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Article Excerpt
IN AN ARTICLE PUBLISHED AT THE DAWN OF THE 20TH CENTURY, the renowned social statistician Richmond Mayo-Smith (1894) identified three major groups among what he called "the whites" in America. First, there were "the native-born of native parentage," (1) the "true Americans" who constituted "a homogeneous body, and to this body the others of more recent arrival tend to be assimilated." Then, there were "the whites of foreign birth, the immigrants ... the real element to be assimilated." Finally, there was the "the native-born of foreign parents ... the second generation of immigrants, so to speak." Second-generation immigrants, Mayo-Smith wrote, "stand half-way ... between the native and the foreign element. ... They represent the process of assimilation in the act" (437-38).
Although few researchers today, if any, would proceed with such a simplistic scheme, Mayo-Smith's remarks are far from being obsolete. In fact, most social research on children of immigrants (2) in the 20th century has unfolded in the broader context of the integration of immigrant groups. More specifically, the idea that children of immigrants are caught between the "worlds" or "cultures" of their parents and the host society permeates the sociological literature. As I will try to show below, this idea is articulated in slightly different terms in different periods. Thus, in Thomas Jefferson's time, it was a matter of political loyalty and commitment to "democracy"; at the turn of the 20th century, it became a matter of social integration and order; and in Robert Park's work it turns into a matter of cultural integration. Ultimately, however, we can think of this as a single thesis that has been used in different forms. In this paper I chose to denote this idea as the "two-worlds thesis," partly because the term "world" is fairly broad (and therefore exposes the vagueness of the thesis better), and partly because it is used by Marcus Lee Hansen (1952) in his famous essay on "three generations."
This paper is a critical examination of the two-worlds thesis in light of autobiographies written by children of immigrants in 20th-century North America. Three major issues will be addressed. First, although the experience of duality is expressed in almost all the autobiographies, once we begin to zoom into the "worlds" of immigrant children, we also observe an immense diversity. Children of immigrants "live" in many--not just two--worlds. In this respect, my findings concur with recent ethnographic studies in multiethnic contexts in Western Europe (Back, 1995; Alund, 1995; Qureshi and Moores, 1999; Soysal, 2001).
By focussing exclusively on the experience of duality, the two-worlds thesis depicts an existence shaped by uncertainty and ambivalence. It is this condition that constitutes "the problem of the second generation" (Hansen, 1952). Autobiographies, however, also reveal the presence of numerous dreams and a desire for a different kind of life. The second major argument of this paper is that the realization of these dreams is an equally important aspect of the "problem."
Finally, we need to tackle the question of how, despite the diversity revealed by ethnographic and autobiographical data, the image of "two worlds" has become so popular and is often accepted even by the children themselves. The autobiographies provide a rather straightforward answer to this question: children of immigrants do not literally live in two worlds, but they live in a world where the belief that there are only two worlds is omnipresent. This "belief" constantly erupts in relations they enter at home, at school, on the street, or in the workplace. I will therefore suggest that the so-called "problem of the second generation" should be located in the tension between diversity and duality, rather than in being caught between two worlds.
Data Sources and Limitations of the Study
Autobiographies as a Data Source
Children of immigrants can neither be defined as a class, nor as an ethnic group, nor even as an age group. The classic proponents of the two-worlds thesis justify this categorization on the grounds that children of immigrants share a common subjective experience (Stonequist, 1937; Hansen, 1952). As the author of a recent study, who had herself grown up as the child of a relatively wealthy immigrant family in early 20th-century America, writes:
I cannot claim to have endured the poverty that was the lot of so many immigrant children. ... Nor did I live in a tenement ... my neighborhood was not a ghetto. ... In spite of all these departures from the typical immigrant pattern, in other respects I, too, suffered from the immigrant child syndrome (Berrol, 1995: ix).
For Berrol, this syndrome involves, "most of all, feelings of marginality." Given this emphasis on feelings and experiences, proponents of the two-worlds thesis often turn to autobiographical texts as one of their major data sources (Park, 1937; Stonequist, 1937). In this respect, autobiographies provide a good starting point for evaluating the two-worlds thesis.
That "immigrant autobiographies" can provide a key for understanding the "experience" of immigrants was first stressed in the pioneering work of Boelhower (1982). We should nevertheless note that not all immigrant autobiographies deal with the experience of migration, nor do they always focus on children. In fact, it might be quite misleading to treat them as a unhied genre. We have no reason to assume that there is a unified "experience" associated with being a second-generation migrant. As Sollors (1997: xv) reminds us in his introduction to Mary Antin's work: "She may be speaking for thousands in one sense, but in another sense, her story does not even resemble that of her own sister."
Methodological Limitations
Since my main objective in the limited space of this study is to show in what ways the accounts given in the autobiographies diverge from the two-worlds thesis, there is little emphasis on the ways in which the autobiographies differ from each other. I try to reveal the multiplicity of relationships and potentials that often remain invisible from the point of view of the two-worlds thesis. It is nevertheless important to note that these relationships and potentials are articulated in different ways by immigrant children, depending on race, ethnicity and gender.
There are, for example, crucial disparities between the works of male and female autobiographers, ranging from language use to attitudes towards sexism. Similarly, when we compare the autobiography of Piri Thomas (1967), who was born of Puerto Rican parents, and Michiel Horn (1997), the son of a Dutch immigrant family in Canada, we see that the former text indicates a much more intense experience of "duality" than the latter, as racial dualities reinforce the "immigrant-host" duality (more on this below). As Wong (1991) points out on the basis of her analysis of autobiographies written by Chinese immigrants, (3) many of the recurring themes in the autobiographies of European immigrants may not be found in the autobiographies of other immigrant groups. (4) Some scholars have even argued that "autobiography" is unique to Western culture (Gusdorf, 1980). However, although a certain way of writing autobiographies might be unique to Western culture, there are examples of autobiographical narratives in other cultures.
Native American Autobiographies
While a rigorous comparison of autobiographies written by Native peoples of North America and by immigrant groups is beyond the scope of this paper, it is worth noting some of the significant differences between the two groups. To begin with, as Krupat (1985: 30) notes, most Native American autobiographies are produced in a different manner than immigrant autobiographies: they are "collaborative efforts, jointly produced by some white who translates, transcribes, compiles, edits, interprets, polishes, and ultimately determines the form of the text in writing, and by an Indian who is its subject and whose life becomes the content of the 'autobiography'. ..." In fact, one might say that not only the content, but the very form and style of the autobiography changes in response to...
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