Dernography, Vol. 25, No. I, February 1988

Language Usage and Fertility in the Mexican-OriginPopulation of the United States

Gray SwicegoodDepartment of Sociology, University of Illinois,Urbana, Illinois 61801

Frank D. BeanDepartment of Sociology and Population ResearchCenter, University ofTexas, Austin, Texas 78712

Elizabeth Hervey StephenDepartment of Dernography, GeorgetownUniversity, Washington, D.C. 20057

Wolfgang OpitzBattelle Human Affairs Research Center, Seattle,Washington 98105

This article examines the effects of English proficiency and fernale education oncumulative and recentfertility within the Mexican-origin population in the V.S. Toascertain whether the culturalor the human capital aspects oflinguistic variables havethe greater salience for fertility behavior, fertility patterns of bilingual women arecompared with thoseof monolingual women speaking English or Spanish. Using the1980 V.S. Census 5 percent Public Use Microdata Sample for ever-marriedMexican-origin women aged 15-44, wefind that for almostall agecohorts, the effectsofEnglishproficiency are negative and increase with rising education. The strength ofthe interaction is greater in younger age groups. Greater English proficiency is alsoassociated with a more negative impact of education for native- than foreign-bornwomen. Overall, the infiuence of"opportunity cost, " as opposed to cultural factors, ismore important in shaping the fertility behavior of these women.

The Mexican-origin population is characterized by higher fertility than are otherracial/ethnic graups in the United States. For exarnple, as indicated by 1980 census data,Mexican-origin wornen aged 15-44 reported 9 percent more children ever born (1,715children per 1,000wornen) than did blacks (1,575 per 1,000) and 39 percent more than didnon-Hispanic white wornen (1,232 per 1,000) (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1983).Moreover, Mexican-origin fertility also exceeded that of other Hispanic graups by arnountsranging frarn 6 percent (as cornpared with Puerto Rican wornen) to 70 percent (as cornparedwith Cuban women).! A portion of these differences is attributable to differencesbetween theMexican-origin and other populations in age cornposition and marital patterns (Bean andTienda, in press). But in cornparison with the fertility of non-Hispanic white wornen, thefertility of Mexican-origin wornen rernains substantially higher even after standardizing forcornpositional differences between the two graups (Bean and Swicegood, 1985).

One explanation fOT such residual fertility differences is the presurned existence ofsubcultural differences between the two groups (cf. Bean and Marcum, 1978; Goldscheiderand Uhlenberg, 1969). For exarnple, Mexican Arnericans have sornetirnes been thought to

Copyright © 1988 Population Association of America

17

18 Demography, Val. 25, No. 1, February 1988

adhere more closely than non-Hispanic whites to familistic norms and values, that is, to giveoverriding importance to the collective needs of the family as opposed to individual needs(Bean, Curtis, and Marcum, 1977; Murillo, 1971). Such orientations-in combination withthe influence of other pronatalistic narms and values presumably mare characteristic of thecultural climate affecting reproductive behavior in Mexico--constitute a plausible explana­tion of higher Mexican-origin fertility (Gurak, 1980; Petersen, 1975). Without priormeasurement, however, of group differences in such norms and values that might affectreproductive behavior, residual explanations are less than satisfactory (e.g., Ryder, 1978).Given the lack of such measures, a useful research strategy is to seek measures of the degreeof cultural attachment and identification within the group. Linguistic variables seem toprovide such possibilities. As we will elaborate, however, the difficulty with assuming thatlinguistic variables reflect the extent of intragroup cultural attachment and identification isthat they mayaiso be interpreted as indicators of human capital, thus rendering ambiguousthe meaning of relationships between language variables and fertility behavior.

Irrespective of whether a cultural- or a human capital-based significance is attached tolanguage variables, studying their relationships to fertility can help clarify the nature offactars sustaining high fertility within the Mexican-origin population, because linguisticvariables provide a basis for distinguishing among members of the Mexican-origin popula­tion that is generally unavailable in the case of members of the native-born non-Hispanicwhite population. For example, in 1980, more than 75 percent of Mexican Americansreported that they were using at least same Spanish in the horne (Bean, Browning, andFrisbie, 1984:table 5). In 1976 in the five Southwestern states where this group isgeographically concentrated, the tendency to speak Spanish was even more pervasive, withonly 12.5 percent of Mexican Americans having indicated that they spake only English,whereas more than 43 percent reparted that they were using Spanish predominantly orexclusively (J. S. Garcia, 1981). Such predominant use of Spanish implies considerablevariability in English proficiency within the Mexican-origin population. Examining theinfluence of this variable on fertility behavior thus adds to the information that can beobtained by making only intergroup comparisons.

The purpose of this article is, thus, to present evidence concerning the relationshipbetween English proficiency and fertility within the Mexican-origin population in theUnited States. We also examine the extent to which English proficiency conditions theeffects of education on fertility within different age and nativity groups. Finally, to ascertainwhether the cultural or the human capital aspects of linguistic variables have the greatersalience for fertility behavior, we also compare the fertility patterns ofbilingual warnen whospeak English weIl or very weIl with those of warnen who speak only English (and who thusare presumably least likely to identify with Mexican culture) and with those of warnen whospeak Spanish but do not speak English weIl (and who thus are presumably most likely toidentify with Mexican culture).

