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Ethnic and Racial Studies
ISSN: 0141-9870 (Print) 1466-4356 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rers20
Immigration and the arts: a theoretical inquiry
Paul DiMaggio & Patricia Fernández-Kelly
To cite this article: Paul DiMaggio & Patricia Fernández-Kelly (2015) Immigration
and the arts: a theoretical inquiry, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 38:8, 1236-1244, DOI:
10.1080/01419870.2015.1016081
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2015.1016081
Published online: 22 Apr 2015.
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GUEST EDITORIAL
Immigration and the arts: a theoretical inquiry
Paul DiMaggio and Patricia Fernández-Kelly
(Received 3 February 2015; accepted 3 February 2015)
This paper proposes a systematic approach to the study of immigration and art by
considering relevant theoretical concepts. We focus on the role of institutions and economic
change as forces shaping the expressive alternatives of immigrants and their children.
Keywords: immigration; art; immigrant assimilation; cultural incorporation; expressive
entrepreneurship
Introduction
Three things are apparent with respect to immigration and art. First, work in that field
is woefully underdeveloped despite the significance of expressive behaviours in
processes of immigrant mobility and adaptation. As they cross borders, immigrants
rely on a vast repertory of communicative behaviours to meet the challenges of
dislocation and settlement in often hostile environments. In lieu of full knowledge
about the mores of adopted countries, and often lacking necessary linguistic skills,
immigrants resort to aesthetic means – the culinary arts, music, dance, poetry, and so
on – to communicate with the wider society. They also use art to assert dignity and
claim national membership. Yet little is known about the mechanisms connecting
immigrant artistic behaviour and social incorporation.
Second, with a few exceptions (Martiniello 2015), texts on art and immigration
give scant attention to the role of institutions and organizations that create boundaries
and inducements for immigrants to engage in artistic expression. Creative behaviour
is not a random occurrence driven solely by personal desires; individuals act in
environments shaped by legislative and policy measures. There is, however, a paucity
of research about how immigrants in concrete institutional milieus organize and
produce art.
Third, little is known about the relationship between immigrant art and economic
change (DiMaggio and Fernández-Kelly 2010). There is suggestive evidence that
expressive behaviour is being used by both immigrants and native-born citizens as
means to circumvent the rigours of labour markets affected by neo-liberal economic
policies; but almost no work exists on that subject. Below, we discuss these three
areas, hoping to stimulate further thinking on art and immigration.
The names of the two authors are listed alphabetically; both are equally responsible for the ideas in
this paper.
© 2015 Taylor & Francis
Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2015
Vol. 38, No. 8, 1236–1244, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2015.1016081
Institutions, immigrants and the arts
A notable gap in research concerns the ways in which the arts are organized – both
at the level of the host society and within immigrant communities. Institutions sit at
the nexus of two endemic tensions that beset immigrant artists1
and organizations
sponsoring their work. How does the artist balance a commitment to a community
and its culture, with the desire to experiment and transcend group boundaries, either
for career success or for artistic satisfaction? The most extreme solutions are the
least problematic. Not everyone embraces the romantic ideal of the artist as
innovator. Many folk artisans, for example, produce traditional objects in timehonoured
ways (Becker 1978). For such creative actors, remaining within
the immigrant enclave and producing art for co-ethnics may be a viable strategy.
By the same token, an ambitious second-generation artist whose goal is success on
the national or international stage may contemplate an obvious approach: seeking
fame through channels outside the immigrant enclave – classical oboe training at
Juilliard or singing choreographed pop tunes on America’s Got Talent. For most
artists, however, the tension is real, involving both identity and career uncertainty
(Bourdieu 1993).
Organizations face different quandaries: should programming present immigrant
culture in its purest form or treat it as a living, evolving force, continuously absorbing
elements and, in turn, influencing the arts of the host society? If the organization opts
for purity, should it accomplish it by empowering artists with similar values, or should
it identify curators with professional training to create exhibitions and productions
that represent the community’s traditional culture?
