Poor Mexican Research Articles

Alonso S. Perales: Pioneer of Mexican-American Civil Rights by Cynthia Orozco

Reviewed by: Alonso S. Perales: Pioneer of Mexican-American Civil Rights by Cynthia Orozco Katherine Bynum Alonso S. Perales: Pioneer of Mexican-American Civil Rights. By Cynthia Orozco. (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2022. Pp. 537. Notes, selected bibliography.) Scholarship on the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) has generally focused on the organization’s assault on school desegregation cases and the landmark Hernandez v. Texas Supreme Court decision in 1954. Chicana/o historians have either ignored or denigrated the work of Alonso S. Perales, who was not only the founder of LULAC, but also a lawyer, public intellectual, Pan-American ideologue, and a United States diplomat. Cynthia Orozco’s biography of Perales argues that the Mexican American civil rights activist was one of the most important figures [End Page 409] in Texas throughout the twentieth century. By embracing “Mexican Americanism” as early as the 1920s—well before Mexicanas/os began using the term—“the Mexican-American male middle class of the 1920s of which Perales was a major leader” was “the first truly bilingual, bicultural sector . . . which consciously asserted citizenship and membership in the United States” (xxxi). The book builds on the author’s previous publication No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed (University of Texas Press, 2009), in which she argues that LULAC was more diverse than the assimilationist, conservative, and anti-immigrant tropes long associated with it. Being born in 1898 to poor Mexican immigrants in South Texas—an area rife with anti-Mexican racism—did not prevent Perales from ascending the socioeconomic ladder throughout his life. He worked hard, entered the middle class through his education and profession as a lawyer, and always kept Mexican Americans, regardless of class, at the forefront of his civil rights organizing. Orozco credits Perales with keeping LULAC alive throughout the Great Depression and managing to help working-class Mexican Americans benefit from defense industry jobs with the Fair Employment Practices Committee. He also later prevented braceros from Mexico from working in small towns in South Texas because of widespread racism. Perales built relationships with other Mexican American political leaders, notably Henry B. González and Albert Peña from San Antonio and United States Senator Dennis Chávez from New Mexico. Orozco argues that Perales embraced candidates who worked to uplift La Raza (the people). She also details the numerous political positions in which he served at city, state, national, and international levels. Although the book is well researched, Orozco is overly apologetic for many of Perales’s shortcomings. He was a proud supporter of ultraconservative politicians like Representative Martin Dies (founder of the House Un-American Activities Committee) and Governor Allan Shivers, both of whom disguised their bigotry against Black and Mexican residents in the name of anti-communism. Perales was an ardent anti-Communist and only supported the San Antonio Pecan Shellers Strike in 1937 once its Communist leadership stepped away from the movement. Racism prevented him from supporting unionization or working in solidarity with Black activists. Furthermore, Orozco ignores the fact that Perales was a light-skinned Mexican American, and although he may have embraced La Raza, he ascended into the middle-class because of his privileged connection to whiteness, not just because of his ability to work hard for an education. Orozco criticizes Perales for his emphasis on homosocial spaces that separated Mexican women into LULAC auxiliary chapters, but the author had previously detailed this thoroughly in No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed. Her chapter on his time as a United States diplomat to several Latin American countries is where she is most critical in this volume. [End Page 410] Orozco reveals that he often followed orders and never spoke out in favor of democratic movements in Latin America, more than likely because they involved leftist politics. Altogether, the biography reveals that Alonso Perales dedicated his life to a limited civil rights cause, often at the expense of others. Katherine Bynum Arizona State University Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association

Physical capability in a rural birth cohort at the age of 52: association with early environmental, nutritional, and developmental factors

