The “ethnic core” as an unsung reference group

Abstract

Using longitudinal survey data and interviews, Edward Telles and Christina Sue’s book, Durable Ethnicity: Mexican Americans and the Ethnic Core (2019), seeks to explain both the endurance and variation of ethnicity among the Mexican American population. They offer the concept of the “ethnic core”: structures and institutions that promote ethnicity that serve as a counterpoint to the mainstream. The ethnic core is a major contribution to Mexican American and Latino/a studies that avoids valorizing a White, middle-class mainstream as the presumed “goal” of assimilation. Honouring Mexican Americans’ simultaneous participation in mainstream and ethnic communities, participation in (or removal from) the “ethnic core” contributes to intra-group variation. In presenting the ethnic core as an alternative to the “mainstream” (coded as White), Telles and Sue undercut the White supremacy pervading much academic scholarship and highlight the importance of a heretofore unsung reference group that exerts its own “gravitational pull” (the ethnic core).

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