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FROM THE TIGRIS TO THE ROUGE: AN EXPLORATORY
STUDY OF CHALDEAN GENDERED ETHNICITY AND
GENDER TRANSITION

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FROM THE TIGRIS TO THE ROUGE: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY OF
CHALDEAN GENDERED ETHNICITY AND GENDER TRANSITION

By

Charles Johnson Spurlock

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPY

SOCIOLOGY

2010

ABSTRACT

FROM THE TIGRIS TO THE ROUGE: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY OF
CHALDEAN GENDERED ETHNICITY AND GENDER TRANSITION

By
Charles Johnson Spurlock

The literature on gender adaptation and migration has illuminated a general
pattern of changing gender relations within immigrant families and communities.
Immigrant women are accomplishing this task with the aid of economic and power
resources they obtain in the host society. Still little theoretical or empirical attention has
been directed at immigrant groups that maintain patriarchal gender relations.

To ﬁll this void, this study examines Iraqi Chaldean immigrants who are a group
from an understudied region of the world and who retain patriarchy authority in their
families and community organizations. Patriarchal dominance is a cultural feature
particular to Near East and Central Asia given that the extended family is the dominant
household arrangement. Beyond households, kinship networks provide access to most
social, political and economic opportunities, making kinship ties persistent and the
gender order patriarchal. Evaluating the social processes immigrants from this geographic
region experience is crucial given the current political involvement of the United States
and with the increasing number of immigrants and refugees arriving for settlement.

To address our needs for more primary research on Near East immigrants, life
history data is collected from ﬁfty-one respondents to address the issue of patriarchal

persistence. Respondents explain their migration motivations, community building and

family history in a dialogical interview. The interviews are low intervention and seen as
polyphonic dialogues understandable to in-group members.

The theoretical approach builds on a structuration model identifying that
emotional and symbolic structures in gender relations create normative constraints
against immigrant and second-generation men and women. Within this ﬁ'amework, social
reproduction occurs. Men accept these constraints acting as responsible patriarchs for
their extended families, while women negotiate within woman-to-woman networks for
desired concessions without a wholesale challenge to existing patriarchal gender
relations.

This research provides an additional case study and expands our theoretical
horizons beyond power and economic factors. Further, pre-migration factors indicate that
men dominate most social and economic resources leaving women in a dependent state.
After migration, ethnic traditions within the community and family build formidable
emotional and symbolic structures that extend patriarchal customs into the second

generation.

Cepyright by
Charles Johnson Spurlock
20 1 O

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I extend special thanks to Steven Gold whose tireless efforts brought this work to
completion. He acted as a patient adviser while reviewing multiple versions of this
dissertation. I marvel at his near encyclopedic knowledge of books, regional studies,
special reports and journal articles on cultural adaptations of multiple immigrant and
ethnic groups of which he has apprised me to contextualize this study within several rich
intellectual traditions. He certainly made more content available than I utilized for this
study. I appreciate Maxine Baca Zinn for her guidance on gender research and directing
this study towards greater methodological clarity. Toby Ten Eyck offered encouragement
along the way and schooled me to understand my status as a young sociologist. Leslie
Moch provided a steady hand during the completion phase of the research making
multiple suggestions for clariﬁcation and presentational style. My colleague Raymond
Liedka provided feedback and comments which have been instrumental in the completion
of my project as well.

I save my last comments for the sacriﬁces my family made while I ﬁnished this
endevour. To my son Danni Zhu, who wrote a poem at ten years of age describing his
daddy as a vampire for staying up all night writing this dissertation, I ﬁnd you a constant
source of inspiration. Without a doubt my greatest appreciation extends to my Lao P0,
Zhu Suyun. Without her constant and intense support, this project may have never come

to fruition.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1
GENDER ADAPTATION AND MIGRATION:

THE CHALDEAN CASE STUDY ................................................ 1

CHALDEAN S INTRODUCTORY REMARKS ................................ 2

GENDER APPROACHES TO SOCIETY ......................................... 7

Structuration ............................................................... 7
Social Reproduction .................................................... 12
GENDERED ADAPTATION AND MIGRATION:
THE LITERATURE ............................................................... 15
Transgressive Practices ................................................ l7
Fragmented Structure .................................................. 19

CHALDEAN STUDIES SO FAR ................................................ 20

GENERATIONS .................................................................... 23

PLAN OF DISSERTATION ...................................................... 24
CHAPTER 2
LIFE HISTORIES ........................................................................... 27

EXPERIENCES IN THE FIELD ................................................. 28

OVERCOMING OUTSIDER STATUS ........................................ 31

CHALDEAN MOTIVATION TO PARTICIPATE .......................... .35

LIFE HISTORY DATA AND LIFE STORY INTERVIEWS ............... 37

RESEARCH PROCESS ........................................................... 41

SAMPLING .......................................................................... 42

CAUTION ON PSUEDONYMS ................................................. 43

DATA ANALYSIS ................................................................. 43

CONCLUSION ...................................................................... 45
CHAPTER 3
MIGRATION: A CENTURY IN THE MAKING ...................................... 47

MIGRATION NETWORK THEORY AND THE GENDER ORDER. 47

IMMIGRANT COHORTS ........................................................ 52

CHALDEAN COHORTS ......................................................... 53

POLTICAL AND ECONOMIC CONTEXT: THE FIRST COHORT ...... 56

SOCIAL TIES, SOCIAL CAPITAL AND PATRIARCHY ................. 58

POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC CONTEXT:

THE SECOND COHORT ......................................................... 61
SOCIAL TIES, SOCIAL CAPITAL AND PATRIARCHY .......................... 70
THIRD COHORT ........................................................................... 75
CONCLUSION .............................................................................. 75

vi

CHAPTER 4
EMOTIONAL AND SYMBOLIC STRUCTURES

OF GENDER RELATIONS ................................................................. 77
ISSUES OF FAMILY STRUCTURE .............................................. 78
CHALDEAN FAMILY STRUCTURE ............................................ 81
WELLSPRINGS OF CHALDEAN CLASSICAL PATRIARCHY .......... 84

Migration Networks ........................................................... 85
Chaldean Sociability ........................................................ 87
Family Traditions ............................................................ 90

CONCLUSION .......................................................................... 96

CHAPTER 5

SOCIAL REPRODUCTION OF CONNECTIVE PATRIARCHY ................... 98
CHALDEAN HABITUS ........................................................... 99

Gender Socialization ....................................................... 100
Dating ....................................................................... 1 03
Education .................................................................... 105
Summary of the Chaldean Habitus ....................................... 106
SOCIAL FIELD ..................................................................... 107
Dating ....................................................................... 107
Symbolic Violence ........................................................... l 12
CONCLUSION ..................................................................... 1 17

CHAPTER 6

CONCLUSION .............................................................................. l 19
GENDER ADAPTATION ......................................................... 1 19
CHALDEAN PATRIARCHY .................................................... 120
STRUCTURE OF GENDER RELATIONS: STRUCTURATION. . . . 120
SOCIAL REPRODUCTION ...................................................... 123
CENTURY IN THE MAKING ................................................... 124
EMOTIONAL AND SYMBOLIC STRCUTURES
OF GENDER RELATIONS ...................................................... 126
SOCIAL REPRODUCTION ...................................................... 127
LIMITATIONS ..................................................................... 128
FURTURE RESEARCH .......................................... . ................. 129
CONCLUSIONS ................................................................. 1.. 130

APPENDIX 1 ................................................................................. 131

APPENDIX 2 ................................................................................. 133

APPENDIX 3.0 .............................................................................. 138

REFERENCES .............................................................................. 143

vii

CHAPTER 1

GENDER ADAPTATION AND MIGRATION: THE CHALDEAN CASE STUDY

This study investigates gender relations among Chaldean immigrants and the
second generation. While most research indicates that women gain domestic authority
and reorder community structures towards egalitarian standards, Chaldeans show notable
patriarchal persistence. This remarkable outcome relates to the world region that
Chaldeans migrate from, and the ethnic resources they have used for building an
institutionally complete community. To untangle pre-migration inﬂuences, I review the
relationship between Iraqi society and Chaldean community. To understand the post-
migration period, I look at inter-community exchanges which reestablish both normative
and economic patriarchy. My variation on this subject is to examine the role that
symbolic and emotional structures play in maintaining conservative gender relations. I
further analyze women’s agency from a social reproduction perspective. This
investigation adds a case study of patriarchal persistence that expands our theoretical
approach in the gender adaptation and migration ﬁeld.

The gender adaption and migration literature focuses on realignments that
transpire in the patriarchal order of immigrant families and communities. While root
causes vary for why immigrant men lose control over the social institutions and group
norms they use to dominate co-ethnic women, the ﬁeld holds that immigrant women play
the leading role in challenging patriarchy within their families and community
organizations. In order to advance our theoretical understanding of this social process, I

utilize the works of Robert Connell (1987) and Pierre Bourdieu (2001). Both theorists

have developed positions consistent with the gender adaptation and migration ﬁeld that
“. .. gender organizes a number of immigrant practices, beliefs, and institutions”
(Hondagneu-Sotelo 2003: 9). In accounting for practices and beliefs, Connell analyzes
structures of gender relations within family, schools, and workplaces by identifying
gender relations in terms of power, economy, emotions and symbols. Bourdieu
incorporates practices and beliefs into his habitus construct (dispositions guiding social
practice) that contributes to social reproduction. I seek to identify Chaldean gender

structures and habitus.

CHALDEAN S: INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

The single most important factor for understanding this group’s gender adaptation
is the strength of their ethnic identity as supported by the many community institutions in
the pre- and post-migration periods. An important factor for understanding the strength of
ethnic attachment is historicity (Bellah et a1. 1996). While Chaldean Catholicism was
recognized by the Roman Catholic Church in 1551 CE, Detroit Chaldeans date their
identity to antiquity with advances in civilization, as with Hammurabi’s legal code, and
early developments in mathematics, science and agriculture. In essence, the community
sees themselves as descendants of the native peoples of Iraq predating Arab inﬂuence. Rt.
Reverend Sarhad Jammo’s (1993) writing embodies much of the intra-community
dialogue about who the Chaldeans are.

Around 634 A. D., Moslem Arabs conquered the region, and Islam was imposed

as the religion of the state, and became gradually thereafter the religion of the

majority; the Arabic language and culture became as well the language and

culture of the majority. Christians remained what they were, i.e. the descendants
of those ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia and the heirs of their cultural
heritage. Therefore, present day Chaldeans and Assyrians are precisely that:
ethnically, they are the descendants of the ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia;
culturally, they are the heirs of the Aramaic language and heritage.

Recognizing these origins remains a part of the everyday discussion that afﬁrms

traditions and customs which in turn form a basis for maintaining community institutions E.-

171 .~_

and cultural heritage. Beyond ancient history, social processes shape ethnic identity

through differences in natal origin, occupation, and cultural organizations.

 

In Iraq, Chaldeans lived separately from Sunni, Shi’a and Kurdish ethnicities in
villages located in the mountainous region north of Mosul, known as the Nineveh Plains.
While villagers had relocated to the cities of Baghdad, Basra and Mosul from the 19203
forward, migrants still trace their origins to their ancestral village that they frequently
visited during Iraq’s hot summer months. There is also a link between village origin and
migration. Mary Sengstock (1999) reports that nearly ninety-ﬁve percent of all Chaldeans
in the Detroit area come from the Village of Telkeppe (meaning hill of stones in Neo-
Soureth); in the Arabic, it is called Telkaif. This fact underscores that dense and
supportive social networks had operated during migration. It also signals the important
role that ancestral village has in adding to the rich texture of identity. Presently,
Chaldeans with ancestral ties to al-Qosh, Araden, Dohuk, among several other villages
migrate to the United States. In Detroit, village of origin plays a limited role in where
Chaldeans live. But as a community, they reside in proximity to their churches in

Oakland and Macomb Counties. In 1999, the City of Detroit had recognized the area

around Sacred Heart Church, at the intersection of 7 Mile and John R, as Chaldean Town.
This belated designation honors the once vibrant community where many families had
settled in the 1960s.

Throughout the twentieth century, Chaldeans have remained an entrepreneurial
business class. In Iraq, their principle economic adaptation had been service related
businesses: hotels, restaurants, and shops catering to Europeans and Iraq’s business
classes (Harris 1958). They carried this pattern of economic activity to Detroit, and
currently own ninety-nine percent of Detroit’s convenience stores, with a majority of
Chaldean families owning at least one business (Chaldean American Chamber of
Commerce 2008).

Obviously, Chaldean identity develops from cumulative interactions between
religion, language, ancestral village and business orientation. Beyond these factors are
multiple social institutions of which there are many; the premier is the Chaldean Rite
Catholic Church. The community maintains its churches in Detroit’s suburbs: Mar Addai,
St. Thomas, St. George, St. Joseph, and Our Lady of Chaldeans Cathedral. Congregants
observe religious instruction in Neo-Soureth, Arabic and English. Older worshipers
receive mass in Neo-Soureth; the church has also established language classes for youth
to learn their parent’s mother tongue. The church’s importance remains signiﬁcant
throughout the life cycle given that Chaldeans receive the sacraments of faith from their
own priest leading to family celebrations of marriage, conﬁrmation and baptism.

Beyond the church other social groups ply for participation and recognition within
the community. Examples include: the Chaldean Federation of America, the Chaldean

American Ladies of Charity, the Chaldean American Chamber of Commerce, the

Chaldean American Community Center and other groups relating to alumni status in both
the United States and Iraq. These groups serve to bring Chaldeans together in informal
and formal interaction. For instance, the Chaldean Federation of America holds the
Annual Chaldean Commencement for graduates of secondary and post-secondary
education. Speakers address perils the world Chaldean population faces, and the need for
youth to remain connected to this formal organization.

Beyond the church and social organizations, the family plays an important role in
identity formation. While all families inculcate values, norms and beliefs into the next
generation, Chaldean families do so from an alternative set of expectations relative to
American families, especially when it comes to gender relations. Stephanie Coontz
(2006) has traced this distinction to Iongue durée processes that make Asian families, of
which the Chaldean family is closely aligned, different from the European family. In
terms of sources of women’s power, European women have held the ability to consent to
marriage proposals and worked prior to marriage for independent incomes since the end
of the eighteenth century. By contrast, these are relative new developments for many
Asian women that have remained locked within a family structure that Deniz Kandiyoti
(1988) calls classical patriarchy. Under this family structure, men monopolize and
expropriate women’s resources. And unlike Europeans, Asian households include the
patriarch, married adult males and their children, and unmarried children. This family
structure remains important for many ethnic groups in Asia, as evidenced by multiple
ethnographic studies (Halberstadt and Nikolsky 1996; Joseph 1999b; Kandiyoti 1988;

Oishi 2005). This structure also contributes to conservative gender relations.

 

In the Chaldean community, this family pattern is less prevalent in terms of
extended family residence. But given that Chaldean families often live within close
proximity to each other, they maintain weekly visitations and engage in business
partnership; Mary Sengstock (1999) concludes that Chaldeans follow a ﬁmctionally
extended family pattern. She reached this conclusion given the often crisscrossing social
ties between laterally and vertically extended kin.

Sociability among family members follows patterned rules similar to what Suad
Joseph (1999) calls connective patriarchy. Connectivity relates to the myriad social
relations between kin, and patriarchy relates to the hierarchal organization of authority.
Chaldean youth learn early on that there is a social legitimacy for male authority, and that
there are incumbent obligations for family members to each other. As a matter of their
identity, the Lebanese men, studied by Suad (1999) learn to speak for their families,
including their “. .. wives, sisters, junior siblings, and children, and to ‘make decision for

9”

them. Men also carry obligations. As a practical example, divorced or widowed Arab
women draw on their eldest brother for social support. These men accept this obligation
because of their connective ties to the family. Further, the eldest male draws upon the
cooperation of household members.

In summary, Chaldeans have built an institutionally complete community in the
Detroit metropolitan region (Breton 1964). The immigrants built this community to
complement their Chaldean social identity. An essential institution remains the Chaldean
Rite Catholic Church where congregants accept the sacraments of faith, and deepen their

mutual commitment towards maintaining ethnic attachment. In part, community building

depends on the entrepreneurial adaption by men in the community. Their business

success provides the material basis for these institutions, but the businesses rely on the

social ties between family members that maintain hierarchal gender relations.

GENDER APPROACHES TO SOCIETY

Chaldeans offer a unique community for following gender adaptation, as they
differ from the undocumented and working class immigrants typically studied. These
groups tend to have transnational orientations in response to the hostile and reactive
forces within the host society (Goldring 2003), and build community institutions towards
the home society (Levitt 2001; Schiller and Fouron 1999; Schiller and F ouron 2001).
Chaldeans differ; they can not return to Iraq. As a result, Chaldeans have to succeed in
the United States, and do so through the community’s high degree of institutional
completeness aided by their entrepreneurial zeal. And a central quality of the group’s
gender nouns is the distinctive feature of connective patriarchy.

This quality makes non-economic sources of gender power, such as emotional and
symbolic structures of gender relations, key for maintaining the legitimacy of their
hierarchical gender relations. Robert Connell’s (1987) and Pierre Bourdieu’s (1990;
2001) works offer frameworks for discussing non-material factors, such as culture,

identity, norms, values and beliefs, in upholding and changing gender relations.

Structuration
Robert Connell (1987: 94) recognizes that institutional reﬂexivity comes “. ..
closest to the requirements of gender theory,” which holds commonality with

structuration theory (emphasis added, Giddens 1984). This perspective formulates that

 

humans hold a reﬂexive capacity to change the structures that restrain them. In this study,
these are structures of gender relations. Gender structures operate in various social
institutions: the family, factory or ofﬁce ﬂoor, and social policies. The factory has a
power structure controlled by men, a gender division of labor, and symbolic and
emotional processes operating in concert to differentially reward women and men for
their labor. Connell calls these gendered institutions gender regimes. Whether the sum
total of society’s regimes complement or conﬂict constitutes what Connell calls the
gender order of the society.

There are three basic gender orders: complementary, parallel, and conﬂictive. In

 

explaining these orders, Connell operates from a critical perspective that the gender order
of society must change. The ultimate aim for feminists is the parallel position. This is a
transgressive movement wherein different social institutions work in parallel fashion to
support greater gender equality. When employers, courts and the legislature promote
equal pay or comparable worth, these social institutions are jointing promoting gender
equality. The conﬂictive order is the backlash position. Here social institutions operate at
cross ends undermining woman centric policies and initiatives. When a political party
removes enforcement of gender pay equity, a conﬂictive context exists. The
complementary position is the historic arrangement of patriarchy, where undue emphasis
is given to gender differences leading to gender stratiﬁcation.

The institutional reﬂexivity position has done an admirable job in outlining the
linkages between socialization, identity and social institutions in the complementary
stage of gender order. One such theorist, Erving Goffrnan (1977) explores how

ideological sexism patterns social interaction in social institutions. His position is that

society routinely accepts biological dimorphism as sufﬁcient for gendering identity, and
then uses social space to reify this belief over the life course. For example, girls readily
see that boys receive differential treatment on the basis of being male; and visa versa
(1977: 314). When children carry these gendered identities into adulthood, girls accept
that they depend on men, and men expect to provide for their wives and children. This
position shares commonality with West and Zimmerman’s (1987) doing gender
perspective, where men and women model their social interactions to demonstrate their
sex category. In essence, gender is enacted through categories (Glenn 2000); the most
notable being male and female.

The reﬂexive institutional position emphasizes the coupling between identity and
society. For instance, Barbara Risman (1998) recognizes that gendered institutions act as
formidable obstacles to feminists families. Men and women committed to peer-marriage
(or no less than a 60/40 split in household and childrearing obligations) ﬁnd that family
expectations and gendered labor markets put their egalitarian principles at risk. Rather
than being partners, society pressures the couple to adopt a more conventional
arrangement, as in caregiving women and breadwinning males. The pressures stem from
a host of sources. For example, gendered inequality leads to less pay for women’s work,
and public policies offer few public solutions for the cost women incur while in the
workforce, as with childcare. Similarly, children burden household ﬁnances making
shared parental obligations difﬁcult for men who commit to the good provider model.
Barbara Risman’s point is that even when men and women want egalitarian domestic
politics, the broader society — in terms of pay rates, job related expectations, and

normative gender standards — conspires against them.

Similarly, Robert Connell (2002) argues that social institutions treat men and
women differently. For example, education organizes education around dimorphic sex
categories that in later life leads to lower wages in part-time work and dead end jobs for
women (Connell 1987: 135). His observations are supported by survey and census data
which routinely documents gender segregation in the labor force, wage differentials, and
gender harassment (Andersen 2006). The same applies to the organization of major
universal entitlements, such as Social Security Income, minimum wage, retirement
income, and unemployment insurance that are all male centered policies (Lorber 1994).
Even today, women’s work remains undervalued and not recognized for purposes of
earning work credits towards Social Security Income. And with nearly seventy-one
percent of women with dependent children now working, women centered policies, such
comprehensive national maternity leave (Baca Zinn, Eitzen and Wells 2008) and
subsidized daycare and universal preschool (Clawson and Gerstel 2002), go unmet.
Expanding these human services would push the United States gender order towards a
complementary stage.

These institutional reﬂexivity accounts differ from sex roles. A proponent of sex
roles, Talcott Parsons (1942) relays his functional view that men hold an instrumental
disposition that are played out in public, while women assume expressive roles hidden in
the private sphere of the home. Rather than recognizing that gender is embedded in social
institutions, Parsons’ model explains gender as internalized in persons. While most
textbooks (Andersen 2006; Eitzen, Zinn and Smith 2009) identify socialization as a
culprit in exaggerating gender differences, Parsons’ shortcoming is not perceiving gender

as a constraint, as a system of power, and as a property embedded in social institutions

10

(Krais and William 2000). Parsons also overlooks that gender operates publicly, as in the
labor market. As every serious study of work shows, ﬁrms selectively include women
workers to perform emotion labor under conditions of gender segregation (Hochschild
1983). Similar points can be made about all major social institutions of society, as with
religion, education, military, police, and political parties; and the social organizations that
carry out the work of these institutions. In terms of power and force, the sex role concept
ignores the horriﬁc degree of violence required to make people live within the stricture of
their role identity (see Connell 1987: 52-54).

Institutional reﬂexivity posits that gender is a structure modiﬁed through personal
strategies, but not to the point of structure being a voluntary imposition. Rather, gender
(like race and class) is relational, as men hold more power than women. The deﬁnition of
power follows a hegemonic construction. Given social institutions reﬂecting
complementarity in gender relations, men tend to be advantaged as a group over women.
Entitlements, lower taxes by not enacting women-centered legislative changes, and
organizational advantages represent male privilege. Even the very deﬁnition of
womanhood undermines practical strategies to rearrange gender identities. In
summarizing his deﬁnition of power, Connell (1987: 107) states “The ability to impose a
deﬁnition of the situation, to set the terms in which events are understood and issues
discussed, to formulate ideals and deﬁne morality, in short to assert hegemony, is also an
essential part of social power.”

In considering the Chaldean case study, several questions present themselves. Are
the community’s institutions sufficient to maintain a sui generis gender order that follows

the Asian kinship model outlined above? Does the American context challenge the

11

institutional gender arrangements within the community? Responses to these questions
require identifying the arrangement of gender relations within the gender regimes of the
family and community organizations, and how these inﬂuence the gender order of the

community.

Social Reproduction

Social reproduction refers to social processes that reproduce relations of power.
Social processes include both social structures and human agency. While class, race and
gender structures operate to undermine social opportunities for women and minorities,
social reproduction adds that actor orientations matter. How people respond to their
structural conditions varies and to some degree may actually shape their agency. William
Julius Wilson (2009) reviews this point noting that “decision making” and “meaning
making” powers of culture along with cultural tools have a role in understanding minority
responses to racial inequality in the United States. In employing social reproduction
analysis here, I explore habitus, social ﬁeld, capital and symbolic violence. These

Bourdieusian concepts have import for our study.

Habitus. Pierre Bourdieu (1990: 53) argues that habitus is a system “ of durable,
transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring
structures.” As a step toward understanding this deﬁnition, habitus deﬁnes a set of
dispositions that are learned through social experience and are reproduced in conjunction

with others (Wainwright, Williams and Turner 2006: 537). As Jay MacLeod (1995: 15)

12

explains, “. . . habitus disposes individuals to think and act in certain ways.” In short,
habitus provides “. .. different ways of apprehending the world” (Swartz 1997: 83).

