in a bank because she was told she was over-qualified.
There is the also the plight of those who have no legal status because their Visa had expired or because they came without more permanent papers. Their challenge is even worse because they have to take jobs that are paid under the table and below minimum wage to support their families. They are constantly in hiding and must strictly instruct their children on how to avoid the law. The children are aware of their precarious position but must wrestle with the existential questions of “why them?” The children find themselves in constant dissonance about themselves and their families, noting the differences in social and economic status of families that surround them. The school system allows their children to be enrolled—but only through high school. After high school, no college will enroll their children. I am reminded of a family in a small town in Central Nebraska whose parents were some of the sweetest, most abiding citizens I knew. The small community loved them because they were helpful and polite. They had lived in this community for a long time but always took care not to get too close to anyone for fear that they might discover that they did not have papers. The wife always expressed how much she would have loved to go to the community college close by but could not. When the son, one of the most obedient and smart kids in the school, turned sixteen, I asked naively if he was excited that he could now drive. His mother was in tears and said he cannot get a driver’s license. I understood exactly what she meant. The son lived through being taunted for not driving by his fellow classmate who could not be told the truth. Then when he completed high school, he had to face the fact that he could not enroll in college like his friends. How can anyone say young people are on the same playing ground and should just apply themselves? There are tons of stories of varied life experiences that tell us status matters in the mental, spiritual and economic welfare of first generation immigrant children.
Response to Prejudice
For most immigrants to the United States color and race have never been an issue. In fact, most report that they were not aware of their racial color until they had to fill out the immigration entry form at their point of entry. I remember not filling anything in on that field of the form because I had never described myself or even known that people are classified by color!
In cultural identity literature, this phenomenon has been well articulated by T. L. Cross26 in the minority cultural development model. Unlike the normal minority cultural development that begins for minority Americans at a very early age, when they begin to ask the question of “who am I?” in a multicultural world, the immigrant does not begin this process until they have come to the US and are socially defined as a minority person of color. The obvious response of the immigrant is to attempt to conform to the majority culture—a natural remnant of identity in colonialism where the European is always considered superior due to technological and industrial advancement.
In time, this response changes as the raw experiences of racism and prejudice begin to encroach on the immigrant. For some who remain in this conformity stage to fit in and gain the benefits of conforming to the majority culture, there is a sense of repressing their needs and expressions. There is a sense of almost living an imposter’s life foreign to who they truly are. Enduring, false humility and amicability with the majority world, while allowing their real selves to emerge only in the familiarity of their fellow ethnic friends and family, characterize such a life. One may call it a “double-life” to distinguish it from the pathological label of bi-polarism. For others who manage to move through the stages of cultural identity development to the Integrative Awareness stage, the journey is long, arduous and many times painful. The journey is characterized by typical developmental symptoms associated with the in-between stages of Dissonance, Resistance & Immersion, and Introspection. Some of the indicators of these stages include:
Strong Need to Maintain Cultural Traditions
Many immigrant families will voice the need to maintain cultural traditions. I call this a “need” because of its function to fill a gap that has been created by the experience of lack of belonging through prejudice. Threat to the sense of self leads to a psychological drive to retain a sense of self-continuity by retrieving to a secure base or a holding environment.27 Idealizing and maintaining cultural traditions is a secure base that is easily accessible to an immigrant in a foreign land. It is the retraction to that which is familiar—like food, dressing, or worship.
Sue and Sue, writing about social enclaves and maintenance of cultural traditions states that many immigrant families find that holding onto their cultural traditions gives them a source of identity in a context that threatens to rob them of identity.28 There is a familiarity that feeds the psychological need to belong when one can cook meals as they always did at home or when they speak their language.
While on the conscious level this may be deemed as a valuation of their own culture above the foreign culture, its function to feed the threatened sense of self should not be underplayed. Cathecting to this need can become detrimental to children when parents demand that children appreciate these traditions as much as they do. Such demands overlook the fact that these traditions may mean absolutely nothing to children who are growing up in the western context!
For many families, maintaining their cultural traditions becomes almost an obsession to contrast the feeling of insecurity in the foreign majority culture. For instance, many parents will simply ignore the Western developmental stages of being sixteen and beginning to date, or turning eighteen and being defined as an adult, demanding that their children pattern their parents’ development. I remember thinking how absurd it would be for me to see my sons holding hands and kissing at sixteen! Those are things that if we engaged in at that age in our African context, they were not meant for the parents to even know! I have also never been comfortable displaying public affection for my husband or receiving affection from him in public because that is just not African, especially not in front of my children.
Displays of affection adored in the West as an expression of love, can easily be termed as crossing of boundaries between parents and children or age groups in Kenyan culture. The response of most families to such cultural expression is a resolution to deepen their commitment to maintain their traditions. Such strict worldviews and age demarcations limit the extent of what one is able to do for recreation with their teen and young adult children. For instance, for many parents it becomes increasingly difficult to go to the movies with their teen children because of fear of the movie having nudity and other age inappropriate language and scenes!
Social Enclaves—Depleted Communal Life
When the immigrant person gets re-defined by the new society as having less value and status sometimes with ridicule and non-appreciation of their giftedness, they, like any other human being, retreat to their social enclaves. In other words, they tend to only socialize in circles where they feel comfortable and appreciated. For most immigrants, this means their social circle is their fellow immigrants usually from the same country/continent. These social enclaves often breed a psychological bias where everything that is foreign in the new culture is de-valued and everything that is familiar and culturally accepted is cherished and protected. To cherish and protect may indeed require the formation of select groups of people where one can truly be oneself and relaxed, while the other (majority or even minority groups that are unlike the self) may be seen as untrustworthy. It is not uncommon to hear children of first generation immigrants who are at various identity stages wondering why their parents do not associate with other parents or frequent social hangouts as do parents of their friends in the majority culture. Parents may associate with majority culture friends either through workplace, church and other necessary social relationships, but these hangouts are essentially different in terms of psychological safety emotional freedom, and other qualitative indicators of open relationships. In more extreme situations, the immigrant family becomes socially isolated especially in geographical areas where they have less contact with their own country people. Their children are essentially caught in between this dichotomy of social clusters and can easily find themselves isolated because they do not necessarily fit in the parents’ social enclaves and yet do not fully belonging in
