Children of Mexican Immigrants: Crisis and Opportunity (original) (raw)
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"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.
Racialization, Assimilation, and the Mexican American Experience
Du Bois Review, 2011
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.
A Community Youth Organization for Latino Immigrant Students
The challenges facing Mexican and Central American adolescents in the United States are numerous and well documented. Despite their challenges, researchers have noticed positive academic outcomes for many of these students. However, the literature has not focused on the role that Community Youth Organizations (CYOs) have to play in supporting them. Evaluations of some organizations have shown them to be successful in promoting resilience and academic achievement in students of disadvantaged backgrounds. This paper adds the perspective of immigrant students to the literature on CYOs. In this case study, I interviewed first and second generation high school students of Mexican and Central American origin who are active participants in their local after school program. The interviews reveal that the immigrant students face unique challenges and that the organization is able to counter those challenges by creating a community of students and staff who promote a culture of success.
2017
Children of immigrants are growing up in a unique historical context in the United States—a time marked by aggressive immigration policies and practices. Although much has been written on the topic of immigration—and immigration enforcement in particular—few empirical studies have examined the impact of immigration policies on the development of children of immigrants. The Foundation for Child Development is committed to supporting young children in reaching their developmental potential, especially children growing up under conditions of economic instability and social exclusion. For over 10 years, through its Young Scholars Program (YSP), the Foundation has sponsored substantial research with vulnerable children populations, particularly children of immigrants. Between 2009 and 2015, a period marked by heightened immigration enforcement (Gonzalez-Barrera & Krogstad, 2016), when approximately 500,000 parents were deported (Pew Research Center, 2015) studies conducted by YSP scholar...
Editors' introduction: Latino youth and struggles for inclusion in the 21st century
This special issue features carefully selected case studies that document and analyze the experiences of Latino youth and young adults as they struggle for inclusion in the United States. Articles draw from qualitative research with Latinos/as who reside in different regions of the United States, hail from or trace their origins to various countries, and embody distinct experiences of incorporation and inclusion. Special emphasis is placed on the 1.5 generation, young people who immigrated to the US as young children but have spent the majority of their lives there—some of whom hold temporary protection under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. This introduction presents a conceptual framework for analyzing the experiences of Latino youth and young adults. We argue for an approach that centers intersecting social locations of youth and the specificity of place for understanding the dynamics and implications of Latino youth's struggles for inclusion in the 21st century.
2014
New deportation policies in the United States are making it harder for undocumented immigrants to return home periodically (Dreby 2013a). This has a direct impact on their children. Because parents can't travel, thousands of foreign-born minors have recently been forced to travel alone in hopes of reunification. Their U.S.-born counterparts face a similar challenge: immigrants' lack of mobility places a new expectation on them to visit relatives that were left behind. Unlike their parents, these children can move freely across borders and maintain family ties. This project explores the second generation's homeland trips as experienced by a small group of childrenfive girls and three boys-of Mexican-origin in the South Bronx, New York. It seeks to understand how children make sense of, negotiate and redefine a parental expectation to visit Mexico alone. When do they make these trips? What do families expect from their visits? And what do they reveal about intergenerational relationships in families of mixed immigration status? Findings suggest that while these visits are valued for their potential to strengthen family ties, they can also expose children to resentment created by family separation. The results show an expansion of the role of children as cultural mediators for their parents that is no longer limited to their settlement communities in the United States, but reaches back to their parents' communities of origin in Mexico. v Acknowledgements This thesis is dedicated to my parents, Sergio and Rosario, and to the children who kindly participated in this study.
2015
Cooper, Barbara Rogoff, the principals and teachers of the Watsonville and Santa Cruz schools, and the staff at the Welfare Mothers ' Support Network, This study would not have been possible without the cooperation of the families who graciously invited us into their homes and answered our questions. Among the settings of children's learning and development outside of school, families are considered a central context for children's mastery of important cultural tools. Contemporary analyses emphasize the "cultural capital " or "funds of knowledge " that parents pass on to their children (Mehan, 1992; Moll, Velez-Ibanez, and Gonzalez, 1991), but Harkness, Super, and Keefer (1992) also note that "theories of culture acquisition must deal with the reality of cultural change " (p. 163). In this chapter, we consider the accommodations that parents make when they immigrate to a new culture or move into a new ecological niche within their present...
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.
Cultivating Capital: Latino Newcomer Young Men in a U.S. Urban High School
Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 2013
Newcomer young men confront numerous obstacles that limit their chances for attainment and achievement. Using social and cultural capital frameworks and a case study methodology, this article examines how four Latino newcomer young men navigated an urban U.S. high school. It reveals how teachers and a counselor cultivated capital and how the young men leveraged this capital, thus challenging traditional depictions of Latino immigrant adolescents and highlighting the importance of belonging for these youth. [recent immigrant youth, young men of color, social and cultural capital, high school, peers] Researchers and policymakers express growing concern about the educational attainment of young men of color in the United States (Edley and Ruiz de Velasco 2010). Among 16and 24-year-olds in 2009, 11 percent of black males and a full 19 percent of Latino males were high school drop outs, compared to just 6 percent of white males (NCES 2010). That same year, while white males represented 27 percent of those enrolled in college, black and Latino males each represented just 5 percent (NCES 2010). Among teenage males, dropout rates are highest and college-going rates lowest for foreign-born Latinos (Reyes and Nakagawa 2010). Foreign-born adolescents in general, and particularly those who are newcomers, also face steeper odds when compared to other immigrant groups. Research indicates that youth who arrive as young adults are less likely to complete high school and persist on to college than those who arrive in early childhood (White and Kaufman 1997). Within this group, Latino newcomers are often least likely to finish high school and enroll in postsecondary education, a trend that is especially true for those from Mexico (Fuligni 1997; Kao and Tienda 1995). The dropout rate for Mexican teenage newcomers has been calculated at 33 percent, three times that of immigrants arriving in early childhood (Fry 2005). Male immigrants tend to struggle more than females, lagging behind with respect to achievement (Portes and Rumbaut 2001; Suárez-Orozco et al. 2008) and dropping out at higher rates (Gándara et al. 2004). This gender gap is larger among foreign-born youth than among the native-born immigrant population (Suárez-Orozco and Qin 2006). These outcomes seemingly contradict what is known in the literature about the experiences of first-generation immigrants. First-and second-generation youth often benefit from immigrant optimism, where they share in their parents' positive attitudes, aspirations, and determinism (Kao and Tienda 1995). Foreign-born youth overall tend to outperform their native-born peers, earning higher grades (Fuligni 1997