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Identity configurations: re-inventing Samoan youth identities in urban California

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Content IDENTITY CONFIGURATIONS:
RE-INVENTING SAMOAN YOUTH IDENTITIES IN URBAN CALIFORNIA
by
Charles Alan Scull
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ANTHROPOLOGY)
December 2004
Copyright 2004 Charles Alan Scull
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ii
Acknowledgements
This research was made possible partly through the support of several
research grants and fellowships: the Haynes Foundation Dissertation Fellowship
from USC (2001-2002); an Individual Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren
Foundation for Anthropological Research (2002-2003); and a Final Summer
Dissertation Fellowship from USC (2004). I am deeply grateful for the privileged
opportunities that this financial support helped make possible.
As with any dissertation, this work would not have been possible without the
creative input and support of countless people. The four members of my dissertation
committee, Gelya Frank, Janet Hoskins, Alessandro Duranti, and Nancy Lutkehaus
provided careful readings and insightful comments that have given me much to think
about as I consider future applications for this work. Janet and Gelya I had known
for years and in several different capacities, but Alessandro was a late addition who
provided many important suggestions for how to think about this work, based in part
on his lengthy research within Southern California Samoan communities. Nancy
Lutkehaus, my committee chair, has become a valued sounding board and a good
friend. I have been constantly amazed by Nancy’s intuitive ability to immediately
recognize those points most in need of clarification or elaboration, which is a
valuable skill for someone with so little spare time. The occasional guidance of other
professors like Eugene Cooper, Carolyn Cartier who were both on my Qualifying
Exam committee, and Pacific scholars like Paul Shankman, Cluny MacPherson, and
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Robert Tonkinson also helped me to better understand key concepts that have
informed this work.
I am also indebted to fellow students Kalanit Baumhaft, Michelle Besaw,
Kamryn Tupuivao Clark, and Steve Koletty whose empathy, humour and fresh
perspectives were always appreciated. Special mention must also be made of Chris
Ford whose enthusiasm, creativity, and constant questioning provided an energetic
impetus to this project in its earliest stages. I would also like to thank the much
valued lessons I learned from Marita Giovanni and Jamie Pugsley, two inspirational
mentors who taught me the importance of maintaining perspective on this project
and in life.
My thanks also to the members of the Northern and Southern California
Samoan communities and the people who serve them, for their acceptance of my
project and for their graceful patience with my incessant questions. They are too
numerous to mention here but I would like to single out some of them: TupuFia
Carlos-Valentino, Tom Church, John Ena, Asoiva Fa’ataui, Fatilua Fatilua, Margaret
Fatilua, Siaki Lealaimatafao, Pat Luce, DanTaulapapa McMullin, Eunice Nuval,
Moafanua Chester Paleso’o, June Pouesi, Sam Ripley, Ailao Tofaeono, and Atiliai
Tofaeono. George Malauulu and Lealaisalanoa Setu Petaia are in need of special
mention here for their patient tutelage and the exceptional efforts they both went to
in order to ensure that this project was realized to its fullest potential. I also want to
thank the National Office of Samoan Affairs, The Office of Samoan Affairs, the
Samoan Community Development Center, and Carson High School, and their staff
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iv
members for accepting me and for making efforts to facilitate my research. There are
also many churches, Pacific Islander student organizations, families, and individuals,
too numerous to mention here, who showed great kindness to me throughout the
course of this project.
I also received incomparable support from my whole family but particularly
my father, John Scull, to whom I can turn for spirited discussion on all manner of
topics, and my mother, Jerolyn Covay, who patiently and critically read every page
of the dissertation with an editor’s pen that improved the work immeasurably
without ever ceasing to be positive and supportive about the piece’s overall worth.
Theresa Getchius, my constant companion, who endured me throughout this process,
is also in need of special mention. Her patience allowed me to work through many
struggles by knowing when to ask critical questions and when to let me ramble until
I figured out what it was I was trying to say. My thanks to her for providing a refuge
from the strains that are inevitably components of dissertation writing.
Most of all I wish to thank the Samoan young people who were good-
naturedly willing to answer my constant and most basic questions, allow me to hang
out with them, and to allow me to video and photograph them. They gave their time
and patience generously and were earnest in their attempts to convey to me their
experiences and philosophies. To them I owe the greatest debt, which I hope this
work in part repays.
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The collective contributions of all these people have helped to make this
work much stronger than it would have been without them and any deficits in this
dissertation remain my own.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ii
List of Tables ix
List of Figures x
Abstract xi
Part I:
Chapter One: Introduction 1
Configurations 3
Fa’a Samoa 5
Fa’asinomaga 17
Fa’ aaloalo 20
The Structure 26
Chapter Two: Theoretical Discussions 29
Introduction 29
Identity and Culture 29
Ethnicity, Immigration, and Race in the United States 36
Mobility: Migration, Translocalism, and Diaspora 53
Socialization 60
Changing Approaches to the Study of Youth 64
Indigenous Epistemologies and Metaphors 74
Performance 77
Chapter Three: Methodology 82
Locating the Field 82
Establishing Rapport and Situating Myself Within the Field 86
Culturally Specific Research Design 95
Study Demographics 105
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Chapter Four: Diasporic Samoa 112
Introduction 112
A Brief Pre-History and History of Samoa 113
Samoan Diaspora 119
Diasporic Samoans: Southern vs. Northern California 132
Conclusion 161
Part II:
Chapter Five: Constructing Identities: 163
Orientations to place, memories, and collective imaginings
Ethnographic Snap Shot: Sunday afternoon at Levi’s 163
Introduction 166
The Samoan Ethnoscape 167
Constructing Identities 178
The Samoan Place in the American Pastiche 188
Changing Relationships to Samoa 208
Conclusion 220
Chapter Six: Identity Expectations 222
Ethnographic Snap Shot: The Tongans made us do it 222
Introduction 225
Expectations: unpacking Samoan stereotypes 227
Intermission 267
Chapter Seven: Performing Identities: 268
Expression, performance, and the emergence of Samoan-
American youth identity.
Ethnographic Snap Shot: Friday night dance practice 268
Introduction 271
Expressions: invisibility, adaptation, and resistance 273
Performance 293
Conclusion 313
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Chapter Eight: Applying Identities 314
Ethnographic Snap Shot: Samoan culture camp 314
Introduction 318
Authority Figures and the Top Down Approach: Ifoga 320
Parenting and Punishment 330
“PI to the Roof”: Collective Identities in the Making 345
Conclusion 352
Chapter Nine: Conclusion 355
Anthropological Relevance 356
Key Findings 358
Future Directions 361
Closing Thoughts 364
Glossary 367
Bibiliography 371
Appendix 392
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List of Tables
Table 3.1: All completed surveys 108
Table 3.2: Birthplace, generation, and number of Siblings (Survey) 108
Table 3.3: All semi-structured interviews 111
Table 4.1: California urban areas with the largest numbers 127
of Pacific Islanders
Table 4.2: Some key socio-demographic differences between Samoans 128
and the U.S. and Pacific Islander populations on the whole
Table 4.3Approximate ethnic distribution of the city of Carson population: 139
selected years, 1968-2000
Table 4.4: Carson friendships according to gender and ethnicity (by %) 147
Table 5.1: Summary of survey findings on the “best” and “worst” 171
aspects of being Samoan
Table 5.2: Time spent in Samoa 182
Table 5.3: Survey findings on attitudes towards U.S. and Samoa 185
Table 5.4: Samoan language 214
Table 6.1: Samoan perceptions of Samoan stereotypes 239
Table 6.2: Sampling of the occurrence of “Samoan” in the Los Angles Times 246
(January 1, 2001 to April 5, 2004)
Table 6.3: Demographics on the USC -Samoan Stereotypes Survey 264
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List of Figures
Figure 1.1: Figure/Ground Image 5
Figure 1.2: Fa’a Samoa diagrams 25
Figure 4.1: “Rank in the order that they are important to you” 131
Figure 4.2: Samoans in Greater Los Angeles (1990 Census Tracts and Data) 135
Figure 4.3: A typical street in the Bayview district 136
Figure 4.4: A typical Carson neighbourhood. 136
Figure 4.5: Continuation High School in the Bayview district. 137
Figure 4.6: Pacific Islander shop in Sunnydale, San Francisco. 137
Figure 4.7: Samoans in San Francisco 151
Figure 7.1: Practicing the fa ’atupati at Carson High School (March 2,2000). 302
Figure 7.2: Girl’s dance practice at Carson High School. (March 2, 2000). 302
Figure 7.3: Taualuga dance. Carson Flag Day, April 14, 2000. 303
Figure 7.4: Rehearsing the identity skit in San Francisco (July 15, 2002). 303
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Abstract
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Samoan American youth are the newest members of a modem Samoan
diaspora that began at the close of World War Two. These young people’s cultural
identities have been jointly shaped by both fa ’ a Samoa (the Samoan way) and
American influences. The focus of this dissertation is on the ways Samoan youth
have chosen to negotiate these two influences and to re-invent new Samoan identities
in California.
The data was gathered over the course of five years in two Californian
Samoan communities: four years in Carson and one year of intensive ethnographic
fieldwork in San Francisco. The methodology included participant observation,
surveys, semi-structured interviews, and visual ethnography. The bulk of the data
comes from individual and group interviews. The decision to use group interviews,
known in this work as ethnovignettes, was part of an effort to incorporate local
indigenous epistemology into the research design.
The exploration of a variety of identity configurations begins by describing
the Samoan ethnoscape. From this flows an analysis of the identity expectations that
have been applied to Samoans. The analysis acknowledges both the orientalist
imaginings of the South Pacific and its people and the unique significance of the
American social environment to Samoan adaptation experiences. A variety of
responses to these perceived identity expectations demonstrate Samoan struggles to
situate themselves within simplistic American racial and immigration schemas. Two
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important types of identity expressions are identity performances, which denote less
reactionary identity expressions, enacted primarily for the benefit of in-group
members; and applying identities, which are theorized as those examples of specific
cultural responses to contemporary issues. The discussion of Samoan identity
examples enables, on a greater level, the development of a more nuanced taxonomy
of identity, a notoriously imprecise concept.
A number of key findings emerged throughout the course of this work. The
two most significant were:
1) Samoan culture is externally construed in gendered ways that make the
cultural adaptation experience different for men and women; and
2) maintaining commitments to more than one culture is socially
advantageous to individuals because it provides them with a broader
range of solutions to contemporary challenges.
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Chapter I
Introduction
When Samoans began to migrate to California in large numbers in the late
1940s and the early 1950s, leaving their South Pacific islands far behind, they
arrived on those new shores equipped with a codified notion of cultural identity
called the fa ’a Samoa. This study focuses on Samoan youth in California, many of
whom are the grandchildren of these first migrants. The extent and manner in which
the fa ’ a Samoa has remained active or has been altered in California, in this present
generation, is the central objective of my research. This task is not an easy one as the
fa ’a Samoa cannot be treated in isolation from other societal, temporal, economic,
and environmental variables and because even in the islands the f a ’a Samoa has not
remained static. Accordingly, this dissertation describes instances of adaptation,
syncretism, and cultural continuity as well as instances of less successful cultural
translations. It draws examples not just from the Samoan culture’s colourful, overtly
performative expressions, but also through its more pragmatic quotidian
manifestations, what Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1996) has called vernacular
culture.
The culturally specific Samoan issues that inform this dissertation, while of
intrinsic interest, also speak to larger fields of anthropological inquiry. My findings
and interpretations add another voice to the ongoing discussions of youth culture,
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immigrant adaptation strategies, transnational/translocal identity, cultural hybridities
and syncretisms, the culture and identity debate, and the American ethnic experience.
However, above all others, identity is the focus of this research. Ultimately,
this dissertation provides an examination of some of the dominant identity
configurations that have emerged through the process of cultural negotiation and
compromise that have shaped Samoan young peoples’ attempts to construct a unique
social place for themselves in California. By looking more closely at some of the
identity choices made by group members we shall see how various identity lenses
can serve to frame similar cultural behaviours in vastly different ways. What
emerges is a more nuanced taxonomy of identity that breaks the vague meta-usage
the term usually enjoys into smaller and more comparable components. Thus, this
dissertation aims to contribute to a more complex understanding of the meaning and
process of identity.
This introductory chapter begins by briefly discussing the title of this
dissertation, “Identity Configurations” before unpacking three key terms: fa ’a
Samoa, fa ’asinomaga, and fa ’aaloalo, briefly defined here as culture, identity, and
respect. A critical awareness of these concepts is an important foundation upon
which to base subsequent understandings of Samoan cultural behaviour in the United
States. The chapter concludes with an outline of the structure of the dissertation.
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Configurations
The title of this dissertation is “Identity Configurations” and it is relevant to
note that the use of the term “configurations” has a distinct academic pedigree both
in psychology and in anthropology. In the social sciences, the Gestalt school of
psychology first used the term as a way to describe people’s ability to recognize
organized patterns. In anthropology, it has emerged and re-emerged periodically over
the years, first through the writings of Ruth Benedict (1934), Edward Sapir (1949),
and Margaret Mead (1935) as a central tenet of the Culture and Personality School of
anthropology and more recently in the writing of Clifford Geertz (1973) although he
does not use the phrase directly (cf. Bock 1980). My usage of “configurations” is
similar to other anthropological applications in some ways, but it also differs
significantly from them and may, ultimately, be closer to the Gestalt model itself.
Put simply, the basic axiom of Gestalt psychology is that the whole is greater
than the sum of its parts, but beyond that, Gestalt or configuration refers to the ability
to make sense of the world by recognizing overall patterns even if all the component
parts are not immediately apparent. They demonstrate this principle through a
number of basic visual tests. This pattern finding principle, along with the emphasis
on the importance of the integrated whole, have been the aspect of the theory that
have been most attractive to anthropologists. In her landmark work, Patterns of
Culture (1934), Ruth Benedict describes four different cultural groups in terms of
their cultural configurations, which she equates to specific individual personalities.
