Urban studies highlight the importance of public parks in fostering community, rest, and civic engagement. Yet for low-income and Latinx/e populations, public spaces that support leisure and community are often scarce or stigmatized as unsafe. To better understand the relationship between public space and social belonging, this paper analyzes the significance of public parks in the lives of Dominican and Puerto Rican men in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data collected over nearly four years, we argue that parks in Lawrence serve as temporal sites for Latinx pla(y)making. This process increases feelings of belonging, transforms the local environment in culturally relevant ways, and, through collective play, affirms cultural heritage while generating loving community and belonging rooted in Caribbean and Latinx/e saberes. These embodied practices—which are too often viewed as unruly by dominant culture—work in opposition to negative “controlling images” and dominant narratives of degradation.
At Hispanic-serving and minority-serving institutions (HSIs/MSIs), where students are often commuters, first generation, and come from working-class immigrant families, faculty play a central role not only in instruction but also in providing emotional and instrumental support. In this article, I pair my testimonio alongside interviews with former students to examine how identity alignment between faculty and students—specifically as a young Latina faculty member—shapes students’ expectations of care and access and heightens the experience of identity taxation. While students often feel more comfortable and supported by faculty who resemble them, this sense of connection can lead to blurred boundaries, assumed obligations, and an increased workload that is not adequately reflected in tenure and promotion evaluations. Therefore, while identity alignment is both a powerful pedagogical tool and a structural challenge, it necessitates institutional recognition and support to ensure equitable teaching environments for both faculty and students.
The politics of language has the potential to “wipe out an entire generation of people.” Like language, the theories, methods and modes of analyses we use have the ability to erase entire groups of people. Using theories that do not center diasporic Blackness to explain Afrolatinx racialized experiences, can lead to the treatment of Blackness as an additive to Latinidad. To combat this treatment, I propose an Afrolatin Critical Framework which is a qualitative methodological frame that centers Blackness throughout the entirety of the research process. Using my own empirical work, I demonstrate how the Afrolatin Critical Framework allows scholars to focus on the “Afro” in Afrolatinidad to demonstrate that Blackness and experiences of Blackness are not monolithic and vary based on multiple intersecting social, historical, and institutional factors. I conclude by urging scholars to use the Afrolatin Critical Framework to center Blackness in critical qualitative research dealing with Afrolatinx people.
Homeownership remains a central mechanism through which ethno-racial stratification is produced and maintained in the United States. While prior research has documented the disadvantages minority households face in accessing homeownership, limited attention has been paid to the challenges they face in the mortgage refinancing market. Moreover, existing studies fail to account for variations in creditworthiness when assessing outcomes in the refinance market. Utilizing 2021 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data, this study examines ethno-racial disparities in mortgage refinancing outcomes across debt-to-income (DTI) levels. Findings indicate that Black and Latino applicants experience disproportionately high rates of loan denial and high-cost refinance loans relative to similarly situated White applicants. Depending on the outcome, Asian applicants tend to perform comparably or slightly worse than Whites. Notably, in the case of high-cost refinance loans, Black and Latino applicants with strong creditworthiness perform similarly to, or worse than, White and Asian applicants with below-average creditworthiness.
Latinx Sociology – and Latinx Social Science broadly – pushes against hegemonic research models by grounding inquiry in Latinx standpoints and incorporating critical methods. Yet it can be challenging for scholars to implement or innovate such methods. Through storytelling, we theorize collective care – defined as efforts to care for ourselves, each other, and community well-being – as a logic to guide research with Latinx communities. Drawing examples from two research projects with immigration-impacted Latinx young adults, we detail how we applied a logic of collective care in our methods and everyday research practices by centering healing, relationality, and reflexivity. We name these efforts methodological carework to capture the intentionality and effort required to develop, adapt, and sustain a logic of collective care. We argue that a logic of collective care invites an unruly research process but ultimately provides the flexibility needed to yield a liberatory research space.
Social status is inversely related to negative health outcomes, including suicide. While extensive research suggests that subjective status measures are better than objective status measures at predicting health outcomes, this trend may or may not predict suicidality—thinking about and/or attempting suicide. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health ( N = 7,155), I estimate survey-weighted logistic regressions to examine the relationship between social status and suicidality and compare subjective versus objective status measures for predicting suicidality. I find that status measures are consistently inversely related to suicidality, and that even when controlling for objective status, subjective status continues to predict suicidality. Bridging a strain theory of suicide with Durkheim’s anomie, I argue that different measures of status proxy different strains, which, in turn, decrease moral regulation and increase suicide risk. These findings contribute to the sociology of suicide by demonstrating how social inequalities translate into suicide risk.
