Trauma and Uncertainty among Latinx Immigrant Communities
Center for Great Plains Studies
Author
04/19/2022
Added
18
Plays
Description
Part of the Reckoning & Reconciliation on the Great Plains summit.
Thomas W. Sanchez (Associate Professor, UNO)
"Immigration Irony: A Better Life Stymied by Law, Trauma, and Uncertainty"
The research examines the everyday life of Deferred Action Childhood Arrivals (DACA) as college students, which is characterized by childhood and family trauma, dramatic changes in family and community structure, and instability. It is laced with an othering process based on citizenship and documentation status.
Cristián Doña-Reveco (Associate Professor, UNO)
"Crisis and Culture of Fear Among Latino Communities in the Midwest"
This presentation looks to analyze the everday life conditions of many Latinos and Latin American immigrants centered around the concept of a "culture of fear" as the conditions created by the government which negatively affect the possibilities of these groups to actively and positively participate in social life.
Isabelle Beulaygue (UNO)
"'Somos Gente de Contacto': Emotional Regulation Among Latinos in Nebraska during the Covid-19 Pandemic"
Latinos have disproportionately and negatively been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic in the U.S. Emerging research has investigated the economic, employment, and earnings impacts of the pandemic on Latinos, unveiling stark health disparities. Nebraska is home to a diverse Latino community, who has navigated the pandemic from a multitude of angles--health, socioeconomic and emotional. This presentation will explore the role of emotions and emotional regulation among Latinos in traversing pandemic challenges, including how they maintained emotional closeness and social cohesion, despite physical distancing.
(Moderator: James Garza)
Searchable Transcript
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- [00:00:00.000](enchanted guitar music)
- [00:00:05.440]Hello, everybody.
- [00:00:06.700]My name is James Garza and I'm an associate professor
- [00:00:10.213]in Department of History and Ethnic Studies
- [00:00:14.410]here at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
- [00:00:17.450]And welcome to our session this morning.
- [00:00:25.010]And we have three guests with us.
- [00:00:29.170]The session is titled "Trauma and Uncertainty
- [00:00:32.570]Among Latinx Immigrant Communities."
- [00:00:36.640]We have three presenters this morning.
- [00:00:38.320]We are going to stick to our hour-long format.
- [00:00:42.420]Our presenters are gonna talk for about 15 minutes each,
- [00:00:46.180]and then we're gonna have questions
- [00:00:50.050]at the very end of our format.
- [00:00:52.240]So if you want to input your questions into the chat format,
- [00:00:59.610]and I'll make sure that we can ask the questions
- [00:01:02.330]at the end of our presentation.
- [00:01:05.450]So I'm gonna introduce our speakers first
- [00:01:07.960]and then they'll present in the order that's listed.
- [00:01:14.290]Our first speaker is Dr. Thomas Sanchez,
- [00:01:17.850]social professor at UNO.
- [00:01:21.460]The title of his talk is "Immigration Irony:
- [00:01:24.190]A Better Life Stymied by Law, Trauma, and Uncertainty."
- [00:01:29.030]And his research
- [00:01:34.804]examines the everyday life
- [00:01:35.720]of Deferred Action Childhood Arrivals as college students,
- [00:01:40.570]which is characterized by childhood and family trauma,
- [00:01:43.330]dramatic changes in family and community structure,
- [00:01:45.700]and instability.
- [00:01:47.870]Dr. Thomas Sanchez is associate professor
- [00:01:49.660]in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at UNO,
- [00:01:53.160]and he's a faculty member
- [00:01:55.200]at the Office of Latino and Latin American Studies, OLLAS.
- [00:01:59.140]He conducts research on ethnic identity,
- [00:02:02.150]formation, and the incorporation of Latino immigrants
- [00:02:05.240]in places like Schuyler, Nebraska.
- [00:02:07.490]He's teaching interests include Chicano
- [00:02:09.300]and Latino studies and sociological theory.
- [00:02:14.500]Our second presenter this morning
- [00:02:16.600]is gonna be Cristian Dona-Reveco,
- [00:02:18.710]who's an associate professor
- [00:02:20.170]also at the University of Nebraska, Omaha.
- [00:02:23.180]His topic title is "Crisis and Culture of Fear
- [00:02:27.380]Among Latino Communities in the Midwest."
- [00:02:30.760]The presentation will look to analyze
- [00:02:32.410]everyday life conditions among many Latinos
- [00:02:35.170]and Latin American immigrants
- [00:02:36.360]centered around the concept of a culture of fear.
- [00:02:40.240]Very interesting topic.
- [00:02:43.750]Dr. Cristian Dona-Reveco is the director
- [00:02:47.400]of the Office of Latino and Latin American Studies,
- [00:02:50.560]an associate professor in the Department of Sociology
- [00:02:53.210]and Anthropology at UNO.
- [00:02:55.410]He researches immigration decisions,
- [00:02:58.620]migration policy in Latin America Southern Cone,
- [00:03:02.930]countries like Argentina and Chile,
- [00:03:06.110]and the relations between the nation state and migrants
- [00:03:09.520]at OLLAS.
- [00:03:11.730]His research includes projects on the impact of crisis,
- [00:03:15.080]the development of a culture of fear,
- [00:03:18.360]and the role of community organizations
- [00:03:21.730]on Omaha's Latino community.
- [00:03:24.880]Our third presenter is Dr. Isabelle Beulaygue.
- [00:03:30.430]She's currently an instructor
- [00:03:31.780]of Exploratory Studies and Sociology at UNO as well.
- [00:03:36.650]She earned her doctorate in sociology
- [00:03:38.580]from the University of Miami, and completed a postdoc
- [00:03:42.260]at the Center for Promise at Boston University,
- [00:03:45.470]where she explored the social and educational wellness,
- [00:03:49.330]and economic conditions necessary for children and youth
- [00:03:52.920]to thrive.
- [00:03:53.753]Her research focuses on adolescent development
- [00:03:57.490]and substance use and its impacts on education and wellbeing
- [00:04:01.730]during adulthood.
- [00:04:03.590]Her topic is (speaking Spanish)
- [00:04:08.177]"Emotional Regulation Among Latinos in Nebraska
- [00:04:11.210]during the COVID-19 pandemic,"
- [00:04:13.750]which examines how Latinos have disproportionately
- [00:04:18.230]and negatively been affected by COVID pandemic
- [00:04:21.490]in the United States.
- [00:04:23.430]So we're gonna go ahead and get started
- [00:04:25.230]with Dr. Sanchez's presentation this morning.
- [00:04:35.850]So good morning, everybody,
- [00:04:36.860]and welcome and thanks or attending our session.
- [00:04:39.640]I'm gonna get right into it.
- [00:04:41.520]My co-author, Dr. Crystal Edwards could not make it today,
- [00:04:45.490]although I'm sure she's here with us in spirit.
- [00:04:47.940]So let me get right into things.
- [00:04:52.100]I'm gonna talk about some of these things today.
- [00:04:54.400]I'm gonna give you a little bit of a background on DACA,
- [00:04:56.798]even though I kind of assume
- [00:04:57.631]that most people are familiar with it.
- [00:05:00.430]And then Nebraska, a little bit about the kind of a reminder
- [00:05:03.960]about the politics in Nebraska
- [00:05:05.380]specifically related to DACA.
- [00:05:08.560]And then I want to try to get as quickly as I can
- [00:05:11.610]right into the data and the findings.
- [00:05:13.440]These are the people that I interviewed
- [00:05:15.880]a little bit of demographics.
- [00:05:17.510]And let me talk a little bit while you're looking at this
- [00:05:19.940]who I interviewed about how the research started.
- [00:05:23.980]In my attempt to humanize DACA students,
- [00:05:26.110]I regularly encountered in the classroom.
- [00:05:28.650]I began this research in the fall of 2015.
- [00:05:31.660]My intent was to deal with DACA recipients,
- [00:05:33.870]ideas, and issues related to their sense of criminalization
- [00:05:37.870]based on traditional media, social media, and public events.
- [00:05:42.270]The whole new world opened up once I conducted, transcribed,
- [00:05:45.380]and analyzed the interviews
- [00:05:47.630]and the following paper came from that data.
- [00:05:50.150]So here you see the subjects that kind of the who
- [00:05:53.438]of what's going on here.
- [00:05:55.330]The first three interview subjects
- [00:05:56.920]were associated with a group called
- [00:05:58.420]Young Nebraskans in Action and otherwise out,
- [00:06:02.280]and I put 'out' in quotation marks,
- [00:06:04.010]out in public about the DACA situations.
- [00:06:06.660]And they were conducted in December of 2015.
- [00:06:10.110]A number of the people that I interviewed,
- [00:06:11.530]these are young people, they used terms like coming out
- [00:06:14.490]and coming out of the closet.
