Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in two impoverished California communities-one made up of recent immigrants from Mexico, the other of U.S.-born Chicano citizens-this book provides an invaluable comparative perspective on Latino poverty in contemporary America. In northern California's high-tech Silicon Valley, author Daniel Dohan shows how recent immigrants get by on low-wage babysitting and dish-cleaning jobs. In the housing projects of Los Angeles, he documents how families and communities of U.S.-born Mexican Americans manage the social and economic dislocations of persistent poverty. Taking readers into worlds where public assistance, street crime, competition for low-wage jobs, and family, pride, and cross-cultural experiences intermingle, The Price of Poverty offers vivid portraits of everyday life in these Mexican American communities while addressing urgent policy questions such as: What accounts for joblessness? How can we make sense of crime in poor communities? Does welfare hurt or help? "Masterful scholarship--detailed, insightful, and original. Dohan investigates the role that immigration plays in understanding Latino poverty in the United States. He also provides a nuanced and detailed analysis of neighborhood factors that help us better understand Latino poverty and how Latino residents navigate the world of low-skill work, resources, and life in the barrio."--Abel Valenzuela Jr., co-editor of Prismatic Metropolis: Inequality in Los Angeles

"A very timely study. At a time when the Latino population is rapidly growing in the U.S., Dohan provides us with one of the best and most poignant studies of the Mexican American Barrio. Based on rich data collected in two poor Mexican-American neighborhoods, this thoughtful and interesting book will draw a lot of attention both inside and outside of academia."--William Julius Wilson, author of When Work Disappears

"With Dohan's book, we finally receive an in-depth understanding of the nuances of life inside the urban, often poor and working-class, Mexican-American communities. Urban ethnographic scholarship on the poor, dominated too long by the African-American experience for its questions, concerns and voices, now finally has a corrective and a complementary text."--Sudhir Venkatesh, author of American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto

Formato	Tapa suave
Número de Páginas	295
Lenguaje	Inglés
Editorial	University of California Press
Fecha de Publicación	2003-12-01
Dimensiones	8.96" x 6.1" x 0.79" pulgadas
Letra Grande	No
Con Ilustraciones	No
Temas	Hispano

Daniel Dohan is Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Institute for Health Policy Studies and the Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.