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The Contribution of Latino Studies by Silvia Pedraza University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Occasional Paper No. 36 February 1998
About the Author: Silvia Pedraza Silvia Pedraza is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She was born and raised in Cuba, from where she immigrated with her family at the age of 12. She was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan and obtained her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago. Her research interests are in the areas of sociology of immigration, race, and ethnicity in America, with particular stress on comparative studies, both historical and contemporary. The leitmotif of all her work, she said, lies in seeking to understand the causes and consequences of the differential historical incorporation of immigrant and ethnic groups in America. In the American Sociological Association, she is presently an elected member of its Council; in the past, she was elected to the Committee on Nominations as well as Chair of the Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities. She was also Director of the Association's Minority Opportunity Summer Training Program (MOST) conducted at the University of Michigan during the summers of 1992 and 1993.
SUGGESTED CITATION Pedraza, Silvia, The Contribution of Latino Studies to Social Science Research on Immigration, JSRI Occasional Paper #36, The Julian Samora Research Institute, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, 1998.
The Contribution of Latino Studies To Social Science Research on Immigration A few years ago, feeling pressured by the veritable boom in immigration research that had taken place in the last 20 years, I felt the need to order such a vast territory conceptually. To do so, I came up with the analogy of a map - a conceptual map to guide us through the issues and approaches that pertain to this topic (Pedraza-Bailey, 1990). The map I drew then had its East-West and North-South coordinates, as well as its main highways, blue highways, and unpaved roads. I still think that map provided a nice guide to those looking for their way in the vast territory that immigration studies encompass. Thus, I thought that to assess the significant contributions of Latino Studies to immigration research in the social sciences, I would begin to use this same image of the map, bringing in selected works of research on Latino studies to illustrate my conceptual map. In sociology, the pattern of immigration research is quite clear. As Alejandro Portes (1978) repeatedly stressed, the study of immigrants was closely wedded with the beginnings of social science in America. Immigrants and their plight were the focus of vivid studies from the early days of social science, as can easily be seen in the classic works of the "Chicago school" of sociology, such as Robert Park's (1950) famous theory of the race relations cycle, and W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki's (1928), The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, which analyzed the social psychological impact of immigration on the immigrants themselves. Sociologists, then, at the turn of the century, were concerned with what the experience of immigration had done to the immigrants' lives, and with the outcomes to the process of integrating those who arrived at its shores. These outcomes were usually conceptualized as acculturation and assimilation - as becoming like the dominant population, which at the turn of the century clearly meant conformity to Anglo-Saxon ways. Research on immigrants and the eventual outcomes of processes of immigration, therefore, was at the very foundation of American sociology. But, with the exception of Paul Taylor's (1934, 1932) monumental work on the life story of Mexican immigrant laborers in the late 1920's and early 1930's, Latinos were remarkably absent from such studies. Instead, the researchers focus was on the European immigrant experience and the experience of Black Americans as newcomers to America's cities. Scholarship on Latinos (much less by Latinos) simply did not put out roots as early as scholarship on Afro-Americans. Perhaps this was partly due to the smaller size of the Latino population back then, coupled with its being largely immigrant - composed of people who thought they would one day return to where they came from. However, I believe it was also partly due to the greater level of segregation experienced by African-Americans, for whom "Jim Crow" laws produced what Booker T. Washington (1969) once called "a nation within a nation." That segregation also gave rise to the historically Black colleges, out of which a Black intelligentsia came, one whose works both of sociology and social thought are still very much worth reading (e.g., the works of W. E. Dubois, E. Franklin Frazier, Booker T. Washington). Nonetheless, early social science placed its emphasis on immigration as a social process, although immigrants from Latin America remained largely invisible to the same social science that did pay heed to immigrants from Europe and the rural South. That emphasis began to wane, however, until in the 1960's, when it all but disappeared. Several different trends promoted its disappearance. First, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1924 cut the massive waves of