CNN recently featured an article by Tomás R. Jiménez, an assistant professor of sociology at Stanford University and an Irvine Fellow at the New America Foundation, who wrote about how “Mexican-Americans have deep ties to the U.S.”

Jiménez begins:

Just about any celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15 – October 15) will highlight the diversity among Hispanics. They come from different parts of the Spanish-speaking world, have settled in various areas of the United States, have distinctive customs and come in all shapes and colors.

But an often overlooked difference among Hispanics relates to how many generations back they trace their roots in U.S. history.

Hispanics are not just immigrants or the U.S.-born children of immigrants. They are also Americans with deep family histories in the United States. This is especially true of the Mexican-origin population, the largest Hispanic subgroup and one that has been continually replenished by immigrant newcomers for a century.

He continues:

Truly knowing what it means to be a person of Mexican origin requires understanding the experiences of the nearly 3 in 10 (8.5 million) Mexican-Americans who were born in the United States to U.S.-born parents.

These later-generation Mexican Americans’ experience in the United States, though rooted in a distant past, is nonetheless deeply affected by current and uninterrupted immigration from their ancestral homeland.

In some ways, Mexican Americans have lived what amounts to a classic tale of assimilation.

They speak English (and no Spanish in the majority of cases), intermarry in large numbers, live in ethnically mixed neighborhoods, work in just about every imaginable profession, are honored on Memorial Day and Veterans Day, occupy important political positions and are highly patriotic. But ongoing Mexican immigration puts a twist on this classic assimilation tale, making “Mexicanness” relevant to later-generation Mexican-Americans in both problematic and enjoyable ways.

It can be tough being a member of an ethnic group that is so synonymous with immigration. Even if their immigrant ancestors came early in the 20th century, continuous immigration means that Mexican Americans are never safe from erroneous assumptions that they are foreigners.

Jiménez concludes:

As we celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month and recognize all of the diversity among Hispanics, it begs the question: How do we know what it means to be Hispanic?

The answer can only be arrived at by appreciating the experiences of those Hispanics whose families have called the United States home for several generations and those who more recently have come to call this land their home. No matter how deep or shallow their roots extend into American history, what almost all Hispanics have in common is that immigration profoundly defines their experience.

Read more of his fascinating article at CNN.com.

In an article entitled, “First Blood: Introducing Menstrual Activism,” Salon.com explores the ‘negative cultural stance toward menstruation’ and what is being done to counter it.

The background, from Salon.com:

Every woman has one. Not what you’re thinking — that too, yes, but I am referring to a menstruation horror story. A bright blood stain blooming on the back of white jeans, a first period that has the audacity to arrive during gym class or one that colors a yellow swimsuit red while you are waterskiing with your grandfather, as happened to Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, the editor of “My Little Red Book.”… But does the embarrassment many women feel arise from a negative cultural stance toward menstruation? And do we need a concerted effort to address it?

In an article published in the Guardian on Friday, writer Kira Cochrane situates “My Little Red Book” at the center of a new wave, as it were, of “menstrual activism.” (The movement is also called “radical menstruation,” “menstrual anarchy” or “menarchy.”) The term, she writes, “is used to describe a whole range of actions,” such as “simple efforts to speak openly about periods, radical affronts to negative attitudes, and campaigns for more environmentally friendly sanitary products,” since a woman could create her own personal landfill with the 11,400 tampons she uses in her lifetime. (What I want to know is: Who counted?)

The sociological commentary:

Chris Bobel, a women’s studies professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the author of an upcoming book, “New Blood: Third Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation,” explains that many “menstrual activists begin by thinking, wait a minute! Do we have to regard our period as something dirty? Do we have to greet a girl’s first period with silence?” According to Cochrane, these women are attempting to take “the shame out of periods,” to overcome the supposed “menstrual taboo.”

But are significant changes really happening?

But the greatest indicator that the cultural attitude toward menstruation has shifted may be the ads for “feminine products.” Ads have ceased to be so euphemistic you have no idea what product is being peddled (“Be free and active!”). The latest from Tampax are hilariously direct in their wink-wink indirectness. Mother Nature (played by Catherine Lloyd Burns) offers a “monthly gift” — a box wrapped in red paper, a symbol obvious enough to please teenage boys and dissertation writers alike — to various women (in one ad, it’s Serena Williams) at inopportune moments. When primetime viewers are savvy enough about menstruation to get in-jokes about periods and blood, it’s a safe bet that the stigma has eased.

