Religion and Culture of Origin. Re-Shaping Identity in the Integration Process: A Case Study in Sicily

What happens when people of different cultures, values, religion live together? Sociological studies on immigrative phenomenon often swing between immigration and integration policies. These policies actually reveal the difficulty of the host society to institutionalize new models of social differences accompanying multiculturalism. Immigrants who “arrive” continue their life in a place where they do not passively participate in the passing of time, but become actors. Pressed by the hegemonic culture of the host society to adapt, do not cease to practice their religious and origin cultural expressions, often in conditions of urban spatial and social marginalization, they resist assimilation with ethnic persistence strategies. Considering the impact of religion and origin cultural values on expression of differences, it is important to consider their role in the integration process. And, above all—facilitate or hinder integration? These dynamics have been analyzed in a research study on immigrants’ integration process in Palermo. The main results are presented in this paper. In this case study, the research’s data hypothesizes a theoretical model of integration in which immigrants, free to express their religious and cultural differences, tend to reduce their perception of minority

Immigration Forum Comment: Cultural Responses to Immigration

In an age when politicians and the mainstream media continue to divide immigrants into deserving and undeserving subjects, making them both hypervisible and yet invisible, the essays by Lauret, Krause and Schreiber are timely and compelling. Together, they map the historical and contemporary processes of state violence, legal erasure and cultural coercion that have shaped immigrant lives and subjectivities. Models of cultural conformity and whiteness, hyphenation, and either/or binaries that enforce the strict separation of old and new, legal and illegal, have affected the immigrant psyche and induced forms of individual and collective trauma, including ethnic shame, madness, family fragmentation and the physical exploitation of human bodies. In their essays on Americanization and Dominican American fiction, Lauret and Krause reveal the less than celebratory narratives that get lost in stories of emancipatory assimilation, ethnic persistence and hyphenated and multiple subjectivities. Likewise, in her essay on contemporary Latino/a music video and undocumented immigration, Schreiber asks us to see what is obscured from view, but also to find room in these new narratives for patterns of immigrant visibility, agency and activism. These essays suggest that immigrant testimony, literature and visual and aural media can be powerfully combined with historical analyses of immigration policy to unravel the complex realities behind the walls of national nostalgia and racial stereotyping. They also suggest alternative ways of seeing that demand we recognize every immigrant's right to humanity and a sense of belonging.

The Role of Ethnicity and Religion in the Social Support System of Older Dutch Canadians

ABSTRACTThis paper focuses on the role of religion and ethnicity in providing social support for elderly Dutch Canadian Catholic and Calvinist parents and in establishing ethno-religious retirement and long-term care facilities. The data come from a 1995 survey of elderly Dutch Canadian immigrants (N = 79) and their adult children (N = 364) examining intraethnic differences in ethnic persistence and parent care. Continuity theory provides the theoretical framework for this study. In the last few decades, second generation Dutch Calvinist immigrants have been busy establishing retirement and long-term care facilities to look after the needs of the older Calvinist generation. Dutch Catholic immigrants have established very few retirement and nursing homes for their elderly members. Ethnic and religious differences influence the kind of support available to elderly Dutch Canadians.