IntroductionMidlife physical capability (PC) is associated with developmental factors in the populations of economically developed countries. As far as we know, there is no information for rural populations of low- and middle-income countries. The aim of the study was to investigate the influence of pre- and postnatal factors on midlife objective measures of PC in a 1966–67 birth cohort from a Mexican rural community. The hypothesis was that adverse developmental conditions are associated with low midlife PC.MethodsIn 1966–67, a birth cohort of all children from a poor Mexican rural community was assembled. Data on family socioeconomic status (SES), parental health and nutritional status, birth weight, postnatal growth and feeding patterns were registered. In 2018, out of the 336 cohort members, 118 were living in the community, and eighty-two of them underwent a comprehensive clinical evaluation. The evaluation included grip strength, gait velocity and chair-stand PC tests. In multivariable linear models, PC tests were the dependent variables, and prenatal, birth and postnatal factors were the independent variables. Adjustment for confounding was made with adult anthropometric, body composition, clinical and ageing status variables.ResultsIndependent of adult health status and other ageing indicators, lower PC was associated with family organization and SES, parental nutritional status, birth weight, infant postnatal growth velocity, and weaning time. These results indicate that adverse family and environmental conditions that are prevalent in poor rural communities are associated with low midlife PC.

Восстание сапатистов: нищие мексиканские индейцы против мирового неолиберального капитализма

Восстание сапатистов: нищие мексиканские индейцы против мирового неолиберального капитализма

Social Class and Parenting in Mexican American Families

Parenting practices are a key mechanism in the transmission of class advantage from adults to children; however, Latinxs have not been a main focus of this work. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 17 middle-class and working-class and poor Mexican American parents, we explore social class patterns in childrearing practices and beliefs. Rather than stark-class differences found in previous work, we observed substantial similarities across social class lines. Our findings suggest that (1) Social mobility experienced by middle-class parents complicate class-based parenting beliefs. (2) Variation in parenting approaches in the same household mitigates class distinctions. (3) Mexican Americans’ shared contextual experiences and cultural values minimize social class differences in childrearing. These findings reshape the literature on class differences in parenting and show how social class and race and ethnicity impact childrearing beliefs and practices that are better illuminated when studied as a process.

Volunteering for a Cause: Gender, Faith, and Charity in Mexico from the Reform to the Revolution by Silvia Marina Arrom

Reviewed by: Volunteering for a Cause: Gender, Faith, and Charity in Mexico from the Reform to the Revolution by Silvia Marina Arrom Jason H. Dormady Volunteering for a Cause: Gender, Faith, and Charity in Mexico from the Reform to the Revolution. By Silvia Marina Arrom. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 2016. Pp. xiii, 279. $29.95. ISBN 978-0-8263-4188-4.) Catholic charity in nineteenth-century Mexico flourished (instead of shrinking) in the presence of state-sponsored anticlerical liberalism. This success came as male and female lay members of the St. Vincent De Paul charitable organization functioned in complimentary roles to improve the lives of poor Mexicans. So argues historian Silvia Arrom in this readable and well-organized volume on the overlooked history of charitable programs in Mexico between Independence (1821) and the 1910 Revolution. Having done research in Paris and Mexico City as well as regional archives, Arrom uses a clear, concise style in this work, which shores up weaknesses on the topic of charity. The introduction and chapter one counter the francocentric history of St. Vincenet De Paul in Mexico, showing how the organization adapted to local conditions and used organizational strategies better suited to Mexico than to France. Arrom also demonstrates that women were key to the establishment of the charity from the start, contrary to chronicles generated by the male laity and Catholic clergy associated with St. Vincent De Paul in Mexico. Chapters two, three, and four continue chronologically with an eye toward gendered variations that occurred in the organization over time. The author counters the narrative created by Mexico's nineteenth-century liberal scholars, demonstrating that St. Vincent De Paul was not feminized in the late 1800s, but instead developed complimentary branches of service that allowed the organization to extend its tendrils deeper into the world of Mexico's poor. Certainly, members of St. Vincent De Paul supported the struggle against secularization, but their work among people not reached by state institutions allowed the group to avoid state persecution and thrive during a time scholars traditionally see as hostile to Catholicism. In chapter five, Arrom uses the case study of the state of Jalisco to confirm her argument about Mexico as a whole. However, her look at the local archives brings insights she would have missed using sources from Mexico City alone. The Jalisco case study enriches existing work on the National Catholic Party and clarifies why Catholic networks during the Cristero War (1926–29) functioned so well. She caps off the work with a discussion in chapter six of how Catholicism served as a modernizing force in Mexico by modeling public welfare and encouraging public health, not the backwards opponent to progress as painted by the ruling elite of [End Page 565] Mexico at the time. In this regard, Arrom shores up recent research by other scholars who, over the last two decades, have deepened our understanding of the multi-faceted work of the Catholic Church in Mexico, particularly its link to public policy and modernization. It also has implications for scholarship that examines why women felt empowered by conservative movements that otherwise restricted their role in society. Volunteering for a Cause is a well-researched, clearly written book that—while not path-making—is a solid contribution to the historical understanding of nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Mexico. Scholars of religion, conservatism, women, and liberalism in Mexico should consult this work as should graduate students with specialties in modern Mexico. While the book is situated in a larger historiographic conversation that might make it difficult to include in undergraduate courses on Modern Mexico, courses on Latin American religion would benefit from its inclusion, particularly in discussions on the role of Catholicism in debates on women in society, state power, or modernization. [End Page 566] Jason H. Dormady Central Washington University Copyright © 2018 The Catholic University of America Press