Those who prefer to remain quiet about the subject may not be evincing gynophobia so much as conversational etiquette. It may be an act of modesty, not of shame. People don’t much discuss erectile dysfunction or bowel problems either, and not for reasons of gender, or because those bodily processes are particularly taboo. When menstruation is a relevant subject between people — girlfriends and boyfriends, husbands and wives, female friends — it’s not generally treated as humiliating or distasteful. And indeed, women don’t seem to feel much fear about talking about it. Case in point: “My Little Red Book,” for which 90-odd female writers agreed to share their stories.

Read more.

Yesterday the Washington Post ran a story on the newly released census data comparing at-home mothers with those who work full time.

The Post reports:

In her article today, Washington Post staff writer Donna St. George reports that a recent census survey shows stay-at-home moms tend to be younger and less educated, with lower family incomes. So why does popular perception hold that a rising number of highly educated women are leaving high-powered jobs to raise their kids?

St. George and Hunter College sociologist Pamela Stone were online Thursday, Oct. 1 at 1 p.m. ET to discuss the new report and what it says about mothering.

An excerpt from the interview:

Arlington, Va.: If it’s not true that women are leaving the workforce to raise their kids, why do you think it’s such a persistent myth? Where do you think it comes from?

Pamela Stone: Why the media fascination? Women who leave successful careers, typically in fields where they’re still minorities, are highly visible no matter what they do, and we tend to focus on exceptions, which these women are. Moreover, their actions seem to conform to traditional gender roles, hence reinforcing what we think we know. Finally, we expect women with solid educational credentials and successful careers to persist in them, so they’re not doing so is counterintuitive. All these things make for an element of surprise and newsworthiness. But I should note that these stories–women turning their backs on achievement to head home–have been around for a long time now, since the 1980s at least, and they all say the same thing. Some have called this evidence of media backlash. What I found in my research, by the way, was that the women I studied were NOT returning home primarily for family reasons, but were effectively being shut out of their jobs once they became moms.

—

San Francisco: To what degree has the myth that educated Moms are “opting out” of the workforce hurt women?

Pamela Stone: Good question. I think it hurts them and all women, by reinforcing the (erroneous) idea that they’re not committed to their work, that work is secondary, and that work and family are “separate spheres,” mutually exclusive. All the data show that women want both, that the vast majority of moms work, and that they need to work, contributing a good portion of household income and sometimes all of it. The opt-out myth, as I often say in my talks, lets employers “opt out” of doing something to really support working moms, making it possible to continue with their careers or easing the burden of work and family.

Read more.

Yesterday the New York Times reported on a new study indicating that at-home mothers rate themselves higher than working moms.

About the study:

The analysis, by the Pew Research Center, is based on several of their telephone polls, the most recent of which was conducted this summer and included 1,815 people 16 and older. It found that among the at-home mothers, 43 percent rated themselves 9 or 10, at the top of the scale, while 33 percent of working mothers did so.

“In perhaps the most powerful evidence of the cross-pressures that many working mothers feel every day,” the study said, “only 13 percent of moms who work full time say having a mother who works full time is the ideal situation for a young child.”

Conclusions with sociological commentary…

Women without a job outside the home are more likely to have an infant in the household and have less than a high school degree, the bureau found.

“It makes sense that the stay-at-homes are younger, as young people are more likely to be in school,” said Guillermina Jasso, a sociology professor at New York University.

Additional findings:

The Pew study found that 3 out of 10 stay-at-home mothers say family responsibilities keep them out of the labor force. While two-thirds of women with children 16 or younger work full time outside the home, most say they would prefer to work part time, the Pew study said.

The Pew study also found that in 66 percent of married couples with children under 18, both spouses were in the labor force.

The census data also revealed that the nation’s 5.6 million stay-at-home moms represent 24 percent of all married couples with children under 15.

Read more.

Yesterday USA Today ran a story about how ‘flocking’ behavior has now “landed on social networking sites” like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. The article integrates commentary from a number of different sociologists on this trend.

USA Today reports:

The interconnected web of our friends, family, neighbors and acquaintances may dominate our lives more than we know.

They’ve always been there, making up our social support systems. But now, largely thanks to the burgeoning popularity of online social networks like Facebook, researchers are discovering what a powerful influence our connections — both online and off — really have over our lives.

“Those of us who study social networks believe they matter — that things do spread along social networks,” says Claude Fischer, a sociology professor at the University of California-Berkeley.

Another sociologist adds…

“Social networking sites have brought social networks into people’s consciousness,” says Barry Wellman, a sociologist at the University of Toronto in Canada who started analyzing social networks in the 1960s and has expanded his studies to online.

The research:

For the most part, being part of a social network is good for you, research suggests. For example, a study in this month’s Scientific American Mind finds that social support and social networking offer benefits, from additional resilience to greater life satisfaction to reducing the risk of health problems. Other studies in the past two years have found that feeling like a part of a larger group helps in stroke recovery and memory retention and boosts overall well-being.

