West Indian in the West

Percy C. Hintzen is Associate Professor and Chair of African American Studies and former Director of Peace and Conflict Studies, University of California at Berkeley He is the author of The Costs of Regime Survival: Racial Mobilization, Elite Domination, and Control of the State in Guyana and Trinidad.

"An important contribution to discussions of identity construction in a globalized world and will be enjoyed and debated by students of ethnic studies." (Library Journal) "An extremely interesting work, addressing an important areathe constructed nature of ethnicity. Ethnicity is, in part, a performancesomething one does as well as something one is. The West Indians' unique and complex relationship with other African Americans . . . and the question of how and under what circumstances ethnic distinctiveness is emphasized and under what circumstances it is minimized is fascinating. The Bay area context, in which West Indians are vastly outnumbered by African Americans, makes for a new and different take on these issues." - Philip Kasinitz,author of Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race "Hintzen's detailed anaylsis of West Indians in the western United States opens the door to new understandings of race class boundaries and their role in maintaining social hierarchies and imbalanced social relationships among racial and ethnic groups. This richly textured ethnography will be required reading for scholars on race and immigration for years to come." - Pedro Noguera,Harvard University Graduate School of Education "Percy Hintzen has given us an intimate and richly textured portrait of West Indian community and identity in northern California. An important scholar of both global politics and American ethnic studies, Hintzen . . . deftly demonstrates how West Indians navigate the precarious terrain of race and racialization in U.S. society by negotiating their distance from African America." - Elaine Kim,University of California, Berkeley "Percy Hintzen's book has made me see so many things afresh. After reading West Indian in West, I see not only life in San Francisco differently, but also life in Brooklyn and in Silicon Valley differently. With subtlety and sensitivity, Hintzen makes us smarter about diasporas, racisms, class aspirations, marriages and public performances in contemporary America. This is an important book." - Cynthia Enloe,author of Bananas, Beaches, and Bases