Feminist-Pragmatist Reflections on the Filial Obligations of a Filipina American Daughter

In this essay, I reflect on the contradictions that arise from a personal experience of conflict with my father and the clash of traditional Filipino gender norms in the context of the practice of name changes within the institution of marriage and intersecting feminist critiques of patriarchy. My understanding of the Tagalog amor propio is self-love or self-pride within Filipino culture and signifies one's authority, place, and meaning in the community. As a concept of authority, amor propio encourages practices of respect toward the authority figure. In the context of the home, amor propio is attributed to the father, and members of the family ought to respect his amor propio. This essay examines my own conflicted relationship with my father and my attempts to navigate the complex terrain of amor propio, as a Filipina, feminist/peminist, dutiful daughter. Filipino immigrant families face distinct challenges within family life owing to globalization, colonialism, and racism, so I find Jane Addams's social ethics of filial relations helpful in framing the tension between individual and social claims within the specific cultural values expected of Filipina women as dutiful daughters. Addams's feminist social sensibilities in her work at Hull House were attuned to the plight of daughters and the conflicting claims of the family emergent within the crowded immigrant neighborhoods in Chicago. She was able to articulate and sympathetically understand the generational divide within immigrant families at Hull House and sought to bridge these differences within the context of the family. I reflect on her work in my own experience as a dutiful Filipina daughter.

Fostering food equity in an immigrant neighborhood of New York City during COVID-19

Food equity includes the right to food that is cul­turally appropriate. Immigrant neighborhoods can be sites of contestation over who participates in the production, distribution, and consumption of food. Manhattan’s Chinatown is a good example of a neighborhood where food is central to its com­merce, cultural heritage, and reputation as a tourist destination. The coronavirus’ origin in China caused imme­diate material impact on Chinese restaurants and food purveyors in New York City as well as in other cities with major populations of Chinese people. Chinatown suffered disproportionate closures of its grocery stores, restaurants, and produce vendors due to COVID-19 as compared to other neighbor­hoods in NYC. The grassroots response to this crisis is a reminder that people have the power to use food to assert the society that they desire, to shape a highly contested urban space, and to claim their right to the city.

Impacts of Multiscale Racial Concentration on Neighborhood Foreclosure Risk in Immigrant Gateway Metropolitan Areas

Scholars define emerging gateway metropolitan areas in the United States as regions in which immigrant communities settled after the 1990s. Historically, immigrant and minority neighborhoods are characterized by exclusion from conventional sources of financial capital––factors which compound risks associated with residential instability and foreclosure. Yet, these new gateways may offer protection from foreclosure due to the relative affordability of housing and concentration of racial and ethnic and class advantages. We examine whether foreclosure risk is mediated through spatial processes, race, nativity, and class. We find that race and nativity play a major role in mediating risk across immigrant gateways. Neighborhoods with higher levels of Asian concentration presented lower risk, regardless of nativity and income. In contrast, Latino foreclosure risk varied by nativity, income, and gateway. Emerging gateways are also associated with higher foreclosure risk. Our findings inform resurgent ethnicity theory and how middle–class immigrant neighborhoods offer improved socioeconomic outcomes without relying on White areas as a standard for immigrant integration.

Perceptions, People, and Places: Influences on Cycling for Latino Immigrants and Implications for Equity

The recent growth in cycling in the United States has paralleled a growth in the diversity of cyclists, but what encourages people to bicycle is not the same across all demographic groups. This study uses intercept survey data from predominately Latino-immigrant neighborhoods to understand how social ecological motivations for cycling differ for immigrants and U.S.-born residents. Both perceptions of cycling and social relationships with cyclists are strong predictors of cycling, and more strongly so for immigrants. Planning that supports both social and physical infrastructure may help meet the needs of diverse cyclists and promote equity.

Ethnicity and US Neighborhoods

Ethnicity is a concept employed to understand the social, cultural, and political processes whereby immigrants and their children cease to be “foreign” and yet retain practices and networks that connect them, at least imaginatively, with places of origin. From an early juncture in American history, ethnic neighborhoods were an important part of such processes. Magnets for new arrivals, city neighborhoods both emerged from and reinforced connections among people of common origins. Among the first notable immigrant neighborhoods in American cities were those composed of people from the German-speaking states of Europe. In the second half of the 19th century, American cities grew rapidly and millions of immigrants arrived to the country from a wider array of origins; neighborhoods such as the New York’s Jewish Lower East Side and San Francisco’s Chinatown supported dense and institutionally complex ethnic networks. In the middle decades of the 20th century, immigration waned as a result of legislative restriction, economic depression, and war. Many former immigrant neighborhoods emptied of residents as cities divided along racial lines and “white ethnics” dispersed to the suburbs. However, some ethnic enclaves endured, while others emerged after the resumption of mass immigration in the 1960s. By the turn of the 21st century ethnic neighborhoods were once again an important facet of American urban life, although they took new forms within the reconfigured geography and economy of a suburbanized nation.