Placing Assimilation Theory: Mexican Immigrants in Urban and Rural America (original) (raw)
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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.
Racial identity and the spatial assimilation of Mexicans in the United States
Social Science Research, 1992
Mexico's national ideology holds that Mexicans are mestixos, a racially mixed group created by the union of Europeans and Indians. When Mexicans migrate to the United States, this mixed racial identity comes into conflict with Angio-American norms that view race dichotomously, as Indian or white but not both. In this paper we examine the process of ideological assimilation by which Mexicans in the United States shift their identities from mestizo to white, and then measure the effect that race has on the level of residential segregation from non-Hispanic whites. Although residential barriers are not as severe for mestixos as for Hispanics of African heritage, we find that mestixos are significantly less likely than white Mexicans to achieve suburban residence and that this fact, in turn, lowers their probability of contact with non-Hispanic whites. Q IFL? ~eademic PRSS, IIK. Despite two decades of affirmative action policy and civil rights enforcement, race remains a fundamental determinant of residential patterns in the United States. This fact is important for U.S. Hispanics because they include people of many different races-white Europeans, black Africans, Amerindians, and Asians, often mixed together in complex combinations. This racial diversity provides a unique opportunity to study the effects of race on spatial assimilation. Denton and Massey (1989) undertook such a study for Caribbean Hispanics. They found that spatial assimilation was greatest among white Hispanics and least among black Hispanics; those of racially mixed origins were in between but generally experienced a high degree of separation This research was funded by NICHD Grants HD-18594 and HD-24041, whose support is gratefully acknowledged. We thank Marta Tienda for giving us her extract of Hispanics from the 1980 5% PUMS file and also for her helpful comments.
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 2007
One of the principal theoretical and policy questions in the sociology of international migration is the extent to which post-1965 immigrants are either assimilating in the United States or remain stuck in an ethnic “underclass.” This paper aims to recast conventional approaches to assimilation through a temporal and spatial reorientation, with special attention to the Mexican-origin case. Attending to the effects of the replenishment of the Mexican-origin population through a constant stream of new immigrants shows significant assimilation taking place temporally between a given immigrant cohort and subsequent generations. Thinking outside the national box, through comparing the growing differences between Mexican migrants and their descendants, on the one hand, and Mexicans who stay in Mexico, on the other, reveals, spatially, a dramatic upward mobility and a process of “homeland dissimilation” that conventional accounts miss. We demonstrate the analytic utility of these two persp...
Geographic Mobility and Spatial Assimilation among U. S. Latino Immigrants
International Migration Review, 2005
Although the spatial assimilation of immigrants to the United States has important implications for social theory and social policy, few studies have explored the atterns and determinants of interneighborhood geographic mobility that lead to immigrants’residential proximity to the white, non-Hispanic majority. We explore this issue by merging data from three different sources - the Latino National Political Survey, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, and tract-level census data - to begin unraveling causal relationships among indicators of socioeconomic, social, cultural, segmented, and spatial assimilation. Our longitudinal analysis of 700 Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban immigrants followed from 1990 to 1995 finds broad support for hypotheses derived from the classical account of minority assimilation. High income, English language use, and embeddedness in Anglo social contexts increase Latino immigrants’geographic mobility into Anglo neighborhoods. U. S. citizenship and years spent in the United Stares are ppsidvely associated with geographic mobility into more Anglo neighbor oods, and coethnic contact is inversely associated with this form of mobility, but these associations operate largely through other redictors. Prior experiences of ethnic discrimination increase and residence in public housing decreases the likelihood that Latino immigrants will move from their origin neighborhoods, while residing in metropolitan areas with large Latino populations leads to geographic moves into “less Anglo” census tracts.
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
Rural Sociology, 2009
This research examines differences between those Mexican migrants choosing metropolitan destinations and those choosing destinations outside metropolitan areas of the United States. Using general estimating equations, the study presents data indicating that since the 1960s migrants choosing rural destinations are less fluent in English, slightly older, much less educated, far more likely to be unskilled, more likely to be married, and more likely to be undocumented. The picture is more complex when consideration is restricted to those migrants arriving in rural areas since the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. These migrants are far more likely to be single, have more education but have less English fluency, have less work experience, and have less family experience with migration to the United States. They are more likely to come from small towns and rural areas of Mexico.