Institute for Social Science Research

Immigration into the U.S. from countries in Latin and Asia is rapidly changing the ethnic and demographic composition of American cities. In Los Angeles alone, the Hispanic 1 population grew from 18 percent of the city's total population in 1970 to 28 percent in 1980. The Asian population, while smaller in total size, rose from 5 percent in 1970 to 7 percent in 1980. As the new wave of immigrants grows in size, much attention in both the academic community as well as the mass public is being devoted to their impact on the social and political composition of the communities in which they reside.

In terms of political development, the new wave immigrants pose new questions for research on ethnic politics. Most salient of these are the following: what form of political empowerment will take place in these ethnic communities? How adequate is the political assimilation model posed by Robert Dahl (1961) or the political incorporation model posed by Browning, Tabb and Marshall (1984) in explaining the political behavior of these ethnic groups? Moreover, given that new wave immigration is highly concentrated in American cities where Black Americans have come to constitute both sizeable proportions of the population and political office holding , what impact will the growing presence of new immigrants have on Black political development?

In order to address some of these concerns, this paper examines the political behavior of the Asian, Black, and Hispanic communities of Los Angeles in a comparative context. Attention is focused on the following issues: 1) the extent to which each group forms an ethnic voting bloc in the city 2) differences in comparative levels of local political involvement and the forces responsible, and 3) the potential for inter-ethnic coalition building among Asians, Blacks and Hispanics. Moreover, the work assesses the adequacy of the Dahl ethnic political assimilation model in explaining the political experiences of these new wave immigrants and discusses the nature and level of political incorporation developing within each group.

In reaction to current emphasis upon internal, supply-side causes, some entrepreneurship researchers have recommended a balancing stress upon the neglected demand-side. Thus, Waldinger, Ward and Aldrich (1985, p. 589) observe that a "common objection to cultural analysis" is its lack of attention to "the economic environment in which immigrant entrepreneurs function." Instead of this lop-sided treatment, they recommend "an interactive approach" which looks at the "congruence between the demands of the economic environment and the informal resources of the ethnic population."Since they wrote, this reaction has achieved the strength of a movement of thought in the entrepreneurship literature (see Morokvasic, Phizacklea, and Waldinger, 1987, p. 6). In principle, a compensatory reaction to cultural analysis is appropriate as a complete explanation of immigrant or ethnic entrepreneurship demands attention to both the demand side and the supply side. Lop-sided explanations must be partial, incomplete, and to that extent wrong.

In this paper I attempt to crystalize a number of issues which pertain to the economic roles of women in peripheral areas of the world. To accomplish this goal, I draw on my own ethnographic field research among the Basotho women of southern Africa and the Navajo women of the American Southwest. The comparative analysis of women's economic roles in these two non-contiguous regions is guided by and incorporates several dimensions of world system theory. More specifically, included in the analysis are considerations of the interrelationship among, core, periphery, and semi periphery; and the intersection of class, ethnicity, and gender in the functioning of the economic systems of these two societies.

For several decades an argument has raged over the determinants of minority mobility. This paper reviews competing theses in this argument. It then relates hypotheses deriving from the competing theses to empirical findings on West Indians and the Chinese population of Los Angeles County.

In the introduction to this volume, Johnson and Oliver (1988) discuss the importance of exploring questions of ethnicity and ethnic group behavior in a comparative context and highlight a specific set of "ethnic dilemmas" requiring immediate attention and remediation. Answers to the types of comparative ethnic questions they raised would ideally require the collection of primary data via large scale social surveys. Because the design and conduct of a social survey is a time consuming and costly undertaking, especially for the lone researcher, social scientists have traditionally attempted to circumvent the problem by undertaking secondary analysis of previously conducted surveys. Given this longstanding research tradition, Stephenson (1988) has compiled an INDEX OF MACHINE-READABLE DATA FILES FOR USE IN COMPARATIVE ETHNIC RESEARCH. The index contains references to UCLA's holdings of surveys, public opinion polls, and both historical and current enumerative data. It will be significantly useful in comparative ethnic research on such topics as: Ethnic assimilation, segregation, and neighborhood change; Labor markets and entrepreneurship; Political and electoral behavior; Health and well-being; Crime; and, Education.

