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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
[Review Of] Louis G. Mendoza. Conversations Across Our America: Talking About Immigration And The Latinoization Of The United States, Brianne Dávila
[Review Of] Louis G. Mendoza. Conversations Across Our America: Talking About Immigration And The Latinoization Of The United States, Brianne Dávila
Ethnic Studies Review
Louis G. Mendoza's book, Conversations Across Our America: Talking about Immigration and the Latinoization of the United States, incorporates thirty-three conversations with forty-two Latinas/os of various nationalities in order to better understand the Latino influence in the United States. To collect this data, Mendoza rode a bicycle approximately 8,500 miles through thirty states from July to December 2007. He draws upon Ethnic Studies tradition as he was driven to conduct research that is relevant to his community. Mendoza draws upon the oral histories and lived experience of his participants to demonstrate the diverse nature of Latinas/os throughout the country. He …
The Dear Diane Letters And The Bintel Brief: The Experiences Of Chinese And Jewish Immigrant Women In Encountering America, Hong Cai
Ethnic Studies Review
This paper employs assimilation theory to examine the experiences of Chinese and Jewish immigrant women at similar stages of their encounters with America. By focusing on the letters in Dear Diane: Letters from Our Daughters (1983), and Dear Diane: Questions and Answers for Asian American Women (1983), and earlier in the century, the letters translated and printed in A Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side to the Jewish Daily Forward (1971), this paper compares and contrasts the experiences of Chinese and Jewish women in America. It concludes that, though they have their own unique characteristics, …
"For Heart, Patriotism, And National Dignity": The Italian Language Press In New York City And Constructions Of Africa, Race, And Civilization, Peter G. Vellon
"For Heart, Patriotism, And National Dignity": The Italian Language Press In New York City And Constructions Of Africa, Race, And Civilization, Peter G. Vellon
Ethnic Studies Review
"For Heart, Patriotism, and National Dignity": The Italian Language Press in New York City and Constructions of Africa, Race, and Civilization" examines how mainstream and radical newspapers employed Africa as a trope for savage behavior by analyzing their discussion of wage slavery, imperialism, lynching, and colonialism, in particular Italian imperialist ventures into northern Africa in the 1890s and Libya in 1911-1912. The Italian language press constructed Africa as a sinister, dark, continent, representing the lowest rung of the racial hierarchy. In expressing moral outrage over American violence and discrimination against Italians, the press utilized this image of Africa to emphatically …
Dressed To Cross: Narratives Of Resistance And Integration In Sei Shônagon's The Pillow Book And Yone Noguchi's The American Diary Of A Japanese Girl, Ina Christiane Seethaler
Dressed To Cross: Narratives Of Resistance And Integration In Sei Shônagon's The Pillow Book And Yone Noguchi's The American Diary Of A Japanese Girl, Ina Christiane Seethaler
Ethnic Studies Review
The Pillow Book by Sei Shônagon, Empress Sadako's lady in waiting from about 993-1000, offers rich detail about the meaning and power of dress during the Heian period [794-1185]. Throughout Yone Noguchi's novel The American Diary of a Japanese Girl (1902), Morning Glory, a newly arrived Japanese immigrant to the U.S., experiments with a multitude of different identities through clothes. Both narratives appropriate (cross-) dressing as a means of overcoming gender, cultural, and class borders. Shônagon and Noguchi engage in "authorial crossdressing" to inhabit a social, cultural, and national space onto which they only have a precarious hold. It is …
[Review Of] Alyshia Galvez, Guadalupe In New York: Devotion And Struggle For Citizenship Rights Among Mexican Immigrants, Stephanie Reichelderfer
[Review Of] Alyshia Galvez, Guadalupe In New York: Devotion And Struggle For Citizenship Rights Among Mexican Immigrants, Stephanie Reichelderfer
Ethnic Studies Review
Alyshia Galvez's Guadalupe in New York is an important contribution to a growing body of sociological and anthropological work devoted to immigrants and their fight for basic human rights in the United States. Galvez, a cultural anthropologist, uses interviews and observations to study the process of guadalupanismo (worship of Mexico's patron saint, Our Lady of Guadalupe) among recent Mexican immigrants in New York City. Between 2000 and 2008, Galvez gathered information on Marian worship by following members of comités guadalupanos, or social groups organized by parish, and explains her methodology in a useful appendix. Galvez argues that through these comités, …
[Review Of] Joanna Dreby, Divided By Borders: Mexican Migrants And Their Children, Leonard Berkey
[Review Of] Joanna Dreby, Divided By Borders: Mexican Migrants And Their Children, Leonard Berkey
Ethnic Studies Review
Most of the recent books on the children of immigrants, whether they focus on new arrivals (Learning a New Land, 2008) or on children born in the United States (Inheriting the City, 2008), have concentrated on these youngsters' adaptation to American society, their performance in school and the workplace, and their attempts to renegotiate ethnic identity in a new land. Joanna Dreby's Divided by Borders is different. She explores what happens to the children of Mexican immigrants to the U.S., and to the migrants themselves, when those children are left behind in Mexico.
