Because immigration is most often a family affair, the process of assimilation cannot be understood without looking at the context of the home. Especially for children and youth, resources and relationships acquired, mobilized, and developed at home shape their process of assimilation. It is precisely within the familial context where researchers have started to analyze the immigration process as an intergenerational one, where structural and contextual factors of the host society interact with internal individual characteristics. Family composition, parental resources, values, language, and sociocultural practices, for instance, are some of the individual factors that have been measured across several assimilation studies (Portes & Zhou 1993; Rumbaut 1996; Zhou 1997; Portes & Rumbaut 2001; Kasinitz et al. 2008; Alba and Nee 2003; Alba et al. 2011). While structural factors emerge from social, geographic, cultural, and economic macro contexts, individual factors converge in micro contexts as seen on the family level.
Studying the family, household, or home, has been useful for understanding the individual and familial transformations that occur as immigrants assimilate to the new country. Focusing on these contexts as a units of analysis, immigration scholars have been able to reveal some of the complexities of the process of assimilation into a new society and the multiple changes that are experienced in terms of gender roles, family relationships, language, and cultural norms (Chávez 1985; Hondagneu-Sotelo 1999; Pessar 1982; Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994; Kibria 1993; Menjivar 2000; Velez-Ibañez and Greenberg 1992). While some researchers have privileged the study of adult relationships and functions within the immigrant family (Donato 1993; Hirsch 1999; Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994, 1999; Kibria 1993; Menjivar 2000; Tienda and Booth 1991), others have focused their analyses on the study of children and youth. Researchers have studied, for instance, the relationships between parents and children in the processes of language socialization at home (e.g., Baquedano-López 1998; Zentella 1997, Orellana 2009); the impact of immigrant children’s educational experiences in family life (e.g., Delgado-Gaitan 1992; Valdés 1996); children and youth’ media usage (Katz 2014; Moran 2011); and the relationship between children’s cultural assimilation, identity development, and psychological well-being (e.g., Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco 2001). Across several longitudinal studies, assimilation scholars have also analyzed youth trajectories of incorporation, especially with the “new second generation,” focusing on large-scale social patterns, parental resources, and the long term outcomes of immigrant youth assimilation processes (Rumbaut 1996; Zhou 1997; Portes & Rumbaut 2001; Kasinitz et al. 2008).
Immigrant youth experiences are heterogeneous and as diverse as their family’s socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds and their contexts of reception. Family dynamics, parenting styles, modes of incorporation, and the resources that immigrant parents have brought with them and have cultivated in the new country, shape multiple dimensions of children and youth assimilation processes. Because not all immigrants start their assimilation trajectories with the same individual and structural factors, their social mobility and cultural participation is best understood intergenerationally according to their particular circumstances. This is especially relevant when analyzing the pathways of immigrants from Latin America and Mexico because they come from different backgrounds and arrive in diverse contexts of reception. Given the nature of their journeys and the racial and social inequalities of their countries of origin, many of the so-called Latino/Hispanic immigrants arrive in the U.S. with low educational attainment and few economic resources. Hence, it could be said that they start their immigrant assimilation trajectories from a position of disadvantage. In the case of the Mexican immigrants who have arrived to the U.S. during the last four decades, for instance, it is very clear that the majority of them came to work in low-skilled jobs. Data from 2009 showed that Mexican immigrants are overwhelmingly represented in jobs that are low skilled, in terms of formal education, including construction, transportation, and service occupations (Brick et al. 2011). Compared with other immigrants, Mexicans have the lowest levels of formal education. According to a report from 2011, 65% of Mexican immigrants 25 and older have less than a high school degree compared to 32% of all other foreign-born adults (Brick et al. 2011).
