Russian immigrants in US - classification possible?

[Sapienza, Filipp]

Greetings SEELANG participants. I am currently planning a study involving Russian speaking immigrants. In my literature search I have run into the problem of how exactly to define and delineate the members of this group. I’m not talking about “waves” but rather, nationality and/or country of birth relative to cultural ethnicity.

For example, research by Fran Markovitz points out the ways that Russian speakers in new countries tend to find other Russian speakers regardless of nationality in order to find companionship and comraderie and a sense of home and so forth. Other more recent research by Ogden, Ogden and Schau outlining the overall problem of ethnicity and immigrant groups in the US (vis a vis marketing and business) uses the term “micro-cultures” and speaks of “ethnic” groups and identification in terms of “objective” characteristics (such as census data) and “subjective” characteristics (such as one’s sense of identity). Of course this issue has been extensively discussed in the sociological literature on globalization.

My own experience working with Russian speaking immigrants confirms the unclarities involved in how these groups define themselves. For example, I know two families (one from Ukraine, one from Belorus) who consider themselves “ethnically” Russian even though they come from countries outside of Russia. I also work with a fair number of students who are children of Russian speaking immigrants having grown up their whole lives in the US and also consider themselves as ethnically Russian. I suspect this situation is not unique to Russian speaking immigrants. I’ve had Pakistani and Indian students join the same organizations and visit the same websites in classes. Although the groups are somewhat hostile toward each other in Kashmir, in the US this hostility seems not to be an issue and in fact they seem to find more in common when away from their home countries.

So, if one were to group Russian speaking immigrants in some order of classification, how might one go about doing this? For example, one thought I had was A: immigrants (first-generation from Russia or “ethnically” Russians such as Ukranians, Belorussians, etc, who consider themselves Russian); B second-generation or more immigrants (children of immigrants who learned about Russian culture outside Russia). However, I can see how this classification might be problematic. I’d be interested in how people who study this group more extensively think about this matter. Feel free to reply off-list if you wish.

Thank you.

Filipp Sapienza
University of Colorado – Denver


Filipp Sapienza
Department of Communication
University of Colorado Denver Health Sciences Center
P.O. Box 173364 Campus Box 176
Denver, CO 80217

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