Guest Column
Mexican American integration slow, education stalled, study finds
- UCLA report charts Chicano experience over four
decades
By Letisia Marquez
Second-, third- and fourth-generation Mexican Americans speak
English fluently, and most prefer American music. They are
increasingly Protestant, and some may even vote for a Republican
candidate.
However, many Mexican Americans in these later generations do
not graduate from college, and they continue to live in majority
Hispanic neighborhoods. Most marry other Hispanics and think of
themselves as "Mexican" or "Mexican American."
Such are the findings from the most comprehensive sociological
report ever produced on the integration of Mexican Americans.
The UCLA study, released today in a Russell Sage Foundation book
titled "Generations of Exclusion: Mexican Americans,
Assimilation, and Race," concludes that, unlike the descendants
of European immigrants to the United States, Mexican Americans
have not fully integrated by the third and fourth generation.
The research spans a period of nearly 40 years.
The study's authors, UCLA sociologists Edward E. Telles and
Vilma Ortiz, examined various markers of integration among
Mexican Americans in Los Angeles and San Antonio, Texas,
including educational attainment, economic advancement, English
and Spanish proficiency, residential integration, intermarriage,
ethnic identity and political involvement.
"The study contains some encouraging findings, but many more are
troubling," said Telles, a UCLA professor of sociology.
"Linguistically, Mexican Americans are assimilating into
mainstream quite well, and by the second generation, nearly all
Mexican Americans achieve English proficiency."
"However," said Ortiz, a UCLA associate professor of sociology,
"institutional barriers, persistent discrimination, punitive
immigration policies and a reliance on cheap Mexican labor in
the Southwestern states have made integration more difficult for
Mexican Americans."
"Generations of Exclusions" revisits the 1970 book "The Mexican
American People," which was the first in-depth sociological
study of Mexican Americans and became a benchmark for future
research. It found little assimilation among Mexican Americans,
even those who had lived in the United States for several
generations.
The earlier study had been conducted at UCLA in the mid-1960s by
Leo Grebler, Joan Moore, and Ralph Guzman. In 1992, construction
workers retrofitting the UCLA College Library found boxes
containing questionnaires from the original study.
Telles and Ortiz pored over the questionnaires and recognized a
unique opportunity to examine how the Mexican American
experience had evolved in the decades since the first study. The
researchers and their team then reinterviewed nearly 700
original respondents and approximately 800 of their children.
The vast majority of the original respondents and all the
children are U.S. citizens.
In the foreword to "The Mexican American People," researcher
Moore had written that she was optimistic that a subsequent
study would find much assimilation among Mexican Americans.
Telles and Ortiz, like Moore, were surprised to find that the
third and fourth generation in this current study had not
achieved more gains, particularly in the educational arena.
Key findings from "Generations of Exclusion" include:
-- The educational levels of second-generation Mexican Americans
improved dramatically. But the third and fourth generations
failed to surpass, and to some extent fell behind, the
educational level of the second generation. Moreover, the
educational levels of all Mexican Americans still lag behind the
national average.
-- Mexican Americans attained higher levels of education when
they knew professionals as children, when their parents were
more educated and when their parents were more involved in
school and church activities. Those who attended Catholic
schools were much better educated than those who attended public
schools.
-- Economic status improved from the first to second generation
but stalled in the third and fourth generation. Earnings,
occupational status and homeownership were still alarmingly low
for later generations. Low levels of schooling among Mexican
Americans were the main reason for lower income, occupational
status and other indicators of socioeconomic status.
-- All Mexican Americans were English-proficient by the second
generation. Spanish proficiency declined from the first to the
fourth generation, showing that the loss of Spanish was
inevitable. However, Spanish declined only gradually, and
approximately 36 percent of the fourth generation spoke Spanish
fluently.
-- First-generation Mexican Americans were about 90 percent
Catholic. By the fourth generation, only 58 percent were
Catholic.
-- Intermarriage increased with each generation. Only 10 percent
of immigrants were intermarried. In the third generation, 17
percent were married to non-Hispanics, as were 38 percent in the
fourth generation.
-- Adult Mexican Americans in the third and fourth generation
lived in more segregated neighborhoods than they did as youths.
This was due to the high number of Latinos and immigrants moving
into these neighborhoods, the researchers said.
-- Most Mexican Americans identified as "Mexican" or "Mexican
American," even into the fourth generation. Only about 10
percent identified as "American." Moreover, many Mexican
Americans felt their ethnicity was very important and many said
they would like to pass it along to their children.
-- Third- and fourth-generation Mexican Americans supported less
restrictive immigration policies than the general population and
generally supported bilingual education and affirmative action.
-- In the 1996 presidential election, 93 percent of
first-generation Mexican Americans voted Democratic. The
percentage of Democratic voters declined in each subsequent
generation. By the fourth generation, 74 percent voted
Democratic.
Telles and Ortiz noted that some Mexican Americans were able to
move into the mainstream more easily than other minorities.
Mexican immigrants who came to the United States as children and
the children of immigrants tended to show the most progress,
perhaps spurred by optimism and an untainted view of the
American Dream.
"A disproportionate number, though, continue to occupy the lower
ranks of the American class structure," the sociologists said.
"Certainly, later-generation Mexican Americans and European
Americans overlap in their class distributions. The difference
is that the bulk of Mexican Americans are in lower class sectors
but only a relatively small part of the European American
population is similarly positioned."
More than any other factor, Telles and Ortiz said, education
accounted for the slow assimilation of Mexican Americans in most
social dimensions. The low educational levels of Mexican
Americans have impeded most other types of integration.
"Their limited schooling locks many of them into a future of low
socioeconomic status," they said. "Low levels of education also
predict lower rates of intermarriage, a weaker American
identity, and a lower likelihood of registering to vote and
voting."
Telles and Ortiz believe that a "Marshall Plan" that invests
heavily in public school education will address the issues that
disadvantage many Mexican American students.
"For Mexican Americans, the payoff can only come by giving them
the same quality and quantity of education as whites receive,"
they said. "The problem is not the unwillingness of
Mexican Americans to adopt Americans values and culture but the
failure of societal institutions, particularly public schools,
to successfully integrate them as they did the descendants of
European immigrants."
The research was funded by the National Institute of Child
Health and Human Development; the Ford, Rockefeller, Russell
Sage, and Haynes foundations; the UCLA Chicano Studies Research
Center; and various UC and UCLA sources.
The book can be ordered by calling the Russell Sage Foundation
at (800) 524-6401 or visiting
www.rsage.org.
Letisia Marquez,
lmarquez@support.ucla.edu
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