Listen to Part 1 of the interview
Listen to Part 2 of the interview
Listen to Part 3 of the interview
Irene Browne the author of the RSF book Precarious Privilege: Race and the Middle-Class Immigrant Experience. In Precarious Privilege, Browne examines how first-generation, middle-class Mexican and Dominican immigrants in Atlanta respond to the stigmatizing assumption that they are undocumented, working-class Mexicans.
Browne is an associate professor of sociology at Emory University. She is a former RSF visiting scholar, editor of the RSF volume Latinas and African American Women at Work, contributor to RSF volumes Urban Inequality and The Atlanta Paradox, and the recipient of multiple RSF research grants.
Q. What motivated you to write Precarious Privilege? What is precarious privilege and how does it relate to the “racialization of illegality?” Why is it important to study the impact of the racialization of illegality on middle-class Latine immigrants?
Thanks for asking these questions. My motivation for writing the book was both academic and personal. Academically, the demographics of the Atlanta were changing quickly as the metropolitan area was becoming a new destination for Latine immigrants. What was once a Black/White city was becoming a multi-ethnic city, where no group had a majority. And there wasn't a lot of research on Atlanta as a new immigrant destination when I started to get interested in this topic, so I wanted to participate in that research.
Personally, I adopted a child from Guatemala, and I was curious about what her experiences would be growing up as a Latine child in Atlanta. The idea for thinking about doing a study arose when I was having a conversation with a friend of mine. I was looking for a new place to live with my daughter, and I said, “Oh, I don't want my child to be the only child of color in the neighborhood.” And my friend said, “Oh, that doesn't matter anymore. It doesn't matter.” And I thought, “Well, everything I read tells me it actually kind of does matter.” And I thought, “I can study that. That's a question: What will her experiences be like in Atlanta as a Latine child?” So those were my two motivations for doing the study.
Precarious privilege refers to the precarity of the social status of middle-class immigrants. Their economic status isn't precarious, it's more their social status. And how this plays out is that, in Atlanta and throughout the United States, there's been a lot of efforts to push Latine immigrants out of the state, especially through state policy. They talk about it as “voluntary deportation.” The policies are so harsh that that immigrants decide to leave the state. So, what this leads to is what's called the racialization of illegality, and that's defined as, “the social forces that transform a Mexican identity into a racial category that's equated with undocumented status.” Basically, what this means is that there's this stereotype or default assumption that all Latines are undocumented Mexicans. That's what the racialization of illegality refers to. What I add in the book is a working-class dimension. I argue that all Latines are not simply assumed to be Mexican and undocumented, they're assumed to be working-class undocumented immigrants. And what that does, with this class dimension, is it opens up strategies for negotiating the racialization of illegality based on middle-class status as a way of differentiating from this stereotype.
I think it's important to study this because, first of all, it gives us insight into the U.S. racial system and how it operates for class privileged, Latine immigrants. The racialization of illegality is stigmatizing. Goffman defines stigma as reducing the bearer from a whole and usual person to a tainted and discounted one. And thinking about this as stigma is important is because stigma takes away a person's dignity. And this is the atmosphere in which Latine immigrants in the United States, and especially in Atlanta, are living. This is now part of the U.S. racial system, and understanding the impact on middle-class Latine immigrants shows how the racialization of illegality can undermine the American Dream by rendering successful middle-class Latine immigrants as outsiders. That’s another reason why I think it's important to study.
Q. Can you speak briefly about the changing demographics of Atlanta? Why study the experiences of Mexican and Dominican immigrants living there?
Atlanta, as I mentioned, is one of the new immigrant destinations in the U.S. South, and it's one of the largest metropolitan areas among the new immigrant destinations. So, it's a really important site in terms of its representation. And as I mentioned, in Atlanta, the demographics have shifted from a predominantly White city to a city where no group has a numeric majority. Basically, what's happened is Whites have moved out, and Blacks and Latines have moved in, and that shifted the demographics of the city.
The other reason why I think Atlanta is interesting and important is it has this very large and vibrant middle class. And I was especially curious to know how middle-class Latine immigrants took advantage of elite Black spaces in Atlanta, if they did, and whether and how they interacted with Atlanta's professional Black population. For example, did Latine immigrants consider moving to these elite Black neighborhoods in Atlanta?
