Latino/a professionals as entrepreneurs: how race,class, and gender shape entrepreneurial incorporation

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how race, class, and gender intersect to shape professional Latinos’ entrepreneurial incorporation, as observed by the conditions that prompt professional Latinos to start a business, including access to capital and experiences with discrimination. In-depth interviews with professional Latino business owners in Los Angeles reveal that individual human capital – via resources and wealth accrued through corporate careers – facilitates entrepreneurial activity. Race, ethnicity, and gender, as intersectional social group identities, combine with class to shape variegated impacts on access to capital and business experiences by gender and target market. Ethnicity is a resource for those serving the coethnic community and is more significant in shaping business ownership experiences for men who target a racially/ethnically diverse clientele, whereas gender and race are more salient for women outside the coethnic community. This study contributes to the ethnic enterprise literature by going beyond ethnicity to demonstrate that multiple dimensions of identity shape professional Latino/as’ entrepreneurial incorporation.     

Entrepreneurship and interracial dynamics: a case study of self-employed Africans and Chinese in Guangzhou,China

ABSTRACT

Guangzhou is the most popular gateway city for African migration to China. Unlike stereotypical international migrants, Africans in Guangzhou are predominantly self-made entrepreneurs, doing business face-to-face with Chinese entrepreneurs who are mostly internal migrants with truncated citizenship rights. African-Chinese encounters in local markets and residential neighbourhoods offer a rare opportunity for studying interracial dynamics beyond the classic black-white dichotomy and traditional paradigm of ethnic entrepreneurship. In this paper, we draw from in-depth interviews and field observations to examine how interacting social forces shape interracial relations and mobility pathways for migrant entrepreneurs in an emerging city of opportunities. Our analyses suggest that interactions between African and Chinese entrepreneurs are economically interdependent and socioculturally contentious processes, and that these processes shape a myriad of intersecting identities and create room for cooperation that transcends race, class, and migrant status. We discuss the theoretical implications of these findings.     

A critical race theory approach to black American entrepreneurship

ABSTRACT

In recent years, a growing literature has suggested that self-employment is a viable means of solving economic problems for a wide range of groups who are subject to poverty, discrimination and other disadvantages. Yet African Americans have not developed an ethnic economy large enough to solve many of their economic problems. To explore the question, this paper reviews three of the most common explanations for black Americans’ low rates of entrepreneurship: the cultural/psychological perspective, the ethnic enterprise perspective and the critical race approach. While the first two are widely accepted, neither approach identifies black Americans as a racial group, instead defining them as a cultural or ethnic group. Accordingly, neither apprehends the full impact of racial inequality in limiting black Americans’ entrepreneurial opportunities. Following a discussion of race-based obstacles to entrepreneurship, the paper concludes that the critical race view provides the most convincing explanation for black Americans’ limited entrepreneurial achievements.     

Entrepreneurship in South African township tourism: the impact of interracial social capital

Ethnic entrepreneurship scholarship has demonstrated the importance of social capital for “minority” entrepreneurs, but these studies presume that social capital is co-ethnic. I complicate this assumption by investigating entrepreneurial black women and interracial social capital in South African township tourism, a niche market within the nation’s growing tourism industry. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two black townships in Cape Town, I spotlight black women who have established home-based bed and breakfasts and formed connections with white Europeans and South Africans during their entrepreneurial journeys. Employing Bourdieu’s theory of capital, I discuss how these entrepreneurs develop ties with whites to acquire social, economic, cultural, and symbolic forms of capital that have been systemically denied to them as black South African women. The interracial transference of these resources underscores the deep inequalities between blacks and whites, but also the agency of marginalized entrepreneurs to attain assets within constricting social structures.     

On classifying race in Brazil: Example from a study of the functional ability of older people (60+)

Abstract

How should race be categorized? This article investigates the usefulness of having three categories to describe a black‐white racial continuum, focusing on Brazil and the functional ability of elderly (60+) people there. Ironically, even as the U.S. census has started to acknowledge mixed race again, much social research in Brazil has begun not to. Using 1998 national household survey microdata (PNAD) for Brazil, we find it advantageous to use a three‐category scheme that separates a mixed black‐white (pardo) status from black or white when examining the functional ability of elders. We also find the tantalizing possibility of a crossover in which browns actually have more functional ability than white counterparts after controlling for many demographic, geographic, and socioeconomic factors.     

