Working Papers

Please reach out to me at floresc@stanford.edu for drafts of working papers.

“La Raza (Des)Unida: Blackness, Whiteness, and Latinx Racial Politics Beyond Panethnicity.” (Job market paper)

Existing work in Latino politics has focused on the role of panethnic and national origin identities in fostering unity and collective mobilization in the face of identity threats, but this literature leaves us ill-equipped to comprehend substantial intra-Latino disagreement on racialized policies like immigration. I argue that Latinos’ racial attachments to groups beyond panethnicity can help us understand these instances of intra-group difference. In addition to maintaining panethnic or national origin identities, many Latinos strongly identify as white or Black, the key racial divide in the U.S. These identities reflect meaningful self-understandings and shared racial policy goals. Because negative racial stereotypes around illegality threaten marginal claims to whiteness, strong white-identifying Latinos distance themselves from undocumented Latinx immigrants. Results show that white identity among Latinos is strongly related to negative attitudes toward undocumented immigrants but not immigration in general, while Black identity predicts support for Black-centered policies such as affirmative action and welfare. These findings suggest new ways of conceptualizing racial identities and broaden our understanding of how marginalized groups navigate identity threats within ethnoracial hierarchies.

“The Limits of Panethnicity: A Framework for Understanding Latinx Ethnoracial Identities.” (under review)

How do Latinos identify their race, and why? In this paper, I advance a novel framework to describe Latinx ethnoracial identities and theorize the social processes underlying identity selection. Employing two original surveys, in-depth interviews, and machine learning techniques, I show that Latinos understand their race in one of two primary modes: through a singular ethnoracial identity as Latinx, or through dual ethnoracial identities as Latinx and as belonging to another ethnoracial group. Individuals in the latter group identify with labels such as Black or Afro-Latino, white, mixed race, or Indigenous, in addition to maintaining strong attachments to Latinidad. Random forests reveal that the second generation is most likely to identify through a singular ethnoracial identity as Latinx compared to the first or third-plus generations. Socioeconomic status and national origin, however, are weak predictors of identity modes. These findings clarify our understanding of how processes like immigration shape ethnoracial identities and suggest that many Latinos may be expanding ethnoracial boundaries like whiteness to be understood as overlapping with, rather than mutually exclusive from, Latinidad.

“Who Changes Their Race, and Why?”

While a growing body of work connects racial fluidity to inequality and politics, we know less about exactly who changes their race and its relation to other social processes. Leveraging a nationally representative, probability-based panel of over 16,000 U.S. adults from 2017 to 2024, this paper elucidates the social and demographic dimensions of racial fluidity. Random forests reveal that being a political independent and moderate is the strongest predictor of instability in racial self-classifications. Employing a differences-in-differences design, I show that becoming Republican or college-educated predicts whitening, and this result is strongest among Latinos. Religion has a distinct relationship among Latinos and non-Latinos, with Latinos who become Mormon shifting to nonwhite self-classifications and non-Latinos who identify as Jewish shifting to white self-classifications. These findings clarify why some individuals change their race and have implications for theories of ethnoracial boundaries and assimilation.