This report examines the labor force position of Latina and Latino immigrants in California. There has been considerable immigration from Latin America throughout the 20th century, with much of this migration coming from Mexico. In the last 20 years, immigration from Central and South America has increased significantly. How immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries fare in the U.S. economic system is a critical research and policy issue. Prior research points to the particular low status position of Latino immigrants in the labor force (Morales and Ong, 1993). Immigrants are typically concentrated in low wage manufacturing jobs, particularly in the garment, plastic, and furniture industries, as well as in low level service jobs, such as restaurant workers, janitors, and private household workers.

Overall, it was found that individual factors—especially education and English language ability—were important in explaining the especially disadvantaged position of non-citizen immigrants. Moreover, individual and structural factors had a strong direct effect on the labor position for both men and women while family characteristics were more important for Latinas than Latinos. We found that gender differences in labor force position were pervasive, with Latinas consistently in a lower status position than their male counterparts.

These findings suggest a number of policies that could be implemented to assist in improving the labor position of Latinos and Latinas.

This dissertation uses mixed qualitative methods to explore the ideas and experiences of Latinx feminists spanning national origin, sexuality, race, and generation status not only to reimagine what we think we know about identity, social movements, and knowledge production, but also how we come to know it. Scholars theorize the Self as produced through social interactions and internalizing how individuals see each other, yet Latinx communities experience the institutionalized disappearance of their bodies, political power, and knowledge. How, then, is the Self formed under these circumstances? Across four empirically-driven chapters, I explore how Latinx feminists make sense of and contest their disappearance in four realms: ideology, discourse, reproductive politics, and academic knowledge production. I argue that for those on the margins, the Self is formed through the production of political lenses in relation to current and future realities, producing what I term politicmaking. I define politicmaking as the creation of imaginaries for being in the world that make salient intersecting oppressions rendered invisible in non-intersectional politics and discourses, motivated by the need to affirm marginalized subjectivities, love, knowledge, and joy. As a relational approach, politicmaking requires the negotiation of fluid and contentious ideas and experiences of privilege and oppression that interrogate the erasure of Indigeneity, Blackness, feminisms, and queer experiences in views of and from Latinx communities.

Based on a nearly three-year ethnography with California Latinas for Reproductive Justice (CLRJ)—a social movement organization engaged in policy advocacy in the movement for reproductive justice—I find that their activism, rooted in how white supremacy, settler colonialism, and other structures affect reproduction, contends with a larger terrain of reproductive rights that prioritizes gendered inequalities. By resisting intersecting inequities and non-intersectional discourses, Latinx feminists make politics that negotiate the similarities and differences across Latinx reproductive experiences. As a result, they create counter narratives of Latinxs as whole selves who also experience autonomy and joy. To further understand how Latinx feminisms are practiced across time and space, I trace some of the permutations of politicmaking through content analysis of various cultural forms, including texts in the humanities and social sciences, podcasts and social media, and literary art.

Throughout the dissertation, I show that Latinx feminists as politicmakers develop a sense of being as contested communities, shifting from the Self as identity to the Self as an ongoing, relational, political stance. Specifically, I explore the relationship between Latinx feminist thought and Black feminist theories in the United States, the distinguishing features that connect Latinx feminisms across social locations, the controlling images that impinge on Latinxs’ abilities to exert self-determination, the contentious perspectives on race and Latinidad, the difficulties and necessities of building solidarity at the intersections of movements and identities, and the implications of sociological research on understandings of Latinx migration as a gendered process. I connect Latinx feminist praxis with Du Bois, Hill Collins, Hunter, and others who examine what it means to resist in a racialized body that is not fully seen. By linking these theories with data on social movements in reproductive politics, I begin to trace the origins and features of a pan-ethnoracial Latinx feminist framework. This framework offers lessons for imagining political solidarity built upon the messiness of difference and sameness. I reveal that Latinx feminists have created a transformative body of knowledge about intra and intergroup relations and political futures that remains either unknown or undervalued.

Extensive research has been dedicated to documenting the long history of racial tension and discrimination of African Americans within the U.S. educational system. Much less is known about the strategies that have emerged from school districts and the African American families they serve, to grapple with this legacy of racial mistreatment. Using five years of ethnographic data, collected from a middle-school in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), this dissertation argues that for African American parents the racial and class inequalities they experience in the broader society are reproduced and exacerbated in public schools by inadequate school policies and insufficient school funding as they participate in their children’s educational experience. First, I find that African American parents develop a racialized dual disposition to meet these challenges. African American parents dual disposition consists of two opposing stances, a desire to work with teachers on behalf of their child and needing to develop racial monitoring strategies to guard against their children’s racial mistreatment at school. Next, I find that the school districts’ adherence to a racially colorblind ideology, renders much of these parents’ participation invisible and their involvement is seen as insufficient. In addition, the colorblind ideology constrains what teachers can communicate to African American parents. Therefore, at district-wide school events geared towards providing Black families tools to navigate the academic landscape issues such as racial discrimination are left unaddressed and unspoken. Teachers and school officials replace discussing these racial inequalities by prioritizing individual -Black parent- responsibility and by extension endorsing the individual deficit model. Finally, I find that the drastic defunding of public education creates what I refer to as a resource deficiency within schools. Instead of an individual deficit among parents, I argue that teachers and school officials lack the necessary resources within schools to address the needs of the diverse families they serve. This study demonstrates how the racial and class inequalities found in the broader society are reproduced and exacerbated in public schools as Black parents participate in their children’s educational experience. These findings have important implications for understanding the, at times, tense relationship between Black families and schools.

