This case study of Central American migration to Washington, DC closely examines how gender is related to the decision to migrate, as well as the choice of destination. The study investigates the social and economic conditions in sending Central American countries as well as those in a receiving city in the United States to determine why women predominate in certain labor migrations. A macrostructural analysis accounts for the conditions that delimit the flow of international migrants, but a concept termed gendered (...) labor recruitment provides the link between macro- and microlevels of analysis. Results of the research indicate that approximately seventy percent of the initial Central American migrants to the nation's capital in the 1960s and 1970s were women and that their migration may be attributed partly to informal labor recruitment. Over the years, Washington's government, diplomatic and professional workforce “recruited,” made arrangements for, or returned to the nation's capital with foreign workers who could provide basic services, primarily as domestics and child-care providers. (shrink)

In the past 20 years, Latinas have begun to outperform Latinos in high school completion and college enrollment, tracking the overall “gender reversal” in college attainment that favors women. Few studies have examined what factors contribute to Latinas’ increasing educational success. This article focuses on gender differences in college-going behavior among a cohort of 50 Latino/a college aspirants in the San Francisco East Bay Area. Through 136 longitudinal interviews, I examine trends in Latinos/as’ postsecondary pathways and life course decisions over (...) a two-year period. Findings suggest evidence for gendered familism, in which gender and racial/ethnic beliefs intersect to differentially shape Latinos/as’ attitudes, behaviors, and college choices. Gendered familism encouraged Latinas to seek a four-year degree as a means of earning independence, while Latinos expressed a sense of automatic autonomy that was not as strongly tied to educational outcomes. (shrink)

Based on in-depth interviews with 18 Korean immigrant working couples, this study explores Korean immigrant working wives' ongoing challenge to male dominance at home and to the unequal division of family work. A main factor in wives' being less obedient to their husbands is their psychological resources such as pride, competence, and honor, which they gain from awareness of their contribution to the family economy. Under immigrant family circumstances in which working for family survival is prioritized, wives feel that their (...) negligence of family work, rejection of the superwoman ideal, and perceived right to demand their husbands' help with family work is legitimized. However, Confucian patriarchal beliefs lead these wives to place limits on the degree of challenge. The findings highlight the interplay of wives' psychological resources, gender norms, and the social standing of being immigrant families in affecting wives' challenge to gender inequality at home. Differences in effects among Korean immigrant families are explored. (shrink)

This article discusses three major dilemmas embedded in women's labor migration by focusing on undocumented Latina migrants in Israel. The first is that to break the cycle of blocked mobility in their homelands, migrant women must take jobs that they would have never taken in their countries of origin, despite uncertainty about possible economic outcomes. The second dilemma is that the search for economic betterment leads Latina migrants to risk living and working illegally in the host country, forcing them to (...) remain on the margins of society. The third dilemma relates to the role of mothers who, to secure a better future for their children, are forced to leave them behind, thus subverting the traditional definition of motherhood. The absence of an egalitarian notion and the practice of citizenship for non-Jews leave undocumented labor migrants in Israel without prospects for incorporation into the society. (shrink)

In this article, I examine how Syrian refugee men and women shifted their household divisions of labor in their initial years of resettlement in the United States. I combine and extend relational approaches from gender theory and economic sociology to examine how men’s and women’s behaviors shifted, the resources engendered by behavioral shifts, and how they interpreted and compensated for new behaviors and resources. I show that shifts in Syrian household divisions of labor occurred at the intersection of inequalities in (...) social policies, labor markets, and households. As a result of limited social assistance, the refugee families needed to earn an income within months of their arrival. The Syrian men entered the labor market, in keeping with a breadwinning expectation for their labor, but could only access menial jobs that limited their time and opportunity to learn English. Women, meanwhile, did not enter the labor market full-time and could attend English classes. By observing this divergence in men’s and women’s language learning, I theorize human capital as a gendered outcome of household divisions of labor. (shrink)

A decade ago, the “new sociology of masculinity” emerged as an exciting new paradigm for understanding gender, emphasizing the study of “hegemonic power relations” among men and women. However, subsequent research has not fully redeemed the promise of the NSM, failing to seriously engage the theoretical implications of studying hegemony. This article addresses the lacunae by presenting a theoretically informed analysis of life history interviews with Chinese American men. Its chief empirical question is how Chinese American men “achieve” masculinity in (...) the face of negative stereotypes. This is accomplished, it is found, through four possible gender strategies: compensation, deflection, denial, or repudiation. The author then fashions a theoretical account of these strategies to show how they can reproduce the social order by striking a hegemonic bargain, which occurs when a Chinese American man's gender strategy involves consciously trading on—or unconsciously taking advantage of—the “privileges” of his race, gender, class, generation, and/or sexuality for the purposes of elevating his masculinity. (shrink)

Recent transnational migration literature does not sufficiently explore women's role in the development of transnational communities. By analyzing 30 interviews with Puerto Rican migrant and return migrant women, the author shows that women, through subsistence production, play a significant role in the social construction of transnational communities. By using a transnational perspective and placing migrant women's subsistence work and its contradictory nature at the center of her analysis, the author challenges studies that assume that maintaining ties to homelands leads to (...) freedom for all family members, moves away from home/host binary frame works of immigrant women's experiences that locate greater gender oppression in home countries and more freedom in host societies, and explores women's complex perceptions of home. (shrink)