White Immigrants Research Articles

The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy by Christopher J. Smith

664 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy. By Christopher J. Smith, Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2013, 352 pages, $45.00 Cloth. Reviewed by T.J. Vaughan, Aurora University In contemporary society the mere subject of blackface frequently provokes abhorrent disgust and thoughts of racism. However, as British novelist L.P. Hartley once wrote “[t]he past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” In this important new work, Christopher J. Smith reminds us that what is true today was not always the case. Smith examines the roots of what became known as blackface minstrelsy, and he positions its origins as a cultural exchange that involved musical styles and performers from various racial and ethnic groups coalescing into what became the first example of a distinctly American popular music. Smith describes this musical fusion as “creolization.” He develops and supports his thesis primarily through the work of antebellum New York painter and musician William Sidney Mount, who was a contemporary observer and recorder of this musical phenomenon. Smith argues that minstrelsy did not spontaneously arrive in 1843 with the emergence of the Virginia Minstrels, as other historians have often asserted. Rather, the Virginia Minstrels transferred this emerging popular music from New York City’s streets to its working class theaters. In this process, performers shifted from being primarily multiracial and multicultural to whites masquerading as black. Although racial conflict obviously existed at the time, African American and white working class musicians came together to play and also construct this new popular music. However, the presence of these performers in theaters that catered to middle and upper class whites would have been too socially threatening, so white performers donned black make-up and attempted to duplicate the music they had heard. Smith shows that the first blackface performers were familiar with the musical genre and its musicians and respected their work. Smith’s study, however, focuses on the era prior to the rise of the Virginia Minstrels as he traces the roots of this music. Here, he finds areas in which diverse groups of performers intersected. This was often on the Book Reviews 665 docks where working class white immigrants brought their Celtic musical traditions and African American workers brought their African and Caribbean influenced styles. Through the shared experience of music, something unique developed that was influenced by existing styles, but was new. This music began to spread via maritime and riverine routes as performers , often dock workers, day laborers and sailors, moved to where they could find work. Additionally, in New York this music was performed on the streets and at festivals such as Pinkster and Negro ‘Lection Day where the coming together of black and white musicians was considered less of a threat to existing social order. William Sidney Mount was from an artistic family and moved between the Lower East Side and Long Island. Although he made his living primarily as a portrait artist, his most important works often prominently feature African American musicians. Mount was musically inclined, playing the flute and fiddle. Making extensive use of Mount’s papers and sketches, as well as his paintings, Smith reveals a world in which musicians, black and white, creatively inspired each other. By using Mount’s visual iconography as the basis for much of his argument , Smith builds upon existing minstrelsy scholarship. These works include sketches that were always drawn from life and also a series of Mount’s paintings that depict musicians posing or performing. Based upon these images, Smith argues that these works provide visual evidence of the creolization of merged musical forms and influences. According to Smith, Mount depicts white performers using techniques typically associated with black players. Based on the ethnochoreographic evidence of musicians and dancers in Mount’s drawings and paintings, Smith takes what might at first be considered to be tenuous support and makes a compelling and convincing argument. Most of Mount’s work was spent painting from real life in and around his home in Stony Brook, New York. He was not trained in Europe nor did his work reflect a European style. His style is generally...

