Mary C Waters
Biographic Data
| ID | 116740 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mary C Waters |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mary C |
| FAMILY NAME | Waters |
| SIGNATURE | WATERS M C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Harvard University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2890-619X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 77 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1914 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 73 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1986 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
Transit bus access to healthy, affordable food: A novel geographic information system (GIS) and community-informed analysis
Good nutrition reduces the risk of chronic disease, but many vulnerable populations do not have equitable access to healthy food. People who are lower-income, non-White, older, or disabled, have increased likelihood of not owning a vehicle and of being dependent on public buses to source healthy, affordable food. Our study took place in three municipalities targeted by the Rhode Island Department of Health for equity-focused interventions. Our me…
Weathering the Storm: Exploring the Use of the Strong Black Woman Role in the Coping Strategies of Black Women Survivors of Hurricane Katrina
To protect against gendered racism, U.S. Black girls and women are socialized to be strong. This study explored the manifestations of the "Strong Black Woman" schema over time in the coping strategies of six Black women who survived Hurricane Katrina. Participants were all Black mothers, enrolled at a local community college, and ages 23-31 at the time of the first interview. All were interviewed three times between 2006 and 2018. Using narrative…
Preparing for climate migration and integration: A Policy and Research Agenda
Predicting Post-Disaster Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Symptom Trajectories: The Role of Pre-Disaster Traumatic Experiences
The mental health impact of disasters is substantial, with 30-40% of direct disaster victims developing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It is not yet clear why some people cope well with disaster-related trauma while others experience chronic dysfunction. Prior research on non-disaster trauma suggests that an individual's history of traumatic experiences earlier in the life course, prior to the disaster, may be a key factor in explaining v…
Becoming white or becoming mainstream: Defining the Endpoint of Assimilation
In this article we address some of the controversies that have arisen in the reception of Richard Alba’s work on changing patterns of ethnoracial diversity and the integration of immigrants. We parse some of the debates around the term ‘assimilation’, arguing that it is still a useful term for understanding the trajectories of immigrants and their descendants. We argue that Alba’s demographic analyses of the incorporation of post 1965 immigrants …
The Impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Older Latino Immigrants
This article examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Latino immigrants age sixty and older from Cuba, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela. Based on 178 interviews with immigrants in Florida and Massachusetts, this study identifies the financial and health hardships they endured, the kinds of government and nonprofit aid they accessed, the factors keeping many from accessing aid, and the coping strategies th…
Analyzing the long-term impact of post-disaster relocation and implications for disaster recovery policy
Ethnic and Racial Identities of Second-Generation Black Immigrants in New York City
This article explores the types of racial and ethnic identities adopted by a sample of 83 adolescent second-generation West Indian and Haitian Americans in New York City. Tne subjective understandings these youngsters have of being American, of being black American, and of their ethnic identities are described and contrasted with the identities and reactions of first-generation immigrants from the same countries. Three types of identities are evi…
Physical Health Symptoms and Hurricane Katrina: Individual Trajectories of Development and Recovery More Than a Decade After the Storm
Objectives. To examine how physical health symptoms developed and resolved in response to Hurricane Katrina. Methods. We used data from a 2003 to 2018 study of young, low-income mothers who were living in New Orleans, Louisiana, when Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005 (n = 276). We fit logistic regressions to model the odds of first reporting or “developing” headaches or migraines, back problems, and digestive problems, and of experiencing remissio…
Race, Legal Status & Social Mobility
In this essay, we review what is known about the role of race and legal status in the incorporation of immigrants in twenty-first-century America. While race and ethnicity matter in the social mobility of immigrants, racialization is not the impassable stumbling block critical race theory predicts. The research paints a remarkably consistent picture of intergenerational socioeconomic progress, one that is very similar to what happened with immigr…
