Newly arrived from Cuba, Angelica, Dora, Marina, and Damaris attempted to negotiate new surroundings and immigrant identities, building a sense of home for themselves and their families. Data from qualitative interviews, classroom observations, and focus group conversations revealed hopes that by acquiring English language skills, they would improve their quality of life in their new country. Struggles included personal factors situated in their pasts in Cuba and their new surrounds in the Miami Cuban exile enclave, contexts that were further complicated by uncertain expectations of new lives in Miami and the overwhelming task of learning a new language at a local adult education center.
Considers the association of cohabitation experience with externalizing behavior among children of Latina mothers whose ethnic origin is in Mexico, Puerto Rico, or the Dominican Republic. Children of Mexican-origin mothers had greater externalizing problems in childhood and adolescence when their mothers were born in the United States or had immigrated as minors. For children of Caribbean-origin mothers, being born to a cohabiting or married mother had a statistically equivalent association with externalizing behavior when mothers were born outside the mainland United States (Dominican and island-born Puerto Rican mothers). Children of mainland-born Puerto Rican mothers had more behavior problems when their mothers cohabited at birth.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
105 p., Situation analysis of children and their families in the Eastern Caribbean in: Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, British Virgin Island, Dominica, Grenada, Montserrat, St. Lucia, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Vincent and the Grenadines and the Turks and Caicos Islands.