“The Spirits Talk to Us”: Regionalism, Poverty, and Romance in Mexican American Gothic Fiction

This essay examines Mary Castillo's 2012 Lost in the Light and Alisa Valdes's 2013 The Temptation ofDemetrio VigiL both Mexican American gothic romances. The characters of both novels traverse parts of what are usually called the West, but which Americo Paredes called Greater Mexico, a term that I adapt to show the often-suppressed presence of Mexican Americans throughout the region. In these novels each heroine's close relationship with her ghostly protagonist--one a poor Mexican American liquor smuggler in the 1920s, the other a poor cholo gangbanger from the near present--reveals specificities and differences between regional experiences, especially those of working-class and poor Mexican Americans. Through the lens of gothic theory and critical regionalism, I consider the ways that specific Mexican American cultures are evoked through the plot elements of a popular genre like the gothic romance. I argue that the striking prevalence of scenes of Mexican American regional and ethnic poverty in what would seem to be beach read popular novels suggests that in the Mexican American gothic, the sense of anxiety and abjection requires uneasy scenes of Mexican American destitution and violence, scenes which function as the true heart of gothic fear and uncertainty for their heroines. African-American authors' appropriation and revision of Gothic conventions shows that the gothic is not a transhistorical, static category but a dynamic mode that undergoes historical change.... --Teresa Goddu, Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation In gothic temporality the past does not dissolve itself smoothly as the present takes its place. Instead, traces of the past remain active, rebounding upon, clawing back, interrupting, exposing, and even mocking the actions and intentions of today....Gothic meets regionalism when pathological or corrupt historical residues are located, not in a rotten patrilineage or a family secret, but rather in a community mentality.... --Jennifer Lawn, Scarfies, Dunedin Gothic, and the Spirit of Capitalism We're Orihuelas and Mexicans. The spirits talk to us.' --Mary Castillo, Lost in the Light At the beginning of Mary Castillo's 2012 modern gothic romance Lost in the Light, present-day, working-class, Mexican American1 police detective Dori Orihuela is at a low ebb in her life. Wounded in a shootout, on leave pending an investigation, suffering from mild PTSD, not sure she can afford her tumble-down Carpenter Gothic home, she is hyperalert and vulnerable. To make things worse, the handsome Mexican American contractor on her house turns out to be Gavin, her ex-boyfriend, who broke up with her because he believes she cheated on him. In this state, on one particularly bad day a stranger suddenly appears, first outside, then in the parlor of her house, as if by magic. The man, we will discover, is in fact a revenant, a ghost tied to a specific place: he is Vicente Sorolla, a poor Mexican American from the barrio who, for a time, made good during the Prohibition in the violent, unstable liquor smuggling business on the California-Mexico border. His betrayal and death in Dori's house (he doesn't know what happened to his body or to his love, Ana Vasquez, after he died) ties him ineluctably to the house itself. Dori is forced to watch as Vicente relives his last day and his graphic beating death by Anglo deputies in her parlor: Two red-faced men stood over Vince, laughing as he fought for breath. His jacket was half ripped off, dirtied with boot prints. A pool of blood oozed off the rug and onto the wood floor. His fingers were so broken and mangled, they were more pulp than skin and bone. No one's going to miss one more grease bag Mexican, the two men joked. Dori saw the deputy stars on their belts. One had a bloody chain wrapped around his fist.... Through the swollen folds of skin [Dori] made out his eyes, staring straight into hers. Do you see me? he wheezed. His cold, bloodied hand squeezed her foot. …

