Gender Dissimilarities in Human Capital Transferability of Cuban Immigrants in the US: A Clustering Quantile Regression Coefficients Approach with Consideration of Implications for Sustainability

Female participation in the labor market has been increasing over time. Despite the fact that the level of education among women has also increased considerably, the wage gap has not narrowed to the same extent. This dichotomy presents an important challenge that the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals with respect to gender inequities must address. Hispanics constitute the largest minority group in the US, totaling 60.6 million people (18.5% of the total US population in 2020). Cubans make up the third largest group of Hispanic immigrants in the US, representing 5% of workers. This paper analyzes the conditional income distribution of Cuban immigrants in the US using the clustering of effects curves (CEC) technique in a quantile regression coefficients modeling (QRCM) framework to compare the transferability of human capital between women and men. The method uses a flexible quantile regression approach and hierarchical clustering to model the effect of covariates (such as years of education, the squared years of education, English proficiency, US citizenship status, and age at time of migration) on hourly earnings. The main conclusion drawn from the QRCM estimations was that being a woman had the strongest negative impact on earnings and was associated with lower wages in all quantiles of the distribution. CEC analysis suggested that educational attainment was included in different clusters for the two groups, which may have indicated that education did not play the same role for men and women in income distribution.

Collapsed Temporalities in Social Media

Social network sites (SNSs) raise complex questions regarding the perception of time. They can also produce a feeling of “co-presence” (Miller, 2011), mixing temporalities of “past, present and future”. Within their affordances, SNSs generate “collapsed contexts” (Marwick and boyd, 2010). When it comes to migrants that leave their home countries, such tools are frequently used in order to maintain a connection with family, friends and land that were left behind. This paper aims at proposing the notion of “collapsed temporalities” to reflect upon Cuban migrants who (voluntarily and legally) moved to Brazil. Apart from the theoretical discussion, we analyze self-narratives on Facebook of two Cuban immigrants, who had agreed to participate in the research and also conceded us online interviews. We argue that, once displaced, they have to deal with multiple layers of temporalities that affect their own self-narratives in terms of language and content.

Afro-Cuban Encounters at the Intersections of Blackness and Latinidad

Chapter 5 illuminates how Afro-Cubans present a challenge to the exclusionary racializing frames discussed in the previous chapters, and to African American-Latino divisions more broadly. Focusing on in-depth interviews with post-1980 Afro-Cuban immigrants, the chapter forefronts their voices in the Miami scenario, and extends the intellectual conversation beyond it. Analyzing Afro-Cuban stories about their experiences navigating identity and community belonging among white Cubans and African Americans in Miami, and African Americans and Mexican Americans in Los Angeles, the chapter demonstrates how they strategically undermine fixed notions of race and ethnicity and create spaces for coalition. The chapter argues that listening closely to these Afro-Cuban voices allows greater insight into how people situated “in-between” confront dominant racial frames. Furthermore, their negotiations of race help resist “color-blind” celebrations of multiplicity as they also make visible the cost of being raced by challenging the stigma attached to black identity.

Introduction

The Introduction discusses the aims of and inspiration for the book, and outlines its methodological approach. It situates the book’s focus on conflict between African Americans and Cubans, generations of Cuban immigrants, and black and white Cubans in Miami within broader scholarly concerns related to the investigation of how race operates in multicultural America. Introducing the theoretical concept of “worthy citizenship” and its application to interethnic conflict, the chapter contextualizes the issue of conflict between groups of color as rooted in a larger foundational framework of an elite-white-male-dominance system. The chapter further contends that the day-to-day lived experiences of marginalized or racialized groups reveal possibilities for challenging the logic of worthy citizenship, offering alternative forms of identification and interethnic cooperation.

Cuban American College Students’ Perceptions Surrounding Their Language and Cultural Identity

Four waves of Cuban immigrants have arrived to the United States from the early 1960s with the fourth wave still in progress. The changing reasons these immigrants fled Cuba have resulted in diverse characteristics for each wave of immigration. This qualitative study investigated Cuban American students’ perceptions of their cultural background and Spanish proficiencies. The results of this study indicate that all participants possessed limited Spanish proficiencies and a strong desire to maintain their heritage. Implications are discussed in light of the current political climate in the United States.