Chapter Main Points

  • Hispanic Americans are a diverse and growing part of U.S. society, including distinct groups; the three largest are Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans. These groups tend to not think of themselves as a single entity.
     
  • Hispanic Americans have some characteristics of colonized groups and some of immigrant groups. Similarly, these groups are racial minorities in some ways and ethnic minorities in others.
     
  • Since the beginning of the 20th century, Mexico has served as a reserve labor force for the development of the U.S. economy. Immigrants from Mexico entered a social system in which the colonized status of the group was already established. Mexican Americans have been a colonized minority group despite the large numbers of immigrants in the group and have been systematically excluded from opportunities for upward mobility by institutional discrimination and segregation.
     
  • A Mexican American protest movement has been continuously seeking to improve the status of the group. In the 1960s, a more intense and militant movement emerged, guided by the ideology of Chicanismo.
     
  • Puerto Ricans began to move to the mainland in large numbers only in the 1940s and 1950s. The group is concentrated in the urban Northeast, in the low-wage sector of the job market.
     
  • Cubans began immigrating after Castro’s revolution in the late 1950s. They settled primarily in southern Florida, where they created an ethnic enclave.
     
  • Anti-Hispanic prejudice and discrimination seem to have declined, mirroring the general decline in explicit, overt racism in American society. Recent high levels of immigration seem to have increased anti- Hispanic prejudice and discrimination, however, especially in the borderlands and other areas with large numbers of immigrants.
     
  • Levels of acculturation are highly variable from group to group and generation to generation. Acculturation increases with length of residence but the vitality of Latino cultures has been sustained by recent immigration.
     
  • Secondary structural assimilation varies from group to group. Poverty, unemployment, lower levels of educational attainment, and other forms of inequality continue to be major problems for Hispanic groups, even the relatively successful Cuban Americans.
     
  • Primary structural assimilation with the dominant group is greater for Hispanic Americans than for African Americans.