Millennials come of age in immigrant families

In this blog entry, Evelyn Ibatan Rodriguez celebrates coming of age ceremonies and discusses what prompted her to write Celebrating Debutantes and Quinceañeras

When I first pitched the project that has become Celebrating Debutantes and Quinceañeras to my dissertation chair, the feminist in me worried that I might be judged as a phony because of my interest in traditions so associated with sparkles, poufy dresses, and curtsies.  Fortunately, my chair had just finished organizing her daughter’s bat mitzvah, so she didn’t need much persuading when I proposed studying “debuts” and “quinces” to better understand gender and American immigrant adaptation.  With this book, I now have the exciting opportunity to show readers how much more there are to debutantes and quinces than meets the eye.

In some ways, this task seems more daunting today than when I started my fieldwork—a decade before Joel Stein lead Time readers to consider whether young adults are more entitled than ever or “will save the world” (2013).  And long before internet commenters blasted Ms. magazine for daring to call pop superstar Beyoncé a “fierce feminist” (2013).  But, amidst the hand-wringing over young people and what advocating for women’s equality should look like, Celebrating Debutantes and Quinceañeras shows how some American immigrant families have managed to indulge their daughters without producing narcissists. These families observe old-world female coming-of-age traditions without imposing old-school limits on what females (and feminists) can be in a number of creative ways:

1.     They tie personal success to collective success.  Although female coming-of-age parties are framed as “for the girl,” the immigrants I studied organized these events as collective endeavors, designed to showcase the beauty and success of their families and cultures, as well as that of their daughters.  This requires celebrants to recognize what they want as inextricable from their parents’ and communities’ desires, needs, and goals, and, ultimately, it imparts a sense of responsibility for the well-being of those around them. This is remarkable when one considers that the majority of my subjects are “millennials,” teenagers who have been accused of being  more self-involved and significantly less civically and politically engaged than the generations before them.

2.     Debuts and quinceañeras also re-establish first-generation authority.   Viewers of MTV’s My Super Sweet 16 and Quiero Mis Quinces (which paint debutantes and quinceañeras as teenage divas who control their parents via tantrums and manipulation) might be shocked that the immigrant parents I observed actually exercised a good degree of influence and control over their daughters.  During preparation for their events, for example, daughters often came to appreciate their near-total financial dependence on their parents.  And, by stressing the “tradition” aspect of their daughters’ celebrations, immigrants asserted themselves as “cultural experts” who their daughters needed to properly understand the traditions they were taking part in. This is vital for children of immigrants who are at risk of “downward assimilation.”  Inter-generational collaboration is also healthy for all youth because of how “cyberculture” has enabled many young adults to evade meaningful contact with anyone beside their peers, though healthy maturation requires youth to relate to older people and things.

3.     And quinces and debuts enable daughters to experience obstacles and figure them out.   Though these events allow some parents to establish greater authority over their kids, the immigrants I studied were not “Tiger” or “helicopter” parents.  In fact, the young women who experienced the best outcomes in my study were those who were granted some autonomy during their debut or quince preparation and performances.  Letting young women to take some financial and/ or organizing responsibilities and enabling them to respectfully voice their disagreement during planning helped cultivate leadership, money-management, communication, and conflict-management skills.  And these are all aptitudes those on either side of the Beyoncé-as-feminist debate should be able to agree are vital to women’s social, political, legal, and economic equality.

Of course there are other ways immigrant-organized debuts and quinceañeras avoid (and do not avoid) producing millennial narcissists and chauvinists.  Nevertheless,Celebrating Debutantes and Quinceañeras should give the hand-wringers some pause—and maybe a little hope.  Because, as I write in the last pages of my book, the advancement of the communities I studied, and of our society in general, depends on how we enlarge our culture to accommodate diverse forms of expression—including feminists in sparkle dresses, being American and Filipino and/or Mexican at the same time, and learning to care for others by organizing a birthday party.

Finding “Home” Abroad

In this blog entry, Carol Kelley, author of Accidental Immigrants and the Search for Home, explains how women immigrating to foreign countries find a sense of belonging in their new homes.

A surprising story in the news last week concerned a Norwegian television program about, of all things, wood. Not just how to chop and stack wood, but how to burn it. Eight straight hours of this twelve-hour program consisted of nothing more than watching a fire burn. Broadcast on Norway’s primary television station, NRK, the show was popular – twenty percent of the Norwegian population watched at least part of the broadcast. The Norwegian interest in wood astounded American media outlets. The New York Times ran an in depth article, there was at least one mention on NPR, and Steven Colbert had a field day.

Cultural quirks and differences are fascinating, and many of us dream of travel and adventure in order to experience them first hand. Imagine, however, that you are Anna, a young Maori woman who has never experienced winter. You arrive in a small Norwegian town with your Norwegian husband where you will live, very possibly for the rest of your life. You look different, speak differently and cannot begin to engage in a conversation about wood fires, not to mention lutefisk or skiing. How will you learn to belong in this culture, and how long will it take? Will you ever truly feel “at home” here? Or will you forever be an “outsider”?

