Abstract
The narrative that dominates political discussions of immigration is typically defined by low-skilled Mexicans who crossed the U.S. border as unauthorized immigrants to toil in physically-demanding jobs with few opportunities for advancement. This description has come not only to structure debates regarding immigration policy but also frequently to define or even stereotype the entire Latino population. Latinos now number more than 52 million, one-sixth of the U.S. population, and have accounted for a majority of the nation’s growth since the start of the new century. Sustained migration from abroad and their young age profiles ensure not only continued growth but secure their critical place in America’s future success.
Jody Agius Vallejo’s new book, Barrios to Burbs: The Making of the Mexican American Middle Class, explores the routes that Mexican Americans take to reach middle-class status. Her book shatters the myth that most Mexicans are downwardly assimilating into a new underclass. It highlights the varied paths—upward or stable—that Mexican Americans take toward achieving the American Dream. The book centers on the lives of 75 highly-accomplished Mexican Americans in Southern California and details how variations in class backgrounds prompted divergent trajectories to the middle class: some rising rapidly from humble beginnings and others reproducing their own middle-class origins.
While the core theme of Vallejo’s book is the considerable heterogeneity present in the Mexican American community (a fact that is regularly lost in the popular narrative) the book also excels in describing the mechanisms that allowed her subjects to climb the socioeconomic ladder and the challenges they experienced along the way. The book is organized around several main themes: education, family connectedness, ethnic identification, and professional associations. As described in the insightful third chapter, education is the primary vehicle driving upward mobility among this group. The book makes clear, however, that the trajectory for those with more humble origins is bumpy and most of her respondents relied on early placement into high-achieving classrooms and adult mentors to navigate educational institutions in order to overcome the limited educational opportunities in poor barrios.
To assess the cross-class ties of her middle-class respondents, Vallejo examines the strength of her subjects’ extended-family networks and their levels of giving to parents, siblings, and other family members who often remain in segregated neighborhoods and struggle financially themselves. In contrast to what research suggests about middle-class whites, Vallejo finds that middle-class Mexican Americans remain strongly linked to their broader family networks and serve as crucial sources of financial and cultural support for lower-class and foreign-born family members. While Vallejo finds that those raised in middle-class families are connected to poor kin in ways that most whites are not, she finds important distinctions between them and her subjects who rose from poor backgrounds. In particular, many of the most socially-mobile respondents felt that their parents’ (and others’) own sacrifices obliged them to provide economic and social support. Those reared in middle-class homes or by non-immigrant parents, by contrast, were more likely to embrace a sense of individualism because, as Vallejo argues, they lack the “immigrant narrative” that defines the upwardly-mobile.
Barrios to Burbs also serves as another reminder that race continues to structure inequality, noting that Mexican American executives are excluded from corporate socializing rituals and are overlooked to serve as company representatives. Yet, the middle-class subjects studied by Vallejo display great variation in their adoption of ethnic identities, and offer some clues that racial boundaries between whites and middle-class Latinos are eroding. While Vallejo’s subjects were aware of the foreignness that outsiders attach to them (something that is amplified when ethnic cues, like speaking Spanish in public, are displayed) they also downplayed ethnicity as a barrier to upward mobility. Importantly, Vallejo finds that ethnic identities become increasingly situational across generations, although few identify as white and Vallejo ultimately concludes that “…a wholesale boundary shift, where Mexican Americans as a group are disappearing into the white category, is not occurring…” (p. 141). The book nevertheless provides a mostly hopeful account of Mexican incorporation into American life. Vallejo is careful to underscore that the assimilation process for Mexicans is neither singular nor linear, but regards her subjects as being on an upward-sloping trajectory.
Some readers may take issue with whether the book is really able to “adjudicate between” (p. 18) the different theoretical perspectives it seeks to test—assimilation, segmented assimilation, and minority culture of mobility—given the selective sampling and that these perspectives are not really mutually exclusive; but it certainly makes an important contribution in dispelling the common public and analytic assumption that the Mexican population is homogeneous. This is, arguably, the book’s greatest strength. It is also, however, perhaps its main weakness. While the book makes a strong case that the Mexican middle class does in fact exist, it never acknowledges that the size of the Mexican middle-class population remains relatively small. However, it is most concerning that given the critical role education plays in enabling upward intergenerational mobility, the Mexican origin population still lags far behind in completing schooling—and the gap may be growing. The latest CPS data reveal that third+ generation Mexicans are twice as likely as whites to drop out of high school and have college completion rates that are lower than any other racial/ethnic group. This empirical reality begs the question of whether Mexican Americans as a group have sufficient access to the educational resources necessary to capitalize on emerging job opportunities created by the retirement of the (largely white) baby-boomer generation. Only the future will reveal whether today’s Latino youth will share the same patterns of upward mobility as Vallejo’s subjects.