- [00:06:15.610]And some of them specifically talked about how they came out
- [00:06:19.610]in ways that mirrored queer people coming out
- [00:06:23.710]in terms of they were worried
- [00:06:24.910]about what family were gonna say
- [00:06:26.147]and what cousins or friends were gonna say.
- [00:06:29.450]And so I'll use that terminology a couple times
- [00:06:32.150]because that's the terminology that they used.
- [00:06:35.350]So three of the interviews were done in December of 2015.
- [00:06:38.690]The other seven interviews were obtained through an email
- [00:06:41.280]inviting DACA recipients to interview.
- [00:06:43.950]They were conducted in early 2017.
- [00:06:46.840]And even though there seems to be biased
- [00:06:48.430]towards the individuals who are more outspoken,
- [00:06:51.540]I distinctly remember at least two interview subjects
- [00:06:54.140]who stated that they were normally shy,
- [00:06:56.670]but chose to interview with me specifically to speak out.
- [00:06:59.900]They saw it as a bit of a political act in and of itself.
- [00:07:03.780]I knew a great number of DACA students
- [00:07:05.470]who, again came out, their words, to me in class,
- [00:07:09.940]but I didn't want to approach them as potential subjects
- [00:07:12.493]so that they could decline the interview
- [00:07:17.441]without their standing in class.
- [00:07:18.983]I just wanted to protect them.
- [00:07:20.870]Either I didn't have them at the time,
- [00:07:22.270]but I could have had them in the future.
- [00:07:23.670]So I wanted them to be able to say,
- [00:07:25.677]"I don't want to interview without having to tell me
- [00:07:29.020]that they didn't want to."
- [00:07:29.860]So that's why I sent the email out through a third party
- [00:07:32.410]and then people just responded to me.
- [00:07:35.050]The interviews were conducted in my office, in sociology.
- [00:07:39.570]They were audio recorded and transcribed.
- [00:07:42.140]I did all the transcription
- [00:07:44.200]and I did the initial coding for topics.
- [00:07:46.410]My co-author, Dr. Crystal Edwards did the focused coding
- [00:07:50.680]to glean the topics that I'm gonna talk about today.
- [00:07:54.520]So just a little refresher,
- [00:07:56.210]I'm gonna go through this fairly quickly.
- [00:07:58.000]DACA was Deferred Action Childhood Arrivals.
- [00:08:01.010]It was an executive order
- [00:08:02.090]that the Obama administration issued in June of 2012.
- [00:08:06.700]You see what you had to be to be eligible.
- [00:08:08.780]People got a work permit.
- [00:08:09.940]And I say kind of a type of temporary permission
- [00:08:13.190]because they still could technically be deported.
- [00:08:15.720]It's what's called prosecutorial discretion.
- [00:08:19.300]Here are some of what they had to do.
- [00:08:20.580]They had to have come to the U.S. under the age of 16,
- [00:08:23.450]resided in the U.S. for the last five years,
- [00:08:25.550]graduated or in school or the military
- [00:08:27.830]and no criminal record.
- [00:08:29.360]These are the quick details of it.
- [00:08:32.250]There's specifics with the criminal record.
- [00:08:34.210]It had to have been a serious misdemeanor,
- [00:08:36.090]et cetera, et cetera.
- [00:08:36.923]But this is kind of the outline here.
- [00:08:38.920]Again, just a reminder of Nebraska politics,
- [00:08:41.570]the legislature is unicameral,
- [00:08:44.510]it's officially nonpartisan.
- [00:08:45.970]And here we have these two instances,
- [00:08:47.950]the driver's license in 2015
- [00:08:49.740]and the professional licenses in 2016,
- [00:08:52.735]both passed over the governor's veto.
- [00:08:56.460]I put this slide up here and I put the zoom here
- [00:08:58.520]to show that there are differences of opinion in the state,
- [00:09:01.430]even though we are labeled as a red state.
- [00:09:04.410]The governor and his people are committed
- [00:09:07.430]to do whatever they can to stay in power
- [00:09:10.560]by being extremely,
- [00:09:11.730]or at least appearing to be extremely anti-immigrant.
- [00:09:15.340]And we see this with some of the ads
- [00:09:17.760]that the current want-to-be-governors
- [00:09:20.083]are airing on TV today.
- [00:09:23.300]And we see some of their anti-immigrant feelings
- [00:09:26.040]in the denial of driver's license
- [00:09:27.367]and other professional licenses.
- [00:09:30.040]However, there are others in the state
- [00:09:32.070]enough legislators to override the governor's veto
- [00:09:35.030]that feel that some immigrants deserve more from the state.
- [00:09:38.020]And hence we have the override, okay.
- [00:09:41.380]Real quickly, just that the DACA identity
- [00:09:44.390]is this all-encompassing identity.
- [00:09:46.820]It never ends.
- [00:09:47.900]I think that most of the people I interviewed
- [00:09:49.810]are on a daily basis concerned sometimes hourly.
- [00:09:57.408]They would be in class,
- [00:09:58.410]it would be a totally different topic.
- [00:10:00.010]And they would be thinking about these kinds of things,
- [00:10:03.320]about some of the things that I'm gonna talk about today.
- [00:10:05.330]So really took on every part of their life.
- [00:10:08.830]These were the four main topics that I found
- [00:10:12.021]in analyzing the data and looking through the interviews.
- [00:10:16.570]First, multi-generational trauma,
- [00:10:19.340]a type of experience that students have
- [00:10:20.657]and their communities,
- [00:10:22.160]the influence of DACA on their lives
- [00:10:23.810]and this kind of cosmopolitan identity that comes out of it.
- [00:10:27.890]I'm gonna talk about the second one,
- [00:10:29.240]that's why it's bold here,
- [00:10:30.402]the types of experience students have in their communities,
- [00:10:33.430]because I assume that a lot of us are from Nebraska
- [00:10:36.293]and it's kind of interesting to see how those things happen.
- [00:10:39.860]So here's some direct quotes that this person said,
- [00:10:47.040]and all of them talk about being unfamiliar.
- [00:10:49.550]And I'll just kind of let the quotes,
- [00:10:51.000]I will read the quotes, but I wanna try in some ways,
- [00:10:54.030]let the words speak for themselves.
- [00:10:55.810]So this person says, "For me, yeah.
- [00:10:58.000]Well, first of all, I'm from south Sioux City, Nebraska.
- [00:11:00.970]That's a very Hispanic populated town.
- [00:11:03.610]I believe that maybe close to 50% of the population
- [00:11:06.240]is Hispanic.
- [00:11:07.560]That town has become inclusive to Hispanic in that sense.
- [00:11:10.150]Yes, you see some racism, but perhaps not as,
- [00:11:13.320]as in comparison to other towns
- [00:11:14.770]where the Hispanic population is not as dominant."
- [00:11:17.900]After reading this quote,
- [00:11:18.920]I went and looked and south Sioux City is 19% Hispanic.
- [00:11:24.960]However, Douglas County is between 38 and 39 Hispanic.
- [00:11:30.470]So about 40% Hispanic.
- [00:11:31.990]So I can see where he would get the 50%.
- [00:11:34.590]As we know, living in Omaha,
- [00:11:37.080]most of us, I don't think know of the difference
- [00:11:38.760]between Douglas County and Omaha.
- [00:11:40.560]And so the same thing holds for some of these smaller towns.
- [00:11:47.760]So the next one here, again,
- [00:11:49.830]experiences in the community.
- [00:11:51.020]This person says, "I feel proud to be living in Omaha."
- [00:11:54.080]Most of these young people were from Omaha.
- [00:11:55.850]Some of them were from small towns around Omaha.
- [00:11:58.410]They were all UNO students.
- [00:12:00.180]So he says, "I feel proud living in Omaha."
- [00:12:02.700]And I ask, "Why?"
- [00:12:04.230]And it just rings like Nebraska nice, right?
- [00:12:07.850]The state slogan,
- [00:12:08.897]"Just how nice people are and how diverse it is.
- [00:12:11.890]And just the living here make me feel at home."
- [00:12:14.630]Again, understanding that people were in their communities.
- [00:12:18.700]I'm getting kind of to the diverse thing here.
- [00:12:20.810]It depends where you are in Omaha,
- [00:12:23.000]but nonetheless, these people felt at home.
- [00:12:25.941]And I think that says something to,
- [00:12:27.800]again, going back to that balance
- [00:12:29.460]between we live in this red state,
- [00:12:31.440]a lot of the governors and the want-to-be-governors
- [00:12:34.170]profess this anti-immigrant feeling,
- [00:12:36.340]but there's hundreds of thousands of others of us
- [00:12:39.320]that don't feel the same way.
- [00:12:40.670]And that actually do what we can to help out.
- [00:12:43.460]Probably many of the people listening today in the audience.
- [00:12:47.387]Another quote here, "I hadn't for a big chunk of my life,
- [00:12:52.170]seen Nebraska as a concern conservative state,
- [00:12:54.740]or I didn't see its conservative pieces,
- [00:12:56.300]like in terms of immigration.
