Latino People Research Articles

Premature mortality from all causes and drug poisonings in the USA according to socioeconomic status and rurality: an analysis of death certificate data by county from 2000–15

SummaryBackgroundIncreasing premature mortality among some groups of Americans has been largely driven by increases in drug poisoning deaths. However, to our knowledge, a formal descriptive study by race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status, rurality, and geography has not been done. In this study, we examined US trends in premature all-cause and drug poisoning mortality between 2000 and 2015 at the county level among white, black, and Latino people.MethodsWe used US mortality data for the period Jan 1, 2000, to Dec 31, 2015, including underlying cause of death and demographic data, collected from death certificates by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National Center for Health Statistics, and ascertained county attributes from the 2011–15 Census American Community Survey. We categorised counties into quintiles on the basis of the percentage of people unemployed, the percentage of people with a bachelor’s degree, median income, and rurality. We estimated premature (ie, deaths in those aged 25–64 years) age-standardised mortality for all causes (by race and ethnicity) and drug poisoning, by county, for the periods of 2000–03 and 2012–15. We estimated annual percentage changes in mortality (2000–15) by county-level characteristics.FindingsPremature mortality declined from 2000–03 to 2012–15 among black and Latino people, but increased among white people in many US counties. Drug poisoning mortality increased in counties throughout the country. Significant increases between 2000 and 2015 occurred across low and high socioeconomic status and urban and rural counties among white people aged 25–64 years (annual percentage change range 4·56% per year [95% CI 3·56–5·57] to 11·51% per year [9·41–13·65]), black people aged 50–64 years (2·27% per year [0·42–4·16] to 9·46% per year [7·02–11·96]), Latino women aged 25–49 years (2·43% per year [1·18–3·71] to 5·01% per year [3·80–6·23]), and Latino men aged 50–64 years (2·42% per year [0·53–4·34] to 5·96% per year [3·86–8·11]). Although drug poisoning mortality increased rapidly in counties with the lowest socioeconomic status and in rural counties, most deaths during 2012–15 occurred in the largest metropolitan counties (121 395 [76%] in metropolitan counties with ≥250 000 people vs 2175 [1%] in the most rural counties), reflecting population size.InterpretationPremature mortality has declined among black and Latino people in the USA, and increased among white people, particularly in less affluent and rural counties. Increasing drug poisoning mortality was not limited to poor white people in rural areas. Rapid increases have occurred in communities throughout the USA regardless of race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status, or rurality. Widespread public health interventions are needed to addess this public health emergency.

Addictive Drugs and Treatments Said to Have Racial Component

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Professional NewsFull AccessAddictive Drugs and Treatments Said to Have Racial ComponentAaron LevinAaron LevinSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:17 Jul 2017https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2017.7a7AbstractNow and in the past, drugs of abuse and the treatment of people with substance use disorder carry an often unspoken dimension of race.“Pharmaceutical whiteness” asserts itself in the racially divergent ways that American society perceives and uses opioids and other drugs, said Helena Hansen, M.D., Ph.D., at APA’s 2017 Annual Meeting in San Diego. Both drugs of abuse and their treatments can be divided by race.Helena Hansen, M.D., Ph.D., notes that the public health potential of buprenorphine is limited by racial segregation and a commercially driven health care system.David HathcoxHansen spoke at a Presidential Symposium honoring the late Chester Pierce, M.D., which addressed the intersection of race and psychiatry (see story on page 1).The racialization of narcotics is evident when illegal drugs like heroin are associated with poor black or Latino people, while legal, prescription opioids and their treatments are marketed to whites, argued Hansen, an assistant professor of anthropology and psychiatry at New York University. Analogously, in the 1950s, marijuana was an illegal street drug used by minorities while Valium was marketed as “mother’s little helper” to middle-class suburban housewives with access to physicians.Of course, not all users of prescription drugs are white, nor are all heroin users or cannabis smokers members of minority groups, but Hansen made a case for the different ways the drugs, their users, and their treatment are racially divided in the medical and legal realms.This difference became even more acute in recent decades, first with racial disparities in sentencing in the 1970s and for cocaine possession and trafficking in the 1980s. Crack cocaine—associated with inner-city blacks—drew drastically longer sentences than the powdered variant, which was seen as a glamorous drug for whites. In the 1990s, promotion of pain as the “fifth vital sign” and heavy commercial marketing of oxycodone led to the take-off of those prescription medications as drugs of abuse.“The puzzle is that we saw increasing white opioid use in the midst of an intensified inner-city drug war,” said Hansen. “We have a clinical track for whites and a criminal track for the rest.”Yet this nominal advantage for white people is also costly for them, she said. “White people pay more money for patented drugs, and some pay again with their lives when they overdose.”Even the recategorization of addiction as a “chronic, relapsing, brain disease” only enhanced the social stratification of addiction, said Hansen. Ironically, the scientists involved wanted to counteract the punitive drug-war mentality by erasing the social and racial foundations of drug use.“An image of a brain scan takes gender, race, and class out of the picture, but that implies a white norm,” she said. “It only whitened opioids by molecular means.”Furthermore, the treatments for drug abuse and addiction present divided racial identities. Methadone was “a poor fit for the suburban spread of narcotic addiction,” Hansen said, quoting a former NIDA director. Thus methadone is handed out to a stigmatized population under tightly controlled conditions at clinics set in marginal neighborhoods. High-priced, on-patent buprenorphine, however, is marketed for a “new kind of addict” (that is, implicitly white and insured) and is dispensed in private physicians’ offices in the suburbs.Such an approach for buprenorphine was not inevitable and may have been counterproductive, she said. Overdose rates in France—a country with a national health system, she noted—dropped 80 percent in the first four years after buprenorphine was introduced for all addicts, while overdoses in the U.S. have quadrupled in the first 10 years after approval.“The public health potential of buprenorphine is limited by our racially segregated and commercially driven health care system, which orphans patients with patchy insurance coverage and tenuous access to providers,” she said. “We could use the current despair over white opioid deaths to build a case for a less market-driven health care system and adopt a more public health and social determinants–based approach to both white and non-white patients.” ■ ISSUES NewArchived

Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas-Mexico Border, 1848–1942 by John Mckiernan-González (review)

Reviewed by: Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas-Mexico Border, 1848–1942 by John Mckiernan-González Julia Rodriguez John Mckiernan-González. Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas-Mexico Border, 1848–1942. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012. xvi + 416 pp. Ill. $94.95 (cloth, 978-0-8223-5257-0), $26.95 (paper, 978-0-8223-5276-1). John Mckiernan-González’s Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas-Mexico Border looks at the contested area surrounding the U.S.–Mexico border as a prism into the mix of biological, cultural, and political factors shaping the social experience of epidemics. There’s much to grapple with in this book. Mckiernan-González takes on this complex topic over a long period of time and from multiple vantage points. His study crosses numerous divides including political states, space, class, and public/private spheres. Running themes that will be of particular interest to historians of medicine include patient–doctor encounters; practices of inspection, quarantine, and exclusion; vaccination; and sociomedical topics such as race. Fevered Measures has a theoretical bent is rich with detail and compelling stories from the perspective of multiple actors. One of Mckiernan-González’s main goals is to explore how the history of public health sheds light on “the interplay of local and national identities” and in particular “the forging of ethnic identities at places where two nations staged and built their own changing identities” (p. 2). He introduces Mexican and Latino people to the historical narrative of U.S. medicine, and in so doing contributes to our understanding of the process of identity formation and definitions of citizenship. The book is organized chronologically, which enables a close reading of the border zone and movement within it over time. Relying on a comprehensive array of sources (some quite creative, such as people’s official complaints against public health officials), the book begins with the 1847–48 border wars through the yellow fever epidemic that ravaged the region in the 1880s. Chapter 2 focuses on quarantines of the 1890s; Mckiernan-González shows how both the U.S. and Mexican governments used public health campaigns to expand the power of the state. Chapter 3 looks at a smallpox outbreak among migrant laborers to Mexico and a vaccine research project. Chapter 4 examines the turn-of-the-century response to epidemics in the border region—leading to new methods of household inspection and quarantine—after the U.S. military occupation of Cuba and subsequent discovery of the yellow fever vector (with credit due to both Cubans and U.S. doctors). Chapter 5 examines the intersection of health and citizenship at a “quintessential crossroad” (p. 167): the El Paso/Juárez border crossing. Here medical and political debates played out, colored by rhetoric of race, labor, and control. Chapter 6 looks at Mexican approaches to public health during the Mexican Revolution (1910–20) and how it contributed to political clashes between the two countries. Finally, chapter 7 examines the period 1920–42, including a close examinations of the Bracero migrant labor program, the creation of segregated communities in border areas, emerging Pan-American health networks, and the beginning of public health activism at the local level. In a brief Epilogue, Mckiernan-González makes it clear that there’s something special about the borderlands that throws big social, political, cultural, and national issues (such as state-building, immigrant [End Page 136] control, and labor relations) into relief. He underscores how people’s daily lives could be affected through loss of access to jobs, housing, education, or even free movement. While the scope, analytical sophistication, and wealth of material in this book are breathtaking, almost encyclopedic, some readers might crave a stronger narrative. Yet, all will agree that Mckiernan-González demonstrates with abundant evidence how a close examination of the history of public health on the border is poised to shed new light on the intertwined history of health and immigration in a place that has been until recently overlooked or misunderstood. As Mckiernan-González states bluntly, “Mexicans, Mexican immigrants, and Mexican Americans should be included in the official...

