On the Age Against the Poor

Abstract

This article focuses on Dominican migration to the United States (U.S.) after 1965. Dominicans left their homeland pressured by economic needs, the desire to improve their lives, and encouraged by a de facto immigration policy that facilitated their exodus. Once in the U.S., most Dominicans encounter an economy that increasingly demands skills and levels of schooling they do not possess. Rather than a prosperous life, in the new land, Dominicans face high unemployment levels and an alarming state of poverty. Paradoxically, while the needs of Dominicans continue to be unmet in the new society, the social policies and the conditions that push them out of their country remain in effect. On its part, the U.S. has responded by adopting a number of immigration laws to control the entrance of unwanted and unneeded job-seekers. As a result, the number of Dominicans coming to the U.S. has begun to decline as the number of Dominicans deported to the Dominican Republic has increased. In the end, poor Dominicans are pushed back and forth by both societies whose immigration policies mask their unwillingness to respond to the needs of the group. The article also discusses the impact on the Dominican community of 9/11 and the crashing of the AA flight 587, on November 12, 2001.     

‘From objects to subjects: the museumification of Blackness in Mexico’*

ABSTRACT

The performative role of the museum as a ‘historical map’ has long served to construct strategic cartographies of identity and community. In addition, the nature of the relational experiences within museum spaces, places these histories and cartographies in a contact zone, in which structures of power and agency influence the locus of enunciation through which subjecthood and objecthood are derived. This essay examines the influential role of museums in Mexico in imaging, framing, and performing strategic configurations of mexicanidad. Particularly, I interrogate how museums have historically muted and made invisible the representation of Mexicans of African descent.Then, I analyze two important regional museums and theorize how they present a transition from objecthood to subjecthood, in which Afro-Mexican knowledge and consciousness is reified to configure an alternative mapping of African heritage within the space of museums and within constructions of racial formations and narratives of being and belonging in Mexico.     

‘Doing Gendered Age’: older mothers and migrant daughters negotiating care work in rural Lao PDR and Thailand

In this article I analyse the reconfiguration of the intersection of relations of gender and age manifesting between older mothers and their migrant daughters. For this I study the negotiation of care work between differently positioned women, drawing on material from Lao PDR and Thailand. Theoretically I draw on the constructivist notion of ‘doing gendered age’, which allows us to integrate the performance of gender–age subject positions with structural changes, most notably the generational dynamics of rural transformation, an expanding neoliberal labour market and demographic transition. I conclude that gender–age subject positions hold women accountable for ‘doing gendered age’ in a particular manner. This forms an important basis for informal mechanisms of social protection. However, these subject positions are neither pre-given nor voluntary but are enacted through everyday social interaction and subject to change.     

Schooling Opportunities and Intergenerational Educational Mobility in Turkey: An IV Estimation Using Census Data

We estimate the intergenerational transmission of education in Turkey using micro-data from the 1990 and 2000 censuses and an instrumental variable (IV) approach. We construct a historical series of provincial enrolment rates by gender to isolate the environmental effect on parental education. The results reveal that intergenerational educational mobility increases over time through a stronger decrease in the transmission of paternal education. The improvement is larger for boys, and the transmission is higher for mother-daughter pairs and in the case of poorer educated parents.     

“Asking Around”: Immigrants' Counterstrategies to Renew Their Residence Permit in Times of Economic Crisis in Italy

In contrast to the main body of literature focusing on irregular migrants' counterstrategies, this article explores regular migrant workers' practices to renew their residence permit in an attempt to circumvent structural hurdles due to the restrictive Italian legislative framework. Studying migrants' agency in a socioeconomic context, characterized by high unemployment rates and extensive informal working patterns, I thus distinguish three main counterstrategies: (1) the use of their informal networks to falsify their working relations; (2) the possibility of starting up an individual firm; and (3) taking advantage of structural “loopholes.”     

From A Redistribution To An Imperial Social Formation: Benin c.1293–1536

This article examines British attempts to stop female genital cutting in colonial northern Sudan through three phases: an initial period of midwifery reform which engaged with local practice in order to bring about change; a period in which local practice was suppressed and western-style education was deployed in an effort to reshape Sudanese gender sensibilities; and a final phase that saw the enactment of legal measures to curtail the severity of the custom. I suggest that each of these methods produced contradictory results that owed much to an incompatibility between British and Sudanese concepts of self.     

