I include the trailer for Speaking in Tongues because although the bilingual education debate in the United States is usually focused around Spanish speakers, the filmmakers chose to emphasize Mandarin and Cantonese and play into viewers’ perceptions of Chinese as an increasingly valuable language.

Update 9/11/12: Thanks to Racialicious for quoting me on their Tumblr. This post seems to have gotten a bit of attention there. I did not realize until this morning that I had automatically disabled comments on my posts; that has been changed.

In the past few years, the American press has written hundreds of feature stories about the push to learn Chinese, and since this is what I study, I pay close attention to these articles. Until this morning, I have not encountered an article in which the arguments for and against Chinese language learning have been so revealing about the US racial order.

Yellow peril fears are noticeably absent in this National Public Radio piece on the Chinese language mandate in Bibb County, Georgia. Asians are not a major presence in this county: according to the 2010 Census, Bibb County is 52% black, 43% white, 1.6% Asian, and just shy of 3% Hispanic or Latino of any race.

Except for a few boilerplate lines about “a Communist regime enacting its geopolitical agenda on their children” and “China and India will have 50 percent of the world GDP,” the commentary here is not about Asians, but rather about blacks and Latinos. For example, let’s take a look at this quote from a Bibb County resident, whom I assume to be white, judging from her English phonology:

“Bibb County is not known for producing the highest-achieving graduates,” says Macon resident Dina McDonald. “You’ll see that many of them can’t even speak basic English.” (emphasis mine)

Here in the bolded text you see McDonald’s language ideology, specifically her ideology about African American Vernacular English (AAVE). While sociolinguists recognize AAVE (often pejoratively referred to as Ebonics) as a rich dialect of American English in its own right, many Americans consider AAVE to be a substandard slang of the ignorant, loaded down with the twin stigmas of blackness and poverty.

When McDonald claims that Bibb County residents “can’t even speak basic English,” she is clearly not talking about immigrants who speak English as a second language. Only 3.6% of Bibb County is foreign-born, matching up well with the percentage of Asians and Latinos. McDonald’s claim is about the county’s majority black residents speaking AAVE.

Black students have to learn to speak standard American English to get ahead in a white-dominated society, and generally learn to switch between the two dialects depending on the social context. Though they may or may not speak standard American English to her, they likely speak AAVE amongst themselves, fueling this perception that they “can’t even speak basic English.”

In the next quote, she argues that some students would find Mandarin more useful than others. I do not have the tools with me to run any statistical analyses on the Census and American Community Survey data from Bibb County, but knowing what we know about black-white gaps in educational attainment, occupational mobility, and income, we can see an implicit racial division here:

McDonald herself has a ninth-grader in the public schools and says she can imagine some students going into fields where Mandarin could be useful, like international business, technology or law. But with lower achievers, she says, “Do you want to teach them how to say, ‘Do you want fries with that?’ in Mandarin?”

The article says that Georgia’s Latino population has doubled over the last Census period. In fact, the Latino population has been increasing throughout the South. Why not offer Spanish, which would be more immediately useful and relevant to students’ lives?

[...] “it is important for communities to educate our children for their future, not our past.” For that future, Dallemand says, there is no choice but Mandarin Chinese.

Dallemand seems to ignore the fact that Spanish is not just the past but the present and long-term future for Bibb County, for the South, and the US as a whole. Mexican immigration has essentially stopped, but the Latino population is still growing rapidly and the US still has strong economic, political, and military ties to Spanish-speaking Latin America. (Have we forgotten that we still hold on to a Spanish-speaking colony in the Caribbean?)

Learning a language requires learning cultural sensitivity. Furthermore, for native speakers of the world’s dominant international language, attempting a foreign language is a symbolic act bridging a gap of privilege with their interlocutors. In calling Spanish “our past,” Dallemand implies that Latinos and Latin Americans are not worthy of engagement on equal terms. Spanish speakers are backwards. They are no longer important. Chinese offers more opportunity to our children.

But does it really? Can learning Chinese open doors for everyone? While I strongly believe in foreign language education for all, and in the cognitive, social, and occupational advantages that foreign language study brings, using Chinese on the job or in everyday life is not necessarily practical or imaginable for all students, especially lower-income students in a largely black-white part of the country. When you don’t reinforce language through use, the skills wither away. When opportunities for using the language seem out of reach, the motivation disappears.