European immigration to the U.S. Second, under the pressures of Anglo-conformity, the children of those European immigrants went on to assimilate in American society at a time when the price of success was often one's sense of ethnic identity. Third, the research focus on immigrants and immigration was also lost as a result of the arrival of the racial demands and militancy of the Civil Rights Movement so that the analytical focus shifted to that of racial and ethnic relations. And in the process what is really distinctive about immigrants was lost: that they have experienced another whole life in another country and another culture, which they bring with them, while they live out a whole new set of choices and experiences in the new society to which they migrated. Immigrants bring a whole host of social resources with them (their social class, education, occupations, culture, motivation, values) from another society, and their outcomes in American society will be a function of three types of factors: l) those initial social resources of class, culture, education, values; 2) the nature of their migration (whether they were political or economic immigrants, victims of genocide, or "brain drain" professional immigrants); and 3) the social context that greeted them; the amount of opportunity available to them in the new society (in the jobs that they can find in sunrise or sunset industries, in the particular cities in which they settled, in the amount of discrimination they afterwards faced). In effect, it was the large and growing impact of the contemporary wave of immigration, which has already so clearly transformed the demographic composition of American society that brought immigration back to the intellectual agenda of the social sciences. This same mass immigration is what has now made the "Hispanic" or "Latino" population the nation's second largest minority group (forecasted to become the first in the middle of the next century). But long before other social scientists realized the impact of immigration, two Mexican social scientists Julian Samora and Ernesto Galarza - focused their research on it, with the two books that to my mind gave birth to Latino Studies in the social sciences: Los Mojados: The Wetback Story (1964), by Julian Samora, and Merchants of Labor: The Story of the Bracero Program by Ernesto Galarza (1964). These two classics then began the new tradition of Latino Studies, which I define as studies about Latinos, by themselves and by others. This new tradition is now developing alongside all of our own work. Let me now begin to draw my map by pointing out the East-West coordinates of immigration research. Immigration is, of course, at the very root of American society. With the exception of the Native American, every American is an immigrant. And immigration is not only what defines American history, but it is also central to the definition of American identity as a nation of immigrants. Oscar Handlin, who wrote the first classic of European immigrant history, The Uprooted (1973), began his book by noting in the Preface that "Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history." Indeed, it is that identity between American history and American immigration that renders the experience of the United States rather singular among other multi-racial and multi-cultural societies (See Pedraza 1996b). Immigration to America can be broadly understood as consisting of four major waves: the first one, that which consisted of Northwest Europeans (from England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Norway, Sweden), who came up to the mid-19th Century; the second one, that which consisted of Southern and Eastern Europeans (from Russia, Poland, Hungary, Italy, Greece) at the end of the 19th Century and beginning of the 20th Century; the third one, the internal movement from the South to the North of African-Americans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Native-Americans precipitated by two World Wars; and the fourth one, from 1965 to the very present, of immigrants mostly from Latin America and Asia. As a result of the fourth wave of American immigration that we are still living through, sociology has refocused its research on immigrants as a social category distinct from racial and ethnic minorities, and on immigration as an international process that reshuffles persons and cultures across nations, rendering them multiracial and multicultural. Without a doubt, Latino scholarship has made major contributions to the writing of the history of those very groups that Carey McWilliams (1968) used to call "the Spanish-speaking peoples of the United States" that were an integral part of this society, yet did not have a written history. Those who had to go Al Norte, (as Dennis Valdés, 1991 titled his book on Mexican workers who came to labor in the fields and industries of the Midwest) did so searching for a solution to the economic and political problems of their lives. Too often, however, they found themselves laboring in what amounted to what Carey McWilliams (1939) rightly dubbed "Factories in the Fields," a reality that has never ceased for those who, as Leo Chavez (1992) underscored, continue to lead Shadowed Lives outside the imagined moral and legal community others belong to. Moreover, that same scholarship has contributed substantially to the writing of the