Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: As part of a larger project, which examines the racial/ethnic, gender, class, and cultural identities of Chinese immigrant working-class women, this paper focuses on how immigrant woman workers negotiate their racial/ethnic identities in particular. The researcher spent one year in the San Francisco Bay Area doing fieldwork among Chinese immigrant woman workers and found out that, upon migration, these women have gone through horrible experiences of racial/ethnic discrimination. In reaction, they have developed a strong Chinese nationalist sentiment and a collective ethnic identity. However, when they withdraw to their nationalist sentiment, the host society does not hesitate to use the withdrawal as a pretext to question their loyalty and to further deny their due rights as American citizens. With limited opportunities and life needs at the doorstep, the women often find it necessary to adopt certain white cultural norms. But they have never stopped negotiating with external racial oppressions and white supremacist ideas. In this process of negotiation, Chinese ethnic media messages have both liberating and paralyzing influences.