Cultural Sustainability and Loss in Sydney’s Chinese Community

IntroductionIt is often supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained.1There are many challenges for those who move from one country to settle in another. Since 2001, I have investigated the issue of gain from loss in the Chinese community of Sydney. Noting the wealth of musical genres at both community and professional levels, I decided to focus on three groups that have responded to the issue of cultural loss in diverse, yet similar ways. These groups are the Australian Catholic Chinese Community (ACCC), the Buddha's Light International Association, Sydney (BLIA SYD), and the Australian Chinese Teo Chew Association (ACTCA), three collectivities within the larger Australian Chinese community of Sydney. These ethno-specific organisations comprise Chinese immigrants and their descendents with diverse migration histories and settlement patterns. Countries of origin range from Mainland China, Taiwan and the Hong Kong Semi-Autonomous Region (SAR) to Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia and Timor-Leste. Drawing inspiration from Salman Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands: Essays and criticism, 1981-1991, this paper will show that where there might be considerable loss through the migratory process, there is also much that can be gained. My study applies to Chinese Australians who have chosen to create a new home in Australia, rather than diasporans who might be classed as 'cosmopolitans' in their constant movement from country to country.Migration BluesIt is a well-known fact that migration is often accompanied by feelings of loss at various levels. There is, for instance, financial loss due to an acute change in employment and environment.2 Further contestation of traditional values might follow with wives and teenage children finding employment to help support the family.3 There is also an overriding sense of cultural loss experienced by many from different age groups4 who may give up on their home culture in a process that sociologist Chan Kwok-Bun terms 'passing'.5 The various efforts to cope with this and other complex issues of migration help locate and maintain the identity of diasporans in the process of assimilation and adaptation.6 Recreational places where music is performed indeed aid with maintaining a sense of home in the new country. This is revealed in the work of Casey Man Kong Lum7 and Frederick Lau,8 who have studied with great detail the function of the Chinese karaoke scene in California and Bangkok respectively.In Chinese communities everywhere, social networks have been established to facilitate a range of religious and voluntary socio-cultural organisations such as schools, religious institutions and the age-old clan system of Chinese societies; much scholarly research has been conducted in this area.9 Kuah-Pearce found that this type of social network construction assists migrants in dealing with homesickness and residual feelings of loss in several dimensions.10Religion and the 'Ethnic Event'In this paper, I propose that religious centres help instil a similar sense of belonging and future in the minds of migrants as a direct response to cultural loss. As the investigator and a member of the Sydney Chinese community (or one who has come from the same cultural zone), I began my research with the premise that the ethno-specific religious centres of a city are where one is best able to observe diasporans, and analyse ways in which they have come to approach their post-migratory experiences of cultural assimilation or preservation, or both. This perspective is inspired by Herberg's11 study of Judeo-Christian, white (non-Anglophone) immigrants in the United States. Herberg found that, as part of their adjustment process in the pre-1960 period, immigrants would cling to religion while surrendering everything else connected to the mother country. The transmission of religion into later generations remained heavily significant for the purpose of ethnic identification, while languages were often lost within the second generation. …

Een warm welkom voor blanke nieuwkomers? Nederlandse emigratie en Zuid-Afrikaanse natievorming (1902-1961)

This article examines the dynamics between European emigration and the South African immigration policy and nation building in the years 1902-1961. It investigates changing ideas and regulations that promoted or impeded transnational mobility of certain national and ethnic categories of ’white’ migrants from Europe to South Africa, and it shows how Dutch emigration fitted into this pattern. A pattern that was determined by a controversy between advocates of an inclusive policy that aimed at opening up the country to white immigrants from all over Europe, and those who were in favour of an exclusive policy that was primarily concerned with strengthening their ‘own’ Protestant, Afrikaans political culture (protecting it from British, Jewish, and catholic influences). When the Dutch government found it necessary to stimulate Dutch emigration, it called on the alleged ‘kinship’ (stamverwantschap) between Dutch and Afrikaner part of the South African population to overcome the obstacles.Dutch newcomers soon were welcomed again to strengthen Afrikaner nationalism and thus support the Apartheid regime.

Employment and Earnings in High-Tech Ethnic Niches

The increase in high-skilled immigrants to the United States coincided with the expansion of the high-technology sector, and now a large share of Asian immigrants concentrate in high-tech industries. Despite much research on the relationship between ethnic concentration and labor market outcomes, the association between ethnic niche employment and earnings within the high-technology sector of the labor market has yet to be examined. This study compares the relationship between employment in ethnic niches and earnings within high- and low-tech industries among Asian immigrants. In low-technology industries, ethnic niches are generally associated with lower earnings compared with non-niches, but in high-technology industries, employment in an ethnic niche is associated with higher earnings. These patterns vary by gender and ethnic group. This association is partly explained by the industries that comprise ethnic niches, as non-Hispanic white immigrants also experience some of the same advantages and disadvantages.

The Unbearable Closeness of The East: Embodied Micro-Economies of Difference, Belonging, and Intersecting Marginalities in Post-Socialist Berlin

This article examines the micro-politics of belonging in the post-socialist outskirts of Berlin, in Marzahn, one of many new urban immigrant settlement areas in Europe. More specifically, it focuses on what locals perceive as an acceptance-precluding conspicuous presence of nominally white immigrants of German ancestry from the former Soviet Union, the Aussiedler (resettlers). Long-term residents read and interpret these immigrants’ everyday embodiments by constructing what I call micro-economies of embodied difference in order to mark immigrants as non-belonging Eastern-European. In order to make sense of such practices and local antipathy towards the Aussiedler, I analyze the embeddedness of this suburban locality in the regional politics of belonging, showing how Marzahn and its long-time residents have themselves become post-wall Berlin's (and Germany's) internal Others, saturated with uncommodifiable traces of now-denigrated state-socialist Easternness. I suggest that in such a context these residents’ practice of ascribing the unwanted Easternness to recent immigrants works to deflect it in order to buttress their own claims to full membership citizenship in the unified Germany from which they have long been excluded. [Key words: belonging, immigrants, embodied difference, Othering, Easternness, Berlin.]