I first became interested in how immigrants find a sense of belonging and home in middle school. I became friends with Susan, who with her parents had escaped from Czechoslovakia after the Soviet invasion in 1968. I remember how confused Susan’s mother was about how to raise her adolescent daughter in the suburban Mid-west. While Susan was getting ready to leave the house, her mother would often pull me aside and ask questions: “Do your parents let you date? What time do you have to be home? How much time do you spend studying?” Even as a teenager I understood how eager my friend’s mother was to fit-in in her new American home.

I will never forget the beaming faces of this family on the day they became American citizens. The joy and pride they found in creating a new home for themselves radiated across the room. Years later own my sister immigrated to Norway, where she has now lived for nearly 30 years. Over time her feelings about living in Norway have fluctuated. Sometimes she seemed to love her life there, enjoying Norwegian culture and appreciating their commitment to social equality. At other times the weather, food and social rules felt oppressive. Eventually she realized that her search for a sense of belonging would not end, but would be a life-long process.

When I began to study anthropology, I pursued my growing interest in immigration, home and belonging. I worked with immigrant populations, researching the effect of social policies and exploring how effective programs can be created for their health care and education. My interest in the emotional, as well as the practical, aspects of immigration continued, and I began to research immigrant’s life histories. My sister’s experience had taught me that to understand issues of belonging and home, I would need to learn how immigrants’ feelings evolve over a long period of time.

For Accidental Immigrants and the Search for Home, I conducted in-depth interviews with four women, all of whom have lived in adopted countries for many years, including Anna. The results of the research surprised me. While all of the participants struggled with issues of belonging, not all faced that struggle abroad: two left home in the first place because they knew they would never belong in their country of origin. They discovered that a totally different culture could better support their values and worldviews.

Belonging is complicated. For some, it feels immediate in a new place, but never exists in their first home. For others it takes a lifetime to adjust to living away from early roots. The commonality is the striving to find a place to belong, and in the tension between commitments to two places. Arriving in the Turks and Caicos Islands a few years ago, I looked for the correct line to have my passport stamped. I expected to see designated lines for citizens and non-citizens. Instead, the signs read “Belongers” and “Visitors.” Despite my knowledge of Anna’s life and her feelings, I wondered: if the same signs existed in the Norwegian immigration line, which would she feel comfortable choosing? I suspect that her choice would be something she still had to contemplate, even after living away from New Zealand for most of her life. But one thing I am sure of – even though she loves Norway, and in many ways feels herself to be Norwegian – she wouldn’t be watching an eight-hour film of a wood fire.

Considering the lives of transnational adoptees

This week in North Philly Notes, Kristi Brian, author of Reframing Transracial Adoption, reflects on the assumptions commonly articulated by non-adopted people that rightly infuriate many adult adoptees.

Thousands of people took to the streets of Moscow earlier this month to protest the adoption ban that prevents U.S. citizens from adopting Russian children. Although the turnout was impressive (reported estimates range from 7,000 to 50,000 protesters) I have to wonder what really brought all these people out.  Are the protesters genuinely united for the sake of Russian children as much as they say they are? Do people feel that they honestly need to help preserve the interests of the mostly white, middle-class, U.S. adopters left with pending or halted adoptions? Of course, it’s not too tough to get folks to stand up for the sake of “poor, orphaned children,” but it’s especially easy if a critical mass of people stands practically “at the ready” to yell at the big state machinery that hasn’t done much for them lately. I suspect this was the predominant unifying element of the protesters and I certainly can’t blame dissidents for making the most of a “hot” moment to demonstrate their democratic freedoms. However, when it comes to rallying behind precious, romantic statements about the immensely better life adoptees are destined to have in the U.S., I urge caution.

As my research on transnational/transracial adoption from South Korea explains (see Reframing Transracial Adoption), “the better life in America” assumptions commonly articulated by non-adopted people rightly infuriate many adult adoptees. Many of the adoptees I spoke with helped me to understand their reality of navigating the imposition of gratitude that surrounds being “rescued” from a nation often implied as inferior.  While it is true that Russian adoptions into white U.S. families are often pursued as a way to avoid the racial component of adoption, questions of belonging, origins, and abandonment are nearly universal to all state-regulated adoptions.

Not only do we have a lot to learn from adult adoptee perspectives, but critically observing the rise and fall of massive adoption projects, such as Korean-American adoption (the first and longest-running form of transnational adoption) should allow nation-states to learn from one another’s mistakes. Korea went from being the world’s top “supplier” of children for adoption in the mid-1980s to a “sending nation” that is, at least to some degree, more conscious of the meaning and impact of that history. This change happened through internal and external criticism, and most notably, in recent years through the dedicated reform work of the Korean adoptees who have returned to Korea to help keep more Korean children in Korea.

While there may be heartache for families with their minds set on a particular child to “bring home,” I feel abundantly confident that criticism and worldwide scrutiny of transnational adoption serves us all. If nothing else, dramatic legislative actions such as the adoption ban should help us to fine tune our understanding of the relationship between family and the state. Perhaps it will make us ask us what the state has done for our family lately. Or what the role of the state should be in helping us form families. I suspect most of us would like to think of the state as an afterthought. It’s there when we need it otherwise we prefer to keep it out of our family matters. Yet for folks fighting like hell to have the state validate their most intimate, loving partnership as legitimate and legal, the family-state question becomes more vivid. Similarly, for those of us unfortunate enough to find ourselves facing the threat of losing our family members, acquiring them, or reuniting with them based on the intervening policies of a state (including policies of the child welfare system, the police force or the prison system) the power struggle can get ugly.

