Generations of Exclusion: Mexican Americans, Assimilation, and Race (review)

Throughout much of the nineteenth century and running through the 1970s, America institutions, and by extension larger society generally defined a citizen as white, socially integrated, culturally linked to specific European ancestry, and racially devoid of Mexican, Native American, African American, Asian American, and Hispanic Caribbean heritage. Thus, many Americans, especially within the Latin American diaspora dynamic, remained outside the scope and significance of mainstream society. Inspired by this growing challenge of the twentieth century, economist Leo Grebler, political scientist Ralph Guzmán, and sociologist Joan W. Moore set out to not only put “Mexican Americans on America’s social and political map,” but “redefine Mexican Americans in terms of race” (pp. xvii, xix). In doing so, these social scientists through their groundbreaking work, The Mexican American People: The Nation’s Second Largest Minority (New York: Macmillan Company, 1970) demonstrated that Mexican Americans were treated akin to African Americans—as a marginalized racial minority group—while confronting the contradiction between the reality of discrimination and the American ideal of equal access to opportunity.

Produced out of the University of California at Los Angeles’ Mexican American Study Project, The Mexican American People sought to gain a greater understanding of the increasingly urbanized Mexican American population. Dismissed as a transient migratory population, with supposedly no real roots in the United States, the aforementioned study, which was processed and prepared primarily between the years 1964–1968, attempted to dispel the “Spanish-surnamed” foreigner myth while grappling with why Mexican Americans were mired in the underbelly of the U.S. economy outside the purview of the federal government. Grounded in survey interviews, it is regarded as one of the best comprehensive studies on Mexican Americans and their economic, social, political, and educational situation in the Southwest. As a descendant of The Mexican American People, Generations of Exclusion was also informed and guided by oral testimony. Indeed, approximately 60 percent of the original interviewees from The Mexican American People who were younger than fifty were re-interviewed for Generations of Exclusion.

Therefore, what is amassed is a “longitudinal study that investigates the intergenerational integration of the Mexican origin population” running from the Vietnam War era to the brink of the “War on Terror” (pp. 10). Along the way, Telles and Ortiz, both professors of sociology at UCLA, incorporate interviews from the children of the original respondents. As a result, this scholarship is anchored in follow-up interviews coupled with an intergenerational approach, giving the reader an appreciation of community progress versus continuing contemporary problems. To the chagrin of the authors and Joan Moore, the only surviving major contributor of the original study, the findings suggest that more problems exist than sustained substantive progress. By the late 1990s, many of the Mexican Americans surveyed, and by extension, a number of their children were still not fully integrated into the echelon of the civic, cultural, political, economic, and educational life of the country. In particular, economic integration, the most sought-after characteristic of assimilation, decreases considerably after the second generation. This study indicates that the social discrepancies between Anglos and ethnic Mexicans have remained relatively the same since the 1960s, projecting slight improvement by the dawn of the twenty-first century.¹ The economic and educational gulf between Mexican Americans and Anglos did in fact widen from 1965 to 2000.² This is especially disheartening for the Mexican American community given the period of cooperative agency that dominated the late sixties and early seventies. From housing to health, Mexican American life by the so-called “Decade of the Hispanic” was circumscribed by powerful social forces that prevented Mexican Americans from making a maximum contribution to their families and communities.³

Like the original project, this second undertaking took a handful of years to reach the data analysis and writing stage. Both studies were also aided by a select number of distinguished scholars from a wide range of disciplines. From...