history of the United States and its many regional histories. For example, David Montejano's (1987) study of Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas: 1836-1986 succeeded in writing two histories. The first history was that of the dispossessed Mexicans in Texas when what had been a highly stratified Mexican people with both an aristocratic elite that lived in haciendas as well as poor Mexican farm laborers and vaqueros that labored for them - progressively became an unstratified people that remained overwhelmingly poor. The second was the history of Texas as a rather feudal, rural society that became incorporated into the rest of the country by becoming a part of the commercial ranch society ruled by a merchant class. This class "grew" cattle, especially Longhorns (rather than a cash crop, such as sugar or coffee), for profit as in other plantation societies in the Third World where agriculture also became commercialized in its service to industrial capitalism. Another example is Tomás Almaguer's (1994) study of the origins of White supremacy in California in the 19th Century, Racial Fault Lines. By assessing the struggles for the control of resources, status, and political legitimacy between the European Americans and the Native-Americans, Mexicans, African-Americans, Chinese, and Japanese in the state, he not only contributed to our understanding of the racialization process of all of these groups, but also to the writing of California's history. Likewise, Ramón Gutiérrez's (1991) When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away is an epic study of the Spanish colonization of the indigenous peoples of New Mexico from 1500 to 1846, a process that was virtually the same as in the rest of Latin America. Yet another example is Gerald Poyo's (1989) With All and For the Good of All (phrase that came from José Martí, a major leader of Cuba's independence movement from Spain), in which he explains the plight of the Cuban tobacco workers of Tampa and Key West in the second half of the 19th Century. Through their newsletters, Poyo showed that the tobacco workers enthusiastically contributed to the Cuban exiles' nationalist movement that increasingly exerted influence on the course of the struggle for independence in Cuba. However, their contribution was often at the expense of themselves as immigrants and as workers, particularly for Black Cubans. Poyo's work pointed the way to the approach that has now taken hold of seeing some immigrants as involved in transnational communities. It also served to bring Latin American history into the United States, thus helping to write the history of Florida - a place that, to this day, is partly situated in Latin America (as David Rieff's (1993) work on The Exile: Cuba in the Heart of Miami also attests to). Latino scholarship, then, has recently been making substantial contributions not only to the history of the peoples that for so long remained invisible and without a written history, but also to the regional histories of this nation of which they were, indeed, a vital part. In addition, Latino scholarship figured centrally in the development of the two main conceptual models that for a long time guided research on race and ethnic relations in America. To this day, the assimilation model has dominated social science research as well as the popular understanding. Best expressed in the work of Milton Gordon (1964) and Nathan Glazer (1971), the assimilation model expected that, as the result of natural, evolutionary processes, in due time immigrants and minorities would become like the dominant majority Americans. In essence, the model held out the expectation that as immigrants and ethnics became acculturated, (took on the values, customs, language, manner, and dress of the majority whites), entry into the major institutions and mainstream of the society would be achieved. Hence, the assimilation model held out the expectation that cultural assimilation would lead to structural assimilation. The major challenge to the assimilation theory came from the proponents of the internal colonialism model, the effort to delineate the ways in which the experiences of racial minorities (African-Americans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Native-Americans - some of its oldest immigrants and most indigenous native sons and daughters) differed significantly from the experiences and eventual assimilation of the white European immigrants at the turn of the century. Following upon its earliest expression in the work of Robert Blauner (1969), Latino scholarship contributed centrally to the development of the internal colonialism model to explain the inequality Chicanos faced, with works such as Rodolfo Acuña's (1972) Occupied America, Mario Barrera's (1979) Race and Class in the Southwest, and Joan Moore's (1970) refinement of the notion of internal colonialism into its three different types in Texas, California, and New Mexico. They underscored that the experience of these groups was different in that they had suffered a process of internal colonization due to their place and role in the system of production, a place and role they came to occupy because of their color, their race. Even more, as Rodolfo Alvarez's (1973) analysis of the different generations that had developed in the course of Mexican-American history argued, the immigration of