"Latinx" (pronounced "La-teen-ex") is the gender-neutral term that covers the largest racial minority in the United States, and the poorest but fastest-growing American group, whose political empowerment is altering the balance of forces in a growing number of states. In this groundbreaking discussion, Ed Morales explains how Latinx political identities are tied to a long Latin American history of mestizaje, translatable as "mixedness" or "hybridity", and that this border thinking is both a key to understanding Latinx cultures and a challenge to America's infamously black-white racial regime.

In a volume that offers once an survey of histories and contemporary trends of Latinx identity in the United States and a gesture toward a radical political potential predicated on such identity, Morales argues that "the Latinx view of race, inherited from nation-building ideologies that lionized race-mixing in Latin America, poses narratives that challenge and resist" the black-white binary which dominates Anglo-American thinking. -- Spencer Dew * Religious Studies Review; June 2019 *

Ed Morales is an author, journalist, filmmaker, and poet who teaches at Columbia University. He is the author of The Latin Beat and Living in Spanglish. He has written for the Village Voice, Nation, New York Times, Rolling Stone, and other publications and is a regular commentator on NPR. His film Whose Barrio? premiered at the New York Latino International Film Festival. He lives in New York City.