Migration and cultures

US immigration studies have been greatly influenced by the historical production of immigrants as bearers of cultural difference. The dominant theories in the field-theories of assimilation (including segmented assimilation), amalgamation, the “melting pot,” and cultural pluralism (or multiculturalism)—all conceptualize the immigrants’ “original” culture as fundamentally opposed to native and white “American” culture. Though prescribing different outcomes, these immigration theories focus on the degrees of transformations of ethnic consciousness-that is, how much individuals or communities assimilate into American life or retain their community-of-origin ties. The present essay argues that this conceptualization of cultural identity-as bipolar and linear-promotes a discourse of race in which “cultural difference,” defined as innate and abstracted from unresolved histories of racial inequality, is used to explain or explain away historically produced social inequalities. Here, I challenge the very authority and authenticity of the term “cultural identity,” asserting instead that culture-or, more precisely, culturemaking-is a social, historical, and transnational process that exposes multiple and interrelated forms of power relations and that articulates new forms of immigrant subjectivity, collectivity, and practice. In the American sociology of race relations, Robert Park and the Chicago School of

Sociology more generally have been most influential in extending a project of racial knowledge. This project, inaugurated by the science of man and twentieth-century anthropology, explicates the “immigrant problem” as a signifier of cultural difference. Allied with such intellectuals as anthropologist Franz Boas, the Chicago sociologists advocated a cultural rather than a biological definition of race. However, as Henry Yu points out, though University of Chicago sociologists claimed to eliminate biology as a consideration, they merely shifted the importance of the physical body into another realm (2001: 46). Because of their strong interest in the massive immigration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Chicago theorists such as Robert Park linked “cultural differences” with the foreign origins of certain human bodies: where one came from became an important element of one’s cultural consciousness (Yu 2001: 47). This mapping of race reinscribes the “others of Europe” as “absolutely different”—and the cultures and geographies from which they come as fundamentally opposed to modern

American society (Silva 2007: 153; see also Lowe 1996: 5). In other words, when Park appropriates the “stranger” as a spatial metaphor to describe “the problem of race relations,” he advances a project of knowledge that is “predicated on a definition of the exotic, of what is absolutely foreign and different about one place and another” (Yu 2001: 6). This approach effectively incarcerates the immigrants in culture, locking them in bounded, timeless, and unchanging “traditions.” Park’s early twentieth-century rewriting of racial difference as a signifier of cultural

difference is key here: by linking cultural consciousness not with the physical body, but with the body’s origins in physical space, Park and his associates literally mapped where “cultural” groups existed in space, fixing their places in the world, vis-à-vis white America (Yu 2001: 47). Thus, the perceived origins of one’s biological ancestors mattered: “the marginalization of the non-European immigrant is concomitant to the marginalization of the world he or she comes from-a country and culture viewed as alien, backward, poor, and unhappy” (Vassanji 1996: 112). To take an example, in the United States, Asia and America are viewed as mutually exclusive binaries-a primitive and stagnant East versus a modern and mobile West. The Orientalist construction of Asian cultures and geographies as fundamentally antipathetic to modern American society racializes the Asian American as the “foreigner-within”—always-already seen as an immigrant, even when born in the United States (Lowe 1996: 5-6). In the same way, anti-immigrant groups have consistently charged that the influx of unwanted immigrants will transform the United States into a Third-World nation. This reference to the “Third World” must be seen as a strategic marker that “metaphorically alludes to social evolution and the threat of immigration leading to a de-evolution of ‘American civilization’” (Chavez 1997: 67). It was this tenet of Chicago School of Sociology, which posited the intimate connections between race, culture, and space, that profoundly marked many scholars’ understandings of the process of immigrant adaptation and incorporation, informing the logic of both the assimilationist and pluralist perspectives. Park’s Americanization cycle-which theorized that two groups coming into contact

