From the Chronicle of Social Change:
It is a cool winter night as Elba Covarrubias, a 30-year-veteran of Los Angeles County’s Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), cuts the dark of poor, suburban and largely Latino Pacoima with the bright beams of her big blue 1987 Mercury Marquis station wagon. Endless rows of single-story homes, most with bars on the windows and doors, flit past through the car window... In 1995, 10 percent of Latino children had substantiated cases of abuse and neglect; by 2010, that share had jumped to 21.4 percent, according to national data analyzed by Dettlaff... But understanding why this is happening requires a deeper look at how “Latinos” are categorized. Rubén Rumbaut, a Professor of Sociology at the University of California Irvine, who has devoted much of his career to studying Latino population growth in the United States, says that this is an issue that will require much more than research based on amorphous groupings by ethnicity of race.

For the full story, please visit https://chronicleofsocialchange.org/analysis/2013/04/17/americanization-....