“Within African-American and Latino families, children follow a cultural tradition that places a high value on respecting, obeying and learning from elders, and in our study they did indeed show more respect for parental authority,” said Julia Graber, a UF psychology professor.

However, when African-American and Latina girls do act up, their mothers consider the arguments more intense than those reported by white mothers who clash with their daughters, said Graber, whose study is published in the February issue of the Journal of Family Psychology.

Hispanic and black mothers, who value strong family connections, a deep sense of family loyalty and the importance of extended family and social support networks, seemed to be much more upset if daughters fell short of cultural, good girl expectations, Graber said. “It may be just the kind of issue that pushes their buttons more, thinking of their daughter as no longer being the good, respectful daughter,” she said.

For all girls, discipline was the only factor that influenced how much conflict they perceived in the relationship. The stricter and harsher mothers were, the less conflict their daughters reported, Graber said. However, as girls get older, stricter discipline may lead to greater conflict if girls try to disagree, she said.

The study differs from other research on mother-daughter conflict in that instead of looking at adolescence, it examines girls in middle to late childhood, at an average age of 8½, Graber said. The teenage years are naturally turbulent times for families, but understanding what happens immediately preceding them sets the stage for a smoother or rockier transition, she said.

Teen conflict is a risk for other behavior-related problems, Graber said. “It does seem that when there are higher levels of conflict, those daughters are more likely to have adjustment problems in terms of feeling more depression, sadness, anxiety and those problems,” she said.

The intensity of the conflicts aside, the study found that mothers’ and daughters’ reports of the frequency of conflict were similar, Graber said. The study, which Graber did with Sara Villanueva Dixon, a St. Edward’s University psychology professor, and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, a Columbia University child development professor, involved 45 African-American, 23 Latina and 65 white girls recruited through fliers while in the third grade and their mothers. The girls and their families were from racially integrated, working and middle-class communities in a large metropolitan area.

The girls’ respect for authority was observed during a series of videotaped interactions with their mothers. Daughters were scored on their listening behaviors, which included attending to their mothers when their mothers were speaking, acknowledging their mothers’ comments and not interrupting their mothers. They also were evaluated for defiant behaviors, such as disobeying their mothers’ requests, being unwilling to cooperate with their mothers and ignoring their mothers during the interaction.

Not only do children need to be more aware of the expectations their parents have for them, but mothers may also want to reassess their feelings about particular issues, she said.

“The challenge for African-American and Latina mothers is they are in an environment where their children are potentially getting messages at school, on television and elsewhere about what normal childhood behavior is like that may conflict with their own expectations for these behaviors,” Graber said.

“In the higher conflict families where mothers and daughters are arguing much more often there seems to be less productive resolution going on and less learning of those skills,” she said. “Everybody feels mad afterwards rather than feeling the potential of moving forward.”

“This is a fascinating study that enhances our understanding of ethnic and racial differences in parent-child relationships,” said Judi Smetana, a University of Rochester psychologist. “One of its strengths is that it examines in a very careful and detailed way how different cultural values are expressed in mother-daughter interactions and how those values influence the quality of family relationships.”

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Restrictions to keep illegal immigrants from entering the United States are having the perverse effect of encouraging those who are already here to stay by any means necessary, a new University of Florida study finds.

The culprit is tightened post 9-ll security, which has prompted immigrants to skip visits to their homelands because of the risk of not being allowed back into the U.S., said UF anthropology professor Maxine L. Margolis.

“These draconian measures do not deter undocumented immigrants from trying to enter the country so much as discourage those who are already here from returning home,” said Margolis, whose research is scheduled to be published in the January issue of the journal Human Organization. “The restrictions are doing exactly the opposite of what they intend to do by locking these people in place.”

The research is based on interviews with Brazilian immigrants and applies to other nationalities as well, Margolis said. “Whether they are Peruvians, Ecuadorians, Dominicans or any other group with a large undocumented population, they are experiencing the same problems,” she said.

Unlike in the past, when most illegal immigrants made a single, permanent move to the United States, in the last few decades they have tended to move back and forth between their home and host countries for a variety of economic and social reasons, Margolis said. Many foreigners come here temporarily for jobs paying anywhere from four to 10 times as much money as they would earn in their native countries in order to support their families, but they may return home briefly to see a sick relative or to attend a family wedding or funeral, she said.

It has become increasingly difficult, however, for immigrants to leave the United States and return since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when the government tightened restrictions for tourist visas, increased deportation of undocumented foreigners, strengthened border patrols and made it harder for immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses and other legal documents, she said.

Many of these people have children, investments, jobs and apartments in this country and don’t want to risk being unable to return, Margolis said. Even with valid passports and visas, they can be denied re-entry if they previously overstayed the limit on their visa, she said.

One Brazilian immigrant, who owned a floor tile company in New York and had lived in the state for several years with his wife and American-born daughter, flew to Brazil when he learned his elderly father was seriously ill, Margolis said. On his return, he was stopped at JFK International Airport and was deported to Brazil for having previously overstayed his tourist visa, she said.

Some undocumented immigrants have found creative ways to get around the regulations and avoid detection, often at considerable expense, she said.

One Brazilian woman living in North Carolina who was desperate to visit her family returned to the U.S. through the Caribbean islands where she boarded a cruise ship bound for Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, Margolis said. Correctly assuming authorities were unlikely to search for illegal immigrants aboard cruise ships, she got through with her Brazilian passport and flew back to the states, she said.

Margolis’ study also revealed immigrants developing schemes to circumvent the requirements for driver’s licenses. Typically, Brazilian immigrants in the Northeast load up in minivans and drive to states such as Delaware, Virginia and North Carolina, which do not require a green card or valid Social Security card for a license, but some have traveled as far as the West Coast, she said.

So far none of the proposed federal, state or local immigration bills has included a provision that would allow immigrants to travel home to visit family and friends and be assured re-entry into the United States, she said.

Conrad Kottak, a University of Michigan anthropology professor, said Margolis “provides a valuable case study of how one group of transnational migrants — Brazilians in the United States — have been affected by changes in American border policies since the 9/11 attacks. Many of her findings no doubt apply as well to other new immigrant communities.”

