City College of the City of New York (United States)

Abstract

New York City was the epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic in Spring 2020 with many low-income Hispanic workers still reeling from its economic and health impacts. Drawing on a survey conducted in collaboration with the Mexican Coalition of New York City, administrative and census data, as well as 20 in-depth interviews, we propose a mixed-method study of the working and housing conditions and environmental hazards that Latino immigrants experience in NYC. We address the following questions: (1) How do working conditions and living arrangements affect the risk of contracting Covid-19? (2) How do environmental hazards lead to differential in mortality outcomes by gender? (3) How can this health crisis inform long standing theories about the more positive health outcomes of foreign-born compared to native-born Hispanics predicted by the Hispanic health paradox?

Principal Investigators

Norma Fuentes-Mayorga

Assistant Professor, Sociology Department and Latina/o Studies, City College of the City of New York

Bio
Norma Fuentes-Mayorga is an assistant professor in sociology, Latin American and Latina/o studies at the City College of New York (CUNY). Her current research documents the growing immigration of higher educated Afro-Caribbean and Indigenous women from the Dominican Republic and Mexico into the United States, their mobility, life chances in New York City, and the contributions they make to the education of daughters left behind. This is the focus of her forthcoming book to be published (2021) by Rutgers University Press. A second project documents the educational mobility of immigrant daughters in the cities of New York and Amsterdam (Holland), as part of a larger, cross-national study supported by the Social Sciences Research Council. A third and preliminary project examines the role of technology and virtual reality in the future of immigration and higher education. Her comparative work has been published in the United States, Latin America, and Europe, among these, in the Annual Review of Sociology, Latino Studies, and Research Papers in Education.

Yana Kucheva

Assistant Professor, City College of New York

Bio
Yana Kucheva is a sociologist and a demographer with expertise in housing policy, neighborhood inequality, and the role of policy in shaping inequalities across the life course and within and across neighborhoods. She has published in several leading journals, such as Demography, Journal of Urban Affairs, and City and Community. Her coauthored book Moving Toward Integration: The Past and Future of Fair Housing (Harvard University Press) uses an interdisciplinary approach and rich new data sources to explain why residential segregation in the United States has been resilient even in an increasingly diverse society.