CLAS Lecture Series: “Strangers all Around: Immigration and the Transformation of the Individual American”

There is little doubt that immigration is changing American society demographically, linguistically, culturally, economically, and politically. And yet for all of these changes, scholarship on American immigration has focused almost exclusively on how immigrants and subsequent generations adapt. But the mass changes brought about by immigration imply that non-immigrant populations - those who have deep generational roots in United States - must adapt to a context that is heavily shaped by immigration. How do these established individuals experience and make sense of these changes? Drawing on ethnographic data in California's Silicon Valley, I show that assimilation is a relation, if not symmetrical, process involving immigrant origin populations (immigrants and their second-generation children) and host-society individuals (those who are US-born of US-born children). In this particular talk, I will present research showing how the immigrant-origin population shapes the ethnoracial identity of host-society African Americans, whites, Latinos, and Asians.  

Speaker: Tomás Jiménez, Associate Professor of Sociology at Stanford University.