# Acculturation, Discrimination, and Ethnic Identity Among Children of Immigrants

R Rumbaut

Acculturation, Discrimination, and Ethnic Identity Among Children of Immigrants1


Ruben G. Rumbaut


"We define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things that significant others want to see in us... The monological ideal seriously underestimates the place of the dialogical in human life. "


--Charles Taylor2


" 'Being American means that you feel like you 're the norm,' one of my friends tells me... [But] in a splintered society, what does one assimilate to? ... I want to figure out, more urgently than before, where I belong in this America that's made up of so many sub Americas. I want, somehow, to give up the condition of being a foreigner... I have to make a shift in my innermost ways. I have to translate myself. "


--Eva Hoffman3


"My children, who were born in this country of Cuban parents and in whom I have tried to inculcate some sort o/ cubania, are American through and through. They can be 'saved' from their Americanness no more than my parents can be 'saved' from their Cubanness... Like other second-generation immigrants, they maintain a connection to their parents' homeland, but it is a bond forged by my experiences rather than their own. For my children Cuba is an enduring, perhaps an endearing, fiction. Cuba is for them as ethereal as the smoke and as persistent as the smell from their grandfather's cigars (which are not even Cuban but Dominican)."


--Gustavo Perez Firmat4


"My identity is hardly clear-cut... To my parents, I am all American, and the sacrifices they made in leaving Korea... pale in comparison to the opportunities those sacrifices gave me. They do not see that I straddle two cultures, nor that I feel displaced in the only country I know. I identify with Americans, but Americans do not identify with me. I've never known what it's like to belong to a community ...I know more about Europe than the continent my ancestors unmistakably came from... Though they raised me as an American, my parents expect me to marry someone Korean and give them grandchildren who look like them... My parents didn 't want their daughter to be Korean, but they don't want her fully American, either. Children of immigrants are living paradoxes. We are the first generation and the last. We are in this country for its opportunities, yet filial duty binds us. When my parents boarded the plane... I don't think they imagined the rocks in the path of their daughter who can't even pronounce her own name. "


--Carolyn Hwang5


History, like life itself, is forever being ambushed by the unexpected. Fifty years ago, leading scholars believed that the phenomena of immigration and ethnicity were already fading from American memory and decreasing in practical importance. But last year the Census Bureau reported that there were over 30 million foreign-born persons living in the United States in 2000, the largest total ever; and their U.S.-born children numbered around 30 million more, so that today over 60 million persons--22 percent of the country's population-- are of "foreign-stock." They hail not from Europe this time, but overwhelmingly from Asia,


Latin America and the Caribbean--with one country alone, Mexico, accounting for more than a quarter of this extraordinarily large and rapidly growing population of newcomers. In terms of class, color, or countries and cultures of origin, never before has the United States received such diverse groups, immigrants who reflect the forces that forged a new world order in the second half of the 20th century, and who are, unevenly, engaged in the process of trying to figure out where they belong "in this America that's made up of so many subAmericas."

The increasing size, diversity and concentration of the foreign-born population have raised significant questions about the impact of immigration on American society (as indeed such questions are now also being raised in countries like Spain with no commensurate experience in incorporating a mass migration of newcomers). Less noticed in the literature, however, or in the public debates swirling about the topic, is the fact that a new generation of Americans raised in immigrant families has been coming of age. The long-term effects of contemporary immigration, including the destinies of the emerging ethnic groups spawned by it, will hinge more on the trajectories of these youths than on the fate of their parents.

Yet we know surprisingly little about them (it didn't help that the critical question on parental nativity was dropped from the last three censuses, pulling out the rug from under the study of intergenerational mobility at the very moment that a new era of mass immigration was rapidly taking hold). Consider, for example, this handful of fundamental empirical questions: Among children of immigrants, what are their patterns of language use, preference and proficiency? Is there any evidence of English language assimilation over time among different national-origin groups? Is there a similar assimilative shift over time in their ethnic self-identities and sense of belonging? If so, what explains it? If not, how do they identify? Is ethnic identity mainly a function of filial-familial attachments, degree of acculturation, experiences of discrimination, or other factors?

The CILS Study and Sample Characteristics

To answer these and related questions I draw on data from the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS), the largest study of its kind to date in the United States. The study, still ongoing,6 has followed the progress of a large sample of youths representing 77 nationalities in two main areas of immigrant settlement in the United States: Southern California (San Diego) and South Florida (Miami and Fort Lauderdale). The initial survey, conducted in Spring 1992 ("T1"), interviewed 5,262 students enrolled in the 8th and 9th grades in public and private schools in those areas. The sample was drawn in the junior high grades, when dropping out of school is rare, to avoid the potential bias of differential dropout rates between ethnic groups at the senior high school level. Students were eligible to enter the sample if they were U.S.-born but had at least one immigrant (foreign-born) parent, or if they themselves were foreign-born and had come to the U.S. at an early age (most before age ten). The resulting sample is evenly balanced between males and females, and between foreign-born (the 1.5 generation) and U.S.-born children of immigrants (the second generation).7

Three to four years later, in 1995-96 ("T2"), a second survey of the same group of children of immigrants was conducted, which succeeded in re-interviewing 82% of the baseline sample--this time supplemented by in-depth interviews with a stratified sample of their parents. By this time the youths, who were originally interviewed in junior high when most were 14 years old, had reached the final year of senior high school (or had dropped out of school); most were 17 to 18 years old at the time of the T2 survey.

[Table 1 here]


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Table 1 shows that the principal nationalities represented in the San Diego CILS sample are Mexican, Filipino, Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, and smaller groups of other children of immigrants from Asia and Latin America. In the South Florida CILS sample, the principal national-origin groups consist of Cubans, Haitians, Jamaicans, Nicaraguans, Colombians, Dominicans, and others from Latin America and the Caribbean. The modest family origins of many of these children, the highly educated backgrounds of the parents of others, their varying patterns of employment and homeownership, are all reflected in the sample. For example, only a small proportion of Mexican and Indochinese fathers and mothers had college degrees, well below the 1990 U.S. norm of 20% for adults 25 and over. By contrast, 41% of Filipino mothers had college degrees, well above national norms. The contrast is made even sharper by the proportion of parents with less than a high school education--that is, less than what their children have now already achieved. Most of the more recently arrived foreign-born children from Mexico, Haiti, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia had fathers and mothers who never completed secondary-level schooling. Rates of labor force participation varied widely by nationality for both fathers and mothers: the Indochinese had very low rates of labor force participation, indicative of their eligibility for and use of public assistance, whereas most of the other groups had LFP rates that exceed national norms. And there was a huge gap between ethnic groups in their proportion of homeowners, ranging in 1995 from a low of 4% among Hmong families from Laos and 8% of the Cambodians to over 80% of the Filipinos.

Table 1 provides a socioeconomic status ranking of the major ethnic groups in the CILS sample, as measured in 1992 by a standardized composite index of father's and mother's education, occupational prestige, and home ownership. These standardized scores are transformed to a scale of 0 to 1, with higher scores indicating higher parental socioeconomic status. As these rankings show, most advantaged were Cuban-origin students attending private schools in Miami (with a score of .612), followed by groups from Europe, Canada and the Middle East (.559) and other Asia (.551), the Filipinos (.516) and the Chinese (.501). In the middle, with SES scores hovering around the sample average of .424, were the Jamaicans and other West Indians, and all other Latin American groups except Mexico. At the bottom were the Haitians (.382) and Mexicans (.269), and all of the Southeast Asian refugee groups: the Vietnamese (.342), Lao (.233), Cambodians (.172), and Hmong (.103).

Immigrant Families and Forms of Parent-Child Acculturation

There are also significant differences in family structure among these groups, and in the character of parent-child relationships. Growing up in immigrant families is often marked by dissonant acculturation, when linguistic and other acculturative gaps develop between parents and children that can exacerbate intergenerational conflicts, cause the children to feel embarrassed rather than proud of their parents as they try to fit in with native peers, or lead to role reversals, as children assume adult roles prematurely by dint of circumstance. There are other types of intergenerational adaptation; e.g., we have also identified and distinguished between consonant and selective acculturation.8 But all immigrant families must contend not only with the "generation gaps" and the "storm and stress" of adolescence, but of acculturation to a new society as well.

[Table 2 here]

Table 2 shows several key objective and subjective indices of family structure and parent-child relations, broken down by national origin and the children's level of acculturation and language ability. Intact family in Table 2 refers to those cases in which both biological parents were present at both the 1992 and 1995-96 surveys (61 percent). Table 2 also provides


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information on four subjective dimensions of the parent-child relationship: family cohesion, parent-child conflict, embarrassment over parents' ways, and attitudes of familial obligation.9 As noted above, immigrant families and groups can be located along a continuum ranging from situations where parental authority is fully preserved to those where it is thoroughly undermined by generational gaps in acculturation--particularly in English knowledge and the extent to which second-generation youth retain their parents' language. In operational terms these patterns should be reflected in the degree of intergenerational cohesion or conflict between immigrant parents and their children, the extent to which these youths report being embarrassed by their parents or attached to them by filial duty.

The results in Table 2 show that Asian-origin families are comparatively more likely to remain intact (the low-SES Hmong and Cambodian refugees are the main exceptions among Asian groups in this regard, in part as a result of a greater proportion of widowed mothers than other groups). The Dominicans are the only Latin American nationality to exhibit the pattern of high family structural instability seen among the Haitians and West Indians. As Table 2 shows, there is not a significant association between family structure and the youths' level of acculturation. But a different picture emerges when we examine the various subjective indices of family integration. Without exception, the Latin American nationalities exhibit the most cohesive families as well as the lowest levels of parent-child conflict. Most of the Latin groups also exhibit lower proportions of youths who report being embarrassed of their parents, with the lowest (14 percent) found among two groups of modest socioeconomic status, the Mexicans and the Dominicans. Indeed, a Spanish-language background was the strongest predictor of fluent bilingualism in our sample, indicative not only of the significant advantage of Spanish speakers relative to other languages in this sample, but also of its association with consonant or selective forms of acculturation among parents and children of Latin American origin. By contrast, all of the Asian, European/Canadian, and Black Caribbean groups fell below the sample average in their percent of high-cohesion families; and nearly all of the Asian and Black Caribbean groups scored above the sample average for high-conflict families. Overall, those families were more strongly associated with patterns of dissonant acculturation. However, the same rank order was not seen with the remaining index of familism. The youths who most strongly adhered to attitudes granting primacy to familial obligations were the Southeast Asians (especially the Laotians and the Vietnamese) and the Mexicans. The least familistic--i.e., those more oriented to individualistic rather than collectivistic outlooks--were the Europeans and Canadians, most of the Latin Americans and the West Indians, and the Filipinos, Chinese and other Asians.

