Understanding Latino politics

John A. Garcia, co-author of Latino Lives in America reflects on understanding Latino politics and writing his book.  

Tip O’Neill is credited with the dictum that all politics is local. I would add that politics has a personal strand for most of us. I will not burden you with the details of my personal experiences with authority, institutions, power, influence, and change. Yet, the accumulation of my connections with the above mentioned areas, and, most certainly, the people that affected my development helped to place my personal side into public arenas. 

Latino Lives in America

There were times when my political maneuverings involved persons whom we now refer to as Latinos (Mexicanos, Raza, carnales, etc.). I found my inquisitive nature made me link the personal and the public. Then I fell into an analytical bent and examined my circumstances. Whether I am directly involved in the ongoing connections to  political matters, or observing “from a distance,”  I have a longstanding interest in sorting things out. So, how could I not be immersed, especially, in the study of Latino politics? I do not view this interest as being as myopic. On the contrary, it has been expansive. Studying Latino politics must take you into most realms of knowledge and experiences both personal and otherwise.

There are times when an event, an exchange with someone, or just being somewhere takes you back to another time and place. Having participated in most of the focus groups for this book had that kind of response from me. When we had decided to conduct all of these focus group sessions, in preparation of national Latino survey, the people and the stories that came out from a pre-designed set of “discussion topics” had an interesting effect. I traveled, in my memory, and, as a result, a series of reflective thoughts and experiences arose. In relating to “my living in America”, I recalled the neighborhood I grew up in; a variety of situations, conditions, and people that I knew; exchanging experiences with parents, young people, immigrants, etc. at soccer games, on my street, on playgrounds, and, then my ensuing experiences in higher education and an eventually, a professional career. I feel that I had traveled along some common paths as our focus group participants, as well as some different paths from many of them. Yet, I realized, in some very basic way, “my living in America” has stayed within the domain of most of the Latino/as’ experiences that were shared with us. I would not go as far as saying their stories is exactly my story. But all of these stories are certainly worth chronicling and adding thematic overlays to share with others. Not only are there many stories and accounts of Latino lives, but they can be told through a variety of different mechanisms and this is but just one.

Hot type about the Venus Hottentot

In this blog entry, Deb Willis, editor of Black Venus 2010 discusses Sarah (Saartjie) Baartman, the “Hottentot Venus,”  and the inspiration for her new collection of essays, poems, photographs and artwork.

Black Venus 2010: They Called Her “Hottentot,” focuses on critical works on the subject of Sarah, or Saartjie, Baartman, the so-called “Hottentot Venus.” The book includes scholarly, lyrical, historical and artistic works, capturing the spirit of a new body of work about Baartman.

Nearly two hundred years after her death and five years after her “homegoing” burial in South Africa, Sarah Baartman’s short life has been examined, critiqued, distorted and mythologized. Born in South Africa in 1789, Baartman was brought to England and placed on exhibit in 1810. She was exhibited on stage and in a cage in London and Paris and performed at private parties for a little more than five years. The so-called “Hottentot Venus” was “admired” by her protagonists, who depicted her as animal-like, exotic, different, and deviant.

The book is divided in four parts– “Sarah Baartman in Context,” ”Sarah Baartman’s Legacy in Art and Art History,” “The ‘Hottentot Venus’ in Art and Film,” and “Iconic Women in the Twentieth Century,” with contributors from various disciplines. The sections explore the physiological and psychological threshold of the space in which Baartman performed, the multiple possibilities in recuperating Baartman’s story as they traverse the crossroads of sexuality and specularity, past and present, production and reception of visual representations. The book concentrates on the art historical aspect of Baartman’s legacy.

Readers may ask one of the most obvious questions surrounding the interest in Baartman —why her? She was neither the first nor the only African woman on display in Europe. Some of the writers in this volume noted that at least one other African woman was exhibited as a “Hottentot Venus” after Baartman’s death. We have only to look at contemporary culture to see the way in which Sarah Baartman’s image continues to be recycled as fashion in the works of some contemporary photographers. The anthology also examines the lives of women who were and still are iconic figures in the twentieth century, such as Josephine Baker.