The Sunshine State produces half the fresh tomatoes eaten in the United States. The task requires more than 30,000 farm workers, growers and packers — all of whom will be required to undergo training in food safety practices developed by the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences and the Florida Tomato Exchange, in cooperation with the Food and Drug Administration and the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.

The effort has gained strong support from state Agriculture Commissioner Charles Bronson, who today announced $253,000 in USDA Specialty Crops Block Grant funding toward the training.

The program could begin as early as this month. Similar programs will extend to leafy greens, berries and melons next year.

“People are worried about how safe their food is to eat, and this really is a case where education is a big step toward improving prevention,” said Keith Schneider, the IFAS food safety researcher who will lead the statewide effort to train tomato workers in the best ways to safely handle produce.

In a Sept. 7 report on foodborne illnesses in restaurants, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed that four widespread cases of raw-tomato-spread Salmonella infection between 2005 and 2006 led to more than 450 illnesses in 21 states.

Schneider said these kinds of reports aren’t signs of new and unheralded outbreaks, but rather examples of an improved ability to finger foodborne pathogens as the culprits.

“Our food is safer than ever,” he said. “But part of that safety — and a bigger part of improving that safety — is being able to detect when these pathogens are a problem, thinking about how to solve that problem and then taking that to the growers and packagers.”

“There are elements as simple as the fact that tomatoes need to go through something like a chlorine bath after being picked,” he said. “But there are a lot of details ranging from worker conditions to how fast the product is shipped — they all need to be taken care of if that salad or taco you’re going to get at a local restaurant is safe to eat.”

The statewide mandate comes from the tomato industry working with state and federal regulators.

“This is a step forward that this state’s tomato industry saw it needed to take, and so essentially took it upon itself to make food safety a priority,” said Martha Roberts, the former Florida deputy commissioner of agriculture, now special assistant to the director of the Florida Experiment Station, IFAS.

Many tomato growers already follow safe food-handling practices, she said.
“But there are still some that can use our help — this isn’t necessarily going to be a simple task to reach everyone now covered by these requirements,” she said.

Roberts added that new tools will need to be developed, such as training materials for the large number of Spanish-speaking workers.

Additionally, the CDC reports state that “current knowledge of mechanisms of tomato contamination and methods of eradication of Salmonella in tomatoes is incomplete,” thus making “tomato safety research a priority.”

The tools and expertise developed by IFAS for tomato training will be applied to other produce next year when similar education will be instituted on a volunteer basis for the leafy greens, berry and melon industries.

“It seems like every other day you see something in the news about food contamination. If it’s not tomatoes, it’s spinach…or peanut butter, or dog food. I think most people ask themselves ‘will this ever stop?’” Schneider said. “The truth is that there our food supply is safer than it’s ever been, but there will always be issues with food safety — it’s all of our jobs to keep trying to make it better.”

In the study of Hispanics enrolled in Medicare-managed care programs, Spanish-speaking patients reported more negative experiences with care than did English-speaking Hispanic patients. However, Spanish speakers in Florida were more satisfied with their health-care experiences than their peers in California and the New York/New Jersey region — a finding that could be attributed to the “Miami effect.” The results appear in the October issue of the journal Health Services Research.

“Eighty-six percent of the Spanish-speaking survey respondents from Florida live in the Miami area, the U.S. city with the highest proportion of Hispanic residents,” said lead investigator Robert Weech-Maldonado, an associate professor in the department of health services research, management and policy at the UF College of Public Health and Health Professions. “Spanish is one of the primary languages in Miami and there is an excellent network of Spanish-speaking health providers.”

The study is the first to examine health-care experiences of Hispanics — a population vulnerable to health disparities — by regional and language differences.

The Medicare-managed care program, known as Medicare Advantage, was designed to give beneficiaries the option of enrolling in a variety of private plans, including health maintenance organizations, or HMOs, and preferred provider organizations, or PPOs. Patients’ out-of-pocket costs associated with the Medicare Advantage plans are relatively lower than those associated with traditional Medicare. Although most Medicare recipients use the traditional fee-for-service program, about 5 million Medicare beneficiaries were enrolled in the managed care program in 2004, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. More than 50 percent of enrollees were Hispanic.

UF researchers analyzed data from the Consumer Assessments of Healthcare Providers and Systems Medicare managed care survey, conducted in 2002. The survey focused on five aspects of care: timeliness of care, provider communication, office staff helpfulness, getting needed care and health plan customer service. Of the more than 125,000 Medicare-managed care recipients who completed the survey, 7 percent, or 8,463, identified themselves as Hispanic. The survey was available in English and Spanish.

Hispanic English speakers reported more negative experiences than whites for all aspects of care except provider communication. Hispanic Spanish speakers had more negative experiences than whites with timeliness of care, office staff helpfulness and provider communication, suggesting language barriers in the clinical setting.

However, the researchers were surprised to find that Hispanic Spanish speakers reported more positive experiences with getting needed care than their English-speaking counterparts.

“This was an unexpected result; we haven’t found this in other studies,” Weech-Maldonado said. “We speculate that Spanish-speaking Hispanics, who may be less acculturated, could be more tolerant of the managed care practices because they are less familiar with the U.S. health-care system.”

Overall, the UF study demonstrates that differences in Hispanics’ health-care experiences exist and there is room for improvement, especially given the regional differences, Weech-Maldonado said.

“Our study suggests that managed care companies should implement quality improvement programs to reduce disparities in patient experiences with care, and one area they can target is interpreter services,” he said, adding that the Hispanic Spanish speakers in the survey were more likely than English speakers to rate their health as fair or poor. “Managed care health plans cover a well-diversified population, so it is important for them to look at disparities in care.”

The UF study provides important information for legislators and policymakers, said Dr. Olveen Carrasquillo, director of the Columbia University Center of the Health of Urban Minorities and co-founder of Latinos for National Health Insurance.

“This study will serve as a wake-up call to those minority organizations that have been strong advocates of these Medicare Advantage plans,” Carrasquillo said. “The analysis by Dr. Weech-Maldonado and colleagues shows that even with the extra payments these Medicare Advantage plans receive, large disparities between Latinos and non-Hispanic whites exist. On many measures, the extra money these plans are getting is not providing added value to Latinos in many parts of the country.”

