Local political opportunity structure and immigrant political incorporation: the multifaceted incorporation of Latinos in Chicago

• Autores: Estefanía Cruz Lera
• Directores de la Tesis: Eva Østergaard-Nielsen (dir. tes.), Margarita León Ramon-Borja (dir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona ( España ) en 2018
• Idioma: inglés
• Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Marc Parés i Franzi (presid.), Salvador Martí Puig (secret.), Irina Ciornei (voc.)
• Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Ciencia Política, Políticas Públicas y Relaciones Internacionales / Politics, Policies and International Relations por la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona
• Materias:
  • Demografía
    • Demografía geográfica
      • Movilidad y migraciones internacionales
  • Ciencia política
    • Sociología política
      • Minorías
• Enlaces
  • Tesis en acceso abierto en:  TESEO  TDX 
• Resumen

  • This dissertation analyses immigrant political incorporation by acknowledging the interactions between immigrants’ agency and the local political context. In this research I focus on explaining the whys and hows of the development a multifaceted process of political incorporation at the city scale. Departing from exploratory research and inductive analysis, this thesis looks at the contrasting and coexisting strategies undertaken by Latinos during the process of their political incorporation in Chicago.

    Using the political opportunity structure (POS) approach, I propose an analytical model considering two variables: the immigrants’ agency and the political structure in Chicago. The agency has three dimensions in the analysis: organization, mobilization, and policy incidence. The structure includes, on the one hand, contextual factors that are the lasting characteristics of the polity having its roots in the social and historical processes. On the other hand, it includes as explanatory variables the political opportunity structures that refer to the political circumstances that barrier or catalyst immigrant incorporation.

    The research design consisted of an in-depth study of the critical case of Chicago. This qualitative study followed a multi-method strategy. The main part consisted on participant observation and elite interviews with leaders of the immigrant organizations and other political actors from Chicago. The main finding of this dissertation rests precisely on how the degree of political inclusiveness of the city and the contextual factors merge with the multifaceted agency leading to complex interactions. This case study found that Chicago Latinos are facing the following dilemmas: 1) mainstreaming vs autonomy in the case of organization, 2) the simultaneous use of both contentious and uncontentious collective action, and, 3) the generation of community innovations to politicize the group in order to avoid depoliticization in the case of policy incidence. This multifaceted incorporation has the broader implication of positioning Chicago Latinos simultaneously as both a challenging group and as a political clientele. These dynamics spotlight a critical case among the universe of research of immigrant political incorporation at the city scale.