Racialization, Assimilation, and the Mexican American Experience (original) (raw)
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Racialization, Assimilation, and the Mexican American Experience: Racialization in Ascendance
Generations of Exclusion: Mexican Americans, Assimilation, and Race is a powerful and important sociological analysis of the changing status of Mexican Americans. Edward E. Telles and Vilma Ortiz have produced a piece of scholarship worthy of wide readership and heartfelt praise. They have set a very high and exacting bar for scholarship not merely for research on the Mexican American experience, but for the fields of immigration studies and race and ethnic relations more broadly. First and foremost, the work deserves praise as an example of scholars seizing upon and bringing to fruition an unexpected research opportunity. With the earthquake remodeling of Powell Library on the UCLA campus in 1993, the original set of interviews from Leo Grebler, Joan Moore, and Ralph Guzman's ~1970! pioneering The Mexican American People: The Nation's Second Largest Minority Group was discovered. Ortiz and Telles saw the potential in this " find " to take-up a remarkable investigation of social change in the conditions and status of Mexican Americans. They set out to re-interview all of those respondents from the original Los Angeles County and San Antonio samples who were under the age of fifty at the time of the original 1965 interviews and to develop a new sample of their children. This ambition would provide them not only with unique panel data from the first major social-scientific survey of Mexican Americans, it would also allow them unusual leverage on possible change over time.
"Generations of Exclusion: Mexican Americans, Assimilation, and Race" - A Review
In 1992, boxes of questionnaires used in a mid-1960s household survey of Mexican Americans in Los Angeles and San Antonio were accidentally discovered by construction workers at UCLA. Those files would form the basis for a unique follow-up study, entailing a multiyear detective effort to locate and reinterview the original respondents who had been surveyed three decades before, and now also a sample of their grown children. The analyses follow an intergenerational longitudinal design: the original respondents were first, second, or third generation adults; their children were second, third, or fourth generations. The parents had gone to school between the 1930s and 1950s, the children between the 1950s and 1980s. The book poses a key question: are social (ethnic and racial) boundaries between Mexican Americans and other groups, especially dominant Anglos, enhanced or eroded over time and generation-since-immigration? Mexican immigrants see themselves as different: they speak Spanish, live in segregated barrios, have distinct political views. But for their descendants, what happens to those ethnic boundaries? Do they persist, blur, or disappear? In sharp contrast to assumptions of linear progress underlying conventional assimilation perspectives, the authors find that educational attainment peaks among second-generation children of immigrants, but declines for the third and fourth generations (the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of immigrants). Similarly, economic progress halts by the second generation — education was the only variable to consistently explain variation in the socioeconomic status of Mexican Americans. Poverty rates remained high for later generations. On the other hand, evidence of acculturation was strong on several indicators, above all language, with English spoken well by the second generation and Spanish becoming nearly extinct after the fourth. Despite the decline of Spanish, ethnic identification persists into the fourth generation, with the lion’s share of respondents preferring Mexican, Mexican American and Hispanic identity labels over American — an outcome that the authors attribute in part to “racialization experiences.” The authors identify institutional barriers as a major source of Mexican American disadvantage. Poorly funded school systems where Mexican American children are concentrated, punitive immigration policies coincident with reliance on cheap Mexican labor in key states, and persistent discrimination all combine to make integration problematic. In these respects, the Mexican American trajectory differs from that of European immigrants in previous generations.
Debunking Sociological Examinations of Mexican-Americans' Assimilation Trends
This paper takes a comprehensive look at the book "Generations of Exclusion: Mexican Americans, Assimilation, and Race," by Edward E. Telles and Vilma Ortiz, and includes other important sociological research studies on the assimilation of Mexican-Americans. I critically examine their conclusions, expose bias within their frameworks, and propose considerations for further research. I argue that current research on Mexican-Americans is deeply flawed and show examples of more upwardly mobile and socioeconomically successful examples of this race-ethnic group, as well as predictions on future statistics.
2011
Studies of Mexican American integration have come to a methodological and theoretical impasse. Conventional investigations have provided limited insight as they are outsider-based perspectives examining native-born minorities within the context of the immigrant experience and race-cycle paradigms. Grounded in cultural ideologies and nationalist narratives, dominant descriptions of minorities have created a conceptual strait that circumscribes the discourse of assimilationists" models of integration. Moreover, studies of marginal groups produce negative consequences by highlighting cultural differences that tautologically reinforce the grounds for exclusion. Little grounded work has been conducted specifically looking at racialized native-born minorities and the dynamics of their generational process of integration. Through embedded ethnography and participant narratives, this research provides direct insight into processes of contemporary integration and the social structural accommodation of native-born Mexican Americans. As a means of sidestepping conceptual barriers, this iv discussion theoretically frames the integration of Mexican American professionals within the context of modernity and liberal human development. By responding to the above critiques, this paper presents an alternative approach to the analysis and explanation of the roots of race-cycle paradigms in the first section. The second section establishes the context for the research and explains the basis for the dissertation"s structure and conceptual arguments. As a means of moving the discourse away from established models, the third section provides a critical overview of the classical and contemporary literature on minority integration through a process of textual deconstruction. In addition, the third section also constructs a theoretical dynamic between structural determinations and individual adaptations to modernity that promotes integration. The fourth section describes the non-traditional method of data collection that provides direct insight into the processes of native-born minority cultural and structural incorporation. Through participant voices, the fifth section describes how individual interactions and institutional forces are shaping the social place that Mexican American professionals have created on the borderlands of American culture and society. What the interpretive findings suggest in the last section is that Mexican American professionals are constructing and redefining their own social and cultural place out of the elements that modern society provides and not as the race-cycle theory predicts. v
Children of Mexican Immigrants: Crisis and Opportunity
Journal of Latino/Latin American Studies, 2012
The children of Mexican immigrants are at risk for “downward assimilation,” and on track to becoming the largest and most disadvantaged of America’s minority populations. The paper draws on the theory of segmented assimilation to explain the factors driving second generation outcomes among Mexican Americans. It also points to those factors that enable children to overcome their disadvantaged backgrounds, paying particular attention to the benefits of maintaining a connection to their cultural heritage and the role of mentors. It points to resources within the Mexican immigrant community that can be tapped to improve second generation outcomes, namely hometown associations and Latino college students. It considers one hometown’s efforts, the Los Haro Summer Camp, as a possible model for replication. In concludes with a proposal for MexiCorps, a bi-national community service program involving Latino college students serving as mentors and role models for under-privileged youth in their communities of origin. Keywords: Second generation, downward assimilation, Mexican hometown associations, cultural heritage, MexiCorps.
Placing Assimilation Theory: Mexican Immigrants in Urban and Rural America (with Angela Garcia)
The ANNALS, 2017
Assimilation theory typically conceptualizes native whites in metropolitan areas as the mainstream reference group to which immigrants' adaptation is compared. Yet the majority of the U.S. population will soon be made up of ethnoracial minorities. The rise of new immigrant destinations has contributed to this demographic change in rural areas, in addition to already-diverse cities. In this article, we argue that assimilation is experienced in reference to the demographic populations within urban and rural destinations as well as the physical geography of these places. We analyze and compare the experiences of rural Mexicans who immigrated to urban Southern california and rural Montana, demonstrating the ways in which documentation status in the United States and the rurality of immigrants' communities of origin in Mexico shape assimilation in these two destinations.