The push to learn Chinese is framed in purely economic and geopolitical terms. When these motivations are rendered moot by the inequality of opportunities, what is left?

Wedding dresses in East London. Photo by Fin Fahey (Flickr/Creative Commons).

Do people of South Asian descent in the UK identify with the label “British Asian”?

Is “British Asian” a good analytical category for researchers and policy makers interested in the diverse South Asian groups in Britain?

Some in-progress research at the London School of Economics suggests that the answer to both may be no.

Sociologist Indraneel Sircar and economist Jyoti Saraswati have done a small pilot study of social cohesion, social mobility, and integration among British-born Hindu Bengalis from working-class backgrounds in London. They wrote about their research today on LSE’s British Politics and Policy blog.

Sircar and Saraswati find that their small sample of respondents largely rejects the “Asian” label (which, in the UK, is used to refer specifically to people of South Asian descent):

…the term has little purchase amongst ‘Asians’ themselves: in the aforementioned self-identification question in our survey, a majority indicated ‘Asian’ as the least favoured option. Respondents avoided the term ‘Asian’ since it had negative connotations in the media (e.g. ‘Asian youth gangs’) and did not reflect their nuanced ethno-linguistic and religious identities vis-à-vis other British-born individuals of South Asian heritage in London.

Contrary to the dominant narrative about working-class British Asians, the group they are studying is socially unintegrated but upwardly mobile. How can researchers make sense of this difference? Is “British Asian” a good category to use, when there is so much difference between different British Asian groups? Sircar and Saraswati argue that the umbrella category is too broad to be useful, at least in this type of research:

By avoiding the catch-all term ‘(British) Asian’, we can move on from a blinkered ethnicity-focussed approach, and instead look at socio-economics and other commonalities to address policy challenges related to integration, cohesion and mobility that can potentially benefit all communities in London.

Their argument here is similar to calls from scholars of Asian Americans to be careful when talking about “Asian Americans” as a whole. Like British Asians, Asian Americans are extremely diverse in terms of class, history, language, and culture. This problem of lumping Asian Americans together came into the public spotlight a few months ago with the controversy over the Pew Research Center’s report on Asian Americans.
Originally posted on The Plaid Bag Connection.

Photo by paul_houle (Flickr/Creative Commons).

In writing my master’s thesis on Chinese language schools, I’m reading tons of books and articles on ethnic language schools and their cousins, ethnic cram schools. Sociologists and education scholars use the umbrella term “supplementary education programs” to refer to Chinese buxiban (補習班), Korean hagwon (학원), and similar institutions in other immigrant communities. These programs aim to supplement the learning that students get in “regular” schools by providing additional lessons and homework.

A buxiban in Taiwan. Photo by chang17 (Flickr/Creative Commons). Original caption was “可怕的地方” (“Scary place”).

Zhou and Li (2003) and Zhou and Kim (2006) (both links to PDF versions of the articles) argue that these schools are part of the reason why American students of Chinese and Korean descent do so well academically. They contend that, on top of the obvious academic benefits, these programs help develop networks of social relations and information sharing that help immigrant families find paths to success for their children.

Academic articles are generally pretty dry, but these two contained lists of school names that made me chuckle:

The Korean hagwon names that Zhou and Kim listed are a little less inventive. They, too, like to invoke the names of Ivy League universities:

They have eye-catching names like “Harvard Review,” “Yale Academy,” “Smart Academy,” “IVY College,” and “UC Learning Institute.” (Zhou and Kim 2006, p. 16)

As Frances Soctomah noted on Twitter, these names speak to tiger parent-type expectations:

@calvinhyj Wow! Would be interesting to see what those kids accomplished long term. Expectations are built right into center names.

