Beyond Within-Group Mobility: Racial and Ethnic Gaps in Sibling Correlations in Latin America and the Caribbean

We decompose sibling correlations in schooling into group-specific contributions defined by race and ethnicity Indigenous peoples, Afrodescendants, and non-Indigenous non-Afrodescendants for 19 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. This approach accounts for differences in group means in the overall national distribution, yielding a measure of each group's intergenerational persistence that reflects both within-family transmission and structural position. Within-group sibling correlations are high throughout the region, ranging from roughly 0.34 to 0.72, and group rankings vary considerably across countries: Afrodescendants show lower within-group persistence than the non-Afrodescendant/non-Indigenous reference group in most countries, while Indigenous peoples tend to display higher. The picture changes substantially once structural position is accounted for. Because Indigenous group means lie persistently below national schooling averages, the structural position component inflates Indigenous persistence in the overall distribution to levels that exceed the reference group in nearly every country by a factor of up to 3.3 in Panama and Paraguay even though within-family transmission dominates the structural position for both minority groups in almost all settings. In countries with large Indigenous populations such as Bolivia and Guatemala, Indigenous families account for roughly 4050 percent of the overall national sibling correlation. These findings suggest that standard within-group mobility measures substantially understate the barriers faced by these populations, and that reducing ethnoracial inequality in LAC requires addressing structural position rather than within-family transmission alone.