Not Working: Latina Immigrants, Low-Wage Jobs, and the Failure of Welfare Reform

Extract

Not Working: Latina Immigrants, Low-Wage Jobs, and the Failure of Welfare Reform. By Alejandra Marchevsky and Jeanne Theoharis. New York: New York University Press, 2006. 336p. $75.00 cloth, $22.00 paper.

This is an ethnographic study of how welfare reform affected Mexican immigrants in Long Beach, California, in the late 1990s. Poverty research is dominated by impersonal statistical studies. Ethnography is valuable for giving more hands-on sense on how the poor react to social policy. The authors know the welfare field well, and they write well. They are, however, much more hostile to welfare reform than are most experts. The major issue their book raises is whether we can take their position seriously. (Full disclosure: I am myself a proponent of reform whom the authors criticize.)