Segmented assimilation and attitudes toward psychotherapy: A moderated mediation analysis.

The present study examines the relations between acculturative stress, mental health, and attitudes toward psychotherapy, and whether these relations are the same for immigrants of color and White immigrants. This study predicted that acculturative stress would have a significant, negative relation with attitudes toward psychotherapy and that this relation would be moderated by race (immigrants of color and White immigrants) so that as acculturative stress increases, attitudes toward psychotherapy become more negative for immigrants of color but not White immigrants. Finally, mental health was predicted to mediate the relation between acculturative stress and attitudes toward psychotherapy for immigrants of color, but not White immigrants. Participants were 149 first-generation, immigrant, young adults, between the ages of 18 and 29, who identified as White, Black, Latino, or Asian. A significant negative correlation was found between acculturative stress and attitudes toward psychotherapy. A moderated mediation analysis demonstrated that the negative relation between acculturative stress and attitudes toward psychotherapy was mediated by mental health symptoms for immigrants of color but not White immigrants.

Who Says We are Dumb?: Identification of the Causes of Learning Difficulties Encountered by New Immigrant Learners in their Adaptation to the Canadian Classrooms

When Canada “opened its doors” to immigration in the 1900s, it was not to everyone. It mostly preferred Europeans, whose membership it felt resembled the White, Anglo-Saxons and French, deemed the founders of modern day Canada. All the “Others” were undesirable, due to apprehension with miscegenation and a watering down of “Whiteness” by ethnically non White immigrants. From the 1960s, to the 1990s the “immigration doors” opened just a little wider, and inevitably so, contingent on the sequelae of wars, famine and pestilence that virtually dismantled ancient city states in Africa and Asia. The Refugees have arrived, and the Geneva Convention of 1951 had made provisions for the admittance of those escaping from troubled regions of the world, regardless of color, creed, race or ethnicity. Most of the refugees who arrived in Canada had among them, children born in refugee camps under sundry and bizarre conditions. Additionally, most had never been in school, and for those who did attend school, it was rudimentary and lacked modern educational appurtenances, such as computers, even scissors that they would later find abundant, new, even strange and as “sine qua non” for learning and successful educational outcomes in Canada. The study found that the concomitant of the immigrant learner’s experience in refugee camps becomes the problem of integration in and successful educational outcomes at the post-migration stage. New immigrant learners’ discomfiture in Canadian classrooms is exacerbated by a meticulously hard-wired racist and Eurocentered system, embodied by an alienating school curriculum and a hostile educational environment, which produce outcomes that are mal coded by educational practitioners as “dumbness.” The study proffered suggestions that include anti-racist, multicultural education, competency training and empowerment models as solutions that promote successful and sustainable adaptation, including successful educational outcomes by immigrant learners to the Canadian and other classrooms. DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2013.v3n2p75

Borders, babies, and “good refugees”: Australian representations of “illegal” immigration, 1979

This article will explore the ways in which ambivalence around immigration was revealed through more conditional regulation of white and non-white immigration and through narratives of deportation involving romance and children. Using textual analysis of newspapers and political discourse—tropes of normative heterosexuality— happy couples and mothers with children reveal themselves as apparent contradictions to otherwise dehumanising imagery and discourses of illegality, while still cementing the regulation of “Australianness” through equally conditional means.

Inclusive academic language teaching in New Zealand: history and responses

Meeting the educational needs of a linguistically diverse population is a challenge for many countries. This is a particular challenge for New Zealand (NZ) which, until the 1980s, had a White Immigration Policy. The last 30 years have seen NZ become a full member of the Asia Pacific Region and move from being a mostly homogenous society to one of the most heterogeneous. This article explores the historical context of education and migration and current initiatives for inclusive academic language teaching (IALT) in NZ. IALT is a teacher-development approach recently developed for multilingual Europe by the European Core Curriculum for Mainstreamed Second Language Teacher Education. The approach rests on principles of acknowledgement of first language and culture, inclusivity and teachers having specialized knowledge of the academic language requirements of their subjects. This analysis seeks to show that knowledge, policy and practices that were once at the margins of the education system must now be central and will benefit all students, particularly those from diverse backgrounds.

