El Sueño Americano? The Generational Progress of Mexican Americans Prior to World War II

Abstract

We present new estimates of the outcomes of first-generation Mexicans and their descendants between 1880 and 1940. We find zero convergence of the economic gap between Mexicans and non-Mexican whites across three generations. The great-grandchildren of immigrants also had fewer years of education. Slow convergence is not simply due to an inheritance of poverty; rather, Mexican Americans had worse outcomes conditional on the father’s economic status. However, the gap between third-generation Mexican Americans and non-Mexican whites is about half the size today as it was in 1940, suggesting that barriers to Mexican American progress have significantly decreased over time.

Life after crossing the border: Assimilation during the first Mexican mass migration

“…Mexican immigrants were paid lower wages than USborn white workers of the same class (Clark 1908, Gamio 1930, Guerin-Gonzales 1994. Further, based on college students' surveys, Mexicans were also among the least favored ethnic group (Kosack and Ward 2020). Carrigan and Webb (2013) document that at least 296 Mexicans were lynched from 1880 to 1928 in the American Southwest, most of the time for unconfirmed crimes.…”

“…This finding of a negative association between lynching and economic mobility contributes to a lynching literature that predominantly focuses on Black victims (Cook 2013, Tolnay and Beck 1995, Williams 2017. This paper complements the intergenerational analysis of Mexican outcomes in Kosack and Ward (2020). The primary difference is that we focus on intragenerational assimilation, like in Hatton (1997), Minns (2003), Abramitzky et al (2014), and Collins and Zimran (2019).…”

“…The primary difference is that we focus on intragenerational assimilation, like in Hatton (1997), Minns (2003), Abramitzky et al (2014), and Collins and Zimran (2019). This paper also covers more key periods of the Mexican mass migration since the data observes 1900-1929 cohorts, while Kosack and Ward (2020) only observe pre-Revolutionary immigrants. When combining our results, it suggests that Mexican progress was slow: gaps widened within the first generation, and zero convergence occurred across generations.…”

Intergenerational Mobility in American History: Accounting for Race and Measurement Error

“…19 The qualitative results are similar when using inverse proportional weights (Bailey et al, 2019). 20 See Appendix C of Kosack and Ward (2018) for further detail on the creation of the income score. (Inwood et al, 2019;Saavedra and Twinam, 2019).…”

The Economic Attainment of Mexican Refugees during the Age of Mass Migration

“…Whereas Europeans experienced upward absolute and relative intergenerational occupational mobility, Mexicans experienced little occupational mobility relative to other groups (Kosack and Ward 2020). Indeed, segments of the Mexican population experienced downward assimilation during this period (Escamilla-Guerrero 2019, Kosack, andWard 2020;Pedraza-Bailey 1985;Fox 2012). However, most research on Mexican immigration during this period has relied solely on U.S. census data, which excludes premigration characteristics of individuals and the contextual influences of the places they settle.…”