In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

14 The Immigrant Family: Cultural Legacies and Cultural Changes Nancy Foner IMMIGRANTS LIVE OUT much of their lives in the context of families. A lot has been written about the way family networks stimulate and facilitate the migration process itself; the role of family ties and networks in helping immigrants get jobs when they arrive in the United States; and the role of families in developing strategies for survival and assisting immigrants in the process of adjustment, providing a place where newcomers can find solace and support in a strange land and pool their resources as a way to advance. Along with the increasing interest in gender and generation, there is a growing literature on the position ofwomen and children in immigrant families-and a growing awareness that the family is not just a haven in a heartless world but a place where conflict and negotiation also take place. In this chapter, I take a different tack. My concern is with the way family and kinship patterns change in the process of immigration, and why. The focus, I want to emphasize, is on first-generation immigrants who come from one world to live in a new one and, in the process, fuse together the old and new to create a new kind of family life. In this account, the family is not simply a site where immigrants create and carry out agendas or strategies ; nor are family relations and dynamics reducible to rational economic calculations. Rather, the family is seen as a place where there is a dynamic interplay between structure, culture, and agencywhere creative culture-building takes place in the context of external social and economic forces as well as immigrants' premigration cultural frameworks . Clearly, the host of structural constraints and conditions that immigrants confront in their new environment shapes the kinds of family arrangements , roles, and orientations that emerge among them. So do the norms and values they encounter when they move here. Moreover, immigrants are not passive individuals who are acted upon by external forces. They play an active role in reconstructing and redefining family life. Indeed, members of the family, by virtue of their gender and generation, have differing interests, so that women (and men) and young people (and older people) often try to fashion family patterns in ways that improve their own position and further their aims (see Kibria 1993; Oxfeld 1993). But something else is at work, too. The cultural understandings, meanings, and symbols that immigrants bring with them from their home society are also critical in understanding immigrant family life. Obviously immigrants do not exactly reproduce their old cultural patterns when they move to a new land, but these patterns continue to have a powerful influence in shaping family values and norms as well as the actual patterns of behavior that develop in the new setting. Indeed, as Nazli Kibria (1993) observes, immigrants may walk a delicate tightrope as they challenge certain aspects of traditional family systems while also trying to retain others. If we look at the role of immigrants' "cultural roots'" in shaping new family patterns, we cannot help put see the ways in which these patterns differ from one group to another, despite the common structural conditions they face and despite common social processes and dynamics of family life. Family patterns among Korean immigrants and Haitians in tlle United States, to name just two groups, diverge in many ways at least in part because of the cultural background of each group. The very meaning of the term "family" and other basic, taken-for-granted cultural aspects of kinship -who, for instance, is considered a relativevary among different immigrant populations. Indeed , the particular groups that social scientists study may well influence the models they develop about family life and family change. It is not surprising that scholars who study Asian immigrants, whose family and kinship systems are markedly different from those of Americans, have tended to put more emphasis on the role of cultural continu- 258 The Handbook ofInternational Migration ity with the sending society than have scholars who study Caribbean immigrants, whose family patterns are more like those in this country. PREMIGRATION CULTURAL INFLUENCES Several studies have pointed out ways in which premigration cultural conceptions and social practices continue to have force in the United States. These conceptions and practices do not continue unchanged, of course. They are restructured, redefined , and renegotiated in the new setting. Yet immigrants continue to draw on premigration family experiences, norms, and cultural frameworks as...

Share