Week 13 – Latin Americans in the United States

There was a mistake in the syllabus.

The article by Portes on the New Latin nation is the last article of the semester.

I have always found this article insightful, even more so now, more than when Huntington was alive. With the recent elections in the US and Trump spreading fear, the so called “Hispanic Challenge” has made it to the White House.

This article, unlike many, give a short, but I would say well thought out introduction into Latin American migrations to the US. This is not the main goal of the article, but we get some context into the nature of immigrants, and now second and third generations (citizens).

I think the article made some interesting comments on ethnicity, education, the rise of transnational communities, and also on downward assimilation.

The line from a bureaucratic box to conceptualizing Hispanic as a ‘race’ is very disturbing, although not new since all “races” are social products. Yet, it is very interesting how things such as these evolve through time, and just as interesting, how they are adopted by the target population, which had nothing to do with coining the term (other names such as ‘Indian’ and ‘African-American’ come to mind).

As far as divisions into how second generations grow-up, much has to do with legal status as much as it does with a parent’s education. As the author notes, second and third generation Cuban-Americans have the highest success rate of the Latino populations in the US. This has to do with how much their parents excelled both in education and the workforce, but just as much, I would say it is the fact that Cubans can become permanent residents, and later citizens much easier than other migrant groups. Mexican migrants on the other hand, have the most difficulty in accessing a legal status that would make opportunities such as access to different educational avenues and/or employment opportunities available.

The most important thing that I took from this article however, was a fact-based analysis that demonstrates that pigeonholing populations based on prejudice does not hold-up to reality. Whether it is Huntington, or now Trump, Latino/a populations for the most part positively contribute to a society, which at many times acts as if it did not need them.

What do you think?

Week 12 – Transnational Migration and the Nationalization of Ethnic Identity among Japanese Brazilian Return Migrants

Even though this article is from 1999, I think it continues to have strong relevance, not only in how describing how Brazilian-Japanese communities in Japan live, work, and adapt. Tsuda explores and analyzes identity without essentialzing the concept of identity as fixed and localized as other authors on the subject have done before and after. The author also managed to dive deep through entering a community through ethnographic efforts, which developed into a thorough description and analysis of what Japanese-Brazilians experience in their daily lives in Japan.

What I found very interesting was his ability to discuss identity without necessarily having to pinpoint it. He mentions the centering and decentering process that an individual goes through whenever they move from one country to another; but this could also take place from city to city and neighbourhood to neighbourhood. I think explaining this at the outset of the article provided good insight into not necessarily looking at Japanese-Brazilians looking for some for of identity, but realizing that it is a relative thing that depends as much on time as it does on space.

The author also moves from different spaces such as the workplace, city streets, and neighbourhoods trying to explain how is it that someone that looks Japanese actually is not really considered one. And at the same time, how a person that has their whole life considered himself or herself to be Japanese deals with the refusal of those co-ethnics, and become a foreigner in their ancestral home. This begs the question as to why governments would assume that just because one has ancestors in a specific land, that they would be able to assimilate better than others that do not.

What I found interesting also was how a number of Japanese-Brazilians came to terms with being Japanese in Brazil, but not so in Japan. Usually, in articles of this kind that I read, there is a focus on the negative effects of identity formation when migration takes place. This however, need not be so; as we see there are multiple ways to deal with rejection. Coming to terms with their Brazilian-ness can be seen as a positive aspect of migration and return.

What do you guys think?