Making and Unmaking Latinos: Ethnoracial Construction Across State, Family, and Self

Abstract

How are individuals with Latin American origins sorting into—and reshaping—the U.S. ethnoracial structure, and what do these dynamics reveal about ethnoracial boundary change in an era of rapid demographic transformation? This dissertation examines how ethnoracial categories are constructed, contested, and made consequential among individuals with Latin American ancestry in the United States. Drawing on four nationally representative datasets, the dissertation conceptualizes race and ethnicity as multidimensional constructs operating across three key sites of race-making: the state, the family, and the self. Across these sites, I show that ethnoracial categories are not fixed or uniformly consequential, but instead emerge from the interactions of classification, categorization, identification, and lived experience. First, I demonstrate that state-imposed categories—here, census race classifications—often misalign with how individuals self-identify, challenging the assumption that official categories correspond to socially meaningful groups. Second, I examine ethnic attrition among individuals with Latin American ancestry, showing that exit from the Latino category is not driven by intermarriage alone, but by the interaction between intermarriage and racial categorization. This finding reveals that boundary crossing is conditional and stratified by racialization, rather than a diffuse process of assimilation. Third, I develop a multidimensional Latino symbolic-consequential ethnicity continuum to assess whether identification corresponds to meaningful shifts in lived experience across the population with Latin American ancestry. While individuals who attrit from the Latino category tend to exhibit highly attenuated ethnic attachments, most mixed-ancestry Latinos retain durable and consequential ties, indicating that ethnoracial mixing does not produce linear boundary erosion. Taken together, these findings challenge dominant interpretations of Latino incorporation that treat categorical mobility as evidence of widespread boundary change. Instead, this dissertation demonstrates that diagnosing ethnoracial transformations depends on accounting for (mis)alignment between institutional classifications and everyday identifications, the racialized conditions under which boundary crossing occurs, and the extent to which identities continue to structure social life. By integrating theories of race-making and boundary work, this project advances a generalizable framework for evaluating when shifts in ethnoracial identification and/or categorization signal substantive changes in social boundaries—and when they do not.