The Immigrant Family: Cultural Legacies and Cultural Changes

The Immigrant Family: Cultural Legacies and Cultural Changes¹

Nancy Foner

State University of New York, Purchase

This article examines the way family and kinship patterns change in the process of immigration -- and why. Offering an interpretative synthesis, it emphasizes the way first generation immigrants to the United States fuse together the old and new to create a new kind of family life. The family is seen as a place where there is a dynamic interplay between structure, culture, and agency. New immigrant family patterns are shaped by cultural meanings and social practices immigrants bring with them from their home countries as well as social, economic and cultural forces in the United States.

Immigrants live out much of their lives in the context of families. A lot has been written about the way family networks stimulate and facilitate the migration process itself; the role of family ties and networks in helping immigrants get jobs when they arrive in the United States; and the role of families in developing strategies for survival and assisting immigrants in the process of adjustment, providing a place where newcomers can find solace and support in a strange land and can pool their resources as a way to advance. Along with the increasing interest in gender and generation, there is a growing literature on the position of women and children in immigrant families -- and an awareness that the family is not just a haven in a heartless world but a place where conflict and negotiation also take place.

In this article, I take a different tack. My concern is with the way family and kinship patterns change in the process of immigration -- and why. The focus, I want to emphasize, is on first generation immigrants who come from one world to live in a new one and, in the process, fuse together the old and new to create a new kind of family life {see Kibria, 1993). In this account, the family is not simply a site where immigrants create and carry out agendas or strategies; nor are family relations and dynamics reducible to rational economic calculations. Rather, the family is seen as a place where there is a dynamic interplay between structure, culture, and agency -- where creative culture- building takes place in the context of external social and economic forces as well as immigrants' premigration cultural frameworks.

4 would like to thank Josh DeWind, Charles Hirschman, Philip Kasinitz and Mary Waters for their comments on an earlier version of this article.

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Clearly, a host of structural constraints and conditions immigrants confront in their new environment shape the kinds of family arrangements, roles, and orientations that emerge among them. So do the norms and values they encounter when they move to the United States. Moreover, immigrants are not passive individuals who are acted upon by external forces. They play an active role in reconstructing and redefining family life. Indeed, members of the family, by virtue of their gender and generation, have differing interests so that women (and men) and young people (and older people) often try to fashion family patterns in ways that improve their positions and further their aims (wKibria, 1993; Oxfeld, 1993).

But something else is at work, too. The cultural understandings, meanings, and symbols that immigrants bring with them from their home societies are also critical in understanding immigrant family life. Obviously, immigrants do not exactly reproduce their old cultural patterns when they move to a new land; but these patterns continue to have a powerful influence in shaping family values and norms as well as actual patterns of behavior that develop in the new setting. Indeed, as Nazli Kibria (1993) observes, immigrants may walk a delicate tightrope as they challenge certain aspects of traditional family systems while they also try to retain others.

Attention to the role of immigrants' "cultural roots"² in shaping new family patterns bids us to look at the way these patterns differ from one group to another -- despite common structural conditions they face and despite common social processes and dynamics of family life. Family patterns among Korean immigrants and Haitians in the United States, to name just two groups, diverge in many ways at least in part because of the cultural background of each group. The very meaning of the term family and other basic, taken-for-granted cultural aspects of kinship, like who is considered a relative, vary among different immigrant populations. Indeed, the particular groups social scientists study may well influence the models they develop about family life and family change. It is not surprising that scholars who study Asian immigrants, whose family and kinship systems are markedly different from those of Americans, have tended to put more emphasis on the role of cultural continuity with the sending society than scholars who study Caribbean immigrants, whose family patterns are more like those in this country.

PREMIGRATION CULTURAL INFLUENCES

Several studies have pointed out ways that premigration cultural conceptions and social practices continue to have force in the United States. These con-

²There is no single definition of culture agreed upon by anthropologists. Here I use it to refer to the "taken-for-granted but powerfully influential understandings and codes that are learned and shared by members of a group" (Peacock, 1986).

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ceptions and practices do not continue unchanged, of course. They are restructured, redefined, and renegotiated in the new setting. Yet immigrants continue to draw on premigration family experiences, norms, and cultural frameworks as they carve out new lives for themselves in the United States (see Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994).