Mexicans to the U.S. departed significantly from the immigration of the Europeans, even when the same "push" and "pull" factors operated. For among Mexicans in the U.S., the Migrant Generation arrived after the racial prejudice, discrimination, and violence that greeted the Creation Generation had already relegated the Mexican to caste-like racial subordination. The internal colonialism model was an important corrective to the assimilation model. However, it suffered from stretching the colonial analogy overly far, not recognizing the essential differences between the domestic situation of race relations in the U.S. and what happened in the colonization of Africa and Asia. The shortcomings of both the assimilation and internal colonialism models can be transcended by replacing the notion of assimilation with one of incorporation of the varying ways in which different groups of immigrants and ethnics have become a part of American society. As Joe Feagin (1978) underscored, we need to pay attention to the initial and continuing placement and access of various groups to the economic, political, and educational institutions of the society over the course of American history. Feagin's emphasis on the varying patterns of incorporation of different groups was at the root of the comparison in my first book, Political and Economic Migrants in America: Cubans and Mexicans (1985), as well as Alejandro Portes and Robert L. Bach's (1985) Latin Journey: Cuban and Mexican Immigrants in the United States. Let me then continue drawing my map. While the East-West coordinates of immigration research were given by the time line of the four major waves of immigration over the course of American history, the North-South coordinates of my map are constituted by the different levels of analysis: micro and macro. In sociology, the traditional, individual micro-approach was best developed by Everett Lee's (1966) theory that made explicit the "push" and "pull" factors that "hold and attract or repel people," as well as the intervening obstacles that proved more of an impediment to some than to others. Thereafter, another approach to the study of immigration focused on structural-level variables. The link between migration and world patterns of unequal development increasingly became evident, not only in North America, (the magnet that yesterday as well as today continues to attract the world's poor), but also in Western Europe - where the periphery countries of Spain, Italy, Greece, and Turkey became suppliers of labor to the industrialized core countries of France, Germany, and Switzerland. Thus, a new set of structural, macro perspectives emerged. This type of migration theory stressed the increased significance of immigrant workers in developed capitalist societies. To counteract the traditional perspective that focused on the migrants' reasons for migration and its personal consequences, the structural perspective argued that a system of economic migration had developed from the flow of labor between developed nations and the underdeveloped ones that performed important functions for them. Michael Burawoy (1978) explicated the role migrant labor played in advanced capitalist societies by comparing Mexican labor in agriculture in the U.S. with African labor in the gold mines of South Africa, and Alejandro Portes (1978b) studied Mexican labor in the U.S. They both agreed that migrant labor, (as immigrant, and as labor), had structural causes and performed important functions for the society that received them. Burawoy defined migrant labor institutionally as a system that separates the functions of renewal and maintenance in the labor force, physically and institutionally, so that only the function of renewal takes place in the less developed society (such as Mexico or Turkey), while only the function of maintenance takes place in the developed world (such as the U.S. or France). Arthur Corwin (1978) also underscored in his many analysis of the role Mexican migration played in the United States that labor migration provided developed countries (such as the U.S. or France) with a dependable source of cheap labor; it also provided underdeveloped countries (such as Mexico or Turkey) with a "safety valve" as emigration became the solution to their incapacity to satisfy the needs of their poor and lower-middle classes. As Jorge Bustamante (1979) also stressed in his analysis of undocumented illegal migration from Mexico, that migration took place "Beyond Borders but Within Systems." My own comparison between Cubans and Mexicans (Pedraza-Bailey 1985) contributed to this approach as I argued that not only was it possible to develop a system of economic migration between sending and receiving countries (such as Mexico and the U.S.), but that it was also possible to develop a system of political migration between sending and receiving countries (such as Cuba and the U.S.) that resulted from the political functions the emigration and immigration played for them. In Political and Economic Migrants in America: Cubans and Mexicans I argued that the loss of large numbers of the educated, professional middle classes had indeed proved erosive to the Cuban revolution, but it had also served as a "safety valve" in externalizing the dissent of those who could no longer side with the revolution. At the same time, in the United States, the arrival of