Chinese Immigrant Women Workers' Mediated Negotiations With Constraints On Their Cultural Identities

Abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this study examines the cultural identities of Chinese immigrant women workers in American society, that is, how the women negotiate with white supremacist cultural values that seek to interpellate them through their everyday use of media. I argue that through certain Chinese ethnic newspapers' cultural discourses, white supremacist cultural values penetrate the women's private lives and regulate their daily matters as minute as the color of their socks. Yet, the women's responses to these mediated discourses reveal that mainstream cultural values are only part of a more complex cultural quandary, which results from a number of constraints facing the women everyday: material difficulty, racial-cultural marginalization, and ethnic patriarchal control. In our group and individual interviews, my participants critically interpreted and negotiated with this cultural quandary. Their negotiation has great value, since it attests to their heightened cultural consciousness. From another perspective, however, their heightened consciousness has yet to develop into a strategic bicultural or multicultural identity, the “mestiza identity” in Anzaldua's words, as a result of the financial, racial, patriarchal, cultural, and psychological constraints in their lives. This situation leads us to reflect more on how we can help to lift these constraints, so that these women can strategically incorporate both Chinese and American cultural practices to improve their quality of life.