Intermarrige, Ethnic Identity and the Generational Progress of Mexican Americans

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Dramatic improvements in educational attainment and earnings occur between Mexican immigrants and their U.S.-born children. Intergenerational progress seems to stall after the second generation, however, with only modest gains observed for later generations. The end result is that even third- and higher-generation Mexicans (i.e., the grandchildren and later descendants of Mexican immigrants) trail the average American in economic status by a disturbing amount. The validity of these intergenerational comparisons, however, rests on assumptions about ethnic identification that have received relatively little scrutiny for Mexican Americans. In particular, analyses of intergenerational change typically assume that the ethnic choices made by the descendants of Mexican immigrants do not distort outcome comparisons across generations. For example, if the most successful Mexicans in later generations are more likely to intermarry or for other reasons cease to identify themselves or their children as Mexican-origin, then available data may understate education and earnings gains between the second and later generations, and may also overstate the economic gap between late-generation Mexican Americans and other Americans. Using microdata from the 2000 U.S. Census and from recent years of the Current Population Survey, the proposed research will explore what factors influence whether individuals choose to identify themselves (or their children) as Mexican-origin, and how these ethnic choices may affect inferences about the intergenerational progress of Mexican Americans. Specifically, this project will: (1) use Census data to analyze the role that intermarriage plays in the intergenerational transmission of human capital and ethnic identification between Mexican-origin parents and their U.S.-born youth ages 16-17; (2) compare objective and subjective indicators of Mexican descent in the CPS to analyze the extent and selectivity of ethnic attrition among first- and second-generation Mexican adults and among first-, second-, and third-generation Mexican youth; and (3) construct a population projection model that starts with a cohort of Mexican immigrants and simulates how selective intermarriage interacts with the parent-child transmission of human capital and ethnic identification to produce the joint distributions of outcomes and Mexican identity across generations.