Questioning immigrants' desire to assimilate

Josh Green, SF Chronicle Staff Writer
February 29, 2008

Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds
Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America
By Gregory Rodriguez
Pantheon; 317 pages; $26.95

Learning a New Land
Immigrant Students in American Society
By Carola Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco and Irina Todorova
Belknap/Harvard University Press; 426 pages; $29.95

Lurking just beneath the surface of the immigration debate are several irksome questions about another topic that we may be afraid to ask.

Beyond long fences, paths to amnesty, guest-worker programs and the nuts and bolts of legislative proposals and politics, we want to know: Who are these new people, and will they adopt English and the American culture? What will our nation look like 50 years from now, once they have become U.S. citizens? How responsible are we for integrating them into mainstream society and seeing them become part of the middle class?

These questions of assimilation no longer reside on the horizon of a hazy future. The sheer numbers of immigrants who have entered the United States in the past three decades, combined with the political spotlight shining on 12 million illegal immigrants in the country, make it imperative that we answer these questions now.

Dozens of books have been written about the immigration debate, but few rise above the oversimplified polemic of deportation versus amnesty. Much of the recent argument is a counterbalance to Sam Huntington's thesis, set forth in his 2004 book, "Who Are We: The Challenges to America's National Identity," in which he argues that this recent wave of immigration - mostly from Mexico - is different from past waves because Mexican Americans are particularly resistant to assimilation into Anglo American culture. This movement away from the Anglo Protestant culture and work ethic, he argues, undermines a commitment to the American democratic ideal.

This thesis set off fiery criticism from those who saw the move to place Latin American immigration into a new category as a cover for a racist agenda bent on keeping America as white as possible.

Two new books diverge from the political approach to the simmering assimilation debate, one looking backward, another looking forward. Los Angeles Times columnist Gregory Rodriguez's provocatively titled "Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America" examines Mexican Americans' self-identity through history, from the Aztec conquest to 21st century immigration into the United States. Rodriguez makes a strong argument that the very idea of treating Mexican Americans or Latinos as a single racial category, as the U.S. Census attempts to do with the "Hispanic" label, misses the fact that, for the past 500 years, the Mexican people have been an "in between" group, with each individual deciding where he or she belonged based on economic and cultural advantage.

A second book, "Learning a New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society," examines how the children of immigrants are doing in American schools. It's a discouraging picture, and should be a wake-up call to anyone who cares about education.

The Latin American concept of mestizaje - or racial and cultural synthesis - runs through Mexican American history and eventually was successful in smashing the Spanish colonials' racial hierarchy. "As it has for centuries, Hispanicity continues to absorb rather than exclude the cultures it encounters and thus redefines itself as it moves northward," Rodriguez writes. Indeed, Rodriguez boldly argues that "Mexican Americans, who have always confounded the Anglo American racial system, will ultimately destroy it, too."

The primary tool for both the creation and maintenance of mestizaje is intermarriage, which started the day Hernan Cortés stepped onto the shores of New Spain (now Mexico) in 1519. Indian chieftains that the conquistadores encountered bestowed daughters and other women upon soldiers as consorts and slaves, and the first mestizos were born from these unions. An influx of hundreds of thousands of African slaves stirred the racial waters further, and it became increasingly difficult to determine who belonged to what categories. Some mestizos were marginalized and became an underclass. Others managed to blend into noble classes or marry Spaniards.

Mestizos' coping strategies under colonial rule inform Rodriguez's view of recent history. Mexican Americans alternated their racial categorization depending on context - they preferred to be considered white when more rights were conferred on that category, but during the 1960s and '70s, the Chicano movement sought to establish Latinos as a separate minority that deserved the same affirmative action policies as African Americans.

Rodriguez says the Chicano movement quickly fell apart because it was forcing a racial identity on people who felt more comfortable existing outside of racial boundaries.

While his book is meticulously researched and ambitious in scope, Rodriguez never delivers on the subtitle's promise: We do not understand "the future of race in America" simply by understanding the Mexican American concept of race through history. But we might get a glimpse of it.

An equally ambitious research study from Harvard University researchers Carola and Marcelo Suárez-Orozco looks to the future rather than the past - and it's a bleak future, in which today's immigrant children grow up to be an uneducated workforce that cannot meet the challenges of the nation's economy. Bilingual research assistants interviewed children born in another country who then moved to the San Francisco and Boston areas. The sample was further divided into five areas of origin (China, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Central America and Mexico).

This is not a small part of the total educational puzzle. About 20 percent of students are children of immigrants, and by 2040 that number is expected to rise to 33 percent.

While the study's academic thoroughness may make it too dense for the lay reader, its findings are pretty clear: Immigrant students do worse, not better, the longer they stay in American schools. Over the five-year length of the study, students' grade-point averages dropped nearly a half point.

The reasons for this failure are myriad and include all of the expected causes: underfunded schools, overcrowded classrooms, a failing and non-standardized English training program and lack of mentoring. Other causes are not so obvious - for example, more than half of the students surveyed were separated from their fathers for five or more years.

The Suárez-Orozcos argue that poor student achievement is more than a moral failing, it's an economic blunder of epic proportions. "Are we prepared to leverage this human potential by nurturing the children of these immigrants? Or would we rather pay the significant price of letting this human resource go to waste?" they ask.

Both authors realize that the real price of ignoring the assimilation question will be a divided and weakened America. If we are destined to become a nation that embraces mestizaje, as Rodriguez envisions, then we'd better start to act like one. {sbox}

Josh Green is a doctoral candidate in political science at UC Berkeley.