This Land Is Our Land: Immigrants and Power in Miami (review)

This is a useful book for both advanced undergraduate and graduate seminars on race and ethnic relations. It is a highly readable and perceptive account of relations between Latin American and Caribbean immigrants, who, in one generation, have transformed Miami from a sleepy southern town to a cosmopolitan "gateway" city, and longer-established groups, specifically whites and African Americans. Overall, it represents an important piece of a growing body of sociological research over the last decade demonstrating that in the era of the "new racial and ethnic diversity" Miami extends the analysis of intergroup relations into uncharted territory.

The authors skillfully use participant observation to assess how the unique characteristics of Miami, for example, the numerical preponderance of racial/ethnic minorities and the unprecedented socioeconomic success of some in the first generation — including, most conspicuously, Cubans — advance our understanding of the dynamics of assimilation. Indeed, in Miami, these characteristics have turned the assimilation process upside down. For example, first-generation immigrants, rather than on a trajectory that will eventuate in becoming "mainstream" Americans, have gained control of many of Miami's key institutions. As a result, Latin Americans have made the greatest inroads with other recent arrivals, such as Colombians, Dominicans, and Haitians, now making advances, though in a more limited way. Meanwhile, whites struggle to maintain influence in some key institutions and African Americans continue largely as disenfranchised and second-class citizens.

Significantly, while often reading like a lively journalistic account, this volume contains much sound and innovative sociological analysis. The authors analyze assimilation as an interactive process across three institutional domains — civic and business power, education, and the workplace. This, of course, stands in contrast to the imagery of assimilation as a one-way street in which immigrants progressively adopt that which is native as a precursor to socioeconomic success. Overall, the key explanatory variable driving the analyses of interaction, and the path along which assimilation proceeds across each of the three domains, is power, a key sociological concept that has remained insufficiently integrated into sociological analyses of assimilation. In fact, the authors' explicit use of power as the key variable allows them to identify the range of paths along which assimilation may proceed.

The authors document that intergroup relations inevitably produce "transculturation," in which immigrants and Americans adapt to each other. However, the degree of transculturation among both immigrants and natives is a function of power relations that vary across institutional domains. In this vein, most interesting to me was the authors' analyses of elite governance in Miami. Specifically, white leaders have engaged (albeit reluctantly after waiting for Latinos to adopt "mainstream" values and culture) in a process of "reverse acculturation," heralding Miami as the capital of Latin America and learning Spanish and adopting Latino culture in response to the growing numbers and power of Latino elites. Similarly, African Americans continue to have influence over Haitian children in the sphere of education. Specifically, Haitian adolescents have undergone "segmentary" assimilation, that is, assimilation to a particular segment of American culture — namely, that of inner-city poor African American youth — by virtue of being a numerical minority and exerting little influence in the same schools attended in poor areas of the city. Finally, across a range of industries, the racial/ethnic composition of managers and supervisors by workplace structures socioeconomic rewards, in part, on the basis of language usage and cultural propinquity.

In sum, as the authors point out, Miami is a harbinger of interethnic relations in other parts of the U.S. Accordingly, the dynamics of assimilation should be increasingly complex in a growing number of geographic areas. This book is important in helping to identify the formula for the increasingly complex patterns of assimilation and, hopefully, spurring research to test its adequacy in various geographic locales.