Social Capital, Employment and Occupational Status of the New Immigrants in Canada

Using the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants in Canada (LSIC), this study examines the role of social capital in the labour market integration of new immigrants in Canada, utilizing various measures of social capital and treating employment and occupational Socio-Economic Scale (SES) as the indicators of labour market integration. The findings show that visible minority immigrants have significantly lower levels of employment and SES compared to white immigrants. Furthermore, social capital contributes significantly to an increased likelihood of employment and also to higher SES positions. However, the effect of social capital varies by the types of social capital, ethno-racial origins, as well as forms of economic integration.

Immigrant Density, Sense of Community Belonging, and Suicidal Ideation Among Racial Minority and White Immigrants in Canada

Immigrants represent a substantial proportion of suicides in Canada. This study assesses the hypothesis that high immigrant density fosters personal sense of community belonging among immigrants, and in turn, protects against suicide risk. This multilevel cross-sectional study is based on individual-level data from the 2007 Canadian Community Health Survey (n = 12,951 participants) merged with area-level data from the 2006 Canadian census (n = 57 health regions). Prevalence of suicidal ideation was 1.3 %. Among rural racial minority immigrants, each 10 % increase in immigrant density associated with 67 % lower odds of suicidal ideation (adjusted odds ratio (AOR) = 0.33, 95 % CI: 0.14-0.77); sense of community belonging did not mediate this association, but was independently associated with suicidal ideation (AOR = 0.44, 95 % CI: 0.28-0.69). Immigrant density was not associated with suicidal ideation among white immigrants or urban settings. Immigrant density and sense of community belonging may correlate with suicidal ideation through distinct mechanisms of association.

The year of the lash: free people of color in Cuba and the nineteenth-century Atlantic world

Michele Reid-Vazquez reveals the untold story of the strategies of negotia-tion used by free blacks in the aftermath of the Year of the Lash--a wave of repression in Cuba that had great implications for the Atlantic World in the next two decades.At dawn on June 29, 1844, a firing squad in Havana executed ten accused ringleaders of the Conspiracy of La Escalera, an alleged plot to abolish slavery and colonial rule in Cuba. The condemned men represented prominent members of Cuba's free community of African descent, including the acclaimed poet PlAcido (Gabriel de la ConcepciOn ValdEs). In an effort to foster a white majority and curtail black rebellion, Spanish colonial authorities also banished, imprisoned, and exiled hundreds of free blacks, dismantled the militia of color, and accelerated white immigration projects.Scholars have debated the existence of the Conspiracy of La Escalera for over a century, yet little is known about how those targeted by the violence responded. Drawing on archival material from Cuba, Mexico, Spain, and the United States, Reid-Vazquez provides a critical window into under-standing how free people of color challenged colonial policies of terror and pursued justice on their own terms using formal and extralegal methods. Whether rooted in Cuba or cast into the Atlantic World, free men and women of African descent stretched and broke colonial expectations of their codes of conduct locally and in exile. Their actions underscored how black agency, albeit fragmented, worked to destabilize repression's impact.

The Collapse of the Bison-Hunting Societies on the Great Plains

In this essay I examine the economic history of bison-hunting societies as an application of Diamond’s collapse thesis. I merge the theory of property rights with the theory of renewable resource use and argue that changes in property rights regimes, in market forces, and changes in legal-political institutions ultimately determined the fate of native bison societies. Some of my findings are consistent with the thesis advanced by Diamond while others are not.In particular I argue that bison societies declined (nay collapsed), after rising rapidly, as a result of the following forces. First, these groups were under pressure (for land and resources) from white immigrants to the east. Second, these pressures and the emergence of the horse into native societies changed the structure of native societies and initially allowed extensive exploitation of the bison on the Great Plains, under both common property and open access regimes. During this period intertribal conflicts led to the demise of prairie societies at the hand of the plains societies. Third, on the emergence of a bison hide market and the inability of tribes to enforce property rights to land and the bison led to rapid and dramatic depletion of the bison herds. I do not find evidence of dramatic changes in climate or the natural environment to have been an important factor.

