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135 Chapter 6 Economic Status N o other issue regarding racial and ethnic divisions in the United States is as troubling as the lack of economic incorporation of some groups, most notably African Americans. The persistently low occupational level, income, and accumulated wealth of minorities demonstrate the limits of the equal opportunity principle and the universality of the American dream. Evidence based on national statistics show that Mexican Americans, like Puerto Ricans and African Americans, have persistently low socioeconomic status even among the third generation.1 Since at least the 1970s, many scholars have argued that racial discrimination in labor and housing markets, inferior and segregated education, and tracking into manual jobs has primarily blocked the mobility of Mexican Americans.2 In contrast, studies of earlier European immigrant groups suggest that the more important and most impressive gains were made by the second generation, with continuing economic and social gains by the third generation.3 Both individual and labor market explanations have been used to describe differences in the nature of European American and Mexican American incorporation experiences. In this chapter , we investigate the socioeconomic outcomes of Mexican Americans and whether economic status improves with generational status. Several leading scholars expect the eventual, though relatively slow, assimilation of Mexican Americans by the fourth generation because of the very low human capital of their immigrant forebears, which puts their descendants at an educational and economic disadvantage.4 We showed in the previous chapter that Mexican Americans have especially low levels of education, well into the fourth generation, and that education does not steadily improve over the generations. According to human capital and status attainment theories, low educational status is the main reason for low job status, though racial discrimination in the labor market may also affect economic status. The payoff to education, also known as income returns to levels of education, has generally been shown to be similar between Mexican Americans and European Americans, but lower for African Americans. The inference, therefore, is that Mexican Americans’ occupational status is primarily due to low education, not to labor market discrimination.5 The first stage of the status attainment model posits that characteristics of the family of origin are particularly important for understanding one’s economic position.6 Status attainment describes the process by which parents transmit their social standing to their children, primarily through the children’s education. In the second stage, child’s education and other human capital characteristics predict their subsequent position in the labor market, particularly their first job. We showed in the previous chapter that indicators of the family’s social class—especially parents’ education and family income—significantly predict the educational status of the children of the original respondents. In this chapter, we examine the extent to which education, parental capital, and other factors predict occupational and income status and the accumulation of wealth and homeownership. Opportunities in the labor market largely determine how significantly ethnic groups will assimilate economically beyond individual gains in human capital and status. The incorporation of the descendants of European immigrants seems to have depended largely on expansive industrial labor markets, which offered an abundance of relatively well-paid employment to even low human capital workers.7 The two original locations of the Mexican American Study Project, Los Angeles and San Antonio, had different economic structures in the 1960s and thus provided distinct opportunities to Mexican American workers. Furthermore, each underwent different kinds of changes in subsequent years. Los Angeles was heavily industrialized and unionized in the 1960s but lost much of its industrial base after that, akin to the experiences of large eastern and midwestern cities. As discussed in chapter 4, Mexican Americans were concentrated in these declining industries.8 San Antonio, on the other hand, was less industrial, with more jobs in tourism, government, and the military in the 1960s. There has been less change in the industrial composition in San Antonio since the 1960s, though the closing of military bases, which had offered some of the most desirable blue-collar jobs in the area, has diminished its importance as an employer. Thus, we examine whether the socioeconomic outcomes of Mexican Americans differs by urban area. Gender is well documented as an important issue in understanding the economic position of individuals (which is not as well documented for most of the other indicators we used in this book). Women tend to have lower wages, lower incomes, considerable occupational segregation, and less wealth than men.9 Of course, race-ethnicity interacts...

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