Americanized and Whitewashed: Boundaries around Ethnic Membership for Mexican and Chinese Americans

• In Event: International Migration Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 09. Ethnic boundary making

Abstract

Using a boundaries approach to explore ethnic membership, this paper argue that boundary-making processes that separate and connect American and whiteness are used to identify and exclude co-ethnics that are perceived as trying to become white Americans. Drawing on 73 interviews with Mexican Americans and Chinese Americans, I explore how definitions of Americanization and whitewashing reveal the everyday boundaries that non-white children of immigrants develop to make sense of their relationship to assimilation and white Americans. Rather than attributing definitions of Americanization to cultural belonging and whitewashing to racial belonging, Mexican American and Chinese Americans perceived co-ethnics as agentic in their assimilation, they tied these terms to whiteness, and when they perceived co-ethnics as passive or assimilation as inevitable, they deemphasized the connection between whiteness and American. This simultaneously expands the categorization of “us” to include co-ethnics who may not have ethnic culture and knowledge and contracts to exclude “them” as co-ethnics who are seen as choosing to have cultural, social, and political ideologies do not align with the ethnic majority. The distinction between us/them constructs a category of American that is not inherently tied to whiteness, which allows Mexican and Chinese Americans to assimilate into the American mainstream while still maintaining recognition and membership in their ethnic community. This work complicates our understanding of assimilation in their everyday lives and shows a more nuanced patchwork of boundary-making that shapes the integration process for non-white children of immigrants.

Author

• Kyle Levin, University of California-Irvine