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Pilsen, a neighborhood on Chicago's near Southwest side, has served as the principal port of entry for a series of immigrant groups. Most recently, in the 1950s, Mexicans began to move into the area in large numbers. Pilsen is today home to the largest Mexican-American community in Chicago and is known as the "heart" of the city's Mexican population. It is emphatically marked as a "Mexican" neighborhood, with streets filled with Mexican-themed murals, museums, galleries, and other forms of material culture. The extreme density of symbolic markers of Mexico in Pilsen is surprising given the fairly recent settlement of Mexicans in the neighborhood and the fact that Mexicans and Mexican Americans live in many other parts of the city. Why is Pilsen such an important symbolic center of the community? This paper considers how four different perspectives from the sociology of culture might help us understand the making and meanings of "Mexican-ness" in Pilsen. The discussion of the use of Mexican culture in Pilsen demonstrates that culture can be a useful tool in claims-making projects and can draw attention to economic concerns. When making arguments in class terms is ineffective, calling attention to distinctions based on lifestyle or ethnicity may be seen as more legitimate, even when these map closely onto class. But culture also has a flexible and inclusive element to it and may be subject to commercialization. Cultural production in public space can thus have contradictory consequences. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the utility of “segmented assimilation” theory in predicting the academic outcomes of second generation immigrant students. It uses the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study to regress students’ GPA on measures of “selective acculturation,” particularly fluent bilingualism. An initial OLS regression offers slight support for the idea that fluent bilingual students have more positive academic outcomes than English monolingual students. A multinomial logistic regression then assesses predictors of fluent bilingualism, finding that being Latino and attending a private bilingual school are the main positive predictors of this language category. Finally, the paper considers the argument of segmented assimilation theory that selective acculturation should matter for those students from families with lower socioeconomic status, who are theoretically most “at risk” of “dissonant acculturation”. Interactions intended to demonstrate differences in the influence of selected acculturation variables for Latinos and for those students who are “at risk” were found not to be significant. The analysis therefore offers limited support for hypotheses motivated by segmented assimilation theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of recent proposals to reform US immigration law, it is particularly important to understand how immigrants receive and respond to legal information. This paper uses a 1996 change to the US Immigration and Nationality Act, which ?streamlined? deportation procedures and raised the burden long-term undocumented residents must meet to avoid being removed from the United States, as a window on the processes of information-sharing and decision-making that shape the impact of immigration laws. To understand who this particular legal change affected and how, it examines deportation proceedings from an ethnographic perspective, addressing two questions. First, how did long-time US residents currently in deportation proceedings get there in the first place, and what does this have to do with the way in which they understood their legal rights? Second, what happens when people encounter state bureaucracy? The ethnography first uncovers a number of factors which have created a disjuncture between immigrants? ?everyday? interpretations of the law and those made by legal professionals. It then describes the way in which decisions on deportation cases are made in court and the processes and resources that shape those decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]