Story Created:
Dec 24, 2009 at 10:42 AM PST
Story Updated:
Dec 24, 2009 at 10:42 AM PST
WASHINGTON — Young Latinos in the United States are satisfied with their lives and optimistic about their futures, but they also are conflicted about their national identity, says a new study from the Pew Hispanic Center.
According to the survey — an in-depth look at Hispanics ages 16-25 — a large majority of Latino youths place a high value on education, hard work and career success. Yet, as a group, Latinos are much more likely than other American teens to drop out of school, become pregnant, live in poverty or join a gang.
The survey of more than 1,000 Latino youth finds that Hispanic females have the highest rate of teen pregnancy — 26 percent — of any major racial or ethnic group in the country. The high school dropout rate among Latinos — at 17 percent — is nearly three times as high as it is among whites (6 percent), and nearly twice the rate among African-Americans (9 percent). About 30 percent of young Latinos say they have a friend or relative who is a current or former gang member, according to the survey.
“These are ... behaviors that, through history, have often been associated with the immigrant experience,” the center’s director, Paul Taylor, wrote in the study. “But most Latino youth are not immigrants. Two-thirds were born in the United States, many of them descendants of the big, ongoing wave of Latin American immigrants who began coming to this country around 1965.”
Though they outperform their foreign-born peers in some economic and social areas, young Hispanics also are about twice as likely as foreign-born teens to have gotten into a fight or carried a weapon in the past year, according to the study. They are also more likely to be in prison, the study says.
“It is clear that many of today’s Latino youth, be they first or second generation, are straddling two worlds as they adapt to the new homeland,” Taylor wrote.
Asked which term they generally use first to describe themselves, 52 percent showed a strong preference for their family’s country of origin over American (24 percent), or the terms Hispanic or Latino (20 percent). The survey used the terms Hispanic and Latino interchangeably.
According to the center, Hispanics are the largest minority population in the United States. They’re also the youngest, with a median age of 27, the center said. And two-thirds of Hispanic youth are native-born Americans.
The study, entitled “Between Two Worlds: How Young Latinos Come of Age in America,” was conducted as part of the larger 2009 National Survey of Latinos.
It’s the first in a yearlong series from the Washington-based Pew Research Center examining the attitudes and experiences of America's millennial generation.
The telephone survey of 1,240 youths has a margin of error of 4.6 percentage points.
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