The browning of Black politics: Foundational Blackness and new Latino subjectivities

Abstract

This article examines the historic and contemporary circumstances that have produced recent fusions between US-American Black and Latino subjectivities in Houston, Texas. It analyzes expressive culture, ethnographic data, popular media and theories about racial power to argue that memories of anti-Black racism and Black anti-racism strongly influence Latino modes of counter-hegemony and complicate the ways in which Black and Latino histories and subjectivities are analyzed. Houston's unique location and history have created a condition through which Blacks and Latinos have shared a uniquely common experience as targets for state-sanctioned racial violence. That shared struggle has produced a wariness of race that bonds the two groups together. Blackness has served as the primary adhesive in that bond because of what I argue to be its function as a universal signifier of opposition to white supremacy from which Latinos draw strength.