Andrés Villarreal

POLITICAL COMPETITION AND VIOLENCE IN MEXICO: HIERARCHICAL SOCIAL CONTROL IN LOCAL PATRONAGE STRUCTURES

Many countries that have recently undergone transitions to democracy have experienced increases in violent crime. Yet sociological theories have generally failed to consider the impact of political factors on crime. The author examines the relation between greater electoral competition and homicide at the subnational level in a country undergoing an uneven transition to democracy. In societies characterized by the presence of patronage networks, social and political changes that undermine the source of unequal exchange between actors at different levels in the social hierarchy result in a temporary loss of social control and an increase in crime. The relation between electoral competition and homicide is tested using electoral results from a sample of 1,800 Mexican municipalities. Greater electoral competition is associated with higher homicide rates across municipalities and over time, even after controlling for standard correlates of violent crime. Consistent with the hypothesis that the increase is due to the disruption of patronage networks, this association is present only in rural areas where patron-client relations are more common.

Stratification by Skin Color in Contemporary Mexico

Latin America is often used as a backdrop against which U.S. race relations are compared. Yet research on race in Latin America focuses almost exclusively on countries in the region with a large recognized presence of individuals of African descent such as Brazil. Racial categories in these countries are based on skin color distinctions along a black-white continuum. By contrast, the main socially recognized ethnic distinction in Indo-Latin American countries such as Mexico, between indigenous and non-indigenous residents, is not based primarily on phenotypical differences, but rather on cultural practices and language use. Many Mexicans today nevertheless express a preference for whiter skin and European features, even though no clear system of skin color categorization appears to exist. In this study, I use data from a nationally-representative panel survey of Mexican adults to examine the extent of skin-color-based social stratification in contemporary Mexico. Despite extreme ambiguity in skin color classification, I find considerable agreement among survey interviewers about who belongs to three skin color categories. The results also provide evidence of profound social stratification by skin color. Individuals with darker skin tone have significantly lower levels of educational attainment and occupational status, and they are more likely to live in poverty and less likely to be affluent, even after controlling for other individual characteristics.

Explaining the decline in Mexico-U.S. Migration: the effect of the Great Recession.

The rate of Mexico-U.S. migration has declined precipitously in recent years. From 25 migrants per thousand in 2005, the annual international migration rate for Mexican men dropped to 7 per thousand by 2012. If sustained, this low migration rate is likely to have a profound effect on the ethnic and national-origin composition of the U.S. population. This study examines the origins of the migration decline using a nationally representative panel survey of Mexican households. The results support an explanation that attributes a large part of the decline to lower labor demand for Mexican immigrants in the United States. Decreases in labor demand in industrial sectors that employ a large percentage of Mexican-born workers, such as construction, are found to be strongly associated with lower rates of migration for Mexican men. Second, changes in migrant selectivity are also consistent with an economic explanation for the decline in international migration. The largest declines in migration occurred precisely among the demographic groups most affected by the Great Recession: namely, economically active young men with low education. Results from the statistical analysis also show that the reduction in labor demand in key sectors of the U.S. economy resulted in a more positive educational selectivity of young migrants.

The Social Ecology of Rural Violence: Land Scarcity, the Organization of Agricultural Production, and the Presence of the State

This article develops a conceptual framework to study rural violence by extending the insights of human ecology. Four hypotheses are proposed regarding the effects of land distribution, collective ownership, and the organization of agricultural production on homicide rates. These hypotheses are tested using data from a census of all agricultural production units in a sample of Mexican municipalities. An unequal distribution of land is associated with higher rates of violence. Insecure property rights and the commodification of agricultural production are also conducive to more homicides. A fifth hypothesis is derived from a consideration of the state’s role in preventing violent conflict. In remote areas that historically have been far from the reach of the state, individuals are more likely to settle disputes violently. Topographical features are used to measure the accessibility of state institutions.

Prenatal Exposure to Violence and Birth Weight in Mexico Selectivity, Exposure, and Behavioral Responses

This article examines the effect of maternal exposure to local homicides on birth weight. We create a monthly panel by merging all births in Mexico from 2008 to 2010 with homicide data at the municipality level. Findings from fixed-effects models indicate that exposure to homicides in the first trimester of gestation increases infant birth weight and reduces the proportion of low birth weight. The effect is not driven by fertility or migration responses to environmental violence. The mechanism driving this surprising positive effect appears to be an increase in mothers’ health-enhancing behaviors (particularly the use of prenatal care) as a result of exposure to violence. The positive effect of homicide exposure is heterogeneous across socioeconomic status (SES). It is strong among low-SES women—but only those living in urban areas—and null among the most advantaged women. This variation suggests that behavioral responses to an increase in local homicides depend on a combination of increased vulnerability and access to basic resources that allow women to obtain prenatal care.

