Sociology Faculty Research

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Open Access
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.
Open Access
Methodological Appendix: A Note on Sociological Reflexivity and "Situated Interviews"
(New York University Press, 2011) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica
Open Access
5. Whiter is Better: Discrimination in Everyday Life
(New York University Press, 2011) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica
Ruben and Adele Mendoza are a married second-generation couple who are both light skinned and have a Hispanic surname. They tell me a powerful tale about how their Spanish-sounding name—Mendoza as a “giveaway” last name—restricted their access to housing when they were newlyweds.
Open Access
8. Conclusion: Racialization despite Assimilation
(New York University Press, 2011) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica
This book has addressed the question of Mexican immigrants’ and their descendants’ integration into U.S. society. One more glimpse into respondents’ lives reinforces the point that racial/ethnic identity is a fluid process that is highly contingent upon context and that assimilation path-ways are not straightforward but open to voluntary personal switchbacks and vicissitudes driven by external social forces.
Open Access
2. Thinned Attachment: Heritage is Slipping through Our Fingers
(New York University Press, 2011) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica
Sixty-five-year-old Maria Montes is a devout Catholic, bilingual in English and Spanish, and the matriarch of her family.1 One of six siblings, Maria emigrated from Mexico when she was four years old with her mother and sister, while her brothers stayed in Mexico. Maria’s mother chose to immigrate in part because one of her brothers and her eldest son were already in the United States and encouraged her to move. They crossed the Rio Grande River and took the train into the United States. Upon arrival, she worked in the fields picking potatoes and green beans and then at the packing house. Maria would join her mother in the fields when she was young or would be under the care of her older sister, a “second mother” caretaker for her. Twelve years later Maria’s mother brought two of her other sons over to the United States.
Open Access
3. Cultural Maintenance: A Pot of Beans on the Stove
(New York University Press, 2011) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica
When I arrived at the Benavidas home in the Oakland hills, my respondent’s wife, Melissa, gave me a tour of the front portion of the home, saying her husband would join us in a minute. The house was immaculately decorated, boasting art on the walls from Spain, Mexico, and Ecuador, as well as southwestern art hand crafted by Melissa’s father. As Melissa ushered me into the kitchen, she laughed, saying tongue in cheek, “Not to be a stereo-typical Mexican family or anything, but we’ve got to get the beans on!” We both laughed. She followed up with, “Well, really, we usually do have a pot of beans in the house.”
Open Access
4. Tortillas in the Shape of the United States: Marriage and the Families We Choose
(New York University Press, 2011) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica
Marriage is a central component of assimilation. Marriage patterns, in particular frequency of intermarriage, are a basic yardstick used to measure assimilation. Marriage has historically been understood as a way to preserve or alter the racial makeup of society. Antimiscegenation laws that banned interracial marriage and interracial sex were enforced until ruled unconstitutional in the 1967 Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia. “Anti-miscegenation laws . . . were both a response to increased immigration from Asia [and Latin America] and a reflection of persistent concerns regarding racial purity and the nature of American citizenship” (Sohoni 2007: 587). While marriage patterns have been the subject of heated popular debate and legal battles, we know less about the role marriage plays in the subjective experience of race among the marital partners and their children, which is the subject of this chapter.
Open Access
7. As Much Hamburger as Taco: Third-Generation Mexican Americans
(New York University Press, 2011) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica
Nearly seven million people are third-plus generation Mexican Americans (Macias 2006: 6), yet there is great diversity and fluidity within this group regarding the way they classify themselves. This chapter analyzes how the contradictory forces of “flexible ethnicity” and “racialization” influence the way third-generation Mexican Americans identify. “Flexible ethnicity” refers to the ability to deftly and effectively navigate different racial terrains and be considered an “insider” in more than one racial or ethnic group. “Racialization,” by contrast, refers to the process of distancing and oppressing people perceived as nonwhite. In this case, other people’s expectations and enforcement of difference create or reproduce social distance and unequal power dynamics. Regardless of whether Mexican Americans experience their racial/ethnic identity to be more “flexible” or “racialized,” they often encounter challenges to their racial “authenticity.” This chapter is organized in four sections. First, I examine the diversity of racial/ethnic claims third-generation Mexican Americans make. Second, I develop the concept of “flexible ethnicity.” Third, I analyze the process of racialization. Finally, I discuss the issue of racial authenticity and the dynamism of culture, especially with regard to gender.
