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Abstract

Many U.S. education researchers studying racism and minoritized groups, including Latinxs, face the question of how to conceptualize Latinx vis-à-vis race. This question is important to the education field because schools—and education research—contribute to our society’s understanding of race and the formation of racialized groups. The author argues that not conceptualizing Latinx as a U.S.-based racial category obscures the racialization process in three ways. First, it simplifies the concept of race as constructed only on visual characteristics. Second, it misses the opportunity to connect the critiques of the category’s essentialism and exclusion as a symptom of racialization’s nefarious process and purpose. Third, it ignores that racialization is context-based. The conclusion suggests future directions for education research, theory, and practice.

Keywords

conceptual change critical theory cultural analysis ethnicity Hispanic Latino/a race racialization social context

Although defining “race”¹ and “Latinx”² in the United States is contentious, it is important that education researchers do so because schools—and education research—shape societal ideas of race and the formation of racialized groups³ (Chávez-Moreno, 2025; Moses, 2002). This is particularly essential for studies centered on people labeled as “Latinx”—a concept debated across disciplines as either an ethnic category, a racial category, or both (e.g., Aparicio et al., 2022; Lacayo, 2017). Like scholars in other fields, some education scholars do not explicitly describe “Latinx” as a racialized label, even as they recognize or research Latinxs’ experiences with racism (as found by Chávez-Moreno, 2023). But others have recently joined the interdisciplinary debate, revealing tensions in how the field conceptualizes Latinx in relation to race (e.g., Busey & Silva, 2021; Calderon & Urrieta, 2019; Chávez-Moreno, 2021b; Dache et al., 2019; J. López & Irizarry, 2022). This article discusses some of these tensions, particularly regarding the field’s reluctance to recognize Latinx as a racialized group.

I argue for conceptualizing Latinx as it relates to race for several interconnected reasons. First, when the concept is not defined, readers are left to surmise whether Latinx refers to a racialized or ethnic category or a combination thereof. This ambiguity may also lead to conflating race and ethnicity—an issue present in the education field,⁴ which sometimes also hesitates to conceptualize or theorize race.⁵ Second, because Latinxs comprise the largest minoritized group in the United States (A. Flores, 2017), how scholars define “Latinx” affects how people understand other racialized groups and the concept of race itself (Chávez-Moreno, 2023, 2025). It also affects how people think about and challenge America’s racial logics and white supremacist hierarchy (e.g., Gómez, 2020). Furthermore, how researchers and practitioners conceptualize Latinx racialization affects how they envision schooling addressing the needs of Latinxs (Moses, 2002), the largest minoritized student population in U.S. public schools (National Center for Education Statistics, 2020). These reasons ground my assertion that by exposing and theorizing racialization, one can move to challenge the oppressive forces that obscure these processes. My positionality as a scholar working to dismantle racial logic and oppression drives me toward theorizing race and racialization with other scholars in amicable debate. Ultimately, this article offers my commentary and a cautionary note against the reluctance in education research to conceptualize Latinx as a racial category.

I start the article by defining race and highlighting racialization’s purpose and process, offering brief connections to education scholarship. In the second section, I advocate for conceptualizing Latinx as a racial construct. The third section discusses three tensions that arise when education researchers do not conceptualize Latinx as a racialized group. The conclusion provides suggestions for achieving conceptual clarity when researching race and racialization and reaffirms the need for education research, theory, and practice to conceptualize Latinx as a racialized construct to expose the process of racialization.

Defining Race

Race, or the ideology that there are racialized groups, was invented by European elites as a system of categorization in their colonial projects to justify their domination of others (Quijano, 2000). “Race” referred to the false idea that humans reproduced in isolated regions, thereby creating biologically distinct groups, each with its own lineage. Espousal of a biological conception of race gave way after the 1960s to a more culturally based racism, focusing from the White referent as “inherently biologically superior” to it as cultural “normality” (Hall, 2021). Although the problematic interpretations of genetic ancestry tests (e.g., 23andMe) and other genomic work have contributed to the persistence of biological interpretations of race (Omi & Winant, 2015), the idea of “culture” is still often used to allude to race and so functionally becomes a stand-in for biological racism (for an example of this occurring with the Latinx group, see Lacayo, 2017).