Economic empathy in family entrepreneurship: Mexican-origin street vendor children and their parents

ABSTRACT

Research on ethnic entrepreneurship has shown that children of immigrants may experience an economic advantage associated with their entrepreneurial parents’ ‘modes of incorporation’ – the individual, group, and structural opportunities and characteristics that facilitate entrepreneurial participation and consequent economic progress. This ethnographic study examines street vending as a family enterprise and finds that the entrepreneurial, but nevertheless, disadvantaged Latino street vending parents experience economic stagnation. Child street vendors in this study experience compounded disadvantages stemming from their parents’ social locations rooted in unauthorized status, informal work, and stigma, as working together shortens the distance between ‘adulthood’ and ‘childhood’. Yet, street vending also sets the stage for children to develop economic empathy, a resiliency that results from experiencing their parent's position of oppression that helps prevent an authority shift in favour of the children.     

U.S. racial and ethnic relations in the twenty-first century

The study of U.S. racial and ethnic relations is often reduced to the study of racial or ethnic relations. This article reveals the limitations of a focus on ethnicity or race, in isolation, and instead urges a new framework that brings them together. We consider three cases that have been conceptualized by the ethnicity paradigm as assimilation projects and by the race paradigm as structural racism projects, respectively: (1) African-American entrepreneurs; (2) the Mexican middle class; and (3) black immigrant deportees. We reveal the shortcomings of the ethnicity paradigm to consider race as a structural force or to acknowledge that structural racism conditions incorporation in marked ways; and the limitations of the race paradigm to take seriously group members’ agency in fostering social capital that can mediate racial inequality. Instead, we offer a unifying approach to reveals how ethnicity and race condition members’ life chances within the U.S. social structure.     

Theoretical perspectives on cinema in Africa: Culture,identity and Diaspora

The study of African cinema is often assumed to be the study of black film. This paper examines this notion with respect to definitions of Africa, questions of identity, and different historical discourses of resistance. Western psychocentric approaches to film criticism are criticized. The issue of authorship is revisited with the question: Can a white director make a film reflecting the “black” experience? This question is explored with reference to debates about Spike Lee's Malcolm X and South African director Oliver Schmitz's Mapantsula. In the process, J examine how meanings are articulated and rearticulated in specific contexts by both those who define them and audiences which interpret them. The articulations of “race wars” in the USA and South Africa respectively are discussed, as is the relationship between race and class in the anti‐apartheid struggle. The disarticulation of Black Consciousness in South Africa from its popularizer, Steve Biko, by film activists in the Mass Democratic Movement during the 1980s, provides a background for the emergence of “non‐racial” cinema. Reception is suggested as a more subtle means of film categorisation. Mapantsula, for example, though made by a mainly white crew, is understood by black audiences to be a film accurately reflecting the experience of the black oppressed in South Africa. Though reception is a dynamic response, shifting and responding to historical trajectories and new discourses, with interpretations fragmenting between different classes and class fractions at different times, such a strategy for area and cultural classification of films avoids the pitfalls of categories based on ideology, myth, race and language.     

Playing through differences: black–white racial logic and interrogating South Asian American identity

Abstract

This article examines how South Asian American communities ascribe meaning to the category of ‘race’ while adding their own sensibilities to racial categories of ‘black’ and ‘white’. Drawing upon ethnographic methods, I analyse leisure spaces of basketball to demonstrate how racial formation in the US for non-white ethnic American subjects engages the black–white racial binary while simultaneously critiquing this racial logic. Racial categories provide a lexicon for comprehending South Asian American difference, while South Asian idioms perpetuate racializing discourses.     

Jewishness as sui generis: extending theorizations beyond the debate of “race,ethnicity, or religion”

ABSTRACT

Scholarship on Jewishness has often assumed that race, ethnicity, and religion are discrete categories. This review article surveys the place of Jewishness within race literature, ethnicity literature, and sociological religion literature, and offers a new theoretical framework for considering Jewishness as sui generis – of its own unique quality. The categories of race, ethnicity, and religion must be theorized as a system of interconnected frames and processes that overlap, interact, and are co-constituted. This web of frames and processes must be situated within the larger social system and meanings that construct Jewishness alongside other subjectivities.     

When and why do some social cleavages become politically salient rather than others?

