“I heard that Mexicans Are Hispanic and Puerto Ricans Are Latino”

Abstract

Chapter 2 unpacks the school’s project of creating “Young Latino Professionals” by analyzing the construction of Latinx as an ethnoracial category across contexts. The chapter tracks the contradictory ways in which race and ethnicity are conceptualized in the context of New Northwest High School and demonstrates how these contradictions are systematically linked to broader forms of ambivalence surrounding the interrelated processes of racialization and ethnicization. It argues that “Mexican” and “Puerto Rican” are not merely straightforward identities that students bring with them to school; instead, it shows how students respond to the erasure of Mexican–Puerto Rican difference within the school’s project of socialization by twisting and turning these categories through practices characterized as “ethnoracial contortions.”