Case Studies of Civic Participation Among Mexican Immigrants in Central Valley Communities

Here to Stay: Case Studies of Civic Participation Among Mexican Immigrants In Central Valley Communities By Ed Kissam July 15, 2003 Research Team: Anna Garcia, Richard Mines, Holly Mines, Anna Rodriguez The Aguirre Group, 555 Airport Blvd., Burlingame, CA 94010 Acknowledgements Thanks should go first to Craig McGarvey, former Director of the Civic Culture program at the James Irvine Foundation, for making this research possible and for ongoing dialogue and insights as we moved along. Marty Campbell, the foundation’s Director of Evaluation, and Lande Ajose, our current Program Officer, have been engaged and collegial, throughout the project. I greatly appreciate their support. The project’s field research team interviewing Mexican immigrants in the Central Valley-- Anna Garcia, Ana Rodriguez, and Rick Mines--brought years of experience, insights, and energy to the project. Santiago Ventura introduced me to several Mixteco civic activists and helped with translation at key points. Special thanks are due to Holly Mines for a marvelous job preparing the profile of one of the civic activists in Chapter 7. The immigrant activists who appear in this report were generous with their time and patient in allowing us to ask them so many questions about their lives, their thoughts and their hopes. I am grateful for their insights and inspiration and hopeful that I adequately portrayed their perspectives. They are: Luis Magaña, Filemon Lopez, Polo Chavez, Jorge San Juan, Raquel Velasco, Gustavo Dominguez, Herlinda Gonzalez, and Gloria Hernandez. The stories and reflections of other insightful immigrant activists and community leaders also informed the current analysis although their experiences are not explicitly mentioned in this report. They include: Miguel Donoso, Preciliano and Tomas Hernandez Velasquez, Ana Lemus, Rafael Flores, Leonel Flores, Jose Loa, Teo Parra, Adalia and Jesus Luevanos, Antonio Flores, Fausto Sanchez, and Antonio Cortes Garcia. Other Central Valley community activists whose insights and/or critiques have been helpful in thinking through certain themes include: Jesus Martinez-Saldaña, Samuel Orozco, and Mark Miller. Thanks also to Eric Cohen and Mark Silverman for sharing with me entries in the ILRC-sponsored student writing contest on .the DREAM Act. An October, 2002 conference organized by Jonathan Fox of the University of California at Santa Cruz, Gaspar Rivera Salgado of the University of Southern California, and Rufino Dominguez of the Frente Indigena Oaxaqueño Binacional provided a wealth of opportunities to learn more about the transnational dimensions of Mexican civic activism from a wide range of leading researchers, activists, and journalists. I am especially grateful to Anna Garcia and Aline Doignon for their detailed ethnographic observations and interviews conducted as part of our “New Pluralism” project community case study in Arvin, to my Aguirre International colleague, Susan Gabbard, for her insights and analyses of National Agricultural Worker Survey data on constantly-changing patterns of Mexico-U.S. migration, and to James Glasnapp, also at Aguirre, for ongoing dialogue about the nature of social capital in Central California communities. Chapter 1 Introduction and Overview Introduction Immigration is changing the face of rural California and America. About one out of every nine persons living in the U.S. is an immigrant and about one in every five children in America is the child of an immigrant.1 Although the majority of immigrants to the United States immigrate to and settle in urban areas, the pace of social and community-level transformation is fastest in rural areas of the country. In 22 rural states, this population has grown by more than 90% during the decade from 1990-2000. Mexican-origin immigrants are the largest component in this growth. This report from The Aguirre Group’s Central Valley Immigrant Civic Participation Project study focuses on the experiences of Mexican immigrants who are the majority of newcomers to rural California and other rural areas of the United States. As such it complements the project’s inquiry and analyses of the dynamics of Hmong immigrants, the second largest new immigrant population in the Central Valley. Project research has focused on the Central Valley because the region is a microcosm of rural regions throughout the country, a crystal ball for considering how all of rural America will be demographically, socially, and politically transformed by immigration in the coming decade. An additional practical reason for this focus is that the region is one where the Aguirre team has now worked for more than 5 years and because the Central Valley continues to be a focus for the James Irvine Foundation’s philanthropic efforts. This