- [00:12:58.060]It didn't make that big of a difference in my life.
- [00:13:00.210]So when those kinds of facts came out, it made me realize,
- [00:13:03.010]yes, Nebraska is very much,
- [00:13:04.880]you know, not accepting of people like me,
- [00:13:07.500]or at least they just make it very hard to do so,"
- [00:13:10.290]to accept people like them.
- [00:13:12.890]Moving on, again, I've been very lucky,
- [00:13:16.610]and I remember this interview, this guy,
- [00:13:18.270]he is this young person 19 years old
- [00:13:20.450]who kind of laughs himself.
- [00:13:22.037]"I was surprised the day Trump got elected.
- [00:13:24.800]I had heard one of the first perhaps racist remarks
- [00:13:27.100]in probably, I just could not recall the last time
- [00:13:29.700]that happened."
- [00:13:30.533]So they're just not used to hearing things
- [00:13:32.450]until the election or the aftermath of the election.
- [00:13:36.447]"In fact, I can't recall at all, like anything before that.
- [00:13:39.270]So in that sense, I am just a lucky individual.
- [00:13:42.290]I have not encountered that,
- [00:13:43.310]or maybe I have encountered racism,
- [00:13:45.570]but not in a way like that."
- [00:13:50.930]Another one, "In one of my classes,
- [00:13:52.470]I was told that Nebraska was one of the most racist states
- [00:13:55.070]in the United States and I thought that was pretty funny
- [00:13:57.470]because I myself never really saw myself
- [00:14:00.460]being discriminated against for being Latino
- [00:14:02.690]or for having Hispanic descent.
- [00:14:05.140]However, when I found out
- [00:14:06.750]that Nebraska was the only state left
- [00:14:08.460]that didn't give driver's licenses to DACA students,
- [00:14:11.330]I realized that there's so much indirect racism."
- [00:14:15.187]"In Nebraska I know a lot of people do support us."
- [00:14:17.540]This was a young man who had been responsible
- [00:14:21.860]for talking to legislators in terms of getting
- [00:14:24.790]the Driver's License bill passed.
- [00:14:27.600]And he had also talked in other parts of the interview
- [00:14:30.800]about talking to the Elks Club and the Soroptimist
- [00:14:34.970]and whatever these kind of fraternal organizations
- [00:14:37.580]in the community that were not Latino organizations
- [00:14:40.550]to try to get people behind them.
- [00:14:42.250]But anyway, I'll go on here.
- [00:14:44.797]"They support me in what I stand for
- [00:14:46.410]and do consider me an American."
- [00:14:47.900]This was one of the key issues that comes up.
- [00:14:49.790]Do you consider yourself or not?
- [00:14:52.207]"And when I surround myself with those people,
- [00:14:53.910]I really enjoy it.
- [00:14:54.870]I have a positive attitude towards it,
- [00:14:57.140]but when I just see everything on the news
- [00:15:00.130]and everything that the government is talking about
- [00:15:03.460]in respect to immigrants, it's just very, very unmotivating
- [00:15:06.870]and saddening in a way."
- [00:15:08.660]This person changed their major,
- [00:15:11.376]I think it was computer engineering,
- [00:15:14.214]or computer science to political science
- [00:15:16.620]because of their involvement
- [00:15:19.920]in trying to get the driver's license issues passed.
- [00:15:22.170]So just by being DACA recipients,
- [00:15:24.860]it's made some of these people political
- [00:15:27.050]in ways that they didn't want to do,
- [00:15:28.810]but they kind of felt that they had to do.
- [00:15:31.100]So you have these mostly positive experiences
- [00:15:34.100]and keeping in mind that they're in their communities
- [00:15:36.560]and on the UNO campus.
- [00:15:38.790]Remember that these are young people,
- [00:15:40.410]the average age was 21.
- [00:15:42.520]And because of their immigrant statuses undocumented,
- [00:15:45.410]they have not traveled much and rarely left the state
- [00:15:48.280]or the communities where they lived.
- [00:15:50.500]A couple of them I remember talking about being in a bubble.
- [00:15:53.480]One of them even said kind of this liberal bubble.
- [00:15:56.240]In other words, for most people,
- [00:15:57.730]certainly for many of the interview subjects here,
- [00:16:01.954]they did not really know
- [00:16:03.490]what United States with Trump as a leader would look like.
- [00:16:07.460]And in the end not very much changed
- [00:16:11.350]after Trump was elected,
- [00:16:12.450]because Obama had not done a lot before that, right?
- [00:16:15.690]And I won't get into Obama waiting until 2012
- [00:16:18.810]to issue DACA when he could have done it four years earlier.
- [00:16:21.240]2012 was an election year, by the way,
- [00:16:23.550]just to kind of give equal blame to both political parts.
- [00:16:27.990]So there's these kind of bright and peppy quotes,
- [00:16:33.230]but I also have to include some of these
- [00:16:35.670]just to kind of bring us down from,
- [00:16:37.030]oh, these people feel so good about the state
- [00:16:39.020]and they feel so good, right?
- [00:16:40.520]This was I led into this talking about,
- [00:16:43.700]my initial idea in this research was to talk
- [00:16:46.450]about their criminalization.
- [00:16:47.630]Most of them didn't feel like a criminal.
- [00:16:49.700]So I kind of veered from that in the analysis,
- [00:16:53.240]but "I didn't feel like a criminal
- [00:16:54.810]and that's what I couldn't understand about people.
- [00:16:57.210]Like this is my home, I didn't do anything wrong you know,
- [00:16:59.550]I had no choice.
- [00:17:00.667]"It was never my choice."
- [00:17:02.150]This was one of the students,
- [00:17:03.370]two of them came, one of them when she was nine,
- [00:17:05.319]the other one was 10.
- [00:17:06.720]And both of those people intimated in the interview
- [00:17:09.760]that they had some choice,
- [00:17:12.060]because they were nine or 10, that they have had a choice.
- [00:17:14.260]Whereas the other ones were three years old
- [00:17:16.510]or three months old or six months old.
- [00:17:18.980]And it was just shocking to me that they thought
- [00:17:21.700]that they had a choice at nine or 10 years old,
- [00:17:23.650]and that they seemed to have shoulder
- [00:17:25.670]some of the blame for the situation they're in.
- [00:17:29.267]"So I feel like I'm part of America,
- [00:17:31.010]but I'm not like, in my mind,
- [00:17:32.290]I'm living in this imaginary.
- [00:17:34.110]This is like a dream where I'm like,
- [00:17:36.130]'Oh, you're imagining, like you're not from here.'
- [00:17:38.700]But like I feel like I am from here.
- [00:17:40.830]I feel like it's just a lie.
- [00:17:42.410]I don't know."
- [00:17:43.500]One of the ways that I've had some people scoff at this,
- [00:17:47.530]but one of the ways that I see them as very, very American
- [00:17:50.920]is their overuse of the word like in their speech.
- [00:17:54.980]And almost all of them had this over and over and over.
- [00:17:58.330]It wasn't in the other quotes, but in a lot of the quotes,
- [00:18:00.900]like is in there all the time.
- [00:18:02.217]And I don't know where they would've got that
- [00:18:04.350]other than the United States.
- [00:18:06.060]Finally, in terms of kind of bringing us down
- [00:18:08.400]to some of their reality,
- [00:18:09.740]'I feel maybe American
- [00:18:11.680]when I just have the freedom to breathe."
- [00:18:15.209](Thomas exhales)
- [00:18:16.042]This one's difficult,
- [00:18:17.097]"The fresh air that everyone else is breathing,
- [00:18:19.340]and I'm not on a trip and I'm at the beach
- [00:18:23.860]and I'm not gonna have the fear
- [00:18:25.190]that someone is gonna come and take me away from that."
- [00:18:29.417]You see, it gets me kind of choked up,
- [00:18:32.100]even just thinking about someone out there
- [00:18:33.975]that doesn't feel to breathe the air
- [00:18:39.360]that the rest of us breathe on a daily basis.
- [00:18:41.570]So limitations of the study,
- [00:18:44.440]there's a lot of limitations.
- [00:18:45.800]These are couple that came up initially.
- [00:18:48.750]And one of them that all the subjects
- [00:18:50.550]where college students, they're all very successful,
- [00:18:54.060]could be seen as a little bit elitist.
- [00:18:56.010]I know that not all dreamers,
- [00:18:57.300]not all DACA recipients are college students.
- [00:19:00.080]And then there's been a lot of social change
- [00:19:01.840]and cultural change since 2015 and 2017.
- [00:19:04.517]And so ideally would be nice to go back
- [00:19:07.340]and interview other DACA students
- [00:19:09.290]or try to find some of these same people.
- [00:19:12.710]I don't know if I could find them all.