Although people often use culture to allude to race, common understandings in the United States define race based on observable physical features tied to ancestry and geographic origin (Obasogie, 2020) and through a Black/White binary—perspectives that schools often perpetuate (Chávez-Moreno, 2023; Santiago, 2017). However, because race is biologically false, what forms racialized groups are not their similar physical traits but, rather, a social process called “racialization” (HoSang & LaBennett, 2020). Accordingly, I use the phrase “racialized group/groups” to emphasize the social process and systematic imposition experienced by people rather than “race/races,” which could imply inherent features of individuals (following other scholars, e.g., Darder & Torres, 2011). I also deliberately use “racialized group” to spotlight racialization—the active process of inventing, perpetuating, and changing social groups through distributing resources along racial lines (Omi & Winant, 2015). Racialization is a nefarious⁶ and dehumanizing process that essentializes cultural practices, sorts people into groups based on artificial and arbitrary delineations, arranges the groups into a racial hierarchy that signifies their perceived humanness and worthiness, and allocates resources accordingly (HoSang & LaBennett, 2020; Omi & Winant, 2015). This leads to material consequences for people who are racialized as “Others,” and in a white supremacist society, it advantages White people.

The racialization process occurs through social practices, such as discourse and unequal resource distribution, which construct differences to delineate group boundaries. Importantly, despite the United States’s explicit definition of race as tied to physical characteristics, social practices form racialized groups and lead us to see race as visual (Obasogie, 2020). As Omi and Winant (2015) explained, “once specific concepts of race are widely circulated and accepted as a social reality, racial difference is not dependent on visual observation alone” (p. 111). The prevalence of racial logic has led to racialized groups’ boundaries being marked not only by physical features⁷ but also by other indicators, such as language, national origin, and citizenship status (Chávez-Moreno, 2021b; Rosa, 2019). For example, U.S. society delineates the Latinx group, which has at times been explicitly labeled as “Spanish speakers” (and later “Hispanic”; Mora, 2014), as a racialized group based on the perception of a shared Spanish language (Chávez-Moreno, 2021b, 2025).

Expanding the conceptualization of race beyond the visual does not negate the realities of anti-Blackness or colorism, nor is this broader understanding mutually exclusive to these and other dimensions of racism. Instead, it builds on historical and social science evidence showing how the United States constructs racialized groups in differential and relational ways (Chávez-Moreno, 2025; Molina et al., 2019). This broader understanding of race lends support to theorizing with specificity to uncover the varied ways racial boundaries and oppression operate. This encourages employing, for example, an anti-Blackness lens to reveal how the racialization process affects Black people differently (e.g., considering the afterlife of slavery; Dumas & ross, 2016).

Building on this broader understanding of race, recent scholarship has conceptualized racialization as a relational construct, meaning that one group’s racialization is contingent on how other groups are racialized (e.g., Molina et al., 2019). Scholars such as Du Bois and Fanon understood the reciprocal significance of the categories White and Black: The value attributed to the former is derived from the devaluation of the latter. Relationality, then, also outlines how other racialized groups (e.g., Asian American, Latinx) are defined, positioned, and compared in the racial hierarchy (Molina et al., 2019). Indeed, all racialized categories are constructed in contradistinction to other such categories, and any racialized-Othered group is constructed as inferior to the White group. Relational racialization can be seen in the educational context through discourses that position Black students and Latinx students in relation to each other (Chávez-Moreno, 2025; Gamez & Monreal, 2021). This happens through, for example, schools’ tracking practices, which limit the learning opportunities for racialized Others, resulting in them being perceived as less intelligent compared to White students in higher academic tracks (Chávez-Moreno, 2021a).