When it comes to your family or your government, who do you expect to win the power struggle? And in the case of transnational adoption, adopters’ vision for family must interface with the power and politics of two nations.  When the fate of our families becomes heavily determined by the “personalities” of two competitive capitalist nation-states (with many skeletons in both closets) both posturing as the top contender in human rights protections, we can only expect a stampede of contradictions to complicate our attempts at creating family intimacy.

My ethnographic research on adoptive families has led me to a position much like the one being voiced by Russia’s Children’s Rights Ombudsman, Pavel Astakhov. Astakhov has stated candidly at human rights hearings on adoption that the “hysterical warnings” about international adoptions being the best viable solution for Russian children only serves those seeking profit from adoption.

The fact of the matter is, as much as we hate to admit it, transnational adoption is a marketplace driven by and reflective of capitalist modes of production. The desires of white Americans and Europeans (predominantly) are the buyers in that marketplace interested in “giving” a better life to a child of their choice. Race does play a big role in which adoption programs adopters choose. Given this fact alone, transnational adoption offers us a chance to follow the advice of philosopher George Yancy as he urges us to shift our gaze (in Look, a White!) to assess the ways of white folks rather than simply accepting them as the way things ought to be done. 

My book explores the actions of white adopters in Korea’s history with transnational adoption. But more importantly it highlights the work of the Korean adoptees who have critically observed adoptive family life in the U.S. as well as the politics of race, culture and statehood surrounding their adoptions. Although Korea has provided more children for overseas adoption than any other place in the world since 1955, Korea has dramatically reduced its numbers down to 627 adoptions to the U.S. last year. That is still a lot of children being transplanted through the complex bureaucracies of two national-states that cannot begin to attend to the life-long emotional realities of adoption. The more we see those numbers decrease in all “sending” countries, the better I feel about our abilities to create home-grown solutions to globalized problems that often masquerade as new ways to embrace superficial multiculturalism.

Speaking of race and class matters at colleges elite and otherwise

This week in North Philly Notes, Elizabeth Aries, author of Race and Class Matters at an Elite Collge and Speaking of Race and Class, looks at the potential impact of the outcome of Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, which considers race as a factor in a university’s admissions process.

There is much at stake in the case of Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, which came before the Supreme Court last week. The Court will determine whether universities can legally continue to consider race as one factor in their admissions process. If they are not allowed to do so, the racial and ethnic diversity of students on our campuses will diminish, as will the educational benefits that ensue from having a diverse student body. 

My books, Race and Class Matters at an Elite College and Speaking of Race and Class have focused on those educational benefits.  I illustrate what, if anything, students actually learn from being with classmates of different races and social class backgrounds inside and outside the classroom. For both books, I followed a group of black and white students, both affluent and lower-income, over their four years at a liberal arts college, interviewing them at three points along the way. The educational benefits of diversity are real and they are important.

Many students come to college from segregated communities and high schools, having acquired widely held racial and class-based stereotypes that persist unchallenged without contact with the people they have stereotyped.  College can provide students with the opportunities to get to know and understand classmates not of their race and/or class, to have their stereotypes and world views challenged, to see the world through a new lens. 

The majority of white students in my study entered college having thought little about race or its consequences for peoples’ lives. Some never thought of themselves as even having a race. Some came to campus believing racial discrimination was a thing of the past, having never personally observed it. But as white students made friends with black classmates, and heard about friends’ encounters with prejudice and discrimination, they recognized that racial discrimination is still a reality. Those who had been taught a color-blind philosophy, taught not to think that race even really exists, found it shocking and upsetting to learn from minority friends about their experiences with prejudice and discrimination, and came to understand that race affects the experiences and opportunities people have. Over their years at college cross-race relationships led many white students to think more about race and racism and to become aware of their white privilege. Racial stereotypes were undermined as white students discovered the diversity within the black student community on campus – the great variability in language, tastes and preferences, in social class, religion, or identification as Caribbean American, African American or African. Given this diversity, it was hard for white students to hold on to the notion that blacks were poor, lived in the inner city, dressed in baggy clothes, spoke Ebonics and listened to rap music. Many students came to realize their racial stereotypes were incorrect and limiting.

Bringing students to campus from widely discrepant economic backgrounds also produced important learning. Students did not fail to notice what classmates had and did not have, not only in terms of material possessions, but in terms of the opportunities they had to go out to eat, take spring break trips, to make connections to pre-professional summer jobs and to good jobs after graduation. Many affluent students who had grown up in the bubble of their affluent communities had been unable to see outside that world. Some considered themselves to be “kind of poor” because their families lacked the extreme wealth of others in their communities. Friendships with lower-income students made them aware of just how privileged their families were, gave them a deeper awareness of class inequalities, of their own unearned privileges, and of the important role social class plays in shaping people’s lives and opportunities. Many lower-income students entered college with extremely negative stereotypes about the wealthy, seeing them as arrogant, spoiled, snobby, entitled, exclusive, as all about showing off their wealth. Through relationships with affluent classmates they, too, recognized that many students did not fit their stereotypes.

