Economic Americanness and defensive inclusion: social location and young citizens’ conceptions of national identity

ABSTRACT

What does it mean to be ‘American’? Drawing on in-depth interviews with 76 undergraduates attending elite universities and 72 teenaged citizen children of immigrants living in mostly low-income households, we identify understudied economic narratives of Americanness: as future-oriented economic opportunities for elite undergraduates or stratified notions of current economic condition among immigrant-origin teens. We also find, depending on social location, that economic notions of Americanness overlap with other boundaries: whiteness for some immigrant-origin youth, and civic membership for elite undergraduates. Elite students place themselves at the centre of Americanness; immigrant-origin youth, even though they are U.S. citizens, sometimes place themselves outside these symbolic boundaries. Still, youth in more disadvantaged social locations sometimes appropriate markers of Americanness in strategies of what we call ‘defensive inclusion’, employing symbolic boundaries of hard work, multiculturalism and birthplace to contest perceived social boundaries of race and class that might exclude them from the core of ‘Americanness’. Our findings suggest that researchers should include measures of economic national identity in future survey-based work and examine discursive practices of defensive inclusion in fieldwork.

KEYWORDS:

• National identity
• race
• comparative
• United States
• social class
• multiculturalism
• citizenship

Acknowledgements

Our thanks to Kathy Abrams, KT Albiston, Bart Bonikowski, Antje Ellermann, Helen Marrow, Fabiana Silva, Sarah Song, Veronica Terriquez, Leti Volpp, Kim Voss, and Rima Wilkes for comments on earlier drafts. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Harvard University Milton Fund (Warikoo) and the Russell Sage Foundation (Bloemraad and Warikoo) for making this research possible. Authors’ names are listed in reverse alphabetical order; they are equal co-authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The two groups of young people are thus distinguished by multiple differences in social and symbolic boundaries, which we conceptualize with the term ‘social location'. Our goal is not to pinpoint the independent importance of any one factor (e.g. household wealth, parents' education, racial minority status), but to consider how an arguably idealized group (Ivy League students) and another at times vilified group (teens in low-income immigrant families) conceive of an ostensibly shared Americanness.

2. Interviews with teens were conducted in 2006 and 2008 and with college students from 2009 to 2011. College students were almost equally divided between sophomores, juniors and seniors. The teens ranged in age from 14 to 18. Given the study design, we cannot isolate the independent effect of age or life course in conceptions of Americanness. This is an interesting area for future research.

3. Fourteen youth arrived in the US at a young age. Thirty-five teens are Mexican American, 18 are Vietnamese American, and 19 are Chinese American. Youths’ parents were undocumented, legal permanent residents, or naturalized citizens.

4. About 11 percent of teens lived in more affluent households, based on parents' self-reported household income of over $100,000 or educated guesses of a family's financial situation based on residence and parents' occupation when parents were unwilling to share their household income.

5. We use the term ‘Mexican American' (or Chinese or Vietnamese American) as a descriptive term to mean the US citizen children of Mexican-, Chinese-, or Vietnamese-origin parents, not as necessarily representing the respondent's personal identification.

6. We coded as ‘opportunity' responses that used this word explicitly, or were related to economic advancement or labor market mobility, including mentions of the ‘American Dream'.

7. Ten teens (14%) mentioned an economic criterion (e.g. having a house, money, a job, earning a college degree, working, and paying taxes), as compared to only eight teens who specifically mentioned voting and eight who mentioned patriotism.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Harvard University Milton Fund and Russell Sage Foundation.