Immigrant Life in the US

Multi-disciplinary Perspectives

Donna R. Gabaccia, Colin Wayne Leach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134402670
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Immigrant Life in the U.S. brings together scholars from across the disciplines to examine diverse examples of immigration to the paradigmatic 'nation of immigrants'. The volume covers a wide range of time periods, ethnic and national groups, and places of immigration. Contemporary Chinese children brought to the U.S. through adoption, Mexican laborers hired to work in the mid-west in the 1930s, Indian computer programmers hired to work in California, and more, are examined in a series of chapters that show the great diversity of issues facing immigrants in the past and in the present.
This book emphasizes the complex tapestry that is the everyday experience of life as an immigrant and turns a critical eye on the place of globalization in the everyday life of immigrants. The contrasts it draws between past and present demonstrate the continued salience of national and ethnic identities while also describing how migrants can live almost simultaneously in two countries.
This book will be of essential interest to advanced students and researchers of Sociology, History, Ethnic Studies and American Studies.

1 Introduction

American identities in a global era

Donna R. Gabaccia and Colin Wayne Leach

According to some millenarian thinkers, the year 2001 marked much more than just the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. History, modernism, and the nation-state, along with existing political, economic, and social boundaries, were all expected to wither in the face of unprecedented transnational flows of people and products (Appadurai 1996; Rajchman 1995). This new mobility was expected to change not only where we lived but how we lived and who we thought we were.

Increased exchange across national borders was expected to transform people's sense of physical, social, and political place, so that Delhi no longer seemed so distant from Denver, Darwin, or Delft. As our understanding of the relationship between space and time adjusted, it was argued, so too fundamental changes would occur in our sense of self and identity (see Harvey 1991; Balibar and Wallerstein 1991; Cerulo 1997). In particular, theorists claimed, nation-states were becoming deterritorialized, and the national would no longer anchor human identities as it had in the twentieth century (Glick Schiller et al. 1992; Basch et al. 1994).

The impact of hastened rates of cultural and economic exchange across national borders during the last three decades of the twentieth century can scarcely be denied. It is true that the things we produce travel faster, farther, and in greater numbers than ever before. In some ways, at least, Delhi is literally now just around the corner from Denver. New transportation and communication technologies allow humans, too, to travel with great speed and to remain easily in touch with family, friends, and business associates over long distances. Videos, wireless telephones, cables, satellites, and the World Wide Web make sounds and images produced by people in one corner of the world readily accessible to persons living on the other side of the globe. It is also certainly true that the world is currently experiencing massive movements of people across national and regional borders: approximately 140 million persons now live outside the country of their birth.

But while millenarian theorists anticipate astonishing change ahead, historians have been more cautious about predicting the long-term consequences of recent globalization. Economic historians have pointed to earlier eras of globalization (O'Rourke and Williamson 2000) and, while undeniably significant, these earlier periods of globalization did not introduce changes of the type currently predicted. Long-term histories of migration (e.g. Hoerder 2002) have even denied that today's international migrations are unprecedented in scale; they may actually be relatively less important numerically than the so-called mass migrations of the end of the nineteenth century (when over 125 million persons were internationally mobile throughout a world with much less than half of today's population). Significantly, these mass migrations accompanied – they did not undermine or prevent – the expansion of the power of national states; in fact historians have often referred to the era of mass migrations in the nineteenth century as an age of nationalism. That previous mass migrations across national borders did not spell the end of the nation-state cautions against such predictions now.

Rather than assuming that human migration necessarily changes human subjectivity, this book asks whether it does and how it does. The possibility that migration changes human lives and identities is best studied, we believe, with methodologies that allow comparisons of people on the move in both the past and the present. We also believe that the impact of changing technology, movement, and communications is best identified through the examination of particular places and the social (economic, political) relations within which people in these places live. As a self-proclaimed nation of immigrants, the United States can provide a firm foundation for such study. Unlike a century ago, however, scholars who choose to generalize about social and cultural dynamics related to migration by studying the U.S. must justify their choice: focusing on a single nation as paradigmatic seems increasingly problematic in a global age.

