(In)adaptation and cultural (dis)integration

Por Alonso Yáñez

When someone decides to move to another country, they're usually worried about preparing for the trip or escaping from unpromising financial or political situations, and don't take into consideration how complicated it is to adapt to a different society.

Many immigrants leave behind better careers and status in their home countries in order to live with more opportunities and liberties elsewhere. They often occupy a wide variety of jobs, usually with poor salaries, such as Fidel Jordán, a Peruvian lawyer who came in 2001 to Los Angeles.

“You're starting all over again,” said Jordán, who obtained a masters in political science from the University of Lima after becoming a lawyer. “It’s like a cycle where you’re born and become familiar with friends, family and institutions, but when I came here I knew nothing.”

“You’re in a desert full of people, but alone and with a different lifestyle,” he added.

Jordán wanted to revalidate his diplomas when he came to the U.S., but the need to make money and the lack of time made that goal almost unreachable. He has had many jobs since he came to Los Angeles, such as gardener, delivery boy, telemarketer and assistant in two legal offices.

In California, 89 percent of immigrants come from Latin America or Asia. While Latin Americans were more than half of immigrants (55 percent) who came to the U.S. looking for a better future, Asians constituted a third (34 percent) of the total, and Jordán’s story is just one among millions of immigrants who struggle to adapt.

Jordán, however, has not worked in his profession since he left his country. In California, 43 percent of Latin American immigrants with a university degree work as cheap labor in other occupations, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

“I’m someone who adapts, as anyone else would, to any circumstance because of my needs,” Jordán said. “I had to forget about my education.”

It wasn’t tough because I was taught at a young age by my family to work in anything,” he added.

Jordán came to Los Angeles motivated by the professional and political instability Perú experienced in the late 1990s. After 10 years doing jobs that lasted no more than a couple of months, he became familiarized with the Peruvian judicial system and was disillusioned by the corruption he saw.

He felt profoundly disappointed because he had gone to law school in order to work within the judicial system, but it turned out “the system did not work, because there was a guy in television who bought the law and judges,” said Jordán, in allusion to Vladimiro Montesinos, who served as advisor for the Peruvian National Intelligence Service during the government of Alberto Fujimori. Montesinos recorded the bribes he paid to influential people in Peru in his famous “vladivideos”.

“It was a broken and immoral judicial system,” Jordán said. “You’re only left with one option: to leave, it doesn’t matter where.”

Like many immigrants who come to the U.S., Jordán believes it is crucial to learn English in order to integrate into American society, but he enrolled in many educational programs and none of them satisfied him.

After trying numerous evening classes in Downtown Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley, he stopped attending because he found the classes too slow and crowded.

“They aren’t effective systems,” said Jordán, “because they’re too long, the resources they use aren’t good, they don’t use labs and it seems that they don’t really want to teach the language.”

If the state truly wanted to teach English and make the adaptation easier, it would teach it well,” he added.

For Ana Sánchez Muñoz, a sociolinguist and professor of Chicana/os Studies at CSUN, bilingual education is not sufficiently valued among a considerable portion of the American public and legislators.

Although the U.S. is a multilingual nation, she thinks that being bilingual is more of a burden than a benefit, because of government policies that want to eradicate immigrants’ native language, promoting the elimination of the identity and culture of various people.

“We could’ve improved (the educational system), but we cut funds for bilingual education and, as a result, we have had a disaster,” Muñoz said.

“We’re having more kids drop out of school, especially Latinos,” she added.

Despite the budget cuts for bilingual education after Proposition 227 was approved in California in 1998, many in the academia consider that bilingual education helps people learn a new language. For Muñoz, the approach of total immersion in English is not effective.

“If you have the capacity to read and write in your native language, those abilities can be transferred to another language, but many immigrants do not have the ability to read and write in their native language because they have not been educated,” said Muñoz before explaining that the effects of Prop. 227 are more evident among young students, because they cannot maintain an adequate level in all their classes and are left behind academically.

“If you don’t have those abilities in your native language, how are you going to acquire them in a language you don’t understand?” Muñoz said.

