Toward A U.S. AsianLatinx Intervention in Critical Mixed Race Studies and Interethnic Relations

Abstract

Diasporic intimacies between Asian and Latinx groups have converged across the world for centuries; the mixing of these cultures and, as a result, mixed individuals are the effect of centuries of interactions with each other. In this article, I review the literature across Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) and Asian and Latinx interethnic relations to situate an AsianLatinx intervention to understand how AsianLatinxs have continually been relegated to the subaltern despite their strong presence in the U.S. I argue that it is necessary to center the AsianLatinx lived experience to understand the interconnectedness of global Asian and Latinx communities. An AsianLatinx intervention disrupts monoracial frameworks of diaspora, mixed identity and interethnic relations to (re)imagine a reality that situates the complexities of mixedness tangential to racialization processes, identity formation and transnationalism.

1. Introduction

“I stood at the border, stood at the edge and claimed it as central. l claimed it as central and let the rest of the world move over to where I was.”—Toni Morrison (Deans et al. 1998)

“This general lack of receptivity or attention to the topic of multiracial identity is due in part to the fact that U.S. social scientists, like the individuals and communities that were the primary focus of their studies, have internalized not only hypodescent but also monoracial norms.”—G. Reginald Daniel et al.

(Daniel et al. 2014)

Since the 2000 census, people in the U.S. have been able to check “two or more races,” and by 2060, the multiracial population is expected to triple in size (Parker et al. 2015). However, under this new umbrella term of multiracial/multiethnic/mixed, many still fall between the cracks and go unaccounted for—such as AsianLatinxs. I use the “X” in AsianLatinx, Latinx, Filipinx and Chicanx as an ethnoracial category that does not essentialize any individual but instead acknowledges the racialization processes and gender inclusion across the shared affinity through Spanish and U.S. colonialism (Beltran 2010; Bonus and Tiongson 2022; Cabral 2022). The removal of the hyphen and the capitalization of Latinx in AsianLatinx is intentional; I do this to argue that AsianLatinx is a fluid ethnoracial identity inclusively comprising all Asian, Latinx and AsianLatinx identities. For example, I am Mexican and Sri Lankan; I often refer to myself as MexiLankan and although I am mixed, I am also Latinx, Asian and AsianLatinx. The fluid choice of being able to identify as multiple ethnoracial identities is often contested since racial frameworks continue to function monoracially (Rondilla et al. 2017; Strmic-Pawl 2022). I define AsianLatinx by expanding and specifying more in-depth what Romero and Escudero (2012) define as Asian Latinos and the removal of the hyphen is to recognize the importance of maintaining both racial/ethnic identities, as Desai (2017) similarly denotes in his article on the Indipino mixed identity.

In agreement with Romero and Escudero (2012), I also identify AsianLatinxs as the following: ethnic Asian immigrants from Latin America who live in the U.S., persons born in the U.S. to parents of cross-cultural AsianLatinx parentage, and a smaller category of self-identified AsianLatinxs as noted by Ocampo (2016) that includes Filipinxs who blend into Latinx communities by inheriting colonial Spanish surnames, familiarity with the Spanish language and shared colonial history. The categorization of AsianLatinx is distinct yet highlights the various ways someone can identify as AsianLatinx within the limitations of the U.S. census. Diasporic relationships and intimacies between Asian and Latinx communities have converged across the world for centuries; the mixing of these cultures and mixed individuals, as a result, are the effect of centuries of interactions with each other (DeGuzmán 2005). I am intentionally choosing to identify these three distinct groups under AsianLatinx to highlight the limitations of the U.S. census and how scholars have engaged with the AsianLatinx communities in the present literature. The inclusion of AsianLatinx communities across varying identifications serves to understand the various ways in which Asia and Latin America are intertwined across spatial and temporal realities—specifically via migration to the U.S. I do not attempt to homogenize the identity into these limitations nor ignore the importance of context in relation to AsianLatinx global communities. Therefore, in this article, I primarily focus on the limited scholarship available on U.S. AsianLatinx communities varying across different racial and ethnic identities to situate the importance of an AsianLatinx intervention in the scholarship regarding mixed identity. By embracing these heterogeneous AsianLatinx communities and identities, there is an opportunity to understand the interethnic relations among diasporic Asian and Latinx communities and the position of AsianLatinx peoples within the broader U.S. society.

Romero and Escudero (2012) explore the 2000 U.S. census data and conclude that, often, AsianLatinxs fall into the “black hole,” unaccounted for (p. 3). The census’ language for choosing more than one race or origin continues to be vague, such as the complexity of white vs. nonwhite Hispanic as a separate question on the U.S. census. Language and the centering of whiteness further complicate mixed classification, often conflating white and nonwhite mixed people into the same category (Strmic-Pawl 2022). For example, Asian–white, Black–white and other mixed white people are categorized under the same racial classification of “two or more races” that AsianLatinx, Black–Asian and other nonwhite mixed people are also limited to choosing. The choice to conflate all mixed people together becomes an issue because nonwhite mixed people have uniquely different racialized experiences to white mixed people in the U.S. Considering that resources are tied to demographic data provided by the U.S. census, white mixed and nonwhite mixed people should not fall under one category of “two or more races,” but rather the census should provide data on how people are mixed. Although there is no explicit question for identifying as AsianLatinx, as in mixed rather than Asian and Latinx on the census, Romero and Escudero (2012) conclude that there is a missed opportunity in which the inclusion of AsianLatinx could mend and cultivate political and cultural liaisons for future policy changes with the inclusion of AsianLatinx in the U.S. census. For example, suppose the census distinguished between specific racial and ethnic mixing; in that case, one could recognize that California has the largest demographic of AsianLatinxs in the U.S. and rather than remain in the early stages of recognition, resources could be allocated to the growing communities as Asian and Latinx migration continue to rise in the state (Mejia et al. 2022). It is not enough to have a catch-all category when identifying mixed people in the U.S. census because there are real consequences to the resources allocated to ethnic and racial groups in the U.S.

As migration to the U.S. continues to be led by ethnic Asian and Latinx groups, accounting for 25% of the total U.S. population, one must consider the growing AsianLatinx populations in the U.S. In states such as California, between 2010 and 2019, there was a record 254,420 people who identified as AsianLatinx (Budiman et al. 2020; Mejia et al. 2022), yet the scholarship on this contemporary demographic remains scarce. Scholars across various disciplines have noted that Asians and Latinxs have a history of sharing similar struggles and geographical locations in the U.S. (Bald 2013; Cheng 2013; Guevarra 2012; Leonard 1992; Molina 2006; Pulido 2006; Saito 1998). However, few have explored how these shared experiences have cultivated intermarriages and the identity formation processes of their mixed children. Even more nascent is the scholarship directly related to AsianLatinx communities in the U.S. (Bald 2013; Cheng 2013; Guevarra 2012; Kang and Torres-Saillant 2016; Leonard 1992; Romero and Escudero 2012). Despite the vast scholarship on the historical, geographical and cultural implications of Asian and Latinx migration and intermarriages, there is still much to learn about the growing contemporary AsianLatinx demographic in the U.S. Learning from their experiences may complexify cultural identity and racial formation of living in what Anzaldúa (1987) refers to as the nepantla, an identity situated in the borderlands between two or more cultures, swimming in a new element of the inbetween. Navigating the inbetween is further complexified vis-à-vis AsianLatinx identities because of the multiplicity of identities that go beyond navigating the inbetween of multiple cultures. As a Chicana, Anzaldua navigated between a Mexican and American cultural identity, but for AsianLatinxs, the inbetween pertains to more than just two cultural identities—to Asian, Latinx and American cultural identities. Hall (1990) defines cultural identity as “becoming as well as of being” (p. 225) fluidly changing across place, time, history and culture. Identity is fluid and ever-changing through adaptation and context—for AsianLatinxs, I argue the borderland concept will become more multifaceted and essential as the AsianLatinx population continues to grow in the U.S.

