R-3 Repository :: Browsing by Author "Chavez, Sergio"

Browsing by Author "Chavez, Sergio"

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Binational Social Networks and Assimilation: A Test of the Importance of Transnationalism
(University of California Press, 2014) Mouw, Ted; Chavez, Sergio; Edelblute, Heather; Verdery, Ashton
While the concept of transnationalism has gained widespread popularity among scholars as a way to describe immigrants' long-term maintenance of cross-border ties to their origin communities, critics have argued that the overall proportion of immigrants who engage in transnational behavior is low and that, as a result, transnationalism has little sustained effect on the process of immigrant adaptation and assimilation. In this article, we argue that a key shortcoming in the current empirical debate on transnationalism is the lack of data on the social networks that connect migrants to each other and to nonmigrants in communities of origin. To address this shortcoming, our analysis uses unique binational data on the social network connecting an immigrant sending community in Guanajuato, Mexico, to two destination areas in the United States. We test for the effect of respondents' positions in cross-border networks on their migration intentions and attitudes towards the United States using data on the opinions of their peers, their participation in cross-border and local communication networks, and their structural position in the network. The results indicate qualified empirical support for a network-based model of transnationalism; in the U.S. sample we find evidence of network clustering consistent with peer effects, while in the Mexican sample we find evidence of the importance of cross-border communication with friends.
Color-Blind Racism among Non-poor Latinos in a Redeveloping Houston Barrio
(2014-04-22) Korver-Glenn, Elizabeth; Chavez, Sergio; Cech, Erin A.; Howard Ecklund, Elaine; Lopez Turley, Ruth N.
Accounts of urban inequality, which often focus on the urban poor, have also highlighted the centrality of non-poor minority actors in shaping poor inner-city neighborhood outcomes. This research suggests that non-poor minority actors may be particularly influential in the process of poor neighborhood redevelopment given their greater access to social, cultural, and political capital. Redevelopment in poor neighborhoods reproduces existing inequalities, at least in part through the legitimating power of color-blind racial ideology. Color-blind ideology privatizes inequality by silencing structural explanations for disparities. Additionally, color-blind ideology has also been shown to influence how minorities themselves explain inequality. Yet to date, no research has examined how non-poor minorities, redevelopment, and color-blind ideology may be linked in a single context. Relying on a year of ethnographic research and 38 in-depth interviews with non-poor Latinos, I ask whether and how these actors frame neighborhood inequality using color-blind ideology in a poor, redeveloping Houston barrio. I find widespread use of the cultural racism frame. I also ask what the implications of this finding may be, and theorize that widespread cultural racism among non-poor Latinos supports the conditions under which redevelopment stakeholders can pursue their projects without obstruction. I conclude by exploring what these findings may mean for issues such as socioeconomic integration, and offer suggestions for future research.
Communication flows and the durability of a transnational social field
(Elsevier, 2018) Verdery, Ashton M.; Mouw, Ted; Edelblute, Heather; Chavez, Sergio
We draw on unique data on communication flows between migrants and non-migrants in a bi-national, cross-border social network to test competing theories of the process of social incorporation. While advocates of the assimilation perspective argue that social incorporation is largely a one-way street, a recent literature on immigrant transnationalism challenges this view by arguing that changes in communication technologies and reductions in travel costs have made it possible for migrants to retain meaningful connections to their origin communities. In the context of this debate, we argue that communication flows—as measured by a combination of the number of social ties and the frequency of communication with them—provide an empirical test of the potential durability of cross-border networks. In our analysis, we find mixed support for both transnationalism and assimilation: while the classic assimilation perspective is correct that the strength of migrants’ ties to origin attenuates as time in the destination increases, we also find evidence of a striking persistence in cross-border communication that is reinvigorated by migrant return visits, consistent with an attenuated view of transnationalism.