But as Table 2 underscores, all of the four subjective family indices were strongly associated with the youth's level of acculturation and language dominance. The acculturation index is a composite measure of the child's preferences for the English language and for American ways as reported at both surveys (a score of 0 indicates that no preference for either was reported at either survey, while a maximum score of 1 indicates that a preference for both was reported at both surveys). The typology of language dominance is based on the youths' varying levels of proficiency in both English and the parental language. The data show that as the youth's level of acculturation increases--and by implication, as acculturative gaps widen and the degree of intergenerational dissonance increases--the level of parent-child conflict and of embarrassment over parents' ways increases, while that of family cohesion and of familistic attitudes decreases. Conversely, greater family cohesion and familism are associated with lesser acculturative preferences for English and American ways--and by implication, with consonant acculturation in intergenerational relations.


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[Figure 1 about here]


These patterns are clearly graphed in Figure 1, and are reinforced by the data on language dominance. Youths classified as English dominant and limited bilinguals--that is, who are not fluent in the parental language--exhibit much higher parental conflict and embarrassment profiles, and much lower family cohesion, than do youths classified as fluent bilinguals and foreign-language dominants--that is, who are fluent in the parental language. Significantly, the familism pattern diverges here. The fluent bilinguals and English dominants--those who are fluent in English and most acculturated--are the least familistic, while the limited bilinguals and foreign-language dominants--those who are neither fluent in English nor highly acculturated--are much more likely to adhere to familistic attitudes.

Language Maintenance and Language Shift

Over 90% of these children of immigrants reported speaking a language other than English at home, mostly with their parents. But at the T1 survey in 1992 already 73% of the total sample preferred to speak English instead of their parents' native tongue, including 64% of the foreign-born youth and 81% of the U.S.-born. By the T2 survey three years later, the proportion who preferred English had swelled to 88%, including 83% of the foreign-born and 93% of the U.S.-born.

Even among the Mexican-origin youth living in San Diego--a city on the Mexican border with a large Spanish-speaking immigrant population and a wide range of Spanish-language radio and TV stations--the force of linguistic assimilation was incontrovertible: while at T1 only a third (32%) of the Mexico-born children preferred English, by T2 that preference had doubled to 61%; and while just over half (53%) of the U.S.-born Mexican-Americans in San Diego preferred English at T1, that proportion had jumped to four-fifths (79%) three years later. More decisively still, among Cuban-origin youth in Miami, 95% of both the foreign-born and the native-born preferred English by T2.

A main reason for this rapid language shift in use and preference has to do with their increasing fluency in English (both spoken and written) relative to their level of fluency in the mother tongue. Respondents were asked to evaluate their ability to speak, understand, read and write in both English and the non-English mother tongue; the response format (identical to the item used in the U.S. census) ranged from "not at all" and "not well" to "well" and "very well." Over three-fourths of the total sample at both T1 and T2 reported speaking English "very well," compared to only about a third who reported an equivalent level of spoken fluency in the non-English language. Even among the foreign born, those who spoke English very well surpassed by 69% to 41% those who spoke the foreign language just as well. And the differences in reading fluency were greater still: those who could read English "very well" tripled the proportion of those who could read a non-English language very well (78% to 24%).

As a consequence, the bilingualism of these children of immigrants becomes increasingly uneven and unstable. The CILS data underscore the rapidity with which English triumphs and foreign languages atrophy in the United States, as the second generation not only comes to speak, read and write it fluently, but prefers it overwhelmingly over their parents' native tongue. It bears adding that these results have occurred while the youths were still residing as dependents in their parents' home, where the non-English mother tongue retains primacy; once they leave the parental fold to lead independent lives of their own, the degree of English language dominance and non-English language atrophy is almost certain to accelerate, all the more among those living outside dense immigrant enclaves.


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But what about their sense of identity, of belonging and ethnic loyalty? Does it too shift rapidly, like language, in straight-line fashion toward dominant American models as these youths seek to fit in with their new social settings? In the jargon of sociology, what is their "definition of the situation"? Perhaps the best way to begin this analysis is with a story.

The Question of Identity

In Los Angeles a few years ago, a well-acculturated Southern California native and high school senior, Stephanie Bernal, thought of herself a "mixed chocolate swirl." Half Latin and half Anglo by her reckoning, she had not had more than a fleeting connection with Mexico, her mother's homeland, until Proposition 187 exacerbated ethnic tensions in California in the Fall of 1994. The measure aimed to "Save Our State," as Proposition 187 was called, by denying social and non-emergency health care services--and access to public schools--to undocumented immigrants and their children. It also required school districts to verify the legal status of students' parents or guardians and to report to state officials any persons suspected of being in the United States unlawfully so that they may be detained and deported. Stephanie reacted by joining with friends who were organizing her school's anti-187 movement and by affirming, even reveling in, the identity of her maternal ancestry: "When we get together to talk about it, we speak Spanish and just feel good about being Mexican."10

The week before, more than 70,000 people had marched in protest through downtown Los Angeles--the largest such march in memory, which was heavily covered on television and by the news media--spawning subsequent marches and student walkouts in local campuses. To the marchers, who included many second-generation youths from area high schools, Proposition 187 was an affront to their parents, their friends and neighbors, according to local news accounts of the events at the time.11 Parents too joined in some of the marches or encouraged their children's participation, making the initiative an issue through which the budding teenage activists could bridge the generational divide and express themselves in solidarity with their parents.

Proposition 187 was attacked by activists as a measure which would invite if not incite pejorative stereotyping and discrimination against anyone fitting a "brown" racial profile. The initiative was being advanced in a context of rising anxiety about the changing racial-ethnic composition of California, which, it was regularly noted, was expected to become the nation's first "majority minority" state shortly after the year 2000. Referring to "that commercial," a frequently repeated ad on television which showed people running across the California-Mexico border, sophomore Jorge Higareda complained that "they show Mexicans, but they don't show Asians coming over in boats or anybody else. It's like we're the only ones coming here. And then they call us illegal." Students at another high school insisted that "this is mostly a Latino school and everyone's proud of their heritage--they want to defend it." In yet another over 200 students walked out of school in protest; and, as in the huge march that had preceded it, the teenagers carried banners saying "No on 187"--and waved Mexican flags.12

The red, white and green flags were meant as a spontaneous show of pride and self-validation by people who felt that their Mexican heritage was under siege; but to non-Latino voters the flags were seen as symbols of anti-American defiance and of suspicious allegiance to a foreign country. A former Marine, watching the high school marchers, reacted with anger: "You see these kids walking down the street with a Mexican flag and demanding that this country give them a free education. It aggravates people." But a 15-year-old sophomore,


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Mariela Flores, shot back: "Why should we carry American flags when this country wants to kick my friends out of school and send them back to Mexico? We carry Mexican flags because they give us pride in where we come from."13

Proposition 187 won in a landslide, getting 59% of the statewide vote; in populous San Diego and Orange Counties, south of Los Angeles, the measure passed with 67% of the votes cast. But Stephanie's Mexican ethnic self-identity was "thickened" in the process, a sense of belonging made more salient than ever as she came to define who she was and where she came from in opposition to who and what she was not.14 The divisive campaign had the unintended consequences of accentuating group differences, heightening group consciousness of those differences, hardening ethnic identity boundaries between "us" and "them," and promoting ethnic group solidarity and political mobilization.

The Complex Allegiances of Children of Immigrants

This process of forging a reactive ethnicity in the face of perceived threats, persecution, discrimination and exclusion is not uncommon.15 On the contrary, it is one mode of ethnic identity formation, highlighting the role of a hostile context of reception in accounting for the rise rather than the erosion of ethnicity. A few years earlier, for example, second-generation Korean-Americans saw over 2,300 Korean-owned stores in Los Angeles' Koreatown targeted by African Americans and burned during the rioting that followed a "not guilty" verdict in the 1992 trial of four white police officers charged with the brutal beating of a black motorist. The event caused many young Koreans born or raised in the United States to become self-conscious about their common fate and distinctiveness as Koreans. They reacted by participating in multigenerational solidarity rallies and by moving to organize politically to protect the interests of the parent generation and the image of the group in the larger society.16

In contrast, conventional accounts of ethnic identity shifts among the descendants of European immigrants, conceived as part of a larger, linear process of assimilation, have pointed to the "thinning" of their ethnic self-identities in the United States. For their descendants, at least, one outcome of widespread acculturation, social mobility and intermarriage with the native population is that ethnic identity became an optional, leisure-time form of "symbolic" ethnicity.17 As the boundaries of those identities become fuzzier and less salient, less relevant to everyday social life, the sense of belonging and connection to an ancestral past faded "into the twilight of ethnicity."18

This mode of ethnic identity formation, however, was never solely a simple linear function of socioeconomic status and the degree of acculturation--that is, of the development of linguistic and other cultural similarities with the dominant group--but hinged also on the context of reception and the degree of discrimination experienced by the subordinate group. Milton Gordon, in his seven-stage portrayal of assimilation in American life, saw "identificational assimilation"--a self-definition as an unhyphenated American--as the culmination of a complex sequence made possible only if and when it was accompanied by an absence of prejudice and discrimination in the core society.19 Whether ethnicity will become similarly optional--a matter of individual choice--for the descendants of immigrants who are today variously classified as non-white, or whether they will be collectively channeled into enduring, engulfing, racially marked subordinate statuses and forge oppositional identities, remain open empirical questions.

