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21 Chapter 2 Theoretical Background H ow ethnic groups are integrated in national societies and why they take particular paths are subjects of considerable debate. In the United States, the literature on their integration often revolves around a tension between assimilation and racialization perspectives. Even though Mexicans are the largest immigrant group with the longest duration in the history of the United States, little is known about their integration trajectories. Do the descendants of Mexican immigrants assimilate into mainstream society, like the descendants of European immigrants have, does race come into play, or is there another path? There is no consensus but much debate about which path they did or will follow, if indeed only these two paths exist. Where some analysts cast Mexican Americans as ethnics who follow the assimilation experience of European immigrant groups, albeit more like the slowly but surely assimilating Italians, others see them as a group that has been marginalized on the basis of race, much like African Americans. We believe that a simple assimilation or racialization hypothesis may oversimplify reality. For one, it requires fitting the Mexican American experience into either the African American or European American box. Mexican Americans, like Native Americans or Asian Americans or ethnic minorities in dozens of countries across the globe, are unlikely to fit entirely into either. Furthermore, factors besides racialization or assimilation may define their experience and there may be important variations within the group. Ideas of race and assimilation, at least as they have been formulated so far, may be artifacts of a social science built largely on one empirical model (the United States), and, moreover, mostly on either the experiences of those of African or European origin. Drawing from realities throughout the globe, Stephen Cornell and Douglas Hartmann stress the remarkable “diversity of forms of race and ethnicity, the variety of functions they apparently serve and the quite different kinds of attachments that claim the ethnic label.”1 In recent years, the debate on ethnic integration has focused mostly on the economic dimension, drawing heavily from the debate on the significance of race for African Americans and other groups. On the racialization side, scholars have often assumed that Mexican Americans have been discriminated against and that their mobility has thus been blocked. Evidence based on national statistics show that Mexican Americans, like Puerto Ricans and African Americans, have persistently low socioeconomic status even by the third generation.2 Since at least the 1970s, many scholars, working largely from an ethnic studies perspective , have argued that racism has been the greatest impediment to Mexican American progress.3 They claim that Mexican Americans have experienced such ills as discrimination in labor and housing markets, inferior and segregated education, tracking into manual jobs, and exclusion from voting rights. In contrast, the historiography of earlier European immigrant groups suggest that the children of immigrants made impressive gains over their parents, with continuing economic and social gains by the third generation.4 Scholars of assimilation have generalized these findings to Mexican Americans, while conceding the process is slower for them.5 Immigrant or ethnic integration may also vary by social dimension, so that the nature of integration may differ along them. We examine ethnic integration broadly and beyond the issue of economic status, as many contemporary accounts tend to do.6 The noneconomic dimensions of the integration process, including the cultural, linguistic, and political , are less well theorized and analyzed but are often assumed to go in the same direction as economic assimilation. A high degree of language retention, for example, may reflect the residential and educational segregation of Mexicans and the availability of Spanish language media, which is often made possible through the large presence of immigrants. We may find evidence of assimilation on some dimensions, such as language , but not others, such as identity.7 For example, we might expect a strong sense of ethnic consciousness and progressive political behavior if Mexican Americans perceive racial discrimination as limiting their chances of success. Based on the experience of European ethnics, for which there is ample evidence, we could expect almost complete erosion of ethnic traits by the fourth generation. The third and fourth generation descendants of European immigrants to the United States are often depicted as having only symbolic ethnicity,8 in which the ethnicity is not accompanied by cultural and social distinctions that matter in the real world, such as language, but is instead often limited to symbolic acts, such as celebration of national holidays or cuisine. That...

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