Political Economy at Work: Examining Interethnic Relations in a Site of Anti-Immigrant Violence

• In Event: Remembering Jean Anyon: Radical Possibilities in Research, Policy, and Practice With and for Vulnerable Populations

Abstract

Educational research is not ontologically free (Anyon, 1997). One cannot study schools and curriculum in education without studying the world of work and the larger societal forces that shape work options. Studying inter-ethnic relations in a neighborhood in New York City that had been the site of anti-immigrant violence required a critical community ethnography. Epistemologically, schools and levels of education were critically important in assessing young adult understandings of inter-ethnic relations. However, recent immigrants living in a post-industrial community must navigate a wide variety of publics and policies, and violence can occur in many social and political contexts. Only in shifting from the macro realities of public policy to the micro realities of the day-to-day experiences of immigrant young adults and their families did ontological shifts of perspectives in inter-ethnic relations occur.


Understanding the lived experiences of newly arrived immigrants with those of native-born minoritized groups, helps explain how these groups work interethnically across racial and ethnic boundaries. This research is place-based with specific understandings of students and families with an aim to build trust within groups and institutions by valuing beliefs and practices (Bogotch, 2014). With respect to education and urban education specifically, I am forwarding the argument that changing demographics require that education need not only be culturally relevant (Ladson-Billings, 1995), but that it be inter-culturally relevant.


Ethnographic research was conducted over thirteen months during 2012 and 2013 in a neighborhood in the northeast that had been the site of 11 purported anti-bias attacks against Mexican immigrants during the summer of 2010. Six months of hanging out preceded in-depth interviews. Using purposive sampling, the author conducted fifteen (15) in-depth interviews with Mexican immigrants between the ages of 18-23, stratified by gender, schooling & immigration status, limited only to those who had lived, worked or gone to school in the neighborhood during 2010.


Research questions about race, inter-ethnic relations and neighborhood violence among recent immigrants, challenged the collective knowledge of the community, by contesting the post-colonial and colonial order of Mexican immigrants’ prior cultural frameworks.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/points of view (84)
Distinct differences in inter-ethnic awareness were found between immigrants completing high school and those unable to finish. Improving interethnic relations is not a priority for non-high school completers, however, when prompted high school completers generally conceptualized this concept. By negating how immigrants understand African Americans and their experiences and not paying attention to how interethnic understandings can be improved, we relegate a large percentage of recent immigrants and racialized minorities to further marginalization rather than social inclusion into the complex fabric of this nation.

There is a dearth of literature about how all immigrants, and specifically Latino immigrants, confront and/or understand African-Americans and African-American Culture. African-American thought and culture is not considered central to an understanding of American ideas in most all education research. Twentieth Century research on immigration emphasized the various ways immigrants assimilate (Portes & Rumbaut, 2006) and the research in immigrants and education does not emphasize interethnic relations.

Author

• Roberto Martinez, Brooklyn College