Further complicating research on the concept of race, a scholar could be speaking of race at the group level (as I do with racialization) or at the individual level. Researchers often use the concept “race” to refer to different aspects of how individuals experience racialization and racial domination in society (Roth, 2016). For example, Roth (2016, p. 1313) outlined how scholars may use the concept to refer to individuals’ racial identity (subjective; no preset options), racial self-classification (e.g., what they check on an official survey), or reflected race (what one believes others assume one’s race to be). This issue of using “race” to refer to various components of our racialized society also occurs in education research (as argued by Chávez-Moreno, 2023; Leonardo, 2013).

Apart from specifying which aspect of race is under study, scholars should also differentiate between concepts such as race and ethnicity to preserve race’s “utility as an analytical tool” (Leonardo, 2004, p. 348). I define ethnicity, in contrast to race, as a concept for examining shared routine cultural practices within or across groups and the in-group and out-group distinctions they produce.

Of course, ethnicity and race do overlap. The United States’s history and contemporary practices have led to racialized groups developing shared histories of oppression and cultural practices (e.g., religion, language, dress), with some cultural practices becoming associated with particular racialized groups (Leonardo, 2004). Still, ethnicity arguably holds a different standing in the United States given that race has been embedded into social structures (Omi & Winant, 2015) and reinforced historically and legally (Gómez, 2018), including in educational institutions (Chávez-Moreno, 2021a, 2025).

In this process, racialized Others come to see themselves through a race lens because whiteness and racialization are overwhelming and imposing.⁸ Not recognizing this is race-evasive (i.e., colorblind) logic—a logic that contradicts how many experience their lives. Once racialized Others recognize their racialization, some unite—at times under the flag of people of color—to struggle against racism. People make meaning of and use these categories strategically to forge community and organize, for example, against banning culturally relevant curricula in schools (Cabrera et al., 2011). Therefore, exposing the racialization process is crucial for anti-racist researchers to reveal how racism in education reinforces racial groups and to support redistributing resources.

The Latinx Racial Construct

Clarifying how “Latinx” is conceptualized in relation to race matters because the way education scholarship defines its concepts implicitly shapes readers’ understanding of them. For this reason, I argue for conceptualizing “Latinx” as a racialized category. This stance does not reify race—because race is already prevalent in our society. Instead, conceptualizing “Latinx” in this way is based on recognizing that U.S. society’s pervasive racialization affects the Latinx group, as evident in U.S. education (Chávez-Moreno, 2025). These consequences manifest through segregating the Latinx group based on language (Santiago, 2017), underfunding schools primarily serving Latinx students (Baker et al., 2020), and prohibiting ethnic studies (Cabrera et al., 2011). It also is based on understanding racialization as fundamentally a nefarious exclusionary process—rather than race as solely an identity defined by visually perceptible traits—and it acknowledges that racialized groups form through context-specific social practices (i.e., “Race is a social construction”).

With that foundation, I suggest Latinx is a category that, as all racial categories, (a) is U.S.-specific and particular to its social context; (b) refers to a group of people who are erroneously imagined to be from a region and a shared culture and ancestry, among other traits; (c) essentializes the people in this heterogeneous group by overlooking their different cultural practices in order to assign them to a category bound together by an arbitrary and artificial association; (d) is sorted into the country’s white supremacist racial hierarchy; (e) has been formed from the distribution of resources in relation to racial group lines; and (f) is used to incorporate people into the U.S. settler colonial nation-state. More specifically, I conceptualize Latinx as a racialized group of people who reside in the United States, are imagined as having a connection to the Spanish language, and suffer the effects of multiple colonialisms—Spanish colonialism, American colonialism, and American imperialism—that entail distinct racializing projects (also see, Chávez-Moreno, 2021b).