“In many ways, human beings behave like flocks of birds or schools of fish,” says Nicholas Christakis, a physician and Harvard University sociologist who is co-author of a new book,Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, out today.

“So many things we normally think of as individualistic — like what our body size is, or what we think about a political topic, or whether we are happy — are actually collective phenomena,” says Christakis, 47.

Whether they’re face-to-face or virtual, social networks influence human behavior and shape everything from finances to the way people vote, say Christakis and co-author James Fowler, a social scientist at the University of California-San Diego.

The authors suggest that the world is governed by what they call “three degrees of influence” — that is, your friend’s friend’s friend, most likely someone you don’t even know — who indirectly influences your actions and emotions.

For example, when a friend starts exercising more, “I change my mind about how much I should be exercising or I share stories with my other friends who are influenced to do the same. You either change your behavior or you transmit information about the behavior to others, who change their behavior,” says Fowler, 39.

Read more…

The Boston Globe ran a story over the weekend about fascinating research by sociologist Diego Gambetta…

In his new book, ”Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate” (Princeton University Press), sociologist and Mafia expert Diego Gambetta explores this subculture and unearths an unspoken language among bad men. He offers insight on how mobsters, pedophiles, prisoners, and other shady characters earn one another’s trust and prove their mettle. And what he documents is both disturbing and, sometimes, hilarious.

It turns out–according to Gambetta, a native Italian and a sociology professor at the University of Oxford–that there are really practical reasons why Sicilian mobsters like to use nicknames, why pedophiles might out themselves to others online, why prison inmates fight (or don’t fight), and why mobsters from Japan to Russia might be out there, right now, reciting lines from ”The Godfather,” such as, ”Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.”

Excerpts from the Globe’s interview with Gambetta:

IDEAS: Based on your research, what would people find most surprising about how people communicate in the criminal underworld?

GAMBETTA: I would say doing things that would seem irrational to us. Like revealing bad things that you’ve done. Or hurting yourself. Or hurting innocent people. I have a chapter on self-harm, which is probably the most unexpected thing you find.

IDEAS: What are some examples of ways criminals compromise themselves to prove their toughness or trustworthiness to another criminal?

GAMBETTA: One thing you can look at is how pedophile rings on the Internet work. Some of them work by asking new members to contribute previously unknown photographs to their website. In that sense, they contribute to the website of pedophile photographs, but at the same time they’re also giving information that they themselves have done that. So they are unlikely to be undercover agents. And with respect to physical harm, the best domain in which criminals have to prove their toughness, day in and day out, is prison. You find a lot of self-harm in prison.

Read more of the interview…

A recent story in the Metro News (Vancouver, Canada) caught my attention…

A group that tells people how to kill themselves has been barred from presenting at Vancouver’s public library over concerns that the library could be held liable for helping people to commit suicide.

Paul Whitney, the city’s librarian, said he cancelled the booking — which tells people how to kill themselves, what drug to buy and where to buy it — after legal and law enforcement advisers told him it would violate the Criminal Code.

Whitney said it was inappropriate for the publicly funded library to be putting itself in that position of “undo risk.”

About the group:

But Dr. Philip Nitschke, director of the Australian right-to-die group Exit International, said the group does not encourage people to commit suicide, but rather it gives them end-of-life information to better consider their options.

“This is an issue of vital importance to elderly Canadians … The library is a place where one would expect the free impartation and discussion of ideas and information,” said Nitschke, via an Internet video link from Australia yesterday.

The sociological perspective…

Russel Ogden, a criminologist at Kwantlen Polytechnic University who has studied assisted suicide in Canada for the past 20 years, said talking about suicide is not an offence.

There is evidence, he added, that discussing suicide can even act as a deterrent.

Read more.

The New York Times ran a story at the end of last week about the media flurry surrounding celebrity deaths over the last several months. The article takes a closer look at the context and meaning of all the alarm.

The trend…

ONE after the other, they were dying: Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon, all in the same week earlier this summer. Next were Walter Cronkite, John Hughes and, in late August, at a pitch point of public grief, Senator Edward M. Kennedy. Then on Monday, Patrick Swayze died after a widely publicized struggle with pancreatic cancer, only to be followed by Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary Wednesday night.

It has been, by all appearances, the endless funereal season, with a news media swarm on the departed and a parade of nostalgic tributes, as bloggers and Twitterers went on “celebrity death watch.” Even before Senator Kennedy succumbed to brain cancer Aug. 25, columnists wrote pleading laments like one in The Washington Post that said, “God, please stop taking away our celebrities.”

But the trend may be exaggerated.

But in fact, no more celebrities had died than in past summers, according to Lou Ferrara, a managing editor in charge of entertainment and lifestyle coverage for The Associated Press.

