Children of Latino immigrants framing race: making sense of criminalisation in a colour-blind era

ABSTRACT

Post-1965 children of Latino immigrants in the United States have come of age during an era of mass incarceration and a colour-blind ideology. Drawing from in-depth interviews with inner city, male, young adult children of Latino immigrants in Los Angeles, we examine the extent to which they make sense of their criminalisation through a racial lens. We find the segregated urban context to be a place of paradox: one that marginalises and racialises children of immigrants, while helping to sustain a colour-blind ideology. Internal dynamics in urban neighbourhoods heightens the criminalisation of young men, but obscures their perceived racialisation. Most young men dismiss instances of discrimination, but a racial lens emerges as they step out of their neighbourhoods into white spaces and discover they are uniformly ‘othered’ in association to the criminalised inner city. Respondents more likely to traverse urban space were more likely to emerge in racial consciousness, whereas the most ‘locked in place’ and subject to criminalisation, normalise this process through a colour-blind lens.

KEYWORDS:

• Colour-blind ideology
• racialisation
• criminalisation
• Latinos
• segregation

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Susan Coutin, Nicholas Marantz, Walter Nichols, Anne Pebley and Seth Pipkin, for providing feedback on drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Much of the literature focuses on the experience of Mexican Americans given the sample and demographics of Los Angeles.

Additional information

Funding

Funding to conduct the follow-up study associated with this project came from the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality New Scholars Grant.