BECOMING AMERICAN, BECOMING BLACK? URBAN COMPETENCY, RACIALIZED SPACES, AND THE POLITICS OF CITIZENSHIP AMONG BRAZILIAN AND PUERTO RICAN YOUTH IN NEWARK

Abstract

This essay examines the performance of “race,” particularly the appropriation of “Blackness,” among U.S.-born Latinos and Latin American migrants in two neighborhoods in Newark, New Jersey. A main argument of this essay is that “Blackness”—a performance of race somewhat detached from actual Black bodies and often associated with Puerto Ricans in Newark—has become a more valued benchmark of belongingness among Latin American migrants than “whiteness,” a stature of belongingness among European migrants in the past. By deconstructing the concept of “urban competency,” an implicit knowledge and cultural capital associated with the valorization of “being urban,” modern, and cosmopolitan, the essay explores how racial performances are deployed by United States-born Puerto Rican and Brazilian migrant youth to mediate alternative constructions of citizenship and belongingness.

Key Words:

• race
• citizenship
• space
• youth
• Latino
• Brazilian
• Puerto Rican

The author thanks the editors of this issue, as well as the editors of the journal and the two anonymous reviewers, whose comments were instrumental in addressing key issues in the essay. Thanks are also due to the 2004–05 participants of the Institute for Research on Women fellowship at and my wonderful colleagues in the Department of Latino and Hispanic Carribean Studies, Rutgers University as well as to the participants of the Conference on Brazilian Migration to the U.S. held at Harvard University in March 2005.

Notes

1. Throughout this article I adopt the analytic framework of racialization to emphasize that “race,” or “racial difference,” cannot be presumed to be based on the “natural” characteristics of identifiable groups or the “biological” effects of ancestry. Thus, “race” is always entangled in social relations and conflicts and retains an enduring (seemingly intractable) significance precisely because its forms and substantive meanings are always eminently historical and mutable (Winant 1994: 58–68; Omi and Winant 1986: 64–66; De Genova and Ramos-Zayas 2003: Chapter 1).

2. An obvious example of this is “the ghetto,” as a physical and symbolic space, and “being ghetto,” as an embodiment of such a space. The processes by which the characteristic of a built environment are transformed into behavior and used to create bodies that possess those built environment characteristics deserve some critical attention in contemporary understandings of “race,” “illegality,” and citizenship in the United States.

3. This article is part of a broader ethnographic project that I am currently undertaking in Newark, New Jersey (United States), Belo Horizonte (Minas Gerais, Brazil), and Santurce (Puerto Rico). For the past five years, I have conducted ethnographic research among Puerto Rican and Brazilian youth, parents, teachers, and community activists in the neighborhoods of North Newark and the Ironbound.

4. It is important to emphasize here that the valorization of “the urban” does not imply an assimilationist trend by which individuals' sense of belongingness necessarily depends on their capacity to relinquish a presumed “traditional culture.” As Néstor García-Canclini argues, “being cultured in the modern era implies not so much associating oneself with a repertory of exclusively modern objects and messages, but rather knowing how to incorporate the art and literature of the vanguard, as well as technological advances, into traditional matrices of social privilege and symbolic distinction” (1995: 46–47). In fact, the capacity to implicitly know how to navigate a world in which displays of cosmopolitanism require a familiarity with the popular and the modern at the same time is at the very core of urban competency.

5. I recognize that distinguishing between these populations is complicated when one considers the multiple transnational affiliations in which “Latinos” and Latin American “immigrants” are implicated. In this article, I use United States-born Latino or simply “Latino” in reference to individuals who either had been born and raised in the United States or who had lived in the United States for most of their childhood and adolescence. By “Latin American migrant,” I mean those interviewees who had been born in Latin America or the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and had not been in the United States for more than five or six years. Throughout this essay, I refer to “Brazilians” or “Puerto Ricans,” without specifying “ethnicity” (e.g., Japanese-ancestry Brazilian) or “color” (e.g., dark-skinned Puerto Rican) partly because I am treating these categories—“Puerto Rican” and “Brazilian”—as racial formations in the United States that are significant and durable not necessarily because of physically “observable” criteria but because they produce and are the product of social relations of subordination, imperialism, and inequality in the context of white supremacy and the privileging of “American”-ness. In instances in which the individual interviewees comment on “ethnic” and “color” distinctions in her/himself or someone else, I include and contextualize these distinctions in the text. This ethnographic strategy should not suggest that it wouldn't be valuable to focus specifically on how “color” and “ethnicity” shape the life experiences of individuals belongingness in racialized or national groups. Such an analysis would be very meritorious but would take a much longer space than I have here.

6. For a broader discussion on the valorization and appropriation of “Blackness” by whites, see Boyd (1997), Forman (2002), Johnson (2003), and Tate (2003).