Unless they opt for an entirely commercial orientation that places no intrinsic value
on immigrant culture, both artists and organizations face a problem of authenticity.2
As sociologists of art have noted (Peterson 1997; Regev 2011), defining authenticity,
much less identifying examples of it, is always problematic. The power to determine
what counts as authentic is a valuable resource over which groups and individuals
struggle. Just as Turkish archaeologists have oscillated from viewing Western
classical or Anatolian antiquities as worthy of excavation depending on the political
and cultural orientation of the country’s leadership (Ozdogan 2002), immigrants must
decide what aspects of their own traditions are worthy of recognition as ‘authentic’.
Research on these endemic tensions must take account of the institutional forms
that the host society makes available to immigrant artists. Distinct institutional forms
promote different resolutions of the tensions between purity and innovation or selfportrayal
and curation. They also facilitate or impede various outcomes in the political
skirmishes surrounding authenticity and representation (Dávila 2012).
The USA has a distinctive system of support for the arts in two respects. First, its
size and wealth enable a critical mass to sustain profitable popular-culture industries.
Such industries exploit globalization whenever possible, but commercial rewards are
mostly realizable at the national level. Therefore, artists may see advantages in
remaining close to their immigrant communities. At the same time, demand is ample
enough that markets can be segmented in many ways – for some cultural forms,
commercial enterprise is a viable source of support for sufficiently large immigrant
expressions.
Ethnic and Racial Studies 1237
Second, direct government support for the arts and culture in the USA is limited,
but indirect support through tax deductions for donors to non-profit organizations is
generous and bestows immense power on private philanthropy as opposed to
government subsidies. The combination of critical mass and decentralization creates
a more diverse and shifting institutional landscape than is present in many smaller
countries. Moreover (and this is a central hypothesis that we propose to the research
community), each of these institutional forms bears affinities to particular modes of
cultural incorporation of immigrant artists into the host community.
Immigrant art and cultural incorporation
Without claiming to set out a full inventory of possibilities, below we consider
theoretical scenarios related to cultural incorporation.
Isolation
It is possible to imagine communities in which immigrant artists pursue traditional
forms without any contact with members of the host community, but this extreme is
probably unsustainable for any length of time. Isolation is most likely to exist in
immigrant enclaves that have not been discovered by outsiders. Artists working in
isolated niches are unconcerned with authenticity because theirs is the unmarked
category. Only when non-ethnic others present themselves are cultural boundaries
salient.
Core-periphery
In other cases, a subset of immigrants may be celebrated by co-ethnics for maintaining
strict boundaries around indigenous forms. Yet, entrepreneurs from inside or outside
the group may link them to host-country publics who value authenticity. In Queens,
New York, for example, immigrant restauranteurs have maintained the alleged purity
of Chinese regional cuisines even as a tiny industry of online food blogs, devoted to
ferreting out the ‘best’ and ‘most authentic’ examples of regional foods, has emerged
to serve a periphery of out-group members.
Concerns over authenticity are likely to be most salient in communities
characterized by the core-periphery mode of incorporation: the ability of middlemen
to (re)present immigrant culture to the periphery depends on maintaining the purity of
the core. Nevertheless, once outside audiences take an interest, the core begins to
(dis)integrate. Two organizational forms – politically inflected community associations
and not-for-profit organizations – are best equipped to maintain boundaries
around autochthonous cultural forms. In the former, status derives from purity and
artist participants exercise social control by equating stylistic deviation to disloyalty.
In the latter, securing authenticity is the task of non-profit organizations dependent
upon private donors, philanthropic foundations or government agencies with an
interest in defending authentic cultures from the market (Stern, Seifert, and Vitiello
2010).3
1238 P. DiMaggio and P. Fernández-Kelly
Pan-ethnic synthesis
In other cases, especially when national-origin groups are too small to constitute
effective markets or to mount large productions, cultural work may be organized
around pan-ethnic identities. Murphy (2010), for example, describes how Boston-area
musicians from Central American nations perform in mariachi bands, borrowing
Mexican genres of sufficient breadth to generate viable audiences and re-enact a
shared musical culture.