National studies in an age of globalization

Why tackle questions of how human lives change in a global era with yet another book on immigrants in the U.S.? After all, at least since the 1500s, almost every corner of the world has been touched by vast and recurring international migrations. The U.S. may be one of a very few nations worldwide that considers itself, proudly, a nation of immigrants, but it is only one of many nations formed through long-distance migrations.

Most of the migrants we study in this volume initially lived or are now living transnational lives. In other words, their lives occur simultaneously in more than one national territory. But most are also simultaneously engaged in creating new identities that link them in some way to places and territories – including national ones – both ‘at home’ and where they live and work abroad, even if only temporarily. Concerned to study human life as situated in particular times and places, our focus on the United States can be justified in at least three ways.

First, rightly or wrongly, the U.S. continues to be regarded throughout the world as the paradigmatic nation of immigrants and as a place where transformations of identity are a routine element of nation-building and national life. The symbolic importance of the U.S. as a nation of immigrants has persisted even during periods of reduced immigration and even during periods when other countries have received – and in some cases incorporated – proportionately far greater numbers of newcomers than has the United States. In both the nineteenth and late twentieth centuries, furthermore, the vast size of the U.S. – facing as it does two oceans and connected historically through the slave trade and empire-building to Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America as well as Asia – has made it a popular destination for a culturally more diverse group of mobile people than most other countries.

Secondly, in an increasingly inter-connected world, the United States also functions symbolically as a hyper-present model of a culturally plural or multicultural nation of individuals with complex identities. This American embrace of what is usually called multiculturalism is relatively recent, however. In the past the United States was instead more often praised or criticized for its insistence on transforming the identities of some immigrants (supposedly making ‘ethnics,’ ‘Americans,’ or ‘whites’ of mobile people from Europe) while simultaneously seeking to exclude people of African and Asian descent from the American nation. It is unlikely that many nations worldwide share with the U.S. its distinctive combination of a long history of slavery and of the segregation of African-Americans with its relative openness to the admission and naturalization of large numbers of foreign-born workers and settlers. But there can be little doubt that it is the intensive study of the United States that has allowed scholars worldwide to pose questions about the determinants and typologies of multicul-turalism as it is now practiced worldwide. Attention to the hyphenated, hybrid, and ethnic identities of the U.S., as well as their relationship to an American sense of national belonging, has also provided a scholarly ‘other’ against which studies of mobile people elsewhere have often been measured.

The third, and perhaps most important reason for again collecting a new set of essays on immigrant life in the United States, is that much of the work on globalism and transnationalism treats the U.S. as an agent of economic and cultural globalization elsewhere without taking into account how globalization may simultaneously transform the United States and its residents, too. Surely the influence of U.S. commerce and culture on the wider world is well documented? Much of this work critiques the spread of an economic, political, and social culture that – while calling itself global – is in fact rooted in local, national, and American (or Euro-American or western) cultures and values (e.g. Winant 1994; Ritzer 1993). In this literature, globalization appears as a variety of American supra-nationalism, often with imperial aims. While valid enough, this approach leaves unexamined the recursive nature of U.S. global influence on the United States itself. In the so-called American twentieth century, the foreign-born residents of the United States often represented cases of ‘the empire striking back.’

In this volume, migration into, within, and out of the United States provides an opportunity to examine how globalization may be transforming human lives in the paradigmatic nation of immigrants. Are these transformations pushing newer immigrants in the direction – away from the importance of the nation – that some theorists of transnationalism have posited? In which human relationships, if any, do mobile people foreground their American or foreign national identities? In which do transnational identities find a place? Are identities among today's transmigrants any more fluid, contested, and complex than those of the immigrants of the past? When and in which human relationships do race, gender, class, or ethnicity most matter? When and in which settings are they most likely to change?

Such questions can, of course, be posed by specialists in any one of a number of disciplines. The study of the identities of mobile people, like the study of international migration, is necessarily a multi-disciplinary undertaking. Because our contributors engage the question of immigrant life in a global age from many different disciplinary perspectives, this volume offers a more complex and a more historical, grounded, and in some ways more skeptical treatment of the vitally interesting relationship between global flows, nations, and human subjectivity than can be found in more theoretical works.

