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Boundary Claims and Category Substantiation: Asian and Hispanic Panethnicity Compared, 1971-1981

Sat, August 20, 10:30am to 12:10pm, TBA

Abstract

Past research has identified the conditions under which racial and ethnic groups engage in boundary movements, but how do new symbolic boundaries become defined? What practices are used to substantiate a new categorical boundary and claim “groupness”? To address these questions, we compare the early phases of the Asian American and Hispanic movements and identify how pioneering magazines defined and characterized “Asian” and “Hispanic” panethnicity respectively. We make a theoretical case for intersecting the fields of organizational analysis and race and ethnicity by unpacking the notion of boundary claims and identifying the practices that are used to assert the existence of a new category. We show that while Asian and Hispanic publications focused on different empirical issues, they substantiated claims about the existence of their panethnic communities in strikingly similar ways. Specifically, both sets of magazines used broad and inconsistent definitions of the group category, depicted core subgroups as prototypes for the broader panethnic classification, and used comparisons with other racial minorities to substantiate the meaning of Asian and Hispanic categories. While seemingly contradictory, we argue that these practices address one another’s limitations: the use of prototypes and comparisons delimit the broader, ambiguous definitions. Taken together, our findings suggest that there are general practices and patterns that undergird how new ethnoracial boundaries are claimed and substantiated.

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