Next generation immigrant negotiation practices

ii Problem Statement and Background . 1 Purpose of the Study . 4 Justification and Significance . 7 Theoretical Background/Literature Review . 8 Research Questions . 17 Methodology . 18 Analysis.21 Findings/Discussion . 22 Conclusion . 60 Limitations Delimitations of the Study and Future Research . 68 References . 71 Appendix A Demographic and Interview Questions . 82 Appendix B Consent Form . 85 Appendix C Definitions of Terms. 86 Next Generation Immigrant Negotiation Practices PROBLEM STATEMENT AND BACKGROUND It doesn‘t always dawn on children that they are different. It takes a community, environment, or family to raise them believing it. This reflects my circumstances. Southfield, Michigan, in the 1980s was a place teeming with groups and people from various religions, races, cultures, or ethnic groups. As a small child in this diversity, I didn‘t initially realize how lucky I was to grow up in such a place, until I began going to a small private school in Detroit. There I learned how special it was to live in a diverse community as my differences quickly and repeatedly were brought to my attention in many ways. The food I ate for lunch, my mannerisms, and my speech all were called into question as I interacted with the other students of my predominantly African American school. While we shared some similarities in pigment, there were many cultural issues that kept arising to separate us. The occasional statement about my mother being a foreigner made me realize that culture played a huge role. The diversity of the student population and the friends I developed when I began going to high school in Southfield, Michigan, was multi-generational and multi cultural. The students created new identities for themselves and drew upon older labels. They used the term Boater or FOB (Fresh off the Boat), a term also used among other ethnic groups to describe themselves (Ajrouch, 2004; Zhou, 1997). For instance, Ajrouch (2004) shows how recent Arab immigrant students in Dearborn were considered ―boaters. ‖ According to second generation Arab Americans peers, the immigrant‘s behavior, clothes, and speech or accent sounded and looked more foreign, and their identities appeared more closely tied to a different country. Next Generation Immigrant Negotiation Practices 2 While existing inside of American society, some U.S.-born Arab Americans have distanced themselves from the Arab American immigrant by categorizing those newer immigrants as boaters (Ajrouch, 2004). It came to denote a negative set of traits in that community. The term boater used in Southfield (pronounced with a ―d‖ to replace the ―t‖) for first generation immigrants, 1.5 immigrants, and second generation immigrants referred to those who displayed ethnic behaviors related to their or their parent‘s country of origin as well. It was a form of reclamation in addition to unification under cultural similarities as opposed to a means to separate immigrants from U.S.-born generations and culture, as was its use in Dearborn (Ajrouch, 2004). It was a negotiation tool for those second generation groups in Southfield to create a hybrid identity of parental culture and mainstream. I began to notice the negotiation tendency in my second-generation American immigrant friends and me. While many of the specific traditions in each culture were different, the essence of many of our experiences similarly illustrated some Gemeinschaft type behaviors. ―The social group brought into existence by this positive relationship, envisaged as functioning both inwardly and outwardly as a unified living entity, is known by some collective term such as a union, fraternity or association. The relationship itself, and the social bond that stems from it, may be conceived either as having real organic life, and that is the essence of Community [Gemeinschaft]. All kinds of social co-existence that are familiar, comfortable and exclusive are to be understood as belonging to Gemeinschaft. In Gemeinschaft we are united from the moment of our birth with our own folk for better or for worse‖ (Tönnies, 1887: 63-64). Next Generation Immigrant Negotiation Practices 3 There were many different cultures but similar reactions based on our socialization in our parents‘ cultures of origin. My classmates and I would sometimes sacrifice something we wanted to do for the greater family or community good, a collectivist cultural thought. These decisions reflected a mix of our various heritages as well as new behaviors we were learning from the mainstream society around us. It became ok to mix and match behaviors to what we deemed appropriate for various situations. Sometimes, mainstream American alternatives were weighed and discussed among friends. There was a constant vacillation between the world around us and the world at home. It was the need to belong everywhere and a longing to create normalcy as we matured. There was also an understanding that the word ―normal‖ was relative to one‘s socio-economic status, capital, and environment. Throughout this paper this will be referred to as ―cultural negotiation. ‖ When one initially moves to a new country, it is sometimes difficult to acclimate or assimilate into a new culture. What if one is born or raised in the United States at a really young age, but his or her parents were not? This is the case of the second generation American immigrants, children of an immigrant, and their 1.5 American immigrant counterparts, who immigrated before the age of 18 with their parents and resided in the U.S. for at least five years (Rumbaut, 1994; U.S. Census Bureau in 2011). In 2000, the U.S. Census stated that 1 out of 5 children in the U.S. is the child of immigrants. National origins are more likely to be from Asia and Latin America than from Europe. Some studies claim that second generation children assimilate into mainstream American culture (Portes and Zhou, 1993; Rumbaut, 1994), but newer Next Generation Immigrant Negotiation Practices 4 theories suggest different paths other than ―straight line‖ assimilation as previous second generation groups may have done before them. Many European groups were able to ―straight line‖ assimilate into mainstream American society by losing language, shedding other cultural traditions, and eventually achieving upward mobility as they were accepted into the white category (Zhou, 1997). Modern second generation American immigrants do not always have opportunities to assimilate into dominant society, often because of classifications into the U.S. racial hierarchy system (Portes and Rumbaut, 2006; Ajrouch and Kusow, 2007). Immigrants from Asia represent one of the largest and fastest growing immigrant groups in the U.S. (U.S. Census, 2002). This study will contribute to the emerging literature on assimilation patterns amongst new immigrants by focusing specifically on patterns of cultural negotiation in second generation Chinese American immigrants. PURPOSE OF THE STUDY The purpose of this research is to better understand and document the behavior of children of the Chinese American immigrant population in Michigan and to discover patterns in the types of negotiation behaviors performed, so they can acculturate to both Chinese and American cultures. This study will provide detailed information about behavior and family interaction not available in data from surveys, the U.S. census data, the American Community Survey, and various quantitative interviews of second generation immigrants in the past (Zhou, 1997). Behavioral dynamics cannot be probed through a survey, as they do not allow the respondents to expound their ideas or give a rationale. Many times study interviews introduce more questions about assimilation and Next Generation Immigrant Negotiation Practices 5 negotiation practices that researchers did not think to ask until later when they analyzed the data. The aim of this project is to work to address such gaps in the literature. New theories have emerged out of straight line assimilation including the notion of segmented assimilation, meant to accommodate minority cultures emergence in to the mainstream American culture and media (Portes and Zhou, 1993). A previous longitudinal study aimed to research the negotiation behaviors among second generation Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshi, and Nepalese Americans (Bandana Purkayastha, 2005). Bandana Purkayastha challenged the theory that immigrants had to pass many generations to attain the ―American dream‖ or be considered assimilated into American society. She ident