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Chapter 1 examines the historical development of jazz manouche in relation to ideologies about ethnoracial identity between the mid-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In the decades after Django’s death in 1953, some Manouche communities adopted his music as a familial practice. Simultaneously, critics, promoters, and activists extolled the putative ethnoracial character of this music, giving rise to the “jazz manouche” label as a cornerstone of both socially conscious and profit-generating strategies. Drawing on analyses of published criticism, archival research, and interviews, this chapter argues that these ethnoracial and generic categories have developed together, each informing and reflecting ideologies about ethnoracial identity and its sonic expressions. Jazz manouche grew out of essentializing notions about Manouches, while Manouches have been racialized through reductive narratives about jazz manouche. This chapter traces the reception and historiography of Django and his cohort to arrive at the living history of jazz manouche in contemporary France and globally.

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to explore how issues such as race relations, indigenous struggles, and the black consciousness movement in Brazil intersect with, and even reshape, the law and its effects on the lives of people like those living on the banks of the São Francisco River in Mocambo and on São Pedro Island. It also details the development of a theoretical model called “legalizing identity.” The model provides a framework that encompasses both black and Indian struggles for recognition and resources, while retaining the ability to understand their specific differences based in history and struggle.

This chapter summarizes the book's main themes and presents some final thoughts. It presents a comparison of the case of Xocó recognition with that of American Indians. It also discusses the rights for Afro-Brazilians and Indians during the first decade of the twenty-first century and social justice and state recognition of new ethnoracial identities.

This chapter explores the paradoxes and contradictions that nourish the transformation of ethnoracial identities. It looks at particular religious and political events in two villages in order to illustrate the unifying role that national citizenship played, just as acrimonious relations between quilombolas and Indians were at their worst. It also analyzes the interfamily and intrafamily feuds and their impact on the politics of quilombo recognition, emphasizing the struggle over naming the village and its residents. Woven throughout the chapter are highlighted moments that reveal the simultaneous importance and unimportance of race and color to the people of Mocambo.

The conclusion summarizes the contributions of the Greater Orlando case study and addresses the role of Latinos in challenging the south’s historic black-white racial binary. The chapter argues that the ethnographic fieldwork provides evidence of the social construction of a distinct Hispanic race and addresses the complexity of ethnoracial identity categorizations by examining the racialization of Hispanics and how they self-idenify.

This chapter outlines the central goals and concerns of the emerging field of language and race, or raciolinguistics. It begins by articulating a commitment to analyzing language and race together rather than as discrete and unconnected social processes. The chapter then makes numerous calls for researchers to look comparatively across ethnoracial and linguistic contexts to better understand the role of language in maintaining and challenging racism as a global system of capitalist oppression; to emphasize the linguistic and discursive construction of race and ethnicity while at the same time noting their endurance as social realities for subjugated racial and ethnic minorities; to consider the complexities of racialization within the rapidly changing demographic shifts and technological advances of the twenty-first century; and, finally, to develop antiracist strategies that impact public discourses on language, race, and education in what I refer to as “hyperracial” times.

This concluding chapter considers the implications from the studies discussed in previous chapters. First is the fact that black gospel music sustains a richly textured, oppositional, ethnoracial consciousness, which might imply further sympathies toward black identity in the evangelical landscape. Second, the fact that blackness has markedly different meanings for musicians of the three scenes indicates the need to examine the multiple meanings of blackness in the African diaspora. Third, the usefulness of the categories of history, place, and body to ferret out the underlying ethnoracial meanings of different musical scenes suggests the value of applying them to other musical scenes and arenas of expressive culture. Finally, how and why the fact that expressive culture sometimes supports and sometimes dilutes ethnoracial identities among evangelicals may contribute to the improvement of strategy by black evangelical movement activists.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book presents a study of Colombian popular music, ethnoracial identity, gender, and the transnational U.S.-Colombian community. It argues that that Colombian popular music provides a common space for imagining and enacting Colombian identity outside traditional national borders and in ways not overtly shaped by the scandal and shame of the drug-trafficking trade and violence with which contemporary Colombia is primarily associated. It examines issues of gender, ethnoracial identity, and transnational migration in the work of the Colombian recording artists such as Shakira, Andrea Echeverri (of the group Aterciopelados), and Carlos Vives. It also engages the current debates in American, Latin American, and U.S. Ethnic Studies regarding the academic location and institutional politics of transnational research.

