Emerging Poverty Scholars Summer 2024 Meeting Series: Agenda

Dr. Casey Nichols Presentation
Motherhood Menace: Black and Brown Women’s Activism as a Politics of Love

Dr. Marianna Amorim Flash Talk
To “Get Ahead” or “Ease the Burden”? Inequities in Financially Intensive Parenting with a Universal Cash Transfer

Dr. Alberto Ortega Presentation
Losing Medicaid and Crime

Dr. Monica Adams Flash Talk
Food Insecurity within the LGBTQIA+ Community

Dr. Daniel Auguste Presentation
Where You Start Matters: Labor Market Inequality and the Entrepreneurship Earnings Penalty Puzzle

Dr. José Loya Flash Talk
Ethno-Racial and Relative Neighborhood Income Disparities in the Mortgage Market

Dr. Karina Chavarria Presentation
Legal Vulnerability at the CSU’s: Undocumented College Students’ Engagement with Campus Services

Dr. Andrea Gómez Cervantes Flash Talk
Esperando in Confinement: Liminal Illegality as Central American Women Await an Asylum Decision

Casey Nichols is an Assistant Professor of History at Texas State University. She specializes in the areas of African American history, Mexican American history, U.S. urban history, and movements for social justice. Her current book project (under contract with the University of North Carolina Press), “Poverty Rebels: Black and Brown Protest in Post-Civil Rights America,” examines post-1965 antipoverty policy with a specific focus on how these polices shaped the relationship between African Americans and Mexican Americans in Los Angeles and brought new significance to Black-Brown relations as U.S. racial paradigm. In this fellowship, Nichols will continue work on her book manuscript and her next project titled, “The Intellectual History of Resistance, Class, and the U.S. City.”

The Black Freedom Movement brought radical change to U.S. society, culture, and politics. In cities, social movements often emphasized infrastructure divestment, police brutality, underfunded schools, food insecurity, and other human rights violations that remained after the 1960s and 1970s golden eras of mass movements for equality. “Motherhood Menace” argues that African American women have maintained a daily culture of resistance that allowed them to advocate for their children, families, and communities when institutions fail to uphold equal conditions. This historical study uses archival collections, oral histories, government reports, popular magazines, film, and newspaper articles to examine Rena Price, a woman whose arrest with her two sons sparked the Watts Rebellion of 1965. Price represents the daily acts of resistance Black women employ to reinforce legal protections for themselves, their families, and their communities.

Mariana Amorim is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Washington State University.  Her work sheds light on the role of public, private, and “shadow” safety nets in promoting the well-being of parents and children during an era of increasing family complexity and economic inequality.

Sociologists have long argued that parenting practices differ by social class, which has important implications for children’s life chances. The childrearing behaviors of middle and upper-class families has been consistently described as “intensive” – child-centered and time-consuming. In this qualitative study, we investigate the extent and ways in which parents across the socioeconomic spectrum engage in “financially intensive parenting” with money from the only long-standing universal, unconditional, individual, anticipated, and large cash-transfer program in the western world, the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend. Overall, our findings suggest that differences in the application of financially intensive parenting practices may inadvertently contribute to socioeconomic inequalities in resources available to children and in children’s life chances. Our results offer insight into the unintended consequences of universal cash transfers within the context of a weak social safety net.

Alberto Ortega is an Assistant Professor in the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University. He is an economist and public policy scholar with health and social policy research, focusing on the well-being of underserved and vulnerable populations. Ortega’s earlier work examined educational barriers and inequities faced by racial and ethnic minorities. His current research explores issues surrounding access to health care and social determinants of health outcomes, including substance use, mental health, and mortality resulting from victimization. As an Emerging Poverty Scholar, he plans to extend his recent research agenda by examining the effects of school and residential segregation on inequities in well-being, health behaviors, and health outcomes.

We study the impact of losing health insurance on criminal activity by leveraging one of the most substantial Medicaid disenrollments in U.S. history, which occurred in Tennessee in 2005 and lead to 190,000 non-elderly and non-disabled adults without dependents unexpectedly losing coverage.  Using police agency-level data and a difference-in-differences approach, we find that this mass insurance loss increased total crime rates with particularly strong effects for non-violent crime. We test for several potential mechanisms and find that our results may be explained by economic stability and access to healthcare, in particular mental healthcare.

Monica Adams is an Assistant Professor of Social Work at Binghamton University. Her broad research interest is health disparities with a more specific focus on the links between socioenvironmental risk factors like food insecurity and poor health outcomes among people with low-income backgrounds. She is interested in studying how limited access to resources influences decision making around health behaviors.

Overview: Literature on food insecurity has either lumped all people with poverty into one group, or focused on specific marginalized groups (e.g., racialized minorities, families with children). Less attention has been given to other populations vulnerable to food insecurity. I will give a brief overview of findings from a scoping review conducted to describe food insecurity within the LGBTQIA+ community in the context of prevalence, risk and protective factors, and consequences of food insecurity unique to the population

Daniel Auguste is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Florida Atlantic University. His research interests include inequality, stratification, economic and organizational sociology, and entrepreneurship. More specifically, his research agenda seeks to understand the structural forces determining who gets what, who participates and to what level they participate in the capitalist production process. In this fellowship, Auguste will investigate the extent to which racial wealth inequality influences racial disparities in business ownership and success; investigate the economic conditions under which entrepreneurship may facilitate social mobility in the United States; and examine the link between employment quality and business ownership and success.

