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>> 257 Part V How Are the Children of Immigrants Shaped by and Also Changing New York City’s and Amsterdam’s Cultural Life? Part V. Children of Immigrants and Cultural Life Cities of migration are the birthplaces of new artistic and cultural forms. Children of immigrants play a vital role in such innovation. They bring all kinds of new ideas, outlooks, and practices into the cultural arena. Influenced by their immigrant parents as well as the receiving society and city, the second-generation children of immigrants find themselves in a special position from which they may rework and challenge established repertoires and invent new styles and forms of artistic expression. The question is not so much if the second generation is a source of cultural creativity and innovation. This seems to happen in all cities of immigration . The central questions are how and why they manage to do so. What shapes the ways in which children of immigrants enter artistic fields? How do they in turn shape the cultural scene in a city? To what effect? And what lines of demarcation and exclusion remain? As the two chapters in this section show, the innovative force of migration on a city’s arts and cultural life can follow quite different pathways and lead to quite different patterns. The comparison of New York City and Amsterdam highlights that cultural innovation by the second generation not only produces hybridity and dynamism, but also reflects existing cleavages. There are, to begin, some underlying dynamics that help to understand why the children of immigrants in both Amsterdam and New York are often innovators in the arts. It is partly, as Philip Kasinitz notes in his 258 > 259 of the 1950s and 1960s—and the subsequent lessening of barriers facing blacks, Latinos, and Asians in the performing and other arts. Certainly , there are far more opportunities than in the pre-Civil Rights era for black, Latino, and Asian actors in New York City’s theaters and in television shows and films made in the city; the work of immigrantorigin artists is now shown in many mainstream museums located in New York. As Kasinitz observes, the contemporary second generation also faces less pressure to assimilate into the dominant American culture , and there is a greater appreciation and tolerance of culture and art from elsewhere. Indeed, immigrant-origin artists in various fields, from theater and film to classical and popular music, have been recipients of many national and citywide honors and awards. The current ethos of multiculturalism, or cultural pluralism, in New York City today—and the public celebration of diversity—provide a receptive context for the immigrant and second generations in the arts. As Kasinitz and his colleagues have written elsewhere, while secondgeneration New Yorkers feel the sting of disadvantage and discrimination , “they move in a world where being from somewhere else has long been the norm [ . . . and reap] the benefits of New York’s long history of absorbing new immigrants” (2008: 360). The extraordinary diversity of the city has played a role in the creative mixing of immigrant and native minority cultures in music, art, dance, and poetry—bringing different traditions together in ways that create new innovative energy (Kasinitz et al 2008: 355). Nowhere is this more true than in hip hop, which Kasinitz calls New York’s most influential cultural export of the last three decades and describes as a creation (in its early New York years) of Afro-Caribbean, Latino, and African American youth. Kasinitz also cites the Broadway musical In the Heights, which is about Dominicans in upper Manhattan and was written by a New Yorker of Puerto Rican heritage. Across the Atlantic, mass popular culture in Amsterdam has been heavily influenced by developments in New York as well as other global centers such as Paris, London, and Los Angeles. At the same time, the second generation has played a distinctive role. As Delhaye and her coauthors note, children of immigrants from colonial Indonesia combined country and rock ’n’ roll, drawn from the United States, with the traditional Indonesian genre of krontjong to create Indorock, 260 > 261 second-generation artists to set up their own niches at the margins or to try to gain access to the native Dutch establishment, which requires them to adapt to existing conventions in established fields—more so than in New York, which appears more open to second-generation innovation in the performing and visual “high” arts. In fact, New York’s fame as a world center...

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