Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica

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https://hdl.handle.net/1794/30398
Professor Vasquez-Tokos received her B.A. in English from Princeton University (1998) and her PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley (2007). She was a faculty member at the University of Kansas beginning in 2007 until joining the University of Oregon faculty in 2012. Her research and teaching areas include: race/ethnicity, Mexican Americans/Latinos, gender, family, and intermarriage.

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Browsing Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica by Subject "ethnicity"

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    Mexican Migration and Settlement
    (Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 2010-06) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica
    Literature on international migration, assimilation, and transnationalism continues to be concerned with questions about ties that migrants and their descendants have with their homelands, coethnics, and the native-born population. Tomás R. Jiménez's Replenished Ethnicity: Mexican Americans, Immigration, and Identity and Joanna Dreby's Divided by Borders: Mexican Migrants and their Children provide important perspectives on different aspects of the larger phenomenon of international migration from Mexico to the United States that is a consequence of labor demand in the United States, economic need and job scarcity in Mexico, and a global economy. Both books deal with social life that takes place across ethnic boundaries, within ethnic groups, and across national borders. Taking qualitative approaches and dealing with the perennial tension between inclusion and exclusion, these books analyze the experiences and perspectives of Mexican migrants, Mexican children, and Mexican Americans.
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    The "ethnic core" as an unsung reference group
    (Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2020-08) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica
    Using longitudinal survey data and interviews, Edward Telles and Christina Sue’s book, Durable Ethnicity: Mexican Americans and the Ethnic Core (2019), seeks to explain both the endurance and variation of ethnicity among the Mexican American population. They offer the concept of the “ethnic core”: structures and institutions that promote ethnicity that serve as a counterpoint to the mainstream. The ethnic core is a major contribution to Mexican American and Latino/a studies that avoids valorizing a White, middle-class mainstream as the presumed “goal” of assimilation. Honouring Mexican Americans’ simultaneous participation in mainstream and ethnic communities, participation in (or removal from) the “ethnic core” contributes to intra-group variation. In presenting the ethnic core as an alternative to the “mainstream” (coded as White), Telles and Sue undercut the White supremacy pervading much academic scholarship and highlight the importance of a heretofore unsung reference group that exerts its own “gravitational pull” (the ethnic core).