The Diversity Challenge: Social Identity and Intergroup Relations on the College Campus

6. The Origins and Persistence of Ethnic Identity Among the New-Immigrant Groups

Chapter 6 The Origins and Persistence of Ethnic Identity Among the New-Immigrant Groups T he previous two chapters charted the introduction of our students to the American political and racial systems. The fact that most of them are members of minority groups, however, raises other questions that focus more directly on their specifically racial and ethnic experiences on a multicultural campus. UCLA, like the broader American society and many other Western nations, has become increasingly culturally diverse since the 1960s. The social and political effects of cultural diversification have been much debated. One particular concern is that it might produce ethnic balkanization, stimulating communal conflict and, in extreme cases, violence and the disintegration of nation-states. Samuel Huntington (2004), for example, argues that heavy waves of immigration from Mexico and the rest of Latin America could diminish national unity in many ways and perhaps even lead to a loss of American control over significant regions of the present United States. Huntington believes that the only way to maintain a unified America is through a common creed and culture. Presumably, ethnic balkanization is intimately connected to the social identities of members of ethnic minority groups—the psychological markers of their relationships to their own groups and the broader society . A student body at a large university that includes a relatively high proportion of ethnic minorities and no single numerically dominant group could provide a “critical mass” that encourages the enhanced salience of ethnic identity and the formation of ethnic enclaves. At UCLA, the issue of possible balkanization hinges most on the trajectory of Asian and Latino students because of the relatively small numbers of African Americans on the campus. Accordingly, our primary empirical focus in this chapter is on the social identities of students from what we earlier called the new-immigrant groups, Asians and Latinos. Two American Prototypes Two popular prototypes exist for thinking about ethnic minority groups in the United States and their social identities. We describe the first as the European assimilation prototype. It focuses on the European immigrants who arrived in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and their descendants. The term “melting pot” is often used to symbolize their general assimilation into the broader society. This assimilation is reflected in much-reduced geographical concentration , fluency in original languages, ethnically based social organization, and intraethnic friendship preferences, as well as increased interethnic intermarriage and socioeconomic convergence with Anglo-American whites. It is also reflected in a lessened burden of stereotypes and prejudice against them and in their own gradual transition from ethnic to American social identities. Of course, this process usually is not depicted as trouble-free or free of discrimination. Moreover, full assimilation has normally occurred across rather than within generations, an important point to which we will return. Still, the assimilation prototype has become a dominant symbolic model of intergroup relations in the United States, and it is often described as part of the “dominant ideology” of American life (see, for example, Alba 1990; Alba and Nee 2003; Gordon 1964; Huber and Form 1973; Perlmann and Waldinger 1996). A second prototype is the black discrimination prototype, deriving from America’s history of legalized discrimination against blacks. African Americans were subjected first to slavery and later to the Jim Crow system before finally being given equal formal status in the 1960s. In the aggregate, blacks have not followed the same assimilatory trajectory as the European immigrants, either in terms of socioeconomic convergence or social integration. They persistently fall at the bottom of most indicators of well-being, such as income, wealth, longevity, infant mortality, health, education, employment, and housing. These racial Origins and Persistence of Ethnic Idenity 137 gaps have not generally decreased very much in recent decades. Moreover , blacks remain the most residentially segregated, show the least intermarriage with other groups, and are the targets of the strongest prejudice from whites (see, for example, Farley 1996; Sears et al. 2000; Stoll 2005). In turn, the continuing separateness and disadvantage of African Americans promotes the continuation of their strong sense of perceived societal discrimination, racial identity, and common fate (Dawson 1994; Hochschild 1995; Sears and Savalei 2006). Which of these prototypes best fits the waves of new immigrants who have entered the United States in the past few decades? A people of color hypothesis, which generalizes the black discrimination prototype to Asians...