Internationalizing the interdisciplinary study of mobile lives

The chapters in this volume focus on the consequences of migration for lives lived (at least in part) in one country – the United States – but also within a globalizing world. By doing so, they also demonstrate how interdisciplinary fields such as American studies, ethnic studies, women's studies, and migration studies have changed in recent years. Almost all scholarly disciplines have in the past two decades struggled to come to terms with the impact of theories of globalization and globality on their often fundamentally national subject matter. This struggle has been particularly intense in American studies – once the academic bastion of the idea that society and culture in the U.S. were exceptional and unlike those of any other nation – but is broadly shared across disciplines, interdisciplinary fields and interdisciplinary area studies alike.

Although we take up in our Afterword the consequences of the changing mix of disciplines represented in this collection, we think it is useful to call attention to it here as a possibly unintentional consequence of the internationalization of scholarly thought. Contemporary unease about continuing to define scholarly fields around national territories or cultures seems to encourage a wider understanding of interdisciplinarity than was traditionally the case, for example, in American studies. A half century ago historians and specialists on literature collaborated to create American studies. Today the number of interdisciplinary fields or ‘studies’ programs has greatly increased; within these interdisciplinary fields, furthermore, historians and literature scholars now interact more frequently with scholars trained in ethnic, women's, and cultural studies, and – more occasionally – in the social sciences.

In sharp contrast, newer scholars from the social sciences actually constitute the majority in our collection of essays; collectively, they document the somewhat distinctive way interdisciplinary work on the lives of immigrants and migrants bridges work in the social sciences and humanities. The ten essays in this volume were written by recent recipients of pre-and post-doctoral fellowships in the International Migration Program of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). Sociology (essays by A. Aneesh, Sara Dorow, Vivian Louie, Ron Mize, and Ayumi Takenaka) and history (Linda Heidenreich, Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof and Mark Wild) are especially well represented in this volume (as they were also in the SSRC program) but authors also include an economist (Nelson Lim) and a political scientist (Kristen Maher). (We very much regret that two original collaborators from anthropology had to withdraw, as anthropology continues to make a vital contribution to migration studies, even of immigrants in the United States.) The editors, too, were an interdisciplinary team, from history (Gabaccia) and psychology (Leach).

Literature and cultural studies – the more usual mainstays of interdisciplinary studies of all kinds in the 1990s – are noticeably absent in this collection and we see this as a result of the sharp divergence of social and cultural analysis in the past decade. But we also see in this volume evidence of a new foundation for convergence. As the philosophical divergence of modernist and post-modernist scholars of the 1990s has begun to wane, a wide variety of interdisciplinary fields offer a promising intellectual site where empirical and discursive analysis of both social and ideological forms might again meet in creative new ways. Certainly, this desire to bring together the study of the social, material, and phenomenological dimensions of human life is evident among the newer generation of social scientists, and in every essay collected here. Contributors include a political scientist who has done ethnographic field work, an economist who tests with survey data the hypotheses that have emerged from qualitative research, sociologists who have critically adopted the concepts and theoretical vocabulary of cultural studies or ethnographic methods, and historians who link demographic with discursive sources. All our contributors viewed human subjectivity as relational, contextual, and in process. All analyzed the creation of identity in particular places and in particular social relationships that could modify existing narratives of identity only by invoking them.

Many of our contributors from the social sciences have also joined in the recent embrace of transnational and comparative methodologies that are internationalizing most interdisciplinary fields – with consequences that we cannot yet predict. Both comparative and transnational methods have long been common in studies of international migration; here, as in American, ethnic and area studies generally, they help us to problematize the meaning of nation, national identity, and of area or ethnic studies themselves. In this volume, a study of Indian engineers who work both in Asia and the U.S., of Chinese girls adopted by American parents, and of Mexican braceros, help to ground the sometimes abstract theories of transnationalism and to demonstrate the impact in the U.S. of its role as an economic and cultural agent of globalization worldwide. Both diverging and converging comparative methods (see Green 1994) are included, with studies of persons of one national and racial-ethnic background in two differing American locations or of differing class backgrounds, or of several immigrant and minority groups in single west coast locations.

