Protective ethnicity: how Armenian immigrants’ extracurricular youth organisations redistribute cultural capital to the second-generation in Los Angeles

ABSTRACT

Research shows the children of educationally-select immigrant groups benefit from a cultural advantage that allows them to realise higher educational outcomes than scholars would predict based on their parental education level alone. Among native-born families, childrearing practices, such as participation in youth extracurricular activities outside of school and home, have been shown to guide youth educational outcomes. But scholars have not fully explained how these cultural practices matter for the children of immigrants. Based on comparative ethnographic research, I examine how Armenian immigrant parents of divergent education levels converge in their desire to cultivate ethnic identification among their children by enrolling them in youth extracurricular activities found in ethnic community organisations. I argue that although working-class immigrants bring their children to these organisations to cultivate their children’s ethnic identification, they also unknowingly expose them to the organisationally embedded cultural capital offered at these sites that youth later draw on for their educational mobility. I conclude that cultivating ethnic identification among educationally-select immigrants functions as a protective social factor because it extends unanticipated material gains to the children of working class coethnics, a phenomenon I call protective ethnicity.

KEYWORDS:

• Protective ethnicity
• immigration
• hyper-selectivity
• cultural capital
• Armenian-Americans

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank everyone who kindly offered thoughtful feedback on earlier versions of this paper: Jennifer Lee, Min Zhou, Cynthia Feliciano, Rocío Rosales, Nina Bandelj and the anonymous reviewers at JEMS.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Oshin Khachikian http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2563-577X

Notes

1 Artseev means Eagle in Armenian. All names are pseudonyms to protect the identities of respondents and organisations, as stipulated by IRB approval for this study.

2 The name of the city was changed to preserve anonymity of study participants.

3 As per IRB regulations and to protect the anonymity of research participants, I have given both Troop Eagle and Troop Artseev pseudonyms.