Colleges and universities educate students who will become our future leaders. If we, as a society, value equity and social justice for all citizens, we must produce leaders who have had their stereotypes challenged and are able to understand the world from perspectives different from their own. The impending Supreme Court decision may well reduce the opportunity for this kind of learning to occur.

To Read Chapter 1 of Race and Class Matters at an Elite College, click here

http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1941_reg.html

To Read Chapter 1 of Speaking of Race and Class, click here

http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/2248_reg.html

No Magic Bullet When It Comes to Water

In this blog entry, Stephanie Kane, author of Where Rivers Meet the Sea, provides her thoughts about the world’s water crisis.

Muhtar Kent, President and CEO of Coca-Cola, and Dean Kamen founder of DEKA Research & Development Corp, televised their plan for sorting out the world’s water crisis on Charlie Rose’s program September 27, 2012. They were followed by Gary White and Matt Damon of water.org who are also working to extend access to potable water. Impressive as all this may seem, I’ve got to spin out an alternative scenario. For a moment, put aside the video image of Africans laughing with pure joy as they fill their containers. Imagine instead, yourself, living in a coastal village in the year 2015, after the Coca-Cola-DEKA plan has been rolled out. All the rivers, wells, wetlands, and seashore have been poisoned by toxic industrial waste and sewage. But no matter! Bring your bucket to the red and white repurposed shipping container emblazoned with corporate logos in the new town square.

Never mind sophisticated energy technologies (solar panels, biofuel converters, batteries) that run the water distillery. All you need to know about are the two hoses: You can take one hose and stick into the chemical waste pond from the local industry that pollutes with impunity and then take the second hose and put your  plastic container under it to collect clean water. It doesn’t matter how poisoned the source is because the new technology is as good as nature, just like water from clouds. And since there is no point fishing anymore (no fish) or farming (rice poisoned by arsenic), you can hang out at the container, watch TV, and recharge your cell phone: a one stop technology center brought to you by corporate beneficence and facilitated by your government and international NGO’s.

Like the proverbial magic bullet, this “slingshot” technology, named after David’s mythically effective use of a simple technology to bring down Goliath, soothes concerns about the aquatic environment. Who cares? We can go on living without guilt because innovation and corporate goodwill have produced a vision of reality that does not require the extension of municipal infrastructure to treat and deliver potable water through pipes into home or to collect and treat sewage. Nor in this vision do we need to sustain healthy ecologies. Water is essential for life and so is the Coca-Cola corporation.

The basic problem is not about the usefulness of this technology. I’m sure it can be useful in many circumstances. Indeed, using corporate distribution networks for the public good is not in itself problematic. (Is it?) The basic problem is the definition of the global water crisis: it is not simply about expanding access to potable water through technology and infrastructure. The crisis, if we want to organize ourselves by this metaphor, is part of the larger, more complex environmental question: how do we transform our ways of life to protect and preserve water habitats, the very water habitats out of which we will draw our drinking water? Are you OK with sticking a hose into a disgusting toxic pit to get drinking water? I’m not. I don’t want an “ecosystem for life” that comes from Coca-Cola. Do you? I want to be a living being surrounded by an ecosystem (wherever I happen to be located on the planet), not a consumer of ecosystem products.

How Can We Sing at a Time Like This?

Mark Pedelty, author of Ecomusicology, writes about the United Nations Environment Programme, and how he came to write about rock, folk, and the environment.

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is using music to increase environmental awareness. The Music and Environment Initiative is predicated on the belief that “Music is one of the most powerful media to communicate environmental messages to billions of people worldwide—irrespective of race, religion, income, gender or age” (unep.org). Participants range from the project’s official “Patron,” Benin’s Angelique Kidjo, to the giant rock festival Lollapalooza.

In Ecomusicology: Rock, Folk, and the Environment I examine popular music as it relates to ecological crises on local, regional, national, and global scales. It was tempting to focus on the most problematic examples, like Live Earth, but hopefully, the tone remains reasonably optimistic as I also highlight examples like Pete Seeger, Jack Johnson, Mos Def, Ani DiFranco, producer Mike Martin, and musical communities around the world (See also Ecomusicology.net). These artists recognize that positive pleasure is more likely to change environmental practices and policies than fear tactics. Projects like UNEP’s Music and Environment Initiative provide such optimism, the hope that popular music can do more than sell beer, cars, tickets, and sex, as if any of those things really need promoting (well, tickets might).

Global projects and movements like UNEP’s Music and Environment Initiative provide hope that the popular arts will be up to the task of dealing with global environmental crises. Of course, as South Park’s young activists discovered in “Die Hippy Die,” it takes more than a rock festival to change the world, and there are as many contradictions in stadium rock concerts as there are answers. Nevertheless, UNEP’s efforts indicate that musicians, producers, and policy makers are facing global environmental problems in earnest. At the national and global levels, movements are afoot to make musical production and performance more sustainable, to use music as environmental communication and inspiration, and to remind us that, for better or worse, music is always “environmental” whether it references rainforest destruction, trashes a field in rural New York, or evokes images of young lovers singing to each other in a Volkswagen.