A UF study described in the current issue of the Journal of Women’s Health revealed that when treated with either of two commonly prescribed medication strategies, Hispanic women achieved greater blood pressure control and were half as likely as white women to suffer adverse outcomes such as heart attack, stroke or death from any cause. The findings provide new data on a population of ethnic women who have been all but absent from such research.

“The study is unique in that we enrolled a substantial number of women and a substantial number of Hispanic patients from a variety of different Hispanic regions. As a result, we have data that enabled us to really fully evaluate the treatment of hypertension in this ethnically diverse group,” said Rhonda Cooper-DeHoff, a research assistant professor of medicine and associate director of the clinical research program in cardiovascular medicine at UF’s College of Medicine.

UF researchers studied 22,500 patients enrolled in the landmark International Verapamil SR-Trandolapril study, known as INVEST, and tracked a subgroup of 5,017 Hispanic and 4,710 non-Hispanic white women who were randomly assigned to a drug strategy containing either a sustained release form of the calcium antagonist verapamil or the beta-blocker atenolol.

The INVEST study enrolled more Hispanic patients than any other hypertension trial to date, Cooper-DeHoff said, and included Hispanic participants from the mainland United States, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Mexico, Canada, Guatemala, Panama and El Salvador.

After 24 months of follow-up, researchers found that both treatment strategies worked — and worked better in the Hispanic women.

Blood pressure control, defined at less than 140/90 mmHg, was achieved in 75 percent of Hispanic women and 68 percent of non-Hispanic white women.

And despite having a higher prevalence of diabetes at baseline, only 5.7 percent of Hispanic women suffered from adverse cardiovascular outcomes, compared with 12.3 percent of non-Hispanic white women.

Cooper-DeHoff attributed the low incidence of adverse outcomes to the fact that Hispanic women enrolled in the study were younger. If follow-up had continued over a longer period of time, adverse outcomes in the Hispanic women may have increased, she said.

However, these women remained at a lower risk for these outcomes even after statisticians adjusted for age and other factors. Still, she warned that problems associated with diabetes are likely to show up in these patients down the road.

“Diabetes in and of itself imparts significant future adverse cardiovascular outcomes,” she said. “These women should be well-monitored under the care of a physician so that they can prevent future cardiovascular morbidity and mortality related to hypertension and diabetes. Importantly, because the Hispanic population is the fastest-growing ethnic minority in the United States, Hispanics — especially women — should be included in future cardiovascular research in order to further our understanding of these high-risk diseases in Hispanic patients.”

High blood pressure is becoming more prevalent in women across all ethnic groups, Cooper-DeHoff said. And although it is thought to actually be less common in Hispanic women, fewer Hispanics have been included in hypertension studies.

“The INVEST findings are important because they demonstrate that this treatment for Hispanic women really pays off,” said Dr. Thomas G. Pickering, director of the Center for Behavioral Cardiovascular Health at Columbia University Medical Center. “They’ve got something really interesting with this study, and it wasn’t something that could have been expected.”

Educators have long believed that a “critical mass” of like students is vital to making minority students feel at home on college campuses – but this study, appearing in the February issue of the journal Research in Higher Education, may be the first to find statistical evidence to confirm that belief.

“These data suggest that if colleges are really serious about reaching out to minority groups, they need to think in terms of clusters, not individuals,” said professor Linda Serra Hagedorn, chairwoman of UF’s Department of Educational Administration and Policy. “If you’re the only Latino or African-American on your college campus, you can certainly succeed academically – but if you’re surrounded by people who share your cultural background, your chances of success improve.”

Hagedorn is the lead investigator and director of the Transfer and Retention of Urban Community College Students (or TRUCCS) project, a multiyear, comprehensive study of the educational outcomes of 5,000 community college students at the nine community college campuses in the Los Angeles area. Investigators queried the students on their backgrounds, attitudes and experiences, and compared that data to the students’ transcript records.

When they looked at students who self-identified as Hispanic, the researchers found that students at largely Hispanic community colleges had better educational outcomes than students at colleges where Hispanic students were rare. The differences were small but statistically significant. Age, involvement in campus activities and even ability to speak English were less predictive of Hispanic students’ success.

Researchers have long suspected that the size of a school’s minority population plays a key role in the academic experience of minority students. The education field has even borrowed a term from nuclear physics – “critical mass” – to describe the point at which minority students become plentiful enough to change the campus climate and give a school a more welcoming feel.

The study produced some surprising findings. For instance, while students at colleges with large Hispanic colleges were more likely to stay in school and succeed academically, they were also less likely to enroll in remedial English or math classes.

In schools where Spanish speakers are few, teachers may be more likely to refer students to remedial classes, Hagedorn said. And a large community of bilingual students may help struggling English speakers learn the language without formal intervention.

The researchers also found that first-generation immigrants – students born in Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries – tended to do better in school than students born in the U.S. to immigrant parents.

“One might expect students who grew up in the U.S. to perform better because they understand the social climate better,” Hagedorn said. “But in fact, many immigrant students were in very good schools in Mexico before they moved here – while many students who were born in the U.S. live in impoverished urban communities with substandard school systems.”

Alberto Cabrera, a University of Maryland education professor, co-authored an earlier large-scale study which found that parental involvement was one of the best indicators of academic success among Latino students. Cabrera said Hagedorn’s study sheds new light on his findings.

“Latino students often rely on their families for social support in school because they do not feel represented among the faculty or students,” Cabrera said. “In light of Linda Hagedorn’s findings, I would hypothesize that a critical mass of Latino students can create a support system that mimics the effect of support from one’s family.”

The study reinforces the benefits of the community college system. Hagedorn notes that among the colleges in the study, every institution with a large Hispanic population was located in a largely Hispanic neighborhood – providing additional social support for students.

“They’re called ‘community’ colleges for a reason,” Hagedorn said. “They’re supposed to serve the community in which they reside, and create a comfortable learning environment for students in that community.”

“Parents need to be able to talk to a counselor about their child’s progress,” said Professor Harry Daniels, chairman of the counselor education department at UF’s College of Education and a co-author of the study. “They need a place in the school system where they feel safe, where they feel their child’s needs are understood.

“These things may seem small, but they have a huge effect on academic success.”

