Abstract
It is sometimes said that the second generation, the children of immigrants, are caught between two worlds—that of their parents’ generation, textured by the migration experience, and that of their everyday reality, shaped by the cities and neighborhoods within which they come of age. These worlds represent dual dimensions of identity for the second generation that are well-known to migration scholars, yet as sociologist María Rendón shows in her new book, each also has distinct implications for the second generation’s socioeconomic prospects.
In Stagnant Dreamers, Rendón explores the “integration” of second-generation Latino men in Los Angeles, California. Using both in-depth interviews and ethnographic observation, she follows 42 young men living in two working-class Los Angeles neighborhoods, one primarily inhabited by Mexican immigrants, the other by a mixture of African Americans and Mexican immigrants. Theoretically, Rendón’s scholarship threads together urban sociology and immigration studies, though this book might be better characterized as employing the tools of the former to shed light on theoretical questions about the latter. Across chapters, Rendón seeks to resolve a long-standing debate about “segmented assimilation” and, more specifically, this theory’s gloomy prediction of “downward assimilation” for Mexican immigrant families in the United States. Rendón finds that second-generation Latino men in her study did not appear to be entering into an “underclass,” though few made substantial leaps of mobility beyond that of their parents either. We learn that most of these individuals ultimately converged on working-class status by their twenties and thirties. While this argument is not new, Rendón’s richly detailed book seeks to explain why this convergence occurs.
Stagnant Dreamers is split into two parts: “The Latino Immigrant Urban Context” and “Second-Generation Latinos in the Inner-City.” The first part describes the segregated neighborhood environments within which second-generation Latinos in Los Angeles are raised (immigrant households in poor and sometimes dangerous areas of the city), while the second part shows how this urban social context shapes the prospects of second-generation Latino men. As Chapter Four (“Caught Up and Skirting Risk”) illustrates, young men in this study had to navigate gangs, violence, racism, and poverty as they struggled to get ahead in life. What, then, allowed these individuals to “skirt risk” when faced with foreboding structural barriers? The answer lies in social capital, which Rendón differentiates into two types: “social bonding” ties, which represent kin and community-based supports, and “social leverage” ties, which are connections to people outside the community and beyond immigrant institutions. To summarize an argument that unfolds over multiple chapters: whereas bonding ties act as a safety net that prevents vulnerable Latino men from falling into destitution, the relative lack of social leverage ties that higher-achieving Latino men (e.g., college attendees) possess causes them to struggle to find their footing in universities and more desirable workplaces. In short, for second-generation Latino men, the presence of one form of social capital raises up those at the bottom while the lack of another impedes those at the top; the net result is a convergence on a working-class position.
Rendón’s empirical research in this book is incredibly rich and textured. We learn about the complicated daily lives of second-generation Latino men that the author rightly notes have received little up-close scholarly attention until very recently. Rendón’s follow-up interviews with study informants five years after initial contact provide rare insight into both how pathways from education into the labor force have played out for these young men and what staunchly optimistic beliefs these individuals hold about upward mobility and the American Dream. Rendón herself is an “insider outsider” to the social world she describes, having been born to immigrant Mexican parents and raised in a nearby Los Angeles neighborhood. For Rendón, the story she tells is deeply personal, which may also explain why she spends considerable time rebuking the downward assimilation prediction about Mexican Americans throughout this book, despite the theory being nearly four decades old. While Rendón is convincing in these efforts, one wonders if the book misses an opportunity to dialogue more directly with two bodies of recent scholarship that appear to lend themselves to her argument: research examining the mechanisms of upward mobility among the children of Latino immigrants (Jody Vallejo’s monograph on the Latinx middle class in southern California comes to mind) and race studies explicating the sources of structural disadvantage affecting black and brown urban communities more broadly. That said, readers of this book will find the first-hand accounts of struggle and determination among Latino men coming of age in contemporary urban America deeply rewarding—they remain stories that are too often rendered invisible.