Working-Class Children of Mexican Immigrants in Dallas, Texas

Abstract

Scholars and the public alike expect children of immigrants without a college degree to fail to assimilate into U.S. society (see for example Haller et al. 2011). Our research, however, leads us to a more optimistic point of view regarding the recent incorporation of working-class children of immigrants, although this may be changing in the aftermath of COVID-19. Focusing on the working-class children of Mexican immigrants in Dallas, Texas, we find that they have built on their parents’ positions, and successfully incorporated into society, despite working-class jobs and relatively low levels of education. In 2019, the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington Metropolitan Statistical Area (thereafter DFW) “ranked first in the annual rate of job growth and second in the number of jobs added over the year” (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2019). Dallas, with nearly a third of the population identifying as Mexican, and 38.3 percent identifying as Hispanic or Latino in the 2010 Census (U.S. Census Bureau 2010), offers many employment opportunities for children of Mexican immigrants. In this article, we argue that DFW has recently provided a context whereby working-class children of Mexican immigrants fulfill their dreams of achieving a good life and experience intergenerational mobility—and in their perspective believe that they are fulfilling the American Dream.We interviewed 25 children of Mexican immigrants ages 18–28 about their experiences with the education system, the world of work, and their sense of belonging to American society. Our respondents have typically worked in low-status jobs in blue-collar and service industries such as construction, restaurant work, and truck driving. In this article we focus on their labor market experiences and what they mean for intergenerational mobility. While their experiences allow us to question some of the assumptions about the trajectories of the children of immigrants in the United States, the emergence of the coronavirus may mean setbacks for these children of immigrants. Waldinger and Perlmann (1999) (see also Perlmann and Roger 1999) have noted that the incorporation of children of immigrants takes place within a context of a class-based society and that "the children of working-class immigrants will take up the same type of positions as occupied by their parents" (p.251). However, in contrast to the class reproduction thesis (see also Willis 1977), the children of Mexican immigrants in our study, for the most part, do not enter into the same types of positions as their parents; while they still