Beate Krais and Jennifer Williams (2000: 56) apply this concept to gender and
argue that habitus actually shapes the body “. .. through the habitus, the social
construction of gender relationships determines body image, body experience, even the
form of the body, sensory perception, the possibility of feeling and expressing joy and
pain.” This is similar to Judith Lorber and Patricia Martin’s essay on gender bodies
(2005). Social demands upon gendered bodies are thought to generate gender differences
in morbidity and mortality. For example, society encourages young men to demonstrate
bravado, and expects women to have effeminate/petite bodies.

Bourdieu (2001: 23) notes that beyond framing uses and expression of body,
gender is so deeply rooted in culture and common sense as to be understood as a
biological fact. “The particular strength of the masculine sociodicy comes from the fact
that it combines and condenses two operations: it legitimates a relationship of domination
by embedding it in a biological nature that is itself a naturalized social construction”

(Bourdieu 2001).

Social Field, Capital, and Symbolic Violence. Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992: 97) deﬁne
a ﬁeld “as a network, conﬁguration, of objective relations between positions.”
Stakeholders take positions in the ﬁeld for the “production, circulation, and appropriation
of goods, services, knowledge, or status” (Swartz 1997: 117). Once within the ﬁeld,

stakeholders accept tacitly the rules of the game. In this way, the ﬁeld establishes the way

13

 

of doing things, and persists as long as the social resources attainable remain desired by
social participants.

Social ﬁelds for immigrants are subject to the condition of hysteresis. Hysteresis
exists when the social ﬁeld no longer offers participants valuable goods. For immigrants
and the second-generation, patriarchal gender relations may be out of place. Perhaps
society offers rewards the immigrant culture can no longer provide. But as long as both
generations accept the logic of the game, Chaldean women and their second-generation
children will continue to take a position in social ﬁelds. The dominant stakeholders
follow conservative strategies to hold onto their advantages, while subordinate players
attempt goals of succession or subversion (Swartz 1997: 125).

In the ﬁeld, stakeholders exercise power according to their capital. Economic,
social, cultural and symbolic are obvious examples of capital, along with organizational,
political, family, state and moral (Swartz 1997: 78). Each form of capital belongs to a
particular ﬁeld; economic capital is the purview of the business realm. In intellectual
circles, cultural capital dominates. Wainwright et a1. (2006) ﬁnd that ballet troupes create
a social ﬁeld rewarding a speciﬁc body shape, posture, and etiquette of dancers. As such,
the bodies of all ballet dancers are not equal for all performance styles showing how
closely ﬁeld and habitus are bound.

All stakeholders seek to maximize power within their ﬁeld (Moi 1991). To
exercise or gain power requires acceptance of the ﬁeld (and its inequalities), and power is
only gained by amassing “symbolic capital” (Moi 1991: 1021). Symbolic capital emerges
from the relational system of doxa and heterodox; doxa means the established order of

doing things, as if no other way existed.

l4

In terms of gender relations, Bourdieu (2001: 93) argues that femininity operates
as a “negative symbolic coefﬁcient.” Being devalued operates between the interaction of
social production and social reproduction. In this instance, Bourdieu (2001) points to men
controlling the power ﬁeld, what Connell calls a part of the structure of gender relations.
Therefore, men manage the economy and state, and hold prestigious professional
positions, while women are delegated to the order-taking position of society. The extent
of the ‘symbolic tax’ is measured when “women who attain very high positions (senior
executive, head of the ministry, etc.) have to ‘pay’ in a sense for this professional success
with less success in the domestic realm (divorce, late marriage or no marriage, difﬁculties
or failures with children, etc.) and in the economy of symbolic goods, or, conversely, that
success of domestic undertaking is often achieved at the price of partial or total
renunciation of major professional success .. .” (Bourdieu 2001: 107).

This discussion provides a clear analytic picture that habitus and ﬁeld are
homologous concepts. So that Chaldean men and women carry a habitus into their
families, community organizations, and family-run businesses. Given the strength of
community attachment, many Chaldeans still uphold customs and practices which make
them stakeholders in social ﬁelds and players who abide by the rules which operate to

deﬁne social interaction

GENDERED ADAPTATION AND MIGRATION: THE LITERATURE
The ﬁeld has developed steadily from the inﬂuences of feminist theorizing to
gradually incorporate gender into the study of migration. Before shifting the focus,

. migration research had examined migration as a class phenomenon. Exemplary of this

15

kind of research, Michael Piore’s (1979) classic study details the conditions of sojourning
males searching for work while minimizing the cost associated with settlement. In
contrast, Donna Gabaccia (1994) documents research on women’s migration motives that
overcomes the limitation of seeing women as locked within sex roles and spatially
immobilized except through their husband’s initiative.

Incorporating a gender framework has proceed according to Pierrette Hondagneu-
Sotelo (2000; 2003) in three phases. Initial research simply had added women as a
variable for the sake of comparing them to men in terms of education and occupational
patterns instead of seeing gender as a relational system of power. Second phase writers,
of which Hondagneu-Sotelo (1994), Nazli Kibria (1993) and Sherri Grasmuck and
Patricia Pessar (1991) are examples, analyzed gender within meso structures, such as the
immigrant family and community. The second phase studies generated useful ﬁndings,
and pushed the ﬁeld into the study of gender relations within these institutions. The third
phase of present research examines gender within the institutions of society. This
dissertation utilizes an approach comparable with both the second and third phase. While
I conduct research on gender relations within family and community organizations, I
remain cognizant of gender relations as these interact between community and society.

Research approaches themselves have utilized a variety of approaches. A general
position is work and income provided women with resources that they use to change
gender relations in the household (Pessar 1986). This explanatory model has grown to
include expanded housework (Kibria 1993), and normative shifts brought about by
contact with mainstream gender relations (Menjivar 2003). Another approach has viewed

migration as undermining patriarchal structures. Fragmented structures include losing the

16

normative order associated with masculine privilege (Levitt 2001), along with extended
family members who liberate men from domestic labor (George 2005). By categorizing
the literature in this way, I am examining research ﬁndings for their utility in identifying

structure and agency.

T ransgressive Practices

As a master statement, the ﬁeld holds that migration leads to the renegotiation of
domestic and community power. Hondagneu-Sotelo (1994: 101) states that: “Research
conducted in Vietnamese, Dominican, Mexican, and Portuguese immigrant communities
in the US. suggests that the increase in immigrant women’s economic contributions to
the family economy, concomitant with immigrant men’s declining economic resources,
accounts for the diminution of male dominance in immigrant families.” Scholarship
differs on the source of change and the starting points from which gender change occurs.
Still, the overall position is that migration creates conditions leading to women’s
empowerment.

The resource approach to marital power states that domestic decision making
belongs to the partner with the greatest resource shares (Blood and Wolfe 1960; Kamo
1988; Pessar 1986). Historically, resource theory has looked exclusively at a male
subject, and states that male education attainment, occupational prestige and earned
income leads to patriarchal domestic power (Blood and Wolfe 1960).

The gender migration ﬁeld currently uses a variation of resource theory which
recognizes women gain these fungible assets in both the pre-migration and post-

migration period. As examples, Asian Indian women lead their household’s migration by

17

virtue of holding professional degrees, and by being the family’s breadwinner (George
2005). Korean and Filipino men experience declining occupational status in the United
States when sponsored by their professional wives (Espiritu 2003a). Among all three
immigrant groups, research holds that domestic power changes towards a more
egalitarian arrangement. Dominican women have accomplished a similar achievement as
measured by their control over household budgets (Pessar 1986).
Transgressive processes operate within community organizations. Prema Kurien L
(2003) observes that Asian Indian religious organizations provide women a site for
renegotiating the community’s gender ideologies, by reordering the meanings of culture I I
stories and by teasing intractable men to revise their gendered outlooks.
Where transgressive practices fail, the general conclusion holds that either strong
gender ideologies operate within the group, or the racist and class structures of society do
not allow for gender role reversal. As an example of social location research (or social
structures), Patricia Zavella (1987) ﬁnds that Santa Clara County’s blue collar job market
stratiﬁes workers by race and gender. As a result, Chicanos earn lower pay than white
workers, and Chicanas gain access to part-time seasonal work. In this case, household
solidarity with traditional gender norms emerges within Chicano households as both men
and women contribute towards maintaining family ﬁnances under the distressed earnings
opportunities of a racialized and gendered labor market.
As an example of gender ideology, Maria Patricia Fernandez-Kelly and Ana
Garcia (1990: 134) hold that “. .. patriarchy should be seen as a series of ﬂexible
ideologies involving norms of reciprocity for both men and women.” For immigrants

who identify with sex roles differentiation, researchers ﬁnd that women’s attitudes

18

towards work are viewed as a short term adaptation not a long-term change. For example,
Cuban and Ladina (Guatemalan) women seek to reinstate their middle class status when
their husbands become ﬁnancially secure (see Fernandez-Kelly and Garcia 1990 for
Mexicans and Cubans; and Menjivar 2003 for Salvadorans and Ladina Guatemalans).
Ladina women also protect their homemaking status by using some of their earned

income for purchasing home decorations.

Fragmented Structures

While transgressive practices originate from women’s gained assets, another
source of changing gender relations emanates from fragmented structures. In following
nuclear family migration, Hondagneu—Sotelo (1994) recognized that family unit
migration leads to changing domestic relations. Similarly, immigrants and refugees leave
family members behind for reasons related to their contexts of exit. For Indian migrants,
Sheba George (2005) notes that Keralite nurses undermine gendered norms simply by
assuming a professional life obtained by working and traveling. Further, the women
attack marital customs that devalue women and burden their families, as with the dowry
system. Further, the Indian social context -— with servants and extended family members —
aids patriarchy by allowing men to avoid household duties. These beneﬁts are lost in
female-led migration. Among refugees, Nazli Kibria (1993) identiﬁes fragmented
extended families as a factor in accounting for declining domestic patriarchy.

Beyond simply leaving patriarchal meso structures behind, research shows how
migrant women also work to transform structures. Prema Kurien (2003) observes that

Asian Indian religious organizations provide women a site for renegotiating the

19

community’s gender ideologies, by reordering the meanings of culture stories and by
teasing intractable men to revise their gendered impositions on their spouses. Sharon Sub
(2004) ﬁnds that women have used the Buddhist temple to provide them with a respite
from patriarchal control.

In moving beyond the meso structures of family and community, Steve Gold
(2003) argues that social policies matter as well. Israeli women leave a society that
provides subsidies for their carework activities, and enter the United States that offers
little caregiving resources through federal or state programs. The two states different
approaches to supporting caregiving lead Israeli women to be less agreeable to the notion
that migration is beneﬁcial. Men, however, are liberated from taxes and competitive
business pressures, and hold a positive assessment of migration beneﬁts.

To recap, the gender adaptation and migration literature focuses on the sources of
change in gender relations through transgressive practices and fragmented structures. As
the Chaldean case study differs signiﬁcantly from other immigrant groups, I review key
social processes as these relate to transgressive opportunities and retention of gender

Stl'llCtllI'CS.

CHALDEAN STUDIES SO FAR

The Chaldean community has received some recognition from academic circles
making a review of secondary sources a point of departure. Qais Al-Nouri (1964), Mary
Sengstock (1999) and Barbara Gallagher (1999) develop statements about gender norms
in their work. A second body of research examined educational issues for Chaldean

youth. These studies are reviewed last.

20

 

Al-Nouri ﬁnds weak labor force attachment, substandard educational attainment,
and young marital age for women play a determining role in women’s gender status, and
it is low. According to Al-Nouri, the typical Chaldean woman is a submissive supplicant
to her husband’s will. Even when Chaldean women work, they do not gain power through
contributing resources to the household. Rather a husband invites his wife to work in the
family business, and dismisses her to care for his children (Al-Nouri 1964: 27).
Archetypical femininity for the Chaldean womanhood is to be deferent. And if a man can
not ﬁnd that quality, he marries transnationally.

Mary Sengstock (1999: 135-136) focuses on women’s incremental gains which
change her gender status relationally to men. She ﬁnds several areas where women have
made inroads to greater levels of equality with her male counterpart. She observes that
age differences have converged among marital partners, and women’s education
attainment and employment opportunities have expanded. Changes extend to public
occasions with mixed-sex groups sitting together in banquet halls, along with women
holding active positions in the church. Her approach is very similar to the gendered
adaptation and migration literature that uses resource theory, but is missing an
explanation as to why conservative gender relations endure.

Barbara Gallagher (1999) offers the ﬁrst study of family and gender on the
Chaldean community. Drawing on interviews with twenty-one women, her work focuses
on gender power within the family. Her advance over previous research is to focus on the
ways women resist men, rather than comply. In opposition to masculine power, women
pout and publicly cry, or they subvert social control by voiding community surveillance

(Gallagher 1999: 153). Chaldean masculinity, however, is presented in rather startling

21

 

and dark terms. Not only do men exploit women by controlling them, but they resort to
violence sanctioned by the family and church. Gallagher’s approach is based on
Foucault’s notion of power over bodies; men control women’s bodies. As understood by
this study, power does not exist as a diffuse, ubiquitous or hegemonic structure recreating
its own set of rules, but rather as male supremacy.

These works represent the most exhaustive community studies in the literature
that comment on gender. There are other dissertations that attend to issues of education.
Sister Therese Shikwana (1997) and Robyne Thompson (2004) study Chaldean socio-
economic status, and parental involvement in children’s educational orientations. The
authors of these studies neglect gender. In essence, the studies assume that parents value
boys and girls education equally (Shikwana 1997; Thompson 2004). A more dated study
by Allene Doctoroff (1978) engages in a detailed statistical analysis of Chaldean children
in the Birmingham School District, which included gender data. Even though signiﬁcant
differences exist in methodology, these education studies provide comparative data to
contrast parental occupation, hours worked by students, and parents’ attitudes about their
children working. I

In another work, Natalie Smith (2001) writes about the degree of genetic
relatedness and pro-social behavior. Basically social cooperation emerges from “inclusive
ﬁtness.” Chaldeans tend to cooperate at rates higher than other groups given their ﬁrst
cousin marriages. But Smith (2001: 92-95) also attributes this outcome to norms
cultivated among Chaldeans given their agrarian past, when help and aid were common
among family groups. This ﬁnding supports the connective patriarchy concept of Suad

Joseph.

22

GENERATIONS

Immigrant cohorts and generations play an important part in the investigation.
The immigrant generation has built a strong community that integrates the second-
generation into community norms around work, religion, dating, marriage, and other
community events. As such, this section deﬁnes the concept of immigrant and second-
generation.

Rubén Rumbaut deﬁnes generation as ﬁrst, one-and-a—half (or 1.5), and second.
Parents represent the ﬁrst generation, as they are the migrants. The ﬁrst generation
includes children born abroad and over the age of twelve at time of migration. At this
point, research supports difﬁculty in adapting ﬂuently to a new language, and makes a
useful distinction in terms of immigrant destinies. The second-generation signiﬁes those
born in the United States of immigrant parents. And the one-and-a-half generation (1.5)
had migrated, but before the age of twelve.

These distinctions play an important role in migrant adaptation. Many
comparative studies point to alternative patterns of assimilation for the second-
generation, such as straight-line, bumpy-line and segmented assimilation (Portes and
Zhou 1993). Where parental and second-generation assimilation occurs simultaneously
there is consonant acculturation between the generations. Under these conditions, role
reversal, or children assuming parental responsibilities, seldom if ever takes place.
However, when children’s assimilation outstrips parent’s then dissonant acculturation
takes place. The ﬁnal pathway is selective acculturation which occurs when community
institutions permit the continued value of parental home culture as in language and norms

(Portes and Rumbaut 2001 : 49-54).

23

Chaldeans represent a mixture of these processes which can be discerned from the
life histories. On the one hand, the Chaldean church and intense sociability operates to
reafﬁrm Chaldean values and norms and is socialized into the second generation. This
has a signiﬁcant impact on maintaining gender relations across generations, as the
parental habitus maintains its relevance for the second-generation. But there is clear
evidence that in the complex maze of time of arrival, age at arrival, context of arrival and
time in the United States, that consonant and dissonant acculturation occur as well. Some
parents push their children towards adapting to key educational institutions with the
unintended consequence of the children seeking more liberal gender relations. Similarly,
some parents fall behind their children’s savvy leading to a loss of connection and

ambiguous generational antipathies.

PLAN OF DISSERTATION

The dissertation investigates Arab Christian immigrants whose social practices
are not entirely understood or documented within the gender and migration literature. The
chapters are organized to examine the exceptional qualities of the Chaldean community,
as institutionally complete, and the family. I will follow how structure and social
reproduction operate within this group.

Chapter two outlines the methodology used in the dissertation. Both theoretical
approaches specify different methodological tactics in discovering the key structures and
sources of agency. For structuration, I will introduce the concept of structural inventory,
and document this approach. I also explain conditions in the ﬁeld relating to the volatile

period following September 11 and the Gulf War, and detail how I made contact and

24

 

gained the conﬁdence of my informants. Further, the life history approach is explained
and the signiﬁcance of life stories in understanding culture. The survey guide and the
population census is provided in the appendix.

In the third chapter, I explain Chaldean migration through network theory. This
theory provides a means to make crucial observations about Chaldean social ties.
Namely, the thick bonds of social trust that generate reciprocity needed for developing an
entrepreneurial adaption in Iraq, and for transporting those skills to the United States.
Beyond identifying social capital, this chapter focuses on the gender regimes and gender
order in Iraqi society. The gender order helps us identify trends between the various
cohorts that left Iraq which pattern their views about gender relations in the United
States.

In chapter four, I present data documenting the regional pattern of classical
patriarchy and how Chaldeans organize connective patriarchy through emotional and
symbolic structures of gender relations. This information provides details on the structure
of the Chaldean family and how this shapes gender relations within the community.
Particular attention is paid to rites, traditions, and gifting. As a structure, this provides
legitimacy to connective patriarchal ties.

Chapter ﬁve explores Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and social ﬁeld. Evidence is
presented as to my interviewees’ deﬁnitions of gender values, norms, and statuses (their
habitus). Gender relations within community organizations and families are explored as
social ﬁelds where women actively build symbolic capital. I propose that the social ﬁeld
still offers a meaningful reason for women to comply with connective patriarchy, while

they continue to be subject to surveillance and gender control.

25

Chapter six concludes my dissertation with suggestions for future research.
Among information collected by but not present include norms of cooperation within

families for businesses formation.

26

CHAPTER 2

LIFE HISTORIES

The methods chosen for this study address the major theoretical concern of the
gender adaptation research agenda; how do migrant women change gender relations? As
discussed in the previous section, gender relations operate as a structure that constrains
the activities of men and women. Migrant men may actually lose supporting societal
patriarchal structures and norms, what I call structural fragmentation. As a result, women
gain the opportunity to transform their domestic and community power relations because
the constraints are no longer in place to restrain their agency. To follow this process,
Robert Connell (1987) recommends a structural inventory. This means accounting for
structures of gender relations as they occur within community institutions, what Connell
calls gender regimes. He also suggests looking across gender regimes to follow how these
institutions conﬂict or support each other, what he calls the gender order. Structures
include: power, economy, symbols and emotions. Power and economic structures are
common in social science analysis. Power is often denoted as decision making capacity,
and economic structure is generally linked to class power and the division of labor.
Emotion and symbol structures are less frequently analyzed yet have explanatory value.
Under Connell (2002), emotions relate to positive or negative feelings people hold
towards objects. For example, the object woman is tied to the negative feelings of
misogyny within the context of a patriarchal society; similarly the object homosexual is
tied to the emotion of homophobia in a compulsory heterosexist society. Feelings can be

positive as is the case for caregiving motherhood in the context of the traditional middle

27

 

class family. Symbols denote ideal images related to masculinity and femininity, and are
often embedded in cultural as ideals, values and norms.

In applying this method, I assume that Chaldeans effectively organize robust
ethnic institutions capable of meeting criterion laid out by Philip Selznick’s (1992)
deﬁnition of community. As a metric for understanding institutional completeness
(Breton 1964), I propose that Chaldeans are accomplished in socializing identity,
engaging in mutuality (exchange), fomenting participation within social and cultural
organizations, and initiating integration of members into community life. In the brief
introduction to Chaldeans in the preceding chapter, I described several community
organizations and institutions that accomplish these missions. The Chaldean Rite
Catholic Church accomplishes all of these tasks, as does the extended family, family
business, and the multiple social organizations. Another measure for validating this
assumption appears in the research ﬁndings that provide ample data to support this
assessment making the structural inventory a legitimate method.

My actual means for gaining information are the qualitative methods of life
history data and participant observation. Chaldeans life or oral histories are memories
drawn from socially and culturally speciﬁc narratives. In other words, life history data
documents the context under which this community arranges gender relations within

family and ethnic institutions in relation to the order of Iraqi and United States society.

EXPERIENCES IN THE FIELD
My research began ten months after September 11, 2001 on June 18, 2002. By the

time I had completed my last interview in July 2005; the United States had launched and

28

concluded the Second Gulf War, begun the occupation of Iraq, and reorganized
Immigration and Naturalization Service into the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration
Services. Immigration law enforcement functions were coordinated by a new branch of
the Federal Government, the Department of Homeland Security.

The events in September generated a ﬁrestorm of suspicion and law enforcement
furor. Over the course of these several months, the Department of Justice detained 5,000
Middle Eastern men shortly after September 11 of which none was ever charged with
terrorism. Under the authority of the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System
(N SEERS), the Federal Bureau of Investigations interviewed another 80,000 men,
detained 2,783, and identiﬁed eleven terrorist suspects, none of which has been charged
with terrorism (The Constitution Project 2008). These national events shook Arab Detroit
and created difﬁcult conditions for launching a study on Middle Eastemer immigrants.

With Detroit being home to major settlements of Arab national origin immigrants,
these events had repercussion within the different Middle Eastern communities around
the metropolitan area. For example, I attended the second meeting of the Congress of
Arab American Organizations (CAAO) at Beit Hanina, a social club for Arab Americans
in Dearbom’s South End, where members were fuming over different discriminatory acts
they endured. An example included the City of Dearbom invoicing two imams $6,600
and $1,500 for failure to attain permits before leading public protests against the buildup
to the Gulf War (Abbas 2002; American Civil Liberties Union 2003).

Demonstrations were a mainstay during these days. And the Federal Government
frequently held town hall meetings to address citizens of Arab ancestry in Dearbom.

Typical of these efforts, the Justice and State Departments, as well as law enforcement

29

agencies from federal, state and local levels received complaints and issued directives
about aiding terrorist organizations abroad. On one occasion, the State Department held a
foreign policy town hall to showcase their Secure Borders initiative. During the luncheon,
I sat with two young adults from the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee
(ADC) and four Euro-American elderly gentlemen. Given the topic, the non-Arab men
voiced their opinions that occupation of Iraq would lead to autonomous political
governance and a self-sustaining economy as occurred in Europe following World War
II. The Arab ancestry youth and I voiced our dissent. Instead of discussing our
differences, one of the gentlemen dismissed himself from the table, and within ﬁfteen
minutes a Dearbom police ofﬁcer arrived on the premises. The younger ADC associates
promptly left. I viewed the reaction of the youth as a response to perceived intimidation.

During this period, the war overtook the normal ﬂow of life. Community
organizations were responding to government policies that were proﬁling them. And
events abroad stirred emotions and public reaction in Dearbom. For example, I had an
appointment with a Dearbom police ofﬁcer for a ride along. Arriving shortly before
meeting the ofﬁcer, I encountered Iraqis celebrating the demise of Saddam Hussein’s
regime, when an American tank had demolished a statue of the deposed dictator. At ﬁrst,
a few cars raced up and down Warren Avenue with the Iraqi flag trailing from the
passenger windows. But as the day wore on, the celebration expanded and Iraqis took to
the street. Their goal was to march on Dearbom City Hall. The following are ﬁeld notes
from that day.

