This article undertakes a multivariate analysis of political participation among Mexican American immigrants. Traditional forms of participation such as registration and voting are not adequate tests of civic engagement for a population including 7 million noncitizens. Rather, this article examines nonelectoral participation including attending a meeting or rally, volunteering for a campaign, or donating money to a political cause. This research employs a national sample of Mexican Americans, including immigrants and noncitizens, and the models reveal that Mexican American immigrants are politically active. The authors find that the foreign-born are not less likely to be active than native-born respondents and, furthermore, among the foreign-born, noncitizens are just as likely to participate as naturalized citizens. Although traditional SES variables remain important, language fluency, percentage of life in the United States, and immigrant attitudes toward opportunities in the United States contribute additional predictive capacity to models of political participation among Mexican immigrants.
Social science research has long recognized the relevance of socioeconomic background for mobility and inequality. In this article we interrogate how and why working-class and first-generation backgrounds are especially meaningful and take as our case in point the professoriate and the discipline of sociology, – i.e., a field that intellectually prioritizes attention to group inequality and that arguably offers a conservative empirical test compared to other academic fields. Our analyses, which draw on unique survey items and open-ended qualitative materials from nearly 1,000 academic sociologists, reveal significant background divergences in academic job attainment, tied partly to educational background. Moreover, and especially unique and important, findings demonstrate significant consequences across several dimensions of inequality including compensation and economic precarity, professional visibility, and isolation at departmental, college or university, and professional levels. We conclude by highlighting how our discussion and results contribute in important ways to broader sociological concerns surrounding mobility, group disadvantage, and social closure.
The Zapatistas gained political access due in part to Mexico's efforts to participate and sustain its position in the world economy. This goal demanded greater sensitivity to the call for democratic openness by the human rights community, anti-North American Free Trade Agreement groups, and indigenous rights organizations. Mexico's effort to bolster its record on human rights internationally created a political opening for the Zapatista protest. The Zapatistas' network of support created a situation where it was able to force the government to constrain their traditional military policy towards popular movements. This is in part due to the need to placate financial and human rights interests in Mexico and internationally. However, the tactics used by paramilitary groups and low-intensity measures taken by the military to deal with the Zapatistas were not under similar constraints, leaving space for their liberal application. and expel the French empire from our soil, and later the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz denied us the just application of the Reform laws and the people rebelled and leaders like Villa and Zapata emerged, poor men just like us. We have been denied the most elemental preparation so they can use us as cannon fodder and pillage the wealth of our country. They don't care that we have nothing, absolutely nothing, not even a roof over our heads, no land, no work, no health care, no food nor education. Nor are we able to freely and democratically elect our political representatives, nor is there independence from foreigners, nor is there peace nor justice for ourselves and our children (EZLN 1993).
Research exploring the participation and retention of Latino/as in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) is still in its early stages, but it is shedding light on the lack of representation, why they occur, and what are the outcomes for those that remain in STEM. This review of the literature explores the barriers, stressors, and health issues that emerge for Latino/a STEM faculty. The review includes work on the comprehensive stress, discrimination, and other burdens that contribute to Latino/a faculty stress. Discrimination and socioeconomic status (SES) can operate in synergistic ways to diminish health and coping mechanisms. We address the professional and organizational contexts that Latino/a faculty face in the university environment and the health outcomes that potentially emerge as a result of their experiences within universities in the United States.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.