Inequality in Immigrant Families: Double Bind and Children’s Language Brokering Work

• In Event: 288 - Regular Session. Immigrant Families

Abstract

This study examines how working-class Mexican-and Korean-Americans describe their family responsibilities and relationships with their immigrant parents. Previous research has shown that an assimilation gap between immigrant parents and their children is a main cause of intergenerational conflict. Others have argued that familism associated with Latino and Asian families operates as a source of intergenerational solidarity. Based on 75 interviews with Mexican-and Korean-American “language brokers” who grew up translating for their immigrant parents, this study moves beyond such a binary understanding of immigrant family relations. Instead, the findings show that children of immigrant face a familial double bind, pulled between accompanying and equally powerful expectations of immigrant sacrifice and immigrant mobility. On the one hand, the widespread expectation that immigrant families should help each other compels children of immigrants to shoulder difficult language brokering work. On the other hand, children of immigrants also strive to fulfill societal and parental expectations of becoming “successful” children of immigrants who obtain intergenerational mobility through academic and career achievement. However, language brokering work sometimes interrupted youth’s ability to excel in school, thus leaving many working-class children of immigrants to feel inadequate while juggling incompatible—and at times impossible— demands. By comparing the similar and different ways that Korean and Mexican-Americans understand and cope with their familial obligations, this study highlights how the cultural images of the “good” immigrant reverberate in the family lives of working-class young people.

Author

• Hyeyoung Kwon, Indiana University