When we left the City of Dearbom Television Studio we heard over the radio that

shots had been ﬁred in Detroit. The ofﬁcer said, “It could be anything, even

30

ﬁrecrackers.” It soon became clear that a march was starting at the Karbala
Islamic Educational Center, and marchers were taking over Warren Avenue.
Dispatch radioed that demonstrators were marching against trafﬁc, and the
response from city hall was to get them off the street. The ofﬁcer was upset and
caustically remarked, “Stupid.” We raced down Warren Avenue siren blaring as
we arrived at the scene of a mass demonstration. The police had already started
routing traffic and blocking off side streets. The police goal became to stop the
demonstration from going to city hall.
Everyday that I went to Dearbom in late 2002 and early to mid 2003, there was a crisis in
Arab Detroit. In March 2003, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents coordinated
interviews and arrests of Iraqi origin immigrants, and by April had conducted 11,000
interviews (Ardalan 2003; Schaefer and Warikoo 2003; Warikoo 2003). It became

apparent that suspicion reigned making my entry into Dearbom unrealistic.

OVERCOMING OUTSIDER STATUS

As outlined above, my entry into the ﬁeld came at a rather difﬁcult period. The
general means for gaining access to the Chaldean community came by searching the
printed media, making phone calls, doing web-based research, and ﬁnding respondent
referrals at public events. My ﬁrst contact with Chaldeans occurred at a food drive
organizational meeting held by Chaldean Americans Reaching and Encouraging (CARE)
on February 13, 2003. I found that meeting by searching the Internet and locating
CARE’s webpage. The website announced the location and time, calling for those

interested to attend. I sent an email to the committee organizer who graciously invited

31

me; there I met three highly involved women and a man who extended later Opportunities
for volunteering at food, clothing and furniture drives. My ﬁrst opportunity came that
Easter.

My ﬁrst food delivery experience gave me a chance to meet new immigrant
families in Detroit. I traveled with other volunteers and visited families just north of
Chaldean Town. These families were linguistically isolated newcomers with signiﬁcant
income and medical service needs. The condition of their housing was poor and the
neighborhood in decline.

In front of a family house we were visiting, a late model car sped through a

neighborhood of vacant lots and concrete slabs where houses once stood. Gun

shot holes ﬁgured prominently in the front windshield and, as the car raced sped
away, plastic and duct tape waved good-bye from the space glass usually sits. The
house we entered was neighbored by a burned, gutted and ruined structure that
served as a dump for unwanted garbage. Inside we found two Chaldean brothers
whose families occupied a subdivided house with uniﬁed living quarters.
This residence pattern resembles the extended family household that is somewhat
common in the Middle East. Visiting other Chaldean homes gave me insight into physical
organization of living space which is linked to family visitation, as most of these homes
had multiple large sofas in the sitting rooms. Experiences, such as these, helped me
identify more subtle forms of family social ties and networks.

While information like this was invaluable, my participation in community

organizations generated the trust needed to gain access to potential interviewees. With the

tight knit relationships within the community, networks buzzed each other about a

32

researcher interested in meeting and attending Chaldean social clubs. As a result, groups
quickly understood that my research goals included attending organizational meetings
and interviewing group members.

For example, the operating budget for CARE in 2003-2004 came from a
fundraiser dinner. At the August 2003 event, I contributed pictures that were projected
onto two large screens in the banquet hall of Southﬁeld Manor, a social club built by the
Chaldean-Iraqi American Association of Michigan (CIAAM). I took these pictures
during the week of the Jewish and Chaldean Opportunity Builders program (JACOB);
when Chaldean and Jewish youth tore down abandoned houses in Redford while breaking
down stereotypes they held towards each other. It was a great week to ride a bus and
listen to youth and their mentors speak at length about themselves, the schools they
attended, their goals in life and the dilemmas of daily life. And I was there with them,
swinging an axe, carrying trash, and generally wilting under the heat and humidity. By
tearing down houses, I was invited to the fundraiser, where I met other Chaldean
community members who invited me to their social organizations and agreed to
participate in my study.

In another instance, parish council members invited me to direct trafﬁc in the
parking lot of a church. As congregants entered the church, parish council members
introduced me to men and women who would later participate in the study. When mass
ended, I held a stop sign to direct trafﬁc on an adjoining street. Beyond making contacts
for interviews, trafﬁc duty led to further opportunities to participate. For example, I was
invited to a fundraiser to aid Chaldean orphans in the Village of Al-Qosh. I was also

invited to a town hall meeting at the church that discussed changing the Chaldean (N eo-

33

Soureth) mass from noon to nine o’clock in the morning. And so it went at every social
activity or ﬁmction; I introduced myself and discussed my research. Through these
efforts, I learned about Chaldean social life from interview and interaction.

By participating, I learned almost serendipitously. For example, while directing
cars in the church parking lot, I recognized a young unmarried woman whom I had
worked with at volunteer functions. As is typical of my jovial self, I shouted out a hello
and was ignored. I felt somewhat rebuffed and later spoke to her about it. She was very
pleasant, but could not recall the incident. I assigned meaning to this interaction as a
violation of community background norms, an unaccompanied and unmarried young
woman does not speak to unrelated men in parking lots.

Even if I did not participate in a social organization, I attended meetings. Doing
this provided me access to more informants and contacts. This process spiraled outward
from these many contacts into different social networks that took me to Chaldean youth,
Chaldean congregants, Chaldean political activists, Chaldean social activists, Chaldean
organizational leaders, and Chaldean businessmen and women. Eventually I made contact
with informants linked to the Chaldean American Ladies of Charity, Chaldean American
Chamber of Commerce, Chaldean American Student Association, Chaldean Cultural
Center on 7 Mile Rd., Chaldean Cultural and Community Center in West Bloomﬁeld and
the Chaldean Rite Catholic Church. Additionally, I attended a informational discussion of
the Iraqi national elections by the Iraqi Democratic Union. I was subsequently invited to
a celebration of the July 14 Revolution, the date of the First Republic, which brought
political sensitive Chaldeans together for dirmer, entertainment and sociability. The food

was simple Arab in origin and delicious.

34

CHALDEAN MOTIVATION TO PARTICIPATE

With all the problems associated with the politics of the Middle East, and with
Chaldeans being Iraqi during a time of war, it seemed somewhat dubious that I could
overcome the problem of outsider status (Merton 1972). And indeed, initial contacts in
Dearbom proved to be very unsupportive of my research agenda. For Arab Detroiters,
instantaneous resistance developed from the Orientalism perspective, what Edward Said
(1979) deﬁnes as the academic and literary misrepresentation of Eastern culture. In
essence, I was an outsider with a research agenda seeking to proﬁt on the despair of an
embattled community.

In actuality, I thought of my research as being sympathetic to Arab origin
immigrants and wanted to explore their identity from their perspective. When I broached
my research agenda with a social service agency, its leaders requested a place on my
dissertation committee, monetary compensation for both informants and the organization,
and control over the research agenda. This may seem somewhat controlling from an
academic perspective; from my experience however, it is quite common for knowledge
gatekeepers to speciﬁcally inquire about the beneﬁts their community can expect from
their participation in a study. In many cases, these communities wanted directed research
with tangible beneﬁts. How does this research help my group? My answer to this
question was that social science research clariﬁes misunderstandings and stereotypes
common within the academy and the general public which aids in fashioning better social
services and reframes racialized discourse. These are worthy goals for both the researcher

and the researched.

35

For Chaldeans, my outsider status was less of a problem; they were much less
guarded about my research project. Instead of rejecting my entreaties, Chaldeans eagerly
involved me in their community organizations. I believe this response relates to the trying
times in Iraq and the United States. After all, my objectivity and independence of opinion
would advance their own claims of being a minority community from Iraq, Christians
from the Middle East, and hard working Americans. This was a message they often
communicated to a sometimes hostile public. I reached this conclusion during an
interview, when a respondent explained that September 11 galvanized the community to
change public perception of Chaldeans. My presence in the ﬁeld coincided with this
initiative, and many Chaldean social groups welcomed my presence.

The community’s major concerns relate to both overseas issues and local
concerns. War consumed a signiﬁcant degree of their attention. Sectarian violence had
emptied many Chaldean villages in the Kurdish region, and priests, nuns, and
congregants remain targeted for personal assault and murder. As a response, Detroit’s
Chaldean community leaders emphatically stated that they have a stake in their homeland
and wished to secure rights for a Chaldo-Assyrian enclave, given the long roots of
Christianity in Mesopotamia. This larger political goal was sidelined by the violence
abroad that created a growing number of Chaldean refugees stranded in countries of ﬁrst
asylum. While waiting for permanent settlement, law makers in the United States had
made “passion fatigue” complaints for not wanting more immigrants in their state. The
- Chaldean Federation of America took it upon itself to advocate for refugees and for

political rights in Iraq. Further, backlash developed against American born Chaldeans. In

36

one instance, a boy at a local high school was followed relentlessly by a principal. These
are problems which the community continues to manage.

A second set of initiatives for participating in the study deals with youth concerns.
Given the high rates of business ownership, families often work long hours. Youth
advocates point out that children need more time with their fathers. Women leaders
recognize that mothers are not geared towards interacting with public officials, even
primary school teachers. And community members schooled in social work discuss the
problems associated with Iraqi discipline in the schools and home as being different from
that in the United States. These are areas of discourse and motives for participating in the

study which made outsider status less problematic.

LIFE HISTORY DATA AND LIFE STORY INTERVIEWS

With Chaldeans inviting me into their community, I could focus my attention on
understanding their history, migration patterns, and settlement experiences. After initial
observations, I had believed that the community was highly assimilated. Women in
community organizations hold university degrees. St. Thomas follows the dictates of
Vatican II with young women serving the Eucharist. Many informants live upper middle
class lifestyles evidenced by their cars, homes, clothing and mannerisms. These
observations suggest that Chaldeans are following social processes common among other
immigrant groups. Had I chosen a positivist approach for data gathering as with a
questionnaire, I could have easily arrived at the wrong conclusion, and missed the

customs that have determinative impact on gender relations.

37

The choice of life history data, therefore, proves advantageous, as the information
collected reﬂects the informant’s understanding of their social contexts and culture.
Further, the narration of events provides descriptively thick accounts of migration
motives, social networks and family history. These accounts operate as recollections and
memories, what Michal McCall and Judith Wittner (1990) refer to as experience.
Experience or memories are, as Mary Chamberlain and Selma Leydesdorff (2004)
recognize, a social and cultural activity that represent mediated knowledge between the
story teller and the listener. “While the personal narrative may be seen as a the property
of the individual — intrinsic to and deﬁning of the individual — the plot that it follows and
the themes that are woven through it may reﬂect and conform to the cultural narratives to
which any one individual is exposed at any one time” (Chamberlain and Leydesdorff
2004: 230). During the discursive activity of giving a life story, the informant draws on
meaning frames shaped in partnership with those of their social group. This quality of
referencing takes on a polyphonic quality (Tanggaard 2009). In other words, the
informant provides explanations towards those within the conversation, even when these
others are not present. The interviewer has the obligation to identify the narrative truth of
the life history with regards to its believability from the perspective of an insider.

This approach is ideally suited for learning about understudied or emergent social
groups, whose culture is not totally known or carefully understood. As life histories are
dialogical, that is discursive with regards to making a narrative truth comprehensible for
others in their social group; it works well for making case comparisons. Case
comparisons allow for conjectural conclusions by contrasting ﬁndings with other groups

in similar social contexts. For example, in following gender adaptation, researchers

38

continuously use their data to contrast the potential sources of change and persistence in
gender relations after migration. These case studies, therefore, add to our understanding
of diverse populations and the social processes unleashed during migration.

In terms of interviews and the meaning of dialogical interviewing, some
explanation is required. First, knowledge gathering through the interview is itself
relatively new, but is an accepted medium for collecting market research, social science
and political polling data, along with other uses (Lee 2008). For the dialogical concept, it
has at least two deﬁnitions. In its simpler meaning, dialogic equals dialogue, a
conversation between two parties. Steinar Kvale (2006) holds that dialogues vary by
intent and approach by the interviewer. I provide two examples of his typology of
interview types. In “agnostic interviews,” the researcher challenges the informant. In
“actively confronting interviews,” researchers push informants to explain assumptions
behind their comments. An alternative use of dialogical owes its development to the
Russian literary theorist Mikhail Buhktin (see Tanggaard 2009). This second usage is in
line with my comments above regarding the social and cultural rules embedded in the
subject’s life story/history. In my case, dialogic means the interviewee holds all the inside
information and explains the cultural meaning and social structures that Chaldeans
understand. This use is certainly more egalitarian than positivist approaches, but it also
depends on my ability to understand the life world of Chaldeans.

Despite my effort to create equality during the interview process, potential
problems arise from life story data. Notably, power relations operate between researchers
and the researched. Steinar Kvale (2006) holds that dialogic interviews, as a two party

partnership, offers enormous potentials for abuse. In essence, the qualitative research

39

interview “. .. entails a hierarchical relationship with an asymmetrical power distribution
(of) interviewer and interviewee. It is a one-way dialogue, an instrumental and indirect
conversation, where the interviewer upholds a monopoly of interpretation” (Kvale 2006:
484).

Beyond the interview format is the knowledge attained. Exactly whose
information is this? Michelle Fine et a1. (2000: 124) advocate moving beyond the
dispassionate researcher model for one taking responsibility on behalf of the researched.
In return for access, the sociologist transforms herself into an advocate. “We must probe
to ﬁnd the sites of intellectual leverage, responsibility, and obligation through which our
work can begin to ﬁssure public and political discourse, shifting the ideological and
material grounds on which poor and working-class men and women are now being
tortured.”

Further related to the power imbalance is a methodological problematic: who is
best able to study disadvantaged groups? This is known as insider-outsider debate.
Insider researchers have advantages in following a research agenda given their innate
ability to overcome the suspicion of the researched, called the insider doctrine by Robert
Merton (1972). Without neglecting the implications of insider status, the shared social
location of the researcher and researched does offer potential for considering alternative
approaches in studying minority groups (Baca Zinn 1979).

While this critique still holds validity, today’s immigrants have high rates of
entrepreneurship, college graduation, and high family median incomes. For example,
Asian Indians have higher labor force participation rates and percent employed as

professionals or specialty occupations than the native born population of the United

40

States. Further, Asian Indians, Filipinos, Hong Kongese, and Taiwanese have median
family incomes 30 percent higher than the native born population (Portes and Rumbaut
1996: 68, 78). Not all immigrants represent minority populations disadvantaged by class,
education, and income. A different issue may be operating, namely the immigrants may

have their own agendas.

RESEARCH PROCESS

My dialogical life story interviews follow a low intervention strategy permitting
informants a high degree of freedom to explain details regarding their participation in
community organizations, interaction within family life, and businesses cooperation. I
chose these themes and constructed a survey guide around these social processes for the
close alignment to research agendas on gender adaptation, ethnic economics, social
networks, and social capital. This strategy follows the advice of William F oote Whyte
(1984) who recommends a scale of intervention ranging from simple encouragement that
you are listening and want the informant to continue, to probing with follow-up questions
for themes introduced during the interview. Probing questions became the dialogic
portion of my interview. As I became more ﬂuent in Chaldean culture, I added cultural
constructs to the interview schedule (see Appendix 2).

In collecting interviews, I made telephone calls to establish appointments and met
each informant at locations they chose. Before they began their actual life story, I
reviewed the consent form (see Appendix 1), and in most cases began the interview. All
interviews were tape recorded and later transcribed. I also took notes in notebook as the

interview progressed. To begin, I asked the respondent to explain their migration and

41

settlement history which they did so chronologically, from the time they or their parents
migrated, migration motivations, social networks used in accomplishing, settlement, and
education and work history. As they progressed through their life history, I referred to the
survey guide to see if there were any unaddressed issues. When I left the ﬁeld, I reviewed
taken notes and began memo writing. Memo writing served for what Anselm Strauss
(1987: 110) considers an internal dialogue. In this context, I took stock of emergent
concepts and added these to the interview schedule. When appropriate, I asked probing
questions in subsequent interviews to ﬁll in details about new concepts. As new terms
become better understood, I closed the topic. I also veriﬁed my understandings through

social interaction in the community’s social spaces.

SAMPLING

To create my interviewee sample, I used a snowball method. To garner a
representative sample, I made contacts through multiple community organizations. I had
attended Chaldean student organizations and social organizations that led me to networks
of young adults at college and work. I met business women and men through the
Chaldean-American Chamber of Commerce. I found immigrants through their political
groups and churches. My informants, therefore, are pulled from many different
organizations. To further enlarge this sample, I received referrals to key informants, and
these respondents recommended informants not linked to community organizations.

The sample of ﬁfty-one participants presented in Appendix 3.0 and Appendix 3.1.
By gender, there are twenty-eight males and twenty-three females. By generation, there

are thirty second-generation, fifteen ﬁrst-generation, and six of different generational

42

status. While the class composition of the same seems skewed towards a professional
middle class and middle class, in actually all of the immigrants began humbly. Only the

second-generation of the second cohort actually started with middle class privilege.

CAUTION ON PSEUDONYMS

Social science research is conducted under the direction of a human subject
review board. This body requires complete conﬁdentiality of respondent information. As
such, I use pseudonyms to protect the respondent. That is, I attribute quotes to people
whose name I made-up. I did this to protect the conﬁdentiality of the persons who
actually participated in the study, even though many of these informants would prefer to
stand behind their comments by being named. For surnames, I borrowed from the
Chaldean Directory, a phone book published by the community for Chaldeans. The given
name however is invented. For English ﬁrst names, I drew on my own knowledge about
male and female names. For Chaldean names, I borrowed these from Chaldeans I know.
It is important to note that the surnames are not chosen for the village ancestry of the

respondent.

DATA ANALYSIS

Life history/story data provides excellent details, but requires an analytic frame to
render order to the information. In this study, the data pointed towards strong cooperation
within families that facilitated migration and established small businesses. Several
frameworks exist that provided a basis for organizing the data. One such approach

includes the New Economics of Migration model of family solidarity (for a discussion

43

see Massey 1994). But the life history data did not support the ﬁndings of this
perspective, as families engaged in family unit migration and there were signiﬁcant age
and gender hierarchies in all the forms of social cooperation.

Under these conditions, I opted for what Robert Connell (1987: 98) calls a
structural inventory. A structural inventory of gender relations means that the researcher
explores the arenas of power, economy, emotions and symbols in gender relations.
Connell (1987) calls this the “gender regime” of the institution.

“Any attempt to grasp the current moment in sexual politics, to deﬁne where we

have got to, any attempt to characterize the gender relations of another culture or

another time, likewise involves a structural inventory.”

In coding the data along the lines suggested by Connell, I created an inventory of
gender regimes for Chaldean institutions, and an inventory of the gender order of Iraqi
society. For gender regimes, I looked at all four dimensions of gender relations of power,
economy, symbols and emotions. For power, I looked at who held it within the family,
community organizations and businesses. In terms of economy, informants discussed
their normative expectation of breadwinner and caregiving roles. Symbolic and emotional
structures generate insight into the meanings the community assigns to women’s work,
income and education. I also used secondary data sources with my life story data to
evaluate the overall pattern of Iraqi social institutions. Was there evidence that Iraqi
society had taken steps towards egalitarian gender standards in education, political
representation, and access to work? How did Chaldeans live within their community
institutions given the Iraqi gender order? And did Chaldean transport conservative gender

relations to the United States? This data is presented in chapter 3 and chapter 4.

44

While I had expected Chaldeans to follow other immigrant groups and establish
more egalitarian domestic politics, the data did not support this conclusion. The
structuration model is good for understanding political transgression, but I ﬁnd that social
reproduction works better for following “meaning making” that supports the existing
social order. Consequently, I used social ﬁelds and habitus to deﬁne the stakeholders
involved and capital accumulated. The key symbolic capital is family honor that is

presented in chapter 5.

CONCLUSION

The life story data provide details difﬁcult to attain through positivist methods. In
the case of Chaldeans, understanding how connective patriarchy shapes social interaction
between men and women migrants and their children can only be understood by getting
detailed knowledge about ideal marital partners, the dilemmas dating poses for girls, and
the immense social connectivity within extended families. In fact, knowing that
connective patriarchy is in play requires learning a great deal about the social group
under study, this can not be imputed by geographic region alone. To follow the processes
shaping gender relations also requires robust knowledge about the number of family
members, surveillance in everyday life, and the meaning of family honor. Such
knowledge is socially and culturally speciﬁc, and may vary by national origin and
ethnicity depending on contextualizing factors, such as war, economic development of
the country of origin, and migrant status. Chaldeans, therefore, may vary from other Iraqi

ethnicities. They may be similar to different ethnicities from other countries. Only by

45

conducting a case study based on understanding the whole of Chaldean culture can such

comparative analysis be made.

46

CHAPTER 3

MIGRATION: A CENTURY IN THE MAKING

This chapter presents a structural inventory of the Chaldean gender regime in the
family and gender order of Iraqi society. In Arab society, kinship serves to organize
familial social ties into hierarchal relations based on age and gender, what we call
connective patriarchy. As family social ties are resource laden networks, some inertia
exists in changing these structures towards egalitarian gender relations in the post-
migration experience. But to analyze this proposition, it is paramount to ﬁrst determine if
normative and behavioral connective patriarchy had operated before migration. This
question is addressed bylooking at Chaldean migration through the prism of cohorts.
Between the migration pulse of the ﬁrst and second cohort, Iraqi society had changed
sufﬁciently to challenge the notion of invariant social contexts. It is possible therefore for
gender relations in society to have changed sufﬁciently to reorder gender regimes. Thus,
it is an empirical matter and an issue resolved by using the structural inventory of gender
relations. The second issue deals with the context of settlement. If gender relations had
remained conservative, perhaps supporting persistent gender structures after migration
which reconstituted connective patriarchy in Detroit. This too is an empirical issue taken

up by examining social interaction between generations.

MIGRATION NETWORK THEORY AND THE GENDER ORDER
Increasingly, research demonstrates international movements occur between

individuals linked in social networks, followed in the literature as transnationalism

47

because persons so connected remain socially sensitive to each other (Levitt 2001;
Schiller, Basch and Blane-Szanton 1992; Schiller and Fouron 1999; Schiller and Fouron
2001). Transnational migration arises for any number of reasons. And in understanding
any particular group requires examining the speciﬁc social context that gives rise to their
migration and the resources they utilize in their trek. As Steve Gold (2005: 259) writes, “
migration is embedded in a series of political, ethnic, familial, and communal
relationships and environments .” Viewing migration under these terms means paying
attention to the varying conditions that pattern human agency. In cases of labor
migration, receiving countries draft legislation aimed at controlling skill sets, gender, and
family status of the desired migrant (Tyner 2003), and sending societies use migration as
a tool for relieving political turmoil (Grasmuck and Pessar 1991). Whatever the unique
sending and receiving factors in play, once in place, migration ﬂows take on a life of their
own from the actions of those linked in social networks, as they create a cultural of
migration (Massey et al. 1993).

The network perspective accounts for migration capacity with the concept of
social capital (Portes 1998). Social capital offers a means for accomplishing those things
not possible in its absence (Coleman 1988). The beneﬁcial quality of social capital tends
to increase with use, actually increasing in value for those who remain attached. In part,
this quality relates to the durable qualities of social capital bearing networks that are “. ..
more or less institutionalized relations of mutual acquaintance and recognition”
(Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 119). Simply put, social ties operate to reinforce social
sensitivities that lead group members to provide support to the construction of

commrmity institutions and practices (Light 1984; Portes 1987), to lend money for

48

starting businesses (Light and Gold 2000; Yoo 1998), to ﬁnance others’ migration and to
help them locate a place to live when settling in a new country (Faist 2000a; Faist
2000b). These ties know little of international boundaries, as measured by remittances,
return vacations, and involvement in ongoing political affairs of the homeland (Castles
and Miller 1998; Foner 1997; Maira 2002; Massey et al. 1998; Massey 1994).

In Arab societies, social ties and social networks are coterminous with family
lineage. Andrew Shryock (2000: 577) writes that “. .. the entire political economy of the
Arab world is shot through with family ties, and those ties extended beyond the region to
inﬂuence the way global business networks, military alliances, and diplomatic elites
operate.” Philip Kayal (1973: 411) supports this contention and writes that “. .. Middle
Eastemers have effectively limited the boundaries of psycho-social identiﬁcation and
responsibility to those of the same family.” This occurs to such an extent that family
lineage operates as a status marker, and the family name remains an important source of
ancestral knowledge that Middle Eastemers used in gleaning details about a person’s
nativity, religious sect, political sensitivities, and personal background information
regarding his education (Shryock 2000: 580). Among Chaldeans that information
includes statements regarding family honor (Sengstock 1999).

