Sociology

This paper examines how race, class, and gender intersect to shape professional Latinos’ entrepreneurial incorporation, as observed by the conditions that prompt professional Latinos to start a business, including access to capital and experiences with discrimination. In-depth interviews with professional Latino business owners in Los Angeles reveal that individual human capital – via resources and wealth accrued through corporate careers – facilitates entrepreneurial activity. Race, ethnicity, and gender, as intersectional social group identities, combine with class to shape variegated impacts on access to capital and business experiences by gender and target market. Ethnicity is a resource for those serving the coethnic community and is more significant in shaping business ownership experiences for men who target a racially/ ethnically diverse clientele, whereas gender and race are more salient for women outside the coethnic community. This study contributes to the ethnic enterprise literature by going beyond ethnicity to demonstrate that multiple dimensions of identity shape professional Latino/as’ entrepreneurial incorporation.

In the 2006 American Community Survey (ACS), 6% of respondents with Latin American
ancestry answered ‘no’ when asked whether they were Hispanic themselves.
Conventional definitions of the Hispanic population exclude such respondents as ‘not
Spanish/Hispanic/Latino’ even though they are self-identified Latin American descendants.
Since their exclusion may bias our assessments of Hispanic social mobility, it is
important to know more about them. Non-Hispanic identification is most common
among Latin American descendants who (1) list both Latin American and non-Latin
American ancestries, (2) speak only English, and (3) identify as White, Black, or Asian
when asked about their ‘race.’ Ancestry and racial identity are considerably more influential
than respondents’ education, income, place of birth, or place of residence. These findings
support both traditional straight-line assimilation and a more recent ‘‘racialized
assimilation’’ theory in explaining discrepant responses to the ethnicity and ancestry
questions among Latin American descendants.

Mexican Americans are a large group whose mobility patterns can provide important insight into immigrant assimilation processes. It is well known that Mexicans have not attained economic parity with whites, but there is considerable debate about the degree to which Mexican immigrants and their American-born children experience mobility over their lives. We contribute to this literature by studying Mexican American wealth ownership, focusing on three interrelated processes. First, we examine childhood poverty and inheritances to establish financial starting points and to identify the degree to which resources from prior generations affect wealth ownership. Second, we study impediments to mobility in young adult-hood to understand how childhood conditions create early adult obstacles to well-being. Third, we study midlife net worth and homeownership to better understand whether childhood and young adult impediments necessarily reduce adult wealth ownership. We find high levels of early life disadvantage among Mexican Americans, but these disadvantages are least pronounced in the second and third generations compared to the first generation. Consistent with prior research, we also find high levels of young adult impediments to mobility for Mexican Americans. However, we find that these early roadblocks do not necessarily translate into lower adult wealth: we show that Mexican Americans have less total wealth than whites but more than African Americans, even when early life impediments are controlled. Our results suggest that Mexican Americans are establishing a solid financial foundation that is likely to lead to long-term class stability. The mobility prospects of Mexican Americans, a growing and important group in the United States, is one of the most intensely debated subjects in immigration studies. Two-thirds of American Latinos, or 32 million people, identify as Mexican (Motel and Patten 2012), and population growth among second-and

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How does culture work in everyday settings? Current social research often theorizes culture as "collective representations"-vocabularies, symbols, or codes-that structure people's abilities to think and act. Missing is an account of how groups use collective representations in everyday interaction. The authors use two ethnographic cases to develop a concept of "group style," showing how implicit, culturally patterned styles of membership filter collective representations. The result is "culture in interaction," which complements research in the sociology of emotion, neoinstitutionalism, the reproduction of inequality, and other work, by showing how groups put culture to use in everyday life.

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How do local cultural organizations try to promote inclusive, inviting urban milieu and what tensions do they face? This paper shows how cultural entrepreneurs in Milan and Los Angeles try altering public perceptions of what is good and inviting, or not, about their urban locales. Mirami, in Milan, tries
to regenerate public spaces that welcome diverse populations, including recent immigrants. Mama’s Hot Tamales, in Los Angeles, tries to to re-define its
neighborhood as an attractive shopping and entertainment destination, not a scary place. The organizations follow different strategies for packaging»
culture, shaped by differing civic traditions. Mama’s wants affluent visitors to its neighborhood to create a vicarious identification with immigrant, ethnic
cultures. Mirami wants to encourage ordinary Milanese to experience Milan in new ways, to upgrade everyday sociability in city life. Our ethnographic approach shows how each strategy of promoting an inclusive urban locale encounters different social and cultural tensions that approaches focused solely on economic or inter-racial conflict would miss.