Sociology Program Presents
CANCELED: Nationalizing Foreigners: The Making of American National Identity
6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Professor of Sociology, UCLA
Becoming “American” entails more than understanding oneself as an insider; it equally involves adopting American attitudes toward persons beyond the territorial divide, a population that includes nationals of one’s country of origin or ancestry. The talk begins with a conceptual framework to understand how attachment to the people of the state of emigration gets transformed into attachment to the people of the state of immigration. Then we focus on Mexican immigrants and their descendants in particular. A variety of data sources can highlight the degree to which group members explicitly identify as Americans and express pride in their American identity. We then focus on Mexican American views of immigration policy in particular. Support for some level of restriction is a fundamental attribute of commitment to the national community. With that in mind, we examine the links between informants’ patriotism, identification and attitudes toward immigrant rights and immigration.
Roger Waldinger, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at UCLA, is among the most influential sociologists of contemporary American immigration. He has studied especially the work immigrants get, and how they seek to control their economic fate and long-term improvements. More recently, he has worked on aspects of transnationalism—that is, how immigrants' lives are involved in both their old and new countries. He is the author of scores of articles and numerous books, such as Still the Promised City: African Americans and New Immigrants in Postindustrial New York (1999, Harvard UP) and The Cross-Border Connection: Immigrants, Emigrants and their Homelands (2017, Harvard UP).
For more information, call 845-758-7667, or e-mail [email protected].
Time: 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Location: Olin Humanities, Room 201