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URBAN EROTICS AND RACIAL AFFECT IN A NEOLIBERAL “RACIAL DEMOCRACY”: BRAZILIAN AND PUERTO RICAN YOUTH IN NEWARK, NEW JERSEY

This essay examines the power-evasive reduction of “race,” racial conflict, and racial subordination from the terrain of the social, material, and structural to the “private” realm of affect and emotions, in an effort to explain how neoliberalism operates in the everyday lives of U.S.-born Latino and Latin American migrant youth, particularly, young, working-class Puerto Rican and Brazilian women in Newark, New Jersey. A main argument of this project is that urban neoliberalism has been complicit in generating new racial configurations in the United States and that, in the case of populations of Latin American and Spanish-speaking Caribbean backgrounds, such articulations of difference have deployed a variation of “racial democracy” ideologies. This “cartography of racial democracy” gives credence to denunciations of racism or racial subordination as long as they are launched in the realm of intimate relationships and attraction—as aspects of “affect” or an “urban erotics”—that frequently overshadows and flattens the structures of urban neoliberalism that require that individual worth is measured in relation to how one “packages” oneself culturally to be profitable.