This article examines the incorporation of middle‐class Latinas in Southern California. Based on three years of participant observation, 30 in‐depth interviews, and 50 conversational interviews with the organization's members, I find that the upwardly mobile Latinas mobilize “middle‐class ethnic capital” to create professional associations in ethnic communities that provide valuable business skills, networks, and social capital to coethnics. Members of the organization realize that they must approximate the normative business standards of white middle‐class business culture to get ahead, yet they feel that it is vital to retain their ethnic identity and provide resources to the ethnic community. While contemporary immigration research maintains the Latino ethnic communities lack the “high‐quality resources” that might buffer against downward assimilation and advance upward mobility, these findings suggest that it takes one or two extra generations for Latinos to mobilize class and ethnic resources to promote mobility.

This essay examines the roots, causes, and effects of racism experienced by Latinos in the Trump era. We argue that Trump and his administration were not the origin of Latinos' experiences of racism, but his rise to power was, in part, derived from Latino racialization. Preexisting politics of Latino immigration, Whites' fear of loss of status due to demographic shifts, and historical and contemporary processes of racializing Latinos were seized by the Trump administration and made central features of his renegade presidential campaign and policy agenda. White nationalist racism became the defining feature of the Trump presidency, making Latinos' heightened experiences of racism, and the relegitimization of overt White nationalism, one of its lasting legacies.

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Based on 50 in-depth interviews and extensive fieldwork, this article contributes to the literature on inequality and middle-class minorities by examining socially mobile Mexican Americans—those who were raised in low-income households, but who are now middle class. Mexican Americans who achieve extreme rates of intergenerational mobility straddle class and ethnic contexts, a position that is accompanied by a set of challenges that are unique to middle-class minorities. Socially mobile Mexican Americans retain an enduring familiarity with poverty and must manage intra-class relations with poorer coethnics, who often request financial and social support. As they enter white professional milieus, they must also manage interethnic relations with whites who do not view them as bona fide members of the white middle class. These challenges reinforce class and ethnic boundaries and lead middle-class Mexican Americans who grow up disadvantaged to adopt a minority culture of mobility that manifests through group-specific mobility strategies embedded in ethnic communities, such as creating and joining ethnic professional organizations.

Mexican Americans are a large group whose mobility patterns can provide important insight into immigrant assimilation processes. It is well known that Mexicans have not attained economic parity with whites, but there is considerable debate about the degree to which Mexican immigrants and their American-born children experience mobility over their lives. We contribute to this literature by studying Mexican American wealth ownership, focusing on three interrelated processes. First, we examine childhood poverty and inheritances to establish financial starting points and to identify the degree to which resources from prior generations affect wealth ownership. Second, we study impediments to mobility in young adulthood to understand how childhood conditions create early adult obstacles to wellbeing. Third, we study midlife net worth and homeownership to better understand whether childhood and young adult impediments necessarily reduce adult wealth ownership. We find high levels of early life disadvantage among Mexican Americans, but these disadvantages are least pronounced in the second and third generations compared to the first generation. Consistent with prior research, we also find high levels of young adult impediments to mobility for Mexican Americans. However, we find that these early roadblocks do not necessarily translate into lower adult wealth: we show that Mexican Americans have less total wealth than whites but more than African Americans, even when early life impediments are controlled. Our results suggest that Mexican Americans are establishing a solid financial foundation that is likely to lead to long-term class stability.

Wealth is an important measure of advantage and disadvantage, especially in a global context of wage stagnation, growing debt, and rising inequality. We see research on the wealth attainment of immigrants and their descendants as fundamental to understanding patterns of migration, stratification, and integration. The collection of papers in this volume link ethnic and migration studies to literatures on wealth inequality and demonstrate how individual-level characteristics, selection effects, global patterns of migration, and varied host-society contexts shape social and economic integration and the reproduction of inequalities in the U.S., Latin America, and China. This special issue underscores the necessity of placing wealth attainment at the centre of ethnic and migration studies, especially as population movements expand at a rapid pace and as income and wealth inequality widens across the globe.

Chinese immigrants are a diverse and growing group whose members provide a unique opportunity to examine within-immigrant group differences in adaptation. In this paper, we move beyond thinking of national-origin groups as homogenous and study variation among Chinese immigrants in wealth ownership, a critical indicator of adaptation that attracts relatively little attention in the immigration literature. We develop an analytical approach that considers national origin, tenure in the U.S., and age to examine heterogeneity in economic adaptation among the immigrant generation. Our results show that variations among Chinese immigrants explain within-group differences in net worth, asset ownership, and debt. These differences also account for important variation between Chinese immigrants, natives, and other immigrant groups and provide important, new insight into the processes that lead to immigrant adaptation and long-term class stability.

In 2000, Latinos superseded blacks as the largest racial/ethnic minority group in the US, comprising nearly 13 percent of the US population, and by 2050, demographers estimate that their population will have reached 25 percent. Given the size and growth of the Latino population, an important sociological concern is the extent to which the adult children of Latino immigrants incorporate into the US social structure. Focusing on the largest ethnic Latino group, Mexicans (and specifically, the Mexican middle class), this article studies one aspect of the incorporation process — the extent to which they `give back' to co-ethnics. Based on 40 face-to-face, in-depth interviews with 1.5- and second-generation middle-class Mexicans, the study finds that those who grew up poor and achieved middle-class status within one generation exhibit a collectivist orientation, and `give back' to poorer kin, co-ethnics and the larger ethnic community. By contrast, those who grew up in middle-class households adopt an individualistic orientation, and display patterns of giving back that closely resemble those of white, middle-class nuclear families.