always underwent a series of social interactions, beginning with competition and ending with assimilation-established an expectation that immigrants would assimilate and integrate into the dominant culture by shedding their “original” culture. Although this interaction cycle described the trajectory of many European immigrants, it could not explain the experiences of people belonging to subjugated “races and cultures” who simultaneously confronted the political pressure to assimilate and the cultural racism that prevented assimilation. By the 1960s, in light of the new social movements that exposed the material histories of racialization, segregation, and economic discrimination, the prescription of assimilation was revised into “multiculturalism,” a new liberal vision that publicly affirmed and celebrated the kaleidoscope of cultures in American society. Scholarly research accordingly shifted from documenting assimilation toward explaining the persistence of ethnic cultures, mainly focusing on the continuing importance of ethnicity among white ethnics of European origin (Novak 1973; Cohen 1977). In an influential article on this topic, Herbert Gans (1979) argued that for the middle-class descendants of European immigrants, “symbolic ethnicity” is all that is left. These latergeneration white ethnics, according to Gans, abstract ethnic symbols from the older “original” culture and look for easy and intermittent ways to express their ethnic identity-ways that do not require the rigorous practice of ethnic culture or active participation in ethnic organizations. But the influx of the largely non-European immigrants, precipitated by world upheavals and changes in US immigration law in 1965, raised an

important research question: How much can we generalize from the experiences of white European ethnic groups to the experiences of racialized immigrant populations? The post-1965 increases in racialized immigrant populations in the US-and the new

social movements of the 1960s-transformed the academy, ushering in new subjects of social knowledge, but also new critical social knowledges. Contesting the depoliticization of culture, critical scholarship, especially in the emerging field of ethnic studies, rejected assimilation but also critiqued multiculturalism’s aim to integrate differences, in the words of Lisa Lowe, as “cultural equivalents abstracted from the histories of racial inequality” (1996: 30). According to Lowe, the characterization of the United States as a “polyvocal symphony of cultures” leveled important differences and contradictions within and among racial and ethnic groups, deploying the liberal promise of inclusion to mask the history of exclusion. In other Western societies, where multiculturalism has been widely endorsed, however incompletely, public discourses similarly define the problem of immigrant integration as a cultural one, thus exempting the dominant society from any responsibility toward the “immigrant problem” (Ossman and Terrio 2006; Roggeband and Verloo 2007). Thus, the multiculturalism model, even as it challenges the inevitability and desirability of assimilation, constitutes ethnic cultures as temporally and geographically distant-much like the assimilation model propagated by Robert Park. As Balibar and Wallerstein (1991) have pointed out, many advocates of multi-

culturalism, while endorsing cultural diversity, cast culture as primordial, fixed, and homogeneous, thereby ascribing certain immutable traits to the peoples within these presumed cultural groupings. This conception of culture assumes that a natural identity exists between people and places, and that discrete peoples belong to specific, bounded territories, which frame their distinct cultures and local identities. Thus, in a case study of Vietnamese American students in New Orleans, Min Zhou and Carl Bankston (1998) argue that the youth’s achievement is rooted in their “core cultural values”—a strong work ethic, high regard for education, and family values, that is, in their “difference.” Other scholars have critiqued this essentialization of culture-the idea that it is a bounded and internally consensual system into which one is born and integrated-and warned that the exclusive focus on cultural difference obscures the connections between the cultural and the material (Roggeband and Verloo 2007). In a study of the riots waged by frustrated and disenfranchised suburban immigrant youths in France in 2005, Ossman and Terrio (2006) denounced the discourse of cultural essentialism that undergirded public reaction to the rioting youths. They reported that key French institutions-legal, political, social scientific, and media-linked the causes of “immigrant delinquency” to what they identified as the culture of poverty of immigrant neighborhood enclaves. Noting the influence of the Chicago School of Sociology’s cultural-ecology model on this public framing of the riots, Ossman and Terrio (2006) show how Parisian jurists and juvenile judges criminalized the cultural origin of the overwhelmingly poor children and families of non-European ancestry by linking their purported “delinquent” actions to “aberrant cultural norms and dangerous social milieus” (Ossman and Terrio 2006: 12). The Paris officials thus attributed the “immigrant problem” to the hegemony of people’s culture of origin rather than to political and economic forces within the “new country.” Ossman and Terrio argue that by reifying and criminalizing what was perceived to be the culture of these immigrant youth, culturalist policies set the stage for the deportation of immigrants as a new tool for defending the nation from external threats (2006: 14). Some advocates of multiculturalism also produce gendered discourses and policies that

construct patriarchy as particular to immigrant culture. In line with the global crusade for

