Ethnic Entrepreneurship, Intersectionality, and the Household Economy

• In Event: 498 - Regular Session. Immigrant Families and Communities: Challenges and Changes

Abstract

The traditional approach to ethnic entrepreneurship emphasizes the role of ethnicity and underscores its primacy in shaping inter-group differences in enterprise, rooted in part, on the access to and availability of ethnic group based resources. Using a framework derived from intersectionality theory, this qualitative study investigates the role of social class and gender in shaping intra-group differences in entrepreneurship among a sample of fifty middle class Mexican-origin entrepreneurs. By focusing on two aspects of the household economy, namely household structure and family ideology, this study examines how class and gender intersect to condition the use of three family based resources that facilitate ethnic enterprise: family labor, entrepreneurial capital, and inheritance. Findings demonstrate that the availability of and access to family-based resources is contingent on class and gender dynamics among family members within ethnic households, with consequent differences in entrepreneurial participation between family members that are at times greater than those observed between ethnic groups. This study challenges the ethnic entrepreneurship paradigm’s emphasis on ethnicity and the presumed ideology of collectivism that characterizes ethnic households by revealing that multiple dimensions of identity influence the access to and use of group-based resources that facilitate enterprise within the same household. This study reveals the strength of an intersectional framework to explain intra-group differences in ethnic enterprise that are rooted in social class and gender among the Mexican-origin middle class.

Authors

• Zulema Valdez, University of California-Merced

• Kristine Navarro, University of Texas-El Paso