Immigrant Women Tell Their Stories

Roni Berger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780789018298
• eBook ISBN: 9781317787815
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

I felt like an alien who fell down to earth, not understanding the rules of the game, making all the possible mistakes, saying all the wrong things.

Your whole life is in the hands of other people who do not always mean well and there is nothing you can do about it. They can decide to send you away and you have no control.

The moment I enter the house, I shelve my American self and become the 'little obedient wife' that my husband wants me to be.

The most difficult part is to find myself again. At the beginning I lost myself.

This jargon-free book documents and analyzes the experience of immigration from the female perspective. It discusses the unique challenges that women face, offers insights into the meanings of their experiences, develops gender-sensitive knowledge about immigration, and discusses implications for the effective development and provision of services to immigrant women. With fascinating case studies of immigration to the United States, Australia, and Israel as well as helpful lists of relevant organizations and Web site/Internet addresses, Immigrant Women Tell Their Stories is for everyone who wants to learn or teach about immigration, especially its female face.

It was like somebody sawed my heart in two. One part remained in Cuba and one part here.

Immigrant Women Tell Their Stories examines the nature of immigration for women through the eyes of those who have experienced it: how they perceive, interpret, and address the nature of the experience, its multiple aspects, the issues that it presents, and the strategies that immigrant women develop to cope with those issues. The women in this extraordinary book came from different spots around the globe, speak different languages and dialects, and their English comes in different accents. They vary in age as well as in cultural, ethnic, social, educational, and professional status. They represent a rainbow of family types and political opinions. In spite of their diversity, all these women share immigration experience. This book provides an understanding of the journeys they traveled and the experiences they lived to bring you new insights into what it means to immigrate as a woman and to frame effective strategies for working withand forimmigrant women.

My father is the head of the house. When he decided to move to America [from India] my mother and us, the daughters, did not have much say. My mother and I were not happy at all, but it did not matter.

Immigrant Women Tell Their Stories provides you with historical and global perspectives on immigration and addresses:

• legal, political, economic, social, and psychological dimensions of immigration and its aftermath
• deconstructing immigration by age, gender, and circumstances
• major issues of immigrant womenlanguage, mothering, relationships and marriage, finding employment, assimilation (how much and how soon), loneliness, and more
• resilience in immigrant women
• immigration from a lesbian perspective
• guidelines for the development and delivery of services to immigrant women

You may say that I am the bridge, the desert generation that lost the chance to have it my way. But I will do my best to raise my daughters to have more choices than I.

In this well-referenced book, immigrant women from Austria, Bosnia, Cuba, various parts of the former Soviet Union, Guatemala, India, Israel, Lebanon, Mexico, Pakistan, and the Philippines tell us their stories, recount what their experiences entailed and what challenges they posed, and teach us ways to help them cope successfully.

This was the best decision we could have made and the best thing we had ever done.

Part I:

Understanding and Studying Women’s Migration

Chapter 1

Immigration: The Process and Its Aftermath

There is no greater sorrow on earth than the loss of one’s native land.

Euripides (484–406 BC)

Introduction

Worldwide, there are over 100 million immigrants and over 13 million refugees, in addition to internal migration within individual countries (Potocky-Tripodi and Tripodi, 2002). The United States and other Western countries have witnessed in recent years an influx of immigrants (Hernandez and Charney, 1998). The foreign-born population in the United States has dramatically increased from 5.1 percent in 1970, to 6.6 percent in 1980, 10.4 percent in 1990, and 11.5 percent in 2002. More than 10 percent of Americans were born abroad, and an additional 10 percent of the population grew up with at least one foreign-born parent. This is particularly true for the states of California, Florida, New York, and Hawaii (Healy, 2002). This affects both the lives of the immigrants and their country of relocation. Consequently, there is growing concern among the public and among professionals about issues that relate to immigrants and ways to address these issues expeditiously.

Immigration is driven by geopolitical considerations in the culture of origin, labor needs of the culture of relocation, and familial, personal, and ideological reasons. Motivation to relocate includes seeking better economic, employment, social, and political conditions; improving children’s opportunities for education; and escaping actual or potential persecution, war, natural disaster, and personal circumstances. Migration can be voluntary or forced and can grant people the status of legal immigrants, undocumented immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, each of which implies different legal and economic eligibilities and psychological and social consequences. For example, in the United States alone, between 1971 and 1995, approximately 17.1 million legal immigrants were admitted, most of them from Asia, Central and South America, and the former Soviet Union (Massey, 1995). Assuming that at least one-third of them were women (the rest are men and children) and estimating that a similar number of illegal immigrants entered the country, over 10 million women joined the nation in the aforementioned period.