7. For a more comprehensive history of Newark and “the riots,” see Hayden (1967) and Miers (1971). A more contemporary ethnographic account of Newark is provided in Ortner (2003).

8. I want to emphasize here that I understand “space” in accordance with Lefebvre (1991). Rather than a mere background, space can be usefully understood as a social relation in itself. Indeed, struggles over social space and the differences they produce are inseparable from more general conflicts over inequalities of power and wealth.

9. It is important to note that the “Hispanic or Latino” category in the Census does not necessarily include Brazilians.

10. Some studies have projected the number of undocumented Brazilians in the United States to raise official Census numbers by a (conservative) 50 percent. For instance, although the 2000 United States Census states that there are 231 thousand Brazilians in the United States, Brazil Ministry of Foreign Affairs claims to have witnessed the emigration of over 800 thousand to one million Brazilians to the United States. These demographic discrepancies also seem to apply to Newark, where perhaps over 50 percent of all Brazilians are undocumented (Meihy 2004; Beserra 2003; Werneck 2004).

11. Brazilians who migrated to Newark had lower educational and income levels than Brazilians migrants to other United States cities and hailed from smaller cities and towns in “interior” of the state of Minas Gerais. They were often considered the “hicks” of Brazil, especially in the eyes of their compatriots from São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, who tended to settle in more “cosmopolitan” cities like New York, Miami, San Francisco, or even Boston (Beserra 2003; Meihy 2004; Sales 1998). In the United States, Brazilians concentrated in New York City, particularly Queens; Framingham and Cambridge, Massachusetts; Danbury and Hartford, Connecticut; Miami and some areas of Los Angeles and San Francisco. During this high-inflation period, Brazilians also migrated to other South American countries, particularly Paraguay; to Europe, especially Portugal and England; and to Japan. These other migration streams have their own distinct characteristics. For instance, many of the Brazilian migrants to Japan were second- or third-generation children of Japanese migrants to Brazil who returned to their parents' homeland.

12. High school provides a unique site for examining the production and reformulation of processes of “becoming” and “un-becoming American,” as well as the creating understandings of citizenship, “immigrant” identity, and race. Although most of my interviewees were affiliated with these two high schools, as students, parents, alumni, staff, the broader ethnographic project also involved “participant observation” at community organizations and interviews with area developers, politicians, and other individuals connected to the respective neighborhoods. Although many interesting features in the curriculum and physical structure of these two high schools deserve further and systematic study, such a research was beyond the purview of my ethnographic project.

13. Scholars of Performance Studies argue that acts of crossing over question the fixity and the oppositionality of the categories that confine people in certain roles (Butler 1993; Garber 1992; Schein 1999). They understand performance as the bodily experiences, embodied racial being, the transhistorical subject, while performativity is seen as the historical situatedness, the fusion through discourse, words, and consciousness of race.

14. I was drawn to a theoretical framework that combines performance and political economy out of a general dissatisfaction with works that treat “performance” and “performativity” in unencumbered and ahistorical ways. In this sense, I am indebted to the works of Micaela di Leonardo (1998) and William Roseberry (1991) for providing a political economic framework that serves in this article as a theoretical “counterpart” to the valuable works of performance scholars.

15. This common “anti-Portuguese” stance often assumed by both Brazilians and Puerto Ricans at ESHS and, to a lesser degree at BHS, raises an important question: To what degree are local, neighborhood-based perceptions of the Portuguese reflective of an understanding of Portugal as “backwards,” a “country in decline,” or a country characterized by “rural poverty”? Jokes related to the “backwardness” of the Portuguese were common, particularly among Brazilian students, who also tended to evoke a history of Portugal colonization of Brazil and the imperial power's subsequent decay. As a student commented: “They are jealous of Brazil, because we're one of the most powerful world economies, we have a lot of culture, technology.” See also Feldman-Bianco (1992).

16. John Ogbu's work (1982) on “acting white” suggests that Black students associate academic success with racial inauthenticity, so that the behavior that promotes academic success is sometimes negatively sanctioned in favor of oppositional performances. A serious limitation of Ogbu's work is his general dismissiveness of the political economic contexts in which students “act white” and the social motivations and racialization processes that might shape such white “acting.”

17. For a critical take on this discussion, see Twine (1998) and Handard (1999).

18. Brazilians have navigated the “Latino” and “Hispanic” labels with great trepidation and used the Portuguese language difference to avoid a racial category they associate with “immigrant,” Spanish speaker, and disenfranchised populations. Many Brazilians in Newark experienced high educational, occupational, and income marginality and were often racialized as “Latino” or even “Hispanic.” Nevertheless, the Portuguese language and global marketing of all things Brazilian also allowed them space for maneuvering such racializations

19. While Brazilians were viewed as “modern” and authentically urban, their racial markedness was often constructed in relation to the Portuguese, who were considered inherently inauthentic or as urban “wannabees,” even if they were born and raised in Newark. The degree to which the Portuguese youth in Newark might have adopted metaphors of Black struggle in the United States to their own battles against class marginalization and authoritarianism merits attention but is beyond the scope of this article.

