Moral bricolage and immigrant identification: The case of Romanian Americans.

Immigration historians have illuminated the institutional forces that made possible Eastern and southern European immigrants' inclusion in the white racial category in the early twentieth century, initiating their ascent into mainstream America. Sociologists have shown that their descendants assimilated into American society while maintaining symbolic attachments to their ethnic roots. But, whereas current studies of immigrant racialization have focused on the strategies of immigrants of colour for asserting a higher position in the American social hierarchy, scholars have generally overlooked such processes for phenotypically white immigrants. This paper highlights first and 1.5 generation Romanian immigrants' strategies for navigating their ambivalent relationship to Americanness. While they assumed their whiteness unproblematically, Romanian Americans sought to distinguish themselves from whites and non-whites on the basis of their ethnicity. Furthermore, they used American values to distance themselves from their former compatriots. Through moral bricolage, Romanians made strategic use of desirable traits they associated with being Romanian and American, melding them into a particularly worthy ethnic identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]