Borrowing from the scholarship of Black and Chicana/Latina feminist scholars who theorize motherhood and maintain that motherhood for women of color is not the traditional, heteronormative, and dichotomous family structure, we argue that the researcher-participant relationship in ethnographic research for women of color scholars is also not traditional. Within this special issue, we reflect on the relationships we built with our research collaborators across two ethnographic studies. Our separate research experiences have a shared unruly theoretical and methodological perspective. Theoretically, we conceptualize othersistering. Methodologically, we challenge the Westernized approach to ethnography as a distant relationship between the “researcher” and the “participant” and the decision we make to develop deeper relationships with our collaborators – what some might deem as “unethical” or in danger of “subjectivity.” Instead, we engage in ethnographic work that creates unruly sociology, with embodied ways of knowing as Black/Afro-Latina and Chicana feminist ethnographers that materialize in othersistering.
Women of color use aesthetics to challenge and reproduce racialized, classed, or gendered marginalization, yet few sociological studies have examined women of color service workers as agents who negotiate, reproduce, and resist racialized beauty norms for their clients. This study utilizes a transnational ethnography of a beauty school course and Latina-owned curly and natural hair salons, primarily serving Latinas and Afro-Latinas, in New York City and Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Through its analysis, this article identifies different forms of gendered labor that stylists perform to introduce “specialized body labor,” thereby disrupting racialized beauty norms that devalue natural and Afro-textured hair. By focusing on stylists’ labor in engendering racialized beauty and femininities, this research demonstrates how the intersections of race, gender, and class shape gendered labor. In addition, this article underscores the significance of how everyday labor can foster inclusivity and challenge marginalizing racial and gender norms.
While many explanations in the literature propose socioeconomic and structural explanations for the rise of protest activity, historical dimensions are often overlooked. Less work undertakes quantitative analysis of these explanations in relation to what has been described by some as the biggest U.S. movement in history, Black Lives Matter (BLM). First, we determine whether socioeconomic and organizational factors, which researchers have used to study the sit-ins during the Civil Rights Movement, are useful for predicting BLM protests. Second, we examine whether counties that had sit-ins in 1960 were more likely to participate in BLM protests. We analyze 1386 BLM demonstrations between July 2014 and January 2017 alongside data from the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Our findings show that several factors that predicted sit-ins predict BLM protests. We also find evidence of an enduring legacy of sit-ins on BLM protests above and beyond socioeconomic predictors.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ+) people in the United States have achieved several important legal and social gains in the recent past. These achievements can be seen in the legalizing of same-sex marriage, nationwide access to adoption, and more Gay-Straight Alliances. It is also the case that more LGBTQ+ people are maintaining relationships with their parents after coming out. However, these advances often obscure the reality of greater discrimination and violence against queer people compared to heterosexuals. This has led some commentators to suggest that the contemporary U.S. queer rights movement is incomplete. In this paper, we show how heterosexism and homophobia continue to operate in relationships between parents and their lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) children in the United States. We argue that preserving parent-LGB child relationships involves managing the meaning attached to time. More specifically, LGBs and their parents use "remedial emotion work," a form of emotion work that involves diminishing, transforming, and thwarting noxious feelings-on behalf of oneself and others-by envisioning a future where the strained relationship is improved. Through remedial emotion work, LGBs and their parents are able to preserve their familial relationships, but at a cost: placing the emotional well-being of parents above those of LGBs and bolstering heterosexism.
The birth doula movement highlights a fundamental conflict between biomedicine's relationship with time and the uncertain processes of birth, demonstrating how speed at which interventions are offered and the timetables within which choices are made can interrupt and undermine patient autonomy, health, and safety. Drawing on 25 interviews with birth doulas in 2022-23, we present a theory of sociotemporal brokerage, arguing that doulas represent themselves as temporally attuned social brokers situated between hospitals and birthing people. We highlight various ways they claim to flow with the unpredictable rhythms of reproductive time and against harmful intrusions of biomedical time. In minimizing clocks and schedules and prioritizing emotions, informed consent, and relationships, doula narratives highlight the role the doula movement can play in humanizing reproductive care. We conclude by suggesting avenues for future research on reproductive justice and sociotemporal brokerage.
This paper aims to identify the challenges Asian Americans face when struggling for political representation in the new immigration destinations. I interviewed 95 Asian American elected officials, political candidates, and organizers in Houston, Texas. I found that, while respondents aim to mobilize Asian voters based on the shared panethnic status, they often fail due to the racial lumping of Asian Americans, which creates a group of heterogeneous voters who do not prioritize the Asian American identity. Meanwhile, they confront the forever foreigner discourse from non-Asian voters who question their Americanness. They are thus trapped in what I term the Asian American unelectability paradox, where their identity is seen as a liability that could neither attract Asian nor non-Asian votes. As a result, candidates either deracialize their campaigns or spend extra effort proving their Americanness. This article expands our understanding of how Asian Americans' racialization in electoral politics reinforces their marginalization, particularly in a minority context.