In this article, I attempt to situate the necessity of an AsianLatinx intervention where the intimacies between Asian and Latinx communities remain central and at the forefront of understanding how AsianLatinx communities unveil a deep interconnectedness beyond intermarriage. I primarily focus on U.S. AsianLatinx communities born to cross-cultural AsianLatinx parentage and how racialization processes developed across the U.S. With the consistent growth of mixed individuals in the U.S., over 300,000 AsianLatinxs in the U.S. at the turn of the millennium to 254,000 as of 2019 and the long history of AsianLatinx communities in the U.S., we cannot continue to ignore the history and growing numbers of AsianLatinxs in the U.S. (Mejia et al. 2022; Romero and Escudero 2012). Centering the AsianLatinx community allows us to understand how AsianLatinxs such as Mexipinxs, MexiLankans, Bengaliricans, Punjabi Mexicans and others refute homogenous definitions of Latinx and Asian American identity (Bald 2013; Guevarra 2012; Leonard 1992; Rondilla et al. 2017; Ropp 2000).

It is critical to address the lack of scholarship on AsianLatinxs vis-à-vis the increase in intermarriages among multiple minority couples in the U.S. Since the Perez v. Sharp decision, which allowed the legal intermarriage between a Mexican American woman and an African American man in California in 1948 and the Loving v. Virginia decision in 1967 legally allowing a Black woman to marry a white man, intermarriages have steadily risen within the U.S. These decisions, coupled with the Hart–Cellar Immigration Act of 1965, which removed immigration quotas to the U.S., could arguably have influenced the increase in intermarriages between minority couples in the U.S. It is evident that AsianLatinxs are continuously missing in the narrative of mixed identity in the U.S., even more so when considering the outlaw of miscegenation in the U.S. since the 1960s.

As the field of Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) expands beyond the centering of whiteness, the voices of AsianLatinxs are still missing from multiple minority discourses (Rondilla et al. 2017). The field of CMRS has recently begun to reflect on the problematics of exclusion in the field and, with the increasing interest in decentering whiteness from the field, we are seeing growth in the scholarship centering multiple minority mixed people—including AsianLatinxs. As the field grows, so does the need to include AsianLatinx-identifying individuals within already established academic disciplines such as Asian American and Latinx Studies. This means pushing beyond the current state of racial frameworks to move beyond monoracial understandings of relational analysis framework (Lipsitz et al. 2019). That is, to begin interrogating and understanding how scholars can expand the importance of race relation theory to include racial/ethnic groups who do not belong to monoracial groups, such as ethnically and racially mixed people. As the multiple minority population in the U.S. continues to rise, we must reassess what this means for those who fall inbetween academic fields, often not in conversation with each other. By bridging these often siloed area studies fields and reading across disciplines, we can complexify what it means to be Asian and Latinx. This placement of AsianLatinxs among Asian and Latinx ethnic groups is essential to reinscribe preconceived optics of racialized understandings of Asians and Latinxs. It is important to understand that those who identify as AsianLatinx belong within all the groups, as these ethnic groups are heterogeneous and diverse. There is no one authentic way to identify and fit within these ethnic groups and, as the mixed population continues to increase in the U.S., let us begin to understand these groups and identities as fluid rather than stagnant and finite.

While there is no dedicated or formal field focused on AsianLatinx communities, scholars have called for a field or framework that encapsulates the AsianLatinx experience, interethnic relations and mixing between Asian and Latinx peoples worldwide (Chao Romero 2011; DeGuzmán 2005). My approach to this article reviews the contributions and limitations of the literature on AsianLatinx communities to argue for an intentional AsianLatinx intervention. While not limited to only these fields, I engage across two academic fields: Critical Mixed Race Studies and Asian and Latinx interethnic relations in the U.S. In doing so, I hope that that the analysis of the literature across these disciplines bridges an opportunity to understand the various relations that Asian and Latinx communities have created for centuries by centering the experiences of different AsianLatinx groups. In the following sections, I focus on the transition from mixed race studies to critical mixed race studies, where I argue for considering an AsianLatinx intervention within the transition to CMRS. Next, I review the literature about Asian and Latinx interethnic relations and how situating AsianLatinxs within comparative and relational analyses complicates our understanding of these frameworks. Comparative and relational frameworks often compare communities in monoracial ways, negating the presence of mixed people that bridge and belong to these often siloed groups. Lastly, I pay particular attention to how AsianLatinx communities came to fruition through increased labor demands and geographical proximity in the U.S. and how these AsianLatinx communities created communities and families through exclusion. I acknowledge that the most significant limitation in arguing for an AsianLatinx intervention is the possibility of reinscribing the same logic of erasure and homogenization seen across the argument in favor of an AsianLatinx intervention. The purpose here is to create an intervention to continue the necessary conversations of embracing the cultural diversity of all AsianLatinx people instead of arguing for a unifying experience. The latter is simply impossible because if no Latinx and Asian American experiences are the same, in no way will an AsianLatinx experience in which these diverse cultures are intertwined ever be identical. Therefore, to begin having these conversations of diversifying the AsianLatinx experience, one must go through the process of convincing the reader of the essential contributions the broader AsianLatinx community can make toward CMRS, interethnic relations and contesting monoracial frameworks of race.

By centering the AsianLatinx individual, we can challenge previously acknowledged understandings of Asian and Latinx peoples worldwide. Acknowledging the mixed narratives of Asian and Latinx ancestry highlights how their narratives have been historically silenced and occluded from hegemonic narratives of Asian and Latinx identity. Before moving forward, I acknowledge that deferring to racial and ethnic markers such as Asian and Latinx might be somewhat limiting in terms of racial categorization. I do recognize that Blackness and indigeneity play a role in Latinx and Asian ancestry and it is with hopes that this call for an AsianLatinx intervention does not detract from or contribute to the erasure of Black, Indigenous, non-Asian and non-Latinx identifying peoples. Instead, an AsianLatinx intervention creates an opportunity for discourse on how AsianLatinx communities engage or disengage with these topics in the broader fields of Asian American and Latinx Studies.