Contributors include an architect, a ceramicist, poets, writers, historians, photographers, installation artists, and writers, including: Holly Bass, Lisa Gail Collins, Renee Cox, J. Yolande Daniels, Carole Boyce Davies, Diana Ferrus, Cheryl Finley, Nikkey Finney, Kianga Ford, Terri Francis, Renee Green, Lyle Ashton Harris, Roshini Kempadoo, Michael Harris, Linda Susan Jackson, Simone Leigh, Zine Magubane, E. Ethelbert Miller, Charmaine Nelson, Debra Singer, Berni Searle, Michele Wallace, Carla Williams and Elizabeth Alexander.

Working and walking with a Jazz Giant on The Autobiography of Jimmy Heath

In this blog entry, Joseph McLaren, co-author of  I Walked with Giants: The Autobiography of Jimmy Heath, describes how he met Heath and came to co-author the NEA Jazz Master’s memoir.

Working with Jimmy  Heath on his autobiography has been a rewarding learning experience. Jimmy was my flute and theory teacher at Jazzmobile, the organization based in Harlem that sponsors community concerts and jazz performance classes. Some of the people who attended Jazzmobile workshops were pursuing careers as jazz artists. Others like me were hobbyists. Jazzmobile was open to adults and younger students who wanted to discover how to play jazz.

I Walked with Giants

I was a student at Jazzmobile back in the early 1970s, and that’s when I first learned about Jimmy, who had known all the icons like Bird, Dizzy, Miles, and Trane. The great thing about Jazzmobile is that it was staffed by active jazz musicians, some of them, like Jimmy, legends in the music. After a few years of attending the Saturday workshops, where I had teachers like Sonny Red, Lisle Atkinson, and Jimmy Owens, I was placed in Jimmy Heath’s class. As a teacher, Jimmy was serious and humorous but always focused on the details of learning jazz improvisation. While teaching, he would weave in stories about the musicians he knew.  In the workshops, he played the chords (“comping”) to jazz compositions while we tried to develop our ensemble and solo playing abilities. Everybody in the class had a chance to solo on tunes, and Jimmy would critique what we did.

In 1976, when Jimmy premiered his Afro-American Suite of Evolution at Town Hall in NY, just days after my second daughter was born, he included our Jazzmobile flute ensemble on a separate part of the program. It was the highpoint for me at Jazzmobile.  That night at Town Hall, we all were so nervous, but knowing that we had practiced a lot and with Jimmy’s encouragement, we performed a couple of Jimmy’s compositions, such as “Heritage Hum,” which he arranged for flutes.

I attended Jazzmobile workshops through the mid-1970s.  After graduate school, where my fields were African American literature and history and the ethnomusicology of jazz, I began a teaching career in literature, but I continued my interest in jazz.  In the late 1980s, I ran into Jimmy, possibly at a Jazzmobile outdoor concert, and asked him if he was thinking about writing an autobiography. He told me that someone had started working with him on one but that the project hadn’t developed. At that point, Jimmy and I decided to collaborate. Knowing Jimmy was from Philadelphia, I contacted Temple University Press, where Janet Francendese was then a senior acquisitions editor, and she wrote back expressing an interest in the project.  Then in 1992, I wrote a cover story about Jimmy for Beth Turner’s magazine, Black Masks.

It took years to do the interviewing of many jazz artists such as Milt Jackson, Percy and Tootie Heath, Benny Carter, and Clark Terry. Of course, I had numerous interview sessions with Jimmy as well.  Transcribing and editing the interviews were two of the challenging parts of the project. When the new millennium rolled around, the project had developed substantially, and Jimmy and I planned how the overall autobiography would be constructed. In 2006, after the book proposal was accepted by Temple, where Janet Francendese had become editor-in-chief, Jimmy and I focused on verifying information and revising the manuscript. It was an intensive period, but during all of it, the collaboration was harmonious. At those revising sessions in Jimmy’s apartment in Queens, we would work for hours, and Jimmy’s wife, Mona, would occasionally give the answer to a question from the past that Jimmy needed to confirm. (She also kept us going with healthy snacks.)

