On "Groupness'

VIRGINIA YANS

WRITING IN THE PAGES of this journal seven years ago, George J. Sanchez, the distinguished historian of Mexican Americans, reached an important conclusion: immigration history had reached an impasse. Renewal and redemption, he argued, awaited the successful incorporation of scholarship developed outside the field, the scholarship of "race, nation, and culture." Sanchez took sides in what sociologists Stephen Cornell and Douglas Hartmann later described as the "race or ethnicity?" debates. Framing these debates in methodological terms, Sanchez argued that the continuing use of assimilation paradigms suited to European immigrant experiences created a kind of analytic paralysis: assimilation paradigms do not account for persistent racial differences; they avoid the master American narrative of "white supremacy."