Rather than the national and global, it is local music that I worry about, perhaps needlessly. After all, ethnography is not a generalizable science. What the ethnographer experiences in one locale is not necessarily true for other places. Unfortunately, in my little corner of the earth, the Twin Cities of Minnesota, it is hard to find music making reference to environmental problems. Not that I expect everyone to be singing songs about environmental crises and solutions, but rather that the conspicuous lack of such connections in musical meaning, performance, or movement makes one wonder what’s gone wrong? For millennia, local music has been intimately connected to the places where we live, we love, and bother to protect (from ourselves). What does it mean when such time honored musical connections are severed?

Local bands and producers are interested in environmental questions, but given how hard it is to make a living making local music, it is understandable how little effort is made to align local art with ecological interest. As in America’s domestic policy, the priority of maintaining a growing economy preempts all other interests, especially long-term sustainability and biodiversity. The most fundamental economy—ecology in the biological sense of the term—is rendered esoteric in that magical thinking mindset.

One can hardly blame local musicians or producers for ignoring environmental matters. Like the rest of us, they have to first make a living before they are able to think about relative luxuries, like making a positive difference (i.e., beyond selling drinks, merchandise, and tickets). Many local musicians express interest in environmental matters, even if they are frustrated when trying to do something about it. The solution lies more with the rest of us, audiences and consumers. As long as that is all we are, active audiences and passive consumers, rather than music makers in our own right, local music will be impoverished. Popular music is too often viewed as a hand-to-mouth (or voice-to-ear) form of consumption as opposed to the fundamental act of human creativity and communication it is. Through music, people gain connection to community, culture, and place.

The Honk! music movement and others like it around the world provide useful models for everyone who is willing to pick up and instrument and/or their voice and get involved. UNEP, recognizing the importance of place in the environmental movement, cites not only big name acts and events, but also creative local acts like the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra. These examples might inspire acts of musical courage on the local level: creative, ecological, and different. As Simon Frith points out, it is not so important that we have local versions of big time, global musics. He argues that it is important “to support not just one’s own local music, but also ‘local’ music in general, ‘different’ music wherever it comes from” (23). Given global digital integration, the entire planet, as well as its smaller places, have become part of everyone’s virtual experience.

However, our local material and community ecologies remain the best interlocutors into environmental problems on a global scale. As we walk through the world with ears in pods and eyes on screens, we are still physically in a place where material connections and disconnections matter, literally. Somewhere in that interface between global and local lives lies a promise for more meaningful musics and more biodiverse and sustainable ecologies. Thanks go out to The United Nations Environment Programme’s Music and Environment Initiative for reminding us of music’s potential to improve our collective lives, places, and planet. 

Frith, Simon. “Popular Music and the Local State.” Rock and Popular Music: Politics, Policies, Institutions. Ed. Tony Bennett, et al. New York: Routledge, 1993. 14-24.

Asking how and why industrial hazards persist

In this blog entry, Dangerous Trade co-editor Christopher Sellers discusses industrial dangers, past and present, and how people have sought to discover and correct these hazards.

Over the past few months, a burst of stories have made headlines in the New York Times and elsewhere about dangers of what we buy and use have posed to those in foreign lands. First came a harrowing report last December about what was happening to car batteries that Americans had used up and discarded.  A growing business has emerged of shipping these batteries to Mexico, where around disassembly plants, lead has been steadily escaping into the air and soil, to poison neighborhood children. Then came the coverage of China’s Foxconn, manufacturer of Apple’s i-pad.  We learned that this latest, dazzling digital wonder, brought to us by one of America’s most respected and successful firms, had come with a cost none of us knew about or had bargained for.  Workers in China had paid, instead, with lengthy work-days, exploitative and sometimes toxic working conditions, and distress that could reportedly turn suicidal. 

Scientists and scholars who have followed these industrial dangers for years have to applaud the media’s new in the distant hazards imposed by our own consumer purchases.  The rising awareness suggests the prospect that, finally, more effective ways of mobilizing and intervening against them may arise.  Those of us who have followed this kind of issue, and sought to dig up its history, have to conclude that these sporadic reports offer only a visible tip of what is likely a global iceberg.  International studies suggest that occupational diseases alone kill more throughout the world than malaria.  These numbers do not include the many additional casualties from contaminants in the air, water, and soil.  With rebounding economic growth throughout the world, this toll is no doubt on the rise once again, especially in the developing world.

A starting point for understanding how and why these dangers continue to recur is to recognize that this problem is far from new.  Dangerous Trade: Histories of industrial hazard across a globalizing world, is the first book to take a genuinely global approach to their history, one that encompasses both the developing and the developed world.  