Overall, it’s fitting that Temple University Press in Philadelphia would publish the autobiography of one of the city’s favorite, legendary sons. It was truly a book that took years in the making. But as my grandmother used to say, “Nothin’ happens before its time!”

I Walked with Giants: The Autobiography of Jimmy Heath is available from Temple University Press.

Mark Vail casts his thoughts on Recasting Welfare Capitalism

My approach to writing Recasting Welfare Capitalism was grounded in my doctoral training but was also shaped by many subsequent developments in both my own perspective and in Europe and the wider advanced industrial world.  As a doctoral student at Berkeley and as a comparative political economist from the historical-institutionalist tradition, I was steeped in the post-war literature on so-called “national models” of capitalism.  Authors like Andrew Shonfield in the 1960s, Peter Hall, Suzanne Berger, and Peter Katzenstein in the 1980s, and Hall and David Soskice in their work on “Varieties of Capitalism” in the early 2000s, showed us that all capitalism was not of a piece; instead, each European country (as well as the United States) had responded to the challenges of post-war reconstruction and political and economic development by creating political-economic orders that were admixtures of tradition and innovation, informed by historical experience but subject to significant innovation in ways that allowed them to confront a series of new and daunting challenges.

This literature was absolutely foundational; it generated a number of critical insights about how national capitalisms work and, perhaps even more importantly, why what Berger and Ronald Dore called “National Diversity” was likely to endure, even in a context of “Global Capitalism.”  At the same time, as I worked on Recasting Welfare Capitalism, I was continually struck by the fact that some aspects of the portraits of post-war France and Germany left to us by outstanding scholars as Hall and Berger failed to capture more recent dynamics in the French and German economic and, even more so, political orders (this was hardly surprising—after all, more than two decades had passed and the era of globalization and liberalization had wrought significant changes across the advanced industrial world).  How was I to explain that a France that so many had portrayed as “statist,” governed from the top down by a narrow and opaque élite, was now characterized by ongoing battles between governments and interest groups in which no single actor seemed to be taking the lead?  Likewise, how was I to explain that a German state long described as “semi-sovereign,” to use Katzenstein’s formulation, now seemed to be anything but, taking the lead in driving some of the most controversial economic reforms since the immediate post-war period?  As I began to hone Recasting into a coherent manuscript, I sought to provide some answers to these questions, to situate the seminal scholarship of my mentors in a more contemporary and fraught context and to bring my work on French and German politics to bear on perhaps one of the most important “big” questions of our day—how does capitalism change, and why?

In this way, Recasting was not merely a response to internal academic debates; it was also a response to a world which had changed enormously since the 1980s.  The book shows, not only that capitalism changes as the international economic context evolves, but also that the political responses to those developments change over time, driven by shifting relationships among the state and interest groups.  This dynamic approach to understanding the development of capitalism, of course, became even more critical with the advent of the international financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 and the broader international economic crisis that followed in its wake.  The crisis destabilized many earlier assumptions about the dynamics of “modern capitalism” (to borrow Shonfield’s earlier formulation) and shattered others, particularly the notion that it can be created and then, in quasi-Deist fashion, left to run itself.  Politics is always at the heart of capitalist economies, and conceptions resting on apolitical understandings of a neutral market of rational, self-interested individuals are unhelpful and even dangerous, to the extent that they distract us from the critical questions of political responsibility and enlightened public policy which we ignore at our peril.  So, Recasting grew out of one world and set of concerns and into another—unwittingly, unintentionally, but, I hope, in ways that demonstrate its continued relevance.  Responses to the crisis also bolster one of the book’s other central, if sometimes implicit, claims—that capitalism’s development is likely to continue to be national as much as transnational, calling into question narratives, prevalent in the 1990s, of an “ever-closer” European Union or a gradually but inexorably homogenizing world of along the lines of an Anglo-American world of free markets and minimal states.