2. Situating an AsianLatinx Intervention within Critical Mixed Race Studies

In this section, I reflect on the field of mixed race studies vis à vis CMRS and how an AsianLatinx intervention contributes to the developing field. The field has grown exponentially since the early published scholarship of Maria Root (1996, 2001). The Multiracial Experience (Root 2001) opened a pathway for mixed and critical mixed race studies. Root claims that people are ready for more comprehensive frameworks to discuss race and that one should be satisfied that more questions emerge than answers are being provided (pp. xxvii–xxviii). Root introduces what she calls the Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed Peoples, which included the following as an understanding of the mixed race experience: “a critical number of multiracial people of an age in positions to give voice to concerns and injustices; a biracial baby boom; and a continued social movement to dismantle racism” (p. 7). She explains her “bill of rights” by dividing the bill into three sections: resistance, revolution and change. She argues that the framework exposes how our lives are entwined with various mechanics of oppression through systemic beliefs, partial data or interpretation of data, rationalization and social distance (p. 14). Root writes:

If we resist this fragmentation, if we revolutionize the way we think about identity and the self in relationship to the other, we begin to free ourselves from an oppressive structure. When we refuse to garment ourselves or others, then we become capable of embracing the humanity in ourselves and the other.

(p. 14)

Although written nearly 30 years ago, it is essential to understand Root’s contribution to mixed race studies. The Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed Peoples is an example of the emerging conversations around mixed race occurring in the late 20th century. Following Root’s foundational research, Williams-León and Nakashima (2001) employ Maria Root’s framework on multiraciality and extend it to center the Asian American experience, disrupting the Black/white race paradigm seen within earlier publications on mixed race studies. Not only that, but this work also explores multiple minority relations and identities, thus expanding preconceived understandings of mixed identity by negating and unsettling whiteness from the conversation. The volume also seeks to go beyond the U.S.’ colonial borders, as we see in several essays of mixed Asian people worldwide in part four of the anthology, offering a perspective of multiracial consciousness beyond U.S. racial formation frameworks (Brinsfield 2001; Murphy-Shigematsu 2001; Parker et al. 2001; Van Tuyl et al. 2001; Weisman 2001). A significant contribution to this volume is that most of the studies are sociological studies, while previous studies were almost entirely centered on psychology. Williams-León and Nakashima noted that approaches to mixed race studies and intermarriages are moving beyond historical and psychological studies (Murphy-Shigematsu 2012). Expanding disciplines for the overarching field of mixed race studies is to begin looking at studies of mixed people beyond a psychological lens, allowing scholars to reconsider whom we can study and how we can continue studying the racial and ethnic dynamics of mixed people. As Michael Omi states in the foreword, this volume was long overdue for 2001 (Williams-León and Nakashima 2001, p. x). Mixed Asian Americans have been present in the U.S. since the earliest arrival and settlement of Asian immigrants. Thus, like Root (1996, 2001), this work also grounds the support for research on multiple minority AsianLatinx individuals. Most importantly, Williams-León and Nakashima (2001) support the argument in favor of an AsianLatinx intervention by demonstrating that the multiple minority literature and scholarship have existed since the early 2000s, justifying that nonwhite mixed people exist and that academia has a long way to go in recognizing the realities for mixed AsianLatinx people. This volume also signifies that the specific subfield of AsianLatinx studies is not farfetched and limited and that the realities of nonwhite AsianLatinx people are a growing community in the U.S.

Rondilla et al. (2017) challenge whiteness and its place in the CMRS field in their pathbreaking anthology Red and Yellow, Black and Brown. Claiming that “the study of multiracial people is the fastest-growing segment of ethnic studies” (p. 4), they note that most of the scholarship concerns people who are part white. The purpose of their book is not about those people but instead to center the experiences of racially/ethnically mixed people from multiple minority backgrounds. Moving away from previous narratives, the scholars turn toward the changing racial landscape of the U.S. and locations worldwide where mixing is standard. The volume draws on “social, psychological and political situations of mixed race people from multiple minority backgrounds, that is, people who have links to two or more peoples of color” (p. 4). The authors are adamant about curating a volume that decenters whiteness in multiracial studies and looks to the historically silenced mixed voices as an opportunity to engage with the understanding of race. The authors argue that CMRS is moving beyond the need to engage whiteness, which I argue is also central to an AsianLatinx intervention within CMRS. Rondilla, Guevarra Jr. and Spickard would most certainly agree that there is a need for AsianLatinx intervention in CMRS.

Romo (2017) focuses on the Blaxican population in Los Angeles and how authenticity policing enforces racial/ethnic boundaries for Blaxicans. More specifically, Romo explores interactional power dynamics between monoracial people of color and mixed race people. “Racial/ethnic authenticity policing is at the core of many of these conflicting interactions and how these interactions drive the development of new or post-civil rights hybrid racial/ethnic identities” (p. 127). She argues that Blaxicans exist at the borderlands between African American and Mexican American. This inbetween differs from white/minority mixed people because of phenotype and the connection to two separate histories of oppression, thus choosing both identities rather than one or the other that is generally seen for white/minority multiracial people. Employing intersectionality, matrix of domination and borderlands theory as frameworks of analysis, Romo writes that Blaxicans must navigate this inbetween of not being Mexican or Black enough, thus motivating individuals to identify as Blaxican and not one or the other. Through in-depth interviews, Romo concludes that Blaxican identities are “undefined and fluid” and choose to identify in a shared struggle across their historically marginalized communities, identifying with both and finding common ground on liberation for both Black and Mexican communities. Romo hints at the potential of centering rather than excluding a multiple minority mixed person in conversations of solidarity as an opportunity to unify communities.

Similarly to Romo’s claim of recognizing the mixedness of Blaxican, Desai (2017) claims that Indipinos must be seen as a mixed group in his article Bumbay in the Bay. The author opens with a vignette of his identity as an Indipino (Indian and Filipinx) being questioned at a conference at the Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS) (p. 147). Like the participants in Romo’s (2017) chapter, Desai clarifies that he is not any different from other mestizos at the conference and that just because he is of mixed multiple minority heritage, he should not be questioned on identity authenticity. In this chapter, Desai explores the Indipino experience, relaying the importance of the nuances in an identity that goes beyond “Filipino Indian” and “Indian Filipino.” Indipino moves beyond the hyphenation of ethnic identity, denoting that identifying through hyphenation splits self and community. Desai explains that Indipino includes mixed races and cultures, meaning that anyone of Indian ancestry who grows up in the Philippines is also considered Indipino. This identification also resonates with how I define AsianLatinxs, in that AsianLatinx identity comprises those who are Asian and Latinx while also acknowledging the uniqueness of the mixed identity.

