New Research
Southern California’s Coachella Valley is known for music festivals, Palm Springs resorts, and golf courses. It is also one of the state’s most productive agricultural regions. Yet the workforce powering the Valley’s economy is sharply divided along racial lines.
Working for Less in the Coachella Valley: How Latino wages in the Valley compare to the rest of California
How do Latino workers in the Coachella Valley compare to Latinos in the rest of California? They earn less. New CLLAS research finds that Coachella Valley Latinos earn a median of $17.63 an hour, compared to $19.87 for Latinos statewide and $33.33 for non-Latino Californians.
Wage disparities are usually explained by what workers bring with them to the labor market, and by education in particular. But that explanation only goes so far in the Coachella Valley. In the Valley, the wage gap widens at higher levels of education, whether Valley Latinos are compared to Latinos elsewhere in California or to non-Latino Californians. The wage gap widens at higher levels of education, especially by gender. At the bachelor’s degree level, Valley Latinas earn just 75 cents for every dollar earned by similarly educated Latinas elsewhere in California. Read the data brief here.
Check out our Coachella Research Project, including our report: A Valley Built on Latino Labor
Recent Publications by Affiliated Faculty
Dr. Hector Amaya, Professor of Communication at USC Annenberg recently published The Economy of Anonymity: Power in the Age of Identification. A description is below. Find out more about it here.
While many have explored the connections between surveillance, datafication, and privacy, relatively little has been done to theorize anonymity and its critical role in our lives. This book rebalances our intellectual investments by expanding our understandings of anonymity. Putting the work of Gloria Anzaldúa and Bernhard Siegert into conversation, Hector Amaya examines the contours of anonymity in different social domains—in relationship to individuals, institutions, and contexts; to epistemology and ontology; and to history and society.