Theoretical Rationales

Although linguistic variables have not received a great deal of attention in the analysisof differential fertility in the United States, three basic rationales suggest that patterns oflanguage usage and proficiency might be associated with fertility within the MexicanAmerican population. One follows from considering language as a key indicator of culturalattachment and identification (Fishman, 1977; Lopez and Sabagh, 1978). The existence ofa unique language, namely Spanish, among some members of the Mexican-ariginpopulation not only may serve as a symbol of Hispanic cultural heritage (Edwards, 1984) butmay also function partially to define ethnicity (Lauwagie, 1979) and to reinforce boundarymaintenance between ethnic groups (Barth, 1969). Hence some observers have emphasized

Language and Mexican-Origin Fertility 19

the disappearance of distinctive linguistic behavior as a necessary but not sufficient conditionfor acculturation and eventual assimilation (Lieberson, 1970). To the extent that thetendency to speak Spanish (or not to speak English) reflects cultural attachment andidentification, and thus adherence to pronatalist fertility norms and values, the childbearingbehavior of Mexican-origin women in the United States would be expected to be negativelyrelated to levels of English proficiency.

A second reason involves the consideration oflinguistic variables as indicators ofhumancapital. If language skills govern access to the resources, opportunities, and networksavailable to the members of ethnic groups, then the ability to use English proficiently in anEnglish-dominated society is a distinct form of human capital just as is education or workexperience (Chiswick, 1978; Portes and Bach, 1980; Tienda, 1980). As postulated by themicroeconomic theory of fertility behavior, such variables negatively affect fertility becausethe earnings foregone by women who curtail their labor force participation to have and rearchilclren varies directly with their stock of accumulated human capital (Becker, 1960;Mincer, 1963). That is, the opportunity cost of childbearing is higher among women withgreater human capital, including Mexican American women who possess greater Englishlanguage skills. Given this negative relationship, the microeconomic perspective wouldpredict, ceteris paribus, a negative relationship between English proficiency and fertilityamong Mexican American women.

A third reason is found in the sociologicalliterature on the relationship between femalelabor force participation and fertility. Complementary to the microeconomic theory, thisapproach emphasizes the ways in which structural factors affect incompatibilities betweenworking and childbearing among women. Institutional arrangements surrounding reproduc­tion (Mason and Palan, 1981; Stycos and Weller, 1967), child care (Stolzenberg and Waite,1981), and race/ethnic relations (Bean and Swicegood, 1985) can affect the degree ofsubstitutability between working and mothering. Such arrangements might be expected togenerate a negative relationship between English proficiency and fertility in the case ofMexican American women. If, for example, poor English skills relegate some women to thesecondary labor market (Beck, Horan, and Tolbert, 1980), where work is more Iikely to bepart time and temporary and chances for advancement relatively poor, then incompatibilitybetween labor force participation and motherhood would be reduced and higher fertilitywould be expected for those less proficient in English.

Each of these perspectives is consistent with the results of recent research indicating thatEnglish language usage and proficiency exert a net positive impact on the earnings andoccupational placement of Mexican Americans of both sexes (Cooney and Ortiz, 1983; S.Garcia, 1979; Tienda and Guhleman, 1985; Tienda and Neidert, 1984) and that participa­tion in Spanish-speaking networks is reciprocally related to socioeconomic status (Mirowskyand Ross, 1984). Such results suggest a further hypothesis about the relationship betweenlanguage and fertility. Irrespective of whether English proficiency functions as an indicatorof cultural attachment or of human capital, if Mexican-origin women with little Englishproficiency adhere to pronatalist norms to such a degree that the rising opportunity coststypically associated with increasing education are overridden by cultural imperatives, thenthe dfects of education on fertility would be diminished. Or if the lack of English languageskills [imits the efforts of even highly educated Spanish-speaking women to use theireducational human capital, then a similar result might be expected. In either case, educationloses its human capital potential and hence its utility as a measure of opportunity costs. Thusour second major hypothesis predicts that among Mexican American women with lowerlevels of English proficiency, the negative impact of education on fertility will be lesspronounced because these women should be either less willing or less able to converteducation into potential earnings than their more highly proficient counterparts.

20 Demography, Vol. 25, No. 1, February 1988

Previous Research

Our investigation has relatively few empirical antecedents, and the available evidenceon the links between language and fertility is mixed. In an attempt to determine whether thedistinctive fertility patterns of racial and ethnic groups result primarily from subcultural orstructural influences, Lopez and Sabagh (1978) examined the association of severalindicators of ethnic integration and the number of children ever born to a sample of MexicanAmerican women from the Los Angeles area in 1973. Surprisingly, they reported a negativerelationship between fertility and the speaking of Spanish at horne and the use of Spanishlanguage media. They argued that language variables reflect a heightened awareness ofexternal discrimination that leads to a reduction in family size, ceteris paribus, therebysupporting a structural interpretation consistent with the kind of minority group status effectshypothesized by Goldscheider and Uhlenberg (1969).2 Cooney, Rogler, and Schroder's(1981) recent study ofPuerto Rican fertility, however, failed to support the findings ofLopezand Sabagh with respect to Spanish language use and childbearing insofar as they found nosignificant relationship between the two after controlling for socioeconomic fadors. Theirfindings of no net association between language and fertility are mirrored in Fisher andMarcum's (1984) study of expected family size among Mexican American couples partici­pating in the Austin Family Survey.

Plan of Analysis

Each of the aforementioned studies relied on relatively small sarnples that were notnationally representative of the ethnic groups involved. Furthermore, they used varyingmeasures of both language and fertility variables, which could also lead to inconsistentresults. The questions on language included in the 1980 census make possible the detailedinvestigation of the relationship between language and fertility with a nationally repre­sentative sample. Our empirical analysis focuses on English proficiency and on whether ornot a language other than English is spoken in the horne. We expect that the linkagesoutlined will be more likely to characterize the younger and the native-born cohorts ofMexican American women. Presumably these women would have experienced lessdiscrimination in the labor market and participated in broader social circles than their olderand foreign-born counterparts. Under these conditions, their attachment to Hispanic cultureand/or the greater opportunity costs associated with higher education should be moreimportant in fertility decision making. In following this logic, the research hypotheses areseparately tested for age and nativity groups.