Desai (2017) employs Rockquemore et al.’s (2009) multiracial identity formation framework to argue that racial category, racial identification and racial identity impact mixed race identity formation. Desai applies this framework to his study to better understand the formation of the Indipino identity and concludes that double minority women with ambiguous physical features were labeled Latina, with Latinx being seen as a catch-all category for people who fell out of other racial categories. The participants also note that they claim to be American more than anything else: “American is a synthesis of race and class that connects their mixed identity and their suburban American lifestyle in opposition to assimilationist constructions of essentialized Filipino and Indian identities” (p. 160). Thus, the participants being American meant they could be ambiguously mixed regardless of ethnic background. Although Desai only had a handful of participants, he found significant findings to understand Indipino identity formation better. More than anything else, Desai contributes to the growing CMRS field. While still in the early iterations of his work, the formation of the Indipino identity of those living in the U.S. depicts identity formation complexities across various levels, such as migration and transnational mixed identity. Desai’s intentionality of unhyphenating attends to the intricacies of identity formation separate to monoethnic communities, agreeing with other mixed race studies scholars (Guevarra 2012; Romo 2017; Root 1996). An AsianLatinx intervention like Desai’s is critical to understanding AsianLatinx mixed identity concerning their monoracial identities and, more broadly, their spatial context—such as the U.S.

Since Desai’s inclusion of migration in the composition of mixed race identity, Newman (2020) most recently considers the intersections of the immigration scholarship and mixed race studies in Revisiting the Marginal Man. Newman focuses on the narratives of adult multiracial people with at least one immigrant parent to “interrogate the use of multiracial identity as an indicator of assimilation” (p. 2). Broader themes from Newman’s study include the relationship between language and identity, the role of trips abroad and parents’ citizenship status. In her article, Newman highlights the theoretical shortcomings of race relations and assimilationist frameworks, especially when considering multiracial identity. Newman proposes the following:

Beyond the strength or fluidity of boundaries, there is potential to explore the prospect of new boundary constructions around this liminal “third racial” experience (Daniel 2010). This transitive space, passed over by the assimilation literature, may also be one of boundary construction.

(Daniel 2010, p. 12)

Thus, Newman argues that this multiracial experience should not be read as liminal and transitioning into assimilation, that third space, such as a multiracial identity, may exist separate from assimilationist frameworks. Rather than consider multiraciality as blurring boundaries or transitionary, Newman writes:

I argue that it should be analyzed as the locus of an individual, as well as a potential collective, identity. Although the institutional treatment of multiracial identity has undoubtedly changed, little has shifted in its application within analyses of assimilation… The analysis of multiracial identity formation must be updated to reflect these new social realities and contexts.

(p. 12)

Newman leaves the reader to reconsider how we engage in mixed identity discourse. What that means more broadly now, as U.S. demographics are drastically changing, is considering mixed identity beyond the transitional and allowing mixed identity to be separate from assimilation discourse.

The need to begin considering mixed race identity across traditional frameworks is addressed in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies, in Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies (Daniel et al. 2014). The authors in this article outline why the “critical” is needed in mixed race studies. The field began to gain traction in the mid-2010s, focusing on revisiting the previous scholarship to reassess the purpose of mixed race studies. The authors write:

Critical mixed race studies place mixed race at the critical center of focus. Multiracials become subjects of historical, social and cultural processes rather than simply objects of analysis. This involves the study of racial consciousness among racially mixed people, the world in which they live and the ideological, social, economic and political forces and policies that impact the social location of their mixed-race individuals and inform mixed-race experiences and identities.

(p. 8)

CMRS moves beyond identity politics by assessing racialization beyond monoracial discourse, particularly in the U.S. The scholars also emphasize the intertwined racial phenomena with gender, sex, sexuality, class and other categories. The field of CMRS and, more broadly, mixed identity has gone largely ignored. “This general lack of receptivity or attention to the topic of multiracial identity is due in part to the fact that U.S. social scientists, like the individuals and communities that were the primary focus of their studies, have internalized not only hypodescent but also monoracial norms” (p. 11). The scholars highlight that mixed race and multiraciality must be critical of potential problematics, such as discourse centering mixed identity as hybridity to ensure unequal power relations and other exploitative motives. Notions of colorblindness or discourse regarding post-racial ideology do not inform CMRS. The authors conclude with the following:

CMRS analyzes socio-historical contexts of slavery and U.S. colonialisms; U.S. empire and its consequences in Asia, the Pacific and Latin America; the rise of cosmopolitan citizens and the new globalization; the women’s, civil rights, black power, brown power, yellow power, red power, as well as the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) movements; and the post-1967 growth in the numbers offspring from interracial marriages… CMRS scholars explore these issues concurrently, understanding how they intersect and are mutually constructed, such as the relationship of mixed race to queer identities, women and feminism; transnationalism and diaspora; and questions of passing as well as authenticity in relation to the narration and counter-narration of the nation and nationalisms.

(p. 25)

CMRS is a growing field that continues to interrogate previous and current mixed race conversations worldwide. The scholars in the article leave the reader with one call for the future of critical mixed race studies: to create your version of what you want critical mixed race studies to be and let it be from your perspective even if it diverges or counters the one told by those in the article. As I argue in favor of an AsianLatinx intervention, I look to the path CMRS scholars have created and how this field allows mixed race scholars to come together and create a space where mixed people are central to the research.

Summary

Mixed race studies and, more importantly, CMRS has developed within the last decade. In this section, I outlined the temporal trajectory and the development of CMRS and situated an AsianLatinx intervention within CMRS. CMRS ultimately challenges society to think beyond monoracial/monoethnic understandings of racialization. Among many concerns, mixed people are often considered less or less authentic because there is a misconception that someone mixed is only half one identity and half the other. Mixed people are not seen as whole beings, which becomes a problem as it seeps into the exclusion of mixed people across all communities. As we see the scholars argue in this section, the mixed demographic continues to grow in the U.S. Newman (2020) argues that rather than seeing multiraciality as a liminal, transitional stage toward assimilation, one should consider multiraciality and mixed people as a potential collective identity. To assume mixed people are in a liminal space toward assimilation disregards and makes an assumption of one’s proximity to whiteness, which not all mixed people have the privilege or access to; how does someone who identifies as AfroLatinx or AsianLatinx reflect the flawed assimilationist argument that being mixed assumes one is moving toward whiteness, where a racial hierarchy continues to exist? This alludes to the fact that assimilationist scholars primarily function within monoracial frameworks and do not engage with multiple minority mixed people in the U.S. and it is evident that these narratives continue to be occluded.

The limitations to mixed race studies are that we are at a turning point in the field, looking more importantly toward a CMRS field in which valid critiques are now pointing the field toward a more reflexive and inclusive field that decenters whiteness and upholds multiple minority people. An AsianLatinx intervention engages with these nuances of homogeneity of mixed identity and engages with the multiple minority identities uniquely different from the experiences of majority minority mixed identities. AsianLatinxs have a different relationship to mixed identity than white and nonwhite mixed people in the U.S. Since Asian and Latinx communities are racialized differently to whiteness in the U.S., it is also essential to understand how AsianLatinxs are also racialized differently in the U.S. Although no collective AsianLatinx racialized experience exists, the importance lies in the added layer of multiracial racialization when placed into the context of the present monoracial frameworks within the U.S. CMRS alludes to how whiteness is placed upon mixed people rather than focusing on whiteness within the mixed individual (Strmic-Pawl 2022). It is critical to recognize this distinction because an AsianLatinx intervention thus contributes to CMRS because a focus on AsianLatinx research is not interested in whiteness in the same way that Rondilla et al. (2017) argue, but rather how mixed AsianLatinx identity has been impacted by whiteness across the U.S. The shift of mixed race studies to CMRS goes much further than inclusivity and identity politics to intentionally sit with the experiences of mixed nonwhite people and how monoracial/multiethnic understandings of race and ethnicity have hindered the possibilities of genuinely understanding the queries of mixed identity.

