Mexican Americans as a paradigm for contemporary intra-group heterogeneity

Abstract

Racialization and assimilation offer alternative perspectives on the position of immigrant-origin populations in American society. We question the adequacy of either perspective alone in the early twenty-first century, taking Mexican Americans as our case in point. Re-analysing the child sample of the Mexican American Study Project, we uncover substantial heterogeneity marked by vulnerability to racialization at one end but proximity to the mainstream at the other. This heterogeneity reflects important variations in how education, intermarriage, mixed ancestry and geographic mobility have intersected for Mexican immigrants and their descendants over the twentieth century, and in turn shaped their ethnic identity. Finally, based on US census findings, we give reason to think that internal heterogeneity is increasing in the twenty-first century. Together, these findings suggest that future studies of immigrant adaptation in America must do a better job of accounting for heterogeneity, not just between but also within immigrant-origin populations.

Keywords:

• assimilation
• racialization
• incorporation
• Mexican Americans
• heterogeneity
• education

Notes

1. Following Alba and Nee (2003, p. 12), we understand the ‘mainstream’ as ‘that part of American society within which ethnic and racial origins have at most minor impacts.’

2. We thank Edward Telles and Vilma Ortiz for sharing the child sample of the MASP data. We take responsibility for any errors committed in our analysis of the data.

3. While scholars heavily debate the distinction between these two terms both in the USA and abroad, for our purposes it suffices to say that the boundaries around ethnic groups often derive more strongly from ‘insiders'’ claims to perceived common ancestry, whereas those around racial groups often derive from ‘outsiders'’ imposition of a social distinction based on perceived phenotypical and other differences (Cornell and Hartmann 2006).

4. Lee and Bean (2010) report similar findings from interviews with the offspring of Mexican–white intermarriages.

5. The children in these families generally belong to the baby boom cohorts, when fertility of non-Mexican women was very high. Assuming that the average exogamous family had 3.0 children and the average endogamous one 4.0, we would expect about 18 per cent of Mexican Americans born in this period to come from intermarriages.

6. These are likely to be underestimates of mobility since the mobile are harder to find in a follow-up study than are those who have remained in place.

7. There is, to be sure, variability in the racialization patterns of Mexicans over time and place within Texas (Montejano 1987).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Richard Alba

RICHARD ALBA is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Tomás R. Jiménez

TOMÁS R. JIMÉNEZ is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stanford University and a Fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion.

Helen B. Marrow

HELEN B. MARROW is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Latin American Studies at Tufts University.