Suchergebnisse

Existing research inadequately addresses the variation in Mexican Americans' patterns of ethnic identification. Drawing on 78 interviews, I address this question by exploring how conceptions of ancestry and nationality shape ethnic identification among New Mexico's long-standing Mexican American population, Nuevomexicanos. I find that Nuevomexicanos emphasized their ties to Spanish heritage within the history of New Mexico to explain their ethnicity and to construct their identity in opposition to Mexican immigrants. Although Nuevomexicanos varied in their claims to Mexican ancestry, they generally prioritized their roots in the original Spanish settlement of New Mexico to emphasize distinctions in ancestry, nationality, and regionality from Mexican immigrants. Moreover, despite Nuevomexicanos' persistent claims to Spanish ancestry, they did not perceive themselves as racially White. Instead, Spanish ancestry was integral to Nuevomexicano identity because it enabled them to highlight their regional ties to New Mexico and long-time American identities. Thus, I argue that Nuevomexicanos' enduring claims to Spanish ancestry represent a defensive strategy to enact dissociation from stigmatized Mexican immigrants. Overall, these findings show that Mexican Americans' dissociation strategies are contingent on how they define themselves as members of an ethnic and national community. These findings also indicate that "Mexican American" as an identity term is a loosely maintained membership category among "Mexican Americans" because of their intragroup heterogeneity.

Our study demonstrates how people manage racial dissonance when faced with situations that conflict with their understandings of racial dynamics. Borrowing from scholarship on culture and cognition, we use the concept of schema to examine how 36 Latinx young adults make sense of a changing racial terrain that defies their racial understandings. During the Obama years, Latinxs doubted or made allowances for the discrimination they experienced because it contradicted their post‐racial understandings of race. When discrimination became blatant during the Trump years, they adopted a new "old‐fashioned" racism schema based, but not identical to, notions of pre‐Civil Rights racism. Our findings point to a new understanding of racism and an expanding cultural repertoire that includes a new "old‐fashioned" racial frame to help young Latinxs navigate their racial experiences. These findings have implications for understanding how people can shift, develop, and expand their schemas to navigate a changing racial terrain.