Cultivating a Symbolic Ethnicity and Resisting Assimilation: Identity Work Among Hungarian Immigrants

• Main Author: Orsolya Kolozsvari
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: North Carolina Sociological Association 2013-06-01
• Series: Sociation Today
• Subjects: immigration; Hungarian immigration; assimilation; ethnicity
• Online Access: http://www.ncsociology.org/sociationtoday/v111/ethnicity.html

Upon arrival in a host country with considerable ethnic diversity, such as the United States, immigrants are frequently confronted with various different perceptions of local, ethnic, and racial categories and identities. Living in the United States often challenges immigrants to reconsider, modify, or reconstruct their previous identities. This has happened, for example, to Eastern and Southern European immigrants in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and more recently to Korean, Filipino, Mexican and African immigrants from Ghana and Cape Verde, who all have had to reinterpret their identities upon arrival in the United States. Many new immigrants start thinking about themselves in ethnic terms for the first time and (re)discover their ethnicity. Through 20 in-depth interviews with Hungarian immigrants this study explores ethnic identity construction among Hungarians in the United States.