While Benedict clearly indicated her connection to the Gestalt psychologists,
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Clifford Geertz was disdainful of psychological models even though his discussion
of “thick description”, in his influential work Interpretation of Cultures (1973)
seems a natural extension of Benedict’s idea of the anthropologist as cultural
translator and pattern-finder.
My use of “configurations” also depends on the researcher to recognize
cultural patterns. Furthermore, the configuration concept provides a good model for
the study of identity because of its emphasis on the integrated whole. Enactments of
identity are socially significant when viewed within greater cultural context than they
are if evaluated as independent acts. However, where Benedict and Geertz sought to
describe the underlying patterns of specific cultures with no suggestion that these
patterns are repeated elsewhere, my use of the term lies in the recognition of
recurring types of identity patterns that are cross-culturally comparative.
Consequently, the Gestalt model that I find most aptly describes this is the famous
figure/ground image, originally introduced by Edgar Rubin in 1915, that is at the
same time the silhouette of two faces and a vase, depending on how one perceives it
(see Figure 1.1). This image reflects my commentary on identity: 1) the material or
behaviours that are collectively recognized as “identity” may reveal different images
when seen from different perspectives even though they are composed of essentially
the same information; 2) although there is some latitude in terms of which image one
recognizes, there are not a limitless number of options, just as identity expressions,
while not fully fixed, must adhere to some cultural limitations and not just any
behaviour can be labeled as demonstrative of Samoan identity.
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Figure 1.1
Figure-Ground Image
5
Fa’ a Samoa
Fa’a Samoa Etymology
Ever since I first began reading about Samoa, I have encountered the term
fa ’a Samoa. Its spelling changes— one word or two, with or without a long ‘a’, with
or without an uppercase ‘s’, italicized or standard font, and so on— and its precise
definition changes from author to author, but it remains ubiquitous in the discussion
of Samoan culture, mostly because above all it seems to signify “Samoan culture”.
Some scholars have defined it as “the Samoan way” (of life, of doing things, of
custom) (Keesing 1934; Wendt 1973), some specifying that it is the traditional or old
Samoan way (Holmes and Holmes 1992); and others preferring a more open-ended
understanding that allow for both tradition and innovation (cf. Anae 2002; Franco
1991; O’Meara 1990).
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However, despite the modem day ubiquity of the term, the etymology of fa ’a
Samoa remains ambiguous. Attempts to uncover its early usage by searching through
the published literature on Samoa, going back as far as the mid-nineteenth century,
yielded naught prior to 1934, at which time the anthropologist Felix Keesing wrote
about it, though he was simply reporting the use of the term and not introducing it
himself. Early accounts by missionaries, such as George Turner (1884) and John
Stair (1897), who wrote richly descriptive accounts for popular audiences made no
mention of the term. Anthropologists such as Augustin Kramer (1901,1903) and
Peter Buck (1930) were much more concerned with recording the material culture in
meticulous detail than they were with synthesizing the more abstract indigenous
epistemology. Subsequent publications by colonial administrators such as F.J.H.
Gratton (1948), who wrote a practical handbook on Samoan customs and provided
protocols for respectful behaviour, also shied away from addressing the big cultural
picture, and early western chroniclers such as Robert Louis Stevenson (1897) and
N.A. Rowe (1930) focused their attentions on describing European-Islander relations
and criticizing the colonial administration. To date there has been little work
published in English that has looked critically at the notion of fa ’ a Samoa. Melani
Anae’s (2002) preliminary work is the one current exception. Thus the question of
whether the word and the behaviour that it codifies emerged independently, or as a
relational foil against the diverse other cultures that began arriving in the Samoan
Islands in large numbers by the 1830s, remains unanswered.
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Despite the uncertainty surrounding its origins, the term now enjoys
widespread and sometimes conflicting usage. Borrowing a term from Marcel Mauss,
Evelyn Kallen calls the fa ’ a Samoa a “total phenomenon” in that:
[I]t is at once a world view; a way of life; a cherished heritage; a set of
structural principles for ordering social life; a plethora of formidable
constraints upon behaviour; and an ideological underpinning for strongly
positive ethnocultural identification” (1982:35).
Melani Anae confirms this perception of the fa ’a Samoa as a master narrative by
stating that, “The fa ’aSamoa is the ordering of a society of the highest kind, for it
refers to the social order, the economic order, the historical order, and the moral
order for Samoan people today” (2002:152). Cluny MacPherson voices his
agreement, cleverly referring to the fa ’a Samoa as, “The authorized version of
Samoan reality” (2004:165). However, the fa ’a Samoa does not operate exclusively
at this higher level; it is also attached to a vast array of behaviour, from precise
directions about how to cut up and serve a pig, to more abstract generalized
principles such as the importance of respect and the mastery of language. These last
two were repeatedly stressed to me in interviews with Samoan teenagers in
California.1
These disparate components do not carry equal importance and furthermore,
that which is held to be most important in the fa ’a Samoa varies a great deal across
settings and among individuals. In overseas Samoan communities the importance of
church, ‘ aiga (extended family), respect, and language are central components of the
1 Melani Anae (2002) found a similar emphasis among diasporic Samoans living in New Zealand.
When she asked them whether language, customs, or beliefs were the most important part of the
fa ’aSamoa, 55% chose language (155).
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fa ’a Samoa, as they are back in the islands (though their expression and
interpretation may be quite different overseas); but some other components such as
those tied to land and to specific customs are understandably less important in
California.
Simply because it seems to include almost everything in the culture,
anthropologists— though they all recognize certain base components of custom,
tradition, and language-have a tendency to infer that whatever it is they are studying
is at the heart of thc fa ’a Samoa. Thus, for Tim O’Meara (1990) it is the matai
system (elected family chiefs who represent the family in the village council of
chiefs, the fono, and who make decisions regarding the use of communal lands) and
the impact on land tenure that the system implies. For Bob Franco (1990), it centers
on the issues surrounding work, tribute, and inter-class relations. For Evelyn Kallen
(1982), it is the value placed on sharing and collective enterprise that allows for what
she calls the “kinship bridge” migration strategy to occur. Lowell and Ellen Holmes
(1992) believe it is the church and family. And yet, perhaps they are all correct in
seeing it that way. Because of its holistic totality, everything is, arguably, equally at
the center of the fa ’a Samoa.
Despite the Samoan reputation for conservatism, the de facto expression of
the fa ’a Samoa appears to stand as a strong counter example. Something as
seemingly innocuous as hairstyle illustrates this point well. Often, when speaking to
large groups of young people about tradition, Samoan elders include in their lectures
the importance of respectful dress and appearance: clothes should be fitted, not too
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baggy and boys’ hair, according to the fa ’a Samoa, should be close cropped and tidy,
not long and braided or shaved to the scalp. As baggy clothes and these hairstyles are
popular in the urban neighbourhoods in which many Samoans live, any given group
of young people may contain a number of young men whose appearance is being
directly criticized through this lecture.
However, a quick survey through some of the historical literature shows that
the appropriate length and style of traditional Samoan hair has varied greatly over the
years. At the end of the nineteenth century, Augustin Kramer (1995) wrote, ‘Today
men and women wear their hair uniformly short, about 5 cm long, combed tightly
upwards ... This style is today a major mark of a well groomed person” (325).
Meanwhile, in 1930, Peter Buck wrote, “the women wore their hair short, the men
kept theirs long. After cutting, the women kept their hair short by singeing the ends
with lighted bark.” (621). Since physical and materially descriptive studies have
fallen out of style more recently, and as Samoan style has been increasingly
influenced by global fashion trends, (thus film and video shot in the 1970s shows
many Samoan bell-bottomed youth with wildly grown out ‘afros’, for example), it
has become difficult to track official perceptions of good grooming. Nevertheless,
the hair example sheds light on several different issues. First, that which is labeled as
‘traditional’ is not fixed. Second, Samoan elders are not above using claims of
authenticity to advance their own socially conservative values when speaking to
young people, not out of an attempt to be devious but because the line between
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tradition and modernity is blurred.2 This boundary blurring, understandably, leads to
more questions, which are of general contention in anthropology in ongoing debates
on representation and authenticity. For example, is the suggestion that a line exists
between modernity and tradition another example of the ethnographic present being
given undue importance by unwittingly suggesting that tradition ends with contact?
And if tradition does not end with contact, when and how does tradition end and how
are subsequent innovations to be incorporated as authentic?
Within the diasporic Samoan communities that which is held to be traditional
and authentic, and the criteria for establishing such claims, are often hotly contested
and actively debated. In Melani Anae’s (2002) discussion of how the fa ’a Samoa is
expressed in New Zealand, tradition comes across as anything but static. In fact it is
decidedly subjective and open in its interpretation and execution (2002:152):
Fa ’ aSamoa has an elusive quality, for although it undoubtedly exists, it
derives ultimately from people’s emotions and situations. Although the
f a ’aSamoa appears to be an enigma—there are many perceptions of what
fa ’aSamoa is and means, and one may rightly be concerned with the tension
between the rhetoric and the reality of the fa ’ aSamoa—every Samoan is very
clear about what their perception of the fa ’aSamoa is.
Generally speaking, “Tradition is”, as Nicholas Thomas puts it, “not just a burden
that must be carried around, but also a thing that can be acted upon or deployed to
diverse ends” (1992:227). However, as we shall see later, and to paraphrase George
Orwell, though all fa ’a Samoas are equal, some f a ’a Sdmoas are more equal than
2 Whether this conservative standard of appearance is based on the example of their own childhoods
in the 50s and 60s or is a lingering by-product of the austere protestant missionary value system that
still influence Samoan congregational Christianity, or some combination of these and other values,
remains unclear.
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others and not all expressions of the fa ’ a Samoa are likely to be equally recognized
as authentic. The lingering questions then are: who is evaluating such claims and on
what basis does their authority rest? Indeed, determining the criteria for what makes
someone an authentic Samoan in California shall be revealed to be an important and
highly contested issue among the youth surveyed.
For many Samoans, their relationship to the fa ’a Samoa remains an
ambivalent one. Although many migrants benefit directly from its social networks,
collective enterprise and the mutual support encoded by it in the form of help with
plane tickets, housing, and jobs, escape from the constraints of the gerontocracy and
from the matai system (political system of elected chiefs), equally contingent
components of the fa ’ a Samoa, are also powerful factors in some young people’s
decisions to emigrate in the first place (cf. Shankman 1990, 1993). Furthermore,
while it is true that the fa ’a Samoa provides much support for community members,
it also asks much from them. Fa’alavelaves are principal amongst these obligations.
They are defined literally as “disruptions to the normal order of life” that is, events
such as births, funerals, weddings, the passage of titles, and the resolution of
disputes. Fa ’alavelaves are accompanied by elaborate gift exchanges. Both
traditional wealth like ‘ie toga (fine mats), siapo (bark cloth), and other island
handicrafts as well as contemporary wealth in the form of bales of printed fabric and
money are distributed amidst much public display and speech-making. One way
families gamer prestige is through the magnanimity they show in making such
offerings. There are some in the community who feel that f a ’ alavelaves have become
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too prolific and have started to serve primarily as fundraisers (cf. O’Meara 1990).
Others feel that the pressure to appear generous is causing some families to give
beyond their means, keeping them in perpetual poverty in the American environment
in a way that similar participation would not cause back in the islands. As Paul
Shankman (1990) writes, quoting an immigrant Samoan woman’s strategically
planned return to Samoa in a manner designed to minimize her financial obligations
to family, “We like Samoa, but not fa ’a Samoa” (168). Furthermore, while most
Samoans rely on the support implicit in the fa ’a Samoa, particularly upon arrival,
and also benefit from these occasional redistributions of wealth, there is a small
emerging middle class of Samoans whose fortunes are not dependent on the fa ’a
Samoa (cf. Anae 2002). Samoan-born elders in particular view this group as a threat
to the preservation of the Samoan culture since, by virtue of their income and
education, they are not in need of the fa ’a Samoa's support and, accordingly, are
more likely to find its demands burdensome and exploitative as others may
parasitically view them as needing little but having much to give.
The Fa’a Samoa in a Broader Context
Although the fa ’a Samoa is certainly unique to Samoans in that it is
concerned with the specific enactment of Samoan culture, it is also simply another
specific example of a more general practice by which many groups codify their
cultural behaviours as a means of maintaining their distinctiveness and supporting
their claims of authenticity. The South Pacific alone has several such codifications,
some very similar in design to the fa ’a Samoa, such as the anga fakatonga in Tonga
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and others much more broad in their scope, such as the ideology of kastom in
Melanesia (cf. Jolly 1992; Keesing 1982, 1993; Lindstrom 1982; Lindstrom and
White 1993; Tonkinson 1983, 2000 for spirited discussions of kastom).
Based on Helen Morton Lee’s writings, the Tongan version of codified
culture, the anga fakatonga is extremely similar to the fa ’a Samoa, even in the
adjustments it has been forced to make in the diasporic context. I would suggest that
the key components of the fa ’a Samoa, as it is practiced in California, are centered
on the ‘ aiga (extended family) and the collectivist values it implies, the language,
fa ’alavelaves, and the principles of fa ’aaloalo (“respect”). Similarly, Morton Lee
lists language, gender divisions, the brother/sister taboo, and above all respect, in a
broad sense, as key components of the anga fakatonga. Significantly, Morton reports
that “Respect (faka’ apa’apa) is a value central to anga fakatonga, and its
importance was stressed in all the interviews I conducted” (2002:140). So similar are
the cultural practices and migration histories for Samoans and Tongans that the
Samoan youth in California appear to share much with the Tongan youth in Australia
in terms of their criticisms of certain cultural practices, such as absolute parental
authority. And, just as Anae (2002) has described the fa ’a Samoa as having an
“elusive quality”, Morton claims that the “ anga fakatonga is a fluid, manipulable, yet
powerful concept” (2002:139). Like thefa’a Samoa that I am seeking to explicate in
this dissertation, the anga fakatonga is not “primarily past-oriented” (Morton
2002:138) and those Tongans in Australia with whom Morton discussed the concept
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“are not so much concerned with creating a past (cf. Keesing 1989) as with knowing
what is right for the present” (ibid).