The purpose of this essay is to encourage future comparative ethnic research by highlighting potential uses and limitations of machine-readable data files, such as those referenced in the INDEX (Stephenson 1988). Toward this end, background details are provided on the organizations and agencies that collect or archive publicly available data and describe in detail selected data files. A second section will focus on data collection policies, sampling deficiencies and inherent limitations for research on comparative aspects of ethnicity and ethnic group behavior. In the concluding section the discussion focuses on, among other salient issues, the social scientist's role in future government decisions regarding the collection of data on ethnic groups in America.

The papers which comprise this volume were produced by a group of these nationally known scholars who are engaged in research on comparative aspects of ethnicity and ethnic group behavior. Organized around a series of themes which run through the extant comparative ethnicity literature and which reflect the expertise and current research foci of the conference presenters, the volume is divided into five parts

Part I addresses issues related to "Ethnic Assimilation, Segregation, and Neighborhood Change."

Part II of the volume addresses issues related to labor markets and entrepreneurship.

Part III of this volume addresses issues related to ethnic political and electoral behavior.

Part IV of this volume focuses on racial/ethnic issues in higher education.

Part V of the book, which we've entitled "Comparative Ethnicity in Society," addresses a number of pertinent dilemmas which have received considerable attention in both the local and national news media.

The purpose of this essay is to discuss the impacts of ethnicity in the politics of the contemporary American city. The importance of ethnicity is seen as derivative of the structure of local politics in the United States and the processes which have resulted in the establishment and maintenance of ethnic identities and communities in American cities. As such, the paper is intended to provide a context for the remaining papers in this session which focus on the recent political behavior of specific ethnic groups in particular cities.

In this paper I examine the conditions under which racial and ethnic groups in America express their group identities through political action. Toward this end, I review first the socio-economic status model of political and electoral participation. In the discussion of this model, I open up for consideration the much broader range of types of political participation possible in society. I then hypothesize that there are an enormous variety of stimuli possible which provoke group based electoral and political behavior, and based on the political participation model -- an alternative model introduced in Race and Ethnicity in Chicago Politics (Pinderhughes 1987) -- briefly discuss some of the factors which explain their existence. Finally, using Black political behavior as an example, I specify some of the ways in which extensive group based political mobilization has occurred in the U.S.

This paper will focus on two elements of the expanded version of the assimilation model: acculturation and residential segregation. If, as Gordon has postulated, acculturation is a precursor to other forms of assimilation, there should be a statistically significant association between acculturation and segregation. Specifically, minority groups that measure high on acculturation should be less segregated from the dominant population than groups that score low on acculturation

In this paper I will focus on changes between the 1950s and 1970s. Our data are drawn from a sample of men and women (157 persons in all) who were members of two major East Los Angeles gangs during their adolescence. Few researchers have considered gangs as long-lasting or quasi-institutionalized groups, but when we consider the differences between the two cohorts in family characteristics, behavior and values, at least three distinct interpretations are possible.

First, since the earlier gang members were largely children of Mexican immigrants and the parents of later members were born in the United States, we would expect the older cliques to be more "Mexican" and the younger, more acculturated. To some extent this also implies that the more 'Mexican' families may be more likely to be traditional.The younger ones may be more likely to be disorganized.

Second, it might be argued that the gang is a 'deviant," and hence socially isolated group,with its own subculture. As such, we might expect that deviant group subculture to evolve on its own.

Finally, it may be that today's gangs are developing into a fraction of an emergent underclass in these Chicano communities, parallel to developments in Black communities elsewhere in the nation (cf. Wilson 1987).

To deal with these interpretations we must first describe the major differences we found between older and younger cliques in three basic respects: (1) family background; (2) behavior and values relating to the gang; and (3) current status. Throughout this discussion, 'older members' will mean those cliques of the gang active in the 1950s. The "younger members" are those active in the 1970s.