3. Asian and Latinx Interethnic Relations in the U.S.

This section turns to the Asian and Latinx interethnic relations in the U.S. Asian and Latinx communities have coexisted since the late 19th century from coast to coast in the U.S. and interactions between groups have yielded a myriad of responses. From intermarriages between Asian and Latinx people to understanding the growing AsianLatinx population due to these intimacies, I seek to understand how Asian and Latinx ethnic groups have interacted and situate the importance of AsianLatinx intimacies within the continual diversification of the U.S. This section focuses on the scholarship readily available in three categories: Asian and Latinx relational and comparative analysis, literary works within Asian and Latinx relations and AsianLatinx communities in the U.S. While these categories are not definitive and are potentially limiting, the distinction between these three categories allows one to see how Asian and Latinx communities have interacted in the U.S. and what factors contribute to these interethnic relations, as well as to understand how AsianLatinx people have negotiated their identities vis-à-vis racialization processes in the U.S. This section highlights the importance of Asian and Latinx interethnic relations and their shortcomings as a locus for future research for relational and comparative analysis by looking at the growing mixed AsianLatinx population in the U.S. By reviewing the current literature on Asian and Latinx interethnic relations in history, the literature and ethnic studies, relational and comparative frameworks’ limitations become more apparent. I argue that the limitations of an Asian and Latinx interethnic relations framework present an opening for AsianLatinx studies to expand understandings of interethnic relations beyond monoracial comparisons. Interethnic relations often negate the intimacies and nuances of the mixed AsianLatinx identity. These frameworks often compare monoracial and monoethnic groups, excluding the mixed individual that encompasses cultures and experiences that culminate between two or more cultures. Thus, this review opens avenues to continue studying and creating a new area of study that looks at AsianLatinxs beyond relational analysis, literary works and histories.

3.1. Asian and Latinx Interethnic Relations

Southern California, specifically Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley, have historically been locations of Asian and Latinx interethnic relations. Davis (2001) in Magical Urbanism (2001) writes the following on these interethnic relations:

Korean investors control thousands of low-income residential units in inner-city neighborhoods as well as the larger share of the “swap meet” space that dominates retail trade in Southcentral Los Angeles. New Asian and Latino residents also rub shoulders in Hollywood and a dozen other neighborhoods west of Downtown, while upwardly mobile Chicanos and affluent Chinese immigrants live side-by-side in the dim-sum-con-salsa suburbs of the eastern San Gabriel Valley.

(p. 58)

Choosing Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley in Southern California as sites of analysis is crucial because they have historically and spatially become central to Asian and Latinx interethnic relations. Molina (2006) in Fit to be Citizens? explains how Chinese, Mexican and Japanese communities were racialized vis-à-vis whiteness in late 19th century and early 20th century Los Angeles. Her book critiques the role of the public health sector as “scientifically objective,” when it was not and was used as a tool to racialize further and distance communities of color from citizenship rights and other public services. The purpose of Molina’s book is to understand “The process by which public health as an institution and a discourse evolved into a key site of racialization in late-nineteenth- through mid-twentieth-century Los Angeles—how it came to exert an influence that extended far beyond the realm of health” (p. 4). Molina argues, “by examining public health as a site of racialization, we will see how public health workers at the local level contributed to the construction of racial categories” (p. 5). This argument is necessary when the reader observes the breakdown of her chapters, how she observes the racialization of the Chinese, Mexican (American) and Japanese in the U.S. and how these racial projects change with proximity to whiteness.

Molina highlights the complications of the Black–white racial paradigm and the nuances of the insider/foreigner dichotomy to racializing minorities in the U.S. While Molina claims to focus primarily on the Mexican population in Los Angeles at the time, she does detail the specific strategies the city took to exclude the Chinese in Los Angeles. We saw laborers being excluded and launderers racialized into losing their businesses because, “The court maintained that the public needed to be protected from laundries because they were centers for ‘the propagation of disease [where] deleterious germs’ could spread to the surrounding atmosphere, giving rise to the danger of infection to persons coming into close proximity’ with the laundries” (p. 38). This became the coded language for attempts to remove the Chinese from Los Angeles. Throughout the book, this sentiment is repeated toward the Mexican and Japanese communities.

One limitation of the analysis within Fit to be Citizens? is the missing interethnic dialogue between the engaged minority groups in the book. An AsianLatinx intervention, I believe, will address how the impact of whiteness not only directly impacts the racial/ethnic groups in Molina’s book, but how other minority groups are also affected by this power dynamic. While Chinese people were targeted because of “yellow peril,” there was no understanding of how Mexican and Black communities responded to these racialized experiences was understood. Whether they were involved or not, much context is missing in this history between the different minority groups. Each chapter on a racialized minority seemed isolated from all other interracial factors except concerning whiteness. Understanding this relationship would have further supported Molina’s claim of racial hierarchy as superior/inferior and insider/foreigner. I understand this is out of her scope; however, it warrants attention to contextualize all minority groups to understand how they are collectively oppressed by whiteness. I do not believe it is enough to compare the experiences of minorities with only whiteness and have them be siloed experiences from each other. However, Molina’s development of race relations frameworks has been foundational to Asian and Latinx interethnic relations and other minority relations in the U.S.

In Race and Politics (Saito 1998), Saito writes on coalition building between Asian and Latinx communities through the collective oppression faced in the San Gabriel Valley. He diverges from centering a structural factor impacting Asian and Latinx communities as Molina does and instead focuses on location as a space for coalition building. During the late 20th century, the San Gabriel Valley became a hub for international, transnational commerce for Chinese communities. The massive immigration waves to the San Gabriel Valley were fueled by the 1965 Hart–Cellar Act, which removed the quota system for migration to the U.S. and contributed to the unification provisions that allowed relatives of workers with high-skilled occupations to migrate to the U.S. Saito underlies that the reason Latinx and Asian people live nearby is the result of the practice of economic and political segregation that has shaped and limited residential choices. The history of living in a community between Asian and Latinx people is not limited to only the San Gabriel Valley, but the history of the Japanese community in Boyle Heights shows that the San Gabriel Valley is not some unique location that became the hub for Asian and Latinx interrelations. The shared racist history that Asian and Latinx people faced in Monterey Park outline why the two communities have settled together in this region. Saito brings these two unlikely groups with racialized histories in Southern California into a conversation. Through grass-roots activism, city politics and racism, Asian and Latinx people living in Monterey Park became politicized within their communities. Saito delved into the development of panethnic identities in the rapidly diversifying region outside of Los Angeles. Ultimately, Saito claims that Latinx and Asian communities have faced similar political forces of exclusion, particularly that the San Gabriel Valley communities share similar political goals and alliances because of these shared histories.