The broader concept of codified culture that is represented by kastom in
Melanesia differs from the fa ’a Samoa in some ways but the two concepts also share
several similarities. The obvious differences are in the scope of their inclusion and in
the manner in which they emerged. While Samoa, as is generally the case with
Polynesian cultures, is typified by cultural and linguistic homogeneity, island
Melanesia, where the term kastom emerged, is well known for its extreme cultural
and linguistic diversity. The Solomon Islands, for example, is a country of roughly
400,000 people with more than 100 active languages.
So, while the fa ’a Samoa establishes Samoan distinctiveness, in contrast
kastom emerged as a unifying trope, an effort to promote a post-colonial pan-
Melanesian identity that recognized a type of inter-group solidarity that was rooted
in the uninterrupted traditions of the people and that was independent of colonial
map-making (cf. Jolly 1992; Lindstrom 1992). Although the goal of kastom was to
encompass even highly localized cultural practices, it was significantly a pidgin
word, and not a term of local vernacular. Kastom is a highly politicized term owing,
in part, to the historical moment in which it originally emerged, specifically the intra-
cultural context of plantation work in the late 19* century (cf. Jolly 1992; Thomas
1992). Through the shared experience of plantation labour many Melanesians came
into contact with one another and formulated the ideology of kastom that partly
defined itself by its unifying opposition to European culture. It remains unclear under
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what specific historical context the fa ’a Samoa emerged as a term, but it is notably a
Samoan word, with old and commonly used component roots.
Despite these significant differences, there are also many essential
similarities between kastom and the fa ’a Samoa. Like the fa’a Samoa, kastom is an
umbrella term used to describe a wide range of behaviours. In addition to the pan-
Melanesianist scope mentioned above, kastom is also used to refer to extremely
localized cultural practices. Roger Keesing (1982) notes this diversity and also
suggests a certain power that is drawn from this purposeful ambiguity and
imprecision. He writes that kastom “is an apt and powerful symbol precisely
because it can mean almost anything” (298). And Lamont Lindstrom’s (1982) words
concerning the highly varied and sometimes personalized interpretations of the
ultimate relevance of kastom are virtually echoed in the similar observations made
by Anae on the fa ’a Samoa and by Morton on the anga fakatonga. Lindstrom writes:
“It [kastom] is a symbol which everyone understands but on the meaning of which
no one agrees” (1982:317).
The conflict inherent in kastom, as with the fa ’ a Samoa and with any
traditional cultural code lies in the compromises groups are forced to make by
maintaining their traditions on the one hand while showing that their cultures are still
relevant in the modem world and further that they are dynamic enough to change
with the times. Indeed, the same individual who prides herself on her adherence to
the old ways may be celebrated by some for the respect she shows the past and
simultaneously labeled by others as a counter-progressive or a conservative and
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reviled for her loyalty to outmoded practices. Finally, as recent events such as the
outbreak of inter-ethnic conflict in the Solomon Islands show, the idealistic potential
of the kastom trope of Melanesian unity may be losing its luster3 . As the length of
time since Melanesian independence increases and the task of nation-building
diminishes, kastom’s role as a rallying call to unify and as a way to contrast pre
contact native culture from European culture has ebbed. Instead, kastom is now
increasingly used to validate highly localized (and at times conflicting) discourses of
tradition and distinctiveness (cf. Tonkinson 2000).
I have been using the term ‘traditional’ very loosely in this discussion to
stand for something more or less equivalent to cultural practices that are somehow
continuous, having started at, or before, the time of first contact with the Europeans.
The term however is much more problematic than this definition would imply as
traditions have always ebbed and flowed, been invented and re-invented, and this
weighting of the ethnographic present may give an undue sense of permanence to
specific practices that were popular at one point in time since it is those practices that
were the most thoroughly described and first committed to print. Well aware of the
true dynamism of cultural invention, many scholars have become much more
dubious about treating claims of “traditional” and “authentic” as though they are
3 Growing ethnic tensions on Guadalcanal, the island on which Honiara, the capital, is located finally
erupted in 1999 when the Isatabu Freedom Movement (JEM) of Guadalcanal attacked the Malaitans
who were living there, causing thousands of them to flee back to their neighbouring island. The IFM
resented the large Malaitan presence on Guadalcanal and the many positions of authority that
Malaitans held. In June of 2000 the Malaitan Eagles Force (MEF), a rival ethnic militia group of
Malaitans, struck back, effectuating a coup, and forcing new elections. Since that time ethnic conflicts
and lawlessness have continued intermittently, although things seem to have improved recently since
a coalition of Pacific forces, led primarily by Australia, were called in to help restore order in the
summer of 2003.
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primordial (cf. Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). ‘Tradition” has come to be viewed as
so subjectively relative that Nicholas Thomas (1992) has advised scholars to
abandon looking at how traditions emerge and to instead focus their attention on that
against which they are “invented”. The ephemerality of tradition is charmingly
captured in the only slightly facetious (presumably) words of a Maori informant
quoted by Jane and James Ritchie (1989): “If something happens once around here,
well it’s just what happens, but if it happens twice it’s a tradition” (104).4
Fa’ asinomaga
A good example of the efforts of the fa ’a Samoa to balance conservatism
with innovation and change is found in the emergence of a new term, fa ’asinomaga.
While the etymology of the fa ’a Samoa remains ambiguous, the etymology of
fa ’asinomaga has a much more recent past. Dr. Aiono Fanafi le Tagaloa (1997), a
prominent Samoan linguist and scholar, first used the term in the late 1990s by
combining the existing Samoan words fa ’asino (“to point or show”) with the
nominal suffix maga. Thus the new word literally translates as “that which is being
pointed at or shown” although in vernacular English it is translated as simply
“identity”. Significantly, most of Fanafi’s writings have been published in Samoan,
making it hard for non-Samoans to gain access to her work, but also revealing in the
4However, the implications of claims of the “traditional” and the “authentic” may also have highly
pragmatic constraints, particularly in the case of fourth world land claims in which oral traditions are
given legal weight (cf. Cruikshank 1994; Tonkinson 2000). Taking this perspective into account,
Robert Tonkinson claims “’tradition’ is most effectively conceptualized as a resource, strategically
employed (or not employed) by certain (but not all) of a community’s members in pursuit of
individual or collective goals” (171).
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process who the intended audience for this type of writing is. The term is still not
widely used in California, but it is gaining recognition. The existence of this word,
along with other writings by Fanafi, are being disseminated to the broader Samoan
community by Samoan scholars and intellectuals, in a process that is reminiscent of
the strategy employed by Christian churches of using native Pacific Islander
catechists to spread the doctrine during the time of the missionaries.
As my own command of Samoan is insufficient to fully absorb Fanafi’s
writings, and because her publications are difficult to obtain in California, my
understanding of why she felt that the introduction of this word was important
remains incomplete. In basic terms, Fanafi is concerned to help Samoans reify their
traditions through their contemporary actions. Her writings on fa ’ asinomaga remind
readers of the rich traditions that have been lost, drastically altered, or robbed of their
original meanings in recent years. Her work lists traditional practices such as the
traditional gender roles (tama’ita’i and aumaga), and the importance of service
(aumaga/tautua), the place of children in society (which she uses as an opportunity
to explain that corporal punishment as it exists today is not traditional), language
(gagana), titles (suafa), lands {laufanua), and the practice of family evening worship
(afiafi) (Tangaloa 1997). It is her hope that by remembering and reenacting these
practices Samoans will retain their cultural distinctiveness now and into the future.5
5 In the Applying Identities chapter of this dissertation we shall discuss some of Fanafi’s fa ’asinomaga
pillars in more detail through one of her student’s interpretations of them for Californian Samoan
youths.
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In many ways the fa ’asinomaga (“identity”) concept seems analogous to
Samoan youth’s search for identity in general in that it is a newly labeled way of
embracing and expressing things from a proud past. However, it should be noted that
both Fanafi herself and her idea of fa ’asinomaga are firmly rooted in legitimizing the
behaviour of today by selectively re-enacting older practices that support it. As such,
she is, as one informant put it, “more of a modem conservative than a radical
traditionalist”, in that she is more interested in entrenching Samoan culture and
privilege as it stands now than she is in revisiting older practices in search of the new
relevance they may offer.
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Fa’ aaloalo
The final component of our introduction is fa ’aaloalo (respect). Although, as
with other issues already discussed, f a ’ aaloalo remains inconsistently understood by
informants, it is often a major source of pride and its inclusion as one of the most
important and distinguishing elements of the fa ’a Samoa in interviews and in surveys
was near universal among my informants. While fa ’aaloalo is fundamentally
concerned with respect, more broadly it provides a set of guidelines for proper
behaviour, discipline, and personal accountability or responsibility. In response to a
question I posed that asked about the most important elements of the fa ’a Samoa,
Isaiah, a fourteen-year-old boy from San Francisco answered ‘ ‘ fa ’aaloald” and then
elaborated on the definition of the term:
Most important things: to be respectful and to be responsible: to be
responsible with whatever I do, to be responsible doing schoolwork, going to
school on time, try to stay truthful...
Despite the fact that fa ’aaloalo is a common source of pride for young
Samoans they also often express a selective reverence for it. Part of their
ambivalence stems from the fact that— according to the experiences of many Samoan
youth, and despite the fact that it is never explicitly stated in formal definitions— it is
impossible to separate fa ’ aaloalo from intergenerational relations in general.6
Although throughout the course of my fieldwork I observed a wide range of
adult behaviour, typically Samoan adults are formal and authoritative in their
relations with younger Samoans and even though they maintain close relationships
61 explore intergenerational relations in greater detail in the Applying Identities chapter.
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21
within their families, especially with young children, in many instances a social
distance emerges between young people and their elders as children grow up. This
age-based cultural value on formality and decorum in many cases leads to a social
disconnect between elders and youth.
This social disconnect become axiomatic when one understands that respect
for elders, arguably the most important component of fa ’aaloalo, extends well
beyond mere courtesy. Fa ’aaloalo is based on the notion that the authority of elders
is not arbitrary but the result of legitimized experientially gained wisdom that ideally
allows elders to serve as exemplary moral paragons to Samoan youth. Such authority
entitles them to deference from youth and blind trust in the wisdom of their edicts.7
Youth are taught to faithfully accept their elders’ wisdom even though at times its
legitimacy or its ultimate logic may elude them. It is not youth’s prerogative to have
demands or admonishments explained to them, let alone to challenge them. Consider
the words of the Samoan scholar, Tamasailau Sua’ali’i:
From childhood through to adulthood, Samoans were taught to respect elders,
to show humility and to give unselfishly. In this context, the collective self
was fashioned through such principles as humility, service, respect and
deference... Children had little reason or opportunity to question the
instructions, knowledge and wisdom of their elders (2001:171-172)
It is in the context of such unexplained edicts that many intergenerational conflicts
arise, particularly in light of the socialization of American liberal values that the
youth are being exposed to outside of the home.
7 As one Samoan high school administrator liked to say to the Samoan students at a San Francisco
high school, “I’ve been your age before. You haven’t been mine”.
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22
The values of humble service and unquestioning subservience mentioned by
Sua’ali’i in the above quote have had a varied impact on diasporic Samoans, both
positive and negative. On the positive side, according to some writers, these values
have predisposed Samoans to enjoy success in fields like the military, organized
sports, and factory work where doing what you are told to do and not questioning
authority are rewarded (cf. Adams 1999; Franco 1991). By the same token, similar
behaviours may serve as obstacles to Samoan success in other institutions such as the
Western education system. For example, Jane and James Ritchie (1989) contend that
Polynesian students in general are susceptible to falling behind classmates in
Western style class settings, in part because they are socialized not to question
adults, even when they do not initially understand things, trusting in the fact that the
truth will eventually become self-evident to them.
It is difficult to assess the true impact of these practices of humble service
and age deference in terms of greater Samoan cultural adaptation because these
behaviours are unevenly practiced outside of the Samoan cultural community. For
example, although the personality and teaching style of individual adults may have a
great deal of impact on the behaviour of students in a given classroom, one Samoan
school administrator offered the following insights to explain why Samoan students
were respectful in his presence but not in the classroom of a specific non-Samoan
teacher at a San Francisco high school.
It’s not us [Samoan adults] they’re scared of; it’s our culture. It teaches
respect for elders and obedience. If we tell them that we’ll contact their
parents that holds a lot of weight. If a pdlagi [of European ancestry] kid gets
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23
in trouble at school and the teacher punishes him for it then he might
complain to his parents to get their support and to reprimand the teacher but
in Samoa if you got in trouble from your teacher you would never tell your
parents because they would beat you twice as hard once you got home. If you
got punished by the teacher then you must have deserved it.
Both the unchallenged respect for elders and a parent’s willingness to take a
teacher’s opinion over that of his or her child’s were embodied in a skit that one
group of Bay area Samoan teens created during a summer video workshop that I
taught. They called the skit “Disciplining Robert” and it was the story of a Samoan
boy living in the Islands who is disruptive and disrespectful, both in the classroom
and in his home. After the teacher pays a home visit to discuss Robert’s behaviour,
his stem but loving father decides that Robert will be sent to live with his “aunty” in
San Francisco. Helen Morton (1996) made a similar observation among Tongan
school children who were reluctant to report having gotten in trouble at school as
they expected further punitive recriminations from their parents rather than indignant
empathy for their unfair treatment.