women’s rights, ratified by the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), scholars and the larger public became preoccupied with “harmful traditions” that allegedly abuse women in minority immigrant communities (Silva 2004). Over the past decade, in many countries, migrant women have appeared at the top of the political agenda. For example, in the Netherlands, gender equality policies have shifted to an almost exclusive focus on migrant (Muslim) women; and “minority policies” have moved more and more towards gender relations. As Roggeband and Verloo (2007) observe, Dutch official and popular discourses construct patriarchy as a signifier of migrant Muslim culture, which has the effect of shifting the responsibility for Muslim “failure” to fully integrate in Dutch society to Muslim migrants, and away from the dominant culture and society. Anti-immigration agendas in Britain have also become entangled with public initiatives to protect migrant women. Targeting the Muslim migrant community, the media have focused on four “cultural” issues affecting women-forced marriage, honor killing, female genital cutting, and women’s Islamic dress. Dustin and Phillips (2008) contend that media treatment of these issues has been problematic, producing discourses that misrepresent Muslim cultural groups as monolithic and naturally oppressive entities. Thus, efforts that purport to address abuses of migrant women simultaneously promote cultural stereotypes, setting up women’s rights in false opposition to multiculturalism. In the United States, academic writings on immigrant family and gender relations,

especially as they pertain to Asian and Latino communities, have also emphasized “an ethnically specific patriarchal culture,” which freezes immigrant men as subjects who oppress women (Kang 2002: 43-44). For example, literary studies scholars (and the larger public) are fascinated with narratives about young immigrant girls coming to the United States and finding liberation. In her assessment of the critical work produced in response to Julia Alvarez’s novel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent, Sarika Chandra (2008) argues that the book is read almost exclusively so as to emphasize the girls’ identity formation and self-assertion against the perceived overbearing and overprotective patriarchal old world of the Dominican Republic. Chandra argues that the near-exclusive focus on gender politics obscures the novel’s engagement with the role of the United States in forcing the Garcias and other Dominicans to flee the island in the first place. By conceptualizing intergenerational strain as a product of “cultural clash” between

“traditional” immigrant parents and their more “modernized” US-born or raised children, rather than as a social, historical, and transnational affair, scholars represent the United States as self-evidently less sexist than the “old country” and they thus fail to expose the multiple and interrelated forms of power relations connecting the two countries. A more dynamic approach to culture conceptualizes cultural identities not as an

essence but as a positioning-“the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past” (Hall 1990: 225). Employing this approach, I have argued elsewhere that Filipino immigrants’ cultural claims-that Filipino culture is more family oriented and thus morally superior to white American culture-constitute a strategy of resistance against the colonial racial denigration of their culture, community, and women (Espiritu 2003: 215). Instead of assuming that these cultural claims perfectly correspond to a bounded and static set of practices imported from the home country into the host society, I underscore the immigrants’ ability to maneuver and manipulate meanings within the domain of culture in an effort to counter the alternative assumption of inevitable white American superiority. In the

same way, Purkayastha (2005) explains young South Asian women’s invocation of their homeland culture-specifically the closeness and sense of mutual obligation of their extended family relationships-as an effort to combat their cultural marginalization in the United States, which is based on culturalist stereotypes about arranged marriages and other presumed patriarchal South Asian practices. By stressing what they perceive to be positive South Asian cultural values, these young women manage “to compare their families to that of their peers in ways that their families become the norm and those of their peers ‘flawed’” (Purkayastha 2005: 67). It is true that the immigrants’ gendered discourse of moral superiority often leads to patriarchal calls for cultural “authenticity,” which locates family honor and national integrity in its female members and renders them emblematic of the community’s cultural survival (Espiritu 2003). However, this critique of patriarchal practices differs from the (multi)culturalist stereotyping of immigrant culture described on pp. 661-62 in that it positions culture in the shifting terrain of histories, economics, and politics. As this line of research shows, the multiculturalist approach to gender outlined on pp. 661-62 is problematic because it misrepresents “patriarchal culture” as indigenous to immigrant communities, rather than as a constantly negotiated strategy deployed by racialized immigrants to claim through gender the power denied them by racism. In the same way, as numerous case studies of immigrant cultures demonstrate, many