so many refugees who succeeded in the flight to freedom also served to provide the legitimacy necessary for foreign policy actions during the tense years of the cold war. Up to here I have drawn the North-South and East-West of my immigration research map. Let me now talk about a few of the Blue Highways - the secondary roads that take us away from the rapid main highways and may, if we have the time to follow them, provide us with more interesting and beautiful pathways. As we go down these Blue Highways it is well to remember that, despite its Third World origins, this last wave of migration is characterized by enormous social heterogeneity, perhaps greater than ever before. Alejandro Portes and Rubén Rumbaut, in Immigrant America (1990), argued that such diversity can best be delineated by thinking of the immigrants as belonging to four major types: labor migrants (e.g., from Mexico, Puerto Rico, the West Indies); professional immigrants, aptly characterized as "brain drain" (e.g., from the Philippines, India, Taiwan, China, Columbia, Argentina); entrepreneurial immigrants (e.g., Koreans); and refugees (e.g., Cubans, Haitian's, Vietnamese, Guatemalan's, Salvadoran's). One such Blue Highway is the research literature that has grown around the question of why immigrants (and not the native-born) become concentrated in petit-bourgeois small business enterprises. Intuitively, we all know that the epitome of ethnic enterprise are the Jews - throughout Europe for centuries, and thereafter in the immigrant generation in the U.S. and Latin America. Precisely because at other times and other places immigrant groups have occupied a similar place in the social structure, the people among whom they lived often recognized the parallel. Thus, the Chinese in South East Asia were often called "the Jews of the East", Asians in East Africa were dubbed "the Jews of Africa", and most recently Cubans have been called "the Jews of the Caribbean." Historically, ethnic enterprise was often a refuge for groups that, due to discrimination, faced occupational closure. In the United States, early in this century, ethnic enterprise was an important avenue of immigrant social mobility for first generation Jews, Italians, Greeks, Chinese, and Japanese that, as a result, were able to escape urban poverty. At present, this "middleman minority" role, as Edna Bonacich (1973) called it, is being played by Koreans, Asian Indians, Arabs, Cubans (especially in Puerto Rico), and Columbians, all of whom have quite directly replaced the old Jewish, Italian, Greek, and Chinese merchants, often by taking over their old businesses. José Cobas and Jorge Duany have examined the case of Cubans in Puerto Rico (1997) as initially a "middleman minority," yet one different than most since in their similarity to their Puerto Rican hosts (in language, culture, phenotype), they may well be disappearing through intermarriage. Immigrants in ethnic enterprise have historically also borne the brunt of much ethnic conflict, such as that which often erupted between African-Americans and Jews, despite their also being allies in the struggle for greater civil rights in America. This conflict between African-Americans and Cubans surfaced in Miami in the mid-80's - the subject of Alejandro Portes and Alex Stepich's (1993) book on Miami as a City on the Edge, and most recently in Los Angeles between African-Americans and Koreans. Another Blue Highway lies in the impact of immigration on sending village communities in the underdeveloped world. Wayne Cornelius (1983) analyzed the impact of remittances from Mexican immigrants in the U.S. on their villages back in Mexico with respect to whether the remittances became channeled into consumption or were productively invested. Recently, Sergio Díaz-Briquets and Jorge Pérez-López (1997) also analyzed refugee remittances when the factors that determine them are not only economic (to help family and friends left behind), but also political - as part of the Cuban community exerts strong social pressure to prevent remittances from bolstering Cuba's failing economy and the Castro regime. In Return to Aztlán: the Social Process of International Migration from Western Mexico (1995), Douglas Massey, Rafael Alarcón, Jorge Durand, and Humberto González also underscored that the impact of migration on sending communities depends on when in the life cycle of the family the migration takes place. For example, in the beginning years of family-building and child-raising all finances must, indeed, go to consumption, though later on, savings can be productively invested. Moreover, the impact of migration also depends on when in the life cycle of a community with or without a history of emigration it takes place. Indeed, there are communities that have long histories of migration to particular cities in the U.S., such as the circular flow of migration that Roger Rouse (1991) studied from Aguililla, Mexico, to Redwood City, Calif. Rouse argued that the process is so longstanding, communication among people at both ends so intertwined, and the flows of capital and labor so regular, that the very image of a community from which people depart or go to is compromised. Instead, Rouse proposed that we should reconceptualize it as a transnational migrant "circuit", a conceptualization that is challenged by Luin Goldring's (1996) emphasis on there