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264 Chapter 11 Conclusions T he Mexican American experience requires that we look beyond the traditional assimilation versus race theories that have been based almost entirely on the European American and African American experiences. The well-known assimilation story, in its classic and modern forms, has been the dominant theory for explaining immigrant integration andwasderivedfromtheexperiencesofEuropeanimmigrantstotheUnited States and their descendants. Even though many of them occupied the bottom rungs of the American class structure when they arrived, their children and grandchildren successfully rode the mobility escalator to middle class status, stopped speaking their native languages, and thoroughly mixedwith the general white population, including the descendants of other recent European immigrants. Overall, they would no longer be differentiated from other Americans, and were hardly ethnic by the third generation. We find that is not at all the story for Mexican Americans, whose ancestors immigrated during the same period as the Europeans and in some cases were natives of what was Mexico prior to 1848 but is now the United States. For third- and fourth-generation Mexican Americans, we find that ethnic boundaries are much more than merely symbolic, which they are for latergeneration European Americans. Mexican American ethnicity continues to influence their language, who they choose as friends and marriage partners, where they live, how they see themselves, and how they vote. Unfortunately, it also shapes their class position. However, the slow acculturation and persistent low status of Mexican Americans is also clearly not the rigid caste-like type predicted by the internal colonial model or by theories predicated on the African American example. Mexican Americans intermarry much more than do blacks, live in less segregated areas, and face less labor market discrimination, which suggests a path also different from that of African Americans. In this sense, racial boundaries for Mexican Americans are clearly less rigid than for African Americans, despite even worse schooling. Using state-of-the-art social science methods, we have followed the intergenerational experience of Mexican origin adults in 1965 to their children Conclusions 265 as adults in 2000. As far as we know, this research design is unique and for many reasons it is the most appropriate for addressing the actual intergenerational integration of immigrants and their descendants. Among its advantages, it permits the investigation of real intergenerational change by seeing how events occurring during childhood or a generation ago are related to adult outcomes and by matching parents to their actual children rather than relying on proxies. We have shown that the experience of assimilation, where it occurred, was far slower than it was for European Americans. The erosion of ethnic boundaries over generations between Mexicans and Anglos, the defining feature of assimilation in our view, is most apparent in the linguistic realm. Although English proficiency is virtually universal for the U.S.-born today, Spanish fluency is not. There is a gradual weaning away from Spanish so that by the fourth generation (or more), only one-third of the child sample is able to speak Spanish and fully 94 percent speak mostly or only English to their fifth-generation children at home. However, there is a surprising amount of ethnic persistence into the fourth generation regarding identities, voting behaviors, and some cultural practices. Among fourth-generation Mexican Americans, many live in majority Hispanic neighborhoods, most marry other Hispanics, most frequently think of themselves as Mexican, and most agree that the United States should allow Mexicans to immigrate to the United States if they want to. Although intermarriage with other groups tends to grow with each generation, it is so slow so that even by the fourth generation, nearly twothirds are still married to other Hispanics. Their identity change is far from complete in the third or even fourth generation and their politics continue to be on the left of the spectrum and to strongly support ethnic issues. All of these sharpen racial and cultural boundaries between Mexican Americans and Anglos, which in turn further restricts their assimilation. Although they may have lost some ethnic cultural attributes like language, most fourth-generation Mexican Americans in our study experience a world largely shaped by their race and ethnicity. In education, which best determines life chances in the United States, assimilation is interrupted by the second generation and stagnates thereafter . Considering the education of parents, it can even be characterized as backwards. Mexican Americans, three or four generations removed from their immigrant ancestors, are less likely than the Mexican American second generation of similar characteristics to have completed...

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