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The present study examines the assimilation of Mexican Americans in the United States. Their relative non-assimilation into American society was first traced through three historical periods. These periods were Conquest and Conflict, which covered the period between settlement to the 1850's; Partial Accommodation, from the 1850's to the 1930's; and Towards Cultural Pluralism from the 1940's to the present. Although the group relations were very different in each of these periods, Mexican Americans did not Assimilate. In the contemporary period a more detailed analysis was undertaken. Gordon's model of assimilation was tested on a sample of Mexican Americans. This sample was obtained from NC-128 samples in the states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Michigan and Texas. Due to the broad scope of Gordon's model, only four of the many possible hypotheses were tested. These four were: 1) an inverse relationship between Cultural Heterogeneity and Assimilation, 2) a direct relationship between Value Consensus and Assimilation, 3) an inverse relationship between stereotyping and assimilation, and 4) Structural Assimilation is a stronger type of assimilation than in Civic Assimilation. The two dimensions of Cultural Heterogeneity measured here were Spanish and Familism. Both of these were statistically significant in their associations with Structural and Civic Assimilation. The third hypothesis also found some support here, as the two measures of Stereotyping, Possibility of Integration and Perception of Prejudice, were statistically significant in their associations with Structural but not Civic Assimilation. In the fourth hypothesis, Structural Assimilation was also found to be a more significant type of Assimilation than Civic. It had more statistically significant associations with the independent variables than did Civic Assimilation. Also, these associations tended to be of greater strength as determined by the R's. Support could not be found here for the second hypothesis dealing with Value Consensus and either Structural or Civic Assimilation. In a cursory examination of sex differences, Mexican American females were found to be more susceptible to assimilation pressures than were Mexican American males. This was evidenced in the statistically significant differences in the strength of the associations between Structural Assimilation and the independent variables for females.

In the literature on immigrants, the focus has been mostly on the migrants themselves or the way receiving societies react to their arrival. In sociology, there is also a long tradition dedicated to studying how residential contexts and neighborhoods impact the opportunities of the disadvantaged. Less attention, however, has been paid to the connection between these two areas of study. Despite the obvious parallel challenges that immigrants face for achieving social mobility in America’s cities and towns, we know less about how arriving to particular places impacts immigrant integration. This gap has grown larger by the tendency to recurrently study immigrant life in exceptionally populous and diverse cities like New York and Los Angeles, or in equally exceptional small, rural destinations. This dissertation seeks to answer one key question: How do different aspects of local context affect immigrant life chances and their ability to fully participate in the social life of their places of residence? The first chapter of my dissertation shows that the literature in migration studies is not fully examining the range of immigrant destinations. I show these tendencies in the literature by conducting a bibliometric analysis of integration studies published in major immigration journals and books from 2008 to 2018. To address the conceptual problems created by this tendency, I propose a framework that moves past populational criteria for case selection and focuses instead on components of context that existing research shows matter for intergenerational mobility and integration. I also introduce a typology of contexts based on possible combinations of these components and offer some hypotheses of how these types might affect integration. This first chapter sets up the principles that guide the rest of the dissertation. In the second, third and fourth chapters, I introduce an original survey and interview study (MATIS) examining the impact of one aspect of context – institutions – on Mexican integration in Albuquerque, New Mexico and Tucson, Arizona. These cities are selected because they are maximally similar with respect to relevant contextual features other than their institutions, and have comparable flows of Mexican immigrants. The study surveys 1.5 and second-generation Mexican immigrants in both cities, and triangulates this data with follow-up interviews on a subsample of second-generation survey respondents with low and high educational attainment. The results reveal that the generosity of college funding that exists in New Mexico through the lottery scholarship, a program that does not have an analogue in Arizona, facilitates entry and completion of college degree for the children of Mexican immigrants. Respondents in both cities explained their educational attainment in a variety of ways, including as a result of their parent’s education, their relationships in their communities and schools, and events in their lives, but only the generosity of college funding stood out as being different across cities. These explanations, and others, are explored using regression analysis which finds that Mexicans that attended high school in New Mexico are more likely to complete college than their counterparts in Arizona even when accounting for individual and family characteristics. Beyond demonstrating the important part that contextual features of place, in this case local institutions, can have on the mobility outcomes of immigrants these empirical findings have clear policy implications. The immediate finding is that increased generosity in educational funding for immigrants in college has direct and observable returns on college attainment, a finding which is aligned with a vast literature connecting college affordability and completion. Additionally, I discuss how the structure of the lottery scholarship, which de-emphasizes merit aid, may have egalitarian consequences for disadvantaged groups.

The purpose of the study was to examine Mexican-Americans values and attitudes toward education and further explore some of the reasons Mexican-Americans drop out of school at such high rates.

A survey of four classes of ELD (English language deficient) students of Mexican descent was performed at Rancho Verde High School, Moreno Valley, CA in March, 2001 in an attempt to determine whether adolescents of Mexican descent who develop an identity close to their Mexican roots have higher levels of self-esteem than those who develop an identity close to their American experience.