This chapter argues that the terms “Latinx” and “latinidad” are messy signifiers that allow us to contend with Latinx’s complicated racial history. While the term Latinx continues to be controversial, and scholars such as Tatiana Flores have examined the case for cancelling latinidad, “Racing Latinidad” points to how latinidad can signify particular political commitments and affinities. Through readings of Manuel Muñoz’s What You See in the Dark (2011) and Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa’s Daughters of the Stone (2009), this chapter illuminates how excavating racial histories outside the logic of the state is a way to summon a politics to imagine a people. Within this framework, “Racing Latinidad” ultimately argues for embracing the incoherence of latinidad as term that resists legibility and visibility and thus institutionalization and state management.

In this essay, I show how Chicanx and Latinx writing critiques assimilation sociology for failing to account for histories of racialization that defy the telos of integration and harmonious coexistence. In addition, a range of Latinx writing demonstrates a different blind spot in assimilation sociology: namely, the way it neglects the inextricability of gender and sexuality from cultural identity. Finally, as I show in the concluding section, Latinx writing encourages us to attend to the role of the state in facilitating or impeding the integration of immigrant and racialized groups. In the last thirty years, immigration policy has been a particular, often violent obstacle for the integration of Latinx migrants, resulting in a situation where many migrants paradoxically assimilate without being assimilated. Assimilation sociology was once a discourse centering primarily on cultural citizenship, but in the absence of legal citizenship, contemporary Latinx writing suggests that cultural citizenship is not enough.