Ó American Sociological Association 2017 DOI: 10.1177/0094306117705870 http://cs.sagepub.com
REVIEW ESSAYS On the Line: Latino Life in New Immigrant Destinations after 2005
HELEN B. MARROW Tufts University
[email protected]
Two years—2005 and 2006—were critical for Latino immigrants living in ‘‘new destinations’’ across the U.S. South. A substantial body of literature documents whites and blacks reacting to Latino newcomers warmly or paternalistically (at best) to neutrally or ambivalently or occasionally negatively (at worst) in the two decades prior. Immediately afterward, however, scholars employing both observational and interview techniques began to document a sharp turn, as U.S.-born natives’ curiosity, confusion, and even uncertainty about who Latino newcomers were, and what impacts their presence would wield, morphed quickly into racialization, resentment, and threat. This was especially the case among southern whites (see Lo´pezSanders [2009; n.d.]; McDermott [2011a; 2011b; 2016]). What happened, and why is the change important? Whereas immigration enforcement was relatively lax in these places prior to 2005, it ramped up nationally following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, ultimately triggering immigrants’ rights marches in spring 2006. A nativist backlash followed, directed primarily at Latino immigrants and especially harsh in new destinations with small immigrant populations. Immigration continued to become a more salient issue nationally after 2006, with anti-immigrant rhetoric among politicians and media peaking between 2008 and 2010 (and arguably again now since 2015). Restrictive laws and policies snowballed, particularly in new destination states (e.g., Arizona, Alabama, Georgia) and localities powered by white (not black) politicians and legislators (see Browne et al. [2013]). Interior enforcement programs also intensified, particularly in the South, where states and localities began joining 287(g) and Secure Communities programs in greater numbers
On the Line: Slaughterhouse Lives and the Making of the New South, by Vanesa Ribas. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016. 272 pp. $29.95 paper. ISBN: 9780520282964.
by the late 2000s. Also starting in the mid2000s, the REAL ID Act eliminated undocumented immigrants’ access to drivers’ licenses; several southern states began restricting undocumented immigrants’ access to higher education; and deportations climbed above 250,000 per year. Compounding political developments, the 2008 recession constricted job opportunities across a number of sectors important to poor and working-class African American and new Latino southerners, including food processing, manufacturing, and construction. It is even plausible that, taken together, these changes demarcate a distinct before versus after period theoretically and empirically critical to our understanding of Latino immigrant incorporation in the South. It is no wonder that scholarship grounded in the period before 2005 is more optimistic, albeit cautiously so, regarding Latino newcomers’ opportunities for upward mobility and integration within southern economic and social life at that time (e.g., see Herna´ndez-Leo´n and Zu´n˜iga [2005]; Marrow [2011]; Morando [2013]; and Striffler [2005], among others). In contrast, scholarship conducted after 2006 poignantly documents Latinos’ rising levels of fear, sharpening perceptions of institutional and interpersonal mistreatment, and frustration with blocked doors. Further, new research is beginning to show that intensifying immigrant marginalization
265
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266 Review Essays may not have only activated threat and reaction among whites (see Flores [2014] in a northeastern new immigrant destination) or blocked Latinos’ opportunities for intergenerational mobility despite even their white mentors’ supportive efforts (see Silver [2012] in a southern one). It also appears to have exerted some effect on opinion and behavior among blacks, especially black elites, who are now more likely to recognize Latino immigrants as the group ‘‘most discriminated against’’ in public opinion polls and interviews (despite blacks’ own feelings of continued racial discrimination). Blacks also appear more likely to see commonalities in experience and opportunities for coalition-building with Latino immigrants than was the case prior (see Jones [2012]; Marrow [2017]; Waters, Kasinitz, and Asad [2014]; Wilkinson and Bingham [2016]; Williams [2016]; Williams and Hannon [2016]). This brief overview of such a swift and dramatic change in the economic, institutional, social, and political context for Latino immigrants in the South, including its ramifications for changes in intergroup relations, is necessary for situating the major contributions of On the Line: Slaughterhouse Lives and the Making of the New South, by Vanesa Ribas, to the growing subfield of research on ‘‘new destinations.’’ On the Line is a vivid and engaging ethnography of what it is like to be a Salvadoran or Honduran immigrant working on the lowest rungs of a large, agroindustrial pork processing plant in southeastern North Carolina in 2009 and 2010. Many of the Central Americans in this plant are undocumented, and what the book does best is use participant observation to help us see and feel how all of them have been forced to embody not just class and labor exploitation (at the hands of the increasingly vertically integrated and consolidated U.S. food processing industry) but also legal and political exploitation (at the hands of America’s new hyper-enforcement regime and the consequent racialization of Latino illegality it has encouraged). How does Ribas capture and convey this embodiment so well? She used her unique positionality—as a self-described whiteappearing, fluently bilingual Latina lesbian born in Puerto Rico—to land a production Contemporary Sociology 46, 3
line worker job at this plant. There, she spent 16 months engaged in fieldwork in two of its departments: the predominantly black Marination Department in 2009 and 2010, followed by the predominantly Latino and black Loin Boning and Packing Department in 2010, to which she requested transfer in order to investigate how different demographic compositions shape interminority relations internally within the plant. (After quitting the job in 2010, she also conducted 23 in-depth interviews with Latino and black workers from 2010 to 2012, but ethnography is her main method and data source.) Ribas’s identity allowed her to experience the oppressive nature of line work and arguably allowed her to be seen as ‘‘one of us’’ by her fellow Central American lineworkers in a way that gives readers an intense and intimate understanding of this industry’s dangers. Indeed, it allowed her to receive, perceive, and convey to readers precisely how preferential treatment along a number of dimensions (e.g., white racial status, bilingual language ability, and citizenship, among others) stratifies opportunity (or lack thereof) throughout the industry, often in ways that locate and keep undocumented Central American immigrant workers on the bottom, stuck in physical and emotional pain. Ribas argues that ever-constant pressure to speed up work lines and to satisfy corporate demands for efficiency, productivity, and return shows little regard for human welfare. And she argues that both upper- and mid-level plant personnel use all kinds of tools, including immigration policy and immigrant categories, to create and manipulate (p. 207 and Chapter 2) the most pliable, flexible, and disposable workforce they can. On the Line is not the first work in the literature on food processing and immigration, which goes back over two decades now, to argue these points (e.g., see the compiled works of D. Fink, L. Fink, Gray, Griffith, Stull, Broadway et al., Smith, Stuesse, and Striffler, among others). But it does bring to bear unique data, first-hand experience, and a writing style so engaging it is sure to attract attention. These qualities may end up one day contributing to a national discussion about improving U.S. labor protections and standards (as discussed in the book’s
Review Essays 267 Conclusion chapter) or enacting comprehensive immigration reform. Chapter Two may also end up linking the study of labor discipline regimes in the South more closely to mainstream sociological theories of ethnic queuing and succession (see also Lo´pezSanders [2009; n.d.]), though in my view it lacks sufficient data with employers and/or HR personnel to convincingly demonstrate the argument that managerial policy ‘‘intentionally [italics added] created the conditions for labor shortages’’ (p. 59). Finally, On the Line should be commended for deepening our understanding of the Central American immigrant experience in the South, since literature in the region has focused primarily on Mexicans (still by far the largest immigrant group in the region) to date. On the Line also offers an interesting contribution to the study of what Levitt (2001), Kim (2008), Roth (2012), and others call ‘‘racial remittances’’—that is, the transfer and flow of racial terminology, categories, and ideas across national borders. In Chapter Three, Ribas explores how Central American immigrant workers came to adopt and deploy the Spanish terms moyo, and to a lesser extent bolillo, to refer to black and white southerners, respectively. She draws on archival and secondary sources to trace what we know about these terms back to Mexico, where they have been argued to reference U.S. (but not Mexican) blacks and whites; she also documents their relative absence in Honduras and El Salvador. In short, Ribas tells a tale of racial terminology originating in Mexico, traveling to North Carolina via Mexican immigrants, getting transferred to Central American immigrants, and then being applied by both groups of immigrants toward black and white southerners in ways that specifically intend to degrade the former but not the latter. This adds to our understanding of the typical bidirectional flow of racial remittances in the literature, where racial terminology and ideas may flow from a sending to a receiving country, or vice versa. It is multidirectional, from a sending country (Mexico) to a destination country (the United States) to immigrants from a third country (Honduras and El Salvador), with further possibilities still
