Carlos is hyper-aware of wealth inequality and issues of access in the U.S., and is puzzled by his immigrant mother's conservative views, especially since she had to sacrifice so much for her family––and for him. And, a political science professor provides some needed context.
Featured Expert:
Eduardo A. Gamarra is a tenured full professor of political science in the department of politics and international relations at Florida International University. He has been at FIU since 1986 where he also directed the Latin American and Caribbean Center (LACC) from 1994 to 2007. As director of LACC, Gamarra was involved in research and public policy issues, academic exchanges, fund raising, and other multiple activities in most countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. In February 2016 he was appointed founding director of the Latino Public Opinion Forum at the Stephen Green School of International and Public Affairs. Gamarra is the founder of Integrated Communications and Research (ICR), a consulting firm with an active portfolio of public and private sector clients throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. His most recent consulting work has centered primarily on market research and public opinion polling. Much of his polling has been used to develop political campaign strategies and messaging as well as public policy decision making, especially in the security area. Most recently Gamarra’s polling has focused on the Latino vote in the United States.
He has taught courses on a wide range of topics including authoritarianism, democracy, drug trafficking and illicit industries, violence and revolution, human rights, political culture, campaigns and elections among others. During the current academic year, he is teaching graduate and undergraduate seminars on the Caribbean and South America. Learn more about his work here.
If you loved this episode, be sure to listen to Dad Denies Systemic Racism, and A Historical Wound He's Trying to Understand.
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Juleyka Lantigua-Williams:
Hi, everybody. Today, I’m speaking with Carlos. He grew up in the suburbs of Miami. He was raised by a mom who worked really hard to provide for him in her adopted country. Carlos, of course, recognizes the many sacrifices she made for her family, but as an adult, he also sees the inequality in the U.S., inequality that makes it so hard for working-class individuals to move up economically. His mom doesn’t see it quite that way. Let’s get into it.
Carlos: My name’s Carlos and I was born abroad but grew up in Miami. When I grew up, I used to call my mother mama. I grew up in the suburbs. We did not grow up with a lot, actually. Mother raised us as a single mother, so that’s already one income, and because she moved to the U.S. as an immigrant, I think the language barrier and the social network barrier meant that she got to do a lot of housekeeping and jobs that just didn’t really provide a lot financially.
We didn’t have to worry about food, and we didn’t have to worry about where we were gonna sleep the next month and our power, but in the next phase of my life where I started working in really distressed communities, those things were very salient. I mean, I worked with students who lived in trailer homes who… Their roof was kind of like a blue tarp. Kids who were perpetually hungry. I mean, I saw a little bit of everything and I’m talking about children, but I also saw that in adults. From that perspective, I also saw where I had more opportunity and more access. That also made me hyper aware of my advantages, right? The attention that my mother gave to me and how hard she worked to put us in a very stable environment with pretty good schools nearby and how not everyone gets that. The range just runs really big in the U.S. from the haves and the have nots.
It caused tension, especially when I was unemployed for a while, and that frustration was eating me up. The frustration of knowing that it’s not your effort, it’s not your merit often times. I don’t want to say it’s the old cliché of who you know, but at the company I was in, for example, every person of color that came in, that came in on my cohort, a cohort of about, I don’t know, 20 people, were the ones that left first or were the ones that were fired first, myself included.
I was trying to explain that to her and for her it’s incongruent, because for her, obviously the U.S. has done quite a lot, and I think that created friction. That created friction. Part of it is that I was already upset. I was already upset to begin with and what I wanted at that point was for… One is sympathy and acknowledgement kind of that you’re not crazy, this is the way things are. But instead, I was getting a lot of what everyone else is telling me, which is just keep trying. Some people even told me if I just made peace with God, things would work out.