Daniels and co-author Sondra Smith-Adcock, an associate professor of counselor education at UF, led a team that surveyed school services administrators in school districts across Florida on the counseling provided to Hispanic students. The researchers published their results in this month’s issue of the journal Professional School Counseling.

Fifty-nine percent of the administrators said their Hispanic students were at risk of not receiving needed counseling. Eighty-four percent said their district needed more Spanish-speaking bilingual counselors to address the personal needs of students, and 80 percent agreed that their district needed more Spanish-speaking counselors to guide students in making career decisions.

The results, researchers say, were worrisome but not surprising. Studies in the mid-1990s showed that while Hispanics made up one-eighth of Florida’s student population at the time, only 2 percent of school counselors were Hispanic. In the past decade, Smith-Adcock said, every single county has seen its Hispanic population increase by at least 30 percent – but there is no evidence of a similar increase in the number of Hispanic counselors.
“When school administrators think of the needs of Hispanic students, they tend to think in terms of language acquisition for new immigrants,” Smith-Adcock said. “There’s a whole stratum of services that is being missed.”

Hispanic students who face mental health issues may find it difficult to trust or open up to non-Hispanic counselors, and often need someone who speaks their first language, Smith-Adcock said.

However, mental health counseling is just one responsibility for counselors, Smith-Adcock said. They also help students define their career goals and navigate the increasingly complex academic world in a way that will help them achieve their goals. These services are particularly difficult to provide students who are new arrivals to the country, or whose parents are first-generation immigrants with limited English skills.

“Simply choosing electives is a new experience for many people in the Latino community,” said Jennifer Gonzales Young, a district-level bilingual counselor for Hillsborough County Public Schools. “In many Spanish-speaking countries, students take a prescribed schedule of courses, and don’t get to choose their classes. Some parents are overwhelmed by the system, and if it isn’t explained to them properly, their children can miss some important opportunities.”

Similar problems can arise when students apply to college, apply for financial aid or try to interpret the results of standardized tests, Young said.

Hillsborough County has one of the fastest-growing Hispanic populations in the state. Young said there are an estimated 51,000 Hispanic children in Hillsborough County’s school system, and more than 36,000 speak Spanish as their first language. Until recently, Young was one of only a few Hispanic counselors serving that population.

“There seems to be a shortage of bilingual counselors everywhere in the state, and Hillsborough is just one example,” UF’s Daniels said. “At the elementary level, for instance, the ideal ratio is one counselor per 300 students. I don’t know of a single place in Florida that comes close to that ratio for Spanish-speaking students.”

UF is attempting to relieve the shortage. The College of Education recently completed a three-year, grant-funded program that brought 17 bilingual Hillsborough County teachers to UF to study for the educational specialist degree in counselor education. All of those teachers were Spanish-speaking and most were either of Hispanic origin or had prior experience living in a Spanish-speaking country.

Daniels said the project, titled “Consejeros: Levantando El Pueblo” (or “Counselors Lifting the Community”) was more than simply a degree program. Students followed a culturally relevant course of study designed to give equal focus to the three major influences in the life of Hispanic families: the school, the family and the community.

Based on the success of that project, Daniels and Smith-Adcock are considering the creation of a permanent distance education program that would allow bilingual teachers to study for a counselor education degree in the county where they work.

“Many bilingual teachers are already serving as a contact point between the school system and the families of their Hispanic students,” he said. “By becoming full-time counselors, they can fill that role more effectively, for more people.”

“A man and a woman of different races in the movies have a greater statistical probability of dying than of getting married or dating seriously,” said Nadia Ramoutar, who did the research for her doctoral dissertation in mass communications at UF and is now a communications professor at Flagler College in St. Augustine.

White women have not appeared in an interracial relationship in a top-selling film since “Pulp Fiction” in 1994, she said. American Indian women have not been portrayed this way since “Dances with Wolves” in 1995, and the last time an American Indian man was part of such a union was in “The Trial of Billy Jack” in 1974.

The findings are important, Ramoutar said, because popular films do more than entertain: They are a powerful means of transmitting culture from one generation to the next.

“The results of this study sadly show that racial and ethnic segregation in romantic relationships is heavily practiced in Hollywood blockbuster films and has become more common rather than less common in the past four decades,” Ramoutar said.

The study analyzed interracial relationships in blockbuster Hollywood films between 1967 and 2005, beginning with the landmark social commentary “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” Ramoutar selected the 15 top-grossing box office hits of each year for her sample. Of these, she found 36 films with interracial couples.

Forty-two percent of the women in such partnerships were victims of violence. “Lying on the table like a piece of sushi” is how police described Cheryl, the drug-addicted, sexually deviant female character in “Rising Sun” responsible for three men’s deaths who dies herself.

The scripts use certain interracial combinations more than others and avoid some entirely, the study found. No Arabic or eastern Indian appears in any film, for example.

The most common racial coupling was a white male with an Asian female, who was often portrayed as a “model minority,” in that she was smarter, more compliant and less sexually aggressive than women of other races, Ramoutar said.

But while Asians were the most common women of color, representing nearly one-quarter of interracial romances, Asian men were practically invisible, Ramoutar said. The only major Asian male in such a relationship in nearly four decades was Jackie Chan’s character in the 2001 movie “Rush Hour 2,” she said.

And a Hispanic woman playing a CIA double agent who briefly falls in love with Chan’s character marks the first time a Hispanic female appears in an interracial relationship at all during those years, said Ramoutar.

Hispanic men also were marginalized, cast in only three movies, Ramoutar said. The women they were paired with, including Michele Pfeiffer’s character Elvira in “Scarface,” were drug addicts with no purpose in life but getting high, she said.

“Despite the large number of women actively employed in the American workplace, the most commonly portrayed occupation of all the women in these films is that they have no identifiable occupation,” Ramoutar said. The second most popular occupation was working as a spy, followed by a tie between prostitute and entertainer, she said.

While white women in interracial relationships came across as either morally corrupt or socially inept or as victims of physical or sexual abuse, women of color who become involved with white men were often presented as erotic, exotic and possessing exceptional talents, she said.