Drawing on the European experience and on the eve of the new immigration from Asia and Latin America, the prevailing view of the matter was framed succinctly by Nahirny and Fishman: "the erosion of ethnicity and ethnic identity experienced by most (but not all)


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American ethnic groups takes place in the course of three generations... ethnic heritage, including the ethnic mother tongue, usually ceases to play any viable role in the life of the third generation."20 However, compared to language loyalty and language shift, generational shifts in ethnic self-identification are far more conflictual and complex. To those authors the "murky concept of ethnic identification" did not lend itself to intergenerational analysis along a unidimensional attitudinal continuum since "fathers, sons, and grandsons may differ among themselves not only in the degree but also in the nature of their identification with ethnicity."21 Thus, paradoxically, despite rapid acculturation, as reflected in the abandonment of the parental language and other ethnic patterns of behavior, the second generation remained more conscious of their ethnic identity than were their immigrant parents. The parents' ethnic identity was "so much taken for granted and accepted implicitly" that they were scarcely explicitly aware of it, but the marginality of their children made them acutely self-conscious and sensitive to their ethnicity, "especially when passing through adolescence." Moreover, at least under reigning conditions of dissonant acculturation, "the generational discontinuity between the formative experiences and dominant environments of most immigrant fathers and sons rendered the family ineffective as an agency for the transmission of traditional ethnicity. So pronounced was this generational gap that by the time the sons reached adolescence the immigrant family had become transformed into two linguistic sub-groups segregated along generational lines." Finally, by the third generation "the grandsons became literally outsiders to their ancestral heritage," and their ethnic past an object of symbolic curiosity more than anything else. "There was no doubt about the national identity of the grandsons--they were simply Americans of one particular (if not mixed) ethnic ancestry. Neither was there any trace left of the 'wounded identity' of the sons, for in contrast with the sons, the grandsons had never experienced the full brunt of marginality."22

Indeed, as is the case with respect to language maintenance and language shift, the decisive turning point for change in ethnic and national self-identities can be expected to take place in the second, not in the first generation. For the children, the process of "becoming American" today has itself taken a new turn, and may now include the adoption or rejection of such officially constructed pan-ethnic categories as "Hispanic" and "Asian/Pacific Islander," which lump together scores of nationalities into one-size-fits-all minority group labels.23 Relative to the first generation, the process of ethnic self-identification of foreign-born immigrant children and the U.S.-born children of immigrants is more complex, and often entails the juggling of competing allegiances and attachments. Situated within two cultural worlds, they must define themselves in relation to multiple reference groups (sometimes in two countries and in two languages) and to the classifications into which they are placed by their native peers, schools, the ethnic community and the larger society.

Pressure from peers and from parents can tauten the tug-of-war of ethnic and national loyalties, contributing unwittingly to a sense of marginality. This state of affairs can be further complicated when identities are racialized, group boundaries are sharpened by a visible color line, and the metaphorical definition of who one is on the "inside" conflicts with the definition of who one is on the "outside," raising questions about the "authenticity" of either identity and doubts about fully belonging to any group. Thus, for example, a young Korean woman feels the sting of being called a "twinkie" ("yellow on the outside, white on the inside") by co-ethnics during her freshman year in college "just because I grew up in a white suburb and was a cheerleader," while her mother does not let her forget that she has to marry a Korean (she had a dream in English that she was "dating a non-Korean guy and my dad showed up speaking Korean"). More complicated is the identity juggling act of 17-year-old Jose Mendoza, a U.S.-born, Spanish-speaking Dominican who is not black enough for many African Americans, not light enough for most Hispanics, and advised by parents to "marry


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light." The way he figures it, "From the inside we're Dominicans; from the outside we're black." And while with his friends he talks mostly in "black Spanglish"--a mix of Spanish and hip-hop English--he feels that "I'm still part Dominican. That's my nationality. If you become African American you give your nationality away. That's like saying you're betraying your country."24

To their parents, who came of age before they came to America, such concerns are almost entirely irrelevant. Immigrants who arrive as adults seldom lose their original linguistic allegiances or accents, even while learning English; neither, for that matter, do they readily shed their homeland memories and self-images, even after becoming naturalized American citizens. On the contrary, they come with pre-existing and fully-formed identities, along with their hopes for the future. Their experience of migration, nostalgia for the homeland, desire to instill in their children a sense of pride in their cultural heritage, and anxiety over their children's rapid Americanization may all actually deepen the parents' own sense of identification with "home," perhaps most poignantly among exiles and sojourners who migrate reluctantly and sustain ritually affirmed hopes of an eventual return. The central theoretical and empirical question is rather what happens to their children and how it is that they come to define their ethnic identities and sites of belonging, particularly during their passages to adulthood--the youthful years of "identity crisis" and heightened self-consciousness when the self-concept is most malleable.25 That developmental process can be complicated for U.S.-reared children of immigrants by experiences of intense acculturative and generational conflicts as they strive to adapt in American contexts that may be racially and culturally dissonant, and in family contexts where the differential acculturation of parents and children may take a variety of forms.

Youths see and compare themselves in relation to those around them, based on their social similarity or dissimilarity with the reference groups that most directly affect their experiences--especially with regard to such socially visible and categorized markers as gender, phenotype, accent, language, name and nationality.26 Their social identities, forged in terms of those contrasts with others, represent the way they self-consciously define the situation in which they find themselves and construct an ongoing account of who "we"--and "they"--are. Ethnic identification begins with the application of a label to oneself in a cognitive process of self-categorization, involving not only a claim to membership in a group or category, but also a contrast of one's group or category with other groups or categories. Such self-definitions also carry affective meaning, implying a psychological bond with others that tends to serve psychologically protective functions--indeed, they may be adopted in part because they protect the individual's self-esteem, whereas negative self-esteem can precipitate an alteration of identification.27 Ethnic self-awareness is heightened or blurred, respectively, depending on the degree of dissonance or consonance of the social contexts which are basic to identity formation. For majority-group youths in an ethnically consonant context, ethnic self-identity tends to be taken for granted and is not salient; but contextual dissonance heightens the salience of ethnicity and of ethnic group boundaries.28 People whose ethnic, racial or other social markers place them in a minority status in their group or community are more likely to be self-conscious of those characteristics. Youths may cope with the psychological pressure produced by such dissonance by seeking to reduce conflict and to assimilate within the relevant social context--the modal response of the children of European immigrants in the American experience. An alternative reaction may lead in an opposite direction to the rise and reaffirmation of ethnic solidarity and self-consciousness, as exemplified by Stephanie Bernal in the vignette sketched earlier. For Stephanie, the newfound sense of belonging she experienced in joining the movement against Proposition 187 helped dissolve the marginality and ambiguity of a "mixed chocolate swirl" identity.


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In the remainder of this paper, I examine various factors shaping ethnic self-identification in our sample of immigrant-origin youths in late adolescence. The way that these youths define themselves is significant, revealing much about their social attachments (and detachments) as well as how and where they perceive themselves to "fit" in the society of which they are its newest members. Self-identities and ethnic loyalties can often influence long-term patterns of behavior and outlook as well as inter-group relations, with potential long-term political implications. Accordingly, I hypothesize that the process of language learning and acculturation, as well as experiences of racial-ethnic discrimination, among other factors, will be accompanied by changes in the character and salience of ethnicity--ranging from "linear" to "reactive" forms, from "thick" to "thin" identities--and hence by divergent modes of ethnic self-identification. In particular, I address these questions: What are their ethnic (or pan-ethnic) self-identities? How salient or important are they to these youths, and how have they shifted over time? What characteristics distinguish the different types of ethnic (or pan-ethnic) identities from each other? And among those characteristics, which are the main predictors of different types of ethnic (and pan-ethnic) identities?

Forms of Ethnic Self-Identification

In both the 1992 and 1995-96 surveys, an open-ended question was asked to ascertain the respondent's ethnic self-identity.29 The respondents' handwritten self-designations were then coded and quantified, and they comprise the main outcomes that I seek here to describe and explain. From the variety of responses given, four mutually exclusive types of ethnic self-identities became apparent, which accounted for over 95% of the answers given in both surveys.30 These four types were classified as follows: (1) a foreign national identity (e.g., Mexican, Vietnamese); (2) a hyphenated-American identity, explicitly recognizing a single foreign national origin (e.g., Cuban-American, Filipino-American); (3) a plain American national identity, without a hyphen; and (4) a pan-ethnic minority group identity (e.g., Hispanic, Latino, Chicano, Black, Asian). The first two of these identify with the immigrant experience and original homeland, if at different degrees of closeness; whereas the last two types are exclusively identities "made in the USA." The first three also involve chiefly national identifications (past or present, or a bridging of both); the fourth reflects a denationalized identification with racial-ethnic minorities in the U.S. and self-conscious differences in relation to the white Anglo majority population.

Ethnic Identity Shifts

Figure 2 presents the frequency distribution of the results from both surveys for the longitudinal sample as a whole.31 In the 1992 survey, when these youths were in the 8th and 9th grades, just over a quarter (27%) identified by the foreign national origin; a plurality (41%) chose a hyphenated-American identification; 13% identified as American; and 16% selected pan-ethnic self-identifications. By the 1995-96 survey, as they were finishing high school, over a third (35%) of the same respondents now identified by national or ethnic origin; less than a third (31%) chose a hyphenated-American identification; only 3.5% identified as American; and over a quarter (27%) selected pan-ethnic self-identifications. Figure 3 breaks down the results for the specific types of pan-ethnic identities reported at both surveys; each type except "Chicano"32 (which decreased from 2.2% to 0.8%) reflected increases during this period. "Hispanic" was reported by 12% of the sample in the first survey and by 18% in the follow-up; a "Latino" self-designation was selected by a much smaller number of youths of Latin American origin, but it increased more rapidly from 0.5% to 1.4%. While hardly any youth had identified as "Asian" or "Asian American" in the first survey (0.3%), that category grew to 4.5% in the second survey. "Black" self-identities doubled from 0.9% to 1.9%.


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9


[Figures 2 and 3 here]

These results show substantial change over time, underscoring the malleable character of ethnicity. The magnitude of the change, however, is moderate: nearly half (44%) of the youths reported exactly the same ethnic self-identity in their written responses to the open-ended question in the follow-up survey. This degree of stability takes on added significance when it is considered that several years had passed between surveys, spanning a relatively volatile developmental period from middle to late adolescence in changing cultural contexts. If ethnic identity does not emerge here as a "fixed" characteristic, then, neither is it so "fluid" as to fit what E.L. Doctorow's character, Billy Bathgate, called his "license-plate theory of identification," the idea that "maybe all identification is temporary because you went through a life of changing situations."33 Still, the fact that over half of the respondents reported a change in their ethnic self-definitions in the span between surveys underscores the need not to take such identities as givens, but to track their evolution across the life course.

