Kyeyoung
Park, "Voices and Voyages: The Hopes and Fears of Korean Immigrants
in South America"
Abstract:
This essay examines the processes of cultural and physical displacement
among Korean immigrants now in the U.S. who were born or raised
in Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay. Some 100,000 Korean immigrants
currently reside in South America, while 30,000 have relocated
to the U.S. The existing literature on Diaspora tends to describe
these displaced populations as either victims of oppression
or romantically as successful migrants. Recent literature often
locates the transnational experience in the context of the place
of origin, or root, without paying sufficient attention to the
entire route, or minorities' encounter with others outside the
dominant culture. This paper, based on ethnographic interviews
with Korean immigrants in Los Angeles who originally migrated
to South America, analyzes their relatively positive experiences
in South America, compared to the U.S. The analysis focuses
on: (1) structure of domination facing immigrants; (2) forms
of prejudice and discrimination, or lack thereof; (3) Korean
immigrants' strategies for socioeconomic mobility. Specifically,
this paper critically analyzes the politics of development and
globalization in both sending and receiving countries of Korea,
Brazil, and Argentina and Korean immigrants' structural location
in the apparel industries in South America. Lastly, the paper
maps out some similarities and differences between Koreans and
Jews' economic, social, and political responses in their displaced
settings and the implications for their future relationships.
About
Kyeyoung Park: Kyeyoung Park is an assistant professor of
Anthropology and Asian American Studies at UCLA. She also taught
at Princeton University in 1998 and 1999. She attended Seoul
National University in Korea before coming to the United States
for graduate studies at the City University of New York, Graduate
Center where she obtained her Ph.D. Her book, The Korean American
Dream: Immigrants and Small Business in New York City (1997),
by Cornell University Press, is the winner of the 1998 Outstanding
Book Award in History and Social Science from the Association
for Asian American Studies. In 1997-98, she was a fellow at
the Russell Sage Foundation. Currently, she is engaged in completing
a second book about racial relations/meanings among Korean,
African, and Latino Americans before and after the 1992 Los
Angeles Uprising. She also co-edited a special issue of Amerasia
Journal on Second Generation Asian Americans. She has published
many articles in journals such as American Anthropologist, Urban
Anthropology, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, and Amerasia Journal.
Her research interests include theories of culture and forms
of social inequality such as race, class, and gender.