Rural Psychiatrists Creating Value for Academic Institutions

Rural areas comprise 98% of our nation’s territory but are typically isolated from larger academic medical centers. Collaborations between rural practitioners and such centers can serve to benefit providers, patients, and academicians. We report on a collaboration that turned an outpatient rural practice into a center providing clinical care, education, and research opportunities for the community and for distant academic medical centers. Challenges particular to rural psychiatry include patient confidentiality and therapeutic boundary issues, overlapping relationships, cultural and ethical demands, lack of subspecialty support, professional isolation, absence of academic collaboration, and difficulties in recruiting psychiatrists. We describe the highlights of our experience since 1994 at the Sun Valley Behavioral and Research Center in Imperial, California, a rural county where 160,600 mostly Hispanic and Latino people were residing when we launched our clinical and service initiatives. Among the successful programs is a linked outpatient and consultation liaison service for patients admitted to local general hospitals in a locale where the nearest inpatient unit is 120 miles away. This service has eliminated the need for psychiatric hospitalizations in about two-thirds of consultations. In a community that lacks a dementia unit, we established an adult day treatment center for the elderly population, which helps delay institutionalization. In 2008 we set up a clinical trials division that has collaborated in 38 research projects to date. Since 2011, cooperation between federally qualified health centers and county mental health services has allowed our psychiatrists to train a community clinic team to triage, identify at-risk-patients, follow patients in their homes, and assist with transportation. Our unsuccessful efforts included a partial hospitalization program that closed when Medicare no longer accepted the host hospital because it was in a different county and an electroconvulsive therapy service that never launched because of perceived stigma and controversy in the community. A National Alliance on Mental Illness chapter and a support group both failed after two sessions because participants were reluctant to disclose private information in this small, tightly interwoven community. Other programs ceased for lack of a large enough base to support group work—again, we believe, a function of the low-density population. We have learned that rural barriers can be overcome when the services launched are culturally sensitive, scientifically sound, dispensed by competent staff, affordable to the consumer, and have a priori advice from qualified people. Most of our unsuccessful initiatives lacked one or more of these components. A persistent difficulty is finding capable staff. The likelihood of low practice income and the challenges of a “rural lifestyle” seem to be the main obstacles to recruiting psychiatrists. To address concerns about professional isolation and lack of psychiatrist availability, we created our own supervision program to enhance recruitment of mid-level practitioners such as physician assistants, master’s-level trained therapists, and medical assistants. Having trained in a large academic center, we have maintained contact with our residency mentor by phone, e-mail, and in person, and we eventually became volunteer faculty at the same university. Collaborating with academicians has helped us understand the importance of publishing as a way of communicating with other psychiatrists, thereby decreasing our isolation, receiving constructive criticism, and stimulating ideas to create new clinical services or improve the existing ones. These collaborations have also resulted in numerous publications focusing on rural psychiatry. Being liaisons between large academic centers and our rural community has been both challenging and satisfying. The main obstacles to implementing funded research interventions include recruitment, transportation, and attrition. One challenge to recruitment is stigma that is partially overcome with extensive education. A second factor is our low-density population and poor public transportation, such that anyone applying for funds must include a larger-than-usual dedicated travel budget. Even after enrollment, some participants drop out for a variety of reasons, such as family illness, new employment, and time spent applying for benefits, such that flexible schedules for research activities should be considered. We believe that psychiatric leadership plays an essential role in initiating and implementing these efforts and can help disseminate the idea that rural psychiatry is not only a clinical placement but also an opportunity to perform research and academic activities. Both those already in rural practices and new recruits can be encouraged to collect data, present at meetings, find a mentor, foster online collaborations, and submit to journals. We recommend reaching out to neighboring departments of psychiatry to ignite interest in rural psychiatry and to build academic bridges; we are convinced that rural psychiatrists can create value for academic centers.

