In her first book, Out of the Barrio: Toward a New Politics of Hispanic Assimilation, Linda Chávez explores Hispanic progress through the lens of education, affirmative action, and immigration policy. When it was published in 1991, the book proved controversial for its author’s assessment of the Hispanic population as not a permanent underclass but an upwardly mobile group and her assertion that bilingual education, affirmative action, and other public policies were not helping but hindering Hispanic progress.