open for transmission to that third or even other countries in the future (e.g., when a worker once applies it to a Garifuna Honduran also working in the plant). Nonetheless, these linguistic flows remain speculative until we can gather more direct evidence of Mexican immigrants using and passing them to Central American coworkers. In Chapters Three through Seven, Ribas goes on to argue that to understand intergroup relations, particularly black-Latino ones, in this North Carolina pork processing plant, we must acknowledge how whiteness has structured all of U.S. social and institutional life historically and contemporaneously, effectively coming to serve as a ‘‘prism’’ through which minority groups understand their locations and experiences and through which they now ‘‘engage’’ with each other. Ribas offers a model of prismatic engagement for understanding interminority relations in the workplace (see the Introduction and Conclusion, especially p. 200). While it is of course important to call for embedding any analysis of intergroup relations in the South (or anywhere in the United States, for that matter) squarely within the historical legacy and current configuration of white power, Ribas not only mistakenly puts forward this lens as novel1 but also unnecessarily pits it against other studies in the field, including my own. She makes provocative allegations that these other authors and I ‘‘fall short as researchers,’’ ‘‘contribute to the invisibility of white nativism,’’ and create ‘‘racial foils in the stories told about social relations among subordinated groups’’ by ‘‘ignoring whiteness’’ (pp. 200– 201). In my view, these allegations not only misrepresent (and occasionally ignore) the
1
See, for example, Masuoka and Junn’s (2013) main conceptual Racial Prism of Group Identity model, which is quite similar to that of Ribas. They employ survey and experimental methods yet frequently come to the conclusion that blacks are ranked and located below Latinos, not vice versa. The similarities and differences in findings across these two books should invite further investigation into when, where, and under what conditions the relative positioning of African Americans and Latino immigrants may or may not be shifting.
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268 Review Essays contributions of previous work;2 they also strain credulity in several of Ribas’s interpretations of what she observed in the field,3 with the effect of averting our eyes away from what I think should be recognized as key patterns across the literature at large. For example, Ribas argues that new Latino immigrants grossly stereotype, racialize, and demean African Americans, whereas African Americans treat and respond to new Latino immigrants in more individualistic, less group-centric, and less racialized ways. She also argues that neither economic competition nor economic-based group threat plays any role in shaping African Americans’ responses to Latinos, an assertion that runs counter to the findings of numerous studies on group position and threat (see Bobo and Hutchings [1996]; Jime´nez [2016]; Gay [2006]; Gray [2016]; Hutchings and Wong [2014]; McDermott [2011]). On one hand, these findings are unusual and because of that very interesting. I, too, found anti-black racial distancing among Latinos in rural North Carolina in the early 2000s, so the fact that these anti-black attitudes were still at play among Latinos in Ribas’s pork plant a decade later, and also that Latinos there continued to perceive and report mistreatment in their daily interpersonal encounters with blacks, is significant. Indeed, Ribas’s findings give us reason to think that Latinos’ 2
My own work, which examined Hispanic/ Latino immigrant incorporation patterns in rural North Carolina several years prior, in the early 2000s, was also predicated on and contextualized within the larger context of white-black economic, residential, social, and political inequality in the South. My original wording (see Marrow [2011:263–64] highlights three important points: (a) the distal influence of structural white racism on micro-level interminority relations (which Ribas erroneously charges I ignore); (b) the regression of that structure to the background for Hispanic/ Latino actors involved in face-to-face interactions on the ground; and (c) more positive relations in the workplace compared to other institutional domains.
