This week, we saw Huntington’s claim in The Hispanic Challenge that the greatest cleavage in American society in the 2000s would be an Anglo-Hispanic one, overtaking the  perceived differences between White and Black Americans. He advocates that several key concepts, including contiguity, scale, illegality, regional concentration, and historical presence can account for this growing divide; he famously claimed that

“These differences combine to make the assimilation of Mexicans into U.S. culture and society much more difficult than it was for previous immigrants. Particularly striking in contrast to previous immigrants is the failure of third- and fourth-generation people of Mexican origin to approximate U.S. norms in education, economic status, and intermarriage rates.” (Huntington, 36).

In Citrin, et. al.’s article, we see in fact that many of these dimensions along which Huntington asserts will be the source of racial cleavages are in fact ones along which Mexican immigrants and 2nd and 3rd-generation descendants tend to assimilate at the same rates as other immigrant populations. In  the following NBC News article, Suzanne Gamboa outlines an argument that it is racism, and not a lack of assimilation is a more pressing problem for Latinos in America. Despite clear (statistical) evidence to the contrary, why is the narrative posed by Huntington still active in current discourse?

  1. What were the various dimensions along which the Citrin, et. al. study analyzed assimilation?
  2. What do you believe accounts for the disconnect between perceptions of assimilation and rates of assimilation itself?
  3. Are Huntington’s claims pre-conditioned on some degree on racial threat? Can those concepts be divorced from each other?