This Working Paper, “Assimilating into Hispanic America: the Case of Nicaraguan Immigrant Adolescents by Lisa Konczal is part of a series produced by the Immigration & Ethnicity Institute of the Center for Labor Research and Studies at Florida International University. This paper is part of a broader research endeavor entitled The Academic Orientations of Immigrant and Native Minority Adolescents, a longitudinal project funded by the National Science Foundation (SBR-9511515), the Carnegie Corporation and the Andrew Mellon Foundation.
The broader project investigates the causes of positive and adversarial academic orientations among native-born and immigrant minority adolescent school-children. It focuses on the social causes underlying teenagers' attitudes toward education, particularly interaction among different native and immigrant minorities, family, co-ethnic community, and gender. The series of Working Papers addresses specific issues related to the larger project.
No matter what the academic measure, many native-born and immigrant minority school-children underachieve, drop out, and fail to pursue higher education. A critical determinant of academic achievement and children's relationship to school, peers and the broader society is their academic orientation, the student's perception that education is or is not a path to success. Although prejudice and discrimination against minorities affect their academic orientation, minority children respond differently to these pressures. Some manage to adopt a positive academic orientation and pursue educational success while others do not. This research is driven by the question: What complex of factors promotes a positive academic orientation among some children and influences others to simply "get by" or totally reject education? This Working Paper and the others in this series address this fundamental question.
As new immigrants increasingly concentrate in native-born minority neighborhoods, interaction among different ethnic groups becomes both more frequent and more important. This is especially the case among children who associate daily in the school setting. Do immigrant minorities generally assimilate to the academic orientation of American minorities? Is there a reciprocal influence? Do co-ethnic community ties mediate inter-ethnic interactions? Native-born minority and immigrant communities have different perceptions of each other, but we do not know how, if at all, these differing perceptions affect academic orientations of school-children in each minority group.
This paper specifically addresses the issues surrounding the experiences of Nicaraguan high school students attending a high school with a predominantly Cuban American student body. Ironically, the Nicaraguans assimilate by becoming Hispanic, by ostensibly abandoning their national Nicaraguan identity in favor of the pan-ethnic Hispanic identity.
This is a Working Paper. The author and the Immigration & Ethnicity Institute invite any comments and suggestions that you may have.
Copies of this and other Working Papers are available directly from the Immigration & Ethnicity Institute at Florida International University.