Of Boundaries and Codes: The Cultural Practices of Nationality in Immigrant Organizations

• In Event: 426 - Section on International Migration Paper Session. Immigrant Organizations and the Assimilation/Transnationalism Divide

Abstract

How do black immigrant use their culture to mediate relationships with other ethnic groups? Social science research claims black immigrants draw on transnational and pan-ethnic identities to strategically avoid assimilation into African American culture. However, these conclusions emerge from individual level analysis of identity and obfuscates understandings of culture that emerge from analyzing cultural practices at the group level through immigrant organizations. To better understand black immigrant boundary making processes, I analyze ethnographic and interview data collected during two years of fieldwork on a Jamaican cricket club in the Midwest. I found that black immigrants practice their culture within the framework of national identity, relying on newly arrived immigrants to replenish the club. Yet the contemporary Jamaican immigrants are no longer coming from a cricket society. An earlier cohort of Jamaican immigrants established a cricket organization where they can practice nationality in a way that reflects the interests and experience of their own migrant cohort around a ‘gentlemen’s code’ of cricket. Practicing their culture in a way that aligns them with this code has consequently lead to a social splintering between the older club members, and the cricketers who are more recent arrivals from Jamaica. This cohort and generation divide has important theoretical implications for understanding how cultural boundaries work at the group level, and are shaped over time by both the context of reception in the host society, and the cultural contexts of sending societies.

Author

• Marcelle Mandisa Medford-Lee, University of Chicago