3
See p. 149 for one example where I think Ribas’s ideological commitment to understanding her fieldwork flavors not only her interpretation of her data, but the data themselves.
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anti-black stereotypes may have become even more pernicious than I had documented in 2003 and 2004, even if Ribas turns out to be correct in her observations that Latinos’ perceptions of mistreatment and discrimination are often unfounded (a possibility I too observed). But it would also be understandable in light of Latinos’ intense resentment at feeling super-exploited by their jobs and U.S. immigration policy more generally. Rather than highlighting these similarities, however, Ribas alleges that I committed a grave ‘‘methodological error’’ (pp. 195– 96) by presenting Latinos’ perceptions of blacks ‘‘as facts’’ (pp. 102–103). That allegation does not hold up, since my main argument relied on interview and observational methods4 to discuss in detail the important role that Latinos’ perceptions of mistreatment by blacks play, in combination with actual instances of both white and Latino stereotyping of blacks, in structuring patterns of intergroup relations and anti-black distancing behavior (for my precise argument and wording, see Marrow [2011:120–22]). Further, Ribas argues that scholars cannot rely on in-depth interviews as a research method to study Latino immigrant life in the first place (p. 14), going on to allege that I did not have enough interview data with African Americans (p. 223) to be able to speak effectively to Hispanics/Latinos’ perspectives about their own incorporation patterns, which was the main focus of my analysis. In fact, while I drew on both interviews with (and observations of) U.S. white and black natives to supplement my project, my research was never designed as a full account of natives’ reactions to Latino newcomers—a topic other scholars have pursued since (see Browne et al. [2013]; Gray [2011]; Jime´nez [2016]; McDermott [2011a; 2011b; 2016]; Williams [2016]; Williams and Hannon [2016]; Wilkinson [2015]; Wilkinson and Bingham [2016]).
4
My research combined 129 in-depth interviews with various types of situated participant observation (see Marrow [2011, p. 274])—a triangulated strategy that allowed me to collect mainly perceptual but also selected observational data.
Review Essays 269 In another instance, Ribas dismisses my broader choice of institutional domains (which included not only several workplaces but also schools, social and health services, law enforcement, and politics), calling the data I developed from them by turns ‘‘blunt,’’ ‘‘unsituated,’’ ‘‘partial,’’ ‘‘limited,’’ ‘‘relatively superficial,’’ and even ‘‘romanticized distortions’’ (e.g., p. 17 and p. 39). In so doing, she repeatedly discounts the possibility of Latino newcomers having any life or experience at all outside what she calls the ‘‘most crucial’’ and ‘‘singularly important’’ domain of the workplace (p. 9). And while arguing that perceptions of economic competition and economic-based threat do not underlie African American plantworkers’ treatment of their Latino coworkers in this one plant where she was employed, Ribas renders to several cursory footnotes (pp. 230–32) the fact that all the African Americans she observed and spoke with were currently employed, in addition to not being at risk of losing their jobs due to immigration status. Perhaps most importantly, Ribas was observing African American plantworkers after 2008. This is a time period when immigration enforcement (including the institutionalization of E-Verify within the plant’s hiring process) had intensified to such a degree that managerial preferences had begun to shift back toward native-born, or even second-generation Latino, workers at the expense of first-generation immigrants. Given these developments, it would not be surprising that this particular group of black workers did not perceive or express strong economic competition or threat vis-a`-vis Latino immigrants (at least not within an integrated work setting). But such findings would not negate the potential for perceptions of economic-based competition or threat to be operating at a larger scale (see Waters, Kasinitz, and Asad [2014]), in other institutional domains (e.g., see Gray [2014]; Marrow [2011]; Stuesse [2016]), or certainly before the critical turn in context took place in 2005. On the contrary, On the Line might even plausibly be read as underscoring the centrality of economically based competition and group threat, this time among a different