This chapter describes how the lives and self-image of the people who became the present-day Xocó Indians were transformed. It shows how the dramatic history of this community emerged from a marriage of local activism and interaction with outsiders. Illustrating the operation of governmentality critical to the transformation of ethnoracial identity, it explains the role of anthropologists who proposed, and succeeded at, convincing government officials that social constructions of Indianness were sufficient for legal recognition. The chapter also analyzes how the Indian Statute of 1973 was used and interpreted so that the Xocó could win recognition even though they were not different from other sertanejo peasants.

This chapter reconsiders the racializing effects of “Mock Spanish,” which has been widely conceptualized as the incorporation of Spanish language forms into English in ways that covertly stigmatize Spanish-speaking populations. I draw on theories of language ideologies and processes of racialization to argue that Mock Spanish stigmatizes populations based on their ethnoracial positions rather than their linguistic practices. Thus, U.S. Latinas/os can be stigmatized by Mock Spanish regardless of whether they identify as Spanish speakers. Meanwhile, elite Latin American and European Spanish-speakers are able to escape this stigmatization. I conclude by showing how U.S. Latinas/os appropriate the meaningfulness of Mock Spanish through the enregisterment of linguistic practices that I call “Inverted Spanglish.” This analysis demonstrates the ways that seemingly similar linguistic practices, such as Mock Spanish and Inverted Spanglish, can function in disparate ways based on language users’ ethnoracial positions.

This chapter suggests that the ongoing shifts within Colombian popular music echo those of contemporary (U.S.-)Colombian society and its ongoing internal struggles with respect to the politics of ethnoracial identity, gender, and transnational migration. The artistic and media trajectories of Latin(o) American artists such as Shakira, Carlos Vives, and Andrea Echeverri reflect the divergent, though inextricably linked, processes underlying the development of an expanded understanding of Colombian identity both within the nation's geophysical borders and among its U.S.-based diaspora. The chapter also considers the Colombian government's burgeoning interest in the instrumentalization of (U.S.-)Colombian identity and the lack of scholarship in “commercial” Latin(o) popular music, which in turn negatively impacts our collective understanding of all Latino popular music and cultural expression.

This chapter charts the transformation of Mocambo identity through a series of legal categories, each carrying particular obstacles and rights, thus illustrating the first component of legalizing identity: the experience of revised identities as laws are invoked and rights are put into practice. This process was complicated by landowners' identities, how decisions were made in relation to the Xocó, disappointment in land reform, and the availability of a new law. The chapter presents a contextualized explication of the interpretation of the quilombo clause during the key years for Mocambo, which provides a prime example of postlegislative negotiation. It highlights the legitimating role of anthropology in redefining the quilombo concept as an illustration of governmentality and its effects. In this case, legalizing quilombo identity was a product of goading by Xocó neighbors combined with liberation theology, legal expertise, and anthropological theory.

This chapter offers a preliminary look at the subjective lives and stances of white Kenyans descended from colonial families as they navigate their unsettled sense of identity in Kenya today. As they continue to enjoy enormous privileges, the chapter shows how their self-consciousness and uncertainties suggest that in some respects, they are of two minds about their entitlement to belong. Though white Kenyans are hardly disenfranchised, they face an awkward tension between their ethnoracial and national identities in a nation where, in public discourse, entitlement to belong and to own land increasingly hinges on having deep ancestral roots in local soil.