ABSTRACT

Tina, for instance, personifies a conventional "melting pot" understanding of immigrant adaptation to American society. People need to be attentive to the ways in which more and more immigrants are being absorbed into the corporate consumer world, whether they are flipping burgers at McDonald's, serving cappuccino at Starbucks, or taking movie tickets at Sony Theaters. Tina works in Chinatown, a globally diverse neighborhood, ill a restaurant that targets a diverse clientele, including international tourists, a pan-Asian residential population, and a multicultural mix of New Yorkers. Employee relations and the values immigrants are confronted with in the workplace are also affected, particularly as they affect the way immigrants see their working conditions. Validation for working in a postindustrial minimum-wage job is found off the job, not on it. Tina's ethnicity, a commodity to be bought and sold in the corporate quest for new cultural customers, will cease to perform the traditional economic function in sustaining the ethnic community.