Researchers have racialized and stereotyped Mexican immigrants and their offspring as permanent members of the working class. Such research on the Mexican-origin population suggests that “Mexican Americans will never assimilate into the middle class” and focusses on “poor and unauthorized workers and their similarly low-income children who remain in disadvantaged or working-class ethnic communities” (2). In contrast, this innovative book by Agius Vallejo focusses on upward mobility by immigrants' children (unauthorized migrants, legal labor migrants, and braceros) in the Los Angeles and Santa Ana area. Utilizing interviews, non-participant observation, participant observation, and ethnography she provides a rich contextual description of middle-class immigrant life.

She asks whether these immigrants experience the “stigma of race and … downward mobility where they incorporate as racialized minorities” or if they experience linear movement “incorporating closer to whites” (18).

The sociologist defines “middle class” by considering income, profession/business ownership, college education, and home ownership. In 2009 a middle-class family in Los Angeles earned $50,000. Among people of Mexican descent only 7 percent had a BA in 2010 and only about half owned their homes. In other words, this Mexican American middle class is small. Yet this class's existence and growth are important and contrary to researchers' prediction of class stagnation or downward mobility.

Agius Vallejo places the structural location of Mexican people in historical context and explains why a middle class of Mexican origin had been prevented or hindered before World War II, “the civil rights movement,” and immigration reform. Their location in the class structure cannot be understood without acknowledging racist immigration laws such as the Bracero program. Likewise, this may be the first study to show that President Reagan's policy, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, resulted in legal status and indeed fostered this new middle class.

Agius Vallejo counters Maxine Baca Zinn and Barbara Wells, who argued that Mexican immigrants lacked “high-quality resources that could facilitate upward mobility for either new immigrants or second- and later-generation Mexicans” (144). Chapter 3 shows that pathways to the middle class include college preparatory classes (especially AP and SAT classes), extracurricular activities, financial-aid information, and middle-class mentors. So the three authors would actually agree that immigrants do not always have access to the “high-quality resources.” Another resource to upward mobility she evidences is residence in middle-class neighborhoods, schools, and suburbs.

Chapter 4, coauthored with Jennifer Lee, addresses to what extent this new middle class feels obligated to family or whether meritocratic individualism takes over. They concluded that over time the new Mexican Americans “more closely resemble the ideal type of white middle-class individualism,” but there is significant giving back to working-class familia (101).

In chapter 5, which examines identities, the author counters the idea of “fading patterns of ethnicity” (177) and overwhelming identification with whites or being “whitewashed.” While she notes that there is some crossing, this group typically develops “a minority middle-class identity that is partly born out of a context of discrimination” (141) and mostly refers to itself as “Mexican American.”

Perhaps the most interesting discussion, in chapter 6, is the incorporation of Mexican Americans into their own “minority culture of mobility,” yet another resource (143). Mexican Americans have created a “pathway to mobility” through professional clubs to empower themselves and learn about business and white/middle-class/professional culture. Though the author does not address the topic, in California Mexican immigrants have had a minority culture of defense organizations since the 1860s; a minority culture of rights organizations since the 1930s; and a minority culture of mobility in Mexican/Mexican American chambers of commerce and professional organizations since the 1970s.

Agius Vallejo, a European American by birth married to a Mexican American, became a member of the Association of Latinas in Business and “passed” as a Latina as part of her study. This insider activity acquired honestly – effective tools by an ethnographer – allowed her to hear middle-class discourse and racialized/sexist comments by whites in Orange County she would not have heard or recorded otherwise.

This is a new middle class and not to be confused with Mexican Americans already here; these are new Mexican Americans. Given the racialization of Mexican immigrants “as poor, unassimilable, and uniformly headed for downward mobility” (184) by some Congress members during immigration debates of 2013, this is a timely, critical, and significant study with policy implications – citizenship/legal status promotes class mobility. This study also confirms that a few new Mexican Americans will slowly join the middle class, but with partial incorporation into whiteness.