What’s Your “Street Race”? Leveraging Multidimensional Measures of Race and Intersectionality for Examining Physical and Mental Health Status among Latinxs

Abstract

Using the 2015 Latino National Health and Immigration Survey (N = 1,197), we examine the relationship between physical and mental health status and three multidimensional measures of race: (1) street race, or how you believe other “Americans” perceive your race at the level of the street; (2) socially assigned race, or what we call ascribed race, which refers to how you believe others usually classify your race in the United States; and (3) self-perceived race, or how you usually self-classify your race on questionnaires. We engage in intersectional inquiry by combining street race and gender. We find that only self-perceived race correlates with physical health and that street race is associated with mental health. We also find that men reporting their street race as Latinx or Arab were associated with higher odds of reporting worse mental health outcomes. One surprising finding was that for physical health, men reporting their street race as Latinx were associated with higher odds of reporting optimal physical health. Among women, those reporting their street race as Mexican were associated with lower odds of reporting optimal physical health when compared to all other women; for mental health status, however, we found no differences among women. We argue that street race is a promising multidimensional measure of race for exploring inequality among Latinxs.