The Right to Stay Home: How U.S. Policy Drives Mexican Migration by David Bacon, and: Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas by David Scott FitzGerald and David Cook-Martin (review)

Reviewed by: The Right to Stay Home: How U.S. Policy Drives Mexican Migration by David Bacon, and: Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas by David Scott FitzGerald and David Cook-Martin Alejandra Marchevsky (bio) The Right to Stay Home: How U.S. Policy Drives Mexican Migration By David Bacon. Boston: Beacon Press, 2013. 328 pp. isbn 978-0807001615 Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas By David Scott FitzGerald and David Cook-Martín. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. 512 pp. isbn 978-0674729049 The mass movement of people around the Americas has been critical to racialized nation building since the 18th century, and has simultaneously produced transnational spaces of social and economic integration and state violence. These themes spring from David Bacon’s sweeping account of contemporary Mexican migration in The Right to Stay Home: How U.S. Policy Drives Mexican Migration (Beacon, 2013), and David Scott FitzGerald and David Cook-Martín’s historical-sociological book, Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas (Harvard UP, 2014). Bacon’s book foregrounds an argument that the prolific journalist and immigrant rights activists have advanced for years: The U.S. is not an unwitting recipient of Mexican immigration; instead, it is swallowing up Mexico’s human and natural resources, and has imposed neoliberal policies that have contributed to skyrocketing unemployment and poverty in Mexico. This has left millions of displaced poor Mexicans no choice but to migrate north. Bacon documents in exquisite prose how Mexico’s “great migration”—which peaked at 12.67 million Mexicans in the U.S. in 2008—was propelled by U.S. policies, especially the North American Free Trade Agreement. This epic exodus is explained through exhaustive details on the assault on Mexican workers. On the heels of NAFTA, Granjas Carroll, a subsidiary of Virginia-based meatpacking giant Smithfield Foods, displaced Veracruz agricultural workers who then migrated to the U.S. for the same type of jobs they had lost at home. Thanks to liberalized foreign investment and trade rules, Smithfield flooded Mexico with cheap, imported pork, and erected massive hog farms in Veracruz’s Perote Valley, bankrupting Mexican pork producers. Representatives from Granjas Carroll and municipal officials promised valley residents “modernization” and jobs. And yet, the few jobs that materialized locked workers out of corporate profit-sharing and extracted 12-hour workdays for as little as $55/week (9). Most Veracruz emigrants settled in U.S. agricultural towns like Tar Heel, North Carolina, where Smithfield employs mostly undocumented Mexican immigrants in the world’s largest slaughterhouse, and the tobacco industry imports H2A visa guest workers and undocumented workers from Veracruz to labor under some of the worst conditions in the country. The story of displacement repeats in Oaxaca, where the federal government transferred communal lands (ejidos) to multinational mining conglomerates. When residents protested land loss and ecological damage from industrial mining, foreign companies cynically offered them free toilets, and local police descended on demonstrators with dogs and guns (50). Home to 20 percent of Mexico’s indigenous population, Oaxaca has seen most of its young residents leave for work in other parts of Mexico and the U.S.: nearly half of its rural communities had negative growth between 1990 and 2000 (57). Bacon argues that capitalists and political elites from both nation-states have spurred migration through their destructive policies. Next, U.S. policymakers have created “illegal” people through laws that racialize and criminalize Mexican immigrants, an effect that produces vulnerable workers for U.S. employers. The second half of the book recounts the repression of Mexican immigrants through the buildup of border and interior enforcement, and the expansion of the immigration detention system. The Right to Stay Home centers the voices of activists with selected testimonios that follow each chapter: In Mississippi, Latino immigrants and the state’s legislative Black Caucus united to block anti-immigration bills that had swept legislatures in other southern states; in Los Angeles, [End Page 185] Latino janitors protested “silent...