group of formerly ‘‘privileged’’ workers (immigrants) now beginning to act on a fear of losing that privilege ‘‘back’’ to black and other U.S.-born workers.5 Regardless, it is strange that Ribas critiques my and other scholars’ work for elevating interminority tensions over cooperation (p. 103) when she herself documents very strong anti-black attitudes among Latinos, as well as multiple instances in which African Americans feel affronted by those attitudes and even try to confront them in direct challenge. The issue, it seems, is that Ribas too easily dismisses Latinos’ reports that they are mistreated by blacks in her own (and others’) data and too easily discounts statements and actions among blacks as somehow irrelevant to the concepts of economic competition and threat—even, at one point, trying to teach a black coworker a more correct (in her view) way of thinking about undocumented immigration (see pp. 163– 66) rather than dealing directly with his views. Of course, not all African Americans exhibit economic, cultural, or political threat toward Latinos. However, one could read Ribas’s data as confirming, rather than challenging, the idea that threat and competition do exist among them, albeit in tandem with other patterns including ambivalence, internal contradiction, and cooperation, which I and other scholars have documented (see Marrow [2011:15–16; also endnote 18 on p. 285]).
5
While Ribas argues that the group position model needs to ‘‘relax’’ its ‘‘flaw’’ of only analyzing African Americans (e.g., p. 97, p. 161, p. 181), it is worth noting that neither contact theory nor group position was theoretically intended to be restricted to the situation of U.S. blacks. If anything, we might read the group position model as assuming the existence of reasonably well-defined groups, which would fit with Ribas’s assertion that Central American immigrants’ sense of alienation, not to mention their racialized identity as hispanos, is only incipient at this point. Either way, earlier studies have already examined group position, threat, and alienation among Latino, Asian, and Native American groups (e.g., see Bobo and Hutchings [1996]; Bobo and Tuan [2006]), not to mention some groups outside the U.S. context, rendering this claim by Ribas another misinterpretation.
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270 Review Essays Ribas’s critiques are unfortunate in part because of the combative tone of the book, but mostly because they are unnecessary. The data and findings presented in On the Line are fascinating in their own right and could have been used to build on and extend the body of emerging knowledge in a less divisive way. We know now that immigrant incorporation is complex; it takes place across multiple domains, and studying it requires not only multiple methods but also multiple theoretical perspectives that are not necessarily mutually exclusive (Bean, Brown, and Bachmeier 2015). One cannot sample on a range of variables that have already been hypothesized to produce less socioeconomic threat among black natives and not expect to find the effect muted. Nor can one analyze only the micro level of interpersonal interactions and dismiss the possibility of threat operating among African Americans in more abstract ways and at higher levels of analysis (see precisely Jime´nez’s [2016] and Waters, Kasinitz, and Asad’s [2014] findings), especially when such threat is not likely to be openly expressed to a researcher who is clearly identified as a member of the very group who may be perceived as a cause of such threat or as a source of racial denigration (as is obvious in black workers’ reactions to how Latinos term and treat them throughout Ribas’s data). One cannot even eliminate economic competition as a variable underlying such potential threat when one only observes employed blacks or unnecessarily limits the definition of what could constitute ‘‘economic’’ threat in the first place. Instead, other research by Gray (2014) and McDermott (2011a; 2011b; 2016) shows convincing evidence of some working-class blacks coming to feel that their livelihoods are being threatened and/or made more difficult or insecure by the presence of Latino immigrant workers, even as they may not necessarily fear being unable to find, or even losing, a job. Those works also demonstrate that some blacks perceive cultural, if not economic, threat vis-a`-vis Latinos, or that other blacks tie economic criteria—such as the notion that immigrants receive social services, or send home their wages in remittances, or don’t pay taxes Contemporary Sociology 46, 3
