What a day...

4 hours reading/researching

What a frustrating day to be Latino in this country. I'm distracted from my dissertation by the news: The Senate votes down comprehensive immigration reform, ensuring the system will stay broken for years to come; and the Supreme Court issues a landmark decision essentially prohibiting public schools from taking race into account in assigning students to schools, ensuring that patterns of residential segregation will map onto the public-school population, affecting students of color potentially for generations.

I'm a political scientist, used to studying even the most horrible phenomena (like La Violencia in Colombia) with a degree of analytic detachment (however personally motivated by choice of projects may be). But this makes me angry, in a way I can't articulate or even explain. Maybe tomorrow I'll feel differently, but today it feels like 2 of the 3 branches of power are saying to Latinos, "Good luck climbing up the ladder; we're just going to knock out a couple of the rungs." But as is always the case, Latino families will find a way to improve their lives and pursue el sueno americano, in the face of the most forbidding obstacles....

Anyway, in terms of my dissertation, I continued to read about institutional design, and research the three states I've tentatively identified for a subnational comparison. I have two states that are in high-conflict areas, one with a high level of electoral competition and another with a lower level of electoral competition. The third state is in a low-conflict area, and has a low level of electoral competition. (Here's the thing: conflict and electoral competition are highly correlated; the non-conflictual regions are all pretty homogeneous in terms of their electoral make-up.) So I want to look at two high-conflict areas with differing levels of electoral competition to see what the impact in the police is in each one, and I want to have a comparison area where there's not conflict, and look at the police dynamic there. Interestingly, the low-conflict area I chose turns out to have, in 1938, significantly higher police and military presence. I'm not sure what that means, but I'm interested to pursue it further....

Today I was at the Science, Industry, and Business Library of the NY Public Library, which is quite a contrast with the main building I've been going to ("the one on Fifth") - much more modern and high-tech. I'll be back here tomorrow to continue looking at the 1938 census, hopefully coming to a conclusion whether these three states are the ones I want.