immigrants themselves appear to have internalized a definition of culture that is tied to homeland traditions and represented by a fixed profile of shared traits such as language, ethnic food, and folk songs. However, a more critical examination of these cultural claims indicates that the immigrants’ seemingly reified comments about their own culture in fact refer to cultural practices that have been reconstituted and transformed in the host society. If we conceptualize culture not as a series of depoliticized and fixed attributes but as a set of evolving practices constituted within webs of power relations, then the immigrants’ cultural claims are less about cultural authenticity and more about strategic self-representation, especially in the context of a hostile host society. For example, Nobue Suzuki (2002) reports that Filipina “mail order brides” in Japan respond to their dehumanization and eroticization by eagerly showcasing various aspects of “Filipino lifestyles and culture” at local schools and community events, including giving talks on their history, performing arts and crafts, and displaying their ethnic cuisine and dresses. By showing “the height of their culture,” the women strategically tap into the Japanese gendered ideal of housewife and mother, in the hope that the Japanese audience will recognize the “elegance of the Filipinas” and accordingly “reformulate classificatory categories more analogous to their own subjective conceptualizations” (Suzuki 2002: 197). In another study, Sunaina Maira reports that in the post-9/11 racial climate of intensified hostility and scrutiny, South Asian Muslim teens in New England dealt with their liminal positions by fashioning everyday identifications with India or Pakistan through the consumption of popular culture found in Bollywood films, South Asian television programs, and Hindi music websites (Maira 2008: 708-09). Such longing to be more “authentically” tied to the “original” culture continues to be very powerful for immigrant youth because it is directed, in Franz Fanon’s words, “by the secret hope of discovering beyond the misery of today, beyond self-contempt, resignation, and abjuration, some very beautiful and splendid era whose existence rehabilitates us both in regard to ourselves and in regard to others” (Fanon 1963: 170). Although these two examples appear to confirm a fixed concept of culture, they in fact demonstrate how immigrants deliberately and strategically memorialize and represent the “original” culture

as a form of resistance to places and practices in the host country that are patently anti-immigrant. In the last twenty-five years, the globalization of labor and capital, the restructuring

of world politics, and the expansion of new technologies of communication and transportation all have driven people and products across the globe at a dizzying pace, thus further invalidating the notion of culture as spatially bounded. Recent writings on “transnational sociocultural systems,” “the transnational community,” “transmigrants,” the “deterritorizalized nation-state,” and “transnational grassroots politics” have challenged previously conventional notions of place, reminding us to think about places not only as specific geographic and physical sites but also as circuits and networks. These writings have contradicted localized and bounded social-science conceptualizations of community and culture, calling attention instead to the transnational relations and linkages among overseas communities, and between them and their homelands (Basch et al. 1994; Levitt 2001; Smith 2006). Living between the old and the new, between homes, between languages, and between cultural repertoires, immigrants do not merely insert or incorporate themselves into existing spaces in a given host society; they also transform these spaces and create new ones, for example the “space between” (Small 1997: 193). Transnationalism is thus a valuable concept that can be used as a tool to highlight the range and depth of migrants’ lived experiences in multinational social fields, thus disrupting the narrow emphasis on cultural assimilation or cultural diversity characteristic of much of the published scholarship in US immigration studies. A critical transnational perspective also provokes us to think beyond the limits of the

nation-state, that is, to be attentive to the global relations that set the context for immigration and immigrant life. As a rhetorical strategy, multiculturalism, with its focus on culturalist identity politics, obscures the role of the United States and other receiving countries in producing the phenomenon of immigration. Because the framework of multiculturalism is “subordinated to and divorced from the historical and socioeconomic conditions of (im)migration” (Chandra 2008: 847), it cannot take into account the way that a long and continuing history of US imperialism shapes processes of migration, racialization, and marginality. Consider as a case in point the relationship of the Philippines and the United States: its origins lie in a history of conquest, occupation, and exploitation. A study of Filipino immigrant culture must begin with this history, and not with US domestic multicultural identity issues. Coming from a former US colony, Filipinos have long been exposed to US lifestyles, cultural practices, and consumption patterns, so much so that before “the Filipino … sets foot on the U.S. continent-she, her body, and sensibility-has been prepared by the thoroughly Americanized culture of the homeland” (San Juan 1991: 118). With English as the imposed language of education in the Philippines came a flood, that reached all Filipinos, of US printed materials and mass media-textbooks, novels, news services, magazines, music, and especially movies. These cultural products infected Filipinos with American norms, standards, ideals, values, and viewpoints (Espiritu 2003: 72-73). Thus, in a critically acclaimed 1990 novel, Dogeaters, Jessica Hagedorn portrays neocolonial Manila, from about 1956 to 1985, as a world in which American popular culture and local Filipino tradition mix flamboyantly. In other words, Filipino culture is the always-already transnational, thus eliding easy localization. By the opposite token, Amy Kaplan (1993) reminds us in an important essay that

