Cuban Mass Migration and the Social Construction of Deviants

An enormous discrepancy exists between what the majority of the American public 'knows' about the Marielitos, the people who immigrated to the United States of America from Cuba in the spring of 1980, and the scientific knowledge of the Marielitos. Most Americans believe that Marielitos were young, black, unmarried and that they were shiftless and dangerous people: prostitutes, homosexuals, mental defectives, and thugs. In reality, there was remarkable heterogeneity in the demographics of the migrants, with the 'deviant' categories accounting for a very small proportion of the aliens. This paper offers an explanation for this discrepancy. It reinterprets what is known about them in order to answer the question of why and how a collective deviant label was attributed to this vast throng of people.

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Como citar: Aguirre, B. E. (1994). Cuban Mass Migration and the Social Construction of Deviants. Bulletin of Latin American Research, 13(2), 155–183. https://doi.org/10.2307/3338273