© The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. Social Forces 94(2) e47 doi: 10.1093/sf/sot158 Advance Access publication on 4 February 2014 Book Review Race Migrations: Latinos and the Cultural Transformation of Race By Wendy Roth Stanford University Press. 2012. 268 pages. $85.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. Reviewer: Mosi Adesina Ifatunji, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill T his insightful ethnographic study of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans pro- vides important clarifications regarding the nature of racial orders in the United States and the Hispanic Caribbean. Wendy Roth investigates the logics that her respondents employ when seeking to racially identify/classify, resulting in two critical contributions to the sociology of race and ethnicity. First, she develops the concept of racial schemas—a more nuanced and con- textualized way of understanding racial identity and classification. Second, she argues persuasively that Latinos constitute a racial group within the US racial order. Given these contributions, there is no doubt that her book will be useful in discussions regarding the “definitional components of race.” That is, findings presented in this book are in line with a series of recent studies that effectively shift focus away from a conception of race that is overly determined by “skin color” and toward a more nuanced consideration of the “racialized body” (to include notions of “bone structure” and “hair texture”), which leaves room for the incorporation of non-physical features in the process of constructing/ assigning racial categories. The central contribution of the book is clear. Roth provides a useful con- ceptual framework for better understanding racial identity and classification. She defines racial schemas as a “bundle of racial categories and the set of rules for what they mean, how they are ordered, and how to apply them to oneself and others” (12). She distinguishes racial schemas from much of the previous work on racial identity, arguing that the latter often does not say enough “about people’s understanding of what races are and which ones exist” (13). This distinction between racial schemas and identities is helpful. That is, our current conception of racial identity has generally been relatively non-contextual and focused on how people identify/classify at a particular point in time. The concept of racial schemas improves our understanding of race and racial classification by more fully appreciating the ways in which the larger “culture”—or racialized social structure—determines the availability Book Review 1 at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on November 19, 2015 http://sf.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from