Arab familism operates under the social organization of connective patriarchy that
is age and gender stratiﬁed. The family household remains normatively and behaviorally
patriarchal and extended. Thomas Stevenson (1997) documents families in the Yemen
Central Highlands living in extended relationships in forty-ﬁve percent of the households.
The nuclear family structure exists as a smaller proportion of all households. For Iraq,

surveys show that nearly ﬁfty percent of marriages are between ﬁrst and second cousins

49

(Tierney 2003). These practices uphold the concept of narrow kin-based social networks
with pro-social behavior limited to those in the lineage (Smith 2001).

Thomas Faist (2000b) provides an example of how migration networks operate in
this geographic and cultural region. His review is based on a case study of a Turkish
village done by Ulla-Britt Engelbrektsson (1978). Her study on Alihan villagers ﬁts the
Chaldean case in the way social ties are cultivated and extended to others. She ﬁnds that
social ties begin speciﬁcally among a single ethnicity within the village, but over time
had extended to others regardless of ethnicity or family lineage.

In short, Thomas F aist argues that these villagers began their migration careers
from the resources gained by using specific reciprocity between kinsmen; over time this
social capital had become generalized across ethnic lines drawing the entire village into
migration. Simply put, social ties had become available to everyone in the town, while in
other villages, immigration had remained limited to only a single lineage and thereby one
ethnicity.

Why were social ties initially limited? Alihanean social networks had supported
the notion of collective consciousness and supported solidarity among the ethnically
homogenous because of extensive intermarriage between different lineages. Effectively,
Alihaneans were of common ancestry. As a consequence, Alihan villagers operate as a
community given their “moral obligation to extend practical assistance to those that
emigrated” (Faist 2000b: 140 quoting Engelbrektsson 1978: 287).

The Chaldean case demonstrates multiple similarities with the Alihan villagers.
Mary Sengstock (1999) estimates that the original Chaldean immigrants mostly came

ﬁom the Village of Telkeppe. These pioneer immigrants and their children tend to view

50

kinship ties as thickly linked and express this normatively by offering aid to their fellow
villagers. As an external motivation for restricting solidarity to their own ethnicity,
Chaldeans have lived as a minority in Iraq. Religion, language and cultural distinctions
set Chaldeans apart from the Muslim majority from which they received differential and
unequal treatment (see Wirth 1945 for deﬁnition of minority group). Given speciﬁc
reciprocity among kin and minority status, my informants spoke of few solidaristic ties
with other Iraqi minorities, as with Kurds or even other Christian groups. As a result,
immigration from Iraq springs from narrow social networks among kinship members
tending to be of the same origin village, at least among the ﬁrst and second cohorts.

Another development in migration research with relevance to the Chaldean case
deals with globalization. While women have always been in migration ﬂows and a
majority in many cases (Gabaccia 1994), researchers tend to forget that manufacturing
pulls women into the labor market and operates as an explanation for women’s migration
(Sassen 2003). But for the Arab region, this position needs further consideration. Nana
Oishi’s (2005: 14) study of foreign direct investment and migration in South Asia leads
her to conclude that gender norms play a determining role in the gender composition of
migration. Her work differs from sex role theory that predicts women migrate less given
that they are tied to domestic work in their own homes (see Hondagneu-Sotelo and
Cranford 1999). She ﬁnds a paradox between economic need and unemployment, both
prime motivators of immigration, and the scant levels of women’s labor migration from
Pakistan and Bangladesh.

The key issue remains legitimacy. From society’s perspective, women’s

employment challenges family honor. While export processing zones have led to the

51

expansion of women’s employment and acceptance of women’s work, the kinds of
international employment open to low-income workers (domestic maids and entertainers)
are not seen as shal kaaj or pure work (Oishi 2005: 166). As such, women do not have
networks or legitimacy for migrating abroad. Such developments take place only after
sustained contact between women and work as in the Philippines. And even then,
domestic relations remain extremely conservative (Parreﬁas 2005).

The social context of South Asia and the Arab region suggests that social ties are
somewhat circumspect. As this review shows, the Arab region maintains distinctive
cultural practices regarding family life and family structure. As explained in the theory
chapter, family life is imbued with gender and age relationality that Suad Joseph (1999b)
calls connective patriarchy. In practice, Telkeppes had extended social ties extensively
among themselves and had become the dominant village origin in Detroit. As other
notable villages exist, the data demonstrates that narrow and exclusive social ties were in
operation. A further deduction can be made in asserting that men dominated immigration
initiatives for their families given the gender order of Arab and South Asian societies.
Additionally, Chaldeans share in common with other immigrant and refugee groups

sequential cohort arrivals.

IMMIGRANT COHORTS

Successive migration cohorts have supplied resources in helping subsequent
migrants settle. In following this among Cubans, Alejandro Portes (1987) identiﬁes
successive Cuban migration waves had provided the conditions for the development of an

ethnic enclave economy, dense residential settlement in proximity to business networks

52

tied together horizontally and vertically to generate positive economic effects (see Light
and Gold 2000: 1 1-15). Similarly, Eastern Jewish immigrants had relied on the aid of
German Jews (Kasinitz 2008). In working together, the New York City’s Jewish
community had consolidated an ethnic economy in the textile industry. From 1899 to
1914 nearly 400,000 workers were employed in this sector of the economy (Gold and
Phillips 1996).

Chaldeans, too, beneﬁt from the process of proximal host. To some extent,
Lebanese business owners and the Maron Church had provided some assistance. But this
was short lived because the pioneers built their own community institutions. The
founding of the Chaldean Rite Catholic Church under the direction of Reverend Thomas
Bidawid at Second and Euclid provided the community a site for focusing their spiritual
and social life (Sengstock 1999: 29). And grocery store ownership had been established
to economically support the extended family.

The actions taken by the ﬁrst cohort had proven to be signiﬁcant for those to
follow. These choices set the stage when Congress reformed the Immigration and
Nationality Act of 1924 (or Johnson Reed Act) that had limited Iraqi migration to only
100 entrants. The community’s population growth had accelerated when quotas were
removed and political turmoil began abroad in Iraq, and had grown by more than ﬁve
fold between 1952 and 1967, and four fold again by 1978 (Sengstock 1999). Thus, a forty
year hiatus broke with a second cohort ﬂood under which the social and economic
patterns of settlement were set by the pioneer cohort making it possible to retain
normative and behavioral connective patriarchy. Businesses had existed to support men

in employment, and social institutions reinforced a traditional normative framework.

53

CHALDEAN COHORTS

The gender adaption and migration literature makes a theoretical distinction that
pre-migration contexts have import for men and women’s experiences during settlement.
I have linked this position with the concept of gender order. Gender order provides a
general direction that gender regimes tend to follow. Given that women have high
employment rates in the United States, there have been some parallel changes in the
gender order. For example, Congress provides tax deductions for daycare, and has passed
the Family Medical Leave Act. While inﬁnitesimal steps, these are parallel and
supportive of egalitarian gender relations in the family.

For the Arab region, the gender order supports social familism and the patriarchal
extended family, a complementary condition between order and regime. Thus two
questions present themselves. Did Chaldeans experience gender relations changes due to
economic and political policies prior to migration? And does the new gender order of the
United States unravel connective patriarchy, if it was ever established?

The Chaldean immigrants represent three distinct cohorts, which relate to multiple
differences in aspects of their migration motives, settlement experiences and changes in
Iraq’s gender order. Among those immigrants coming before and during the 19503, they
left an undeveloped country. The principle reason for leaving relates to the demographic
pressures on the village of Telkeppe and dire economic conditions. The dominant gender
order of Iraq for the initial cohort provided few outlets for women. Among Chaldeans,
the structural inventory reveals that women married at an early marriage and lived a
domestic life. The gender regimes of business and education operated as sex segregated

institutions structuring male and female opportunities differently.

54

The group coming in the 19603 until the 1980s left a country in political crisis and
undergoing national development under increasingly Arab auspices. Basically, the Baath
Party had sought to change minority identities, as with Kurds and Chaldeans, into Arab
and Iraqi national identities. Further, areas without Arab majorities had been transformed
by forced p0pulation movements.

Political crisis and identity assaults mark the basic reasons this cohort left Iraq.
The gender order of Iraqi society changes during this period. The state had taken
measures to modernize society by changing women’s status. Positive gains included
women marrying later, attending primary and secondary school, graduating from
university, and a growing number working outside the home. These changes are uneven.
Among Chaldeans, multiple trends exist. Middle class women expected an education and
potential employment during their lifetimes. For other women, feminine identities
revolve around patriarchal family.

The third cohort is composed of Chaldeans leaving since the end of the ﬁrst Gulf
War. This group departs Iraq under conditions of extreme deprivation following years of
war with Iran, United Nations’ sanctions, and ongoing security and economic crises.
Further, under these trying times, the gender order of Iraqi society has regressed. Honor
killings have reemerged, occupying headline news among the Muslim majority.
Chaldeans do not report honor killings, still women’s overall condition has suffered.

Each of these cohorts had faced different social, political and economic contexts
that had shaped their Iraqi gender order. The social forces of disparagement and
economic and existential insecurity frame the motivations for their exit. In the proceeding

sections, the social context for exit is presented for the ﬁrst two cohorts. For each group,

55

the term immigrant means a person who migrated at an adult age. For those over the age
of twelve years, 1 denote them as one-and—a—half as they have had more contact with
United States society than adult immigrants. Some of these children have been educated
in primary and secondary Detroit schools. Iraqi born children who had migrated as
toddlers or younger are referred to as one-and-three-quarter. These children are close to
being reared entirely in the United States, but may have different developmental
experiences. The second-generation refers to any individual born in the United States of
either cohort. In the section dealing speciﬁcally with the ﬁrst cohort, the second-
generation refers to the children born of the ﬁrst cohort. Typically these are older men
and women, and are either working or retired. Similarly, the second-generation of the
second cohort means the children of immigrants. Their parents had migrated during the
1960s and 19705 leaving Iraq given the political turmoil. These are younger men and

women who are just beginning their adult status.

POLTICAL AND ECONOMIC CONTEXTzTHE FIRST COHORT

“My uncle just knew he had to go somewhere, because they were dirt poor. I
mean it was absolutely terrible.” This is a common explanation for the migration motive
among the ﬁrst cohort. Iraqi policies and the failure of the Ottoman Empire to bring
economic development to this area made it a necessity to leave.

Micaeli di Leonardo’s (1984) discussion of Southern Italians applies to the
Chaldean case. Much the same as Italian peasants, state policy had disadvantaged
Chaldeans. By withdrawing resources from rural areas, the Iraqi state had sought to

maximize urban development in Baghdad (Tripp 2000: 69). Chaldeans had been further

56

victimized by differential tax treatment, paying ﬁve to six times that charged to Muslim
cultivators (Lukitz 1995: 31-32). And as the global depression of the 19305 arrived, state
policy and global economic processes had pauperized the Christian population (Lukitz
1995: 31). Migration theories often posit economic need as a prime motivator for
international movement.

For this cohort, migration was a perilous journey. Bill Hermiz, a one-and-a—half
immigrant himself, talks about his uncle who had migrated during the timeframe of the
ﬁrst cohort. Bill’s uncle started in Mexico where he supported himself by reselling
clothing before coming to Detroit. Other migrants followed similar pathways. In one
case, a man had spent twenty years separated from his extended family, as he peddled
wares across the Canadian frontier. He had played an important role in settling the
Chaldean community in Detroit, by soliciting sojourner migration among several men
from Telkeppe families.

As another motive, Chaldeans had left Iraq because nationalist education policies
had closed minority schools (see Article 28 of the 1930 Public Education Law). This law
“. .. (had) deprive(d) 125,000 Christian children (of) their communal schools” (Lukitz
1995: 28). By 1939, the state had direct control over all private schools, with the power to
shutter any school that undermines national unity (see Lukitz 1995: 120; Simon 1986, for
further discussion of public education reform).

Both economic and educational policies had placed Christians at a disadvantage
during this time period. Beyond these issues, nation building had ﬁgured notably in the
fates of Iraq’s national minority populations. As the British Colonial Ofﬁce and Iraq’s

monarchy sought to strengthen national identiﬁcation, the multiple minority peoples of

57

the nation had lost recognition for political autonomy (Lukitz 1995: 30-32). As a result of
their minority status, Chaldeans had to undertake migration. Personal security plays a role
here in their motives. As Bill explains, “You know, just being Christian at that time was
difﬁcult. My uncle, my mother ’s brother, was physically thrown off a train and killed by
another soldier strictly because we worshiped a Jew by the name of Jesus Christ.”

This history documents three major forces driving Chaldean migration for the ﬁrst
cohort: economic, security, and identity. In studying ethnicity, sociology places these as
notable conditions for fostering reactive solidarity, a form of social capital. Like the
Alihaneans, Chaldeans use social ties, as regulated by connective patriarchy, in effecting
migration. And kinship sensitivities remain a part of even the Americanized immigrant’s

sensitivities that are quoted above.

SOCIAL TIES, SOCIAL CAPITAL AND PATRIARCHY

Social ties had meant everything for the ﬁrst cohort in getting to the Americas.
Migration sponsorship, ﬁrst job, and business loans had ﬂown from their kin to make
their migration journey possible. These ties had generated social capital while
simultaneously accruing in the context of relational kinship statuses. In the above quote,
Bill Hermiz refers to his uncle as his mother ’s brother. This is a particularly noteworthy
comment coming from a highly Americanized immigrant with ﬁfty years experience
living in the United States. Mother’s brother (or khal) are men extending kindness and
support in their relations to their sisters’ children (Joseph 1999a).

Within connective patriarchy, Chaldeans expect social and economic support

from heads-of-household. Thus, older men hold legitimacy to call the shots in business or

58

expect privileges at home. Both Mary Sengstock (1999) and Qais Al-Nouri (1964)
provide quotes that women had upheld their status in the patriarchal bargain as caregivers
and homemakers. Children contribute to the bargain by working in family stores. Like
previous research on the community, my informants basically called family relationships
“. .. very patriarchal, and whatever the father said was normally done.”

In operation, connective patriarchy had meant that most Chaldeans depended on
relationships between men. Bill Hermiz recalls that his father’s brother had sponsored his
father. In return, his father had worked for my informant’s uncle to learn the retail trade
until he had opened his own business. That business had supported my informant’s
family, and had drawn on his and his siblings’ labor. Further, migrant men had made it
their moral obligation to support their patriarchs (that is their fathers) isolated by
language or left unproductive by age.

For women, the same kinship networks existed. What differs is their gender
status. In the ﬁrst cohort, women had married young, many in their middle teen or
younger years. Parents had provided dowries when the marriage had not been between
cousins. Further, girls’ schooling remained nominal relative to boys.

Following migration, it is understandable that women were somewhat isolated
from the public realm. Not knowing English had deepened their dependence on their
husbands. In explaining her mother’s situation, Terry Kashat, a second-generation
informant with ﬁrst cohort parents, spoke of the “. . . few women (who had) started taking
English classes at night.” The majority, she concluded, had found Neo-Soureth suitable

for caregiving, and did not learn to drive a car.

59

For the second-generation, connective patriarchy had worked as a constraint in
every detail of their lives. Even the pull of American youth culture (Whyte 1992) did not
unmoor Chaldean prohibitions regarding dating and dances. For Terry, she relied on
patriarchal protection to attend a school dance. “I really had to beg my father, in order to
attend my high school prom. And he only let me go because my cousin was going to
double with me.”

Further connective patriarchy interacts with additional male migration. As Terry’s
father’s brothers migrated to the United States, they had made demands that she and her
sisters should live more conventionally. For Julia (Terry’s sister), “My father’s brothers
(had migrated) from Telkaif, and as my father was the youngest, all the strict village
traditions (had been) thrown right back on me.” Attempts to arrange marriage and
terminate education goals had been their demands. As this demonstrates, connective
kinship obligations continuously renewed migration networks, which in turn revitalized
connective patriarchy.

While the dimension of power and economies are easily documented here,
evidence emerges showing the gender structures of symbols and emotions. For example,
women’s role as caregivers are recognized and supported within community institutions
as a basic value. The Chaldeans American Ladies of Charity acknowledges outstanding
women who are nominated for the Guardian Angel award. Bestowing the award is based
on community service. Kayla Facho, a second-generation woman (in her mid-thirties)
explains that her grandmother earned this award from her charity work.

My grandma did numerous things for the community. She would visit senior

citizens at nursing homes and pray with them. She would sew for them. She was

60

one of the few women in her age group that drove; so she gave several women

transportation to church. And she started her own prayer group.

While men give to the community as well, their contributions follow masculine
expectations. Chaldean men raised money to build or to rent infrastructure for the
community’s many social organizations, such as the churches, community center, and
social clubs. Thus, men and women are symbolically coded and rewarded differently. In
this case, women’s symbolic rewards support complementary gender relations.

For the ﬁrst cohort, the structural inventory includes male breadwinning, social
capital controlled by men, and intact connective patriarchy after settlement. Using the
structure of gender relations model, Chaldean men predominate in the areas of power,
economy, and symbols. From the late 1930s, until the middle of the 1950s their second-
generation is embedded in the gender regimes of the Chaldean community organized
around gender relations marked by patriarchal dominance in all areas of gender
structures. For the ﬁrst cohort women, interactions between the gender order of the
United States and the gender regimes of the community are present, but limited and not
ubiquitous. For the second generation, the community shelters its girls from the dominant
society. In summary, the data does not support a parallel trend in gender relations
between the gender order of the United States and the gender regimes of the community

or Chaldean family.
POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC CONTEXT: THE SECOND COHORT

The reason the second wave got out of Iraq, was not because of the magnet power

of American wealth. The majority of the second wave was better oﬂmonetarily in

61

Iraq. So, they had to leave because their children were of military age or because
of background discrimination. Which was not very public, but it is there all the
time. The Nationalist Arab movement, the Bath, had encouraged [these negative
feelings between ethnic groups]. And after 1963, Abd al-Salam Arif, who
ruled Iraq for about seven or eight years, declared in one of his speeches, “There
will be no John and Johnny in Iraq any more. There will only be Mohammad and

Ali.” The names John and Johnny are pretend Christians, because they are

Christian names, like western names. Mohammad and Ali are other people,

Muslim people. So in a public speech, he is saying that. So there is a lot of

pressure on Christians to get out. (N emir Romayah, second cohort male, age 505).
This quote catches the horns of a dilemma. While most second cohort informants discuss
political and security concerns as the prime motive for their migration, more than a few
immigrants recall that they or their parents choose to stay in Iraq during the critical years
leading up to the war with Iran. In staying put, these Chaldeans had offered explanations
ranging from status inconsistency, lost wealth and income, lost language proﬁciency, and
most importantly the inability to function as patriarchs.

Those who stayed had taken advantage of Iraq’s economic development as it
unfolded during the 19605 and after nationalization of the nation’s oil ﬁelds in the 19705.
Chaldeans had been uniquely positioned to capture oil dollars in service businesses. For
example, Islamic rules forbid Muslims to sell liquor. As Christians, Chaldeans faced no
legal or religious restrictions in service businesses open to them. Secondly, many

Chaldean families had encouraged their sons to attend university. A5 a result, several

62

Chaldeans had become qualiﬁed professionals in banking, accounting, and engineering.
As Jim Esso, second cohort immigrant explains:

From 1968 to 1979, the country was fairly prosperous. There was a lot of work,

contracts, the oil had been nationalized, and proﬁt from oil production was

coming back to rebuild the country. So there was a lot of promise and hope.
A5 a result of these conditions, Chaldeans speak of these times as ﬁnancially viable. A
second cohort male had explained it in terms of the currency exchange. During this time,
the dinar (Iraqi currency) had been three times the value of the United States Dollar.
Nedhal Habboo, a third cohort immigrant women, recalls that her father visited Detroit in
the 19705 “. .. to check out the scene; he had decided that life in Iraq was much better
ﬁnancially.”

That promise had ended in 1980 when Saddam Hussein crashed Iraq’s future by
waging war on Iran. As my informants explain, no family escaped the war, and nearly
everyone lost kin. For those fortunate enough to survive, the war still had brought
economic problems and had made physical security a major concern. A third cohort
immigrant woman recalls that intense attacks on Basra had sent her family to the desert in
search of safety. They eventually returned north to the Mosel area where Chaldeans have
many villages and enclaves in northern cities like Mosul.

While economic inertia provides one explanation for not migrating, another factor
had operated as well. From the interviews, two themes emerge. The ﬁrst is inter-family
status. Most immigrants did not speak of simple status inconstancy, as in having to drive
a taxi in Detroit when they had been a professional in Iraq. Rather, Chaldeans had felt

signiﬁcant community pressure. Most migrants had anticipated that their lack of English

63

proﬁciency and circumscribed social networks would erode their status within their
community of peers. Thus, Iraqi Chaldeans and American Chaldeans had harbored
ambiguous feelings towards each other. In one case, a university trained second-cohort
immigrant had been chastised for not mopping a store ﬂoor correctly, and he had
conveyed his feelings regarding such as an insult. Qais al-Nouri (1964) writes about
inter-community strife between the older and newer immigrants from his ﬁeld work as
well.

The second factor relates to being able to support a family solely by male
earnings. Chaldeans did not see this as possible. Nadhal Habboo summarizes the
conﬂuence of mixed motives shaping ambiguous migration motives during this period.

Although being in Detroit might have promised them greater economic

prosperity, they (had) noticed that they would not be able to practice the same

professions. So they would have to go into the store business. In my father’s case,
he would have joined his brothers in their store business and would have stayed
away from (his profession) which was his career. And he (had) considered this as

a kind of degradation, or going down a step in profession; even though it might

have promised his family a better future. So he decided to go back to Iraq, and we

are talking the 19705 which was for the Arab world a period of oil boom

Things were going very well economically for Iraq. Although he was not making

a great salary he was easily able to support his family. And he was just

comfortable in Iraq; he could speak his ﬁrst language. English would have been a

great barrier for him. So he would have had to abandon his profession, his fame,

and his good (professional) reputation there. They didn’t speak enough Chaldean.

64

So they were estranged from both communities in the United States, both the

American and Chaldean.

As this narrative makes clear, potential migrants had debated risk associated with
staying versus conditions in Detroit. Inter-community status and status inconsistency had
been a factor in the decision making. In part, this point shows clearly that Chaldeans had
considered their economic and social fates in the United States as tied to opportunities
established by their extended family. This suggests that Chaldeans depended on social
capital from their social ties within the community. Secondly, as the above informant
makes clear, maintaining head-of-household status had been an important consideration.
This ﬁnding is similar to men in the Dominican and Hmong communities, who prefer
return migration (or at least mention it) over permanent settlement with lost gender status
(Espiritu 2003a; Pessar 1986).

Although some of the informants had explained why they or other family
members choose to remain in Iraq, the overwhelming majority had chosen to leave. For
these informants, the society had become intolerable given the emerging totalitarianism,
internal warfare, and identity threats from Arabization campaigns. They simply had
known that remaining in Iraq was not an option.

From Abd al-Karim Qasim, the leader of the 1958 Revolution that ended Iraq’s
monarchy period, through 1973 and the Algiers Agreement, Iraq’s political regimes had
sought to undermine Kurdish autonomy. The entire period can be read as attempts to
pacify separatist aspirations through force, phony negotiations, and forced population

movements. The principle aim had been to gain control over the Kirkuk region, which is

65

located in Northern Iraq and is an oil rich region (Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett 2001;
Human Rights Watch 2003b: 8; J awad 1981). Chaldean villages are located in northern
Iraq and are in proximity to these contested areas. As a result, whatever happened
militarily to the Kurds, had repercussions on the Chaldeans living in the villages or the
major cities where Arabization campaigns took place.

Bassarn Gumma, a second-cohort migrant male, relates the following account. He
describes security concerns as one of the prime motives for Chaldean migration during
this period. At this time Detroit offered a supportive community and safety.

