Becoming "Ethnic," Becoming "Angeleno," and/or Becoming "American": The Multi-Faceted Experiences of Immigrant Children and the Children of Immigrants in Los Angeles

In November 2003, the Foundation funded an extensive survey of 4500 households in Los Angeles to provide definitive information about the inter-generational progress of immigrant groups in what is now America's largest immigrant receiving city. The Foundation had previously sponsored a similar survey of New York's immigrant second generation, which included a series of in-depth interviews with a subsample of the survey respondents. This qualitative portion of the study yielded rich accounts of what it meant to be a second-generation young adult in New York at the end of the 1990s.

Now, the Foundation is supporting a similar set of interviews for the Los Angeles study. Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou will conduct a qualitative study of economic and social mobility of a random sample of the respondents to the Los Angeles survey. Specifically, they want to explore the different ways in which immigrant children and the children of immigrants navigate through immigrant households, schools, ethnic communities, and the labor market in Los Angeles, where Mexicans not only represent the majority of the population, but also the single largest source of legal and undocumented migration. In the process, Lee and Zhou hope to shed light on how mobility pathways differ by generation, by ethnicity, and by gender. They will ask these children about their definition of success, their identities, and the ways in which race, class, gender, and national origin impact their lives in the United States. The investigators will report their results in a co-authored book.