The reason why I chose Dominicans and Mexicans to study is Mexicans are, by far, the largest group of Latines in in Atlanta. And so, if you're going to say anything about Latines in Atlanta, you really need to talk about Mexicans and understand their experiences. Dominicans, I chose as a contrasting group for several reasons. One is that Dominicans have this really wide range of phenotypes—or physical features—and that they go from looking European and White to looking African American. And so, I was really interested in how some differences in physical features might influence how Dominicans interact, especially with Atlanta's elite Black population. The other thing about Dominicans is that the population of professional Dominicans in Atlanta is still really small. So, they don't really have these institutions that Mexicans have, for example, the Mexican consulate. At least, when I was doing my study, they didn't have these institutions. So, I thought that was another interesting contrast looking at Mexicans compared to Dominicans.
Q. How did the middle-class Latine immigrants you spoke with navigate the U.S. racial classification system? How does it compare to hierarchical race and class systems in Mexico and the Dominican Republic?
This I thought, was a really interesting finding in my study. Respondents used several strategies to navigate the U.S. racial classification system. One of the most interesting ways was to reject the racial classification system altogether. Respondents lamented that there was just too much focus on race in the United States, and they implied that this focus was retrograde. And they emphasized that in their country of origin, race and racial distinctions were not important. They were drawing on this concept of mestizaje to compare their country of origin to the United States. And what mestizaje really means is that there’s this idea of mixture, and a combination of European and Indigenous backgrounds. And that's considered the prototype in Mexico and the Dominican Republic of citizenry, that there's this mixture of European and Indigenous background. And that's actually considered sort of the pinnacle, or an ideal. So, in these countries, there's a pervasive belief system that there's racial democracy without racial hierarchy. In other words, there's this idea that everybody's sort of a mix and race isn't important. “We don't look at race.” At the same time, there's also this emphasis on this really steep class stratification.
In reality, even though there’s the belief system or ideology that there's racial mixing and that there's a racial democracy in Mexico and the Dominican Republic, there actually is a race hierarchy. People with light skin tend to be in the most prestigious positions, on the one hand, and on the other hand, Indigenous individuals in Mexico and Haitians in the Dominican Republic tend to be stigmatized. So, there’re all these groups that are at the bottom, but they don't talk about it that way. My respondents didn't usually acknowledge the racial hierarchies in their country of origin and a number said, “Oh, you know, we don't think about race in my country, it's not an issue,” and, “You know, there's too much focus on race in the United States.”
Q. What is the “typical Latine”? How did middle-class Mexican and Dominican immigrants respond to being stereotyped as the typical Latine? How did Mexicans and Dominicans differ in their responses? How were their responses similar? How did they perceive discrimination?
As I mentioned previously, the typical Latine refers to this constellation of stereotypes in which non-Latines perceive Latines as undocumented, working-class Mexicans, even when they don't fit those categories. The typical Latine is a default stereotype that is really constellation of these attributes. The middle-class Mexicans in my study, who experienced this stereotyping, responded by emphasizing that they're not working class. So, if they had social interaction with someone, and the person assumed that they were undocumented, working-class Mexicans, they would emphasize that they're not working class. Sometimes this worked, sometimes not. There was one Mexican respondent who worked at CDC, and she said, someone asked her, “Oh, where are you from?” She said, “Mexico.” “And where do you work?” And she said,
“CDC.” And they said, “Oh, Arby's?” And she said, “No, CDC.” And they said, “Huh?” She said that the person couldn't really connect the two—that it didn't make sense, for this person she was talking to, that she was Mexican, and she was a professional at CDC. So that's one example.
The Dominicans I interviewed emphasized that they weren't Mexican. So again, while Mexicans emphasized they weren't working class, middle-class Dominicans emphasized that they were not Mexican. A couple Dominicans even brought up the issue saying, they said, “We say we’re not Mexican because the stereotypes of Mexicans are negative, and so, we don't want to be associated with that.” A couple people said that.
Many of the respondents, when we asked them if they experienced discrimination said no. So, even when they described being stereotyped, they said they didn't experience discrimination. There were some respondents who did perceive discrimination, and they talked about situation which they or their family members were treated unfairly. So, there was a range of responses to that issue of discrimination.
Q. What is “cosmopolitan cultural capital?” How did the participants in your study use cosmopolitan cultural capital to negotiate the racialization of illegality? How did they talk about diversity?
