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 New Report: Latino Immigrant Integration Highly Dependent on Local Context

By the Wilson Center's Mexico Institute (May 10, 2010)

Our new report, Context Matters: Latino Immigrant Civic Engagement in Nine U.S. Cities, looks closely at nine U.S. cities and finds that Latino immigrant communities are more determined than ever to integrate and participate in civic and political life where they live in the United States. The full text of Context Matters, in English and in Spanish, as well as nine earlier reports in both languages produced on each of the nine cities where assessments of immigrant civic participation were conducted-Charlotte,Chicago,Fresno,Las Vegas,Los Angeles, Omaha,San Jose, Tucson and Washington, DC-can be found at http://www.wilsoncenter.org/migrantparticipation.

According to Jonathan Fox in Chapter 1 of the report, "Understanding Latino Immigrant Civic Engagement": "In contrast to the dominant research focus on the characteristics that immigrants bring with them, the focus here is instead on varia­tion at the receiving end. The punch line for understanding immigrant civic engagement, in other words, is that 'context matters.'Inspired by this approach, this report synthe­sizes the results of a study of Latino immigrant civic engagement across nine different cities.

The focus on a diverse array of cities was intended to inform comparative analysis by highlighting varying patterns of civic engage­ment. The project included both traditional immigrant gateway cities, such as Los Angeles and Chicago, as well as centers of rapidly grow­ing new settlement, such as Las Vegas, Omaha, and Charlotte. The cities' sizes also ranged from vast metropolitan areas to regional centers. While the U.S. Latino communities in some of the cities are longstanding, as in Fresno, San Jose, and Tucson, they are much more recent in others, as in the case of Washington, DC.

As a result, in some cities immigrants join large, well-established Latino communities, whereas in others they unsettle long-standing black-white paradigms. Substantial Asian immigrant communities, especially in California, add to the varied panoramas of civic engagement. The nine city experiences documented in the reports that accompany this overview, while by no means a "representative sample" of the diversity of local contexts for immigrant civic engagement, offer a robust picture of the uneven terrain within which immigrants decide whether and how to engage in civic action."

Context Matters is a report by the Project on Latino Immigrant Civic Engagement at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The project is coordinated by the Wilson Center's Mexico Institute and supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

The analysis was written by Andrew Selee, director of Wilson Center's Mexico Institute; Xóchitl Bada, a professor in the Latin American and Latino Studies Program at the University of Illinois, Chicago; Jonathan Fox , a professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz; and Robert Donnelly a program associate at the Wilson Center Mexico Institute, who coordinated the Project on Latino Immigrant Civic Engagement

About the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

Established by an act of Congress in 1968, the Wilson Center is our nation's official living memorial to President Woodrow Wilson. As both a distinguished scholar-the only American President with a Ph.D.-and a national leader, Wilson felt strongly that the scholar and the policymaker were "engaged in a common enterprise."

For further information:

Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center

One Woodrow Wilson Plaza

1300 Pennsylvania Ave., NW

Washington, DC 20004-3027

http://www.wilsoncenter.org/