Back in the beginning of 1970, I became a teacher. For my ﬁrst four years of

teaching, I was in the middle of a civil war. The Kurdish uprising had a huge

impact because geographically the Chaldean towns and villages were in the
middle of the conﬂict. And many of those towns were bombed. So I can tell you

the biggest factor in Chaldean lives in Iraq was what happened between 1961

until now.

Establishing Arab hegemony over the oil rich areas had marked a long period of military
action and political machination. Through the 19805, military actions had included the
gas attack on Halabja and the ethnic purges during the Anfal campaign. Chaldean
villagers were affected in terms of security concerns, and sought refuge in cities and
migration.

Beyond insecurity in the north, informants speak of their experiences in terms of
surveillance. Chaldeans had seen the Baathist party establish a link between the security
apparatus of the state and political recruitment. As Fawzi Younan, second cohort male,

explains, the Baathist had attached itself to collage campuses.

66

And the same things happen in the colleges. 1 had so many friends that the
Baathist used to call and ask them to join the party. And for any reason, if you say
no, then they either beat you up, or they would call the secret police to take you
away in handcuffs. From there, they take you to a processing center. Now who
knows about you? Not even God. Not even God knows where you’re at. And if
your family were to go to the secret police or to the other government ofﬁces and
ask about you; then they would say ‘We don’t know. Sorry, we have not heard of
this person.’
As Fawzi explains, denying the Bath political allegiance carried great risk. This
narrative is not a lonely account. Many Chaldeans left Iraq for the well-founded fear of
political persecution. While the stories vary, escape from violence serves as the cause for
Chaldean exit (see Zolberg, Suhrke and Aguayo 1989 for discussion of political
refugees). Some of those leaving were newspaper writers and editors. Others were simply
politically active.

A similar account about the fear of Baathist incursion on social life is expressed in
the following account. In his life history, Nemir Romayah’s family protects their son
from possible military conscription by sending him out of the country. His own
precocious appetite for political discussion perhaps aided his parents’ decision to send
him abroad.

So, I left in the late 605. Basically my family was afraid because I was kind of

active. And so they arranged for me to leave the country, and go for study. It

wasn’t life threatening or things like that. But they were afraid of what was going

to happen. I was getting into the age of the army, which is 18. And the army in

67

that era was a very bad place to be. You know, because there were a lot of wars

and stuff like that. So I left. And when I left Iraq, I got very much involved in

Iraqi politics, human rights issues, and defending Iraqi rights. (I was) working for

democracy, and trying to build democracy in Iraq. Basically, after that I could not

go back. I could not go home. I was opposing the regime at that time. And the

Iraqi state, through the Mohabrat, secret police, and the embassies all over the

world were against me and people that dissented. I was in England and they took

my passport away to force me to go back to Iraq. So they could erase me.
These exit narratives share in common the palpable fear emerging from 1963 through to
the beginning of the war with Iran. The civic life of Iraq was strangled by the Baathists.
In order to political power, the party increasingly used surveillance over Iraqis (see
Makiya 1989).

Beyond major conﬂicts and the police state, Chaldeans also cite ethnic
disparagement as a reason for leaving. For some, the society developed under a
totalitarian model without tolerance for ethnic diversity. Jim Esso explains how he felt
Christianity was threatened.

In 1968 when I ﬁnished at the university, the Baath Party came to power. Saddam

Hussein’s regime had come to power. They basically had closed the Jesuit

Schools, Baghdad College, al-Eckma that was the name of the university, and

basically all Christian schools. There were many Christian schools in Iraq run by

the Chaldean sisters. And, the rationale and reasoning you know, it wasn’t always
spoken, was that this was not compatible with the philosophy of the Baath party.

Private education was not compatible with the philosophy of the Baath Party.

68

They wanted to educated people a certain way. With that, any hope of mine going

back at one time, idealistic notions going back and serving, became very difﬁcult.

And the family started making plans to come over. So my family came over in

1973 that was my father, mother, and siblings. I had one that remained behind and

got married. But eventually he came and he immigrated in 1978.

For Jim Esso’s family, the problem had not been a stated concern for security, or having a
well-founded fear. Rather, his family considered the possibly of remaining Chaldean in a
society intolerant to ethnic diversity problematic.

During the 19605, Human Rights Watch (1995) documents that Iraq engaged in
identity cleansing. As an example, a Chaldean solider had ceased to be ethnic when the
state relabeled him as Arab. Nemir Romayah explains the same process.

I was in England when the census started in 67 or 68, I can’t remember. Being

Iraqi, I got excited. So I went to the center and I ﬁlled twenty forms. And under

race, I put Chaldean. I went to the stupid ofﬁcer sitting there, somebody with a

high school degree; and he said, “What is this? What is Chaldean?” He throws the

thing in my face; and he says, “Go put Arabic.” There is no Chaldean in Iraq.

That is a personal thing, and that is what happened to the community. Eventually,

a lot of Christian and Chaldeans left Iraq because of this discrimination.

As these accounts make clear, Baathist policies encroached upon education, politics, and
social life. Living in Iraq meant staying in a society that was intolerant of diversity.

Given these exit narratives, it is clear that Chaldeans saw migration as a one-way
street. In migrating, the second cohort had understood return migration had little

possibility. To the extent that transnational social ties operated, Chaldeans had focused on

69

relatives stranded by immigration delays in countries of ﬁrst asylum, as with: Jordan,
Italy, Greece and Spain. Thus, permanent settlement for the second cohort and those
making up the initial third cohort had become the only option. There is little reason to
believe that this trend will reverse. At the time of this writing, the United Nations High
Commissioner for Reﬁrgees estimates approximately two million Iraqi reﬁrgees. As a
result, Chaldean migration is deﬁned as family unit migration (that is the whole families
migrated), permanent, and dependent on social ties and networks between family

members.

SOCIAL TIES, SOCIAL CAPITAL AND PATRIARCHY
The hospitality business, and the restaurant business in Iraq, was run by the
Christians for a reason. The Muslims were not granted by law, a liquor license. It
is against their religion. So, that actually opened a window to the Christians, and
mainly the Chaldeans got into that. And the country’s economy was improving a

lot. So that business ﬂourished (Nemir Romayah, second cohort immigrant male).

This respondent explains what Ivan Light and Carolyn Rosenstein (1995) call supply side
effects in entrepreneurship. Supply effects occur when a group is more able to provide a
good or service relative to some other ethnic group in society. Because Iraqi society had
placed restrictions on Muslims, Christians had become the nation’s hospitality business
owners. This adaptation dates back several decades.

Desmond Stewart and John Haylock (1956: 58) had identiﬁed Chaldeans as

restaurant and hotel owners in Baghdad in the late 19405. George Harris (1958: 4)

70

identiﬁes class heterogeneity within the community ranging from lower to higher
occupational prestige. Harris (195 8) recognizes that Chaldeans were disproportionate to
their numbers when examining occupations associated with Europeans. They were
domestics, servers at restaurants, assistants on archeological sites, and dealers of
antiquities (Harris 1958: 4). As these authors conﬁrm, Chaldeans had established their
own businesses at a rate disproportional to their numbers. This condition meets what
sociologists call ethnic economics and ethnic niches (Waldinger 1996; Zhou 1992).

As a social institution, the Chaldean ethnic economy relies extensively on kinship
ties. As with the ﬁrst cohort, these networks had been embedded in gendered practices.
For example, Ayman J iddou, a second cohort immigrant, had explained that his father,
born in Telkeppe, had migrated successively from Telkeppe to Mosul in 1945, then to
Baghdad in 1952. When his father had left Baghdad, he had relied on a brother to assume
the Mosul business. In this case, speciﬁc reciprocity Operates within the lineage; help is
extended within the psycho-social limits of the family. In a similar case, an inter-
generational lineage tie had led an informant to stay and maintain a family business
holding during the Iraq-Iran War. When things proved untenable, he had migrated to
Detroit, and his father had established him in another business. As his experience
demonstrates, men follow this pattern of social cooperation in both Iraq and Detroit in
building business assets.

The reliance on male networks had carried a burden for Chaldean men, especially
among the second cohort. These men had taken advantage of educational opportunities in
Iraq and the West. Some had travelled to England and others to the United States for

graduate study in engineering and other ﬁelds. Their major burden had not been simple

71

status inconsistency, where occupational prestige is jeopardized by linguistic isolation or
credentials mismatch. Rather, Chaldean men had remained important, as breadwinners
for their families. Consequently, immigration had depended on them accepting an
economic adaption which could support the extended family.

Jim Esso, a second cohort immigrant with graduate training as an engineer, had
left his chosen ﬁeld, and delayed marriage to carry out his obligation to his family of
origin. Similarly, Yasmeen Hakim, a second generation female, explains that her father
left his career to support his extended family

[My father] is a civil engineer by trade. And he worked [for a manufacturing ﬁrm]

for about maybe three to four years before he realized that working for a company

wasn’t going to suit him ﬁnancially. [When his several] brothers and sisters came
from Iraq, he had opened a party store. My father is very educated and an
interesting man, and should never have been behind the “cage.”
Stores had offered a means to sponsor siblings and parents to the United States because
the businesses had provided jobs and income to immigrants. These cases point towards
connective patriarchy through the sacriﬁces men made in helping their families migrate
to the United States.

Similar to the ﬁrst cohort, women had relied extensively on male networks. While
women had played roles in facilitating migration, most women had their migration
sponsored by relatives or came in family unit migration. Beatrice Denja, a second
generation female, had explained that her mother had migrated to the United States by
herself. Upon arriving, she had lived with her aunt. She had understood, being the eldest,

that her earned income was to support her family of origin when they arrived in the

72

United States. Thus, very much like the men, women had supported their fathers and their
siblings.

But noticeable changes exist in terms of gender status for Chaldean women in this
cohort. While it remained that some Chaldean women married as teen brides and had
little educational experience, others had gained some education and professional
experience. This trend had reﬂected a change in the Iraqi gender order.

Gender relations had begun to change with personal status reforms. Personal
status laws pertain to rights to divorce, age of marriage, inheritance, and child custody.
Amal al-Sharqi (1982) writes that Iraq had changed these laws in 1978. Further, al-Sharqi
states that the Baathist had sought to expanded women’s participation in education. To do
so, public education had been made free at all grade levels in 1974. This new policy had
sought to eliminate parental social practices of favoring boys over girls when it came to
education. This policy initiative had expanded by the 1979 school year when the
government had mandated compulsorily education for all Iraqi children. As a result, the
number of girls in primary education improved from 29 percent of the student body in
1970 to 45 percent in 1979. In the same period, women represented 31 percent of the
university students. Educational gains had worked to increase women’s representation in
employment, and 19 percent of the non-agricultural workforce had been female (Al-
Sharqi 1982). On the face of it, the gender order of Iraq seems radically changed.

An important research study provides us a test of resource theory. Qais al-Nouri
(1993) had studied domestic decision making among rural women. Al-Nouri ﬁnds that
urbanization had made a signiﬁcant impact on eroding traditional family structure. In

principle, removing kinship obligations offers one means for women to balance domestic

73

power. However, al-Nouri ﬁnds this to be a mixed blessing. Instead of a feminist
realization, young wives had lost contact with their extended family resulting in less
emotional and material support. These women had been handed the double burden of
access to work, while losing care resources. Secondly, women’s status within families
had changed very little. As al-Nouri (1993) states, “Conjugal life has not been
seriously disrupted despite a growing imbalance between old and new norms governing
spouses relationships.” Similarly, al-Nouri notes that career women, generally older and
unmarried, are subject to “gossip and criticism.” While expanded rights to education and
work, women’s relations with men in the household had remained conventional.

Among Chaldean women that migrated in the 19605, their second-generation
daughters had not recounted educational or occupational gains by their mothers. They
simply had stated that their mothers were housekeepers. In part, these accounts reﬂect the
marital practices of Chaldean men who returned to Iraq and arranged marriages to
younger women, teens in some cases during the 19605. In other instances, young
immigrant women chose to work at a family store and had followed a marital path
without thought of further career or educational goals. Either through arranged marriage
or opting for marriage, these women chose to be caregiving wives and mothers.

But there were changes. A few of the immigrant women had earned high school
and university degrees either in Iraq or in the Detroit metro area. Even among this group,
fathers and husbands had dictated where some of these women could work. A few
actually had combined career and family in ways consistent with the similar unequal
domestic responsibilities borne by women, but with acceptance of American standards of

personal freedoms and choice in working and career.

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In any event, the structural inventory remains consistent with men organizing
migration and economic adaptation. By taking the role of patriarch, the men had gained
important symbolic and emotional recognition that legitimates their privileged position
with the family. Most Chaldeans speak lovingly of their fathers and all the things these
men have sacriﬁced on their behalf. Given the loss in professional status and the cost to
their patriarchal privilege by coming to the United States, it is understandable that men

had been fully vested in the symbolic and emotional structures of gender relations.

THIRD COHORT

The end of the 19705 seemed pivotal in terms of greater status and freedoms for
Iraqi women. However, fortunes turned for the worse. What followed end progressive
social reforms. And women’s gains have faltered in terms of education and occupation.

These changes related to maintaining control over the country following the ﬁrst
Gulf War. Saddam Hussein had relied on conservative religious and tribal groups to
consolidate his power. Under this new regime, previous legal gains granted to protect
women’s rights had been lost, leading to an increase in honor killings throughout the
nation. Under presidential decree, “a male defendant accused of murder or assault of a
female relative may plead as a defense that he was motivated by a real or perceived
breach of family honor” (Human Rights Watch 2003a). Additionally, the paralyzed
economy has left universal education derelict due to the lack of ﬁrnds. In response, Iraqis
have chosen to educate their boys over girls. Once again the gender gap has increased in

terms of education.

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For Chaldean women, the life histories support some of these larger
generalizations, but not honor killings. Nadhal Habboo, a third cohort immigrant, recalls
with regards to her own motivations in leaving is that things got worse after the Iran-Iraq
War.

I guess it depends on the social class. Both my father and mom’s families had

working women in them. In fact, all my aunts are working women, and my mom.

In terms of social mobility and freedom for the women in the 605 and 705 it was a

lot better than during my generation or my sister’s generation during the 805. In

terms of the way they could dress outside of the house, the kind of options they
had for working, or interaction with other people, they had freedom. It is not that
every generation had those freedoms. Rather the particular social class they
belonged, with them being Christian, and often times being within the community
being equated as being more westernized helped Chaldean women a great deal.
In summary, war and sanctions undermined potential gains for women in Iraq related to
development. Taken together, gender developments have not borne out signiﬁcant gains
for women making the gender order of Iraq in the complementary or conﬂict state by

2005.

CONCLUSION

This chapter has reviewed many of the details for why Chaldeans left Iraq.
Economic, political and cultural discrimination had force the migrants abroad. Further,
these reactive conditions had cemented speciﬁc reciprocity. The gendered obligations of

connective patriarchy had placed men in charge of migration. In terms of settlement, men

76

had maintained their breadwinning role. While women had contributed, their primary role
had remained as homemakers. This gender division of labor results in Chaldean men
receiving syrnbolical and emotional validation for their work. Women’s work and
sacriﬁces receive recognition more for their homemaking activities.

For the ﬁrst cohort, the data points towards women being subsumed by family and
community. Even as the ﬁrst second-generation had struggled with the traditional gender
relations of their parents, additional family members (from the second cohort) had added
to the overall lineage, making for age demands upon younger brothers to uphold
conservative norms, showing that connective patriarchy still operated within the second-
cohort and could be extended to the ﬁrst cohort by the authority of older men.

The incoming second cohort had left Iraq prior to signiﬁcant changes in the
gender order. Any advances for women had been uneven, with middle class women
receiving the lion’s share of expanded opportunities into the late 19705. And once in the
United States, the small producer economy had set a pattern of male breadwinning and
social institutions had provided ample opportunity to recreate gender within community
space.

As the data shows, Chaldeans had been their own proximal host with the
unintended consequence of upholding connective patriarchy from the beginning to the
end of the twentieth century. This case differs from German and Eastern Jews, as
Chaldeans became inﬂuenced socially by the new wave of migration. Still the economic
success of the group made all of this possible, otherwise the economic and social

resources might have led to a different gender trajectory.

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CHAPTER 4

EMOTIONAL AND SYMBOLIC STRUCTURES OF GENDER RELATIONS

I have found that a lot of the girls were still having that double standard with
school, work, and going out. A lot of girls can’t tell their parents that they are going
out. If they go anywhere, then their brothers have to be with them. Actually one of
my ﬁiends right now, her sister-in-law has never worked a day in her life and has
never gone anywhere without somebody in her family. Now that she is married, she
actually has more freedom, than she did when she was living at home. She didn’t go
to [college]. She did high school and that was it (Kayla Facho, second-generation

informant).

This study did not expect to ﬁnd strong prohibitions against young women’s
education, dating, and work into the second-generation of the second cohort. These
double standards, while shifting in their nature, have remained in place for nearly a half-
century. This is an odd ﬁnding which requires an explanation. A dominant perspective on
migrant adaptation, assimilation theory, holds that all immigrant groups undergo
structural and cultural integration with the dominant society and lose their distinctive
ethnic practices in family life and interaction styles (Alba and Nee 2003). In the Chaldean
community, the prolonged double standard suggests that the family gender regime is
embedded in gender norms resistant to assimilative pressure. In part, this stems from their
economic success as merchants. As reported by the Chaldean American Chamber of

Commerce, nearly seventy percent of Chaldeans own a business and the community’s

78

median family income is $96,100 (2008). So while assimilation obviously occurs, the
tried-and—true method of being Chaldean has tremendous value. To ferret out what
assimilation theory misses, I examine the family from the perspective of gender

structures. I will examine in particular emotional and symbolic features.

ISSUE OF FAMILY STRUCTURE

To understand the Chaldean family requires examining its social organization and
cultural meanings. As a minority group, Chaldeans follow the dominant kinship pattern
of Iraq, which is also endemic to Asia. Thus, many different Asian national and minority
peoples live under a similar kinship structure. For example, the kinship patterns of
Chaldeans are similar to historic patterns among the Japanese and Chinese (Chow 1996;
Glenn 1986). Nana Oishi’s (2005) discussion of contemporary Pakistani, Bangladeshi,
and Asian Indian women follow similar kinship and gender norms of Chaldeans. And
another minority group from the region, Bukharan Jews from Uzbekistan and Tadjikistan
hold similar family practices and structures (Halberstadt and Nikolsky 1996).

In terms of practice and norms, the Bukharans provide a good example. Men hold
authority within their families, and women abide by the power of their “. .. father,
brothers, and then husband” (Halberstadt and Nikolsky 1996: 245). A Bukharan woman
gains status in the patrilineage through her children. With age, she becomes “. .. a
decision maker for her adult children and may control the family wealth” (Halberstadt
and Nikolsky 1996: 246). Still a woman’s status remains low. “Neither education, nor the
professional status of women can necessarily provide her with the respect of her family”

(Halberstadt and Nikolsky 1996: 245). For single women, double standards exist and girls

79

glt
for

be:

are not allowed to date. Rumors of loose behavior lead to girls being undesirable marital
partners within their community, which is very similar to the Chaldean community.

This kinship pattern, known as classical patriarchy, diverges from the patriarchal
family of Europe and North American (Coontz 2006; Kandiyoti 1987; Kandiyoti 1988).
These differences are signiﬁcant enough to warrant review. Stephanie Coontz (2006:
124-25) argues that European family structure and practice was modiﬁed over several
centuries to become radically dissimilar to classical patriarchy. As practiced, European
women have held distinct advantages. They beneﬁted from neo-locality after marriage,
delayed marital age, and earned their dowry (Coontz 2006: 124-132). As a result,
European women have enjoyed greater independence and gained more power after
marriage relative to Asian women living under classical patriarchy. This dates historically
to the fourteenth century (Coontz 2006: 124). Additionally, European society had
prohibited polygamy by the twelfth century and the doctrine of consent had allowed for
consensual unions.

In the United States, the Standard North American Family developed by the
nineteenth century. Limited to a white middle class, women organized their domestic life
under the cult of true womanhood (Welter 1973). This family relied on a division of labor
between a breadwinner father and stay-at-home mom. By the mid-twentieth century,
institutional arrangements between government, industry and labor extended this
arrangement to the working class (Coontz 1997). But change was inevitable. Economic
globalization undermined male breadwinning ability by the 19705, and women’s labor
force participation increased dramatically. With women’s entry into labor, men have

begun to take up the slack in childcare and domestic work to the extent of being

80

recognized by some researchers as holding their own second shift (Bianchi, Robinson and
Milkie 2006).

Asian patriarchy is built on different traditions that uphold patriarchal privilege in
contrast to the Standard North American Family. As practiced historically, the household
patriarch retains power over the multigenerational family that includes his wife,
unmarried sons and daughters, married sons and their wives, and grandchildren. Women
enter this family at a young age often without much say over her betrothed. Her future
status depends on bearing sons and cultivating lifelong and enduring social ties with
them. If she accomplishes this feat, she gains status in the household through control over
daughters-in-law (Coontz 2006; Kandiyoti 1988).

My interviews identify many of these broad facets of classical patriarchy, as with
young age at marriage, patrilineal residence, arranged maniage, and in a few instances a
cruel mother-in-law. In terms of female dominance, young women spoke to their desires
to be accepted by the groom’s family as a sister. As explained, some families might not
be nice to the daughter-in-law. This stems historically from the cyclical status of women
under classical patriarchy. In an unfortunate description, Saleen Koury discusses how her
grandmother victimized her mother.

My grandmother trained her sons, which are my dad’s brothers, to beat my mom.
So she had a very rough life. Between all the children she bore and the cruelty of
my uncles, it was a lot on her body.
The interviews support the basic proposition that Chaldean women of both the ﬁrst and
second cohort had contemporaries living within the structure and normative system of

classical patriarchy. While not all households exercised male hegemony over every

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aspect of family life, evidence documents that classical patriarchy worked in the
Chaldean community in terms of arranged marriage and male privilege.

These differences between European and Asian family structure and practice play
an important role in post-migration experiences. To understand this for Chaldeans, we

need to review the details of their kinship and family practices.

CHALDEAN FAMILY STRUCTURE

Al-Nouri’s (1964) work documents the pattern of classical patriarchy among the
Chaldean community of Telkeppe in the early twentieth century. The typical family
structure continued in the extended form. “At least three generations continued to live
and functioned as an economic unit” (Al-Nouri 1964: 4). Family leadership fell to the
senior male. When the father died, the rule of primogeniture passed the family wealth to
the oldest male heir, and he assumed authority over the household. Family members
included the patriarch, his wife, unmarried sons, married sons and their wives, along with
children and grandparents. Patrilineal descent had meant that-only men carried the family
name, an “. .. girls were entirely submerged in their spouses’ kin groups” (Al-Nouri
1964: 5). Gender roles had segregated male and female experiences from childhood till
death.

The Chaldean family structure is not unique to the Village of Telkeppe or the
early twentieth century. In the contemporary period, informants mentioned that had they
remained in Iraq then they naturally would have lived in their fathers’ household and

given him their earnings. The continuance of classical patriarchy among Chaldeans is not

82

exceptional for the region. Thomas Stevenson (1997: 22) used Yemen’s census data and
found that forty-ﬁve percent of the households were extended or multifamily.

After migration, Mary Sengstock (1999: 47) observed that the Chaldean family
remained close because of their business dealings and frequent visitation. In her analysis,
she prefers the concept of functionally extended family and expanded family pattern. My
research conﬁrms her ﬁndings that sponsoring families had grown and contracted as
relatives arrived and eventually moved on to their own residence. In terms of visitation
frequency, Sengstock (1999: 40) reported that 25 percent of the families of the 1962-1963
survey had relatives other than their own children living within their households. The
household also expanded when elderly parents or grandparents fell back on the children
for care when ill. In her 1990-1991 survey, Sengstock found that over ﬁfty percent of the
elderly Chaldeans report living with their children (1999: 41).

Like Sengstock, I had encountered brothers working together and living in close
proximity, or even the same subdivided rental property. I visited a household in Detroit
with a newcomer extended family. Two brothers settled their family on the separate
ﬂoors of a rental property but joined the common living spaces into a single cooking and
eating arrangement. For sleeping, one family occupied the upstairs and the other the
downstairs rooms. And it goes without saying that many brothers and cousins work
together in business and spend their leisure jointly.

