Brokered Boundaries: Immigrant Identity in Anti-Immigrant Times

8. Visualizing Identity

213 Chapter 8 Visualizing Identity T he last chapter concluded an extended analysis of the narratives offered by immigrants in response to questions we put to them about their hopes, expectations, and experiences in the United States. Our purpose was to give voice to immigrants’ side of the identity issue, allowing them to speak for themselves in articulating the complex process of identity formation in the United States. Despite our efforts to peer directly into the immigrant mind through guided, in-depth conversations , however, the resulting textual data are inevitably filtered. It is the interviewer who asks the questions and decides in which direction to steer the conversation, and it is the researchers who select segments of the conversation to include in tables and feature in quotes and assign codes to specific passages. These various subjectivities embedded in the process of qualitative data collection offer many opportunities for investigators to impose, wittingly or not, their own views and interpretations on the resulting data. We therefore sought to include in our process of data collection a second, confirmatory methodology that would offer respondents another, independent opportunity to show us what the world really looked like to them. Specifically, we offered immigrants a chance to visualize identity and to transmit their visualizations directly to us. We accomplished this goal by giving disposable cameras to a random subset of respondents and asking them to take pictures of the people, situations, and objects in their daily environment that, to them, seemed “American” and those people, situations, and objects that seemed “Latino.” We developed and analyzed the resulting photographic images to discover the content and meaning of the two identities as seen through immigrant eyes. identity Through immigrant eyes To set in motion our visualizing methodology, we chose a 10 percent systematic sample of the qualitative interviews by giving two disposable cameras to every tenth person on our list. A total of sixteen respondents 214 Brokered Boundaries were given the two cameras, each of which contained twenty-seven exposures . One of the cameras had Latino written on it, and the other was labeled American. Respondents were asked to take pictures of whatever they saw in their daily lives that, to them, seemed to be “Latino” or “American.” They were told to take as many pictures as they wished, up to the maximum number of exposures on the camera. No further instructions were issued. Of the sixteen respondents selected to participate in the photographic study, ten returned cameras to us, for a response rate of 62.5 percent. Table 8.1 shows selected characteristics of the final sample of ten photographers compared with the full ethnographic sample of 159 respondents. Compared with respondents on the sampling frame, those in the photographic subsample were disproportionately of the second generation (60 percent versus 31 percent), and Caribbean respondents were entirely absent , with their share being made up by Mexicans. Females were slightly overrepresented (58 percent compared with 40 percent on the sampling frame), but the distribution of photographers by place roughly paralleled that on the frame (allowing for minor departures owing to small numbers). What the resulting photographs yield, therefore, are the visualized perceptions of a small sample of first- and second-generation Mexicans and Central and South Americans living in the New York–to– Philadelphia urban corridor. Table 8.1 Characteristics of sample for study of Visual representations of Latino and american identity Total Characteristics Photographer Sample Ethnographic Sample Generation First 40.0% 69.4 Second 60.0 30.6 National origin Mexican 60.0 34.4 Caribbean 0.0 24.4 Central or South American 40.0 41.3 Gender Male 50.0 41.9 Female 50.0 58.1 Place New York 20.0 29.4 New Jersey 40.0 36.3 Philadelphia 40.0 34.4 Sample size (N) 10 160 Source: Immigrant Identity Project (Office of Population Research 2009). Visualizing Identity 215 Whereas ten respondents returned the Latino camera, only seven turned in American cameras, suggesting that respondents found it more difficult to conceptualize an American than a Latino identity. The three people who did not return American cameras included a second-generation Colombian from New York, a second-generation Mexican from New Jersey, and a first-generation Ecuadoran from New Jersey. Only one respondent used all of the exposures available, and even this person wasted several shots that could not be used because of over- or underexposure or blurriness. In...