ABSTRACT

Building on Posner (Posner, Daniel N. 2005. Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press), this article describes a framework for organizing the information about a community’s social cleavage structure so as to identify the incentives that individuals face to adopt particular social identities. The framework is parsimonious but powerful: it generates predictions about the social cleavages that will emerge as salient in politics, the lobbying we can expect to see regarding the social categories with which community members should identify, and the attempts that will be made to assimilate or engage in “identity entrepreneurship” to fashion entirely new social identities. The framework also clarifies why partition is unlikely to be a remedy for intractable ethnic conflicts.     

Introduction to the Special Issue,Commitment to Alterity and Its Disavowal: The Politics of Display of Belonging

ABSTRACT

As multiple ethnic/race affiliation is highlighted more and more, we lack analytical frameworks to examine diverse ways individuals navigate through them as they balance aspirations, fears, desires, pride, responsibility, and pragmatic necessities. Existing studies of identification practices offer little examination of practices of those who disavow identifying with certain ethnic/race categories except for the ones focused on a narrow field of social relations, such as the academic achievement and career success in ‘acting White.’ This introductory piece introduces the main theoretical ideas in the special issue, commitment to alterity and its disavowal, which expands the scope of analysis to a wider range of identification practices and fields of social relations. This piece also briefly describes each contributing article, which further develops these notions to analyse various contours and degrees of belonging and links to wider cultural politics and power relations.     

When the refugee status becomes an economic asset: how Malians in a Burkinabé City negotiate the “refugee” category

ABSTRACT

Since early 2016, part of the Malian urban refugees living in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso, have to “capitalize” on their refugee status to make ends meet. By examining when, why, and how the refugee status transmutes into an economic asset, this article shows how the possibilities to negotiate with the refugee category vary significantly within this group of forced migrants. Indeed, categories are not only imposed on people, but are negotiated by the actors themselves in their interactions and within their social and political economies. My article shows how the refugees’ ability or possibility to participate in the co-construction of their category is shaped by both the social and political context in which they are, as well as by wider intersectional and structural dynamics in which their lives are situated, such as socio-economic class, gender and race.     

Notes on theorizing racism and other things

ABSTRACT

In the spirit of ‘furthering debate and reflection’ in this response to Theories of Race and Ethnicity, we consider here the pertinence of the theme of resistance that occupies particular chapters within the collection and that has been central to key works within the wider race critical scholarship. Yet, when the larger field of contemporary race study is considered, we also note that other contiguous concerns – including capitalism, religion, nation, and war – are key factors in thinking through racism. Here, we further elaborate on how future theorizations of race and ethnicity must engage with these domains.     

Maternal Social Disadvantage and Newborn Telomere Length in Archived Dried Blood Spots from the Michigan Neonatal Biobank

Telomeres are the protective caps at the ends of eukaryotic chromosomes. Short telomere length is associated with morbidity and mortality among adults and may mark the biological impact of social experiences. Using archived dried blood spots from the Michigan Neonatal Biobank, this study examined markers of maternal social disadvantage (educational attainment, receipt of public assistance, marital status, and race/ethnicity) from linked birth certificates as predictors of telomere length at birth in a sample of 192 singleton neonates born to non-Hispanic black, non-Hispanic white, and Latina mothers aged 20–35 years. Consistent with two recent studies in newborns, but counter to the idea that maternal social disadvantage is associated with shorter offspring telomere length, we found that infants born to black mothers had longer telomeres than those born to white mothers (b = 0.12, SE = 0.06, p = .05). However, black/white differences in newborn telomere length varied by receipt of public assistance. Among newborns whose mothers received WIC and/or Medicaid, there were no significant black/white differences in telomere length (b = 0.09, SE = 0.08, p = .25). In contrast, among those whose mothers did not receive public assistance—just 6 out of 69 infants born to black mothers versus 41 out of 69 infants born to white mothers—we found that babies born to black mothers had longer telomere length than babies born to white mothers (b = 0.37, SE = 0.16, p = .03). The interaction between black race/ethnicity and receipt of public assistance did not reach the conventional threshold for statistical significance (b = ?0.22, SE = 0.15, p = .13), suggesting that this finding may be due to chance. No other markers of maternal social disadvantage were related to infant telomere length. Although replication of these results in a larger sample with more infants born to black mothers with relatively high socioeconomic status is needed, this study offers preliminary support for the hypothesis that race/ethnic differences in newborn telomere length depend on social context.     

