The Changing Face of World Cities: Young Adult Children of Immigrants in Europe and the United States

Chapter 9. Belonging

206 Chapter 9 Belonging Jens Schneider, Leo Chávez, Louis DeSipio, and Mary Waters Feelings of belonging or of being at home are difficult to grasp in surveys because how one feels about one’s identity depends so much on the context. The enactment of identity and identities is situational , depending on who one is interacting with, when, and where. At the same time, people forge identities within a set of institutional arrangements, for example, citizenship and naturalization regimes or school systems or the labor market, that make it easier or more difficult to self-identify with specific identity categories. As Fredrik Barth (1969, 15) has argued, it is not the “cultural stuff ” that determines the boundary between insiders and outsiders, but rather the underlying social processes. Identitylabelingconsistsof threeinteractiveprocesses:theself-ascription of the individual, the habitus of the category (or the group itself), and the outside world’s perspective on the nongroup members. How contested the ascription of an identity label may be depends on consensus across these three perspectives. There are, of course, many empirical examples for cases in which the identities felt by individuals or groups diverge from social categorizations mainstream society uses to describe them, which demonstrates that labeling is generally not based on actually observable Belonging    207 behaviors or similar seemingly objective attributes (Devereux 1978; Balibar and Wallerstein 1991). But at the same time, identities are also connected to, or closely intertwined with, distinct cultural and social practices, which may have symbolic, interactional (or situational), and discursive dimensions. The second generation sits between forces that often pull them in different directions: their immigrant parents, their wider family and community networks, their friends, their schools, and the wider society into which they were born or moved as a child. The second generation is influenced by peers of different cultural backgrounds, by teachers, and by the mass media. The history of the receiving nation places positive or negative associations on different identities and therefore their relative attractiveness . For example, the break-up of Yugoslavia opened the identity options available to migrants living in Berlin or Vienna. In the United States, the large number of poorly educated, low-wage Mexican immigrants (both documented and undocumented) has shaped the public perception of Mexicans and anti-Mexican prejudices in a way that has made a Mexican American identity much more problematic. So the question is how children of immigrants cope with the challenge of reconciling these contending pulls and pushes. How do they manage to feel at home and, more important, can they feel part of the society into which they were born or socialized yet not alienate themselves from the cultural and social context, or the wider ethnic community, of their parents? This chapter examines these questions among the young adult children of Mexican and Chinese or Taiwanese immigrants in Los Angeles; of Chinese and Dominican immigrants in New York City; and of the Turkish and formerly Yugoslavian immigrants in Berlin, Germany, and Vienna, Austria. We have chosen in each site to focus on two groups that seem to be located at different ends of a continuum of structural participation. In educational terms, the Chinese second generation in Los Angeles and New York is extraordinarily successful, and Mexicans in Los Angeles and Dominicans in New York have relatively low educational outcomes. In Europe, the Turkish second generation represents the lower end of educational outcomes , and public discourse frequently mentions Turks when referring to integration problems. The children of immigrants from former Yugoslavia come closest to the educational success of the Chinese in the United States. However, as in the other chapters, we particularly examine the Turks and Mexicans because they are the largest immigrant groups in Europe and the United States and their identities and feelings of belonging are important to understanding the second generation cross-nationally. 208    The Changing Face of World Cities The following sections examine the questions in our three surveys that probe how the second generations feel about here and there. Because, as noted, surveys have a hard time capturing identity, we supplement the analysis of survey questions with qualitative data from in-depth interviews. We address the following issues: • What labels do the second generations use to identify themselves among the categories presented to them in the surveys? • What is the role and practice of different languages in the lives of the second generation? • What role does religion play in second-generation self...