Search

This dissertation links research on residential mobility with research on policing and the criminalization of poverty. It does so through a case study of Black movement to Los Angeles’ Antelope Valley through the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher Program, a federal housing assistance program that is increasingly replacing public housing and one designed to promote residential mobility and racial integration.Fifty years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act banning discrimination in the sale or rental of housing, and the publication of the Kerner Commission report urging integration- oriented housing policy, social policy has turned towards residential mobility as a mechanism of combatting segregation and, by extension, racial inequality. Though the effects of mobility programs like vouchers are known to be smaller than expected, less is known about why this might be the case.I look to the Antelope Valley to examine what voucher experiences there might reveal about this process. Tracing the region’s decades-long history of racial segregation and inequality, I show how racial hierarchy has adapted to changes in laws, racial composition, and economic circumstances. I then illustrate how the Great Recession drove Black voucher movement to the valley over the past decade.Turning to qualitative findings, I show how Black voucher renters moving to the Antelope Valley are met with racism, economic resentment, and gendered stereotypes in their new communities. This social context of reception is key to understanding the mobility process. I then trace how one local government reflected and encouraged these sentiments by developing policies designed to reverse voucher movement by criminalizing, policing and evicting Black voucher renters in the area. While some of these schemes were abandoned, changes to the municipal code structure that encourage individual policing remain a highly effective mechanism of intimidating, impoverishing, and evicting Black voucher renters. This

Transmission of status across generations is a central concern in studies of social stratification and mobility. Most sociological research takes a two-generation approach to understand social mobility from parents to children. Not until recently did mobility researchers acknowledge the role of grandparents, who have become more involved in grandchildren’s lives because of increasing human longevity, declining fertility, and the growing number of single-parent families. My approach to multigenerational social mobility in this dissertation looks at the importance of grandparents, but also looks beyond the grandparent generation including great grandparents, relatives in kin networks, and even more remote ancestors. The three empirical chapters take into account long family histories of social status that span from three to more than ten generations. Findings from these chapters show that individuals’ social success is not predetermined by their ancestry, but it nevertheless is influenced by ancestry.

Research on assortative mating over the past three decades shows a tendency of individuals to marry others with similar characteristics. Positive marital sorting increases income inequality and is positively correlated with wage inequality. Even though marriage choice has important implications for inequality and its persistence, little is known about how marital sorting patterns arise. The positive correlation between spouses' characteristics reflects two forces in the marriage market: demand and supply. Investigating mating preferences in the process of union formation is central to understand marriage market dynamics leading to social inequality. This dissertation project focuses on the process of partner choice. My first chapter investigates educational homogamy by union type (i.e. cohabitation and marriage) in Mexico. I test two hypotheses that explain differences in educational homogamy between marriage and cohabitation: the "winnowing" and the "looser bond" hypotheses. I use data from three waves of the Mexican Family Life Survey (MxFLS) and follow the stock-and-flow framework proposed by Schwartz (2010). My second chapter investigates the influence of skin color in the process of partner choice. I examine assortative mating patterns by skin color using data from the Mexican Marital Preference Porject pilot (MxMPP), a novel dataset that includes information about skin color of respondents and their spouses. I investigate skin color homogamy using log-linear models to describe the association between partners' skin color. The third and final chapter of my dissertation examines the underlying preferences that lead to positive assortative mating in terms of education, skin color, and age. I use data from the MxMPP and use information about the choice set of available partners before the first union (i.e. marriage or cohabitation). I start by estimating log-linear models as a point of departure to investigate the patterns of association between partner's characte