Moreover, the direction of the shift was unexpected. If their rapid language shift to English documented previously were to have been accompanied by a similar acculturative shift in ethnic identity, then we should have seen an increase over time in the proportion of youths identifying as American, with or without a hyphen, and a decrease in the proportion retaining an attachment to a foreign national identity. But as shown in Figure 2, the results of the 1995 survey (conducted in the months after the passage of Proposition 187 in California) pointed in exactly the opposite direction. In 1992, over 53% identified as American or hyphenated-American, but only 34% did so three years later--a net loss of nearly twenty percentage points. Meanwhile, both the foreign national origin and pan-ethnic identifications combined for a net gain of almost twenty percentage points. The shift, therefore, has been not toward mainstream identities but toward a reaffirmation of the immigrant identity for some groups (notably Mexicans and Filipinos in California, Haitians and Nicaraguans in Florida), and toward pan-ethnic minority group identities for most others, who become increasingly aware of and adopt the ethno-racial markers in which they are persistently classified by the schools and other American institutions. How and why this occurred is a complex story. One part of it has to do with the stability and salience of the different types of ethnic self-identities, and I turn first to that issue.

[Table 3 here] Stability and Salience

Table 3 presents a detailed crosstabulation of these results. For each of the identity types chosen in 1992, the table shows the proportion of respondents who reported exactly the same identity in 1995-96 (a measure of the stability of that identity), as well as the proportions who shifted to a different type of ethnic self-identification. As Table 3 shows, 58% of the youths who identified by their own or their parents' foreign national origin in 1992 did so again three years later (the most stable and "fixed" type of self-identification), compared to 47% of those choosing pan-ethnic identities, 45% of those reporting a hyphenated-American identity, and a mere 15% of those who had identified as plain Americans (by far the most unstable and "fluid" type of self-identification). Of those shifting to other identities, Table 3 suggests the patterning of the shifts: they either added a hyphen or dropped the hyphen in favor of a pan-ethnic or a foreign nationality identity. Very few shifted to a plain American identity by the second survey (overall it plummeted from 13% to 3.5%); among those who had initially identified as American only, a third shifted to a hyphenated-American identity, while another third adopted a pan-ethnic type.

[Figure 4 here]


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In the follow-up survey, the youths were asked how important their reported ethnic self-identity was to them. The responses, on a 3-point scale from "very important" to "not important," provide a measure of the salience of the different identity types. Figure 4 compares the different identity types by their degree of stability (the percent reporting the same identity years later) and salience (the percent reporting their identity as "very important"). Once again foreign national-origin identities command the strongest level of allegiance and attachment: over 71% of the youths so identifying considered that identity to be "very important" to them, followed by 57% of the hyphenates, 53% of the pan-ethnics, and only 42% of those identifying as plain American. The latter emerges as the "thinnest" identity, with the lowest stability and salience scores--fitting theoretical expectations for a highly acculturated, majority-group self-image in socially consonant contexts. The foreign national identity, in contrast, emerges as the "thickest" identity, with the highest stability and salience scores--fitting theoretical expectations for a less-acculturated, more acutely self-conscious image in socially dissonant contexts. In the salience-stability hierarchy of ethnic identities, the pan-ethnic and hyphenated-American types fall in between those two poles.

Multivariate logistic regressions (not shown) were carried out to identify the factors most likely to predict ethnic identity and salience. A large array of possible predictors was examined--but only a handful of variables emerged as significant determinants of stability and salience. Identities tended to be most stable among less-acculturated respondents (i.e., who reported lesser preferences for English and American ways of doing things) and those high in perceptions of discrimination (i.e., who reported experiences and expectations of unfair treatment because of one's ethnicity or race). Identities were also more stable among those youths whose parents were both born in the same country, and who spoke the parental language at home. Females were also more likely than males to have retained the same ethnic identity over time. Those same predictors also determined salience, except that gender had no significant effect on salience whereas our measure of family cohesion did34--i.e., net of other factors, the more cohesive the family, the more likely were the youths to consider their ethnicity as being very important to them. Put another way, "thicker" (stable and salient) ethnic self-identities were least likely to be found among second-generation youth who experienced little discrimination, had become more acculturated and spoke English in homes with low family cohesion--a recipe for dissonant acculturation and ancestral dis-identification.

Ethnic Self-Identities by National Origin

How did these patterns of ethnic self-identification vary among the major nationalities in the study? Table 4 provides a breakdown by national origin, showing both the percent selecting the four main ethnic identity types in the most recent survey, as well as the percent change (+/-) in each identity since the initial survey. In addition, "internal ethnicity"35 is specifically considered in this table by separating the Vietnamese and the ethnic Chinese from Vietnam, and the Lao and the Hmong from Laos--the ethnic Chinese and the Hmong were segregated and disparaged minority groups in their country of origin, and as such their identity choices and homeland attachments bear closer comparative scrutiny.36 A number of points merit highlighting.


[Table 4 here]


First, a glance at Table 4 reveals that the patterns discussed so far do not apply equally to every nationality, and that in fact there are very large discrepancies in some cases. For example, I found that 35% of the total sample identified by a foreign national origin in the latest survey, a gain of 7% from the first survey. But that figure is an average that ranges from


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a high of 67% among the Lao (compared to 48% of the Hmong), 58% of the Vietnamese (compared to 26% of the ethnic Chinese-Vietnamese), and over 50% of the Filipinos and Nicaraguans, to a low of only 5% of the Dominicans and 6% of the Cubans in private schools. The Mexicans and Filipinos--in California--registered the strongest gains in foreign national-origin identities from the baseline survey (each increasing by 24%), vividly documenting (especially in the Mexican case) the Prop-187-induced process of reaction formation sketched in my earlier vignette. Most of the Mexican shift came from youths who had identified as Chicano, Latino or Hispanic in the 1992 survey.

Other groups registered significant losses in national-origin identification, especially Dominicans, West Indians, and the Hmong, Chinese and smaller Asian-origin groups. All of these smaller groups instead posted very large increases in pan-ethnic identities, with 72% of the Dominicans choosing "Hispanic" or "Latino" self-identities, as did 62% of the Colombians. The Hmong and the Chinese, virtually none of whom had identified pan-ethnically as "Asian" in 1992, made large inroads into this type of self-identification by 1995. This result is clearly not explained by socioeconomic factors, since the Hmong had the lowest family socioeconomic status of all the groups in this study (and the highest poverty rate in the United States, for that matter), whereas the Chinese in this sample mostly came from professional families. By contrast, virtually none of the Filipinos identified in pan-ethnic terms (less than 2%), as did only 4% of the Haitians. The Filipinos and Haitians stand out from all other groups in that they almost entirely identified either by national-origin or as hyphenated-Americans, maintaining an explicit symbolic attachment to their parents' homeland.

Every group, with one exception, posted losses in the plain American identity by the latest survey. Even upper-middle-class private-school Cubans, over a third of whom had identified as American in 1992, abandoned that identity almost entirely by 1995-96 (a loss of 33%). The sole--and telling--exception involve the Europeans and Canadians: not only were they the only groups who increased (by 16%) their proportion identifying as plain American, but by the last survey over half (58%) had adopted that majoritarian, mainstream identity as their own. All other groups were in the low single digits by comparison, marking a sharp segmentation of identities. Socioeconomic status alone would not explain this divergence; as noted, the high-status private-school Cubans dropped that identity, and another relatively high-status group--the Filipinos--consistently posted miniscule numbers identifying as unhyphenated Americans. Neither would acculturation to American ways by itself explain it; again the Filipinos, easily the most highly acculturated Asian-origin group, serves as a counter-example. In the following I attempt to disentangle this puzzle.

Nation, Family, and Identity

Ethnic identity is, in part, a way of answering the question "where do I come from?" The answers given are often expressed in a metaphorical language of kinship (e.g., "homeland," "fatherland," "mother tongue," "blood ties") with reference to a "birth connection"37 to nation and family--to an imagined common origin or ancestry. Even the "thinnest" ethnicities tend to be rooted in such kinship metaphors. Thus, while ethnic identities may be socially and politically constructed, they are experienced and expressed as "natural." In this regard, nativity variables (where one was born, to whom one was born, where one's parents were born) are clearly important to ethnic and national self-definitions. For children of immigrants, they are also variables that can significantly complicate a clear-cut answer to basic questions of ethnic self-definition, particularly when the parents' country of birth differs from that of the child and (in cases of interethnic marriage) from each other. The


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extent of such differences in the nativity patterns of our respondents and their parents is depicted in Table 5, broken down by national origin groups.


[Table 5 here]


Half of the children of immigrants in the CILS sample were born in the United States (the second generation), while the other half was foreign-born (the 1.5 generation). However, as Table 5 shows, there are wide differences by national origin. Well over 90% of the Laotians, Cambodians and Nicaraguans were foreign-born, as were 84% of the Vietnamese. By contrast, over 90% of the Cubans in private school were U.S.-born, as were 86% of the Europeans and Canadians, and well over half of the Mexicans, Filipinos, and other Asians and West Indians. Note that only three-fourths of the children in the sample had parents who were both born in the same country--and hence who could transmit to their children a common national origin. These rates of homogamy vary widely by nationality, with the highest proportions of endogamous co-national parents (between 85% and 95%) found among the Laotians, Vietnamese, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Cubans in private school, while less than one fourth (23%) of the Europeans and Canadians had co-national parents--indicative of high levels of interethnic marriage.

[Figure 5 about here]

How do these nativity patterns affect ethnic self-identification? That question is vividly answered in Figure 5, which graphs each of the main types of ethnic self-identity by the place of birth of the child and his/her parents. Among those who reported a foreign national-origin identity, 75% were foreign-born, compared to 31% of those who reported a hyphenated-American identity and a miniscule 8% of those identifying as plain American. Less than half (47%) of those identifying by pan-ethnic categories were foreign-born. In families where both parents came from the same country of birth, their offspring were much more likely to incorporate that national origin as part of their own identity (either wholly or as a hyphenated-American identity). In families where both parents were foreign-born but came from different countries of birth, their offspring were more likely to simplify the complexity of mixed origins by adopting either a pan-ethnic (minority) or plain American (majority) identity, thus resolving the conflict of identifying with one parent rather than the other.38 For example, asked how she identified, Rosa, the 15-year-old U.S.-born bilingual daughter of a Cuban-born father and a Salvadoran-born mother told me, "If I said I'm Cuban, that'd make my mom mad; and if I said I'm Salvadoran, my dad would get all upset, so I think I'm... Hispanic!" The pan-ethnic identity label "made sense" for her as a simplified category that focused on shared traits (and was popular with her Spanish-speaking school friends as well) while avoiding the dilemma of privileging one or the other parental "birth connection"--to have done so would have been tantamount, to this offspring of a hybrid marriage, to an act of ethnic disloyalty to one or the other parent.

