Ethnic Identity and Academic Achievement Among Latino/a Adolescents

This study examines Latino/a adolescents' ethnic identities and academic achievement. In open-ended interviews, the high school aged youth employed cultural and nationality explanations for their ethnic label choices. In many cases, they did not commit to a specific label, employing instead language that indexed their fluid, border identities. This study also made use of various academic performance measurements to quantitatively explore relationships between ethnic identity and academic achievement. A cultural dimension to ethnic identity and a bicultural identity emerged as significant predictors of academic performance. However, no single ethnic label had a definitive relationship with academic performance.