PI: Sandra Smith Co-PI: Jennifer Jones Institution: University of California, Berkeley
This study employs extensive ethnographic field work to examine how race is produced through a case study that compares Afro-Mexicans and Mexicans migrating from new coastal sending regions to the receiving community of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. This project investigates how race relations between blacks, whites and Latinos are impacted by these shifts. Contrary to previous studies, it is anticipated that a significant number of Afro-Mexicans and Mestizo Mexicans will express closeness to African-Americans. The experience of Mexicans in a new contemporary geographical and political context, in part, as a consequence of restrictive immigration policies, may move Mexicans toward a more minority based consciousness and political alignment. In this way, this study will help us understand both the openings for and barriers to community-level organization between and within racial and ethnic groups.
Broader Impacts: This research will produce knowledge that can be used to help both scholars and policymakers think more critically and progressively about how to craft immigration policy at the local, state, national and international level in ways that can ameliorate some of their negative impacts on immigrants, as well as their sending and receiving communities.
Intellectual Merits: This dissertation argues that a regime of increasingly tight state regulations around immigration since 2005 and an increasingly security based federal policy since 2001, forced individuals and local communities to respond to think about race in unexpected ways. This project hypothesized that these twin factors of rapid demographic change and legal restriction strongly impact race relations between whites, blacks and Latinos, particularly in new Latino destinations such as the American Midwest and South. Since the mid-1990s, immigration patterns of settlement have shifted dramatically away from the Southwest and urban centers to the suburbs of the Midwest and Southeast. As a result, many of our taken-for-granted assumptions about immigration, assimilation and race relations no longer apply (Massey 2003, Singer 2009, Smith and Furseth 2005). Using a qualitative study design, this study employed extensive ethnographic field work to examine a case study of the interaction between local policies and community relations in producing new forms of race relations and racialization. Specifically, this study investigated how race is produced through a case study that compares Afro-Mexicans and Mestizo Mexicans migrating from new coastal sending regions to the receiving community of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Specifically, this project asked: how are race relations between blacks, whites and Latinos impacted by these shifts? Contrary to previous studies, we found that a significant number of Afro-Mexicans and Mestizo Mexicans expressed closeness to African-Americans, and a broad sense of shared minority identity. We found that the experience of Mexicans in a new contemporary geographical and political context, in part as a consequence of restrictive immigration policies, moved Mexicans toward a more minority based consciousness and political alignment. Moreover, we found that African-Americans actively facilitated these views, leading Latinos to develop a shared minority identity and calling for African-Americans to develop a Civil Rights consciousness in relation to anti-immigrant attitudes and practices. These findings are contrary to much of the immigration and incorporation literature, as well as popular wisdom regarding African-Americans and Latinos that highlights conflict and competition between them (Kaufmann 2003, Marrow 2008, McClain et al 2006). Broader Impacts: By detailing the mechanisms that led to these undertheorized outcomes, this study furthers our understanding of both the openings for, and barriers to, community-level organization between, and within, racial and ethnic groups. Further, it serves to produce knowledge that can be used to help both scholars and policymakers think more critically and progressively about how to craft immigration policy at the local, state, national and international level in ways that can ameliorate some of their negative impacts on immigrants, as well as their sending and receiving communities. Moreover, this study is an important contribution to the small but growing body of literature on new immigrant destinations, which are now home to a significant proportion of immigrants, suggesting a long-term shift in our understanding of immigrant incorporation and race relations.
