Latino Racial Formations in the United States: An Introduction Like much of the Latino Studies scholarship by sociologists, political scientists, and literary or cultural critics, anthropological research on "Latinos" (or "Hispanics") in the United States is often trapped by a tendency to sub- sume its subject under the conceptual frameworks of "culture" or "ethnicity." Indeed, anthropological research, due to predictable disciplinary inclinations, may be especially susceptible to the appeal of "culture" or "ethnicity" as preferred analytic categories. This volume, however, is concerned to foreground the questions of social inequality and political subjugation that are more frankly examined through an incisive analysis of the social productions of "race" (or racialized difference) in everyday life. Culturalist explanations of intra-Latino "ethnic" identifications tend to presuppose substantive, if not essentialized, commonalities internal to groups with origins in Latin America, and thereby also take for granted their a priori status as groups. Our perspective on "Latino racial formations," in contrast, focuses on the dynamic and relational pro- cesses of power inequalities and subordination to a white supremacist state that account for the eminently historical production of these "groups" as such, and thereby situate them within a wider social field framed by the hegemonic polarity of racialized whiteness and Blackness in the United States. Thus, the "Latino" (or "Hispanic") label tends to be always-already saturated with racialized difference. With these considerations as an organizing theme, this collection of essays investigates both the possibilities for and limits to pan- Latino identity (Latinidad) and identification (Latinismo) within the broader framework of racialization. The intrinsic incoherence of social categories such as "Latino" or "Hispanic," combined with their persistent meaningfulness, are telltale indicators of the ongoing reconfiguration of "Latinos" as a racial formation in the United States. It is commonplace among many commentators, not the least of which is the U.S. Bureau of the Census, to assert that Latinos are not a "race" and that Latinos may be, variously, white or black, or "some other race" that presumably The Journal of Latin American Anthropology 8(2):2—17 copyright © 2003, American Anthropological Association Journal of Latin American Anthropology