A new study led by UC Merced sociology professor Daisy Verduzco Reyes finds that many first-generation Mexican American college graduates see success as providing financial support to their parents, including paying bills or purchasing a home for them. The research, which took 14 years to complete, followed the lives of 61 millennials—people born between 1981 and 1995—who identify as Latinx, attended college in California, and mostly still live in the state.
Reyes, who is also part of the Latina Futures 2050 Lab at UCLA, said her work addresses a gap in understanding this population. “As researchers, we do not have much documented data and analysis to help us see and understand the lives of this population,” Reyes said. Her interviews confirmed earlier findings that millennials are more likely than previous generations to have paid for their own college education. She noted that among those interviewed, 85 percent were the first in their families to graduate from college and 96 percent were of Mexican origin.
The study appears in the journal Sociology of Race and Ethnicity and will contribute material for a future book following up on Reyes’ earlier work, “Learning to Be Latino,” which examined how undergraduate institutions influence Latino student culture.
According to Reyes’s findings, young Latinos often measure personal achievement differently than what sociologists describe as the five-stage Standard North American Adulthood: leaving home, finishing college, entering the workforce, getting married and having children. Instead, responsibility toward family plays a central role for immigrant as well as second- and third-generation Latinx individuals.
“The cultural and socio-structural conditions in which Latino millennials live contribute to their need to fulfill financial, emotional, legal and cultural labor roles in their families of origin,” according to Reyes. The study refers to this dynamic as the “Latinx mobility bargain” or “immigrant bargain.”
The research included responses from 40 women and 21 men with questions such as whether they had achieved upward mobility compared with their parents or if they provided financial support for anyone else. Participants ranged from those earning enough money to buy homes for their parents to others whose low-wage jobs left them feeling stagnant.
“The one idea that none of the respondents questioned was the cultural imperative of the immigrant bargain, the idea of taking care of your parents. Some might expect this ‘burden’ to feed resentment, but none of my respondents expressed any such feelings,” Reyes said.
“For many Latinx millennials, providing for parents has constrained their mobility trajectories. Yet this constraint is perceived as an accomplishment.”
The Great Recession had a notable impact on Latinx families’ finances; between 2007 and 2016 middle-income Latinx households lost about 55 percent of their wealth compared with a loss of about 31 percent among white middle-income households (https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2018/07/23/hispanic-household-wealth-and-income-in-recent-years/).
“Millennials are worse off economically than previous generations in terms of income, wealth, homeownership and debt,” Reyes said.
Sandra Baltazar Martínez serves as senior communications manager at Latina Futures 2050 Lab.
