Constructing Choice, Compelling Culture

Abstract

This chapter turns to a common experience for migrants in general: how raising children far from where the parents grew up can focus attention on the consequences of migrating into multiculturalism. It consider ways that migrants evoke terms implicating culture and assimilation to understand how youth become icons for debating how best to navigate cultural and acultural spaces. In both New Zealand and the United States, Samoan communities publicly discussed the problems their youth presented—not being respectful enough, not speaking Samoan well enough, and so on. The youth also described encountering problems that were often the exact inverse of what their parents saw as the problems—they were not accepted by Samoan communities as Samoan enough but faced prejudice for being Samoan in school and at work. Migrants in both countries interpreted generation gaps as cultural gaps, although with different solutions. In New Zealand, Samoan migrants said that children needed to be taught Samoan culture. In the United States, Samoan migrants insisted that parents needed to be taught another approach, the American way. This difference in framing affects the solutions Samoan migrants advocate when rearing children. The chapters explores in detail how Samoan community workers in the United States attempt to teach Samoan parents to think about Samoan culture in a new way, to see Samoan culture as something that one can choose to enact rather than something one is born enacting.