These family practices reﬂect an alternative arrangement which is very dissimilar
to that of North America, Europe, many parts of Africa, and the Caribbean. While other
groups demonstrate similar historical familial arrangements, economic development,

urbanization, and migration have undermined the traditional patterns of classical

83

patriarchy. In particular, Dominicans had family patterns marked by male dominance
over land assets. But national economic development undermined male power given as
women could migrate and seek work outside the patriarchal family (Grasmuck and Pessar
1991; Pessar 1995). Chaldeans are unique in terms of being able to reestablish male
control over ﬁnancial assets and their geographic region, where classical patriarchy
remains a hegemonic force in shaping family life. This second assertion is reasonable
given the patriarchal norms discussed by Oishi (2005) and Halberstadt and Nikolsky
(1996), which show that normative and structural classical patriarchy shape migration

and settlement.

WELLSPRINGS OF CHALDEAN CLASSICAL PATRIARCHY

There is little evidence that either the pre-migration or post-migration context had
generated signiﬁcant changes in family practices. Still, the United States gender order
differs sufﬁciently so that attitudes about family and gender relations ought to bear
evidence of a broad shift in community and domestic politics. My interviews should have
borne conversations about these changes, but did not.

The answer resides in family practices in a broad community sense. It is not
simply male privilege embedded in the gender structures of power and economic. Rather,
the rich and thick social ties which are celebrated jointly at church and family gatherings
forge emotional and symbolic structures that provide signiﬁcant amount of social reward
to either gender. This section explores the intense commitment to kinship obligations

which are part of everyday life in among Chaldeans. The evidence is presented on

84

migration networks, family visitation, family traditions, gifting rules, family size, and

generational authority.

Migration Networks

The Chaldean extended family exists in large part due to familial obligations. For
both Chaldean cohorts, men undertake the task of reestablishing their patrilineage in the
United States. To do so, Chaldean men rely on family-based social capital. Chaldean
social ties operate under strict gender and generational norms emanating from the cultural
practice of connective patriarchy. Under these norms, men accept responsibility for their
unmarried siblings, retired parents, nieces, nephews and cousins. They place family
above their own interest, and without regard to personal sacriﬁce fulﬁll their masculine
obligation. Accepting this position within the family provides men with cooperation from
their household. Older parents migrate despite their preference to remain in Iraq, and
younger family members comply with request for working in family-based economic
activities.

Representative of this process, Susan Kasshamoun, daughter of the second cohort,
explains the migration network of her family. Like many of the informants, brothers
cooperated in effecting migration from Iraq and had jointly opened a business.

What happened was her father’s older brother came to the United States in 1963.

My uncle started a business here, but I don’t remember what it was. To get the

family here, he sponsored my grandmother, my dad’s mom. And she sponsored

the rest of the kids. So my father came with the rest of the family in 1966. So at

that time, my uncle had a business; and his brothers came and started working

85

with him for about a year. Eventually they became partners with that business

which was a liquor store in Detroit.

Nearly all of my informants point to an older male who assumed responsibility for
the family’s migration. This stems from earlier cultural preferences to retain sufﬁcient
family property to support the eldest male head-of-household, or primogenitor (Al-Nouri
1964). Therefore, the eldest male works in cooperation with his parents and siblings,
which to some extent means some degree of primogenitor has been transplanted to
Detroit.

This migration pattern differs between Chaldean men and men of other national
origins discussed in the gender adaption and migration literature. First, Chaldean men do
not face status inconsistency in terms of their family, and never incur role reversal as
heads-of-household. This is more common among the Mexican men studied by Patricia
F eméndez-Kelly and Ana Garcia (1990) or the Ladino Guatemalan men studied by
Cecilia Menjivar (2003). This difference springs from classical patriarchy that provides
ample social capital to reinstate breadwinning roles once in the United States. This social
practice reiﬁes male authority, making Chaldean fathers revered within their families.

Among my sample, nearly every informant links the migration task to the
provided resources and sacriﬁces of their fathers. It is important to note that Barbara
Gallagher (1999) ﬁnds women did negotiate with Kurds to effect escape for themselves
and their marital partners in military service. In my sample, when women had initiated
migration, they had done so within the framework of meeting community normative

expectations. For example, one mother had wanted a perfect Chaldean daughter-in-law.

86

lO<

6X

CE

So she had travelled to Iraq to ﬁnd a girl with socially desirable traits. In this case, she
looked for a girl that was young, of a good family name, not overly educated, and
excellent potential for cooking traditional Chaldean foods.

For Chaldeans, their post-migration experience is perhaps more similar to the
Bukharan case in that both rely on small businesses to support the family. Further, small
business assures the patriarch a securer ﬁnancial role over those in the secondary labor
market or day laborers (Dohan 2003; Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994; Menjivar 2000). In all
cases, life history points towards lineage cooperation in the migration experience, and

intact family-unit migration.

Chaldean sociability

In the post-migration context, family social ties retain their importance.
Visitations develop around weekly meetings, holidays, and key life cycle events, such as
ﬁrst communion and wedding parties. Obvious beneﬁts develop from being close to
family which includes emotional, social and economic support. Nemir Romayah, a
second cohort male explains visitation as a common weekly practice.

Most of the time, we get together at my mother’s house on Sundays for dinner. It

is a good occasion for the brothers and sisters to get together and chat about the

events of the week, about politics, about events in Iraq. Also these occasions are

good for kids to get to know their cousins by mingling and bonding with them.
Social ties born of weekly visitation provide enduring relationships replete with social
trust translated in later life into economic partnership. I ﬁnd many cases of second-

generation Chaldean men forming business relations with siblings and cousins. They

87

engage in all types of business ventures, from the traditional ethnic niche of grocery
stores to professional services. In one instance, an informant had founded an IT ﬁrm with
a cousin. In another instance, brothers manage multiple grocery stores, and spend their
leisure time together.

Sociability training also comes with a price when family visitation conﬂicts with
mainstream institutions. Life stories document this factor. Karen Yono, second cohort
and a one-and-three-quarter generation, describes the problem.

When we came home, we were totally Chaldean. If we had a report, homework,

or anything that we had to do with school, then it was dropped when there was a

family event to go to. If relatives came over, then you’d drop everything.

Anything related to family was ﬁrst priority. They [my parents] would never say

[when out late visiting family members]: ‘Oh, we got to leave as it is 10 o’clock

and my kids have school tomorrow morning.’ Instead, we would stay out till one

o’clock in the morning. From our cousins’ houses, we would come home and go

to school the next day.
Family might interfere with going to school, as discussed above. Among today’s high
school students, this problem still exists. My informants mention related problems
associated with working long hours in family businesses, being fatigued and inability to
pay attention at school. This ﬁnding supports Sister Shikwana’s (1997) work that
documents parental preference for their children working after school, and Allene
Doctoroff” s (1978) research that showed boys had been typically employed and worked

many hours for their parents.

88

Another form of family sociability relates to kinship obligations and involvement
in the lineage. Chaldeans demonstrate similar practices studied by Suad Joseph (1999a:
134). In Lebanon, culture formalizes brother and sister ties around the relationship of
maternal uncle and aunt, or khal and khalta. The maternal uncle and paternal aunt hold
authority to intervene with their siblings’ children as a matter of kinship obligation.
Chaldeans recognize that brothers and sisters (or uncles and aunts) have both the right
and the obligation to step into family matters and make points about their nieces’ and
nephews’ social conduct. Nemir Romayah, second cohort male informant, explains.
My cousins, my brothers-in-law, my sisters-in-law, my wife’s family, we are open.
Anybody can walk in without even calling, and they are welcome. We are a very
extended family! And we keep it that way. It is good for the kids. They grow up
with their grandfather, grandmother, and cousins. And everybody around them
keeps them from trouble. That is because they are a big family. If I talk to my kid
and he doesn’t listen to me, then I pick up the phone and my sister will get
involved. I say, “Hey talk to this guy.” And she will call him and put him in her
house. My sister has all the right to talk to my kids, as much as I do.

Being responsible to each others children only intensiﬁes the connectivity between

family members. The scope of these ties operates to link family networks together and

provide substantial resources to family members in later life.

Despite any interferences that family obligations might have when it comes to
mainstream institutions, the families themselves give them high priority. Karen Yono —
second cohort and a one-and-three-quarter generation — recalls that: “Whatever we had to

do [it] was dropped [if] we had a family event to go to. Or relatives came over, you drop

89

everything. Anything at home was ﬁrst priority.” Family ties are highly prized and

desired and create formidable emotional structures of gender relations.

Family Traditions

There are multiple formalized customs in the Chaldean culture: the tenetha,
wedding gifting, social visitation and social capital being highly prized. Perhaps the most
pleasurable is the betrothal ritual. While directing traffic at a local church, a congregant
talked with obvious joy of an upcoming tenetha for his daughter. Chaldeans uphold this
tradition which has long historical standing in the group. The terminal end of tenetha is a
wedding. Gifting to brides and grooms follows the normative guidelines of connective
patriarchy with closer relations to the bride and groom expected to provide more valuable

gifts.

Tenetha. Leading up to tenetha, a man has basically expressed his interest toward a
woman. In more traditional families, the man’s family will call on the woman’s family
for tea. If the woman accepts his interest, the families proceed towards the more formal
event. At the tenetha, the boy’s father asks the girl’s father for her hand in marriage. As
explained by Kayla Facho, one of several second-generation women who recount this
ritual.

But what they do in the traditional tenetha is they ask for the hand of your

daughter. And they basically form it in the phrase where it sounds like; translated,

it sounds like this, “May we have a ﬂower from your garden and plant her in

ours.” That is what it translates to.

90

The engagement ritual symbolically places the girl within the patrilineage of her
husband’s family. This is a vestige of the old marriage system, when girls actually joined
the patriarch’s household with her husband. Today, this is more ritualistic than practiced,
as the couple establishes their independent household. But cases obviously operate where
young couples return for periods to live with the husband’s family. This is the preferred
case, as Chaldean culture patterns cooperation between fathers and sons, or between
brothers.

The tenetha is not a one time meeting. Rather, tradition dictates that the families
continue to meet at recurring social occasions that terminate with a wedding reception. A
typical festive event is the engagement party. One informant recalled that her brother’s
engagement party had over 200 guests. Traditionally, couples asked a priest to bless the
wedding bands, making the engagement official and binding, and adding further
symbolic importance. Some families have henna parties (less formal or stylized than the
Arab practice), and most hold wedding showers prior to the weddings.

The most celebrated occasion among the extended family is the wedding
ceremony and reception. These events are ﬁrst and foremost family events. The wedding
reception itself is a huge occasion. As explained by my informants, the groom and bride
typically invite their ﬁrst and second cousins. As Chaldean families are large, this can
mean up to hundreds of people.

This practice is so pervasive in the community. There was not a single second-
generation woman who missed the opportunity to speak at length about tenetha,

weddings, and receptions. Young men had tended to be somewhat standofﬁsh about such

91

information, but they were well aware of marriage customs in the community. Beatrice
Denja explains the problems of inviting guest. Her account is nearly representative of
every young woman in this sample.
Beatrice: Personally, if it were my wedding, then I would invite my closest friends
and my closest relatives. I wouldn’t go very far. Maybe I would invite one from
each family. It is really hard when you have to cut down to that many people,
because I have 150 ﬁrst and second cousins on my dad’s side and a 150 from my
mom’s side. So I have 300 ﬁrst and second cousins alone that would be at my
wedding right there, if I invited every single one.
Charles Spurlock: Are you close to all these ﬁrst cousins?
We are all close. We don’t see them all the time. I see them, but I don’t see them
everyday. I see them, if I am lucky may be once every couple of months, and then
for sure during family function and the holidays.
The narrative describes ongoing closeness in social ties to her kinship group. Like many
other Chaldeans, she has had constant contact with her cousins through multiple family
occasions. As such, these social ties require conﬁrmation within important lifecycle

events. One such measure of fact is the reception.

Wedding Gifts. In my experience in attending Chaldean events, I had learned quickly that
it is typical to provide a gift appropriate to my relationship with my host and for the
degree of respect I held him or her. In one case, I had been invited to a wedding. Not
knowing how to calculate an appropriate gift, I had asked an informant what I should do.

I explained the situation, and he asked me two questions. “Are you close to this person

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and do you want to show some respect?” Obviously, I wanted to keep good faith, and my
informant told me the safe gift range.
The same rules apply within the community and gifting provides another
opportunity to examine connectivity in Chaldean social networks. Theodore Bestor
(1989) discovers a similar practice in an urban community of Tokyo, referred to by the
Japanese as koden. Similar to this community, Chaldeans track the value of gifts given at
their wedding receptions. Failure to meet expected monetary obligations are interpreted
very harshly. An informant explained that failure to give appropriately is interpreted as a
lack of love between you and the extended family. Other outline the need for gifting
according to the closeness between you and the family member. Kayla Facho veriﬁed this
point.
My cousin, she was saying how her husband’s family was cheating her. She thought
they were cheap because they only gave the minimal amount of money. At my
brother’s wedding, my younger brother and I went through the cards, because my
brother (the groom) went on a honeymoon. We got a couple of blank cards (no gift
or money). So yes, you keep track. We actually had a wedding list, and we went
through and put down next to each name how much they gave. And whenever a
wedding comes up, we will pull up the list and see how much they gave. Because
you don’t want to under give.

Again, gifting is a gendered and age event. Chaldeans look at birth order and closeness in

determining the range of their gifting. Obviously, the greater the distance between you

and the wedding couple, the smaller the gift. Similarly, the gifts become larger depending

on the closeness and the age and gender of the receiving party.

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Family Size. This is a factor somewhat unique to Chaldeans. Among Arab national origin
migrants, total fertility rates for women had been 7 children from 1975-1980 and has
decreased to around 4 in the present period (Central Intelligence Agency 2009; United
Nations 2001). Most of my informants had large families with many siblings, but a few
had small family sizes. Many migrant groups do not have this beneﬁt. For instance,
Russian Emigrés, Cubans and Koreans tend to have lower fertility rates in the pre-
migration period, making their families smaller (Gold 1992; Kim 1981; Light and Gold
2000). These other national origin immigrants still utilize family resources, but they draw
them from a smaller pool of relatives.

For Chaldeans, family size acts to extend family relations along horizontal or
lateral lines, instead of simply vertical lines. As noted above, my informants note
extensive social connection between cousins. But at times, they also refer to aunts and
uncles, as cousins and as brothers and sisters. The reason for this is the wide age range
among siblings. The eldest sibling’s son or daughter may be of the same age as the
sibling’s youngest brother or sister. In other words, an aunt could be younger than her
niece. As such, the kinship network expands for any age group according the family size
and ages of siblings’ children. For example, Susan Kasshamoun provides her own
experience in terms of family size and the high degree of connectivity.

In fact, I have an uncle that is my age. And my mom and grandmother were
pregnant at the same time. I have an aunt who is younger than me as well. These 12

aunts and uncles range from the upper 605 to the youngest as 36. So we all grew up

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as friends, more like cousins than aunt and uncle. I didn’t even call them aunt and

uncle cause we were so close in age.

Social Capital. By maintaining close familial ties, Chaldeans generate effective and
enduring social ties which create social conditions supportive of social trust. This routine
quality of network operation delivers a form of social capital that Alejandro Portes (1993)
referred to as value introjection. Visitation works to reinforce the collectively held value
of working with family members throughout the community. The result is that Chaldean
networks offer family members resources that come from being a member of the kinship
group. Chaldeans draw on social capital for all kinds of activities. Examples include,
businesses mentoring, family loans, and information for jobs and schooling opportunities.
Gaining knowledge about business opportunities, securing networks to jobs

outside the ethnic economy, and learning about educational opportunities represent gains
from being linked to family networks. The knowledge about these opportunities emerges
from immediate family members and extended family members. Mariam Qashat, a
twenty year old second generation informant, explained how she found a job. She
explains her relationship to family social ties from two vocabularies. In the more
common American system, she says aunt’s dad. But her training in connective patriarchy
has her saying mother’s brother.

Mariam Qashat, second generation female: (somewhat fast) my aunt’s dad’s

company, my uncle’s, my mom’s brother’s wife’s dad’s company.

Charles Spurlock: is this an uncle, or an aunt that owns the business?

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Mariam Qashat: [a little slower] it is my uncle’s wife’s family’s, so it isn’t even
hers.
Charles Spurlock: uncle’s wife’s family’s?
Mariam Qashat: [normal speech rate] Here, I can tell you. It is my uncle that is an
attorney; his wife’s family; like her dad’s company. And I had needed a summer
job. I was having trouble ﬁnding one, and she said why don’t you come help us out
over here? And it is about 3 years later, and I am still there.
It is interesting that the informant indexes her relatives in a way similar to the ﬁrst
cohort’s second generation. While she is not conveying social obligation, she is tracing
familial relations as if living under the conditions of connective patriarchy (Joseph
1999b). To extend these relations unto her mom’s brother wife, who is not Chaldean, is
not really surprising. I read this informant as being skilled in her culture and seeking help

from her familial network.

CONCLUSION

As explained throughout this chapter, Chaldean social ties within and between
families remain ongoing and intense. This sociability consummates the legitimacy of
men’s authority, as patriarchs, by forging a powerful cathexis towards family. While
family itself is gendered and treatment towards women disagreeable (at a level and extent
not measured by the study), both men and women draw pleasure from this social life.
This emotional structure is overlaid by the symbol structure of gender relations encoded
in the tenetha. This is a ﬁnding not typically studied or reported within the gender and

adaption literature.

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The family practices themselves hold signiﬁcant value. Connective patriarchy
provides durable networks rich with ready family members who share information,
savings, and cooperation as part of their value system. This differs from North American
families where reciprocal exchanges between siblings are rare and limited to emotional
support (Widmer 2004). Chaldeans demonstrate time and time again that there is
extensive ﬁnancial and emotional obligation throughout their family ties.

Another point which makes Chaldeans unique from working class and day labor
migrants is that the men did not experienced status inconsistency or role reversal. Men
fulﬁll their obligation to their family, and take their status as family patriarch.

As part of the extended case method, the combination of emotional and symbolic
structures with male status consistency maintains the status quo in gender relations. I
believe that family ties socialize Chaldean values which produce orientations towards
cooperation that make the ethnic economy as viable as it is. A big issue is the extent that
gender relations are unresponsive to women’s needs which is discussed in the next

chapter.

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CHAPTER 5

SOCIAL REPRODUCTION OF CONNECTIVE PATRIARCHY

We don’t say you have to marry a Chaldean, any Chaldean. It has to be somebody
from a good family. There were a couple of boys I wanted to date, but my father
wouldn’t let me do it. They were Chaldean, but they didn’t have good reputations.

Or their families didn’t have good reputations. So, family reputation meant

everything. So we are selective even within our community (Terry Kashat, second

generation of the ﬁrst cohort).
A good family meets certain criteria regarding honor. In Iraq, Sana al-Khayyat (1990)
deﬁnes honor as gendered where men and women’s conduct reﬂects on their lineage.
Men bring respect to their family by being a good earner, hard worker, or educated. In
other words, men give honor (in the Arabic sharaj) to their families through their
achievements. Women hold a limited number of statuses, the dominant being
homemaker. Consequently, her actions place her at risk for shame. For women, they
maintain their ird, by remaining sexually innocent and aib, by being modest.

In the Chaldean community, I have observed many instances of women being
evaluated on the basis of their ird and aib, but not to the extent that her shame disﬁgures
family honor requiring some drastic solution. My examples are more mundane. I had
attended a network meeting among Chaldean professionals sponsored by the Chaldean
American Chamber of Commerce. During the course of a mostly male event, an

intelligent female ﬁnancial services professional had remarked that Chaldean businesses

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needed better accounting statements. While a helpful suggestion and legitimate point, she
had brought the meeting to an abrupt halt. The facilitator had to contain himself in order
to maintain his decorum, but the breach had been made. The problem was not the
soundness of the idea, but the violation of aib. In another instance, Terry and Julia Kashat
recount the rules of their ﬁrst cohort parents. Their family asked them not to dance at
weddings. Instead they were expected to “sit down, and be discrete, be humble, be low
key.” The community expects men and women to uphold the standards of sharaf, aib and
ird, as indicators of family worth. This chapter seeks to explore women’s agency in
upholding family prestige by redeﬁning aib.

This position differs from Pierre Bourdieu’s (2001) case study of Kabyle society
where men convert women’s purity into social capital, or create networks with other
lineages by tying them more tightly on the basis of marriage. Perhaps Chaldeans make
marital arrangements to conserve family ﬁnancial capital, but this wasn’t a research
ﬁnding. The most consistent ﬁnd was that women use multiple strategies to refashion the
rules of connective patriarchy into a slightly more egalitarian arrangement. This deserves
our attention, which is executed by looking at the interplay between habitus (durable

di5position) and social ﬁeld (stable set of social relations between actors).

CHALDEAN HABITUS

The habitus concept relates to dispositions (Krais and William 2000; MacLeod
1995; Wainwright, Williams and Turner 2006). Under this construction, social interaction
occurs as durable ways of doing things. Years of socialization, practice, rewards, and

punishments lead men and women to assert gender identities consistent with the gender

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regime of family and the community. Under Pierre Bourdieu’s (1990: 54) construction
this creates mental dispositions for action.
[The habitus] ensures the active presence of past experiences, which, deposited in
each organism in the form of schemes of perception, thought and action, tend to
guarantee the ‘correctness’ of practices and their constancy over time, more
reliably than all formal rules and explicit norms.
Social practice creates a collective representation of reality that is a schema and manner
of doing things; it becomes the normative rule for the social group. This position has been
criticized for being determinist and unresponsive to political action (Connell 1987).
However, Ricardo Costa (2006) holds that refrarning the habitus permits changing the
social ﬁeld. In other words, people remake the structural relations of their lives by what
they do. Against the weight of tradition, the second-generation constantly challenges
parental rules framed by the habitus. The habitus carries with it the way previous
generations handled issues of honor, namely protecting female purity. The second-
generation works against these traditions to win liberties that ever so slowly ﬁlter back to
the habitus of the community and ameliorate gender relations for today’s second-

generation.

Gender Socialization

Gender socialization lays the initial ground work for the habitus. In regards to
socialization, Chaldean households are like other immigrant groups in that double
standards operate around carework, domestic tasks, dating, extracurricular activities, and
education (Espiritu 2003b; Song 1999). Mexican girls tend to domestic tasks more readily

than boys. “. .. moreover, they seem to operate with the "running wheel" of a caregiver's

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mind, attending to what needs to be done and simply doing it without being asked” (Orellana
2001:382)

My informants tend to support the notion that boys and girls receive differential
treatment as children. Historically, parents expected girls to leave the father’s home and
marry at a relatively young age. Further, the social institutions for education did not
progress past the second grade level for girls, and parents did not pay attention to their
education. As Susan Kasshamoun (second generation in her thirties) explains,

My mother was pulled out of school in the second grade to take care of the other

siblings. That wasn’t uncommon for over there, where you were raised as a

women to immediately be a wife and a mother.

Even though this happened in the past, and by the 19705 Iraq had passed universal
education, the community still sees a good homemaker as an ideal marital partner. And if
required, men and mothers will seek suitable women in the homeland.

Since these qualities still have prime importance, it is not surprising women train
their daughters to do domestic work. Rhonda Mansoor, a second generation homemaker
in her thirties, explains that she teaches her daughter to be an all around woman; able to
do school work, but also to carry out her duties as a homemaker.

