Amaya, Hector. “Performing Acculturation: Rewriting the Latina/o Immigrant Self.” Text & Performance Quarterly 27, no. 3 (July 2007): 194-212. (original) (raw)
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2019
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At the dawn of a new century, new American ethnic groups are forming faster than ever before. The emerging ethnic groups of the United States in the 21 st century will be the children and grandchildren of today's immigrants. Their numbers and diversity will ensure that the process will have a profound societal impact. This new era of mass immigrationand hence of ethnogenesis-now overwhelmingly non-European in composition, is raising familiar doubts about the assimilability of the newcomers and alarms that they might become consigned to a vast multiethnic underclass, on the other side of a new 21 st century "color line." While assimilation may still represent the master process in the study of today's immigrants, it is a process subject to too many contingencies and affected by too many variables to render the image of a relatively uniform and straightforward path convincing. Instead, the present generation of children of immigrants is better defined as undergoing a process of "segmented assimilation" where outcomes vary across immigrant minorities, and where rapid integration and acceptance into the American mainstream represent just one possible alternative. Why this is so-and how it is that different groups may come to assimilate to different sectors of American society-is a complex story that is explored in this book. The chapters that follow examine systematically a wide range of factors that shape the incorporation of youths of diverse national origins-Mexican, Cuban, Nicaraguan, Filipino, Vietnamese, Haitian, Jamaican and other West Indian-coming of age in immigrant families on both coasts of the United States. They are based on an analysis of a rich new data set collected by the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS), the largest to date in the United States.
The Latin Americanist, 2013
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2009
The United States is presently characterized by rising anti-immigrant sentiment, repressive immigration enforcement, and the negative framing of Latinos as threatening and undesirable. As a result, social boundaries between immigrants and natives have hardened and boundary crossing has become more difficult. Under these circumstances, the prediction of classical assimilation theory is turned on its head: the more time that immigrants spend in the United States and the more contact they have with Americans and American society, the more aware they become of the harsh realities of prejudice and discrimination and the more they come to experience the rampant inequalities of the secondary labor market. Rather than ideologically assimilating, therefore, the greater their experience in the United States, the more likely immigrants are to express a reactive ethnicity that rejects the label “American. ” Our work suggests that the greatest threat to the successful assimilation of immigrants ...