US imperialism contributes not only to the cultural Americanization of the colonized “other” but also to the consolidation of a dominant imperial culture at home.

George Lipsitz has made a similar point: US armed conflicts against “enemies” in Asia “functioned culturally to solidify and reinforce a unified U.S. national identity based in part on antagonism toward Asia and Asians” (1998: 72). These studies suggest that we need to examine migration and cultures not only for what they tell us about the integration of immigrants but more so for what they say about the racialized economic, cultural, and political foundations of the United States. In other words, migrant cultures and US national culture(s) are mutually constituted. By situating US national culture within a globalist framework, these scholars call attention to the deep entanglement of the domestic and the foreign, and thus to how both US national and immigrant cultures are shaping and being shaped by intersecting social and historical relationships. This scholarship suggests that a critical transnational perspective is not just a methodological approach; it is fundamentally a theoretical orientation. That is, it is not necessarily or only about doing multi-sited projects; it is more about linking the study of culture and immigration inextricably to the study of empire-even when the research focus is on the domestic front. In an influential work on Asian American cultural politics, Lisa Lowe (1996) urges her

readers to consider the role that critical cultural works play in exposing the racialized foundations of the nation. Calling attention to the importance of critical remembering, Lowe has argued a position also articulated by others, that “culture is a … mediation of history, the site through which the past returns and is remembered, however fragmented, imperfect, or disavowed” (1996: x). For participants in racialized immigrant communities who have had to struggle for access to means of representation, she notes, “the question of aesthetic representation is always also a debate about political representation” (Lowe 1996: 4). As Elaine Kim (2003) suggests, many Asian American artists are committed to a cultural politics that challenges, resists, and hopes to transform US nationalized memory and culture. For instance, in recent years, Vietnamese American artists have begun to grapple with the war’s disastrous consequences for Vietnam and its people, giving rise to oft-haunting artistic and cultural representations that imagine, remember, and trace the complex genealogies of war and forced displacements that precede and shape Vietnamese resettlement in the United States. In light of the “organized forgetting” of the Vietnam War and its people in US media, these Vietnamese American cultural forms are crucial for what they reveal about US military crimes in Southeast Asia and how they underwrite the tensions, irresolutions, and contradictions of Vietnamese American lives (Espiritu and Nguyen-Vo 2005). For the most part, migration to the United States “has been the product of specific

economic, colonial, political, military, and/or ideological ties between the United States and other countries … as well as of war” (Ngai 2004: 10). And yet, much of the published work in the field of immigration studies has not situated US immigration history within a transnational or global framework, opting instead to focus on the immigrants’ integration into the nation. This framework focused on “modes of incorporation” assesses the assimilability of the immigrants but leaves uninterrogated the racialized and gendered foundations of the United States. In this essay, I have argued that the scholarly focus on immigrants’ integration-and the concomitant failure to connect US foreign interventions with US-bound migration-stems from the historical production of the immigrants as bearers of cultural difference. Today, many immigration studies scholars continue to invoke “cultural difference” to individualize and explain (away) immigrants’ perceived “lacks,” thereby eliding the role that “U.S. world power has played in the global structures of migration” (Ngai 2004: 11). In other words, the

essentializing and liberal tendencies of multiculturalism obscure the continuation of racial violence, both physical and symbolic, in the United States and globally. At this moment of reinvigorated US imperialism and soaring immigration to the United States, it is imperative that immigration studies scholars recognize and analyze the intimate connection between US foreign interventions and migration to the United States-to be mindful of what Amy Kaplan (1993) calls the “entanglement of the domestic and the foreign.” To do so, we first need to link culture to history, economics, and politics in order to better scrutinize the United States as a historical entity with policies that play a key role in producing (im)migration.