Abstract HYDE, KATHERINE ANN. Holding Disillusionment at Bay: Latino/a Immigrants and Working Class North Carolinians Expose and Reinforce the American Dream’s Discrepancies. (Under the direction of Jeffrey Leiter and Barbara Risman.) This dissertation examines how a group of twenty-eight working class people in North Carolina, including African Americans, whites and Latino/a immigrants, cope with the discrepancy between the American dream’s promises and premises and their own reality. I analyze interview data focusing on participants’ inward and outward looking emotion management. With the former, participants cope by developing a “grin and bear it” stance regarding challenges and limited opportunities. They shift their attitude in order to shut off or dull the impact of an unpleasant thought or feeling. They also use “I can do it” pep-talks to muster up a general willingness or readiness to deal with whatever comes their way. With outward looking emotion management, participants cope by venting frustration. They “other” fellow working class people, targeting slackers and beneficiaries of preferential treatment, who fail to abide by the meritocratic principles of the dream. I argue that participants’ emotion work is driven by their practical, emotional and cognitive needs and reveals ambivalence toward the American dream ideology. They neither wholeheartedly buy into the dream, nor do they actively criticize the ideology. Their emotion management is bound up in the logic of the dream; it represents a response to the dream, it takes place within the dream’s logic, and, in the end reinforces the dream. I discuss the helpful and hurtful implications of participants’ emotion management and suggest that the short-term gains are outweighed by such long-term costs as perpetuating inter-ethnic hostility and misunderstanding and inhibiting solidarity among oppressed people. I emphasize that participants’ power-evasive emotion work deflects attention away from the ideology itself, the economic system to which the ideology is tied, and the elite agents of this system. My findings point to a need for more research on the emotional and cognitive costs of abandoning the dream’s framework and the conditions under which oppressed people may develop an alternative framework for understanding and responding to their life’s difficulties. HOLDING DISILLUSIONMENT AT BAY: LATINO/A IMMIGRANTS AND WORKING CLASS NORTH CAROLINIANS EXPOSE AND REINFORCE THE AMERICAN DREAM’S DISCREPANCIES by KATHERINE ANN HYDE A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty of North Carolina State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY Raleigh 2002 APPROVED BY: _____________________________ _____________________________ _____________________________ _____________________________ Co-Chair of Advisory Committee Co-Chair of Advisory Committee Biography Katherine A. Hyde was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. She earned a Masters of Science degree as well as a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. Since 1999, she has worked at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies in Durham, North Carolina. ii Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank Jeff Leiter and Barbara Risman for serving as my dissertation committee chairs. Thank you, Jeff, for the opportunity to work on this project. Thanks especially for the time you’ve shared in thinking about and carefully editing all the pieces of my dissertation. Barbara, thank you for many years of believing in and supporting me. Thank you both for the last year of monthly meetings with tasty food and thought-provoking discussion. Your guidance, encouragement and insight have been well needed and always appreciated. I also offer my sincere thanks to Don Tomaskovic-Devey and Rick Della Fave for serving on my committee, asking valuable questions and providing crucial suggestions and criticism. To Sandra Godwin, Jen Rothchild, Daphne Holden and Doug Schrock, thank you for the support you’ve given me as friends throughout these grad school years and for the inspiration you’ve provided as fellow sociologists. I owe special thanks to Sandra for the time she’s generously devoted to my dissertation. Thanks, Sandra, for reading, thinking and listening. Many thanks also to Maura Dillon for her insights, kindness and her faith in me and to Libby Manley, Tracy Mitchell and Alicia Vila for being certain that I would finish. My family has also, all these years, given me moral support, for which I’ve always been thankful. iii For their support, I would like to thank the staff at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies. Thanks especially to Dwayne Dixon and Wendy Ewald for