Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/1794/30398

Professor Vasquez-Tokos received her B.A. in English from Princeton University (1998) and her PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley (2007). She was a faculty member at the University of Kansas beginning in 2007 until joining the University of Oregon faculty in 2012. Her research and teaching areas include: race/ethnicity, Mexican Americans/Latinos, gender, family, and intermarriage.

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Open Access
Across Borders, Across Generations: Immigration, Assimilation, and Racial Identity Formation in Multi-Generational Mexican American Families
(University of California, Berkeley, 2007) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica
This dissertation investigates how racial identities of Mexican Americans both change and persist inter-generationally within families. Using purposive and snowball sampling, I interviewed three-generation middle class Mexican American families in California. I conducted in-depth interviews with sixty-seven members from twenty-nine three-generation families (Mexican immigrant grandparents and their children and grandchildren born in the U.S.). Two questions inspire this inquiry. First, what are the families’ trajectories of racial identification and incorporation across the three generations? Second, what familial and social forces influence each generation’s racial identity formation? My research elaborates on and refines existing theories of assimilation and racial identity formation by using a generational, family-centered approach. I evoke and utilize the categories of "thinned attachment" and "cultural maintenance" to capture trajectories of assimilation across generations. My study suggests that eight factors are significant in shaping racial identity development and incorporation patterns: spouse/partner, personal traits (phenotype and name), cultural toolkit, gender, social position, social context, institutions, and immigration/citizenship status. Intergenerational family memory (knowledge and stories transmitted through generations), parental ideologies, and historical context are also significant in shaping both racial identity and incorporation trajectories. My research finds that assimilation, as a mode of structural incorporation, is predominant among the families interviewed. Structural assimilation influences racial identity formation in two bifurcated ways: it prompts a loss of Mexican affiliation or sparks a desire to retain a Mexican-oriented identity. Public and institutional discrimination have a tremendous impact on Mexican Americans’ racial identity. Historical period is also influential: the Civil Rights’ Movement offered a new racial rhetoric with which to combat racism and promote visibility. Finally, third generation Mexican Americans range from displaying flexibility in their identification options to being highly racialized in a way that makes Mexican American identity not a matter of choice. This research extends racial identity and assimilation theories by highlighting the mechanisms that drive these processes. Neither racial identity nor assimilation are straightforward progressions but, instead, develop unevenly and are influenced by family, society, and historical social movements.
Open Access
As Much Hamburger as Taco: Third-Generation Mexican Americans
(New York University Press, 2011) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica
Nearly seven million people are third-plus generation Mexican Americans (Macias 2006: 6), yet there is great diversity and fluidity within this group regarding the way they classify themselves. This chapter analyzes how the contradictory forces of “flexible ethnicity” and “racialization” influence the way third-generation Mexican Americans identify. “Flexible ethnicity” refers to the ability to deftly and effectively navigate different racial terrains and be considered an “insider” in more than one racial or ethnic group. “Racialization,” by contrast, refers to the process of distancing and oppressing people perceived as nonwhite. In this case, other people’s expectations and enforcement of difference create or reproduce social distance and unequal power dynamics. Regardless of whether Mexican Americans experience their racial/ethnic identity to be more “flexible” or “racialized,” they often encounter challenges to their racial “authenticity.” This chapter is organized in four sections. First, I examine the diversity of racial/ethnic claims third-generation Mexican Americans make. Second, I develop the concept of “flexible ethnicity.” Third, I analyze the process of racialization. Finally, I discuss the issue of racial authenticity and the dynamism of culture, especially with regard to gender.
Open Access
BLURRED BORDERS FOR SOME BUT NOT “OTHERS”: RACIALIZATION, “FLEXIBLE ETHNICITY,” GENDER, AND THIRDGENERATION MEXICAN AMERICAN IDENTITY
(Sociological Perspectives, 2010) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica
How are the lives of middle-class third-generation Mexican Americans both racialized and gendered? Third-generation Mexican Americans in California experience a racialization process continuum that extends from “flexible ethnicity,” the ability to be considered an “insider” in different racial/ ethnic communities, to racialization as nonwhite that is enforced through the deployment of negative stereotypes. Using interview data, the author finds that women are afforded more “flexible ethnicity” than men. Accordingly, men are more rigorously racialized than women. Women are racialized through exoticization, whereas men are racialized as threats to safety. Lighterskinned individuals escaped consistent racialization. These findings have consequences for the incorporation possibilities of later-generation Mexican Americans, as women and light-skinned (often multiracial) individuals are more frequently granted “flexible ethnicity” and less strongly racialized than men and dark-skinned (often monoracial) individuals. Even among the structurally assimilated, contemporary racial and gender hierarchies limit the voluntary quality of ethnicity among third-generation Mexican Americans.
