Mary Romero

Racial Profiling and Immigration Law Enforcement: Rounding Up of Usual Suspects in the Latino Community

Critical race theorists have applied the concepts of micro-aggressions and macro-aggressions to characterize the racial affronts minorities encounter in the criminal justice system, particularly in the War on Drugs and in the use of racial profiling. Building on LatCrit and critical race scholars, I analyze the function that immigration raids serve as a policing practice that maintains and reinforces subordinated status among working-class Latino citizens and immigrations. Using a case study approach, I analyze a five day immigration raid in 1997. locally referred to as the “Chandler Roundup.” Immigration policing constructed citizenship as visibly inscribed on bodies in specific urban spaces rather than “probable cause.” The Chandler Roundup fits into a larger pattern of immigration law enforcement practices that produce harms of reduction and repression and place Mexican Americans at risk before the law and designate them as second-class citizens with inferior rights. Latino residents experienced racial affronts targeted at their “Mexicanness” indicated by skin-color, bilingual speaking abilities, or shopping in neighborhoods highly populated by Latinos. During immigration inspections, individuals stopped were demeaned, humiliated and embarrassed. Stops and searches conducted without cause were intimidating and frightening, particularly when conducted with the discretionary use of power and force by law enforcement agents. In urban barrios, the costly enterprise of selected stops and searches, race-related police abuse, and harassment results in deterring political participation, identifying urban space racially, classifying immigrants as deserving and undeserving by nationalities, and serves to drive a wedge dividing Latino neighborhoods on the basis of citizenship status.

Reclaiming the Gift: Indigenous Youth Counter-Narratives on Native Language Loss and Revitalization

In the beginning . . . Elder Brother and Younger Brother were instructed through visions by the breath-giver to teach . . . the newly created people [how] to live. All the instructions were in the native language. The people lived happily for many years. . . . Something bad happened and there was a battle among the peaceful people. The head chief then commanded that there would be many languages. . . . The people migrated and divided into different language groups. Lucille J. Watahomigie, “The Native Language Is a Gift” (1998, 5)

Chicanas modernize domestic service

The shift from live-in to day work was a step in the modernization of domestic service because it limited the length of the working day and reduced the psychological exploitation involved in the interpersonal relationship between domestics and mistresses. Even the shift to an hourly wage did not end the extraction of emotional labor, however. Interviews with Chicanas employed as private household workers reveal the next step in the evolution of domestic services. The current development is away from wage work, in which “labor time” is sold, selling a service in which a “job” is exchanged for a specified amount of money. Chicanas are defining themselves as expert cleaners hired to do general housework. Most supervision and personal services are thus eliminated from the job. Mistress-servant relations are being transformed into customervendor relations, reducing the personalism and asymmetry of employer-employee relationships.

Introduction to the special issue: intersectionality and entrepreneurship

ABSTRACT We briefly review the ethnic entrepreneurship paradigm, identifying the problems associated with an approach that emphasizes the salience of one social group, ethnicity, to the exclusion or downplaying of others, such as race, class, and gender. We introduce an intersectional approach to the study of (ethnic) enterprise, reviewing the literature and using the articles in this special issue to demonstrate the utility of this perspective. We close by encouraging the use of this approach in future research.

Conceptualizing the Foundation of Inequalities in Care Work

Over the past decade, social science researchers in the area of feminism, labor, immigration, and family have written extensively on the care work crisis and globalized care work. Depending on how broadly care work is conceived, these writings emphasize unique aspects of gender, race, class, and/or citizenship inequalities. Second wave of feminist perspectives, for instance, identify housework and most work culturally defined as “women’s work”—including all paid health occupations dominated by women, such as nurses, direct care workers, and hospital workers but also possibly even health, education, and social service occupations—as central to gender subordination. Another important research stream, focusing on domestic labor as women’s work, but recognizing its traditional outsourcing to slaves, servants, and later employees, highlights the complexities of the inequality generated, not only in terms of gender but race, class, and citizenship as well. Bringing these two bodies of literature together in conversation initially pointed to the inaccurate assumption that care work was valued when it became wage labor. The paid labor of domestics, nannies, and elderly care workers, however, remains deeply devalued, most often with those with limited options entering the profession. This article both assesses contradictions within dominant approaches to care work and highlights the cultural and political foundations of the very inequalities that domestic care workers experience.

Integrating sociology: Observations on race and gender relations in sociology graduate programs

Abstract Issues related to the integration of race within sociology doctoral programs were explored. Two sets of data were analyzed: open-ended interviews with 26 women of color graduate students and 92 questionnaires completed by Ph.D. programs on faculty, graduate courses, and expertise in race. Quantitative data show that faculty of color are likely to be the one member of their race in the department. EuroAmerican faculty are over-represented in the rank of Full Professor and Associate Professor and faculty of color are under-represented in the tenured ranks. Less than a quarter of departments included the study of race in required theory courses. Departments listing race and ethnicity as a specialty in the area did not always offer graduate courses in the field and courses that were offered did not necessarily focus specifically on U.S. race/ethnic/minority relations, but included international studies and broad topics in social organizations and stratification. Comments by a sample of women of color graduate students point out a number of critical issues: curricula that are outdated, ignore race, are monocultural, and look better in the catalog than in the classroom; faculty that are top-heavy with older White males; students discouraged from pursuing what attracted them to the academy in the first place; and students in conflicts with racial overtones over scarce resources and favors. Qualitative results show that women of color graduate students perceive the inclusion of students and faculty of color to include an acceptance of their racial and ethnic experience in the intellectual and social culture of the department. They linked the goal of integration of the student body and the faculty to be inseparable from integration of race into the curriculum in both required and nonrequired courses, and assigned readings.

Reflections on Globalized Care Chains and Migrant Women Workers

An analysis of the international division of reproductive labor is incomplete without acknowledging the proliferation of state regulations in migrant-receiving countries, which result in restricting workers’ ability to maintain their own families and to exercise their full range of labor rights. An overview of trends in nations fueling the need for domestic workers and caregivers includes the social conditions for migrants increasingly fill this niche. The transnational circuits of care migration are constructed by the commercial and legal processes used to recruit and transport domestic workers. These are highlighted by analyzing the policies in the USA and United Arab Emirates to demonstrate the restrictions countries place on migrants seeking employment and the limited labor protections offered migrant domestic workers. Two otherwise different countries have adopted similar entry requirements tying migrant domestic workers to employer sponsored jobs in their homes. However, the USA offers fewer visa options to domestic workers and recruitment systems differ. Vulnerabilities faced by migrant domestics receiving visas are linked to these immigration policies.

The Real Help

The recently released film, The Help, based on Kathryn Stockett’s best-selling novel, foregrounds domestic service in the American imagination. Both the film and the novel have been met with both praise and criticism. The story is set in 1963 Mississippi during the era of Jim Crow laws and the rising Civil Rights Movement. Skeeter, an aspiring writer and naive young white women, is the center of the story. Uncomfortable with the racist treatment of African American women hired as maids in her family and friends’ homes, she confronts the racism of white Mississippians indirectly by writing a book on domestic workers’ experiences of racism and abuse in white employers’ homes. One of the central tensions in the story is the danger Skeeter places these maids in as a result of telling their stories. In the end, she triumphs as a hero by exposing the cruelty of Jim Crow laws and white employers’ attitudes and prejudices and lands a coveted journalism job in New York City.

Trump’s Immigration Attacks, in Brief:

A look at the Trump administration’s attacks on Mexicans, Muslims, and unauthorized immigrants and how they’ve undermined longstanding policy and public perception.