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I AccIdentAl ImmIgrAnts From Roots to Routes Where am I from? Well, that’s a long story. —LISA PATHWAYS “W here are you from?” is a simple question but one that in today’s world of movement can elicit multiple responses. Behind a one-line answer there is likely a significant story. Where a person is from might mean where he or she was born, grew up, or currently lives. “Home” is a concept that integrates many levels of meaning and emotion: home can be a structure, a town, a country, and a feeling. Home can be the location of our past or our present. We can go home to visit our parents, perhaps thousands of miles away, or go home for lunch to an apartment where we have lived for only a week. Home can be a cultural, spiritual, and physical locale. Home can be a literal destination or a figurative one—“an inner geography where the ache to belong finally quits” (Zandy 1990, 1). As an idea, home has inspired works of fiction, memoirs, and scholarly research. Here, I explore home as it applies to immigrants. The stories that follow look at how a sense of home develops, or is perhaps inhibited, when individuals leave their roots to make a home in a new country. In Western cultures, the idea of home generally represents something static. Being rooted is venerated, while itinerancy or homelessness is considered suspect or unstable (Malkki 1997; Jackson 1995, 85–87). This myth may give us a feeling of stability, but it is not grounded in reality. Historically, both Western and non-Western populations have engaged in travel and external commerce, or have been displaced, and as a result have had to create new homes for themselves. Geographic movement has always been part of the human condition (Wolf 1992; Tucker 1994, 186). 10 • pArT I Before modern transportation and communication, immigrants were often unable to return home. Today, however, movement is easier, and people move from region to region, rural to urban, and continent to continent on a regular basis. Immigrant workers go back and forth between their own countries and others, sometimes several times a year and sometimes even daily. In the contemporary world, whether because of the influence of media, work opportunities, environmental disasters, political policies, or even tourism, the frequency and intensity of movement has increased (see Appadurai 1996, 191–192).1 Greater mobility, though, does not eliminate individuals’ need to have a sense of place and belonging2 (Geertz 1996, 261). For the purposes of my discussion, I consider the concepts of home, belonging , and identity to be interconnected but not interchangeable. The feelings associated with the concepts influence and respond to one another and often shift in concert. For instance, a deep understanding of one’s identity can enable a sense of belonging. paradoxically, though, this level of selfunderstanding usually occurs most dramatically when there has been displacement from home (rapport and Dawson 1998b, 9). Home and belonging can affect perceptions of identity (Sixsmith 1986), and similarly, identity and belonging create a sense of place in the world: the feeling of home. “Home” is an emotionally laden word. Ideally, the physical location of home is a safe place that grounds us, a place from which we can go out into the world, know who we are, and to where we will return (Dovey 1978, 29).3 Home is our territory and the location from which we learn to compare differences with others and other places4 (relph 1976, 40; Case 1996). Naming our home is more than locating ourselves physically. An understanding of home reflects one’s individual and social identity (see Case 1996). Where or what we call home gives clues to who we are, how we view ourselves, and in turn, how we want others to view us. Identity, too, is a complex phenomenon. The first perception of identity usually comes from our parents. They name us, tell us who we are in relation to them, and perhaps describe our family history. Our identity is internalized through stories, holiday traditions, the media, and how others perceive us. We are influenced by cultural identities, group identities, and family identities, and gradually we develop an individual identity and sense of self as we grow up and begin to separate emotionally from our parents (see Akhtar 1999). All the things that contribute to how people see themselves , as well as how they are seen by others, are internalized and influence identity: ethnicity...

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