Mexicans in California: Transformations and Challenges - Brossura

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0252076079 ISBN 13: 9780252076077

Casa editrice: Univ of Illinois Pr, 2009

Riassunto

Numbering over a third of California's population and thirteen percent of the U.S. population, people of Mexican ancestry represent a hugely complex group with a long history in the country. Contributors explore a broad range of issues regarding California's ethnic Mexican population, including their concentration among the working poor and as day laborers; their participation in various sectors of the educational system; social problems such as domestic violence; their contributions to the arts, especially music; media stereotyping; and political alliances and alignments.

Contributors are Brenda D. Arellano, Leo R. Chavez, Yvette G. Flores, Ramón A. Gutiérrez, Aída Hurtado, Olga Nájera-Ramírez, Chon A. Noriega, Manuel Pastor Jr., Armida Ornelas, Russell W. Rumberger, Daniel Solórzano, Enriqueta Valdez Curiel, and Abel Valenzuela Jr.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull'autore

Ramón A. Gutiérrez is the Preston & Sterling Morton Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Chicago. Patricia Zavella is a professor of Latin American and Latino studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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Mexicans in California

Transformations and Challenges

University of Illinois Press

Copyright © 2009 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-07607-7

Contents

Acknowledgments...........................................................................................................................................................................viiIntroduction..............................................................................................................................................................................11. Poverty, Work, and Public Policy: Latino Futures in California's New Economy Manuel Pastor Jr.........................................................................................152. Working Day Labor: Informal and Contingent Employment Abel Valenzuela Jr..............................................................................................................363. Understanding and Addressing the California Latino Achievement Gap in Early Elementary School Russell W. Rumberger and Brenda D. Arellano.............................................614. Reaffirming Affirmative Action: An Equal Opportunity Analysis of Advanced Placement Courses and University Admissions Armida Ornelas and Daniel G. Solórzano.....................775. Chicano Struggles for Racial Justice: The Movement's Contribution to Social Theory Ramón A. Gutiérrez.......................................................................946. "Lifting As We Climb": Educated Chicanas' Social Identities and Commitment to Social Action Aída Hurtado.........................................................................1117. The Quebec Metaphor, Invasion, and Reconquest in Public Discourse on Mexican Immigration Leo R. Chavez................................................................................1338. Prime-Time Protest: Latinos and Network Television Chon A. Noriega....................................................................................................................1559. The Politics of Passion: Poetics and Performance of La Canción Ranchera Olga Nájera-Ramírez............................................................................16810. Conflict Resolution and Intimate Partner Violence among Mexicans on Both Sides of the Border Yvette G. Flores and Enriqueta Valdez Curiel............................................183Bibliography..............................................................................................................................................................................217Contributors..............................................................................................................................................................................243Index.....................................................................................................................................................................................247

Chapter One

Poverty, Work, and Public Policy Latino Futures in California's New Economy MANUEL PASTOR JR.

Introduction

As recession gave way to a strong expansion in the mid-1990s, many felt California had entered an era of a "new economy." Employment gains over the decade were impressive, with roughly 2.2 million jobs added over the 1991–2000 period. Unemployment rates declined sharply, with the state rate in 2000 dipping below 5 percent even as unemployment in the San Francisco and San Jose areas fell to around 3 percent. When an economic downturn began in early 2001, many felt that it was but a temporary blip in a healthy trend of long-term growth and suggested that California's fundamental strengths in industries such as information technology and biotechnology would help it stay ahead of the national economic curve. The recession did last longer than expected—and was remarkably deep in the high-tech environs of northern California—but by 2005, California's unemployment rate was back around its 1999 level.

Yet the optimism about the overall economy was not matched by hope about progress in terms of inequality in the state. Once celebrated as a sort of land of opportunity for all, by the late 1990s California had emerged as the third or fourth most unequal state in the union, depending on whether one measured inequality as the ratio of the top fifth of households to the middle fifth or the top fifth to the bottom fifth (Economic Policy Institute, 2002). And while California improved its distributional position slightly in the early part of the century—an update from the Economic Policy Institute on income distribution for the 2001–2003 period placed California as the tenth most unequal state when comparing the top fifth of households to the middle fifth of households, and the sixth most unequal in the United States when comparing the top fifth to the bottom fifth—this was hardly a record to boast about (Bernstein et al., 2006:18–19, 23).

Against this backdrop of a robust economy and unequal fortunes, California's Latinos have generally shown up at the lower end of the income profile. Employment rates for Latinos are relatively high, suggesting a strong work ethic and attachment to the labor force. At the same time, Latinos are the poorest ethnic group in California, with disproportionate representation at the bottom of the wage and occupational structure. As I note below, this is not simply a function of the recency of immigration, with a longer period of time in this country likely to produce improved outcomes—even second- and third-generation Latino households find their incomes lagging those of Anglos. And because employment and economic growth do not seem to be doing the trick on their own, Latinos will need to devise long-term political and policy strategies to improve economic outcomes for themselves and their children.