Recasting Welfare Capitalism by Mark Vail is now aviable from Temple University Press. www.temple.edu/tempress

Dancing to cumbia sonidero in Mexico City

Temple University Press publicist Gary Kramer describes his experiences at a cumbia sonidero event he attended with Música Norteña author Cathy Ragland in Mexico City.

Last week I attended the Society for Ethnomusicology conference in Mexico City on behalf of Temple University Press. The conference exhibition helped Temple University Press promote the recent Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant (awarded to Indiana University Press and Kent State University Press as well) to develop and publish ethnomusicology multimedia.

There was considerable scholarly interest in our books and ethnomusicology multimedia at the conference. However, my ethnomusicological education came from an experience I shared with Temple University Press author Cathy Ragland (Música Norteña). Cathy invited me to a cumbia sonidero DJ event, held in a big warehouse-sized space in a neighborhood far from the conference hotel.

Even the cab ride to the site was exciting. A driver pulled up in an old, beat-up VW bug with the front passenger seat missing. We got in and Cathy tried to explain where we were going. I admired the Day of the Dead skeleton that hung from his windshield. (The skeleton “chattered” when the driver pulled its string, which he did for our amusement at every opportunity.) As we crawled through traffic, the cab driver would stop to spit or buy loose cigarettes from men in the street.

The event was held in this huge space—a warehouse for cabs, I understand. When we arrived, the ticket takers patted us down twice(!)—for weapons, I suspect. They didn’t charge us—perhaps because we were two of the three gringos at the event. Cathy later explained that the organizer was told to keep an eye out for us.

The space had a row of bright rod-like lights against one wall that flashed while the first DJ spun the music—which featured conga (drums), keyboards, guitar, and other instruments. Another wall had a huge sign where many folks (including us) took photos. We heard four DJs spin during the two hours we were there, and peering into their CD racks, I spied everything from Mexican musicians to Depeche Mode.

Many of the attendees wrote dedications on sheets of paper that they hoped the DJs would read as the music played. The facial expressions of some of the guys trying to get their messages read showed how meaningful these events were to them. It was often quite difficult to hear the actual music over the constant announcements, and the volume was extremely loud. (Cathy regretted she’d not brought earplugs, as I did the next day, when the hearing in my left ear wasn’t so good.)

As we got our bearings amid the lights, the noise, and the smoke—cigarettes were plentiful, infusing the air and our clothes with a pungent odor—men and women started salsa dancing all around us. At times, many dancers were encircled by a modest crowd, and they were the best performers to watch; they moved gracefully and fluidly to the music—it was simply hypnotizing. I wanted to dance, and although Cathy egged me on to ask a peroxide blonde in skin-tight pants to salsa, she was a bit intimidating for a non-pro like me. I did eventually line dance with two guys because I felt I could actually follow the moves. (I didn’t do so well, but at least I can say I dance, or tried to salsa).

Part of the allure was seeing the people—a diverse mix of working-class Mexicans in all their fabulousness. Guys dressed to the nines in suits and sport jackets, or sported only T-shirts and ripped jeans. Some women were heavily made-up and bejeweled while others sported bad dye jobs, overly tight clothes, or “chic” body-hugging sweat suits. The coolness of these individuals, all of whom glistened with perspiration was palpable.

What I most admired from what I observed was how everyone got along and, like us, was there to have fun. Men danced with women and then switched partners; men danced with men and women with women. The attendees ranged from teenagers to middle aged couples. One older gentleman, who was quite drunk, asked Cathy and me what we thought of the event, and if it was like anything we’d ever attended before. It wasn’t, I replied. When he put his hand on my shoulder to talk, the pure heat from it burned under my shirt.

At one point, we went over to one of the refreshment stands to get a drink. I ordered a Coke, and the server wiped it down with a dirty rag that prompted me to pour the contents of the can into a huge paper cup. The power from all of the music/sound made my cup vibrate in my hand. My throat soon vibrated too. But I found this exciting. The sensation mirrored my excitement.