Is there any way to ascertain whether aspects of cultural attachment or aspects ofhumancapital are more salient for the fertility behavior ofMexican-origin women? Examining whathappens in the case of bilingual women who speak English well both as compared withwomen speaking only English and as compared with women who speak Spanish but Englishpoorly provides a basis for distinguishing the salience of the two alternatives. Culturalarguments emphasize language as an aspect of cultural attachment and identification. Theytend to portray bilingual Mexican Americans as at least partially identified with Mexicannorms and beliefs about fertility behavior, and as a result they imply that such normativeorientations operate to erode the force of experienced opportunity cost effects, thusweakening the negative education/fertility relationship for such women as compared withwomen who speak only English. By contrast, the human capital-based arguments wouldtend to emphasize only the potentially greater marketability of women with greater Englishskills (or perhaps the even greater marketability of persons with both English and Spanishlanguage skills)and thus would not predict any necessary weakening of the education/fertilityrelationship among bilingual women compared with women speaking only English. Hence

Language and Mexican-Origin Fertility 21

in our analyses, we also compare the strength and pattern of the education/fertilityrelationship among these three groups of women.

Data and Method

The data for this study are from the 1980 U.S. Census 5 percent Public Use MicrodataSample (PUMS-A). Because our hypotheses concern patterns of childbearing within theMexican American population, the sampie is limited to ever-married women aged 20-44who are of Mexican descent. For the first time, the Spanish-origin question was asked ofeveryone in the 1980 census. It allowed respondents to identify whether they were of Spanishorigin or descent. We define the Mexican-origin population as persons who identifiedthemselves as "Mexican," "Mexican American," or "Chicano" or those persons who wrotein an entry such as "La Raza." The total sample consists of 29,506 women.

We analyze both the cumulative and recent fertility of these women. These dependentvariables are operationalized as the number of children ever born and number of childrenunder age 3. The former is taken directly from the census question, and the latter isapproximated using own-children techniques.! The recent fertility measure is examinedbecause it provides additional information on the differential timing of fertility, an importantconcern when examining the childbearing patterns of immigrant groups (Bean et al., 1984).The recent fertility measure also represents childbearing that is temporally eIoser to the levelof English proficiency of the respondent at the time of the survey. Of course, to the extentthat the assumptions behind own-children fertility estimates are not met, using recentfertility measures may involve sacrificing precision in our childbearing measure to achievea greater temporal correspondence with the language measure.

The key independent variable is English proficiency. The census questionnaireineIuded language questions pertaining to language usage at horne and, of those who spokea language other than English, a question that asked: "How weIl does this person speakEnglish?" Respondents could answer "very well," "weil," "not well," or "not at all." Wehave scored the item from 0 to 4, with 0 the score for "not at all," 3 the score for "very well,"and 4 the score for persons who spoke only English.

We use standard regression techniques to estimate the relationship between Englishproficiency and the two fertility measures net of several important demographie controlvariables, also including a term for the interaction between English proficiency andeducation. Control variables ineIuded in the analysis are respondent's age, nativity, maritaldisruption, and education. Age is measured in years. Marital status is controlled in theanalysis by restricting the sampie to ever-married women and is coded as 0 for currentlymarried women and 1 for women who were separated, widowed, or divorced at the time ofthe interview. Nativity is coded as I for foreign-born and 0 for native-born women.Education is measured in single completed years of education.

Results

The descriptive data in Table 1 show a relationship between fertility and languageproficiency for both cumulative and recent childbearing measures across all age cohorts ofMexican-origin women in 1980. The top and middle panels contain, respectively, the meannumber of children ever born and own children under age 3 for the total sample of womenaged 20-44 and each 5-year age cohort. For the total sarnple, women who speak onlyEnglish have two children on average as compared with more than three and one-thirdchildren for women speaking no English at all. In fact, the cumulative fertility of women inthe total sampie monotonically decreases with rising levels of English proficiency, and ingeneral, this pattern is observed within each age cohort. Cumulative fertility also increasessharply across age cohorts, but there is little reason to expect that the completed family sizes

22 Dernography, Vol. 25, No. 1, February 1988

Table 1. Mean Nurnber of Children Ever Born and Children Under 3, by English Proficiency and AgeGroups, Ever-Married Mexican-Origin Wornen: 1980

Age group

Proficiency 20-24 25-29 30-34 35-39 40-44 Total

Children Ever Born

English only 1.15 1.63 2.30 3.13 3.00 1.99Very weil 1.33 1.89 2.62 3.23 4.09 2.47Weil 1.39 2.21 2.80 3.60 4.02 2.79Not weil 1.49 2.09 3.23 4.05 4.25 2.90Not at Cl.1I 1.50 2.62 3.69 4.50 5.75 3.37

Children Under 3

English only 0.61 0.36 0.17 0.09 0.01 0.31Very weil 0.66 0.49 0.34 0.14 0.05 0.37Weil 0.65 0.49 0.31 0.17 0.05 0.34Not weil 0.77 0.58 0.47 0.30 0.10 0.47Not at all 0.75 0.65 0.47 0.30 0.15 0.50

Percent and Nurnber of Cases

English only 18.2 17.2 14.2 10.8 11.3 14.8Verywell 40.2 39.9 40.4 41.5 37.2 40.0Weil 17.5 18.2 20.7 23.6 25.7 20.6Not weil 12.1 14.5 14.4 13.7 14.7 13.9Not at all 12.0 10.1 10.3 10.5 11.1 10.7Total 100.0 99.9 100.0 100.1 100.0 100.0

Nurnber 6,063 7,572 6,706 4,901 4,264 29,506

of the younger cohorts will match the levels attained by the older cohorts, rnuch of whosechildbearing occurred during the "baby boom" era.

