Dropped From the Rolls: Mexican Immigrants, Race, and Rights in the Era of Welfare Reform

Welfare reform transferred considerable discretion over eligibility standards and benefits to individual caseworkers, contributing to a highly diffuse, yet system-wide, practice of discrimination against nonwhite and foreign-born families within the new TANF program. Based on a two-year ethnographic study of welfare reform\u27s impact on Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles County, this article documents a pattern of heightened anti-immigrant sentiment and disentitlement within L.A. County\u27s welfare system following the passage of PRWORA. The vast majority of eligible immigrant families in our study lost some or all of their cash and food stamp benefits, and were systematically denied access to the work and social supports promised under welfare reform, including childcare, training and education, and transportation. Our research illuminates how race, gender, and immigrant status intersect to block Latinas\u27 access to welfare entitlements, and to maintain their position in low-wage and unstable employment. We describe the racial effects of three tactics used by welfare officials in L.A.: unlawful reductions or termination of immigrant benefits; harassment and humiliation through Job Club; and the tracking of immigrants away from education and into low-wage jobs. Placing the current welfare debate in the context of postcivil rights politics, we also question the refusal of mainstream policymakers and welfare researchers to engage issues of racial discrimination and inequality in their evaluation of PRWORA

We have to learn to define ourselves, name ourselves, and speak for ourselves: Black teenagers, urban schools, writing and the politics of representation.

This dissertation is a collection and exploration of the journal writings of a group of black urban high school students in Boston, Massachusetts who attended the Jeremiah Burke High School. These students created a history of post-busing, post-manufacturing Boston through their journals--a history significant for how it changes understandings of life in Boston and how their writing of the story allows them power not only over how they are represented but how they are understood. Using their journals as well as Census materials, school records, newspaper and television accounts, histories of Boston and the Boston Public Schools, educational articles, historical and sociological work on urban issues, other ethnographies, and my own observations and conversations as their teacher, this dissertation looks the perspectives and stories of a group of urban Black teenagers focusing in particular on how they write about education, race, family, sexuality, fun and violence. It seeks to challenge prevalent ideas of black urban youth as pathological, victimized, or criminal and show these young people as engaged and thoughtful social actors. It locates their writings within the larger history of post-war Boston and the particular realities of the Jeremiah Burke High School. The political, economic, social and educational realities of Boston have helped discount and disenfranchise black urban young people bestowing upon them a second-class citizenship by virtue of their race, class, and location. Such realities inform their writing. This dissertation's purposes are two-fold: to challenge ideas that life for urban teenagers is all horror, pathology, or despair and show instead how it is filled with joy, humor, and meaning. It is also to demonstrate that these students have confronted and continue to face significant hardships which have tremendous emotional and material consequences in their lives. Most importantly, then, it is to create an understanding of the perspectives of a group of young people that is more recognizable to their thoughts and experiences than studies that have gone before.Ph.D.American studiesBlack historyBlack studiesEducationLanguageLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsPolitical scienceSecondary educationSocial SciencesSocial structureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/129817/2/9624746.pd

JSSE twentieth anniversary

The Larson Studio Collection contains portraits and landscape photographs from Thomas Larson and his son O. Blaine Larson, who operated the Larson Studio in Provo, Utah County, Utah