Assistant professor of sociology Stephanie Dhuman recently published an article on respectability politics among Puerto Ricans in the journal Ethnic and racial studies.
““I’m not a pure Puerto Rican? » Racialization, respectability politics, and Puerto Rican intragroup tensions» explores the importance of understanding engagement in respectability politics as a response to racialization and structural inequality.
Dhuman’s research, which involved a group of Puerto Ricans who moved from the Northeast and Puerto Rico to Florida, showed intragroup tensions in the areas of language, status, and culture.
“Groups’ experiences of racialization in their home communities prior to their arrival, coupled with their interactions with white co-residents in Florida, play a role in the expectations they have in these arenas, and subsequently, in the way they exercise their respectability,” Dhuman said. said.
Making the assumption that a group is cohesive on the basis of a shared ethnoracial identity is not necessarily accurate and depends on the prior experiences of the individuals in the group. Dhuman said, “As immigration to the United States increases for many groups, understanding tensions within groups becomes increasingly important, particularly if the goal is merger. »