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Edward E. Telles and Vilma Ortiz
Russell Sage Foundation, New York, NY, USA, 2008, paperback, 383pp., $24.95,
ISBN: 0871548496
In 1993, a cache of dusty boxes that had been concealed behind a bookshelf in University of California's Powell Library for nearly 25 years came into the possession of sociologists Edward Telles and Vilma Ortiz. The crates contained the original survey questionnaires - complete with the contact information of respondents in Los Angeles and San Antonio - from Leo Grebler et al's (1970) pioneering study, The Mexican American People: The Nation's Second Largest Minority. Telles and Ortiz embraced the extraordinary opportunity to conduct a follow-up study where they would re-examine the original respondents and their children to provide an insight into a particularly vexing question in Latino Studies: the issue of Mexican-American socio-economic mobility and incorporation.
Mexicans comprise 30 per cent of the foreign born population and are by far the largest group of immigrant newcomers. Many Mexican immigrants are unauthorized, have low levels of human capital and live in working class communities. The disadvantaged structural position in which Mexican immigrants find themselves after arrival, combined with a restructured economy lacking in mobility ladders and the constant vitriol directed towards them in the political and public arenas, has led scholars to debate whether their American-born descendants are experiencing upward mobility and gaining a foothold in the middle class as rapidly as their white ethnic predecessors, or whether they are becoming downwardly mobile and incorporating closer to African Americans, America's most stigmatized racial group.
To address these debates, Telles and Ortiz astonishingly tracked down and re-interviewed...