Successful conservation efforts require understanding predictors of private-land stewardship (PLS), its definitions, and what people feel they owe stewardship responsibility to. Various strands of research have touched on the concept, but there is little research focusing on how it is communicated and enacted among the lay public, especially among Latinos. We used a case study in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas to address this gap by identifying and assessing Latino views of PLS. Our results indicate positive relationships between self-identification as a land steward, male gender, and agricultural-land ownership. Respondents associated PLS with property maintenance (60%), naturalresource conservation (14%), and addressing pollution problems (21%). They viewed PLS as a responsibility owed to family rather than to a larger community.

Hispanics are a growing segment of the United States population and will be an increasingly important stakeholder in future allocation and management of natural resources, including wildlife. In the United States, Hispanics now are the largest ethnic minority and will remain so over the next 40 years. Texas supports the second‐largest Hispanic population in the United States behind California, and it will have a Hispanic majority by 2040. Some analysts predict that this demographic shift will leave us with a less‐educated population with smaller incomes and higher levels of poverty—posing not only a social concern but also a challenge for conservation of wildlife resources. Here we identify shared Hispanic cultural characteristics, such as family, socioeconomic factors, and language, and their importance in planning wildlife outreach programs. Recognizing differences among Spanish‐speaking cultures is equally important. Knowledge of cultural characteristics will enable wildlife advocates to better expose wildlife issues in a manner receptive by Hispanics. It is in the best interest of wildlife and wildlife professionals to encourage Hispanic participation in this planning process because of their growing political and economic influence.

Previous research has linked racial/ethnic residential segregation to a number of poor health conditions, including infectious disease. Here, we examine how racial/ethnic residential segregation is related to the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. We examine infection rates by zip code level segregation in four major cities across the U.S.: New York City, Chicago, Houston, and San Diego. We also include a number of area-level Census variables in order to analyze how other factors may help account for the infection rate. We find that both Black and Latino residential clustering are significantly and positively related to a higher SARS-CoV-2 infection rate across all four cities, and that this effect is strong even when accounting for a number of other social conditions and factors that are salient to the transmission of infectious disease. As a result, we argue that neighborhood-level racial/ethnic patterning may serve as an important structural mechanism for disparities in SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Latinos in the United States are an increasing segment of the population and are becoming important stakeholders in the management of natural resources. Although Latinos have been included in attitudinal research on environmental concerns, few studies have focused exclusively on Latino attitudes toward natural resources and the environment. We surveyed Texas college and university students of Mexican descent (n = 635) to determine their environmental concerns. Using the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP), we determined an environmental concern score for each respondent and compared this index to several demographic variables. We found that gender, a political candidate's environmental position, mother's education, combined parental income, and, to a lesser degree, the number of grandparents born in the United States and religiosity (church attendance), were important model variables. We hypothesized that acculturation would be an important factor in predicting NEP scores; however, acculturation level was not an important predictor in our study, which we attribute to both the nature of our sample (i.e., highly acculturated college students) and small sample sizes of less‐acculturated college students. We recommend that future research consider determining the importance of acculturation in Latino attitudes toward natural resources and the environment.

No abstract

Public attitudes toward wildlife ownership represent an important and poorly studied component of biodiversity conservation. We began addressing this knowledge gap by interviewing residents along 140 km of the United States side of the farthest southeastern border with Mexico (n ¼ 402). After controlling for demographic variables, urban background (b ¼ 0.13) and land ownership (b ¼ À0.19) predicted attitudes regarding wildlife ownership (p < .05). Most exurban respondents considered wildlife public property (72%), and rural respondents were divided (48% considered wildlife public property). Non-Latino whites demonstrated a stronger positive correlation between land ownership and considering wildlife private property (r p ¼ 0.81) than Latinos (r p ¼ 0.23). These results suggest exurban immigrants will strengthen support for public ownership of wildlife in borderland contexts. The positive relationship between agricultural land ownership and thinking wildlife should be private property may weaken in borderland areas if Latinos regain agricultural land ownership.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately impacted U.S. communities of color, such as the Latino/x population. The pandemic coincides with other major contemporary structural factors affecting Latinxs, including the effects of U.S. immigration policies and President Trump's xenophobic rhetoric and priorities. Yet, the independent and simultaneous implications of the larger sociopolitical climate and specific COVID-19 concerns for Latinx mental health remain less clear. The present study uses an intersectional and social determinants of health framework to examine these relationships. Multivariable regression models were estimated with three waves of population-based panel data from the Pew American Trends Study (collected between 2019 and 2020) with Latinx adults (n = 1,132). We simultaneously examined how worries regarding deportation, respondents' citizenship and legal status, perceptions regarding the Trump Administration, anti-Hispanic discrimination, and pandemicrelated concerns predicted variation in Latinx self-reported psychological distress, after adjusting for other important covariates. We also conducted analyses separately by gender. The results indicated that worrying about a family member or a friend being deported, perceiving higher anti-Hispanic discrimination, and viewing coronavirus as a threat to respondents' personal health and finances were significantly associated with higher levels of psychological distress. Stratified analyses revealed that gender filters the ways that some of these stressors affect the mental health of Latinas, such as perceived threats about deportation, compared to Latinos. Taken together, this work demonstrates the diverse social determinants shaping Latinx mental health in intersectional ways early in the pandemic. Public Significance StatementThis study finds that worries about deportation, perceptions of anti-Hispanic discrimination, and having higher levels of COVID-19-related financial and health concerns were significantly associated with increased psychological distress among Latinxs in Spring 2020, net of other covariates. Gender-stratified analyses reveal that worries about deportation, legal and citizenship status, and pandemic-related effects on This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.

No abstract