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45 Chapter 3 The Mexican American Study Project T he 1965 Mexican American Study Project was designed as the first comprehensive study to “depict factually and analytically the present realities of life for Mexican Americans in our society.”1 Using the latest scientific methods at their disposal, Grebler, Moore, and Guzmán collected random sample surveys of Mexican Americans in Los Angeles County and San Antonio City, the two largest concentrations of Mexican Americans and together 25 percent of all Mexican Americans in the Southwest and 37 percent of all Mexican Americans in urban areas.2 The samples represented the wide diversity of Mexican Americans in the two metropolitan areas on various characteristics including class, levels of segregation, and generation-since-immigration. Fully thirty-five years later, we have completed a second wave of that study, by interviewing the original respondents and their adult children. Our study is thus intergenerational and longitudinal, providing a research design that is especially well suited for examining the theoretical debates regarding ethnic integration. Specifically, our data consist of the 1965 to 1966 random sample of Mexican Americans in Los Angeles County and San Antonio City age eighteen to fifty,3 a 1998 to 2002 follow-up of the original respondents, who are by then fifty-three to eighty-five years old, and a sample of their children, who are between thirty-five and fifty-four when they are interviewed in the same period. Parent and child data are linked by families. Because we depend on the original random sample in 1965 for representation, we develop a weighting scheme to maintain the same randomness, inasmuch as possible, in the 2000 follow-up. This controls for selectivity bias resulting from the loss of a numerical minority of the cases in the intervening thirty-five years and a similar bias in child interviews. Advantages of our Research Design Grebler, Moore, and Guzmán noted that a cross-sectional study such as theirs “does not take the place of a longitudinal study.”4 Nonetheless, such conventional data have been the main source of information about immigrant integration, but cross-sectional comparisons by generationssince -immigration are only a simulation of a dynamic process. Immigrant integration is an intergenerational process and is modeled better through longitudinal and intergenerational information. Our study design captures the dynamics of longitudinal and intergenerational change, thus providing unique data for addressing the important sociological questions we posed in chapter 2. Although census and other official national data are important because they are widely representative and include numerous cases, they are not designed to capture information on many of the pressing questions in the field of race and ethnicity. Specifically, our survey design offers several benefits. First, it preempts the effect of identifying as other than Mexican origin. It includes information on children and parents to establish actual generations. It includes information on parental attitudes and behavior at time one. Children, on average, are at time two roughly the same age as their parents were at time one. It includes information on the fourth generation. It covers two metropolitan areas. Last, it focuses solely on the Mexican-origin population. Preempts “Opting Out” of Mexican Origin Identity A major advantage of the follow-up survey is that respondents who identified as Mexican origin in 1965 and 1966 may no longer identify as such, and thus wouldn’t fall into a new cross-sectional sample. They may identify as American or as Hispanic or Latino, with no identifier that permits placing them in a Mexican origin sample. This might occur because of extensive cultural and economic assimilation in which there is no longer an attachment to Mexican roots, including living in a mostly white neighborhood or having no contact with the Spanish language or Mexican culture, or because of parental intermarriage . Because such individuals might not be captured in a crosssectional study of the Mexican American population, such data could not fully measure the extent of real-world change for the Mexican-origin across generations. We study ethnicity or ethnic change on the basis of a sample that does not have such an ethnic bias. In our study, we use a random sample of Mexican Americans—that of the original respondent sample—and choose a random sample of their children, regardless of how they identify in 2000. Indeed, we find that more than 10 percent of the children of the 1965 sample identify primarily as white or American rather than Mexican, Mexican American, Hispanic, or Latino. This suggests...

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