Consequential Identities: Mexicans in the US and Turks in Europe

Edward Telles and Christina Sue’s Durable Ethnicity: Mexican Americans and the Ethnic Core makes a key contribution to academic, social and political debates on international migration, assimilation, ethnicity, and identities. This novel account of Mexican Americans’ manifestation of ethnicity draws on 70 qualitative interviews and a random sample of about 1500 US-born Mexican Americans. Written fluently and in a moving style, it probes the “cultural assimilability and Americanness” of Mexican Americans. This research and its findings are relevant to a broader range of audiences in the US and are of special interest to academic and public debates on immigration and integration in Europe. In what follows, I will reflect on the book’s main findings and conclusions and review the newly developed symbolic-consequential ethnicity scale. I will conclude by discussing the relevance of the findings for the European migration experience and suggest the need for comparative research.