Silvia Dominguez - Getting Ahead: Social Mobility, Public Housing, and Immigrant Networks

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Getting Ahead

Social Mobility, Public Housing, and Immigrant Networks

Silvia Domnguez

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
www.nyupress.org

2011 by New York University
All rights reserved

References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Domnguez, Silvia, 1961
Getting ahead : social mobility, public housing, and
immigrant networks / Silvia Domnguez.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8147-2077-6 (cl : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8147-2121-6 (e-book)
1. Social mobilityUnited States. 2. ImmigrantsSocial networks
United States. 3. AcculturationUnited States. 4. Political refugees
Chile. 5. ChileansUnited States. I. Title.
HN59.D643 2010
305.5130869120973dc22 2010029342

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This book would have never been possible without all my friends and respondents in East and South Boston. I am extremely thankful for the hundreds of hours they allowed me to spend with them and their families. In the interest of confidentiality, I cannot divulge their names, but I thank them all.

I am also thankful for the guidance and constructive criticism of my dissertation committee members, Nazli Kibria, Deborah Belle, Judith Gonyea, William Julius Wilson, and Gwen Dordick. Nazli Kibria was instrumental in encouraging me to study immigrants, and Deborah Belle could not have been more instrumental in focusing me on women and poverty. Judith Gonyea was instrumental in getting me through the doctoral program. I am extremely grateful to Bill Wilson for having opened the door to me and challenged my thinking around poor neighborhoods. Gwen Dordick was a tremendous teacher of ethnographic inquiry; I am grateful for all her clarifying questions on my field notes. I am also extremely grateful to James Quane for always pushing me, Diane Purvin and Steve Kalberg for encouragement and support, and Xavier de Souza Briggs, who introduced me to social networks and public housing.

I am extremely thankful to Ilene Kalish for believing in my project and to Aiden Amos and the blind reviewers for New York University Press. The Ford Foundation Diversity Fellowship could not have come at a better time, for finding this book project to be valuable and worth supporting and giving me the privilege of being mentored by Cecilia Menjvar, who has been among my biggest supporters and provided me with valuable feedback. Other people who read chapters and provided feedback include Deborah Belle, Nazli Kibria, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Kathrina Zipple, Michael Brooks, James Battle, Danny Farber, Gordana Rabrenovic, Tammi Arford, and my writing group members, including Alisa Lincoln and Theresa Osypuk. I am particularly thankful for the feedback I received in the development of the social flow framework from Steve Vallas, Mario Small, Shelly Kimelberg, and Liza Weinstein, who read the theoretical chapters and helped me to clarify and strengthen the framework. I am indebted to Helio Leal for his uncanny sharpness and the support he has given me since I began to put this book together. This book would be a different book without his input.

To Phillip Berard and Jos Luis Molina, who helped me to develop the diagrams, thank you so much. I am indebted to Jos Luis for all the trial and error I put him through transnationally from Boston to Barcelona and back. I am thankful to Gabriela Ruiz for her expert editing.

Part of the research on which this book is based was conducted in conjunction with Welfare, Children, and Families: A Three City Study. I am thankful to the principal investigators of that study, who gave me the opportunity to learn from them and access to these data. This book would not have been possible without the funding I received from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the American Association of University Women. I am thankful to Patrick Simon and Marie-Hlne Bacque, who supported me while I was analyzing data in Paris. I am also thankful to the Journal of Social Problems and the University of California Press; the Journal of Community Psychology and Springer; and the Journal of Family Relations and Whiley-Blackwell for granting me permission to reprint previously published material in my book.

Although my father, Carlos Domnguez, died early in my doctoral education, he is always on my mind, and it is to him that I owe my interest in sociology and inequality. My mother, Silvia Alvarez, is one of the strongest women I have ever known; she and my sisters, Ester, Carmen, and Rosario, provide me with strength and help me maintain my focus, passion, and commitment to work, research, and the development of policy that increases social justice. I am most grateful to my son, Matias, who has had to put up with a mother who sits in front of the computer writing almost all the time. You are the most important person in my life, and each day that passes leaves me in wonder of how you are growing and flourishing.

We woke up on September 11, 1973, an early spring day, to the radio broadcasts describing troop movements all over Chile. My parents had been working for several years against the far Right, an elite influence in Chile, and were at that time working with President Allende. My mother cofounded and directed a party based on liberation theology, and my father, who was educated at Harvard, worked in the Department of Agriculture and taught sociology of law. Salvador Allende was the first socialist president elected democratically in Latin America and in the context of the cold war; this was not acceptable to the U.S. government. The United States provided the Right with financial and military power to challenge him. My sisters and I had been living through rather uncertain times as we struggled with the fast pace of life and the confrontations between our family members. While some sided with the privileged classes, others, like my parents, favored the ideals of social justice that were sweeping through Latin America, in different avatars, during those difficult yet hopeful days.

That early spring date came to be known as El Golpe (coup). My parents took us to our grandparents house and said good-bye. Convinced that we would never see them again, we cried as they rushed to their partys headquarters to burn all the documents containing names, addresses, and anything else that could be used to track down the partys members. We sat and waited while our aunts and grandparents drank champagne to celebrate. We knew that they did not realize what was happening, but also that we could count on them. The radio told us that people were being rounded up all over the country. Although my sisters and I were terribly afraid, our family did not notice because they, like the country, were so profoundly divided along political ideology that my sisters and I lived in different realities.