How Job Characteristics Affect International Migration: The Role of Informality in Mexico

Despite the importance given to employment opportunities as a primary motive for migration, previous studies have paid insufficient attention to the kinds of jobs that are more likely to retain workers in their countries of origin. We use information from a panel survey of Mexican adults to examine how job characteristics affect the risk of international migration. The sampling strategy and overall size of the survey allow us to analyze the effect of employment characteristics on migration from urban areas, which have much greater labor market diversity, and to separate our analysis by gender. We also distinguish migrants according to whether they migrate for work or for other reasons. We find informality to be a significant predictor of international migration. Even after controlling for individual factors including workers’ wages, as well as various household- and community-level predictors, we find that workers employed in the informal sector have significantly higher odds of migrating than their counterparts in the formal sector. The pervasive nature of informality in many developing countries from which a high proportion of international migrants originate may therefore create a constant supply of workers who are predisposed to migrate. Our findings thus have important implications for a proper understanding of the effects of economic development on migration.

Ethnic Identification and Its Consequences for Measuring Inequality in Mexico

This article examines ethnic boundary crossing and its effects on estimates of ethnic disparities in children’s outcomes in the context of Mexico, a country with the largest indigenous population in the Western hemisphere. The boundary that separates the indigenous and non-indigenous population is extremely fluid, as it is based on characteristics that can easily change within a generation, such as language use, cultural practices, and a subjective sense of belonging. Using data from the Mexican Census, I examine the ethnic classification of children of indigenous parents. I find that movement across the ethnic boundary depends on which of the two criteria currently recognized by the Mexican Census is used. Children of indigenous parents are much less likely to be classified as indigenous according to language proficiency, especially when their parents have higher levels of education. By contrast, when proxy self-identification is used as a criterion, children of indigenous parents are more likely to be classified as indigenous, and greater parental education results in higher odds that children will be classified as indigenous. The shift in children’s indigenous classification with parental education strongly affects estimates of educational disparities between indigenous and non-indigenous children.

Flawed Statistical Reasoning and Misconceptions about Race and Ethnicity

The replication of empirical findings is essential to the sociological research process. Flores and Telles’s (hereafter FT) analysis, which largely confirms my own results using an entirely different dataset and with substantially different measurements, is therefore a welcome contribution. Although FT’s results indicate the continued presence of skin color differences in socioeconomic status in contemporary Mexico, they argue that my results overstate the effect of skin color in Mexican society. They claim to find a smaller effect of skin color on educational attainment, and most dramatically, no effect of skin color on the occupational status of employed Mexican adults. They suggest there is “little, if any, contemporary color discrimination in the [Mexican] labor market” (p. 490). FT further argue that the alleged differences between their findings and my own are due to three things: (1) my inability to control for individuals’ class origins, which they measure using parents’ occupational status; (2) my allegedly inadequate measure of indigenous ethnicity, which they remedy by using an indicator based on respondents’ and their parents’ self-identification and language use rather than one coded by the interviewer; and (3) their use of a supposedly more “objective” measure of skin color. As I will demonstrate, FT’s charges are not supported by their own statistical analysis and are based on flawed reasoning. Many of the views they express about race and ethnicity in Latin America, and about objectivity in survey measurements of perceived social traits, have long been discarded in the field.

The Education-Occupation Mismatch of International and Internal Migrants in Mexico, 2005–2012

Recent studies have found international migrants from developing countries such as Mexico to be negatively selected by education; that is, they are less educated than those who stay behind. Moving beyond the question of whether migrants are negatively selected by education overall, I examine how migrants are selected compared with others in similar jobs. Using data from a nationally representative panel survey of Mexican households, I find that men who migrate abroad have significantly higher levels of education than nonmigrants in the same occupation. Because men who are overeducated for their occupation tend to receive lower wages than those employed in occupations commensurate with their education, and are also more dissatisfied with their jobs, overeducation may encourage men to emigrate. Results from the regression models, which account for differential selectivity into employment, indicate that internal migrants within Mexico also have higher educational levels than nonmigrants in the same occupation prior to migrating but comparable levels of education afterward. Migrating internally, therefore, appears to allow men to improve their occupational placement. Finally, I examine changes in migrants’ education over time and find evidence that the education-occupation mismatch has increased among Mexican emigrants in the years following the 2008 U.S. recession.

Immigrants’ Economic Assimilation: Evidence from Longitudinal Earnings Records:

We examine immigrants’ earnings trajectories and measure the extent and speed with which they are able to reduce the earnings gap with natives, using a dataset that links respondents of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to their longitudinal earnings obtained from individual tax records. Our analysis addresses key debates regarding ethnoracial and cohort differences in immigrants’ earnings trajectories. First, we find a racially differentiated pattern of earnings assimilation: black and Hispanic immigrants are less able to catch up with native whites’ earnings compared to white and Asian immigrants, but they are almost able to reach earnings parity with natives of their same race and ethnicity. Second, we find no evidence of a declining “quality” of immigrant cohorts even after controlling for their ethnoracial composition and human capital. Immigrants arriving since 1994 actually experience similar or slightly higher earnings growth compared to immigrants from earlier eras. We identify a pattern of accelerated assimilation in which more educated immigrants experience much of their earnings growth during the first years after arriving.