The generation of identity: Redefining the second generation within a transnational social field

Georges woke up laughing. He had been dreaming of Haiti, not the Haiti he had visited last summer, but the Haiti of his youth. But it wasn't actually the Haiti of his youth either, as he realized when he tried to explain to his wife, Rolande, the feeling of happiness with which he had awakened. He was walking down Grand- Rue, the main street of his hometown of Aux Cayes. The sun was shining, the streets were clean, and the port was bustling with ships. He and his friends were laughing, joking, and having a wonderful time. Once he was awake, Georges laughed again, but this time not from joy. Georges had been dreaming of a Haiti that never was. The Haiti of Georges's youth had actually been more nightmare than joy. The Duvalier dictatorship was clamping down on all dissent. Wearing an Afro, speaking out at school, or joining any form of organization could lead to disappearance, beatings, imprisonment, torture, and murder. Besides being afraid, Georges was constantly anxious about how he would get an education and find some sort of a job. He couldn't even take his next meal for granted, although his father was the director of a technical school and his mother did sewing and fancy embroidery to supplement the family income. Georges's joyful dream of his dear, sweet homeland would have been familiar to immigrants from around the world whose days as well as nights are filled with memories of things past. In the pain of resettling in a new country, reminiscence is often replaced by nostalgia. The deprivations or repression that prompted migration often are put aside. This nostalgia persists even though for Georges and for millions of contemporary immigrants from all over the world, the longed-for homeland is a location of ongoing experience. These immigrants are transmigrants living simultaneously in two countries. They participate in personal and political events in both their homeland and their new land. They live their lives across borders in a social world that includes the often harsh realities of their homeland. Nonetheless, many immigrants continue, as does Georges, to dream of a homeland in which "the sun is shining and the streets are clean." What of the next generation, who were born or grew up in the United States rather than in Haiti? How have they been affected by the fact that the pattern of their lives is shaped not only by their parents' nostalgia but also by their families' enduring transnational connections? And if, as we and a growing number of scholars have been documenting, immigrants' transnational social relations connect homeland and new land into a single social field, how do we delimit the boundaries of the generation born to immigrants, the second generation? After all, many young people living in Haiti are also children of immigrant families, living in Haiti while their parents or other relatives who maintain their households live incorporated into the United States. In this chapter, we employ a transnational perspective to examine the second generation. We look at the effects of transnational migration on young people born in the United States of Haitian parentage and on young people living in Haiti within transnational social fields. We also examine the similarities and differences in identification with Haiti between children of Haitian parentage living in the United States and Haitian youth born in Haiti. Our conclusions are based on research we conducted on Haitian transnational migration and Haitian ethnic, racial, and national identities in New York and in Haiti. This research extended from 1969 to 1999. When we describe the experience of one of the authors, we use the third person, referring to "Georges" or "Nina." To describe our joint analysis we speak in the first person plural. Between 1985 and 1997, in addition to participant observation, we conducted surveys, two in the United States and three in Haiti. In total we interviewed 229 poor and middle-class people and asked about the relationship between those who have left Haiti and those left behind. To discuss the experience of a generation living within the daily realities of transnational migration, we will use quotations from interviews conducted in 1996 and 1997 with two samples of young people, one in New York and one in Haiti, and observations of a conference called in New York in 1996 to build what became the Haitian American Community Action Network. While we draw on data from all the interviews and discuss the identities of the second generation and how they vary over time and in location, degree of education, class position, and political involvement, we highlight the voices of youth who served as the unpaid staff of a radio program in Aux Cayes, Haiti, young people who participated in the 1996 conference in New York, and Haitian students at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. We present these particular voices because they contribute to the public debate within Haitian transnational social fields about the identity of the second generation and the relationship between those in Haiti and the Haitian diaspora. However, we wish to stress that there is not a single voice of Haitian youth, either in Haiti or in the diaspora. There are many experiences and imaginings of Haiti, of the United States, and of their relationship.1 We use our findings to argue for a new and expanded concept of the second generation and to examine long distance nationalism as an ideology of belonging that extends across the territorial boundaries of states, as well as across generational divides (Anderson 1993, 1994; Glick-Schiller and Fouron 2001).