Race and Ethnicity Commons^™

Latinos In Massachusetts Selected Areas: Fitchburg, Phillip Granberry, Trevor Mattos

Gastón Institute Publications

This report provides a descriptive snapshot of selected economic, social, educational, and demographic indicators pertaining to Latinos in Fitchburg. It reflects a commitment by UMass Boston’s Mauricio Gastón Institute for Latino Community Development and Public Policy to provide periodic updates on the growing Latino population in Massachusetts.

The report on Fitchburg is part of a larger series that covers cities and towns in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts with a significant number of Latinos. Each report analyzes data from the American Community Survey (ACS) conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. We obtained the data from the American Factfinder website in tabular …

Latinos In Massachusetts Selected Areas: Haverhill, Phillip Granberry, Trevor Mattos

Gastón Institute Publications

This report provides a descriptive snapshot of selected economic, social, educational, and demographic indicators pertaining to Latinos in Haverhill. It reflects a commitment by UMass Boston’s Mauricio Gastón Institute for Latino Community Development and Public Policy to provide periodic updates on the growing Latino population in Massachusetts.

The report on Haverhill is part of a larger series that covers cities and towns in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts with a significant number of Latinos. Each report analyzes data from the American Community Survey (ACS) conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. We obtained the data from the American Factfinder website in tabular …

The Silent Crisis Ii: A Follow-Up Analysis Of Latin@ Participation In City Government Boards, Commissions, And Executive Bodies In Boston And Chelsea, Massachusetts, James Jennings, Jen Douglas, Miren Uriarte

Gastón Institute Publications

This report provides an update on the participation of Latin@s in city government in Chelsea and Boston. Since 2001 several studies have documented a severe underrepresentation of Latin@s in policy-making bodies in government institutions that affect their lives (e.g., Hardy-Fanta, 2002; Uriarte, Jennings, & Douglas, 2014). The Silent Crisis, the 2014 study (Uriarte et al., 2014) commissioned by the Greater Boston Latin@ Network, found significant under-representation of Latin@s in the city governments of Boston, Chelsea, and Somerville. In each of the three cities, the representation of Latin@s in the population far outpaced their role in the municipal governments.

The Diversity And Dispersion Of Latinos In Massachusetts, Ivan Lozano, Phillip Granberry, Trevor Mattos

Gastón Institute Publications

This snapshot report highlights the growing number, and increasing diversity, of Latinos in Massachusetts. In this state, as well as nationally, Latinos’ share of the population continues to increase, at the expense principally of the aging non-Latino white population. The Latino population is young, with a high rate of dependent children and a low rate of dependent elders. Its workforce composition has not changed signifi cantly in recent years: Latinos continue to be over-represented in blue-collar and service-sector jobs and under-represented in white-collar jobs. Across all occupational sectors (including white-collar jobs), Latino workers earn substantially less on average than members …

Being Non-Christian In A Christian Community: Experiences Of Belonging And Identity Among Korean Americans, Jane Yeonjae Lee

Institute for Asian American Studies Publications

This study responds to the need to investigate the lives of secular migrants where religious marginalization may play a significant role in their everyday lives. Through a qualitative approach, this exploratory study examines the experiences of secular and religiously marginalized Korean Americans in relation to their predominantly Christian communities. In particular, the study focuses on the unique experiences of those aged between 25 and 35 living in the greater Boston area. The study compiles vivid narratives of non-Christian Korean American experiences within a dominant Christian ethnic community focusing on their religious and non-religious performances.

The overall objectives of this study, …

Living Below The Line: Economic Insecurity And Older Americans, Racial And Ethnic Disparities In Insecurity, 2016, Jan Mutchler, Yang Li, Ping Xu

Center for Social and Demographic Research on Aging Publications

New estimates from the 2016 Elder Economic Security Standard^TM Index highlight the high risk of economic insecurity experienced by older adults, a risk that is especially high for racial and ethnic minorities. The Gerontology Institute compares the 2016 household incomes for adults age 65 and above living in one- and two-person households to the 2016 Elder Economic Security Standard^TM Index for each state and Washington, DC to calculate Elder Economic Insecurity Rates (EEIRs), the percentage of independent older adults age 65 or older living in households with annual incomes that do not support economic security. The EEIRs allow …

How Do Latino Students Fare In Massachusetts Charter Schools?: An Analysis Of Student Outcomes, Enrollment, Teacher Preparation, And Discipline Across 10 Districts, Michael Berardino, Lorna Rivera, Trevor Mattos

Gastón Institute Publications

The objective of the research was to better understand the experiences and outcomes of Latino students in Massachusetts charter schools. To reflect the diversity of the Latino population in Massachusetts, this research is built on comparisons of demographics and student outcomes between traditional public school districts and the charter schools that serve each school district.