Trends in culturally relevant interface design features for Latino Web site users

There is a lack of published research on designing Web-based instruction for the adult U.S. Latino population. Instructional designers need guidance on how to design culturally relevant learning environments for this audience, particularly for Latino people from Mexican heritage. The authors used content analysis to investigate the extent to which 20 U.S. state food stamp Web sites and 20 Mexican state government Web sites contained culturally relevant interface features targeted at the Spanish-speaking Latino population. Web sites were coded for 10 features distilled from Hofstede’s work on cultural differences. Results indicated that more culturally and linguistically relevant features, including Hofstede’s dimensions of collectivism, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance, as well as adequacy of information in Spanish, were found on Mexican than on U.S. Web sites. The findings suggest that Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory might provide a useful framework for designing Web-based resources for the adult U.S. Spanish-speaking Latino population and provides additional evidence to further investigate if Web-based interface features tailored for U.S. Latino Web users motivate users, strengthen communication, and promote learning.

Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage

Recovering the U.S. hispanic literary heritage is a program that works with an international board of scholars, librarians, and archivists to constitute and make accessible an archive of cultural productions by Hispanic or Latino peoples who have existed since the sixteenth century in the areas that eventually became part of the United States. Founded in 1992 with support from the Rockefeller Foundation and subsequently funded by many other organizations, the project brought together scholars who wanted to make accessible to any interested person, with any level of education, the full range of texts generated by Hispanic peoples and to reform the concept of American nationhood. Depending on available funds, the program underwrites scholarly research, creates virtual and paper archives, microfilms for preservation, digitizes for accessibility, publishes material in conventional and digital form, organizes conferences, and maintains communications with some five thousand associates. The program has found, accessioned, and made accessible tens of thousands of books and documents that were heretofore unknown. It has digitized more than 500,000 items, ranging from published books and newspapers to manuscripts of varying lengths from the first encounters between Hispanic and indigenous peoples in North America to broadsides and photographs from the twentieth century—in short, all the materials that a literate community generates over centuries.

The Lord Will Make a Way Somehow: Strategies for Cross-Cultural Music and Worship

With neighborhoods shifting racially and economically, churches are challenged with meeting the new population with relevant and culturally meaningful worship music. Ethnic groups are diverse within themselves as well, with black and Latino peoples having disparate tastes and traditions from Church of God in Christ to South American Evangelicals. Congregations must have strong pastoral leadership and competent, spiritually alert musicians and singers. Although the leadership may want more effective outreach through music, it requires trained musicians, often in jazz, to educate the musicians as well as the congregation. Vocalists must also be melded together, trained and untrained, into a vernacular blend in praise teams or choirs. Musicians must do research in the community for songs and resources that touch the “heart music” of the target population. The result of such a commitment is to see a congregation rally around a new mission and new friendships. Children growing up in such a cross-cultural worship have a more open view of the world. But bearing fruit in cross-cultural ministry is measured in decades and may not have overwhelming success like some homogeneous church plants. If we want to see the church's witness as credible before a watching world, racial reconciliation and justice fleshed out in the worshipping community must be a greater priority. In a society still plagued with racial alienation, this may be the toughest strategy of all.

The New Black Cultural Studies: Hip Hop Ghetto Lit, Feminism, Afro-Womanism, and Black Love <em>The Coldest Winter Ever</em>

The Coldest Winter is a young teenage ghetto fairytale for anybody who wants a front row seat or a first floor window into the hoods of the United States of America . . . or the hoods of any country of the world that black people or Latino people live in poverty . . . -Sister Souljah1

Frequency distribution of the single-nucleotide -108C/T polymorphism at the promoter region of the PON1 gene in Asian Indians and its relationship with coronary artery disease

