Preserving Ethnic Identity

Recently the focus of historical studies of different ethnic groups in the United States has shifted from the transformation of ethnic identity to its preservation. Whereas earlier historians argued that the ethnic identity of various immigrant groups to the United States blended to form an American national character, the new scholarship has recent trend; it also exemplifies a problem that is common to such scholarship.

In comparing the first three generations of Japanese Americans (the Issei, Nisei, and Sansei), Fugita and O’Brien conclude that assimilation to United States culture increased among Japanese Americans over three generations, but that a sense of ethnic community endured. Although the persistence of community is stressed by the authors, their emphasis in and O’Brien themselves acknowledge that there has been a “weakening of Japanese American ethnic community life.”

Because of the social changes weakening the bonds of community, Fugita and O’Brien maintain that the community cohesion of Japanese Americans is notable not for its initial intensity but because “there remains a degree of involvement in the ethnic community surpassing that found in most other ethnic groups at similar points in sense of “peoplehood.” They argue that this sense of peoplehood extended beyond local and family ties.

Fugita and O’Brien’s hypothesis illustrates a common problem in studies that investigate the history of ethnic community. Like historians who have studied European ethnic cultures in the United States, Fugita and O’Brien have explained persistence of ethnic community by citing a preexisting sense of national consciousness that is independent of how a that have adapted to United States culture and been exposed to the pluralism of American life.