Flexible Coding of In-depth Interviews: A Twenty-first-century Approach
Qualitative coding procedures emanating from grounded theory were limited by technologies of the 1960s: colored pens, scissors, and index cards. Today, electronic documents can be flexibly stored, retrieved, and cross-referenced using qualitative data analysis (QDA) software. We argue the oft-cited grounded theory framework poorly fits many features of contemporary sociological interview studies, including large samples, coding by teams, and mixe…
Spare the Rod, Ruin the Child?: First- and Second-Generation West Indian Child-Rearing Practices
The Next Generation: Immigrant Youth in a Comparative Perspective
Gentrification, Neighborhood Change, and Population Health: A Systematic Review
The Social Consequences of Disasters: Individual and Community Change
We review findings from the last decade of research on the effects of disasters, concentrating on three important themes: the differences between the recovery of places versus people, the need to differentiate between short- and long-term recovery trajectories, and the changing role of government and how it has exacerbated inequality in recovery and engendered feedback loops that create greater vulnerability. We reflect the focus of the majority …
Nathan Glazer on Race and Ethnicity: Youthful Optimism and Mature Revisions
Effects of gentrification on health status after Hurricane Katrina
Posttraumatic growth in low-income Black mothers who survived Hurricane Katrina
This mixed-methods study aimed to gain knowledge of the lived experience of posttraumatic growth (PTG) in 32 low-income Black mothers whose New Orleans' homes were damaged or destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, and half of whom had relocated indefinitely to Houston. Data from in-depth interviews with participants were examined in conjunction with quantitative scores on the Posttraumatic Growth Inventory (PTGI; Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1996). Participants …
Twelve years later: The long-term mental health consequences of Hurricane Katrina
I Don’t Belong Anymore: Undocumented Latino Immigrants Encounter Social Services in the United States
As undocumented Latino immigrants transition into adulthood, they also transition into illegality. They move from a somewhat protected status under which they had access to education and other social benefits, to the more vulnerable category of undocumented adults without access to social rights. How undocumented immigrants’ interactions with social services contribute to the formation of their ethnic identity and feelings of belonging to the Uni…
Obamacare in action: How Access to the Health Care System Contributes to Immigrants' Sense of Belonging
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) aimed to reduce stark health inequalities by providing universal health insurance to all Americans and long-term authorised immigrants. Later regulations, however, gave the 50 U.S. states latitude to choose the degree of coverage for their constituencies. In this paper, we explore how interactions with these diverse systems of care contribute to the incorporation of immigrants into America, especially among the most …
Life after Hurricane Katrina: The Resilience in Survivors of Katrina (Risk) Project
This article presents an overview of the findings to date of the Resilience in Survivors of Katrina (RISK) Project, a longitudinal study of 1,019 young, predominantly female and African American community college students who were surveyed a year before Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and then two to three times afterward. This study combines a multidisciplinary, multimethod approach to understanding the immediate and long-term effects of the Ka…
The Integration of Immigrants into American Society
The Effect of Universal Service Delivery on the Integration of Moroccan Immigrants in Spain: A Case Study from an Anti-Oppressive Perspective
The ‘progressive's dilemma’ questions the ability of public social services to facilitate the integration of immigrants into modern welfare states. The rationale is that majority groups react negatively towards minorities when they perceive their prerogatives threatened, which creates a backlash against immigrants' integration. In this article, we argue that universal social services, as opposed to means-tested programmes, can help to overcome th…
Immigrants and African Americans
We examine how recent immigration to the United States has affected African Americans. We first review the research on the growing diversity within the black population, driven largely by the presence of black immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa. As their children and grandchildren come of age, relations between immigrants and African Americans are complicated by the fact that a growing portion of the African American community has origins i…
Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America
In this perceptive and revealing study, Mary Waters explores the "reinvention" of ethnicity in the lives of the grandchildren and great grandchildren of European immigrants, asking how their ethnic heritage is lived, maintained, and celebrated. Through in-depth interviews with sixty third and fourth generation white ethnics in suburban California and Pennsylvania, the author discovers a surprisingly resilient sense of ethnicity among people who c…