A single-nucleotide promoter region polymorphism (-108C/T) of the paraoxonase (PON1) gene had been suggested to influence an individual's susceptibility to coronary artery disease (CAD). No data is available on this polymorphism from India. One hundred seventy-eight healthy individuals and 204 angiographically proven CAD patients were recruited to get baseline data on the frequency distribution of the -108C/T polymorphism in normal people of Asian Indian ethnicity and its relation with the risk of CAD. Polymerase chain reaction followed by restriction fragment length analysis was used as the method for genotyping. Blood samples were used for DNA isolation. In the normal subjects, the genotypes were distributed as CT (43.26%) > CC (30.34%), >TT (26.4%). The allele frequency of the C allele was 0.52, and that of the T allele was 0.48. The patients showed a similar pattern, but the TT genotype was about two times more frequent in the controls than in patients. Odds ratios for developing CAD for individuals with CT, TT, and CT + TT genotypes were 0.89 (0.50-1.59), 0.56 (0.27-1.08), and 0.76 (0.44-1.29), respectively (at 95% confidence interval), when compared to CC homozygous people (age- and sex-adjusted, p = 0.114, all genotypes compared). This suggested a trend for the T allele as protective against CAD. This first report on the frequency distribution of the -108C/T polymorphism in people of Asian Indian ethnicity suggests that the normal distribution is similar to that observed for the Chinese, Japanese, and Latino people, but the disease association is unique. The TT genotype and the T allele which are widely found associated with the risk of CAD showed a protective trend in this study.

Paso del Norte

Carlos Morton is a leading Chicano dramatist, who has been writing and producing plays for more than four decades. Among his best-known plays are The Many Deaths of Danny Rosales (1983) and Johnny Tenorio (1992). In addition to his work for the stage, which has been widely produced, he has written for television and radio, and taught at universities in Texas, California, and Mexico (he holds a PhD from the University of Texas, Austin). When he started his career, at the end of the 1960s and the start of the 1970s, his enthusiasm was sparked by the political theatre produced by Teatro Campesino and the San Francisco Mime Troupe. His work has since adopted a wider variety of styles and themes: evoking historical events, myths, biblical stories, and contemporary political issues, such as racism and machismo, interweaving realism with fantasy. But he always addresses a Chicano audience, and exposes the oppression of Chicano and Latino people. He is currently Professor of Theater at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Mental health in senior housing: Racial/ethnic patterns and correlates of major depressive disorder

Objectives: Mental health problems are associated with disability, overuse of medical care, higher rates of mortality and suicide as well as personal suffering for older adults. Residents of urban, low-income senior housing may face increased risk of a variety of mental health problems, including depression. This study identified the prevalence of multiple mental health problems in older residents of low-income senior housing and explored correlates of major depressive disorder for the two largest ethnic groups: black and Latino. Method: In-person diagnostic interviews identified rates of mental illness in a sample of 635 residents of 13 low-income senior housing buildings in a medium-sized northeastern city. Applying George's Social Antecedent Model of Depression, logistic regression analyses identified shared and unique correlates of depression for Latino and black participants. Results: This population had high rates of major depressive disorder (26%), generalized anxiety disorder (12%) and other mental health problems that varied significantly by ethnic and racial group. Separate multivariate models for Latino and black people showed that younger age, more chronic conditions and social distress were related to major depressive disorder for both ethnic groups. Perceived environmental stress, shorter tenure in the building, poorer perceived health, higher life stress and fewer leisure activities were associated with depression for Latinos only. Conclusion: Mental health screening and treatment services are needed in senior housing to address these high rates of mental illness. Unique constellations of correlates of depression for different ethnic groups underscore a need for culturally competent approaches to identification and treatment.

Translating Health Information Effectively for Latino Populations

California is the state with the most Latinos, constituting over one third of California’s population. The majority of Latinos, the fastest growing minority group in the United States, does not speak English at home. With lower levels of education, English-language proficiency, and health literacy, Latino people need health information they can understand. Literal translations of materials from English to Spanish without tailoring are common and often result in products containing egregious inaccuracies and awkward language usage that can also be out of context. In a medical setting, these errors can compromise health and be life-threatening. This commentary and tool provides examples of “translations gone wrong” and tips to follow to help make Spanish-language products and interpretation services more culturally and linguistically appropriate.

