What happens when we move beyond a Black-and-white understanding of racism? This provocative book challenges conventional narratives by exploring how Mexican Americans navigate the U.S. racial hierarchy—not simply as victims of white supremacy, but as complex participants in systems of racial oppression. Tracing the construction of race from colonial regimes to the present, author Bianca Sofia Rubalcava argues that non-Black people of color, particularly Mexican Americans, often negotiate their racial position by distancing themselves from Blackness. Through legal history, social movement archives, and survey data, this work reveals how anti-Blackness has persisted across borders and generations, from the pursuit of legal whiteness to enduring family biases around interracial relationships. Ultimately, the book offers a powerful critique of how anti-Black ideologies hinder cross-racial solidarity and perpetuate marginalization. A bold and necessary intervention, this study pushes the Latinx community—and all readers—to confront complicity and reimagine racial justice in more inclusive and transformative ways.

1 Introduction
2 Racialization of Mexican Americans: The Allure of Whiteness, Mestizaje and Anti-Blackness
3 Foundational Anti-Blackness, Examining the Making and Meaning of Blackness in Mexico and the United States
4 Unstable Whiteness: Mexican American Pre-Civil Rights Racialization
5 The Chicano Movement: Cultural Nationalism and its Implications for Coalition Building
6 Inter-Ethnoracial Intimacies: Everyday Anti-Blackness
Conclusion: So What? Contemporary Anti-Blackness in Mexican Americans Politics
Acknowledgments      
Notes
Bibliography
Index