“Pedagogically, the idea of ‘sink or swim’ makes no sense,” said Amon Emeka, a sociology professor at USC. “There are lots of studies since Prop. 227 and the number of reclassification from non-English speakers to English proficient has not changed at all, and actually has gotten worse since 1998.”

Adaptation is the gravitation of immigrant educational, financial, and professional averages towards the averages of natives, according to Emeka, who specializes in immigrant adaptation and racial inequality.

“There’s this image of this constant stream of immigrants coming across the border who are going to be poor and they are going to be a burden on the government, but welfare use is very low because they don't qualify or are afraid to come forward,” Emeka said, after explaining that focusing on the fiscal impact of immigrants, rather than how long it takes them to adapt, is one of the main problems with the immigration debate in the U.S.

“Without immigration, who is going to do the work?” he added. “This is all happening in the context of baby-boomers aging out. At some point there are going to be a lot of retirements and lots of positions that need to be filled, and Americans don't have babies as much as we used to have.”

In his investigations, Emeka has concluded that white immigrants tend to be more successful and black immigrants less successful than all other groups, while Asians and Latinos are in between. He believes this is caused by the power structure in America, because “it's not a coincidence that white workers get the most desirable jobs and all the bosses are already white.”

That inequality, intolerance and lack of integration have made it harder for Jordán, as many other immigrants, to adapt to a new life in the U.S.

“I don’t know what to adapt to, because the politics of this country, its culture and education are not strong enough, and I don’t see behaviors or cultural patterns that I should adopt,” said Jordán. “What I have to do is restructure my life, from an idealistic, rational and cultural perspective, and that’s what I’m doing everyday, but not necessarily adapt to the sort of empty lives Americans live.”

Aside from learning a new language, immigrants have to familiarize themselves with a new system and culture that could sometimes contradict their own cultural values.

Jordán and Muñoz, who came from Spain in 2000, consider solitude the greatest obstacle to adapting to Los Angeles. For them, that loneliness is produced by the peculiarity of American interpersonal relationships.

“(Solitude) is the first thing you find here,” Jordán said. “And it is negative, because solitude isn’t something positive.”

“It’s been tough and it’s going to be tough the rest of my life,” Muñoz said. “I have given up because I know things are not easy in this city, for the distance and a different system of priorities. Here, work is much more important than personal relationships.”

Both Jordán and Muñoz agree that problems in adaptation not only manifest themselves in difficulties to socialize or learn a new language, but also in a lack of government integration policies. They both consider that conservative groups have taken advantage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to push their xenophobic agenda.

“Throughout U.S. history, there has been a not very equal or pacific coexistence,” said Muñoz. “It’s a mix of oil and water, there are many levels, but they are not integrated.”

“It’s a system of oppression and limitation that makes immigrants fall behind, and then people complain why they don’t adapt,” said Jordán.

When Jordán left MacArthur Park, after the infamous 2007 May Day march that ended with police brutality, he believed that the social awakening of immigrants in the U.S was consolidated.

For him and Ruth Milkman, sociology professor at UCLA, the 2006 and 2007 national protests were important because they generated a movement, and a necessary popular and legislative debate.

“In those big marches, many of the people present were not immigrants,” said Milkman, director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. “The process of building that coalition has to come out of the labor movement, that’s not something anybody else is in a position to do right now.”

“The challenge is to bring it to a bigger scale, where it really has an impact,” she added. “But there’s a long way to go in terms of making it really transformative.”

Not only should we talk about justice or social integration, but also about respecting everybody’s dignity, regardless of their nationality or legal status, said Jordán, who recently celebrated his daughter Francesca’s second birthday, product of a relationship he has with a second generation Hungarian immigrant.

“Culture is a way of life, rather than an ideology,” Jordán concluded after saying that the xenophobic efforts by conservative groups are futile, because traditionally the U.S. is a country of immigrants, especially Latinos.

“How can another culture say that your culture or your way of life is incorrect? On the contrary, they have to recognize it, respect it and not interfere.”

Alonso Yañez/ El Nuevo Sol
Fidel Jordán, a Peruvian immigrant, with his two-year-old daughter Francesca.