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“Not Mexican-American, but Mexican”: Shifting ethnic self-identifications among children of Mexican immigrants

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Abstract

Based on survey data and 21 qualitative interviews, this article examines how and why ethnic self-identifications shift as children of Mexican immigrants in Southern California transition from adolescence to early adulthood. The study finds that respondents born in the United States are more likely than those born in Mexico to use multiple identity labels, such as Mexican-American or Latino. Negative political contexts heighten the salience of Mexican, as opposed to Latino/Hispanic or American, ethnic self-identities. University-educated respondents tend to develop stronger self-identities as Mexican than those who did not go to college. This study highlights the importance of generational status and transnational experiences, social and political contexts, and educational experiences in understanding changes in ethnic self-identifications over time.

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Notes

  1. For simplicity, we use the term “ethnic identities” throughout the article, but these identities could be considered racial or ethnic. We do not distinguish between the two here because, like Brown et al (2006), Rodriguez and Cordero-Guzman (1992), and Vaquera and Kao (2006), we argue that many children of Latin American immigrants do not make distinctions between race and ethnicity.

  2. Proposition 187 was eventually struck down by the courts as unconstitutional.

  3. H.R. 4437 [109th]: Border Protection, Anti-terrorism and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005. The bill was never made into law.

  4. Although ideally we would have wanted to conduct in-depth interviews with a representative sample of the CILS respondents, this was not feasible. However, given the similarities of our qualitative sample to the CILS respondents in terms of age, national origin, generational background (1.5 and second) and Southern California residence, we see little reason why the insights generated from our in-depth interviews would not also pertain to the CILS sample.

  5. We use pseudonyms to protect the identities of our respondents.

  6. We also considered language use and preferences as predictors of ethnic self-identification. Because we consistently found that language had no effect in the quantitative analyses, we excluded it from the results. Language was not a factor that emerged in the qualitative interviews either, but this may be because all of our respondents spoke Spanish with their parents.

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the UCI's Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program for funding the interview portion of the project. We thank Rubén Rumbaut, Roberto Gonzalez and anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions and feedback. We also thank Pablo Avila and Brandon Doherty for their research assistance.

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  1. Maternal Outreach Management Systems, Orange County,

    Jessica Tovar

  2. University of California, Irvine, CA

    Cynthia Feliciano

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  1. Jessica Tovar
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Correspondence to Cynthia Feliciano.

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Tovar, J., Feliciano, C. “Not Mexican-American, but Mexican”: Shifting ethnic self-identifications among children of Mexican immigrants. Lat Stud 7, 197–221 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/lst.2009.18

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