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permanently in the United States than were their husbands. In both studies, the women
had enhanced their status by migration, while the men had lost theirs. Hondagneu-
Sotelo noted that Mexican women advanced the permanent settlement of their families
by taking regular, nonseasonal employment; negotiating the use of public and private
assistance; and forging strong community ties. Grasmuck and Pessar observed that Do-
minican women tried to postpone their families return to the Dominican Republic by
extravagantly spending money that would otherwise be saved for their return and by
establishing roots in the United States.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
The key to understanding diversity in Latino families is the uneven distribution of con-
straints and opportunities among families, which affects the behaviors of family members
and ultimately the forms that family units take (Baca Zinn & Eitzen, 1996). Our goal in
this review was to call into question assumptions, beliefs, and false generalizations about
the way Latino families are. We examined Latino families not as if they had some
essential characteristics that set them apart from others, but as they are affected by a
complex mix of structural features.
Our framework enabled us to see how diverse living arrangements among Latinos
are situated and structured in the larger social world. Although this framework embraces
the interplay of macro- and microlevels of analysis, we are mindful that this review de-
voted far too little attention to family experience, resistance, and voice. We do not mean
to underestimate the importance of human agency in the social construction of Latino
families, but we could not devote as much attention as we would have liked to the various
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Chapter 11 " Dimensions of Diversity 463
ways in which women, men, and children actively produce their family worlds. Given the
sheer size of the literature, the non-comparability of most contemporary findings and
the lack of a consistent conceptual groundwork ( Vega, 1990, p. 102), we decided that
what is most needed is a coherent framework within which to view and interpret diversity.
Therefore, we chose to focus on the impact of social forces on family life.
The basic insights of our perspective are sociological. Yet a paradox of family so-
ciology is that the field has tended to misrepresent Latino families and those of other
racial-ethnic groups. Sociology has distorted Latino families by generalizing from the
experience of dominant groups and ignoring the differences that make a difference. This
is a great irony. Family sociology, the specialty whose task it is to describe and understand
social diversity, has marginalized diversity, rather than treated it as a central feature of
social life (Baca Zinn & Eitzen, 1993).
As sociologists, we wrote this [reading] fully aware of the directions in our dis-
cipline that hinder the ability to explain diversity. At the same time, we think the core
insight of sociology should be applied to challenge conventional thinking about families.
Reviewing the literature for this [reading] did not diminish our sociological convictions,
but it did present us with some unforeseen challenges. We found a vast gulf between
mainstream family sociology and the extraordinary amount of high-quality scholarship
on Latino families. Our review took us far beyond the boundaries of our discipline,
making us cross disciplinary migrants (Stacey, 1995). We found the new literature in
diverse and unlikely locations, with important breakthroughs emerging in the border-
lands between social science disciplines. We also found the project to be infinitely more
complex than we anticipated. The extensive scholarship on three national-origin groups
and others was complicated by widely varying analytic snapshots. We were, in short,
confronted with a kaleidoscope of family diversity. Our shared perspective served us well
in managing the task at hand. Although we have different family specializations and con-
trasting family experiences, we both seek to understand multiple family and household
forms that emanate from structural arrangements.
What are the most important lessons our sociological analysis holds for the family
field? Three themes offer new directions for building a better, more inclusive, family
social science. First, understanding Latino family diversity does not mean simply ap-
preciating the ways in which families are different; rather, it means analyzing how the
formation of diverse families is based on and reproduces social inequalities. At the heart
of many of the differences between Latino families and mainstream families and the dif-
ferent aggregate family patterns among Latino groups are structural forces that place
families in different social environments. What is not often acknowledged is that the
same social structures race, class, and other hierarchies affect all families, albeit in
different ways. Instead of treating family variation as the property of group difference,
recent sociological theorizing (Baca Zinn, 1994; Dill, 1994; Glenn, 1992; Hill Collins,
1990, 1997) has conceptualized diverse family arrangements in relational terms, that
is, mutually dependent and sustained through interaction across racial and class bound-
aries. The point is not that family differences based on race, class, and gender simply
coexist. Instead, many differences in family life involve relationships of domination
and subordination and differential access to material resources. Patterns of privilege
and subordination characterize the historical relationships between Anglo families and
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464 Part IV " Families in Society
Mexican families in the Southwest (Dill, 1994). Contemporary diversity among La-
tino families reveals new interdependences and inequalities. Emergent middle-class and
professional lifestyles among Anglos and even some Latinos are interconnected with a
new Latino servant class whose family arrangements, in turn, must accommodate to the
demands of their labor.
Second, family diversity plays a part in different economic orders and the shifts
that accompany them. Scholars have suggested that the multiplicity of household types
is one of the chief props of the world economy (Smith, Wallerstein, & Evers, 1985).
The example of U.S.-Mexican cross-border households brings this point into full view.
This household arrangement constitutes an important part of the emerging and dy-
namic economic and technological transformations in the region ( Velez-Ibañez, 1996,
p. 143). The structural reordering required by such families is central to regional eco-
nomic change.
Finally, the incredible array of immigrant family forms and their enormous capacity
for adaptation offer new departures for the study of postmodern families. Binational,
transnational, and multinational families, together with border balanced house-
holds and generational hopscotching, are arrangements that remain invisible even in
Stacey s (1996) compelling analysis of U.S. family life at the century s end. And yet the
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