Becoming Bicultural: Risk, Resilience, and Latino Youth

5. Cultural Adaptation Styles and Health: Risks of Staying Separate or Assimilating

130 5 Cultural Adaptation Styles and Health Risks of Staying Separate or Assimilating When I came to the U.S. at fifteen, my life was changed. I didn’t know how to speak English and the Americans would talk to me, and I couldn’t express myself. When I started school it was so difficult communicating with the teachers and expressing myself. I couldn’t express myself. I learned somewhat how to understand English. Then, I began to make friends. That didn’t help. They’d invite me to go out, and I neglected my studies. It got worse because I couldn’t really study. I was only doing stuff with my friends. I still don’t know how to speak English very well. All my friends are Mexican. If we made a movie of my life, the movie ends with me not finishing school [high school], but I get married and start a family with four or five children. —Bonifacio, seventeen-year-old Mexican male In chapters 2 and 3, we took an intimate look at the dynamics of culture-of-origin involvement within the immigrant family’s home and host-cultural involvement outside of home. Staying separate or assimilating both posed different challenges for immigrant adolescents. In this chapter, we consider how these different cultural adaptation styles are related to health, mental health, and adjustment. More than five decades of both qualitative and quantitative empirical research have demonstrated the association of acculturation, especially high and low levels of acculturation (e.g., Separation and Assimilation), with physical health and mental health status (Rogler, Cortes, and Malgady 1991; Organista, Organista, and Kurasaki 2003). Many authors hypothesize a link between acculturation and social maladjustment, psychopathology, and substance use (e.g., see Szapocznik and Kurtines 1980; Gil, Vega, and Cultural Adaptation Styles and Health 131 Dimas 1994; Al-Issa and Tousignant 1997; Delgado 1998). Researchers have posited disparate relationships between acculturation and social maladjustment , and have proposed positive, negative, and curvilinear associations. In other words, acculturating is thought to improve, decrease, or have a complex relationship with minority health (LaFromboise, Coleman, and Gerton 1993). However, the theoretical frameworks introduced in earlier chapters of this book posit different relationships between acculturation and maladjustment. Briefly, assimilation theory assumes that the relationship between acculturation and health outcomes is positive and linear; that is, health improves as immigrants become more “Americanized.” In contrast , alternation theory assumes a nonlinear, perhaps curvilinear, relationship wherein some acculturation is beneficial but the benefits decrease at higher levels of acculturation, especially when ethnic identity is left behind in favor of assimilation. Assimilation and alternation theories have both inspired several decades of research and knowledge development. Neither theory has been able to marshal enough empirical support to dominate the other. Lloyd Rogler, Dharma Cortes, and Robert Malgady (1991) reviewed thirty investigations to determine whether consensus existed on the link between acculturation and mental health. Their review found evidence supporting each of the proposed relationships—positive, negative, and curvilinear—between acculturation and mental health. The relationship depends upon the specific mental health issue (e.g., drug use, aggressive behavior, depression, anxiety ) that is under scrutiny. Considering the lack of consensus, and the resulting competition and potential confusion in choosing programs and policies stemming from these theories, it is particularly important to understand what these approaches bring to acculturation research. Figures 5.1 and 5.2 combine the cultural adaptation styles and theoretical frameworks from figure 1.2 with the empirical findings generated from research on acculturation and health. These figures capture major findings related to research on acculturation and health, and present the same basic information, but in different visual formats. The key findings are summarized in the following two points: 1. As acculturation progresses from low levels of assimilation (e.g., Separation ) to high assimilation levels, alcohol use increases, especially binge drinking and alcohol use by females; psychiatric problems proliferate ; and familism (by definition, familism is an especially strong sense of family cohesion and the cultural emphasis on family life being at the center of a person’s world) decreases. 132 Cultural Adaptation Styles and Health 2. Compared to low and high levels of assimilation, biculturalism has been found to be associated with more positive health behavior and psychological attributes. This research will be reviewed in chapter 6. What these figures do not convey is that researchers have found important mental health differences between foreign-born Latino immigrants and U...