—
Frances V. Soctomah (@FVSoctomah) September 01, 2012

I love the SGV more and more each day! @ Little Harvard Academy instagr.am/p/NtqamJunLG/

—
Cathy (@GastronomyBlog) July 30, 2012

Our safety tutoring center if Little Harvard Academy doesn't pan out instagr.am/p/Oc_DqjOnJe/

—
Cathy (@GastronomyBlog) August 18, 2012

And yet another fine option for my yet to be born prodigy! #compton instagr.am/p/OfRnq1unES/

—
Cathy (@GastronomyBlog) August 18, 2012

Zhou, Min, and Xi-Yuan Li. 2003. “Ethnic language schools and the development of supplementary education in the immigrant Chinese community in the United States.” New Directions for Youth Development (100):57–73.

Zhou, Min, and Susan S. Kim. 2006. “Community Forces, Social Capital, and Educational Achievement: The Case of Supplementary Education in the Chinese and Korean Immigrant Communities.” Harvard Educational Review 76(1):1–29.

Originally posted at The Plaid Bag Connection.

I try to avoid driving between my field sites, though it is quite a long trip on the bus.

Fellow ethnographers, how do you use technology in the field? I have only had a smartphone for the past three months and a tablet for two weeks, but so far I have found both of them indispensable for collecting data in my field sites (two Chinese language schools in the Los Angeles area).

I am drawn to Tricia Wang’s idea of writing “live fieldnotes” but the way she uses technology in her work is not feasible for me because I work with minors. For privacy and other ethical reasons, I cannot and do not upload pictures of students or the school sites to the Internet, and I do not feel comfortable sharing accounts of what happened in the field so openly on the Internet.

Instead of documenting and sharing as widely as Wang does, I use technological tools to facilitate the types of data collection that ethnographers have been doing for decades.

The gadgets

1. A smartphone

Image by Siddhartha Thota.

I was too frugal to get a smartphone until I realized how valuable it could be for the type of work that I do. I use it to take “jottings” in the field, snap quick pictures of scenes to jog my memory, and record interviews. I have an iPhone 4S but a cheaper Android phone with a fast processor will do perfectly. A phone that is too slow will just bog you down, especially if you work in a fast-paced, constantly-changing environment like a school.

Using a smartphone in public is not always appropriate. For example, I wouldn’t use a smartphone if I were sleeping in a homeless encampment, but if I were researching youth culture in the San Gabriel Valley I’d be on Instagram all day.

My two field sites serve communities on opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum, and the appropriateness of typing away on a smartphone varies accordingly. In the middle-class site, pretty much everyone is on their smartphone (even some of the students) and I blend right into the background. In the working-class site, however, whipping out an iPhone in the middle of class makes me look both inattentive and conspicuously wealthy, so I try to use my phone as little as possible.

2. A tablet computer

I used to think that a tablet computer was a frivolous luxury, but since acquiring one I’ve found it to be indispensable for my life as a graduate student. Reading PDFs on the iPad 3 is a joy, and the limited multitasking abilities help me stay focused on the task at hand. In field situations where it does not stick out too much, it can also be extremely useful. Recently, I was at an administrative meeting at the middle class school site where I could sit down and take detailed notes with the iPad and a Bluetooth keyboard. The iPad and keyboard combination is much lighter than my laptop (which was under repair, in any case) and with wi-fi will sync to the cloud.

The apps

1. A cloud-based mobile backup solution

A cloud-based mobile backup solution is essential for everything I do, since I work on a number of different devices that I own as well as campus computers and borrowed laptops. Dropbox (free, with the option to pay for more space) helps keep everything in sync, and has been especially helpful this weekend when my computer was in the shop. I was able to borrow my sister’s laptop, scan some documents I collected in the field, upload them to Dropbox, and annotate them on my iPad.

2. A note-taking app

Some actual jottings of a conversation I overheard. I took these notes on an iPad but took this screenshot on an iPhone.

I use the pre-installed iOS Notes app for what Emerson et al. call “jottings,” or quick notes taken in the field to jog your memory when you write fieldnotes later. The Notes app has completely replaced the pocket notebooks I used to use. It syncs through iCloud to all iDevices and Macs running OS X Mountain Lion. At the meeting this weekend, I typed most of my notes on my iPad and some more on my iPhone when I stepped away from the table for a bit. When I came back to a space with wi-fi, I could see all of my notes on both devices. If I had my laptop with me, it would have been synced onto there as well.
Some people like Evernote (free, with the option to pay for more space and bandwidth) for organizing notes, but I find it to be slow and prone to crashes and have not been able to integrate it into my workflow very well.