Race-Ethnicity, Poverty, Urban Stressors, and Telomere Length in a Detroit Community-based Sample

Residents of distressed urban areas suffer early aging-related disease and excess mortality. Using a community-based participatory research approach in a collaboration between social researchers and cellular biologists, we collected a unique data set of 239 black, white, or Mexican adults from a stratified, multistage probability sample of three Detroit neighborhoods. We drew venous blood and measured telomere length (TL), an indicator of stress-mediated biological aging, linking respondents' TL to their community survey responses. We regressed TL on socioeconomic, psychosocial, neighborhood, and behavioral stressors, hypothesizing and finding an interaction between poverty and racial-ethnic group. Poor whites had shorter TL than nonpoor whites; poor and nonpoor blacks had equivalent TL; and poor Mexicans had longer TL than nonpoor Mexicans. Findings suggest unobserved heterogeneity bias is an important threat to the validity of estimates of TL differences by race-ethnicity. They point to health impacts of social identity as contingent, the products of structurally rooted biopsychosocial processes.

Working for God, Country, and "Our Poor Mexicans": Catholic Women and Americanization at the San Antonio National Catholic Community House, 1919-1924

ON A HOT JULY DAY IN 1919, May J. Williams arrived in San Antonio on official business for the National Catholic War Council (NCWC). As a trained social worker and a member of a prominent Milwaukee Catholic family, she applied her professional skills and an outsider’s eye to complete a detailed survey of the city. Williams researched a broad range of issues, but she paid particular attention to the plight of Mexican immigrants, describing their vice-filled neighborhoods that lacked running water, sanitation, or police protection. The solution to these problems, she concluded, was “a little Americanization work.” She warned, however, that white San Antonio Catholics were ignoring these conditions, while at least five Protestant groups were ramping up Americanization efforts in Mexican neighborhoods. The NCWC, she recommended, could fill this gap by establishing a National Catholic Community House in San Antonio as a center for Catholic Americanization. Between 1919 and 1924, the NCWC hired professionally trained laywomen like Williams to do Catholic Americanization work in San Antonio. These women, known as “secretaries,” almost all came from outside the Southwest, and most did not speak Spanish, but they shared a deep commitment to a vision of Americanizing Mexican immigrants while also preserving their Catholic faith. The NCWC leadership sent them to the city as part of their National Catholic Community House project, a larger national program of war reconstruction and immigrant outreach. As they enacted this national agenda, however, the secretaries had to confront the racial and sexual politics of postwar San Antonio, which posed special challenges to them as social missionaries within the Church. They found themselves on the front line of the struggle to define what it meant to be both Catholic and American in the modernizing and multi-ethnic United States. John McGreevy and other historians have examined the ways American Catholics contended with the tensions associated with modernity in the

Migration and Financial Constraints: Evidence from Mexico

Abstract This paper shows that poor households’ entitlement to an exogenous, temporary, but guaranteed income stream increases Mexican migration to the United States, although this income is mainly consumed. Some households use the entitlement to this income stream as collateral to finance the migration. The new migrations come from previously constrained individuals and households and worsen migrant skills. In sum, financial constraints to international migration are binding for poor Mexicans, some of whom would like to migrate but cannot afford to. As growth and antipoverty and microfinance programs relax financial constraints for the poor, low-skilled Mexican migration to the United States will likely increase.

