Keys to the Cage: Universities and the Facilitation of Coethnic Relationships

• In Event: Student Forum Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Roundtable 18: Educational Access and Inequality

Abstract

While much of the literature on ethnic and immigrant social networks has remained largely positive focusing on the benefits of social networks for establishing social support for co-ethnics, recent research has complicated this understanding noting how through various relational dimensions, immigrant and ethnic social networks can also become sources of exploitation. In the realm of sociological research on the function of universities in their surrounding communities, scholars have examined the negative implications universities have on their communities discussing the power that universities have in reproducing inequality in labor, housing, and income. Drawing upon an ethnographic study of a university-led Hispanic cultural center based in Syracuse, New York, I argue that the co-ethnic relationship between the center’s staff, interns, and volunteers and its patrons are facilitated through the University.
I argue that the University’s facilitation of the relationship functions to exacerbate the dimensions of exploitation within ethnic social networks and shapes the ways exploitation operates for these Hispanic co-ethnics. Looking specifically at youth programming within the center, the benefits for Hispanic university students and staff at the center, and an examination of the center’s communications team, I find that the university-led Hispanic cultural center works to support their socioeconomically disadvantaged co-ethnics, while simultaneously being limited and constrained by the university which dictates the extent of their support for their co-ethnics. Due to their identities as co-ethnics and university affiliates, both separately and in conjunction, center staff, volunteers, and interns work to support their co-ethnics, while their relationship to the university lends them to engage in unconscious mechanisms of exploitation. These findings contribute to the growing body of research which complicates the relationships established within ethnic social networks, while revealing how universities influence the way that co-ethnics engage in relationships with one another.

Author

• Anais Elisa Mejia, Syracuse University