Flexible Coding of In-depth Interviews: A Twenty-first-century Approach
Qualitative coding procedures emanating from grounded theory were limited by technologies of the 1960s: colored pens, scissors, and index cards. Today, electronic documents can be flexibly stored, retrieved, and cross-referenced using qualitative data analysis (QDA) software. We argue the oft-cited grounded theory framework poorly fits many features of contemporary sociological interview studies, including large samples, coding by teams, and mixe…
Segmented assimilation revisited: Types of Acculturation and Socioeconomic Mobility in Young Adulthood
This article examines the debate between key theories of immigrant assimilation by exploring the effect of acculturation types - dissonant, consonant, and selective - on socioeconomic outcomes in young adulthood. Drawing on survey data from the Immigrant Second Generation in Metropolitan New York, we show that while all three types occur, dissonant acculturation is the exception, not the norm, among second generation young adults. Our results als…
Immigrants and African Americans
We examine how recent immigration to the United States has affected African Americans. We first review the research on the growing diversity within the black population, driven largely by the presence of black immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa. As their children and grandchildren come of age, relations between immigrants and African Americans are complicated by the fact that a growing portion of the African American community has origins i…
The Social Consequences of Disasters: Individual and Community Change
We review findings from the last decade of research on the effects of disasters, concentrating on three important themes: the differences between the recovery of places versus people, the need to differentiate between short- and long-term recovery trajectories, and the changing role of government and how it has exacerbated inequality in recovery and engendered feedback loops that create greater vulnerability. We reflect the focus of the majority …
The process of ethnogenesis among Haitian and Israeli immigrants in the United States
This article examines the process of ethnic identity formation among two different groups of recent immigrants to the United States: secular kibbutz-born Israelis and middle-class Haitians. While the two groups are different in a number of ways, they share an ambivalence with the identities that American society would assign to them - as Jews and blacks respectively. By contrasting these two case studies we identify the role of the 'proximal host…
Becoming American/Becoming New Yorkers: Immigrant Incorporation in a Majority Minority City
Many observers have noted that immigrants to the United States are highly concentrated in the largest metropolitan areas of a relatively few states. Though immigrants diffused into many places that had previously seen relatively few immigrants during the 1990s, as of the 2000 census, 77 percent of the nation's 31.1 million foreign born residents still lived in six states – California, New York, Texas, Florida, New Jersey, and Illinois. According …
The role of lineage in identity formation among black Americans
Five years later: Recovery from post traumatic stress and psychological distress among low-income mothers affected by Hurricane Katrina
Ethnic Groups in Flux: The Changing Ethnic Responses of American Whites
As whites become increasingly distant in generations and time from their immigrant ancestors, the tendency to distort, or remember selectively, one's ethnic origins increases. Distortions and inconsistencies in ethnic reporting are shown to vary with age, educational attainment, and marital status and even to exist within families when parents report the ethnic ancestry of their children. These examples of inconsistency, simplification, and syste…
Twelve years later: The long-term mental health consequences of Hurricane Katrina
Life after Hurricane Katrina: The Resilience in Survivors of Katrina (Risk) Project
This article presents an overview of the findings to date of the Resilience in Survivors of Katrina (RISK) Project, a longitudinal study of 1,019 young, predominantly female and African American community college students who were surveyed a year before Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and then two to three times afterward. This study combines a multidisciplinary, multimethod approach to understanding the immediate and long-term effects of the Ka…
The location of ethnic and racial groups in the United States
Defining difference: The role of immigrant generation and race in American and British immigration studies
This article reviews the ways in which Britain and the USA classify and analyse the integration of immigrants and their descendants. While both societies recognize racial differences in their official statistics and in the academic analyses of change over time, the USA tends to classify immigrants and their descendants by immigrant generation much more than Britain does. The importance of the concept of generation in American immigration research…
