Place, nature and masculinity in immigrant integration: Latino immigrant men in inner-city parks and community gardens

ABSTRACT

With this paper, I offer three contributions to the subfields of gender and migration scholarship, and to the sociology of immigration. Firstly, the paper argues for the importance of place and gender in immigrant integration, and seeks to nudge the sociology of immigration away from the dominant paradigms of assimilation and transnationalism, towards one that acknowledges how quotidian practices and the materiality and meanings of place constitute active assertions for the right to make a home in the city. Secondly, this paper builds on several decades of gender and migration scholarship, and seeks to bring immigrant men back into the frame, not as androcentric agents, but as actors with gendered, intersectional social locations imbued with both masculine privilege and social marginality. Thirdly, the sociology of immigration has mostly ignored the materiality of the local environment in processes of settlement and immigrant integration, and this paper adds a focus on how plant nature and landscape shape immigrant integration and public home-making practices in inner-city contexts. The empirical work informing this paper includes one and half years of team ethnography and interview data collected in public parks in South Los Angeles and a large community garden in Watts.

KEYWORDS:

• Masculinity
• green spaces
• parks
• community gardens
• immigrant men

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8085-2566

Notes on contributor

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California. Her research has focused on gender and migration, informal sector work, religion and the immigrant rights movement, and the relationship between migration and gardens. Her publications include four sole-authored books, the most recent of which is Paradise transplanted: Migration and the making of California gardens (University of California Press 2014). Current research focuses on Latina/o immigrant home-making in historically Black neighborhoods, and examining how place attachments and plant nature shape this process.

Notes

1. The California DREAM Act of 2011 granted undocumented students in-residence college tuition and benefits, and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) signed by the President in 2012 allowed 2 million undocumented youth and young adults to provisionally work and study in the US.

2. To gain an appreciation of how combative this prolonged political battle became, see the documentary film The Garden, http://www.thegardenmovie.com.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by an ASSHR grant from the USC Provost’s Office.