Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration

Capa
Harvard University Press, 30 de jun. de 2009 - 384 páginas
In this age of multicultural democracy, the idea of assimilation--that the social distance separating immigrants and their children from the mainstream of American society closes over time--seems outdated and, in some forms, even offensive. But as Richard Alba and Victor Nee show in the first systematic treatment of assimilation since the mid-1960s, it continues to shape the immigrant experience, even though the geography of immigration has shifted from Europe to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Institutional changes, from civil rights legislation to immigration law, have provided a more favorable environment for nonwhite immigrants and their children than in the past. Assimilation is still driven, in claim, by the decisions of immigrants and the second generation to improve their social and material circumstances in America. But they also show that immigrants, historically and today, have profoundly changed our mainstream society and culture in the process of becoming Americans. Surveying a variety of domains--language, socioeconomic attachments, residential patterns, and intermarriage--they demonstrate the continuing importance of assimilation in American life. And they predict that it will blur the boundaries among the major, racially defined populations, as nonwhites and Hispanics are increasingly incorporated into the mainstream.

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Conteúdo

Rethinking Assimilation
1
Assimilation Theory Old and New
17
Assimilation in Practice The Europeans and East Asians
67
Was Assimilation Contingent on Specific Historical Conditions?
124
The Background to Contemporary Immigration
167
Evidence of Contemporary Assimilation
215
Conclusion Remaking the Mainstream
271
Notes
295
Index
351
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Página 18 - European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations.
Página 18 - He is an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.
Página 320 - David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991), and Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995).
Página 17 - Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our language or customs any more than they can acquire our complexion?
Página 145 - transnationalism" as the processes by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement.
Página 18 - Corinthian brass, was formed; so in this continent, — asylum of all nations, — the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles, and Cossacks, and all the European tribes, — of the Africans, and of the Polynesians, — will construct a new race, a new religion, a new state, a new literature...
Página 20 - A wise policy of assimilation, like a wise educational policy, does not seek to destroy the attitudes and memories that are there, but to build on them. There is a current opinion in America, of the "ordering and forbidding...
Página 19 - a process of interpenetration and fusion in which persons and groups acquire the memories, sentiments, and attitudes of other persons and groups, and, by sharing their experience and history, are incorporated with them in a common cultural life.
Página 295 - Robert Blauner, Racial Oppression in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1972...
Página 76 - As the old culture fell away — and it did rapidly enough — a new one, shaped by the distinctive experiences of life in America, was formed and a new identity was created. Italian-Americans might share precious little with Italians in Italy, but in America they were a distinctive group that maintained itself, was identifiable, and gave something to those who were identified with it, just as it also gave burdens that those in the group had to bear.

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