Defining Sikhism: Boundaries of Religion and Ethnicity Among Sikhs in the US
(2016-04-22) Khalsa, Simranjit; Ecklund, Elaine Howard; Chavez, Sergio
U.S. immigration has brought rising numbers of non-western religious practitioners whose religious and ethnic identities are linked, and there has been a concurrent rise in white Americans converting to these faiths. Research on religious-ethnic traditions has not addressed how communities of white converts impact religious-ethnic traditions. I study this phenomena among US Sikhs, comparing members of two Sikh communities. I ask how they construct their Sikh identity and what boundaries they draw around this identity. I draw on participant observation and 31 in-depth interviews with both Indian Sikhs in Houston and members of Sikh Dharma, a predominantly white Sikh community. I find that respondents in each community draw on the same elements (symbols, practices, values) to construct Sikh identity, however, they diverge in regards to the specific practices they emphasize. Differences in religious practice become boundaries between respondents, separating Indian Sikhs and members of Sikh Dharma along both religious and ethnic lines. Furthermore, members of Sikh Dharma redefine both Sikh practice and the boundaries around Sikhism, despite the dissent of Indian Sikhs. Thus, my findings suggest that white practitioners of non-white religious-ethnic traditions have outsized agency in defining Sikhism for themselves and the broader American public.
Encounters with Outsiders: An Examination of White Habitus in a Gang Intervention Site
(2015-04-17) Garcia, Adriana Lizette; Ecklund, Elaine H; Emerson, Michael O; Chavez, Sergio
Although law enforcement agencies have utilized incarceration as a means of incapacitation, mass incarceration has not made great strides in impeding gang entry. In response, religious and nonprofit organizations have created community programs and assessment-based approaches to gang intervention and prevention. Few studies have examined the various ways volunteers implement such interventions to a contemporary social problem. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research (2012-2014) as well as 27 semi-structured interviews, this thesis examines how affluent, white mainline Protestant volunteers construct and participate in gang intervention work. I argue that the gang intervention volunteers possess a “white habitus” which inhibits their encounters with gang-affiliated youth. This white habitus, described as predispositions which condition whites’ racial tastes and views on racial matters, informs their perceptions about gang culture in a way that either reproduces whiteness or leads to an unsuccessful relationship between mentor and mentee. Instead, volunteers create “reaffirmed outsiders”, as they reapply stereotypes and generalizations and offer limited perspective on gang intervention solutions. These results provide a more nuanced account of gang intervention implementation and just as importantly, of race and its pernicious effects on the everyday efforts of well-intentioned people and programs.
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Exploring the relationship between maternal nativity, food insecurity, and young children’s experiences at school.
(2022-08-11) Fern, Simon E; Kimbro, Rachel T; Chavez, Sergio
Children growing up in food insecure households experience serious challenges in their day-to-day lives, wellbeing, and development which understandably affect them at school. While food insecurity and maternal nativity, and food insecurity and school outcomes have been explored substantially by other scholars – there is a scarcity of work which interacts the three together. Using nationally representative data from the period 2010-2016 for 4,250 children in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010-2011, with household incomes at or below 400 percent of the federal poverty level, this study explores whether maternal nativity affects the relationship between household food insecurity and children’s academic achievement and teacher-assessed behaviour. This analysis demonstrates a substantial food insecurity gap between households headed by US or foreign-born mothers, and a diversity of relationships between food insecurity and school outcomes. This paper provides evidence for the importance of disaggregating the ‘foreign-born mother’ category to think about the relationship between different places of origin and later trajectories in the United States.
How do High-Status Parents Choose Schools? Evidence from a Choice District
(2015-01-30) Bancroft, Amanda; Lopez Turley, Ruth; Bratter, Jenifer; Chavez, Sergio
One premise of contemporary school choice is that parents largely use academic quality indicators – loosely referred to as “accountability data” – to choose schools. This premise does not sufficiently account for the role of other mechanisms in parents’ decision-making that have been emphasized by other scholars, such as racial prejudice or network information. This project aims to highlight the mechanisms which are most important in the school choice narratives of high-status parents in a large, southern city. This population was sampled because of their above-average economic capital and social privilege and their capacity to access and use accountability data, which increase their ability to navigate school and residential markets. Participant data from in-depth, qualitative interviews highlight alternatives to the assumption that parents primarily or exclusively use accountability data to choose where to send their children to school. Specifically, parents’ color-blind “cultural logics,” which include collective ideals, constructs, and stereotypes about race, emerge as key elements in parents’ school choices and how they later explain those choices. A discussion of the data will suggest that these collective mechanisms are meaningful for parent choice, and may have unintended consequences for school choice programs within racially diverse and segregated districts.