With my daughter, I have never really pressured her. She has been on honor role

her whole life. If I see a B or B-, I never ask her why. I don’t want her to be all

academic. Because to be Chaldean, you need to be an all around type not just
child, but a woman. Meaning that, I want her to be good at school and be able to
go to school, to graduate and to have good grades. But I also want her to be able

to come home and ﬁx dinner for her husband. To know how to cook, how to

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clean, that is a very important thing, to know it without me even telling her. If she
comes home at 3:15 and she realizes there is food on the table, she doesn’t have to
wait for me to say, “Serve yourselﬂ”
In essence a girl’s social identity is the capacity to internalize the rules related to making
a home. Schooling remains important, but it is secondary to her identity as a future
mother. The community considers domestic and traditional gender role socialization
consistent with appropriate gender knowledge. Under this model, women play an
important role in recreating culture through social reproduction that is the work needed to
reproduce Chaldean ethnicity. Food such as dolma (meat and rice dish served in grape
leaves) or kuba (breaded meat in a tomato base served with rice) reinforce ethnic identity.
The ﬂavor, scent and enjoyment of food is enacted over and over again as a family ritual
weekly and then again on the weekends with the hustle and bustle of the extended family.
While girls are trained towards domestic life, boys receive special attention within
the community and their family. Still practiced within the community, perhaps more
commonly among the older immigrants, relatives observe a girl’s birth with sadness and
delight in a boy’s arrival. Chaldean parents hold special sensitivity towards boys. While
not neglecting girls, parents stop whatever they are doing to sooth boys who need
physical or emotional comfort. Further, boys are granted greater liberty for their actions,
as parents impose few restrictions. Rhonda Mansoor discusses her experience.
And when you say boys were spoiled or boys got to do more than girls; this was
certainly so in our case. My brother got to do anything he wanted. My older sister
still tells us about the story when he couldn’t go with my parents one day; so he

pulled the entire Christmas tree down. And he didn’t get in trouble for it, because

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he was a boy, and that is a funny thing. Or even when he used to hit or chase us;

he never got in trouble. We got in trouble for screaming.

Upholding favoritism for boys is a holdover from the old country. Historically, Chaldeans
had transferred wealth from children to parents. Under those conditions, boys were seen
as social support for the parents in old age. Inforrnants had indicated that Chaldeans
viewed girls from the perspective that they were subsumed by their husband’s lineage
and lost as “spilled water” later on. In some ways, there is a bit of cultural lag in play, but
it still speaks to the emotional qualities of Chaldean gender structures.

Honoring parents holds a signiﬁcant place in adolescent socialization that carries
over into youth and eventually adulthood. When asked to explain what a Chaldean
believes, among the top three or four responses is honoring and caring for the elderly.
Sengstock (1999: 41) presents data from a survey that collected data on 91 Chaldean
elderly; she found that “over half of them (of 60 years of age and over) report living in
households in which one or more children were present.” Often Chaldeans explain that
they support their fathers to honor his sacriﬁces for taking the arduous task of migrating
and settling in a new country. Given that respect for elders is an obligation under

connective patriarchy, it is not surprising that both genders abide by this norm.

Dating

Ethnic survival and feminine purity tend to be conﬂated within immigrant
communities. In response to this pressure, immigrant parents protect their daughters from
harm. As a consequence, girls face double standards during teen years. Yen Le Espiritu

(2003b) ﬁnds that Filipino parents justify these restrictions by linking sexual activity to

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Americanization and the immorality of the dominant culture. Thinking in terms of
regional patriarchy, Gloria Gonzalez-Lopez (2003) notes that mothers protect their
daughters’ sexual purity as a means to facilitate greater marital satisfaction. Diane Wolf
(1997) writes that parents exert control over girls who they considered to be sexually
vulnerable and place restrictions over where to attend college.

The Chaldean community is no different than these other immigrant groups.
Families think in terms of marriage for their daughter. Ideal marriages fall to girls with an
excellent reputation, which includes her and her family’s conduct. Dating threatens this

goal, and parents often remark that while they trust their daughters, they consider them

 

vulnerable. Consequently, girls ﬁnd dating, going out, or inviting ﬁiends of the opposite
sex home impossible.

The second-generation recognizes there are double standards in operation. And
despite the inherent inequality regarding spatial mobility, as girls are more restricted in
who they visit and the time they are allowed to be out, boys see this as reasonable. They
basically agree with their parents that ethnic survival is at stake. Frank Yalda, second
generation 205 year old student, discusses his views.

But when I think about it (double standards), I don’t see there is really a problem

with the parent’s position. When we came here, we didn’t really have problems

with premarital intercourse or things like that. We had such strong moral ethics,
like all of our people, most of them. And then people started to get integrated into
society, and that is how we took a stand against that. How we kept our own
identity; was to make strong enforcements on our women, to keep them from

doing these things. So we can keep ourselves, I guess you could say, pure. I don’t

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know how to exactly describe it. Most people don’t understand where we come
from. They don’t understand how we think. We look at it as a threat to our
existence. I would say to our way of life.
This statement mirrors Espiritu’s (2003b: 274) ﬁndings that“... it is the daughters who
have the primary burden of protecting and preserving the family.” Thus, a central
community norm has been to protect girls and young women, leading to the practices that
young women remain with their family until married, of limiting dating, travel and
mobility.

For boys, parents allow them to date, but it is impossible for them to ﬁnd a

 

Chaldean girl. “I am 16 (and) my parents don’t mind if I have a girl friend, but it is pretty
hard trying to ﬁnd a Chaldean girl that is about my age, that is allowed to go out.” This is
quite common. As this young man explains, “Chaldean-wise it is kind of different. The
girl is kind of put on lockdown.” So when it comes to being around girls, they describe
them as “white girls; American I guess you would call them.” And it wasn’t dating, “it
was you went out with them, I wouldn’t consider it a girl friend kind of thing. We are
together; and you just do this and that.” While boys hang around and gain socializing

experiences with the opposite sex, parents consider this very risky for Chaldean girls.

Education

The community holds rrrixed views on education (Shikwana 1997). In part, this
relates to being merchants, where children’s labor has been helpful in running small
businesses. Allene Doctoroff (l 978: 191) documented this ﬁnding ﬁrst, noting that boys

tended to work long hours, and were less likely to see education highly important. For

105

instance, girls are twice as likely to agree with the statement “It is very important to
please teachers.” Doctoroff attributes this to boys working longer hours.

Among my informants, there is a growing recognition that second-generation
women of the second cohort hold higher levels of education than men. Other informants
indicate that while their parents encouraged them to attend school, it was “unusual,
especially for girls” to be supported in these pursuits. Still others had ﬁnished high
school, but became disillusioned when their parents suspended approval for college and
university attendance.

Boys ﬁnd education problematic as well. Doctoroff ﬁnds clear data that boys had
worked many hours and more so than girls. To this day, youth continue to work for their
parent’s business concerns. This second-generation school teacher has observed that boys
“come in really late and many times.” The reasons relate to them having “. .. to work at
the family business; either it is a gas station or a party store. And (they) don’t get home
till (midnight).” While boys might be encouraged to work, they may ﬁnd that education is

not necessary to ﬁnding fulltime employment or to make the transition to adulthood.

Summary of the Chaldean Habitus

Gender socialization remains sensitive from childhood through the life cycle.
Parents place expectations upon children to retain their honor. While boys hold freedoms
denied girls, they also hold responsibilities which demand longer work hours. Girls tend
to be protected more, but tradition requires them to understand the needs of homemaking
and being a Chaldean woman. The gender habitus disposes boys and girls towards

different honor systems which lead to how they act in social ﬁelds. The most obvious

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social ﬁeld is that of the family, but also includes church and everyday life. In the next

section, I focus on the social ﬁeld of dating and marriage.

SOCIAL FIELD

The Chaldean gender habitus is a “system of lasting, transposable dispositions
which, integrating past experiences, ﬁmctions at every moment as a matrix of
perceptions, appreciations and actions” (Bourdieu 1977: 83). As such, it operates as a
generative process by reproducing Chaldeans both as individuals and as a collectivity
(Adkins 2003). Within a social ﬁeld, of which there are several in any given society,
actors stand in durable relation to each other and compete in what Bourdieu calls a game.

The game’s players seek to gain power over the ﬁeld and dominate it by acquiring
symbolic capital. Women enter any ﬁeld with a distinctively “negative symbolic
coefficient” (Bourdieu 2001: 93). Under these conditions, it is hard for women to come
out ahead, as “The aim is to rule the ﬁeld, (and) confer or withdraw legitimacy from
other participants in the game” (Moi 1991: 1021). If monopolization takes place, then the
doxic position acts as a censor over the entire ﬁeld. Under these conditions, Moi argues
that symbolic violence exists. In this case, violence means control over legitimate
expressions, not physical or emotional abuse. The issue is to what extent has classical

patriarchy been frozen in time, or can youth act in the social ﬁeld as actors.

Dating

While gender socialization suggests girls become dominated by gender status at

an early age, the data reveals an interesting give and take in parental and child relations.

107

For example, families retain the right to intervene in the social life of girls. In some cases
this is subtle. Many attend Catholic schools which are gender segregated. For these girls,
a school dance creates a temporary conundrum, as in who to bring to the dance. Later, the
problem becomes where to attend college. Parents request and encourage their daughters
to attend schools close by so they may continue to live at home. In fact, many girls live at
home until they marry. In all of these scenarios honor is being preserved. Parents act to
protect their daughter’s reputation which they deem important for marriage to Chaldean
boys.

But the situation remains a little more complex than simply following the doxic
wishes of parents. As used by Bourdieu, doxic means the dominant and the only way of
doing things. Chaldean youth have been ever engaged in careful negotiation with parents
about freedom to date. While boys win liberties without much effort, girls and young
women work strenuously to fabricate social space which honors their parents but
provides some openness to youth needs.

Across the two second-generations (referring to the children of the ﬁrst and
second cohort, women in their ﬁfties and higher, and young adults), a pattern frequently
reoccurs in response to gender control, what Judith Lorber (1994: 30) deﬁnes as approval
or disapproval direct at non-conforming gendered behavior. Some girls choose to keep
things hidden from their parents. They do so in a variety of ways. One informant
discusses how she and her boyfriend had arranged clandestine meetings in another city in
the metropolitan area to be alone. Typically, this meant simply hanging out. But as this is
unheard of, young women have to keep secrets from their parents and avoid community

surveillance to do these things.

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Another position taken by girls includes negotiation. A woman recounts how the
ﬁrst second-generation girls had formed a youth club to “stay within the bounds” of their
parental expectations. To do so, they organized a youth club. Instead of American styled
dating, they had met as a group, and were able to do a variety of activities: picnics,
boating, hay rides and dances. Not all parents accepted this accommodation and the
newest second-generation often appeal to notable women in the community to petition on
their behalf. Interestingly, these are woman-to-woman interactions. Rosie Yaldoo
recounts a time when young Chaldean women needed her help.

I had a friend of mine come to me pleading. She was just in tears; she wanted to

go to her prom. And her parents said, “High school prom: absolutely not.” You

have to consider, in the old country, we had no such thing as proms. But for [my
friend] it was very important. I literally took her mother out to lunch, and said, “It
is no big deal. Let her go with one of her cousins, just let her go.”

For boys the issues differ. Boys have their freedom and liberty to date, go out,
stay out, and attend parties. Neither the men nor the boys had recounted ordeals in
ﬁnding ways to respect the parental wishes while negotiating for freedom in mobility.
Boys, however, take a privileged position in the ﬁeld, and hold power over their sisters
and other girls. They have a legitimate right (or symbolic capital) to make demands of
their sisters or other women in their lineage that stems from connective patriarchy.

This stands across the two generations. A ﬁrst generation woman recounts the
time she was going on a date, and a cousin made her cancel. As she explains, “ﬁrst
cousins are like your brothers. And my ﬁrst cousin J irnmy made me call this boy and say

no.” Fifty years later and boys are still telling girls what to do. Beatrice Denja rerrrinisces

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about her non-chaperoned sister who was schooled by a young man for being in a bar
without permission.
This guy [says to my sister], “No one better talk to you; I’m going to tell your
brothers. Wait till I tell your brothers; I’m going to call them.” And she said,
“They are going to here in half-an-hour.” He was freakin’ out cause my sister was

at the bar.

These instances carry with them tremendous burdens and resentment among
young women. Often times, girls ﬁnd themselves the subject of gossip which is notorious
within the community. In fact, a priest had remarked that “talk” was a problem, and had
beseeched his congregation to forget past transgressions and evaluate how young people
live here in the United States. That assessment resonates with many of the women
participating in the study. In one case, a woman had been studying with a brother and was
reported by another Chaldean male as being out with an unknown man. In another
instance, a young woman had met an old friend waitressing at a restaurant, the two
exchanging joyful hellos. Two days later, my informant had to address questions on
whether she had been drunk.

Contrasting girl agency to male gender enforcement (or female guarding by boys,
gossip, and talk) illustrates the conundrum of the social ﬁeld. When girls act, they
negotiate as partners in seeking a means to gain legitimacy for their interest while at the
same time respecting parental norms. As a result, they create the conditions for their own
symbolic capital by seeking alliances with notable women, or through their own social

ties and networks. When successful, the girls have wrought changes in Chaldean habitus

110

leading to a more generalized acceptance of female liberties. Of course, these are
freedoms within boundaries. Still, the tireless pressure brought by girls and women have
won expanded freedoms which are becoming increasingly embedded in the habitus of the
community. The changes are uneven, but are progressing, as explained by Sommer
Shaouni a second-generation school teacher in her 205.
There are some parents that still don’t allow their kids to attend school dances.
The kids can’t go to homecoming and can’t go to prom, especially the daughters.
They are more restricted. Things are changing with this generation. They are a
little bit more allowed to go than they were even 15 years ago. And even at this
very school, teachers say, ‘[We] remember when none of the Chaldean kids,
especially the girls, would show up at the school dances cause their parents
wouldn’t let them.’ Now they are showing up. And now it is a little different. But
if they show up with a date, sometimes their parents know and sometimes they

don’t. You know it might be a secret.

Why have Chaldean women struggled so long to gain recognition for dating and
freedom of movement? In part, the transnational linkages between the community and
Iraq and the entrepreneurial adaption work to reinforce each other. During the relevant
time period, Iraq’s gender order had remained supportive of connective patriarchy.
Universal education had arrived late and war had ushered a return to conservative gender
relations within a few years, hardly long enough time for a new gender order to advance
society towards egalitarian gender relations. Besides, the reactive condition fostered by

personal security had led to further Chaldean emigration. As a result, extended families

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had reuniﬁed bringing older and more traditional kin to American. Among the ﬁrst
second-generation, informants had brought this up more often than the second second-
generation. Rosie Yaldoo provides an example of male authority.
In fact I did cancel a date. I was going to go out to a dance at the university, just
one dance that a boy had asked me to. And just two weeks before, my uncle came
to America. Both my mom and dad said, “You have to cancel. I said, ‘[Jeez] it is
just one date.”
The habitus, or dispositions toward action, undergoes a tug-of-war. On the one hand,

second-generation girls of the ﬁrst cohort pushed parents toward accepting elements of

 

American youth culture. They got their parents onboard with dating, dances, and going to
college. Then transnational reinforcements arrived to reassert older gender conventions.
What was won became endangered, and the community retrenched its position on
appropriate gender behavior. The current second-generation is taking up a similar
struggle trying to overcome community gender norms regarding many of the same issues

regarding dating, independence, and travel.

Symbolic Violence

Different case studies show that not all immigrant groups have openness toward
changing gender relations. In part, time of arrival has an impact. For others, like the
Bukharan Jews, culture and time of arrival interact. This Central Asian immigrant group
upholds traditions of classical patriarchy; as a consequence, gender relations remain

highly conservative.

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Chaldeans were very similar to this group when living in Iraq through the 19705,
and the second cohort transported many of these norms with them to Detroit in the19605.
For instance, Qais al-Nouri (1964) notes Chaldean women’s overall domestic power
remained insigniﬁcant. These women had never held means to improve their situation
given low education attainment, linguistic isolation and spatial immobility. Consequently,
major domestic decision fell to men, including children’s marriage.

Another situation reﬂecting the dominant place of the husband is the greater

importance attached to his views on the marriage of his children. This point is

explicit in the exclusive concern of a man wanting to marry a girl with her
father’s response to his request. When he feels that her father is favorable about
giving her in marriage to him, he scarcely worries about her mother’s role. It is
true that in few cases the husband consults with this wife about whether or not his
daughter should marry a particular man. But the ultimate opinion on the matter is

his sole right (Al-Nouri 1964: 30).

Young women support this interpretation. Most had remarked that their mothers were
housewives. Some of the ﬁrst second-generation comment about the dependence many
women still display in simple things like ordering dinner when at restaurants.

The life history data had noted occasions where men did in fact arrange marriages
between cousins. For a family that lost their father, his father’s brother had stepped in
providing mentoring, support and guidance. In time, the uncle had asked his nephews to
give their sister’s hand in marriage to his son.

In recounting the history of marriage and choice, one informant dated the arrival

of romantic love in the community around the 19805. Before then, many of the women in

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the ﬁfties “were more ﬁxed up.” Inaya Kinaya, second-generation female in her forties,

explains.
It was more arranged, and they didn’t really date. So those women, their choices
were based on who their parents wanted. And not who they wanted; [even then]
they didn’t have the [chance] to ﬁgure it out. It was a matter of a good family, a
good provider, a good husband; and those were the basics. For women in their
forties, they had a little more freedom. They did date, but only for the purpose of
marriage. Still even when they dated, it was a very short time. It was based on
who your parents wanted, more so than your own choice. If the relations had

failed to end in marriage, then the girl’s reputation was marred. Today’s women,

 

those in their twenties are more open; they date. So the community is more

encouraging to them.
This progression points towards time in the United States and the addition of girl’s and
women’s struggles to pressure the culture to accept women’s choices. This reading
neglects to account for an important stakeholder in this social ﬁeld, the mother. As
discussed above, women gain power over time under the arrangement of classical
patriarchy. As a consequence, older women hold onto their moral capital and inﬂuence
their children’s choices. Often times, women in their 305 and 405 remarked about young
men being mamma’s boy. By this they meant that even if a girl and a boy held strong
romantic intensions, these “men” defer to their mother’s wishes even though it might not
be his desire.

Mother’s inﬂuence also had extended to taking the matter into their own hands.

On one occasion a mother was becoming increasingly dissatisﬁed with a series of

114

unacceptable marital partners for her children. Unwilling to risk further disappointment,
she had taken her son to ﬁnd a bride in Iraq. In another instance, a mother returned with
her son’s bride. The mother had found what she was looking for, a daughter-in-law with
skill in cooking, cleaning and making a nice home. These examples impeach al-Nouri’s
assertion that women did not hold domestic power. But the kind of power exercised here
operates as a form of symbolic violence because the outcome favors only one gender
identity for women.

Consequently, Chaldean women often report ﬁnding it difﬁcult to hold education,

employment or income, and be acceptable to Chaldean men their age. A second-

 

generation woman had caustically ridiculed men for labeling her as unapproachable.
Other women understand that age and independence are not qualities sought for by “old
fashion” families and their son. And the general method for ﬁnding a match closes after a
certain point.

But rejection happens within the daughter’s family as well. Not only does a
Chaldean woman suffer at the hands of men, they ﬁnd little consolation from their female
kin. One woman had expressed dismay over how the women in her kinship group fawned
over a cousin. The issues are typical; having waited too long she was no longer
considered prime marital material, while her cousin was much younger. The same
conditions apply to the cases of transnational marriage, explained above. In this way,
women are subject to symbolic violence. The only legitimate capital within the marital
ﬁeld for traditional families is the physical capital of youth and beauty (Wainwright,

Williams and Turner 2006).

115

For these families, a daughter’s capacity to capitalize on education or income is
seriously jeopardized. In one case, a mother favors a young, Arab speaking and non-
educated daughter-in-law over her own daughter. In many ways, the mother’s habitus
acts as a schema reciting a mantra: young, homemaker, pure, and innocent. Such women
do not really neglect the value of education per se, or not love their daughters, but their
habitus has not changed and is upheld by others.

Even though it may seem as if women always lose in the marital ﬁeld, given the
impossibility of remaining naive and forever young, my data disputes hegemonic

domination by the doxic habitus. While Chaldean culture holds some very old traditions

 

in marital rituals, one in particular allows girls and women leeway. Working in tandem, J
what Erving Goffman (1967) calls an interaction team, mothers and daughters give subtle
clues on how they feel when a family calls over for an appointment. Daughters are
schooled on serving tea to visitors as practice for when this day might arrive. Typically
the visitors sit in the living room and engage the parents in conversation, the girl presents
herself at the same time as the tea, and the family makes an appraisal. If the daughter
leaves quickly or ﬁrmbles pouring the tea, then the mother generally intervenes ending
the interest then and there. Clearly, woman to woman networks operate to shape the
outcome of these visits.

Another common means for shaping marital choice occurs in the social spaces of
the community. Beside boys making decision or the mother of a boy, women do take the
matter into their own hands for their daughters. In one instance, an inﬂuential woman in
the community had been approached by a mother and daughter wanting an arranged

meeting with her son. My informant had visited the family and had conveyed her son’s

116

feelings that he was not interested. The interested women then pursued my informant’s
mother. While their insistence did not change the nature of the interaction, it
demonstrates that woman to woman networks operate in the marital ﬁeld. Women’ 5

social capital does have legitimacy in shaping the outcome.

CONCLUSION

Chaldean gender relations have changed, but not at the speed predicted by the
gender and migration literature. Rather than reading this as a form of cooptation, the data
points towards a complicated pattern of negotiation and entrenchment. Changes come
slowly with girls and women using a host of social resources at their disposal to create
transgressive practices. The most powerful source for change is woman to woman
networks. Girls suffering from a common disadvantage had banded together to form a
social club, and girls appeal to recognized and well respected women for their help.
These woman-to-woman networks enter the dating and marital ﬁeld and shift the
conversation towards a different conclusion. Such interventions have an incremental
impact that is slowly changing the Chaldean habitus and transforming dating into a non-
honor threatening activity. Similarly, girls do shape the marital ﬁeld. This is an important
ﬁnding for it has been suggested that Chaldean women have no say in their marital
choices. Obviously women do play a role in these affairs as do men.

The other side of the issue is symbolic violence. Again symbolic violence means
the censorship power of the doxic habitus. In this case, women’s age and beauty operate
as powerful coefﬁcients in her choices. In some ways, an older unmarried woman may

actually have a master status attached to her by virtue of being educated and outspoken,

117

older and mature, and working and independent. These are not the qualities of the ideal
spouse for an “old-fashion” Chaldean family. But for Americans, these traits have
afforded a more comfortable living standard from the wages women contribute to the
household. For Chaldeans, this may not be an overriding concern especially for the more

traditionally minded and the more afﬂuent.

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CHAPTER 6
CONCLUSIONS

Chaldeans represent a unique case study for reassessing our theory of gender
relations after migration. As stated at the outset, my research project began under the
assumption that politics in the domestic sphere and community organizations move
towards an egalitarian/participatory model rapidly, with migrant women beneﬁting in h
terms of household decision making and greater freedom of movement. While limited
support exists for this position, a more conservative ﬁnding asserted itself. Across cohort

and generation, powerful centripetal forces reinforce traditional gender relations. While it

 

[1

is somewhat surprising, this was not a totally unexpected outcome. It turns out that
Chaldeans are like other immigrant groups that have high rates of self-employment (see

Light and Gold 2000: 156).

GENDER ADAPTATION

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo (1994) states that multiple immigrant groups
experience a shift in gender relations after migration. Her position rejects the New
Economics of Migration perspective that posits a harmonious family myth. Instead,
women ﬁght family dominance, and draw on resources in the post-migration context to
assert themselves in their homes and communities. This position deﬁnes a broad research
outcome in the study of many immigrant households. One criticism has been that many
of these case studies follow gender relations among undocumented or class

disadvantaged migrants. And in looking at Middle Eastemers, and now Chaldeans, we

119

ﬁnd a growing list of irnnrigrants where gender relations remain more traditional (Light
and Gold 2000).

In understanding high rates of self-employment, researchers identify multiple
ethnic resources which create conditions for self-employment. Ivan Light and Carolyn
Rosenstein (1995) note that ethnicity plays a role in shaping the supply of entrepreneurs.
Basically, culture supplies skills differently to ethnic groups in society, providing some
groups with skills needed but in short supply. Ann Swidler (1986) calls this the tool-kit
approach, meaning that culture teaches people a language, style of cooking, orientation

towards interaction which provides skills for making a living. Chaldeans demonstrate that

 

beside human capital, social capital is acquired through sociability. And somewhat like
the “other side of embeddedness concept,” male entrenchment in income generating
activities secures the cultural preference for a gender division of labor. Rodger
Waldinger’s other side of embeddedness concept simply means that ethnic entrenchment
in a business closes recruitment to other ethnic groups into that sector of the work force
(1987; 1996). Self-employment may actually operate to retain conservative patriarchal

relations, as an interaction between ethnic economy and cultural retension.