Furthermore, this conceptualization differentiates “Latinxs” (a racialized group of people living in the United States) and “Latin Americans” (people living in or of the diaspora from Latin American countries). Although the Latin American diaspora is widespread across the globe, U.S. racist practices and histories have systematically structured society to create a Latinx group different from “Latin American” (Chávez-Moreno, 2023; N. Flores & Rosa, 2023). In the United States, the Latinx racialized group includes individuals who identify as Afro-Latinx, Indigenous Latinx, Asian Latinx, and/or biracial/multiracial (Aparicio et al., 2022; Romero & Escudero, 2012). Some Latinx people, similar to folks in other racialized groups, experience colorism, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, and other racialized issues (e.g., Cioè-Peña, 2024; Dache et al., 2019; García-Louis & Cortes, 2023; J. López & Irizarry, 2022; Singh, 2025).

It is also important to note that defining “Latinx” as a racial construct does not negate that it can also be understood as an ethnicity, panethnicity, ethnorace, or other variation. I submit that Latinx can be both a racialized and an ethnic group, in the same way that other racialized groups—such as Asian American or Black American—are also understood as ethnic, multicultural, or ethnoracial categories.⁹ My critique, however, focuses on what is conveyed when education research does not conceptualize Latinx as a racialized category.

Issues in Education Researchers Conceptualizing the Latinx Construct

In this section, I comment on three trends I notice in the education field that lead me to argue for the importance of education researchers viewing Latinx as a U.S. racial construct. First, I suggest that referring to Latinx as solely an ethnicity simplifies race as constructed only on visual characteristics. Second, I submit that not framing Latinx as a racial category misses an opportunity to connect critiques of essentialization and exclusion to racialization’s fundamental nefarious process and purpose. Third, I critique the conflation of Latinx and Latin American as indicative of overlooking the U.S.-specific history of the Latinx category and the context-based nature of racialization. These three issues, I maintain, obscure racialization.

Simplifying Race as About Skin Color

Although many education researchers do not explicitly conceptualize Latinx in terms of race—even in studies that center Latinxs or address issues of race and racism (as found in Chávez-Moreno, 2023)—some do share how they conceptualize the Latinx category. For example, some describe Latinx using “ethnorace”/“ethnoracial,” recognizing that the ethnic and the racial intersect in people’s lives (e.g., Busey & Silva, 2021; Ullman & Hecsh, 2011). Ullman and Hecsh (2011) used the term “ethnorace” and noted that “the experience of Latinos in the US makes the conceptual distinctions between race and ethnicity complex” and that this term highlights two categories crucial for “understanding Latino experience in the US” (p. 625). Fraga and Perez (2020) also described Latinx as an ethnoracial group, noting that it is “often not considered a race because they do not share a particular biological or genetic makeup” (p. 30), which they later referred to as “color” (p. 31). These uses of “ethnorace” bring up potential concerns. For example, it could inadvertently imply that Latinx is distinctively complex compared to other racial groups (i.e., White, Black) or that other groups are “real (biological) races.”

Other education researchers define Latinx as an ethnicity/ethnic group (e.g., Salas Pujols, 2022) or imply this by stating, for example, that “Latinxs can be of any race” (J. López & Irizarry, 2022, p. 1541) and are “racially diverse” (Santiago et al., 2021, p. 207). Salas Pujols (2022) described her New York City metro-area Afro-Latina participants as “ethnically Latina and racially Black” (p. 593) and as “phenotypically Black and ethnically Latinx” (p. 594).¹⁰ Adams and Busey (2017) described “Afro” as the “racial designation that stretches across numerous ethnicities, and Hispanicity (Latina/o), as an ethnic category that encompasses multiple races” (p. 13). These examples might lead to a conclusion similar to what Fraga and Perez (2020) mentioned, that because the Latinx community has a wide range of phenotypes, it is not a race (i.e., racialized group) and is a cultural group of many skin tones.

