#white identification

Whiteness" is an enduring social force that produces a racialized system of access/excess. Those with access have phenotype, structure advantages, and racial legacies to thank. But it is also, as Judy Helfand suggests, that which 'is shaped and maintained by the full array of social institutions -- legal, economic, political, educational, religious, and cultural.' In other words, whiteness is methodically sustained through ideology and praxis."

To identify oneself today as a "Hispanic" is partially to acknowledge one's ethnic heritage without surrendering one's "whiteness." Hispanic identity thus implies a kind of "separate but equal" whiteness- whiteness with a twist of salsa, enough to make one ethnically flavorful and culturally exotic without, however, compromising one's racial privilege as a white person.

[Tafoya] posits that native born Hispanics' racial identification depends on their degree of inclusion in the American polity and economic success: to the extent that Latinos feel politically excluded and economically marginalized, they will opt for "some other race."

In a study focusing on native-born Latinos (not only Mexican-Americans), demographer Sonya Tafoya compared "white Hispanics" (that is, those who identified as Hispanic and white on the census) and "some other race Hispanics" (those who identified as Hispanic and selected "some other race"). She found that white Hispanics had significantly higher incomes, were twice as likely to consider themselves Republicans, and were considerably less likely to believe that Hispanics experience significant descrimination in the United States.

The Mexican-American who has made it into the upper strata of Anglo society... often feels great bitterness about his ancestry and identification with La Raza. When Paul came home from college on a vacation one time, he told his mother about a real or sensed insult he received from a professor about being a Mexican-American. "I wish I could get every drop of Mexican blood out of my veins and change it for something else," Paul said to his mother. "I'd take any blood in the world. Anything except Mexican!" His children will have only half his complaint because their mother is an Anglo.

I think like an Anglo and I act like an Anglo but I'll never look like an Anglo. Just looking at me, no one could tell if I am an American or one of those blasted Mexicans from across the river. It's hell to look like a foreigner in your own country.