Identity and the Second Generation

Description

Most recently, Americans have become familiar with the term "second generation" as it's applied to children of immigrants who now find themselves citizens of a nation built on the notion of assimilation. This common, worldwide experience is the topic of study in Identity and the Second Generation. These children test and explore the definition of citizenship and their cultural identity through the outlets provided by the Internet, social media, and local community support groups. All these factors complicate the ideas of boundaries and borders, of citizenship, and even of home. Indeed, the second generation is a global community and endeavors to make itself a home regardless of state or citizenship.

This book explores the social worlds of the children of immigrants. Based on rich ethnographic research, the contributors illustrate how these young people, the so-called second generation, construct and negotiate their lives. Ultimately, the driving question is profoundly important on a universal level: How do these young people construct an identity and a sense of belonging for themselves, and how do they deal with processes of inclusion and exclusion?

Sujets

• Children's Studies
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Sociology
• Anthropology

Informations

• Publié par: Vanderbilt University Press
• Date de parution: 04 avril 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780826520708
• Langue: English

Extrait

IDENTITY AND THE SECOND GENERATION
IDENTITY AND THE SECOND GENERATION
HOW CHILDREN OF IMMIGRANTS FIND THEIR SPACE
EDITED BY FAITH G. NIBBS AND CAROLINE B. BRETTELL
VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY PRESS
NASHVILLE
© 2016 by Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville, Tennessee 37235
All rights reserved
First printing 2016
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file
LC control number 2015001075
LC classification number JV6344.I34 2015
Dewey class number 305.23—dc23
ISBN 978-0-8265-2068-5 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-8265-2069-2 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-8265-2070-8 (ebook)
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Faith G. Nibbs and Caroline B. Brettell
1. History and the Second Generation: Differences between Prewar and Postwar Japanese American Nisei
Takeyuki (Gaku) Tsuda
2. Confronting Identities and Educating for Leadership among Asian Youth
Caroline B. Brettell
3. “My friends make me who I am”: The Social Spaces of Friendship among Second-Generation Youth
Lisa Haayen
4. “Too white and didn’t belong”: The Intra-ethnic Consequences of Second-Generation Digital Diasporas
Faith G. Nibbs
5. Political Spaces: The Ambivalent Experiences of Italian Second-Generation Associations
Bruno Riccio
6. Living in Transnational Spaces: Azorean Portuguese Descendants in Quebec
Josiane Le Gall and Ana Gherghel
7. Religious Spaces: “Boat People” Legacies and the Vietnamese American 1.5 and Second Generation
Linda Ho Peché
8. Health Spaces: Representations of French Immigrant Youth in Mental Health Care
Stéphanie Larchanché
9. Legal Spaces: Failed Asylum-Seeking Children in the Irish Homeland
Erin Moran
Afterword. Spaces of Identity: Rejecting the Hegemony of Assimilation
Louise Lamphere
Contributors
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book had its beginnings as a panel on the second-generation children of immigrants at the 2012 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association. We want to thank the many contributors, some of whom participated in the original panel and others who later volunteered chapters for the volume as it developed. All the authors brought their academic expertise and ethnographic knowledge to bear on the production of a unified and focused volume. We would like to acknowledge in particular Louise Lamphere for agreeing to write an afterword. We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers who offered insightful comments that helped to improve the quality and coherence of the volume and to Eli Bortz, editor at Vanderbilt University Press, for his careful and patient stewardship of this project. We would also like to thank the many children of immigrants across the United States, Canada, and Europe who shared their time and experiences with us in order to generate a greater understanding of the spaces of identity they occupy. We are also grateful to Faith Nibbs’s research assistant and graduate student at Southern Methodist University, Carrie Perkins, who helped in compiling the final material for publication. Finally, we would like to thank SMU and colleagues in the Department of Anthropology for providing a stimulating and supportive work environment.
IDENTITY AND THE SECOND GENERATION
INTRODUCTION
Faith G. Nibbs and Caroline B. Brettell
By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, there were close to seventeen million children of immigrants (defined as children under eighteen living with one foreign-born parent) in the United States (Batalova and Fix 2011). These children represented almost a quarter of all children in the United States. A German survey of similar date indicated that a third of all children in that country belonged to immigrant families, while in France it is estimated that the children of immigrants represent close to one-fifth of all children (Cebolla-Boado and Gonzalez-Ferrer 2008; Clauss and Nauck 2009).
