Veronica Terriquez

Becoming DACAmented Assessing the Short-Term Benefits of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)

In response to political pressure, President Obama authorized the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in 2012, giving qualified undocumented young people access to relief from deportation, renewable work permits, and temporary Social Security numbers. This policy opened up access to new jobs, higher earnings, driver’s licenses, health care, and banking. Using data from a national sample of DACA beneficiaries (N = 2,381), this article investigates variations in how undocumented young adults benefit from DACA. Our findings suggest that, at least in the short term, DACA has reduced some of the challenges that undocumented young adults must overcome to achieve economic and social incorporation. However, those with higher levels of education and access to greater family and community resources appear to have benefited the most. As such, our study provides new insights into how social policy interacts with other stratification processes to shape diverging pathways of incorporation among the general pool of undocumented immigrants.

Schools for Democracy: Labor Union Participation and Latino Immigrant Parents' School-Based Civic Engagement.

Scholars have long argued that civic organizations play a vital role in developing members’ civic capacity. Yet few empirical studies examine how and the extent to which civic skills transfer across distinct and separate civic contexts. Focusing on Latino immigrant members of a Los Angeles janitors’ labor union, this article fills a void by investigating union members’ involvement in an independent civic arena—their children’s schools. Analyses of random sample survey and semi-structured interview data demonstrate that labor union experience does not simply lead to more civic engagement, as previous research might suggest. Rather, conceptual distinctions must be made between active and inactive union members and between different types of civic engagement. Results show that active union members are not particularly involved in plug-in types of involvement, which are typically defined and dictated by school personnel. Instead, active union members tend to become involved in critical forms of engagement that allow them to voice their interests and exercise leadership. Furthermore, findings suggest that the problem solving, advocacy, and organizing skills acquired through union participation do not uniformly influence members’ civic engagement. Experience in a social movement union serves as a catalyst for civic engagement for some, while it enhances the leadership capacity of others.

Training Young Activists Grassroots Organizing and Youths’ Civic and Political Trajectories

This article examines how nonprofit activist youth groups shape the civic and political trajectories of their adolescent members. Based on analyses of survey and semi-structured interview data gathered from low-income, racially diverse, and immigrant alumni members of grassroots youth organizing groups and from a comparison sample, findings suggest that adolescent activist groups foster high levels of civic and political participation in early adulthood. Similar to other public-oriented volunteer associations—such as student government—activist groups impart civic skills and experiences that facilitate later involvement. Yet activist groups may function as particularly intensive training grounds for future participation by developing members’ political consciousness and engaging them in political processes. In spite of operating within a neoliberal context that sometimes inhibits the political activity of nonprofits, contemporary grassroots youth organizing groups, somewhat like the 1960s’ civil rights groups decades earlier, can propel some young people toward ongoing engagement with social movements.

Financial Challenges in Emerging Adulthood and Students’ Decisions to Stop Out of College

By examining the college attendance patterns of youth who came of age during the Great Recession, our study investigates the economic factors in emerging adulthood that may contribute to the limited upward educational mobility experienced by a contemporary cohort of young adults. Drawing on telephone survey and in-depth interview data gathered from 18- to 26-year-olds, we analyze patterns of stopping out—or leaving college with intentions to return. Our findings demonstrate that financial considerations in emerging adulthood—including receipt of government financial aid, attending to family financial obligations, paying for housing expenses, and rising tuition rates—play a key role in shaping pathways through community and 4-year colleges. We argue that in seeking to understand inequality in educational and labor outcomes, researchers should make conceptual distinctions between financial factors connected to an individual’s family background, and related, but temporally distinct financial issues experienced during the transition to adulthood.

Celebrating the legacy, embracing the future: How research can help build ties between historically African American Churches and their Latino immigrant neighbours

In South Los Angeles, like in many low-income urban communities throughout the country, Latino immigrants are moving into historically African-American urban neighborhoods. This results in some real and some perceived competition for government resources, jobs, and political power. In such contexts, religious institutions can play a powerful role in building alliances between African-American and Latino immigrant residents. This case study aims to inform how the Second Baptists Church of Los Angeles, a historically African-American church and leader in civil rights, can begin developing ties with its Latino neighbors. Drawing on analyses of publicly available administrative data and original needs assessment data, we identify issues that might unite African-Americans and Latinos around a common agenda. This study presents a replicable model for a research-based approach to promoting multi-racial alliances in neighborhoods experiencing demographic transitions.

Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs in Texas: Mexican Workers and Job Politics During World War II:

Anarchy as Order is the third in a series of related books by Mohammed Bamyeh. Framed most broadly, Anarchy as Order explores that myriad of issues and contestations associated with moving from a society based on ‘‘an imposed order’’ to a society premised on ‘‘an unimposed order.’’ Substantively, this is an elaboration of the theoretical scaffolding Bamyeh began building in these earlier works. This is an essential consideration for the reader at times, because rather than a sustained, conventional engagement with the contemporary anarchist literature, Bamyeh elects in this book to expand further upon notions that were either introduced or at least hinted at in his previous works. (For instance, there are only three or four references to anarchist works published since 1993, while eight of the author’s works are cited.) This can be a fruitful approach that deepens one’s analysis and understanding of the author’s interpretation of anarchy as an unimposed order, but it also places certain obligations on the reader to consider a range of concepts in the broader context of debates that Bamyeh has explored more fully elsewhere. The principle merits of this work concern the author’s serious and considered effort to engage the profoundly difficult task of imagining a society based on unimposed order, while we remain necessarily locked within the analytical and conceptual limitations that reflect our everyday experiences with a society based on imposed order. In this regard, Bamyeh’s challenge is two-fold. First he must develop a language to describe such a society and second he must provide a plausible explanation of possible transitions to such a society. He takes on both of these to varying degrees of success. Where he falters, however, this is primarily a consequence of the inherent conceptual difficulty of presenting and analyzing any vision of a society that remains yet-in-formation. To describe a society based on unimposed order, Bamyeh deploys two basic strategies. First, by way of illustration, he cites cases of anarchy that arise historically (and spontaneously) within the fabric of a society based on imposed order. In the selection and description of cases there is a strong existentialist influence that shapes Bamyeh’s account. Somewhat problematically, however, this existentialist framework is never explicitly detailed and, thus, must be understood as having been earlier introduced in Of Death and Dominion. In fact, the existentialist premises of Bamyeh’s work are essential to understanding his notion of self-development that drives an individual’s pursuit and realization of freedom through the occasional and ongoing creation of anarchist spaces and the continual reorganization of social institutions that follows from this. For Bamyeh, this notion of self-development appears to be an almost exclusively organic process that follows from what it means to be an individual in mass society—regardless of the specific details of that mass society. The second strategy of Bamyeh is to describe a society based on unimposed order by providing a type of counter description of such a society via a series of contrasts with societies based on imposed order. Recognizing the inherent difficulties of presenting a transparent vision of a society whose premises for being remain in a yet-to-be realized set of social conditions and conceptual categories, Bamyeh leads the reader through a detailed account of various conceptual categories of social organization derived from a society based on imposed order and provides an alternative understanding of these same categories as they might be experienced in a society based on unimposed order. These conceptual categories include civil society, the common good, self-will, commitment, and freedom. As a general strategy this strikes me as a plausible and