Students of entrepreneurship have been puzzled by the fact that people persist in entrepreneurship despite the fact that overall earnings are substantially lower among entrepreneurs than among paid employees. And scholars have provided conflicting narratives for why people persist in entrepreneurship. Some have argued that people persist in entrepreneurship because it provides non-pecuniary benefits, such as autonomy and being one’s own boss, that compensate for lower entrepreneurship earnings (Hamilton 2000). In contrast, others have contended that people undertake entrepreneurship because it allows them to experiment with new ideas (Manso 2016). In this study, I provide an alternative model for understanding the apparent entrepreneurship earning penalty puzzle. In doing so, I account for labor market inequality, showing how it spills over into the entrepreneurship arena, shaping disparity in earnings among entrepreneurs, as well as between paid-employees and entrepreneurs.

José Loya is an Assistant Professor in Urban Planning at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs and faculty affiliate with the Chicano Studies Research Center. His research addresses Latino issues in urban areas by connecting ethno-racial inequality and contextual forces at the neighborhood, metropolitan, and national levels. His research discusses several topics related to stratification in homeownership, including ethno-racial, gender, and Latino disparities in mortgage access.

Unequal access to homeownership is a major aspect of ethno-racial stratification. Prior studies have shown substantial ethno-racial disparities in access and outcomes throughout the homeownership process at both the individual and neighborhood levels. In addition, previous housing research that considers neighborhood characteristics has focused on absolute income levels, ignoring local variation or relative income levels in their assessment of mortgage access across ethno-racial groups. This paper uses annual data from the 2018 and 2019 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) to assess variation in ethno-racial differentials in loan outcomes across relative neighborhood income levels. I demonstrate that ethno-racial inequality in the mortgage market varies tremendously across relative neighborhood income levels. I show that high-cost loan originations and mortgage denials are highest among Latinos and Blacks across relative neighborhood income levels compared to Whites. Asians perform similarly as Whites. In addition, borrowers applying in lower income neighborhoods are more likely to experience adverse loan outcomes than those applying in higher income neighborhoods. These trends are particularly true when examining mortgage denials as Latinos and Blacks applying in high income neighborhoods perform similarly as Whites applying in low income neighborhoods. Implications for ethno-racial and neighborhood stratification are discussed.

Karina Chavarria is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at California State University Channel Islands. Broadly, her research agenda bridges multiple sociological sub-fields: education, migration, and race and ethnicity. In particular, she examines the relationship between educational inequalities, as these impact marginalized youth across race/ethnicity and immigration status, and youth’s agency in enacting transformative social change. Chavarria will use this fellowship to further her current research which aims to advance our understanding of the academic and economic outcomes of Latinx youth in Ventura County via an assessment of the challenges and opportunities shaping their educational and employment prospects amidst the devastations produced by COVID.

California’s pro-immigrant policies (AB 540, Dream Act, SB 2000, AB 68) have mediated many of the financial challenges produced by federal restrictive immigration policies and the volatility of limbo statuses such as DACA. Current work suggests that university-level policies can mediate the impact of restrictive policies for undocumented students, but the mechanisms underlying this mediating effect remain unclear. Drawing on 27 interviews with 1.5 generation undocumented college students at two California State University campuses, we explore how undocumented college students’ experiences of legal vulnerabilities— defined as financial challenges and social exclusions—shape their engagement with campus services. We find that undocumented college students’ prior experiences with financial challenges and social exclusion inform their awareness, access, and use of campus services. In particular, undocumented college students’ prior and current experiences with financial challenges and social exclusions have an iterative effect as they shape students’ awareness of, access to, and use of available supports. It is this iterative effect that influences the degree of mediation impact that campuses have on undocumented college students’ experiences. Understanding this iterative effect is critical to clarifying processes by which campus services can mediate the challenges undocumented students face due to legal vulnerabilities produced by undocumented immigration status. Ultimately, these findings shed light on the potentialities postsecondary institutions represent for intervening in the reproduction of inequality among a growing legally vulnerable population of students.”

Andrea Gómez Cervantes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Wake Forest University. Her research specializes in international migration and immigration policies, social inequality and socioeconomic mobility, families, and gender violence. As a Mexican immigrant, she is especially interested in creating initiatives that address the well-being of immigrant families and communities in the U.S.

In 2023, over two million immigrants wait for an immigration court hearing, including asylum and removal decisions. It takes on average four years to close a hearing, but some cases have been pending for over a decade. While they wait, migrants are not given immigration status or the rights and protections associated with such (i.e., a social security number, access to poverty relief programs, driver’s license, or subsidized healthcare), and only a few receive a work permit. Unlike undocumented immigrants or migrants in temporary statuses, those who await a court hearing are under the watchful eye of immigration control through programs such as Alternative to Detention Programs, and immigration parole but lack any protections of temporary statuses. I argue that this system reflects the functioning of racial capitalism, creating a racialized exploitable and controlled population. The majority of those entangled in the immigration courts system are Latinos: Mexican and Central Americans (with the number of Venezuelans growing in recent years). I will present data from two projects including observations of immigration court hearings and past interviews with migrants who are in Alternative to Detention Programs, awaiting an immigration hearing decision. Menjívar coined “liminal legality” to grasp life in ambiguity that immigrants in temporary statuses experience, those who are neither fully undocumented nor documented and are awaiting an immigration decision. Liminal legality shapes immigrants’ integration and amplifies existing social divides based on gender, race, and class (Menjívar 2006). Building on Menjívar’s work, I argue, a combination of the liminality embedded within the ambiguous waiting period that prevents migrants from fully integrating into society with the exploitative conditions of undocumented status is then further exacerbated by immigration enforcement control, creating the condition of liminal illegality. Thus, it is not only the waiting for a court decision, but in cumulative with exploitation and discrimination of living life in illegality while also facing constant immigration control that generates a life under confinement. Only a small fraction of cases end in relief. Serving racial capitalism, liminal illegality helps to maintain a controlled and exploitable population, keeping immigrants in poverty with an expiration date for expulsion.