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Senator Barack Obama and Immigration Reform
Margaret Dorsey & Miguel Díaz-Barriga
Journal of Black Studies (2007) 38, p. 90 (12 pages)

This article explores Senator Barack Obama's views on immigration reform, and details his history of support for bipartisan legislation to overhaul current laws and restrictions.

Latino vs. Hispanic: The Politics of Ethnic Names
Linda Martín Alcoff
Philosophy and Social Criticism (2005) 31 , p. 395 (10 pages)

In this article, the author contemplates the question of ethnic names.
 

Gender Digital Divide: The Role of Mobile Phones among Latina Farm Workers in Southeast Ohio
Olga Patricia Mendez Garcia
Gender Technology and Development 2011 15: 53 (23 pages)

The author uses a feminist perspective to examine whether mobile phone technology is empowering for immigrant women, to discover whether Latina farm workers enjoy the same kinds of empowerments that communications technology has afforded other poor communities.  Her findings show that “gender structures in the immigrant farm worker community have been reinforced by masculinity and femininity discourses.  Mobile phones reinforce gender structures and patriarchal hierarchies by adapting them to women’s roles in the household and community” (72).

Latino Police Officers: Patterns of Ethnic Self-Identity and Latino Community Attachment
Dawn Irlbeck
Police Quarterly 2008 11: 468 (29 pages)

This article tests the efficacy of the national wide policy of employing ethnic police officers to police ethnic communities.  Underlying this policy choice is the idea that such employment will enhance policing in ethnic communities due to a shared common ethnic identity and positive attitude towards the community.  However, the findings of this study “document the varied and complex ways in which Latino police officers negotiate ethnic categorization, revealing three generalized identity patterns” (489), and ultimately refute the perspective that like will police like in a more positive fashion.

Brown picket fences:  The immigrant narrative and ‘giving back’ among the Mexican-origin middle class
Jody Agius Vallejo and Jennifer Lee
Ethnicities 2009 9: 5 (28 pages)

This article looks at an important sociological concern: the extent to which the adult children of Latino immigrants – they specifically focus on middle-class Mexican immigrants-incorporate into the social structure of the US.  Using a single aspect of incorporation – the extent to which they ‘give back’ to co-ethnics – the authors find a significant pattern of individuation among Mexican Americans who grew up in the middle class, detailing who they have moved away from the practices of giving that characterized their parents’ and grandparents’ generations.  However, their respondents who grew up poor and achieved middle-class status in one generation continued to exhibit a collectivist orientation, and continued to ‘give back’ to poorer kin, co-ethnics, and the larger ethnic community.

Between Black and Brown: Blaxican (Black-Mexican) Multiracial Identity in California
Rebecca Romo
Journal of Black Studies 2011 42: 402 (26 pages)

This article examines racial/ethnic formation, challenging the Black/White color line that grounds much racial discourse in the United States.  Multi-racial identities are becoming significantly more common, however the ways that multi-racial people are categorized remains limited by older sociocultural formations.  The author interviews 12 “Blaxicans” – individuals who are both Black and Mexican –  to construct her argument that “choosing, accomplishing, and asserting a Blaxican identity challenges the dominant monoracial discourse in the United States, in particular among African American and Chicana/o communities. That is, Blaxican respondents are held accountable by African Americans and Chicanas/os/Mexicans to monoracial notions of “authenticity.” The process whereby Blaxicans move between these monoracial spaces to create multiracial identities illustrates crucial aspects of the social construction of race/ethnicity in the United States and the influence of social interactions in shaping how Blaxicans develop their multiracial identities” (402).

Living Under the Trees
David Bacon
Contexts 2008 7: 50 (9 pages)

This photo essay discusses the extreme poverty that many Mexicans are burdened with, particularly focusing on people intending to or already having accomplished migration from the state of Oaxaca.  In particular, the author discusses the Living Under the Trees project, which “documents the experiences and conditions of indigenous farm worker communities. It focuses on social movements in indigenous communities and how indigenous culture helps communities survive and enjoy life. The project’s purpose is to win public support for policies to help those communities by putting a human face on conditions and providing a forum in which people speak for themselves” (50).