Class Homology and the Mobilization of Ethnic Capital: Middle Class Immigrant Parents’ Child-rearing Strategies

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

Abstract

Early research on ethnic capital has focused on its operation within ethnic enclaves, often treating ethnic communities as internally homogeneous and representing class-based ethnic capital as a product of ethnic culture. Although later studies show that ethnic capital varies by class composition and migration trajectories, we know little about the processes through which ethnic capital is differentially mobilized across co-ethnic communities with varying class diversity. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 29 middle-class Asian and Latino immigrant parents in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, this article reconceptualizes ethnic capital as the product of perceived class homology, emphasizing how its mobilization is shaped by immigrants’ perception of class alignment within co-ethnic communities, rather than ethnicity consistency.
Integrating Bourdieu’s concept of misrecognition, the analysis shows that parents routinely reinterpret class (in)consistency as cultural distinction, or personal preference, thereby obscuring the class foundations of ethnic capital. These perceptions further inform their child-rearing strategies, including residential and school choice. Parents who perceive class homology with their co-ethnic communities cluster in co-ethnic neighborhoods and schools where education-centered ethnic capital is institutionally dense. In contrast, parents who perceive class heterogeneity distance themselves from ethnic enclaves and adopt fragmented strategies combining selective residential proximity, school choices, and family-based cultural transmission.
By shifting analytic attention from objective class structure to immigrants’ class perceptions, this article demonstrates that ethnic capital is relationally produced through perceived class homology, offering a class-inflected account of how ethnicity and class jointly structure immigrant child-rearing strategies and unequal access to mobility-oriented resources.

Author

• Yiching Huang, University of Maryland-College Park