In recent decades, U.S. cities have experienced an increasing prevalence of gentrification, especially in Black urban neighborhoods, and the growth and dispersal of new immigrants. Although scholarship suggests links between immigrant settlement and gentrification, few quantitative studies examine this relationship and consider differences across neighborhood ethnoracial contexts and city-level contexts of immigrant reception. This study draws on U.S. Census and American Community Survey data from 1990 to 2019 to examine this relationship across the United States. We find that higher shares of recent immigrants lower the likelihood that neighborhoods gentrify, except in Black neighborhoods. In Black neighborhoods, the share of recent immigrants is positively associated with gentrification, particularly since the 2000s and in newer immigrant destination cities. Findings suggest that new immigrants serve as pioneers of gentrification and buffers in Black neighborhoods but that this pathway is contingent on the broader context of immigrant reception.
The growing disenchantment with working careers - commonly referred to as the 'anti-work' sentiment - has emerged as a form of critique of the current economic system. However, this phenomenon remains under-explored, particularly with regard to the subjective meaning of hostility towards work. This article proposes a conceptual map of the themes related to anti-work from the workers' perspective, drawing on an empirical study of content posted within the most prominent virtual community discussing anti-work. The findings reveal that a complex network of themes underpins the idea of anti-work. They also highlight that a significant portion of these themes reflects workers' perceived need for recognition - not only through a fair wage but also through meaningful acknowledgement in the workplace - rather than an idealistic notion of being 'liberated' from work.
As institutional reckonings move from the margins to the mainstream, an increasing number of colleges and universities have sponsered efforts to examine their institutions' involvement with enslavement. Despite this trend, little is known about how key constituencies, including students, receive these projects. We examine students' responses to universities' efforts to engage its history with enslavement and its effects. Qualitative, thematic analysis of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 111 undergraduate students at a private, selective, southern U.S. university reveals that students overwhelmingly understand university motivations for this work as reputation management. While students of color were overtly cynical, frequently associating a university's reputation-management efforts with student recruitment and financial gain, White students balanced both cynicism and hope, differentiating between altruistic individuals and insincere institutions. We offer the concept of "racial cynicism" to theorize these responses, illuminating the interpretive processes sustaining the well-documented gap between diversity programming and racial justice.
This article explores market-oriented activism in a branch of the alternative food movement called the Young Farmers Movement. Using archival and in-depth interview data from young beginning farmers across the United States, I explore how these individuals conceptualize farming as lifestyle activism and engage in a movement tactic called politicized production: the growing and selling of politicized goods for political consumers. Because politicized production places young farmers into competition with one another, this tactic fractures the identity fields into which activists typically organize themselves and others. I explore how they employ identity work techniques to strategically reframe other young farmers, as well as food system adversaries, in ways that repair and reorganize the movement's identity fields. These findings connect literature on social movements and agrifood studies by exploring the overlap of movements and markets, and the limits and consequences of using identity work to facilitate market-oriented activism.
Building upon theories of capital conversion, we examine relationships between one form of social capital (intergenerational closure, defined as the number of connections among parents in a school) and both simple and complex forms of cultural capital (school-oriented home activities and concerted cultivation) across socioeconomic status (SES). Using nationally representative data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Class of 2010 to 2011, the results show that intergenerational closure is significantly and positively associated with both home activities and concerted cultivation, having a stronger association with the latter. Families with lower SES report higher rates of engaging in everyday home activities, whereas families with higher SES concentrate more of their efforts into concerted cultivation. Furthermore, network size positively affects home activities across socioeconomic contexts but has stronger associations with concerted cultivation in socioeconomically disadvantaged families. We interpret these findings as suggesting that parental networks can be key mechanisms for converting forms of capital in socioeconomically disadvantaged contexts.
This manuscript explores if memorials to collective violence can promote healing and reconciliation vis-& agrave;-vis changes in intra- and intergroup attitudes. The paper focuses on a case study: the National Memorial for Peace and Justice-the first national large-scale memorial to victims of lynching-in Montgomery, Alabama. Using data collected before and after the memorial's 2018 opening, we assess the differential individual and community effects of the memorial by racial group, comparing residents and nonresidents on measures of racial ingroup and outgroup closeness and social distance. Overall, there was no consistent relationship between the memorial and intra-/intergroup attitudes. The results reveal that White Montgomery residents had elevated levels of ingroup closeness, in comparison with White nonresidents, and all Montgomery residents had increased feelings of social distance after the memorial's opening, net of their racial identification. The findings inform future research on the potential ways that memorialization-both passively and directly-can impact reconciliation and intergroup relations.
A person's educational attainment and that of their parents, referred to as intergenerational education, is associated with later-life heart health. Yet, whether the association between intergenerational education and adult heart disease varies by cohort or gender is unclear despite the increasing importance of education for health, especially among women. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, we examine associations between intergenerational education and heart disease prevalence (n = 34,113) and incidence (person-year observations = 274,618) and variation by gender and cohort. The heart health benefits of education increase across levels of parental education, and individuals with high intergenerational education have the lowest prevalence of heart conditions. We find a similar pattern for women, but no differences across gender. There is a heart health benefit of high intergenerational education for the cohort born between 1942 and 1953, but no differences across cohorts. Overall, educational disparities in heart disease are greatest among adults with highly educated parents.