“(Chinese-American) Alex in ‘Charlie’s Angels’ is a sky-diving, computer-hacking, black belt martial artist who can defeat a room full of men – her only misgiving is that she is a bad cook,” she said. “And Charlotte Lewis’ character in ‘The Golden Child’ can leap over tall walls or from high buildings, usually just wearing Eddie Murphy’s shirt and her underwear.”

The majority of black women on the big screen were pale skinned like Halle Berry, with dark-skinned actresses rarely cast except as villainesses or femme fatales, she said.

Terry Francis, a film studies professor at Yale University, praised Ramoutar’s choice of a topic. “It might be the quintessential American narrative,” she said.

The research was conducted in Mexico, but many of these pesticides, although they go by a different name, have the same ingredients and are used in the United States, potentially giving Americans the same risks, said Elizabeth Guillette, a UF anthropology professor who led the research.

The connection from mother to child was found among Sonoran Mayan girls whose mothers were exposed to chemical spraying. They did not develop the ability to produce milk, unlike their counterparts who lived a more organic lifestyle, she said.

“The results underscore the importance of women protecting themselves from manufactured chemicals beginning at birth because they stay in the body,” said Guillette, whose research is published in the March issue of Environmental Health Perspectives.

The study found changes in breast development when comparing pre-adolescent girls whose mothers grew up in an agricultural valley where heavy doses of pesticides were sprayed with those who were raised in surrounding foothills where none were used. Some of the girls in the agricultural valley had no mammary tissue or a minimal amount.

Although several studies have examined the effects of pesticides on when puberty begins, none have looked at how exposure influences the development of mammary gland tissue, she said. To investigate the question, Guillette found two population samples about 50 miles apart in the northwestern Mexican state of Sonora’s Yaqui Valley that were almost identical except for their exposure to pesticides.

The Sonoran Mayan people of the valley split philosophically over the use of pesticides and other modern agricultural techniques during the country’s Green Revolution of the early 1950s, when large-scale pesticide-based agriculture came into practice. Valley residents embraced pesticides, herbicides and other agricultural chemicals, including spraying in homes, while the other group, which moved to the foothills, avoided them entirely.

“These groups were the same in every respect, culturally, genetically and socio- economically, except for their use of pesticides,” Guillette said. “They had the same diet, the same child-rearing practices and the same school system.”

Although the farmers in the valley and the ranchers in the foothills had cousins and other extended family members living in the other community, they never intermarried because of their strong differences over pesticides, she said.

Guillette began her research in 1966, comparing the physical coordination and mental development in preschool children from the two communities. In an earlier published study, she found that valley children were less adept at catching a ball, reflecting poor eye-hand coordination, and showed dramatic differences in their ability to draw a person.

Her more recent study focused on breast development in girls between the ages of 8 and 10 and involved 30 girls from the valley and 20 girls who lived in the foothills. Guillette and local nurses measured total breast diameter and mammary diameter.

While breast size was much larger in the girls in the valley, they had much less mammary tissue, and sometimes none at all, than the girls in the foothills, Guillette said.

Mammary tissue could not be palpated in about 19 percent of the girls from valley towns who showed signs of breast development. In contrast, none of the girls from the foothills who had reached this stage lacked mammary tissue.

“With the foothill girls, there was a direct correlation between breast size and mammary development, whereas with the pesticide-exposed girls there was none,” Guillette said. “In fact, we saw girls who were fairly well developed with absolutely no mammary glands.”

Because the Yaqui Valley was in its fifth year of a drought at the time of the study, with most farmers moving into ranching and stopping pesticide use, the results point to earlier exposure, probably transferred from the mother before birth, she said.

Various pesticides, mainly organophosphates and organochlorines, were used extensively to farm the Yaqui Valley near the time of the girls’ birth, between 1992 and 1994, and many of these compounds are known to cross a pregnant woman’s placenta to the developing child, Guillette said. A study of newborn children from the valley that was done close to the time these children were conceived found elevated pesticide levels, she said.

“Many of these pesticides are popular in the United States, both for agriculture and for home use and lawn care,” she said. “We know the age for breast development in girls is occurring earlier and there is the potential that pesticides may be playing a similar role in the United States as found in Mexico.”

People who left without paying for any items were six times more likely to be shoplifters who bypassed the check-out line to avoid drawing attention to themselves, said Richard Hollinger, a UF criminologist and one of the study’s researchers. The work also cautions against trying to spot shoplifters based on race, gender, age and ethnicity.

“We all believe it to be courteous behavior when a retailer asks ‘May I help you?,’ but what they’re really saying is ‘We know you’re here, please don’t shoplift,’” he said.

Behavioral cues are more important than demographic characteristics in identifying shoplifters, Hollinger said. Professional shoplifters often scan the store to make sure no none is watching them tampering with the products, he said.

“There’s a phenomenon called ‘shopping while black,’ with some evidence to suggest that certain shoppers, particularly blacks, are scrutinized more heavily and even harassed in various stores,” he said. “Our study raises serious questions about the profiling of suspected shoplifters, particularly black males.”

Popular shoplifting stereotypes were challenged in the UF study, in which researchers covertly observed 1,365 shoppers in an Atlanta drug store with closed-circuit television cameras. Slightly more than 8 percent of the people who entered the store stole an item.

The UF study, which was published in the December 2004 issue of Justice Quarterly, additionally disputes the image of most shoplifters being female. “The rule of thumb always has been that women shoplift more than men simply because there are more women shoppers, unless it’s a sporting goods store or a hardware store,” he said. “But we were able to determine that men actually stole more often than women.”

Drug abuse may be driving this trend, Hollinger said. “We estimate, based on other research, that many male shoplifters are not what we would call ‘primary household shoplifters,’ — they’re not shoplifting food for tonight’s dinner or medications for their child’s cold,” he said. “Rather, many of them hit the film, pain relievers or batteries, steal them in large quantities and sell them, using shoplifting as a way to feed their drug habit.”

And although shopkeepers often are quick to blame juveniles for missing items, the UF study found shoplifters were most commonly between the ages of 35 and 54. These middle-aged adults, most of them gainfully employed, were “primary household shoppers” who occasionally stole to acquire goods whose cost stretched beyond their household budgets.

Overall, blacks and Hispanics were no more likely than whites to steal merchandise. However, when race and gender were examined by subcategory, Hispanic females stole the most, shoplifting at more than seven times the rate of white females, he said.