Migration and Financial Constraints: Evidence from Mexico

Using data collected for the evaluation of the rural component of Oportunidades, Mexico's flagship anti-poverty program, I show that poor households' entitlement to an exogenous, temporary but guaranteed income stream increases US migration even if this income is mainly consumed and that some households likely use the entitlement to this income stream as collateral to finance the migration. The individuals who start migrating because of this income shock belong to households with no counterfactual US migrants, come from the middle of the local predicted wage distribution, and worsen migrant skills.These results suggest that financial constraints to international migration are binding for poor Mexicans, some of whom would like to migrate but cannot afford to. If generalizable, they indicate that, as growth and anti-poverty and micro-finance programs relax financial constraints for the poor, Mexican migration to the US will increase and higher levels of border enforcement will likely be needed.

Barrio, Bulldozers, and Baseball: The Destruction of Chavez Ravine

Barrio, Bulldozers, and BaseballThe Destruction of Chavez Ravine Andy McCue (bio) The cover of a Ry Cooder cd encapsulates one of the urban myths of Los Angeles. The illustration on the 2005 album shows Death driving a bulldozer through a hilly community of simple houses. Death sports a baseball cap and chomps on a cigar holder like the ones used by Los Angeles Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley. For those slow on the uptake, the cover of the booklet inside the cd case shows a picture of earth-moving equipment at the groundbreaking ceremony for Dodger Stadium.1 The myth in the music, and the story repeated to this day by some former residents and activists, connects two undoubted facts.2 The poor, Mexican American community of Chavez Ravine was destroyed. And Dodger Stadium stands there today. The myth is that these facts are logically connected, that the first was done to create the second. The myth is constantly reinforced by powerful photographs and film from the archives. The pictures that appeared in Los Angeles newspapers on May 9, 1959, showed Aurora Vargas being forcibly carried down the steps of her wooden frame home by policemen. The picture is presented as a poor Mexican American family torn from their home to permit construction of Dodger Stadium. Context can be everything. In some cases, pictures need their thousand words. Some of the context came quickly in 1959, but has largely been forgotten. Mrs. Vargas was part of the extended Arechiga family. Soon after the eviction, Los Angeles newspapers reported the family owned and rented out eleven houses around Los Angeles.3 The Arechigas were not poor. They were in a dispute with the city of Los Angeles about the value of the Chavez Ravine house. The squatters who inhabited the hills around the Arechigas property were poor, but they weren’t part of the story. The rest of the context, however, was quickly lost. It’s a story of a divided city elite, a disenfranchised minority community, and the McCarthy era of the early 1950s. [End Page 47] Chavez Ravine sits in the hills just a bit north of downtown Los Angeles. Its name grew from the quickest path from the old central area of the city into the hills, up a ravine owned by Julian Chavez. In the late 1940s, it was a community of about 1,100 families, overwhelmingly Mexican American and mostly poor. Crispin Martin, who played Pancho in some of the Cisco Kid movies, lived there, but his financial status was the exception. Some of the streets were unpaved. Utilities could be haphazard. There were solid houses, but there were also ramshackle dwellings teetering on hillsides. Goats and chickens wandered freely. An elementary school and a Catholic church served as focal points.4 Chavez Ravine evoked different images. The residents saw a close community where somebody always had an eye on the kids playing outside and you could count on help if hard times hit. The elites of downtown Los Angeles saw an eyesore. They saw roaming animals, trash, wooden shacks, and poor Mexicans. The liberals in the elite wanted to improve housing conditions and conservatives in the elite wanted to clean things up. Driven by World War II, and then Cold War defense spending, Los Angeles had boomed during the 1940s. The county’s population had grown 49 percent, to nearly 1.4 million.5 But the number of available housing units had grown by only 32 percent.6 Veterans and their families were living in Quonset huts in city parks and other appropriated areas. The elites knew they had a problem and the liberals among them saw an opportunity for public housing, then a byword of urban planning across the country. In 1949, Congress passed the Public Housing Act, providing funds to build eight hundred thousand housing units across the country. The Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles acquired $110 million to build ten thousand units at eleven sites. In October 1950, the Los Angeles City Council signed a contract with the housing authority for the project. The 3,364 units to be built in Chavez Ravine were dubbed Elysian Park Heights...