Immigration And Domestic Politics In South Africa: Contradictions Of The Rainbow Nation, Vernon D. Johnson
Immigration And Domestic Politics In South Africa: Contradictions Of The Rainbow Nation, Vernon D. Johnson
Ethnic Studies Review
The region of Southern Africa has been part of the global capitalist system since its inception in the late 15th century, when Portugal incorporated Angola and Mozambique into its empire. In 1652 the Dutch East India Company established a "refreshment station" at the Cape of Good Hope for ships travelling between Europe and the Far East.1 From that time the region has experienced several periods of deepening incorporation into the global system.
Chang-Rae Lee's A Gesture Lite: The Recuperation Of Identity, Matthew Miller
Chang-Rae Lee's A Gesture Lite: The Recuperation Of Identity, Matthew Miller
Ethnic Studies Review
In Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life, the elderly, wellrespected and fastidious Franklin "Doc" Hata begins an introspective journey toward a revitalized and reimagined identity. For Lee, this journey affords the chance to address ethnicity and immigration under a unique transnational context. The novel chronicles how an identity can be recuperated (i.e., healed) through personal and cultural reconnections to the body and to memory. I purposefully use the word "recuperate" in both the traditional and theoretical senses. "Recuperation" results from Hata's moving back into his past to grow forward in self. Simultaneously, he "heals" his self, physically and psychologically, from various …
Nisei Politics Of Identity And American Popular Music In The 1930s And 1940s, Susan Miyo Asai
Nisei Politics Of Identity And American Popular Music In The 1930s And 1940s, Susan Miyo Asai
Ethnic Studies Review
Growing nationalist thinking and anti-immigration legislation in American politics today calls for a critical historicizing of the continuing ambiguities of U.S. citizenry and notions of what it is to be an American. The identity crisis of Nisei-second generation Japanese Americansresulted from the complex intersection of America's racialized ideology toward immigrants, California's virulent anti-Asian agitation, and the economic and political power struggles between the United States and Japan in gaining dominance of the Pacific region.
[Review Of] Shalini Shankar. Des; Land: Teen Culture, Class And Success In Silicon Valley, Gitanjali Singh
[Review Of] Shalini Shankar. Des; Land: Teen Culture, Class And Success In Silicon Valley, Gitanjali Singh
Ethnic Studies Review
Shalini Shankar begins her book by locating her own positionality of growing up in a predominantly white, middle-class high school in suburban New York versus the study's main focus of South Asian youth in Silicon Valley's mostly ethnic neighborhoods. Shankar was encouraged by her Indian, immigrant family to socialize with other South Asians, similar to the youth she studies; however, she clearly notes the stark differences in the researcher and subject divisions. Shankar employs an unusual anthropological approach to study Desi youth in the Silicon Valley by historically contexualizing the economic success of the South Asian community while presenting the …
Rifton Finns: An Ethnic Enclave In Ulster County, New York, Mika Roinila
Rifton Finns: An Ethnic Enclave In Ulster County, New York, Mika Roinila
Ethnic Studies Review
When you begin to consider the Finns of New York State, there are two obvious foci that have received the majority of attention in the ethnic literature. The presence of some estimated 20,000 Finns in New York City during the 1920s provided a large population with its myriad cultural, religious and social organizations and activities. The heyday of the large Finnish population has passed, and as of 2000, a total of 3,466 Finns lived in New York City.1 This number remains the highest population within the state. Due to this large population size, much has been written about their existence, …
The Dialectics Of "Oriental" Images In American Trade Cards, Sue J. Kim
The Dialectics Of "Oriental" Images In American Trade Cards, Sue J. Kim
Ethnic Studies Review
A late nineteenth-century trade card, or a color-printed circulating advertisement, touts Shepherd and Doyle's new "Celluloid" waterproof collars, cuffs and shirt bosoms (Fig. 1).1 These "economical, durable, and handsome" clothing items require less starching and washing, and so remove the need for Chinese laundries. The text on the reverse side includes directions on how "to remove yellow stains," and the image enacts a kind of literal version of this removal. The slovenly laundryshop (the clothes overflowing the basket, the linens hung up askew, the steaming basins), the mix-and-match, gender-ambiguous garments of the workers, and their thin, slouching bodies all participate …
