This dissertation addresses the problem of racial stratification of the Latino community in the United States from the theoretical position of critical race theory. Racial stratification for Latino residents and Latino immigrants is possible in the everyday through a series of practices that allow for persons of the community to contribute to the proliferation of race in American society by rendering race very difficult to address politically. The theoretical analysis of friendship as a form of moral aesthetics in the works of Aristotle, Kant, and Rousseau allows for a theory of race that addresses the invisibility and the transcendence of race constitutive of American society and, therefore, constitutive of the racial stratification of the Latino community in the United States. In this theoretical development, race is thought as an aesthetic of both the citizen and the immigrant subjects or, in other words, as a race-aesthetics. McKnight's (2010) theory of the conditionality of race, Hall's (New Ethnicities 1996, Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance 1996) theories of cultural representation and hegemonic domination, Gilroy's (1995) theory of Black Atlantic counterculture, and Mills' (1997) theory of the hegemony of the racial contract are critically engaged and expanded with the theory of the race-aesthetic.