front cover of Abandoned Families
Abandoned Families
Social Isolation in the Twenty-First Century
Kristin S. Seefeldt
Russell Sage Foundation, 2016
Choosing whom to marry involves more than emotion, as racial politics, cultural mores, and local demographics all shape romantic choices. In Marriage Vows and Racial Choices, sociologist Jessica Vasquez-Tokos explores the decisions of Latinos who marry either within or outside of their racial and ethnic groups. Drawing from in-depth interviews with nearly 50 couples, she examines their marital choices and how these unions influence their identities as Americans.
 
Vasquez-Tokos finds that their experiences in childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood shape their perceptions of race, which in turn influence their romantic expectations. Most Latinos marry other Latinos, but those who intermarry tend to marry whites. She finds that some Latina women who had domineering fathers assumed that most Latino men shared this trait and gravitated toward white men who differed from their fathers. Other Latina respondents who married white men fused ideas of race and class and perceived whites as higher status and considered themselves to be “marrying up.” Latinos who married non-Latino minorities—African Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans—often sought out non-white partners because they shared similar experiences of racial marginalization. Latinos who married Latinos of a different national origin expressed a desire for shared cultural commonalities with their partners, but—like those who married whites—often associated their own national-origin groups with oppressive gender roles.
 
Vasquez-Tokos also investigates how racial and cultural identities are maintained or altered for the respondents’ children. Within Latino-white marriages, biculturalism—in contrast with Latinos adopting a white “American” identity—is likely to emerge. For instance, white women who married Latino men often embraced aspects of Latino culture and passed it along to their children. Yet, for these children, upholding Latino cultural ties depended on their proximity to other Latinos, particularly extended family members. Both location and family relationships shape how parents and children from interracial families understand themselves culturally.
 
As interracial marriages become more common, Marriage Vows and Racial Choices shows how race, gender, and class influence our marital choices and personal lives.
 
 
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Dining at the Lineman's Shack
John Weston
University of Arizona Press, 2003
Mountain lion barbacoa. Margarita's yam soufflé. Pastel de Choclo, a.k.a. Rodeo Pie. And for dessert, perhaps, Miss Ruby Cupcakes. These are but a few of the gustatory memories of John Weston that waft us on a poignant journey into the past in the company of a gifted writer and unabashed bon vivant.

The place is Skull Valley in central Arizona, the time the 1930s. Taking food as his theme, Weston paints an instructive and often hilarious portrait of growing up, of rural family life under difficult circumstances, and of a remote Arizona community trying to hold body and soul together during tough times. His book recalls life in a lineman's shack, interlaced with "disquisitions on swamp life, rotting water, and the complex experience of finding enough to eat during the Great Depression."

Central to Weston's account is his mother Eloine, a valiant woman rearing a large brood in poverty with little help from her husband. Eloine cooks remarkably well—master of a small repertory from which she coaxes ideas surprising even to herself—and feeds her family on next to nothing. She is a woman whose first instinct is to cry out "Lord, what am I going to feed them" whenever visitors show up close to mealtime. Recalls Weston, "Her strength lay in a practical- and poverty-born sense that there must be more edible food in the world than most people realized," and he swears that six out of seven meals were from parts of four or five previous meals coming round again, like the buckets on a Ferris wheel.

Although Weston evokes a fond remembrance of a bygone era that moves from Depression-era Skull Valley to wartime Prescott, rest assured: food—its acquisition, its preparation, its wholehearted enjoyment—is the foundation of this book. "I did not have a deprived childhood, despite its slim pickings," writes Weston. "If I recall a boiling pig's head now and then, it is not to be read as some Jungian blip from Lord of the Flies but simply a recurring flicker of food-memory." Whether remembering his father's occasional deer poaching or his community's annual Goat Picnic, Weston laces his stories with actual recipes—even augmenting his instructions for roasted wild venison with tips for preparing jerky.

Dining at the Lineman's Shack teems with sparkling allusions, both literary and culinary, informed by Weston's lifetime of travels. Even his nagging memory of desperate boyhood efforts to trade his daily peanut-butter sandwich for bacon-and-egg, baloney, jelly, or most anything else is tempered by his acquaintance with "the insidious sa-teh sauce in Keo Sananikone's hole-in-the-wall restaurant on Kapahulu Street"—a peanut-butter-based delicacy for which he obligingly provides the ingredients (and which he promises will keep, refrigerated in a jar, for several weeks before baroque things begin to grow on it).