To be sure, the cultures from which immigrants come are themselves the product of change so that it is misleading to assume a timeless past of family tradition there. Indeed, family patterns in the sending society may well have undergone significant transformations in the lifetimes of the immigrants or their parents. In her study of Japanese immigrants who came to the United States in the first decades of this century, Sylvia Yanagisako (1985:17-18) notes that the Japan in which they grew up in the late nineteenth century was as dynamic as the United States in which their children grew up in the twentieth century. At the end of the nineteenth century, Japan was characterized by great population growth, industrialization, a spreading market economy, and increasing urban migration. At the same time as ideas from the West were finding their way into Japan, the ideology of the ruling warrior class, including ideas about marriage and family practices -- such as parentally arranged marriages and standards of primogenitural succession and inheritance -- were spreading to the peasantry in a process of "samuraization." To take another example: recent Vietnamese refugees to the United States grew up in Vietnam in the period between the 1950s and 1970s when the upheavals of war and urbanization led to dramatic transformations in traditional kinship structures (Kibria, 1993; see also Freeman, 1995).

Although there is no such thing as a timeless tradition, immigrants may come to think of life in their home society in these terms. As Yanagisako puts it, they may construct their own versions of tradition as they reconceptualize the past to make sense of current experience and to speak to current dilemmas and issues. These "invented traditions" can have a life of their own in that immigrants may interpret and act upon the present in light of their models of the past (Yanagisako, 1985:247).

Among the many factors that help to keep alive (albeit in modified form) cultural patterns from the home country are strong immigrant communities and institutions, dense ethnic networks and continued, transnational ties to the sending society. In many cases, immigrants are part of what have been called multilocal binational families (Guarnizo, 1997), with parents and children distributed in households across national borders. Whatever their living arrangements, those in the United States are able, through modern transportation, to visit back and forth, and through modern communications they are able to participate in family events and decisions from a distance (Basch, Glick-Schiller and Szanton-Blanc, 1994; Foner, 1997; Rouse, 1991). This continued, close contact with home communities -- or, as Roger Rouse

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(1991) puts it, simultaneous engagement in places with different forms of experience - often strengthens immigrants' attachments to family values and orientations in the home society. Indeed, transnational connections may foster a complex cross-fertilization process, as immigrants bring new notions to their home communities at the same time as they continue to be influenced by values and practices there.

This said, consider some ways that the cultural elements immigrants bring with them can have an impact on family life in the United States. In her study of Vietnamese families in Philadelphia, Nazli Kibria (1993) argues that the Vietnamese ideology of family collectivism promoted cooperative kin-based economic practices that helped families cope and survive in the immigrant setting. The notion that the kin group was of more significance than the individual drew strength from Confucian ideology, including the importance of ancestor worship. In the households she visited, family altars with photographs of deceased relatives were a common sight; the death anniversaries of important departed ancestors were almost always observed with the performance of rites to honor ancestors. Ancestor worship, Kibria writes, "affirmed the sacredness and essential unity of the kin group as well as its permanence in comparison to the transience of the individual. ... It highlighted obligation as a key feature of a member's relationship to the kin group . . . [and] familial obligation was defined by the idea that the needs and desires of the kin group took precedence over personal ones" (1993:100).

Partly because Vietnamese immigrants believe that kinship ties are an effective way to cope with uncertainty and economic scarcity, they engaged in what Kibria calls a process of kin-group reconstruction in the absence of close kin in Philadelphia. They elevated distant kin to the position of closer relatives, placed more importance than they used to on kinship ties forged by marriage, and redefined non-kin with whom they had close "kinship-like ties" as kin, using kinship terms (like brother) to refer to them and their relations. Among recent Hmong refugees in Wausau, Wisconsin, patrilineal clan and lineage ties continue to influence day-to-day relations. Socializing, anthropologist JoAnn Koltyk (1998) observes, is largely confined to patrilineal kin. Unless they are in the same kin group, Hmong next-door neighbors do not visit or sometimes even greet each other.

Another example of the continued impact of premigration cultural beliefs and social practices is arranged marriages among South Asian immigrants. In many South Asian immigrant families, parents formally arrange the marriage of their children. When young people reach marriageable age, usually after finishing college, an all-points bulletin is broadcast through the networks of family and friends (Lessinger, 1995). Sometimes, immigrants return to India to find a spouse or rely on friends and relatives there to help in the search. Newspaper advertisements may be used to broaden the pool of candidates. A

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good number of classified advertisements in Indian newspapers relate to American-born or American-raised people who are looking for spouses. One recent advertisement read "U.S. raised Ivy League graduate seeks U.S. raised girl;" another said "Match for beautiful progressive U.S.-born medical student. Looking for US-born young man, handsome and professional" (Jaleshgari, 1995).