Acculturation, Language, and Identity

Of course, even when the nativity patterns of the youths and of their parents are held constant, many other factors are likely to impinge independently on the process of ethnic self-identification. Table 6 lists a variety of factors related to patterns of acculturation of both parents and children (measured in the 1992 survey) that are strongly predictive of the children's identity outcomes (measured three to four years later in the 1995-96 survey). A glance at the data in this table makes clear that each identity type has a distinct social profile that differs significantly from each of the others. For example, the parents' length of residence in the United States provides an indicator of their own level of acculturation. As Table 6


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shows, the longer the parents had resided in the United States, the more likely their children were to assimilate their identities along the continuum from foreign national to pan-ethnic to hyphenated-American to plain American. That same linear progression is evident for each of the different indicators of parental socioeconomic status shown (home ownership, occupation and education), of foreign and English language proficiency and use, and of preference for "American ways" reported separately by both the youths and their parents. Language, in particular, is closely connected to the formation and maintenance of ethnic identity. The shift to English is associated with a shift in self-definition and seems to entail abandoning not only a mother tongue but also a personal identity. Those youths most loyal to the mother tongue were also most loyal to a national-origin identity; conversely, those youths who preferred English and spoke only English with their parents and close friends were much more likely to identify as an unhyphenated American.

[Table 6 about here]

Finally, Table 6 presents selected indicators pertaining to the youths' attitudes toward and attachment to their parents and family, and the effect of those on ethnic self-identifications. One item asked at both surveys--measuring the youths' response to a question about feeling embarrassed about their parents' ignorance of American ways-- provides an empirical indicator of dissonant acculturation within the family. As Table 6 shows, again the same linear relationship obtains as with the other measures of acculturation: least embarrassed were youths who identified by national origin, and most embarrassed were those who identified as plain American (with the proportion widening over time). A different set of items tapped attitudes expressing felt collective obligations toward the family; two of them are shown in Table 6 (believes that only relatives can help with serious problems, and that living close to family is very important). The higher the level of agreement on these items, the more likely the youth identified by national origin; the less the agreement, the more likely the youth identified as plain American, with the other two identity types falling in between.

But perhaps most revealing of the effect of parental ethnic socialization and of the strength of parent-child bonds on the children's ethnic self-definitions were two open-ended questions (asked in the 1992 survey) asking the respondent to write in how they perceived their father and mother to self-identify. Those responses were coded and quantified, and correlated against the children's own ethnic self-identities reported in the 1992 and 1995-96 surveys. Table 7 presents the correlations for the main identity types over time, which effectively provide a measure of the degree of consonant or dissonant identification of the youths with their parents. It is remarkable to see that even after the passage of several years, and despite the attenuation of the correlation coefficients over this time, the way the children had perceived their parents' ethnic identities remained significantly associated with their own modes of self-identification, mirroring them as if they were reflections in an ethnic looking-glass. The strongest consonant identification (i.e., the strongest correlation) involved national-origin identities, which, as seen above, were also the most stable and salient identity type.

[Table 7 about here]

Clearly the family plays a central role in the process of ethnic socialization. It is the crucible of the child's first notions of belonging and of "home," and it is within the family that the child first learns about and forms ethnic attachments and self-concepts. Even in the sometimes bumpy passage through adolescence and under varying degrees of differential acculturation, how these youths think and feel about themselves continue to be affected by the parents' modes of ethnic socialization and by the strength of the attachment that the child feels to the parents.


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Discrimination, Reactive Ethnicity, and Identity

The story of the forging of an ethnic self-identity in the second generation, however, plays out on a much larger stage than that of the family. I began by focusing attention on social forces outside the family that shape both the creation of racial-ethnic categories and of ethnic self-definitions, particularly those involving discrimination and the politics of reactive ethnicity and not only those involving acculturation and the psychology of linear ethnicity. I now return to those concerns.

Regional location (in Southern California or South Florida) and the type of school these youths attended (inner-city or suburban, public or private schools) are two such extra-familial contextual factors. They delimit the youths' exposure to different social worlds, shape differential associations with peers in those contexts, and influence attendant modes of ethnic socialization and self-definition. As Table 8 shows, slightly over half of the sample (52%) was located in South Florida, and slightly less than half (48%) in the San Diego area. But two-thirds (67%) of those identifying by a foreign national origin were in San Diego, while about four-fifths (79%) of those identifying as plain American were in South Florida. The distribution of the main types of pan-ethnic identities--as specified in Table 8--is even more skewed by location, reflecting the varieties of groups that have settled in those areas. The location of the school attended in junior high school--which is in part a function of family socioeconomic status--remains associated with the self-identities reported by the youths several years later. Those identifying as plain Americans were most likely to have attended suburban schools (73%), followed by those identifying as hyphenated-Americans (70%); by comparison, the youths identifying by each of the different varieties of pan-ethnic labels were more likely to have attended inner-city schools with peers who tend to be primarily native racial and ethnic minorities. Although only a third (35%) of the sample attended schools in the inner city, half of those identifying as Black did so (49%), as did 43% of the Asians, and 38% of the Hispanics or Latinos.


[Table 8 about here]


The process of growing ethnic awareness among the children of immigrants in the CILS sample is especially evident in their perceptions, experiences and expectations of racial and ethnic discrimination. As Table 8 shows, reports of actually being discriminated against increased from 54% to 62% of the sample in the last survey. Virtually every group reported more such experiences of rejection or unfair treatment against themselves as they grew older, with the highest proportions found among the children of Afro-Caribbean and Asian-origin immigrants, followed by Mexicans and other Latin Americans, and the lowest proportions among Cuban youth in Miami.

As seen in Table 8, there are significant associations between experiences and expectations of discrimination reported at both surveys, and the types of ethnic and pan-ethnic self-identities expressed in the latest survey. Indeed, discrimination sharpens ethnic-racial identity boundaries and increases the salience of the category on the basis of which persons experience unfair treatment. Among the three main types of ethno-national identities, the highest proportions of experienced and of expected discrimination were reported by those who identified by national origin, and the lowest by those who identified as American, with hyphenates in between. Among the three main types of pan-ethnic identities, by far the highest proportions were seen among "Black"-identified respondents, with "Asian"-identified pan-ethnics in the middle, and the lowest among "Hispanic"-identified youth. This latter result was most clearly seen among Latin American-origin youth in South Florida, where they


15


constitute a numerical majority in dense ethnic enclaves that buffer them from external discrimination.

Still, it is important to underscore the fact that despite their growing awareness of racial and ethnic inequalities, most of the youth in the sample (almost two-thirds) continued to affirm a confident belief in the promise of equal opportunity through educational achievement. Even more tellingly, as Table 8 shows, 61% of these youths agreed in the 1992 survey that "there is no better country to live in than the United States," and that endorsement grew to 71% three years later--despite a growing anti-immigrant mood in the country and especially in California during that period. Again there were significant differences by ethnic identity types, and even wider differences by national origin groups. Tellingly, the groups most likely to endorse that view were the children of political exiles who found a favorable context of reception in the U.S.: the Cubans and the Vietnamese. The groups least likely to agree with that statement were those who had most felt the weight of racial discrimination: the children of immigrants from Haiti, Jamaica and the West Indies. In reacting to their contexts of reception and learning how they are viewed and treated within them, the youths form and inform their own attitudes toward the society that receives them--and their own identities as well.

Race and Identity

Near the end of the follow-up survey, the respondents were asked to answer a semi-structured question about their "race." They were given the option to check one of five categories: "white," "black," "Asian," "multiracial," or "other;" if the latter was checked, they had to write in their own words what that "other race" was. The results (also presented i Table 8) are revealing.

Less than half of the total sample checked the conventional categories of white, black, or Asian; 11% reported being multiracial; and over 40% checked "other." When those "other" self-reports were coded, it turned out that nearly a quarter of the sample (24%) wrote down "Hispanic" or "Latino" as their "race," and another 14% gave their nationality as their "race." Among those youths adopting pan-ethnic identities, as Table 8 indicates, there is an obvious conflation of race and ethnicity in the way they define their identities: 92% of those who identify as "Asian" give that as their race, as do 85% of those who identify as "Black"--while 58% of those who identify as "Hispanic" or "Latino" extend racial meaning to that label as well. Among those youths identifying by the other ethno-national types, racial self-definition as "white" make a decisive difference: 58% of the plain-American youths said they were white, compared to 17 % of the hyphenated Americans, and only 6% of those identifying by a foreign national origin.

The explicit racialization of the "Hispanic-Latino" category, as well as the substantial proportion of youths who conceived of their nationality of origin as a fixed racial category, are noteworthy both for their potential long-term implications in hardening group boundaries, and for their illustration of the arbitrariness of racial constructions.39 The latter point is made particularly salient by directly comparing the youths' notions of their "race" with that reported by their own parents (the same "race" item was used in the parental interviews of 1995-96). Those results are cross-tabulated in Table 9, by national origin.

[Table 9 about here]

The closest match in racial self-perceptions between parents and children is evident among the Haitians, Jamaicans and other West Indians (most of whom self-report as black), among the Europeans and Canadians (most of whom label themselves white), and among most


16


of the Asian-origin groups except for the Filipinos. The widest mismatches by far occur among the Latin-American-origin groups. For example, 93% of Cuban parents identify as white, compared to only 41% of their children; 68% of Nicaraguan parents see themselves as white, but only 19% of their children agree, as is the case among all other Latin-origin groups except Mexicans. The children of the former, instead, largely adopt "Hispanic" or "Latino" as a racial label, whereas scarcely any of their parents do so, as Table 9 vividly shows. Among the Mexicans, whose pattern differs from all of the others, the children preponderantly racialize the national label, whereas Mexican parents are more likely to use "other" (mestizo) and "multiracial" as descriptors.

These remarkable results point to the force of the acculturation process and its impact on children's self-identities. Fully exposed to American culture and its racial definitions, children learn to see themselves more and more in these terms and even to racialize their national origins.