Many stole household items they needed, such as medicine or makeup, or snatched a candy bar or lollipops off the shelf for their children, whom they had brought along, if they started to fuss or cry, he said.

Few studies have focused on family shoplifting, except those that examine “distraction teams,” Hollinger said. “These shoplifters might take children along with them, usually with an ice cream cone or a candy bar in hand, mainly to distract the sales clerk, who tries to head off the kids from damaging the merchandise while mom and dad steal,” he said.

Shoplifting is sometimes called the “crime tax,” because it results in annual losses of more than $10 billion that are passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices, said Hollinger, who did the study with criminology professors Dean Dabney at Georgia State University and Laura Dugan at the University of Maryland. “It’s been estimated that about $400 is spent annually by each family in America just to pay for the cost of replacing these stolen goods,” he said.

Recent evidence also suggests that many professionally shoplifted items are even fenced overseas and used to fund other criminal activities, including terrorism, he said.

Shaun L. Gabbidon, a criminal justice professor at Penn State Harrisburg and an expert on shoplifting, said the study is “groundbreaking and very important.” It raises serious questions about racial profiling of shoplifters, and unlike other research relies on observational rather than official data, which are often tabulated based on police arrests. Unfortunately, studies show police arrest patterns sometimes reflect bias, he said.

“With this observation data, we can actually see what is going on,” he said. “It tells us that relying on official data is fraught with problems and we should be very careful in how we interpret them. We need more studies like this one.”

“What these workers don’t know about agriculture, it seems, can truly hurt them,” said Cesar Asuaje, an extension agent with UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. “In recent years, Hispanic workers have accounted for a growing number of injuries and fatalities in agriculture and related industries such as landscaping.”

He said immigrants from Mexico and other countries in the tropics make up the majority of Florida’s seasonal agricultural workers, and some have received little instruction in farm safety.

“As a result, injuries and fatalities among Hispanic workers are increasing, and the language barrier is one reason for that,” Asuaje said. “In a lot of cases, people are hurt because they cannot read signs or safety instructions, and some don’t want to let on that they don’t understand.”

Working out of UF’s extension office in West Palm Beach, Asuaje is offering farm safety training in 11 counties, and the training program is being expanded to meet a growing demand from the state’s Hispanic population. He goes to citrus groves, sugarcane fields, tomato farms and other agricultural enterprises throughout South Florida, teaching a one-day, on-the-job training course to migrant workers. The training, which is presented in Spanish, covers topics ranging from operating tractors and other heavy equipment to handling pesticides and avoiding back injuries.

The program is currently being offered in Broward, Collier, Hendry, Hillsborough, Manatee, Martin, Miami-Dade, Orange, Palm Beach, Pinellas and St. Lucie counties.

Asuaje said the most recent statistics from the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) indicate fatal injuries among Hispanic workers on the farm rose more than 18 percent while nonfatal injuries rose by 33 percent between 1999-2003.

In the landscaping industry – a sector of Florida agriculture that employs large numbers of immigrant workers – nonfatal injuries increased by 63 percent over the same period.

“It’s a trend you see everywhere, particularly in Florida,” said Luis Santiago, director of OSHA in the Fort Lauderdale area. “They’re doing work that others won’t do – and that usually means dangerous work.”

For example, when you can’t read instructions on heavy equipment, just about any work can become dangerous, Santiago said. He cited recent deaths among workers using heavy-duty industrial lawnmowers in landscaping operations in South Florida residential areas. Workers unfamiliar with warnings often use them on steep slopes near canals – and sometimes tumble in and get pinned under the mower.

Santiago said federal regulations require safety training for every worker. While some employers usually show a Spanish-language video, that’s no guarantee that every migrant worker will receive effective training.

“Most growers are honest, but some don’t train workers because they want to avoid claims against them if something goes wrong,” Santiago said. “For example, a lot of these workers have never seen a respirator before working here. If they’re spraying pesticide, they might not know that a respirator is required for protection.”

While video training materials may help, Asuaje said it’s better to have someone teaching in person. In addition to training workers at farms around the state, he organized the Hispanic Health and Safety Fair in Homestead, Fla. on June 4, and he is planning a similar program in Kissimmee on August 20. More than l,000 migrant farm workers are expected to attend.

The popularity of the farm safety program has led Asuaje to begin offering other Spanish-language classes. His office is one of the few places where Florida residents can take Spanish-language classes for a license to apply pesticides – something that can give a new landscaping company a leg up on competitors who are not licensed to apply pest-control products to lawns and shrubs.

Asuaje said the pesticide training class is popular among immigrants who started as landscape workers and then opened their own landscaping businesses.

The test for the license is in English, and applicants need some basic reading skills in English to pass the examination, but instruction in Spanish can make a difference in how well the students understand basic concepts, he said.

“We start with Spanish and include more and more English as the class goes along,” he said. “If someone has a problem understanding something, we can work it out in Spanish, which is easier.”

Asuaje said workers with acceptable reading skills seem to benefit most, while those who have lower reading skills will begin to learn the process for pesticide certification.

With the growing number of Spanish-speaking people in Florida, Asuaje says he has only begun to scratch the surface in the demand for instruction in farm safety and farming.

Tim Lockette, a former UF/IFAS news writer, contributed to this story.

“Latinos clearly differ by groups when it comes to health, despite the tendency to lump them all together and assume they’re identical because they come from Latin America and speak Spanish,” said Barbara Zsembik, a UF sociologist whose paper has been accepted for publication in the journal Social Science and Medicine.

Latinos are the largest minority group in the United States, making up about 15 percent of the country’s population, followed by 12 percent for blacks, Zsembik said. The share of Latinos is projected to grow to about 25 percent by 2050, she said.

“If Latinos as a group are in poorer health and not covered by health insurance or have a higher rate of claiming disability, ignoring their health is going to cost taxpayers money,” she said.

Zsembik and Dana Fennell, a UF sociology graduate student, studied health outcomes for 12,028 Mexicans, 2,268 Puerto Ricans, 1,432 Cubans and 388 Dominicans as measured by a set of surveys between 1997 and 2001 by the National Center of Health Statistics and the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control. The study examined the number of chronic medical conditions, the number of physical impairments and self-rated health.

