Civic Hopes and Political Realities: Immigrants, Community Organizations, and Political Engagement

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments There is perhaps no greater time than the present to be examining the contours of immigrant civic participation. The chapters in this volume bring a variety of disciplinary perspectives to analyze the extent to which the civic hopes of community involvement lead to political benefits for immigrant groups and immigrant -serving organizations. The idea for this volume arose in the summer of 2005. We had both applied separately for grants from the Russell Sage Foundation on the topic of immigrant political incorporation, and thought that—given the emerging nature of this field of inquiry and our common interests—we could combine energies on an ambitious project together, and also draw in people working on similar projects elsewhere. After the first year of data collection for the Immigrant Civic Engagement Project, we broached the idea of an edited volume with colleagues in varied fields. Given the richness of our data collection efforts , we also wanted a volume that would plumb the intricacies of particular metropolitan areas and ethnic groups featured in the Immigrant Civic Engagement Project, which includes localities in the metropolitan areas of San Jose, Los Angeles, Orange County, Chicago, Central New Jersey, and Washington, D.C. We put together a proposal, a draft introductory chapter, and gathered the enthusiastic involvement of scholars across the country. There was, however, one missing ingredient: we needed to get together to present working drafts and to make sure that the edited volume would hang well together. The Russell Sage Foundation provided that important link, as Karthick spent a semester on a visiting fellowship in the fall of 2006 and was granted a request to convene a working conference for contributors to the volume. We all spent two days together in New York in December, making presentations, commenting on each others’ work, and soliciting the input from scholars at the foundation and in the region. Thus, for several reasons, we are grateful first to the Russell Sage Foundation for supporting our research, as well as those of others studying immigrant political incorporation. Thanks especially to Aixa Cintrón-Vélez, Eric Wanner, and the board of the foundation for encouraging research in this area, and to the various reviewers of our project and the edited book. Thanks also to Suzanne Nichols for shepherding this book from its initial proposal to final publication . At our working conference in New York, we benefited greatly from the involvement of Aixa Cintrón-Vélez, Orly Clergé, Héctor Cordero-Guzmán, Katherine Ewing, Michael Fortner, Jane Junn, José Itzigsohn, Jitka Malečková, Pyong Gap Min, John Mollenkopf, and Dorian Warren. In developing our theoretical framework for this volume and the larger project, we also benefited from presentations at Syracuse University, the UCLA Migration Study Group, and at the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association and the American Sociological Association. Although we are surely forgetting the names of individuals who gave valuable feedback, we thank in particular Elizabeth Cohen, Adrian Favell, Rubén Hernández-León, Taeku Lee, Peggy Levitt, Melissa Michelson, Anthony Orum, Ricardo Ramirez, and Roger Waldinger. We also acknowledge the support of our home institutions in valuing collaborative , interdisciplinary efforts such as this edited volume, and to entitites such as the Hellman Family Faculty Fund, The Institute for Governmental Studies, and the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, all at UC Berkeley, and to the Public Policy Institute of California. The Immigrant Civic Engagement Project that inspired this volume would not have been successful without the assistance of truly exceptional research assistants. Some of these scholars have contributed their independent work in this volume, including Els de Graauw, Shannon Gleeson, and Rebecca Hamlin, while others such as Sofya Aptekar, Laurencio Sanguino, and Celia Viramontes have contributed chapters based on this larger data collection effort. In addition, we acknowledge the expert assistance of Kristel Acacio, Soo Jin Kim, Adam Orlovich, and Jennifer Paluch. Finally, we thank our respective families for granting us the time to work on this volume and for continuing to provide encouragement and patience as we continue to work on publications from the Immigrant Civic Engagement Project. Our spouses (Brinda Sarathy and David St. Jean) have been particularly understanding in this regard, and for that we continue to be ever so grateful. We dedicate this volume to all of our families, of varying immigrant generations, and especially to children like Omji, Maxime, and Félix, who represent the future of political voice and civic engagement. x Acknowledgments ...