Inclusion Work: Children of Immigrants Contesting Social Exclusion

• In Event: 4240 - Power and Inequality in the Lives of Children and Youth

Abstract

Existing research consistently demonstrates how politicians can leverage cultural representations depicting immigrants of color as unassimilable foreigners to enact exclusionary policies and practices. Undertheorized is how racialized immigrants contest social exclusion they experience in the US. This study shifts the theoretical attention from dominant actors to children of immigrant by analyzing 80 interviews with working-class Mexican-and Korean-American “language brokers” who translate for their parents. To respond to the multiple forms of exclusion they experience, respondents engaged in “inclusion work,” which I define as the process through which marginalized social actors mobilize available cultural repertoires to validate their presence in the larger society. Specifically, I show that both working-class Mexican-and Korean-Americans made use of cultural repertoires about “good” immigrants to claim full membership in the US. Such inclusion work, however, varied by race, with working-class Mexican Americans deploying a wider range of repertoires to contest the rhetoric portraying Mexicans as problematic underclass. By demonstrating how marginalized groups’ structural position shapes how they put culture to use, this study moves beyond assimilation theory, which tends to conceptualize culture as static values.

Author

• Hyeyoung Kwon, Indiana University