To Arrange Or Not: Marriage Trends In The South Asian American Community, Farha Ternikar
To Arrange Or Not: Marriage Trends In The South Asian American Community, Farha Ternikar
Ethnic Studies Review
The idea of the arranged marriage has always seemed "exotic" yet has fascinated the American public. Recent media coverage of arranged marriages is evident in popular periodicals such as the New York Times Online (August 17, 2000) and Newsweek (March 15, 1999). Foner highlights that the arranged marriage is an example of "the continued impact of premigration cultural beliefs and social practices" that South Asian immigrants have transported to the United States (Foner 1997, 964). She offers an interpretive synthesis by showing that "[n]ew immigrant family patterns are shaped by cultural meanings and social practices that immigrants bring with them …
Chinese Americans And The Borderland Experience On Golden Mountain: The Development Of A Chinese American Identity In The Woman Warrior: Memoirs Of A Girlhood Among Ghosts, Diane Todd Bucci
Ethnic Studies Review
In The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Maxine Hong Kingston tells the story of her immigrant family and their efforts to rise above their working-class status in America, which optimistic Chinese regard as the Golden Mountain. The Hongs' experience is not unlike that of other immigrants who come to America to escape hardship in their homeland and hope to live the American Dream. The road to American success has numerous obstacles, and immigrants encounter many conflicts on their journey. One conflict relates to their cultural identities. Gloria Anzaldúa uses the word "borderland" to refer to the meeting …
The Ties That Bind: Asian American Communities Without ''Ethnic Spaces" In Southeast Michigan, Barbara W. Kim
The Ties That Bind: Asian American Communities Without ''Ethnic Spaces" In Southeast Michigan, Barbara W. Kim
Ethnic Studies Review
According to the 2000 census, over 12 million Asian Americans, almost 70 percent of them either immigrants who came to the U.S. after 1970 or their children, comprised an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse population that was more regionally dispersed throughout the U.S. than ever before. (Lai and Arguelles, 2003). Despite these transitions and increasing heterogeneity, discourses about Asian American communities have focused on ethnic enclaves such as Chinatowns, Koreatowns, and Little Saigons where coethnic residents, businesses, services, institutions and organizations exist and interact in urban or suburban physical spaces of the bicoastal United States (Fong, 1994; Li, 1999; Zhou and …
"No Opportunity For Song:" A Slovak Immigrant's Silencing Analyzed Through Her Pronoun Choice, Danusha V. Goska
"No Opportunity For Song:" A Slovak Immigrant's Silencing Analyzed Through Her Pronoun Choice, Danusha V. Goska
Ethnic Studies Review
I can't tell the most frightening story I know, because stories are made of words, and once I was without them. I was trekking in Nepal and ended up with amnesia. Later I stumbled into a mission hospital with a bruised jaw. A bad fall? I can't say. I had no words. No words for this thing that was wrenching and crying, in which "I" - a bundle of terror - seemed trapped. No words for where I began, stopped, or the mud stubble terrace on which I sat. No words to map, no words to define, no words to …
[Review Of] Rámon Grosfoguel. Colonial Subject: Puerto Ricans In Global Perspective, Enilda Arbona Delgado
[Review Of] Rámon Grosfoguel. Colonial Subject: Puerto Ricans In Global Perspective, Enilda Arbona Delgado
Ethnic Studies Review
Merging world-systems and postcolonial analyses, Grosfoguel presents an insightful look at Puerto Rico's colonial status and its consequences on the Puerto Rican migration experience while comparing these experiences to those of other Caribbean migrants. While asserting that "world-system theorists have difficulties theorizing culture, whereas postcolonial theorists have difficulties conceptualizing political-economic processes" (13), Grosfoguel challenges scholars of the modern world-system to move from paradigms of earlier centuries and go outside their disciplines in order to reduce the risk of reductionism. The analysis is grounded on "Bourdieu's concept of "symbolic capital" and Quijano's notion of "coloniality of power [to] redress these limitations" …
Towards First Rate - Ideas, Larry Shinagawa
Towards First Rate - Ideas, Larry Shinagawa
Ethnic Studies Review