- [00:19:14.430]I definitely couldn't find them all,
- [00:19:15.580]but some of them for future research,
- [00:19:17.840]again, trying to get non-DACA dreamers
- [00:19:21.530]to get their opinion on things,
- [00:19:23.260]on how has DACA changed people's lives that got DACA,
- [00:19:26.380]but not other dreamers,
- [00:19:28.170]immigrant youth who came to the United States with papers,
- [00:19:30.520]or with authorization.
- [00:19:32.100]And then I've run into a lot of former DACA people
- [00:19:34.990]who either have citizenship or green card.
- [00:19:37.720]So it'd be nice to talk to them
- [00:19:39.060]to see how their ideas might have changed.
- [00:19:41.270]So I'll end here.
- [00:19:43.170]Thank you and gracias to first the Office of Latino
- [00:19:45.760]and Latin American Studies, OLLAS at UNO.
- [00:19:48.490]And I wanna really thank all the DACA recipients,
- [00:19:50.690]all the dreamers and all the hardworking immigrants
- [00:19:54.430]that help keep the United States of America a great country.
- [00:19:58.880]Thank you for listening.
- [00:20:03.810]All right, thank you, Dr. Thomas Sanchez for that talk.
- [00:20:11.850]Very interesting, I wanna remind everybody
- [00:20:14.190]that if you have any questions,
- [00:20:15.570]make sure you pop them into the chat
- [00:20:17.680]and we can have the question and answer session
- [00:20:20.610]at the very end of our talk.
- [00:20:24.570]So we're gonna go ahead and move on to our next presenter,
- [00:20:29.800]Dr. Cristian Dona-Reveco.
- [00:20:33.680]Good morning, everyone.
- [00:20:35.040]Thank you very much for inviting me
- [00:20:36.370]to present this work here.
- [00:20:39.790]What I'm presenting is a very incomplete work
- [00:20:45.310]that I've been trying to on and off think about
- [00:20:48.750]for the last couple,
- [00:20:50.990]in fact, it's something that has a much longer trajectory.
- [00:20:53.710]I've been thinking about this in a different context
- [00:20:55.920]for roughly about the last 18 years.
- [00:20:59.390]But in the last couple of years, I ended up cementing
- [00:21:05.212]in a research question
- [00:21:07.790]or at least in a way of thinking about culture of fear
- [00:21:11.400]that I think that it makes a good theoretical argument
- [00:21:16.120]to understand everyday life of Latinos in the United States.
- [00:21:20.080]So bear with me if there's some inconsistencies
- [00:21:23.090]on the logical arguments,
- [00:21:24.740]because it's still very much a work in progress.
- [00:21:28.810]And I mean, I was listening to Tom's presentation
- [00:21:34.340]and I think it fits.
- [00:21:35.680]So it's always good to see how
- [00:21:39.100]my arguments actually make sense in other contexts.
- [00:21:44.620]There are several ways of entering
- [00:21:46.850]the idea of culture of fear
- [00:21:48.100]and crisis and culture of fear.
- [00:21:50.230]One of them is from what Jeffrey Alexander, a sociologist,
- [00:21:56.690]he spoke toward a theory of culture of trauma
- [00:21:59.750]and he wrote, he opened the book saying,
- [00:22:02.957]"The culture of trauma occurs when members of a collectivity
- [00:22:06.540]feel that they have been subjugated
- [00:22:08.580]to a horrendous event that lives inevitable marks
- [00:22:12.170]upon their group consciousness,
- [00:22:13.640]marking their memories forever
- [00:22:16.110]and changing their future identity
- [00:22:17.800]in fundamental and in a backward ways.
- [00:22:21.940]And I started thinking about Alexander's idea
- [00:22:24.730]of culture of trauma
- [00:22:26.620]when I was thinking about my own dissertation
- [00:22:33.962]more than 10 years ago
- [00:22:34.840]on how Chilean immigrants in the United States
- [00:22:42.300]remember their visits to Chile
- [00:22:44.790]and remember the times they left.
- [00:22:47.090]And working on that, I came across a very small article
- [00:22:50.950]published in 1983 on a Mexican Journal/magazine
- [00:22:57.637]by Guillermo O'Donnell.
- [00:22:58.720]Guillermo O'Donnell was political scientist,
- [00:23:03.725]a political sociologist who did some of the grounding work
- [00:23:07.970]on authoritarianism in south America.
- [00:23:11.200]And in the 1983 Mexico,
- [00:23:12.940]he published this short article called
- [00:23:14.877]"The Harvest of Fear."
- [00:23:16.870]And in that article, O'Donnell,
- [00:23:19.320]he presents the possible effects of authoritarianism
- [00:23:22.480]in the search for democracy
- [00:23:23.890]and the role that fear plays on the search.
- [00:23:27.860]He says that fear can be the fear to return
- [00:23:30.510]to democratic government,
- [00:23:33.640]the fear to silence, and the fear to revenge.
- [00:23:39.230]And with this article,
- [00:23:40.950]to my understanding O'Donnell opens
- [00:23:42.700]a broad field of analysis that is very interesting,
- [00:23:48.450]and it defines how role or the role that fear plays
- [00:23:53.720]both on authoritarian societies and democratic societies.
- [00:23:58.210]Now, this perspective that has other authors
- [00:24:01.040]that I explained later in a couple of minutes
- [00:24:04.440]has been almost left aside as something very particular
- [00:24:08.040]to specific historical context,
- [00:24:10.730]that is of the 1970s and 1980s dictatorship
- [00:24:13.800]in the Southern Cone of America,
- [00:24:16.430]which is Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and Uruguay.
- [00:24:21.140]But on the contrary, in the global north,
- [00:24:23.430]the idea of fear as a collective emotion,
- [00:24:30.770]its analysis has been mostly focused
- [00:24:33.086]as an emotion at the macro level
- [00:24:36.490]on what in sociology has been called the sociology of risk,
- [00:24:39.770]for example, or more in the criminology aspect of sociology,
- [00:24:45.260]the fear of the other.
- [00:24:49.670]From a more French theoretical perspective,
- [00:24:52.580]there is this thing called the sociology of emotions,
- [00:24:55.300]where more from a cultural sociology perspective,
- [00:24:59.460]these authors argue that as memory,
- [00:25:02.940]emotions are not a psychological thing,
- [00:25:06.720]they only exist because they exist in the social world.
- [00:25:11.420]So when we think about rage, when we think about melancholy,
- [00:25:17.350]when we think about fear,
- [00:25:20.150]we're thinking about things that can only occur
- [00:25:22.880]when we are in context with others.
- [00:25:24.630]Meaning when we are in the social realm,
- [00:25:27.330]same as memory as Holback and others have argued.
- [00:25:31.700]Now the global north perspective on the sociology on fear
- [00:25:38.520]have not only a macro aspect, but also micro level
- [00:25:42.610]where fear is constructed along three axis mainly;
- [00:25:46.050]one, the fear of others, to this fear of social exclusion
- [00:25:50.860]and this idea of a senseless fear,
- [00:25:52.470]something that we don't know where it comes from.
- [00:25:55.570]The first, the fear of others
- [00:25:58.040]is defined by the subjective feeling of personal insecurity
- [00:26:02.170]manifested in the possibility
- [00:26:03.640]of being the subject of a crime, right?
- [00:26:06.040]That is the more criminology based area.
- [00:26:09.920]This doesn't have a real empirical background or grounding.
- [00:26:14.490]We know that even though many cases,
- [00:26:19.090]empirical data, meaning crime rates are high.
- [00:26:22.180]The actual possibility of being the victim of a crime
- [00:26:26.640]are significantly small.
- [00:26:29.350]But more of a ever-present
- [00:26:32.060]or omnipresent metaphorical criminal that exists out there.
- [00:26:37.220]The second one is the fear base on the notion
- [00:26:41.780]that social relations as they used to be,
- [00:26:44.970]they no longer exist, right?
- [00:26:47.280]This idea of community life,
- [00:26:49.250]nothing used to be like it was, right?
- [00:26:53.490]And the third one is the senseless fear of an imaginary
- [00:26:59.200]or not really imaginary, of everyday experiences
- [00:27:04.690]that seems to be increasingly creating chaos
- [00:27:08.220]in everyday life.
- [00:27:09.610]Now, when I started thinking about this,
- [00:27:12.850]COVID was another thing, right?
- [00:27:15.140]And pollution, the end of the world due to global warming,
- [00:27:23.010]while real, it is still this senseless fear.
- [00:27:27.180]Now pandemics are not senseless fear anymore.
- [00:27:32.679]They're there,
- [00:27:33.512]but still this idea of major pandemics,
- [00:27:35.910]major drugs, major pollution, et cetera,
- [00:27:40.227]has this idea of they are out there,
- [00:27:42.510]I'm concerned about my everyday life,
- [00:27:45.450]but they're not directly in touch with me.
- [00:27:49.440]And then this last one is what the sociology of risk
- [00:27:52.570]have focus on, right?
- [00:27:56.670]That defines the current modernity
- [00:27:59.070]as something that is lived
- [00:28:01.350]within a context uncertainty of the future.
