Francisco Herrera (FH): How did this project come about? What questions led you to ask how race was theorized in a hemispheric way?
Juliet Hooker (JH): The impetus for the book came from two initial realizations. One was that there was this narrative about Latino racial exceptionalism that had become central to the way in which people talked about how Latinos are transforming conversations about race and racial identity in the United States. It’s this idea that Latinos don’t fit US racial categories, because they come with these Latin American ideas about race that are so entirely different from those in the US, because in Latin America mixture is emphasized, which is antithetical to US binary notions of race. One thing that struck me was this construction of the US and Latin America as apparently having completely distinct ideas about race that have never been in contact, or weren’t in conversation with each other, which is historically wrong.
The other impetus for the book was that there are times in which African American thinkers in particular are portrayed as having simply reflected the dominant US binary notions of race, without paying attention to these thinkers’ connections to Latin America and to black populations in the region. This seemed to me to be a simplistic reading of how African American thinkers thought about race, which located them strictly in a US context, when they were actually much more diasporic than was revealed by this particular understanding of the contrast between US and Latin American racial systems.
All of this led me to wonder: what exactly are the ideas about race that Latinos are bringing with them? What are Latin American ideas about race, and how have they been formed in relation to the US and vice versa? How have ideas about race in the US been formed in relation to Latin America?
FH: You’ve made the point that you could have chosen other thinkers, such as Ida B. Wells, than the ones you focus on in the book. Tell us more about how you chose these four figures.
JH: The question of selection is unavoidable with this kind of book. It’s very common in political theory to do this kind of mapping of intellectual history by focusing on specific thinkers. No project that tries to map African American or Latin American political thought is ever going to map the whole tradition, however, so that’s a drawback of the approach of focusing on specific thinkers.
The choice of the four thinkers was based on a number of different criteria. First, I wanted thinkers who were contemporaries and who were major players in their respective canons. There’s no doubt that Douglass and Du Bois are huge figures within African American political thought, and there’s no question that Sarmiento and Vasconcelos are equally prominent within Latin American political thought. So part of it was choosing thinkers who were prominent and also put forward very influential notions about race that shaped subsequent debates in really important ways in their respective regions.
I think that’s true of all four of them: people are still wrestling with Vasconcelos’s arguments about mestizaje, and they’re still wrestling with Du Bois’s notion of racial identity. These four thinkers made sense because their ideas have lived on in a really important way. If I had chosen a different set of figures, of course, I would have had different insights, and so I welcome other people taking up that challenge and doing more of this kind of hemispheric analysis.