CHALDEAN PATRIARCHY

The deﬁnition of patriarchy requires careful consideration. Deniz Kandiyoti
(1988) notes that there are differences in Asian and Afro-Caribbean kinship practices.
Similarly, Stephanie Coontz (2006) argues that European and Asians families differ. This
dissertation argues that Chaldeans follow an Asian kinship model, referred to as classical

patriarchy (Kandiyoti 1988). As presented by Deniz Kandiyoti, particular attention is

120

paid to the structure of power in the domestic realm. Suad Joseph (1999b) provides a
valuable addition to this model by focusing on connective patriarchy for its age and
gender relationality. As she explains, the Arab model follows multiple rules that deﬁne

relationship obligations and power. Both connective and classical patriarchy operate in

Chaldean kinship.

STRUCTURE OF GENDER RELATIONS: STRUCTURATION THEORY

Robert Connell (1987; 2002) appropriates structuration for the purpose of
exploring structures of gender relations. These are power, economics, emotions and
symbols. These structures channel the ebb and ﬂow of men and women’s lives as they
navigate gender regimes in work, education, and organizations.

To date, most studies on immigrant gender relations focus almost exclusively on
power and economic factors. As an exception to this tendency, Prema Kurien (2003) adds
storytelling to her understanding of gendered ethnicity. And women’s control over
cultural narratives stems from women’s employment and the domestic power that they
gain in the post-migration period. Sheba George (2005) offers a book length treatment of
gender using a structuration model. Yet, she limits her analysis to the structures of power
and economy. My work expands on this by focusing on how emotional and symbolic
relations operate in the Chaldean community. Thus, tenetha offers emotional and
symbolic importance to social life. The ritual involves signiﬁcant amounts of time,
money and energy to celebrate, making them a formidable structure.

Using this model towards understanding the post-migration period also requires

looking at gender regimes relative to the overall gender order between regimes. Again,

121

regimes operate within any social institution or organization around the four key
structures of gender relations.

In terms of gender order, regimes operate either in complementary, conﬂictive or
parallel relationships. Many studies have focused on private patriarchy, or interpersonal
domination, forgetting that immigrants are robust community builders. In following
gender relations among Chaldeans, it is important to evaluate religious rites, business
ownership, social organizations, and family as these either buttress or change gender
relations. In other words, Chaldeans have a community life where their own institutions

operate as connected regimes, which allow them to create their own particular gender

 

order somewhat independently of the larger society. L

The gender adaptation literature offers some examples of this. Michael Jones-
Correa (1998) documents gendered participation in hometown association. In this case,
Mexican men set the agenda with only tangential participation by women. Prema
Kurien’s group does the opposite, where women assume power over storytelling with the
intensions of reshaping gender relations in the domestic and community realms. Given
these possibilities, my goal was to disentangle symbolic and emotional effects from work
and power dimensions.

For Chaldeans, it turns out that social institutions operate at the complementary
stage for the ﬁrst cohort. Even the second generation of the second cohort struggles with
their gender status in terms of attending parties and dances and in choosing their own
occupations. Rapid assimilation does not occur, and women remain attached within the
community. But given the larger social context of the United States, it is necessary to see

how connective patriarchy is reproduced.

122

SOCIAL REPRODUCTION: THEORY

The social reproduction model in this study operates on the basis of exchanges
within social ﬁelds. Pierre Bourdieu (1990; 2001; 1992) provides the basic model for this
perspective. Within a social ﬁeld, stakeholders seek to modify interactions towards their
favor by using resources at their disposal to gain dominance. If that outcome is reached,
then symbolic violence is said to delegitirnize the symbolic capital of all others within a
ﬁeld. F

My approach represents an accommodation with the model. In the Logic of

Practice, Bourdieu discusses strategies by Kabyle families in the marital ﬁeld related to

 

wealth, number of children, and status of potential matches. Parents hold greater power
over marriage than children given that they control the sole source of wealth, land. In
deciding acceptable marital partners, boys are expected to marry women that fetch a high
dowry. Of course, this depends on multiple factors such as the number of siblings, their
sex, and the potential for hypergarny. In other words, logic depends on what capital a
family holds.

This modeling does not ﬁt my needs. But the notion that social actors vie for
legitimacy within a social ﬁeld does. Therefore, I look at data that supports the dominant
habitus of honor, but seeking to redeﬁne what was acceptable. To that end, second-
generation women keep challenging the doxic position on dating, marriage, employment
and education. They challenge the community to reconsider the cultural assumptions of
honor and shame.

I prefer understanding Chaldean women’s agency under this model for it

demonstrates that compliance and contest operate simultaneously. Thus, the women may

123

seem controlled, because they concede to a conservative patriarchal bargain. But that
reading is only partial. The data shows a tremendous amount of symbolic capital in
women’s hands that makes it viable for them to forge social capital as a resource to

negotiate change over the deﬁnitions of aib.

 

CENTURY IN THE MAKING Pt
Chaldeans migrate for multiple reasons and across nearly eleven decades. Given

this long period, economic and political changes provide potential structural conditions '

for reordering gender relations. Economically, nationalizing oil had fed the economy in

the 19705, but this had a paradoxical impact. While the state had used these proceeds to ""

extend universal education to boy and girls, many Chaldeans had found the strong
economy supported male breadwinning. If any thing, the oil driven economic boom had
deepened the competitive advantage to Chaldeans who were already established business
owners. Besides, universal education came late to Iraq, and most of the ﬁrst and second
cohorts had already immigrated to the United States (Marr 1985).

Sana al-Khayyat (1990), Qais al-Nouri (1993), and Lahai Mokhif (1991) revisit
the issue of gender relations in the 19905. They argue independently that neither
urbanization nor war had reconﬁgured women’s gender status entirely. And today, the
conditions for women have simply worsened.

In Iraq, gender regimes and the overall order between regimes had supported
patriarchal privilege while the majority of the ﬁrst and second cohort lived there. In the
United States, social changes in work, family size and age at time of ﬁrst marriage have

been cumulative causes in changing domestic and public gender relations. Despite these

124

gains, Veronica Tichenor (1999) and Barbara Risman (1998) ﬁnd gender constraints
operate against women, while Pepper Swartz (1994) presents data showing the possibility
of egalitarian domestic relations in peer marriage. As such, America’s gender regimes
might well reshape Chaldean gender relations with more time in the United States.
However, Chaldean gender relations have stood the test of time, although there
have been changes with regards to dating and other issues relating to more mobility and
freedom for young women. The reasons for conserving traditional measures of n
masculinity and femininity are somewhat complex, but deal with status consistency, male

bread winning, connective patriarchy, family unit migration, continued migration and

 

social solidarity. :3

The pioneers had founded the key social institutions to reestablish male
breadwinning and patrilineage in the United States. The ethnically owned economy in
grocery stores and party stores provide the ﬁrst step in what Jennifer Lee (2002) refers to
as evolutionary retail chain. As the more experienced Chaldeans moved into different
businesses services (or up the line of business specialization) newer immigrants had
replaced them in the store business. Today, Chaldeans sell Information Technology,
professional services, and development expertise in construction and architecture. Male
breadwinning remains in place across a broad spectrum of self-employment activities.

In large part, the initial business model relied on men’s positions within
connective patriarchy. Men had drawn on their authority, as patriarchs, to gain the
support of their immediate family to work in their stores. Siblings had pooled resources
to buy collectively owned businesses. And fathers had relied on sons to support them

when age or linguistic isolation rendered them superannuated. Further, the store business

125

had the potential to draw the lineage together in the United States which sustained both
the family composition of extended family, and the myriad of in connective relations.

As security concerns had worsened abroad, extended family members choose to
migrate and join family already in the United States. As a result, the migrants’ older
brothers revived traditional gender expectations in the community.

Finally, the stark pre-migration contexts had operated to create reactive solidarity.
As a minority, Chaldeans had become accustomed to relying on their families. This ﬁts F
the broader pattern of family-based social networks in the Arab region (see Shryock

2000). And in migrating, they had depended on family based-social networks to provide

 

resources in terms of jobs, housing, and loans. lb"

EMOTIONAL AND SYMBOLIC STRCUTURES OF GENDER RELATIONS

Initial indication suggests that neither immigration nor settlement processes had
led to male status inconsistency or role reversal that is accompanied by women’s
resources. Rather, the data had shown that men remained in charge of multiple facets of
social, economic and family life. Such persistence comes about only when the legitimacy
of this social arrangement is supported by sources other than brute force.

Using the method of structural inventory, information is presented on the
emotional and symbolic structures of gender relations. The Chaldean family provides a
rich cultural life for the people living in their community. Many rituals reafﬁrm the
community’s ethnic identity. These include family sociability, tenetha, and gifting.

Family sociability includes the ongoing integration of the extended family.

Weekends, holidays, and special occasions bring the extended family together, so that it

126

is possible to know and have close family relations with hundreds of cousins. Further,
brothers and sisters expect strong and positive relations between each other and their
children. Maternal and paternal uncles and aunts understand their roles in interacting with
the second generation. Together, sociability and extended family relations create strong
social networks which have constructive implications for business relations.

Another source of emotional attachment are community rituals. Historically, the
tenetha had tied families together. Today, this rite carries less ﬁnancial or economic
consideration, but still generates a signiﬁcant emotional investment and holds some
symbolic meaning as well. Further, brides and grooms have other occasions that draw
their families together deepening the symbolic quality of marriage. The wedding
reception itself is organized around patriarchal connectivity. Birth order and sex drives
the guest list. And valuation of gifting depends on the closeness and respect paid to the

groom and bride’s family of origin.

SOCIAL REPRODUCION

The Chaldeans hold that masculine and feminine behavior should follow percepts
of honor and shame. These two concepts frame the Chaldean habitus which shapes social
action within social ﬁelds. This is only possible given the ongoing quality of community
life. Consequently, when Chaldeans interact over important issues, like an interest in
marriage, each knows the quality of the others resources, their various capitals. As such,
the history of particular families and individuals shape perceptions regarding business

trustworthiness and matrimonial worth.

127

 

In following the second-generation, my ﬁndings indicated that women hold a
stake in family honor. The data clearly documents that women face constraints in
multiple social ﬁelds (dating, education, and marriage), but they work in woman-to-
woman networks to win concessions from parents. As a result, they reshape the
deﬁnitions of shame, and gain liberty to attend extracurricular school activities, group
data, and set their own educational goals and work expectations.

But it is also clear that the habitus has deep seated gender norms and statuses that
are hard to invalidate. If these dispositions come to censor the entire ﬁeld, be that dating,
marriage, education or work, then a state of symbolic violence has been achieved. Using
this as an objective measure, I believe that youth are participating in reproducing an
ethnic culture in the United States. However, the culture is responsive to the new social

context and demands of the second-generation.

LIMITATIONS

The research does hold several limitations. While the community concept
operates within this group, there is evidence that ethnic identity has an optional quality
among some of the latest second-generation and youth of the third cohort (Waters 1990).
One informant actually had commented that women with premarital sexual experience
are being seen as acceptable marital partners within the community. Obviously, this
would only apply if the groom is not from an “old fashion” family. Another group of
Chaldeans, not interviewed for this study, are converted Protestants.

Still, the data has not been contrived. Among those participating in the study, one-

hundred percent can deﬁne organizing cultural tenants. Nearly, one-hundred percent

128

 

 

 

 

document close social ties with family members, centrality of business cooperation, and
common experiences in migration and family life.

Of the third cohort, there is little evidence gathered here. This group presents a
unique cohort. Their experiences under Saddam Hussein’s surveillance society, decades
of war, sanctions and occupation, and experiences in country of ﬁrst asylum may well
have sparked signiﬁcant changes in gender attitudes. The only third cohort informant had
clearly rejected the Chaldean habitus, and had ceased to participate in the social ﬁelds of
the community, making this a possibility.

While transnationalism was touched upon, the relationship between the Chaldean
diaspora and the Detroit community are not fully understood. Clearly the community
maintains an interest in Iraq and the diaspora. Fundraisers support orphans abroad and
Neo-Soureth instruction schools. Also the community’s major organizations have
petitioned the United States Congress to provide refugee status for those without a
country of permanent settlement, and families support kin stuck in their country of ﬁrst

asylum.

FUTURE RESEARCH

The relationship between ethnically owned economies and gender relations in the
immigrant family is beginning to take shape. While class location has been the leading
analytic tool, it is clear that certain immigrants hold cultural attitudes and identities which
maintain conservative patriarchal bargains. In these cases, gender arrangements may be a
driving factor in creating ethnically owned economies. And in the Chaldean cases, I have

collected data that documents this trend.

129

 

The initial data shows that men beneﬁt from connective patriarchy and receive a
host of resources related to their status as patriarchs. The resources vary but include:
dedicated family labor, extended family cooperation, and family derived loans. Resources
extend beyond the family to Chaldean embeddedness in higher order organizations. For
example, Chaldean ownership in food stores leads to their involvement in Associated
Food Dealers of Michigan. Similarly, Chaldean business leaders network at the Chaldean
American Chamber of Commerce providing insight into key problems businesses might
face in uncertain regulatory conditions, as was the case when oil companies sold their gas
stations.

These ﬁndings need to be presented as the ethnic economy ﬁeld holds some
ambivalence towards the necessity of family labor in business formation. Further, little

information is presented on the attitudes of children in ethnic economies (Song 1999).

CONTRIBUTIONS

The United States war on terrorism is leading to a new set of institutional and
personal connections that may increase the number of immigrants and refugees from
regions of the world were classical patriarchy is dominant. In these areas, we know that
foreign direct investment is slowly changing the gender orders of these societies granting
women some legitimacy to work and travel (Oishi 2005). As migrants consolidate their
settlement, some cities should become host to an understudied set of social relations. This
dissertation has reviewed one such group to note their distinctiveness.

Minority status among immigrants in the pre-migration period has not been

assessed completely either. Cecilia Menjivar (2003) recognizes gender differences among

130

Ladino and Mayan immigrants from Guatemala. But most cases studies focus on
ethnically dominant migrants or treat migrants according to their United States minority
status. It is clear that Chaldean minority status had created an outsider orientation. As a
result the community has become practiced at being community builders in two
countries. This is similar to Parminder Bhachu’s (1985) East Asian immigrants that twice
migrated from India to Aﬁica, and then from Africa to England.

While multiple studies exist on gender adaptation by migrants, few document 1

gender relations as an outcome of community processes. In this study, community has

 

signiﬁcant importance which can not be easily invalidated. The multiple community
organizations offer social settings to act out gender identity: to do gender. Further,
community processes make it possible to sustain high degrees of connectivity between
family members both horizontally and vertically. Also, the community reiﬁes the
connective features of patriarchy, which is a ﬁnding often overlooked in Nabila Kibria’s
(1993) work on the Vietnamese in Philadelphia. For example, a battered woman sought
help from her abuser’s older brother. In other words, she turned to the community’s
traditional means, connective patriarchy, to resolve the problem.

The focus on emotional and symbolic structures of gender relations offers a
means to critically examine what is often called gender ideology, noted as the deep seated
belief in gender differences in behavior (Femandez-Kelly and Garcia 1990). In many
ways, the degree that migrant women seek changes in their patriarchal bargains relates
directly to the degree that social life reproduces legitimacy in these symbolic and
emotional structures. The rites, customs and rituals offer a means for substantiating a

collective value system which operates within the Chaldean patriarchal bargain. It is

131

apparent that women are busily reworking these traditions, but their focus for changes
relates to maintaining their legitimacy in the habitus of the community. Of course,
Chaldeans are slipping away to the mainstream society, but it is clear that there is a large

community busy and active in reproducing their social values.

132

 

 

APPENDICES

133

 

APPENDIX 1

Title of Dissertation Project: From the Tigris to the Rogue: an exploratory study of
Chaldean gendered ethnicity and gender transition.

Dear Sir or Madam:

This is a consent form, asking for your participation in a study about immigrants
and their settlement experiences in the Detroit region. The goal of this interview is to
collect your ideas, sentiments, and feelings to better understand how your life is
inﬂuenced by international migration. The interview will last from 1 to 3 hours, and will
be recorded. If you participate in this study, you will not beneﬁt from your participation.
There are no foreseeable risks associated with participation in this study.

What is the value of this study? Your participation in this study may contribute to
the understanding of America’s multiple ethnic, racial, and immigrant groups. Such
information may help us to better understand each other. Such information has helped us
to better understand how immigrant groups are settling and adjusting to life in America,
and how non-immigrant groups understand and interact with them. I hope you will take
this opportunity to help me better understand the interactions between yourself and others
in the Detroit region.

How will this information be used? The details you provide may be included in a
dissertation, book, or social science journals. As such, you may want to know more about
your rights as a participant. It is my responsibility to protect your conﬁdentiality by every
measure allowed for by law. I can only do this by reporting and attributing any
information you provide under a pseudonym. If you allow me to take your photo, you
must realize that your image may be reproduced in a publication. If you chose, I can
collect your information and offer to one of several museums and institutes that are
interested in the collection and archiving of the life stories of immigrants.

I hope you choose to participate in this study today. And should you have any
questions or wish to provide additional information after the interview, please contact me
at the following address.

Chuck Spurlock

Sociology Department

316 Berkev Hall

Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824-1111
Telephone: (517) 355-6640
Fax: (517) 432-2856

and by email spurloc1@msu.edu

134

 

or if an emergency (only during reasonable hours) my home phone is 5 1 7-337-3 989
(please no collect calls).

Title of Dissertation Project: An exploratory study of international migration and social
factors affecting the settlement and adaptation of immigrants in the Detroit region.

Please sign:

Yes, I want to participate but I do not wish to contribute this interview to an archive:
Signed by , and date

 

 

Yes, I release you to use my image or that of my business or property for your own work:
Signed by , date

 

 

Yes, I wish for my life history and my image to be stored as part of an archive. But
understand that such material may not be released immediately to the public.
Signed by , date

 

 

Additionally, Michigan State University wants you to know that if you have questions or
concerns about your rights as a research participant, please feel free to contact Peter
Vasilenko, Ph.D., Director of the Human Subject Protection Programs at Michigan State
University: (517) 355-2180, fax: (517) 432-4503, email: irb@msu.edu, or regular mail:
202 Olds Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824.

135

 

APPENDIX 2

Survey Guide

FROM THE TIGRIS TO THE ROUGE: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY OF
CHALDEAN GENDERED ETHNICITY AND GENDER TRANSITION

Demographic Information
Baseline demographic data is collected on every informant. This includes: social

identity, age, sex, and years in the United States, religious background, citizenship

status and involvement in community organizations.

Immigration History:

 

What was the migration motive?

Who was in the migration network?

What were the work and homemaking responsibilities prior to coming to the
United States?

Does this family maintain social ties to support family members abroad?

|
|
What was the highest level of education attained abroad?
Do you belong to any social clubs or academic groups that have their origin

abroad?

What was the work performed abroad?

What was the marital status abroad?

What were family living and support arrangements abroad?

Did the informant come with his or her family?

Whose idea was it to migrate?

Did the family come together?

136

Did the family stop in a transitional country? How long was the family there and
who supported the family while in this country?
Who sponsored the migration?
Family History:
At what age did you marry?
What was the age of your spouse?
Did you have children right away?
Did you live with your in-laws?
Who supported the family?
After migration did you live with relatives?
Do you live near relatives now?
Is it important to visit family?
How often do you visit family?
What are the family traditions you uphold?
Are weddings important within your community?
Do families sit together during community events? Are there exceptions?
Does your community maintain a gender division with women and children
separate from men?
Do you feel that you have the right to speak for your younger brothers, sisters and
cousins?
Do older relatives tell you what to do? And do you listen?
Is it important to maintain maternal and paternal relations between siblings?

Does this involve simply visitation?

137

Or do you expect relatives to help with the moral upbringing of your children?
As a second-generation adult, do you plan to marry within your mother and
father’s social group?

Do you plan to marry anyone from your geographic region?

 

Do you plan to marry within the general American public?

What is your expectations regarding jobs and education?

Do you want to leave the area?

Is your family so important that you might wish to stay in the area?

Did family life interfere with your education? If so how?

 

Could you participate in extracurricular actives?
What are the types of things you did as a kid that make you who you are today?

Education History:

What is the highest level of schooling abroad?

Do you speak the mother tongue ﬂuently? Do you write it ﬂuently? Is it important
to maintain? Why?

Did you continue your education in the United States?

15 education the reason you came to the United States?

Do you know others educated at a college program abroad that you maintain
regular contact? Has this group formed a social club?

What subject did you study?

 

Was it important to ﬁnd a job in your ﬁeld of study? If not, why not?
Did you require your kids to learn the mother tongue?

Are your kids able to converse with their grandparents, or is there a language gap?

138

For the second generation:

Did you learn your parents’ mother tongue? If no, then why not? If yes, did you

like it?

 

Did your parents allow you to attend school activities?
Did you negotiate with your parents on issues like dating, attending dances or
proms, or other issues? How did you negotiate and bargain? Did you have an

easier or harder time than the younger or older siblings?

Work History:

How did you ﬁnd your ﬁrst job when you arrived in the United States?

 

How did you ﬁnd subsequent jobs?

Did you take a job that the community ﬁnds acceptable work?

Do you own a business?

Did family help raise the initial capital?

Did you run the business with family? Were your children helpful and needed in
your business? Do you want them to follow in your footsteps?

How many business have you owned? 15 there any kind of progression in it?
Do you rely as much on family now as you did when you started?

Do you have a retail business in Detroit?

Does your business deal more with b2b or is it towards the public?

Do you ﬁnd it hard to work with the public? If so, why?

Do you participate in the communities that support your business? If so how?

 

Do you have good working relations with the public? Or are there problems?

139

Is there an expectation for your social group to get involved with the community,
or is it your own idea?
Organizational Involvement History:

Do you attend social or cultural clubs?

If so, are these professional or community based?

Do you contribute funds to support these social institutions?

Which are the most important social clubs within your community? Do you
belong or don’t want to belong to these? If yes why? If no why?

Do you have leaders within your community that are not elected to public ofﬁce?

 

Is it important to uphold your status within these community organizations?
How important to’your identity are these organizations?
Spatial History
Where did you initially settle?
Do you still live there?
Where did you move?
Do you live near family members?
What is it about your current residence that you like besides the commute? Is it

close to family, and social and community organizations?

140

 

APPENDIX 3.0

9.06.5999ri

Generation

2nd
2nd
2nd
2nd
2nd
2nd
2nd

1and‘/2
land‘/2

1 st
1 st
1 st
2nd
1 st
1 st

land‘/2

2nd
1 st
1 st
1 st
1 st
2nd
1 st
1 st
1 st
2nd
1 st
2nd

CHALDEAN SAMPLE
MEN

Career
college student
college student/store employee
college student/disc jokey
professional
professional
college student/store employee
business owner
business owner
Executive
retired business owner
business owner
Engineer
business owner
Engineer
real-estate
Clergy
college student/store employee
real-estate
Engineer
Artist
computer programming
Lawyer
business owner
computer programming
business owner
Lawyer
scientist
business owner

141

Age
205
205
205
305
305
205
205
405
605
705
505
605
505
505
605
305
205
505
605
605
505
305
605
505
605
305
605
305

APPENDIX 3.1

 

CHALDEAN SAMPLE
WOMEN

Generation Career Age
1 . 2nd student/ intern 205
2. 2nd ﬁnancial services 305
3. 2nd Lawyer 405
4. 2nd social worker 405
5. 2nd ﬁnancial services 305
6. 2nd ﬁnancial services 305
7. 2nd Teacher 205
8. 2nd student/employed - 205
9. 2nd Teacher 205
10. l and 1/2 ﬁnancial services 305
11. lst social worker 305
12. 2nd Doctor 405
l 3. 2nd student/employed 205
14. 3rd social worker 305
1 5. 2nd Teacher 205
l 6. 2nd retired/charity 705
17. 2nd business administration 405
l 8. 1 st student/employed 205
19. 2nd Professional 3 05
20. 1 and % Homemaker 405
21. 2nd Teacher 205
22. 2nd retired/store 605
23. 2nd artist 305

142

 

 

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