In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 Chapter 1 Introduction I n 1993, when UCLA’s historic Powell Library was being retrofitted to meet stricter earthquake codes, workers found numerous dusty boxes hidden behind a bookshelf in an unused basement room. The boxes contained the original survey questionnaires taken in 1965 and 1966 that were used to inform Leo Grebler, Joan Moore, and Ralph Guzmán’s The Mexican American People: The Nation’s Second Largest Minority, published in 1970. This path-breaking study had accompanied the national discovery of Mexican Americans, which, they claim, began in 1960 with the presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy. Based on random samples of Mexican Americans in Los Angeles County and San Antonio City, their study concluded that though some sectors of the Mexican American population had entered the middle class and begun to participate in American society, there was still little overall assimilation, even for those who had lived in the United States for several generations.1 Library staff soon brought these questionnaires and other project materials to our attention. Sensing a unique opportunity, we seized on the idea of revisiting the original respondents. We sensed that Grebler, Moore, and Guzmán’s survey could once again be important if we could examine the lives of the original respondents some three decades later and thus create a longitudinal study. In addition, we thought to make this genuinely intergenerational by interviewing the children of the original respondents, who would now be well into adulthood. This kind of follow-up study would require substantial detective work to find the survivors and a sample of their children, both of whom we knew would be scattered not only throughout California and Texas but also beyond. Several years later, with generous funding from the National Institute of Health (NIH) and several foundations as well as the assistance of many energetic graduate students , we were able to locate and interview 684 of the nearly 1,200 respondents who were younger than fifty in the original survey (nearly 60 percent) and 758 of their children. We believe that this truly longitudinal and intergenerational design would be especially well-suited to address current debates about the integration of immigrants and their descendants in American society. We were able to design a research study that addresses conceptual and methodological issues that arise in intergenerational and longitudinal research and ethnic integration generally. These include the problems of interviewing respondents who might be so highly assimilated that they no longer identify with the group, tracking intergenerational change with cross-sectional data, and selectivity due to respondent loss over time. Our survey examines a randomly selected sample of persons who identified themselves as Mexican Americans in 1965 and follows them and their children some thirty-five years later, regardless of how they identified in 2000. In other words, our research design allows sampling without an ethnic bias. It also permits investigating actual intergenerational change from adult parents to their adult children a generation later, overcoming the problem of comparing generations with cross-sectional data. Finally, to overcome the loss of respondents over time, we are able to adjust our follow-up data to reflect the entire original random sample, using information from the 1965 survey questionnaires. In this book, we carefully examine the historical and intergenerational trends along several dimensions used to measure the integration of ethnic groups, as well as several factors that may shape these trends. We investigate the trajectory of integration along the dimensions of education , socioeconomic status, exposure to other groups, language, ethnic identity, and political participation. We look for factors that shape the integration trajectory, including generation, education, household characteristics , and urban and neighborhood contexts. As far as we know, this is the only study of its kind. Background on the Original Study Grebler, Moore, and Guzmán’s study sought to systematically address the huge gaps in knowledge about “the nation’s second largest minority” of the time.2 It evaluated the condition of the Mexican American population using a 1965 to 1966 household survey of Los Angeles and San Antonio as well as the 1960 U.S. Census information on “white persons of Spanish surname” in the five southwestern states of Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas. Before “The Mexican American People,” the major scholarly work on Mexican Americans was ethnographic and based in rural settings. It generally described the population as almost entirely poor, trapped in their backward cultural traditions, and unassimilable.3 The 1970 study instead focused on cities, where...

Share