Learning More than Language: An Examination of Student Achievement in English Immersion and Bilingual Programs
(2015-04-23) Alvear, Sandra Anna; Turley, Ruth N.L.; Bratter, Jenifer; Chavez, Sergio
Quantitative education research has yet to assemble a cohesive perspective on the impact of bilingual programs on Spanish-speaking students’ achievement. The current study offers a nearly unprecedented methodological advancement in bilingual education research through a comprehensive, comparative analysis of reading achievement across four major language acquisition programs in U.S. schools—transitional, one-way developmental, two-way bilingual immersion, and English immersion. Furthermore, the study contextualizes these programs and their outcomes within segmented assimilation theory, theoretically linking each program to a specific form of acculturation. Using a longitudinal dataset from a large urban school district in Texas, I employed multilevel models to examine reading outcomes in elementary school. Results indicate that transitional and two-way students have comparable reading outcomes in Spanish and English. Across grade levels, one-way students demonstrate lower Spanish reading growth than transitional students. The English reading analysis shows that program exposure beyond four years is linked to significantly lower reading performance across all students, and among English immersion students in particular. These results indicate that transitional programs—although associated with consonant acculturation’s limited bilingual foundation—lead to similar, and in some cases higher, reading outcomes compared to fully additive bilingual programs such as one-way or two-way.
Occupational Linguistic Niches and the Wage Growth of Latino Immigrants
(Oxford University Press on behalf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2012-12) Mouw, Ted; Chavez, Sergio
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The Daily Struggle: How Immigrants Secure Insecure Work at Informal Hiring Sites.
(2021-02-04) Samayoa, Erick; Chavez, Sergio
Day labor is a highly competitive informal labor market activity. Latino immigrant day laborers (mostly men) continue to dominate this labor market niche often facing the risk of becoming victims of labor law violations and abuse at the hands of employers. In addition to the risk and competition embedded in this labor market, Latin American day laborers must learn to interpret employer’s expectations, how to negotiate a deal based on an informal honorary system, and deal with figures of authority. This study investigates how Latino day laborers learn the ropes of this informal job-seeking activity to secure work. Based on in-depth interviews with 32 day male laborers and 10 months of ethnographic data in two informal hiring sites, -Rosedale and Lakeview- I analyze how Latino day laborers in Houston, find work in an informal market where few job offers exist. I argue that the process of waiting for work is key to understanding how day laborers learn the tricks of this job-seeking activity. I identify three strategies workers cultivate and enact - spatial, interactional, and transactional strategies- to avoid harassment from authorities, distinguish oneself from the on-site competition, and avoid rip-offs. This research contributes to the emerging literature on day labor by expanding the geographic scope of previous research and delineating the ways in how job opportunities are created, and risks are managed, despite their legal, social, and financial precarity of this labor market.
The Reproduction of Hegemonic Masculinity: The Case of Men’s Cross Sexual Orientation Friendships
(2015-10-28) Rothwell, William R; Cech, Erin A; Chavez, Sergio; Denney, Justin T
This study examines how hegemonic masculinity is upheld in the formation and maintenance of cross-sexual orientation friendships between college aged men. Broadly defined, hegemonic masculinity prizes that which is masculine, and subordinate that which is considered feminine, including non-heterosexual identities for men. The practices of hegemonic masculinity establish a hierarchy that perpetuates the dominant social position of heterosexual men, and the subordinated position of women and those men with non-heterosexual identities. Drawing on 40 interviews with 20 self-identified queer and 20 straight men at a large public university in the south, this study finds that while the masculine hierarchy is central to both the formation (or non-formation) and maintenance of cross-sexual orientation friendships, the hierarchy is of greater importance to the queer men in these associations. Regarding the formation of these friendships, queer men expressed anxiety regarding entering into these associations, commonly citing past experiences of homophobia, fear of coming out, and the lack of desire for friendship on the part of the straight male as the chief reasons for their apprehension for entering into these associations. Juxtaposed with other studies, the present study found that straight men reported little anxiety about entering into these associations: most reported that these friendships would likely offer them greater disclosure than their other friendships. Once formed, queer men in these friendships often policed themselves so as to not make their sexual identity salient, queer men put more work into maintaining these friendships, and interactions between straight and queer male friends were found to differ when in public and private spaces. These results point to cross-sexual orientation friendships between men as an avenue through which the masculine hierarchy is not diminished, but rather mutually upheld by queer and straight men alike.

Browsing by Author "Chavez, Sergio"

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