Immigration can come in many constellations of the immigrating unit. For example, four types of migration patterns are typical to the United States: mothers first, chain migration, family migration, and multigeneration migration. Mothers-first migration has been typical for women from the Carribean Islands and Central and South America who migrate as domestic workers, leaving their children to be raised by relatives until they can be later reunited with them. Chain migration has been more popular among Mexican, Asian, and some Middle Eastern immigrants, in which one family member, often the man, comes to work and gradually brings his family to live with him. In this type of migration it has not been uncommon for women and children to learn that these men have established a second family during the years of living away from the original family. Immigrants from other countries also come in whole families, often multigenerational families, which is typical for immigrants from the former Soviet Union, for example. In Israel, a fifth version can be found, in which youngsters from Ethiopia or the former Soviet Union immigrate first and are placed in special programs, such as Naale, which is a Hebrew acronym for “adolescent immigrants without parents,” to be followed by their families months or years later.

Irrespective of the type of immigration, it is a major disruption in a person’s life, which may cause tremendous stress and potential trauma. In professional literature it has been recognized as a life crisis or traumatic experience (Garza-Guerrero, 1974; Glassman and Skolnik, 1984; Harper and Lantz, 1996; Ben-Sira, 1997). It shakes up physical, social, financial, legal, and emotional being and self-definition. The immigration experience is inevitably fraught with radical objective changes. These changes have been called culture loss (Furnham and Bochner, 1986; Stewart, 1986).

Immigration involves displacement and multiple losses. Some of the losses are symbolic. For example, an immigrant from Russia states, “Leningrad, the city in which I was born and raised and lived most of my life, is again St. Petersburg, so in a sense you can say that the place does not exist anymore.” Many losses are tangible. One loses familiarity with landscapes, physical environment, climate, sights and smells, roads, knowing where to slow the car down and where to expect traffic, labels on products in the supermarket, currency, and measurement units for weights, distances, and temperatures. Irina, a recent immigrant from Siberia to Israel describes the feelings of strangeness.

I came a little later than most of my friends and relatives, so I had some sense of what to expect, and yet it was very different. I saw pictures of Israel, but reality was unlike my imagination. The landscape was bizarre, the sights were strange, even the smell of apples was not the same. There [Siberia] you would go into the home and a fresh and sweet smell of the apples displayed on the table would hit you. Here they have a synthetic smell, like everything else.

A woman who left Cuba in her early twenties to return for a visit twenty-three years later writes, “The moment I stepped out of the hotel, I knew exactly where I was, what corners to turn, what buildings will be waiting for me on the next block, and which one of the buses going by would take me to which place in the city” (Espin, 1992, p. 14).

Immigrants lose significant relationships with friends, relatives, neighbors, classmates and teachers, and co-workers and bosses. Natural support systems either remain distanced in the country of origin or are not available because of their own struggle to acculturate, making immigration an experience of diminishing family contacts. Immigrants also lose an intimate understanding of cultural norms, social clues, acceptable behavior patterns, the ability to adequately perceive reality and the context for interpreting it, and an understanding of the way of life. One loses the comfort of shared memories, named by some “the sweet familiarity” (Donnelly, 2000, p. 50).

An immigrant from Greece to France described the experience: “In France I feel disconnected from myself; they [the Frenchmen] do not know about my childhood heroes. No coffee shop, no plaza remind me of myself when I was little. In France I have no past. French songs remind me nothing” (Alexakis, 2001, pp. 39–40).

Immigration often means a career change, frequently stepping down in the professional ladder, from a physician to a health care provider, engineer to technician, and teacher to child care worker, accepting nonprofessional jobs or remaining unemployed. Immigrants lose recognition of previous achievements, such as professional credentials, credit history, and driver’s license, and must struggle to regain them. For example, Foner (2000), who studied female migrants to New York, found that many household workers she interviewed had been teachers and clerical workers in their homeland and experienced transition “from mistress to servant.” Many health care aides in nursing homes had previously worked as nurses. Because their professional credentials were not recognized and their language proficiency was limited, they were forced to take jobs below their education and training.