Cheng (2013) continues where Saito (1998) concludes in his book on Asian and Latinx interethnic relations in the San Gabriel Valley. In The Changs Next Door to the Díazes, Cheng centers racial identity and how space influences these understandings. The author introduces the concept of regional racial formation, defining it as place-specific racial processes with the potential of challenging dominant hegemonic ideologies of race. By focusing on the predominately Asian and Latinx communities in the San Gabriel Valley, Cheng further analyzes the racialized perceptions of her participants of the San Gabriel Valley. One way an AsianLatinx intervention could build from Cheng’s regional racial formation is a more in-depth focus on how the intimacies of the Asian and Latinx communities living so close to each other foster and support interethnic relationships, even in places like the suburbs. Cheng alludes to some romances but never truly delves into how these two communities are intertwined and have led to mixing these two communities beyond a monoracial analysis of interethnic relations. Therefore, while this book looks to understand the role of space and racial formations ideology, an AsianLatinx intervention would further explore how space impacts Asian and Latinx intimacies. While I highlight this discrepancy between the Asian and Latinx interethnic relations approach, I want to carefully point out that Cheng’s work is one that I see as a broader trend within Asian and Latinx interethnic relations, relational race relations and comparative analysis. Most of the scholarship broadly looks at these relations from a monoethnic and monoracial perspective.

Similarly, Guerrero (2017) employs a race relations approach as the scholars mentioned earlier in Nuevo South. Guerrero compares the racialized experiences of Asian and Latinx peoples by looking at the Vietnamese and Cuban refugee relocation program at Fort Chaffee and the recent migration of Latinx poultry workers in the late 20th century and early 21st century. Guerrero employs and redefines what the Nuevo South is and what it is becoming. The Nuevo South builds on what was previously known as the New South in understanding how Latinx and Asian communities are increasingly redefining what the South is and how it continues to change demographically. “Nuevo South framework also grapples with the multifaceted ways in which Latinas/os and Asians are sometimes granted a modicum of acceptance by established communities, how they locate themselves within a field of social and racial positions…” (p. 11). Guerrero builds on Cheng’s regional racial formation, contributing to the racialization literature. Two arguments remain central to Guerrero’s book: to understand processes of racialization for the Vietnamese, Cuban and Mexican groups, there must be an understanding of the place-specific ideologies that extend to the ways these migrant groups were racialized; in this case, a racially white conservative and evangelical northwest Arkansas. In tandem with the first, Guerrero argues that national discourse and larger-scale racialization processes influenced and informed Vietnamese and Cuban refugees’ local racialization processes and the most recent influx of Latinx migrant poultry workers in Arkansas.

Guerrero explains changing demographics in the South through her Nuevo South framework. As the South continues to diversify, the outdated Black–white binary paradigm is no longer applicable to the South, with the need to start considering how migrant populations are reshaping the demographics and racialization of the South. Nuevo South contributes to place-specific racialization processes and how minority groups are racialized differently in the national discourse. Like previously noted across the literature in this section, there is no analysis of how the Asian and Latinx communities in the South are racialized in relation to each other. I have noted this limitation in Fit to be Citizens? (Molina 2006), in so much that the comparative framework or relational analysis seems to concern racialization processes from hegemonic structures—essentially, how minority groups are racialized in isolated settings only to whiteness, negating how minorities are racialized among each other within larger structures of whiteness.

The literature on Asian and Latinx interethnic relations seems to maintain monoracial analyses of these two demographics. The approach to interethnic relations seldom includes the interactions between minorities—in this case, Asian and Latinx communities. As seen in this section, most of these interethnic relations understand how Asian and Latinx communities have been affected by the same hegemonic structures or are compared vis-à-vis spatial location—for example, racism in the public health sector, living in the San Gabriel Valley and lastly racialization within the deep systemic racism of the South. The experiences of mixed AsianLatinx people are scarcely found within these texts and ultimately speak to the more significant exclusion of mixed people in the literature regarding interethnic relations. In the following section, I turn to literary works that again draw on interethnic relations between Asian and Latinx ethnic groups and their shared histories of oppression in the U.S. Mirroring the similar analytical frameworks being used across this section, it becomes apparent that race relations and comparative analysis have not engaged with the mixed person, which I argue should be a critical component to understanding race relations between Asian and Latinx communities—a position that AsianLatinx-centered research would approach.

3.2. Asian and Latinx Interethnic Literary Connections

In this section, I turn to literary works to understand how cultural production has been used to understand Asian and Latinx experiences in the U.S. I begin with literary works that are broadly comparative and then focus on the latter portion of the literature review to analyze how AsianLatinx people have been incorporated into literary works and how their identities are negotiated by their community or themselves. I highlight these texts to underscore the discrepancies in interethnic relations and relational works and how these fields across disciplines contribute to the erasure of AsianLatinx peoples. By centralizing literary works, one can see that even catch-all terms such as “LatinAsian” do not consider mixed AsianLatinx people. I argue that this further erases AsianLatinx people who cannot see themselves represented within their cultures because of dominant homogeneous generalizations of Asian and Latinx identity in the U.S.

LatinAsian Cartographies, by Susan Thananopavarn (2018), is a recent addition to the literature on Asian and Latinx interrelations in the U.S. Her approach to Asian and Latinx interrelations via literary comparison examines experiences of being a racial minority in the U.S. Thananopavarn examines the Latinx and Asian American literature to rewrite official national narratives and situate U.S. history within a global context that resituates understanding of what it means to be American. She illustrates shared experiences of U.S. imperialism, nativistic racism, Cold War divisions and globalization by theorizing on the transpacific zones of Asian–Latinx interactions created via migration and colonization. Thananopavarn claims the book is comparative and intersectional, acknowledging how transpacific zones by Asian–Latinx communities have been created by centuries of migration and colonization. By employing a framework Thananopavarn calls the LatinAsian contact zone, one can better understand how similar systemic oppressions intertwine Asian and Latinx communities. Thananopavarn defines the LatinAsian contact zone as the following:

I propose the United States may productively be understood as a LatinAsian contact zone. In this place, people of Latin American and Asian descent constitute groups with unique histories and intersect in ways that reflect centuries of global labor migration U.S. military intervention abroad.

(p. 4)

Her theoretical framework reinterprets U.S. history through the lens of Asian American and Latinx communities without necessarily bringing the two groups into conversation besides comparing their experiences to U.S. intervention and U.S. systemic oppression. Thus, as previously noted in other examples of interethnic relations, this limits the conversation of these two groups interacting with each other, calling for further expansion of Asian and Latinx interrelations beyond comparative histories. While this text is essential to understanding that Asians and Latinxs in the U.S. have been erased in textbooks and mistreated throughout their history in the U.S., the literature on the interrelations between these two groups must continue to be explored beyond comparative literature. I argue that Thananopavarn interprets what María DeGuzmán (2005) meant by Latinasia with limitations to the possibilities of a Latinasia. In Spain’s Long Shadow, María DeGuzmán writes:

The displacement to China of a description that could be interpreted as primarily about Latin(a/o) American identity makes all the sense in the world when one thinks of the tremendous mixture of peoples and cultures in China. Even more apt, somehow, is the conjoining of the “Latin” with the Chinese or, more generally, Asian, in light of transnational migratory patterns and demographic processes in the Americas over the last three centuries—that is, the enormous influx of Asian immigrants and the movement of Latina/o peoples across the Americas, south to north and west to east. What has and will continue to result from these converging processes might begin to be described under the rubric Latinasia.