Social Capital and Economic Integration of Visible Minority Immigrants in Canada

On the basis of the 2002 Ethnic Diversity Survey, we study the role of human and social capital in explaining the personal earnings of foreign born persons working full-time, aged 25–64 years. The income differences associated with given visible minority categories are reduced after controls for human and social capital, but the differences remain significant, especially for men and for all but the Chinese category. Among the human capital factors, education and speaking English or French at home are positively related with earnings, while having the highest degree or diploma from outside of Canada is negative for all groups, although not statistically significant. Among the social capital considerations, trust was associated with higher income, while lack of participation in community organizations was an earnings disadvantage. Counter to expectations, individualization, or weak bonding and weak bridging ties, was associated with higher income, for men and for the other/multiple visible minorities and white immigrants.

The Suppression Hypothesis Reconsidered: Competition Between Blacks and White Immigrants in the Retail Trade in Large Northern Cities, 1910-1930

Introduction The development of entrepreneurship in retail trade in large northern cities during early 20th century was viewed by many leaders as essential to economic progress of blacks as group. If retail entrepreneurs could monopolize local trade in communities that were created in these cities by first wave of Black Migration to North (circa 1915-1930), then, it was believed, number of benefits would follow: These entrepreneurs would expand their businesses, hire additional employees, and, over long run, sustain network of black-owned wholesaling and manufacturing enterprises that could provide foundation for economy, that is, a cooperative arrangement of industries and services within Negro group such that group tends to be closed economic circle largely independent of surrounding white world (Du Bois 1907: 179, quoted in Waldinger and Aldrich 1990: 59). The basis of this belief was doctrine of double-duty dollar, which was popularized by church and press in urban North in 1920s and 1930s. This doctrine, which was evidently based on concept of multiplier effect in economic theory (Pearce 1986: 288), argued that money spent in retail stores owned by blacks would circulate within community and, in so doing, generate greater employment and incomes for blacks, locally and nationally (Drake and Cayton 1962: 430-431; see also Light 1972: 119, citing Harris 1936; Myrdal 1944). Accordingly, in wake of Great Migration, support for entrepreneurship in retail trade was vigorously encouraged in northern cities by churches, newspapers, and voluntary organizations, such as lodges and fraternal orders. This support often took form of buy black campaigns. These campaigns originated in urban North (Frazier 1957: 166) and emphasized the duty of to trade with Negroes and promised to blacks ultimate 'racial' salvation through their loyal patronage of black-owned retail stores (Drake and Cayton 1962: 430; see also Ofari 1970: 52). Sometimes support for entrepreneurship took form of attempts to promote cooperative ventures among those entrepreneurs who sought to become retail merchants. These attempts were motivated by belief that in retail trade would be achieved through efficiencies gained by pooling of resources, coordination of business practices, such as advertising, and standardization of goods and equipment. The Colored Merchants Association, founded in New York City by Albon Holsey in 1929 under auspices of late Booker T. Washington's National Negro Business League, was an example of such collective venture (Light 1972: 125, citing Harris 1936). In spite of these efforts, though, entrepreneurs struggled to establish themselves in retail trade in urban North. They faced numerous obstacles, including racial bias in lending and in extension of credit, exclusion from main commercial districts, restricted access to business training, and denial of both property rights and police protection (Boyd 2001: 242, citing Bates 1973; Butler 1991; Harmon 1929; Harris 1936; Higgs 1977; Myrdal 1944). Furthermore, by some accounts, they were also hampered by limited opportunities to gain experience in buying and selling (Frazier 1949: 411), dearth of entrepreneurial success symbols (Foley 1966: 572), and absence of socio-cultural heritage that included rotating credit associations that could generate financial capital for business startups (Light 1972: 22). As consequence of these and other difficulties, blacks were greatly underrepresented in retail trade. For example, in 60 large northern cities in 1930, number of retail merchants was, on average, 81 percent less than what would be expected on basis of representation of blacks in these cities' workforces (Boyd 2003a: 451). …

Asian-American elders’ health and physician use: An examination of social determinants and lifespan influences

While the Asian American population is growing rapidly, relatively little research has focused on intergroup health comparisons. The application of the life course perspective sheds new light on the inter-section of the ageing process and social determinants of health. This study compares physician use and health equity among Asian ethnic groups and non-Hispanic Whites. Data on Asian American and non-Hispanic White immigrants over 65 were extracted from the California Health Interview Survey. Weighted logistic regression models were tested applying the Commission on Social Determinants of Health model. Intergroup differences in physician use and health equity were observed. Furthermore, physician use and health varied among the groups by age. The diverse background of older Asian Americans and the differential effects of the ageing process point to the need for novel interventions to promote health among this population.

