Latinos and race: An overdue examination into the impact of race on Latino birth outcomes in the United States.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the consequences of race on birth outcomes for Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans in the United States. Within the US, substantial racial disparities in health exist. Research examining these disparities, however, has largely excluded Latinos. I hypothesize that race impacts the health of Latinos through three mechanisms: (1) Race operates as it has for non-Latino groups, with imposed racial categorizations having consequences for health; (2) Race contributes to Latino subgroup differences through the disproportionate distribution of phenotypic characteristics used to impose racial categorization onto individuals; and (3) Race impacts health through the process of segmented racialization, where Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and Cubans have been differentially racialized from one another in their process of incorporation into the US. In Chapter 1, I explicate my theory of segmented racialization. In Chapters 2 through 4 I report on empirical tests of hypotheses that follow from my theory of segmented racialization. In Chapter 2, I examine empirically the individual-level consequences of race for low birth weight (LBW) among Latinos across the US. Results from these analyses demonstrate that race matters for LBW and the consequences of race vary based on Latino subgroup and nativity status. In Chapter 3, I conduct multilevel analyses to examine the relationship between socioeconomic deprivation and cultural factors of census tracts on odds of LBW for Latinos in New Jersey. While odds of LBW vary at the census tract level, the relationship between deprivation and culture and LBW is mixed. In Chapter 4, I test my theory of segmented racialization by replicating analyses on non-Latinos conducted by Frisbie and colleagues (2004) for Latino populations. I find the mortality advantage that Puerto Ricans had initially eroded over time. Overall, findings from this dissertation demonstrate that race matters for the health of Latinos and also provide some evidence consistent with my segmented racialization hypothesis. As a group, the results suggest a lack of theoretical justification or empirical utility of grouping all Latino subgroups into one pan-ethnic category or of generalizing the often favorable health outcomes found among Mexicans across socioeconomic categories to Puerto Ricans or Cubans in health research.