Underemployment, professional disqualification, and unemployment are very frequent. My own experience, which is not uncommon, was of going from being somebody to being nobody to struggling to become somebody again. These losses may be exacerbated by xenophobia in the new environment.

Another major loss is that of language—the way of framing ideas, thinking about a belief system, mastering a means for making meaning, communication and self-expression, spelling and pronunciation of words, and knowledge of idioms and colloquialisms. Limited or absent literacy in the language of the new culture has been recognized as a key factor in determining the ability of immigrants to fulfill parental, professional, and social roles (Paul, 1999). Having command of the language of the new culture contributes to the prospect of securing employment. Thus Filipino women who come from an English-speaking background have been more successful than Korean immigrants in achieving emplyment (United Nations, 1995).

Immigration means emotional muteness, at least for some time, sometimes for life. A popular song by songwriter David Broza who emigrated from South America to Israel, where he writes and performs in Hebrew, is titled “I Dream in Spanish.” It speaks of how deep one’s language of origin is rooted in one’s core. Many immigrants who are eloquent in the new language continue to calculate and to dream in their language of origin because their innermost feelings are in the mother tongue. Even for those who fluently speak the language of the country of relocation, much of the meaning they wish to convey is lost in translation.

Immigration often leads to a loss of safety because of shattered family equilibrium as a result of moving from a traditional gender-based role allocation and authority system to an environment with a different power structure (Balgopal, 2000). For example, moving from a “macho” culture to a culture in which women’s status is more egalitarian challenges the familiar division of power and allocation of roles in the family, i.e., who makes which decisions and who controls the family budget.

All the aforementioned changes place the issues of identity at the core of the immigration experience. Moving from one culture to another tugs at the roots of one’s identity. One of the women in this study describes it, “You leave pieces of yourself behind.” Specifically challenged is one’s ethnic identity, i.e., the way an individual perceives his or her place in and in relationship to ethnicity (Jasinskaja-Lahti and Liebkind, 1998). Ethnic identity is a complex and multifaceted concept that has two distinct aspects: one aspect refers to self-identification, i.e., the ethnic group one affiliates with; the second aspect reflects one’s attitude toward and feeling about belonging to a given ethnic group (Liebkind, 1992). In the process of shaping their ethnic identity following relocation, immigrants face the need to choose between the options of mono- and bicultural ethnic identity (Szapocznik, Scopetta, and Kurtines, 1978). The monocultural identity can be either the culture of origin or the absorbing culture. The bicultural identity incorporates both cultures in some type of combination.

The process of developing one’s new identity often involves revisiting one’s original identity. Kamani (2000), an immigrant from India, comments, “Becoming ‘American’ is for me inextricably tied up with becoming fully aware of what it is to be ‘Indian’; being born again as a self-aware Indian is what I equate with becoming ‘American’”(p. 96).

Diverse efforts to deconstruct the acculturation experience have been developed. Higham (2001) observes diversity and assimilation as complementary processes suggesting “pluralistic integration,” i.e., preserving traditions combined with assimilation and amalgamation, and shaping the host and the immigrant culture simultaneously. Berry (1986) identified four ways of coping with identity issues among immigrants:

1. Assimilation—relinquishing one’s original cultural identity and moving to adopt that of the larger dominant society
2. Integration—combining components from the culture of origin and the absorbing culture
3. Rejection—self-imposed withdrawal from the dominant culture
4. Deculturation—striking out against the dominant culture accompanied by stress and alienation (a sense of “not here and not there”)

Berger (1997) suggested a clinically based typology of patterns for coping with issues of ethnic identity among immigrant adolescents. Four types of patterns were identified: clingers, eradicators, vacillators, and integrators. Clingers adhere to their culture of origin and tend to live in national/ethnic enclaves in neighborhoods heavily populated by their compatriots that replicate the culture of origin within the new country. They consume books, movies, newspapers, and food from their original homeland, which they often visit if politically and financially possible, and passively avoid or actively refuse to acculturate to the new culture. Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, New York, Little Havana in Miami, Florida, and the Arabic community in Patterson, New Jersey, are inhabited by people who chose to replicate their culture of origin within the United States. Commerce and street signs are in Russian, Spanish, or Arabic, schools have bilingual programs, and people maintain much of their preimmigration lifestyle. Although many immigrants use such homogenous communities as a springboard, clingers tend to stay in them.

