Thread by @Noahpinion

1/Up next in my "immigration and diversity" reading list is "Second Generation: Ethnic Identity Among Asian Americans", a collection of essays edited by Pyong Gap Min.

amazon.com/Second-Generat…

2/Second-generation Americans (children of immigrants) are very important for the immigration story. But we talk about them much less. This is the first of four or five books I'm going to read on this topic.

3/The essays in this book are almost all ethnographies. The interviews and quotes have lots of interesting tidbits that allow deeper, more nuanced understanding than survey research. The tradeoff, and the danger, is the tendency to conclude that anecdotes are representative.

4/The classic theory of 2nd-gen Americans is that they're caught between two worlds - brought up with American culture, and knowing only little of their parents' countries, but still feeling weird and different due to having immigrant parents.

5/Obviously, racialization exacerbates this problem. This book deals with Asian 2nd-gen Americans, who in addition to having immigrant parents often feel excluded for not being white. Many of the essays in this book deal with that feeling of exclusion.

6/What's interesting is how differently the people in the various ethnographies deal with these challenges. The responses can be extremely different...

7/One kind of response is to construct an identity based on opposition to racism (and other forms of exclusion). For example, here are some quotes from the book's first chapter, about Filipino Americans:

8/And here is a strikingly similar idea from a later chapter about Indian Anericans. The author centers "antiracist struggles" as a key part of Indian American identity.

9/Sociologists may already have a term for this, but if I were coining a term, I'd call these "identities of resistance".

Unable to feel at home in either the American mainstream or their parents', some 2nd-gen folks make resistance to the American mainstream their identity.

10/Now, people on the political right will probably freak out when they see this. "The children of immigrants aren't assimilating!", they will cry. "We're importing people who are going to hate America!"

But there are a number of reasons why this reaction will be misplaced.

11/First of all, "identities of resistance" (my term) seem far more widespread than this. There are plenty of others - punk rock, activism, nerd culture in the 80s. They are pretty quintessentially American, and not at all unique to 2nd-gen Americans.

12/Second, "identities of resistance" are themselves a mechanism of assimilation (something the people who embrace these identities will probably not be happy to hear, but it's true nonetheless). They are a way for people to find their place in alternative American culture.

13/Third, the ethnographies in this book make it clear that these pugnaciously oppositional identities are almost always constructed during the college years.

To me, that suggests they are part of a necessary phase of individuation and adulthood that most Americans go through.

14/But fourth, and most importantly, the people who embrace "identities of resistance" are probably a small minority of 2nd-gen Americans.

The other ethnographies in this book lay out a number of alternate scenarios that are probably much more common.

15/For example, a later chapter discusses how many Chinese and Korean American students are turned off by the politics of campus pan-Asian groups.

16/The interviews make it clear that some 2nd-gen Asian Americans feel most comfortable in specific national-origin groups, some in pan-Asian groups, others in groups that are mainly Black and Latino, and others in mostly white groups.

A vast diversity of life paths and choices.

17/The most unique chapter in the book was about Filipino American youth gangs!

It tells the story of how Filipinos in Southern California banded together to resist Latino youth gangs. (Whites aren't even mentioned in the chapter!)

18/In fact, that chapter ends up telling a happy, even exuberant story. In the end, the age of gangs ends and the Filipino American youth gangs turn into DJ crews and party crews, and make a bunch of money.

America contains multitudes.

19/Anyway, although the book tells the stories of Americans whose experiences and perspectives are very different than my own, it's definitely the America I know and love - a contentious, fractally diverse, sometimes violent place where everyone is struggling to find their niche.

20/And although it never explicitly says it, the book seems to raise an interesting possibility - that as Asian Americans become a larger share of the population, and as popular culture recognizes them as more of a "foundational" American group, the struggles of 2nd-gen...

21/...Asian Americans will become more like the struggles of white ethnics in past generations - an immigrant struggle, but not one of eternal racialized exclusion.

22/Anyway, I have other books on my shelf about the experiences of 2nd-gen Latino and Black Americans, so I'm looking forward to reading about 2nd-gen issues from those angles as well.

(end)