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New Mexico's long-standing Mexican American population, known as "Nuevomexicanos," often see themselves as distinctive from other Mexican-origin people across the Southwestern United States. In this book, Casandra Salgado theorizes this distinction as "Mexican American exceptionalism," and interrogates how present-day Nuevomexicanos residing in Albuquerque make sense of race and racism within this context.
Nuevomexicanos' view their long history and numerical dominance in New Mexico buffers them from racism. Yet Salgado finds they still confront anti-Mexican racism and are seen as foreign. While Nuevomexicanos' racial frames are rooted in their colonial history to elevate their racial status, Salgado argues this strategy no longer serves contemporary Nuevomexicanos as such frames are imbued with colorblind racism— ignoring white supremacy and perpetuating intra-group discrimination.
As multi-generational Latinos are predicted to become a larger proportion of the Latino population in the United States, Salgado's findings are suggestive of larger trends in the country's evolving ethnoracial landscape - trends toward region-specific identities that buck against common binaries.
"In Mexican American Exceptionalism, Casandra Salgado has written a book that is empirically grounded and theoretically innovative. Drawing from nearly 100 interviews of middle-aged Mexican Americans in Albuquerque who span the socioeconomic spectrum, she finds that their ethnic/racial identity is ever-present even if far from simple. I especially value her concept of "race-minimizing frames" that help the two-thirds of her sample manage day-to-day racism while holding the idea of color-blindness. The book shows us how white supremacy becomes normalized for self-described Hispanics and how that makes racism more pernicious for them and for other non-white groups."—Laura E. Gómez, author of Inventing Latinos: A New Story of American Racism