(see evidence of this in On the Line on pp. 163–66)—to a broader and more symbolic sense of cultural and political threat. New experimental work even shows African Americans tightening boundaries, both attitudinally and behaviorally, in response to Latino growth (see Abascal [2015]). Importantly, it is possible to situate such perceptions of competition and threat toward a new immigrant group within an overarching structure of white racism and also beside simultaneous feelings of empathy, support, or compassion (see Masuoka and Junn [2013]). These are not mutually exclusive findings or endeavors. Continuing, one cannot analyze a single domain of social life—the workplace, no matter how important or interesting in its own right—and argue that other scholars’ findings in other domains are somehow less important, more ‘‘superficial,’’ or wrong. This is especially important to recognize when the workplace (especially in food processing-dominated locales in southern new destinations) has now been demonstrated to be unique in its patterns of black-Latino hierarchy, status, and threat (for this precise argument, see Gray [2014] and Stuesse [2016]). Indeed, it is the variation or commonality that might emerge both within and across various institutional domains, not to mention over time in each one of them as economic and political contexts transform, that should be of ultimate interest to the larger body of knowledge we should be building (for solid scholarship on interminority relations and incorporation patterns in other institutional domains such as neighborhoods, schools, health care facilities, local politics, and public spaces, see Deeb-Sousa [2013]; McDermott [2011a; 2011b; 2016]; Silver [2015]; and Winders [2015], among others). On the Line contributes to our understanding in this greater endeavor, to be sure, but it does not render other scholars’ methods or contributions less worthy along the way. In the end, my summary assessment of On the Line is that it adds greatly to our knowledge about the dynamics of labor, race, and immigration in the U.S. South, but that it is simultaneously a cautionary model for other scholars who are engaged in moving this
Review Essays 271 collective body of research forward. The book clearly stands out among others for its approachability and style. In addition, it boldly advances a discussion about identity, positionality, and reflexivity regarding this topic. Yet rather than dismiss findings that do not match her own, Ribas would have been better off discussing the particular post-2006 context in which she conducted her ethnography, how quickly and sharply that context had transformed in just two years’ time, how her own identity as a Latina might have influenced what she saw and was told,6 and how the workplace setting (especially a large and integrated one) may differ from—instead of being potentially indicative of—other institutional domains. Life for Latino immigrants in the South, especially those who lack legal authorization, has indeed changed dramatically since 2006, and one of the great contributions of On the Line is that it so vividly captures the pain experienced by the workers in this one plant in the years since. The rise of anti-Latino sentiment and the harsh enforcement regime facing Latinos, as well as their effects on non-Latino southerners, are important to document and communicate. But this cannot be done with one methodological tool, one domain, one site, one time period, one theoretical approach, or even
6
Indeed, Jime´nez (2016) became careful to present himself as a white American interviewer in his own recent study of black responses to Latino immigrants in East Palo Alto, California, because pre-tests signaled concerns about social desirability bias when presenting himself as Mexican American. Ribas makes a few elementary attempts to consider whether her race as interviewer may have introduced social desirability bias when observing or talking to black coworkers (see pp. 169–75 and especially endnotes 3 and 5 on p. 230). But rather than seriously acknowledging its plausibility or taking any concrete methodological steps to address it—such as Jime´nez did, or as Flores (2014) did by bringing in a research assistant of a different race with whom to compare results in his study of white attitudes toward Hispanics in Hazelton, PA—Ribas simply dismisses social desirability bias as ‘‘an impossibly mystical notion of African Americans’ unknowability’’ (p. 230).
