The disadvantaged labor market status of an ethnic minority: Puerto Rican women in the United States, 1970-1990.

This dissertation explores the causes for the deterioration of employment prospects for Puerto Rican women in the United States. Specifically, it examines the links between changing economic and personal characteristics and the labor force participation outcomes and economic well-being of Puerto Rican women and their families since 1970. Data are from the 1970, 1980 and 1990 Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS) of the U. S. Census of Housing and Population and ethnographic research conducted by the author in 1993 in New York City. Findings from the quantitative analysis of census microdata show an increasing within group differentiation of labor market outcomes for Puerto Rican women, depending on marital status, and a continuing gap between them and non-Hispanic blacks and whites. In addition, immigrant Puerto Rican women appear to have lost their comparative advantage over their U.S.-born and educated counterparts. The study also involves the collection of primary data, in the form of oral histories of a sample of primarily Island-born, poor or working-class Puerto Rican women living in New York City. Qualitative analysis of these personal narratives corroborates a story of economic restructuring and ethnic realignment in the New York metropolitan area. It is also the story of a seemingly increasing association between ethnicity and labor market outcomes and between marital status and labor market outcomes. The ethnographic material gathered in this study challenges the common depiction of female migrants as passive followers of men. The first person narratives of New York Puerto Rican women portray females as active agents in migration, in many cases autonomous migrants themselves or the initiators of networks of exchange, not only of goods, services and information, but of people as well. Findings strongly suggest that the proximate determinants of migration and employment are highly familiarized and gendered. Combining both, quantitative and qualitative sources of data enhances our understanding of the timing and characteristics of the paths to employment and social mobility among this group. Findings also reaffirm the importance of adopting a historically-specific approach and invite further inquiry into the role that gender and family ideology play in poor people's strategies for economic survival.Ph.D.Ethnic studiesLabor economicsSocial SciencesWomen's studiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/129513/2/9527603.pd