Immigrant and Refugee Women: Recreating Meaning in Transnational Context
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Immigrant and Refugee Women: Recreating Meaning in Transnational Context Denise L. Spitzer ABSTRACT: Migrating to another country is potentially fraught with both challenges and potential opportunities. This article examines ways in which mature Chilean, Chinese and Somali women who migrated to Canada deploy personal and communal resources to imbue shifting relations and novel spaces with new meanings. Through these activities, they create a place for themselves on Canadian soil while remaining linked to their homelands. I argue that the ability of immigrant and refugee women to reconstruct their lives—often under conditions of systemic inequalities—is evidence of their resilience, which consequently has a positive effect on health and well-being. KEYWORDS: agency, Canada, health, identity, immigration, women My oldest daughter went back to Chile because under conditions of systemic inequalities, is she wanted to find her roots, to find out where she belonged after so many years in Canada, she evidence of a resilience that consequently has didn’t know where you belong. It’s like you’re a a positive impact on health and well-being. tree without roots. Psychologically it makes you As Oakley (this volume) indicates, health feel like, who I am, where do I stand? So she went and well-being offer an important arena in to Chile to find out and it was okay, it was good then because they said, we are half Chilean, half which to examine the complex and compel- Canadian. —Esther1 ling tensions emerging from the dynamic in- tersections of gender, migration and socio- political context that are played out through In the quotation above, Esther’s eldest a host of issues, including identity negotia- daughter is described as a tree without roots. tion. Moreover, by focussing on the relation- The embrace, however, of her transnational ship among identity, health, migration and identity, forged by a return to the land of gender in this work we can attend to the her birth, eventually allows her to branch out ways in which cultural logic, social forces across multiple landscapes and cultivate a and personal resources operate in daily life. sense of belonging. In this article, I draw on research with mature Chilean, Chinese and Somali women who migrated to Canada to examine the ways in which they deploy per- Immigrant and Refugee Women in sonal and communal resources to imbue Canada: An Overview shifting relations and novel spaces with new meanings. Through these activities they cre- A brief demographic overview suggests that ate a place for themselves on Canadian soil the ability to flourish on foreign soil is sub- while remaining linked to their homelands. stantially difficult. Statistics indicate that I argue that the ability of immigrant and refu- immigrants—primarily those from non- gee women to reconstruct their lives, often European source countries—are especially Anthropology in Action, 14, 1 & 2 (2007): 52–62 © Berghahn Books and the Association for Anthropology in Action doi:10.3167/aia.2007.14010206 Immigrant and Refugee Women AiA vulnerable to poverty. Furthermore, within ily and community networks that may have this category, women experience a more pre- served as important sources of social support cipitous decline in socioeconomic status than in their homeland. In addition, newcomers men (Kazemipur and Halli 2001). After resid- must contend with conflicting values, novel ing in the country for a period of more than social pressures, potentially disparate gender ten years, non-European immigrant women ideologies and contesting ideas about health also report a greater deterioration in health (Spitzer 2004; Thurston and Vissandje´e 2005). status than men from similar countries of Indeed, the primary purpose of this research origin and than their Canadian-born counter- project was to explore the ways in which parts (Ng et al. 2005; Vissandje´e et al. 2004). mature women from three ethnocultural From a biomedical perspective, negative per- communities negotiate ideas about meno- sonal habits such as smoking, alcohol con- pause and aging in the context of migration sumption and poor nutrition leading to (Spitzer 1998). What emerged was a testa- obesity are regarded as the primary factors ment to the ways in which women were able that contribute to poor health outcomes. to recreate meaning in new contexts while Newcomers to Canada, however, are less holding lightly to tethers linked to the land likely to engage in these behaviours and are of their births. not more likely to be obese than the average To illuminate these issues further, I begin Canadian (Ng et al. 2005). Social determi- with a brief examination of identity forma- nants of health, therefore, such