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Advocating For Integration: Acculturation In A Non-Profit Serving Immigrants Organization, Daniel Calderon

SPACE: Student Perspectives About Civic Engagement

This paper presents acculturation practices in a non-profit, serving immigrants organization in a Midwestern city in the United States. Although the programs and services offered at this organization become pertinent vis-à-vis the welfare of the immigrants, their expected outcomes seem to foment the Americanization of the organization’s clients.

Through a critical examination, certain services and practices within this organization respond to a unidirectional process of acculturation, in which the immigrants turn out to be the ones who have to acquire certain sociocultural and linguistic repertoires for them to adapt and fit in the U.S. mainstream society.

The utilization of the …