that it would be titled, None of the Above: The Fifty Million Other Americans. “There are millions of walking question marks,” affirms Fernandez, “Americans who can never fit into the racial boxes that officially divide us into whites, blacks, and others.”

Fernandez, the director of the Center for Caribbean and Latin American Studies, will anchor his latest book in hundreds of interviews “to make it easy for people to empathize with and understand how these ‘doubles’ represent America’s best chance to seriously challenge the black/white dichotomy.”

An eloquent and sometimes fiery speaker on issues of race, ethnicity, and legal and undocumented migration, Fernandez has mapped the ever-changing contours of national and personal identity in a series of books. The Disenchanted Island (1992) is regarded as a seminal analysis of the century-long relationship between the U.S. and Puerto Rico. In the book’s foreword, noted attorneys William M. Kunstler and Ronald L. Kuby state: “Fernandez meticulously documents the evolution of American colonialism in Puerto Rico, mercilessly exposing the lies, cynicism, economic pretension, racism, and denial of democratic rights that have so often characterized American domination over Puerto Rico.” Cruising the Caribbean: U.S. Influence and Intervention in the Twentieth Century was hailed by The Reader’s Guide of the New York Review of Books as one of the best books in print. In June 2003 he published Mappers of Society: The Lives, Times and Legacies of Great Sociologists.

Of his America’s Banquet of Cultures: Ethnicity, Race and Immigration in the Twenty-first Century, Fernandez says, “I want to forge a positive national consensus,” maintaining that the nation’s many ethnic groups can be a powerful source of unprecedented economic, artistic, and scientific creativity.

None of the Above will center on how those who do not fit the black/white dichotomy underscore the need to re-evaluate the discourse on race in U.S. society. Fernandez says, “Congress changed the immigration law in 1965 and welcomed the world. One result is that the 50 million Latino, Asian, and Arab newcomers challenge traditional beliefs about race and ethnicity.” For example, he goes on, “Fully fifteen million Latinos—42 percent of the total—refused to check ‘black’ or ‘white’ in the 2000 census. They chose ‘none of the above’ because many Latinos—and especially Mexicans—believe they are ethnic combinations from the moment of inception. And none of these ethnic groups neatly fits into the black/white dichotomy, and thus the grammar of racial conduct collapses. In many instances we lack ‘racial’ words—certainly positive words—to describe many of our most recent immigrants.”

Fernandez believes that, instead of assimilating, instead of losing their original culture and melting into the American mainstream, dissident groups are mounting a “mutiny.” In states like California and Texas with huge Latino populations, the Chicano culture “is often defiantly anti-American,” says Fernandez. “My interviews will zero in on the word ‘Americano.’ This is a brand new identity—with the accent on the “o”—and I want to grasp the meaning of the identity in the everyday life of Chicanos and other Mexican Americans.”

In New York, Fernandez will study Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Colombians, and West Indians—groups, according to Fernandez, that “give ethnicity far more weight than race.” In Miami, he will concentrate on the interactions of “old” and “new” Cubans. And he will extend his study to charting the changing identities of Asian-, Indian-, and Arab-Americans.

Finally, Fernandez will focus on the millions of “walking question marks”—those persons of double or triple heritage. Fernandez plans to examine how the parents of the nation’s “walking contradictions” reconfigure the culture in their homes. “My interviews focus on the degree to which they are creating labels that ignore color and move us toward a future that erases race as the axis of group categorizations,” he says.

Fernandez’ scholarship suggests a powerful alternative: “Instead of focusing on assimilation—on squeezing the rest of the world into our arbitrary categories—let’s use the ‘others’ of American life to start a conceptual revolution. Let’s rethink the basic categories of American self-identification. Let us say ‘thank you’ to the 25 million newcomers and, as a community of inextricably linked human beings, invite them to participate in the creation of concepts that always welcome every child in every state.”


— Geri Radacsi