Open Access
Chicana Mothering in the 21st Century: Challenging Stereotypes and Transmitting Culture
(Columbia University Press, 2008) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica
This chapter examines the experiences of mothering among Mexican American women in the early 21st century. Mexican Americans are a large and growing minority group due to both immigration and fertility rates. Chicana mothering involves acting as a guardian or mediator between racial messages from the “outside world” (school, media, inter-racial social networks) and their children. Mothers are responsible for overseeing their children’s growth and development; as minorities, this often requires defusing negative racial messages and replacing them with affirmation.
Open Access
Conclusion: Racialization despite Assimilation
(New York University Press, 2011) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica
This book has addressed the question of Mexican immigrants’ and their descendants’ integration into U.S. society. One more glimpse into respondents’ lives reinforces the point that racial/ethnic identity is a fluid process that is highly contingent upon context and that assimilation path-ways are not straightforward but open to voluntary personal switchbacks and vicissitudes driven by external social forces.
Open Access
Couple Identity Work: Collaborative Couplehood, Gender Inequalities, and Power in Naming
(Gender & Society, 2024-01) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica; Sue, Christina A.; Nunez, Adriana C.
The study of baby naming is valuable for understanding how gender inequality is reproduced in families. Often treated as an event, baby naming also represents an important social and cultural process that can reveal gendered dynamics in couple decision-making. Baby naming, which represents a highly visible and symbolic family milestone, is a strategic site in which to examine how couple identities are constructed—for self, partner, and others—through the naming process and through stories parents tell of how they named the baby. Drawing on 46 interviews with U.S. Mexican-origin heterosexual parents, we expose tensions that result when practices do not align with a desired (egalitarian) couple identity and detail the ensuing cognitive, emotion, and narrative labor that parents—primarily women—perform to reconcile inconsistencies. We introduce the concept of couple identity work, or the work involved in creating and projecting a desired impression of a relationship for multiple audiences, to provide a theoretical framework for these gendered dynamics. We show how couple identity work is enacted—and power expressed—through men’s and women’s strategies of action/inaction and storytelling, and how this work reproduces and obscures gendered power and inequality in the intimate context of baby naming.
Open Access
Cultural Maintenance: A Pot of Beans on the Stove
(New York University Press, 2011) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica
When I arrived at the Benavidas home in the Oakland hills, my respondent’s wife, Melissa, gave me a tour of the front portion of the home, saying her husband would join us in a minute. The house was immaculately decorated, boasting art on the walls from Spain, Mexico, and Ecuador, as well as southwestern art hand crafted by Melissa’s father. As Melissa ushered me into the kitchen, she laughed, saying tongue in cheek, “Not to be a stereo-typical Mexican family or anything, but we’ve got to get the beans on!” We both laughed. She followed up with, “Well, really, we usually do have a pot of beans in the house.”
Open Access
Disciplined Preferences: Explaining the (Re)Production of Latino Endogamy
(Social Problems, 2015-07) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica
While racial intermarriage is heralded as the last stage in integration processes, endogamy (intragroup marriage) is the overwhelming norm in the United States. What are the familial, dating, and community processes that produce endogamy? Drawing from 70 in-depth interviews with heterosexual Latinos concerning dating and marriage, this article reports that surveillance, punishment, and self-discipline harden racial boundaries and induce endogamy. Typically construed as highly personal, romantic preferences are, in fact, socially constructed and policed through family, peer, and community-level processes. “Third parties” such as family members, friends, and community members enforce intramarriage via advice, threats, censure, and violence. In turn, outsiders’ surveillance and punishment converts into self-discipline, which constrains romantic preferences and choices. To maintain social distance, both non-Hispanic whites and Latinos discipline their kin and their kin’s cross-racial romantic interests away from those who stand lower on the racial order. Latinos enjoy racial privilege relative to African Americans and preserve privilege by excluding blacks as romantic possibilities. Latino endogamy is a disciplined response to accumulated racial messages and racial boundary policing. Results show that racial communities are invested in perpetuating endogamy to preserve relative privilege and exert social pressures that largely support the contemporary racial hierarchy.