This dissertation further investigates predominant issues in the educational pipeline, that is, both the higher education and K-12 context. In particular, I first attempt to answer why post-secondary enrollment at U.S. colleges and universities has increased among all students, but racial/ethnic and gender inequalities persist in the college experience. That is, Latinx and Black students continue to be less likely to graduate from post-secondary institutions and women are underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Second, I further contextualize suspensions and the criminalization of students of color in schools today. Today, many schools rely heavily on police and security officers to maintain discipline. Therefore, in part, this dissertation explores this phenomenon and investigates how the type of staff (e.g., support vs. policing) may contribute to the days of lost instruction time due to out-of-school suspensions. Overall, to investigate the issues proposed, my dissertation uses social network methods to examine college-level educational trajectories at the institutional level and, using quantitative methods, I examine discipline disparities using national data.

My dissertation, The Biopolitics of Third Gender Category in India, uses 18 months of ethnographic data and 32 in-depth interviews to investigate how transgender women sex workers in West Bengal negotiate claims to state resources following the Indian Supreme Court’s ruling of a “Third Gender” category in 2014. Significantly, the implementation of this non-binary gender category occurred while “homosexual acts” remained criminalized by the Indian state; for transgender women—especially those who are sex workers. This produced a paradox in which state visibility around gender identity could also expose them to criminalization, depending on how local state actors perceived the legitimacy of transgender women’s claims to womanhood. On the surface, legal recognition of the Third Gender category seems to be steps towards greater inclusivity and gender equity; however, there is currently little research that explores the impact of such legal recognition on the lives of people who identify as gender non-binary. My scholarship addresses this gap by demonstrating that people who fall into the Third Gender category do not necessarily interpret legal recognition as an unambiguous good. Across empirical chapters on state surveillance, sex work, and the family, I reveal how cultural and social structures shape the ways which people interpret, contest, and expand this new category.

The theoretical implications of my research are catalyzed by the premise that much of the sociology of gender in the United States takes the experiences from the West as its point of reference, thereby, erasing and Orientalizing knowledge produced in and about the Global South. My research intervenes into the sociology of gender by centering the experiences of non-Western transgender people. To this end, I analyze how the legal and social categories of transgender and third gender continue to be contested, expanded, and shaped by the politics of social location.

For example, my manuscript, “Gender Calculus: Third Gender, Governance, and Legibility,” addresses the questions: How do transgender people become visible to the state as Third Gender? I find that the Indian state has created the Third Gender category but lacks the mechanisms and methods to account for variations of all genders in an inclusive way and one that respects an individual’s self-determination. The state lacks a pan-Indian law that articulates and enshrines the rights and protections for people in the Third Gender. As a result, as transgender people attempt to become visible to the state, they face ground-level state actors who attempt to arbitrate who falls in this legal category. These ground-level actors engage in what I name gender calculations, a process by which the State renders certain gendered bodies visible while further obscuring others and that are embedded in local gender, class, and caste ideologies. In the context of India, these calculations occur within a context of Brahminical (Caste-based) patriarchy. Specifically, the state and media commonly conflate the Third Gender with Hijra. In this vein, Third Gender communities in India continue to be haunted by the legacy of British colonial law that deemed them “criminal tribes” and cited their existence as evidence of the moral decadence and inferiority of the entire population of the Indian sub-continent. Therefore, investigating the gendered and sexual violence against transgender people in India demonstrates how gender and sexuality have been central to the project of post-colonial nation-building.

