Silvia Pedraza

Families, neighborhood socio-demographic factors, and violent behaviors among Latino, white, and black adolescents

Youth violence is a major cause of morbidity and mortality among Blacks and Latinos. Violent behaviors within Latino subgroups and the reasons for subgroup differences are not well understood. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (N = 16,615), this study examined the risk for violent behaviors among an ethnically diverse sample of youth, with special attention to different Latino subgroups. Family dynamics were examined as moderators between neighborhood socioeconomic status (SES) and violent behaviors who lived in neighborhoods with different racial/ethnic compositions. Results indicated that neighborhood SES was positively associated with risk for violent behaviors among youth living in predominately Black and Latino neighborhoods, but negatively in predominately White neighborhoods. Additionally, family cohesion, parental engagement, and adolescent autonomy differentially impacted the relationship between neighborhood SES and youth violent behaviors for youth living in predominately Latino neighborhoods.

A SOCIOLOGY FOR OUR TIMES: Alvin Gouldner's Message

For the St. Louis meeting of the Midwest Sociological Society, the author organized a special session to reflect on the particular sociological tradition associated with Washington University, with a particular focus on Alvin Gouldners work. From that session came this symposium, for which various papers presented were developed into articles. The session and these articles raise important issues for what they tell us both about Gouldners work and about where sociology is as a discipline today. Among these issues are (1) the optimistic quest for objective value-free knowledge positivism entailed in the past versus a self-reflexive quest for knowledge that entails a tragic acceptance of its limits at present, (2) the effort to distinguish social theory from sociology, ideology, and politics, with all of whom it overlaps as they strive to be both social diagnosis and social therapy, (3) the production of knowledge as dependent both on the lived experiences that shape our biographies and on the intellectual influences available in the local settings where we work, (4) the effort to warn us against the various excesses to which our disciplinary and personal commitments give way, and (5) the role social theory can play as a search light that illuminates our way in the darkness of the empirical world in which we live, while it simultaneously casts a shadow.

Immigration and Women: Understanding the American Experience

This book begins with the creation of the colony of the Philippines in 1898 and ends with national independence in 1946. However, the book does not center upon either; instead, it focuses on the economic, political, and legal struggles of Filipino immigrants in the United States. The book is organized chronologically, although there is some overlap of periods across chapters. The first chapter deals with the racial politics of empire and the establishment of the Philippines as a colony of the United States. This lays the groundwork for the analysis of the political economy of Filipino immigration (1900s–1920s) in the second chapter. The next chapter deals more specifically with social and legal barriers that Filipinos confronted during the first three decades of the century. Chapter Four is a study of violence directed against Filipinos in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Finally, last two chapters deal with the political negotiations for independence, the participation of Filipinos in the Second World War, and the consequences for immigrants in the United States. The colonization of the Philippines resulted in the creation of a new legal category: the U.S. national, that is, those persons owing allegiance to the United States because they were at the same time citizens of one of its colonies. However ‘‘nationals’’ were not full-fledged citizens of the United States, and this initially led to considerable confusion about their rights to entry and to work. This ambiguous political status set the stage for the immigration of Filipinos who came to work in agri-business, first in Hawaii and then to the western and southwestern states. Later, Filipinos would also find work in service and industrial sectors. The first generation of Filipino immigrants struggled for and soon (in 1906) attained the right, as U.S. nationals, to unlimited entry into the United States. The author skillfully shows how Filipinos were clearly agents, and not merely victims, in this process: they were active in both class struggles, to obtain better wages and conditions, and legal battles, to achieve right of entry into the United States. Even though they gained the right to unrestricted immigration, Filipinos confronted other legal barriers regarding interracial marriage, property rights, and naturalization as U.S. citizens. In addition, local governments also attempted to police the color line by passing laws enforcing social segregation. In general, the legal issues were complicated by two principal factors. First, the laws were not always created with Filipinos in mind and the existing racial categories did not easily apply. Indeed, part of the strategy of Filipinos was to argue that they were outside of the laws that were erected explicitly against Afro-Americans, Mexicans, and ‘‘Asiatics,’’ namely, Chinese and Japanese. Second, the interests of local ‘‘nativists’’ often conflicted with those in agribusiness or the federal government. On the one hand, the nativists sought to preserve white privilege, dominance, and the color line; they opposed Filipino immigration. On the other hand, agricultural enterprises were in favor of Filipino workers, although they also sought ways to divide and conquer them whenever workers organized and pressed for better working conditions. In addition, the federal government was obliged to concede some degree of legal and naturalization rights to Filipinos. In the international sphere, it was not good politics to simply exclude them as ‘‘aliens’’ in U.S. society. Especially interesting is the analysis of the diverse and often contradictory positions of the local nativists in towns, counties, and states, the economic interests of agribusiness in the region, and the laws and policies of the federal government. In addition, the full range of actions and strategies of Filipinos on different fronts is fully explained.

