Ethnicization and Identity Construction among Twice-Minority Groups: Korean-Chinese and Uyghur Immigrants in the United States

• In Event: 1284 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 03. Migrant Racial/Ethnic Identity

Abstract

“Twice-minority” immigrants, immigrants who were ethnic minorities in both their country of origin and country of destination, may experience patterns of identity construction and race conceptions that are different from immigrants who were the majority ethnic group in their home country. Based on 37 in-depth interviews with recent immigrants from two minority ethnic groups from China – Korean-Chinese (Chosunjok) and Uyghur, this paper is the first comparative study of the identity and race conceptions among twice-minority immigrants. I find that twice-minority immigrants usually construct their ethnic identity situationally in their interactions with different groups of people, as they experience pushing and pulling forces towards different identity options in these interactions. The salience of Korean-Chinese immigrants’ twice-minority identity mainly grows out of their advantages in the labor market in ethnic economies, whereas the Uyghur identity usually becomes stronger as a result of other people’s assumptions and reactions to their ethnicity basing on their physical appearance. People in the two groups also tend to develop very different understandings of the ethnoracial concepts in the United States and China because of their different characteristics and their experiences in these two countries.

Author

• Xiang Lu, New York University