This chapter seeks to contribute to this task by offering a longer-run look at the state of Latinos in the California economy. I begin with a brief review of employment and distributional trends of the last decade and a half. I then profile key economic characteristics of California's Latinos, especially the striking contradiction between high rates of labor-force participation and high rates of poverty, and suggest that a significant portion of this gap has to do with lower levels of job quality and educational attainment. I suggest that Latinos are a disproportionate share of the state's working poor and note how strategies geared to the working poor should therefore be of special interest to Latinos. I conclude with a brief discussion of both the policies and the political will that will be necessary to improve Latinos' fortunes.

A few caveats are in order. First, I do not focus in this piece on Latino small business; in Pastor (2003), I offer a more detailed account of that sector and stress the importance of such businesses in hiring other coethnics and thus enhancing employment. I also note the potential contribution of small business to community and economic development, emphasizing how the flowering of a middle class with sufficient assets and political power can help a general Latino agenda, particularly when that middle class is only one generation and modest amounts of income away from its working-class origins. However, though the number of Latino businesses has grown dramatically, in 2002 the receipts for Latino-owned firms in California were only about 2 percent of total business receipts in the state, slightly down from the 2.4 percent share of such receipts in 1997. This suggests that much of the economic action for Latinos is occurring elsewhere, particularly in the more generalized labor market.

Second, while I note what the literature has told us about the relative importance of immigrant status, education, and other factors, I do not offer any independent regression analysis of the determinants of Latino economic performance in the state (for that, see Pastor, 2003). In general, the bottom line from such statistical studies squares with common sense: though discrimination, networks, and other factors are also extant, immigration, education, and job quality are among the most important variables in explaining Latino well-being in California. This suggests that a Latino economic agenda may wish to focus on those measures as well as accept that the very nature of the "new economy"—despite the glitter and glitz of high tech and bioengineering—is such that improvements in basic labor standards may be an essential part of Latino economic advancement.

Third, I do not offer an analysis of the stock of wealth by ethnicity in the state. This is an important issue because generational advantage is often passed on through wealth, and enhanced private wealth, including home equity, can make it easier for communities to borrow, start businesses, and further economic development. This issue is, however, covered in detail in Lopez and Moller (2003), including an analysis suggesting that the average Anglo household in California has around three times the level of wealth as the average Latino household, with the wealth disparity even larger if one does not include home equity but instead focuses on financial assets. Yet from a broader perspective, even the focus on Latino labor in this chapter is about assets: the state has a population that is working hard every day but still falling behind, suggesting that much economic energy is going to waste and thus compelling us to consider new policies that will aid Latinos directly and therefore all Californians hoping for economic vitality and widespread prosperity.

The General Economic Picture and Latinos

The fortunes of the California economy have seen dramatic shifts over the last decade and a half. The 1990s began with a sharp recession, which given its origins in cutbacks in national spending on defense and aerospace had the sharpest impact on southern California, particularly the Los Angeles metro area. Figure 1.1 shows the unemployment experience in the state as a whole and in several key metro areas: San Francisco (which includes Marin and San Mateo Counties), Oakland (which includes Alameda and Contra Costa Counties), and the Los Angeles, San Jose, and San Diego metro areas, all of which include only the county in which the city is located.

As can be seen, Los Angeles helped lead the state into recession and lingered there longer than the rest of the state, a fact that deeply affected Latino outcomes because nearly 40 percent of the state's Latino population lives in Los Angeles County (versus fewer than 20 percent of the state's Anglos). As the recovery proceeded, the San Jose and San Francisco metro areas—that is, Silicon Valley—led the boom, but as 2000 turned to 2001, that region also led the bust (particularly the San Jose/Santa Clara heart of the valley). Although most recessions start with a slip in consumer spending, the recession of this decade was largely triggered on a national level by a decline in business investment, particularly in high-tech spending. Because so much of the state's employment was in that sector and had been rising during the 1990s—with even more of Silicon Valley's employment high-tech dependent—the national recession was felt early and hard, particularly in the Bay Area. The high-tech recession also led to problems for every resident because the state had become highly reliant on income tax revenues from the richest residents, many of whom were paying higher taxes because of boom-induced high incomes, but saw them slip sharply downward, along with the value of stock options and the vibrancy of the economy itself.

What did this pattern mean for distributional outcomes? To get at this, I use the March Supplement of the Current Population Survey (CPS) to calculate changes in income at various points in the income distribution. Income was inflation-adjusted to reflect 2004 dollars—the iteration of the March CPS available at the time of writing was from 2005, and so the most recent income data available was from 2004. California's income distribution started off quite unequal: in 1989, a peak year for the California economy, the two-year moving average income for those at the 25th percentile of the income distribution was just below $26,000, the income level for the median household was just over $49,000, and the income level for those at the 90th percentile was about $122,000. Distribution worsened over the next fifteen years: by 2004, those at the 25th percentile had slipped by $1,000, those at the median had gained only about $600, and those at the 90th percentile had gained nearly $15,000 in real inflation-adjusted income.