The Ethnic Responses of Whites: What Causes Their Instability, Simplification, and Inconsistency
This article analyzes some inconsistent or puzzling observations in the data derived from the new approach to measuring ethnicity first used in the 1980 census. These puzzles include the simplification of children's origins by parents who each have a different single ethnic origin, inconsistencies in the ethnic origins that parents ascribe to their children, and changes in the pattern of ancestry responses across the life span of individuals. Thr…
Commentary: The Kids Are (Mostly) Alright: Second-Generation Assimilation: Comments on Haller, Portes and Lynch
Journal Article Commentary: The Kids Are (Mostly) Alright: Second-Generation Assimilation: Comments on Haller, Portes and Lynch Get access Richard Alba, Richard Alba CUNY Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Philip Kasinitz, Philip Kasinitz CUNY Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Mary C. Waters Mary C. Waters Harvard University Search for other works by this author on: Oxfo…
Between Race and Ethnicity: Cape Verdean American Immigrants, 1860-1965
Journal Article Between Race and Ethnicity: Cape Verdean American Immigrants, 1860–1963. By Marilyn Halter. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. xxii, 213 pp. Cloth, $32.50, ISBN 0-25201997-0. Paper, $14.95, ISBN 0-252-06326-0.) Get access Mary Waters Mary Waters Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 81, Issue 3, December 19…
Ethnic identities in the future: The Possible Effects of Mass Immigration and Genetic Testing
Two important trends may influence the identities of the later-generation descendants of European immigrants in the USA: high levels of ongoing immigration to the USA from all over the world, and the growth of genetic testing for ancestry and ethnic origins. I suggest that these trends may modify Gans's predictions of what will happen to later-generation ethnicity. Both trends might lead to the maintenance of some type of identity, even if it is …
Immigrants in New York City: Reaping the Benefits of Continuous Immigration
Using New York City as an example, this essay examines how American cities that have a long and continuous history of absorbing immigrants develop welcoming institutions and policies for current immigrants and their children. Cities such as Chicago, San Francisco, and New York have been gateway cities for many previous waves of immigrants and continue to absorb new immigrants today. The ethnic conflicts and accommodations of the nineteenth and tw…
Obamacare in action: How Access to the Health Care System Contributes to Immigrants' Sense of Belonging
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) aimed to reduce stark health inequalities by providing universal health insurance to all Americans and long-term authorised immigrants. Later regulations, however, gave the 50 U.S. states latitude to choose the degree of coverage for their constituencies. In this paper, we explore how interactions with these diverse systems of care contribute to the incorporation of immigrants into America, especially among the most …
The everyday use of surname to determine ethnic ancestry
Becoming white or becoming mainstream: Defining the Endpoint of Assimilation
In this article we address some of the controversies that have arisen in the reception of Richard Alba’s work on changing patterns of ethnoracial diversity and the integration of immigrants. We parse some of the debates around the term ‘assimilation’, arguing that it is still a useful term for understanding the trajectories of immigrants and their descendants. We argue that Alba’s demographic analyses of the incorporation of post 1965 immigrants …
I Don’t Belong Anymore: Undocumented Latino Immigrants Encounter Social Services in the United States
As undocumented Latino immigrants transition into adulthood, they also transition into illegality. They move from a somewhat protected status under which they had access to education and other social benefits, to the more vulnerable category of undocumented adults without access to social rights. How undocumented immigrants’ interactions with social services contribute to the formation of their ethnic identity and feelings of belonging to the Uni…
Discrimination, Race Relations, and the Second Generation
In an increasingly diverse America, the experience of race and racial discrimination is too often described as if it is the same for all racial and ethnic groups. Utilizing the perspective on ethnic and racial groups developed by Zolberg that stresses their contingent and dynamic nature, we explore ethnic and racial discrimination in depth. Drawing on data from the New York Second Generation Study we describe the experience of prejudice and discr…
Social science and ethnic options
and raises some provocative questions about its methodol-ogy, ideology and its relevance for understanding current issues of race andethnicity. I think that we fundamentally disagree about issues of epistem-ology and the value of social scientific research, and I suspect that we alsohave some political disagreements, although I am not sure of the exactnature of Anagnostou’s stance on issues of racial equality and justice. Yet,I am pleased that we…