FORGOTTEN FACES: EXAMINING THE REPRESENTATIONS OF LATINO SUBCULTURES IN AMÉRICAS AND PURA BELPRÉ PICTUREBOOKS

Latinos are the largest and fastest growing ethnic minority in the United States with millions of Latino children enrolled in US early-childhood programs. These children represent a heterogeneous group of people celebrating diverse cultures. The children's literature written about them, however, does not. Research indicates that it is important for Latino children as well as non-Latino children and educators to encounter accurate and positive representations of the Latino people in children's literature. This promotes positive ethnic identity development in Latino children while helping non-Latino children and educators develop an appreciation and understanding of the diverse Latino culture. The Américas and Pura Belpré awards are presented to children's books that exemplify literary quality and authentic portrayal of the Latino culture. Latino and non-Latino children and educators frequently encounter the messages within these award-winning picturebooks. Using content (visual and textual) and semiotic analyses, this study critically examined the representation of diverse Latino cultures in a sample of these award-winning picturebooks. The study concluded that picturebooks winning the Américas and Pura Belpré awards do not represent the complete social and cultural mosaic of the Latino people, with deficiencies in representation of cultural diversity, socioeconomic status, gender roles, sexual orientations, and physical/mental abilities.

Oppositional Consciousness within an Oppositional Realm: The Case of Feminism and Womanism in Rap and Hip Hop, 1976-2004

Hip Hop is an oppositional cultural realm rooted in the socio-political and historical experiences and consciousness of economically disadvantaged urban black youth of the late 20th century. (1) By numerous accounts, Hip Hop originated in the South Bronx section of New York City during the mid-1970s from a confluence of factors, including ethnic dislocations spurred by the construction of the South Bronx highway, and a rapid decline in municipal services induced by severe cuts in federal funding at the end of the Great Society era. The local job loss and worker obsolescence precipitated by the national shift from an industrial to a service, information, and finance economy generated an artistically productive crossroads of lack and desire that ultimately gave birth to the culture known as Hip Hop. (2) Tricia Rose has characterized this time and place as an intersection of alienation, prophetic imagination, and yearning where postindustrial conditions, technological innovations, and Afrodiasporic cultural frames and priorities came together to produce the techno-black cultural syncretism known as rap music. (3) Braiding strands of protest and pleasure together into a seamless flow, rap initially expressed both gleeful and aggressive views of survival, social critique, and revelry to neighborhood audiences comprised primarily of African American and Latino youth. (4) Over time, however, and due in part to signal shifts in both commercial culture and the mass media, rap's audience grew beyond the bounds of neighborhood to encompass first the larger city of New York, later the nation (emerging first in a variety of regional flavors, then becoming regionally syncretized), and ultimately the globe. Today, Hip Hop culture, which encompasses not only rap music and videos but also particular forms of dress, dance, language, and attitude has been described as the new global cultural dominant. One thing that has not changed about Hip Hop, however, is that it continues to represent the voices and visions of the culturally, politically, and economically marginal and disenfranchised. Even as Hip Hop becomes global, its perspective is still centered in the experiences of the underdogs and it still expresses the cultural flair of African American and Latino people. Women have been integral to the evolution of Hip Hop culture, especially rap music, since the beginning. (5) Yet, historical accounts and critical analyses of the Hip Hop phenomenon have tended to downplay the contributions of women. Women have played pivotal roles as artists, writers, performers, producers, and industry executives. Women have influenced rap style and technique, ultimately shaping aesthetic standards and technological practices utilized by both women and men. Nevertheless, certain facts remain undeniable. First, men have outnumbered women in both the artistic arena and the corporate end of Hip Hop. Male rappers have outnumbered female rappers and male industry leaders have outnumbered female industry operatives. The production pipeline, from writers and performers to producers and executives, has effectively functioned like a modified old boys' club, hampering women's entry and ascent to power within the industry in ways both subtle and overt. Now that Hip Hop has expanded beyond music into video production, clothing design, and other lifestyle enhancement domains, the processes impeding women's participation and power-sharing have only become more widespread. Second, a masculinist discursive strand is clearly identifiable in both rap music and its parent culture, Hip Hop. (6) The numerical preponderance of men, combined with pre-existing masculinist scripts and sexist practices in virtually all occupational and commercial realms as well as the society at large, has ensured the greater visibility of men's prerogatives and perspectives relative to women's in both rap music and Hip Hop. Due largely to masculinist biases already in place in the domains of advertising and news reporting, the public face of both Hip Hop and rap is masculine and the mainstream discourse of rap as Hip Hop's mouthpiece is masculine. …

Felix Longoria's Wake: Bereavement, Racism, and the Rise of Mexican American Activism. By Patrick J. Carroll. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. xviii, 270 pp. Cloth, $45.00, isbn 0-292-71246-4. Paper, $19.95, isbn 0-292-71249-9.)