3. An audio recording app

iTalk Premium Recorder.

I have not found an audio recording app for iOS that I could rave about. That said, iTalk Recorder Premium ($1.99) certainly beats lugging around my heavy laptop and running Audacity on it for recording interviews. You can choose between three recording qualities and smaller files will sync to Dropbox. For longer files, unfortunately, you need to use the slow companion app for Windows of Mac or iTunes file sharing. iTalk saves in the ancient, space-hogging AIFF format that takes forever to upload.

If anyone knows of an affordable, simple to use iOS app that syncs to Dropbox and saves in MP3, please let me know! There is also a voice recording app that comes with iOS, but I do not use it because I prefer to keep my field data away from iTunes (more on this later).

4. A camera app

This is not from my field site, but I often will take pictures of documents like this one that I cannot take home with me.

I use the iOS native camera app for taking quick snapshots of scenes from the field. Since I’m not concerned about photo quality or aesthetic value, and am constantly trying to be as discreet as possible when taking these kinds of photos, the native camera app is perfect.
5. A dictionary app

Pleco

A dictionary is indispensable if you are working with populations that do not speak a language with which you are 100% comfortable. For Chinese, I like Pleco (free) with its comprehensive dictionary and paid optical character recognition add-on ($14.95 before the educational discount). I also like Qingwen ($4.99), which will pronounce things for me in Cantonese and is also searchable in the jyutping Cantonese transcription system.

Data management

I prefer to keep all of my field data separate from my personal data, both because I want to protect the privacy of my respondents and because I believe in a general separation of work and personal life. Unfortunately, Apple designs its products to automatically keep all of your data together. Thankfully, the workarounds I use are simple:

• Photos – I try to keep the photos from going into iCloud’s Photo Stream, uploading them directly into Dropbox instead. If they go into the Photo Stream before I have a chance to do this, it’s a simple matter of deleting them from there.
• Audio – iTalk does not sync to iTunes, which is wonderful for data management purposes. However, I still end up sending files through iTunes to convert them to MP3, which saves space in my Dropbox. After the conversion I delete the files off of iTunes.
• Notes – I do not archive my jottings. I delete my jottings from the Notes app immediately after I write my field notes. Because of the “in the moment” nature of jottings, they don’t tend to make much sense later on, anyway.

From the 2011 Glen Waverley Chinese New Year and Lantern Festival. Photo: Alpha (Flickr/Creative Commons).

The Age ran an article this week about the Melbourne suburb of Glen Waverley, which is quickly becoming an enclave for affluent, well-educated Chinese migrants. Currently, Mainland China is the country that sends the most migrants to Australia. Many arrive in the country as international students and decide to settle (although “settling” in the era of transnational capital flows may still involve plenty of back-and-forth travel and living arrangements, as detailed in Aiwha Ong‘s Flexible Citizenship).

But why are so many choosing Glen Waverley? The answer is that it provides the crucial building blocks to begin a life in a new country: good public school education, transport, a safe environment and – an important factor – other new migrants.

This demographic shift makes Glen Waverley analogous to other affluent “ethnoburban” communities in Western settler societies: Arcadia and Rowland Heights near Los Angeles, for example, or Markham near Toronto.

Interestingly, in the accompanying photo gallery the editors decided to focus on school performance in Glen Waverley:

Last year Glen Waverley’s school was the highest performing non-selective state school in the VCE, and 80% of its enrolment have Asian backgrounds.

Which came first, the Asian students or the high performance?

Rachel Ishikawa of social justice organization CAAAV in New York City alerted me to a protest that has been going on on 11 Allen Street in Manhattan’s Chinatown. The new landlord of the building is trying to evict the residents, all of whom are working-class Chinese immigrants. Many of them have lived in the building for decades.

Chinatown is located in a prime location in downtown Manhattan, and wealthy landlords have been trying to capitalize on that for many years. In her book Contemporary Chinese America: Immigration, Ethnicity, and Community Transformation, sociologist Min Zhou wrote that, in the 1980s, real estate in Chinatown became extremely expensive as investors from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia began to buy up property in the neighborhood.