Ethnic Groups in Flux: The Changing Ethnic Responses of American Whites
As whites become increasingly distant in generations and time from their immigrant ancestors, the tendency to distort, or remember selectively, one's ethnic origins increases. Distortions and inconsistencies in ethnic reporting are shown to vary with age, educational attainment, and marital status and even to exist within families when parents report the ethnic ancestry of their children. These examples of inconsistency, simplification, and syste…
The location of ethnic and racial groups in the United States
From Many Strands: Ethnic and Racial Groups in Contemporary America
The everyday use of surname to determine ethnic ancestry
Counting Heads: New Data on the Ethnic Composition of the American Population
The Costs of a Costless Community
What does claiming an ethnic label mean for a white middle-class American? Census data and my interviews suggest that ethnicity is increasingly a personal choice of whether to be ethnic at all, and, for an increasing majority of people, of which ethnicity to be. An ethnic identity is something that does not affect much in everyday life. It does not, for the most part, limit choice of marriage partner (except in almost all cases to exclude non-whi…
Can Ethnicity Be Counted
Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America
In this perceptive and revealing study, Mary Waters explores the "reinvention" of ethnicity in the lives of the grandchildren and great grandchildren of European immigrants, asking how their ethnic heritage is lived, maintained, and celebrated. Through in-depth interviews with sixty third and fourth generation white ethnics in suburban California and Pennsylvania, the author discovers a surprisingly resilient sense of ethnicity among people who c…
Ethnic options: Choosing identities in America
From Many Strands: Ethnic and Racial Groups in Contemporary America
Multiculturalism and Intergroup Relations
What Happened to the White Ethnics
Sociology
Sociology
The role of lineage in identity formation among black Americans
Indian Country, L.A: Maintaining Ethnic Community in Complex Society
The process of ethnogenesis among Haitian and Israeli immigrants in the United States
This article examines the process of ethnic identity formation among two different groups of recent immigrants to the United States: secular kibbutz-born Israelis and middle-class Haitians. While the two groups are different in a number of ways, they share an ambivalence with the identities that American society would assign to them - as Jews and blacks respectively. By contrasting these two case studies we identify the role of the 'proximal host…
The Ethnic Responses of Whites: What Causes Their Instability, Simplification, and Inconsistency
This article analyzes some inconsistent or puzzling observations in the data derived from the new approach to measuring ethnicity first used in the 1980 census. These puzzles include the simplification of children's origins by parents who each have a different single ethnic origin, inconsistencies in the ethnic origins that parents ascribe to their children, and changes in the pattern of ancestry responses across the life span of individuals. Thr…
L'ethnicité symbolique: Un supplément d'âme pour l'Amérique blanche
Selon le recensement de 1990, 90 % d'Américains déclarent avoir des racines ethniques. Pour les Américains blancs d'origine européenne, cette affirmation d'une identité ethnique est considérée comme positive. En effet, se dire d'ascendance irlandaise, italienne ou grecque... est vécu comme un «supplément d'âme» par ces Américains de la classe moyenne parfaitement intégrés. Un choix individuel dans lequel ne se reconnaissent pas toutes les minorit…
Refugee Communities: A Comparative Field Study
Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race.Philip Kasinitz
Ethnic and Racial Identities of Second-Generation Black Immigrants in New York City
This article explores the types of racial and ethnic identities adopted by a sample of 83 adolescent second-generation West Indian and Haitian Americans in New York City. The subjective understandings these youngsters have of being American, of being black American, and of their ethnic identities are described and contrasted with the identities and reactions of first-generation immigrants from the same countries. Three types of identities are evi…
Ethnic and Racial Identities of Second-Generation Black Immigrants in New York City
Mary C. Waters, Ethnic and Racial Identities of Second-Generation Black Immigrants in New York City, The International Migration Review, Vol. 28, No. 4, Special Issue: The New Second Generation (Winter, 1994), pp. 795-820
Politics in the Lifeboat: Immigrants and the American Democratic Order
Making Ethnic Choices: California's Punjabi Mexican Americans
Sociology (56 works) · Political science (39 works) · Ethnic group (27 works) · Geography (27 works) · Immigration (26 works) · Gender Studies (24 works) · Law (23 works) · Psychology (23 works) · Anthropology (22 works) · Migration and Labor Dynamics (22 works)