Conceptualizing Latinx to refer exclusively as an ethnic group and not a racialized group (hereafter referred to as “solely-an-ethnicity framing”), I submit, could present several issues. First, viewing Latinx solely as an ethnicity due to the group’s phenotypical diversity implies the untenable notion that there are “real races” (e.g., Black, White) characterized by normative physical traits. This may also further the flawed idea that racialized groups are derived from visually perceptible characteristics, which then leads to discrimination, rather than framing race as a construct intended to subjugate some people by constructing arbitrary group distinctions. Highlighting the group’s phenotypical diversity to categorize it as an ethnicity shifts the focus to presumed shared cultural practices as the basis for group cohesion—an essentializing move that imagines Latinxs as a unified cultural group and paradoxically leads to calls for emphasizing Latinx cultural diversity. Moreover, this conceptualization risks ignoring the fact that other racialized groups also have both shared and distinct cultural practices (as found in the literature by Chávez-Moreno, 2023).

Second, the solely-an-ethnicity framing disregards the racialization process the Latinx group has endured, which includes being essentialized, dehumanized, and categorized along with other races and suffering inequitable distribution of resources. This oppression also has compelled them to unite around Latinx racialized identities/experiences and organize anti-racist movements (Omi & Winant, 2015; Zepeda-Millán & Wallace, 2013). This solely-an-ethnicity framing inadvertently confers a sense of perpetual foreignness on Latinxs, disregarding their history of racialized resource distribution in the U.S. nation-state, potentially hindering efforts to seek protections, reparations for injustices, and cross-racial coalitions (Gómez, 2020; Haney López, 2003). Furthermore, not considering Latinx racialization—a process that is something done to this social group—could lead to misconstruing race, potentially resulting in the incorrect inference that race is an inherent individual quality (i.e., biological or simply color-based). That is, the mistaken idea that race is an inherent individual quality is not arbitrary; it results from describing race solely in terms of appearance, disregarding the racialization process, and interpreting certain aspects of race based on incomplete information drawn from prevalent societal messages.

Lastly, using “Latinx” solely to refer to ethnicity disregards that most individuals in this group distinguish their cultural differences with other labels (e.g., Mexican American, Boricua; as noted by Fraga & Perez, 2020; Rosa, 2019). This framing also overlooks the significant proportion (approximately 40%) of Latinxs/Hispanics who select “Some other race” on questionnaires that lack “Hispanic/Latino” as a racial option, and it ignores social science research indicating that they do not identify as White, Black, or any of the other provided racial options (Gómez, 2020). Indeed, people are lumped into the Latinx group because the racialization process disregards their cultural diversity. The solely-an-ethnicity framing leaves a void for a term that can spotlight the racialization of many people in this group.

It is a valid critique to note that education research on Latinxs that does not disaggregate participants may overlook that some people identify as Latinx and Black, Asian, White, multiracial, and so on (J. López & Irizarry, 2022; Salas Pujols, 2022). It is important to have data about how, for example, Afro-Latinxs experience anti-Blackness and colorism. At the same time, this should not imply that the category Latinx is solely an ethnicity for all Latinxs, as implying that Latinx is not a racialized group obscures the racialization of many people who are categorized into that group.

Ignoring Racialization While Problematizing Latinx

Recent education scholarship has advanced the specificity of Latinidad vis-à-vis Blackness and/or Indigeneity in the United States (Calderon & Urrieta, 2019; Cioè-Peña, 2024; Dache et al., 2019; Singh, 2025). Some compellingly argue that the Latinx construct is oppressive when used to invisibilize Indigeneity and/or Blackness (Busey & Silva, 2021; Calderon & Urrieta, 2019; J. López & Irizarry, 2022). Education research should continue examining the diverse experiences in the Latinx group, including Afro-Latinxs, Asian Latinxs, and Indigenous Latinxs. However, critiques that conceive Latinx solely as an ethnicity (Adams & Busey, 2017; Busey & Cruz, 2015) raise questions about how they conceptualize their core concepts given that some fail to define race, for example.