Determinants of Ethnic Self-Identities

Thus far I have examined a number of variables that were theoretically and empirically linked to specific patterns of ethnic self-identification. Among these factors are parental socioeconomic resources, nativity and national origin, parent-child relations within the family, acculturation and language, discrimination and race. Which of these predictors have the strongest independent effects on the various ethnic and pan-ethnic identity outcomes? For this purpose, I conducted a series of multivariate logistic regressions (not shown) with each separate identity type as the dependent variable, and entered into each equation the same set of predictor variables. To establish unambiguously the temporal ordering of effects, most of the predictors in the equations were measured in 1992 (the exceptions are four composite indices that average scores measured at both the 1992 and follow-up surveys), while the dependent variables were measured in 1995-96. Some of the main results are briefly summarized below.40

The relationships of a few of these predictor variables to the identity outcome variables are first sketched in Figures 6 to 8. Figure 6 shows the clearly linear patterns of the relationship between socioeconomic status, acculturation, and discrimination in the continuum from a national-origin self-identity to hyphenated-American to plain American. Figure 7 sketches the relationship of the different identities to indices of the youths' attitudes toward their parents and family. And Figure 8 depicts the manner in which identities are forged in a social field shaped by the interaction of two powerful social forces, acculturation and discrimination, each pulling and pushing in different directions in the process of ethnic self-definition. The main types of ethnic and pan-ethnic identities have been mapped onto the space formed by the intersection of the two axes of acculturation and discrimination, based on their respective mean scores in the acculturation and discrimination indices. As Figure 8 shows, the national-origin identity occupies the high-discrimination, low-acculturation top left quadrant of the social field, while at the opposite end is found the plain-American identity, occupying the low-discrimination, high-acculturation bottom right quadrant. The hyphenated-American identity is located along the diagonal between those two, although closer to the American than to the national-origin location. In the low-discrimination, low-acculturation lower left quadrant is found the "Hispanic" pan-ethnic identity (and its variants). This identity was adopted preponderantly by youth in the Miami metropolitan area, where Latin American-origin groups form a majority of the population--and where an institutionally complete community has emerged that may serve both as a buffer against external discrimination and as a brake to rapid acculturation. Finally, in the high-discrimination, high-acculturation upper


17


right quadrant are found second-generation youth who define themselves as "Black." Their adoption of a pan-ethnic identity has little to do with a lack of acculturation--they clearly prefer English and American ways--but to persistent high levels of racial discrimination and the inexorable sense of otherness that accompanies it.


[Figures 6 to 8 here]


The patterns that emerge from the multivariate analyses confirm a continuum of determination from national-origin to hyphenated to plain American self-definitions, as well as distinct profiles for the main pan-ethnic identities. First, nativity variables remain powerfully linked to self-identity. Being born in the United States (that is, being a member of the 2nd vs. 1.5 generation) was by far the strongest negative predictor of identifying by the parental national origin. It was also the strongest positive predictor of identifying as a hyphenated-American, and it was a significant positive predictor of selecting a plain-American identity as well. Among pan-ethnic identities, being born in the U.S. was also positively predictive of both Hispanic and Black identities. Becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen adds to the pattern above for all three of the ethno-national identities--negatively predicting a foreign nationality identity, positively predicting American self-definitions, with or without a hyphen--but it washes out of the equations for all three of the pan-ethnic identities. Citizenship influences national self-definitions, over and above nativity, but it seems to be irrelevant for the adoption of racially-bounded minority identities. The acquisition of citizenship may be interpreted as signaling a stake in the society as a full-fledged member, legally as well as subjectively, with an accompanying shift in one's frame of reference. These variables--nativity and citizenship--had far stronger net effects on ethnic self-identification than our measure of years in the United States. Thus, it is not so much the length of residence in the receiving country but rather the nature of one's sociopolitical membership status in it that appears to be more determinative of the psychology of ethnic identity.

The parents' own nativity in turn exerts a strong independent influence on the ethnic socialization of the child. Having both parents born in the same nation strongly boosted the odds that the child will identify with the parents' nationality, or at least keep part of it by identifying binationally as a hyphenated-American. When the parents were not co-nationals, having one parent born in the United States also strongly increased the probability of adopting a hyphenated-American identity. Conversely, children whose parents were born in different (typically Latin American) foreign countries were more likely to identify pan-ethnically as Hispanic or Latino, showing again the impact of parental intermarriage on the lack of continuity of ancestral identities. As illustrated earlier in the case of Rosa, the native-born daughter of a Cuban father and a Salvadoran mother, interethnic marriage blurs the boundaries of ethnicity for the children and clearly complicates and may derail the transmission of an ancestral identity.

Secondly, among the set of predictors involving the children's perceptions of their parents and family, three such variables retained significant effects on ethnic identification: early perceptions of the parents' own subjective ethnic identity, and the embarrassment and familism indices. Respondents who perceived their parents to identify as hyphenated-Americans in 1992 were themselves much more likely to identify in the same manner several years later. In addition, respondents who reported feeling embarrassed by---and hence not proud of--their parents were less likely to identify by national origin, and more likely to identify as a hyphenated-American. This index was also the strongest determinant of choosing an "Asian" self-identity: the more embarrassed of their parents, the more likely they were to adopt that pan-ethnic identity. By contrast, those high on the attitudinal familism index were more likely to identify by national origin and to choose a "Black" self-identity. These results


18


point to the varying effects on ethnic self-identity of the loosening of family ties--and of the maintenance of family attachments. In general, the above set of variables involving various aspects of the parent-child relationship underscores the fundamental influence of the family as a crucible of ethnic socialization in this diverse population of children of immigrants.

Thirdly, parental socioeconomic status washed out in most of these regressions, suggesting that its effect on modes of self-identification is indirect and more likely to be mediated through other variables. However, the two cases where direct effects are observable are noteworthy. Immigrant parents who are higher-status professionals were more likely to influence their children's selection of a foreign national identity. Conversely, a Hispanic minority identity was associated with lower-status parents, suggesting that, with other predictors held constant, more vulnerable low-SES youths were also more susceptible to that pan-ethnic mode of self-definition. In more resourceful, upper-middle-class immigrant families the child may have more reason to associate social honor with and to feel pride in the national identity of the parents--and to affirm it for themselves. Indeed, as Rosenberg has observed, the child's sense of self-worth is in part contingent on the prestige of the elements of social identity.41 This finding is in accord with theoretical expectations that identity shifts tend to be from lower to higher status groups and not vice-versa, all other things being equal.

Fourthly, acculturation and language use, preference and proficiency remain significantly but only moderately linked to most of the forms of ethnic self-identification. Youths who did not prefer English or American ways (low acculturation index scores) and who were not proficient in English (as measured in the 1992 survey) were somewhat more likely to identify by a foreign national origin in the latest survey. Those who identified as Hispanic, by contrast, were youths who also did not prefer English or American ways (low acculturation index scores) yet were proficient in English while also regularly speaking Spanish at home. Highly acculturated respondents who preferred and were proficient in English but who also used the foreign language frequently at home were most likely to identify binationally as hyphenated-Americans. If they were equally acculturated but spoke only English at home, they were more likely to drop the hyphen and identify as plain American. Yet the strongest effect on the probability of identifying as "Black" or "Black American" was the frequency of speaking only English at home (an identity selected primarily by native-English-speaking West Indians but not by Haitians whose mother tongue is not English). In sum, these identity choices reflect not only varying levels of linguistic fluency but also the nuances of how and which languages are used with significant others in varying social contexts. As noted earlier, the switch to English is part of a larger acculturation process bound to entail the abandonment not only of an ancestral language but also of an ancestral identity. What the switch to English per se does not predict is the form that alternative self-identities will take.

Finally, discrimination and racialization exert among the strongest net effects on modes of ethnic self-identification. Youths who scored high on the discrimination index were strongly disposed to identify with a foreign national origin, without any "American" qualifier attached. Such experiences and perceptions of exclusion and rejection on ascribed racial-ethnic grounds clearly undercut the prospect of identificational assimilation into the mainstream. It is worth noting that in analyses of national-origin identities, the strength of the discrimination effect was cut in half after two "race" dummy variables were entered into the regression (for those reporting their "race" either as white or as their nationality). This suggests that a substantial part of the index of discrimination was absorbed by those racial categories. Holding other factors constant, a non-white racial self-designation was strongly predictive of a foreign national identity. And those who understood their nationality of origin


19


in fixed, racial terms--as a "race"--were even more likely to define themselves by national origin. Only a foreign birth had a stronger net effect on the probability of adopting a foreign national origin self-identity.

On the other side of the identity continuum, respondents who scored high on the discrimination index were significantly less likely to identify as plain American. The effect of the discrimination measure was negative and significant before the same two racial self-definitions were entered into the equation. The strength of the discrimination effect was attenuated to insignificance once the two "race" variables were entered. Indeed, when a "white" racial self-conception was entered into the equation, that variable had by far the strongest effect on the determination of plain American identities. An "American" ethnic identity and a "white" racial identity emerge as nearly synonymous in these results. What is more, when national-origin groups were entered in the models, the only ones who retained strong and positive net effects on the odds of selecting a plain American identity were Europeans and Canadians. Without exception, none of the Latin American, Caribbean or Asian groups in the sample had a significant positive association with that particular identity outcome.

Among the various pan-ethnic identity types, high scores on the discrimination index were significantly associated only with the selection of a Black self-identity. But discrimination had a strong negative effect on the selection of a Hispanic identity, underscoring the observation made earlier about the comparatively protective aspects of the Miami enclave as a buffer against experiences and expectations of discrimination among Latin-origin youths. In this regard, a contextual variable--the type and location of the school (and by inference, of the neighborhood and the proximal peer groups) in which these youths were placed---made an additional difference in the process of self-definition. With all other predictor variables held constant, having attended inner-city schools in junior high school where most students were racial-ethnic minorities significantly increased the likelihood of developing a racial or pan-ethnic identity (particularly for youths reporting a Black or Hispanic-Latino self-identity), while decreasing the probability of identifying ancestrally by national origin. These results provide empirical support for a segmented assimilation perspective, here applied to the process of ethnic (and racial) self-definition.

Did any particular nationality continue to affect the types of ethnic self-identification once the other predictors were taken into account? In many cases they did not; that is, despite the wide range of differences between them, many nationalities (entered as dummy variables into the regression equations) retained no significant effects in the models tested. In some cases, however, they did--suggesting that there is more about those national-origin groups and their contexts of reception that is not explained by the set of predictors included in the model. For example, I already noted the strong independent effect of European and Canadian national origins on the selection of a plain American identity. More than any other nationality, Cubans stood out for their strong attachment to a hyphenated-American identity--a "life on the hyphen"42--and they were followed closely in this propensity by the Vietnamese, net of all other factors. Two other important cases involve the Mexicans and Filipinos, both of whom retained strong positive effects on the likelihood of adopting a foreign national identity.