Open Access
Do Latinos Consider Themselves Mainstream? The Influence of Region
(Sociological Perspectives, 2019-11-06) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica
Drawing from 89 in-depth interviews with Latinos, this article asks how Latinos perceive their relationship to U.S. mainstream society. As regional location matters to racial identity, this comparative study focuses on field sites in California and Kansas—locations with different proportions of Latinos—to investigate how regional dynamics are embedded in racial meaning-making. Showing a region, race, and class intersection, Californians who were poor or working-class in their youth use social distancing strategies and “reactive Americanization” to avoid stereotypes fueled by a dense Latino population. By contrast, most Latino Kansans leave racism undetected, the smaller Latino population in Kansas deflating negative group stereotypes. Region also influences ideas about the mainstream: Californians pointed to local racial heterogeneity to argue for a multiracial mainstream, whereas most Kansans did not make that argument. Regional processes of class-inflected racialization are a contextual factor that shapes Latinos’ sense of mainstream inclusion and their incorporation trajectories.
Open Access
Ethnic identity and Chicano literature: How ethnicity affects reading and reading affects ethnic consciousness
(Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2006-08-16) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica
This article interrogates the impact of readers’ ethnicity (Latino and non-Latino) on meanings crafted from Chicano literature. This article addresses the effect of Chicano literature on ethnic identity and worldview formation. The data source is participant observation and interviews with eighteen students in a college-level Chicano literature seminar in the United States. Latino students found that the literature spoke to their experience as Latinos, inciting a sense of membership in a community that merits inclusion in a college course. This connection with the literature transmuted into ethnic validation for nearly all Latino students. Non-Latinos, hindered from relating to the course content on an ethnic level, discovered alternate entryways into the texts that allowed for identification on other particular levels. Non-Latinos ascertained how ethnic distinctions partially shape human experience and that this understanding is critical to cross-cultural appreciation and empathy. Non-Latinos additionally perceived that a common humanity tunnels beneath ethnic difference.
Open Access
Fit to Be Good Cooks and Good Mechanics: Racialization in Schools
(New York University Press, 2011) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica
School systems are simultaneously racialized and racializing. Educational institutions possess tremendous capacity to reproduce the power structure and racial hierarchy of society. Family, as another social institution, mediates the racializing effects of the educational system. The family is a critical site of racial identity development as it is a locale where intergenerational biography-based teaching occurs and strategies of action and resistance are formed. Within both schools and families, students respond to racializing messages and renegotiate their racial self-understanding. School experiences are conditioned by historical context, gender, and parental influences as parents use their own schooling experience as fodder for the intergenerational transfer of knowledge and ideologies to their children. This chapter asks, What influence do educational systems have on immigrants’ and citizens’ racial identity formation? What role do families play in amplifying or mitigating the process of racialization? From a long-term perspective, what are the cumulative effects of racialization across family generations? This chapter examines how second- and third-generation Mexican Americans experience their social identity within the educational system and how parents’ experiences with their own schooling shape their parenting styles.
Open Access
Gender across family generations: change in Mexican American masculinities and femininities
(Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 2014-04) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica
How do conceptions of gender – attitudes, expectations, and behaviours – change from generation to generation in Mexican American families? The notion of gender as socially constructed allows for the possibility of change, yet existing studies documenting change provide insight into why gender changes occur but do not sufficiently describe how this process happens. Based on interviews with three-generation Mexican American families in California, this article finds that reflection on natal family experiences and intergenerational family communication – autobiographical stories, lessons, and advice – are mechanisms that shift masculinity, femininity, and gender relations. Men use their natal family dynamics to rethink male dominance in favour of improved familial and romantic relationships whereas women consider their biographies and cross-generational advice to challenge patriarchy and become more educated and assertive. Families are crucibles of social change: reflection on natal family experiences and communication that crosscuts family generations actualise and initiate paradigm shifts about gender.
Open Access
“If I Can Offer You Some Advice”: Rapport and Data Collection in Interviews Between Adults of Different Ages
(Symbolic Interaction, 2017-05) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica
Reflexively analyzing interactions between myself (young adult woman) and 150 adult research participants, I explore how interviewees responded to the interviewer's perceived age in combination with other social identity categories. Addressing a gap in scholarship on adult-adult interview interactions, this article examines how age gradations, in combination with other axes of similarity or difference, affect researcher-interviewee rapport and data acquisition. Racial similarity, regardless of age, unlocked access to the topic of race/ethnicity. Age intersected with gender such that women within a decade of the woman interviewer's age assumed similarity and were communicative. In interviews with similarly-aged heterosexual men, awareness of sexuality inhibited answers around intimacy. With older interviewees, gender similarity bridged the age chasm with women. In contrast, age and gender difference inspired older men to act paternalistically and give unsolicited advice. Even among adults, interviewees' classification of the interviewer's age contours the interactional dynamic, impacts data acquisition, and reproduces social distinctions.