Importantly, by not framing Latinx as a racial category, these critiques miss an opportunity to connect the invisibilization, essentialization, and exclusion they expose to racialization. That is, because racialized categories are created to oppress, to break human connections, and in contradistinction to other racialized categories (Molina et al., 2019; Omi & Winant, 2015), this marginalization arises from the very process and purpose of race. This marginalization occurs across all racialized groups due to the homogenizing effect of racialization; consequently, many individuals who identify as mixed race also feel unaccepted or that they do not fit into society’s racialized categories (e.g., García-Louis & Cortes, 2023). In not framing Latinx as a racial category, these critiques obscure the racialization that the Latinx group has experienced. Conversely, framing Latinx as a racialized category clarifies that the essentialization and exclusion exposed by these critiques result from racialization itself.

In a similar vein of critiquing “Latinx” without considering U.S. racialization, Busey and Silva (2021) referred to Latin American history and racial logics. They argued that the U.S. “Brown” discourse and descriptor for Latinx students is homogenizing, relates to Latin Americans’ mestizo (“Indigenous/European mixed”) racial category, and “prohibits Afro-Latinx students from viewing themselves as Black and Latinx at the same time” (p. 182). In my interpretation, their critique suggests that this uneasiness with the terms “Latinx” and “Brown” points to insufficient teaching of students that (a) discusses the racialization process, (b) challenges the oversimplification of race as skin color, and (c) describes race/racialization as fundamentally nefarious and about exclusion/dehumanization.

Their critique also appears to overlook the U.S. history of Latinx racialization, instead favoring an emphasis on Latin American racialization (Busey & Silva, 2021; I delve into the conflation of Latinx and Latin American in the next section). The Brown group label gained prominence with the Chicana/o movement’s aligning with the Black Power movement and its embrace of a nonwhite identity despite society at times officially labeling Latinxs as White to withhold rights from them (Haney López, 2003). Although not without issues, “Brown” as a label is tied to a U.S.-specific historical context and attempts to be legible in and respond to the United States’s Black/White binary rather than aligning solely with the Spanish colonial concept of mestizo. Furthermore, dismissing Latinx as a racial category and critiquing Brown as homogenizing imply a reduction of race/racialized groups to mere skin color. Such dismissal ignores how the Latinx category is formed and that it is meant to essentialize and marginalize individuals, which itself indicates that Latinx is a racial category. The United States has socially constructed groups who are neither Black nor White, are feared and disparaged, and have suffered from unequal distribution of resources along racial group lines (for examples in education, see Cabrera et al., 2011). If “Brown,” “Hispanic,” and “Latinx” are not deemed appropriate racial terms, then what term points to this U.S. social/racial group—especially if some education scholars insist that Latinx is solely an ethnicity?¹¹

Without these terms, the United States would still need a term to refer to the racialization of the “Spanish-speaking” group (Mora, 2014). In the absence of such a term, the critiques risk distorting recent immigration and education policies and discourses and obscuring the endemic, historical, and systemic racism experienced by that group. This oversight would misrepresent or disregard the experiences of Latinx students who are not racially ascribed under other terms, such as Afro-Latinx.

This issue also reveals the folly in seeking the “right” racial term in pursuit of inclusivity given that race/racialized categories are inherently nefarious, essentializing, homogenizing, and exclusionary. Indeed, the focus on wanting a racial category’s label to support inclusivity fosters the illusion that race can be inclusive, thereby obscuring racialization. Rather than focusing on the possibility of making racial categorization a positive concept, I suggest that a more productive path for the education field is to teach about the racialization process and conceptualize race as nefarious. This approach leans into working through what it means for racial categorization to be fundamentally about systems of oppression and exclusion.

