Unveiling the Cosmic Race: Racial Inequalities in Latin America

Woo-Mora, L. Guillermo

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3870741

Cited by 12 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 72 publications

(66 reference statements)

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“…From 1980 to 2000, the share of total income held by the top 10 percent of the income distribution was 57 percent, with the lowest level observed for Argentina (45.3 percent); in contrast, the top 10 percent of income earners in the United States in 1980 held an estimated 34 percent of total income (World Inequality Lab 2020). These inequalities manifest across different dimensions, including geography (e.g., rural vs. urban), gender, racial, and ethnic groups (Chackiel and Schkolnik 2004; Deere and Leon 2003; Woo‐Mora 2021), implying that the most vulnerable (and privileged) groups in LACar countries are defined by the intersection of social categories (Viveros Vigoya 2015). An example of these intersecting social and economic disparities can be observed among indigenous women born in rural areas who migrated to urban areas as teenagers: these women typically work as live‐in domestic workers in the middle‐ and upper‐class households of highly educated women (Castro Torres, Gutierrez Vazquez, and Bernardes 2022).…”

Section: Study Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Neglected Role of Domestic Migration on Family Patterns in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1950–2000

Torres

2023

Studies in Family Planning

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Urbanization has played a key role in shaping twentieth‐century demographic changes in Latin America and the Caribbean (LACar). As a result, scholarly research on domestic migration and the family has primarily focused on fertility differentials by migration status in urban areas, finding a robust negative correlation between internal migration and fertility. This research has overlooked how this relationship varies across types of migration flows other than rural‐to‐urban migration and by women's age at migration and social class. Additionally, not enough attention has been paid to the family formation and dissolution trajectories underlying the lower fertility of rural migrants. I use a life‐course inductive approach to examine these overlooked aspects among women from 10 LACar countries, including the three largest countries by population. Using retrospective information on women's childbearing and marital histories from the Demographic and Health Surveys, I build an eight‐category typology of family paths and study the conditional distribution of this typology by women's age at migration, educational attainment, and origin/destination area. This examination demonstrates that social class is the primary source of differentiation across family formation and dissolution trajectories and that low‐class young rural migrants played a crucial role in the demographic transformations that occurred in the region.

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Section: Study Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Neglected Role of Domestic Migration on Family Patterns in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1950–2000

Torres

2023

Studies in Family Planning

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“…This overrepresentation means that domestic workers suffer an additional layer of disadvantage due to the long-lasting historical discrimination that affects their communities. Since the national independence processes in the 19th century, ethnic and racial minorities in Latin America have faced structural and institutional discrimination: from states’ absolute negligence, such as in the Colombian Guajira region, to daily racism and discrimination in the health and educational systems and the job market (Pinheiro et al, 2009; Woo-Mora, 2021).…”

Section: Persistently Low Fertility Among Live-in Domestic Workersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Together with abundant qualitative studies on domestic workers' living and working conditions in the region (cited along the text 1 ), these studies have highlighted the pervasiveness of asymmetric power relations between domestic workers and their employers (patronas hereafter as in Spanish). According to these works, domestic workers are under strict physical control, and their life courses are filled up with challenges, lack of recognition, and minimal opportunities (Casanova, 2019;Durin, 2014Durin, , 2020Maich, 2010;Pérez, 2021) -all made possible due to the high and entrenched levels of socioeconomic inequality and racial/ethnic discrimination that persist across virtually all Latin American and Caribbean societies (Sánchez-Ancochea, 2021;Woo-Mora, 2021).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Power relations and persistent low fertility among domestic workers in Latin America

Torres

Gutierrez-Vazquez

2023

The Sociological Review

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Scholarly work on international chains of care have highlighted the stratified nature of reproductive work along the lines of gender, social class, race/ethnicity, and cross-national economic inequalities, particularly with regard to childbearing and childrearing tasks. Immigrant women from the global South are taking rising shares of domestic and care workloads in global North countries. Less attention has been devoted to national contexts, particularly from a quantitative perspective. Using large-scale nationally representative data for Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, this work presents a quantitative assessment of fertility and offspring mortality patterns among live-in domestic workers and their employers ( patronas) during the second half of the 20th century. Our results indicate that the historically low and delayed fertility of live-in domestic workers stems from the confluence of socioeconomic disadvantages throughout their life courses, the everyday mobility constraints they face, the physical control exerted over them by their employers, and the expropriation of their daily and life course time by middle- and upper-class families. These results underline the stratified nature of reproduction in the Latin American context and urge scholars, particularly those working with quantitative data, to re-center research questions around the social mechanisms, including power relations, underpinning unequal living conditions and their consequences for the stratification of reproductive tasks. We use this evidence to argue that the increasingly feminized nature of domestic work and the rising trends of socioeconomic inequalities within and between countries render the examination of intersectionality-defined minorities central for a deeper understanding of family change beyond the Latin American context.

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“…Brazil's population (213 million) is more than four times that of Colombia, and its area (8.5 million square kilometers) is more than eight times that of Colombia. Second, while both nations are ethnically diverse, the Afro‐descendant population is much more prominent in Brazil than in Colombia (Woo‐Mora, 2021). In addition, Brazil's economy is much more robust and developed than Colombia's (Williamson, 2010).…”

Section: Background and Study Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Diverging reproductive outcomes by maternal education during the Covid‐19 pandemic across Brazilian and Colombian regions

Torres,

Acosta,

Pardo

et al. 2023

Population Space and Place

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This work contributes to the current understanding of the heterogeneous impact of the Covid‐19 pandemic on fertility. Using more than 36.4 million birth and death records for Brazil and Colombia (2015–2021), we document state‐level correlations between the intensity of the pandemic, measured by the current and 9‐month lagged excess mortality, and the observed number of births relative to a Covid‐19‐free hypothetical scenario. We disaggregate these correlations according to maternal age and years of schooling to test the hypothesis that the influence of the Covid‐19 pandemic on births interacted with pre‐existing forms of social inequality. Results from multivariate linear models suggest that the association between the intensity of the pandemic and the relative number of births was negative for women with at least 8 years of schooling, while it was positive or null for women with fewer years of education. This result means that in subnational areas severely hit by the Covid‐19 pandemic, women with few years of schooling did not delay fertility as most women potentially did. These results suggest that disadvantaged groups in Latin America and potentially in other contexts may suffer more acutely the consequences of the Covid‐19 pandemic, which has been largely neglected by studies that assume homogeneous impacts of Covid‐19 on population dynamics.

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Unveiling the Cosmic Race: Racial Inequalities in Latin America

Cited by 12 publications

References 72 publications

The Neglected Role of Domestic Migration on Family Patterns in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1950–2000

The Neglected Role of Domestic Migration on Family Patterns in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1950–2000

Power relations and persistent low fertility among domestic workers in Latin America

Diverging reproductive outcomes by maternal education during the Covid‐19 pandemic across Brazilian and Colombian regions

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