Explores the multiple ways in which diverse individuals negotiate the nature of U.S. racial and ethnic categories in terms of self-descriptive labels. Draws from narratives of 100 individuals who participated in 13 different focus groups over a 9-month period (September 2006 to May 2007). Through their everyday rhetoric, individuals who were born primarily in the Caribbean or Central and South America and then immigrated to the US were most likely to resist essentialist racial and ethnic labels.
