The reading, “Latinos in the U.S. Race Structure” explains how Latin Americans view race and the way that race is viewed overall in the United States. The reading gives reasons as to why there is a disconnect between the two viewpoints. After reading the article, I saw two issues that Rodriguez helped me clarify and they were; how Latin Americans understanding of race differ from the understanding of the U.S and how Latinos’ experiences of race show that race is manmade.
The first issue that Rodriguez helped me understand was how Latinos perception of race differs from the U.S. I say this is an issue because whenever there are opposing views there are problems. In the reading Rodriguez talks about her own experience with how the U.S views her.
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I can relate to her observation about skin color effecting your status because when I was a child in school the largest group of kids, usually white, would only want to play with other white kids and since they were the largest group they controlled the playground. Subtle experiences like this show that there is something bigger happening that is effecting the U.S. This problem of status based on race stems from the fact that most people that are not Hispanic do not have a problem identifying themselves in terms of race because most can pick Black or White or Native American. For the Hispanic population we are left somewhere in the middle and so we cannot identify with the larger groups. This also ties into another point that Rodriguez touched on and that was about immigrating to the U.S and having to assimilate into America. As Latinos were coming to settle in the United States they had their own social hierarchy from their native country, now that they moved they had to conform to a new social construct that was already in place. The whites were usually on top of the social ladder and blacks where on the