The Normative Mulattoes: The Press, Latinos, and the Racial Climate on the Moving Immigration Frontier

Abstract

Recent work on race and ethnicity has turned attention to the effects of growing populations that are neither black nor white on racial status hierarchies in the United States. A separate literature on new immigrants to the United States has succeeded in establishing the notion of a context of reception as a way of understanding the variable contextual cluster of factors that shapes the course of new immigrant assimilation. This article studies a problem that lies at the intersection of these two literatures. It proposes to expand the scope of conceptual models of immigrant contexts of reception to include the effects of regional media and the news on what I call the climate of new immigrant reception. The notion of a media climate of reception is used as an entrée to the study of modes of symbolic incorporation of new immigrants, Latinos specifically, into the race-coded grid of normative distinctions that define contemporary racism. The analytic focus is on the way this symbolic incorporation occurs in newspaper reporting. An analysis of fourteen years of newspaper reporting in Oregon finds strong support for a conditional whitening hypothesis. This article proposes that a similar framework be used for the comparative study of the racial climate of incorporation of Latinos across regions.