The Price of Poverty: Money, Work, and Culture in the Mexican American Barrio

Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in two impoverished California communities—one made up of recent immigrants from Mexico, the other of U.S.-born Chicano citizens—this book provides an invaluable comparative perspective on Latino poverty in contemporary America. In northern California’s high-tech Silicon Valley, author Daniel Dohan shows how recent immigrants get by on low-wage babysitting and dish-cleaning jobs. In the housing projects of Los Angeles, he documents how families...