As shown earlier (in Table 4), those two California-based nationalities shifted to the foreign national identity by a greater percentage than any other group on either coast. And in the case of the Mexicans in particular, anecdotal evidence was provided to illustrate how that the California sociopolitical context in which the divisive Proposition 187 campaign was conducted had heightened the salience of ethnic and racial boundaries and accompanying processes of reaction formation. As a test of this effect, I entered into the regression a dummy


20


variable for regional location. When this contextual factor was accounted for, the Mexican nationality effect completely washed out of the equation--but the Filipino effect, although reduced in magnitude, remained strong. The results suggest that the propensity of the Mexican-origin youths to identify by national origin at the time of the 1995 survey was accounted for by the effect of the California context. However, the similar propensity of Filipino youths was not explained by any of the predictor variables in the model, raising intriguing theoretical and empirical questions as to why this is so. Perhaps the history of U.S. colonialism in the Philippines and the valence of that colonial past in Filipino collective consciousness may have more to do with the identity choices of Filipino youth as forms of ethnicity that react as much against that past as to their present circumstances. Indeed, the larger theoretical significance of national-origin groups as proxies for their contexts of reception in the United States--and as proxies for the histories of the relations of those countries with the United States--further underscore the complexity of the factors that may impinge on the determination of ethnic self-identities in the second generation.

Conclusion

Ethnic identities are not inevitable outcomes, but complex products of people's ongoing efforts to interpret, understand and respond to the social structural, cultural, and historical situations in which they find themselves, within their sets of resources and vulnerabilities. Thus, in the present era of civil rights, affirmative action and ethnic revivals, immigrants are treated more leniently than they were during the heyday of hegemonic Americanization in the early 20th century. Instead, today's newcomers are re-categorized in broad racialized pan-ethnic clusters that the host society deems appropriate for those sharing (or imagined to share) a particular language or phenotype--and that convey the symbolic message, with its attendant stereotypes, that they belong to a subordinate status in the national hierarchy. Although the state, the school system, the media and the society at large may insist on redefining these immigrants and their children into one-size-fits-all pan-ethnic labels such as "Hispanic s" and "Asians," the children themselves are quite plural in their ethnic self-definitions. Challenged to incorporate what is "out there" into what is "in here" and to crystallize a sense of who they are, they "translate themselves" and construct a variety of self-identities. Some cling tenaciously to their parents' national loyalties and retain their parents' national identities, with or without a hyphen. Others shift to an unhyphenated American self-image and identify symbolically with the mainstream, banking on their unaccented English and consonant phenotypic traits. Still others internalize the racial and pan-ethnic categories into which they are constantly classified and identify symbolically with national minorities.

As we have seen, the paths to those different forms of ethnic self-definition are shaped by a variety of social and psychological forces. The results of our surveys show major differences in patterns of self-identification among teenage children of immigrants from scores of sending countries growing up in two distinct corners of the United States. They suggest some of the complex, conflictive, often incongruous and unexpected ways in which race and class, discrimination and acculturation, family relationships and personal dreams can complicate their sense of who they are. And they suggest that identities are neither fixed nor irreversible, but always a function of relational processes, whose meaning is embedded in concrete social and historical contexts.

Indeed--to return to the four epigraphs with which we began this paper (by Taylor, Hoffman, Perez Firmat, and Hwang)--in this dialogical process of "translating themselves," some gain in translation, while others may be lost in it. In Life on the Hyphen, Gustavo Perez Firmat wrote of the 1.5 generation of Cuban-Americans that "One-and-a-halfers are


21


translation artists. Tradition bound but translation bent, they are sufficiently immersed in each culture to give both ends of the hyphen their due... One-and-a-halfers gain in translation."43 But--in the absence of perceived discrimination and reaction formation (which remain open empirical questions, as suggested by the unexpected responses reported among young Cuban Americans in Miami during the recent Elian Gonzalez saga44)--the straight-line process of acculturation may well "thin" a Cuban ethnicity and take its inevitable generational toll on his U.S.-born, Miami-raised children, if without interfering with their sanguine sense of belonging, as vividly portrayed in one of the epigraphs. Yet in another context, the experience of self-translation and the quandaries of identity can take on a "thickened" and quite different meaning, as expressed by Caroline Hwang, the daughter of Korean immigrants, whose reflections on race and marginality serve as a countervailing epigraph. If for some the search for identity may with time and acceptance blur and fade into the twilight of ethnicity, for others it may with sharpened salience lead into the high noon of ethnicity--and for still others something in the wide range between those poles. But the underlying process is one in which all children of immigrants are inescapably engaged and of which they are acutely aware: making sense of who they are and finding a meaningful place in their adoptive society.

Coda: Mixed Methods in the Contextualized Study of Ethnic Identity

I have extracted in the foregoing a great deal of analytical mileage on ethnic self-identity and the factors that shape it from a single open-ended question asked at two points in time, three years apart, in a mostly structured survey of representative samples of adolescent children of immigrants. Those surveys were supplemented by separate interviews with their parents, in which we were able to ask some equally-worded questions for comparative analysis, including items on racial self-identification. Moreover, the sampling frame on which the CILS study is based allows us to generalize our findings to the population universes from which they were drawn, enhancing the utility of our results. Nonetheless, I remain keenly aware of the limitations involved in this analysis--both substantively and methodologically.

Substantively, as indicated previously, because ethnic identities--which I have conceptualized here as "definitions of the situation of the self"--are contextually malleable and may be hypothesized to vary across different social situations, across different developmental stages throughout the life course, and across different historical contexts. Our survey instruments did not examine the situational contexts in which ethnic self-identities may be differentially deployed; yet, in theory, the way an ethnic identity may be expressed in one's presentation of self can differ depending on one's audience. For instance, it is possible in principle to identify as "Chicano" with one's peers, as "Mexican American" or "Hispanic" in varying secondary relations or in filling out official forms, as "Mexican" with one's parents at home... and ironically as "American" not in the United States but upon making a visit to Mexico to see relatives who might focus on the poor Spanish or other insignia of "Americanization" that make the U.S.-based visitor suddenly conscious of cultural differences vis-a-vis their Mexican counterparts. We surveyed our respondents from their mid to their late teens. But adolescence is, among other things, a developmental period of "identity crisis" and identity formation; the CILS results reported here are thus limited to that period of the life course and may not apply to samples of, say, middle-aged adults with children of their own in whom they may be trying to inculcate a sense of ethnic attachment. And as seen especially among Mexican-origin respondents with respect to reactive self-identifications expressed in the aftermath of the Proposition 187 campaign in California, the larger sociopolitical and historical context matters. But our surveys were limited to the same locales (in California and Florida) in the mid 1990s.


22


Methodologically, because although the quantified coded responses given by thousands of individuals from dozens of diverse national origins revealed a handful of distinct patterns that advance our explanation of complex processes of self-identification, they do not tell us much about the (likely varying) subjective meanings that particular ethnic or racial labels may have had for individual respondents, the degree to which ethnicity is racialized in the respondents' own notions of these modes of group identity, or for that matter the possibility that the same label (e.g., "Latino") may take on different meanings for the same individual at a later time (e.g., in young adulthood) or in different circumstances (e.g., in college). Such considerations underscore the need to both broaden and deepen our research by incorporating mixed methods as appropriate to get at those dimensions of varying subjectivity and situationality, and to facilitate a more thoroughly contextualized study of ethnic identity and social belonging. In particular, they suggest the need to extend our study longitudinally into adulthood, and to complement the survey methods we have employed in CILS--and the representative sample on which the study is based--with in-depth qualitative interviews, oral histories, and targeted ethnographies.

We have already begun to do this. In 2001 we returned to the field to locate and contact as many of our respondents as possible (from the baseline sample drawn a decade ago in 1991, when most were 14 or 15 years old)--something made much more feasible now with new technologies and internet companies that have vastly enhanced the success rate of computerized searches on the basis of a few key items of information. The survey instrument now focuses on the social, cultural, and economic trajectories of this diverse sample of young adults over the previous six years since the last follow-up survey of 1995-96. During these critical years, our respondents have been making their transitions to adulthood: completing their education, leaving the parental home and establishing independent households, securing stable employment, marrying or cohabiting, forming a family and becoming a parent, perhaps becoming politically involved or in some cases maintaining transnational ties. They may move back and forth rather than in a linear fashion from one status to the next, depending on a variety of factors, contexts, and turning points. We aim to map in detail the sequence and patterning of these trajectories in early adulthood, and analyze their general direction and determinants; trace the degree to which ethnic differences in achievement, acculturation, and experiences of discrimination in adolescence are maintained, widened or reduced in young adulthood; and probe their implications for social mobility, intermarriage, and ethnic self-identity.

In addition, we have also begun a series of in-depth, open-ended, qualitative interviews with a stratified sample of a minimum of 150 of our original San Diego respondents. Through these intensive interviews and oral histories, we aim to explore and probe in much greater detail and nuance the kinds of issues that survey instruments and methods constrain us from delving into. Among the themes we have identified for detailed exploration is that of ethnic self-identity, including issues of situational ethnicity, change in ethnic self-identity over time and in different social contexts, the subjective meanings of ethnic and racial labels and identities to the respondents, and--with respect to the effect on ethnonational self-definitions of major historical events--their perceptions of and reactions to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in the United States, and the concerns which these have provoked about national membership, belonging and loyalty in a time of war.45

In this way--by combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, and by extending our longitudinal study to encompass a full decade across a critical transitional period of the life span--we hope to significantly enhance our understanding of identity formation processes.


23


NOTES

1 I gratefully acknowledge the support provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for a

fellowship year in residence at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford,

during 2000-01; and by research grants from the Russell Sage, Andrew W. Mellon, Spencer, and

National Science Foundations to Alejandro Portes and Ruben G. Rumbaut, Principal Investigators, for

the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS), 1991-2001.

2 Charles Taylor, "The Politics of Recognition," in A. Guttman, ed., Multiculturalism and `The Politics

of Recognition' (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 33.

3 Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), pp.

202, 210-11.

4 Gustavo Perez Firmat, Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way (Austin: University of Texas

Press, 1994), p. 5.

5 Caroline Hwang, "The Good Daughter," Newsweek, September 21, 1998, p. 16.

6 During 2001-02 we are locating and reinterviewing the entire baseline sample; most of the

respondents are now in their mid-twenties.

7 For details, see Ruben G. Rumbaut, "The Crucible Within: Ethnic Identity, Self-Esteem, and

Segmented Assimilation Among Children of Immigrants," International Migration Review 28, 4

(Winter 1994): 748-794.