According to a study by the Real Estate Board of New York in 1986, the annual rent per square foot for commercial space in the core of Chinatown ($275) was far higher than that on Wall Street ($175); it was also higher than the most desirable commercial location in Manhattan’s central business district-for example, on Madison Avenue above 42nd Street ($255). (p. 67)

Landlords began using illegal tactics to extract more money from tenants, such as forcing them to pay “key money” when they first move in. Like what is happening at 11 Allen Street today, some landlords would also harass tenants and try to evict them, in order to rezone the property as commercial. This had disastrous effects on the low-income residents of the community:

I found, in short, that the cost of property, particularly renovated space, in the core Chinatown area became so high that little affordable housing remained on the fringes. This was not simply caused by a gentrification trend that created greater demand for space throughout Manhattan; there had also been a specific change in Chinatown. Chinatown used to be a residential enclave based on a social structure of sojourning; now, it was increasingly a hotbed for investment and real estate speculation by more affluent coethnics from abroad. (p. 69)

Some tenants would fight back against unscrupulous landlords, but they were largely unsuccessful. Zhou interviewed an activist who told her about some residents’ attempts to take legal action. An excerpt from what the activist told her:

For example, in 1984, 22 tenants of two tenements on Henry Street in Chinatown filed a legal complaint against their landlords for excessive rent increases. Most of these tenants were longtime residents who had been working in Chinatown. They suspected that the increases were a prelude to getting them out and getting in those with more money to spend on rent. [...] After making some improvements-new storm windows, light fixtures, an intercom system, and a coat of paint-the landlord received an approval for rent increases of up to 30 percent. But the actual rent increase was much higher than what was legally allowed. For example, the new rent for 88-year-old Mr. Yuen, another longtime resident, who lived alone in one room there, was $200.68, from $77.44. Mr. Yuen’s Social Security check could barely cover the increased rent. The tenants decided to pay the old rents while they challenged the increases. However, the landlord, Mr. Sung, simply put the building up for sale. The tenants did not win the case. (p. 68)

Ishikawa believes that the residents of 11 Allen Street are having better luck. After a year of protests, the landlord is finally willing to discuss letting the residents stay and keeping their rents affordable. But will what happened on Henry Street in 1984 happen again on Allen Street in 2012? Will the landlord renege on his promises or find other ways to kick the tenants out? The fight is far from over.

Watch the video, or download the audio file (MP3, 11.18 Mb).

From his biography:

Of Chinese and Lao extraction, and a first-generation Australian, Tim was raised in the southwest suburbs of Sydney. He completed his Doctor of Philosophy in political theory at the University of Oxford, from where he also holds a Master of Philosophy degree (with distinction). Tim studied at Oxford as Commonwealth and Jowett Senior Scholar at Balliol College. He is a first-class honours graduate of the University of Sydney.

For those curious about the correct pronunciation of Tim’s surname, the phonetic spelling of it is Soot-pom-ma-sarn.

Cross-posted at The Plaid Bag Connection.

George and Johnny Huynh’s story last year complicated the model minority myth.

I hate to get too academic on this blog, so please forgive me as I enumerate my issues with the Pew Research Center Report on Asian Americans that is circulating this morning. I will try to be as brief and clear as possible.

This report presents an overly optimistic picture of the state of Asian America. I think it’s fantastic that their research sample was better educated and happier with life than the typical American. However, we must look more closely at who they talked to in order to obtain these results.

The Pew Research Center survey was designed to contain a nationally representative sample of each of the six largest Asian-American groups by country of origin—Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, Indian Americans, Vietnamese Americans, Korean Americans and Japanese Americans. Together these groups comprise at least 83% of the total Asian population in the U.S.

I am no expert on research survey design, but we might note that the Asian American groups with the highest poverty rates (namely Cambodians, Hmong, and Laotians) are not included in this survey. According to C. N. Le’s analyses of Census 2000 data, Cambodians, Hmong, and Laotians have poverty rates similar to those of blacks and Latinos. 22.5% of Cambodians, Hmong, and Laotians in the US lived in poverty, compared to 24.9% of blacks and 21.4% of Latinos.