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24
In this brief discussion I have introduced three overlapping core concepts of
diasporic Samoan culture: fa ’a Samoa, fa ’asinomaga, fa ’aaloalo. Although each
of these terms is discrete from one another they also enjoy significant overlap. In an
earlier attempt to understand them I developed a schematic that showed them as
overlapping spheres. Much pleased with my visualization, I showed it to LeSui, an
intellectual Samoan informant, with whom I had discussed similar issues earlier. He
said that he found my diagram interesting but ultimately he rejected it. In its stead he
offered a new diagram that placed the fa ’a Samoa in a single large sphere with
fa ’asinomaga as a concentric sphere within in it fa ’aaloalo as a concentric
sphere within the fa ’asinomaga sphere, so that the end diagram looked like a bull’s-
eye. See Figure 1.2 to view the two diagrams.
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Figure 1.2
Fa’ a Samoa Diagrams
Charley’s diagram:
Fa’a Samoa
(culture)
Fa’asinomaga
(identity)
Fa’aaloaio
(respect)
LeSui’s diagram:
Fa a Samoa
Fa’asinomaga
Fa aa oalo
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2 6
My objective in looking at each of these terms and the relationships among
them has been to provide an emic filter through which to view the material that
follows while simultaneously suggesting how these Samoan specific cultural
institutions are implicated in broader theoretical debates that focus on the structured
strategies that any group employs to define its cultural distinctiveness. This approach
is a defining characteristic of the dissertation as a whole.
The Structure
In my search to understand what their Samoan heritage means to the youth
involved in this study, I approach the question from two distinct perspectives. The
first perspective emphasizes context and the second highlights specific examples,
which, without the preceding context, would be much less meaningful. Accordingly,
this dissertation is divided into two unambiguous parts.
In Part I, I will begin by discussing the theoretical positioning of this research
and then go on to describe my methodology and to provide an overview of the
Samoan people and their history of migration to the United States. The first chapter
of this section, Theoretical Discussions, sketches some of the key theoretical debates
that are implicated by this study, and serves to reinforce its wide-ranging
anthropological relevance rather than simply its ethnographic novelty. Next, the
Methodology chapter will describe the research design in detail and will situate the
study within a broader field of urban research while simultaneously describing the
highly localized specificities of the Samoan culture and discussing in the process
some of the unique challenges that were a part of this research. The final chapter,
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Diasporic Samoa, will historicize and pre-historicize Samoans briefly before
describing the mass migration of Samoans to the United States and other
destinations. In that chapter we will learn more about the specific diasporic
communities and sites implicated in this study in an effort to provide as richly
descriptive a backdrop as possible against which to read the actions of the Samoan
youth who will be featured in detail in the second half of the dissertation.
Part II will allow us to delve into the specific data in detail, framing it in the
course of examining various identity configurations. Part II is divided into four
chapters and a conclusion. The first of these chapters, Constructing Identities, is
concerned with describing some of the key steps the Samoan communities have
made to establish a place for themselves, often literally a physical place, in the
American environment. Settlement patterns and the resilience of specific Samoan
institutions will be used as ways to stress the permanent mark Samoan communities
have made, and continue to make, on the American landscape. This chapter will
reveal some key differences between the San Francisco and Los Angeles Samoan
communities. The next two chapters, Identity Expectations and Performing
Identities— although divided here into two chapters to make the material more
manageable-thematically form a single symbiotic chapter. Together, these two
chapters are concerned less with the physical landscape and more with the social and
human landscape that Samoans constitute. The first of these chapters, Identity
Expectations is self-explanatory, describing expectations (and perceived
expectations) of Samoans, and their sources and histories. The Performing Identities
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chapter describes some of the variety of identity expressions that have emerged in
response to these expectations and closes with a discussion of identity performances,
a term I shall define in that chapter. These paired chapters are important because it is
through them that we see the emergence of a Samoan youth identity that may be
different from Samoan identity in general. In the next chapter, Applying Identities,
we visit several examples in which the Samoan culture has been used, or theorized,
as giving Samoans cultural advantages over other Americans living in the United
States; but it will also explore some instances in which the Samoan culture may be
poorly adapted to its American circumstances. The brief concluding chapter will
highlight key findings of this study and suggest several avenues of future research.
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Chapter II
Theoretical Discussions
Introduction
In this chapter I will build a theoretical framework that will serve to situate
my research within broader academic debates. This discussion will successively
address the place of identity within the culture model, the unique usage of ethnicity
in the United States, the very current and hotly debated topic of mobility in the
modem world system, the role that socialization plays in recreating cultural
behaviour, various approaches to the study of youth, the importance of finding
indigenous and local models and metaphors to better understand particular cultural
events, and finally, performance theory. Through this wide-ranging discussion, I will
show both the insights that previous theorists have provided for our study of similar
topics within Samoan culture and, simultaneously, provide yet another perspective to
these debates by suggesting how the Samoan material supports or challenges them.
With this theoretical framework in place the reading of the specific Samoan material
in the rest of this dissertation, particularly in Part II, will be rendered significantly
more meaningful.
Identity and Culture
The main objective of this dissertation is to understand cultural identity as it
is enacted by Samoan immigrant youth in California. The difficulty in exploring this
topic lies partly in the meaning of the highly contested terms “culture” and
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30
“identity”. We shall later look at issues like youth culture, and immigrant youth
culture in particular, but ultimately, the key concept of this dissertation is identity.
To begin to understand identity, one must first know its roots, and in this case
they are inextricably intertwined with the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, who is often
credited as having invented the term in the definition by which we now know it
(Friedman 1999). Erikson is a particularly appropriate starting point for our
discussion of identity not just because he coined the term in its current popular usage
but also because he has singled out adolescence as the crucial period for its
exploration. Erikson defines identity as follows:
[I]n psychological terms, identity formation employs a process of
simultaneous reflection and observation, a process taking place on all levels
of mental functioning, by which the individual judges himself in the light of
what he perceives to be the way in which others judge him in comparison to
themselves and to a typology significant to them; while he judges their way
of judging him in light of how he perceives himself in comparison to them
and to types that have become relevant to him. (1968:22-23)
A critical component of Erikson’s definition is that he gives identity a two-fold
meaning in which the individual claiming the identity enjoys only partial control
over its production. This is certainly germane to the experiences of Samoan teens,
who, as we shall see in Part II of this dissertation, struggle not only to decide what
aspects of their parents’ and grandparents’ cultures are important to them, but are
also forced to define themselves, in part, against the expectations of others both
outside of and within their communities. Just as Erikson suggested, the result, on a
generalized level, is a compromise between how they wish to be seen and how they
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have reacted to their perceptions of how others see them, in spite of their efforts to
define themselves wholly, and independently.
Erikson was most interested in identity formation in individuals, as it
expressed itself in the form of personality, but identity now enjoys a broad usage
and, significantly, is used to describe group behaviours as well as individual ones. It
is this group identity, and within that, ethnic identity specifically, that is the focus of
this dissertation. For the purposes of this discussion, ethnic identity and identity will
be used interchangeably to describe group identities that emphasize cultural and
ethnic behaviour.
Through Joanne Nagel’s (1994) words we quickly discern how easily identity
and ethnicity can be substituted for one another and, in so doing, see how similar the
two-fold labeling process of ethnic self-definition can be to Erikson’s description of
identity in general.
Ethnic identity... is the result of a dialectical process involving internal and
external opinions and processes as well as the individual’s self-identification
and outsiders’ ethnic designations — i.e. what you think you think your
ethnicity is, versus what they think your ethnicity is. (154).
To label something is to wield power over it. Thus the power to identify oneself and
to have that identification vindicated by the group to which one aspires to
membership, or to have a label applied to oneself from others not within the group to
which one aspires membership, are both ultimately political stances.
The political nature of identity has propelled it to the forefront of debates on
inter-group relations and has significantly enabled it to challenge the continued
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relevance of the culture concept, and in the process the very essence of anthropology.
The question that lingers is whether identity is truly something new and different
from culture or if it is simply a new label for describing a pre-existing social process.
Within anthropology and other social sciences, the term “culture” has been
under considerable attack, particularly since the late 1970s, based variously on its
alleged implications of primordialism, stasis, ahistoricicity, its abstract quality, its
homogeneity, and so on. In short, culture has come to be viewed narrowly as a set of
rigidly defined practices that provide limited allowance for change. Accordingly
then, there have been a number of attempts by writers like Pierre Bourdieu (1977),
James Clifford (1986; 1988), Lila Abu-Lughod (1991) and others to introduce new
terms to discuss variations of the processes that “culture” was previously used to
describe.
In a provocative article entitled “Forget Culture” (1995), Robert Brightman
argues that these critics have miscast culture. In fact, he argues, culture has rarely
been portrayed in the rigid and essentialist manner its critics claim it has. As he says,
these critics’ have “selectively reconstituted” definitions of culture and that they
have “invented images of culture, both arbitrary and partial with respect to a much
more diverse and versatile field of use. Such images, nonetheless, are rapidly
acquiring more authoritative prelocutionary effects.” (541).
Certainly a look back at the history of “culture” seems to support Brightman
and not the critics of the culture concept. For example, E.B. Tylor (1871), who first
defined culture for anthropology described it as that “complex whole which includes
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knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits
acquired by man as a member of society”. Nowhere in Tylor’s words do we see any
sense that culture is unchangeable or that it is homogenous. Neither do we find these
static qualities in Boas’ cultural particularism theory, which emerged as a direct
response to the evolutionary and racist ideology that was popular in late nineteenth
century America (Elliot 2002). In an interesting work entitled The Culture Concept
(2002), Michael Elliot argues that “culture” as we now think of the term, is a
distinctly American term that was jointly developed through the writings of early
ethnographers and the American literary realism school who both used it as a way to
write about group-identity based difference. Given this idealistic goal, and the
popularity of racial and evolutionary ideology against which they were developing
the idea of culture, there is a certain irony not only at how the term has been
demonized as hegemonic, but also that it may ultimately be replaced by “identity”,
the very idea it was developed to describe.
In the end, Brightman determines, it is of little relevance whether culture
embodies these negative principles that its critics claim that it does. If enough people
believe that culture connotes these qualities its true definition will be rendered
irrelevant and it will soon make itself linguistically obsolete. As Brightman puts it:
“the phonological shape will exit the active anthropological vocabulary and those
features of culture’s meaning consistent with current theoretical orientations will be
relexified” (ibid). Perhaps culture, as with anthropology in general, is just too greatly
associated with colonialism and Western hegemony in the popular imagination to
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remain usable in post-colonial discourse. If this should prove to be the case it is
possible that the major shift will be nomenclatural, rather than substantive, and
“culture” will increasingly be replaced by its adjectival forms like “cultural” and by
newer terms with fewer connotations like Bourdieu’s (1977) habitus. However, for
my part, I am not yet ready to abandon culture and I find myself nodding my head in
agreement to the oft quoted words of James Clifford, who writes: “Culture is a
deeply compromised idea I cannot yet do without” (1988:10).
Ethnicity and identity are both deeply involved in the debate on culture’s
continued relevance. Like culture, ethnicity and identity enjoy sweeping and
amorphous definitions, but they are most often employed to emphasize specific
aspects of cultures. Identity has gained much of its popular currency in the
increasingly multi-ethnic post-colonial world in which groups feel compelled to
establish their cultural differences from each other as they increasingly come into
contact with one another.
In a historical discussion on the emergence of identity politics in the United
States, Vine Deloria (1987), a prominent Native American rights activist and
historian, describes the influence of post Civil Rights Movement ethnic studies
programs on our understanding of identity and of group members’ understanding of
themselves.
In attempting to resolve the dispute between identity and culture minority
groups became consumers of their own culture, which they objectified, and
this consumption was understood as a political act that affirmed a
nationalistic identity. (100)
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Deloria’s choice of words is significant, specifically his use of “objectified” and
“political acts”. In my estimation, these are the key terms that distinguish ethnic
identity from culture in general.
Pacific political anthropologist Robert Norton (1993) is critical of this type of
objectification, although he places the blame for its abstract conceptualization on the
anthropologists who have written about it and not on the people for whom they seek
to assign it. He writes disdainfully that, “discourse on identity involves the making of
a cultural symbol or practice an object for contemplation, dialogue and affirmation, a
proclamation of distinctive identity in inter-group contexts” (742). He would like to
see discourse on identity, culture, and tradition more pragmatically oriented to
foreground identity transactions in their sociological context and not airily reduced to
the abstract theorizing of their most colourful or rhetorical manifestations.
The decisions that groups make regarding the expression of their cultural
identity are of course selective and they are significantly influenced by their socio-
environmental contexts. In the case of small embedded minority cultures like the
diasporic Samoans in California, expressions of culture are almost universally
expressions of identity due to the fact that outside of their original context, such acts
are inherently political and bound to be artificially recreated objectifications. I
contend that these cultural or identity acts are objectifications, not in an attempt to
show that they are any less authentic or relevant than similar acts performed in the
islands, but instead to establish that these acts are the product of members of the
culture actively responding to a threat, whether real or perceived, to their continued
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36
cultural existence. Culture can be enacted in a quotidian way that need draw no self-
conscious or oppositional attention to itself in the Islands—because Samoan
islanders are in the majority in their culturally homogenous territory and because
they enjoy an eco-cultural continuity— in ways that are not possible for Samoan-
Americans living in California. Samoan-American identity provides a good example
of a common practice of voluntarily self-objectified enactments of cultural
distinctiveness that many ethnic groups in multi-ethnic contexts, like the modem
United States, feel compelled to perform.