Recently, my 21 year old son and I returned to California to visit my father, sister and extended Shinagawa clan during the winter holiday season. Three months earlier, my mother had passed away after several years of illness fighting off the twin demons of tuberculosis and pneumonia. My father was recovering slowly from the loss of my mother and my sister was doing her best to keep up his spirits. During the illness and after my mother's passage, a reverend of the local Japanese American Buddhist church helped enormously with the pain, sense of loss, and the need to let …
Being Ourselves: Immigrant Culture And Self-Identification Among Young Haitians In Montréal, Scooter Pégram
Being Ourselves: Immigrant Culture And Self-Identification Among Young Haitians In Montréal, Scooter Pégram
Ethnic Studies Review
Since the early 1960s, large numbers of Haitians have emigrated from their native island nation. Changes in federal immigration legislation in the 1970s in both the United States and Canada enabled immigrants of colour a facilitated entry into the two countries, and this factor contributed to the arrival of Haitians to the North American continent. These newcomers primarily settled in cities along the eastern seaboard, in Boston, Miami, Montréal and New York. The initial motivator of this two-wave Haitian migration was the extreme political persecution that existed in Haiti under the iron-fisted rule of the Duvalier dictatorships and their secret …
Migratory Movement: The Politics Of Ethnic Community (Re) Construction Among Creoles Of Color, 1920-1940, Andrew Jolivétte
Migratory Movement: The Politics Of Ethnic Community (Re) Construction Among Creoles Of Color, 1920-1940, Andrew Jolivétte
Ethnic Studies Review
This article considers the social and economic conditions under which Creoles of Color left the state of Louisiana from 1920-1940.1 Because Creoles in the years following 1920 were legally reclassified as black, many lost their land, social and legal rights, and access to education as well as the possibility of upward mobility to which they had previously had access when they were accorded the status of a distinct/legal ethnic group. Creole families had to make decisions about the economic, social, religious, and cultural futures of their children and the community as a whole. As a form of resistance to colonial …
The Ethnic Impulse In Frank X. Gaspar's Poetry And Fiction, Reinaldo Silva
The Ethnic Impulse In Frank X. Gaspar's Poetry And Fiction, Reinaldo Silva
Ethnic Studies Review
Although a compelling and award-winning voice in contemporary American literature, the work of Frank Xavier Gaspar (1946-) has not received the attention it deserves. Apart from an article by Alice R. Clemente,(1) to my knowledge, there are no other scholarly publications touching upon his writings, all of which published in the course of the last seventeen years. While his work appeals to all audiences in the United States of America and even abroad -- Portugal in particular -- his poems dealing with issues related to his ancestral culture and ethnic background are the ones which have sparked the attention of …
[Review Of] Garbi Schmidt, Islam In Urban America: Sunni Muslims In Chicago, Jess Hollenback
[Review Of] Garbi Schmidt, Islam In Urban America: Sunni Muslims In Chicago, Jess Hollenback
Ethnic Studies Review
Islam in Urban America: Sunni Muslims in Chicago is a well-researched, carefully nuanced, and timely contribution to our understanding of Muslim Americans and an excellent corrective to the all-too-common tendency to homogenize both Islam and Muslims. This study stresses the multiple elements of diversity in American Islam by focusing on how ethnicity, class, gender, class, age, and ideology have influenced the presentation and practice of Sunni Islam among immigrant communities in Chicago during the 1990s. Garbi Schmidt is currently a researcher in the ethnic minorities program at the Danish National Institute of Social Research in Copenhagen. This book is a …
[Review Of] Patricia V. Symonds. Calling In The Soul: Gender And The Cycle Of Life In A Hmong Village, Jeremy Hein
[Review Of] Patricia V. Symonds. Calling In The Soul: Gender And The Cycle Of Life In A Hmong Village, Jeremy Hein
Ethnic Studies Review
Hmong Americans are a diaspora group that came from Laos after leaving southern China in the early 1800s. The U.S. C.I.A. recruited a Hmong army during the 1960s to assist with the American military campaign against communism in Southeast Asia. Hmong refugees began arriving in the United States in 1975 following the collapse of the pro-American Laotian government. There are now about 200,000 Hmong Americans.