being a transnational migrant "community," where people do live their emotional, familial commitments across nations. Yet another Blue Highway lies in the topic of women and migration, the social consequences of gender. Because most studies have been studies of labor migration, for a long time the implicit model was that of the male pauper. Yet the fact that since 1930 every year women consistently outnumbered men among migrants to the U.S. pointed our way to begin studying how migration is different for a woman than a man (Pedraza 1991). Immigrant women, for example, enter a much narrower range of occupations, salient among which, (yesterday as well as today), are the garment industry and domestic service. Women became incorporated in the garment industry, above all, because it relied on a traditional skill that throughout much of the world defined womanhood - the ability to sew - and also because it relied on home work and subcontracting, allowing women to stay at home with their children to care for them. This advantage led women to accept low wages and exploitative conditions, as they continue to today. At the turn of the century New York's garment industry mostly hired Jewish and Italian women and, later, Puerto Rican women, as Virginia Sanchez-Korrol's (1984) study of the old Puerto Rican community in New York City in the early part of the century, From Colonia to Community, showed. Today immigrant women newly arrived from Latin America and Asia continue to supply the labor for the garment industry. Yet such similarities can mask profound differences. In a recent study, María Patricia Fernández-Kelly and Anna García (1992) compared Mexican and Cuban women who worked in the Los Angeles and Miami garment industries, respectfully, and argued that at stake were two very different social processes. Mexican immigration to the U.S. was the sustained migration of unskilled and semi-skilled replacement labor, while the Cuban migration to the U.S. was the migration of skilled Cuban political refugees. Thus, Mexican women immigrants worked in the garment industry due to the long-term financial need generated by their husbands' inadequate earnings, or the total loss of male support due to illness, death, or abandonment that had turned them into heads of households. For them, work in the garment industry was the imperative posed by survival. By contrast, Cuban women immigrants worked in the garment industry as a transitory experience aimed at recovering the family's lost middle-class level of living by helping their husbands become self-employed in business, the economic foundation of what Alejandro Portes and Robert L. Bach (1985) called the "ethnic enclave" in Miami, a distinct form of immigrant spatial incorporation. Women immigrants also often ended up working as domestic servants, jobs which often allowed the women enough savings to finance their own upward mobility as well as that of their families (cf. Diner, 1985 on Irish women, Glenn, 1983 on Japanese women). Thus, focusing on Latinas in domestic service has also been a very worthwhile research focus, as in Mary Romero's (1992) Maid in the U.S.A., as well as Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo's (1994) work. Comparing the experience of migration for women and men, studies have repeatedly found that, difficult as the experience of immigration was, it was often far more positive for women than for men. The migration allowed women to break with traditional roles and patterns of dependence and assert a new-found (if meager) freedom. Yolanda Prieto's (1986) study of Cuban women working in factories in Union City, N.J., argued that these immigrant women took on the burden of working outside the home as an extension of the traditional notion of a woman's role. Thus, while the woman's place was no longer in the home, it was still for her husband and children's welfare, thus implying no real change in values and family roles. Lisandro Pérez's (1988, 1986) work argued that the higher family incomes of Cubans among Hispanics in the United States were quite dependent on the higher labor force participation of Cuban women who regularly brought home their earnings. Yet another Blue Highway lies in the study of poverty among Latinos at present in the United States. Research on Latino poverty in the United States does not have the same long pedigree as research on African-Americans because, until recently, most of the large data sources publicly available did not incorporate Latinos in sufficient detail to permit it. Nonetheless, in the 1990's, it has finally become part of the intellectual agenda and the search for the most adequate theoretical model to conceptualize it has begun. A central concern of Joan Moore and Rachel Pinderhughes (1993) has been whether the underclass model that has grown popular following the work of William J. Wilson (1994, 1987, 1985) on African-American urban poverty is conceptually suitable to describe and understand poverty among Latinos in the United States. Douglas Massey (1993) argued that Hispanics and African-Americans differ in such fundamental ways that theories of the underclass and their standard methods are inappropriate for studying Latino poverty. African-Americans, he stressed, share a distinct history in this country, thus a common historical memory; Latinos represent many variegated experiences because