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Latino educational gains over time and income mobility portend a burgeoning Latino middle class. In this article, we critically review scholarship on the Latino middle class, from theoretical perspectives aiming to explain Latino experiences to empirical research investigating mechanisms that promote, and barriers that thwart, upward mobility. Studies suggest that the Latino middle class is distinctive for many reasons—from structural barriers to asset accumulation, legal status precarity for self or family, financial responsibility for class-disadvantaged kin, and negative controlling images that bog down class ascension. Scholars' recent efforts to decouple middle-class status from Whiteness is an important contribution that undercuts the notion that melding into Whiteness is the desired outcome of middle-class integration. In addition to the utility of education to upward mobility, we contend that studies of middle-class pathways should expand to recognize that Latinos are engaging in workarounds—career paths not requiring a bachelor's degree, such as business ownership or credentialed professions. Workarounds are an intervention that accounts for routes to mobility that are eclipsed by conventional conceptions of mobility. Ultimately, we argue that Latinos are attaining middle-class status even as they are racialized, thereby expanding the minoritized middle class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Latinas represent one of the fastest‐growing groups of entrepreneurs in the United States, yet they are understudied in entrepreneurship research. Through three case studies of middle‐class and wealthy Latinas, we explore how ethnorace, gender, immigration, class, and community shape their entrepreneurial endeavors as they practice what we refer to as feminist ethnoracial entrepreneurship–entrepreneurial endeavors that aim to empower, assist, and/or build community amongst women through ethnic and gender‐specific services and experiences. Feminist ethnoracial entrepreneurship, in theory, aims to mitigate ethnoracial and gender inequality. Our participants draw from their lived experiences to inform their entrepreneurial motivations to make a profit and a social difference. By incorporating research centered on feminist approaches to entrepreneurship, we show how gender and the ethnoracial context combine with class to shape Latina entrepreneurs' ethnoracial capitalism and community empowerment practices at the levels of institutions, in community spaces, and markets as they navigate broader structures of racial and gender inequality. Our participants challenge structural ethnoracial and gender exclusion via entrepreneurial endeavors in finance that aim to address gender and racial gaps in access to commercial capital, by opening Latino coffee shops rooted in community and feminist ideology, and by fashioning physical and digital makers markets grounded in Chicana/Latina Feminisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research examines Latino economic elites in Los Angeles who engage in 'ethnoracial philanthropy' – giving to or creating ethnic-centric organisations that focus on alleviating socioeconomic inequalities. We draw on 65 in-depth interviews to provide insights into the ethnoracial educational structures created by Latino elites to facilitate the mobility of Latino youth. We compare three ways in which philanthropy manifests: via the creation of Latino scholarship funds; ethnic-centric charter schools in low-income Latino neighbourhoods; Latino youth leadership programmes comprised of college students from the top 100 universities. These institutions may serve to widen the path to inclusion by creating a distinct ethnoracial integration path via education, contrasting with assimilation theory and the minority culture of mobility framework. However, the focus on education, and not on other issues, benefits those who reproduce the elites' image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on qualitative data drawn from Latino elites, Latino entrepreneurs, and two Latino banks in Los Angeles, we theorize the concept of ethnoracial capitalism , which occurs within racialized groups when group members commodify ethnicity through the sale of culturally-specific goods or when institutions and services are imbued with ethnicity and assumed to form the basis of profitable financial exchanges. We investigate why Latino elites establish Latino-centric banks, and we draw on the perspectives of Latino-elites and middle- and upper-class entrepreneurs to examine whether shared ethnoracial and class resources breed solidarity between Latino elite-owned and -operated banks and the Latino entrepreneurs they target. We find that structural constraints, the state, and class conflict thwarts the possibility of sustaining banking practices rooted in ethnoracial solidarity. Our research provides insights into the fraught intra-ethnic relationships that can occur within ethnoracial capitalistic endeavors that are situated within racist racial projects, such as the U.S. banking system. Ultimately, the sole presence of capital and ethnic financial institutions in minoritized communities does not remedy economic inequalities born of White supremacist racial projects and racially stratified systems, such as U.S. financial markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]