"'Contextual Whiteness: Spanish Immigrants' Panethnic White Identity in the United States, Argentina, and the United Kingdom".

Following the 2008 global financial crisis, emigration rates out of much of Southern Europe, particularly Spain, radically increased. Spanish emigration's global character presented a novel opportunity to study the role that considerably different destinations have on European individuals' white ethnoracial identity and status. Through two years of ethnographic observations of and 135 interviews with Spanish emigrants in New York City, Buenos Aires, and London, this paper is an international comparative/Transatlantic analysis of how race/whiteness operates for Spaniards in the U.K., the U.S., and Argentina in both social and institutional settings. In the U.S. context, I engage more heavily on concepts of boundaries between whites and Hispanics/Latinos. Particularly, I focus on the Hispanic/Latino and white boundaries and engage with both Mary Waters' "ethnic options" and Michel Lamont's "symbolic boundaries" frameworks. For Latin America, much of the literature on whiteness has actually focused on Brazil, and the role that class plays in transitions to whiteness for some mixed-raced groups. The key conceptual framework that operates in the region is the notion of a raced-based pigmentocracy that has been the legacy of both the Portuguese and Spanish colonial regimes. I believe that Argentina, being a predominantly European country, adds a different layer of complexity to this race literature that often looks at far more racially diverse/mixed countries in the region, particularly the aforementioned Brazil and Mexico. The U.K. context has been heavily shaped by both the broad implementation of the EU and the ultimately successful Brexit campaign, so there I focus on how regional panethnic ties have begun taking hold post-2008 financial crisis, especially between Southern Europeans, Northern Europeans, and Eastern Europeans. Overall, I develop the concept of "contextual whiteness," which I argue better captures the more nuanced manner by which the white identities operate across political, cultural, and national lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]