Through this tantalizing smorgasbord of memories, stories, and recipes, John Weston has fashioned a wholly captivating commentary on American culture, both in an earlier time and in our own. Dining at the Lineman's Shack is a book that will satisfy any reader's hunger for the unusual—and a book to savor, in every sense of the word.

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Imagined Orphans
Poor Families, Child Welfare, and Contested Citizenship in London
Murdoch, Lydia
Rutgers University Press, 2006

With his dirty, tattered clothes and hollowed-out face, Oliver Twist is the enduring symbol of the young indigent spilling out of orphanages and haunting the streets of late-nineteenth-century London. Although poor children were often portrayed as real-life Oliver Twists—either orphaned or abandoned by unworthy parents—they in fact frequently maintained contact and were eventually reunited with their families.

In Imagined Orphans, Lydia Murdoch focuses on this discrepancy between the representation and the reality of children’s experiences within welfare institutions—a discrepancy that she argues stems from conflicts over middle- and working-class notions of citizenship that arose in the 1870s and persisted until the First World War. Reformers’ efforts to depict poor children as either orphaned or endangered by abusive or “no-good” parents fed upon the poor’s increasing exclusion from the Victorian social body. Reformers used the public’s growing distrust and pitiless attitude toward poor adults to increase charity and state aid to the children.

With a critical eye to social issues of the period, Murdoch urges readers to reconsider the complex situations of families living in poverty. While reformers’ motivations seem well intentioned, she shows how their methods solidified the public’s antipoor sentiment and justified a minimalist welfare state that engendered a cycle of poverty. As they worked to fashion model citizens, reformers’ efforts to protect and care for children took on an increasingly imperial cast that would continue into the twentieth century.

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Jobs Aren't Enough
Toward a New Economic Mobility for Low-Income Families
Roberta Rehner Iversen and Annie Laurie Armstrong
Temple University Press, 2006
This unflinching examination of the obstacles to economic mobility for low-income families exposes the ugly reality that lies beneath the shining surface of the American Dream. The fact is that nearly 25% of employed adults have difficulty supporting their families today. In eye-opening interviews, twenty-five workers and nearly a thousand people who are linked to them—children, teachers, job trainers, and employers—tell wrenching stories about "trying to get ahead." Spanning five cities over five years, this study convincingly demonstrates that prevailing ideas about opportunity, merit, and "bootstraps" are outdated. As the authors show, some workers who believe the myths end up destroying their health and families in the process of trying to "move up." Jobs Aren't Enough demonstrates that the social institutions of family, education, labor market, and policy all intersect to influence—and inhibit—employment mobility. It proposes a new mobility paradigm grounded in cooperation and collaboration across social institutions, along with revitalization of the "public will."
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Life After Welfare
Reform and the Persistence of Poverty
By Laura Lein and Deanna T. Schexnayder; with Karen Manges Douglas and Daniel G. Schroeder
University of Texas Press, 2007

A Choice Outstanding Academic Book

In the decade since President Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 into law—amidst promises that it would "end welfare as we know it"—did the reforms ending entitlements and moving toward time limits and work requirements lift Texas families once living on welfare out of poverty, or merely strike their names from the administrative rolls?

Under welfare reform, Texas continued with low monthly payments and demanding eligibility criteria. Many families who could receive welfare in other states do not qualify in Texas, and virtually any part-time job makes a family ineligible. In Texas, most families who leave welfare remain in or near poverty, and many are likely to return to the welfare rolls in the future.

This compelling work, which follows 179 families after leaving welfare, is set against a backdrop of multiple types of data and econometric modeling. The authors' multi-method approach draws on administrative data from nine programs serving low-income families and a statewide survey of families who have left welfare. Survey data on health problems, transportation needs, and child-care issues shed light on the patterns of employment and welfare use seen in the administrative data. In their lives after welfare, the families chronicled here experience poverty even when employed; a multiplicity of barriers to employment that work to exacerbate one another; and a failing safety net of basic human services as they attempt to sustain low-wage employment.

