Understanding Inequality: Mexican Americans’ Stratification Beliefs

Abstract

How people understand ethnoracial inequality, or their stratification beliefs, is an important concern for social scientists. Stratification beliefs can be highly influential in the development of individuals’ political attitudes and support for social policies. Despite this, research on stratification beliefs is limited in a number of ways. First, whereas much attention has been given to Whites’, and to some degree Blacks’, stratification beliefs, the attitudes of those in the “racial middle” have been largely neglected, despite their growing demographic presence. Second, much of the literature on stratification beliefs has focused on whether individuals adopt cultural or structural explanations for ethnoracial inequality, with less understanding of how people use a combination of these explanations to interpret inequality. Finally, theoretical and empirical knowledge of stratification beliefs is based largely on survey data. In an attempt to address these gaps, this research draws on interview and supplemental survey data from 70 Mexican Americans to provide an in-depth exploration of their stratification beliefs. The authors pay particular attention to respondents’ use of mixed explanatory modes, illustrating how they draw on cultural and structural discourses to make sense of the world around them. Ultimately, the authors argue that scholars need to pay attention to the interconnections among ideology, everyday experiences, and identity to understand the complexities of stratification beliefs.

Individuals in Default or the System? Race and Ethnicity, Stratification Views on Legal Debt, and Desire for Escalating Punishment

“…Whites are most likely to identify with individualism and least likely to identify with structuralism. Consistent with other findings (Sue and Lambert 2020), Latinxs adhere to mixed views. Their perspectives are consistent with Blacks on questions of structuralism.…”

“…Rather than see individualism as an alternative to structuralism, researchers stress the two can be layered onto one another as a dual consciousness. The simultaneous identification with individualism and structuralism is especially prevalent among minority groups like Blacks and Latinxs (Hunt 1996(Hunt , 2007Sue and Lambert 2020).Those who have been historically discriminated against are less convinced by dominant ideology and more likely to articulate system-challenging alternatives, but within-group fragmentation among minoritized groups tends to blur the cohesion of counterviews (Mann 1970).…”

Chasing Respectability: Pro-Immigrant Organizations and the Reinforcement of Immigrant Racialization

“…These findings suggest the need to examine community organizations as sites of immigrant racialization and highlight the need for critical inquiry into the racialized assumptions of pro-immigrant groups. Although social scientists have investigated respectability politics as an individual-level strategy to achieve upward mobility or avoid racist interactions (Lacy, 2007; Sue & Lambert, 2021), we theorize it as a structuring force in group racialization and demonstrate its utility as a framework for understanding racialized organizations (Ray, 2019).…”

“…Contemporary work on respectability politics analyzes it as a strategic response to racism (Dow, 2016; Turner, 2020) or of upward socioeconomic mobility (Harris, 2014; Sue & Lambert, 2021). Both approaches conceptualize respectability politics as an individual-level effort to demonstrate that oneself or ones family, as individuals, are worthy of inclusion in social institutions or, at the very least, not deserving of ostracism (Cohen, 1999; Luna, 2017; Sue & Lambert, 2021; Turner, 2020). In conceptualizing respectability politics as an individual-level tactic, these studies treat it as akin to an assimilation approach.…”