Long Island leaders in predominantly South Asian neighborhoods, according to a recent account in The New York Times, estimate that almost one-half of American-born or American-raised people of South Asian heritage agree to formally arranged marriages (Jaleshgari, 1995). Some young people view arranged marriages positively, seeing them as a way to avoid the frightening American dating scene, involving premarital sex and potential rejection. More commonly, young people submit, if reluctantly, to arranged marriages in the face of parental pressure (Lessinger, 1995). In the closely-knit Punjabi Sikh community in rural "Valleyside" California, gossip, shame, and guilt were sanctions that parents used to ensure that children (especially daughters) went along with parental marriage plans. Young people who married without their parents' blessings risked being cut off, although anthropologist Margaret Gibson (1988:126-127) notes that Punjabi youths' ties to family and community were so strong that this ultimate sanction was rarely needed. Other accounts indicate that new conflicts and tensions have developed around arranged marriages in the United States {see short stories of Divakaruni, 1995) and that "courtship" and marriage patterns are changing in many ways {see Lessinger, 1995).³ Still, arranged marriages are alive and well in South Asian immigrant communities, and, for better or worse, they are an issue with which the younger generation are often forced to deal.

NEW FAMILY PATTERNS

If immigrants bring with them a "memory of things past" that operates as a filter through which they view and experience -- and create -- new lives in the United States, it is also clear that much changes here. Faced with new circumstances in the United States, many beliefs, values, and cultural symbols as well as behavior patterns undergo change. While some former beliefs and social institutions persist apparently intact, they may change, if only subtly, in form and function in the new environment.

way the arranged marriage institution is shifting in the United States, according to Lessinger (1995), is that caste, language group, and religion are less important in mate selection if the young people are otherwise compatible in terms of education and profession. Also, "semiarranged marriages" are becoming increasingly common. Parents introduce suitable pre-screened young men and women who are then allowed a brief courtship period during which to decide whether they like each other well enough to marry.

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To say that immigrants change, however, does not mean that they become fully assimilated into American culture. Indeed, the classic concept of assimilation glosses over many complexities in the way immigrants and their institutions change in this country. As many scholars have pointed out, the notion of assimilation, as commonly understood, is too simplistic to analyze immigrant change in a complex society like the United States where there is no undifferentiated monolithic "American" culture. Indeed, the recently developed notion of segmented assimilation is an attempt to refine the assimilation concept. Segmented assimilation refers to the fact that immigrants assimilate to particular sectors of American society, with some becoming integrated into the majority white middle class and others assimilating into the innercity underclass (Portes and Zhou, 1993; Portes, 1995).

Yet even if we find similar behavior patterns among immigrants and certain Americans, this is not necessarily an indication of assimilation in the sense of internalizing the new ways and values. Rather, these behavior patterns may be independent responses to similar social and/or economic conditions that immigrants and the American born face. Moreover, as Yanagisako (1985) argues, immigrants and native-born Americans may have apparently similar norms regarding, for example, conjugal relations, but they may conceptualize these norms in light of different folk histories. These very conceptions and models of the past can influence the way people act and thus play a role in further shaping or modifying kinship norms and behavior. Immigrants "interpret their particular cultural histories in ways that generate issues of meaning and symbolic categories that in turn structure their kinship norms" (Yanagisako 1985:260).

A long line of scholars have recognized that the cultures of immigrant groups differ both from the culture left behind in the sending country and from American mainstream culture. In their 1918-1920 study of the Polish peasant in America, Thomas and Znaniecki wrote of the "creation of a [Polish-American] society which in structure and prevalent attitudes is neither Polish nor American but constitutes a specific new product whose raw materials have been partly drawn from Polish traditions, partly from the new conditions in which the immigrants live, and partly from American social values as the immigrant sees and interprets them" (1996:108). Some 40 years later, Glazer and Moynihan's critique of the melting pot notion tried to get at the way New York's immigrant groups became "something they had not been, but still something distinct and identifiable (1963:14)." And, most recently, Margaret Gibson argued that the end result of assimilation or acculturation among immigrants need not be the rejection of old traits and their replacement. Rather, "acculturation may be an additive process or one in which old and new traits are blended" (Gibson, 1988:25).

