Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Will Hispanics Take Over American Politics?

April 19, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Party Identification among Eligible Hispanic Voters in Midterm Elections

The rapid growth in the U.S. Hispanic population over the last 40 years — both in terms of raw numbers and percentage of the population — is probably the most important emergent force in American politics today. The evidence is around us: In 2008, each party conducted an entire presidential primary debate in Spanish. In 2009, the first Hispanic judge, Sonia Sotomayor, was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. And in 2010, for the first time ever in a single election, three Hispanic candidates won top statewide offices: Republican Brian Sandoval became Nevada's first Hispanic governor; ... Read More

More like this: Culture, May-June 2011, Miller-McCune Research Essay, Politics
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SB1070 Better for Governor Than for Traders

October 29, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

A rusty 12-foot fence is all that separates the United States from Mexico in Nogales, Ariz. The barrier traces up and down the surrounding hills from east to west, marking a flimsy separation and an ironic separation in this city of 40,000, where there are 12 million border crossings each year. Residents, commerce and culture go back and forth daily between Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora. Like much of southern Arizona, Nogales' economic survival depends on Mexican tourists and consumers, who spend nearly $4 billion in Arizona each year. On a typical day in Nogales, the population ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Politics
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Study Finds Racial Pay Disparities Among Nurses

May 10, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

When Sandra McGinnis and Jean Moore at the Center for Health Workforce Studies at the State University of New York at Albany looked at the results of a 2007 survey of close to 3,000 New York City hospital nurses, they didn’t expect to see such wide differences in pay. Conventional wisdom suggests in a world of inequality, nursing is less unequal, McGinnis said. “It’s pretty well known there are salary disparities by race and ethnicity in the wider work force, but because nursing has been a field that has these cyclical shortages, a lot of people have regarded it as some place where ... Read More

More like this: Health
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The Revolution Will Be Mapped

December 28, 2009 • By • 14 Comments

To get to the headquarters of the Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities, visitors have to navigate a lengthy dirt road past white picket fences, grazing horses and a variety of outbuildings in various stages of disrepair. Set in a one-room former Primitive Baptist church on a 43-acre spread in rural Orange County, N.C., the institute holds a collection of old, ergonomically incorrect wooden desks and metal filing cabinets. The only signs of modernity are computers atop the desks. Institute founders Allan Parnell and Ann Joyner, who live in a modest country house a stone's throw ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Culture & Society, January-February 2010, Magazine Feature Story
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Program Puts Sidelined Doctors Back in the Game

September 11, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

After spending seven years studying to become a doctor in her native Mexico, Nidia Payan found herself having to sell tamales to make ends meet when she first arrived in Los Angeles. Later, just to be considered for a part-time job as a medical assistant, she had to start as a volunteer. "It was very hard," says the now 30-year-old, recalling those early months in the U.S. "This was a big transition. It was like starting at the bottom again." Other equally well-trained Hispanic doctors have found themselves driving taxis or working in lowly medical jobs, unable to practice in the United ... Read More

More like this: Health
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Breaking the Minority Attorney Drought

August 18, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

Sonia Sotomayor may be the first Hispanic female nominated for the Supreme Court, but she's unusual in another way: She's a minority who made it past the law school gate. The American Bar Association's Commission on Racial and Ethnic Diversity reported that in 2000 (the last year statistics were compiled based on U.S. Census data), only 9.7 percent of attorneys in the U.S. were minorities; that breakdown showed 4 percent of attorneys were African American, 3.3 percent Hispanic and the remainder of the minority contingent Asian American. These rates were starkly lower than for other ... Read More

More like this: Legal Affairs, Rational Argument, September-October 2009
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That Falling Tide Does Not Recede Evenly

July 28, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

The continuing hemorrhage in Hispanic employment in the United States continues to gush, something researchers quoted by our Lewis Beale last November predicted. Of course, every demographic group is hurting right now — a falling tide lowers all boats, you could say — but Hispanic workers seem to be moored in the Bay of Fundy. In the spring of 2008, the rate of Hispanic employment was greater for Hispanics than for whites, who traditionally have the lowest jobless rate. A year later, Hispanics had fallen behind white employment rates. And now, in California, Hispanic unemployment ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, Findings
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Video Games Are a White Man’s World

July 27, 2009 • By • 2 Comments

Imagine a world in which 85 percent of the people are male and 80 percent are white. A world in which women and members of other races are a token presence, with most assuming passive, subsidiary roles. Corporate America, circa 1950? Try the present-day world of video games. In "The Virtual Census," a paper just published in the journal New Media & Society, a group of researchers led by Dmitri Williams of the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communication analyzed an array of best-selling video games and the characters who populate them. They found that, ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Culture & Society, Media, Mediator
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Racism in Schools: Unintentional But No Less Damaging

April 8, 2009 • By • 3 Comments

Alejandra is the daughter of Mexican immigrants who speak little English and hold down jobs cleaning houses and working in a hotel. Last year, she graduated from a high school in Santa Barbara, Calif., where the student population is roughly half poor Latino and half affluent white. Their worlds rarely intersect, with most white students taking high-level courses and most Latinos enrolled in the general-ed classes. But during her high school years, Alejandra was the exception. She was the only Latino student with immigrant parents enrolled in a college-level program known as ... Read More

More like this: Culture & Society, Education
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At the Bleeding Edge of the Great Recession

March 4, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

Way back in November, our Lewis Beale predicted that Hispanics would be on the bleeding edge of the recession, even though better times had seen lower unemployment for that population. He based the prediction in part on the work of Angel Reyes, a Dallas lawyer, and three academics from Texas Tech and Augusta State universities that appeared in the Journal of Business Valuation and Economic Loss Analysis. They looked at a period from January 1976 to June 2008, and noticed that: "In summary, the unemployment rate for Hispanics is higher and more volatile than it is for whites. Moreover, ... Read More

More like this: Findings
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