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23 Assimilation is the problem of the twenty-first century. The number of international migrations has nearly doubled in the past quarter century from 99 million in 1980 to 190 million in 2005 (United Nations 2006). The issue of how to bridge the chasms that separate the world’s peoples in general and those that separate migrant from host populations confronts an ever-expanding share of the world’s nations. Assimilation is often conceptualized as a one-way process: “to make like,” according to the simplest dictionary definition. Certainly, there is a long history of efforts to do that to migrant populations. The efforts to Americanize the immigrants of the early twentieth century sought to encourage or coerce them into giving up their cuisine, religion, and child-rearing patterns so they could be “made like” earlier generations of Americans (Mink 1995). Yet, these efforts rarely succeed because assimilation typically is a two-way process. As migrants learn to adapt to the ways of their hosts, the hosts themselves inevitably change as well. This chapter examines the two-way process of assimilation in the case of immigrant involvement in the arts and cultural world of Philadelphia, whose immigrants have adapted to their new home by incorporating some American cultural practices while retaining some of their own. At the same time, however, immigrant cultural practice is changing the social organization of the arts and culture in the United States. In particular, the presence of immigrant artists and cultural participants has strained the American system of nonprofit arts. Although the status of nonprofit cultural organizations has already been challenged by other changes in the cultural world and its audiences, immigrants’ cultural engagement appears to be accelerating this trend. Migrants and the Transformation of Philadelphia’s Cultural Economy Mark J. Stern, Susan C. Seifert, and Domenic Vitiello c h a p t e r 2  m. j. stern, s. c. seifert, and d. vitiello 24 While not a gateway city, Philadelphia is representative of a large number of American metropolitan areas with a relatively recent and moderate increase in the foreign-born population. Indeed, if Philadelphia’s modest immigrant presence has had a significant impact on the region’s cultural sector, immigrants are likely to have even more influence in gateway metropolitan areas. Data from a variety of sources developed by the Social Impact of the Arts Project (SIAP) at the University of Pennsylvania demonstrate that immigrants are relatively disengaged from the mainstream cultural institutions of metropolitan Philadelphia. Yet migrants are engaged in informal and commercial culture in levels comparable to those of the U.S.-born population. The expansion of immigrant cultural engagement has given a push to trends that were already well under way in the arts world, specifically the shift in the division of labor among nonprofit, commercial , and informal arts. The Social Structure and Ecology of Immigrant Communities Immigrants represented a larger share of Philadelphia’s population at the beginning of the twenty-first century than at any time since the 1950s. As recently as 1990, only 6.6 percent of the city’s population was foreign-born, and by 2006, according to the American Community Survey, the proportion had reached 11.3 percent. In addition to their sheer growth, immigrant communities have influenced the cultural sector in two ways. First, the immigrant population displays a distinctive class structure as a result of broader changes in the economy and in immigration policy and enforcement practices. Second, the immigrant generation and the second generation have reacted in distinctive ways to different sectors of the cultural world. More than nine million immigrants entered the United States between 1991 and 2000, the largest influx in American history (U.S. Department of Homeland Security 2008). As a result, the proportion of the nation’s population that was foreign-born reached 12 percent in 2005. When this immigrant wave started to swell in the 1970s and 1980s, the vast majority of immigrants settled in a small set of gateway centers: New York, California, Texas, and Florida, in particular. But by the end of the century, immigrants and their influence on the nation’s social, economic , and cultural life had spread to secondary cities and nonmetropolitan areas (Portes et al. 2006). Philadelphia reflected this pattern. Between 1945 and 1990, internal migration— by African Americans and Puerto Ricans—had been the defining feature of the city’s demographic history. As late as 1990, Puerto Ricans had swelled the size of the city’s Latin American population to...

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