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The Long Shadow
Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood
Karl Alexander
Russell Sage Foundation, 2014
A volume in the American Sociological Association's Rose Series in Sociology West Baltimore stands out in the popular imagination as the quintessential “inner city”—gritty, run-down, and marred by drugs and gang violence. Indeed, with the collapse of manufacturing jobs in the 1970s, the area experienced a rapid onset of poverty and high unemployment, with few public resources available to alleviate economic distress. But in stark contrast to the image of a perpetual “urban underclass” depicted in television by shows like The Wire, sociologists Karl Alexander, Doris Entwisle, and Linda Olson present a more nuanced portrait of Baltimore’s inner city residents that employs important new research on the significance of early-life opportunities available to low-income populations. The Long Shadow focuses on children who grew up in west Baltimore neighborhoods and others like them throughout the city, tracing how their early lives in the inner city have affected their long-term well-being. Although research for this book was conducted in Baltimore, that city’s struggles with deindustrialization, white flight, and concentrated poverty were characteristic of most East Coast and Midwest manufacturing cities. The experience of Baltimore’s children who came of age during this era is mirrored in the experiences of urban children across the nation. For 25 years, the authors of The Long Shadow tracked the life progress of a group of almost 800 predominantly low-income Baltimore school children through the Beginning School Study Youth Panel (BSSYP). The study monitored the children’s transitions to young adulthood with special attention to how opportunities available to them as early as first grade shaped their socioeconomic status as adults. The authors’ fine-grained analysis confirms that the children who lived in more cohesive neighborhoods, had stronger families, and attended better schools tended to maintain a higher economic status later in life. As young adults, they held higher-income jobs and had achieved more personal milestones (such as marriage) than their lower-status counterparts. Differences in race and gender further stratified life opportunities for the Baltimore children. As one of the first studies to closely examine the outcomes of inner-city whites in addition to African Americans, data from the BSSYP shows that by adulthood, white men of lower status family background, despite attaining less education on average, were more likely to be employed than any other group in part due to family connections and long-standing racial biases in Baltimore’s industrial economy. Gender imbalances were also evident: the women, who were more likely to be working in low-wage service and clerical jobs, earned less than men. African American women were doubly disadvantaged insofar as they were less likely to be in a stable relationship than white women, and therefore less likely to benefit from a second income. Combining original interviews with Baltimore families, teachers, and other community members with the empirical data gathered from the authors’ groundbreaking research, The Long Shadow unravels the complex connections between socioeconomic origins and socioeconomic destinations to reveal a startling and much-needed examination of who succeeds and why.
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Making the Work-Based Safety Net Work Better
Forward-Looking Policies to Help Low-Income Families
Carolyn J. Heinrich
Russell Sage Foundation, 2009
Work first. That is the core idea behind the 1996 welfare reform legislation. It sounds appealing, but according to Making the Work-Based Safety Net Work Better, it collides with an exceptionally difficult reality. The degree to which work provides a way out of poverty depends greatly on the ability of low-skilled people to maintain stable employment and make progress toward an income that provides an adequate standard of living. This forward-looking volume examines eight areas of the safety net where families are falling through and describes how current policies and institutions could evolve to enhance the self-sufficiency of low-income families. David Neumark analyzes a range of labor market policies and finds overwhelming evidence that the minimum wage is ineffective in promoting self-sufficiency. Neumark suggests the Earned Income Tax Credit is a much more promising policy to boost employment among single mothers and family incomes. Greg Duncan, Lisa Gennetian, and Pamela Morris find no evidence that encouraging parents to work leads to better parenting, improved psychological health, or more positive role models for children. Instead, the connection between parental work and child achievement is linked to parents' improved access to quality child care. Rebecca Blank and Brian Kovak document an alarming increase in the number of single mothers who receive neither wages nor public assistance and who are significantly more likely to suffer from medical problems of their own or of a child. Time caps and work hour requirements embedded in benefits policies leave some mothers unable to work and ineligible for cash benefits. Marcia Meyers and Janet Gornick identify another gap: low-income families tend to lose financial support and health coverage long before they earn enough to access employer-based benefits and tax provisions. They propose building "institutional bridges" that minimize discontinuities associated with changes in employment, earnings, or family structure. Steven Raphael addresses a particularly troubling weakness of the work-based safety net—its inadequate provision for the large number of individuals who are or were incarcerated in the United States. He offers tractable suggestions for policy changes that could ease their transition back into non-institutionalized society and the labor market. Making the Work-Based Safety Net Work Better shows that the "work first" approach alone isn't working and suggests specific ways the social welfare system might be modified to produce greater gains for vulnerable families.
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Organizing Strangers
Poor Families in Guatemala City
By Bryan R. Roberts
University of Texas Press, 1973