Mexicans are an epidemiological paradox in that they are healthiest as poor immigrants, Zsembik said. The longer they live in the United States and adopt its cultural customs, the more bad habits they acquire, which they then pass to succeeding generations, she said.

For example, Mexicans who move to the United States bear bigger and healthier babies than whites even though whites often have health insurance that covers prenatal care, Zsembik said. “One argument is that their culture protects them with all sorts of family care and rules about what pregnant women are supposed to eat and do,” she said.

By the second or third generation, Mexican women, especially those who are poor, give birth to less healthy babies, perhaps because they adopt bad habits they acquire in their new country, such as smoking during pregnancy, she said.

Another example of negative acculturation is Mexican teenagers who start to smoke, drink or acquire other unwholesome practices, abandoning the healthy habits of their parents as they undergo an identity crisis trying to make their way in a white world, Zsembik said.

“They come with cultural buffers and over time the buffers disappear and they start to look as unhealthy as whites,” she said.

In addition, many Mexicans tend to be overweight, sedentary and have poor diets, Zsembik said. The Mexican diet, especially the American version, is heavy in fatty foods such as flour tortillas, cheese and lard, she said.

“And the activity craze has not really hit Mexicans, as it has other Americans, as something they value or have time for,” she said. “Puerto Ricans interestingly tend to be a little bit thinner. Neither they nor Cubans are as likely to have this problem of being overweight.”

Puerto Ricans enter the United States in worse health than other Latinos, Zsembik said. They resemble blacks in this country in that they frequently migrate to the large cities, are poor and don’t have health insurance, making preventive care unaffordable, she said.

Unlike Mexicans, Puerto Ricans’ health improves the longer they remain in the United States, largely because their income increases and they can afford health care, Zsembik said.

Cubans and Dominicans provide less clear-cut profiles, but their experience resembles that of Puerto Ricans more than Mexicans. Little is known about Dominicans, one of the fastest growing ethnic groups, because so many are undocumented immigrants, Zsembik said.

“The poorer Dominicans are searching for a better life in this country, and whatever the effects of poverty they experienced in the Dominican Republic they bring with them,” she said.

Cubans, an older immigrant group, can become healthier or unhealthier as they grow accustomed to American ways, Zsembik said. Although Cuban immigrants have more health problems than Cubans born in the United States, the positive effects of acculturation may decrease with increased exposure to bad habits, she said.

Kristen Peek, a professor in the department of preventive medicine and community health at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, said Zsembik’s research is “very important in that researchers tend to lump Hispanics together as one group, when this is a vastly diverse population who experience the effects and process of acculturation very differently.”

Hispanics, which made up about 17 percent of Florida’s population in 2000 according to U.S. Census figures, are projected to account for about 23 percent in 2030, said Stan Smith, director of UF’s Bureau of Economic and Business Research. By comparison, the share of the state’s population of non-Hispanic nonwhites - which includes blacks, Asians and American Indians - is expected to rise from 17 to 19 percent, Smith said. And although their total numbers will continue to grow, non-Hispanic whites are expected to decline as a proportion of the state’s population during the same time period, from 66 percent to 59 percent, he said.

“Florida will continue to experience strong growth as it as in the past three decades, but the Hispanic population will grow much more rapidly than the state’s total population,” he said.

In sheer numbers, Miami-Dade County will experience the largest increase, where the number of Hispanics is projected to increase by nearly 900,000, followed by Broward, Orange, Hillsborough and Palm Beach counties, Smith said. Hispanics are drawn to these larger counties, where more jobs are available and greater numbers of Hispanics already live, he said.

Percentage-wise, however, some of Florida’s smaller counties will experience the greatest changes as proportions of their total populations. These include Osceola, Flagler and Lake counties, which are expected to grow by 281 percent, 257 percent and 217 percent respectively, between 2000 and 2030, he said.

Smith said that in Florida Cubans’ share of the Hispanic population is declining dramatically. “Twenty years ago they made up more than half of the state’s Hispanics,” he said. “Now it’s down to 31 percent.” Other Hispanics in Florida include residents from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and El Salvador, he said.

This is the first year the bureau has released projections for Hispanics. “There has been more and more demand for data on Hispanics,” said Smith, noting that such information is used by businesses, schools and political parties.

“There is no reason to think we’re going to see increasing integration in schools unless we see integration where people live,” said Brian Stults, a sociology professor with UF’s Center for Criminology and Law. “Unfortunately, we’re still seeing very high levels of black-white segregation. It’s sort of a chicken-and-egg problem: We need integration in schools to lessen prejudice, which will then reduce residential segregation, but in order to have school integration, we need residential integration.”

With segregation, blacks tend to be channeled into worse neighborhoods than whites of similar socioeconomic standing, with higher crime rates, poorer schools and homes of less value, he said.

Using 1980, 1990 and 2000 U.S. census data, the study sought to determine changes in racial segregation involving blacks and whites in 255 metropolitan areas, Hispanics and whites in 210 metropolitan areas, and Asians and whites in 116 metropolitan areas. Stults, with sociologists John Logan, with the State University of New York at Albany, and Reynolds Farley, with the University of Michigan, used the most common measure of urban segregation, the dissimilarity index, to assess the extent to which two different ethnic groups are evenly distributed across a metropolitan area.

Although census figures show black-white segregation in most of the nation’s metropolitan areas declined an average of 13 percent between 1980 and 2000, the decline tapered off in the ’90s, a decade that was expected to usher in more mixing of neighborhoods, said Stults, whose findings appeared in the February issue of Demography.

“As it turned out, none of the positive trends that made demographers predict the ’90s would be the decade of change really had much influence,” he said.

These trends included an increase in the average income of blacks, resulting in a larger black middle class; increasingly positive attitudes among whites about living in integrated neighborhoods, as shown by survey results comparing the 1960s with the 1980s and ’90s; and the influx of greater numbers of Hispanics, Asians and other ethnic groups into metropolitan areas, he said.

“The ’90s was a pretty prosperous decade for both blacks and whites, and even though blacks still earned substantially less than whites, it was particularly surprising that we saw no (neighborhood integration) effect from the growing convergence of black and white incomes,” Stults said.