20. Hintzen (2004) challenges arguments that consider diasporic identity as a subjectivity produced from a collective phenomenon of displacement and dispersal from a real or imagined homeland. He argues that such an understanding of diasporic identity ignores the integral way in which identity is embedded in national and local sociopolitical geographies. In particular, Hintzen discusses how diasporic identities emerge from historical and social junctures in which discourses of national belonging deny claims of citizenship on racial, cultural, religious, linguistic, or other communal grounds. Hence, rather than being based on claims of common origin and on a commonality of culture inherited from an original “homeland,” diasporic identities are a response to nationally-based notions of peoplehood from which diasporic subjects are excluded and creates solidarity across fragmented geographies. My argument diverges from Hintzen in the sense that I view such diasporic identities resulting from both the nationally-based notions of exclusion and also on “homeland” criteria of belongingness, inclusion, and exclusion.

21. As Linda Bosniak (2003: 176–177) has eloquently argued, “citizenship is a flexible enough concept to take on new meanings, even some that appear sharply in tension with earlier understandings… . [T]he idea of citizenship contains enough universalist normative content that it can plausibly be used (though perhaps paradoxically) as a resource for challenging narrower and more exclusive understandings.”

22. Only when Brazilians began arriving in the Ironbound in significant numbers in the 1980s did the Portuguese residents become concerned with the possibility of deportation. They feared that a persecution of “illegal” Brazilians would also uncover the existence of Portuguese residents who had remained undocumented for decades.

23. By style-talk, I am not invoking a facile reference to “hip-hop” fashion, but rather a way of addressing how broader discussions of race, class, gender, and citizenship were frequently coded in narratives around clothes and style more generally.

24. Here I am alluding to the Critical Race Theory literature that has understood whiteness as largely unmarked, neutralized, and taken-for-granted in social scientific and popular discussions of race in the United States. The power to ignore race, when white is the race, has been recognized as a privilege, a societal advantage, and has often rendered whites racially invisible (e.g., Frankenberg 1997).

25. Research on “race” in Brazil has generated a prolific, long-standing literature by scholars in Brazil, the United States, and other parts of the world. Over several decades, this research has examined various dimensions of racial formation, systems of subordination, historical analyses of slavery, and even comparisons between “race” and racism in Brazil and the United States. Some of the most recent approaches to these topics include Hanchard (1999), Sheriff (2001), and Telles (2004).

26. In analyzing these conversations, some readers and reviewers of my essay felt that it was essential for me to state the “color” of the interlocutors. Although welcomed and valuable in some ways, I find this request also problematic for a variety of reasons. First, it fails to account for the contextual and subjective qualities that contribute to racial marking. From my own subjective location, I may find someone to be “light-skin” or “white,” when other people might find the same person to be “dark-skin” or “non-white.” Do we want to bring in racial categories like “mulatto,” “pardo,” “trigueño”? And, if so, what are the political implications of doing this (in the United States, in Puerto Rico, in Brazil)? Moreover, there is a contextual element to “colorism.” The specific student-interlocutors in this ethnographic vignette may not be confused for African American in predominantly “Black” areas of Newark, but they would also not be considered “white” in the predominantly “Portuguese” Ironbound. One of them was confused for “Puerto Rican”—itself a racial category—when she went to a community agency in North Newark. More significantly, the request is also problematic because it presupposes that terms like “Latino” or “Hispanic” constitute “ethnicities” or “cultural” groups, which can then be categorized under “Black” or “white” racial rubrics. This perspective overlooks the fact that “Latino” or “Hispanic” in the United States has itself become a racial (not ethnic) term—different from Italian American, Jewish, Irish—that evokes images of subordination, inequality, and even alluding to socio-economic indicators often comparable with groups racialized as “Black” or “Asian” (De Genova and Ramos-Zayas 2003). Among the students whom I interviewed in Newark, I did not meet any who defined him/herself (or were defined by other Latinos or Latin American migrants) as “Afro-Brazilian” or as “Japanese-Brazilian.” In Belo Horizonte, however, I did encounter one upper-middle-class student at a private school who did identify himself as “Afro-Brazilian.” This student's classmates were divided between those who did validate his “Afro-Brazilian”-ness and those who stated that they didn't think this student was “really Black” and that whatever “Blackness” he might embody had to do with his “clothing style.”