- [00:28:05.820]Now, other arguments have developed
- [00:28:08.770]what is thought as a culture of fear,
- [00:28:14.670]but this culture of fear is based on a very privileged,
- [00:28:23.020]from the perspective of a majority
- [00:28:25.310]that the contemporary human experience
- [00:28:30.280]is live within a set of potential risks,
- [00:28:33.860]crime, conspiracies and the other, right?
- [00:28:38.640]And the old specifically space is constructed
- [00:28:40.910]a very racial terms, right?
- [00:28:42.390]The other are immigrants, especially Latinos, Muslim,
- [00:28:49.164]the ads for our current gubernatorial race,
- [00:28:52.250]it is strongly created around that, right?
- [00:28:55.400]The fear of the other, the fear of Muslims,
- [00:28:58.340]and recently the fears of Chinese
- [00:29:01.320]as the betters of deceit, right?
- [00:29:06.060]But in this context, in that culture of fear,
- [00:29:09.390]there's very little research on the fears
- [00:29:11.940]that ethnic minorities and immigrants have of the majority.
- [00:29:17.390]So mostly it's the majority fearing the minority,
- [00:29:19.660]but never studied the minority fearing the majority.
- [00:29:24.530]So most of research have engaged on this analysis
- [00:29:27.150]of fear towards the groups.
- [00:29:31.430]At the same time,
- [00:29:36.160]the few studies that are that exist are both are gender.
- [00:29:42.940]How women live their everyday lives
- [00:29:47.000]are definitely in a context of fear, right?
- [00:29:52.540]There are significant differences in what men fear
- [00:29:54.627]and what women fear.
- [00:29:55.960]There's countless studies of that,
- [00:29:59.810]sexual minorities, right?
- [00:30:02.350]And the racial aspects of fear
- [00:30:06.430]have mostly centered on African Americans
- [00:30:08.700]and not in other racial and ethnic minorities.
- [00:30:11.420]Now there's a small caveat on that.
- [00:30:18.604]This is my own research
- [00:30:19.445]on how others have researched fear.
- [00:30:22.200]Now, by that, they use the word fear.
- [00:30:26.040]In the case of Latinos, or in the case of immigrants,
- [00:30:29.690]the use of fear as how immigrants themselves see their lives
- [00:30:35.450]is less common.
- [00:30:37.240]So it's not that there's no research,
- [00:30:39.510]it's that how the construction of this research
- [00:30:42.920]in terms of fear is less prevalent.
- [00:30:44.600]And that's what I'm trying to create at the end.
- [00:30:46.790]So this is all that research on Latinos,
- [00:30:50.400]such the one Tom was presenting, right,
- [00:30:53.240]need to have a broader theoretical frame
- [00:30:57.410]that is that is defined as a culture of fear.
- [00:31:02.640]And I argue that this can be done
- [00:31:06.990]following O'Donnell's culture of fear argument.
- [00:31:11.930]So Norbert Lechner, who worked with O'Donnell
- [00:31:15.690]and he also a sociologist,
- [00:31:19.270]his announce of fear as a method used by dictatorial regimes
- [00:31:22.960]to maintain order.
- [00:31:24.210]He defines fear as the percept of a threat
- [00:31:27.280]that is either real or imaginary.
- [00:31:31.710]So fear is not necessarily something that's real,
- [00:31:34.180]something that can also be imaginary.
- [00:31:36.720]Here he says, "While fear is connected to mortal threats
- [00:31:39.640]and to threats to our materials subsistence,
- [00:31:41.580]these are just the tip of the iceberg."
- [00:31:45.460]He argues that authoritarian regimes, for example,
- [00:31:50.730]construct themselves within,
- [00:31:52.550]or construct a culture of fear
- [00:31:55.020]that is defined as the wholesale everyday experience
- [00:31:57.590]of human rights abuse.
- [00:32:00.140]So when we think about fear,
- [00:32:01.360]what actually thinking about is about human rights abuse,
- [00:32:05.580]right?
- [00:32:06.510]They create an everyday life and permanent culture of fear
- [00:32:11.120]through which people feel an everyday social anxiety,
- [00:32:15.610]through which they constantly have endure
- [00:32:17.580]as they hear stories and see experiences
- [00:32:20.510]of human rights abuse.
- [00:32:22.140]So this is not the fact that someone else
- [00:32:29.520]might have being deported,
- [00:32:31.660]it's that I know people who were deported.
- [00:32:36.234]I know that I cannot go to the ER,
- [00:32:39.750]not necessarily because I don't have insurance,
- [00:32:41.990]it's because I can get caught by ICE there.
- [00:32:44.640]Ice is waiting for me there, right?
- [00:32:47.490]I know that I cannot send my kids to school
- [00:32:50.260]because ICE can get them there,
- [00:32:53.020]or what happens if ICE gets me in my place of work,
- [00:32:56.020]and my kids are at school, right?
- [00:32:59.080]That is the everyday life
- [00:33:05.440]wholesome everyday life experiences of human rights abuse,
- [00:33:09.330]right?
- [00:33:10.163]Gareton creates two metaphors to talk about this fear.
- [00:33:14.170]One is a dark room and the other one is a barking dog.
- [00:33:17.210]The dark room is the latent fear of what is unknown.
- [00:33:21.570]And the barking dog is a fear of someone that is perceived,
- [00:33:26.700]sorry, that is known as remember as fearful
- [00:33:32.070]and it's a manifest threat.
- [00:33:34.570]So why is this important?
- [00:33:35.650]Why is important to actually bring those theories
- [00:33:38.670]into the context of Latinos in the U.S.?
- [00:33:41.280]Not because us it's an authoritarian state per se,
- [00:33:44.540]no one would argue that,
- [00:33:47.230]but is through its acts or the lack of protection
- [00:33:51.380]of human rights is allowing the permanent culture of fear
- [00:33:56.990]or that Latinos and others, but in this case Latinos
- [00:34:00.120]live in a permanent culture of fear.
- [00:34:02.260]And then is important because as Lechner argues
- [00:34:05.150]that no real democratization process,
- [00:34:07.510]no real democracy can take place
- [00:34:10.730]unless we take responsibility for this fear.
- [00:34:14.110]So societies need to define
- [00:34:17.810]or need to take responsibility that fear exists
- [00:34:26.560]because in this case, fear is the institutional, cultural,
- [00:34:30.240]and psychological repercussion of violence,
- [00:34:33.380]and of state violence, right?
- [00:34:36.170]Again, do not think state violence
- [00:34:37.560]is in the case of south American dictatorial regimes.
- [00:34:41.650]We don't have a strict police driving for fear
- [00:34:47.110]getting people out the street, right,
- [00:34:50.090]but we do have ICE, we do have institutions
- [00:34:54.725]whose role is to actually social control
- [00:34:57.220]of those who are not supposed to be here.
- [00:35:00.230]Fear is a response to this idea that
- [00:35:06.170]immigrants bring social exclusion or uncertainty.
- [00:35:11.210]Now I'll finish in less than one minutes.
- [00:35:15.450]So the current literature on this topic in the U.S.,
- [00:35:18.130]and there's vast.
- [00:35:19.930]I'm just gonna show, I don't know if you can see it,
- [00:35:23.480]but I have many, many written pages of notes on what exists.
- [00:35:29.420]Most authors,
- [00:35:34.594]when they talk about fear, they talk about,
- [00:35:36.240]as I said, fear of deportation,
- [00:35:37.980]fear of getting caught, fear of not being accepted
- [00:35:42.850]and others talk about such as, sorry,
- [00:35:52.197]such as Menjivar and Abrego talk about legal violence
- [00:35:55.820]or liminal spaces or immigrants living in liminal spaces.
- [00:35:59.490]So what I'm trying to to develop here
- [00:36:02.660]is a theoretical argument that will connect
- [00:36:06.510]those two arguments,
- [00:36:07.930]that somewhat loosely sociology of fear
- [00:36:13.180]from the perspective of Latinos in the U.S.,
- [00:36:15.120]either through illegal violence or liminal spaces
- [00:36:19.200]where there's culture of fear of authoritarian regimes
- [00:36:22.490]that makes individuals live
- [00:36:24.930]that their everyday lives are defined by the acts
- [00:36:30.600]or the in acts of the government
- [00:36:31.930]that does not protect their human rights.
- [00:36:35.440]Thanks for listening.
- [00:36:39.620]Thank you very much, Dr. Cristian Dona-Reveco
- [00:36:42.704]for your presentation this morning.
- [00:36:46.720]A reminder, if we have any questions,
- [00:36:48.790]we still will have time
- [00:36:50.010]at the very end of our presentations.
- [00:36:53.720]Our final presenter this morning is Dr. Isabelle Beulaygue,
- [00:36:57.740]and she will have a screen share as we can see.
- [00:37:02.120]She will go ahead and start her presentation right now.