Eradicators reject and “erase” their culture of origin and totally adopt the norms of the new culture. They try to maximize their immersion in the new culture. The new country’s style of dressing, eating, and living are adopted, and visits to the country of origin are minimal or nonexistent. Donnelley’s (2000) description of herself gives a vivid picture of an eradicator. A British immigrant to California, she shares,

I bring so little of my old country to my new. I certainly do not run with the Brit-pack, and if occasionally I cook a British meal or rent a British video, it is to show curious friends how things are done in another country—my contribution, if you will, to the cultural melting pot—rather than to indulge any nostalgia or nationalism of my own. I cannot even fully remember by now how it felt to regard England as home. (p. 51)

Vacillators oscillate between the two cultures, sometimes tending more to the clinging pole and on other occasions (or periods) toward the eradicating end of the continuum. Integrators combine components of both cultures.

Portes and Rumbaut (2001) conceptualize three outcomes for children of immigrants in intergenerational terms: dissonant acculturation, in which children learn the language and ways of the receiving culture but their parents cling to the “old ways”; consonant acculturation, in which parents’ and children’s pace of moving from the “old” to the “new” is in sync; and selective acculturation, partial retention of the culture of origin combined with some adoption of the culture of relocation’s norms and language.

Decisions regarding ethnic identity are affected by the immigrants’ culture of origin, the dominant culture of resettlement, and the ethnic subculture (the diaspora) in the country of relocation. Facing the aforementioned financial constraints, language and social barriers, and prejudice and discrimination, immigrants attempt to maintain an ethnic continuity and to re-create familiarity with the host country (Hattar-Pollara and Meleis, 1995b; Wong, 1999). This process includes several phases that will be discussed in the next section.

Developmental Aspects of Immigration

Immigration is not a single event of being uprooted from the culture of origin and leaving behind the homeland to face the challenge of assimilation into a new culture. Rather, it is a lifelong, multifaceted and multilayered, complex, and never-ending experience. In this process, three phases have been identified: departure, transition, and re-settlement (Sluzki, 1983; Drachman and Shen-Ryan, 1991). Unique stresses and tasks characterize each of these phases.

Departure (Preparatory) Phase

The departure phase is the period that precedes the actual relocation. It may last for months and sometimes years, from the time the idea first occurs until the actual move. However, if immigration is forced by political, legal, or any other type of external pressure, including danger to one’s life or personal or family emergency, this phase may be significantly shorter. Immigration is the result of a deliberate decision to change one’s life, especially for people who choose to relocate, unlike refugees who are forced to do so. This decision involves a conscious component of risk taking.

Two types of factors are involved in the decision to immigrate: the push factors and the pull factors (Berry et al., 1987). Push factors include forces of expulsion that make one decide to go away from the culture of origin, such as persecution or economic, social, religious, and political ordeal. The pull factors are the forces that attract immigrants toward the culture of relocation, such as economic opportunities, liberal social and political realities, and personal freedom.

During the preimmigration period the prospective immigrant evaluates these risks, deliberates plans, and prepares for moving. These preparations have practical and emotional aspects. They include separation from people, places, and possessions and making logistic adjustments. Sorting out what will be moved to the new country and what is to be left behind involves a process of decision making, revisiting memories associated with books, photographs, presents, and favorite memorabilia. When immigration is potentially irreversible because the prospects of returning are nonexistent, as is the case for most refugees, the pain may be enormous. Ambivalence, debating options, building expectations, and struggling with fears of the unknown are at the core of this phase (Berger, 2001).

Transition Phase

The actual relocation from the country of origin to the new country can last for weeks and months, if temporary stay in refugee camps or detention centers is involved, or may take only a few hours by plane. For those who travel by boat or those who have to spend time in transition camps either on the way to or in the absorbing country, this means a prolonged period colored by uncertainty (“living out of suitcases”) and instability (“living in the gr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface: How and Why This Book Was Born
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Understanding and Studying Women’s Migration
• Part II: Stories of Immigrant Women
• Part III: Conclusions and Implications
• Epilogue
• Resources
• References
• Index