As the event continued, I wandered around and found some promotional materials—the publicist in me never rests. I took some promotional flyers and a huge colorful poster for the next event. The poster is now hanging in my office, a souvenir from a memorable, musical night in Mexico.

Celebrating the life of Bert Bell

Robert Lyons’s On Any Given Sunday is the first definitive biography of Bert Bell, a man who some considered the greatest commissioner in the history of professional sports. In this Q&A, Lyons discusses the subject of his book.

In this Q&A, Temple University Press author Robert S. Lyons discusses why he was inspired by Bert Bell, the subject of his book On Any Given Sunday

Q: You titled your book On Any Given Sunday, a phrase Bert Bell was said to have coined. Can you prove he said this? Everyone seems to think this is apocryphal.

A: Besides being told repeatedly in separate interviews by his sons, Bert Jr. and Upton, that they often heard their father say this, I had the origin of the phrase confirmed by my research as to the exact game he was quoted. It was on November 30, 1958, when Pittsburgh upset the Chicago Bears 24-10. This was the Steelers’ first win over the Bears in 14 games spanning more than 24 years. Tom Callahan confirms this in his book, Johnny: The Life and Times of John Unitas.

Q: What prompted you to/why did you want to write a biography of Bert Bell?

A: I became intrigued by Bert Bell’s accomplishments while researching his life for the “Front Office” chapter of The Eagles Encyclopedia. I found so much substance to his life that I told my co-author Ray Didinger that Bert Bell deserved a separate chapter. After that book was published, I was offered the opportunity to write this book.

Q: How/where did you do your research?

A: I had complete access and cooperation from Bert Bell’s sons, Bert Jr., and Upton, whom I interviewed separately a number of times. In addition to personal interviews, official minutes of NFL owners’ meetings, documents in the Pro Football Hall of Fame and Bell’s personal scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, I used NFL Films archives and numerous other newspaper and library resources in Philadelphia, New York, and Pittsburgh.

Q: What did you discover working on this book that surprised you about Bert Bell?

A: I was surprised by a number of things: the fact that he was a privileged descendant of one of Pennsylvania’s most influential families; that he actually played football for five years at the University of Pennsylvania; that he led the Quakers to the Rose Bowl (Penn in the Rose Bowl???); that he was a certified war hero; that he actually played in a professional football game against Jim Thorpe; the interesting details about his relationship with Frances Upton (an amazing story, herself); the previously-unknown account about his negotiations with (and possible defection to) the All-America Football Conference; how he carefully developed the use of television when the medium was in its infancy; how he masterfully cultivated members of Congress when the Federal Government was trying desperately to nail the NFL for antitrust violations, and, most of all, how he talked Pete Rozelle out of quitting as general manager of the Los Angeles Rams. The list goes on and on.

Q: Bell began his football career at Penn, playing quarterback, and then he went into coaching. Do you think he could have gone pro, or was coaching his best option?

A: No. He was a good-to-average quarterback at Penn and realized that he would never make it as a professional football player.

On Any Given Sunday: A Life of Bert Bell by Robert Lyons is being published on the 50th Anniversary of Bert Bell’s death.

On October 12, 1949, Bert Bell was stricken with a heart attack in the final two minutes of an Eagles-Steelers contest at Franklin Field in Philadelphia.
It was a “poetic death” for Bell. Writes Lyons, “[Bell] was watching the game he loved, between two teams he once owned, at the stadium where he began his football career as a Penn quarterback in 1914.”

In his book, Lyons recounts the response of Phil Musick, who later wrote in PRO! magazine: “It was like Caruso dying in the third act of Pagliacci.” Lyons continues to report the reaction at the game:

“Philadelphia’s future Hall- of- Famer Tommy McDonald had just scored the go- ahead touchdown with a leaping catch of an 18- yard- pass from Norm Van Brocklin to cement a 28– 24 Eagles victory. McDonald was walking back along the sidelines and looked up toward the stands. “Half of the stadium was cheering but the whole mob of people on the other side of the stadium were yelling and running the other way,” he recalled. “Ten minutes later we learned that Mr. Bell had died. I’ll never forget it.”