The perception of numerous celebrity deaths was not supported by the number of obituaries the news agency wrote, he said, because it was not a matter of how many died, but who.

What does all of this mean? The sociologist explains…

This summer could come to be known as the summer when baby boomers began to turn to the obituary pages first, to face not merely their own mortality or ponder their legacies, but to witness the passing of legends who defined them as a tribe, bequeathing through music, culture, news and politics a kind of generational badge that has begun to fray.

“This is a historical development in cultural history,” said Todd Gitlin, 66, the sociologist and author of “The Sixties,” who teaches at the Columbia University School of Journalism. “It’s the ebbing of figures who have a wide enough span of appreciation and admiration so they appeal to significant numbers of people, like incarnations of virtue. So people take a new measure of themselves when they ask, ‘Will there ever be anybody else like X’ ”?

Read more.

The Chicago Tribune ran a story this week about the rash of bad behavior by politicians, celebrities, and athletes alike in recent months.

The breakdown:

After watching South Carolina Republican Rep. Joe Wilsonheckle the president during a joint session of Congress,Serena Williams cuss out a line judge at the U.S. Open andKanye West snatch the microphone from a 19-year-old newcomer, to champion a much-honored megastar, on theMTV Video Music Awards, you may have had the following thought:

What the (bleep) is wrong with people these days?

Those three incidents during the past week represent the latest trifecta of public incivility in a year in which town-hall health-care discussions routinely have devolved into shouting matches, President Barack Obama has been compared to and depicted as Adolf Hitler and figures across the political spectrum have flung epithets unprintable in a family newspaper.

The incidents, notable as much for their breaches of decorum as for their content, follow a general pattern: incident, outrage, hundreds of thousands of YouTube hits, apology and, maybe, punishment. What’s unclear is whether such outbursts are signs of shifting times or just a news cluster that gives us an excuse to wring our hands and look back at polite ol’ days that may never have existed.

Sociologist Gary Alan Fine is asked for his comments, and thoughtfully responds that this is likely not a new pattern of behavior, but a new pattern of interest…

Northwestern University sociology professor Gary Fine was reluctant to draw big conclusions, noting that Williams follows a long line of athletes — among them tennis players Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe — who have berated umpires, that presidents have been heckled in some form at least since Lyndon Johnson and that the British Parliament shows far less respect toward its head of government.

What the current controversies really indicate, Fine said, is what kind of news most people prefer.

“People like to pretend that they care about policy, but they really care about people and stories,” Fine said, noting that the Wilson outburst “provided a story about what is otherwise a complicated, confusing and, dare I say, boring debate about the details of health care.”

Read more.

The San Francisco Chronicle ran a story earlier this week about a recent recommendation by the NCAA to screen college athletes for the gene that can cause sickle cell disease. This has resulted in a significant amount of heated debate including testimony from experts who claim the testing is unnecessary and highlight the possibility of unintended discrimination against minority athletes.

About the issue:

Sickle cell disease is a blood disorder that can cause severe pain, stroke and death, but sickle cell trait is almost always benign, and many people never know whether they carry the gene. About 8 percent of black people and about 1 percent of Latinos have sickle cell trait, but it’s rare among white people, affecting only about 1 in 10,000.

Several high-profile cases of athletes dying during extreme workouts have led some researchers to believe that sickle cell trait can be fatal. The case with the most impact was the 2006 death of 19-year-old Dale Lloyd II, a Rice University football player who had sickle cell trait and collapsed after a physically intense practice.

Lloyd’s family filed suit, saying the university should have tested the young man. As part of a settlement, the NCAA made its recommendation to screen athletes, which was announced in June.

A medical opinion:

But sickle cell experts, including at Children’s Hospital Oakland, say the action is misguided. There is little science to back up the assumption that sickle cell trait causes death, they say, and screening players could do more harm than good for black and other minority athletes. “A coach is going to be able to say, ‘Even though this kid is great, do I really want to put him out there as the quarterback or starting player and take the risk of something happening?’ ” said Dr. Elliott Vichinsky, a sickle cell expert and director of hematology and oncology at Children’s Hospital Oakland.

And a sociological opinion:

The United States has a long history of discrimination against people with sickle cell trait, said Troy Duster, a sociologist at UC Berkeley and New York University. In the 1960s, people who tested positive weren’t allowed into the Air Force Academy, and into the ’70s people were denied insurance or certain jobs, he said.

It’s irresponsible to screen people when there’s little scientific evidence that the gene causes death and no specific precautions athletes can take to protect themselves, Duster said.

“When you screen someone, the question is, for what? What are you going to do with that information?” Duster said. “The NCAA is saying they want education, but education requires research, and there’s no research.”

Read more.