ABSTRACT
Among immigrant families moving from one sociocultural environment to another, gender and generational role dissonance in rapidly changing marital and parent-child relationships can amplify and intensify conflicts and lead to family breakdown. The persistence of significant ethnic differences suggests the need for more intensive, comparative ethnographic research. International migration entails more often than not a radical, engulfing, transformative process that profoundly affects and changes all who attempt it, including individuals, families, and societies. It is no mere coincidence that the words travel and travail share a common etymology. Indeed, to make sense of the diversity of immigrant families people need to begin with the recognition that it makes no sense to speak of a singular immigrant family experience. A century ago another massive wave of immigration to the United States from Southern and Eastern Europe was dubbed the new immigration by the US Immigration Commission to distinguish it from the old immigration from Northwest Europe.