Ethnicity, Immigration, and Race in the United States
Ethnicity
Notwithstanding the wide-ranging imprecision with which ethnicity is
employed— in its adjectival form it is used to describe everything from culinary
novelty to the justification for war—there are still some commonalities that bind it
together. In the context of ethnic groups for instance, our main interest in this
discussion, ethnicity is used to define a group’s opposition to otherness. As Stuart
Hall writes in his discussion of Englishness:
Tobe English is to know yourself in relation to the French, and the hot-
blooded Mediterraneans, and the passionate, traumatized Russian soul. You
go round the entire globe: when you know what everybody else is, then you
are what they are not. Identity is always, in that sense, a structured
representation which only achieves its positive through the narrow eye of the
negative (Hall 1997:21).
Ethnicity emerges then when minority groups, whether numeric or hegemonic
minorities, make efforts to negotiate a distinct space for themselves within a greater
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37
society or against a perceived threat to their sovereignty. As Steve Fenton writes,
ethnicity emerges when “real or perceived differences of ancestry, culture and
language are mobilized in social transactions” (1997:6).
Ethnicity is now a widely and hotly debated topic as throughout the world the
relatively recently accelerated movement of people, culture, capital, and ideas has
changed notions of cultural discreteness and isolation irrevocably (cf. Appadurai
1996; Clifford 1994, 1997; Hall 1990, 1997). In light of such changes, ethnicity has
arguably become the dominant global political ideology, particularly in the wake of
the breakdown of the socialist bloc and the emergence of regional meta-states and
trade conglomerates composed of diverse ethnic groups. Ethnicity is complicated by
the fact that it often overlaps other contested categories such as “race”, nation, and
religion, confounding attempts to understand any one of these terms in isolation.
Which of these other categories encroaches on ethnicity mostly depends on the
region, and the local issues that affect the people there. In the United States the
regional particularities that significantly overlap with the discussion of ethnicity are
immigration and race.1 Over time a number of different perspectives on these
associated topics have emerged. According to Omi and Winant (1994), there have
been three historical stages in the discussion of ethnicity in the United States. Prior to
1930, the debate on race and ethnicity was between liberal academics like Boas and
1 Perhaps religion will soon need to be added to this list of American particularities in light of the
anti-Muslim and anti-Arab backlash that emerged following the A 1 Qaeda attacks on the United States
on September 11,2001 (cf. Shryock 2002; Jacobs-Huey 2003). Only time will tell how lasting this
latest ethnic schism will be.
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38
his students who railed against the popular biological determinist approach espoused
by the eugenisists and others. Between 1930 and the passing of the Immigration Act
and the Voters Rights Acts in 1965, the key debate was between the assimilationists
and the cultural pluralists. While both sides of that debate contended that categories
like ethnicity and race were socially rather than biologically determined, the
assimilationists, beginning with Robert Park (1950), believed that ethnic
communities were but a stage on the path to full assimilation into the Anglo-
American cultural mainstream while the cultural pluralists, beginning with Horace
Kallen in 1924, argued that some ethnic communities found it advantageous to
maintain their cultural autonomy and might choose never to assimilate fully (cf.
Eriksen 1993; Omi and Winant 1994). Indeed, Kallen believed that ethnic ancestry
was an indelible mark one could not be rid of even if one wished to (1924). The
current period pits the conservative egalitarians, who believe that all people should
now be treated the same regardless of previous inequalities and who are opposed to
programs like affirmative action and reparations, against a consortium of opposing
views that might best be described as “identity politics” (cf. Takaki 1994).
It is during this middle period (1930-1965) that ethnicity emerged as a
legitimate theoretical term and much of the lasting groundwork for ongoing debates
on ethnicity was laid. Therefore, the ideas of that period and the subsequent
responses that these debates spurred are in need of further elaboration.
In the 1920s and ‘30s urban sociologists from the University of Chicago
emerged to form what came to be known as the Chicago School. Members of this
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39
group, starting with Robert Park conducted a number of landmark community
studies in urban mutli-ethnic cities. One of their key findings was the assimilationist
pattern which came to be known as “melting pot theory,” in which an ethnic
individual’s life would progress from isolation, through stages characterized by
competition, conflict, and accommodation, finally ending with assimilation (Eriksen
1993:19). This theory was intended to show how, over time, groups became more
like the dominant society as they came to share a single American ethos.
The critical response to the assimilationist model was known as “cultural
pluralism” which eventually became labeled multiculturalism. The assimilationist
model was challenged early on by Chicago School scholar Horace Kallen (1924), but
the cultural pluralism responses really took off following the civil rights movement
in the 1960s and 70s, notably through the work of Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick
Moynihan in their landmark book Beyond the Melting Pot (1963). Advocates of this
approach began with a base observation that some groups did not seem to assimilate
no matter the span of time since they had arrived in America, whether because of the
racism of white Anglo society or because of proactive efforts by groups to maintain
their ethnic distinctiveness. They suggested the new metaphor of the mosaic (or the
tossed salad as it is sometimes called) to replace the image of the melting pot and
required of Americans not only that they recognize the diversity of ethnic groups, but
that they celebrate that difference (Alba 1990). This view is now so dominant that
Kearney (1995) has come to refer to recent immigration flows as “Post-melting pot
migration” (554) as a way to distinguish the spirit of cultural acceptance (at least in
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40
official circles) from the reception given to earlier arrivals who were expected to
become “American”, and to do so quickly.
Critics of the Chicago School contend that because its research was
dominated by the study of “white ethnics” the theoretical scope of their analysis was
severely limited in that it rarely accounted for the importance of race in determining
a group’s status, preferring to treat race as simply one variable among others like
religion, class, language, and national origin (cf. Omi and Winant 1994; Waters
1999). This assimilationist model bias has recently been criticized even in the study
of white ethnics such as Italian-Americans who have maintained a vast range of
ethno-cultural commitments despite their ability to integrate fully into mainstream
society now if they so choose (cf. Di Leonardo 1984; Waters 1990, 1999).
Another strong criticism of the Chicago School was based on their
essentialist emphasis on cultural content in determining ethnicity. One of the most
forceful of these challenges came from the Norwegian scholar Fredrik Barth, whose
landmark essay “Ethnic Groups and Boundaries” (1969) used an interactional
framework to point out the inherent subjectivity of ethnicity. Controversial for its
time, in this essay Barth argued against the importance of cultural content and denied
its primordial purity. He wrote that it is “the ethnic boundary that defines the group
not the cultural stuff that it encloses” (15), by which he meant to stress the
maintenance of difference as more important than the content of that difference.
Coming from a similar interactional position, George De Vos (De Vos and Orozco
1990) has suggested that it is the “emblems of contrast” (212) rather than the
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41
essential content of an ethnic group that are relevant to its ethnic autonomy. Whereas
Barth was interested in how ethnic boundaries were internally maintained, De Vos
wanted to describe the ways that cultures project themselves outwardly. He wrote
that the “emblems of identity are more apt to be worn or practiced for others to see”
(ibid). De Vos argues that his emphasis on the outward expression of cultural
distinctiveness, while philosophically similar to Barth’s, is more heuristically useful,
in that it provides observable data (the specific content of these emblems) for
contemplation.
While some scholars criticized early studies of ethnicity for ignoring
particularistic social variables in their modeling, others, such as Sherry Ortner (1991)
have criticized American scholars in partifcular for failing to recognize inter-group
commonalities, such as the influence of class. Ortner accuses ethnicity scholars of
“ethniciz(ing) various groups, classes, and even institutions to treat them as if they
were in effect separate tribes” (186) rather than components of a larger, socio-
politico-economic sphere. Ortner’s critique is well taken, as is her Marxist-feminist
observation that “class is central to American social life but it is rarely spoken of in
its own right. Rather, it is represented through other categories of social difference:
gender, ethnicity, race and so forth” (164). She poses a legitimate challenge to
analyses that separate identity politics from class struggle. Although Ortner stresses
that class is no more important than gender, ethnicity, or race, she is quick to point
out that in overlooking its importance, social scientists cloud our understanding of
the complexity of these issues by failing to recognize their class-based
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42
commonalities. Although few other American scholars have singled out the
importance of class as ardently as Ortner has done, criticism of the Chicago School’s
overriding analytical emphasis on individual agency over collectivist ethnic
strategies has been widespread (cf. Eriksen 1993; Omi and Winant 1994; Waters
1999).
To be fair to the early members of the Chicago School, America was a vastly
different place at the turn of the twentieth century than it was by the 1960s. Patterns
of immigration, particularly of non-white immigrants, had drastically changed and
the political climate was such that members of ethnic groups had become much more
aggressive in the conservation of their cultural distinctiveness, broadcasting their
group particularities rather than accepting ethnic anonymity. Also, the Chicago
School did provide insights that still influence the way we view ethnicity in America
to this day, in terms of its fluidity and its strategic deployment. Their community-
based approach to urban ecology, with its Darwinian overtones of competition for
territory and access to resources, has also remained influential (Eriksen 1993).
Immigration
As our survey of the study of ethnicity in the United States has already shown
there is a great deal of overlap between ethnicity and immigration. Many of the
“melting pot theory” issues dealt specifically with the rates at which newly arrived
immigrant groups were able to integrate themselves into mainstream (read white
Anglo) American culture. Some more detailed understanding of the distinctive waves
of American immigration is thus needed at this point to understand better the way
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43
that the movement of peoples was also serving to influence the theorizing of their
behaviour.
As one of the largest and wealthiest countries in the world today, the United
States is a prime destination for immigration from all parts of the globe. This current
influx of immigrants is not novel for the United States. Immigration has been a
central aspect of its formation as a modem nation since the late seventeenth century
when the newly arrived began to outnumber the indigenous people of the territory
(themselves, participants in a great migration from Asia thousands of years earlier)
for the first time (Hodges 2003). This long and varied immigration history has lent a
rich ethnic diversity to Americans, and the trope of the immigrant success story
remains one of the most cherished sources of national pride. However, this rich
history has not been uniform, as the American immigration experience has varied
greatly over time and across ethnic groups (cf. Takaki 1999; Foner 2000)
Over the centuries, there have been successive and distinctive waves of
immigrants to the United States. Although throughout the years there have always
been a variety of smaller groups of immigrants from different areas and immigration
from some areas has ebbed and flowed but never fully ceased, the following
chronology lays down the succession of dominant immigration trends. Speaking
specifically about the American Colonies, and thus excluding early French and
Spanish landholdings in the New World, the first significant and sustained American
immigrants came primarily from the British Isles, beginning in earnest in the
seventeenth century and distinguishing themselves from one another in their
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44
settlement patterns based largely on religious affiliation. The eighteenth century was
marked by the mass influx of involuntary immigrants in the form of African slaves.
From the nineteenth to midway through the twentieth centuries, a mass influx of
Europeans from throughout the continent arrived, with different groups dominating
different decades. At the height of immigration around the turn of the twentieth
century Eastern and Southern Europeans: Jews Slavs and Italians were the main
immigrant groups, although immigrants from English speaking Europe and Northern
Europe also continued to arrive in large numbers, particularly the Irish and the
Germans. This is the immigration period that most Americans probably still think of
when considering the ethnic diversity of modem America, conjuring up “the huddled
masses” standing in endless lines on Ellis Island, awaiting inspection and acceptance,
the first great waves to enter the United States once it had become an independent
country. It was during this time period that the country reached its highest reported
foreign-born population. By 1910, 14.7% of Americans were bom overseas and in
big cities like New York, that number was as high as 41% (Heinze 2003; Foner
2000). In 2000 only 11.1% of Americans were foreign bom (US Census).
Although there is certainly a long and rich history of immigration to the
United States, there is an equally important history of exclusion of groups based
largely on their ethnicity. As early as 1790, the Naturalization Law was passed,
granting citizenship only to free “white” immigrants (effectively discriminating even
against such long time American residents as Blacks and Native Americans as well
as new non-white arrivals). There was also a series of specifically anti-Asian
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45
legislation that were passed, beginning in 1882 with the Chinese Exclusion Act (cf.
Lowe 1996; Takaki 1987; Tuan 1998). It was not until the Immigration Act of 1965
was passed that the doors to America were, at least technically, opened to all
peoples, regardless of race or nation, though non-whites had been involved as
labourers without the rights of citizens throughout American history.2 The period
since the passing of that act has seen increased migrations from throughout Asia, the
Pacific, and Latin America, as well as various pockets of political and economic
refugees from places like Viet Nam, Cambodia, Cuba and Nicaragua. It is during this
final stage with its corresponding political climate of comparatively open borders
that Samoan migration has occurred.
Race
This review of the successive waves of immigrants to the United States has
also shown the significant role that racial perceptions have played in the ways that
various groups have experienced the United States. That a similar blurring of
boundaries between race and ethnicity should occur in the United States is not
surprising, given that labeling something as ethnic (as with race) historically has
served to single a group out as having inferior status to the dominant mainstream and
ostensibly white Anglo society (cf. Alba 1990; Foner 2000; Ryan 1973).
Despite widespread intellectual acknowledgement that race is an arbitrarily
determined social construct with no basis in human genetics, it unfortunately remains
2 For instance, the great Maori anthropologist Sir Peter Buck (Te Rangi Hiroa) was denied American
citizenship in 1941, despite being the director of the Bishop Museum and anthropology chair of Yale
University at the time, because as a Polynesian he was considered Asian, and thus ineligible.
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46
an active and hotly debated topic in discussions of ethnicity in the United States.
Although race is also a widely discussed issue in many other regions, notably in
Britain (cf. Black 1996; Gilroy 1991; Hall 2002), in the United States, perhaps in
part because of the legacy of the slave trade, race remains a particularly resilient
mobility obstacle to people of colour. Race also dramatically affects dialogue on
ethnicity as racial labeling often supercedes ethnic self-identifying among non-white
peoples, particularly in the case of those who are closest in appearance to blacks.
Despite my conviction that it is hard to move beyond race when we continuously
single it out, my research with Samoan teens has shown me the importance of
understanding the racial underpinnings of America ethnicity. Racial labeling and
mis-labeling is a recurrent and defining theme for Samoans living in the United
States, arguably, much more so than it is for Samoans living in New Zealand, where
Pacific Islanders are the largest ethnic minority and there is no prior history of
African slavery.
According to Thomas Eriksen,“ Race refers to the categorization of people
while ethnicity has to do with group identification” (1993:5). However, this
explanation does not account for the floating definition of race or the inconsistent
precision with which the ethnicity label is applied. For example, various “white
ethnic” groups such as the Jews, Irish, and Italians, all of whom were racially labeled
at some point in their American histories, have eventually been able to ascend into
the American mainstream, and in the process have been allowed to exchange their
racial labels for ethnic ones (cf. Alba 1990, Brodkin 1998). Such social mobility has
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47
largely been confined to European groups as racial meta-categories continue to be
applied to a diverse range of non-white ethnic groups that share only minimal
phenotypical similarities (cf. Waters 1999). For white ethnics, “ethnic” is now used
primarily as a way to celebrate cultural heritage and white diversity. As Alba writes:
“ethnic distinctions based on European ancestry once quite prominent in the social
landscape, are fading into the background.” (1990:3). He further contends that these
group identities have been replaced by a pan-European ethnicity that sets itself up in
contrast to the variety of new non-European ethnicities that are now part of the
United States. Meanwhile, for non-whites, “ethnic” may now be no more than
politically-correct nomenclature for categories that were historically racially labeled
and are still viewed by many in racial terms (Alba 1990; Ryan 1973).
Although there is a myriad of ethnicities living in the United States, in
practical terms, they are reduced to one of three non-white ethno-racial supra-
categories: Asian, Black, and Hispanic.3 Interestingly, these three groups are labeled
according to vastly inconsistent yet highly racialized criterion: Asians by geography,
Blacks by skin tone, and Hispanics by language. Each categorization emphasizes the
essence of the historical and hegemonic relationship of that group/region with the
United States, as sources of raw material including human labour, as a commentary
on white genetic/racial superiority, or as a threat to the English language and by
proxy its culture. Unfortunately, for non-whites these limited identity options, which
3 As I mentioned in an earlier footnote in this chapter, it is debatable whether Arab/Muslim should
now be added to this list in light of the racial stereotyping against that group following the A 1 Qaeda
attacks of September 11, 2001 and the ensuing American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
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48
are largely externally imposed, invariably ignore group particularities in favour of
all-encompassing racial generalizations and stereotypes.
The Black/White divide is still the most impermeable in the United States
and while any non-white status may hinder a group’s social mobility, the further
removed from blackness the better for that group and/or individual group member. In
an interesting work on Afro-Caribbean migrants to New York City, Mary Waters
(1999), shows the strategies that people use to emphasize their immigrant rather than
their racial identity because of dominant American society’s simultaneous sympathy
for migrants and prejudice against blackness (also see Foner 2000). Another of
Waters’ interesting findings was that the immigrants in her studies arrived in the
United States with two widely held beliefs: that it was still the land of opportunity;
that it was a racist country. A reputation for American racial prejudice is thus
widespread in the outside world. Surprisingly, despite their belief in this inherent
racism, the Afro-Caribbean migrants are still willing to come to the United States
because of their assumptions that the racism they would encounter would largely be
institutional. What the subjects in Waters’ study were still almost universally
unprepared for was the high level of interpersonal racism they encountered in their
daily lives. Sadly, as Omi and Winant put it,
With rare exceptions, ethnicity theory isn’t very interested in ethnicity among
blacks. The ethnicity approach views blacks as one ethnic group among
others. It does not consider national origin, religion, language, or cultural
differences among blacks as it does among whites, as sources of ethnicity
(1994:22).
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For Hispanic Americans, their ethnic label, which began as a US census
abstraction gradually morphed into a reified category with social significance, but it
is a category so broad and inclusive as to be virtually meaningless in terms of
description. It includes wide ranges of racial categories (from indigenous, to black, to
white), geographical, and class differences (from South America to Mexico and the
Caribbean). Also, in certain American cities the Latino populations are dominated by
a single ethnic group, as a result of specific historical or geographic relations that
group has to the city, such as Cubans in south Florida or Mexicans in Los Angeles.
New Latino arrivals are often lumped in with this existing group and with all of the
prejudices that go with such an affiliation, similar to African, Afro-Caribbean, and
Afro-Hispanics who are treated as indistinguishable from African-Americans in New
York. If the dominant Latino group is an underprivileged or discriminated against
one in that city, such as the Puerto Ricans in New Y ork or the Mexicans in Los
Angeles, such a mis-labeling can present a genuine obstacle to mobility to these
newly arrived groups (cf. Foner 2000; Meagher 2003).
In some rare instances, groups may actually benefit from this mis-
classification, as has been the case for the Nicaraguan community in southern
Florida. There Nicarauguans benefit from the mainstream public’s confusion
between Nicaraguans and Cubans since the Cuban immigrants are generally socio
economically successful and well thought of by other Americans because of their
anti-socialist status and middle class standing. Of course the generally light skin
tone, and their own history as anti-socialist refugees also helps Nicaraguans in ways
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50
not available to the darker skinned Haitians living in the region (Portes and Zhou
1993).
Asians are arguably at the top of the non-white racial hierarchy. Because of
the economic and educational success of some Asian groups, they have gained a
degree of acceptance from mainstream Americans. As Nancy Foner says, “In
general, “nonwhite” immigrants who are not defined as black have had the most
success in being recognized for their nationality, rather than their color, and in
benefiting from the “whitening” effects of class” (2000:150).
However, differences between Asian groups, both in terms of national and
cultural origin and in terms of socio-economic success in the United States, are still
rarely recognized by non-Asian Americans, and so the default category is a pan
ethnic one that groups them according to race in what Omi and Winant (1994) call
the: “They All Look Alike” model. In a provocative book, Forever Foreigners or
Honorary Whites? (1998), Tuan draws attention to the unique status ambiguity of
this group. The Asian American community, and I use the term community
guardedly, is typified both by the long history of an Asian presence in the country,
particularly by groups like the Chinese, Japanese and Filipinos, and by the large
number of new immigrants that are still arriving from these countries, primarily from
East Asia (China and Korea predominantly) and South East Asia. Over 69% of
Asians self-identified as foreign bom on the 2000 US Census. Unlike the Italian
Americans of Mary Waters’ study Ethnic Options (1990), who seem to have some
flexibility regarding the profundity of their ethnic commitments, Asian Americans,
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51
argues Tuan (1998), often have no such luxury as they are subject to both racial and
xenophobic exclusion.
While American blacks are discriminated against based on their skin colour,
no one questions that they are American, whereas Asians, regardless of how long
they have lived in the United States, are discriminated against both because of their
skin colour and the fact that, in the eyes of many Americans, they are phenotypically
marked as having come from somewhere else (ibid). The fact that Asian Americans
have experienced limited mainstream integration despite their general overall
economic success also contradicts the simple assimilation models that suggest that
increased financial status automatically leads to social inclusion.
For smaller groups like Pacific Islanders, their place in this ethno-racial
scheme remains ambiguous. They do not fit into any of the major racial categories
and yet they also are not generally categorized as white. They experience much mis
labeling (primarily as Latino or Filipino but more dependably as whatever the
dominant minority group in their area is) and sometimes suffer the corresponding
prejudices that accompany this label. Because Pacific Islanders are aware of racial
inequality they are apt to find it in their own interactions with the dominant society,
whether it specifically singles them out or not, and sadly, this expectation of
discrimination only seems to grow upon increased time spent living in the United
States. There is also ambiguity in the foreignness of Samoans in the United States.
Within the larger category of Pacific Islanders, Samoans enjoy a privileged
relationship with the United States in terms of legal access, whether other Americans
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52
know this or not, and because there is a potential for them to be mis-labeled as
Hawaiians, who are undeniably American, though of a special status, Samoan
acceptability as “Americans” remains unclear.
The Samoan experience articulates with this larger discussion of ethnicity,
immigration and race in the United States in a number of important ways. However,
as with all individual cases there are a number of instances in which the Samoan
experience slips between the general frameworks I have laid out here, just as we saw
them defy the standard taxonomy in the discussion of race. For example, in terms of
immigration, Samoans, because of their privileged relationship with the United
States, as an American Territory, were able to move much more easily into the
country, so the Immigration Act of 1965 did not greatly affect these movements.
Although many Samoans share the values of middle class America, and aspire to
have what middle class America has, among my informants, there was little talk of
abandoning their ethnic affiliation to attain it. There were even some who suggested
that their biculturalism was an advantage in the American context. The most
important topics of this section in terms of the rest of this dissertation are Barth’s
idea of ethnic boundary maintenance, and De Vos’ emblematic identity. Variations
of both of these ideas will persist throughout the dissertation, as we will examine
many examples of the strategies employed by Samoans to make a place for
themselves in the United States and to maintain a distinctive ethnic identity in the
process.
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53
Mobility: Migration, Translocalism, and Diaspora
The recent intensification of movement of people, ideas, goods, and capital
on a global scale has led social scientists to re-think the idea of mobility. Of course
people, products, and ideas have always been in motion, but not with the breadth and
speed they now enjoy, as previously disparate locations are increasingly
interconnected with the broader world (cf. Appadurai 1996; Clifford 1997; Hall
1990). The South Pacific, a region well-known for its history of long distance travel
and interconnectedness, has appropriately been at the forefront of this theorizing and
provides excellent practical examples of currently popular notions like diaspora and
translocalism that feature prominently in this dissertation.
The movement of people throughout the Pacific has long been one of the
region’s dominant themes, whether rural-urban migration to port towns that are more
directly connected to the world economy, or transnational movements to other Island
Pacific and Pacific Rim nations. The current surge in the movement of peoples is of
course part of a world-wide phenomenon that has gained increasing attention from
scholars in a number of disciplines, including anthropology. Pacific migration can
now be considered a localized example of the current academic discussion of
‘diaspora’ (as opposed to ‘Diaspora’). In anthropology, this interest began with
James Clifford’s article “Diasporas” which appeared in Cultural Anthropology in
1994, building on Stuart Hall’s (1990) earlier use of the term from a Cultural Studies
perspective. Clifford has subsequently expanded on these ideas in a more recent
work, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (1997).
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Just as this current intense period of global mobility is not without its
historical antecedents of the movement of goods and people, such as mercantilism,
colonialism, or Marx’s description of capitalism’s need for a perpetually expanding
world market (Harvey 1990; Waters 1995), so too does diaspora have theoretical
predecessors. I will explore diapsora’s historical antecedents now before elaborating
on its current theoretical state.
Historically, migration studies have most often emphasized economic
motivators and have focused on labour flows. Such approaches centered initially on
unidirectional dichotomies of push and pull factors that base themselves on the
assumption of wealth differentials between the sending and the receiving country,
and of a rationally-acting “Economic Man” (sic), moving for purely pragmatic
reasons (Portes 1987). Paul Shankman’s Migration and Underdevelopment (1976) is
a good Samoan example of such a study. These approaches, often supported strongly
by statistical data, have been criticized recently for over-emphasizing the structural
elements of migration and for offering little agency to the migrants themselves. They
have also been criticized for being largely ahistorical and for failing to recognize that
push/pull factors offer potential rather than predict the specific mobility decisions
that individuals make. Labour opportunities, like capital and migration flows, do not
materialize out of nothingness but have important historical antecedents.
In his landmark essay, “Our sea of Islands”, the Tongan writer and
anthropologist Epeli Hau’ofa (1999) rejects analyses of the Pacific that emphasize its
isolatedness, and the pitfalls of economic dependency and instead recalls the pre-
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55
Contact trade networks of the region and the ongoing travel and cooperation that,
though invisible on a macro scale analysis, truly sustains the economic and social
vitality of the diasporic Pacific community.
In response to the limitations of economic approaches, a number of recent
studies have focused on the interaction between community of departure and
settlement country, and have generally tried to suggest a more complex
understanding of both the motivators and modes of migration. A good example of
such an approach is found in Cathy Small’s (1997) excellent longitudinal
ethnography of Tongans in the United States and back in the islands. It has become
increasingly clear that our understanding of migration must be broadened to include
not just controlled periods of labour contracts and permanent migration, but also
commuting, visiting, retirement, travel, and other forms of mobility (cf. Clifford
2000b; King and Connell 1999). The relatively cheap cost of communication and
travel has altered the permanence of the experience of leaving in ways that would
have been barely imaginable a few decades earlier. For example, many members of
the Samoan community regularly travel back to the Islands for stays of varying
lengths, though they now live permanently in the United States, and they email with
one another and are otherwise able to remain a part of local affairs through the
virtual community of the Internet. It is important to note that this new and broader
understanding of mobility and migration adds to, rather than overlooks, the
continued importance of such pragmatic issues as citizenship, colonial ties, and
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economic booms and recessions. It is also noteworthy that not every individual and
place are equally implicated in this potential for freedom of global movement.
An important attempt to include some of these recent changes in migration,
notably the relationship between culture of origin and culture of settlement, has been
the development of the notion of transnationalism. This term is used to describe
processes of globalization that include the movement of people, capital, and ideas
between disparate locations. However, this term is flawed because of its similarity to
transnational corporations (TNC), which appear to operate in a supra-national
capacity in which the physical location of the company is virtually irrelevant, and
because of its use of the suffix “nation” when it is not the nations themselves that are
in motion and when many of the movements, particularly in the Pacific, may not
even involve the crossing of national borders. Arjun Appadurai (1996) has suggested
using the term translocalism instead, as a way to privilege the connection between
entities such as home villages to ethnic enclaves of people from that same village
that are living in different places throughout the world, rather than describing the
movement of one nationality to a new nation. In describing the connections between
Samoans back home in the islands to those who are now living in urban centers of
New Zealand, Cluny and La’avasa MacPherson (1999) fittingly call the New
Zealand enclaves “islands in the city”, metaphorically suggesting this idea of
translocalism and also of the continuities between home and away culture.
The idea of diaspora takes the ideas of transnationalism a step further by
suggesting a wide-spread dispersal of peoples united together in their shared memory
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of a mythic homeland to which they may or may not ever return. It includes the idea
that people are bound to each other through their shared culture and history and their
collective sense of alienation in a distant host country (Clifford 1994). As Clifford
puts it: “Diaspora discourse articulates, or bends together, both roots and routes to
construct what Gilroy describes as alternate public spheres (1987), forms of
community consciousness and solidarity that maintain identifications outside the
national time/space in order to live inside, with a difference” (1994:308). It is
important that the criteria for authenticating diasporic claims remain deliberately
unbound to a narrow definition, as such a practice would be antithetical to the
concept of diaspora itself. Indeed, all diasporic claims are intrinsically relational as
they are always defined against something-home, tradition, the nation-state, other
ethnic groups, and so on. By liberating the definition of diaspora from the confines
of the nation-state focused perspective of transnationalism, Clifford allows for the
much more complex metaphor of the interconnected web to be put forth. The
diaspora metaphor accounts for the relationship between home and satellite
community and for multi-lateral connections between diasporic communities and
still evokes the theme of movement, which is central to transnationalism.
Some scholars, like the geographer Kathryne Mitchell (1997) have been
critical of the diaspora model and of Appadurai’s theorizing for being naively
idealistic in that they presume that everyone has equal access to movement, capital,
and technology. Such approaches offer potential but not necessarily probability, they
argue. Others, like Paul Spickard (2002) have criticized the diaspora for its
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limitations, claiming that it is only useful in describing the first generation to leave
the homeland and fails to account for the ensuing hyphenated identities that
invariably emerge in the descendants of these first arrivals. Conversely, scholars like
Hans van Amersfoot (2004) are critical of the looseness with which writers like
Clifford now use diaspora to describe all variety of migrations. Van Amersfoot
would like to see a much narrower definition employed. He defines contemporary
diaspora as: “A settled community of a population that considers itself to be ‘from
elsewhere’ and whose common and most important goal is the realization of a
political ideal in what is seen as a ‘homeland’” (2004:152) If held to this narrower
usage, many communities that are currently identified as diasporic, the Samoans
included, would no longer be appropriately described by the term. Instead of
representing infinite potential, diaspora, on the contrary, would only be used to
describe specific types of groups that are involuntary or at least reluctant migrants.
Although these are all valid criticisms of the diaspora model, based on
Clifford’s definition cited above, it still seems the best one available to desribe
contemporary Samoan settlement patterns. Furthermore, in the case of Samoans at
least, diasporic movements do not exist on the level of attractive but unattainable
potential but are reasonable possibilities for average Samoans. With the possible
exception of the first wave of Samoan migrants, the ability to migrate to the United
States and to travel back and communicate with the islands does not seem to be a
class issue, as it remains within the grasp, (though not necessarily the easy grasp) of
even those families with meager savings and earning potential. Undoubtedly the
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Samoans are privileged among many groups because of their largely uncontested
access to the United States, that most popular of diasporic destinations. Furthermore,
I disagree with the argument that the diaspora model focuses only on the first
generation. On the contrary, its allowance for the multi-lateral connections between
diasporic communities, as well as connections by all of these diasporic sites back to
the home community, seem to support an argument in favour of continuous and
mutually reinforcing identity constructions. Having noted the criticisms it has
received, the diaspora model is the one that this paper will employ, used according to
the definition provided above, to describe the ever-changing nature of what it means
to be Samoan in California.
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Socialization
Ethnic groups culturally sustain themselves by successfully transmitting emic
information that defines their group to other group members. Anthropologists call
this process enculturation or socialization.4 The examination of socialization
processes is particularly germane to our discussion of Samoan youth because,
although socialization is part of a lifelong process, in most countries it is most
intense during childhood.
Socialization is a concept that has long attracted interest in both the social
and hard sciences. In a historical overview of the topic Jane and James Ritchie
(1989) show how studies of socialization have moved from a natural sciences
approach through psychoanalytic-based culture and personality to a more recent
cognitive model of ethnopsychology which seeks, in general terms, to explore the
context and processes through which world views are acquired.5 Their survey
succeeds in revealing the wide range of fields that have taken an interest in
understanding this key process of cultural transmission.
Apart from anthropology, both psychology and sociology have also featured
prominently in the theoretical examination of socialization. Historically, according to
Robert LeVine (1982), each of these three major disciplines has rallied around
different aspects of socialization, often at the exclusion of the insights provided by
4 Mead (1963) makes an etic/emic style distinction between the two by stating that enculturation is the
process of learning a particular culture and socialization is the set of demands made on people by all
cultures everywhere, but in popular practice the two terms are used more or less interchangeably.
5 The Ritchies are quick to point out that this rough chronology should not be taken to suggest that
these earlier models have been fully discarded, but simply to show prevailing temporal trends.
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the other two fields. Anthropology, he claims, has centered on socialization as
enculturation, focusing on the intergenerational transmission of cultural knowledge,
from parents and other elders to children. More recent works like that done by
linguistic anthropologists Bambi Schieffelin and Ellinor Ochs (1986) have countered
this top down model by proposing a description of socialization as a collective
project in which “individuals and society construct one another through social
interaction” (1). This definition opens the door to multiple socializing agents and
processes that are both dialogical and dynamic.
The psychologists and psychoanalysts approached the topic as one of
acquisition of impulse control, in which members of a society are taught which
behaviors are considered socially disruptive and how to suppress the desire to act
them out. Finally, the sociologists have suggested that socialization comes down to
learning one’s societal role. They stress conformity and normalcy over the
psychoanalytic focus on the negative reinforcement of socially deviant behaviors. A
component of the sociological interest in “role theory” is the idea of primary versus
secondary socializers. Drawn from the work of Talcott Parsons (1949) and later from
Glen Elder (1968), primary socializers are defined as family members and other
personal contacts who have an influence, often a generalized influence, over an
individual’s early development. Secondary socializers are more specialized and also
often institutional in design, such as schools and workplaces, or they are
hegemonically persuasive like the media. For diasporic youth, who are largely
socialized in an environment that is removed from much of the material and
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6 2
geographic context of their parents’ enculturation experience, these secondary
socializers are likely to have a powerful influence.
Although youth is still generally viewed as a heightened period of
socialization in most cultures, approaches centering on the life cycle and life course
provide something of a challenge to this generality (cf. Dragstin et al. 1975). The life
cycle approach rejects the notion that socialization and development are limited to
specific early stages of an individual’s life and posits instead that this process is
ongoing throughout one’s life. The life course approach is based on the
understanding and intersection of three key components: 1) the individual’s life span;
2) the social timetable of the life course (rites of passage and other social stages); 3)
the historical passage of time, to the extent that historical events effectuate social
changes during the individual’s life span (Elder 1975). Both the life course and life
cycle approaches are inherently slippery and discourage sweeping generalizations
about youth that are based on isolated and temporally specific cultural observations.
Furthermore, such perspectives, particularly the life course, allow for variations
within societies and enable observers to isolate variables from one another while still
being able to view them synchronistically and over an extended time period.
Another variation of this longitudinal view of socialization is found in life
history and biography. Gelya Frank (2000) calls this approach “cultural biography”
and defines it as the combination of life history and ethnography. Apart from
anthropology this approach also has a rich tradition in many fields, such as history,
literature, psychology, and sociology (Langness and Frank 1981). In anthropology its
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roots can be traced back to such auspicious work as the richly evocative writing of
Cora DuBois (1944) and Oscar Lewis (1961). As with the life cycle and life course
approaches, cultural biography combines together the individual life history with
current and cultural events but in recent years it has become both more analytically
critical and more reflexive. Cultural biographies by Barbara Myerhoff (1978) and
Gelya Frank (2000) are good examples of this, as they show us the degree to which
the construction of a biography is a collaborative work that reveals much about the
author and the historical times in the course of telling the life story of an individual.
There is a myriad of ways through which to examine socialization, several of
which are relevant to our discussion of Samoan youth. These include, prominently,
primary socialization experiences like language acquisition (cf. Duranti 1997; Ochs
1988; Ochs and Schiefflin 1986) and initiation rites (cf. Cote 1997; Herdt 1981;
Lutkehaus and Roscoe 1995); and sites of secondary socialization such as schools
(cf. MacDougall 1999; Willis 1977), church, work (cf. Franco 1991) and the
influence of the media (cf. Amit-Talai and Wulff 1995). Each of these works deals
with different stages in the life cycle and they collectively provide a glimpse of the
vast range of socialization processes.
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Changing Approaches to the Study of Youth
The ultimate focus of this study is on youth and identity. The pairing of these
two terms is intentional because individual searches for identity, including the search
for ethnic identity, are widely associated with the stage of human development
between childhood and adulthood referred to as “youth” or “adolescence”, at least
since the time of Erik Erikson’s work on identities (1968). Although, as we shall see,
Erikson’s ideas represent a radical break from earlier writings on the topic, even now
it remains culturally contestable whether youth, as a category, is anything more than
an ethnocentric abstraction.
In Western culture, while some argue that the isolation of youth as a specific
category spans as far back as the Ancient Greeks (Esman 1990; Offer et al. 1988),
most agree that it came into its own as a critical field of study with the psychologists
and the psychoanalysts who began writing about it in the early parts of the twentieth
century. Most prominent among the early theoreticians was the American educator
and psychologist G. Stanley Hall (1904) who described the stage as one of social
turmoil or “storm and stress”, as it came to be known.6 Hall, it should be noted, was
writing about the state of youth in North America-a generation that w as coming of
age during the height of the industrial revolution in their country. His writings were
6 Hall borrowed the term from a period of eighteenth century German Romantic literature called
Sturm und Drang (literally “storm and stress” but more loosely translated, “adolescent turmoil”)
(Esman 1990). Highly influenced by Rousseau, the works from this school rejected neo-classical
conventions and emphasized man’s unease in contemporary society, the importance of individualism,
sensitivity, and creativity, the rebelliousness of youth, and the celebration of nature. The most famous
author of this school was Johann Von Goethe, whom Freud greatly admired and whose writings
greatly influenced his own psychoanalytic theorizing.
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further influenced by his own familiarity with romantic literature that often portrays
youth as a passionate, tumultuous, and melodramatic time (Offer et al. 1988). In fact,
this seemingly overt cultural bias, which critics seem to have often overlooked or
ignored, typifies many of the early analytic attempts to establish a cross-cultural
universality to the experience of adolescence. Despite the fact that the universality of
these tumultuous symptoms has been frequently challenged, beginning with
Margaret Mead’s Coming o f Age in Samoa (1928), the views have sustained a certain
popular, and even disciplinary, currency due to a “common sense” approach that
views the sensationalist examples of deviant behaviours of teens as part of some sort
of regrettable but unavoidable biosocial compulsion.
This “common sense” approach is thoroughly described and critiqued in Cote
and Allahar (1995). Because of the continued popularity of this type of approach,
researchers continue to pursue studies with universalist ambitions despite well
established criticisms of such approaches (cf. Offer et al. 1988). For example, a
recent work by Offer et al. (1988) described a massive study of middle class youth in
ten different industrial countries in an attempt to define a “universal youth”. Their
major finding was that the vast majority of youths are relatively happy, confident,
and optimistic. Consequently, they determined, studies that focus on deviance and
delinquency (still dominant themes in the study of youth) should be acknowledged as
exceptional rather than normative youthful behaviour. Failure to recognize
adolescent turmoil as aberrant is not only patronizing; but may also be harmful to the
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mental health of youth, by contributing to low self-esteem (Cote and Allahar 1995;
Hine 1999).
The work done by Hall and by the early psychoanalysts was concerned
primarily with the inner psyche and the psychological processes of individuals and
largely overlooked the extent to which individuals are socially and culturally
influenced. By doing so, they placed themselves in the midst of the nature versus
nurture debate that was so important to early American anthropology. Indeed,
foremost among those anthropologists who contested the biological determinists
(nature), was of course Margaret Mead, one of Franz Boas’ students, who fittingly
based her argument in support of the role of culture (nurture) not only on her data on
youth, but specifically on her data on Samoan youth (Mead 1928). Although Mead’s
findings were widely hailed as a victory for culture over biological determinism at
the time and have since been replicated in other non-Westem cultures (Cote 1994),
recent stances have softened somewhat and biosocial views that allow for both
physiological and cultural influences during the development stage of adolescence,
are now popular (cf. Herdt and Leavitt 1998; Whiting and Whiting 1987; Worthman
1998).
A key early proponent of this shift away from the stress and conflict models
in favour of a more integrated place for youth in the ongoing process of human
development was Erik Erikson. Erikson, who studied with both Sigmund Freud and
his daughter Anna, introduced the developmental stages approach. He argued in
favour of a more nuanced view of human development. His approach challenged
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previous beliefs that personality was largely determined by early childhood
experiences. Instead, he proposed a model of the eight ages of Man (sic) that
describes a development cycle that takes place throughout an individual's life. Each
stage has an accompanying psychological crisis. The crisis for adolescence, the fifth
age of the cycle, is the conflict between determining one’s identity and suffering
from role confusion (Erikson 1968).
