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This is a richly-detailed ethnographic account of the powerful role that race and colour play in organizing the lives and thoughts of ordinary Mexicans. It presents a previously untold story of how individuals in contemporary urban Mexico construct their identities, attitudes, and practices in the context of a dominant national belief system.

In recent decades, an increasing number of Latin American countries have included ethnoracial questions on their censuses, giving rise to unprecedented data on monoracial and multiracial forms of classification. In Mexico, the government launched a count of its black population for the first time in the nation's history in 2015, in addition to its long-standing practice of enumerating its indigenous population. Most recently in 2018, it conducted a survey, again asking about both black and indigenous identification. Within this short time span, the black population grew from 1.8 percent to 5.9 percent, becoming a sizable, statistically visible minority. A large majority of black individuals also identified as indigenous, revealing an important form of dual-minority multiracialism. In this article, we analyze these unprecedented data, detailing the size, composition, and growth of these populations. We use the Mexican case to illustrate the potential implications of measuring ethnoracial inequality using single- versus dual-category approaches. We find that black disadvantage is considerably more pronounced when explicitly allowing for multiracial classification. Methodologically, our findings contribute to nascent conversations about how to incorporate the new social and statistical realities of multiracialism in inequality analyses. Theoretically, we expand the multiracialism literature from its traditional focus on part-white mixtures, to a focus on overlapping minority classification. Finally, we build on theories of intersectionality, which generally focus on intersections of oppression across multiple "master statuses" (e.g., race, class, and gender), by also examining intersecting oppressions within the single master status of race.

How people understand ethnoracial inequality, or their stratification beliefs, is an important concern for social scientists. Stratification beliefs can be highly influential in the development of individuals' political attitudes and support for social policies. Despite this, research on stratification beliefs is limited in a number of ways. First, whereas much attention has been given to Whites', and to some degree Blacks', stratification beliefs, the attitudes of those in the "racial middle" have been largely neglected, despite their growing demographic presence. Second, much of the literature on stratification beliefs has focused on whether individuals adopt cultural or structural explanations for ethnoracial inequality, with less understanding of how people use a combination of these explanations to interpret inequality. Finally, theoretical and empirical knowledge of stratification beliefs is based largely on survey data. In an attempt to address these gaps, this research draws on interview and supplemental survey data from 70 Mexican Americans to provide an in-depth exploration of their stratification beliefs. The authors pay particular attention to respondents' use of mixed explanatory modes, illustrating how they draw on cultural and structural discourses to make sense of the world around them. Ultimately, the authors argue that scholars need to pay attention to the interconnections among ideology, everyday experiences, and identity to understand the complexities of stratification beliefs.

In 'Durable Ethnicity', Edward Telles and Christina A. Sue examine what ethnicity means and how it is negotiated in the lives of multiple generations of Mexican Americans. Rooted in a large-scale longitudinal and representative survey of 1500 Mexican Americans, Telles and Sue draw on in-depth interviews to examine individual ethnic strategies and demonstrate that integration is often a back and forth process that varies by individual rather than a one-way movement.

In this article, we examine a large, interdisciplinary, and somewhat scattered literature, all of which falls under the umbrella term race mixture. We highlight important analytical distinctions that need to be taken into account when addressing the related, but separate, social phenomena of intermarriage, miscegenation, multiracial identity, multiracial social movements, and race-mixture ideologies. In doing so, we stress a social constructivist approach to race mixture with a focus on boundary crossing. Finally, we also demonstrate how ideologies and practices of race mixture play out quite differently in contexts outside of the United States, particularly in Latin America. Race-mixture ideologies and practices in Latin America have been used to maintain racial inequality in the region, thus challenging recent arguments by U.S. scholars that greater racial mixture leads to a decline in racism, discrimination, and inequality.