Moral bricolage and immigrant identification: The case of Romanian Americans

Immigration historians have illuminated the institutional forces that made possible Eastern and southern European immigrants' inclusion in the white racial category in the early twentieth century, initiating their ascent into mainstream America. Sociologists have shown that their descendants assimilated into American society while maintaining symbolic attachments to their ethnic roots. But, whereas current studies of immigrant racialization have focused on the strategies of immigrants of colour for asserting a higher position in the American social hierarchy, scholars have generally overlooked such processes for phenotypically white immigrants. This paper highlights first and 1.5 generation Romanian immigrants' strategies for navigating their ambivalent relationship to Americanness. While they assumed their whiteness unproblematically, Romanian Americans sought to distinguish themselves from whites and non-whites on the basis of their ethnicity. Furthermore, they used American values to distance themselves from their former compatriots. Through moral bricolage, Romanians made strategic use of desirable traits they associated with being Romanian and American, melding them into a particularly worthy ethnic identity.

New York, Chicago, and the "Black Metropolis" of the Early 20th Century

Analyzing census data on Northern cities, this study refines the conventional view that, after the beginning of the Great Migration, the large black communities of New York and Chicago offered unparalleled opportunities for blacks. The highest levels of black participation in the creative pursuits of acting and music were in New York; and the highest levels of black participation in the business ventures of insurance, beauty culture, and retail trade were in Chicago. Yet black participation in art, medicine, the ministry, and public service was no higher in these cities than elsewhere in the urban North. The findings add nuance to the claim that Harlem and the South Side were "Black Metropolises" by suggesting that opportunities for Northern blacks to enter high-status positions in the early twentieth century were greatest in regional centers that had small black communities and small populations of white immigrants. These results therefore provide a basis for revising the conventional view of the Black Metropolis.

The geopolitics of dependent development in Central Africa: race, class and the reciprocal blockade

This paper explores dependent development, industrialisation and transitions to the semiperiphery, examining tensions between geopolitics, racial and class conflict that evolved into a ‘reciprocal blockade’ in the Central African Federation (CAF), comprising Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and Nyasaland (Malawi). The 1923 transfer of power from the chartered British South Africa Company to a semi-autonomous, settler-dominated government in Southern Rhodesia provided the foundations upon which an asymmetrical relationship between capital, white settlers, Africans and other groups was built. Incipient African nationalism arose in the 1950s in the shadow of an introverted apartheid South Africa and British decolonisation. Industry, commerce and the professions embraced the idea of a multiracial CAF, but recent white immigrants believed their privileged positions to be threatened, setting the stage for the 1962 election of the white supremacist Rhodesian Front and its unlawful 1965 Unilateral Declaration of Independence from the UK, despite profound misgivings in the security forces. An examination of the geopolitical, economic, ideological and institutional dynamics and ultimate failure of Rhodesian state-building from 1923 to 1963 places the reciprocal blockade in context.

Forty years in Aotearoa New Zealand: white identity, home and later life in an adopted country

ABSTRACTIn this article we recount some of the memories, hopes and strategies of 22 older migrants who are ageing in their adopted country of Aotearoa New Zealand. Having arrived as young adults in the 20 years after World War II, most of the immigrants have lived on ‘foreign’ soil for twice as long as their brief sojourns of childhood and early adulthood in their country of origin. Arriving from a variety of backgrounds in 12 different countries, they can all be considered ‘white’ immigrants in relation to New Zealand's indigenous Māori population and other non-European immigrant groups such as those from Pacific Island Nations or Asia. Their lives encompass the experience of globalisation and transnationalism in communication technologies and inter-country migration. As they recount the meaning of living through these changes, these older folk discuss the delicacies of assimilation in post-World War II New Zealand and the interplay between the daily life of New Zealand as ‘home’ and the homeland asHeimat. Their stories argue against the assumption that decades of residence, particularly for white immigrants in a white-majority nation, imply an ‘assimilation’ of cultural identity. Instead, the stories evoke recognition of the negotiation of gain and loss which continues as they, and their contexts, change over time.