January 2, 2025
Sociology
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 inequalities.
Dhuman’s research, which involved a group of Puerto Ricans who had relocated from the Northeast and Puerto Rico to Florida, showed intragroup tensions in the areas of language, status, and culture.
“Groups’ experiences with racialization in their communities of origin prior to arrival, coupled with their interactions with white co-residents in Florida, play a role in the expectations they hold in these arenas, and subsequently, the way they perform respectability,” Dhuman said.
To make an assumption that a group is cohesive based on a shared ethnoracial identity is not necessarily accurate and depends on prior experiences of individuals in the group. Dhuman said, “As (im)migration to the U.S. is increasing for many groups, understanding within-group tensions becomes increasingly important, particularly if coalescence is the goal.”
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