Latinx Access to the Social Safety Net: An Intersectional Case Study in California

• In Event: 41061 - Section on Latina/o Sociology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 4: Health, Social Safety Nets, and Aging in Latinx Communities

Abstract

Recent scholarship has begun to focus on the heterogeneity of lived experience among the Latinx population in the United States, challenging prior narratives that characterize this population as a monolith. For some immigrants and their U.S.-born children, racial identity, language, gender, and regional contexts play a significant role in how they navigate society; these markers then take on greater significance in understanding within group differences. Further, while scholars have sought to understand how the context of reception shapes incorporation trajectories of immigrant communities (Golash-Boza & Valdez, 2018; Portes and Rumbaut, 2024), a close examination of Indigenous Mexican-origin immigrants within the Latinx community and their experiences accessing State resources remains understudied. This paper asks, how is access to the social safety net among Latinx families shaped by intersecting social locations across Indigenous Mexican-origin status, gender, and legal status? Drawing on 100 interviews with Latinx young adults ages 18-34 in Southern California; this paper focuses on the experiences of U.S.-born Latinx and Indigenous Mixteco immigrant young adults. Findings demonstrate that access to the U.S. social safety net is shaped by the compounding effects of participants’ intersecting social positions, which influence the role of co-ethnic networks, Spanish language fluency, and legal status in facilitating access to social safety net resources. Among undocumented, Indigenous Mixteco women, undocumented status and homogenization of Mexican immigrants intersect to compound the barriers they must overcome. The exclusion from access of State services due to undocumented status is exacerbated by low Spanish language literacy which restricts possibilities for awareness through available Spanish language resources. Their ability to access the social safety net is precarious at best given the significant challenges to acquiring information about eligibility and availability of safety net resources.

Authors

• Victoria Maria Ciudad-Real, University of California-Irvine

• Karina Chavarria, CSU Channel Islands