The recent fertility experience ofMexican Arnerican wornen (rniddle panel ofTable 1)is sirnilarly related to their English language abilities. For the total sarnple, wornen speakingno English have about 60 percent more children under age 3 than do wornen speaking onlyEnglish (0.50 vs. 0.31). Although this differential pattern is not as pronounced for theyoungest age group, for each age eohort the differenees in reeent fertility between thosewornen with the greatest and least proficiency in spoken English is of sufficient magnitudeto be of substantive interest. The bottorn panel ofTable 1 provides the percentage of wornenin each category of English proficiency and the corresponding number of cases on which thefertility estimates are based. Substantial variance in English language skill is observed withinand arnong age groups. For exarnple, irrespective of age, roughly one-quarter of the womeneither do not speak any English or do not speak it well.

In the next stage of the analysis, we estirnate sets of multiple regression modelscorresponding to the research hypotheses eoneerning the assoeiation between language andfertility and the interactive effects of language and education on fertility. Again we examineboth eumulative and recent ehildbearing for the total sampie and for each age eohort. Thedeseriptive statisties for the variables included in these models are presented in Table 2. Themean number of ehildren ever born ranges from 1.35 for the 20- to 24-year-old women to4.16 for the 40- to 44-year-old wornen, and the variation within eaeh eohort is substantial.The levels of reeent ehildbearing follow the expected age pattern of fertility, decreasing fromabout 0.7 children less than age 3 for the youngest cohart to less than 0.1 far the oldest

Language and Mexican-Origin Fertility

Table 2. Means and Standard Oeviations (S.O.s) of Variables Used in Regression Models for AllEver-Married Mexican-Origin Wornen, by Age Groups: 1980

23

Age group

20-24 25-29 30-34 35-39 40-44 Total

Variable Mean S.O. Mean S.O. Mean S.O. Mean S.O. Mean S.O. Mean S.O.

Chi/dren ever born 1.35 1.07 2.01 1.38 2.81 1.67 3.55 2.07 4.16 2.47 2.62 1.97Own chi/dren <3 0.67 0.70 0.50 0.62 0.34 0.55 0.18 0.43 0.06 0.26 0.38 0.59

Age 22.25 1.38 27.02 1.43 31.90 1.41 36.85 1.39 41.90 1.38 30.93 6.69Post-married 0.12 0.33 0.14 0.35 0.16 0.37 0.18 0.39 0.19 0.39 0.16 0.36Foreign born 0.33 0.47 0.34 0.47 0.36 0.48 0.38 0.49 0.39 0.49 0.36 0.48Education 10.05 3.34 10.12 3.82 9.96 3.94 9.36 4.15 8.54 4.21 9.71 3.91

English proficiency 2.40 1.24 2.40 1.22 2.34 1.19 2.28 1.15 2.23 1.17 2.34 1.20English proficiency

x education 26.41 16.05 27.01 17.29 25.88 16.78 24.04 16.50 21.84 16.20 25.39 16.73

N 6,063 7,572 6,706 4,901 4,264 29,506

cohort. The relatively large standard deviations for the older age groups, however, indicateconsiderable variation in the number of children born to Mexican-origin women duringtheir late 30s and early 40s.

Age and marital status are included as control variables in the regression models in orderto take into account variation in exposure to the risk of childbearing. Other variablesincluded are nativity and education. It is especially irnportant to take these into accountbecause of their dernonstrated correlation with both language and Eertility. Roughlyone-third of the wornen in the sampIe were born in Mexico, which does not vary greatly byage cohort. The rnean level of education in the sarnple is less than 10 years, and even theeducational attainrnent of the youngest cohort does not greatly exceed this. The educationalattainrnent of the younger group would be higher, however, if the sampie were not restrictedto ever-rnarried wornen, a point to which we will return. Our rneasurernent strategy ofcoding English proficiency on a 5-point scale ranging frorn 0 for warnen speaking no Englishto 4 for warnen speaking only English rnakes the results of the test far interaction effectssimpler to present. The linearity assurnption does not greatly depart frorn the pattern ofrelationships observed in Table 1. The rnean level of English proficiency for the total sampIeis 2.35 and shows little variation across the age cohorts.

The regression coefficients for English proficiency frorn the additive models of childrenever born for each age cohort and the total sampIe of wornen are as follows: 20-24, -0.001;25-29, -0.062; 30-34, -0.106; 35-39, -0.135; 40-44, -0.304; total, -0.099. Thecoefficient for the total sample indicates that net of controls, wornen who speak only Englishaverage about 0.4 fewer ehildren ever born than warnen with no proficiency in English. Thissignificant (at the 0.01 level) net association between language and eurnulative fertility isevident for all age groups except the 20-24 year olds, The language effects are especiallystriking for the oldest age group, for which we estimate a net differential of about 1.2 birthsacross the range of the proficiency measure.

This same pattern of results (with the same pattern of statistical significance) is repeatedin the language eoeffieients for the analysis of reeent fertility. These coefficients are asfolIows: 20-24, -0.007; 25-29, -0.048; 30-34, -0.045; 35-39, -0.029; 40-44, -0.032;total, -0.033. Again, we find considerable support for our first hypothesis in the total sampIe

24 Demography, Vol. 25, No. 1, February 1988

and in all but the youngest of the four age groups. It is important to keep in mind, however,that the presence of an interaction between English proficiency and education means thatthe association between proficiency and fertility will vary across levels of education. Thus tothe extent that we find support for the interaction hypothesis, these coefficients are bestviewed as a composite measure of the language effect for all women included in each model.

The interaction hypothesis predicts that the negative effect of education on fertility willbe more pronounced for women with greater English proficiency. This hypothesis is assessedby including a term for the cross-product of the proficiency and education measures in theadditive model just discussed. Support for the hypothesis takes the form of a significantnegatively signed coefficient for this term. Table 3 shows the regression coefficients for therelevant independent variables. Results for the total sampie are consistent with theconditional-effects hypothesis, as indicated by the interaction coefficients of -0.021 and-0.003 from the cumulative and current fertility analyses, respectively. These coefficientsallow a ready assessment of the statistical significance of the hypothesis because the testinvolves only one degree of freedom. To see clearly the pattern of effects on fertility ofEnglish proficiency and education, however, it is useful to examine partial derivatives(Stolzenberg, 1979).

