin American immigrants. Dr. Gómez Cervantes is a University of California President's Fellow, a Ford Fellow, and an American Sociological Association Minority Fellow. Her research has received support from the National Science Foundation as well as affiliated universities. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Kansas in 2019. Her work appears in Social Problems, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Migration Letters, Sociology Compass, and Feminist Criminology, among other outlets. More information about about Dr. Gómez Cervantes can be found at www.andreagomezcervantes.com.