- [00:37:09.630]Thank you very much.
- [00:37:10.740]I'm gonna try to put it in slideshow.
- [00:37:13.417]Sometimes it's a bit iffy with Zoom,
- [00:37:16.640]but tell me, can you see it well?
- [00:37:19.520]Yeah, we can see it.
- [00:37:20.900]Okay, great.
- [00:37:22.010]Good morning, everybody.
- [00:37:23.320]Thank you so much, James.
- [00:37:25.150]My name is Dr. Beulaygue
- [00:37:26.680]and I'm gonna talk to you about some preliminary results
- [00:37:30.860]from my study that I'm conducting
- [00:37:33.560]in conjunction with Cristian Dona-Reveco.
- [00:37:36.150]And the title of our study is
- [00:37:37.781](speaking Spanish)
- [00:37:38.927]"A Qualitative Exploration of Emotional Regulation
- [00:37:41.490]among Latino During the Covid-19 Pandemic in Nebraska."
- [00:37:46.270]So I'll give a brief moment of background.
- [00:37:49.810]Pandemics have perpetuated social inequalities
- [00:37:52.920]among Latinos prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
- [00:37:58.000]And during this pandemic specifically,
- [00:38:00.030]U.S. Latinos have tested positive
- [00:38:02.230]at higher rates than other groups.
- [00:38:04.630]The reasons for this are very, very large
- [00:38:08.210]and we're not gonna get into detail about all of them,
- [00:38:10.580]but specifically racism, prejudice, lack of healthcare,
- [00:38:14.290]difficult access to care have been adversities
- [00:38:17.810]that Latinos have encountered during this last pandemic.
- [00:38:22.960]And also we live in a culture
- [00:38:25.210]that has prioritized production over safety,
- [00:38:28.060]specifically in our home state of Nebraska
- [00:38:30.320]in the context of meat packing factories and plants.
- [00:38:37.960]So our research question here loosely defined
- [00:38:41.020]for this project is how have Latinos in Nebraska
- [00:38:43.620]navigated and negotiated their emotions
- [00:38:47.200]in the face of adversity and social distancing policies?
- [00:38:50.540]And as Cristian mentioned in his study,
- [00:38:52.670]we know as sociologists that emotions
- [00:38:55.260]are not just psychological
- [00:38:57.180]and happening at the neurochemical level,
- [00:39:00.160]but they're also socially anchored and manifested.
- [00:39:05.700]So our data emanate from 20 oral history interviews
- [00:39:10.550]that we conducted at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
- [00:39:14.840]This is part of a multicenter project
- [00:39:16.820]called "Voces of a Pandemic Oral Histories Project,"
- [00:39:19.610]which is housed at the University of Texas at Austin.
- [00:39:23.170]So this project involves many universities, including UNO,
- [00:39:29.153]UT Austin, UCLA, and many others.
- [00:39:32.020]And the data are publicly available on YouTube,
- [00:39:36.050]the interviews.
- [00:39:38.720]So oral histories have been conducted
- [00:39:40.680]by sociologists, historians, journalist,
- [00:39:43.180]political scientists,
- [00:39:50.312]medical professionals to gain a better understanding
- [00:39:55.710]of participants' memory.
- [00:39:57.280]This is a (speaking indistinctly)
- [00:40:00.390]which Cristian also alluded to in his presentation analysis.
- [00:40:05.340]So we're doing a qualitative research methodology
- [00:40:07.540]that seeks to extract things from the data.
- [00:40:09.490]And we utilize MAXQDA to code and analyze our interviews.
- [00:40:17.000]So this is an inductive process
- [00:40:19.220]as opposed to a deductive research process.
- [00:40:22.550]So our results, the are many, many themes
- [00:40:25.480]that as I was in coding these interviews
- [00:40:27.680]emanated from the data.
- [00:40:29.230]But for this story, I'm specifically gonna focus on two;
- [00:40:33.070]alienation and social capital.
- [00:40:35.150]So how alienation was a present theme
- [00:40:38.880]and how social capital was used
- [00:40:40.590]to buffer the effects of alienation
- [00:40:42.670]amongst Latinos in Nebraska during the pandemic.
- [00:40:46.550]So briefly, theoretically I think we're all familiar
- [00:40:49.820]with alienation and it's theoretical form
- [00:40:52.870]from Marx and Hegel,
- [00:40:54.000]but also from Melvin Cohen and from Freund.
- [00:40:57.300]So postindustrial working conditions,
- [00:41:00.420]Marx argued, created alienation
- [00:41:02.920]from the product of one's labor,
- [00:41:04.740]from the process of labor itself,
- [00:41:07.030]from ourselves as humans and from other human beings.
- [00:41:10.450]There's a famous quote, "As a man labor so he."
- [00:41:13.890]Melvin Cohen, which was a professor at Johns Hopkins,
- [00:41:18.960]a sociologist also said that alienation affects personality
- [00:41:22.380]and the emotional self
- [00:41:24.270]in one of his big quantitative studies, actually,
- [00:41:27.730]and Freund construed that emotions are sensations
- [00:41:31.080]that are expressed in the physical bodies,
- [00:41:33.170]but are also contingent on socioeconomic status
- [00:41:36.630]and can have an impact on one's health.
- [00:41:40.030]So I'm gonna talk about some quotes, not all of them,
- [00:41:44.010]that show different dimensions of alienation.
- [00:41:48.550]And I put the alienation in red
- [00:41:50.540]and then the social capital in blue,
- [00:41:52.070]so we can distinguish them.
- [00:41:53.890]So here's a quote from a Latina nurse that said,
- [00:41:56.607]"So my parents were pretty scared at the beginning,
- [00:42:00.090]because I was working with COVID patients
- [00:42:02.990]and I was pretty scared,
- [00:42:11.070]careful every time I was off work.
- [00:42:13.590]I will like take off my tennis shoes outside my uniform,
- [00:42:17.610]take it off before I even enter the main entrance.
- [00:42:19.741]I didn't have contact with my parents or siblings
- [00:42:20.890]because I wanted to make sure they were safe."
- [00:42:22.570]So here we see two dimensions of alienation.
- [00:42:24.460]We see the dimension of alienation from others,
- [00:42:26.500]but also from oneself as a healthcare worker.
- [00:42:32.400]So here, this is a difficult one.
- [00:42:34.585]As Thomas mentioned, there are difficult quotes,
- [00:42:37.250]and this is something that I called systemic alienation.
- [00:42:41.680]And this is about unemployment benefits.
- [00:42:44.907]"Yeah, there was some unemployment money that was given,
- [00:42:47.360]but not everybody can apply for that, you know,
- [00:42:49.640]you have to have access to that.
- [00:42:51.550]Or even, I know I helped some people,
- [00:42:53.200]it wasn't an easy task, you know,
- [00:42:55.180]to try to get all that paperwork in and get it done.
- [00:42:58.810]You know, it wasn't something easy that comes overnight.
- [00:43:01.610]So yeah, definitely a lot of obstacles
- [00:43:03.340]for Spanish-speaking families in south Omaha."
- [00:43:05.670]So this speaks to systemic alienation
- [00:43:07.650]that not everybody can apply for that unemployment money
- [00:43:10.730]and also linguistic alienation.
- [00:43:13.670]There are barriers and distancing
- [00:43:17.150]if you don't speak English.
- [00:43:19.860]Okay, this alienation quote, I translated it into English.
- [00:43:24.760]It was originally in Spanish.
- [00:43:26.610]And this speaks to, you know,
- [00:43:28.010]pure Marxist alienation in the workplace.
- [00:43:31.490]Alienation in meatpacking plants and factories.
- [00:43:33.917]"She worked in Tyson Foods in the lard section.
- [00:43:36.370]There she was, it was very cold
- [00:43:38.310]and I don't know, she was not doing well.
- [00:43:40.830]A lot of people got it, many died where she worked there."
- [00:43:43.840]So this is a community member
- [00:43:45.140]who's talking about his family member,
- [00:43:47.740]his close relative that got really sick from COVID
- [00:43:50.740]working in the meatpacking factory
- [00:43:53.770]and how others just died there.
- [00:43:59.450]Alienation from family and others.
- [00:44:02.370]This quote, I'm going to summarize it.
- [00:44:06.450]It's a very difficult quote.
- [00:44:07.890]People not being able to travel to funerals,
- [00:44:11.260]missing family events,
- [00:44:12.550]which are very important to Latinos because of the pandemic.
- [00:44:18.510]And this one I'm going to translate.
- [00:44:20.400]It is very interesting because we think of alienation
- [00:44:24.180]as a local process,
- [00:44:25.390]but also a lot of our immigrants
- [00:44:26.727]who have families in Mexico and Columbia.
- [00:44:29.610]And this is quote from a mental health therapist
- [00:44:32.390]at One World who is from Columbia originally.