(p. 301)

DeGuzmán indicates to the reader that Latinasia is the converging processes and mixtures of both peoples and cultures from Latin America and Asia across the Americas, situating AsianLatinx understandings most organically through understandings of inevitable mixings between the groups. While understanding that Thananopavarn extends Latinasia to the U.S. as explained in her LatinAsian contact zone framework, I would argue that María DeGuzmán defines Latinasia beyond just the convergence of shared spatial location and oppressive nature of the U.S. onto Asia and Latin America. DeGuzmán alludes to understanding how Asia and Latin America converge through intermarriage, mixed identity and cultural mixing. Essentially, Latinasia can be seen heavily in the works of Asian diaspora scholars and how these convergences have led to AsianLatinx mixed communities (Camacho 2012; Chang 2017; Chao Romero 2011; Delgado 2013; Gonzalez 2017; Hu-DeHart 2000; Lee 2018; López 2013; López-Calvo 2008; Masterson and Funada-Classen 2004; Siu 2007; Triana and Herrera 2009; Young 2014).

Similarly, Le-Khac (2020), in Giving Form to an Asian and Latinx America, draws upon a literary comparison between Asian and Latinx Cold War migrant communities in the U.S. Le-Khac introduces what he calls transfictional form. He explains that this framework “describes narrative works that create an effect of many distinct, semiautonomous stories, each focusing on different characters and events but taking place within the same imagined world” (p. 8–9). By focusing on Latinx and Asian American authors’ literary works, Le-Khac traces the Dominican Republic and Vietnam histories and the relationship these countries have to the U.S. post-Hart–Cellar Act of 1965. While many of the authors included in the text are different in literary aesthetics, Le-Khac explores the relationship of disruptive U.S. forces that have contributed to the violence of the Dominican and Vietnamese communities going beyond the U.S. nation-state. In particular, the author focuses on the effect of two U.S. invasions in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic within two months of each other and how these invasions were informed by each other and contributed to the mass displacement of Vietnamese and Dominicans to the U.S. Again, as we have previously seen with other scholars across this literature review, Le-Khac argues that Asian and Latinx communities are interconnected because of U.S. imperialist powers. Le-Khac writes:

They share an intertwined history that this book traces through a shared aesthetic paradigm, an interlinked yet discontinuous transfictional form that structures many contemporary Asian American and Latinx fictions…Within the shared history of these groups are the potential for solidarities that could confront the global military and capitalist forces buffeting so many of their members and intervene in the present and future of the United States and its relations to the world.

(p. 5)

Understanding the potential of shared oppressions imposed by the U.S. onto Latinx and Asian communities, Le-Khac argues there is immense potential for coalition building and cross-ethnic organizing. He recognized how an understanding of these shared oppressions may lead to an emergent formation not yet perceivable by writing the following:

This emergent formation can become a political force only if recognized across minority communities that currently see their fates separate. Read together, literature by Asian Americans and Latinxs make this formation palpable. Their aesthetics give it a legible shape, frame it into shareable stories, make visible its tensions and help us imagine its possibilities. They give form to an emerging Asian and Latinx America.

(p. 5)

Le-Khac leads the reader to imagine a world beyond literary works and hopes that transfictional form can move beyond the literature to see Asian American and Latinx communities build solidarities and new possibilities.

In Somos Asiáticos, Kang and Torres-Saillant (2016) produce a literature review that challenges the dominant Black–white narrative of race relations in the U.S. Looking at the Asian and Latinx communities, they underline how they have fostered connections through the arts, intermarriage, economically, politically and culturally. While there is a shortage of scholarship on AsianLatinx mixed relations, the authors review and discuss the literature that has normalized these realities and shown us the possibilities of AsianLatinx intermarriages and AsianLatinx mixed peoples. This review differs from the rest of the literary works in this section and the broader literature review. It includes how Asian and Latinx communities have converged beyond comparative analysis and shared systemic oppressor—the U.S.’ imperialist nation-state.

The scholars across this section all similarly write on Asian and Latinx coalition building and the possibilities of understanding their intertwined shared oppressions. Kang and Torres-Saillant (2016), Thananopavarn (2018) and Le-Khac (2020) all share the possibilities for a future of solidarity between Asian and Latinx global communities. The scholars in this section clearly outline how these two communities come together. However, without the scholarship produced on Asian and Latinx relations beyond the understanding of shared histories and oppressions, I argue that we are left with empty hands imagining only solidarity movements, negating the realities of AsianLatinx mixed people who are living the realities of Asian and Latinx interethnic relations in the U.S. In the following sections, we will see how AsianLatinx people have existed in the U.S. and how they navigated and negotiated their mixed identity as multiple minority mixed peoples.

3.3. AsianLatinxs in the U.S.

AsianLatinx people have a long history in the U.S. and, while I only discuss a few of the texts on AsianLatinx communities, the literature available speaks to how AsianLatinxs have not been central to the scholarship on Asian Americans and Latinxs in the U.S. Karen Leonard (1992) sought to change that by centering her research on California’s Punjabi–Mexican community that emerged through agricultural labor demands in the 20th century in Making Ethnic Choices. As a result of the labor shortage, Punjabi men came to work in the Imperial Valley of California and, as their time was prolonged, they began to intermarry with Mexican women. Leonard documents the lived experiences of the Punjabi–Mexican families and the issues they faced navigating their multiethnic families and identities. Leonard theoretically delves into ethnic identity formation through regional economic context and public policies. Regarding ethnic identity, Leonard also observes how identity changes through generation, gender, stage of life and social class. One prominent theme addressed in her book is “the articulation of gender power relationships and the problematic of ethnic identity within as well as outside of family” (p. 13). She highlights the purpose of observing such a small community in Southern California with the following:

All three themes emphasize individual and family life processes that is, micro-level processes, with the political economy. Here was a community so small and idiosyncratic that the state took no official notice of it—a community that lasted only one, possibly two generations in any structural sense. Nevertheless, its history can tell us a great deal across time, space and context. In particular, its history offers insights into the nature of ethnic pluralism in the United States.

(p. 14)

Leonard’s work is critical to understanding labor migration and how this has increased intermarriages between two distinct ethnic groups. As one of the earliest groups in the U.S. to intermarry between ethnic Asian and Latinx communities, it is crucial to understand how migration impacts lived realities for migrants in the U.S.

