Culture Clash? Contesting Notions of American Identity and the Effects of Latin American Immigration

Abstract

The publication of Samuel Huntington's Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity provides an opportunity to consider several distinct underlying assumptions about American national identity, and to evaluate the claim that this identity is threatened by growth among native-born and immigrant populations of Latin American origin, particularly—but not exclusively—Mexicans.Luis R. Fraga is Associate Professor of Political Science at Stanford University (fraga@stanford.edu). Fraga was a member of the APSA Standing Committee on Civic Engagement and Education that co-authored Democracy at Risk: And What to do About it (Brookings Institution Press 2005) and is co-author of Multiethnic Moments: The Politics of Urban Education Reform (Temple University Press, forthcoming 2006). Gary M. Segura is Associate Professor of Political Science at University of Washington (gmsegura@u.washington.edu). Among his most recent publications are “Earth Quakes and After Shocks: Race, Direct Democracy, and Partisan Change,” in the American Journal of Political Science (2006), “The Mobilizing Effect of Majority-Minority Districts on Latino Turnout” in the American Political Science Review (2004), and the edited volume Diversity In Democracy: Minority Representation in the United States, published in 2005 by the University of Virginia Press. Fraga and Segura are both among the co-principal investigators of the Latino National Survey (LNS), an 8600 respondent state-stratified survey of Latinos in the U.S. scheduled for completion in the Spring of 2006.