Encountering American faultlines: Race, class, and Dominican incorporation in Providence
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Encountering American faultlines: R a c e , c l a s s , a n d D o m i n i c a n i n c o rpo ra t i o n i n P r ovi d e n c e Jose´ Itzigsohn Russell Sage Foundation Publications, New York, NY, USA, 2008, hardcover, 238pp., $37.50, ISBN: 978-0871544483 Latino Studies (2010) 8, 286–288. doi:10.1057/lst.2010.14
As the nation engages in a political and social debate on immigration, scholars continue to grapple with questions surrounding the incorporation of immigrants into American society. Encountering American Faultlines makes an important contribution to the field of immigration research and the study of immigrant assimilation into the American social and racial structure. In his book, Itzigsohn is concerned with the question of how immigrants become American. Through his study of Dominican immigrants in Providence, Rhode Island, Itzigsohn arrives at an understanding of the obstacles immigrants face and the instruments they use to overcome these barriers. Itzigsohn’s study of the Dominican community is holistic in its approach, covering both the socio-economic insertion of the group as well as the identity formation and transformation of Dominican immigrants. In Part I, Itzigsohn lays out the theoretical framework of his analysis and introduces the reader to the Dominican population in Providence, arriving at his theoretical approach through a close examination of the current
sociological literature on assimilation. For Itzigsohn, new assimilation theory (Alba and Nee, 2003) lacks a deep analysis of the racialization and internal class structure encountered by immigrants, whereas segmented assimilation theory (Portes and Zhou, 1993) fails to explain how upward mobility within immigrant communities is attainable. Itzigsohn proposes a new framework to study immigrant incorporation, which he calls stratified ethnoracial incorporation. Focusing on the empirical convergences of the different theories, Itzigsohn argues that the intersection of race and class stratification should be the starting point for analyzing the immigrant experience. A stratified ethnoracial incorporation approach to the study of immigration “emphasizes class and race as dynamic social forces that shape the trajectories of immigrants and their children” (14). Through this framework, the process of incorporation for low-skilled minority immigrants is characterized by three trends: first, immigrants incorporate into a society where minorities are more likely than the majority to occupy the lower end of the racialized class structure;
r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1476-3435 Latino Studies Vol. 8, 2, 286–288 www.palgrave-journals.com/lst/
Book Review
second, ethnoracial groups establish an internal class stratification; and third, immigrant groups develop and sustain ethnoracial identities and communities. The socio-economic insertion of Dominican immigrants in Providence is discussed in Part II of the book. The Dominican community in Providence is emblematic of the patterns of ethnoracial stratified incorporation, where existing racial and cl
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