Open Access
Methodological Appendix: A Note on Sociological Reflexivity and "Situated Interviews"
(New York University Press, 2011) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica
Open Access
Mexican Migration and Settlement
(Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 2010-06) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica
Literature on international migration, assimilation, and transnationalism continues to be concerned with questions about ties that migrants and their descendants have with their homelands, coethnics, and the native-born population. Tomás R. Jiménez's Replenished Ethnicity: Mexican Americans, Immigration, and Identity and Joanna Dreby's Divided by Borders: Mexican Migrants and their Children provide important perspectives on different aspects of the larger phenomenon of international migration from Mexico to the United States that is a consequence of labor demand in the United States, economic need and job scarcity in Mexico, and a global economy. Both books deal with social life that takes place across ethnic boundaries, within ethnic groups, and across national borders. Taking qualitative approaches and dealing with the perennial tension between inclusion and exclusion, these books analyze the experiences and perspectives of Mexican migrants, Mexican children, and Mexican Americans.
Open Access
Race Cognizance and Colorblindness: Effects of Latino/Non-Hispanic White Intermarriage
(Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 2014-12) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica
Latino racial/ethnic intermarriage has grown over time, increases with each generation in the United States, and occurs most frequently with non-Hispanic Whites. This article answers the question: How does intermarriage change racial/ethnic consciousness for both partners? Drawing on in-depth interviews with thirty intermarried Latinos and non-Hispanic Whites, I critique assimilation, Whiteness, and colorblindness theories, finding two predominant racial consciousness outcomes of intermarriage: race cognizance and racial colorblindness. First, intermarriage can enhance Whites’ understanding of race/ethnicity and racism, a phenomenon I call race cognizance. Second, intermarriage can produce colorblind discourse that focuses on similarity, yet in ways inconsistent with colorblind racism. Racial consciousness varies by ethnicity: most intermarried Whites reported race cognizance, an outcome unforeseen by traditional theories of integration, whereas Latinos more often espoused colorblindness. These understandings are used in different contexts: race cognizance is stimulated by the public domain, whereas colorblindness is evoked in private space. These findings demonstrate that racial consciousness is fluid, and influenced by intermarriage and ethnicity.
Open Access
Review, Latinos in American Society: Families and Communities in Transition
(Contemporary Society: A Journal of Reviews, 2013-04) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica
Review of Latinos in American Society: Families and Communities in Transition by Ruth Enid Zambrana.
Open Access
Talking Back to Controlling Images: Latinos' Changing Responses to Racism Over the Life Course
(Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2015) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica; Norton-Smith, Kathryn
‘Controlling images’ are central to the reproduction of racial, class, and gender inequality, yet there is a dearth of knowledge pertaining to Latinos. Drawing from sixty-two in-depth, life history interviews with Latino men, we ask: How do controlling images of Latinos as gang members and sports athletes impose constraints and channel emotions? How do Latinos respond to these images? We document how institutions and people deploying controlling images blockade access to education and upward mobility. We find that life course stage shapes Latinos’ responses to this imagery. In their youth, Latino respondents used emotional strategies to resist racial subjugation. As adults, respondents resisted racist controlling images through leadership activities in the professional realm. Since adults possess more social power than youth, adults were better equipped to engage in leadership endeavors as resistance as compared to youth who, constrained by age, predominately utilized emotional resistance strategies.
Open Access
The "ethnic core" as an unsung reference group
(Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2020-08) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica
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).
Open Access
THE BUMPY ROAD OF ASSIMILATION: GENDER, PHENOTYPE, AND HISTORICAL ERA
(Sociological Spectrum, 2011-10) Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica
Gender, phenotype, and historical era powerfully shape the life experiences, identities, and cultures of Mexican-origin families. Using interview data from three-generation Mexican-American families, second-generation Mexican-American women were inclined to revivify their heritage upon marriage or childbearing whereas men underwent the gendered racialization process of U.S. military service. Among the third generation, skin color determines the relevance or irrelevance of “symbolic ethnicity.” Women engaged in a “third-generation return” to ethnicity far more than men, revealing gendered expectations of cultural transmission. This article advances assimilation theory by identifying fractures within generations—gender, phenotype and historical context—that steer incorporation processes.