Cultural capital refers to culturally valued aptitudes and knowledge, such as speaking French, knowing how to navigate social institutions, knowing how to interact with authorities as an equal, for example, and having vocabulary to demonstrate comfort with different cultural objects and activities. People who have these culturally valued aptitudes can more easily navigate social institutions, can get more resources for themselves, for example, access to well-resourced schools and professional jobs. So, that's cultural capital. And what cosmopolitan cultural capital does is puts an international spin on cultural capital. It highlights what I call the privilege side of precarious privilege. And it includes having openness to foreign others and cultures, possessing the ability to navigate a broad range of cultural and cross-national experiences, and being able to interact with people from a wide variety of nationalities and backgrounds. Individuals with cosmopolitan cultural capital also often have the visas and credit cards to facilitate international study and travel. One reviewer said, “Well, you know, working-class people have cosmopolitan cultural capital as well.” But middle-class people, in my study, were able to actually travel internationally and they had visas. They had the money to do that.
One of my favorite quotes from the interviews captures how respondents use cultural capital to elevate their own status above the status of non-Latine immigrants. This is a quote from Juan, who is a Dominican. He was in an Atlanta restaurant with a group of Dominican friends, and the group was speaking in Spanish. A drunk patron approached their table and said, “Why are you speaking Spanish? You should speak in English. Stop speaking.” And so, one of the people in the group said, “This is a free country. I can speak whatever I want.” And then he said, “We speak French, we speak Spanish, we speak English. What do you speak?” So, it shifted the status hierarchy and eliminated the stigma of speaking Spanish. This scenario challenges the academic literature that uses the white American middle-class as the favored goal for immigrant success.
Discussion of diversity came out the most often when they were talking about their kids and who their kids’ friends were, who their kids knew in school, and what their school racial composition was like. And they talked about it in terms of being this really positive thing, that their kids had friends from all different backgrounds and that they went to school with kids from all different backgrounds. They saw it as a really positive thing and connecting it to this cosmopolitan cultural capital where it's a benefit to be able to navigate and negotiate situations where people are from different backgrounds or different countries, even.
Q. Despite the racialization of illegality and increasing anti-immigrant sentiment in Georgia, many of your respondents denied that race and stigma played a large part of their daily lives. What are some explanations for that? Did this change after the election of Donald Trump in 2016?
I actually think of this as a conundrum, because there were a lot of respondents who described situations that sociologists would define as discrimination, yet they said, “No, I don't experience discrimination.” And they went beyond this. A lot of them said, “I love the United States.” One person said, “If they asked me to go and fight, I would.” There was this really strong attachment to Atlanta, and to the United States, and this came up with this discussion of not experiencing discrimination.
I interpret this using three different explanations. They're not mutually exclusive, they could all be happening at once. So, first of all, it's possible that they weren't experiencing discrimination, and that having a middle-class status actually shields people from experiencing discrimination. Again, that explanation is undermined a little bit from the data where they describe instances that sociologists would say are discrimination.
The second explanation is social comparison. That they compared where they lived in their country of origin, or even where they lived in New York City or Florida, to their current situation in Atlanta. And in Atlanta, they were able to live comfortable lifestyles, work in fulfilling jobs, and establish rewarding relationships with professional friends and neighbors. And so, this might be much more impactful for them than experiences of racialization of illegality, which might not happen every day or very not be very common. So, what's really important to them is their current lifestyle. So, the social comparison is the second explanation.
The third explanation is what's called defensive identity work. So, they might be motivated to save face by downplaying or denying racism and, basically, distancing themselves from people who are in marginalized positions by denying discrimination. As I said, I don't say one explanation is right, I’d say here are three possible explanations.
So, in terms of Trump and Trump's election in 2016, we actually did 10 interviews in in 2021, through 2023 or 2024, and asked people about Trump specifically. There was actually a range of responses and there were several people who said that they benefited from Trump's economic policies. There were just a range of responses.
We know from other research that there's been an increase in Latine support for Trump since 2016. And so, really, I'm hoping to conduct more interviews to delve into this phenomenon. My interviews don't tell me about change from before 2016 to after 2016, but my interviews do give some clues as to why middle-class Dominican and Mexican immigrants in Atlanta might favor Trump. Again, because if they say race isn't important, “I don't face discrimination,” and they think that they've benefited from Trump's economic policies, those could all play into them having support for Trump.
But now that things are even more extreme in terms of deportations, what I predict from my interviews is that middle-class Latine immigrants are actually going to be stereotyped more, stigmatized more. The negative rhetoric and negative actions don't just fall on undocumented Latine immigrants, it actually falls on all of them.