The Racial Middle: Latinos and Asian Americans Living Beyond the Racial Divide

Virtually every academic in the United States, not to mention the reading public, knows too little about Iran (the fact that this is even truer for Iraq explains part of the reasons for that catastrophe). And I would recommend this book to every academic in the United States, especially in the social sciences and humanities. As someone who has undertaken a 500-year history of social change in Iran, who sees social movements through the prism of race, class, and gender, it was eye-opening to encounter so much that I did not know about the country. ‘‘Sexual politics’’ refers in this book to at least three things: (1) the struggle for women’s equality with men, (2) the struggle for gay and lesbian rights, and (3) the relationship of gender to social movements, cultural freedoms, and, in the case of Iran, revolutions. Janet Afary’s accomplishment is to document painstakingly the complexity of sexual politics across 200 years of Iranian history, and to present us with a new take on its surprising, and mixed, record. The author ultimately makes the case that sexual politics is intimately (as it were) connected to politics tout court. She goes far beyond the existing literature (some of it very good indeed) on ‘‘gender and Iran,’’ which has focused till now predominantly on women and almost exclusively on heterosexual matters. As befits a superb historian of Iran—her first book was a history of the 1905–11 Constitutional Revolution—she digs deeply and creatively into the archives for primary materials of all kinds and combs an extensive secondary literature in several languages. As an accomplished theorist who has coauthored with Kevin Anderson a wonderful book, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, she forges a highly original theoretical and conceptual interpretation of this material at the same time, on a scaffolding that includes Foucault’s ‘‘ethics of love;’’ James Scott’s ‘‘hidden transcripts’’; psychoanalytic insights from Freud, Fromm, and Marcuse; and a command of both Western and Third World feminist theory from Simone de Beauvoir to Chandra Mohanty, Deniz Kandiyoti to Minoo Moallem. The book is further graced with 80 valuable illustrations, including seventeenthcentury paintings showing homoerotic scenes, nineteenth-century black-and-white photos and sketches from the shah’s harem and other sites, political cartoons from the Constitutional Revolution of 1905 through the turmoil of the 2000s, images from women’s magazines of the last 40 years, political posters and photographs of women’s participation in the Iranian Revolution and after, and portraits of many of the key players on all sides of sexual politics in Iran. The 16-page introduction, which presents the issues and previews the main characteristics of the last two centuries, is alone worth the price of the book. Although the book’s title tells us that it is a study of sexual politics in modern Iran, we are treated in Part One to 100 pages of deep background on ‘‘Premodern Practices,’’ which sensibly provide a baseline for the developments of the past century. These pages focus on nineteenthcentury patterns, meanings, and practices around marriage (including love and divorce), sexuality, law, religion, and resistance in its many guises. A turning point occurs during the authoritarian modernizing reign of Reza Shah, who seized power in a 1921 coup abetted by the British, had himself crowned king in 1925, and thereby started the Pahlavi dynasty. This would consist of himself until 1941, and his son, Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (known to us simply as ‘‘the Shah’’) who would be deposed and see the monarchy itself abolished in the course of the 1978–89 revolution. In these chapters, Afary continues to cover all the topics above, and begins to document the changes in gender relations and social and cultural norms as Iran moved

Between Two Islands: Dominican International Migration.

Popular notions about migration to the United States from Latin America and the Caribbean are too often distorted by memories of earlier European migrations and by a tendency to generalize from the more familiar cases of Mexico and Puerto Rico. Between Two Islands is an interdisciplinary study of Dominican migration, challenging many widespread, yet erroneous, views concerning the socio-economic background of new immigrants and the causes and consequences of their move to the United States. Eschewing monocausal treatments of migration, the authors insist that migration is a multifaceted process involving economic, political, and socio-cultural factors. To this end, they introduce an innovative analytical framework which includes such determinants as the international division of labor; state policy in the sending and receiving societies; class relations; transnational migrant households; social networks; and gender and generational hierarchies. By adopting this multidimensional approach, Grasmuck and Pessar are able to account for many intriguing paradoxes of Dominican migration and development of the Dominican population in the U.S. For example, why is it that the peak in migration coincided with a boom in Dominican economic growth? Why did most of the immigrants settle in New York City at the precise moment the metropolitan economy was experiencing stagnation and severe unemployment? And why do most immigrants claim to have achieved social mobility and middle-class standing despite employment in menial blue-collar jobs? Until quite recently, studies of international migration have emphasized the male migrant, while neglecting the role of women and their experiences. Grasmuck and Pessars attempt to remedy this uneven perspective results in a better overall understanding of Dominican migration. For instance, they find that with regard to wages and working conditions, it is a greater liability to be female than to be without legal status. They also show that gender influences attitudes toward settlement, return, and workplace struggle. Finally, the authors explore some of the paradoxes created by Dominican migration. The material success achieved by individual migrant households contrasts starkly with increased socio-economic inequality in the Dominican Republic and polarized class relations in the United States. This is an exciting and important work that will appeal to scholars and policymakers interested in immigration, ethnic studies, and the continual reshaping of urban America.