On both sides of the Atlantic, there has been a growing interest in studies of this population, the so-called second generation (Portes and MacLeod 1996, 1999; Portes and Rumbaut 2001; Rumbaut and Portes 2001; Andall 2002; Hall 2002; Súarez-Orozco and Súarez-Orozco 2002; Súarez-Orozco and Todorova 2003; Kasinitz, Mollenkopf, and Waters 2004; Kim 2004; Alba 2005; Kim 2006; Thomson and Crul 2007; Heath et al. 2008; Kasinitz, Mollenkopf, Waters, and Holdaway 2008; Foner 2009; Alba and Waters 2011; Kasinitz, Matsumoto, and Zeltzer-Zubida 2011; Ziolek-Skrzypczak 2013; Ali and Gidley 2014; Heath 2014). Much of this work draws on aggregate data sets from large metropolitan areas and focuses on achievements against desired outcomes: rates of education, rates of employment, rates of intermarriage, and levels of language acquisition (Sakamoto and Woo 2007; Cruz 2008; Barban and White 2011; Capps and Fix 2012; Ludemann and Schwerdt 2013; Alba and Holdway 2013). Suárez-Orozco et al. (2008), for example, explore the impact of school on immigrant and second-generation youth, looking in particular at academic engagement and performance and searching for explanations for why many immigrant youth fall through the cracks while others outperform their native-born peers (see also Deaux et al. 2007; Portes and Fernández-Kelly 2008; and Kao et al. 2013). Perlmann (2005) compares the outcomes for the Italian second generation of a century ago with the Mexican second generation of today. On schooling, he concludes that Mexican youth of today lag further behind native whites than did their counterparts of a century ago—something that is then aggravated by their alarmingly high drop-out rate. Nevertheless, he is still seeing progress by comparison with the immigrant generation, and by comparison with the Italian youth of the past he identifies growing wage inequality as the most serious challenge to the progress of the children of Mexican immigrants today. This, he concludes, may mean that economic assimilation happens more slowly—“four or five generations rather than three or four” (p. 124). However, a more recent study (Hao and Woo 2012), based on a sample of eleven thousand children from diverse backgrounds who were tracked from age thirteen into their early thirties, concludes that the children of immigrants are doing better than those with more deeply rooted family lineages in the United States. These advantages applied to both Asian and Hispanic children.
The second-generation literature also explores issues of ethnic self-identification, of how race in America is negotiated, of generational and cultural dissonance both in the United States and abroad, and of processes of change. Acculturation, assimilation, segmented assimilation, integration, incorporation, convergence, reactive ethnicity, lived hybridity, and immigrant youth culture are all analytical concepts that have been used (Portes and Zhou 1993; Maira 2002; Min 2002; Butterfield 2004; Lee 2004; Alba 2005; Aparicio 2007, 2008; Dhingra 2007; van Niekerk 2007; Rumbaut 2008; Shankhar 2008; Brettell and Nibbs 2009; Maira 2009; Heath 2014). Often change, particularly in relation to assimilation, is theorized dichotomously—the children of immigrants are either assimilated into the social life of the host society or they resist absorption.
The essays in this collection explore in greater depth the social worlds or spaces of identity for the children of immigrants, thereby linking this volume to the broader spatial turn in the social sciences. This spatial approach emphasizes the relationship between space, social relationships, and social identities, hence formulating spaces as fields of interaction, human experience, and belonging (Low 1996; Olwig and Hastrup 1997; Nibbs 2014). Some of these spaces are structural contexts where the identities (including the right to belong) of the children of immigrants are to some extent shaped for them; others are arenas where the children of immigrants have more agency to construct their own identities. For example, Abu El-Haj (2009) describes community arts as an alternative space for citizenship education among Arab American youth. Several of the authors in this volume are particularly attentive to the dimensions of discourse that characterize the spaces of identity for immigrant youth.
The approach in this volume is cross-national and includes studies of the children of immigrants in the United States, Canada, and several European contexts. This cross-national approach poses a methodological problem, as Portes (1994) and more recently Andall (2002) have argued. Methods of data collection and definitions of whom to count and include when referring to the second generation are not consistent between countries. In the United States, early definitions of the second generation were loosely defined as immigrant children “either born here [USA] or brought from the mother country at an early age” (Child 1943: 3). Later definitions defined them as “native-born children with at least one foreign-born parent or children born aboard who came to the United States before age 12” (Portes and Zhou 1993: 75). In the European context, British scholar Modood (1997) lumps both native-born and fifteen-year-old foreign-born children together in the same analysis.
A more precise definition was offered by Rumbaut (1997) based on research on the children of immigrants to the United States. He distinguished between those persons born in a country with one or both parents born outside the United States including its territories of Puerto Rico, Guam, the Virgin Island, and American Samoa (second generation), and a “1.5 generation,” defined as persons born abroad who ca