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In my work on Jamaican immigrants I have found it useful to think of the process by which new cultural and social patterns emerge among them as a kind of "creolization" process. The term creolization has long been used in the Caribbean to describe the social system that developed in Jamaica and other West Indian societies. Neither African nor English, the locally developed system of social relations and cultural forms was something completely new -- creole -- that was created in the context of specific West Indian economic, social and political circumstances (Smith, 1967; Mintz and Price, 1992). The population, Raymond Smith writes, became increasingly "creolized rather than Anglicized, a process which affected Englishmen as well as others" (1967:234).

Thinking in terms of a kind of creolization process occurring among late twentieth century immigrants in the United States suggests that we look at the blend of meanings, perceptions, and social patterns that emerges among the immigrants. This blend, needless to say, is different for each immigrant group, reflecting, among other things, its specific cultural, social and demographic characteristics. At play are the complex processes of change as customs, values, and attitudes immigrants bring from home begin to shift in the context of new hierarchies, cultural conceptions, and social institutions they confront in this country (Foner, 1977, 1994). As I have argued elsewhere, Jamaican immigrants do not become exactly like Americans, black or white. Nor are they any longer just like Jamaicans in the home society. New meanings, ideologies, and patterns of behavior develop among them in response to conditions and circumstances they encounter here.

The Vietnamese case cited above is a good example of this kind of creolization process. Confucian family ideology lingers on in many ways, but there are new arrangements, too, as more distant kin, in-laws, and "fictive kin" have been drawn into the bosom of the family (Kibria, 1993). As noted in my own research on Jamaican family life in New York, I also found a mix of old and new. As in Jamaica, the household was primarily women's domain. There seemed to be little change in attitudes to illegitimacy or common-law unions among most immigrants; these were still widely-accepted practices with no stigma attached to them. Much to women's dismay, men continued in New York to have a propensity to wander and to divert resources away from the household. Yet, there were also changes. Jamaican women in New York were less tolerant of men's outside sexual exploits and more likely to demand that men help out and spend time at home. The reasons: women had greater financial independence in New York; women were at work and did not have female relatives available to provide assistance; and they were influenced by dominant American values extolling the ideal of marital fidelity and "family togetherness" (Foner, 1994, 1986). A number of studies of other groups have shown that though immigrants "bring their own versions of 'tra-

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ditional' patriarchal codes to the United States" (Pessar, 1996), their households become less patriarchal and more egalitarian here as women gain access to social and economic resources previously beyond their reach and as they participate more actively in public life (Espiritu, 1997; Grasmuck and Pessar, 1991; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994; Kibria, 1993; Pessar, 1987).

To return, once more, to Sylvia Yanagisako's (1985) detailed analysis of Japanese American kinship, her work provides a good illustration of the kind of culture creation or culture-building process I am talking about. As Japanese immigrants (and their children) constructed their family lives here, they drew on models of "Japanese" as well as "American" kinship, creating a "Japanese American" synthesis (1985:22). Japanese American kinship, she writes, is, at all levels of analysis, similar to and different from what has been described as the kinship system of white middle-class Americans. The composition of Japanese American family gatherings and life-cycle celebrations is larger and genealogically more extended than is generally reported for the white middle class. Concerning normative expectations, the filial responsibilities of second generation (Nisei) sons and daughters appear more sharply defined and more differentiated by gender than the filial responsibilities articulated by middle-class whites. Moreover, the assignment of the role of representative of the sibling group to the elder brother in certain kinship and community affairs such as funerals is not common among other Americans (Yanagisako, 1985:255).

What also holds Japanese kinship together, Yanagisako argues, and differentiates it from kinship among other Americans is "Japanese Americans' shared model of their cultural history. The model is at the same time a charter for what Japanese American social life should continue to be and how it might change. Other Americans do not share this charter even though they may share many of its provisions, for other Americans do not conceptualize their kinship relations in terms of their connections with an ancestral Japanese past and the experience of Japanese immigrants to America" (Yanagisako, 1985:258).

