From West Hunter:

Generations of Exclusion  is a book by two UCLA sociologists, Vila Ortiz and Edward E Telles, published in 2008. It originated in a fair-sized data set (1576 people) collected in 1965, which was rediscovered in 1992. The original respondents and their adult children were interviewed. It shows quite clearly that although second-generation Mexican-Americans averaged more education and higher SES than the first generation, presumably because they knew English, there was no further improvement in the third and fourth generations. The gap remained substantial: the fourth generation had a college completion rate of 6%, compared to a rate of 35% for whites of that same era. 

Which is pretty much what you see in New Mexico too, except that here we’re often talking about the fifth, sixth, and seventh generation living in the US 

I don’t see much sign that the story is greatly different in Central and South America. Mestizos – whose ancestry is part Amerindian and part European (usually Spanish), make up most of the population in those countries. Their PISA scores are low – lower than those of Hispanics in the US. Performance in science and technology is more important than test performance – but Latin America’s low performance is consistent with their low test scores. This showed up in my Zones of Thought map. 

Isn’t there reason to believe that this is all going to change radically for the better in the near future, powered by the strongest force in the Universe, wishful thinking? Nope.

New Mexico has relatively few illegal immigrants because it has had so few jobs. 

When New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (who is 3/4th Latino) was running for the Democratic nomination for President in 2007, Tim Russert gave Richardson a hard time about his state on Meet the Press:

MR. RUSSERT:  But let’s go through the resume a little bit.  First, there’s governor of New Mexico.  As you well know, they rank states in a whole variety of categories from one being the best, 50th being the worst.  This is New Mexico’s scorecard, and you are the governor.  Percent of people living below the poverty line, you’re 48.  Percent of children below, 48.  Median family income, 47.  People without health insurance, 49.  Children without health insurance, 46.  Teen high school dropouts, 47.  Death rate due to firearms, 48.  Violent crime rate, 46.  You’re the very bottom of all those statistics of all 50 states, and you’re the governor for five years.

Ouch.

New Mexico's state motto ought to be "Thank God for Mississippi!"