Generations of Exclusion: Mexican Americans, Assimilation, and Race [Hardcover]

Edward E. Telles (Author), Vilma Ortiz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 2008 | ISBN-10: 0871548488 | ISBN-13: 978-0871548481 | Edition: 1

When boxes of original files from a 1965 survey of Mexican Americans were discovered behind a dusty bookshelf at UCLA, sociologists Edward Telles and Vilma Ortiz recognized a unique opportunity to examine how the Mexican American experience has evolved over the past four decades. Telles and Ortiz located and re-interviewed most of the original respondents and many of their children. Then, they combined the findings of both studies to construct a thirty-five year analysis of Mexican American integration into American society. Generations of Exclusion is the result of this extraordinary project.

Generations of Exclusion measures Mexican American integration across a wide number of dimensions: education, English and Spanish language use, socioeconomic status, intermarriage, residential segregation, ethnic identity, and political participation. The study contains some encouraging findings, but many more that are troubling. Linguistically, Mexican Americans assimilate into mainstream America quite well--by the second generation, nearly all Mexican Americans achieve English proficiency. In many domains, however, the Mexican American story doesn't fit with traditional models of assimilation. The majority of fourth generation Mexican Americans continue to live in Hispanic neighborhoods, marry other Hispanics, and think of themselves as Mexican. And while Mexican Americans make financial strides from the first to the second generation, economic progress halts at the second generation, and poverty rates remain high for later generations. Similarly, educational attainment peaks among second generation children of immigrants, but declines for the third and fourth generations.

Telles and Ortiz identify institutional barriers as a major source of Mexican American disadvantage. Chronic under-funding in school systems predominately serving Mexican Americans severely restrains progress. Persistent discrimination, punitive immigration policies, and reliance on cheap Mexican labor in the southwestern states all make integration more difficult. The authors call for providing Mexican American children with the educational opportunities that European immigrants in previous generations enjoyed. The Mexican American trajectory is distinct--but so is the extent to which this group has been excluded from the American mainstream.

Most immigration literature today focuses either on the immediate impact of immigration or what is happening to the children of newcomers to this country. Generations of Exclusion shows what has happened to Mexican Americans over four decades. In opening this window onto the past and linking it to recent outcomes, Telles and Ortiz provide a troubling glimpse of what other new immigrant groups may experience in the future.

EDWARD E. TELLES is professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. VILMA ORTIZ is associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 383 pages
• Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation; 1 edition (February 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0871548488
• ISBN-13: 978-0871548481
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.4 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #823,353 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 29 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Social science at its objective best June 2, 2008

By Steve Sailer

Format:Hardcover

UCLA sociologists Edward E. Telles and Vilma Ortiz write:

"Despite sixty years of political and legal battles to improve the education of Mexican Americans, they continue to have the lowest average education levels and the highest high school dropout rates among major ethnic and racial groups in the United States. ... However, leading analysts, apparently believing in the universality of assimilation, argue that this is the result of a large first and second generation population still adjusting to American society. ... These and other scholars predict that Mexican Americans will have the same levels of education and socioeconomic status as the dominant non-Hispanic white population by the fourth generation."

Mexican Americans are new to the East, but they've been in the Southwestern U.S. since before there was a U.S. The 1920 Census found one million Hispanics in the U.S. -- that's an ample sample from which to draw conclusions.

While social scientists in the mid-20th Century paid intense interest to European ethnic newcomers and African Americans, Latinos were largely overlooked. Telles and Ortiz note that Mexican Americans "were well off the radar screen of the largely Eastern and Midwestern-based social sciences. At best, they were viewed as some inexplicable frontier anomaly."

Telles (of UCLA Chicano Studies Dept.) and Ortiz conclusively debunk the conventional wisdom that Mexican Americans close the gap by the third or fourth generation.

During the Great Society, UCLA organized the first major survey, the Mexican American Study Project. In 1965, UCLA academics interviewed 1576 individuals of Mexican descent in the two largest Mexican American metropolises of the time, Los Angeles County and San Antonio....

The respondents were classified into first generation (Mexican-born immigrants), second generation (American born children of immigrants), and third generation (grandchildren of immigrants).