FOOD INSECURITY ASSOCIATED FACTORS IN POOR MEXICAN HOUSEHOLDS

ObjetiveAssess food insecurity (FI) in poor Mexican households and its association with social and demographic characteristics.Methods410 households with children were classified into 4 levels those were defined as: food security (FS); mild (MIFI), moderate (MFI) and severe (SFI) food insecurity using the Scale Latin American and Caribbean Food Security (ELCSA). Logistic regression models were tested in order to measure the association between levels of food insecurity and economic and demographic characteristics as follows: age and maternal education, housing conditions as floor material and overcrowding.Results34.7% of households were classified as MIFI, 28.7% as MFI and 23.3% as SFI. Overcrowding was a factor significantly associated with some category of FI (OR=5.9, p=0.015) and ground floor with SFI (OR=2.8, p=0.001).ConclusionThe proportion of Mexican households whit FI at this sample was very high such as their poverty indicators association.

Migration vs. development? The case of poverty and inequality in Mexico

Although the migration – development nexus is widely recognized as a complex one, it is generally thought that there is a relationship between poverty and emigration, and that remittances lessen inequality. On the basis of Latin American and Mexican data, this chapter intends to show that for Mexico, the exchange of migrants for remittances is among the lowest in Latin America, that extreme poor Mexicans don't migrate although the moderately poor do, that remittances have a small, non-significant impact on the most widely used inequality index of all households and a very large one on the inequality index of remittance-receiving households, and finally that, to Mexican households, the opportunity cost of international migration is higher than remittance income. In summary, there is a relationship between poverty and migration (and vice versa), but this relationship is far from linear, and in some respects may be a perverse one for Mexico and for Mexican households.

Does food insecurity compromise maternal dietary Zinc or energy intake in favor of her child, in rural poor Mexican households?

To analyze quantitative indicators of food insecurity (FI), and estimate if FI modifies the association between maternal and child Zinc and energy intake as evidence for maternal dietary compromise in favor of her child. Cross-sectional study (n=2 563), data derived from baseline impact evaluation of the Mexican Programa de Apoyo Alimentario. Quantitative indicators of FI were:Household food storage, maize and/or bean production, food expenditure, and spatial access to food markets. We evaluated percentage adequacy of energy (PAE) and Zinc (PAZn) intake. Multiple linear regression model was fitted to estimate the association between maternal and child PAE and PAZn. Child PAE and PAZn were positively associated with those of their mothers. None of the FI indicators modified the association between maternal and child PAE and PAZn. No evidence of maternal dietary compromise in favor of her child was observed using four quantitative indicators of FI in central-southern rural Mexican househods.

Liquidity Profiles of Poor Mexican Households

Summary Buffer stock savings theories predict that more vulnerable households build up liquid savings in order to cope with income variability. Using data from 1801 marginalized Mexican households, this paper examines how household liquidity levels vary by income level and use of banking. The paper finds strong evidence of buffer stock savings in poor and vulnerable households. It also shows that membership in a financial cooperative is a determinant of higher household liquidity levels. Financial instruments are used more to confront idiosyncratic shocks than systemic shocks. Idiosyncratic shocks and remittances are important determinants of liquidity levels in unbanked households.