The experience of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, the largest population of Latino people in the United States, is still, in most mainstream depictions, a minimalist outline of a vague Hispanic presence in the meta-narrative. Unlike the acknowledged and substantive integration of the story of African American society as a fundamental part of American history, Latinos are mostly sketchy attachments. While excellent Mexican American, Chicano, and/or Latino scholarship exists to provide correction of this serious oversight, it still seems to remain (in 2003) for Anglo (the Chicano and Mexican American term for European American) scholars to utilize it. Patrick J. Carroll has done so in his Felix Longoria's Wake. This is an excellent account of one of the seminal events in the post—World War II Mexican American community: the denial in 1948 of the Three Rivers, Texas, funeral chapel for the wake of Felix Longoria Jr., a Mexican American soldier (and citizen of Three Rivers, Texas), because “‘the whites wouldn't like it’” (p. 56). Carroll details the subsequent response by the Mexican American community in south Texas and the counterreaction of the Anglo community with fascinating research that combines up-to-the-moment narrative with careful and detailed description of and analysis of the main protagonists in their evolving relations to the place and time of south Texas and the immediate post—World War II United States. Within the context of racialization, ethnicity and ethnocentrism, economic structures, and the widely divergent American perspectives of entitlement and equal opportunity, Carroll presents the Felix Longoria affair as the major event in the expansion of the American G.I. Forum, the most important postwar organization of the Mexican American generation. He also describes the active participation of Lyndon B. Johnson as a critical moment in the development of lbj as the most accomplished national Anglo politician in American civil rights history. The book's major contribution is the presentation of Dr. Héctor Perez García (1917–1996) as a major figure in Mexican American history or, as Julie Pycior states in the 2003 pbs documentary Justice for My People: The Story of Dr. Hector Garcia, a “giant of the 20th century.”

The Latin Grammys and the ALMAs: Awards Programs, Cultural Epideictic, and Intercultural Pedagogy

This article is not about Latino educators, nor is it about Latinos-as-students in educational settings. Our concern is Latino peoples and cultures as a curricular object-Latino/as as course content. This article examines 2 media texts, the Latin Grammy Awards and the ALMA Awards. We argue that the awards programs, and their didactic qualities, arise from and are a reaction to a profound social realization of the Latino presence. We begin by outlining our critical reformulation of epideictic rhetoric. Second, we provide background on the 2 programs and interpret their import as epideictic discourse. Finally, we offer some preliminary guides as instructional materials on Latino cultures.

Preparing Counselors to Dialogue about Race

PREPARING COUNSELORS A 750 word excerpt from this manuscript appeared in the March 2002 edition of the TCA Guidelines newsletter, on behalf of the Texas Association for Multicultural Counseling and Development. This article focuses on an interview conducted with Dr. Katherine Bankole, a scholar in the field of African American Studies and an expert in racial and ethnic conflict resolution. In this interview, Dr. Bankole discusses her perceptions concerning the importance of race relations work in the helping professions. Suggestions for the incorporation of these ideas into the counseling setting are provided. This article presents an interview conducted with Dr. Katherine Bankole, a scholar in the field of African American Studies and an expert in racial and ethnic conflict resolution. In this interview, Dr. Bankole discusses race matters in the helping professions and gives her thoughts about how race relations work relates to counselors. Dr. Bankole earned her B.A. (1987) from Howard University in Washington, D.C., in History, with an African American concentration. She received both an M.A. (1972) and Ph.D. (1996) in African American Studies from Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Dr. Bankole has completed additional certification in Conflict Mediation, Negotiation, and Racial/Ethnic Conflict Resolution Training. She is the author of Facilitating Race, Guiding Constructive Dialogue on the Subject of Race, Racism, and Race Relations (1998) and The Conflict Mediation Handbook (1991). Her scholarly essays have been published in Race, Gender, and Class and The Journal of Black Studies. Dr. Bankole is presently an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Director, Center for Black Culture and Research at West Virginia University. The following interview took place in Denton, Texas on November 15, 2001 and addressed Dr. Bankole's reflections on her philosophy of Dynamic Diversity, whereby one empowers self in the effective development of race relations knowledge and skills and then transmits this information to others. BD: How did you first become involved in race relations work? KB: I first became involved in race relations work when I began as a program Assistant Director in African Studies at Kean University in New Jersey. It was my first professional position in African Studies and in an African Studies department. What I discovered was that I was going to have to not only fulfill the needs of the department, but do race relations work. We were on a predominately White college campus. As the Assistant Director, I often got pulled into all kinds of race programs and discussions. The Black Student Union would want to have forums. Black faculty and staff would participate in formal and informal discussions on race relations. I left that position and took another position at Kean as Coordinator of the Conflict Mediation Program. I was responsible for developing mediation at the institution. What I wanted to do was to develop the program in such a way that it addressed all kinds of issues that occur [on] a college campus. I also took on the issue of race relations as a component of conflict mediation. You will find, even today, the issue of racism is not dealt with consistently in conflict resolution. I believe that it can be, so I always worked on that piece. I also developed a model for addressing African and African American intergroup conflict while I was a graduate student. That's basically how I got into race relations work and its been good. BD: How would you describe the state of ethnic and racial relations today? KB: I think that as we embark on the 21st century, we're probably encountering some of the most difficult aspects of race relations because of our ignorance of history. We still live in a highly segregated society, even though we have the appearance of diversity, which I call virtual diversity. At the same time, we still have racism; we still have White supremacy; we still have these issues impact Black people, Latino people, American Indians, Asian people. …

