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L101.1 Gallimore, R. & Reese, L. J. (1999) Mexican immigrants in urban California: Forging adaptations from familiar and new cultural resources. In M.C. Foblets & C.L. Pang (Eds.), Culture, Ethnicity and Immigration. In honor of Prof. E. Roosens. ACCO: Leuven, Belgium, pps. 245-263.
The parents we have been talking with over the last ten years have now spent between 11 and 40 years in the United States. All are first generation immigrants whose identity is tied to their home country nationality. They are first and foremost Mexicanos. A source of pride in their ethnic identity as well as of their aspirations for their children lies in the concept of educación. To them, the Mexican is a seen as a diligent worker, regardless of the humble status of the job he may have, and for that is deserving of respect. Their view of the U.S. as a permissive and libertine society that does not do enough to keep its children on the buen camino underscores educación values as becoming a significant ethnic marker. Together, their sense of diligence and morality add a second dynamic to the dual-frame of reference described by Suárez-Orozco (1989). Although the immigrant family may be living in crowded conditions and the parents working long hours for a minimum wage, and although they may experience discriminatory treatment as newcomers with little control of the English language, they can nonetheless compare their circumstances to what they left in their home country and feel that they are better off in their new land. Parents in our sample provide numerous examples of this dual frame of reference, referring to el norte as the "country of opportunity" for jobs for themselves and education for their children. If the first generation parents experience discrimination, for example, they explain it as a fault of their own lack of home country education and lack of English.
However, the dual frame of reference operates for these families in a different and complementary way. Although the home country is viewed as a land of economic hardship and closed options, it remains a treasured source of moral values, which sustain the immigrant abroad. In the contrast, U.S. popular culture is viewed suspiciously by many some immigrant Mexican parents as supporting libertinaje ('libertinism'). Thus, while seeking access to better jobs and material goods, parents are determined to retain their moral heritage and raise their children with the same values that they themselves were raised with.
The "dual frame of reference" works in two ways for the Mexican immigrant families we have been interviewing. On one hand, they look to their home country as a place where, no matter how hard they worked, they would not be able to earn what they earn in the United States, and where they experienced discrimination, albeit for different causes than they experience in the U.S. On the other hand, they yearn for the healthier, simpler, purer way of life that they left behind. They not only experience nostalgia for the life left behind, but in a profound way experience that nostalgia in moral terms. The two-fold nature of the immigrants' frame of reference, in which the host country exemplifies both material good and moral decay, contributes to their differential adoption of U.S. customs and values.
The immigrant Mexicanos in our study see themselves as struggling to maintain children on the buen camino amidst considerable pressures for them to succumb to the temptations of life in the morally dangerous and permissive American environment. Many Americans share a similar view that contemporary U.S. society truly is a "garden of good and evil."The adaptive struggle confronting Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles is played out in moral terms: how does one raise children who surpass their parents economically but do not fall prey to the moral dangers of contemporary American society. To do this, they cannot simply recreate familiar patterns. The settings are too disparate. Nor can they, in good conscience, abandon their children to American ways. The solution lies in a third path, in which accommodations are forged from the familiar and the new in such a way that core moral values continue to give coherence and meaning to everyday life. One anvil on which they forge the old and new is the everyday routine of family life and the activities in which their children participate. Although constrained by economic and social factors, they like all parents try to shape daily life in accordance with their values. By forging everyday routines through which they hope to influence children's development and their futures, the families seek to adapt, not abandon, their "agrarian model" of human development. For the families, this arguably agentic process is a struggle to survive in difficult environments. They like millions of earlier immigrants (Sennett & Cobb, 1972) are torn between the lure of the modern, and all its promises, and fear of the social and moral consequences of their choices on the children. Suro (1998) tells the story of some immigrant Mexicana mothers who walk the streets of Los Angeles at night to pacify gang members, known as gangbangers. They are entering into community level politics in ways which previously unknown to them for the purpose of maintaining safe neighborhoods and families. Suro writes, "The madres are neither American nor Mexican. They are creating something new in the barrios out of the old ways they brought from the south and the tools they discovered on American terrain (p.75)." |