Intra-group differences among Black undergraduate students remain understudied. To gain a more nuanced understanding of Black student life, we must examine how other social locations, like gender and class, connect to the racialized experiences of Black students. This dissertation argues that for Black students, class and gender, along with race, create boundaries that are simultaneously rigid and fluid and that need to be negotiated. I conducted sixty-two in-depth interviews with Black undergraduates at a large public university. First, I find similarities in the economic challenges faced by both low-income and lower middle-class students that demonstrate fluid class boundaries between the groups. In contrast, a more clear distinction exists between these groups and those from solidly middle-class backgrounds indicating rigid class boundaries. Next, I find that the severe underrepresentation of Black students in the university creates rigid boundaries around Black racial identity. Black students are expected by their Black peers to be connected to the Black on-campus community via participating in Black student organizations, events and networks. Those that try to meet these expectations run the risk of being overburdened while others face difficulty in meeting these expectations. Black students employ negotiation strategies to deal with these tensions including stepping away from activities, saying "no" strategically, showing up when they can and avoiding predominantly Black spaces. Finally, I find that Black students regularly experience racial microaggressions from non-Black students and these microaggressions create rigid boundaries between them and Black students. Black students were seen as exotic, hypersexual and aggressive with variations on how these perceptions were directed at Black men and women. Black students were assumed to be low-income and from poor neighborhoods, regardless of their class background. Black students employed "equalization strategies" such as "beasting" or debating classmates, "being the best," educating others, silence and humor to resist these microaggressions. This study demonstrates how boundaries are constructed within an institutional context and the significance of race, class and gender in the lives of Black students. These findings have important implications for Black student retention in higher education.

Much of the scholarship on Latina/o undocumented young adults has focused on their college and labor market participation, with few studies documenting on-the-ground their experiences in K-12 schools. Even fewer studies comparatively examine U.S. born and undocumented Latina/o students’ incorporation in the academic and social spaces in schools. To fill these gaps in scholarship, I draw on five years of school ethnography, in-depth interviews with 50 Latina/o high school students (25 undocumented immigrant and 25 U.S. born), and follow-up conversations one year post-high school. I find that Latina/o students, irrespective of immigration status, experience an exclusionary incorporation in school because the racial dynamics within K-12 educational institutions continue to fragment their opportunities to succeed. Specifically, I explore how race, undocumented immigration status, and working-class position influence their structural integration in academic programs and inclusion in the social channels at Hillcrest high school. While immigrant incorporation scholars point to Latina/o youth’s trailing patterns in educational attainment, I argue that we need to examine the centrality of race and racialization in schools as these affect Latina/o youth’s divergent paths of participation in social institutions. Thus, I conceive of school incorporation as a process by which students become structurally integrated in the school’s academic hierarchy and socially included to reap the benefits of participating in top academic programs, capturing structural and inter-personal features of school processes that shape racial disparities in educational attainment. This emphasizes the centrality of racism in K-12 schools, and demonstrates its impact on the exclusionary incorporation of immigrant youth and the children of immigrants.

The dominant paradigm of American race relations has changed dramatically in the last two decades, as the prevailing White-Black binary is challenged by mass migration from Latin America. Although immigrants arrive to the U.S. with racial ideologies and practices that originate in their countries of origin, we know little about how ideas about race "travel" with migrants across borders, and the implications of this for immigrant incorporation into the U.S.' racial structure. My dissertation examines how migration to the U.S. transforms immigrant understandings of race. Whereas the U.S. racial system has been historically characterized by the rule of hypodescent, Mexico is an indo-mestizo nation where the primary social distinction is that between indigenous peoples and the dominant mestizo population (persons of mixed Spanish and indigenous ancestry). As such, nationalist ideologies of mestizaje construct Blackness as invisible and foreign to the nation. Despite these distinctions in U.S. and Mexican racial contexts, scholars of U.S. racialization often limit their analysis to immigrant experiences with race after they have migrated. Yet, failing to examine how immigrants construct racial meaning in the sending society renders incomplete our understanding of how racial hierarchies and encounters are navigated in the receiving society.

This multi-site study draws from 75 in-depth interviews with three distinct samples of Mexican respondents: non-migrants in Guadalajara, as well as recent and long-term immigrants in Los Angeles. Findings show that the maintenance of transnational ties between immigrants and those remaining in the home country facilitate Mexicans' engagement with U.S. racial ideologies prior to migration. As immigrants gain direct exposure to the U.S. racial system, they communicate their observations and experiences with racial encounters - particularly with U.S. Blacks -, discrimination, employment and residential segregation back to Mexico, a transnational process of racial remittances. In the second part of my dissertation, I turn my analytical focus to the immigrant experience in Los Angeles. I argue that immigrants often renegotiate their pre-migration constructions of race upon settling into their lives in the host society. Residential and occupational patterns in Los Angeles, duration in the U.S., and the frequency of social encounters with Blacks, Whites, and others, influence how Mexicans make sense of racial hierarchies, including their position in the U.S. racial order. While these factors saliently shape attitudes and perceptions about race and identity, I further highlight how this process if affected by legal status. With increased exposure to anti-immigrant prejudice and blocked opportunities for upward mobility, immigrants view themselves as occupying a distinct racial status vis-�-vis Blacks and Whites, illustrating a clear departure from the U.S.' White-Black binary.