Open Access
Review, Latinos in American Society: Families and Communities in Transition
(Contemporary Society: A Journal of Reviews, 2013-04) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica
Review of Latinos in American Society: Families and Communities in Transition by Ruth Enid Zambrana.
Open Access
6. Fit to Be Good Cooks and Good Mechanics: Racialization in Schools
(New York University Press, 2011) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica
School systems are simultaneously racialized and racializing. Educational institutions possess tremendous capacity to reproduce the power structure and racial hierarchy of society. Family, as another social institution, mediates the racializing effects of the educational system. The family is a critical site of racial identity development as it is a locale where intergenerational biography-based teaching occurs and strategies of action and resistance are formed. Within both schools and families, students respond to racializing messages and renegotiate their racial self-understanding. School experiences are conditioned by historical context, gender, and parental influences as parents use their own schooling experience as fodder for the intergenerational transfer of knowledge and ideologies to their children. This chapter asks, What influence do educational systems have on immigrants’ and citizens’ racial identity formation? What role do families play in amplifying or mitigating the process of racialization? From a long-term perspective, what are the cumulative effects of racialization across family generations? This chapter examines how second- and third-generation Mexican Americans experience their social identity within the educational system and how parents’ experiences with their own schooling shape their parenting styles.
Open Access
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).
Open Access
Couple Identity Work: Collaborative Couplehood, Gender Inequalities, and Power in Naming
(Gender & Society, 2024-01) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica; Sue, Christina A.; Nunez, Adriana C.
The study of baby naming is valuable for understanding how gender inequality is reproduced in families. Often treated as an event, baby naming also represents an important social and cultural process that can reveal gendered dynamics in couple decision-making. Baby naming, which represents a highly visible and symbolic family milestone, is a strategic site in which to examine how couple identities are constructed—for self, partner, and others—through the naming process and through stories parents tell of how they named the baby. Drawing on 46 interviews with U.S. Mexican-origin heterosexual parents, we expose tensions that result when practices do not align with a desired (egalitarian) couple identity and detail the ensuing cognitive, emotion, and narrative labor that parents—primarily women—perform to reconcile inconsistencies. We introduce the concept of couple identity work, or the work involved in creating and projecting a desired impression of a relationship for multiple audiences, to provide a theoretical framework for these gendered dynamics. We show how couple identity work is enacted—and power expressed—through men’s and women’s strategies of action/inaction and storytelling, and how this work reproduces and obscures gendered power and inequality in the intimate context of baby naming.
Open Access
Across Borders, Across Generations: Immigration, Assimilation, and Racial Identity Formation in Multi-Generational Mexican American Families
(University of California, Berkeley, 2007) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica
This dissertation investigates how racial identities of Mexican Americans both change and persist inter-generationally within families. Using purposive and snowball sampling, I interviewed three-generation middle class Mexican American families in California. I conducted in-depth interviews with sixty-seven members from twenty-nine three-generation families (Mexican immigrant grandparents and their children and grandchildren born in the U.S.). Two questions inspire this inquiry. First, what are the families’ trajectories of racial identification and incorporation across the three generations? Second, what familial and social forces influence each generation’s racial identity formation? My research elaborates on and refines existing theories of assimilation and racial identity formation by using a generational, family-centered approach. I evoke and utilize the categories of "thinned attachment" and "cultural maintenance" to capture trajectories of assimilation across generations. My study suggests that eight factors are significant in shaping racial identity development and incorporation patterns: spouse/partner, personal traits (phenotype and name), cultural toolkit, gender, social position, social context, institutions, and immigration/citizenship status. Intergenerational family memory (knowledge and stories transmitted through generations), parental ideologies, and historical context are also significant in shaping both racial identity and incorporation trajectories. My research finds that assimilation, as a mode of structural incorporation, is predominant among the families interviewed. Structural assimilation influences racial identity formation in two bifurcated ways: it prompts a loss of Mexican affiliation or sparks a desire to retain a Mexican-oriented identity. Public and institutional discrimination have a tremendous impact on Mexican Americans’ racial identity. Historical period is also influential: the Civil Rights’ Movement offered a new racial rhetoric with which to combat racism and promote visibility. Finally, third generation Mexican Americans range from displaying flexibility in their identification options to being highly racialized in a way that makes Mexican American identity not a matter of choice. This research extends racial identity and assimilation theories by highlighting the mechanisms that drive these processes. Neither racial identity nor assimilation are straightforward progressions but, instead, develop unevenly and are influenced by family, society, and historical social movements.