Dangerous Trade explores the contours of this kind of problem not only in our contemporary world, but historically, through the past century and more of what has been a long-standing trade in industry-derived dangers.  In every period when international trade has picked up, the most hazardous industries have tended to cross national boundaries, to gravitate to where regulation and awareness of the attendant hazards remain less.  Looking at examples from colonial Malaysia’s mining industries to the extraction of oil in Mexico, this book’s essays offer rigorously documented accounts of just why and how these dangerous industries arose where they did, and the ways in which locals strove to cope with them.  As these essays make clear, the ways and means by which dangerous activities travel has nevertheless been shifting over the last century. As technology has changed, nations especially in the developed world have come up with new and more effective ways of recognizing and correcting the worst hazards.  The result, however, is hardly one of unadulterated progress. Instead, these hazards endure, if in changing and ever more wily ways. They get shipped elsewhere, where the companies that rely on them, and the consumers who give these companies their business, can once more put their dangers out of mind.  Hence, the resurgence of poisonings from lead, perhaps the longest known and most studied of industrial hazards, but still sickening workers and children from Uruguay to Mexico in our contemporary world.  

This collection constitutes a first effort to ask how and why these problems have persisted, even decades after new efforts have arisen around the globe successfully to identify and address them. A central concern of the collection, as well, is to generalize cross-nationally, about the evolving repertoire through which people in different times and places have sought to discover and correct these dangers, once they arise.  From the early health departments to worker compensation laws of the early twentieth century, to the environmental legislation starting in the sixties and seventies, to latter day campaigns to ban a dangerous substance like asbestos, the tools and targets of those who would ameliorate these dangers have constituted a work in progress.   Often it is precisely the loopholes in an earlier system of control that make a later one necessary.  But a key theme as well is that amelioration has not been a given even once the hazards became unmistakable to the experts and officials in charge.  Expert activism was often important in calling attention to new hazards, but as if not more important in stirring real change was the mobilization of the inexpert.  From the workers in Mexican oil fields to the environmental agitators in late twentieth century France and Uruguay, those who were themselves the victims of these exposures also had to mobilize, to marshal the available political tools to induce governments as well as scientists to consider their problems. 

If these histories suggest just how persistent industrial hazards like lead or asbestos can be, together they also offer many grounds for hope.  Not just failures but success stories abound here, of mobilizations fighting asbestos and lead battery-burning and pesticides and liquefied natural gas facilities. In addition to elucidating these problems’ persistence, these essays thereby offer an abundance of models that may inspire today’s practitioners, activists, policy-makers, and citizens, and on which they may build.

The Top Five Myths in Nursing

In this blog entry, Lisa Ruchti, author of Catheters, Slurs, and Pickup Lines  debunks assumptions about intimacy, race, gender and caring in the nursing industry.

With popular television shows about nursing today, e.g. Nurse Jackie and HawthoRNe, one might think that we know all we need to know about nursing. Even if we don’t watch television, we probably think we understand nursing when we consider how often we or our loved ones find ourselves under nursing care. The truth of the matter is that we couldn’t possibly understand nursing the way a nurse does simply because nurses hide many aspects of their work as part of their job. They know that patients and family members don’t need to be bothered with the specifics of nursing when patients are really interested in their own illness and recovery.

In my research for writing Catheters, Slurs and Pickup Lines, I found that most people did not understand nursing. Even the president of the hospital I studied said, “I don’t care how they do it; I’m just glad they do!” But after years of intensive study of nursing and eight months in a hospital setting, I can honestly say I understand some of the ins and outs of nursing. 

 Check these out. You might be surprised.

 One:  Patients are too weak to want sex.

 I know it is hard to imagine a patient sexually grabbing a nurse, making lewd comments, or even having sex with their visitors. We don’t tend to think of patients as anything other than needy so it might be hard to imagine that patients can exhibit sexual desire. Yet, in an eight month study I conducted, nurses consistently reported these behaviors to me. I found that if nurses were successful at gaining trust of patients, patients sometimes felt entitled to service, attention, or even sex. Interestingly, when patients engaged in sexual behaviors toward nurses, many of which were legally defined as sexual harassment, most nurses did not define these acts as sexual harassment. While new nurses were surprised at sexual behaviors from patients, experienced nurses negotiated them as part of their daily work.

Two:   Patients are never mean.

The majority of the 45 nurses I interviewed avoided describing patient care as involving conflict. They used words like nurture, kindness, and compassion to make it seem like nurses “being caring” was a natural personality characteristic characterized by goodness. Feminist philosopher Eva Kittay discusses this in her work: patients are not usually described as anything other than “needy,” and we don’t tend to think of needy people as causing conflicts for those who provide their care. In my study, however, I found that patients – “ordinary” patients, not “psychiatric” patients – yelled at nurses and even hit them. My focus on identifying conflict is as much about seeing patients clearly as it is about seeing the work of nurses clearly.

Three: Race does not matter in the provision of care.

Women of color nurses worked harder to negotiate racism and xenophobia from patients.  For example, sexual harassment of women of color nurses incorporated multiple aspects of their identities. It is one thing for nurses to manage sexually explicit language or touches; it is quite another when those are combined with racial slurs and epithets.  Imagine that a nurse not only walks in to check on a patient and sees him masturbating, but she is also called a “dirty foreigner.” Or, a nurse is giving a patient a bath, and the patient says you remind him of his mammy.

Four:  Male nurses aren’t as caring as female nurses.

My study shows that men feel called to care and also care well. All the male nurses I interviewed were in the job because they cared. I watched male nurses take great care with their patients. I also observed male nurses have what seems like a “knack” for care, but is actually simply skilled expertise. My findings on men challenge the idea that men don’t want to care or can’t care just because they are men.