Pan-ethnic synthesis is most likely to occur when the community is so small that it
cannot constitute an audience for communal artistic performances, and when commercial
enterprises are the primary channels through which immigrant culture reaches the
public. Under those conditions, artists will be encouraged to expand (or, at times,
falsify) their ethnic identities to encompass sufficient scale to produce both artistic
programmes and paying audiences to attend them. Producing pan-ethnic definitions of
immigrant culture is facilitated when different national-origin groups share a common
language and when intermarriage produces composite identities in the second or third
generations (Kasinitz 2009; DiMaggio 1991; Wong 2010). Pressures towards pan-ethnic
representations of immigrant culture are especially effective when big corporations
become involved. As Mora (2014) has documented, Univision and other media outlets
tapping the US Spanish-speaking market not only exploited pan-ethnicity but actively
collaborated in producing and institutionalizing ‘Hispanic’ as a population category.
Selective representation
Immigrant communities may also maintain what, following Goffman (1959), may be
called ‘backstage’ and ‘front-stage’ versions of a shared culture. Some Chinese
restaurants consign dishes with ingredients such as pork intestines or pigeon to the
Chinese-only menu, while adapting traditional dishes to host-country tastes. Similarly,
Haitian and Cuban botánicas in Miami offer buyers an assortment of arts and crafts
with double identities – to outsiders they are curios; to insiders they represent magical
or sacred objects.
Selective representation requires comparatively high levels of social control and
compliance, sufficient to maintain power over immigrants who might share intimate
or low-status cultural forms with outsiders for profit. This is easier in small
communities where informal and not-for-profit organizations, managed by individuals
embedded in the immigrant power structure, play a primary role in public events such
as festivals, parades and exhibits. Culture may be kept backstage because it violates
normative religious beliefs (or because it represents arcane shared beliefs); because it
may discredit practitioners (e.g. narcocorrido – tunes celebrating the exploits of local
drug lords); because it is associated with disempowered minorities (as with
indigenous rap music); or because elites prefer to feature immigrant contributions to
high culture (e.g. ballet versus hip-hop dance).
Permeable niche
Some immigrant artists may write, create, or perform primarily for their co-ethnics,
with occasional crossover productions reaching broader markets. Such niches often
Ethnic and Racial Studies 1239
provide a typical career path, whereby successful artists shift from niche to mass
market and then, when their star fades, return to the fold. Ricky Martin sang with the
successful Puerto Rican teen group Menudo before crossing into the mainstream pop
market. Tejano artist Baldemar Huerta had a successful career as a country and rock
artist under the name Freddy Fender, before returning to Spanish-language recordings
towards the end of his life. This was a standard sequence among both black and rural
white performers through the 1960s, when gospel music artists would try their hand at
the country music or R&B markets, shifting into those performing circuits for as long
as they could sustain their popularity, but returning to the gospel track as their careers
ebbed.
The incorporation of immigrant culture is facilitated when immigrant communities
are large enough to sustain enclave business niches representing their own art. Nonprofit
galleries or performance venues tend to select artists with a commitment to purity,
and place constraints on their ability to deviate from communal understandings of
authenticity. By contrast, commercial immigrant entities demand weaker authenticity
claims, and may even encourage artists to venture outside the enclave market, so long as
they can benefit through commissions or management fees. The ability of mainstream
media to incorporate immigrant artists is enhanced in music and film by the rise of the
internet as a major platform for publicity about and distribution of those forms.
