Search Results

This chapter explores how Colombian and Dominican children of immigrants living in New York City negotiate multiple identities, selves, cultures, and histories within transnational social fields. Children of immigrants grow up in the midst of multiple cultures and juggle an array of cultural norms, values, and expectations of their parents’ culture and those of mainstream “American” culture, while they maintain transnational ties to the home country of their parents. This chapter is based on a mixed-methods secondary analysis of both qualitative and quantitative data collected on Dominican and Colombian young adult children of immigrants (ages 18 to 32) living in New York City by the Immigrant Second Generation in Metropolitan New York study (ISGMNY) in 1998–2000 (Kasinitz, Mollenkopf, & Waters, 2004). The author argues that children of immigrants navigate multiple identities as a result of their experiences of growing up within transnational social fields shaped by their parents’ home country and the United States. Second, children of immigrants embrace and feel at ease with the complexity and ambiguity inherent in their border-crossing lives. Third, children of immigrants construct and manage their personal and social identities by comparing and contrasting their multiple cultural repertoires without juxtaposing them as oppositional dichotomies. Using a transnational perspective allows us to approach the study of migration and its impact on people’s lives with a lens of continuity and recognizes migration as a family project and as a process of transition and change where migrants maintain connection between their pasts, presents, and futures through subsequent generations.

After a decade of nomadism, the author returns home to her native South Texas and discovers her homeland has turned into a death valley in her absence, poisoned by petrochemical industries, ravaged by the drug war, and soon to be barricaded by a steel wall. The concept of “nepantla” is introduced as the way Aztecs described their struggle to reconcile their indigenous ways with the one Spanish colonizers forced upon them in the sixteenth century. More recently, Tejana writer Gloria Anzaldua described nepantla as a metaphor for a “birthing stage where you feel like you’re reconfiguring your identity and don’t know where you are.”

Part Two of the book commences when, after five years of story-gathering in her native South Texas, the author relocates to the region of upstate New York known as “The North Country” for a year-long professorship at St. Lawrence University. She soon learns that the Mohawk Nation of Akwesasne is just a 40 minute drive away. She recognizes this nation as the setting for the haunting 2008 film “Frozen River,” about human trafficking across the St. Lawrence River. After an encounter with the U.S. Border Patrol, the author quickly realizes she is back in nepantla, the land of in-between.

The author concludes her exploration of the U.S. borderlands with a meditation on the concept of borderlines. They don’t just delineate countries. Political parties are highly adept at redrawing the lines of congressional districts with a legal magic that—at the ballot box—brings about “miracles” on par with La Virgen de Guadalupe (only nowhere near as hopeful). For a borderline is an injustice. It is a time-held method of partitioning the planet for the benefit of the elite. Fortunately, there are legions of activists, artists, and faith keepers out there, petitioning on humanity’s behalf, but they need serious reinforcement. For the greatest lesson in nepantla is that many borderlines needn’t exist at all.