Mestizo” (Baker 2009). Baker makes this point in support of the drive to
add Mestizo to the choices for race offered by the Census. He also notes
that because the Mestizo population outnumbers the Afro-Latin and other
Spanish-speaking populations, the contributions of those groups are
minimized as a result:
[B]aseball star David “Big Papi” Ortiz (black) does not physically
look like actress Cameron Diaz (white), and that soccer legend Pele
(black) looks nothing like funnyman George Lopez (Indio/Native
American), and so on. Yet, they are all Latinos here in the U.S.
(ibid.)While social scientists and politicians debate this issue of race, the public
has come to its own conclusions. Anglos do see Mexicans as racially
other: not white or black, but brown. Barrett (2006) took a job as wait staff
at an Anglo-owned Mexican restaurant in California to study
Anglo/Mexican language ideologies in a realistic, unarranged setting. The
casualness with which staff and managers acknowledged the color line
(wait staff is Anglo; kitchen staff is Latino) is seen in this example of an
exchange between Barrett and a manager:
Manager: Oh, your check isn’t in this pile, this is the brown pile.
Me: They’re divided that way?
Manager: Well, you know, kitchen and wait staff.(Barrett 2006: 176)A comparison of the official stance (Mexicans are white, according to the
U.S. Census Bureau) and the reality documented by Barrett and many
others (Cobas and Feagin 2008; Gómez 2007; Hill 2008; Niemann et al.
1999; Rinderle and Montoya 2008; Santa Ana 2002, among others)
suggests that Mexican-Americans occupy an ambiguous position in the
social order that has rendered them off-white (Gómez 2007).^8 This is what
Foley (1998) calls, quite aptly, “a parallel universe of whiteness” (as cited
in Powers 2008: 62).
The relevance of these complex issues of race will become clearer in the
following sections on specific kinds of discrimination.