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California Dreaming: Proposition 187 and the Cultural Psychology of Racial and Ethnic Exclusion
Author(s) -
SuàrezOrozco Marcelo M.
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
anthropology and education quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.531
H-Index - 46
eISSN - 1548-1492
pISSN - 0161-7761
DOI - 10.1525/aeq.1996.27.2.04x0225q
Subject(s) - proposition , sociology , post industrial society , malaise , ethnic group , context (archaeology) , immigration , underclass , gender studies , criminology , social science , political science , anthropology , epistemology , law , history , philosophy , archaeology , immunology , biology
This essay examines California's Proposition 187 as a paradigm of the contradictions engendered by new postnational social formations. On the one hand, most—if not all—advanced postindustrial democracies in Western Europe, the United States, and now even Japan, have developed an “addiction” to easily exploited foreign workers to do the jobs the Japanese call “the three K jobs” (for the Japanese words “dangerous, dirty, and demanding.”) On the other hand, in the context of a transnational malaise, new immigrants have become the focus of powerful anxieties—economic, demographic, and cultural. This essay concentrates on the social contexts generating these new anxieties in light of a psychocultural theory of “the need for strangers.”