one book alone. All findings must be appropriately situated. References Abascal, Maria. 2015. ‘‘Us and Them: Black-White Relations in the Wake of Hispanic Population Growth.’’ American Sociological Review 80(4):789–813. Bean, Frank D., Susan K. Brown, and James D. Bachmeier. 2015. Parents without Papers: The Progress and Pitfalls of Mexican American Integration. New York: Russell Sage. Bobo, Lawrence D., and Vincent L. Hutchings. 1996. ‘‘Perceptions of Racial Group Competition: Extending Blumer’s Theory of Group Position to the Multi-Racial Social Context.’’ American Sociological Review 61(6):951–72. Bobo, Lawrence D., and Mia Tuan. 2006. Prejudice in Politics: Group Position, Public Opinion, and the Wisconsin Treaty Rights Dispute. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Browne, Irene, Beth Reingold, Mary Odem, and Anne Kronberg. 2013. ‘‘Race, Politics, and Anti-Immigration Legislation in the Nuevo South: Do African American Lawmakers Support or Oppose ‘Juan Crow’?’’ Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association, Chicago (November 21). Deeb-Sossa, Natalia. 2013. Doing Good: Racial Tensions and Workplace Inequalities in a Community Clinic in El Nuevo South. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Fink, Deborah. 1998. Cutting into the Meatpacking Line: Workers and Change in the Rural Midwest. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Fink, Leon. 2003. The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Flores, Rene´ D. 2014. ‘‘Living in the Eye of the Storm: How Did Hazleton’s Restrictive Immigration Ordinance Affect Local Interethnic Relations?’’ American Behavioral Scientist 58(13):1743–63. Gay, Claudine. 2006. ‘‘Seeing Difference: The Effect of Economic Disparity on Black Attitudes toward Latinos.’’ American Journal of Political Science 50(4):982–97. Gray, LaGuana. 2014. We Just Keep Running the Line: Black Southern Women and the Poultry Processing Industry. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Griffith, David. 1993. Jones’s Minimal: Low-Wage Labor in the United States. Albany: State University of New York Press. Herna´ndez-Leo´n, Rube´n, and Victor Zu´n˜iga. 2005. ‘‘Appalachia Meets Aztla´n: Mexican Immigration and Inter-Group Relations in Dalton, Georgia.’’ Pp. 244–73 in New Destinations: Mexican Immigration in the United States, edited Contemporary Sociology 46, 3
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Morando, Sarah J. 2013. ‘‘Paths to Mobility: The Mexican Second Generation at Work in a New Destination.’’ Sociological Quarterly 54(3):367–99. Roth, Wendy D. 2012. Race Migrations: Latinos and the Cultural Transformation of Race. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Silver, Alexis. 2012. ‘‘Aging into Exclusion and Social Transparency: Immigrant Youth and the Transition to Adulthood.’’ Latino Studies 10(4):499–522. Silver, Alexis. 2015. ‘‘Clubs of Culture and Capital: Immigrant and Second-Generation Incorporation in a New Destination School.’’ Ethnic and Racial Studies 38(5):824–40. Smith, Barbara Ellen. 2009. ‘‘Market Rivals or Class Allies? Relations between African American and Latino Immigrant Workers in Memphis.’’ Pp. 299–317 in Global Connections and Local Receptions: New Latino Immigration to the Southeastern United States, edited by F. Ansley and J. Shefner. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Striffler, Steve. 2005. Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Stuesse, Angela C. 2009. ‘‘Race, Migration, and Labor Control: Neoliberal Challenges to Organizing Mississippi’s Poultry Workers.’’ Pp. 91– 111 in Latino Immigrants and the Transformation of the U.S. South, edited by M. Odem and E. Lacy. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Stuesse, Angela C. 2016. Scratching out a Living: Latinos, Race, and Work in the Deep South. Oakland: University of California Press. Stull, Donald D., and Michael J. Broadway. 2004. Slaughterhouse Blues: The Meat and Poultry Industry in North America. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Stull, Donald D., Michael J. Broadway, and David Griffith, eds. 1995. Any Way You Cut It: Meat Processing and Small Town America. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press. Waters, Mary C., Philip Kasinitz, and Asad L. Asad. 2014. ‘‘Immigrants and African Americans.’’ Annual Review of Sociology 40:369–90. Williams, Kim M. 2016. ‘‘Black Elite Opinion on American Immigration Policy: Evidence from Black Newspapers, 2000–2013.’’ Journal of African American Studies 20:248–71. Williams, Kim M., and Lonnie Hannon. 2016. ‘‘Immigrant Rights in a Deep South City: The Effects of Anti-Immigrant Legislation on Black Elite Opinion in Birmingham, Alabama.’’ Du Bois Review 13(1):139–57. Winders, Jamie. 2013. Nashville in the New Millennium: Immigrant Settlement, Urban Transformation, and Social Belonging. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Wilkinson, Betina Cutaia. 2015. Partners or Rivals? Power and Latino, Black, and White Relations in
Review Essays 273 the Twenty-First Century. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Wilkinson, Betina Cutaia, and Natasha Bingham. 2016. ‘‘Getting Pushed Back Further in Line?
