South Americans, one of the fastest growing Latino and immigrant groups in the United States, are an understudied group. To examine South Americans’ integration into US society, I focus on racial and ethnic identities as proxies of assimilation. Assimilation involves the absorption of one group into another group, denoting how people identify with and have solidarity to racial and ethnic groups (Rumbaut 2011). However, assimilation theories have neglected gender and thus, I utilized intersectionality to explore the ways selected South American groups racially and ethnically identify and assimilate into US society.The dissertation adhered to a mixed methods approach. In the first stage, I examined the selection of racial categories by people of South American origin using the American Community Survey data. Secondly, I conducted semi-structured, face-to-face interviews with Colombians, Peruvians and Argentinians in Ohio. Ohio was selected because it is one of the states besides Illinois that have the largest population of South Americans in the Midwest (Pew Hispanic Center 2013). Through the mixed methods approach and intersectional analysis, I not only found that national origin, race, ethnicity, gender, class, documentation status and phenotypic differences in the selection of racial and ethnic categories, experiences of racialization, but also in the meanings and identities of South Americans. While their Latinidad is associated by others as foreigner, inferior, and Mexican, South Americans express their identities and group membership as culture, language, origins, unity, empowerment, and commonalities in experiences including racialization as a minority group.
Read