Open Access
The Latino Middle Class
(Annual Review of Sociology, 2024) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica; Vallejo, Jody Agius
Latino educational gains over time and income mobility portend a burgeoning Latino middle class. In this article, we critically review scholarship on the Latino middle class, from theoretical perspectives aiming to explain Latino experiences to empirical research investigating mechanisms that promote, and barriers that thwart, upward mobility. Studies suggest that the Latino middle class is distinctive for many reasons—from structural barriers to asset accumulation, legal status precarity for self or family, financial responsibility for class-disadvantaged kin, and negative controlling images that bog down class ascension. Scholars’ recent efforts to decouple middle-class status from Whiteness is an important contribution that undercuts the notion that melding into Whiteness is the desired outcome of middle-class integration. In addition to the utility of education to upward mobility, we contend that studies of middle-class pathways should expand to recognize that Latinos are engaging in workarounds—career paths not requiring a bachelor's degree, such as business ownership or credentialed professions. Workarounds are an intervention that accounts for routes to mobility that are eclipsed by conventional conceptions of mobility. Ultimately, we argue that Latinos are attaining middle-class status even as they are racialized, thereby expanding the minoritized middle class.
Open Access
Do Latinos Consider Themselves Mainstream? The Influence of Region
(Sociological Perspectives, 2019-11-06) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica
Drawing from 89 in-depth interviews with Latinos, this article asks how Latinos perceive their relationship to U.S. mainstream society. As regional location matters to racial identity, this comparative study focuses on field sites in California and Kansas—locations with different proportions of Latinos—to investigate how regional dynamics are embedded in racial meaning-making. Showing a region, race, and class intersection, Californians who were poor or working-class in their youth use social distancing strategies and “reactive Americanization” to avoid stereotypes fueled by a dense Latino population. By contrast, most Latino Kansans leave racism undetected, the smaller Latino population in Kansas deflating negative group stereotypes. Region also influences ideas about the mainstream: Californians pointed to local racial heterogeneity to argue for a multiracial mainstream, whereas most Kansans did not make that argument. Regional processes of class-inflected racialization are a contextual factor that shapes Latinos’ sense of mainstream inclusion and their incorporation trajectories.
Open Access
THE BUMPY ROAD OF ASSIMILATION: GENDER, PHENOTYPE, AND HISTORICAL ERA
(Sociological Spectrum, 2011-10) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica
Gender, phenotype, and historical era powerfully shape the life experiences, identities, and cultures of Mexican-origin families. Using interview data from three-generation Mexican-American families, second-generation Mexican-American women were inclined to revivify their heritage upon marriage or childbearing whereas men underwent the gendered racialization process of U.S. military service. Among the third generation, skin color determines the relevance or irrelevance of “symbolic ethnicity.” Women engaged in a “third-generation return” to ethnicity far more than men, revealing gendered expectations of cultural transmission. This article advances assimilation theory by identifying fractures within generations—gender, phenotype and historical context—that steer incorporation processes.