The maintenance of extensive transnational connections among certain groups, or certain sectors of groups, adds a further dynamic to the process of change as new family forms develop in the context of transnational communities or migration circuits. For example, in the "multilocal binational families" that are frequently found among Dominicans, one or both parents live in New York City with some or none of their children while other children live on the island in households headed by relatives or nonrelatives (Guarnizo, 1997). Among successful Korean professionals and businessmen, what Pyong Gap Min (1998) calls "international commuter marriages" arise when the husband returns to Korea for a better job while his wife and children remain in the United States to take advantage of educational opportunities here. They visit several times a year and talk on the phone at least once a week.

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FACTORS SHAPING FAMILY CHANGE

Why do family and kinship patterns among immigrants change and develop the way they do? This is an enormously complicated question that would require detailed study of a wide range of groups to determine the combination of factors that produce certain kinds of changes in particular populations. As a way to begin building a framework for studying immigrant family change, I want to suggest some of the factors involved.

I have already discussed the role of premigration family, marriage and kinship beliefs and practices in shaping family lives here. The demographic composition of the immigrant group also has an impact; sex and age ratios in each group affect marriage and family patterns. For example, a markedly unbalanced sex ratio will encourage marriage outside the group or consign many to singlehood or the search for spouses in the home country. Kibria argues that the scarcity of Vietnamese women in the United States enhanced unmarried women's value in the "marriage market," giving them greater bargaining power in their relationships with men. The women were able to use the threat of leaving a relationship to push partners to meet their demands (1993:112--121; see Goodkind, 1997). In other groups, a sizable proportion of old people may ease the childcare burdens of working women {e.g., see Orleck, 1987, on Russian Jews). In still other cases, the absence of immigrants' close kin in the new setting creates the need to improvise new arrangements, a reason why "fictive kin" are common in immigrant communities and why men sometimes find themselves filling in as helpmates to their wives in childcare and other household tasks.

Quite apart from cultural or sociodemographic features of the immigrant group, external forces in the new environment shape immigrant family lives as they provide new opportunities and constraints as well as new sets of values, beliefs, and standards. There are, for a start, economic conditions and opportunities. The immigration literature is filled with examples of immigrant women gaining authority in the household and increased leverage in relations with their spouses now that they have greater opportunities for wage employment and contribute a larger share of the family income in the United States. By the same token, declines in men's earning power can reduce their authority {see Kibria, 1993:109--112). Among certain groups, old people have suffered a decline in status in the United States because, among other things, they no longer control valued resources such as land {see Chan, 1994; Oxfeld, 1993). Another scenario has been reported for New York's Korean elderly. Access to government welfare programs in the United States has allowed many to be more independent of their children - economically and residen-tially -- than they would have been in Korea. According to Pyong Gap Min's account, the Korean elderly welcome these changes, pleased not to have to ask their children for money or to face restrictions and frequent conflicts that come with living with sons and daughters-in-law (Min, 1998).

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Certain kinds of economic arrangements are more likely to support the continued importance of extended kin ties than others. As an example from the period prior to World War II, the predominance of family businesses among the Japanese in Seattle (before the incarceration of the Japanese in internment camps) provided die Issei with an economic base for the stem family system of differentiated filial relations. First sons could be groomed to work in the family business, assume its management, and eventually support elderly parents with the proceeds from an enterprise that they had themselves worked to build. The wives of first sons could be incorporated into the household as useful productive workers as well as reproducers of the next generation. Second sons and daughters could be "married out" of the household to create a ring of affinal ties with other households in the community (Yanagisako, 1985:158).

Immigrants are also inevitably influenced by dominant American cultural beliefs and values concerning marriage, family, and kinship that are disseminated by the mass media, schools, and other institutions. (The term influence includes cases where immigrants enthusiastically embrace certain American beliefs and values or tentatively begin to accept or even angrily reject diem.) Some family members are more enthusiastic about certain American values and norms than odiers. Typically, women are more eager than men to endorse values that enhance women's position, just as young people generally support new norms diat give them greater freedom which their parents may resist.