as socioeco- tion in a transnational and multicultural con- nomic class and access to social support, text, followed by an overview of the research health services and remunerative employ- project. I then present perspectives from ment, appear to the most important contribu- Chilean, Somali and Chinese Canadian tors to this decline in health status (Dunn women who uncovered ways to re-aggregate and Dyck 2000). and realign themselves in Canada. I conclude Generally, immigrant women are better with a discussion of the efforts by these educated than their Canadian-born counter- women to reconfigure their sense of identity parts; however, they are less likely to work and belonging in a new, often materially and in positions that are commensurate with their socially impoverished environment. education and former occupational status than native-born women or foreign-born men (Chard et al. 2000; Statistics Canada (Re) Making Identity and Belonging 2003). Moreover, despite relatively higher in Transnational Context levels of education, immigrant women are disproportionately located in the lowest- waged sectors of the Canadian labour market The traditional notion of culture as a set of (Chard et al. 2000). Professional gatekeeping beliefs, customs and behaviours situated in and demands for Canadian credentials and a particular landscape has been displaced by experience serve as additional—and signifi- the observation that our world is character- cant—obstacles to the efforts of migrants to ised by global flows that interpenetrate com- reclaim past occupational status (Bauder munities north and south. These global 2003; Bannerjee 2004). ethnoscapes are evidence of an increasingly While coping with downward social mo- de-territorialized world where people, goods bility, immigrants and refugee women must and ideas are highly mobile (Appadurai often negotiate new gender and familial 1996). Both intensified connectedness and roles, particularly in light of dislocated fam- more frequent uprooting challenge the idea 53 AiA Denise L. Spitzer that culture is a wholly stable entity quite Disruptions in spatial relations may lead to literally grounded in a specific soil (Gupta increased opportunities to create new attach- and Ferguson 1997). The relationship among ments with other members of society poten- space, people and culture is always a social tially resulting in enhanced social solidarity and historical creation undermining the no- and altered identity constructions (Abdul- tion that there is a ‘natural’ national identity rahim 1993; Ehrkamp 2005). that can elicit firm allegiance from—and offer Travel between homelands can also lead “authentic” identity to—individuals and to an increased sense of displacement that communities (Gupta and Ferguson 1997). For engenders further negotiation of one’s iden- immigrants and refugees, movement and re- tity (Spitzer 2006a). Moreover, transnational settlement necessitates a reconfiguration of linkages between homelands and lands of identities and a re-calibration among mean- resettlement further contribute to hybridized ing, identity and place that is further compli- identities in which multiple versions of self cated by individuals’ confrontation with and community are constructed under con- potentially novel physical and social loca- ditions of inequity (Bhabha 1996). Rather tions. than succumbing to the notion of ethnic mi- Identity provides us with a sense of be- nority cultures as bounded, pristine entities longing, the discursively constructed ‘place that can be juxtaposed against the backdrop to stand’ that links individuals and within of a dominant culture, hybridity embraces whose networks meanings are shared. Iden- the messiness of ongoing negotiations be- tity is neither singular nor is it a fixed cate- tween cultural formations of unequal stature gory, but is instead one that is constantly in where new discourses are shaped in the in- a state of creation, maintenance and reconfig- terstitial spaces between them (Bhabha 1996). uration. Notably, we deploy multiple identi- For example, in their study of African Cana- ties that render others both inside and dian women, Okeke-Ihejirika and Spitzer outside of those groupings depending upon (2005) found that second-generation women context. While identity can be regarded as successfully negotiated between the gen- both a process and a resource that can be dered expectations of their parents and their deployed, it is also delimited by social loca- common desire to retain some form of Afri- tion, socioeconomic status and cultural con- can identity while integrating mainstream text (Dwyer 2000; Fortin 2002; Spitzer 2006a). liberal discourses of individualism and Gender also plays a significant role in shap- choice. ing the form and boundaries of identity for- mation. For example, under diasporic