Much of this difference, of course, is related to how these groups came to the US. As the Pew report points out:

About half of all Korean and Indian immigrants who received green cards in 2011 got them on the basis of employer sponsorship, compared with about a third of Japanese, a fifth of Chinese, one-in-eight Filipinos and just 1% of Vietnamese. The Vietnamese are the only major subgroup to have come to the U.S. in large numbers as political refugees; the others say they have come mostly for economic, educational and family reasons.

While the other groups were either stringently selected from the highly skilled, highly educated sectors of their native countries or came through family reunification, large swathes of Vietnam’s population fled the country during the Vietnam War. The same could be said about the Cambodians, Hmong, and Laotians. We must also note that the Cambodian elite was one of the primary targets of the Khmer Rouge genocide, and that many of the Cambodians who made it to the US were of low socioeconomic status.

Thus, by taking a sample of the largest Asian groups in the US, most of whom were highly skilled upon arrival and more or less easily moved into the US middle classes, Pew was able to find that Asian Americans are better off, better educated, and happier than the typical American. This report completely overlooks differences between the groups selected for the study and the smaller, poorer, less educated, and likely less happy groups that were excluded.

It also overlooks differences within groups. For example, as a result of family reunification, undocumented immigration, and the inclusion of refugees from the Vietnam War, Chinese Americans fall into two distinct, large clusters: the low-skilled, poorly educated working class and the high-skilled, highly educated middle class. Le’s analysis hints at this, showing that 23.6% of Chinese have less than a high school education, the largest proportion of the groups sampled for Pew’s study.

By looking only at the groups that are doing the best and not breaking down statistics within these groups, Pew’s study ends up reifying the model minority myth. Their biased aggregate measures say that Asian Americans are doing great. But just ignoring the significant differences between and within groups in terms of poverty, education, and other measures does not make these differences disappear! I worry that by hastily sweeping these differences under the rug, those groups that need help will not be able to get it. After all, if Asian Americans as a whole are doing well, then why bother helping them?

Cross-posted at The Plaid Bag Connection.

A blackjack dealer in Las Vegas. Photo by Dolan Halbrook (Flickr/Creative Commons). Halbrook asked in the caption: “BTW, I think at least 50% of the dealers were Asian women. Does anyone know why?” Here’s an answer.

In his study of casino labor in the United States and South Africa, sociologist Jeffrey Sallaz found that, in 2005, 34% of Nevada dealers were Asian, though Asians made up only 4.5% of the state population and less than 3% of Nevada visitors at that point (p. 207). Sallaz argues that the disproportionate hiring of Asian dealers can be explained partially by the casino industry’s response to demands from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and other groups for proportionate African American representation in the workforce. Instead of hiring more African Americans, the casinos diversified the workforce by hiring Asian immigrants. They could then argue that they have made strides in incorporating minorities:

Adaptation to changing rules in this case entailed not hiring African-American dealers to achieve equity, as the decree specified, but employing Asian immigrants to display diversity. (p. 245)

Why Asian immigrants? Sallaz says that it is not because casinos can pay immigrants less; all dealers make near the federal minimum wage. He also says that it is not because of increased demand from Asian customers, which I find surprising considering the number of Asian people I’ve seen roaming around Las Vegas casinos and the growing recognition of Asian and Asian American buying power. Instead, he says that “Asian immigrants best fit some pre-existing stereotype on the part of managers as to what constitutes a ‘good dealer.’”:

When asked directly why they hire so many Asian dealers, managers repeatedly invoked these workers’ “extreme company loyalty,” how much “trust you can put in them,” and their “reliability.” The result is a system that can be seen as entirely analogous to the substitution of “local” black homeland workers for British dealers in South Africa during the late apartheid period. In both cases, casinos “diversified” their internal labor markets in response to an external political threat by hiring ethnic workers treated as “honorary whites.” (p. 208)

In other words, casino managers saw Asians as a model minority, implicitly defined in opposition to African Americans. In these hiring practices, dealers perceived an additional element of sexualized exotification:

[...] It is understood that Asian dealers are in demand. Prospective dealers of other ethnic groups often complain privately that casino managers have a “fetish for Oriental women.” (p. 34)

This is one of the few mentions of the specific preference for Asian women in the book. I would have liked to see a deeper investigation into this gendered dimension of racialized dealer hiring, but in the end this point is ancillary to his larger argument about labor and management practices in casinos in the two countries. You can’t put everything into one book.