Authoritarian legality and informal practices: Judges, lawyers and the state in Russia and China

To participate in the global economy authoritarian states are pressed to offer international business a legal order that protects the interests of investors, customers, and sellers, but the creation of a modern legal order threatens to undermine the leaders’ control of public life. An increasingly common way to resolve this dilemma, I argue, is developing formal legal institutions that appear to meet world standards, while using informal practices to maintain control over the administration of justice when needed. In this paper I show how the governments of post-Soviet Russia (with its hybrid or competitive authoritarian regime) and the fully authoritarian People’s Republic of China as well, have used this approach in their relations with judges and defense lawyers in their respective countries. The analysis underscores the utility of investigating informal practices along with the reform of formal legal institutions, especially in the context of transition.     

Chapter 7. Mental Health Intervention with Dominican Immigrants

Abstract

Dominicans are a significant force in the changing composition of Hispanic immigration in the United States, and all indications are that they will continue to be in the years to come. A framework has been applied in which Dominican culture, psychosocial strengths and risks, and treatment implications are explored in the context of how Dominicans appear to be similar to and different from other Hispanic groups in the U.S. Much more needs to be done in terms of elaborating this combination of homogeneity and heterogeneity. Mental health practitioners who are open to such inquiry, and to keeping an open mind regarding the possibilities of modifications in therapeutic techniques and modality choices, will find Dominicans to be a clinically responsive, and an enjoyable population to work with.     

The Complexity of Marriage in Rural Ethiopia: Parental Transfers and Post-marital Residence Choices

This paper examines the relationship between parental transfers and post-marital residence of children in rural Ethiopia. We investigate whether asset transfers to children are an avenue which parents use to secure old age. We model post-marital residence and transfers simultaneously in a two-stage probit least squares estimation framework. We find a positive relationship between transfers and post-marital residence, a proxy for old age support. Children who receive more assets are more likely to stay at birth place after marriage and vice versa. In conditions of scarce or lacking social security mechanisms, parents make strategic transfers to ensure better old age.     

Dissecting the Attitudes of Political Science Students Towards Democracy and the 2004 Elections in Indonesia

Students’ attitudes towards Indonesia's transition from an authoritarian era to democracy varied from strong support for the democratic transition to nostalgia for the authoritarian era's strong leadership and economic prosperity. A sample of 317 students from three Indonesian universities was asked to rate the importance of political, economic, legal and social democratic principles. In addition to concerns about corruption, economic decline and security, students differed significantly centring on the importance of legitimate elections, representation, tolerance, accountability, human rights and gender equality. The majority of students were pessimistic about the elections; paradoxically some students optimistic about the general elections rated democratic principles the least important. After discussing the implications, political attitudes about democracy and elections were related to cognitive consistency and dissonance theory.     

THE NEW U. S. IMMIGRANTS: HOW DO THEY AFFECT OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN EXPERIENCE?

The implications of recent immigration for race relations in the United States depend importantly on family cultural orientations among Mexican Americans and how this group is culturally perceived by Anglos. Because Moynihan's 1965 work (in)famously emphasized the need to change black family culture in order to ameliorate black poverty, his work still holds implications for understanding how cultural orientations affect changing color lines. Unfortunately, his partially insightful analyses inadequately foresaw that policies designed to alleviate poverty through the modification of family cultural patterns are likely to fail without parallel changes in structural opportunities. Similar limitations also often emerge from mis-characterizations of Mexican origin family cultural situations, which all too often are incongruously reified as either being unduly familistic (thus falsely implying Mexican origin families foster self-sufficiency) or largely governed by culture of poverty tendencies (thus inaccurately suggesting Mexican origin families depend on welfare). Here we review research suggesting that Mexican origin families are neither substantially familistic nor disproportionately susceptible to moral hazard, thus indicating that future Mexican origin economic advancement is likely to turn on the availability of structural opportunities. In-depth interviews with Anglos further suggest that Mexicans are not culturally viewed with the same degree of prejudice and discrimination as blacks, implying that the integration of Mexicans into American society, contingent on adequate economic opportunity, will probably progress more steadily than often feared, while that of blacks may proceed more slowly than often expected.     