Tables 4 and 5 contain the partial derivatives showing the change in cumulative andrecent fertility examined first with respect to English proficiency (Table 4) and then withrespect to education (Table 5). Each column of estimated effects results from a transforma­tion of the coefficients from the corresponding model in Table 3 (Stolzenberg, 1979). Thetransformations yield estimated effects of an independent variable across levels of a secondindependent variable with which it interacts. For example, in the total sampie, the effect ofEnglish proficiency on the number of children ever born to women with eight years ofeducation is estimated as -0.076 = 0.092 + (-0.021 X 8). The effect for women with 16years of schooling is -0.244 = 0.092 + (-0.021 X 16). The coefficient for the Englishproficiency term of 0.092 has little meaning when viewed in isolation from the interactionterm. Technically, it represents the effect for women with zero years of education, a very

Table 3. Regressions of Children Ever Born and Own Children <3. on Selected Variables. FiveCohorts of Ever-Married Mexican-Origin Wornen: 1980

Age group

Variable 2~24 25-29 3~4 35-39 4~4 Total

Children Ever Born

Education -0.035* -0.009 -0.105* -0.127* -0.171* -0.092*English proficiency 0.287* 0.392* 0.091** -0.005 -0.368* 0.092*Education x English

proficiency -0.030* -0.049* -0.002* -0.016* 0.008 -0.021*

R2 0.12 0.15 0.16 0.14 0.13 0.33

Own Children <3

Education -0.016* 0.002 0.000 -0.007** 0.005** -0.003English proficiency 0.002 0.004 -0.017 -0.011 -0.023* -0.008Education x English

proficiency -0.001 -0.006* -0.003** -0.002 -0.001 -0.003*

R2 0.02 0.04 0.04 0.05 0.02 0.14

Note: Control variables include age, post-rnarried, and nativity.* Significant at p s 0.01 .

•• Significant at p s 0.05.

Language and Mexican-Origin Fertility 25

Table 4. PartialDerivatives ShowingChange in FertilityWith Respect to English Proficiency,From Regression Results in Table 3

Years ofAge group

schooling 20-24 25-29 30-34 35-39 40-44 Total

Children Ever Born

8 0.047 0.000 -0.085 -0.133 -0.304 -0.07610 -0.Q13 -0.098 -0.124 -0.165 -0.288 -0.11812 -0.073 -0.196 -0.173 -0.197 -0.272 -0.16014 -0.133 -0.294 -0.217 -0.229 -0.256 -0.20216 -0.193 -0.392 -0.261 -0.261 -0.240 -0.244

Children <3

8 -0.006 -0.044 -0.041 -0.027 -0.031 -0.03210 -0.008 -0.056 -0.047 -0.031 -0.033 -0.03812 -0.010 -0.068 -0.053 -0.035 -0.035 -0.04414 -0.012 -0.080 -0.059 -0.039 -0.037 -0.05016 -0.014 -0.092 -0.065 -0.043 -0.039 -0.056

small segment of the Mexican-origin population. Thus the results for the total sampie inTable 4 indicate that except for women with very little education, English proficiency isnegatively associated with both cumulative and recent fertility. Similarly, the results in Table5 show that the negative effects of education on fertility are most pronounced among womenwith greater English skills. In the case of the total sarnple, the negative impact of educationon cumulative childbearing is nearly twice as great for wornen speaking only English ascompared with those women speaking none (-0.176 vs. -0.092). The conditional effect ofEnglish proficiency is even more pronounced in regression estimates of recent fertility, forwhich the negative impact of education is nearly five times as great for women with thegreatest English proficiency as compared with those with the least (-0.015 vs. -0.003).

Table 5. Partial Derivatives Showing Change in FertilityWith Respect to Education,From Regression Results in Table 3

EnglishAge group

proficiency 20-24 25-29 30-34 35-39 40-44 Total

Children Ever Born

English only -0.155 -0.205 -0.192 -0.190 -0.137 -0.176Very weil -0.125 -0.156 -0.170 -0.174 -0.145 -0.155Weil -0.095 -0.107 -0.148 -0.158 -0.153 -0.134Not weil -0.065 -0.058 -0.126 -0.142 -0.161 -0.113Not at all -0.035 -0.009 -0.104 -0.126 -0.169 -0.092

Children <3

English only -0.019 -0.021 -0.012 -0.016 -0.000 -0.015Very weil -0.018 -0.015 -0.009 -0.014 -0.001 -0.012Weil -0.017 -0.009 -0.006 -0.012 -0.002 -0.009Not weil -0.016 -0.003 -0.003 -0.010 -0.003 -0.006Not at all -0.015 -0.003 -0.000 -0.008 -0.004 -0.003

26 Demography, Vol. 25, No. 1, February 1988

Table 3 also shows results from the age-specific interaction models, and Tables 4 and5 the associated partial derivatives. In the case of cumulative fertility, we find evidence of thepredicted education X language interaction for aB of the age cohorts save the oldest (Table3). The partial derivatives for these models (Tables 4 and 5) indicate that except for youngwomen with very low levels of formal schooling, the effect of English proficiency on fertilityis negative and this negative effect increases with rising education. Moreover, greater Englishproficiency clearly accentuates the negative impact of education on fertility, except amongthe 40-44 year olds. For exarnple, in the case of 25- to 29-year-old women, for whom themagnitude of the interaction effect is greatest, the estimated effect of education on childrenever born ranges from -0.009 for women with no proficiency in English to -0.205 for thosewho use English only. In sum the age-specific analyses of cumulative fertility generallyparallel the patterns observed for the total sample, Models of recent fertility in the bottompanel ofTable 3 provide somewhat less support for the interaction hypothesis, but significantconditional effects are in evidence for the 25- to 29- and 30- to 34-year-old cohorts. (Thepartial derivatives with respect to both English proficiency and education for interactionmodels in the bottom panels ofTabies 4 and 5 for the 20-24 year olds also show the expectedpattern of association.)