Drawing on San Diego’s demographics, Guevarra (2012), in Becoming Mexipino, highlights to the reader that San Diego has the second-largest enclave of Filipinxs worldwide and Mexicans constitute the largest group of Latinxs in San Diego. While Guevarra Jr. outlines the collective contribution to economic and social development in San Diego by Filipinxs and Mexicans, his focus is that there had been no meaningful analysis of San Diego’s Mexican and Filipinx groups in relation to each other. Guevarra Jr. writes on culture, location and religion as factors for the high intermarriage rates between Filipinxs and Mexicans in California. He argues that “racial and ethnic groups have always functioned in relation to each other, not as separate entities” (p. 170). His book is essentially a social-historical interpretation of Mexicans and Filipinxs who met in San Diego from 1903 to 1965. This period reflects the first migration of Filipinxs to San Diego in the 20th century and the Immigration Act of 1965 that impacted both Mexican and Filipinx communities. Guevarra Jr. uniquely brings cultural, social and historical similarities into the conversation between two groups coming together in San Diego. His work from all angles focuses on the interethnic relations between Filipinxs and Mexicans in San Diego. He turns to newspapers, census records, immigration records and marital records from Seattle, Washington to Acapulco, Mexico. He also incorporates oral histories with Filipinxs, Mexicans and Mexipinxs across multiple generations. While his work engages with interethnic relations between Mexicans and Filipinxs in San Diego, Guevarra Jr. engages with the two communities’ intimacies. By engaging with the Mexipinx community, Guevarra Jr. goes beyond just the comparative analysis of U.S. hegemonic oppression; he engages with the generation after and the mixed Mexipinx community to understand how this community both navigates and negotiates their identity between their Mexican, Filipinx and broader U.S. American identities.

Similarly, Bengali Harlem Bald (2013) explores South Asian labor migration to the U.S. Bald explores the South Asian community lost when the United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind case declared that South Asian migrants were not eligible for a pathway to citizenship. As this book focuses primarily on the early 20th century, the context of the Bengali migrants to Harlem and their relationships with Puerto Ricans in New York contains essential insight into the South Asian and Latinx interrelations fostered by immigration. Bald indirectly highlighted the effect of ethnic enclaves and when different groups live close to each other, it can foster intermarriages and other relationships between South Asians and Latinxs. Although the text’s focus is historical, it is essential to consider how South Asian and Latinx communities living in proximity to each other can shape the different forms of created relationships, as we see with the Bengali and Puerto Rican communities. In Harlem, the Bengali migrant primarily encompassed men working on ships, settled in the Puerto Rican area of Harlem and eventually intermarried with the Puerto Rican women. In the later chapters of his book, Bald delves into these intermarriages’ dynamics and provides vignettes of the BengaliRican children from these intermarriages and their mixed multiple minority identity dynamics. We can see and understand how AsianLatinx identity has manifested as early as the 20th century in various places across the country, as we saw in the Imperial Valley, San Diego and Harlem.

Lastly, in Ocampo’s (2016) book The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race, Asian and Latinx interethnic relations manifest in the Filipinx community’s lives. He writes that Filipinxs are often seen as racially ambiguous, transgressing between Asian and Latinx communities and often relating to the Latinx community, alluding to the fact that Filipinx and Latinx communities have a shared history of Spanish colonization. Ocampo argues that Filipinxs embody an identity often seen in the confines of Asian and Latinx communities. He seeks to document how Filipinxs carve out their racial place in American society. Using interviews and surveys, Ocampo unveils the ways Filipinxs have found a shared collective identity with ethnic groups outside of their own. Ocampo contributes to AsianLatinx studies to push scholars to think beyond the confines of arbitrary racial and ethnic lines and see an ethnic group such as Filipinxs as an ethnic group that is Asian, Latinx and AsianLatinx. As we saw in Romero and Escudero (2012), the authors also include a third category that includes Filipinxs, acknowledging how the Filipinx community has a shared history of Spanish colonization and U.S. intervention and imperialism as seen in Latin America and Asia.

4. Conclusions

In this article, I argue that an AsianLatinx intervention would not only benefit the fields of Critical Mixed Race Studies and Asian and Latinx interethnic relations, but also benefit traditional disciplines and other traditional disciplines through an interdisciplinary intervention. By nature, focusing on a particular community, such as the large AsianLatinx community worldwide, to engage holistically and intentionally will not limit this field to a particular academic discipline. The literature reviewed in this article allows us to see how scholars have engaged with various global AsianLatinx communities and the potential for future studies. The importance is that the amount of literature centering the AsianLatinx demographic continues to grow to allow scholars to continue building on this scholarship. Although AsianLatinx studies is not academically recognized as a field of study, this does not indicate that scholars have not engaged with AsianLatinx communities because the literature on these diverse communities has existed for decades, as demonstrated in this article. I claim that a dedicated AsianLatinx intervention rediverts and recenters AsianLatinx narratives, allowing us to understand and make sense of racialization processes for the AsianLatinx diaspora across the globe.

I acknowledge that I cannot mention all the literature on AsianLatinx communities worldwide; it is simply a task too grand for one article. However, I want to acknowledge one limitation to this growing AsianLatinx intervention. In particular, the nascent yet salient literature presents the experiences and identity formation of multiple minority AsianLatinxs, such as with have parents from Latin America and Asia. This population is essential to recognize, considering that the Asian and Latinx migrant communities continue to be the largest migrating groups to the U.S. and, as DeGuzmán (2005) alludes to in her book, as the convergence of a Latinasia north, south, east and west across the Americas (p. 301). As the AsianLatinx multiple minority populations continue to grow, research centering AsianLatinx experiences and identity formation expands pre-existing frameworks of racialization processes. Thus, these limitations allow for the scholars invested in AsianLatinx communities to take the field in all directions, expanding, elaborating and imagining a new reality in which AsianLatinx communities worldwide are no longer relegated to the margins—but intentionally centered.

This article attempts to centralize the importance of an AsianLatinx intervention that reaches across various disciplines engaged with AsianLatinxs and situates them within a conversation that further develops a potential AsianLatinx studies field. Across CMRS and Asian and Latinx interethnic relations, limitations all point to the lack of autonomy that allows AsianLatinxs to dictate their own identity and understandings of their identity. Much of the critique in including AsianLatinxs as an essential demographic of study originates from the harmful reductionist tendencies that racial and ethnic categorization creates, and I recognize that although categorization is essential, there are also limitations. Therefore, I acknowledge that although the purpose of this article calls for an AsianLatinx intervention, I am also partaking in these reductionist categories and acknowledge that AsianLatinxs are not a homogenous population. Our experiences are unique and important and I hope this call for an AsianLatinx intervention continues to grow in ways that allow us to speak our truth without reducing our identities for the sake of validity and visibility.

Ultimately, the scholarship regarding global AsianLatinx communities will continue to grow because we, as AsianLatinxs, continue to grow every day around worldwide. I end with the following quote, which I opened with by the late Toni Morrison, “I stood at the border, stood at the edge and claimed it as central. l claimed it as central and let the rest of the world move over to where I was” (Deans et al. 1998). This quote emphasizes the importance of reclaiming what becomes the central focus or canon. I do not intend to co-opt Toni Morrison’s words and fully understand the context of her quote in relation to Blackness. However, I want to acknowledge the importance and possibilities if we can situate AsianLatinxs as central rather than at the edges to understand better diaspora, mixed identity and racial processes in the U.S. and worldwide.