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20 Int'l Migration Rev. 4 (1986)

handle is hein.journals/imgratv20 and id is 1 raw text is: Immigrant Economic Adjustment and Family Organization: The Cuban Success Story Reexamined Lisandro Perez Florida International University The economic adjustment of Cuban-origin persons in the U.S. has been traditionally analyzed at two levels: the individual and the community (enclave). The analysis presented here represents a complementary ap- proach at the household level. Data from the 1980 U.S. Census show that the relatively successful economic adjustment of Cubans is largely a family, rather than individual, phenomenon. The data also permit an identification of the structural features of the Cuban-origin family that facilitate economic adjustment. The results have special implications for the study of the labor-force experience of Cuban women and their role within the enclave economy. Economic adjustment has long been a central concern in much of the litera- ture on postrevolutionary Cuban migration to the United States. Cubans are frequently regarded as the modern prototypes of the economically-successful immigrant, examples that the American dream of upward mobility and eco- nomic prosperity is alive and well among today's immigrants (Perez, 1976:1- 3). Such a view is not without some basis in fact. Research has tended to verify the Cubans' relative success, especially in comparison with other Hispanic groups in the U.S. (Prohias and Casal, 1973:58-61; Stevenson, 1973:85-91; Diaz, 1980:51-2; Rogg and Cooney, 1980; Jaffe, Cullen, and Boswell, 1980; Borjas, 1982). Although the popular media has usually based claims of success on atypical individual cases of skyrocketing upward mobility, the social-sci- entific literature has used somewhat more representative data (Table 1). These figures indicate that for literally every measure of family income, Cubans evidence levels superior to the Spanish-origin population -levels that are only slightly below the corresponding measure for the total U.S. population. There is, in other words, a greater gap between the Spanish-origin population and the Cubans than between the latter and the total U.S. population, despite the fact that the Cuban-origin population of the U.S. is composed primarily of immigrants: three-fourths of the 803,226 persons of Cuban origin living in the U.S. in 1980 were born in Cuba (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1983b:17). 4 IMR Volume xx, No. 1

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