they come from different countries for very different reasons and at varying points in time, and also because their historical processes of incorporation into American society have been vastly different. Even more, theories of Latino poverty cannot ignore the impact of immigration, a central dynamic that increases the incidence of poverty both because of the selectivity of the migration, and because new immigrants may compete with and displace other poor Hispanic Americans from their jobs (Meléndez 1993). By contrast, immigration plays a small part in the development of African-American poverty. An exception, however, may be the Puerto Rican case (cf. Tienda 1989), over which there is clear disagreement. Meléndez (1993) argued that the Puerto Rican case resembles that of African-Americans given its high levels of welfare dependency and families headed by single women; their concentration in areas, such as New York, that have experienced profound economic restructuring; the steep decline of industries, such as the garment industry, in which they were overwhelmingly concentrated; and the impact of race and discrimination on their life chances. And even in the case of Puerto Ricans, the selectivity of migration plays a role. Douglas Gurak and Luis Falcón's (1990) research on poverty among Puerto Rican families has argued that the women most likely to migrate from the island to the U.S. mainland are those with less labor force experience, less education, more children, and whose unions are more unstable; while those most likely to migrate from the mainland to the island are the ones whose unions are more stable, have fewer children, and more education. This double selectivity, as they called it, clearly contributes to the high proportion of female-headed families and poverty among Puerto Ricans in New York. The problem of poverty issues from the problem of racial segregation in America, but comparisons between the segregation of African-Americans and Latinos yield quite different results. Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton (1989) underscored that for Latinos in the U.S. segregation is more of a variable, one that depends on their level of acculturation, their socio-economic status in the community, the region of the country, the rate of immigration, and their skin color or phenotype. For African-Americans, by contrast, segregation is more of a constant since it has not declined over time. That constancy indicates that race itself - and attendant prejudice, and discrimination - is playing a major role in that segregation. Again the case of Puerto Ricans is the exception among Hispanics in that their pattern of segregation resembles African-Americans', for whom color clearly matters. The difference that phenotype, (shades of color and variation in features), makes in social outcomes within the very variegated Latino population has been the subject of the work of Carlos Arce, Edward Murguía, and Parker Frisbie (1987) for Mexican-Americans, as well as of Clara Rodríguez (1991) for Puerto Ricans. Massey and Denton (1989) came to understand segregation as composed of several different measures-evenness, exposure, clustering, centralization, and concentration-and used separate indices to capture each so as to compare the patterns of segregation among African-Americans and Hispanics. They found that African-Americans were highly segregated under four or five of these measures in many of the largest cities of the U.S., such as Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Newark, and St. Louis. They used the term "hypersegregation" to denote the conditions under which a very substantial part of the African-American population still lives. By contrast, Latinos showed low to moderate levels of segregation, even in the cities of large Hispanic populations, such as Los Angeles, San Antonio, Miami, New York, and Chicago. Let me now finish drawing my map by pointing to those areas of research where we have done too little and need to do more, the Unpaved Roads of immigration research. An Unpaved Road lies in the need for studies that link the micro and macro levels of analysis better. The recent macro-approach was an important corrective to the traditional micro approach, which failed to take into account that since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, all individual decisions to move have cumulated in migration flows that moved in only one direction. The danger of the structural emphasis, however, lies in its tendency to obliterate people, to lose sight of the individual migrants who make decisions. The theoretical and empirical challenge now facing immigration research lies in its capacity to capture both individuals and structure. We need to consider the plight of individuals, their propensity to move, and the nature of the decisions they make. We also need to consider the larger social structures within which that plight exists and those decisions are made. Such a link between micro and macro levels of analysis is provided by Massey, Alarcón, Durand, and González's (1987) study of the Mexican migration to the U.S. In Return to Aztlán, they showed that international migration originates historically in transformations of social and economic structures in sending and receiving societies, but once begun migrants' social networks grow and develop. These networks support and channel