ABSTRACT
Edward Telles and Christina Sue’s Durable Ethnicity: Mexican Americans and the Ethnic Core makes a key contribution to academic, social and political debates on international migration, assimilation, ethnicity, and identities. This novel account of Mexican Americans’ manifestation of ethnicity draws on 70 qualitative interviews and a random sample of about 1500 US-born Mexican Americans. Written fluently and in a moving style, it probes the “cultural assimilability and Americanness” of Mexican Americans. This research and its findings are relevant to a broader range of audiences in the US and are of special interest to academic and public debates on immigration and integration in Europe. In what follows, I will reflect on the book’s main findings and conclusions and review the newly developed symbolic-consequential ethnicity scale. I will conclude by discussing the relevance of the findings for the European migration experience and suggest the need for comparative research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).