Bryan Roberts’ study of two poor neighborhoods of Guatemala City is an important contribution to the understanding of the urban social and power organization of underdeveloped countries. It is the first major study of any Central American urban population.

Organizing Strangers gives an account of how poor people cope with an unstable and mobile urban environment, and case material is provided on the emergence of collective action among them. Several themes that are crucial to understanding the significance of urban growth in the underdeveloped world are explored: the impact of city life on rural migrants, the relationship between living in cities and the development of class consciousness, and the changing significance of personal relationships as a means of organizing social and economic life.

Guatemala City’s rapid growth and low level of industrialization created a keen competition for jobs and available living space and inhibited the development of cohesive residential groupings. Thus the poor found themselves living and working with people who were mostly strangers. Trust is difficult to create in such an environment, and the absence of trust affected the capacity of the poor to organize themselves.

While the poor were integrated into city life, the manner of their integration exposed them to greater exploitation than if they were truly socially isolated or marginal. Bryan Roberts analyzes a variety of formally organized voluntary associations involving the poor and concludes that such associations are essentially means by which middle- and upper-status groups seek to negotiate order among the poor.

The problems faced by these poor families are due less to their own incapacities or inactivity than to the effects of economic and political relationships that exploit them locally, nationally, and even internationally. A major conclusion of this study is that the uncertainties in the relationships among poor people and between them and other social groups are the underlying causes of a general political and economic instability.

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The Projects
Gang and Non-Gang Families in East Los Angeles
By James Diego Vigil
University of Texas Press, 2007

2008 — ALLA Prize for Best Book on Latina/o Anthropology

The Pico Gardens housing development in East Los Angeles has a high percentage of resident families with a history of persistent poverty, gang involvement, and crime. In some families, members of three generations have belonged to gangs. Many other Pico Gardens families, however, have managed to avoid the cycle of gang involvement.

In this work, Vigil adds to the tradition of poverty research and elaborates on the association of family dynamics and gang membership. The main objective of his research was to discover what factors make some families more vulnerable to gang membership, and why gang resistance was evidenced in similarly situated non-gang-involved families. Providing rich, in-depth interviews and observations, Vigil examines the wide variations in income and social capital that exist among the ostensibly poor, mostly Mexican American residents. Vigil documents how families connect and interact with social agencies in greater East Los Angeles to help chart the routines and rhythms of the lives of public housing residents. He presents family life histories to augment and provide texture to the quantitative information.

By studying life in Pico Gardens, Vigil feels we can better understand how human agency interacts with structural factors to produce the reality that families living in all public housing developments must contend with daily.

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Second Home
Orphan Asylums and Poor Families in America
Timothy A. Hacsi
Harvard University Press, 1997

As orphan asylums ceased to exist in the late twentieth century, interest in them dwindled as well. Yet, from the Civil War to the Great Depression, America's dependent children--children whose families were unable to care for them--received more aid from orphan asylums than from any other means. This important omission in the growing literature on poverty in America is addressed in Second Home.

As Timothy Hacsi shows, most children in nineteenth-century orphan asylums were "half-orphans," children with one living parent who was unable to provide for them. The asylums spread widely and endured because different groups--churches, ethnic communities, charitable organizations, fraternal societies, and local and state governments--could adapt them to their own purposes.

In the 1890s, critics began to argue that asylums were overcrowded and impersonal. By 1909, advocates called for aid to destitute mothers, and argued that asylums should be a last resort, for short-term care only. Yet orphanages continued to care for most dependent children until the depression strained asylum budgets and federally-funded home care became more widely available. Yet some, Catholic asylums in particular, cared for poor children into the 1950s and 1960s.

At a time when the American welfare state has failed to provide for all needy children, understanding our history in this area could be an important step toward correcting that failure.

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