(Dis)Claiming Identity: Christina García’S The Agüero Sisters And Julia Alvarez' How The García Girls Lost Their Accents, Özlem Ögüt
Ethnic Studies Review
Christine Garcia's The Aguero Sisters and Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents are novels that revolve around the conflicts and tensions among the members of the two immigrant families, the Aguero sisters from Cuba and the Garcia sisters from the Dominican Republic, arising mainly from their need to come to terms with their ambiguous identities. This article focuses on the ways in which the Aguero and Garcia sisters through their hybrid identities overcome boundaries and exclusive categories so as to challenge homogenizing, hegemonic systems, and open vistas into new, non-essentialist modes of identity that still can be …
[Review Of] Marilyn Halter, Shopping For Identity: The Marketing Of Ethnicity, Sarah Shillinger
[Review Of] Marilyn Halter, Shopping For Identity: The Marketing Of Ethnicity, Sarah Shillinger
Ethnic Studies Review
Marilyn Halter has written an informative book on the interaction between the marketplace and ethnic identity in the United States. Her book fills an important gap in ethnic studies literature. While research abounds on the role the marketplace has played in the Americanization of immigrants, few scholars have researched its role in the maintenance of ethnic identity.
Becoming American: The Hmong American Experience, Kou Yang
Becoming American: The Hmong American Experience, Kou Yang
Ethnic Studies Review
Hmong Americans, who came from a pre-literate society and rural background, went through many acculturation barriers and have had many successes between the time they first arrived in 1975 and the year 2000. Their first decade was preoccupied with their struggle to overcome cultural shock and acculturation difficulties. The second decade is their turning point to be new Americans, beginning to run for political office, establish business enterprises, achieve in education, and reduce their high rate of unemployment and welfare participation. Hmong Americans in 2000 appeared to have achieved much, yet have some serious challenges still ahead.
[Review Of] George Anthony Peffer. If They Don't Bring Their Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration Before Exclusion, Philip Q. Yang
[Review Of] George Anthony Peffer. If They Don't Bring Their Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration Before Exclusion, Philip Q. Yang
Ethnic Studies Review
If They Don't Bnng [Bring] Their Women Here by George Peffer is another significant addition to the skimpy repertory of books on the history of Chinese American women, which includes Judy Yung's Chinese Women of America (1986) and Unbounded Feet (1995), Benson Tong's Unsubmissive Women (1994), and Huping Ling's Surviving on the Gold Mountain (1999). Unlike the other volumes, Peffer's book focuses on the debarment of Chinese women from immigration to the United States before the 1882 general exclusion of Chinese laborers. He argues that the cultural constraints imposed by the traditional Chinese joint family structure and the male sojourner …
[Review Of] Rachel C. Lee. The Americas Of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions Of Nation And Transnation, David Goldstein-Shirley
[Review Of] Rachel C. Lee. The Americas Of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions Of Nation And Transnation, David Goldstein-Shirley
Ethnic Studies Review
Rachel C. Lee acknowledges that understanding Asian American experiences merits the study of transglobal migrations of persons and capital. Rather than criticize this scholarly trend in Asian American studies (and, I would add, in ethnic studies more broadly), Lee integrates into them a greater attention to gender. Like much of historical and social scholarship, works on the Asian American diaspora tend to neglect gender. By examining how gender figures into the various ways in which four Asian American writers imagine "America," Lee reminds us that gender, like race, always matters.
A Historical Perspective On The Development Of An Ethnic Minority Consciousness In The Spanish-Language Press Of The Southwest, Nicolás Kanellos
A Historical Perspective On The Development Of An Ethnic Minority Consciousness In The Spanish-Language Press Of The Southwest, Nicolás Kanellos
Ethnic Studies Review
Various scholars have treated ethnic newspapers in the United States as if they all have evolved from an immigrant press.(i) While one may accept their analysis of the functions of the ethnic press, there is a substantial and qualitative difference between newspapers that were built on an immigration base and those that developed from the experience of colonialism and racial oppression. Hispanics were subjected to "racialization"(ii) for more than a century through such doctrines as the Spanish Black Legend and Manifest Destiny during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. They were conquered and incorporated into the United States and then …
[Review Of] Michael Angelo. The Sikh Diaspora: Tradition And Change In An Immigrant Community, Karen Leonard
[Review Of] Michael Angelo. The Sikh Diaspora: Tradition And Change In An Immigrant Community, Karen Leonard
Ethnic Studies Review
This is a peculiarly narrow book, although published as part of a series on Asian Americans entitled Reconceptualizing Culture, History, Politics. The title is misleading, at first referring to "the Sikh diaspora," the settlement of India's Punjabi Sikhs throughout the world, but then indicating "an immigrant community" which turns out to be in the U.S., the upstate New York region around the capital, Albany. Angelo wanted to study Sikhs, a highly visible religious Indian sub-group, to see the effect of interaction with American culture on traditional religious values and attitudes. He found 2,694 Asian Indians in the 1990 Albany district …