report is meant to make both practical and theoretical contributions to efforts to move forward proactively and creatively in California’s journey toward becoming a multi-cultural, multi- lingual, pluralistic society. In the case of Mexican immigrants to rural California, there has been something of a policy vacuum regarding proactive strategies to facilitate their social integration. The de facto locus for social integration has, for many years, been the workplace. The basic notion of the Special Agricultural Worker (SAW) provisions of IRCA (that immigration policy might be crafted to get Mexican workers into the labor force but discourage their families from joining them) turned out to be wrong. As Mexican immigrant settlement in rural areas has continued, it has become clearer that comprehensive strategies will be required to integrate immigrants into the economic, social, civic, and political life of local communities.2 By 1 Analyses are from a presentation by Michael Fix and Jeffrey Passel to “The Changing Face of Rural California” conference sponsored by The Urban Institute/University of California, Davis, Asilomar, CA May 18, 2003. 2 The politically polarized California debate about the cost of services to immigrants reflects the problems inherent in a policy dialogue where the primary issue has been access to a standard menu of program services. David Hayes-Bautista of the UCLA School of Public Health began, early in the 1980’s, exploring ways in which Latinos’ sociodemographic profile differed from other populations and suggesting that “cookie cutter” designs for public health and social programs would not be adequate.. Chapter 1--Introduction and Overview--Mexican Immigrant Case Study 1 “integrate” is meant not simply “incorporate” but a more challenging objective—to collectively engage in a process which systematically seeks to work toward social, political and economic equity in those communities. This is an area where the James Irvine Foundation has been a leader for more than 15 years and our hope is that the report will be of assistance to the foundation in its ongoing strategic planning for the coming decade. Beginning with the applied research in The Changing Relations Project sponsored by the Ford Foundation from the late 1980’s through the early 1990’s there has been impressive progress in applied research on immigrant social integration (e.g. Bach et al 1993; Portes and Rumbaut 2001; Suarez-Orozco and Paez 2002). During the same period, there has been a separate strand of applied research inquiry on the changing nature of community life which focuses on the dynamics of civic and political participation. Much of this research has consisted of analysis of trends at the national level (Verba et al 1995; Putnam 2000; Clagett and Pollock 2000; Jenkins et al 2003). It has provided the foundation for a lively social policy debate. Yet there has been little attention to the specific ways in which civic life in communities with especially high influxes of immigrants might differ from the overall national patterns although the line of inquiry on immigrant social integration suggest that the type of economic, social, civic, and political environment in a community, makes a major difference in processes of integration and outcomes (Menjivar 2000; Hagan 1998; Cano 2002) The Aguirre Group’s decision to focus the project inquiry at the “micro-level”--the experiences of individual immigrants, their families, informal social networks, neighborhoods, and local communities-- was meant to enhance the study’s utility as a basis for designing local “place-based” initiatives, as well as an effort to provide insights into the social dynamics which give rise to the macro-level regional and national patterns of immigrant integration. The distinct contribution of the current report is that it examines the personal and social dynamics of immigrant integration and civic participation in rural communities where change is proceeding more rapidly than in urban areas—because the flow of Mexican immigrants migrating north to work in agriculture is ongoing. As such it may complement the findings from the research on urban immigrant integration. The hope is that it will give a human face to more abstract, over-arching analyses of sociopolitical trends in these communities, thereby providing assistance to program planners, community-based organizations, local government entities, and funders seeking to find concrete and innovative solutions to address the range of issues related to the social and civic transformation of rural communities. The goal, in the Immigrant Civic Participation Research project and this report on that inquiry has been three-fold: to articulate a textured framework for understanding how individual migration experiences,

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