their encouragement and patience. Finally, I offer my genuine thanks to this study’s many participants. Thank you for sharing your time and your stories. iv Table of Contents LIST OF TABLES vii CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION 1 Origin of research project 1 Data collection 2 Analytic strategies 9 Coding strategies and evolving analytic direction 11 CHAPTER TWO: PARTICIPANT OVERVIEW 18 Cabarrus County family and home life 18 Cabarrus County employment 26 Duplin County family and home life 31 Duplin County employment 35 Table one: Cabarrus County participant overview 44 Table two: Duplin County participant overview 46 CHAPTER THREE: THE AMERICAN DREAM AND ITS UNLIKELY BELIEVERS 48 The American dream ideology 48 The American dream as a dominant ideology 50 Variations among the consensus 51 In agreement with the dream 56 In disagreement with the dream 61 CHAPTER FOUR: PARTICIPANTS’ TALK ABOUT OPPORTUNITY AND INDIVIDUALISM 71 Opportunity 71 Individualism 77 Inconsistency 81 Table three: Participants’ talk about opportunity and individualism 83 CHAPTER FIVE: GRIN AND BEAR IT EMOTION MANAGEMENT 84 Coping strategies 84 Coping with challenges, fueling the American dream 89 Emotion management, shifting attitudes and understanding 90 Conditions that shape emotion management 96 Implications of attitude shifting emotion management 114 Summary 121 Table four: Participants’ grin and bear it emotion management 124 v CHAPTER SIX: OTHERING AMONG SUBORDINATES 125 Othering 126 Venting frustration, holding disillusionment at bay 129 Slackers 131 Preferential treatment beneficiaries 139 Implications of othering 154 Summary 164 Table five: Othering fellow subordinates 166 CHAPTER SEVEN: CONCLUSION 167 Analytic conclusions 167 Implications for future research and activism 171 Struggling to make ends meet 172 Social movements as an avenue for change 176 Critical consciousness as a foundation for social organizing 179 Directions for future research 181 Avenues for consciousness raising and social change 184 REFERENCES 197 APPENDIX 206 vi List of Tables Table one: Cabarrus County Participant overview 45 Table two: Duplin County Participant overview 47 Table three: Participants’ talk about opportunity and individualism 84 Table four: Participants’ grin and bear it emotion management 125 Table five: Participants othering fellow subordinates 167 vii Chapter one: Introduction Origin of research project Several years ago a group of labor advocates, university professors and students and state labor department people began to discuss the upsurge of Latino/a immigration in North Carolina. The group was concerned with the vulnerability of North Carolina’s new immigrants as well as the emerging relations among Latinos/as and non- Latinos/as in the state. The discussion focused on the question of whether and how Latino/a immigrants were replacing or displacing North Carolinians in the realms of jobs, housing and social services. In the summer of 1998, Jeff Leiter and Don Tomaskovic-Devey were awarded a Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation grant to study this question. I became involved as the project’s research assistant, under the direction of Jeff Leiter, with funding from this Z. Smith Reynolds grant. I was drawn to the project because of its uncommon engaged research design. The many stages of the research project, including the development of research goals, the data collection, and the dissemination of research findings, have involved the collaborative efforts of university-based researchers, community organizers, state officials, social service providers and other active community members living in the research sites. The subject matter of the research project concerns me greatly, especially questions related to the potential for racial/ethnic tension and intolerance, as well as general issues surrounding working class people’s struggle and survival in North Carolina. 1 Furthermore, I was excited to be involved in a project with international, national and local relevance and implications. Data collection As the project’s primary field researcher, I was actively involved in data collection for just over one year, from September 1998 to October 1999. The first stage of data collection involved my fieldwork. In September 1998 I entered the field. I made weekly visits to one of the two North Carolina counties1 - Duplin County and Cabarrus County- in order to learn about these areas that I had previously driven through, but never known anything about. I quickly developed a field work routine; I typically left on Thursday morning, spent the night in a hotel in the respective field site and returned to Raleigh by Friday evening. The grant