Though the results in Tables 3-5 point to differential patterns of association betweenlanguage, education, and fertility across the age groups, these patterns must be interpretedwith some caution. We had expected the hypothesized effects of English proficiency to bemost apparent for the younger cohorts. To some extent this expectation is supported by theresults, as in the case in which the interaction effects are stronger for the cohorts youngerthan age 35. The analysis of cumulative fertility, however, suggeststhat the interaction effectis weaker for the 20-24 year olds (the youngest cohort in the sarnple) than for the twosubsequent cohorts, and no significant interaction effect is found in the recent fertility modelfor the 20-24 year olds. Although this cohort has probably had greater labor market andearnings opportunities available to them than has been the case for oider Mexican-originwomen, there are also other reasons to expect that the English proficiency effects for this agegroup may be somewhat dampened.

The first reason involves our restriction of the sarnple to ever-married women. Youngwomen with the highest opportunity costs are likely to be delaying marriage as weIl aschildbearing and, consequently, are eliminated from our sarnple. If, as we expect,Mexican-origin women with higher levels of English proficiency and education aredisproportionately delaying marriage beyond the early 20s, then the variance in our fertilitymeasures for this youngest cohort is Iikely to be truncated in such a way as to attenuate thehypothesized relationships." To check this possibility, we also ran the models on aB womeninstead of only on ever-married women, and we found that the expected negativerelationship emerged in the data.

The second reason follows from the mean number of children ever born to the 20-24year olds. Given their average of 1.35 children ever born, it is likely that much of their recentfertility decision making has been concerned with the transition from first to second parity.Hout (1978) presented theoretical and empirical evidence indicating that women's potentialearnings-a proxy for opportunity costs-are IessIikely to influence this parity transition thanothers. If these kinds of factors are sirnilarly affecting the early fertility of Mexican-originwomen, then they could contribute to the diminished Ianguage effects observed for the20-24 year olds.

Although the conditional effects of Ianguage and education on fertility are Iargelyconfined to the younger cohorts, the estimated patterns of effects in Tables 4 and 5 show anegative relationship between English proficiency and both measures of childbearing at alllevels of education for all of the older cohorts. In fact, English proficiency appears to be morestrongly related to the cumulative and recent fertility of these oider women than does

Language and Mexican-Origin Fertility 27

education. Viewed across all five of the age cohorts, the results also suggest that the effectsof language on fertility accumulate during the life course. Although we cannot entirelydiscern the extent to which this pattern for cumulative fertility is distinct from cohort-specificinfluences, the findings for recent fertility indicate that the processes linking fertility andlanguage operate into the later ages of childbearing.

Up to this point, we have treated nativity as a contraI variable in our fertility models.We now present empirical analyses that focus more directly on the question of how thenativity of Mexican American women might condition the findings reported thus far.Previous research indicates that the negative relationship between education and fertility isless pronounced for women born in Mexico (Bean and Swicegood, 1982), and we want toavoid confounding the two sets of interaction effects insofar as possible.

We pursue the issue in two ways. First, we add terms for the interaction betweengeneration and education to the fertility models shown in Tables 3-5. The results from thisanalysis (not shown here) do not alter the original findings for English proficiency in anyappreciable way. 5 Next, we estimate the language effect models separately for the native- andforeign-born samples, and we find that negative English proficiency effects increase withrising education for both fertility measures (Table 6). For the foreign-born wornen, however,English proficiency does little to condition the relationship between education and thenumber of children everborn, and only a modest interaction effect is present in the analysisof the number of own children under age 3.6

We find considerable consistency in the results for the native-born women. By virtueoftheir longer residence in the United States, these women presumably have greater access toa range of economic resources and social networks than do Mexican-born wornen, as weilas less cultural attachrnent to Mexico. Higher levels of education and English proficiency arereported by native-born wornen. The regression coefficients for the models in Table 6 showthat greater English proficiency is associated with a more negative impact of education onfertility for native- than foreign-born wornen. This may be explained in part by the higherrnean and greater variance in the fertility of the women born in Mexico. These womenaverage 2.77 children ever born, as cornpared with 2.38 for all native-born women.Foreign-born women are also characterized by a relatively low rnean level of schooling (7.6years as compared with 10.9 years for native-born wornen), rnuch or all of which rnay havebeen acquired in Mexico.? Given such low levels of education, English proficiency mayassurne greater weight in fertility outcomes among the foreign born." It is also likely thatthese women experience difficulties in translating education acquired in Mexico into labor

Table6. Regressions of Children Ever Bornand Own Children <3 on Independent Variables, byNativity Status, Ever-Married Mexican-Origin Wornen: 1980

Children Ever Born Own Children <3

Native Foreign Native ForeignVariable born born born born

Education -0.067- -0.100- -0.001 -0.005--English proficiency 0.336- -0.146- 0.002 -0.007Education x English proficiency -0.040- -0.000 ~0.004· -0.003"R2 0.35 0.31 0.14 0.13N 19,928 10,578 19,928 10,578

Note: Control variabtes include age and post-married.- Significant at p :5 0.01 .

•• Significant at p :5 0.05.