Overlooking the Contextuality of Racialization

There is a necessary project in education research and race/ethnic studies research of transcending borders to understand how ideas about racialization change based on context and time and how people’s movements across localities help shift a society’s understandings about race and its racialized categories (e.g., Scott & Bajaj, 2023; Zamora, 2022). However, although “Latinx” has been used to refer to a U.S.-specific category, some scholars have also applied it to people across Latin America and its broader diaspora disregarding that racialization, like any categorization, is context-based. My critique here on overlooking the contextuality of racial categorization uses the conflation of “Latinx” with “Latin American” as indicative of this issue (e.g., Busey & Cruz, 2015; Busey & Silva, 2021; Medina & Machado-Casas, 2022). Examples of this conflation can be read in, for instance, Machado-Casas and Medina (2022) referring to “Latinx populations in the US and abroad” (p. 1) and Busey and Cruz (2015) mentioning “a large population of Latin@s of African descent throughout Latin America, the Caribbean, and North America” (p. 293). Others use “U.S.” to modify “Latinx,” suggesting that there are non-U.S. Latinxs (e.g., Hamann et al., 2002; Vásquez, 2007). These uses imply, perhaps unintentionally, that Latinx acts as a border-transcending group category, equally and similarly intelligible in both the United States and Latin America (e.g., Busey & Silva, 2021; Medina & Machado-Casas, 2022).

This conflation of Latinx and Latin American is a signal of the education field overlooking (a) the U.S. history of the Latinx category and (b) that racial categories are context dependent.

To address the first issue, in the United States, the category Latinx derived from “Hispanic,”¹² which evolved from “Spanish-speaking,” and further back, from “Mexican” (e.g., Gómez, 2018; Gutiérrez, 2016; Mora, 2014), with the latter sometimes standing in for “Latinx”—a substitution tied to racial logic that simplifies, homogenizes, and exaggerates in creating an “ideal type” for a racialized category.¹³ The Latinx category, irrespective of its current name, emerges from and for the U.S. sociopolitical context. It serves to incorporate a group into its racial hierarchy, which then propels some group solidarity in resisting racial oppression. Thus, the category is rooted in the specific U.S. history and context and its need to mark a “Spanish-speaking” group (Gómez, 2020; Mora, 2014).

Although Spanish colonial history does affect U.S. racial logics (Busey & Silva, 2021; Gómez, 2018), some discussions overlook the U.S. history in creating such category. For example, in Busey and Silva’s (2021) argument against the Brown designation used in the United States, they focused on Latin American history, overlooking the multiple colonialisms experienced by the Latinx group, specifically, the U.S. historical and ongoing racial project that shaped this group (Chávez-Moreno, 2021b; Gómez, 2018; Mora, 2014). Drawing only from other nations’ racialization history and logics misguidedly assumes that those histories and logics result in the same categories that guide the United States’s conceptualization of its racialized groups. Thus, although it is correct that Latinx is not a race in Latin America and that Latin Americans are racially diverse, this does not negate that Latinx (or Hispanic) is a racialized group in the United States.

Critiquing Latinidad’s anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity is important, and this ongoing conversation has been shaped by contributions from various scholars, including my own work (Chávez-Moreno, 2023, 2025). However, some critiques of the “Latinx” category situated in the United States have at times detached it from its U.S. colonial and racial roots (Busey & Silva, 2021). In doing so, they disregard the well-documented U.S. racialization of the Latino/Hispanic/Spanish speaker/Mexican category (Donato & Hanson, 2017; Gómez, 2018; Mora, 2014; Valenzuela et al., 2012). Examples of this scholarship include Busey and Cruz (2015) and Adams and Busey (2017), who emphasized the connection between Latinxs and Latin Americans and the slave trade in Latin America. A scholarly focus that connects United States and Latin American slavery is much needed and deserved. However, these analyses would benefit from engaging with the distinction that Latin American countries do not organize their societies based on a Latinx group as is done in the United States.

Regarding the second issue, social science research shows that group formation, including racialization, is always dependent on context and time (Omi & Winant, 2015). An example of such context-specific categorization is Guatemala’s Ladino category, which is unintelligible in the United States (Boj Lopez, 2017) and is not used for resource distribution. Although discourses and racial ideologies can travel and change (Scott & Bajaj, 2023; Zamora, 2022), societies in Latin America have not organized around nor adopted Latinx/Latine/Latina/Latino as a category for distributing resources. Consequently, the concept of Latinx/Latine/Latina/Latino as a group category has no purchase in Latin American societies (Gómez, 2020) and is not understood there in the same way it is in the United States.