Gender and Perceived Control in the Russian Federation

The consequences of the socioeconomic transition for male physical health in Russia are widely documented, but much less research examines psychological well-being and mental outlook, or how these outcomes differ for men and women in Russia. Exploring gender differences in personal control, an important aspect of psychological well-being, we find that, controlling for social and economic factors, Russian women report lower levels of control than men. Gender differences in the social determinants of perceived control highlight the importance of gender roles for understanding psychological stress and inform how social expectations differentially influence men's and women's paths to well-being in Russia.     

On the relationship between human resources and development: Theory,methods and data

The article challenges simplistic one‐way models of the relation between education (human resources) and economic development. Diachronic analysis clearly indicates different patterns or trajectories linking the two variables through time in individual nations, with significant thresholds or transition points. The relation between educational levels and economic development is seen as part of the international division of labour, depending on the degree of national autonomy, and on the relations between countries rather than the differences between them. Education may influence development through changes in the system of social stratification as well as through the expansion of knowledge. The diachronic approach is used to test these relations in a number of developing countries.     

Suicide and undetermined deaths among youths and young adults in Latin America: comparison with the 10 major developed countries--a source of hidden suicides?

In Latin American (LA) and the major developed countries' (MDC) suicide and undetermined deaths are analyzed as methods of suicide and the number of undetermined deaths are similar, possibly containing hidden suicides. The goal was to test the likelihood that LA cultural attitudes lead to higher undetermined rates and more hidden suicides. We used 3-year WHO average mortality data to compare LA and MDC mortality by age and gender, and chi2 tests to examine any differences. In 13 LA countries younger-aged (15-34) men and women's suicides were higher than all-age rates, and undetermined deaths exceeded the suicide rates. Nine LA countries had significantly more undetermined younger-aged male deaths than females. Sixteen of 18 LA countries had significantly higher undetermined death rates than the MDC. LA younger-aged malefs24 146s differential suicide: Undetermined rates indicated they may contain substantial numbers of hidden suicides. Inadvertently, cultural attitudes to suicide may hinder prevention.     

Russian Educational Reform and the Introduction of the Unified State Exam. A View from the Provinces

The introduction of the Unified State Examination (USE) in Russian higher education has been the subject of much debate. One of the primary factors hindering the transition has been ambivalent public and professional perceptions of the effectiveness of the USE in addressing the problems associated with inequalities of access to higher education. This essay contributes to research in this area through a case study analysing the introduction of the USE in Ul'yanovsk Oblast’. It draws on survey data collected from pupils and parents of final year high school students about the USE reforms and explores the reasons why the transition to USE did not proceed as smoothly as its creators might have envisaged. Here the negative perceptions of the high-school graduates and parents reveal that the reforms have been judged to be largely ineffective with regard to reducing the role of material and regional inequalities in determining access to higher education, and in addressing how the differing institutional status of ordinary ‘comprehensive’ and elite, specialised schools continues to create inequalities in access to higher education in Russia.     

Democracy and Dictatorship in Continental Latin America During the Interwar Period

This article emphasizes the key role of labor in shaping trends and patterns of pica change. The first section of the article argues that during the interwar period, continental Latin America experienced common trends in several areas, including a general upsurge in labor unrest, deepening conflicts among elites, the implementation of new modes of state regulation, and a disruption of prevailing trade arrangements within the world economy, all of which were accompanied by a brief but significant wave of democratization in the 1920s. Noting that these general trends were unevenly distributed through the region (particularly after the 1930s), the second section of the article proceeds to abstract four patterns of political arrangements (repressive dictatorships, party competition, corporatist nationalism, and unstable labor politics). The article uses two principal variables (the relative weight of the middle and working classes and the degree of cohesion/fragmentation among elites) to explain these patterns of political change. Overall, the article suggests that the relative strength of labor and subordinate groups was key to shifts away from repressive dictatorship, while the degree of convergence among elites was significant in shaping political outcomes, but not in promoting democratic outcomes. I would like to thank Professor Irving Louis Horowitz for useful comments on an earlier version of this article. Previous versions of this research were presented at a seminar of the Latin American Studies Center at Princeton University, and at an annual meeting of the Southern Labor Studies Conference, where I benefited from comments by panel participants.     