Sallaz, Jeffrey J. 2009. The Labor of Luck: Casino Capitalism in the United States and South Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cross-posted at The Plaid Bag Connection.

Screencap from ArgenChino.

I finally got a chance to watch Julia Reagan’s documentary ArgenChino, about Chinese supermarkets in Buenos Aires. It was a well-made film and a good introduction to the subject. I particularly liked the section on the looting of Chinese supermarkets and government protection of chain markets during the 2001 financial crisis; this was something that I (inexplicably) did not come across in my own research. I do, however, have a number of critiques to share:

1. The voice of the immigrants

As in many media depictions of the Chinese in Argentina, the voices of immigrants who do not speak Spanish are not heard. While we hear from some 1.5 generation immigrants who do speak Spanish, much of the ire against Chinese immigrants in Argentina is directed towards those who don’t speak the language. How do supermarket owners who haven’t spent most of their lives in the country feel about their businesses and about the xenophobia and racism directed against them?

2. Two factual errors and one glaring omission

• The events of 1989 in China are not termed “the Cultural Revolution.” The Cultural Revolution (文化大革命) happened during the Mao era, from 1966-1976.
• Fujian province is most definitely not in the northern part of China. I get the sense that the respondent was being evasive. There is no way he would have thought that his birth place was in the north.
• There is no mention that La Gran Época (The Epoch Times; 大紀元) is a newspaper founded by Falun Gong, which would explain why the Editor-in-Chief would have such a negative view of the PRC government.

3. Why don’t the Chinese integrate culturally?

There were several important elements missing in the section towards the end about why Chinese immigrants aren’t integrating into Argentine society. First, I suspect that the immigrants may be ambivalent about integrating because they do not know how long they will stay. Only once in this film is it mentioned that many Chinese use Argentina as a stepping stone to third countries like the US and Canada. Return migration to Taiwan and Mainland China is not mentioned at all, though after the 2001 financial crisis many Taiwanese did in fact go back to Taiwan.

Second, Argentine society’s understanding of what immigrant integration entails is largely shaped by the experiences of the Great Wave (“Gran Ola”) of immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During the Great Wave, millions of migrants from all over Europe (but mainly from Italy and Spain) arrived on Argentine shores, making Argentina the receptor of the second-largest flow of immigrants during this period, after the United States. Immigrants rushed into Argentina’s depopulated countryside and developing cities in such large numbers that, for over fifty years, immigrants formed half of the population of the most economically important provinces and almost 70 percent of the population in the city of Buenos Aires.

While the United States received more immigrants, the native-born United States population was fairly large, and immigrants came over a long period of time. In Argentina, however, the native-born population was fairly small, and immigrants came in large numbers over a relatively short period of time. This is reflected in the census data. In 1914, more than 30 percent of the Argentine population was foreign-born; in contrast, in 1910, only 14.4 percent of the United States population was foreign-born (Fontanella de Weinberg 1979).

This overwhelming influx of immigrants drastically transformed Argentine society. Unlike in the US, where immigrants added on to an Anglo-American substrate, immigrants were the vast majority in Argentina’s political and cultural capital and completely redefined what it meant to be Argentine. While the US talks of the melting pot, where immigrants melt into the preexisting soup, Argentina uses the “crisol de razas” (crucible of races) metaphor, implying a much more transformative process that does not take any one group to be the foundation.

The melting of races has already happened, and the “nuevo tipo argentino” (new Argentine man) has already emerged out of it. Now that immigrants are coming in small trickles rather than overwhelming waves, it seems that Argentina doesn’t really know how to incorporate them.

Fontanella de Weinberg, María Beatriz. 1979. La asimilación lingüística de los inmigrantes: Mantenimiento y cambio de la lengua en el sudoeste bonaerense [The linguistic assimilation of immigrants: Maintenance and language change in southwestern Buenos Aires Province]. Bahía Blanca,  Argentina: Universidad Nacional del Sur.

Cross-posted at The Plaid Bag Connection.