Celebrating the inventor of Basketball

Rob Rains, co-author with Hellen Carpenter of James Naismith: The Man Who Invented Basketball describes Naismith’s accomplishments on and off the basketball court.

The image that most sports fans have of James Naismith is that of an old man, standing next to a peach basket, holding a basketball. Naismith did invent the game of basketball, something he was very proud of, but reducing his life to that one accomplishment does the man a giant disservice.

Even the title of a new biography, in a way, is guilty of this same mistake. The book’s title calls Naismith “the inventor of basketball” as if everything else he accomplished in his life was not worthy of mention.

Hopefully, the contents of the book are not as confining, and have more opportunity to reward Naismith for what he personally considered were his accomplishments and contributions to society greater than the invention of basketball.

Naismith was a young instructor at the YMCA Training School in Springfield, Mass., when he invented basketball in 1891, responding to a challenge and direction from his boss to create a new game which would keep a class of rowdy students busy during the cold winter months between the football and baseball seasons.

Really, Naismith had no other goal in mind. He was not thinking beyond his assignment … and the fact that basketball caught on as quickly and spread as rapidly as it did was a big surprise. Make no mistake, Naismith was very proud and honored to be recognized for his invention because he did believe it fulfilled a need for society, but it was not as if that encaptured his entire life’s work.

Naismith trained to be a minister, then went to medical school … not really wanting to become a doctor but so he would know more about how the human body worked. He became a beloved teacher at the University of Kansas, mentoring students who never even picked up a basketball in their life. He was much more interested in the role physical education played in a young man and woman’s development than whether or not they were star athletes. He considered athletics a part of a student’s overall education, just as important as their educational and moral development, but not more important. To this day he remains the only coach in the school’s fabled history in the sport with a losing career record, maybe because in many of the games when he was supposed to be coaching, he also was working as the referee.

 At age 56, when the U.S. became involved in World War I, Naismith enlisted in the Army as a chaplain. He went to France and worked on the front lines of battle, counseling young soldiers far away from home. A lesser man would never have taken on that challenge, but Naismith thought it was his duty, something he had trained to do, and was a contribution he wanted to make.

It was near the end of that war that Naismith wrote a letter home to his wife Maude, expressing concern and worrying about what was going to happen to all of those young men when they returned home. He had an idea, he wrote, about what the U.S. government could do to help those men who had risked their lives for their country, and in a few simple handwritten pages, drafted a very similar plan to what would become the GI Bill – at the end of the next world war.

That was just one example of how progressive and ahead of his time Naismith was. Even in his sport of basketball, he suggested that if a goal was made from outside a certain distance it should count for more points than a goal closer to the basket … more than 40 years before the three-point shot came into existence.

Naismith often said he really only had one goal in life … “to leave the world a little better than he found it.” There is no doubt he did exactly that.

A Q&A with Nancy Heinzen, about Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square

Nancy Heinzen, author of The Perfect Square: A History of Rittenhouse Square discusses the history of Rittenhouse Square in this new video clip.

And, in this Q&A, Heinzen explains why she loves where she lives.

Why did you title your book The Perfect Square?

The title comes from an account of Rittenhouse Square from The American Scene written by Henry James. When he was in Philadelphia to lecture, James was standing in one of the “ample, tranquil” bay windows of what had been James Harper’s house [now the Rittenhouse Club] located on the north side of the Square, when he made the observation about the residential square being “perfect.”

What is the significance of the reflecting pool and the guard house on the cover?

These easily recognizable symbols lie in the heart of the Square. The mosaic on the reflecting pool represents Neptune and his sea garden. It was designed by Paul Cret and executed by Enfield Tile Co in 1913. The mural was removed in 1914 and restored in 1999 by Friends of Rittenhouse Square.

Can you reveal the story about the statue of the Duck Girl in the reflecting pool? 