Communities Of Opportunity: Pursuing A Housing Policy Agenda To Achieve Equity And Opportunity In The Face Of Post-Recession Challenges, Kalima Rose, Teddy Kỳ-Nam Miller

Trotter Review

Where we live directly impacts our ability to achieve our full potential. Access to good schools, quality jobs, reliable transportation, and healthy food is fundamental to achieving communities of opportunity. Unfortunately, communities of color, and urban black communities in particular, are disproportionately residing in neighborhoods locked out of opportunity, or disproportionately burdened by housing costs —spending over half of their income on housing. In 2015, PolicyLink undertook a research project to understand the changing post-recession housing landscape, to characterize the forces that were undermining housing security for communities of color, and to characterize the policy opportunities that could address the …

Introduction: The Gentrification Game, Barbara Lewis

Trotter Review

In real estate talk, there are only three things that matter, and they are location, location, location. The same is true in dispossession, which translates into the freeing up of location so that it can be possessed by others. Another term that has cropped up fairly recently, much in use in the crossover between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is gentrification, which has a benign face as well as one that is not so kindly, like the paired tragic and comic masks of classic drama.

In this issue of the Trotter Review, we explore gentrification and its alternate, dispossession, …

The Politics Of Race, Class, And Gentrification In The Atl, Keith Jennings

Trotter Review

Methodologically, the essay uses a multidisciplinary approach to examine gentrification from a race, class, and gender perspective. Within the essay a number of the dynamics directly associated with Atlanta’s political economy and the impact those dynamics are having on issues such as affordable housing, poverty, and Black employment and underemployment are analyzed. While not a central focus of the essay, the changes taking place outside of Atlanta in several counties, as a result of the push and pull effect in the metropolitan region, are briefly discussed.

Uncovering The Buried Truth In Richmond: Former Confederate Capital Tries To Memorialize Its Shameful History Of Slavery, Howard Manly

Trotter Review

Richmond Mayor Dwight C. Jones had the noblest of intentions.

With Virginia’s capital having a poverty rate of nearly 25 percent, no one blamed Jones, a child of the sixties and preacher by calling, for trying to develop prime riverfront property to generate revenue to create more jobs, better schools, and housing.

But when Jones unveiled a proposal in 2013 that included building a new baseball stadium near one of the city’s historic slave burial grounds in Shockoe Bottom, it was, by all accounts, troubling to historic preservationists and Black community activists. “Shameful” was one of the words most often …

Gentrification As Anti-Local Economic Development: The Case Of Boston, Massachusetts, James Jennings

Trotter Review

Activists and political leaders across the city of Boston are concerned that gentrification in the form of rapidly rising rents in low-income and the poorest areas are contributing to displacement of families and children. Rising home sale prices and an increasing number of development projects are feeding into this concern. There is also a growing wariness about the impact that this scenario can have on small and neighborhood-based businesses and microenterprises whose markets are represented by the kinds of households facing potential displacement. This potential side-effect suggests that gentrification could actually emerge as anti-local economic development in Boston. It can …

“Separatist City”: The Mandela, Massachusetts (Roxbury) Movement And The Politics Of Incorporation, Self-Determination, And Community Control, 1986–1988, Zebulon V. Miletsky, Tomás González

Trotter Review

November 4, 2016, marks 30 years since the historic referendum in which close to 50,000 citizens of Boston living in or near the predominantly Black area of “Greater Roxbury” voted on whether the area should leave Boston and incorporate as a separate municipality to be named in honor of former South African president Nelson and Winnie Mandela, or remain a part of Boston. The new community, what planners called “Greater Roxbury,” would have included wards in much or all of the neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan, Jamaica Plain, the Fenway, the South End, and what was then known as Columbia …

Book Review: Desire And Disaster In New Orleans: Tourism, Race And Historical Memory By Lynnell L. Thomas, Casey Schreiber

Trotter Review

Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race and Historical Memory, by Lynnell L. Thomas, challenges the racial messages embedded within dominant tourism narratives in New Orleans. From tour guides, to websites, to travel brochures, Thomas extracts and analyzes a variety of messages to document how competing representations of race—desire and disaster—are two frames through which New Orleans tourism narratives represent black culture. Thomas leads readers to question the extent to which alternative tourism narratives can be constructed to more justly address constructions of blackness.

