Siting Replenishment: The Role of Place in the Immigrant Incorporation Experience

• In Event: 1451 - Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 1. Building or Breaking Community

Abstract

Research has demonstrated the significant impact “replenishment” and the continual arrival of new immigrants of varying legal statuses has on the Mexican American immigration experience, specifically with respect to its impact on ethnic identity. This article puts forward an institutional based approach to immigrant incorporation and draws on over five years of ethnographic fieldwork at a large soccer facility I call Chicharito’s Place in a predominantly Mexican American neighborhood in Chicago. My fieldsite, which is host to a diverse population of Mexican Americans in Chicago including new undocumented arrivals and long time residents, is a part of a social milieu that can both protect and constrain immigrants and is an example of what I call a “safe space”: in a context of heightened fear and institutional avoidance, these are spaces which provide a measure of institutional acceptance where the replenishing population of both documented and undocumented immigrants interact and where the undocumented can feel comfortable. Through examining and comparing the experiences of the undocumented 1.5 generation and their citizen born peers specifically, I show how such spaces reveal mechanisms behind the strengthening of intergroup boundaries and the simultaneous sharpening of internal differentiation within this Mexican-American group. Investigating the tension that is produced in these contrasting experiences adds texture to theories of undocumented life in the United States today.

Author

• Brian Tuohy, University of California, Los Angeles