Conflating Latinx with Latin American, in my interpretation, incorrectly implies that U.S. socioracial organization can be directly transposed to the diverse Latin American nation-states. Although some authors have noted that race is understood differently in Latin America compared to the United States (Busey & Cruz, 2015), the trend of U.S. researchers conflating Latinxs with Latin Americans suggests an oversimplified uniformity across contexts and/or imposes a U.S. group category not recognized in the racial contexts of Latin American societies. This conflation disregards the context- and time-dependent nature of categorization and racial group formation (Omi & Winant, 2015), obscuring the process of racialization.

Ultimately, my critique highlights the importance of recognizing the specificity of the Latinx category as emerging from a U.S. context, reminding us that social categories differ across contexts and should not be uniformly applied.

Future Directions in Conceptualizing the Latinx Racial Construct

I have presented three tensions conveyed when education research does not conceptualize Latinx as a racialized category. First, describing Latinx as solely an ethnicity simplifies race to a purely visual-based construct. Second, not framing Latinx as a racial category results in missing an opportunity to expose and connect the critiques of the category’s essentialism and exclusion as a symptom of racialization’s nefarious process and purpose. Third, conflating Latinx with Latin Americans is indicative of overlooking that racialization is context-based. These three trends of how the field conceptualizes Latinx vis-à-vis race show the field underconceptualizing racialization, which results in further obscuring the purpose and process of racialization.

To counter this, I invite education scholars to consider employing Roth’s (2016) typology of race’s multiple dimensions. Roth’s typology can serve as a valuable conceptual and analytic tool for scholars who research race at the level of the individual.¹⁴ For example, the typology differentiates between “racial identity,” “reflected race,” “observed race,” and “phenotype” of individuals. This typology could help researchers specify the dimension of race under examination, thereby enriching scholarship and public discourse with a deeper understanding of the complexities of the concept of race at the individual level.

The education field should also examine the U.S. racialization process at the group level, particularly given that U.S. society and schools espouse race-evasive ideologies while structurally reinforcing group hierarchies (Chávez-Moreno, 2024). One entry point into understanding racialization at the group level comes from exposing how the Latinx group is constructed through social practices (Chávez-Moreno, 2025). Conceptualizing Latinx as a racialized group involves understanding that it is constructed, like all racialized groups, through relational social practices and context-based processes (HoSang & Molina, 2019). This approach allows educators to affirm students’ identities while also teaching students to recognize racialization as an inherently nefarious process that excludes or homogenizes people into groups by ignoring cultural differences and essentializing them. With these framings, the field can better lean into why the Latinx construct may feel oppressive—an approach that would better expose society’s racialization process and thus work to challenge race-evasive ideologies and promote anti-racist education.

Understanding how the United States forms the Latinx racialized group through social practices helps situate the group in discriminatory structures and helps explain why Latinx communities unite, even if contentiously, in struggle against racial oppression. Engaging with and discussing racialization explicitly will better position education researchers and practitioners to stand against racial oppression and support coalition building across racial groups. Indeed, recognizing the Latinx group as a product of racialization also helps explain why there is a Latinx community at all—that is, a community does not emerge from the intention of expressing we are Latinx but, rather, from the need to affirm our humanity in the face of racism.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Laura C. Chávez-Moreno

Notes

Author

LAURA C. CHÁVEZ-MORENO, PhD, is assistant professor at the Departments of Chicanx & Central American Studies and Education at University of California-Los Angeles, 315 Portola Plaza, Box 951559, Los Angeles, CA 90095; ChavezMoreno@UCLA.edu . Her research focuses on how schools make race and Latinidad and on advancing educational equity.

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Conceptualizing Latinx vis-à-vis Race in Education Research

Abstract

Keywords

Defining Race

The Latinx Racial Construct

Issues in Education Researchers Conceptualizing the Latinx Construct

Simplifying Race as About Skin Color

Ignoring Racialization While Problematizing Latinx

Overlooking the Contextuality of Racialization

Future Directions in Conceptualizing the Latinx Racial Construct

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Notes

Author

References