- [00:44:35.410]And she speaks here that, "You can get on a plane
- [00:44:39.630]and I really miss them, I miss airports,
- [00:44:42.660]but I'm also really afraid to take that risk.
- [00:44:46.530]So you're here and you're only here and it's through camera
- [00:44:50.930]that you see them, that you call them.
- [00:44:52.640]And as a therapist, I try to help my family in Colombia
- [00:44:58.100]and give them relaxation techniques.
- [00:45:00.380]But it's really hard.
- [00:45:01.540]This is the only thing I can do,
- [00:45:03.540]and I can only pray for them."
- [00:45:05.430]So the physical and geographic distance was augmented
- [00:45:10.420]during this process.
- [00:45:13.630]And finally, this is the quote from which
- [00:45:16.877](speaking Spanish) is extracted,
- [00:45:18.850]and this was pronounced by our council of Mexico
- [00:45:23.400]here in Omaha.
- [00:45:24.690]And I will translate it.
- [00:45:27.547]"Here, families like us, Mexicans and Latinos
- [00:45:30.950]generally speaking families come with their spouses
- [00:45:35.370]with their children.
- [00:45:36.560]Everybody wants to be together.
- [00:45:37.960]And this is the part that personally is the hardest for me,
- [00:45:42.450]what hurts me the most apart from millions of life
- [00:45:45.660]that have been lost is not being able to be with people,
- [00:45:49.250]not being able to hug people,
- [00:45:51.110]not being able to say hi to people
- [00:45:53.340]because us Mexicans and Latinos in general,
- [00:45:56.420]we are people of contact.
- [00:45:58.530]So here families come together
- [00:46:01.010]and when they enter the consulate,
- [00:46:03.760]they have to respect social distancing measures.
- [00:46:09.290]They have to respect
- [00:46:10.123]the separation of six feet or two meters."
- [00:46:15.380]So that's physical alienation and missing touch
- [00:46:17.480]is something that has been really difficult for Latinos.
- [00:46:21.700]But besides alienation and the adversity
- [00:46:23.560]that alienation triggered and caused
- [00:46:29.940]during this pandemic among Latinos in Nebraska,
- [00:46:32.890]I also saw themes of social capital and cohesion
- [00:46:36.770]that are more positive that emanate from the data.
- [00:46:40.270]And briefly theoretically,
- [00:46:41.420]social capital has been construed
- [00:46:43.160]by Bourdieu, Coleman, and Putman,
- [00:46:45.010]as the cultural social connections and trusts
- [00:46:48.640]that can result in cohesion and upward mobility in society.
- [00:46:52.400]There is a wide body of literature on social capitalists
- [00:46:55.230]and success amongst immigrants.
- [00:46:57.130]And specifically I'm thinking of Alejandro Portes
- [00:47:01.310]and Rumbaut, who talk about how immigrant enclaves
- [00:47:05.230]and segmented assimilation, supports systems,
- [00:47:07.770]and networks amongst immigrants in the United States
- [00:47:10.320]have allowed communities to flourish.
- [00:47:16.230]And so in terms of social capital,
- [00:47:18.210]I saw a lot of positive quotes
- [00:47:20.590]about the importance of family ties.
- [00:47:22.980]And here's a Latina nurse
- [00:47:25.210]who speaks about the importance of her family.
- [00:47:27.817]"I do feel like living with my parents and my family
- [00:47:29.917]and my siblings has helped me survive the difficult times
- [00:47:33.310]and all this stress of going to work
- [00:47:34.820]and seeing people dying.
- [00:47:36.450]And like I said, my people, Latinos dying,
- [00:47:38.530]not having anybody there.
- [00:47:40.210]Every time there was a COVID-positive Latino,
- [00:47:42.560]I was thinking about my mom or my dad being in that bed,
- [00:47:45.410]not having somebody who spoke the language,
- [00:47:48.000]being with them is flaming them.
- [00:47:51.220]Even the little things, those patients are scared.
- [00:47:54.500]They didn't wanna be there.
- [00:47:56.000]They're scared because they know that there is no cure.
- [00:47:59.400]They don't know if they're gonna wake up the next day,
- [00:48:01.540]they don't know they're a nurse.
- [00:48:03.230]It was just very stressful and pretty difficult.
- [00:48:05.510]But I do think that my parents helped me a lot
- [00:48:08.100]with the mental stress I was going through,
- [00:48:10.210]going to work and also going through nursing school,
- [00:48:12.950]my friends and my parents were pretty helpful."
- [00:48:15.710]So here, what do we see?
- [00:48:16.900]We see social capital as in the importance of family ties,
- [00:48:20.180]but in a way that nurse, that Latina nurse,
- [00:48:23.100]she was a source of social supporting capital
- [00:48:25.610]for her patients, for her Latino patients.
- [00:48:27.970]She was in a way their family.
- [00:48:33.670]Here we see that also another dimension
- [00:48:36.700]of social capital Latinos
- [00:48:38.690]stayed in touch with each other,
- [00:48:40.050]and even the ones who were a little far,
- [00:48:42.650]they leveraged technology.
- [00:48:44.030]And for some, it was a source of support.
- [00:48:46.497]"The cool thing was that I started calling people
- [00:48:48.990]and talking to people like my uncle I said,
- [00:48:52.320]he's in California, but he's making phone calls,
- [00:48:54.940]catching up on things because he wouldn't,
- [00:48:57.150]he's a comedian and he travels around the world,
- [00:48:59.780]but I think the entertainment world is just shut up.
- [00:49:03.390]So he's not doing anything.
- [00:49:04.550]So the cool thing was he was spending time calling people
- [00:49:07.110]and so was I.
- [00:49:10.210]So another dimension of social capital
- [00:49:13.050]that I saw was the increase in connections with neighbors
- [00:49:18.600]and this in sociology, we call it collective efficacy,
- [00:49:22.160]how neighbors come together to protect their neighborhoods.
- [00:49:25.780]And this participant talked about,
- [00:49:28.947]"Actually, we just saw more of our neighbors.
- [00:49:31.150]It's sad that I took a pandemic
- [00:49:32.660]for neighbors to get to know each other again, or at all.
- [00:49:35.480]I've lived in this house 21 years
- [00:49:37.030]and I barely knew of my next door neighbors.
- [00:49:39.810]They have lived there before I got there.
- [00:49:42.240]It's been interesting."
- [00:49:46.040]So here's a quote about organizational support,
- [00:49:50.303]a UNMC professor who provided a lot of resources
- [00:49:53.710]in Spanish and English and really help the community.
- [00:49:57.620]So for the sake of time, I'm going to skip this one.
- [00:50:02.650]And again, an immigration attorney.
- [00:50:06.960]She provided amazing resources
- [00:50:09.040]and social support through social media
- [00:50:11.330]and through Facebook about the vaccine.
- [00:50:14.100]And so here we're really see Latinos coming together
- [00:50:16.330]and leveraging social media and technology
- [00:50:19.510]to buffer these effects of alienation.
- [00:50:25.414]This one, I want to read.
- [00:50:32.190]This one speaks to intergenerational closure.
- [00:50:34.340]So specifically children helping parents.
- [00:50:36.830]And this one is a very difficult quote.
- [00:50:39.490]The speaker here,
- [00:50:40.740]the participant's father was on the brink of death
- [00:50:46.441]in the ICU, and they didn't have information
- [00:50:49.640]on a specific drug.
- [00:50:51.497]"So we didn't have the information about what the drug was.
- [00:50:54.400]And in my head I wasn't there to ask those questions.
- [00:50:57.020]When I called we're very lucky again,
- [00:50:58.580]that I have a friend who's a doctor
- [00:51:00.050]who I went to school with and I texted him.
- [00:51:02.100]I said, "Hey, can you tell me what this drug goes,
- [00:51:05.090]what it does because I had called and left message
- [00:51:08.040]with the doctor, but they're busy.
- [00:51:09.340]They're not gonna give you a call right away."
- [00:51:11.320]And my friend gave me some information.
- [00:51:13.090]My mom knows my friend.
- [00:51:14.900]We went to college together and he came,
- [00:51:17.180]he and my other friends came to my parents' house
- [00:51:19.540]all the time.
- [00:51:20.373]So she trusts him.
- [00:51:21.800]So I told her the information that he gave me,
- [00:51:24.850]then the doctor called us with some information.
- [00:51:27.880]My mom was now okay."
- [00:51:30.310]So this quote is very powerful
- [00:51:32.110]because the Latino friend gave the information
- [00:51:37.060]and that resource,
- [00:51:38.220]the mother knows the friend, there is trust.
- [00:51:40.647]And so you have children and friends helping parents.
- [00:51:43.990]I thought it was very beautiful.
- [00:51:45.730]And in the end, the father was okay.
- [00:51:49.720]So in conclusion,
- [00:51:51.290]we've uncovered different dimensions of alienations
- [00:51:53.490]among Latinos during the pandemic in Nebraska,
- [00:51:56.260]physical, systemic, linguistic, geographic, labor, mental.