Of course, these end-to-end comparisons poorly illustrate the impacts of the business cycle along the way. Thus, in Figure 1.2, I normalize the income levels at one hundred for the various income distribution points discussed above and track the yearly changes (using a two-year moving average)—remember that despite the fact that all the series start at one hundred, they represent very different levels of initial income. The chart highlights that the recession of the early 1990s had very little impact on high-income households but caused a sharp decline in incomes for those in the middle, and even more for those at the 25th percentile of the distribution. The recovery in the latter 1990s did yield strong benefits for richer households but the buoyancy of the economy also led to strong gains for those at the 25th percentile. The recession in the early 2000s had a strong impact on those at the top end—the sectors hardest hit, after all, were higher tech—but there were big losses at the bottom of the distributional pyramid as well.

The overall pattern suggests the importance of a strong economy to those in the lower half of the distribution. And this, as it turns out, is especially salient for Latinos: in Figure 1.3, I look at the ethnic composition of households by income deciles in California for the period 2002–2004. As might be expected, the Anglo share of households steadily rises in the higher deciles, peaking at 71 percent of households; African Americans have a very high representation in the lowest decile; the Asian community is bifurcated, with significant representation at the lowest and highest deciles; and Latino households peak in the second, third, and fourth deciles. This is exactly the group whose income appears most sharply affected by the state of the business cycle.

But it is not just economic growth that produces wage gains—policy matters as well. For example, while the federal minimum wage fell nearly 12 percent in real terms between 1997 and 2002, California's real minimum wage rose more than 13 percent over the same period as a result of state-mandated hikes. Alongside this state-level policy came the adoption of numerous living wage ordinances throughout the state—measures that required both local authorities and contractors to pay their own workers above a certain standard—as well as a growing movement to raise local minimum wages (for example, in San Francisco). Even market-oriented critics have concurred that such living wage ordinances did tend to improve income outcomes for the targeted low-wage workers (Neumark, 2002) and early studies suggest no evidence of employment losses owing to local minimums (see Dube and Reich, 2005, on the San Francisco case). Of course, neither the minimum wage nor living wages could protect households against the slack labor demand from a slowing economy, but the measures provided crucial floors and suggest much of what needs to emerge from future policies.

What did this changing economic and distributional picture mean for Latinos? Once again, I turn to the Current Population Survey data and chart the two-year moving average for household income, this time for Anglos, Latinos, and African Americans. In the results pictured in Figure 1.4, two patterns stand out. First, Latinos and African Americans are both at the bottom, with a substantial gap relative to Anglo households and with one group occasionally switching places to replace the other as the "leader" in low incomes. Second, the experience of both groups, in keeping with the discussion above, seems more susceptible to the state of the business cycle—the ups and downs of African American and Latino incomes track the state level of employment.

In analyzing the experience of Latinos, it may be useful to look not just at household income but also poverty rates. As Rodriguez (1996) notes, the majority of foreign-born Latino households contain three or more workers, twice the number for Asian immigrants and more than three times that for Anglos. Thus it is possible, depending on the number of earners and dependents, to be both below the poverty level (which controls for the number of people in a household) and squarely in the middle of the household income distribution (which does not control for the number of people or earners in a household). In looking at poverty, I use as a benchmark the 150 percent poverty rate—that is, persons are designated as poor if the households in which they live have incomes that, if adjusted for household size, would place them below 150 percent of the federally determined poverty line. This poverty level is becoming more common in economic analysis, partly because the calculation of the federal poverty line has not been adjusted for years and seems absurdly low in the context of California's high housing prices. To afford the readers a sense of what this means, the 150 percent poverty threshold was around $28,000 in 2004 for a family of four, a level most observers would associate with hardship in high-cost California.

As can be seen in Figure 1.5, Latino poverty rates—pooled over the 1999–2004 period to smooth out any business cycle fluctuations—are the highest in the state, well above those of Anglos but also exceeding the poverty rates for African Americans. The chart also shows that poverty rates for Asian Pacific Americans exceed those for Anglos; the latter may surprise some who also know that Asians have relatively high household incomes, but it is a pattern that reflects the experience of some subgroups—that is, the higher Asian poverty rates are determined by the experience of Southeast Asian immigrants and Filipinos, both of whom fare less well than other Asian Pacific Islander groups. Still, the striking fact is that the Latino poverty rate is nearly 40 percent—almost half of California's Latino population lives in conditions most observers would term quite challenging.

While some may assume that these high poverty outcomes largely owe to the presence of low-earning immigrants, this is not a full explanation. Figure 1.6 displays the household income data for the two largest groups, for which the larger sample size makes the data the most reliable: Anglos and Latinos. The figure shows that immigrant Latino households are low earners, but even households headed by U.S.-born Latinos earn only about 80 percent of their Anglo counterparts. Something besides the generational immigrant experience is factoring in here.

(Continues...)

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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Univ of Illinois Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2009
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0252076079
• ISBN 13: 9780252076077
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 255
• Redattore: Gutierrez Ramon A., Zavella Patricia
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile