EXPLORING SECOND-GENERATION AMERICANS IN URBAN AND RURAL SETTINGS

Becoming New Yorkers: Ethnographies of the New Second Generation. Edited by Philip Kasinitz, John H. Mollenkopf, and Mary C. Waters. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004. xii + 419 pp. Tables, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95.

Latino Churches: Faith, Family, and Ethnicity in the Second Generation. By Ken R. Crane. New York, NY: LFB Scholarly Publishing Co., 2003. x + 225 pp. Illustration, notes, bibliography, appendices, and index. $60.00.

Elliott Robert Barkan
California State University, San Bernardino

Scholars are beginning to pay more attention to the children of the newest waves of immigrants. New York continues to be one of the most dramatic meeting places of peoples from around the world. That diversity once again creates a unique environment in which newcomers and their children can negotiate the extent of their acculturation, adaptation, and cultural retention, for, New York being what it is, many see becoming New Yorkers as essentially becoming American. The city, of course, provides the ultimate urban setting for these processes, but if one were inclined to actually equate New York with the American experience, Ken Crane's study of Mexicans and their children in rural Indiana and Michigan would provide a useful corrective. The overlap of perspectives expressed in both settings and the marked differences in attitudes and perceptions of ethnic institutions proves quite illuminating. These two interesting works shed valuable light on a phenomenon now coming into its own: the integration of the children of contemporary immigrants.