Five:    You can’t teach someone how to be caring.

A lot of people, including nurses, think that the quality of care cannot be taught in nursing school. My study maps how experienced nurses care so that it can be taught in nursing school. When I first began the study I was not sure if and how a nursing student could be taught what is typically seen as a “caring quality”. But after the study I am convinced that if new nurses know to expect conflict on the floor and learn how they can negotiate those conflicts they will be better able to care.

The Cycles of the Haitian Vodou Ceremony

In this blog entry, Benjamin Hebblethwaite, author of Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English, describes a recent vodou ceremony he attended at Société Linto Roi in Miami.

In this blog I want to tell you about the gorgeous beauty of Vodou, a systematic Haitian religion with roots in the Vodun of West and Central Africa. The ceremony and its rituals, music, dance, and possession events are key expressions of the Vodou religious and cultural system. The periodic Vodou ceremonies I have attended at Société Linto Roi in Miami, most recently on the eve of January 2^nd and morning of January 3^rd, 2012, are riveting experiences that start at 9 p.m. and go beyond 6 a.m. The ceremonies are literally founded on continuous drumming, singing, dancing, and ritualizing that leads to short and long possession events.

Kongo-style Vodou drum (photograph by Hebblethwaite)

The ason rattles hang from the center post (photograph by Hebblethwaite)

 The white attire worn by the initiates, the temple’s most active members, indicated that the Rada rite of Dahomian origin, with its regimented line of Dahomian lwa (spirits), would begin the evening’s worship. Later in the evening, when the focus shifted to the Petwo-Kongo rite, the participants changed and wore multicolored attire. The oungenikon (the choir leader) led the songs and shook the sacred rattle and bells (ason ak klochèt) while the ounsi (initiated choir members) responded in song and dance. Four drummers thundered taught rhythms, intensifying their beating to heighten spiritual energy and urgency. The ountogi (drummers) are central as they pound the lwa into the heads of the Vodouists. As the music filled the temple with its cathartic power, the priests and priestesses—there are usually several working in tandem—began cycles of ritualizingthat endured throughout the ceremony.

A vèvè symbol consecrates the ceremony (photograph by Hebblethwaite)

Each lwa in the Rada or Petwo-Kongo pantheon receives a handful of songs. As each spirit receives her or his allotted songs and praise, priests and priestesses skillfully wield their rattles and bells as they salute and honor the major stations of the Vodou temple: the drummers and drums, the center post (potomitan) which is the conduit of the lwa, the altar, and the audience. The salutation of each station—renewed with each new cycle of songs to a specific lwa—entails the synchronized dancing and ason-work of the priests and priestesses. The rattle and bells are held forward and shaken in unison; the priests or priestesses gracefully twirl, dance, dip and bow as they approach each station. At the station, the ason is shaken and touches the parts of the station, rum or water libations are poured out, gulps of rum are vaporized into a fine mist, candles are lit, and, in the case of the drummers, bowing takes place in which the head touches the ground.

The colorful attire indicates the Petwo-Kongo rite; the manbo salutes the drums (photograph by Hebblethwaite)

The manbo salute the center post on which the serpent lwa Danbala and Ayida Wèdo are painted (photograph by Hebblethwaite)

The Vodou ceremony is cyclical ritualizing and dancing. For each lwa called upon—for example, Legba, Marasa, Ayizan, Loko, Danbala, Agawou, Agwe, Azaka and so forth—a series of songs are sung and the stations of the temple are saluted with renewed vigor. Although the lwa, the songs, and the rhythms change throughout the ceremony, the salutation of the stations in the Vodou temple remains constant. Cutting through the cyclical nature of the ceremony is the cyclical nature of Vodou songs which are condensed statements on the lwa and the Vodou universe expressed in 4-8 lines. The songs are cyclical as the lines are repeated; at the same time the lines of the songs can be slightly embellished as they recur. The salutation of the stations of the Vodou temple cycle from lwa to lwa; however, unique ritual elements specific to the honored lwa are expressed in each cycle. For example, candy is presented to the audience during the cycle for the Marasa (the Divine Twins) and a sword is presented during the one for Ogou. Another important cycle in Vodou is the dancing and worship that moves counterclockwise around the center post (potomitan).

The cyclical structure of the ceremony, of the songs and rhythms, and of the dancing around the center post all serve Vodou’s primary objective: to be the launch pad for possession by the Vodou lwa (spirits). They often appear in the sequence of ritual in which they are heralded, and they dance in the heads of those they ride, expressing their traits, traditions, wisdom and energies. Atibon Legba, the ancient one, comes stooped over a crutch, blessing worshippers who bow before him; the wide-eyed Èzili Dantò, exuding power, pain and strength, tightly grasps daggers at each side; Danbala Wèdo, the serpent lwa, writhes silently on the ground and is covered with a white sheet by worshipers. The appearance of the lwa is a sacred narrative that inserts itself into the course of worship. The various forms of cyclicity in Vodou ceremonies serve to insistently call upon the appearance of sacred narrative—possession.

