Replenished Ethnicity

How does the presence of a large Mexican immigrant population influence the ways later-generation Mexican Americans assert and exercise their ethnic identity? More broadly, how do Mexicans as a group fit into the U.S. ethnoracial mosaic? This theoretically innovative and empirically rigorous book graciously navigates the ideological debates about Mexican assimilation and provides new insights on both questions, while simultaneously opening a rare window into the fundamental contradictions that shape the lives of Mexican Americans today. Given the centrality of the Mexican experience in the national debate about immigration policy and assimilation, Jiménez makes a strong case for how this experience must be taken into account if we are to fully understand the complexity of immigration today. Mexicans as a group constitute a unique case study for two reasons. First, their sheer demographic presence, coupled with a relatively low level of human capital and lack of legal status, has placed them at the front and center of these debates. According to the 2008 American Community Survey, one in ten Americans is of Mexican origin. More specifically, Mexican immigrants account for 30% of the total foreign-born population and more than half the undocumented population in the United States. Second, Mexicans’ status as both a formerly colonized group and an immigrant group points to their relative internal heterogeneity. For example, among the Mexican-origin population, only one-third is foreign born and twothirds are of native-born stock, with the latter group comprised of individuals of both second and later generations. In this important book, Jiménez provides the first comprehensive study of ethnic identity for Mexican Americans. The main data come from 123 in-depth interviews with later-generation Mexican Americans in Garden City, Kansas and Santa Maria, California—cities that were chosen to reflect different immigration dynamics. Whereas Mexican immigration into Santa Maria has been continuous since the 1900s, Garden City experienced a hiatus from the 1930s to 1980s. To compare the experience of Mexican Americans with European Americans, Jiménez theoretically sampled only respondents whose family had been in the United States prior to 1940. To fully understand the social context in which his respondents were embedded, Jiménez also relied on insights from informal interviews with community leaders and other