Rapid Mexican immigration has challenged host communities to make sense of immigrants' place in New Latino Diaspora towns. We describe one town in which residents often characterize Mexican immigrants as model minorities with respect to work and civic life but not with respect to education. We trace how this stereotype is deployed, accepted, and rejected both by long-standing residents and by Mexican newcomers themselves. KeywordsMexican immigration, social identification, ethnic contrasts, minority students Disciplines Education CommentsSuggested Citation: Wortham, S.E. F, et al. (2009) [ep]In 20-25 years mostly all the business is gonna be Mexican. … They're a little slow, but when you put them to work, they work. You employ the black people, the boss leaves, they sit down, they doesn't work, but these Mexicans, you put them to work and they work. They want to better themselves, you can see it.It's just like the Italian people. The Italian people when they come from Italy they just work like slaves because they want to better themselves. That's what it looks like the Mexicans are, but the black people they just want everything for free.Welfare, welfare, welfare. There's a lot of welfare in Marshall. You on welfare, they give you a house, they pay most of your rent. The Italian people won't stoop that low to get welfare, and the Mexican people are all like that too. They like to work, they like making money. In 20-25 years this area is going to be controlled Petterson describes Japanese Americans' -avid‖ preparation and -determination to achieve‖ academically and how, -denied access to many urban jobs, both white collar and manual, [they] then undertook menial tasks with such perseverance that they achieved a modest success‖ (1966:21). As developed in the 1960s, then, the model minority stereotype presupposes that -Asian Americans had finally succeeded in becoming accepted into white, middle-class society through their hard work, uncomplaining perseverance and quiet accommodation‖ (Suzuki 1980:156). As it has developed, the stereotype foregrounds academic success, portraying Asian Americans as -successful in school because they work hard and come from cultures that believe in the value of education‖ (Lee 1994:413). Residents sometimes characterize Mexicans in ways that do not fit the stereotype, however. Many residents do not think that Mexicans work hard in school, and they do not expect Mexicans to succeed through education. The article also describes how Mexican immigrants themselves both accept and reject the stereotype. Before turning to this description, we clarify how categories like the model minority stereotype come to identify people in practice.[h2]The Process of Social Identification People are socially identified when they or others interpret signs that identify them. Signs of identity explicitly or tacitly point to certain characteristics of a group by drawing on images of people that we infer must apply in this instance (Gumperz 1982). A Mexican immigrant may ignore an insulting gesture...

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As Mexican immigrants move to areas of the United States that have not been home to Latinos, both longstanding residents and newcomers must make sense of their new neighbors. In one East Coast suburb relevant models of identity are sometimes communicated through "payday mugging" stories about African American criminals mugging undocumented Mexican victims. These narratives racialize African Americans and Mexicans in different ways. As payday mugging stories move across narrators from different communities, the racialized characterizations shift.

Interviews are designed to gather propositional information communicated through reference and predication. Some lament the fact that interviews always include interactional positioning that presupposes and sometimes creates social identities and power relationships. Interactional aspects of interview events threaten to corrupt the propositional information communicated, and it appears that these aspects need to be controlled. Interviews do often yield useful propositional information, and interviewers must guard against the sometimes-corrupting influence of interactional factors. But we argue that the interactional aspects of interview events can also be valuable data. Interview subjects sometimes position themselves in ways that reveal something about the habitual positioning that characterizes individuals or groups. We illustrate the potential value of this interactional information by describing “payday mugging” stories told by interviewees in one New Latino Diaspora town. (Interview data, narrating events, transference)

Latino students' educational success is central to America's prosperity-in traditional immigrant destinations and in New Latino Diaspora locations, previously unfamiliar with Latinos. Implicated in this success is the reception young immigrants receive, especially the ways in which they are identified in schools. We describe findings from 6 years of ethnographic research in a high school and an elementary school in the New Latino Diaspora and describe divergent ideologies of Mexican-immigrant Spanish circulating in each context. We show how monoglossic language ideologies in the 2 schools frame teenage immigrants as deficient and younger immigrant children as proficient. These ideologies influence both elementary and high school decisions about how to serve immigrant students, and they shape students' own language practices, which have implications for their learning opportunities and future trajectories. We argue that attention to these divergent language ideologies is necessary for understanding different educational outcomes across decimal generations of immigrant students. KeywordsNew Latino Diaspora, language ideologies, Latinos, decimal generations, English-language learners, contexts of reception Katherine Mortimer University of Texas at El Paso Sarah GalloThe Ohio State University Implicated in this success is the reception young immigrants receive, especially the ways in which they are identified in schools. We describe findings from six years of ethnographic research in a high school and an elementary school in the New Latino Diaspora and describe divergent ideologies of Mexican immigrant Spanish circulating in each context. We show how monoglossic language ideologies in the two schools frame teenage immigrants as deficient and younger immigrant children as proficient. These ideologies influence both elementary and high school decisions about how to serve immigrant students, and they shape students' own language practices, which have implications for their learning opportunities and future trajectories. We argue that attention to these divergent language ideologies is necessary for understanding different educational outcomes across decimal generations of immigrant students. Holly Link University of Pennsylvania Stanton Wortham