Abstract
Founded by individuals pursuing higher education in the United States, the Marshallese community in Orange County today also represents family and national interests in access to business opportunities, employment, education, medical services, and other goals. This community has become an "official" Marshallese overseas community, site of the first Marshallese consulate in the mainland United States, and a link between overseas Marshallese and the home islands. Individuals and family units traverse networks of inter-linked households, highlighting processes of Islanders' investments, including at least a short-term reversal of theoretically expected remittance flows. We explore the process of community formation, and compare rural and urban sites in the Marshall Islands to call attention to the community's place in a system of geographically dispersed locations within the global political economy.
Highlights
The community has hosted public meetings convened by the president and his cabinet when they came to the United States, and for several years the Marshallese government had a consulate in Orange County
We describe a situation in which the overseas community was created through the pursuit of education and not labor migration, where relatively high incomes are available from rents paid for strategic assets and military facility land use as well as compensation for nuclear testing, and where remittances are more often sent from the island community to the migrant community than in the reverse direction
The Orange County Marshallese seem at first to be an exception to the usual Pacific Island migration patterns
Summary
California, from the late 1970s until the early 1990s. It is among the older and larger Marshallese communities in the United States; other substantial Marshallese communities are centered in San Diego, California; Eugene, Oregon; Springdale, Arkansas; and Enid, Oklahoma (Allen 1997). Smaller communities exist in Texas, Missouri, Arizona, and elsewhere in California These communities originated in the travels of students for higher education while the Marshalls were under US administration. The community has hosted public meetings convened by the president and his cabinet when they came to the United States, and for several years the Marshallese government had a consulate in Orange County. The history of this community illustrates the effects of political interests, the key role of education, mediation by diverse institutions, and the importance of connections through both family and nonfamily networks in facilitating the international movement of people
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