The white attire indicates the Rada rite; Danbala has possessed a worshiper (photograph by Hebblethwaite)

Danbala is covered with a white sheet as he writhes toward the altar room (photograph by Hebblethwaite)

Our book, Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English, is a diverse collection of texts that stem from Haitian Creole Vodou worship. The songs span Haitian and pre-Haitian history and preserve the sacred traditions from the African nations that Haitians descend from. As the Vodou ceremony is grounded in song, including during possession events, they are literally the main body of the religion’s sacred literature. The mythologies, histories, epistles, prophesies, and commandments of religions like Islam, Christianity or Judaism are not found in Vodou sacred literature; instead, songs and prayers dominate the religion’s literary output. To know Vodou theology, mythology, history, culture, and language and to grasp Vodou ceremonies, one should read, listen to, and sing Vodou songs. The songs repetitively cycle in order to heighten trance states of mind and open the way for possession performance. Vodou ceremonies and songs are beautifully preserved illustrations of the African wing of humanity—the cyclical structure of Vodou worship is a unique dimension of this sublime World Religion.

Challenging dominant stereotypes of young people of color

In this blog entry, Bindi Shah, author of Laotian Daughters, describes the impressions formed about an unlikely group of young Laotian girls who became advocates and leaders for social justice and community change.

In the late 1990s I began field work with Asian Youth Advocates, a youth program for second-generation Laotian girls in Richmond, California run by the environmental justice organization Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN). This excerpt from field notes on one of my early research visits portrays them as ordinary inner-city American teenagers interested in fashion, music and boys:

It’s a cold, crisp but sunny Tuesday afternoon in February. As I walk in almost everyone looks and smiles or says “hi.” The front room of this small house in Richmond, which serves as LOP’s offices, is packed today. Twenty-one of the youth members are here, waiting for the Whole Group Training on campaign options to start. Bryanna and Huk are sitting close to the radio, tapping their feet to Eminem rapping “My Name Is…” Once the song ends Bryanna turns the dial to a station that plays alternative and R&B music. Two girls are sitting on the floor in the middle of the room, sharing thumsom, a green papaya salad. Others are sitting on the chairs placed in a circle, munching on nachos, burgers, burritos, and sipping on soda.

A lot of the girls are dressed in black today, black flared trousers, black tops and black jackets. Others sport blue or white flared jeans, short T-shirts or shirts that hug the body, and platform shoes or sneakers. This ‘70s retro style transports me back to my own dress preferences as a teenager, though I wore luminous pink crimplene trousers. In the 1990s, these girls are wearing muted colors, which often bear the logos of Tommy Hilfiger, The Gap, BeBe, Nautica, or The Old Navy. Bryanna wears an oversized orange rain jacket, nylon pants that bunch up around her ankles, and sneakers. Others resemble the style of the majority of their peers in the urban multicultural neighborhoods, blue jeans, long T-shirts and sneakers or high-tops.

Their conversations revolve around boys, school, and clothes. My by-now-trained ear picks up both Black English and standard English, with a smattering of Mien and Lao words that I don’t understand.

At first sight this group of teenage Laotian girls appear unlikely candidates as advocates and leaders for the Laotian community in west Contra Costa County, California. In Laotian Daughters, I unravel popular images of young people of color and draw attention to their engagement with political activism and community building.

Politicians and journalists have tended to portray young people, particularly those growing up in poor, urban neighborhoods as social problems and as experiencing moral decline. For example, a media report on a 2001 University of California study that found Laotian high-school girls had the highest teenage pregnancy rate in California and the highest number of teen births was ominously titled “Asian Teen Mothers, a quiet State of Crisis”. Despite a steady decline in youth crime and violence over the last few decades, we continued to hear from the media, politicians and other professionals that young people were “at risk”, with proclivities for teenage pregnancy, gang involvement, violence, drug addiction, and reliance on public assistance. Such constructions provided a rationale for increased surveillance of and intervention into young people’s lives by schools, police, health services, and the juvenile justice system. In April 2001 Governor Gray Davis of California approved $3.3 million for juvenile crime prevention in Contra Costa County. One of the programs that the funding financed was a program that places probation officers in selected high schools and middle school to provide supervision and services to youths with problems ranging from truancy to major criminal offenses.

It is important to examine youth programs with a social justice agenda because such programs can help challenge such representations of young people of color and reveal how citizenship is not just an adult experience. In a community that is linguistically isolated and lives in a region experiencing extensive environmental pollution, APEN hoped to empower and engage the bilingual second generation to act as advocates for the health of their community and to organize around environmental justice, reproductive health, and broader community issues such as inadequate academic counselling resources in schools and the political challenges to bilingual education. Asian Youth Advocates was a broad, integrated youth program that aimed to nurture a new generation of women leaders, in a community where authority is traditionally vested in elderly Laotian males, as well as address issues of adolescence and cultural identity experienced by the teenage Laotian girls.

In Laotian Daughters I show that if we dig beyond the dominant stereotypes of young people of color, particularly young women of color, we can unearth political engagement and the construction of active citizenship amongst this group. Through political mobilization around issues faced by a new immigrant community, these teenage Laotian girls both re-fashioned Laotian culture and demonstrated that young people can be a positive voice for change. In the process they forged a sense of belonging for Laotians in the American nation.