28 Demography, Vol. 25, No. 1, February 1988

market rewards in the U.S. irrespective of their English proficiency, which would tend todampen language X education interaction effects on fertility among the foreign born. 9

As a final consideration, we attempt to ascertain whether the relationships involvingEnglish proficiency that we have examined derive more from the possibility that greaterattachment to Mexican culture among women with lower English proficiency mitigatesnegative education effects, or whether they derive rnore from the possibility that Englishproficiency is simply a necessary condition for the operation of opportunity cost effects. Totest this, we created three groups of women: (I) those who did not speak English weIl andspoke Spanish, (2) those who spoke only English, and (3) those who spoke English weIl orvery weIl. The latter group includes women who indicated they also spoke another language;given their Mexican origin, this other language is undoubtedly Spanish for all but a tinyfraction of women in this group. We then reexamined the education effects on fertility forthese three groups. While the women in the English-only group possess the language skillsnecessary for the operation of opportunity cost effects, they may be viewed as not possessingas strong an attachment to Mexican cultural values as the other Mexican-origin womeninasmuch as they do not speak Spanish. The women in the bilingual group possess not onlythe language skills necessary for opportunity cost effects but also a greater attachment toMexican cultural values, as indicated by their speaking Spanish. Figures 1 and 2 show thepredicted levels of recent and cumulative fertility for these three groups for high, medium,and low values of education (the medium value is taken as the mean sample for education,and the high and low values are the points one standard deviation above and below it,respectively). The women in all three language groups were assigned the means on thecontrol variables for their nativity group. Results are presented here only for the native-bornwomen because interaction effects between education and English proficiency on fertilitywere predicted and observed to be more likely among these women.

If cultural attachment overrides human capital effects, we would expect to find aneducation pattern among the bilingual women that more closely approximates that amongthe non-English-proficient women than that among the English-proficient women. If goodEnglish skills are simply aprerequisite for human capital effects, we would expect to find aneducation pattern among bilinguals that is eIoser to the pattern among English-proficientwomen. In the case of the children-ever-born measure, the pattern for the bilinguals eIearlyparalleis that for English monolinguals. In the case of the recent fertility measure, the patternfor bilinguals is nearly exactly intermediate to the patterns for the two monolingual groups,suggesting that both kinds of forces implied by the two hypotheses might be operating atonce.!" In sum, the pattern for children ever born favors the opportunity cost hypothesis, andthe pattern for recent fertility seems to reflect factors associated with both hypotheses. Onbalance, we are thus inclined to think that the results owe less to the cultural attachmentaspects of the language variables examined than to the tendency of the language variables toreflect differential opportunity costs.

Summary and Discussion

The purpose of this article has been to examine relationships among Englishproficiency, education, and the fertility behavior of Mexican-origin women in the UnitedStates. We have relied on both a cultural and an opportunity costs framework to link thesevariables, arguing that English skills can be viewed as an indicator either of cultural distancefrom Mexico or of human capital among Mexican American women. With data from the1980 census, we show that, in general, there is a substantial negative correlation betweenEnglish proficiency and the cumulative and recent fertility of this ethnic group. We alsoreport evidence suggesting that the frequently observed negative relationship betweeneducation and fertility is most pronounced among women with greater English language

Language and Mexican-Origin Fertility 29

3.2

3. 1

3.0

2.9

2.8pRED 2.7IC

~ 2.8D

e 2.5HILD 2.4REN 2.3

EVE 2.2R

~ 2.1RN

2.0

1.9

1.1

1.7

ENGLISHMONOLINGUALS

S~ANISH MONOLINGUALS

1.75 2.00 2.25 2.50 2.75 3.00

EDUC

1.501.00 1. 25l.S~---''--""""T'"-T""-~--.---.-"'"'?""-...--.........--r--,.--r---._-.-_...---..._...--~ __

0.75

Figure L Predicted Levels of Children Ever Born, by Education for Three Linguistic Croups, Native-BornMexican-Origin Warnen, 1980. The three points on each line show the low, medium, and high values of

education, with the rnean at 2.00 (medium) and the low and high values at ± 1 standard deviation.

skills. In addition, we examine these relationships for English and Spanish rnonolingualwornen (or in the caseof the lattergroup, thosewho are as elose to being rnonolingual as wecan obtain given 1980 census data) as cornpared with bilingual women, The bilingualwornenrnight be argued to possess not only an attachrnent to Hispanicculture but also theEnglish skills necessary for success in the U.S. labor rnarket. We suggested that whicheverpredorninates in affecting the fertility behavior of the bilingual wornen should determine

30 Demography, Vol. 25, No. 1, February 1988

SPANISH MONOLINGUALS

• • •

0.45

PRED 0.40ICTED

CH

l 0.35DREN

UNDE 0.30R

3ENGLJ:SHMONOLJ:NGUALS

BILINGUALS

0.25

1. 501. 251. 00O. 20 "r----r-.....-T"'""-.....,r--.....--r-.......--,--y-"""T'"---......."T'""......-~_-r__­

0.75 1.75 2.00 2.25 2.50 2.75 3.00

EDUCFigure 2. Predicted Levels of Children <3, by Education for Three Linguistic Groups, Native-Born Mexican­

OriginWomen, 1980. The three points on each line show the low, medium, and high values of education,with the mean at 2.00 (medium) and the lowand high values at ± I standard deviation.

whether their education/fertility relationships would more closely approximate those ofSpanish or English monolingual women. The latter was observed to be more nearly the case,implying that an opportunity cost as opposed to a cultural approach provides a more usefulbasis for interpreting the fertility behavior of Mexican-origin women.

Various theoretical and methodological considerations led us to expect these patternsto differ across age cohorts and nativity groups. More detailed analyses confirmed this

Language and Mexican-Origin Fertility 31

expectation. We find that the effects of English proficiency on fertility tend to cumulateacross the childbearing ages, with larger differentials in number of children ever bornappearing at older ages. The effectsof education also appear to be conditioned more by levelsofEnglish proficiency during the women's 20s and early 30s and among native-born women.We speculate that these differing patterns reflect the particular relevance of the interactionhypothesis to younger and native-born women. The former have entered the childbearingages at the time of expanding labor market opportunities and participation, especially forwomen with advanced education. The circumstances of these women are no doubt differentfrom those encountered by the older cohorts during their prime childbearing years (i.e.,during the baby boom). Similarly, foreign-born women face a more restricted set ofopportunities than native-born women. Education acquired in Mexico may be less salient totheir employment possibilities, thus making English proficiency all the more important totheir social and economic attainment. Moreover, Mexican immigrant women (and men) aremore likely to work in occupations in the operative and labor categories and in industriessuch as manufacturing and agriculture (Bean et al., 1984), where immediate opportunitycosts are likely to be low and incompatibilities between work and motherhood less extreme.

