Generations of Exclusion
Mexican-Americans, Assimilation, and Race
Publication Year: 2008
Published by: Russell Sage Foundation
Title Page, Copyright, Dedication
Download PDF (15.7 KB)
About the Authors
Download PDF (23.2 KB)
Download PDF (43.1 KB)
Download PDF (76.3 KB)
UCLA’s Mexican American Study Project is the ancestor of the study you hold in your hands. Born in the politically charged environment of the mid-1960s, the UCLA study was a massive effort to help put Mexican Americans on America’s social and political...
Download PDF (127.9 KB)
In 1993, when UCLA’s historic Powell Library was being retrofitted to meet stricter earthquake codes, workers found numerous dusty boxes hidden behind a bookshelf in an unused basement room. The boxes contained the original survey questionnaires taken in 1965 and 1966 that...
2. Theoretical Background
Download PDF (158.3 KB)
How ethnic groups are integrated in national societies and why they take particular paths are subjects of considerable debate. In the United States, the literature on their integration often revolves around a tension between assimilation and racialization perspectives...
3. The Mexican American Study Project
Download PDF (518.3 KB)
The 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...
4. The Historical Context
Download PDF (247.9 KB)
At the time that Grebler, Moore, and Guzmán were conducting their study, Mexican Americans were beginning to enter universities in significant numbers. These students, along with a tiny cadre of Mexican American professors, were beginning to question the prevailing...
Download PDF (314.5 KB)
Today, according to most public opinion polls, education ranks as the most important issue facing Latinos.1 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...
6. Economic Status
Download PDF (141.6 KB)
No other issue regarding racial and ethnic divisions in the United States is as troubling as the lack of economic incorporation of some groups, most notably African Americans. The persistently low occupational level, income, and accumulated wealth of minorities...
7. Interethnic Relations
Download PDF (170.9 KB)
Residential segregation and intermarriage have become primary indicators of the extent of social distance between race and ethnic groups. High levels of residential segregation and low levels of intermarriage mean that boundaries between groups are rigid, implying...
8. Culture and Language
Download PDF (208.0 KB)
Mexican Americans are often believed to share particular cultural attributes associated with Mexican culture, such as the Spanish language, Catholicism, and pronatalist and patriarchal family orientations. These and other attributes are not only used to...
9. Ethnic Identity
Download PDF (168.1 KB)
Modern understandings of ethnicity stress that ethnics or ethnic groups are created when members of society actively erect and sustain social boundaries between themselves and so-called others, often but not always on the basis of perceived cultural differences...
Download PDF (193.5 KB)
Grebler, Moore, and Guzmán blamed a “history of conflict” for the limited Mexican American political involvement outside of New Mexico and south Texas. “No other ethnic group,” they asserted, “has labored under a similar handicap of hostility, mistrust and suspicion...
Download PDF (272.6 KB)
The Mexican American experience requires that we look beyond the traditional assimilation versus race theories that have been based almost entirely on the European American and African American experiences. The well-known assimilation story, in its classic and modern...
Appendix A. Descriptive Statistics
Download PDF (51.8 KB)
Appendix B. Multivariate Analyses
Download PDF (142.9 KB)
Download PDF (180.4 KB)
Download PDF (145.0 KB)
Download PDF (131.0 KB)
Page Count: 416
Publication Year: 2008