Racial Remittances

Abstract

Recent research has examined how racial ideologies vary across national contexts, but relatively few scholars have investigated how ideologies might be transmitted across national boundaries. The author examines how antiblack racial ideologies in the United States are circulated back to the immigrant-sending community via social ties held between U.S. immigrants and non-migrants, who have never left their home societies. Drawing on 75 in-depth interviews with Mexicans in Mexico and the United States, the author shows how immigrant perceptions of black Americans are relayed back to nonmigrants as racial remittances—the movement of racial discourses and stereotypes across national borders. Whereas recent scholarship has documented immigrants’ preference to maintain social distance from black Americans, the author’s findings challenge assumptions that these attitudes are merely a product of the U.S. assimilation process or a reflection of Latin American antiblack racism. Rather, this research suggests that these two processes interact and have consequences pertaining to how immigrants relate to black Americans upon migration to the United States. The article ends with a discussion of the findings’ implications for how new immigrants are navigating the evolving U.S. racial order.