Organoleptic Properties, Ease of Use, and Perceived Health Effects Are Determinants of Acceptability of Micronutrient Supplements among Poor Mexican Women

We assessed the acceptability of 3 micronutrient supplements for pregnant and lactating women: micronutrient powder (Sprinkles), a fortified food (Nutrivida), and tablets. Pregnant or lactating beneficiaries of the Oportunidades program participating in a cluster randomized supplementation trial in urban Mexico were surveyed about the acceptability of 1 of 3 supplements (n = 268). Semistructured interviews (n = 40) were also conducted with a subset of women in the trial and from adjacent rural areas. Acceptability of the supplements was evaluated based on women's perceptions and experiences with organoleptic qualities, ease of use, and perceived health effects (positive and negative). The median Likert scale ranking of organoleptic and use qualities for all 3 supplements was “I liked it” (2 on a scale of 1–5). However, responses to open-ended survey questions and semistructured interviews indicated decided preferences. Tablets and Sprinkles were strongly preferred over Nutrivida. In interviews, women expressed dislike of the smell, taste, and texture of Nutrivida; they found it cumbersome to store and prepare and reported the most negative effects with it. Between tablets and Sprinkles, tablets were preferred because of the absence of perceptible taste or smell and the simplicity of use. This study provides valuable insights into our currently limited understanding of women's perceptions and preferences among supplements by broadening the concept of acceptability beyond organoleptic properties. Such an analytical approach is useful for identifying both appropriate nutritional supplements within a given sociocultural context as well as the information that should be included in nutrition education to improve adherence.

Depressive symptoms among poor older adults in Mexico: prevalence and associated factors.

To describe the presence of depressive symptoms (DS) and factors associated with them among poor Mexican older male and female adults (OA). A survey was conducted among OA enrolled in a governmental poverty relief program (Oportunidades) in Mexico. Participants completed a short version of the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale and answered questions about health and life conditions. The prevalence of DS over the cutoff point was 43% (confidence interval (CI) 39.5-46.4). DS were associated with different variables among male and female participants. For men, difficulties in performing daily life activities were associated with DS over the cutoff point (odds ratio (OR) 2.62, CI 1.58-4.34) and literacy was associated with less DS (OR 0.46, CI 0.31-0.68). For women, difficulties with daily life activities were associated with more DS (OR 2.50, CI 1.57-3.97), and being head of the family was also positively associated (OR 1.81, CI 1.11-2.93). DS were frequent among this sample of poor OA. The differences between men and women in variables associated with DS highlight the importance of considering the gendered aspects of growing old.

Mexican Nationalisms, Southern Racisms: Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the U.S. South, 1908–1939

The early twentieth century brought transformative Mexican migrations to places from Texas to Alaska, Michigan to California, and the South was no exception. Examining the case of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the South from 1908 to 1939, this essay shows how international migration, in this case between the United States and Mexico, has shaped the racial ideologies of nations and societies at both ends of migration streams. It traces the arrival of Mexican immigrants to two Southern locations, New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta, and discusses their initial experiences of race and class there. It then focuses on the middle- and upper-class community surrounding Mexico’s New Orleans consulate, as well as the self-appointed leadership among poor Mexican sharecroppers in Gunnison, Mississippi, to illuminate the distinctly Mexican strategies which Mexicans of all social classes pursued in their quest to attain and retain white status in the U.S. South. In the early twentieth century U.S. South, there were no Mexican Americans who could call upon U.S. citizenship or claims to be “Caucasian” under the law, nor organizers drawing Mexicans into class-based politics. There, Mexicans’ sole cultural and political claims took the form of Mexico-directed activism, through which the racial ideologies of both immigrants and Mexican government bureaucrats had a discernible impact upon the color line’s shape and foundations. Conversely, it was in the South that Mexican government representatives most directly confronted the black-white eugenic binary of U.S. white supremacy, and did so without the support of U.S.-based institutions or groups. This article argues that during the decade following the Mexican revolution, Mexican immigrants and bureaucrats in the South emphasized Mexico’s pre-revolutionary tradition of cultural whitening, avoiding the official post-revolutionary celebration of race-mixing, or mestizaje. In so doing, they successfully elided questions of eugenic race in their negotiation of the color line. They eventually secured Mexicans’ acceptance as white, a trajectory more closely mirroring national trends for European, rather than Mexican immigrants in the same period.

Culture of Empire: American Writers, Mexico, and Mexican Immigrants, 1880–1930

Culture of Empire: American Writers, Mexico, and Mexican Immigrants, 1880–1930