The poverty rate among blacks fell by 31 percent in the 1990s, compared with 15 percent among whites, he said. The median income of black households also made just a slight increase from 57 percent of that of whites in 1980 to 58 percent in 1990, then jumped to 66 percent in 2000, he said.

“Blacks are just not as able to convert income into residential location because of strong social forces that include continuing discrimination in real estate and mortgage lending practices,” he said. “They live in much poorer neighborhoods than whites and in areas with higher crime rates regardless of education, income, home ownership status or social class.”

Of the 240 metropolitan areas studied, segregation between blacks and whites increased in just 15 between 1980 and 2000, significantly fewer than for either Hispanics or Asians. Hispanic segregation increased in 124 metropolitan areas and declined in 86, while Asian segregation rose in 69 metropolitan areas and fell in 47, probably because of swelling immigration, he said.

“Hispanics and Asian immigrants often settle in ethnic enclaves where there are a lot of foreign-speaking residents and a number of businesses that cater to them,” he said.

The average percentage of whites in the neighborhood of the typical Hispanic resident fell from 48 percent in 1980 to 37 percent in 2000, Stults said. For Asians, these rates generally fall as later generations leave urban ethnic neighborhoods for the suburbs, Stults said. “That was the classical model for white ethnic immigrants at the turn of the century,” he said. “They concentrated in the central city, which second and third generations used as a springboard for the suburbs as they assimilated into mainstream American culture.”

That pattern isn’t true for blacks because they typically settle much closer to downtowns, Stults said. “Often blacks move into suburban neighborhoods that are still right on the periphery of the central city, which look more like urban neighborhoods,” he said.

The highest levels of segregation between 1980 and 2000 occurred in the Northeast industrial centers and many of the major urban centers in the Midwest and Middle Atlantic states, Stults said. “These are areas where blacks moved in during the great black migration from the South to the North in the early 1900s at a time of legal segregation, and that segregation has persisted,” he said.

The largest decline in segregation rates between whites and blacks over the 20-year period occurred in Dallas and the least in New York City. The biggest reductions took place mainly in the South and West.

“Professor Stults’ research addresses one of the fundamental divisions in the nation’s cities today,” said Gregory Squires, chairman of the sociology department at George Washington University. “It demonstrates, once again, how powerful forces continue to nurture segregation and unequal opportunity in urban America.”

Unchanged are portrayals of white characters, who are depicted as noble, wise or heroic folks no matter whether they encounter rampaging blacks in old, silent flicks or oppressed blacks in color features almost a century later, said Andrew Gordon, a UF professor of English and one of the authors of the book published this month.

The book, “Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness,” co-written by UF sociology Professor Hernan Vera, analyzes the images of white protagonists interacting with people of another race or ethnicity in American movies from 1915’s “Birth of a Nation” to “Black Hawk Down” in 2001. The authors see the portrayals of whites in movies as “sincere fiction” fed to society through means such as the media, with minorities assigned secondary roles to advance the fictions of the white self.

Gordon said there have been many studies of minority images in film - African Americans, Asian Americans and Latinos - but most ignore the obvious: About 95 percent of Hollywood movies are made by, for and about white people.

The portrayal of leader-like whites and backup blacks has a powerful influence on the world’s image of the United States, Gordon said. “We tend to dismiss cinema as mere entertainment, yet it has profound effects in shaping our thinking and behavior,” he said.

Early films portrayed blacks as vicious upstarts, such as the black soldier who tries to rape a white aristocrat’s daughter in “Birth of a Nation,” or as faithful servants, such as Mammy, the motherly maid in 1939’s “Gone with the Wind,” Gordon said. Today it is not uncommon to see movies like “Save the Last Dance,” in which a black teenager not only teaches a white girl he romances how to hip hop but also straightens out her life, he said.

“On the surface it seems to be a role reversal - a kid from the ghetto who incorporates middle-class values and upward mobility more so than the white characters,” he said. “But it’s a substitution of one set of stereotypes for another: that is, the minority figure is still functioning to prop up the white identity.”

The same is true in the “Lethal Weapon” movies, in which a black Los Angeles cop, played by Danny Glover, is an older, wiser middle-class family man who rescues a reckless and suicidal white cop, played by Mel Gibson, Gordon said.

“Even though white characters no longer automatically demand black characters be subordinate and faithful followers, they nonetheless still expect them to prop them up psychically,” he said. “(Director) Spike Lee objected to what he saw as a proliferation of recent movie characters he called ‘magical Negroes,’ who seemed to exist only to serve the white heroes.”

Whites are persistently represented across time as brave, kind, firm and generous; natural leaders worthy of the loyalty of slaves or subordinates of color, Gordon said.

“We can say minorities today are portrayed through a far greater range of characters than the obnoxious stereotypes of such early movies as ‘Birth of a Nation,’ a hymn of praise to the Ku Klux Klan,” he said. “But the portrayal of whites doesn’t change much despite all the gains of the civil rights movement, which seems to fly in the face of common sense.”

Even well-intentioned films considered progressive for their time fuel these stereotypes in their magnanimous treatment of whites, Gordon said. “Amistad” (1997), for example, affirms the fundamental goodness of white American civilization by romanticizing the institutions that made it legal and possible for slavery to exist, he said.

Another example is “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” (1967), the story of a white patriarch coming to terms with his daughter’s intention to marry a black man, which ends with a long speech reaffirming the father’s wisdom and tolerance, Gordon said. As it appears a newly integrated American family is about to form, its members continue to be served by a black maid, he said.

“The more things change, the more they remain the same,” he said.

Blacks remain secondary characters even when they are the center of a story, Gordon said. In “Mississippi Burning” (1988), which looks back to the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-1960s, blacks are primarily passive, suffering victims incapable of fighting without the help of whites, he said, while in “Glory” (1990), which dramatizes black soldiers’ service to the Union Army, the hero is a white abolitionist - the only actual historical figure among the principal characters - who controls the film’s narrative in the form of letters home.

The work already has received praise. “This book reveals the diverse, often disturbing ways in which movies manufacture the ‘white self’ - the image and story of whiteness articulated by white filmmakers,” said Daniel Bernardi, a University of Arizona media arts professor and an expert on race.