Melissa Villarreal

Abstract

Much of the current disaster literature adopts a social vulnerability perspective, which considers how political, social, and economic factors influence pre-disaster preparation and post-disaster recovery. Even with this focus, however, there remains a dearth of literature on immigrant populations and their long-term recovery trajectories. This dissertation is an intersectional, multi-level analysis of Mexican-origin women and their disproportionate vulnerability in post-disaster recovery. Specifically, I explore how the racialization of Mexican-origin women in the U.S. impacts their long-term housing recovery in the context of cumulative disaster exposure. This study focuses on the recovery after Hurricane Harvey, which dropped an unprecedented amount of rainfall on Houston, leading to record-breaking, catastrophic flooding.

First, I conducted an intersectional and critical document analysis of U.S. disaster recovery planning and policy documents (n=170). This analysis sheds light on the legislative structures that impede or facilitate Mexican-origin communities’ access to disaster recovery resources, including eligibility criteria, consideration (or lack thereof) of social vulnerability, and planning for cumulative disaster exposure. I argue that disaster recovery agencies can be classified as racialized organizations (Ray 2019) and are comprised of anti-immigrant disaster recovery policies (Villarreal 2023). I connect this theorization to the racialization of Mexican immigrants in the United States to show how they have been marginalized in society and in public assistance provision more broadly. Thus, I highlight the systemic structures that are making this population vulnerable in times of disaster. Second, I collected ethnographic observations (n=~40 hours) and gathered semi-structured interviews (n=24) with community-based (CBOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs, n=8) in Houston, Texas. These data were collected in 2019 and 2021 to understand the organizational context of recovery after Harvey. I triangulated this data with a content analysis of organizational websites. I found that service providers in local organizations were constrained by the disaster recovery system as well. My research with these local organizations shows the strategies that service providers engaged in to assist the Mexican-origin community move forward in disaster recovery. I conducted interviews with Mexican-origin women (n=46) in 2022 to show how they navigate disaster recovery considering the broader political and organizational context and cumulative disaster exposure. I describe the women’s previous disaster experience and how structural, organizational, and interpersonal power dynamics influenced their preparedness and response decision-making ahead of Harvey. I outline three temporal phases of women’s long-term recovery trajectories over four years, including the power dynamics that informed their recovery throughout time.

Ph.D. in Sociology
University of Colorado Boulder
2024

Committee Members

Lori Peek (Chair)
Jill Harrison
Celeste Montoya
Rachel Rinaldo
Christina Sue

Defense Recording

You can see a recording of the public dissertation defense in English and Spanish. Thank you to the Community Language Cooperative for providing simultaneous translation.

English

Spanish