Which Mexicans Are White? Enumerator-Assigned Race in the 1930 Census and the Socioeconomic Integration of Mexican Americans

Brian Duncan () and Stephen Trejo
Additional contact information
Brian Duncan: University of Colorado Denver

No 16402, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: The authors explore unique complete-count data from the 1930 Census in which a respondent's race was assigned by enumerators and "Mexican" was one of the possible responses. Census enumerators frequently and selectively assigned a non-Mexican race— predominantly "white"—to U.S.-born individuals of Mexican ancestry. As a result, using enumerator-assigned race to identify Mexican Americans misses a sizeable fraction of the relevant population and significantly understates this group's socioeconomic attainment. The propensity for Census enumerators to identify Mexican Americans as white varied enormously across U.S. counties, and this variation is strongly associated with both the educational attainment of U.S.-born Mexican Americans observed in the 1940 Census and the amount of return migration by Mexican immigrants during the 1930s. As such, this variation may help to identify local environments that were more favorable for the integration of Mexican Americans.

Keywords: immigrant assimilation; Mexican Americans; ethnicity; race; intergenerational progress (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2023-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-lab, nep-mig and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published - published in: ILR Review, 2025, 78 (1), 62- 85

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp16402.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Which Mexicans Are White? Enumerator-Assigned Race in the 1930 Census and the Socioeconomic Integration of Mexican Americans (2025)
Working Paper: Which Mexicans Are White? Enumerator-Assigned Race in the 1930 Census and the Socioeconomic Integration of Mexican Americans (2023)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp16402

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().