The Duck Girl was created in 1911 by Paul Manship for another site. Manship would gain fame when he created another statue in the classical style–the Prometheus in Rockefeller Center. The Duck Girl was first exhibited in 1914 at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and was soon after recommended for purchase by the Fairmount Park Art Association’s Committee of Works of Art.  In 1916, it was placed in Cloverly Park in Germantown. Years later, in the 1940s, it made its first appearance in the square, where it was vandalized and moved into a Fairmount Park warehouse. In 1960 the statue was placed in the reflecting pool in the Square until a more suitable site could be found.

The Perfect Square traces the growth and development of Rittenhouse Square through the ages. How do you think the square has evolved over time?

The era that gave the Square its cachet even today, was the Post Civil War period. This was when Philadelphia was the most important city in the U.S. thanks to coal, iron, and most importantly, the Pennsylvania Railroad. Great fortunes were made at that time—and where better to live than on Rittenhouse Square?

There are grand mansions and tony apartment buildings that line the perimeter of Rittenhouse Square. Do you have a favorite building, or a place  that particularly fascinates you?

I have always been fond of 1804 South Rittenhouse Square. This charming little house squeezed in between two high rises was the home of John  D. Lankenau, a renowned philanthropist. I like the house because it retains it architectural details, such as the iron railing at the entrance.

How did you come to research and write this book? How long have you been documenting the history of the square?

I have always been interested in the history of the area, and over the years I have read and collected stories of the people and happenings, I guess I began this about 15 years ago, by collecting photographs.

What has been your greatest pleasure about living on the square?

The change of seasons each with its own special magic and promise that one never grows tired of.

Women in the Electrical Labor Force

Francine Moccio, author of Live Wire, writes on the problems women face in the electrical labor force.

As a professor of labor studies at a public university, I faced the somewhat daunting task of teaching a class on the topic of “class, race and gender” to young, mostly white, male construction workers who were my students in an electrical apprenticeship program. Upon completion of their training sponsored by their union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), Local Union #3, one of the most powerful unions in the country, these young men (many of whom were beneficiaries of “father to son” sponsorship) aspired to attain good paying highly skilled jobs as master electricians, jobs that did not necessarily require professional degrees. 

Minority men and women were for the most part viewed by my electrical apprentice students as encroaching on the industry because of “government interference” due to affirmative action goals.  According to some apprentices, “women were taking the place of a guy who really needed a job.” “Women are for after work,” indicated one young man, demonstrating how polarized gender relations are still extant among highly skilled electricians and tradesmen.      

I also encountered a paradox among unionized electricians. Despite the strong degree of racism in society, minority men are somewhat more accepted in the industry and craft trade while women despite nearly forty years of policy reform and advocacy, only still constitute 2% and women of color are even scarcer. I wrote Live Wire to better understand why after all these years of litigation, advocacy, and policy reforms, sex segregation in this occupation and trade have endured.  I wanted to point out how labor relations between the union and  its employers, the Electrical Contractors Association (ECA), factored into the degree to which women, as well as other new groups were accepted into the electricians’ trade.  I thought that perhaps unraveling the reasons for sex segregation in this industry and occupation, I could also contribute more broadly to facilitating women’s entrance into other predominantly male jobs and professions.

While women have made strides in other previously male dominated professions like medicine and law, highly skilled blue-collar occupations and industries, as well as professional fields of science and technology have remained fiercely segregated. In order to find out why, I felt compelled to ask the following questions: What are the organizational and subtle conditions that maintain this type of tenacious occupational segregation? Can strict economic explanations satisfy an answer to why this exclusion of women is so severe; or is it necessary to also examine the customs and traditions of the industry and occupation, the institutional structures and organizational behavior that shapes gender relationships among workers or employees on the ground.  In addition, I asked how do formal and informal cultural networks at work, as well as the interrelationship of gender relations at work and home influence the speed or slowness of integration.  

