The Price of Poverty: Money, Work, and Culture in the Mexican American Barrio (review)

For decades, the face of urban poverty has been synonymous with African American, but today, urban poverty has many faces that span the ethnic spectrum. The Price of Poverty explores urban poverty in two Mexican communities in California: "Guadalupe," a neighborhood in San José dominated by newly arrived foreign-born Mexicans; and "Chávez," a community in East Los Angeles characterized by native-born Mexican Americans. Drawing on nearly two years of ethnographic research, Dohan paints a rich portrait of the lives of working-poor Mexicans against the backdrop of deindustrialization, globalization, and continued immigration. Dohan focuses specifically on how the residents in each community generate income through work, illegal activities and public assistance, and shows that they often combine these resources to piece together a decent standard of living.

Differences abound between the residents of Guadalupe and Chávez, but there is one striking similarity –their commitment to the work ethic. Work gives them a sense of self-sufficiency and independence, and just as importantly, shields them from the stigma of welfare receipt. Moreover, they value work despite the fact that many hold jobs that pay poorly, provide little opportunity for advancement, offer only part-time hours and no security, and entail long and inconvenient commutes.

While residents in both neighborhoods value work, they view these low-wage jobs through different cultural orientations. Here, Dohan's comparative framework is particularly illuminating. While the residents in Guadalupe view minimum wage jobs as difficult, they believe that they represent a viable path to upward mobility. Because the foreign-born gauge the worthiness of their jobs through a "dual frame of reference" – that is, by measuring their wages against what they could earn in Mexico – they willingly take jobs that pay as little as $5 an hour. The residents in Chávez, however, are not foreign-born and their frame of reference is like that of other native-born Americans. While they, too, value employment, they recognize that $5 an hour cannot purchase new cars, market-rate rents, or a decent standard of living to which Americans of all hues have come to expect. Furthermore, the foreign-born residents of Guadalupe punctuate the daily grind of low wage work by planning yearly visits to Mexico and staying for weeks at a time, thereby giving them a much-needed reprieve from their routinized work days. By contrast, there is no end in sight of low wage work for native-born Mexicans.

Dohan's comparative framework also provides insight into the different ways that these communities engage in "illegal" activities to supplement their meager incomes. The Guadalupe residents "overwork" and purchase fake documents in order to secure higher paying and more stable jobs. In fact, Dohan estimates that about 40 percent of Guadalupe's residents lack legal documents. By contrast, the residents of Chávez engage in different types of "illegal" activity; they "hustle" by selling drugs, peddling stolen merchandise, stripping parts off cars, or stealing them altogether. While both strategies provide supplemental income, Dohan argues that they actually impede upward mobility in the long run. For instance, "hustling" often leads to arrest, incarceration, and violence. By contrast, "overworking" exacts a price of a different sort. While employers readily hire immigrants who work long hours for little pay, they are unwilling to promote employees –regardless of how hard-working they may be – if they disrupt their work routines by taking off to Mexico for several weeks at a time. Hence, residents in both communities pay the price of poverty.

While Dohan does an excellent job of demonstrating how the different income generating strategies ultimately provide little room for upward mobility, he neglects to explain how some are able to move up and out of these barrios. For instance, a Chávez resident, Charlie, slowed his drug sales when, after several years working in construction, he finally got his union card. Given the increased...