Qualified assimilation
Immigrants may move entirely into mainstream markets by: (1) tailoring the
representation of their groups to the expectations of host-country audiences; or (2)
seasoning their work with elements of their culture of origin. The first mode was most
prominent in the twentieth century, whereas the nineteenth-century variety stage
featured English-origin comics caricaturing German, Irish, Jewish or, especially,
African American stereotypes. By the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries,
mainstream performers drew on their ethnic backgrounds to provide flavour to
popular hits: thus, 1970s Polish American pop star Bobby Vinton used elements of
polka instrumentation in some of his tunes, and Italian American artists like Tony
Bennett adopted songs like ‘That’s Amore’ (the lyrics to which were penned by an
English immigrant to the USA). Chris Ofili, the Nigerian English painter, and winner
of the Turner Prize, exemplifies the second mode of qualified incorporation. Born in
London, he combines Nigerian forms and media, including elephant dung, with iconic
images from the Catholic pantheon.
Qualified assimilation will not occur until second- or third-generation immigrants
assimilate into the larger society. Indeed, such artists may deploy communal cultural
forms only after making their mark at the national level. Cellist Yo-Yo Ma, a firstgeneration
Chinese American, was educated at Juilliard and Harvard and did not record
an album of Chinese compositions until 2000, long after he was well established.
Outside appropriation
This mode of incorporation entails the wholesale appropriation of an imagined
immigrant culture by the host society with little involvement of immigrants themselves.
1240 P. DiMaggio and P. Fernández-Kelly
Thus McDonald’s offers a ‘sausage burrito’ and other Latin-themed menu options.
Similarly, mozzarella sticks and calamari have become standard fare in ‘American’
restaurants far from their origins in Italian cuisine; and New York’s famed Torrisi’s
gained acclaim when its Italian American chefs incorporated ingredients like dried
shrimp from nearby Chinatown into conventional Italian dishes.
The appropriation of immigrant culture by outsiders requires three conditions: (1)
that cultural forms are organized commercially; (2) that a cultural element (an
instrumental form, a culinary ingredient, a graphic symbol) is sufficiently familiar to
outsiders to be meaningful; and (3) that the immigrant community does not mobilize
to contest outsiders’ appropriation of their culture as illegitimate or offensive. The
second and third conditions are most likely to hold when an immigrant group has
been strongly incorporated into the host community through social interaction,
intermarriage and representation among employees of the appropriating companies.
The strategies outlined above depend in large part on the institutional forms
available to immigrant artists. Each form illustrates a particular relationship towards
the community of origin, and towards particular representations of authenticity, based
on the preferences and agendas of actors who control critical resources. Commercial
forms tend to erode strong boundaries around genres and other cultural categories in
the pursuit of markets, but the extent to which and the ways in which they do this
depend on the manner in which markets for artistic expressions are segmented.
Narrow segments permit greater cultural specificity, whereas broader segmentation
enforces the blurring of genres and identities. Even where segments are narrow,
commercial firms will rarely emphasize stylistic purity or tradition and will almost
always trade off authenticity for revenues or define authenticity in a way that
maximizes financial rewards (DiMaggio 1987).
Expressive entrepreneurship
Also important from a theoretical standpoint is the relationship between immigrant art
and economic change. The concept of expressive entrepreneurship was first
introduced to designate ways in which second- and third-generation immigrants
seek to circumvent labour market uncertainties (Fernández-Kelly and Konczal 2005)
by relying on artistic expression to generate income as well as meaning. The term
sheds light on new dimensions of entrepreneurship in immigrant communities. Firstgeneration
arrivals tend to enter host societies as providers of cheap labour or as highskilled
workers attempting to survive in formal and informal markets. Their children
and grandchildren, by contrast, are making claims on both pecuniary autonomy and
social significance.
When they first arrive, immigrants tend to measure success through benchmarks in
their countries of origin. Among working-class immigrants, even small increases in
income and status match up favourably with the limited prospects left behind. The
opposite is true for their descendants, whose tastes and experience are formed in host
countries and whose recollection of the ancestral land is imagined, not felt through
direct experience. Their search is not solely for subsistence, but often for recognition,
wealth and even fame. Among low-income workers, those goals are harder to achieve,
given limited opportunities in employment. But even educated second- and thirdEthnic
and Racial Studies 1241
generation immigrants yearn for levels of independence that are difficult to attain in
the highly regimented corporations dotting Silicon Valley or Wall Street.