Fortunately, workers in 1992 stumbled upon the 1965 survey forms in a storage room at the UCLA library. Sociologists affiliated with UCLA's Chicano Studies Research Center came up with the audacious notion of searching out the original respondents, then interviewing them again, along with some of their children. This would turn the old 1965 cross-sectional study into a much-needed longitudinal one.

What's really interesting, though, is that they also interviewed in 2000 about 700 of the 1965 respondents' children, who were born 1946-66, roughly during the Baby Boom. The 700 Baby Boomer children were all American-born and represent second through fourth generation Mexican-Americans.

To keep things simple in my summary of the findings, I'll ignore the original respondents and just report on these 700 Baby Boomer children of the old respondents (or, in one case, the Baby Boomer children's Generation X children).

Their multiple regression analyses show that the key factor, driving all the others, is education. They conclude:

"Throughout this book, our statistical models have shown that the low education levels of Mexican Americans have impeded most other types of assimilation, thus reinforcing a range of ethnic boundaries between them and white Americans."

As is well known, American-born Mexicans average more years of education than do their Mexican-born immigrant ancestors. Unfortunately, as Telles and Ortiz report, the third and fourth generations of Mexican Americans do not continue to close the gap relative to non-Hispanic whites:

"In education, which best determines life chances in the United States, assimilation is interrupted by the second generation and stagnates thereafter."

The fourth generation (whose grandparents were born in America) was particularly unaccomplished:

"Sadly and directly in contradistinction to assimilation theory, the fourth generation differs the most from whites, with a college completion rate of only 6 percent [compared to 35 percent for whites of that era]."

The fourth generation Baby Boomers averaged 0.7 years less schooling than the second and third generation Mexican Americans born in the same era.

Telles and Ortiz found:

"...the educational progress of Mexican Americans does not improve over the generations. At best, given the statistical margin of error, our data show no improvement in education over the generations-since-immigration and in some cases even suggest a decline."

In 2000, the UCLA interviewers also asked the Baby Boomer children of the original subjects about their own children (i.e., the grandchildren of the 1965 respondents). These grandchildren (who are third to fifth generation Mexican Americans, Generation X-ers born in the 1960s and 1970s) "seemed to be doing no better than their parents" at graduating from high school.

Their book is a monument to disinterested, objective social science. Read more ›

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Social science at its best April 27, 2008

By S. Barton

Format:Hardcover

Telles and Ortiz provide us with a remarkable combination of theory tested against data in a book that is carefully and clearly written. They look at theoretical perspectives on Mexican immigration to America, ranging from the optimists who see Mexican-Americans as just the latest ethnic group to arrive and assimilate into American society to the pessimists who see Mexican-Americans as a racialized group that is treated as non-white and whose members largely remain at the bottom of the economic ladder. They provide a useful review the history of Mexican-Americans, demonstrating both the past injustices and racial segregation imposed on them and the changes that have taken place in recent decades, noting that continuous immigration from Mexico results in a very different situation from previous more time-limited immigration from European countries such as Italy. Then they carefully examine the results of two surveys, an original survey of Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles and San Antonio done in 1965 and a follow-up survey with original survey respondents and a sample of their children done in the late 1990s. The description of the work involved in finding the original respondents is fascinating in itself.

Their unique data set enables them to portray a complex reality, which combines substantial assimilation on some dimensions, especially language and politics, with a mixed picture of major initial economic and educational progress in the first two or three generations followed by relative stagnation in the area of education and the accompanying harmful effects of limited education on upward economic mobility in subsequent generations.... They conclude with an appeal focused on the importance of education, and improving educational opportunities in order for Mexican-Americans to continue their economic progress and to continue to ensure that they are able to fully take their place in American society and are not held apart as a different "race". The title seems somewhat misleading, but I guess "Generations of partial exclusion and partial assimilation" would not grab anyone's attention, and this book deserves the attention.

The writing is very clear and the authors are also clear about what is supported by their data and what is speculation. No one can claim to speak or write about immigration issues or more general issues of race and ethnicity without coming to grips with the material presented here. Read more ›