Racial Alienation and Black Attitudes toward Immigration and Immigrants.’’ PS: Political Science and Politics 49(2):221–27.
Bully Nation and Our Current Predicament
RODDEY REID University of California-San Diego
[email protected]
The publication of Bully Nation in 2016 could not have been more timely. Its release came as the United States witnessed acts of domestic terrorism and mass shootings, a rash of video-recorded police killings of unarmed African American men, and the successful presidential bid of a candidate whose campaign engaged in unprecedented acts of intimidation and personal abuse of political rivals, including threats of incarceration and political assassination of his opponent in the general election. These events constitute a challenge not only to the very political fabric of the United States but perhaps also to ingrained habits of analysis and thought of social scientists. In this respect, Bully Nation is an ambitious book that attempts to widen the contours of current public discussions of the forms of coercion and intimidation popularly called ‘‘bullying’’ in the United States that the authors contend are limited all too often to childhood, the institutional settings of primary and secondary schools, and the narrow parameters of the psychological sciences. Invoking C. Wright Mills’ ‘‘sociological imagination’’ (p. 8), public sociologists Charles Derber and Yale Magrass call for a ‘‘paradigm shift’’ by enlarging the psychological and psychiatric lens through which bullying is commonly viewed today by educators, experts, and journalists alike to the wider determinants of ‘‘militarized capitalism’’ and its social structures and institutions that the authors claim distinguish the United States from most other nations (p. 3). They are not the first scholars to offer such a general overview (some date back to 2008)—the authors acknowledge an earlier book by sociologist Jessie Klein, Bully Society (2012), whose title their book echoes; Klein’s
Bully Nation: How the American Establishment Creates a Bullying Society, by Charles Derber and Yale R. Magrass. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2016. 272 pp. $24.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780700622603.
book even includes a chapter titled ‘‘Bully Economy.’’ The authors trace the peculiar origins of the United States as a ‘‘bully nation’’ back to its beginnings as a violent, conquering settlement colony based on slavery and a relentlessly expanding capitalist economy. In a sense the authors take the opportunity of bullying as a public problem to make a field argument for the value of sociology as a discipline and to renew the longstanding dispute with the rival field of psychology and its individualizing paradigm focused on personality traits that ignore social relations of power. For them, people aren’t born bullies but rather are most often made so by a society that recruits them as agents of the ‘‘structural bullying’’ (p. 7) practiced by institutions. There is little to quarrel with here regarding the authors’ broad methodological perspective and general observations and much to be said in favor of bringing to the general public a powerful synthesis of the manifold ways bullying as a form of aggression and power pervades and shapes contemporary U.S. society. Accordingly, Derber and Magrass, who are new to the research topic of bullying, devote separate chapters to detecting bullying across society from the nuclear family, extremities of wealth, and the free market and corporate workplace Contemporary Sociology 46, 3