Is the East European “underclass” feminized?

Results of national surveys carried out in East-European countries convincingly showed that after the fall of communism the gender gap in earnings remained substantial. Following the same analytical framework here I explore a range of issues concerning the gender gap in membership in what I define as the “underclass” in 6 post-communist societies. The basic question is to determine whether or not such a gap exits. I find considerable cross-national variation in the odds of female/male membership in the underclass: women in Poland, Russia and Hungary appear to be most heavily over-represented in this category, while in Bulgaria and Slovakia, the effect of gender does not exist. In addition, the explanation for this gap cannot be found in the intergenerational transmission of poverty, in differences in marital status, and other social–demographic attributes commonly employed in quantitative studies. It is only the lower educational status of women, living in rural areas, and older age, which significantly interact with relatively higher representation of women in the underclass. After controlling for several characteristics of a person’s socio–economic position I found that in four countries, namely in Poland, Russia, Romania and Hungary, a statistically significant net effect of gender remains which provides solid evidence for the feminization of the underclass in these societies.     

Internal migration in Turkey: Socioeconomic characteristics by destination and type of move, 1965–70

Based on examination of internal migration in Turkey during the 1965-70 period, the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of migrants and the variation in these properties by type of move undertaken (first, repeat, and return migration) and by choice of destination are described. The volume, rates, and differentials of migration are discussed in this context. A very rapid rural-urban migration occurred in the 1950-70 period; urban population increased from 18.8 to 35.8% of the total. The emphasis on industrialization, the mechanization and relatively slower growth of agricultural production, the scarcity of new lands to cultivate, and the construction of a large road network connecting cities with their hinterland and rural communities contributed to this increased movement. The 1970 Turkish census questionnaire included a question on "place of usual residence 5 years ago" for the 1st time. Along with information on place of birth and usual residence in 1970, the census provides information on place of residence at 3 points in time. The study is based on a 1/1000 sample selected from the household records of the 1970 Population Census of Turkey. Discussion is restricted to the migration of the adult population; the migration of children (up to age 15), which is viewed as involuntary is excluded. The working file contains 20,602 cases. Variables analyzed include age, sex, education, labor force status, occupation, and place of residence in 1970. The migration-defining variables are province of birth and usual residence in 1965 and 1970. Census data indicated that 9.2% of the population 15 years of age and older changed their place of residence during the 1965-70 period, moving to another province. An additional 4% moved to another place within the same province. There were strong indications of stage migration, if movements both within and between provinces are considered. All urban places showed population grew through intraprovincial migration. Only large metropolitan cities have grown through interprovincial migration. Migrants from rural areas 1st move to towns and cities within the same province and then make a 2nd move to other, mostly larger, urban areas and metropolitan cities. The majority of the interprovincial migrants (60%) were interurban movers, and only 1/5 were rural to urban migrants. +a large group of repeat migrants who moved primarily between urban places, were relatively older, better educated and skilled, and more likely to be employed in white-collar occupations than their counterparts. Although interprovincial migration was dominated by young and single males, there was considerable variation in migrant properties according to the type of move made and the place of destination. Socioeconomic characteristics of the 2 basic migration types are included.     

The impact of the gender composition of households on inequality and poverty: a comparison across Russia and Eastern Europe

This study compares poverty and income distribution among gender subgroups in Russia and four East European countries—Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Poland—in 2000. Does the gender poverty gap exist in these countries and if yes, how big is it? How much does the level of gender inequality contribute to explaining the level of aggregate inequality and poverty within each country? To what extent may the differences emerging in cross-country comparisons of poverty and inequality be explained by differences in the gender composition of households, e.g., the prevalence of female-dominated households? These are the questions I seek to answer in this paper.Equivalent expenditure is adopted as a measure of economic welfare of households with different gender ratios. The gender gap is defined as the degree of distance between the economic welfare of households dominated by women and households dominated by men. Headcount poverty and average poverty shortfalls are calculated using relative poverty lines. Inequality is measured by Gini and Theil L coefficients.