Overall, our results provide empirical evidence of the negative relationship betweenEnglish proficiency and the cumulative and recent fertility of Mexican-origin women,standing in contrast to previous research linking language and childbearing. Prior studieshave tended to report either little relationship or, in the case of Lopez and Sabagh (1978),a positive correlation between Spanish language use and fertility. Using 1976 Survey ofIncome and Education (SIE) data, Bean and Swicegood (1985) also found that increasinglynegative education effects at higher levels of English proficiency were more likely to occuramong foreign-born than native-born women. Discrepancies between the results presentedhere and those from other research may have arisen for three reasons. First, in contrast to themore geographically concentrated samples of most of the other studies, we have used a verylarge, nationally representative data source. Second, we have focused on English profi­ciency, whereas many other studies, including Lopez and Sabagh's, examined various facetsof Spanish language usage instead. However, we also estimated regression models thatsubstituted a Spanish language usage variable for the English proficiency measure andobtained results entirely consistent with those presented above. Third, results based on theSIE data may have been affected by the fact that the English proficiency question in thatsurvey yielded very little variability arnong native-born wornen (Bean and Swicegood,1985:115-116), whereas the 1980 census data used here showed variability among bothforeign- and native-born women.

Finally, it is difficult to devise clear-cut tests of the merits of cultural versus humancapital-type explanations. A useful strategy for future research, however, might be toexamine the relationship between language and fertility for other ethnic groups in the UnitedStates, including groups that have not been characterized as having high fertility norms. Ifpatterns of relationship similar to those observed here for Mexican Americans are found,then the idea that an opportunity cost approach provides a useful basis for studyingracial/ethnic fertility behavior would be strengthened.

Notes

1 Fertility of Mexican-origin wornen was also higher than that of Arnerican Indian wornen in 1980 (V.S.Bureau of the Census, 1983). The nurnber of children ever born was 1.701 per 1,000 wornen for the ArnericanIndians.

2 Lopez and Sabagh's findings seern particularly counterintuitive insofar as they found linguistic indicators ofethnic integration negatively related to fertility, whereas indicators of contextual ethnicity had the oppositeassociation (see Lopez and Sabagh, 1980; Marcum, 1980).

3 For the own-children allocation, farnily relationships were exarnined to match children to their rnothers.This procedure is designed to allocate children to their social rather than biological rnothers, particularly forsubfamilies within a household. Children are allocated to wornen if two criteria are met: (I) if the child and the

32 Demography, Vol. 25, No. I, February 1988

woman have the same family identification number and (2) if the detailed relationship recode of the childcorresponds to that of the woman. Therefore, a child would be allocated to a woman if the child is coded as thechild of the family or subfamily head and has the same family identification number as the mother.

4 Almost every womanwhopursues a college education willspendsomeportionof thisage interval in school,which tends to delayboth marriage and childbearing. This leads to selection with respect to higher fertility in ouryoungest age cohort.

5 In every instance save one in whichweobserve a significant language x educationinteraction effect in Tables3-5, we also find one in the parallel models that include the generation x education interaction. The languageinteraction terms are alsoconsistently betterpredictors of fertility than the generation interactions.

6 The age-specific models for the twogenerational groups generally do not add or detractfrom the story thatwe have already laid out. Age-specific models for the native-born womentend to mirror thosefor the sampieas awholeexceptthat the interaction effects are more pronounced.

7 Educational attainmentat levels belowgrade eight is unlikely to be translated into opportunities. Moreover,if education alfects fertility primarily through delaying first births (Rindfuss, Bumpass, and St. [ohn, 1980), thenmuch of the variance in education for the first generation is unlikely to be associated with fertility differentials.

8 Previous research byTienda and Neidert(1984) indicated that English proficiency has a greater effect on thesocioeconomic status of foreign-born Mexican-origin males than that of the native born. Parallel results werereported byCooney and Ortiz (1983) with respect to female labor force participation. They found that educationis an importantpredictor of labor force activity for native-born Mexican-origin women, but English proficiency isnot. The relationships, however, are reversed in the case of immigrant women.

9 Amongforeign-born women, the disruptions associated with immigration mightalsooperate to attenuate thetype of interaction effects that we are examining. This might occur as a result of differential patterns of spousalseparation. It seems likely that immigrants with greater language skills and education would experience lessseparation from their spouses because they can find better jobs more quickly and deal more efficiently withbureaucratic matters encountered in the process. This would lead to a more positive relationship between Englishproficiency, education, and fertility than would otherwise be the case.

10 In the case of the children-ever-born analysis, the slope of the regression of fertility on education for thebilingualwornenwas not significantly different fromthe slopeforEnglish monolinguals (F = 1.95, not significant),whereas it was significantly different from that for Spanish monolinguals (F = 105.55, p< 0.001). In the caseofthe recent fertility analysis, the slope for the bilingual women was significantly different from that of each of themonolingual groups (F = 9.67, P< 0.002, in the English monolingual case and F = 5.60, P< 0.02, in theSpanishmonolingual case).

Acknowledgments

The research in this article was supported in part by National Institute for Child Health and HumanDevelopment Grant HDI8834. An earlier version of the article was presented at the Annual Meetings of thePopulation Association of America, San Francisco, April 1986. We thank Doug Forbes for assistance inprogramming and data analysis.

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