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Over the last five decades, immigration has profoundly transformed the population of metropolitan New York, long divided by race and class. The almost-forgotten 'underclass' debate established that New York was the nation's capital of concentrated poverty, which grew significantly worse during the 1970s and 1980s. Though more recent data show that New York has achieved a remarkable turnaround since 1990, most probably associated with immigration, it remains a city of economic extremes and stubbornly high poverty. Concern about where new immigrants—and their children—might fit into this matrix of urban inequality led several leading social scientists to hypothesise that some members of the second generation would be downwardly mobile. To investigate this possibility, in 1999 and 2000, the Immigrant Second Generation in Metropolitan New York (ISGMNY) surveyed 3,415 young people aged 18 to 32 years, from five immigrant and three native-born racial and ethnic backgrounds, about their life trajectories. This paper conducts an analysis of the contextual effects of the neighbourhoods in which respondents grew up on their later experiences in terms of educational attainment and labour market success. Using OLS and HLM modelling, we find small but consistent and theoretically interesting effects. In particular, growing up in a poor neighbourhood has a negative effect on later outcomes, while growing up in a black neighbourhood does not, once poverty is taken into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Afrocuban cultural practices in New York City, specifically the 'folkloric' music and dance complex known as rumba. I look at these cultural performances as arenas in which black Cubans from the post-1980 migratory cohorts (among others) craft and negotiate identifications that are shaped—discursively and spatially—by the larger social contexts, but are also sites for contesting hegemonic constructions of Cuban identity. Although most participants claim they are not political, I argue that they are engaged in a politics of recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With micro data from the US Census for 1980 and 1990, we document the growth of recent immigrants across New York metropolitan area job structure and test for the effects of recent immigrants on mean job earnings for native-born white, black and Hispanic male workers. During the 1980s foreign-born workers increased from 31 to almost 50 per cent of all workers in 'secondary' jobs, the lowest paying jobs that employ about one-third of the region's workforce. While employment trends for nativeborn minorities and recent immigrants were positively related among the best professional, managerial and technical jobs in the 1980s, there is evidence of replacement for all three native-born groups in the less skilled (subordinate primary and secondary) parts of the metropolitan job structure. We find negative effects of the growth in recent immigrant share of job employment on the change in earnings for white and black native-born groups, but little or no overall effect on Hispanic workers or recent immigrants themselves. Downward wage effects were strongest in secondary jobs for black men and among good blue-collar jobs (subordinate primary) jobs for Hispanic men. Among the best jobs, recent immigrants show higher wage growth where their employment growth was fastest, suggested a positive 'niche' effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]