As I mentioned earlier, I found that Jamaicans were influenced by American notions about the desirability of nuclear family "togetherness" and joint husband-wife activities. Dominican women studied by Grasmuck and Pessar (1991) claimed to be patterning their more egalitarian relations with their spouses on what they believed to be tlie dominant American model. According to Kibria (1993), American notions about the equality of men and women and an acceptance of women who smoke, drink beer, and wear "clothes that show their bodies" challenged Vietnamese norms of feminine behavior and gender relations. In general, American ideas about what kinds of dating and premarital sexual behavior are appropriate, as well as about romantic love and free marriage choice, provide ammunition for immigrant children who want to reject arranged marriages and close supervision of their relations with the opposite sex. Indeed, parents may modify their demands in the face of the new American values for fear of alienating their children altogether and creating a legacy of resentment (cf, Yanagisako, 1985). Alternatively, serious conflicts may develop when young people (or women), spurred on by changed expectations and expanded economic opportunities, are more assertive in challenging parental (or spousal) authority (see, for example, Min, 1998; Pessar, 1995).

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Finally, the legal system in die United States provides a further impetus to change, making certain premigration customs and practices illegal or giving legal support to challenges to these practices. One reason wife beating is less common among Vietnamese immigrants in the United States than in Vietnam is that immigrants are highly conscious that such behavior is "illegal." Kibria tells of cases where women telephoned die police during physical confrontations with their partners (1993:121--125). In my research on Jamaicans, I found that children threatened to, and sometimes actually did, call the police to prevent or stop physical abuse from their parents. Parents bitterly resented diis new infringement on meir authority and ability to discipline meir children mrough physical beatings, but many tempered their behavior as a result.

The United States legal system and government agencies can affect family relations by defining family membership and rules, like those pertaining to inheritance, in terms of American cultural assumptions. United States immigration laws themselves, based on American notions of the nuclear family, facilitate the immigration of parents, legitimate children, and legal spouses while often separating "illegitimate" children and "common-law" spouses as well as siblings and other close, cooperating kin (see, Garrison and Weiss, 1987). A study of the Laotian Hmong in California notes that social service agencies affect die Hmong's sense of what constitutes a "family" by using the nuclear (rather than extended) family as die unit of distribution for various kinds of assistance (Chan, 1994). And the fact mat women are frequendy the intermediaries between their households and outside government agencies (including various kinds of public assistance programs) often expands the scope of meir activities and plays a role in improving their status in this country {cf., Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994; Kibria, 1993).

CONCLUSION

In the wake of the enormous recent immigration to the United States, we are only just beginning to understand the complex ways that the new arrivals construct -- and reconstruct -- their family lives here. In this article, I have discussed some of the dynamics involved, including the cultural meanings and social practices immigrants bring with them from their home countries as well as structural, economic and cultural forces in their new environments. As we search for common factors that impinge on and shape immigrants' family lives -- or look for evidence of ways that immigrants are becoming more like "Americans" -- we also need to bear in mind that each group puts a unique stamp on family and kinship relations that stems from its special cultural and social background.

Clearly, a lot more work needs to be done in this field. We need additional careful cultural -- as well as structural -- analyses of immigrants' family lives to appreciate the new forms and patterns that develop among them here. Of

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late, there has been considerable analysis of the way immigrant women's, men's and younger people's statuses change in the United States, but we also need studies that investigate the meanings that immigrants attach to their kinship and family relations. Cultural analysis is important, not because culture constitutes a controlling code and thereby assumes causal priority in the understanding of social action, but because, as anthropologist Raymond Smith reminds us, "without adequacy at the level of meaning the other dimensions of the analysis are all too likely to be rooted in the unexamined assumptions of the observer's own culture" (Smith, 1988:27; see also Schneider, 1968).

The complex interplay between culture, structure, and agency - stressed throughout this article - is involved in other questions that call for further study. This article has focused on the first generation, but obviously it is crucial to explore how, and to what extent, their present family arrangements, roles, and orientations will leave a mark on the second generation who are born and raised in the United States. Among the immigrants themselves, there is the question of whether some of the changes in family relations I have mentioned here, such as women's increased power in dealings with their spouses, are simply a temporary phase and that if circumstances allow, prem-igration forms will be reconstituted. Alternatively, shifts in family and kinship relations in the United States may have a lasting effect, altering immigrants' expectations and notions about what is acceptable behavior and "the right thing to do" in the family and among kin. It seems highly likely that changes in actual social relations, however small, will leave a permanent mark and will ultimately impress themselves on normative patterns that guide action. Moreover, there is the intriguing possibility, noted by Richard Alba and Victor Nee (1996), that family patterns and values among some immigrant groups will affect notions of what is considered "normal" behavior in mainstream America and, over time, become part of the standard repertoire. Whether -- and how -- such processes will take place in the years ahead is just one of the many questions that pose a challenge for future research.

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