Assimilation or social mobility? Explaining ethnic boundary crossing between the Ecuadorian 2001 and 2010 census

ABSTRACT

Individual ethnic boundary crossing, i.e. the change in the ethnic category of an individual, is one of the elementary strategies of ethnic boundary making. The large bulk of the empirical literature so far has shown that ethnic categorization is correlated with cultural and economic attributes of the individuals. However, few empirical studies are able to investigate individual boundary crossing. This article adds to this literature by studying ethnic boundary crossing between 2001 and 2010 with a panel of about 340,000 Ecuadorians. It is shown that while ethnic boundary crossing is common, the overwhelming majority of crossings were made from or to mixed categories. In order to explain these boundary crossings, I test a cultural assimilation and an economic “money whitens” hypothesis. I find evidence for both explanations with cultural assimilation having a much stronger effect on ethnic categorization.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnicity
• boundary making
• assimilation
• class
• census
• panel

Acknowledgments

For helpful feedback I would like to thank Siri Völker and Aline Hirseland.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Oliver Strijbis http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9530-1380

Notes

1 Wimmer distinguishes between economic, political and symbolic capital.

2 We dropped the population older than 65 in 2001 for this comparison because of high mortality levels among the older age groups up to 2010. However, these cases were not dropped for the construction of the panel data.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft: [grant number DFG STR 1379/1-1; NO 217/9-1].