Intermarriage and the Intergenerational Transmission of Ethnic Identity and Human Capital for Mexican Americans

Dramatic improvements in educational attainment and earnings occur between Mexican immigrants and their U.S.-born children. Intergenerational progress seems to stall after the second generation, however, with only modest gains observed for later generations. The end result is that even third- and higher-generation Mexicans (i.e., the grandchildren and later descendants of Mexican immigrants) trail the average American in economic status by a disturbing amount. The validity of these intergenerational comparisons, however, rests on assumptions about ethnic identification that have received relatively little scrutiny for Mexican Americans. In particular, analyses of intergenerational change typically assume, either explicitly or implicitly, that the ethnic choices made by the descendants of Mexican immigrants do not distort outcome comparisons across generations. For example, if the most successful Mexicans in later generations are more likely to intermarry or for other reasons cease to identify themselves or their children as Mexican-origin, then available data may understate human capital and earnings gains between the second and third generations. Using microdata from the 2000 U.S. Census and from recent years of the Curren