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

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 ofMexican immigrants assimilate into American society and often intermarrywith 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 identi- fication, some of themost 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.