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Who Remains Mexican? Selective Ethnic Attrition and the Intergenerational Progress of Mexican Americans

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Book cover Latinos and the Economy

Part of the book series: Immigrants and Minorities, Politics and Policy ((IMPP))

Abstract

This chapter argues that selective ethnic attrition creates potentially serious problems for tracking the socioeconomic progress of the US-born descendants of Mexican immigrants. As the descendants of Mexican immigrants assimilate into American society and often intermarry with non-Mexicans, ethnic identification weakens, particularly among the children produced by Mexican intermarriages. This process of ethnic leakage is highly selective, because Mexican Americans who intermarry tend to have much higher education and earnings than Mexican Americans who do not intermarry. Consequently, available data for third- and higher-generation Mexicans, who usually can only be identified by their subjective responses to questions about Hispanic ethnicity, understate the socioeconomic attainment of this population. In effect, through the selective nature of intermarriage and ethnic identification, some of the most successful descendants of Mexican immigrants assimilate to such an extent that they fade from empirical observation. We present several pieces of evidence that are consistent with this story.

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Acknowledgement

This research was supported by NICHD grants 5R03HD050574-02 to Stephen Trejo and 5R24HD042849 to the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Colorado, Denver, CO, USA

    Brian Duncan

  2. University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

    Stephen J. Trejo

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  1. Brian Duncan
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Correspondence to Brian Duncan .

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  1. , Department of Government, University of Texas, Austin, USA

    David L. Leal

  2. , Department of Economics, University of Texas, University Station 1, Austin, 78712-0301, USA

    Stephen J. Trejo

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Duncan, B., Trejo, S.J. (2011). Who Remains Mexican? Selective Ethnic Attrition and the Intergenerational Progress of Mexican Americans. In: Leal, D., Trejo, S. (eds) Latinos and the Economy. Immigrants and Minorities, Politics and Policy. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6682-7_14

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