“Not helping out”: classed strategies of the (non) contribution of children in immigrant family businesses

This article analyses the role of immigrant entrepreneurs’ class positions in understanding the participation of children in business activities. Immigrant entrepreneurship scholarship has highlighted how the participation of children depends on relations of reciprocity as well as on the lack of opportunities in paid employment. I argue that the (non) contribution of children has to do with the social mobility strategies that migrant families put in place. Drawing on the narratives of fifty-five Latin American entrepreneurs and family members in Spain, I explain (i) the role of the small firm in trajectories of social mobility, (ii) how class positions explain the (non) participation of children, and (iii) the mechanisms by which downward mobility is cushioned through practices of distinction for middle-class entrepreneurs. The article contributes to nuance our understanding of the role of family ties in migrant firms by integrating the impact of class on the lives of migrants’ children.     

Strategic ethnic performance and the construction of authenticity in urban Japan

This paper introduces the concept of strategic ethnic performance (SEP), when members of one ethnic group present themselves as members of a phenotypically similar ethnic group for economic gain. I use ethnographic and interview data focused on Sub-Saharan African merchants involved in the Hip Hop fashion boutique business in urban Japan to show how SEP develops from four interconnected areas: the opportunity structure for ethnic entrepreneurs, the physical presentation of sellers, the arrangement of the selling venue, and feedback loops between the seller and the consumer. By utilizing SEP, ethnic entrepreneurs enhance the perceived authenticity of their goods and themselves. A thorough analysis of this process illuminates the interactional nature of ethnic authenticity as it is understood by consumers within urban areas.     

The discursive detachment of race from gentrification in Cartagena de Indias,Colombia

In this article, I provide an ethnographic account of the gentrification process and its relationship to race and racism in the community of Getsemaní in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. I introduce Racial Attachment Processes as a conceptual framework for understanding how individuals reconcile Latin American discourses that suggest that race is not a primary stratifying principle with the material spatial realities of racial hierarchies that counter such discourses. Drawing on ethnographic participant observation and semi-structured interviews, including those employing photo-elicitation, I demonstrate how people discursively mobilize race in everyday life, yet selectively detach race in ways that allow them to interpret processes of gentrification as untethered to their racial underpinnings. This paper ultimately demonstrates how the discursive detachment of race from understandings of Colombian socio-spatial, political and economic relations obscures the relationship between racial domination and social inequality.     

Opportunism and Diversification: Entrepreneurship and Livelihood Strategies in Uncertain Times

As economic crisis deepens across Europe people are forced to find innovative strategies to accommodate circumstances of chronic uncertainty. Even with a second multi-billion euro bailout package secured for Greece, the prospects of a sustainable recovery in the near future look bleak. However, crisis has also created dynamic spaces for entrepreneurial opportunism and diversification resulting in social mobility, relocation, shifts in livelihood strategy and a burgeoning informal economy. Although economic systems are currently undergoing radical reassessment, social demands such as competitive consumption remain. Opportunities for investment in renewable energy programmes, especially photovoltaics, are also pervasive. By considering cases of business opportunism and livelihood diversification in relation to Max Weber's concept of wertrational and notions of uncertainty, this article brings new perspectives to strategies of negotiating the worst economic crisis in living memory.     

Territory Defence in Black Redstarts,Phoenicurus ochruros: Effects of Intruder and Owner Age?

European black redstarts, Phoenicurus ochruros, vigorously defend all-purpose territories and exhibit delayed plumage maturation, most subadult males looking exactly female-like in their first breeding season. We tested the hypotheses that such dull subadult male plumages are beneficial in order to reduce aggression of adult males either by deception or by honest signalling of subordinance status, and that, in turn, conspicuous (adult) plumage colorations are able to intimidate contenders because they act as a signal of fighting ability and aggressive motivation. Adult and dull yearling black redstart territory owners were confronted with intruders mimicked by stuffed mounts of either a conspicuous adult or a dull subadult male. Our results do not support the hypotheses tested: dull plumages of young intruders did not reduce aggression from adult territory owners and aggressiveness towards intruders was significantly higher in yearling territory owners as compared with adult owners. Conspicuous intruders did not deter dull territory owners and we found no indications that conspicuous male coloration is a signal of fighting ability or aggressive motivation in this species. Instead, the amount of aggressive response to intruders showed considerable individual variance within age classes regardless of the plumage of the intruder and the status of the owner.