Community Land Trusts: A Powerful Vehicle For Development Without Displacement, May Louie

Trotter Review

In the Great Recession of 2007–2009, Boston’s communities of color were hit hard. A 2009 map of foreclosures looked like a map of the communities of color—Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan. The one island of stability was a section of Roxbury called the Dudley Triangle—home to the community land trust of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI).

Originally established to respond to the community’s vision of “development without displacement,” the land trust model was adopted to help residents gain control of land and to use that control to prevent families from being priced out as they organized to improve their neighborhood. …

From Disinvestment To Displacement: Gentrification And Jamaica Plain’S Hyde-Jackson Squares, Jen Douglas

Trotter Review

In this essay, I offer a place-based history of socioeconomic and demographic change in Hyde Square and nearby Jackson Square (henceforth “Hyde-Jackson Squares”). I document the area’s ongoing gentrification and describe the distribution of gentrification pressures. I situate this contemporary process against the socio-spatial patterns carved out by the area’s historical rise as an industrial suburb, its struggle amid decades of disinvestment, and the community efforts that ultimately stabilized the neighborhood. In these sequential transformations is the story of how Latinos and Blacks entered, departed, and have strived to remain in the neighborhood.

Still Waiting: An Analysis Of The Permeation Of Racial Stereotypes In Top-Grossing Black Romance Films From The 1960s To The 2000s, Jasmine Boyd-Perry

Honors College Theses

In this study, I compare how films portray relationships involving Black people, over the course of 5 decades. I do this by analyzing the characters and relationships in the top-grossing film from each decade (1960’s through 2000’s), that have a focus on Black love. I started this journey curious about how the silver screen portrayed how Black people loved romantically. As a person who regularly frequents my local major movie theatre, I had become tired of only seeing Black actors in comedies, Black men in drag and buddy dramas. I also grew tired of the sappy love stories featuring White …

Bolling V. Sharpe And Beyond: The Unfinished And Untold History Of School Desegregation In Washington, D.C., Bryce Celotto

Honors College Theses

While the Brown V. Board of Education case is constantly referenced when discussing educational equity and desegregation, Bolling v. Sharpe stands as another important education civil rights case and is perhaps more telling of the story of education in the United States. Bolling V. Sharpe was argued and decided in the United States Supreme Court over the course of 1952 to 1954. Similar to Brown v. Board in terms of intent, Bolling v. Sharpe aimed to desegregate public schools in Washington, D.C. in order to give African-American students equal access to a high quality public education on par with that …

Commonwealth Compact: Using Research To Promote Diversity, Robert Turner

New England Journal of Public Policy

Commonwealth Compact is a statewide initiative of the University of Massachusetts Boston launched in 2008 with a primary focus of promoting diversity—especially racial and ethnic diversity—in the workplace. In addition to conducting workshops, sponsoring forums, and creating job placement tools, Commonwealth Compact has conducted research, which is the central focus of this article.

Three rounds of Benchmarks reports, using data from 2007, 2008, and 2011, showed that the reporting Massachusetts employers generally weathered the recession fairly well but that efforts to improve racial diversity lagged far behind those for gender diversity.

Data from two national surveys, produced for Commonwealth Compact …

Health And Mental Health Of Older Asian Americans: A Comparative Study Of Chinese, Filipino, Asian Indian, And Other Asian/Pacific Islander Elders, Jing Tan

Institute for Asian American Studies Publications

Purpose: This study examined the health and mental health status among U.S. Chinese, Filipino, Asian Indian, other Asian/Pacific Islander (API), and non-Hispanic White older adults, using nationally representative data. Method: An aggregated data file from the National Health Interview Survey from 2000 to 2009 was analyzed. The sample included 848 Chinese, 823 Filipino, 337 Asian Indian, 1,488 “other API,” and 74,042 non-Hispanic White older adults aged 65 and older. Bivariate and multivariate analyses were used to compare the health and mental health status among different ethnic groups of older adults and to identify related factors. Findings: The descriptive statistics reveal …

Profiles In Leadership: Women Of Color Elected To Office In Massachusetts, Center For Women In Politics And Public Policy, University Of Massachusetts Boston, Women's Pipeline For Change

Publications from the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy

There are two narratives that provide the story behind this guide. These stories may seem contradictory at first, but they are both true: it is only by telling both sides of the story that we can understand the full meaning and impact of the experiences of the women pictured in the pages that follow.