Throughout my research, I conducted in-depth interviews with the major stakeholders in the industry, that is, contractors, unionists, workers, and trainees. I always began these interviews with the same question:  Why is it such a big deal about a handful of women coming into this occupation?  I also felt compelled to find out whether or not every new work group experienced similar resistance as women, for example, African-Americans and Jews. Much to my surprise, responses to my inquiries required a book length explanation. 

How could I proceed to identify a method that would maximize my understanding? Thus, I examined the history of fraternal societies and the role they play in building union solidarity, the external influence of social movements of equality, the interconnectedness of workers’ masculine identity at work and home, and internal stratification among electricians and members of the union brotherhood along the lines of sex, race and occupational skill. 

What light could be shed by this case study of women’s decade-long efforts to break into the electricians’ trade and union brotherhood on broader questions of discrimination at work and the role of women in unions? In addition, how can we better identify the factors that still cause such strong resistance of new work groups such as women into breaking into other predominantly male jobs and professions? Here is one lesson I learned from writing Live Wire: advocates, judges, legislators, unionists, educators and anyone concerned with efforts to advance workplace inclusion need to identify and address both the organizational and subtle forms of discrimination women encounter in any industry and occupation. In addition, it is critical to understand the history and nature of labor relations in an industry and occupation, including its organizational networks, the forms that occupational sex-typing take and the industry and union traditions among male employers, unionists and workers that can influence the reproduction of sex segregation.      

Writing from the Heart

Allison Carey, author of On the Margins of Citizenship, explains how her sister’s needs prompted her to write about disability rights.

In 1971, when my sister was born with Down Syndrome, the state did not yet recognize the right of children with disabilities to attend school, nor were there many services offered in the community for people with disabilities. During her lifetime, much has changed, but much has remained the same. Even after the passage of an assortment laws to secure rights for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, my sister still has difficulty finding integrated activities that will accommodate her disability; there is no public transportation where she lives to facilitate community integration; she has few friends of her age and little access to social recreation; her job options have largely been unfulfilling to her and her jobs have never lasted long; and, as someone who lives in the community with my father, she is not deemed to be in “emergency need” for services and therefore is largely ineligible for them. What then do her “rights” do to actually empower her or improve her quality of life?

On the Margins of Citizenship: Intellectual Disability and Civil Rights in Twentieth Century America emerged out of my growing interest in the Disability Rights Movement, and my awareness of its largely unrealized potential for people with developmental and intellectual disabilities. In this work I examine how rights have been conceptualized for people with intellectual disabilities throughout the 20th century, and why particular groups have fought for or against specific rights. Throughout this century, many tensions arose as Americans considered issues of rights for this population. For example, American policy tends to stray away from the provision of social rights for adults, yet the absence of social rights diminishes the effective exercise of other rights such as the rights to vote and to assemble. The provision of social rights tends to be reserved for people defined as incompetent or “needy”, yet this conceptualization undermines their status as worthy and active citizens. The American system of rights tends to prioritize rights that offer freedom to citizens to act as they wish (e.g. to worship as one wishes, to assemble with whom one wishes), yet people with intellectual disabilities are often deemed incompetent and dependent and therefore unable to exercise rights based on freedom.

This analysis draws upon a relational-practice approach to citizenship to argue that rights do not offer clear guarantees. Instead, rights offer potential resources to be claimed and negotiated, and the outcomes of the dynamic process of trying to exercise rights are highly dependent upon the immediate social context and the larger system of social stratification. For people with intellectual disabilities, who so often occupy a social position with little power, their “rights” are often undercut as they are defined by other citizens and by the courts as biologically or intellectually unable to exercise rights, as a threat to the rights of others, and as undeserving of the privilege and influence that are bestowed through the exercise of rights.

Therefore, it is unfortunately not surprising that the 10^th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision Olmstead v. L.C. – a decision which found that unnecessary isolation and institutionalization constituted discrimination on the basis of disability – is marked with little success towards deinstitutionalization and instead the filing of a court case in Pennsylvania, charging that the state has yet to comply with the Olmstead decision. People with developmental and intellectual disabilities find that even after their rights are formally established, these rights are undermined and must be fought for again and again.