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.
Explores the relationship of family and demographic factors to the frequency of receiving emotional support and the frequency of engaging in negative interactions with family members (i.e., criticism, burden, and being taken advantage of). Overall, no significant differences were found between African Americans and Caribbean Blacks in the frequency of emotional support or negative interaction; several significant correlates (e.g., age, family closeness) were found for both groups.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
6 p., Argues the extension of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians -- and particularly the redesignation of the eligibility period -- demonstrates the best of what the Administration can do using its executive branch authority to improve the quality of people's lives. It demonstrates a commitment to good immigration policy and to "good government" policies such as greater transparency and coordination. In the Haitian context, the Department of Homeland Security should also implement a program to grant humanitarian parole to the estimated 105,000 Haitian already approved as beneficiaries of family-based visa petitions, just as has been done for Cubans under the Cuban Family Reunification Parole Program.
Several theories of stress exposure, including the stress process and the family stress model for economically disadvantaged families, suggest that family processes work similarly across race/ethnic groups. Much of this research, however, treats African-Americans as a monolithic group and ignores potential differences in family stress processes within race that may emerge across ethnic groups. This study examines whether family stress processes differ intraracially in African-American and Black Caribbean families.
Data from the National Survey of American Life are used to investigate relationship satisfaction and their relation to extended family relations (i.e., emotional support and negative interaction) among nationally representative samples of African American and Black Caribbean adults. The study contributes to the literature by focusing on two groups of unmarried persons -- those who are cohabiting and persons who are unmarried/non-cohabiting -- in addition to married persons.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
41 p., Three years after the devastating earthquake in Haiti, tens of thousands of people are still living in insecure and inadequate shelters. This report shows how Haiti's post-quake reconstruction is failing to protect and fulfill the right to adequate housing. Amnesty International has documented a pattern of forced evictions of internally displaced families, involving mass removals without notice. Forced evictions violate the rights of internally displaced people at all stages: threats prior to the eviction, violence during the eviction, and homelessness following the eviction.
Campaigning in 2007, Barack Obama promised to end restrictions on remittances and family travel to Cuba, resume "people-to-people" contracts, and engage Cuba on issues of mutual interest. As President, Obama has declared his desire to forge a new "equal partnership" with Latin America. Two months later, the 39th General Assembly of the Organization of American States voted to repeal the 1962 resolution that suspended Cuba fro its ranks.
Argues that the task for the researcher is attempting to understand how race and class differently interact in particular contexts. Concludes that a focus on Black Caribbean heritage families can further develop the concept of concerted cultivation, and demonstrate the complex ways in which, for these families, such a strategy is a tool of social reproduction but also functions as attempted protection against racism in White mainstream society.
The examination of Leonora Miano's work offers a great example of how, through literature, a new form of Negritude could be identified. This paper intends to highlight her American (including Caribbean) literary inspirations and how the rising Franco-Cameronese novelist has compounded them with her African upbringing and family ties which allows her to reflect on what she calls "Afropeaness".
Explores the challenges facing immigrant families as they adapt to the United States, as well as their many strengths, most notably high levels of marriage and family commitment. The authors examine differences by country of origin in the human capital, legal status, and social resources of immigrant families and describe their varied living arrangements, focusing on children of Mexican, Southeast Asian, and black Caribbean origin.