So, part of why this is important, she takes it as a personal slight, but I’m talking about systemic issues of access. She’s talking about failures as a parent and, “You view what I’ve given to you as a failure, as not enough.” That’s not what it is, mamí. What it is is that there are several rules in this country based on the background you come from, based on the color of your skin, based on your gender and your sexual identities, and those rules affect us deeply and it impacts our success later in life. It impacts what we can do and what we cannot do.
Whereas she’s looking at it as some sort of statement on her parenting, which is not what I’m saying. I guess I was able to address a little bit of it with her through a field trip. I had an interesting field trip with my mother, and I think that changed her perspective a little bit. We had to go to Central Florida for something. I took a detour. We went to a town called Pahokee. We’re not just talking about urban poverty. We’re also talking about rural poverty and it’s all kind of wrapped up in one. And these are Black communities. That’s kind of the demographics of the region.
There’s three Dollar Stores. There’s no other place to find food. Buildings that are condemned. You’re really looking at people who don’t have a lot at all and I think for her that was a bit of a mind shift, because she’s never… She’s never seen that. In her 20-year history, 25-year history in the United States, she’s never seen a place like that before. It didn’t necessarily resolve our views on wealth inequality and what that means and how that impacts opportunity, but I think it changed her mind to an extent.
She still talks about it.
Lantigua-Williams:
I wanted to explore this disconnect between first gens like Carlos and their parents. Many of us have a hard time understanding our parents’ conservative and economic views, especially in light of the fact that they are immigrants to this country. I definitely needed help with this one, so I called in an expert.
Eduardo Gamarra:
My name is Eduardo Gamarra. I’m a Professor of Politics and International Relations at Florida International University. I’ve been at the university now for 35 years. My research at the university spans really most of Latin America in terms of geographic focus. I’ve done a lot of work on the Andean region, the Caribbean, Central America, and on various topics, but mainly campaigns and elections. And I began a consulting career doing research in the United States on Latino politics.
Lantigua-Williams:
So, you heard Carlos’s story. What did you hear when you listened?
Gamarra: Well, it’s an interesting story, and frankly what I heard is a story that I’ve heard many, many, many times from my students. In fact, Carlos is very typical of the kind of students that we receive at FIU. Somebody whose mother worked to the bone and put him in a position where he basically has middle class aspirations and is very analytical, and is analytical about his situation here, but really reflects very little knowledge about where his mother came from. And that’s always very interesting of immigrants, right? Especially second and third generation kids who see how their parents struggle, but don’t really understand where their parents came from.
Lantigua-Williams:
Can you talk a little bit more about that, about basically the gap in their analysis of their current situation, on their family’s situation, versus their lack of understanding of the situation from which their parents came?
Gamarra: You know, parents come from a variety of backgrounds. They may come as refugees fleeing violence or fleeing political persecution, or they may just simply come as economic immigrants, and when they arrive here, they really come with aspirations of very, very quick upward mobility, and then find themselves in very difficult situations, because they have to work long hours and completely abandon the lifestyle that they may have had at home.
The children appreciate what their parents do to a certain extent, but they’re being socialized into the American dream. And so, they go to school and they forget their Spanish, the little Spanish they knew, because instruction in school is so… There is no Spanish instruction to speak of. There is no teaching of the history of Latin America or any of the countries where these kids come from, or very cursory kind of teaching, right?
So, what you have then are kids who grow up not learning about their past with parents who are really too busy to educate them about where they came from, right?
Lantigua-Williams:
So, it seems like ideologically once the first generation, once the child born and socialized in the U.S. starts to gain consciousness there’s a split, right? There’s a fork in the ideological road between the parent and the child. Can you talk about where the split begins to happen and what are the core values expressed by each of them, by each generation, as the fork gets wider and wider in the road?
Gamarra: What I see often, and I have the experience of 35 years of teaching children of immigrants, a lot of the parents who flee their home countries are conservative and have conservative values, and the values that they try to inculcate at home get softened as generations pass on a number of things. On religious values, on tolerance issues, on things that the migrant parent back home might have found just absolutely unacceptable. For example, things like racial integration, things of course that relate to the way in which the United States has advanced on social issues. The whole issues ranging from sexual identity and so on that today are common with young kids, but that older generations still find difficult to accept.