On the one hand, there is a story of exclusion, marginalization, and lack of representation of women of color in governing bodies all across Massachusetts – from local to federal office. The Massachusetts Legislature has existed since 1780, yet we have only had 14 women of …

Latinos In Massachusetts Selected Areas: Everett, Phillip Granberry, Mayara Fontes

Gastón Institute Publications

This report provides a descriptive snapshot of selected economic, social, educational, and demographic indicators pertaining to Latinos in Everett. With a total population of 42,504, Everett is home to an estimated 9,232 Latinos. They represent about one-fifth (22%) of the city’s population, a smaller share than for whites but greater than for blacks and Asians.

Latinos In Massachusetts Selected Areas: Framingham, Phillip Granberry, Mayara Fontes

Gastón Institute Publications

This report provides a descriptive snapshot of selected economic, social, educational, and demographic indicators pertaining to Latinos in Framingham. With a total population of 70,448, Framingham is home to an estimated 12,037 Latinos. They represent about one sixth (17%) of the town’s population, a smaller share than for whites but greater than for blacks and Asians.

Latinos In Massachusetts Selected Areas: Lynn, Phillip Granberry, Priyanka Kabir

Gastón Institute Publications

This report provides a descriptive snapshot of selected economic, social, educational, and demographic indicators pertaining to Latinos in Lynn. As the largest city in Essex County, Lynn is home to an estimated 32,217 Latinos. They represent slightly more than one-third (35%) of the city’s population, which is a smaller share than for whites but greater than for Asians and blacks.

Latinos In Massachusetts Selected Areas: Boston, Phillip Granberry

Gastón Institute Publications

This report provides a descriptive snapshot of selected economic, social, and demographic indicators pertaining to Latinos in Boston. As the largest city in the Commonwealth, Boston is home to an estimated 124,061 Latinos. This represents the largest Latino population in the state, though several other cities have greater concentrations of Latinos. They represent about one-fifth (19.2%) of the city’s population, a smaller share than for whites and blacks but greater than for Asians.

Latinos In Massachusetts Selected Areas: Somerville, Phillip Granberry, Mayara Fontes

Gastón Institute Publications

This report provides a descriptive snapshot of selected economic, social, educational, and demographic indicators pertaining to Latinos in Somerville. As one of the most densely populated municipalities of the Commonwealth, Somerville is home to an estimated 7,742 Latinos. They represent about one-tenth (10.1%) of the city’s population, a smaller share than for whites and Asians but greater than for blacks.

Latinos In Massachusetts Selected Areas: Waltham, Phillip Granberry, Priyanka Kabir

Gastón Institute Publications

This report provides a descriptive snapshot of selected economic, social, educational, and demographic indicators pertaining to Latinos in Waltham. Waltham is home to an estimated 7,728 Latinos. They represent slightly more than one-tenth (12%) of the city’s population, which is a smaller share than for whites but greater than for Asians and blacks.

Latinos In Massachusetts Selected Areas: Revere, Phillip Granberry, Mayara Fontes

Gastón Institute Publications

This report provides a descriptive snapshot of selected economic, social, educational, and demographic indicators pertaining to Latinos in Revere. In addition to having the oldest public beach in America, Revere is home to an estimated 13,547 Latinos. They represent slightly more than one-quarter (25%) of the city’s population, which is a smaller share than for whites but greater than for Asians and blacks.

Latinos In Massachusetts Selected Areas: Salem, Phillip Granberry, Priyanka Kabir

Gastón Institute Publications

This report provides a descriptive snapshot of selected economic, social, educational, and demographic indicators pertaining to Latinos in Salem. As a historical seaport, Salem has long welcomed new arriving populations and is home to an estimated 6,149 Latinos. They represent 15% of the city’s population, which is a smaller share than for whites but greater than for Asians and blacks.

Latinos In Massachusetts Selected Areas: Chelsea, Phillip Granberry, Mayara Fontes

Gastón Institute Publications

This report provides a descriptive snapshot of selected economic, social, educational, and demographic indicators pertaining to Latinos in Chelsea. As one of the smallest municipalities of the Commonwealth in terms of land area, Chelsea is home to an estimated 22,484 Latinos. They represent about three fifths (60.9%) of the city’s population, the largest percentage of any ethno-racial group in the city.