Non-Hispanics with Latin American ancestry: Assimilation, race, and identity among Latin American descendants in the US
Highlights
► This study examines patterns of Hispanic identity among Latin American descendants. ► 12% of US born Latin American descendants identified as non-Hispanic in the 2006 ACS. ► Non-Hispanic identities among Latin American descendants are somewhat predictable. ► Racial identities are predictive of non-/Hispanic identities among Latin Americans in the US. ► Higher SES is predictive of non-Hispanic identity among Latin Americans in the US.
Introduction
In the year 2006, there were an estimated 44.1 million US residents who reported Spanish or Latin American ancestry (e.g., Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, Guatemalan, Spanish, Salvadoran, Colombian, etc.). Of that number, 2.5 million (6%) answered in the negative when asked whether they were “Spanish/Hispanic/Latino.” This fact may reflect a pattern of ‘ethnic attrition’ that has important methodological and theoretical implications for the study of racial/ethnic identification and immigrant incorporation. Since most studies of Hispanic1 experience and advancement define the Hispanic population(s) on the basis of Hispanic identity and not Latin American or Spanish ancestry, those 2.5 million non-Hispanic (identifying) Latin American descendants are routinely excluded from assessments of intergenerational mobility (Duncan and Trejo, 2007a) as well as from projections of Hispanic population growth (Golash-Boza and Darity, 2008).
Strong cases have been made that assimilation will not proceed at the pace nor to the extent for recent immigrants as it did for the European immigrants of the early 20th century (Gans, 1992, Levitt, 2003, Portes and Zhou, 1993). Non-Hispanic identities held by Latin American or Spanish descendants, however, may speak to the centripetal force assimilation continues to exert on American life in the 21st century. Recent studies have demonstrated the emergence of the unhyphenated ‘American’ identities among Latinos (Golash-Boza, 2006, Telles and Ortiz, 2008), but in those studies the ‘American’ label is not necessarily to the exclusion of Hispanic or Latino identities. The question here is not why some Latin American descendants choose to identify as ‘American’ but rather why they choose to identify ethnically as ‘not Spanish/Hispanic/Latino.’ Few studies focus squarely on the issue of non-Hispanic responses among Latin American descendants, and those that do focus entirely on Mexican descendants (Alba and Islam, 2009, Duncan and Trejo, 2007a, Duncan and Trejo, 2007b). However, the Mexican–American experience is unique and not necessarily generalizable to other Hispanic groups with respect to identity (Jimenez, 2008, Agius Vallejo, 2009). This study is novel in that we focus on patterns of racial and ethnic identification among Latin American descendants of all ancestries.
The theoretical and methodological contributions of this paper will inform debates on the extent and processes of Latin American identificational assimilation by using 2006 American Community Survey (ACS) data to answer the question, what explains the occurrence of non-Hispanic identification among Latin American descendants?
Section snippets
Measuring hispanic identity: problems and potentialities
It should be noted from the outset that we can never know the meanings and motivations respondents draw on when answering survey questions regarding their racial and ethnic identities which tend to be fluid and situational (Harris and Sim, 2002, Nagel, 1994, Omi, 2001). This is no less true among Hispanic people (Eschbach and Gomez, 1998, Oboler, 1995, Rodriguez, 2000) who are often confused by race and ethnicity questions (Hirschman et al., 2000, Rumbaut, 2006) that treat their Mexican, Puerto
Literature review
Scholars question whether recent immigrants and their children, the vast majority of whom are non-European, are incorporating in the ‘straight-line’ fashion of their European predecessors. Milton Gordon’s (1964) canonical definition of assimilation posits that immigrants may acculturate by adopting the language and other cultural trappings of the ‘host’ society. Acculturation is often followed by integration into the core educational, occupational and economic structures leading, ultimately, to
Data and methods
We employ data from the 2006 American Community Survey9 to test the hypotheses discussed above. This data set was chosen for (1) its size
Results
Ancestries that respondents list when asked “What is [your] ancestry or ethnic origin?” appear to be predictive of how they answer when asked “[Are you] Spanish/Hispanic/Latino?” Table 1 provides the ancestral composition of the Latin American descendant population in the 2006 American Community Survey sample as well as a bivariate look at the relationship between ancestry and non-Hispanic identity. 86.8% write in one of the ten ancestries listed in the upper panel of the table leaving 13.2%
Discussion and conclusions
This paper began by pointing out an often unrecognized undercount of the Hispanic population in the US More than 2 million persons of self-acknowledged Spanish or Latin American ancestry answer “No” when asked if they are themselves “Spanish/Hispanic/Latino” and are, therefore, excluded from most analyses of Hispanic achievement and mobility. Moreover, there may be many more Latin American descendants who do not acknowledge their Latin American ancestry anywhere—rendering them totally invisible
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Sharon Hays, Charlie Hirschman, Daniel T. Lichter, John R. Logan, Douglas Massey and anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful feedback on earlier versions of this paper. Responsibility for any shortcomings of this work, however, is borne entirely by the authors. We would also like to express our appreciation for the support we received from the University of Southern California Center for the Study Immigrant Incorporation (CSII), the University of California, San Diego Center
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