Ambiguous Ethnicity? Social Segregation and Racial Assimilation among Hispanic Adolescents

Ted Mouw, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Texas A&M University

This paper examines social network data drawn from a nationally representative sample of schools in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) to pursue two related questions: (1) How much intra-ethnic friendship is there among Hispanics? and (2) Does racial segregation among Hispanics increase the longer they have lived in the U.S.? To answer the first question, we analyze the degree of intra-ethnic friendship among different Hispanic origin groups. To answer the second question, we use information on the length of time since immigration to the U.S. and the multiple reports of race available in the Add Health data to investigate the process of "racial assimilation" among Hispanic immigrants. Although the p-star models depict lower levels of racial and ethnic homophily, a simulation will show that the predicted outcome levels of segregation converge to the logit estimates.