Open Access
Race Cognizance and Colorblindness: Effects of Latino/Non-Hispanic White Intermarriage
(Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 2014-12) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica
Latino racial/ethnic intermarriage has grown over time, increases with each generation in the United States, and occurs most frequently with non-Hispanic Whites. This article answers the question: How does intermarriage change racial/ethnic consciousness for both partners? Drawing on in-depth interviews with thirty intermarried Latinos and non-Hispanic Whites, I critique assimilation, Whiteness, and colorblindness theories, finding two predominant racial consciousness outcomes of intermarriage: race cognizance and racial colorblindness. First, intermarriage can enhance Whites’ understanding of race/ethnicity and racism, a phenomenon I call race cognizance. Second, intermarriage can produce colorblind discourse that focuses on similarity, yet in ways inconsistent with colorblind racism. Racial consciousness varies by ethnicity: most intermarried Whites reported race cognizance, an outcome unforeseen by traditional theories of integration, whereas Latinos more often espoused colorblindness. These understandings are used in different contexts: race cognizance is stimulated by the public domain, whereas colorblindness is evoked in private space. These findings demonstrate that racial consciousness is fluid, and influenced by intermarriage and ethnicity.
Open Access
The racialization of privacy: racial formation as a family affair
(Theory and Society, 2021-01) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica; Yamin, Priscilla
A right to family privacy is considered a cornerstone of American life, and yet access to it is apportioned by race. Our notion of the “racialization of privacy” refers to the phenomenon that family privacy, including the freedom to create a family uninhibited by law, pressure, and custom, is delimited by race. Building upon racial formation theory, this article examines three examples: the Native American boarding school system (1870s to 1970s), eugenic laws and practices (early/mid 1900s), and contemporary deportation. Analysis reveals that state-sponsored limitations on family privacy is a racial project that shapes the racial state. Performing an ideological genealogy with our cases, this article makes three contributions: it illustrates how the state leverages policies affecting families to define national belonging; it reveals how access to family privacy is patterned by race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, and national origin; and it distills how Whiteness and a national racial hierarchy are socially constructed and maintained over time. With the racialization of privacy, we identify how the state seeks to reproduce institutionalized White supremacy and the effects this has on families. We argue that families are the linchpin in state-sponsored racial projects that construct the nation and that the racialization of privacy, as a form of inequality, is a defining characteristic of the color-line.
Open Access
Gender across family generations: change in Mexican American masculinities and femininities
(Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 2014-04) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica
How do conceptions of gender – attitudes, expectations, and behaviours – change from generation to generation in Mexican American families? The notion of gender as socially constructed allows for the possibility of change, yet existing studies documenting change provide insight into why gender changes occur but do not sufficiently describe how this process happens. Based on interviews with three-generation Mexican American families in California, this article finds that reflection on natal family experiences and intergenerational family communication – autobiographical stories, lessons, and advice – are mechanisms that shift masculinity, femininity, and gender relations. Men use their natal family dynamics to rethink male dominance in favour of improved familial and romantic relationships whereas women consider their biographies and cross-generational advice to challenge patriarchy and become more educated and assertive. Families are crucibles of social change: reflection on natal family experiences and communication that crosscuts family generations actualise and initiate paradigm shifts about gender.
Open Access
“If I Can Offer You Some Advice”: Rapport and Data Collection in Interviews Between Adults of Different Ages
(Symbolic Interaction, 2017-05) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica
Reflexively analyzing interactions between myself (young adult woman) and 150 adult research participants, I explore how interviewees responded to the interviewer's perceived age in combination with other social identity categories. Addressing a gap in scholarship on adult-adult interview interactions, this article examines how age gradations, in combination with other axes of similarity or difference, affect researcher-interviewee rapport and data acquisition. Racial similarity, regardless of age, unlocked access to the topic of race/ethnicity. Age intersected with gender such that women within a decade of the woman interviewer's age assumed similarity and were communicative. In interviews with similarly-aged heterosexual men, awareness of sexuality inhibited answers around intimacy. With older interviewees, gender similarity bridged the age chasm with women. In contrast, age and gender difference inspired older men to act paternalistically and give unsolicited advice. Even among adults, interviewees' classification of the interviewer's age contours the interactional dynamic, impacts data acquisition, and reproduces social distinctions.