migration on a continuously widening scale. Thus, the migration that was initially propelled by an external, structural dynamic (such as poverty, lack of land) and logic increasingly acquires an internal dynamic and logic of its own (such as family reunification). In this way, migration comes to fuel itself, as has happened in all migration that have been sustained for a long time, such as that of Mexicans and Cubans. Sherri Grasmuck and Patricia Pessar's (1991) analysis of Dominican migration to New York city, Between Two Islands (Dominican Republic and Manhattan), also focused on social networks and households as the link between micro and macro levels of analysis. Thus, they demonstrated that gender is central to household decision-making - to the decision to migrate as a family strategy to meet the challenges that accompanied underdevelopment and economic and political transformation in the Third World. As Grasmuck and Pessar emphasized, the household is the social unit which makes decisions as to whether migration will take place, who in the family will migrate, what resources will be allocated to the migration, what remittances or household members can be expected to return, and whether the migration will be temporary or permanent. As Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo (1994) showed, however, all of these decisions are guided by the norms that surround kinship and gender roles as well as by the hierarchy of power within the household. In her participant observation study of Mexican undocumented women, Hondagneu-Sotelo also found that while the decision to migrate may constitute a joint family strategy, the actual process of decision-making and the staggered departures of family members betrayed enormous interpersonal conflict. Grassmuck and Pessar went on to show that gender was not only at the center of the decision to emigrate from Dominican Republic to New York but also that it was at the center of the reluctance to return back to the island. Women struggled to maintain the gains that migration and employment had brought them. Men were eager to return, as expressed in their frugal, austere living to cumulate savings, but women tended to postpone or avoid return because they realized it would entail their retirement from work and the loss of their new-found freedoms. As a result, a struggle developed over finances and the possibility of return that revolved around the traditional definitions of gender roles and privileges which the migration itself had changed and many men sought to restore by returning back home. Another Unpaved Road lies ahead in the need to do more studies of "brain drain" - the immigration of educated, middle-class professionals (doctors, scientists, accountants, nurses) from Third World countries to the First World. "Brain drain" is an increasingly large component of the contemporary wave of migration, defining most of the Asian immigration and a large part of the Latin American immigration (e.g., from Columbia, Argentina, Chile, and even Puerto Rico now). Curiously, it remains little studied. Yet another Unpaved Road lies in the growing research around the issues that refugees and exiles, as distinct from economic immigrants, pose. For example, the Cuban exodus to the United States has now lasted, intermittently, over 36 years and brought close to a million Cuban immigrants. As a result, the United States has now inherited over a tenth of the Cuban population. Such an exodus harbors distinct waves of immigrants, alike only in their final rejection of Cuba. In contrast to economic immigrants, refugees are more "pushed" by the social and political processes in the society they leave than "pulled" by the attractiveness of the new (Lee 1966; Rose 1993, 1981). As I explained in Cuba's Refugees: Manifold Migrations (1996c), each of the major waves of the Cuban migration has been characterized by a very different social composition with respect to their social class, race, education, family composition, and values - differences that resulted from the changing phases of the Cuban revolution. They render the Cuban community in the U.S. today extremely heterogeneous, not only in the dramatic contrasts in their social characteristics but also in their processes of political disaffection as what E.F. Kunz (1973) called "vintages" - "refugee groups that are distinct in character, background, and avowed political faith" (p. 137). My ongoing research project seeks to capture that dual variability, (in social characteristics and political attitudes), across the four major waves of the exodus and across the different "vintages" that coexist within the same wave. Still other Unpaved Roads lie ahead, no doubt, but already we can see that research on Latinos in the United States is an important part of the research we need to do on all the issues that pertain to immigration, race, and ethnicity in the United States. America is being transformed once again. So is the nature of its social science research. The study of Latinos in the United States is now making rather central and solid contributions to our understanding of the social processes they have been part of as immigrants and as ethnics. Even more, by studying Latinos, collectively we are also helping to write both American and Latin American history. References
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