Q

hi consonant acculturation the learning process and gradual abandonment of the home language and culture occurs at roughly the same pace among immigrant parents and their children--the opposite of dissonant acculturation. This situation is most common when the parents have levels of education sufficient to accompany and monitor the acculturation of their children. Selective acculturation takes place when the learning process of both generations is embedded in a co-ethnic community of sufficient size and institutional diversity to slow down the cultural shift and promote partial retention of the parents' home language and norms. This latter option is associated with a relative lack of intergenerational conflict, the presence of many co-ethnics among children's friends, and the achievement of fluent bilingualism in the second generation. This typology is presented in greater detail in Alejandro Portes and Ruben G. Rumbaut, Immigrant America: A Portrait (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), chpt. 7; and in Alejandro Portes and Ruben G. Rumbaut, Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation (Los Angeles and New York: University of California Press and Russell Sage Foundation, 2001).

9 For details on the composition of these scales, see Rumbaut, 1994; and Portes and Rumbaut, 2001,

chapt. 8.

10 Amy Pyle and Simon Romero, "Prop 187 Fuels a New Campus Activism," Los Angeles Times,

October 25, 1994, p. B1.

11 Ibid. See also Patrick J. McDonnell, "Complex Family Ties Tangle Simple Premise of Prop. 187,"

Los Angeles Times, November 20, 1994, p. A1; Ruben Navarrette Jr., "At the Birth of a New--and

Younger--Latino Activism," Los Angeles Times, November 13, 1994, p. M1.


12

Pyle and Romero, "Prop 187 Fuels a New Campus Activism," p. B8.


13 Sandy Banks, "Unflagging Controversy," Los Angeles Times, November 10, 1994, p. B1-B3.

24


14 On the characteristics and determinants of "thick" and "thin" ethnic identities, see Stephen Cornell

and Douglas Hartmann, Ethnicity and Race: Making Identities in a Changing World (Thousand Oaks,

CA: Pine Forge, 1998), chapter 4. On the related concept of "thick" and "thin" types of citizenship, see

Charles Tilly, "Citizenship, Identity, and Social History," in С Tilly, ed., Citizenship, Identity, and

Social History (1996), p. 8.

15 The distinction between "reactive" and "linear" ethnicity is elaborated in Portes and Rumbaut,

Immigrant America: A Portrait (1996), chapter 4. Cf. also T. Alexander Aleinikoff and Ruben G.

Rumbaut, "Terms of Belonging: Are Models of Membership Self-Fulfilling Prophecies?" Georgetown

Immigration Law Journal, 13, 1 (Fall 1998): 1-24. Identity-defining reaction formation processes in

situations of ethnic conflict have their parallel in the way national self-definitions have been forged in

inter-national conflicts, rivalries and particularly wars, so that the concept of the "nation" becomes

inseparably associated with the wars it has fought. See Michael Howard, "War and Nations," in John

Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith, eds., Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp.

254-57. Similarly, on the influence of catastrophe on identity in the second generation, focusing on the

paradigmatic case of post-Holocaust Jewish identity, see Alan L. Berger, "Job's Children: Post-

Holocaust Jewish identity in Second-Generation Literature," in David M. Gordis and Yoav Ban-Horin,

eds., Jewish Identity in America (Los Angeles: Wilstein Institute, 1991); and Robert Prince, The

Legacy of the Holocaust: Psychohistorical Themes in the Second Generation (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI

Research Press, 1985).

16 As many as 30,000 persons participated in a solidarity rally held in Koreatown on the day after the

rioting ended, making it the largest Korean meeting ever held in the United States. See Pyong Gap

Min, "Korean Americans," in P. G. Min, ed., Asian Americans: Contemporary Trends and Issues

(Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995), pp. 216-17. See also Mehdi Bozorgmehr, Georges Sabagh, and

Ivan Light, "Los Angeles: Explosive Diversity," in Silvia Pedraza and Ruben G. Rumbaut, eds., Origins

and Destinies: Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in America(Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1996), pp. 346-

59.

17 Richard D. Alba, Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1990); Herbert J. Gans, "Symbolic Ethnicity: The Future of Ethnic Groups and

Cultures in America," Ethnic and Racial Studies 2, 1 (1979): 1-20; Mary Waters, Ethnic Options:

Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

18 Richard D. Alba, Italian Americans: Into the Twilight of Ethnicity (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-

Hall, 1985).

19 Milton M. Gordon, Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). See also W. Lloyd Warner and Leo Srole, The Social

Systems of American Ethnic Groups (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1945).

20 Vladimir С Nahirny and Joshua A. Fishman, "American Immigrant Groups: Ethnic Identification

and the Problem of Generations," in Werner Sollors, ed., Theories of Ethnicity: A Classical Reader

(New York: New York University Press, 1996 [1965]), p. 266. The essay first appeared in Sociological

Review, NS 13 (1965): 311-26.

21 Nahirny and Fishman, ibid., p. 267.

22 Ibid., pp. 277-78.

23 Since 1977, those categories have been set by Statistical Directive 15 of the U.S. Office of

Management and Budget, the agency responsible for determining standard classifications of racial and

ethnic data on all federal forms and statistics, including the census. OMB Directive 15 fixed the

identities of Americans in five broad categories (the other three are "American Indian or Alaskan


25


Native," "Black" and "White") for statistical purposes, but through widespread public use the categories soon began to shape those identities and evolved into political entities, with their own constituencies, lobbies and vested interests. See Lawrence Wright, "One Drop of Blood," The New Yorker, July 25, 1994, pp. 46-55.

24 See Oi Veerasarn, "The Faces of Asian America," Common Quest, 4, 1 (1999): 46-55; Gabriel

Escobar, "Dominicans Face Assimilation in Black and White," The Washington Post, May 14, 1999, p.

A3.

25 See Erik H. Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis (New York: W.W. Norton, 1968); Morris Rosenberg,

Society and the Adolescent Self-Image (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965); Jean S.

Phinney, "Ethnic Identity in Adolescents and Adults: Review of Research," Psychological Bulletin,

108, 3 (1990): 499-514.

26 Cf. Henri Tajfel, Human Groups and Social Categories (London: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

27 Cf. Kay Deaux, "Social Identification," in E. Tory Higgins and Arie W. Kruglanski, eds., Social

Psychology: Handbook of Basic Principles (New York: Guildford Press, 1996), p. 777-98.

28 Cf. Morris Rosenberg, Conceiving the Self (New York: Basic Books, 1979).

29 The wording of the question was: "How do you identify, that is, what do you call yourself?" It was

followed in parentheses by a wide array of illustrative national and ethnic designators appropriate to the

research sites.

30 In the remaining small percentage of cases (3.3% in the 1992 survey, 4.8% in the 1995-96 survey)

the respondents gave a variety of mixed identities not classifiable into the four main types. Typically

they consisted of a combination of two or more different national origins, mirroring the different

national origins of their parents.

31 There were no statistically significant differences in the distribution of ethnic identity types reported

in the baseline survey between the 4,288 youth who were re-interviewed three years later and the 974

who were not, suggesting no bias as a result of sample attrition with respect to this variable.

Accordingly, I focus here only on results for the longitudinal sample of 4,288. For analyses of cross-

sectional results from the full baseline survey, see Rumbaut, "The Crucible Within," op. cit.

32 For an analysis of the characteristics and determinants of a Chicano ethnic identity, based on results

from the 1992 survey for the subsample of respondents of Mexican origin in San Diego, see Rumbaut,

ibid., pp. 781-82.

33 E. L. Doctorow, Billy Bathgate (New York: Random House, 1989). Quoted in Kay Deaux, "Social

Identification," p. 792.

34 The family cohesion measure is a scale composed of 3-items: "Family togetherness is important,"

"Family members feel close," and "Family members like to spend time together." To each item the

respondents were asked to record how frequently that is the case in their own family, on a scale from 1

(never) to 5 (always).

35 Internal ethnicity refers to the presence of different ethnic groups within an immigrant nationality.

The conventional focus on an immigrant group as a whole tends to reduce ethnicity to national origin

and ignore important subgroups. For an analysis of internal ethnic differences among Iranian

immigrants, comparing the ethnicity of the Muslim majority to that of Armenian, Bahai, and Jewish

Iranians, see Mehdi Bozorgmehr, "Internal Ethnicity: Iranians in Los Angeles," Sociological

Perspectives, 40, 3 (1997): 387-408.


26


36 In the special cases of these ethnic minorities from abroad, those identifying as "Hmong" or

"Chinese" (although they came from Laos and Vietnam) were coded as "national origin" identity

choices. None of the 48% of the Hmong respondents classified under "national origin identity" in

Table 5 identified as "Laotian;" all identified as "Hmong." Similarly, those identifying as "Hmong-

American" or "Chinese-American" were classified as hyphenates.

37 Cf. Cornell and Hartmann, Ethnicity and Race: Making Identities in a Changing World, p. 54;

Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

38 Most respondents, typically, did not identify by both of the parents' different national origins,

although as noted earlier a small number (less than 5% in both surveys) did explicitly recognize mixed

ethnic origins in their self-designations. Of those with non-co-national parents, just over 10% reported

a mixed self-identity.

39 OMB Directive 15 (see supra, note 22) breaks down "ethnicity" into "Hispanic Origin" and "Not of

Hispanic Origin," and the U.S. Census Bureau has attached an asterisk next to the category "Hispanic"

to explain that "Hispanics may be of any race." But during the 1993 Congressional hearings held to

reexamine the system of racial classifications, the National Council of La Raza proposed that Hispanics

be considered a race, "not just an ethnic group;" and the National Coalition for an Accurate Count of

Asian Pacific Americans lobbied to add Cambodian and Lao to the nine different nationalities already

listed on the census forms as separate races under the heading of "Asian or Pacific Islander." The

arbitrariness of this process of state-constructed ethnic and racial categories and identities is reflected in

the fact that nearly every U.S. census since 1790 has measured "race" differently. See Lawrence

Wright, "One Drop of Blood," op. cit.

40 The procedures and results of multivariate logistic regressions are specified in Portes and Rumbaut,

Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation (2001, in press).

41 See Rosenberg, Conceiving the Self, op. cit., p. 13.

42 Perez Firmat, Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way, op. cit.

43 Ibid., p. 7.

44 Fabiola Santiago and John Dorschner, "Outside Image Bewilders Exiles," The Miami Herald

Sunday, April 23, 2000, p. A-1.

46 A separate, comparative qualitative sample of 250 young adult children of both natives and immigrants in New York City are being interviewed in similar fashion (in conjunction with a parallel study that has already included one round of oral histories as well as detailed telephone surveys).


27