The "sandwich generation" — a term coined in the 1980s to describe adults simultaneously raising children and caring for aging parents, squeezed between the demands of two generations of dependents — had long been associated primarily with middle-class white baby boomers. Research emerging in the early 2010s was complicating that picture, documenting high rates of multigenerational caregiving among Hispanic and Indian-American communities that had previously received less attention in the mainstream discussion.

For both groups, the reasons for multigenerational living and caregiving intersected cultural values with structural realities. In many South Asian families, the expectation that adult children — and particularly daughters-in-law — would care for aging parents was deeply embedded, an obligation understood as both moral duty and family solidarity. The immigration pattern of Indian-American families, in which parents often arrived in the United States after their children had established careers and households, created situations in which adult children were effectively assuming care responsibilities in a country where the parents had no independent support networks.

Hispanic families showed similarly high rates of multigenerational living and caregiving, driven by a combination of cultural values emphasizing family obligation, economic factors that made institutional care inaccessible, and immigration circumstances that could leave elderly family members particularly dependent on their American-based relatives.

The caregiving burden in both communities fell disproportionately on women — on wives and daughters-in-law who were often simultaneously managing careers, childcare, and elder care with limited institutional support.

What the research revealed was that the sandwich generation was not a phenomenon of one demographic but of any community where family obligation, longevity, and inadequate public elder care infrastructure converged. The squeezed middle is wider than the original coinage suggested.