So, that tension is there.
Lantigua-Williams:
It really struck me in Carlos’s story that it took that sort of like winding detour through a predominantly Black, economically depressed area for his mother to have an awakening about the economic disparities and the racial disparities in her backyard. And so, I’m wondering what you made of that story and I wonder if you have heard similar stories in the many years that you’ve been teaching the children of immigrants?
Gamarra: Well, you know, what’s interesting of course is that Miami is a very, very… How should I put it? It camouflages poverty and it camouflages poverty extraordinarily well. You know, the City of Miami is one of the poorest in the United States, and you would not know that, because the same people that live in those neighborhoods, the Opa-lockas, the Allapattahs, and so on. They shop at Walmart, but they also shop at Target, and they also show up at Dadeland Mall, right? And they’re able to kind of, how should I put it, I guess camouflage their own socioeconomic status.
And so, there’s this false sense here that we’re all middle class, right? When what we see is that most of us are really only a paycheck away from destitution, right?
Lantigua-Williams:
Well, so are most Americans.
Gamarra: Yeah. Most Americans. Yeah. Yeah.
Lantigua-Williams:
Most Americans don’t have $400 for an emergency in their bank account.
Gamarra: Correct.
Lantigua-Williams:
All right, so then to use, to borrow a political term, let me ask you about what you think the key talking points should be when a first gen starts to notice the differences, the ideological and point of view differences between themselves and their parents, what are some of the key talking points for them? And also, because you’ve identified that there is clearly a background gap. They don’t know, they don’t understand sufficiently what their parents come from. What is the type of information that they should be seeking from their parents?
Gamarra: Yeah. Look, unfortunately it’s a thing that has to work itself out. On the one hand, it’s the parent who needs to initiate the dialog, right? You have to talk to them about where you came from. What was it like, in my case in Bolivia? What was it like in Bolivia in the case of their mother? Look at where it is that we live, how it is that we got here, and where we’re gonna go. Now, Carlos is an adult, and Carlos now has a responsibility not of trying to convert his mother into being more tolerant, but he has a responsibility to understand why his mother thinks the way she does. So, his mother went to Central Florida or wherever it was that they witnessed that situation. Carlos needs to do the same. He needs to meet his mother and look at where his mother came from to understand her a little bit better.
Lantigua-Williams:
And with that, I’m going to thank you so much for making time to talk to us today.
Gamarra: Thank you. It was a pleasure.
Lantigua-Williams:
All right, let’s recap what we learned from Eduardo. Be curious about their past. To better understand your parents’ values and where their POV comes from, ask about their family history and their experiences in their home country. Take ownership of the conversation. There are many reasons for the gaps between our parents lived experiences and what we know about them. But as adults, we can take the lead and start the conversations. And remember, strive to understand different contexts. As grown-up children socialized in the United States, we have a perspective that our parents may never share, but don’t try to convince them to see things your way. Instead, listen with a caring ear and understand them better. Share your POV and allow them to alter their own perspectives at their own pace.
Lantigua-Williams:
Thank you so much for listening and sharing us. How to Talk to [Mamí and Papí] About Anything is an original production of Lantigua Williams & Co. Virginia Lora produced this episode. Michael Castañeda mixed it. Micaela Rodríguez is our founding producer and social media editor. Cedric Wilson is our lead producer. I’m the show’s creator, Juleyka Lantigua-Williams. On Twitter and Instagram, we’re @TalktoMamiPapi. Please subscribe and rate us on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, and anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts. Bye, everybody. Same place next week.
CITATION:
Lantigua-Williams, Juleyka, host. “When Mamí Doesn't 'See' Economic Inequality.”
How to Talk to [Mamí & Papí] About Anything,
Lantigua Williams & Co., November 16, 2020. TalkToMamiPapi.com.