This text is part of The New Immigrants Series edited by Nancy Foner. This groundbreaking new series fills the gap in knowledge relating to today's immigrants, how these groups are attempting to redefine their cultures while here, and their contribution to a new and changing America.

Salvadorans in Suburbia: Symbiosis and Conflict (Part of the New Immigrants Series)

History

Foner, Nancy

Mahler, Sarah J.

Americas

Pearson

Presents culture and identities as continual processes of doing, rather than as things people possess. This text encourages readers to understand how we learn culture so early in life that we come to view “it” as a possession more than as our groups’ particular ways of thinking and doing. We do the same for “identities” such as gender, race, nationality, and religion because these are also learned. Moreover, as we become culturally competent as children, we do not see what we do as cultural but as natural, as normal. Therefore our ways become comforting to us yet often discomforting to others and vice-versa. The author’s goals are to encourage readers to understand how we acquire our cultural comfort zones so that we can expand them throughout life and to appreciate cultural diversity and similarity. Culture as Comfort is a unique learning tool that is written broadly to appeal to a wide, cross-disciplinary audience. It is not a typical textbook, nor is it a classic supplemental text. Instead, it addresses a critical scholarly concept–culture–using the latest multidisciplinary scholarship. It renders the information in nontechnical language, adding in the author’s own insights and stories to make the information enjoyable and easy for readers to comprehend and remember. Learning Goals Upon completing this book readers will be able to: <ul>
<li> Understand culture and identities as ongoing processes of learning patterns of thinking and doing, rather than as things we possess </li>
<li> Comprehend how learning to be culturally competent involves feeling culturally comfortable among people with whom we share culture and discomforted with those different from ourselves </li>
<li> Recognize that we can expand our cultural comfort zones if we embrace cultural discomforts as opportunities to continue to learn culture </li>
<li> Apply the book’s ideas to creatively solve cultural problems in their home, school, and work lives </li> </ul>

Culture as Comfort

Politics & Social Sciences

Anthropology

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Culture as Comfort: Many Things You Know About Culture (But Might Not Realize)

American Dreaming chronicles in rich detail the struggles of immigrants who have fled troubled homelands in search of a better life in the United States, only to be marginalized by the society that they hoped would embrace them. Sarah Mahler draws from her experiences living among undocumented Salvadoran and South American immigrants in a Long Island suburb of Manhattan. In moving interviews they describe their disillusionment with life in the United States but blame themselves individually or as a whole for their lack of economic success and not the greater society. As she explores the reasons behind this outlook, the author argues that marginalization fosters antagonism within ethnic groups while undermining the ethnic solidarity emphasized by many scholars of immigration.
 Mahler's investigation leads to conditions that often bar immigrants from success and that they cannot control, such as residential segregation, job exploitation, language and legal barriers, prejudice and outright hostility from their suburban neighbors. Some immigrants earn surplus income by using private cars as taxis, subletting space in apartments to lower rent burdens, and filling out legal forms and applications--in essence generating institutions largely parallel to those of the mainstream society whereby only a small group of entrepreneurs can profit. By exacting a price for what used to be acts of reciprocal good will in the homeland, these entrepreneurs leave people who had expected to be exploited by "Americans" feeling victimized by their own.

American Dreaming: Immigrant Life on the Margins

Social Sciences

Princeton University Press

American Dreaming chronicles in rich detail the struggles of immigrants who have fled troubled homelands in search of a better life in the United States, only to be marginalized by the society that they hoped would embrace them. Sarah Mahler draws from her experiences living among undocumented Salvadoran and South American immigrants in a Long Island suburb of Manhattan. In moving interviews they describe their disillusionment with life in the United States but blame themselves individually or as a whole for their lack of economic success and not the greater society. As she explores the reasons behind this outlook, the author argues that marginalization fosters antagonism within ethnic groups while undermining the ethnic solidarity emphasized by many scholars of immigration. Mahler's investigation leads to conditions that often bar immigrants from success and that they cannot control, such as residential segregation, job exploitation, language and legal barriers, prejudice and outright hostility from their suburban neighbors. Some immigrants earn surplus income by using private cars as taxis, subletting space in apartments to lower rent burdens, and filling out legal forms and applications--in essence generating institutions largely parallel to those of the mainstream society whereby only a small group of entrepreneurs can profit. By exacting a price for what used to be acts of reciprocal good will in the homeland, these entrepreneurs leave people who had expected to be exploited by "Americans" feeling victimized by their own.

American Dreaming

World

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