The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial Identity

“liberal” label such well-known scholars as William J. Wilson, David Ellwood, Mary Joe Bane, Alejandro Portes, and Ming Zhou, whom they see as minimizers of racism and perpetuators of morally-based cultural arguments about the poor. Their dismissal of these scholars makes it difficult to agree with many of their arguments at this point. Although initially refreshing, the strident criticism with which the book begins runs the risk of leading the reader to dismiss the authors’ own scholarship as leftist dogma. The impatient reader could readily develop an “I know where this is going” feeling, which would be far from accurate. Instead, what follows is a significant contribution to several theoretical currents including studies of neighborhood effects, immigration, poverty, families and welfare. Field studies that get at the fundamental negotiations of immigrants in their social contexts of poverty are sorely needed in much of the research literature. Poverty literature is overwhelmingly based on African Americans. Thus, European Americans and immigrants are left out of the public debate, which in turn fuels the idea that poverty is an African-American condition. Yet the majority of welfare recipients consists of European Americans. In addition, immigrants settle in low-income areas. One of the most significant contributions made by Marchevsky and Theoharis is to take into account issue of both poverty and immigration. This provides us with a better understanding of how these Mexican-immigrant women are negotiating welfare and work requirements while lacking viable child care, and of how women who are enthusiastic and expect to get viable training are taught instead to improve their self-esteem and act positively while compromising wages and health insurance. The authors remind us that there is fluidity embedded in immigrant families in relationship to rights and entitlements. This fluidity is the result of immigration patterns within a family. At any given time, a household can be populated by U.S. citizens, legal residents, and the undocumented, thus creating variation within families with regard to benefit eligibility. Moreover, as the authors find out, legality does not guarantee benefits. Racism and nativism combine with changing welfare laws that give cover to welfare workers, who discriminate against Mexican mothers who are legal residents by denying them benefits even when shown legal proof of legal residency. Marchevsky and Theoharis criticize the fact that welfare studies rarely take into account the neighborhood context, and never focus on suburbs. They bring to our attention the fact that many suburbs are now home to “ethnoburbs,” large pockets of low-income immigrants. Furthermore, they point out the need to “reconsider the landscape of poverty as including areas with single family homes, landscaped yards and wide boulevards,” emphasizing that these are also “global suburbs” (p. 75). Lastly, these authors make an important contribution by pointing out that when it comes to poverty relief, we Americans have very low expectations. The authors take the position that by celebrating individual success in a disadvantaged neighborhood, we are not only reinforcing the notion that urban change rests with individual initiative, but also agreeing that much can be done with little and in the process, normalizing social inequality. In a sense, that is exactly what this book is about, how increasing levels of inequality persist. This book also shows the strengths of ethnographic methods and their capacity to see more complete pictures of phenomena by allowing us to understand not only the “what, “ but also the “how” and the “why” of social issues.