Book excerpt: "Despite their citizenship and English monolingualism, Mexican Americans have long been known to remain largely working class, which, academically, has meant that they tend to be mostly high school graduates with low rates of college attendance and completion. Attempting to understand this phenomenon, Five Generations of a Mexican American Family in Los Angeles chronicles the home work, and school lives of the author's multigenerational family throughout the twentieth century. Using oral histories of thirty-three members across five generations, the Fuentes story illuminates the interactions among race, ethnicity, and class at home, in the labor market, and in schools, which circumscribe the opportunity and resources - or lack thereof - for academic success."--BOOK JACKET.