-
Chapter Two: Looking North and the Immigrant’s Social Imaginary
- University of Notre Dame Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
t w o Looking North and the Immigrant’s Social Imaginary Ric a r d o Ai n s l i e a n d D a p h n y D o m i n g u e z Ai n s l i e In an interdisciplinary examination of the impact of immigration on the North American social landscape at the end of the millennium, Marcelo Suárez-Orozco (1998) noted that the phenomenon is likely to have a “momentous” effect on American culture and society. The current climate of debate over national immigration policy makes clear how prescient Suárez-Orozco’s views were. And if immigration is having a significant effect upon the United States, the same can be said for its impact on the countries immigrants are leaving behind. The research presented here is primarily interested in this phenomenon in terms of the psychology of immigration in the context of the Mexican experience . This mass migration of Mexicans north of the border is having as profound an impact on Mexico as on the United States. According to the most recent Pew Hispanic Center study on immigration patterns (Passel 2005), one out of every eleven Mexicans now resides in this country—a fact that clearly has equally momentous implications for both Mexico and the United States. 86 Looking North and the Immigrant’s Social Imaginary ■ 87 Our interest in the present chapter, however, is not to explore the impact of immigration upon Mexico and Mexicans as such, but rather to explore the ways in which that impact might “live” in the experience of the Mexican immigrant as a kind of imaginary, that is, as a conscious and unconscious “presence” in the psychological experience of the immigrant . This perception is derived from and embedded in an ongoing, explicit, and implicit understanding of how one’s fellow countrymen view the current immigration phenomenon and what the immigrant is undergoing. Culture and Identity Leaving one’s homeland for another land represents a dislocation of varied meanings and implications. In order to understand the psychological impact of that experience, we must first understand the role of culture in identity, since the immigrant’s dislocation stirs, in part, internal , psychological dislocations as well. Elsewhere, the first author has written about culture in relation to the development of identity (Ainslie 1995). Others, too, have theorized related points (see Winnicott 1971; Volkan 1997). From the very beginnings of human life the internalization of culture is part of identity. Indeed, Winnicott’s implication is that without theorizing culture as a psychological process it is impossible to conceive of relationships more generally. Relatedness between infant and caregiver may be the foundation for identity, but to theorize about relationships as if they stood outside of a cultural embeddedness is meaningless. Winnicott (1971) argues that each mother-infant dyad relates within a particular idiom of mothering, that is, through the particular ways in which that child is held, spoken to, and engaged, as well as through the kinds of objects that are brought into the child’s life. This idiom is obviously embedded within and draws from the culture within which the dyad exists. The flavors, odors, and rituals that accompany the experience of being fed, or the language that governs parent-child interactions, with its specific tones, cadences, and melodies, are created by and in turn form a specific parent-infant culture. In the same 88 ■ Ainslie and Ainslie moment, the broader culture shapes the dyad. These elements contribute to a specific “aesthetic of being” (Bollas 1987), that is, an aesthetic that becomes indistinguishable from identity itself. Winnicott underscores the essential role of continuity and stability in creating a familiar “holding environment” for the child: a specific constellation of experiences, rituals, and forms of engagement defined by a measure of predictability, notwithstanding the fact that development is an unfolding process also characterized by moments of spontaneity and novelty. Invoking Winnicott’s work, Bollas (1987) notes that it is against this “reciprocally enhancing stillness” that a continuous negotiation of intersubjective experience gains coherence. Key to this formulation is the understanding that in this developmental context, the mothering figure represents an “other” through which the infant’s experience of “inside” and “outside” is transformed. This is Winnicott’s “environment mother,” the person who, to the child, represents the total environment. The child’s experience of being taken care of, of being “mothered,” is indistinguishable from the child’s still unthought notions about culture . But not being thought does...