Cecilia Márquez joins us this week to talk about her new book, Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation, published by The University of North Carolina Press. Above all, we discussed the production of Latino identity in relation to Blackness. Márquez argues that, in the South, Latinos are either Black or non-Black—not Black or white, mind you, but Black or non-Black. It was an important distinction not only during the Jim Crow era, but also today given our ongoing debates about Latino racial identity. Márquez’s broad arguments come to life through fascinating characters and places like the South of the Border rest stop, just on the South Carolina side of the North/South Carolina divide. Beyond the subjects in Making the Latino South, we talk in general about some of the most important themes preoccupying Latino historians today. Márquez is the Hunt Family Assistant Professor of History at Duke University. She’s currently working on her next book, about the Latino Far Right in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.