Exercising agency under social constraints: The identity construction and negotiation of Chinese working-class immigrant women in San Francisco Bay Area and the role of Chinese ethnic newspapers in this process (California)

My dissertation takes an ethnographical approach to examine identity issues of Chinese immigrant working-class women in the San Francisco Bay Area. I spent a year doing fieldwork among Chinese immigrants in the area, seeking to answer two major questions: How do the women react to external social situations and construct their racial/ethnic, gender, class, and cultural identities? And what are the influences of the media that they encounter on a daily basis on their reactions to hostile social situations in their identification processes? The research reveals a process of identity construction and negotiation by these marginalized women, whose ethnic/racial, class, gender, and cultural identities are all called into question by various external social factors, including the turmoil of immigration, crushing work routines, the racial and class oppression in U.S. society, and the traditional Chinese patriarchal values that have been transplanted into immigrant settings. I argue that once uprooted from home cultures and enmeshed in intercultural misunderstandings, these women turn to Chinese ethnic media to cultivate nostalgic feelings, nationalist sentiments, and a sense of belonging. However, these media have both positive and negative impacts on immigrants' lives. On the one hand, they enrich the women's interpretive repertoire of various racial, ethnic, and cultural situations in the host country. On the other hand, however, they also instill white supremacist ideas and censor immigrants' social behaviors, which generate different modes of negotiation from these immigrant working-class women.