Racialization and Belonging: A Critical and Empirical Analysis of Hispanic Discrimination in Everyday Life

Abstract

This paper examines how Hispanic adults are racialized across everyday U.S. institutional settings and barred from full civic belonging. Grounding our analysis in socio-legal theories of belonging, intersectionality, and language politics, we evaluate inequities across seven everyday domains: healthcare, housing, work, job applications, policing, shopping, and social services. We use nationally representative data from the 2021 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) Full-Year Consolidated file (N = 9,346). Survey-weighted bivariate comparisons and multivariable logistic regressions control for an extensive set of sociodemographic, economic, and health-related confounders to isolate ethnic disparities. The empirical baseline reveals that Hispanic adults face significantly higher adjusted odds of perceiving discrimination when shopping (OR = 2.97, p < .01), interacting with police (OR = 2.02, p < .01), applying for housing (OR = 1.48, p < .05), and at work (OR = 1.28, p < .05) relative to non-Hispanic White adults. Higher educational attainment and poorer perceived mental health are also associated with elevated odds, illustrating intersectional vulnerabilities. English use operates as a protective factor in gatekeeping domains such as healthcare and social services but is unrelated to exposure in retail and policing. We synthesize these findings within critical ethnic frameworks to demonstrate that everyday discrimination reflects structural racialization rather than isolated interpersonal events, but that this racialization is domain-differentiated rather than uniform, operating through distinct mechanisms across settings and therefore requiring domain-specific remedies.