Studies of cultural diversity became the mainstream of many interdisciplinary fields in the 1990s – in part because of burning and typically national debates over multiculturalism and its significance for national unity. These debates occurred not only in the United States but also in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and parts of Latin America as well (Gabaccia 2002). Oddly, however, as interest in cultural diversity increased in historical, literary, and social science area studies generally, many of the main themes and concepts of scholarship on migration and immigration – notably human mobility, ethnic groups, ethnicity, generations, naturalization, and assimilation – almost disappeared. For a decade, scholars instead focused energetically and productively on the analysis of ‘race’ (a term most scholars reject as scientifically untenable, even as they seek to trace its social power), of racial groups, of gender and – to a much lesser degree – of class. The essays in this collection suggest that a rapprochement of social and cultural analysis and of social scientists and humanists will further redefine our understandings of race and gender with their attention to age and generation, to class, and to the meaning of national identity itself.

In short, a new and more globally informed analysis of the linkage of cultural, ethnic, and national identities seems in order – both in the United States and worldwide. We know from historical literature on immigrants in the U.S. that distinctive social practices – in families, neighborhoods, and communities – have been important sites of identity formation. Newer research on the cultural production of music, food, literature, autobiography, film, and leisure has widened our understanding of the origins of racial and gender identities. In both cases, however, communities and identities have too often been imagined as sedentary or self-enclosed. We believe that scholars can best answer the questions raised about nations by theories of postmodernity by studying the internationally mobile, their social relations, and their subjectivity. By focusing on people moving into and out of the United States, both the past and present, this collection of essays does just that.

Students of immigration to the United States have long identified important zones of contact, where natives and newcomers establish new social relationships; scholars of transnationalism have reminded us of the importance of social relationships that reach across national boundaries. Most that is distinctive and diverse in human life is created in both kinds of social relations, as people evoke, modify, and reject discursive elements of identity such as race, gender, class, and nation. For those born abroad and entering the U.S. as adults, workplaces and relations between employers and employees may well be the most important sites of identity formation, whereas for their children (including both the so-called 1.5 generation – born abroad but migrating as children – and the second generation – born in the U.S.) social relations within families and educational institutions and involving recreational and popular cultural activities may be more important. One result is the generationally diverging identities that often produce sharp intergenerational cultural conflicts – including conflicts over citizenship, national identity, and national loyalties – in mobile populations. It is around these themes – age and generation, race, ethnicity, class, and nation – that most of our contributors have tackled the study of immigrant life in the United States.

Interdisciplinary perspectives on immigrant life

Migration both binds and transforms the countries it links; it affects the collective identity of receiving and sending countries as well as the identity of migrants themselves. While migration from China to California or from the Dominican Republic to the United States strikes contemporary observers as generating global and transnational perspectives, it is often experienced by the migrants themselves as a move between two small-scale and even intimate localities. By examining how younger and older migrants create new lives and identities in specific times and places, this collection seeks new answers to important questions. Do transnational flows of people necessarily produce transnational selves, and if so under what conditions? Have new technologies of transportation and communication marked the current round of globalization as unique or particular in any way? If so, how is human subjectivity changing in the current global ecumene and what transformations seem most salient to those working, living, or studying in the United States?

Part I of Immigrant Life in the U.S. takes up the particularly complex issues of national identities, nation-building, and mobility in the United States, past and present. It opens with a close examination of a single California county at a critical moment in the history of American nation-building. By 1850 the United States had seized the Pacific west coast from Mexico; southerners and northerners from the U.S. poured into California just as immigration increased across the Pacific and as, first, sectional conflict and, then, Civil War raised hard questions about whether birthplace, culture, or skin color would determine American citizenship, and thus membership in the American nation. Historian Linda Heidenreich reminds readers that in California, American nation-building immediately became an effort to render invisible the considerable diversity of local populations. As Benedict Anderson might have predicted, schools and t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge advances in sociology
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Preface and acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: American identities in a global era
• PART I The local and the nation in a transnational world
• PART II Family, school, and youth culture
• PART III Immigrant labor
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index