Old dreams, new realities: Symbolic capital and identity development among DR Congo migrants

ABSTRACT

Immigrants and refugees from the Democratic Republic (DR) of Congo represent one of the largest migrant groups coming to the U.S. Yet little has been written about this unique group of migrants, particularly regarding their experiences of identity development and cultural integration. Therefore, this paper critically investigates how migrants from DR Congo conceptualize their lives in the U.S. We use notions of identity and language investment as defined by Norton as well as Bourdieu’s concepts of cultural, social, and linguistic capital to analyze interview data from 15 migrants currently living in a small community in the Midwest. Using the tools of qualitative data analysis we argue that while DR Congo migrants believe acquiring various forms of capital will help them achieve their imagined identities, their new experiences are burdened with unforeseen obstacles, both obvious and hidden, which impede the process of integration into U.S. society.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Except for the name of the state, all other names of places and participants are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Darrin Hetrick

Darrin Hetrick is a recent Ph.D. graduate in Foreign Language and ESL Education from the University of Iowa. His main areas of research are in language policy and planning, migration, second language acquisition, and discourse analysis.

Emny Nicole Batista de Sousa Bernini

Emny Nicole Batista de Sousa-Bernini is Assistant Professor at Instituto Federal de Ciencia e Tecnologia da Paraiba in Brazil. She was awarded her a Fulbright grant in 2017 and 2018 when she took part in the Foreign Language and ESL Education doctoral program at the University of Iowa. Since then, her research has focused on cross-cultural ethnographic analysis of language policies for forced migrants in Brazil and in the U.S.

David Cassels Johnson

David Cassels Johnson is Associate Professor of Multilingual Education at the University of Iowa and Visiting Professor of Applied Linguistics at Shanghai International Studies University. He holds a Ph.D. (with distinction) in Educational Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania. He lectures, teaches, and consults on issues of language policy and language education in the U.S. and around the world. He has held faculty positions at Washington State University, Texas A&M University, the University of Equatorial Guinea, and the University of Costa Rica. He is the author of Language Policy (2013, Palgrave Macmillan) and co-author of The Language Gap: Normalizing Deficit Ideologies (2021, Routledge).