Drugs and Substances: Views from a Latino Community

The last three decades have seen an increase in the study of licit and illicit substance use and abuse. Very few studies, however, have been conducted to show the views of minority people on what substance abuse really is and how it affects their families and communities, although connections have often been made between crime and minority involvement in drug trafficking, use and abuse. This exploratory study presents an attempt to explore Latino or Hispanic people's perceptions and attitudes regarding the use and abuse of both licit and illicit substances, in a Texas City. Further, it is set up to examine individuals' views on drugs' definitions, their use in their community, and their effects on abusive and violent behavior in the family. The findings indicate that although individuals in this Hispanic community hold views on drugs similar to those in other communities, they nonetheless place most importance on the impact of the use of legal substances (alcohol and tobacco) on problem creation.

Latino and anglo political portraits: lessons from intercultural field research

Authors report sharply contrasting portraits of Anglo and Latino political values and behaviors, urging careful consideration of these differences in plans to include Latinos in civic life in the US. Reported data were collected during two and one half years of ethnographic field research which accompanied a domestic diversity program. 1 1 This report summarizes a symposium presented at the meetings of the International Academy of Intercultural Research, March 17, 1998 in Fullerton, CA. The authors want to thank panelists Rosita Albert, Milton Bennett, Dan Landis, and Frank Montalvo for their thoughtful comments which have helped guide preparation of this report. We are deeply appreciative of the support of project fundors — Fairfax County, VA, the Mobil Corporation, and the Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation — for endorsing an exploratory action research venture. Our most deeply felt thanks go to United Community Ministries, a non-profit human service agency in Alexandria, VA, that so generously supported, hosted, and guided this project. We also want to acknowlege the valuable editorial assistance of Fathali Moghaddam and Gail Weigl at Georgetown University. Developed in the Washington, DC metro area, the Hispanic Leadership Project set out to prepare leaders from a recently arrived Latino immigrant population — primarily from El Salvador — to advocate and form political alliances on behalf of their people. With joint local government and private foundation support, project designers sought alternatives to the marginalization and misrepresentation which are common experiences of Latino peoples recently settled in the US. Intentionally inclusive, but accidentally ethnocentric, the Hispanic Leadership Program could not realize most of its ambitious goals for social change, but proved to be a very heuristically powerful approach to set certain Anglo and Latino cultural patterns in bold relief, particularly those related to political self-expression and world view. Despite the specific features of its context and participants, the project offers broader lessons to guide future research and practice; noted are guidelines for quantitative follow-up study and for subsequent efforts to foster Latino participation in politics. The Hispanic Leadership Project and companion research are offered as a demonstration of learning to be extracted from putative program failures and from use of qualitative methods in intercultural research.

Latino Immigration and Citizenship

Immigration figures prominently in Latino politics in both historical and contemporary terms. It underlies the formation and development of a longstanding Latino presence in the United States. Indeed, the very heritage of the Latino people is rooted in the history of conquest and settlement in the Americas. In more recent times, immigration has fueled the growth of the Latino population in the United States; over 40% of U.S. Latinos are first-