An implicit claim behind the concept of expressive entrepreneurship is that the use
of art and art-related activities to secure revenues as well as meaning occurs wherever
there is a convergence between: (1) rising aspirations on the part of younger
populations; and (2) labour markets perceived by the young to offer limited
opportunities. Starting in the 1970s, and accelerating in the subsequent decades,
neo-liberal economic policies promoted deindustrialization and the relocation of
manufacturing operations to less developed countries. That, in turn, severely reduced
the availability of stable, long-term employment for multitudes of youngsters growing
up in the USA. In a context characterized by static wages, dwindling union
membership, and diminishing paths for upward mobility, young people use aesthetic
expression to supplement their income and, sometimes, to achieve notoriety. Such is
the case of Armando Christian Pérez, better known by his stage name Pitbull. Born in
1981, in Miami’s Little Havana, a residential tract famous for its concentration of
Cuban exiles, Pérez became involved in drug dealing as an adolescent. He also
acquired a conscience fixed on giving voice to marginal and oppressed people.
Talented and ambitious, he later became one of the most successful and richest pop
singers of his generation.
In several ways, Pitbull embodies the themes summarized in this paper. His art
combines the music and rhymes of his ancestral country with rap, a genre associated
with African American struggles. He is equally inspired by Jose Martí, Celia Cruz,
Tupac Shakur and a panoply of successful entrepreneurs. His music finds authenticity
in the fusion of an immigrant past and a claim to the American Dream. In every way
he represents the possibilities of expressive entrepreneurship.
Conclusion
In this paper, we have argued for a systematic approach to the study of immigration
and art by focusing on institutions as critical forces shaping the aesthetic alternatives
of immigrants and their children. We have drawn attention to modes of incorporation
shaped by governmental and civil organizations, and underscored the part played by
global economic change in opening new channels that are turning art into a significant
vehicle for immigrants to attain both financial independence and social prominence.
We see this brief outline as a proposal for new ways to contemplate art and for
researchers to consider further exploration of a field neglected until now.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. We use the term ‘artist’ to refer to creative workers in many fields: painters, sculptors,
muralists, artisans, singers, songwriters, dancers, actors, playwrights, concert violinists, DJs
and turntablists, chefs, comics and fashion designers. Artists of different kinds face similar
1242 P. DiMaggio and P. Fernández-Kelly
tensions and dilemmas, but variation in the institutions that support different kinds of work
have profound effects on the way that they can resolve them.
2. In this paper, we use ‘authenticity’ to refer to any claims on behalf of an artist or artwork
that it represents the culture of the immigrant group in some way, with the understanding that
such claims are ordinarily disputed; and we use the term ‘purity’ to refer to such artists or
artworks whose status as representative of the immigrant culture is accepted by virtually all
attentive members of the relevant community.
3. For example, New York’s Tutuma Social Club, devoted to promoting Afro-Peruvian jazz,
was founded by an Italian American restaurateur with a strong interest in Peruvian culture.
Advised by a PhD ‘curator’ on the faculty of a nearby university, engaging a network of
Peruvian jazz artists, and promoting cultural tourism as well as Peruvian cuisine, the club
combined features of a commercial enterprise with those of a cultural non-profit organization.
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PAUL DIMAGGIO is the A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Sociology and Public
Affairs at Princeton University.
ADDRESS: Department of Sociology, Princeton University, 118 Wallace Hall,
Princeton, NJ 08544, USA. Email: dimaggio@princeton.edu
PATRICIA FERNÁNDEZ KELLY is Senior Lecturer in the Department of
Sociology at Princeton University.
ADDRESS: Department of Sociology, Princeton University, 255 Wallace Hall,
Princeton, NJ 08544, USA. Email: mpfk@princeton.edu
1244 P. DiMaggio and P. Fernández-Kelly