New Books In Latino Studies

Richard Alba, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, has written an intriguing new book on our understanding of American demographic data, and how we, as citizens, see each other as part of the fabric of the United States. The Great Demographic Illusion: Majority, Minority, and the Expanding American Mainstream (Princeton UP, 2020) examines the long historical narrative of the experience of immigrants to the United States while also mapping out various forms of data to help us understand the actual experience of immigrants, over time, in the U.S. Part of Alba’s research in this project is highlighting the issue of what kind of assimilation actually happened in the U.S., especially in the post-World War II period. He explains that there was mass assimilation, after World War II, of the children of immigrants who had arrived in the U.S. in the earlier waves of immigration, prior to WWII. But Alba is not only interested in the immigrant experience, what he is re