- [00:52:01.310]And so alienation really affected the physical
- [00:52:03.830]and emotional health of Latinos during the pandemic.
- [00:52:07.750]But we also uncovered various dimensions of social capital
- [00:52:11.900]that buffered these effects,
- [00:52:13.740]family, community, collective efficacy,
- [00:52:16.490]organizations, technology, social media, and trust.
- [00:52:20.710]So despite emotional difficulties and adversities
- [00:52:23.240]and distance, Latinos came together
- [00:52:24.890]to express resiliency and support for their community.
- [00:52:27.720]Thank you.
- [00:52:32.007]All right.
- [00:52:32.840]Thank you, Dr. Beulaygue for this presentation
- [00:52:35.970]on COVID-19 and its impact on Latinx communities.
- [00:52:41.970]At this time, we have seven minutes left in our time block.
- [00:52:47.760]And I wanna ask if anybody has any questions,
- [00:52:52.050]please go ahead and post them on the chat board.
- [00:52:59.720]And we can go ahead and proceed
- [00:53:01.030]with the question and answer session
- [00:53:03.230]for our presenters this morning.
- [00:53:10.042]I don't think we have any questions yet.
- [00:53:13.024]While we're waiting for some questions, James,
- [00:53:14.900]I just wanna say that, this panel was,
- [00:53:19.700]I mean, it was organized a month ago,
- [00:53:21.270]but we didn't really know what each other
- [00:53:23.000]was presenting on it.
- [00:53:24.627]And I think it came together very nicely
- [00:53:28.420]with Dr. Dona-Reveco's more theoretical piece.
- [00:53:32.500]And then we saw sandwiched
- [00:53:34.080]by some of the empirical realities specifically with DACA,
- [00:53:37.530]because that's something that people know about
- [00:53:39.703]that's on people's radar screens,
- [00:53:41.590]that they've been aware of for a long time.
- [00:53:43.680]And then I really like this information on COVID
- [00:53:46.150]because it's very relevant, it's very recent.
- [00:53:49.420]And it's something that we're still dealing with
- [00:53:51.210]and that the Latino community will see the aftermath
- [00:53:54.670]and some of the positive and negatives
- [00:53:56.310]that Isabelle talked about for years to come,
- [00:53:58.640]for decades to come most likely.
- [00:54:00.300]So it really came together nicely,
- [00:54:02.420]and this happens often at conferences, right?
- [00:54:05.710]It's not an accident, we're put together for a reason.
- [00:54:08.400]But I thought the presentations came together nicely,
- [00:54:11.540]even though it wasn't planned
- [00:54:13.677]and we didn't know exactly
- [00:54:14.780]what each other was talking about.
- [00:54:17.380]Yeah, and I think also what's relevant is that,
- [00:54:20.120]the immigration issue is still being written right now.
- [00:54:24.160]We have potential,
- [00:54:28.580]the current issue with the Trump era rules
- [00:54:31.190]being potentially revised or revoked,
- [00:54:35.690]but that's blocked currently.
- [00:54:37.920]And we don't know what's going to happen in the border.
- [00:54:43.890]And my roots are on the border right now
- [00:54:49.210]and there's a lot of controversy on that, obviously.
- [00:54:56.380]So the next few weeks
- [00:55:01.080]will determine what a lot what's gonna happen
- [00:55:05.810]concerning from Central America, especially.
- [00:55:12.280]And that's also tied, you know,
- [00:55:14.678]there's a lot of fear,
- [00:55:17.880]unreasonable fear that's tied to that
- [00:55:23.179]and the current political atmosphere we have.
- [00:55:27.050]I don't know if anybody has any thoughts about that,
- [00:55:33.650]but if anybody has any thought,
- [00:55:36.660]any of our presenters have any thought or anybody--
- [00:55:39.750]I have a question for Isabel.
- [00:55:42.010]Because as I'm watching the quotes
- [00:55:44.930]that you have on screen,
- [00:55:46.073]it seemed like a really wide array.
- [00:55:49.935]I think there was an attorney, there was a UNMC doctor.
- [00:55:52.870]I recognized Alexander Cortez,
- [00:55:54.640]a former student of mine at the end.
- [00:55:56.550]And then people from the community nurses,
- [00:55:58.540]how did you elicit the participants,
- [00:56:02.760]the people that you studied,
- [00:56:03.730]how did you contact them and get them to agree to interview?
- [00:56:07.970]So I think this question,
- [00:56:13.260]Crisitan can this speak to it a little better,
- [00:56:15.160]'cause he did most of the recruiting,
- [00:56:18.980]but a lot of it was word of mouth, right?
- [00:56:21.100]Like a snowball sampling.
- [00:56:22.930]Right, Cristian?
- [00:56:24.860]Well, thanks.
- [00:56:26.040]Yes, most of the original sample
- [00:56:30.670]was among community leaders.
- [00:56:33.718]The idea was to interview both community leaders
- [00:56:36.520]and frontline workers and for better or for worse,
- [00:56:40.720]I have more context with community leaders
- [00:56:42.690]than with frontline workers.
- [00:56:44.610]So that's what the people I got
- [00:56:47.910]and we did send out some,
- [00:56:52.550]we have a list of community leaders to start sending out
- [00:56:55.170]and people that we knew started sending out requests
- [00:56:57.580]if they want to interview.
- [00:56:59.280]We have about 20, maybe more by now.
- [00:57:02.760]We have about 27 I think interviews by now.
- [00:57:08.030]But a lot of people say no.
- [00:57:10.330]Couldn't send this to the people that we got
- [00:57:11.730]and we've been working on this for two years.
- [00:57:15.060]So that's mostly how it came out.
- [00:57:18.150]And then Isabel, did you say, and maybe Cristian,
- [00:57:20.570]you know this two,
- [00:57:21.760]did you say that the interviews are on YouTube?
- [00:57:25.110]Yes, so they art part of, like I said,
- [00:57:29.693]the "Oral Histories Project"
- [00:57:32.090]that is housed at the University of Texas at Austin
- [00:57:35.220]and the Voces project uploads the interviews on YouTube,
- [00:57:39.850]yes.
- [00:57:40.790]I've seen a few of them.
- [00:57:43.120]So if you type Voces you can find that.
- [00:57:47.612]And all of them are gonna be housed at Christian Library
- [00:57:52.362]as well.
- [00:57:53.195]The original recordings,
- [00:57:54.605]the transcripts everything's gonna be housed
- [00:57:56.914]at Christian Library.
- [00:58:02.667]Well, that's fascinating.
- [00:58:03.500]I think as a historian,
- [00:58:04.760]I think this will definitely be for historical uses
- [00:58:10.710]for decades to come.
- [00:58:11.760]This is going to be a great resource
- [00:58:14.988]for future use for students to study this tumultuous period,
- [00:58:23.260]especially it's great impact on Latino communities.
- [00:58:27.740]Yeah, and we have to say thank you
- [00:58:29.770]to the Center for Great Plains Research
- [00:58:33.670]that funded a little part of this study as well.
- [00:58:36.803]Yes, yeah, definitely.
- [00:58:39.770]Well, we've got one minute left in this time.
- [00:58:43.820]Final thoughts on this important topic.
- [00:58:52.220]It just seems coming from DACA,
- [00:58:54.850]I did these interviews.
- [00:58:56.920]I can't believe it's seven years ago
- [00:58:58.940]when I did the 2015 interviews.
- [00:59:00.640]It was about six and a half years,
- [00:59:01.960]but it's just hard to believe that nothing has changed
- [00:59:06.820]with DACA.
- [00:59:10.010]And I'm thinking about going back even to 2015
- [00:59:13.860]and beyond that when it started in 2012.
- [00:59:17.240]It's amazing to me that nothing has changed,
- [00:59:20.947]that neither the Democrats or the Republicans
- [00:59:22.790]have had the political will to do anything about this.
- [00:59:31.200]Well, correct.
- [00:59:34.580]I wanna thank everybody who presented today.
- [00:59:38.510]I wanna thank the Center for Great Plain Studies,
- [00:59:42.930]UNO, everybody and our guests and our audience out there.
- [00:59:49.010]Thank you for attending and for this talk
- [00:59:56.440]and the reminder that we still have other panels.
- [00:59:59.850]If you go to the Center for Great Plain Studies,
- [01:00:02.070]you can look on the schedule to see everything
- [01:00:05.680]that's still going on I think today as well.
- [01:00:09.720]So on behalf of the Center for Great Plain Studies,
- [01:00:13.280]on behalf of our committee, our panel today,
- [01:00:18.098]thank you very much for attending.
- [01:00:20.020]And if you have for any further information,
- [01:00:22.130]please be sure to send an email.
- [01:00:26.743]You can send an email to myself
- [01:00:27.780]or check the links on the webpage.
- [01:00:31.230]Thank you very much.
- [01:00:32.296](enchanted guitar music)
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