While sharing many base assumptions with his predecessors regarding the
construction of the subconscious, he also challenges some of their fundamental
precepts. For example, instead of sharing the inevitability with which his peers
approached personality development, Erikson suggested that reflecting on earlier
failures and difficulties need not be deterministic but on the contrary, surviving such
ordeals could lead to personality overhauls. As the sociologists James Cote and
Anton Allahar (1995) write, Erikson distinguishes himself from other psychoanalysts
because he "concentrates on the positive components of the psyche, including
creativity, adaptation, altruism, dedication, and ethical striving"(72).
In terms of the study of youth, one of these positive components is Erikson’s
idea that adolescence provides the opportunity for a psychosocial moratorium.
During this period youth are entitled to a “time-out” of sorts, during which society
ideally supports an individual’s need to prolong her adolescence in order to
experiment with various cultural roles and occupations and to find her spatial niche
in society (Erikson 1968:156-157). This period can prove critical in an individual's
personality formation.
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Other social scientists agree with Erikson and have suggested a direct link
between adolescence and the formation of an individual’s ideas about the importance
of his ethnicity to his identity. As Jean Phinney writes,
The issues of cultural identification have particular relevance during
adolescence when, as part of the identity formation process, minority
youths examine their ethnicity and its implications in their lives as they
seek to establish a secure ethnic or racial identity. In addition to
examining their ethnicity, adolescents are likely to consider their role
and position in wider society. (1997:4)
This hypothesis was one of the key reasons that I chose to focus on youth in
my effort to understand Samoan identity. Despite the fact that Samoan culture
publicly favours a top down approach to the stewardship of culture, I justified my
focus on youth by referencing the writings by Erikson, Phinney and others. I
reasoned that Samoan youth, in the course of this general process of identity
formation (I advisedly avoid the word universalist) that occurs during adolescence,
were bound to consciously or unconsciously be thinking about and enacting the
various identity options open to them in experimental ways, particularly as they
found themselves exposed to both American and Samoan cultural values.
Other scholars have adapted views on youth that, like Erikson’s, are more apt
to recognize the significant agency that this group commands. Recently, a number of
scholars have explored the idea of “youth culture” as a genuine and autonomous
culture and not just as a stage in “adult culture”, an idea that Margaret Mead— ahead
of her time, as usual-wrote about in her 1970 book Culture and Commitment.
Furthermore the study of youth has subsequently emerged as a field of study unto
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itself in the eyes of some (cf. Amit-Talai and Wulff 1995; Epstein 1998; Esman
1990). As MacDougall says, the study of youth in society is not only inter-
generational, but also cross-cultural “because it involves childhood and what is
increasingly being seen by anthropologists as a significant separation between the
cultural worlds of children and adults” (1999:16). Meanwhile, in recognition of the
inherently dynamic and temporal construction of youth identity, but not wishing to
downplay its importance and potentially lasting impact, Helena Wulff (1995) calls
for a new commitment to “the anthropology of the ephemeral cultural construction”
(2), by which she is referring to youth culture.
Though youth culture is a relatively new field, it already has some distinct
historical stages. Early studies have tended to focus on white male urban experiences
in Western cities and have emphasized delinquency, subcultures, and social
disharmony such as the work done at the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies
at Birmingham, amongst which is included Paul Willis’ (1977) excellent book on
working class peer socialization in a multi-ethnic British secondary school.
Alternately, they have emphasized the way in which youth have been victims of
marketing in the age of consumerism (Wulff 1995). While such themes are important
and are still being studied, recent work has begun to emphasize less deviant
expressions of youth culture and to view youth as creators of culture, not just as
objects of it, thus highlighting teen agency.
Studies of youth culture, keeping pace with greater trends in the social
sciences, have recently broadened their scope to be more inclusive of issues of
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gender, class, race, ethnicity, and geography. Recent anthologies like Youth Culture:
Identity in a Postmodern World (Epstein 1998) have highlighted teen driven social
critique epistemologies such as those found in raves, music, style/fashion, and in the
exploration of the teenage body and sexuality. Meanwhile other studies like that of
Amit-Talai and Wulff (1995) are explicitly transcultural in their design, focusing on
the global trends that invariably include both localized variations and universal
homogenizations as they explore themes of youth culture worldwide.
Critique of Western Approaches to the Study of Youth
Upon further reflection, it becomes apparent that many points of contention
about the study of youth remain. Most contentions surround the undeniable
ethnocentric historical roots of such studies that continue to influence the ways that
youth is theorized. This conflict within the study of youth is part of a bigger debate
in the social sciences that questions the applicability of theoretical models across
cultures. Since most models still come from the Western world, they often come with
colonialist and hegemonic overtones to such statements. The response to this has
been post-colonial conferences like the “Native Pacific Cultural Studies at the Edge”
conference at the University of California in Santa Cruz in 2000 and the emergence
of indigenous scholars who draw on local epistemologies and local metaphors in
their work (cf. Smith 1999; Wendt 1999).
The difficulties with the study of youth begin at the outset since even the
terms of the debate are culturally contestable. The idea of youth, or of adolescence
specifically, is not a universal biosocial fact, as we have discussed already, and yet
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notwithstanding that knowledge, the category of adolescence is now widely
projected on young people throughout the world, as the influence of Western
hegemony continues to assert itself. Adolescence is, in fact, a relatively new term
that has a specific Western history associated with its inception. Though there are
undeniable physical changes that occur in all individuals as they age, there is no
cross-cultural consensus as to the ages that adolescence includes or whether it is even
a discernible social stage in some cultures. As such, it is said that, from a cross-
cultural perspective, although the start of adolescence may be partially determined
by biological development, the end is irrefutably socially determined (Schlegel and
Barry 1991). Put another way, while pubescence may be a biological universal,
adolescence is not.
If one recognizes that the identification of adolescence as a distinct and
universal developmental stage is debatable, then the legitimacy of any subsequently
theorized corresponding causalities must also be questioned. For example, if youth
conceptually is not the same culturally for Samoans as it is for the youth in Erikson’s
study, then surely other Eriksonian concepts such as the validity of the psychosocial
moratorium are also in question.
Erikson describes the psychosocial moratorium as a period during which
individuals take time to experiment with different identities before deciding what
type of adult lives they will live. Ideally elder social group members accept that the
identity decisions youthful people make during this time period should not be viewed
with the same irrevocability as identity decisions made at other times during their
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lives. Erikson’s model made sense in the standard Euro-American household of the
1960s, on which he based his theories. In such homes, it was typical for young
people, as they reached the end of adolescence, to find themselves in the midst of a
transition from living with their parents to living on their own. The psychosocial
moratorium or liminality could be acted out through the experience of going off to
university or by sampling various types of vocations, traveling, or socializing with
diverse social groups and mates. Ideally this time period would conclude when
individuals did one or more of the following: completed their studies, gained full
economic independence from their parents, married, had children, began neolocal
residence, or settled on a career. It is debatable whether this model effectively
applies even to Euro-American youth today let alone to youth from other cultures.
Based on this temporal and cultural bias I realized how important it was to
consider whether my attempt to project Erikson’s theories onto this Samoan identity
research was appropriate. In most cases, in the Samoan community, the connection
between youth and identity searches is not axiomatic as it was in Erikson’s
observations of Western youth. For young Samoan people, the end of high school
rarely coincides with leaving the family home, as the succeeding years of work
and/or study are most often spent living with one’s parents and grandparents and
often contributing large portions of one’s wages directly to the collective family.
Even marriage and having children are not necessarily associated with leaving the
home. Young couples will often live together, even after they have begun to have
children, in the homes of one of the spouse’s parents or other elder relatives.
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Neolocal residence is a rarity for most traditionally oriented Samoans, whose homes
often house up to four generations at once, including grandparents and
grandchildren. Since for most Samoans the break between childhood and adulthood—
between dependence and autonomy— is much less abrupt and definitive than it is in
Erikson’s ideal model, it follows that the time of physical adolescence does not
necessarily correspond with their identity searches.
For many Samoans, the identity search, if it occurs at all, may still take place
but slightly later in life. This has been shown in Melani Anae’s (2002) discussion of
the prevalence of “time out” periods taken during early adulthood for Samoan
congregants of the New Zealand based Newton Church. Similarly, for those
Samoans who follow more Westernized life trajectories, particularly those who
pursue higher education, the identity search may still be an important stage of their
early adulthood, as is evidenced by the political awareness I have seen on display in
Pacific Islander clubs on college campuses. Such groups, sharing the path taken by
other campus ethnic organizations, are pushing for inclusive cuniculums and for
public recognition of their cultural distinctiveness, or at least their regional
distinctiveness (i.e. pan-Pacific culture area).
Further evidence of the inappropriateness of this Western model of
adolescence to Samoan youth is found in the example of cultural prejudices. This
cultural disjuncture from the Western values is highlighted in some of the negative
qualities associated with the expression, pdlagi or “ acting white”. Using fia
palagi as a foil against which to showcase positive Samoan cultural values, Samoans
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cite: kicking your kids out of the house when they turn eighteen, sending your
grandparents to live apart from their families in retirement homes, and selfishly
thinking of your own career and material needs before those of your family, as
examples of this socially undesirable bahaviour.
Indigenous Epistemologies and Metaphors
Postcolonial and (even more so) postmodern perspectives have generally
been critical of the search for universals, which they view as misleadingly
deterministic. Instead, they have favoured multivocality, regional particularities and
inter-subjectivities. Although the extremism of their stance is often hyperbolized by
their critics (cf. Brightman 1995), it is important to note that postmodernists have
importantly succeeded in bringing to the fore previously little heard voices that have
meaningfully contributed to our greater understanding of regional issues. This
“voicing” has been made possible in part through their recognition of the critical
validity of indigenous epistemologies and metaphors.
Often these regional insights have come directly from the words and writings
of indigenous scholars, but this need not necessarily be the case. In some instances
particularly well-attuned theorists like James Clifford (1997), in his theorizing of
traveling cultures, or Jane and James Ritchie (1989) in the context of Pacific
pedagogies, have sought to draw theoretical inspiration from regional metaphors
rather than Western ones, even thought they are Westerners. Such approaches,
particularly when they come from the pens of Western scholars, risk the criticism
that they are merely examples of neo-romantic attempts to recreate the noble savage
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iconography by replacing racial stereotypes with cognitive ones in the form of
indiscriminate celebrations of the intuitive wisdom of the elders. Nevertheless, this
new-found interest in indigenous ways of thinking is increasingly recognized in
anthropology and there are several interesting examples of it that come from the
Pacific itself.
One of the most influential recent essays in the field of Pacific Studies has
been the Tongan scholar Epeli Hau’ofa’s piece “Our Sea o f Islands” (1999). In it
Hau’ofa, drawing on traditional navigation for metaphorical inspiration, refutes
claims about the Pacific as small, isolated islands that are economically vulnerable.
Instead of the “belittling” Western interpretation of the South Pacific as “islands in a
far off sea” he described the region as “Oceania” (significantly linking the people to
the Ocean) and as a “sea of islands,” literally full of them. In the new world order, he
argues, it’s possible to recall the connections that existed between island groups in
the time prior to contact and to understand how principles of land finding, which
include recognition of numerous telltale indicators that expand concentrically from
the land mass itself, make islands and atolls seem far less isolated from one another
than Western maps lead one to believe.
In the postcolonial Pacific there is freedom of movement once again, and
through it, one is able to see that it was the relationships and the connections
between island groups that were important rather than that which was being
exchanged among them or to which islands one traveled. Awareness of this essential
truth gives Hau’ofa hope that the continued expansion of the Pacific to new
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territories, like the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, will continue to be
supported by strong inter-group ties, and that both the movement and the ties are
traditions that pre-date European contact. As Hau’ofa argues, the legacy of these
connections is found on the level of the individual, the family, and the village and
consequently remains absent from most Macro-level analyses that have much less
positive prognoses of the economic viability of the region.
Another important indigenous scholar has been the Samoan writer Albert
Wendt. Although most of his writing has been in poetry and fiction, he has also
contributed to the fields of anthropology and to Pacific Studies. In an interesting
article on traditional Samoan tattooing, Tatauing the Post-Colonial Body (1996),
Wendt waxes philosophical about the history and significance of tattooing, language
(both Samoan and postmodern), and cultural syncretism. In the process he alludes to
a Samoan metaphor which is similar in meaning to that described by Hau’ofa above.
Wendt unpacks the Samoan term “va” which he defines as “the space between, the
betweenness, not empty space, not space that separates, but space that relates, that
holds separate entities and things together in the Unity-that-is-All, the space that is
context, giving meaning to things” (402). A common Samoan expression is “ la teu le
va” which is translated as, “nurture the relationship”, but literally means to nurture
the space between people that connects them to one another.7 This is certainly an apt
7 Bradd Shore (1982) uses a variation on this expression, teu le va, which he defines as the “order of
social relations”, as a platform from which to discuss the importance of relationships between both
individuals and groups in Samoa, which he describes as a cultural cognitive structure called
“relational thinking”. Through a series of linguistic examples Shore shows that, where English reflects
a Western bias that “focus(es) on things in themselves rather than things in their relations,” Samoans
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metaphor to promote the value of individuals maintaining bonds between each other
despite the physical obstacles pre sented by the modem Samoan diaspora.8
Where possible, I have sought, in this dissertation, to incorporate as many
indigenous and localized metaphors and models as possible, not simply in support of
principles of the inherent value of post-colonial modeling, but because such models
sometimes offer data that generic ones do not. In some instances, such as Aiono
Fanafi’s introduction of fa ’asinomaga, as a new term for identity, which she seems
to base, in part on the retention and practice of selective traditional activities and
orientations, the specific insights remain obscured to me, but I am aware of their
potential importance. Other elements, like the importance of “talking story” a
common and unifying metaphor throughout the Pacific, I recognize more easily and
am mindful of the unique data that they offer. Incorporating such abstractions into
practical research design is thus not only philosophically desirable but it has also
been effective and qualitatively rich.9
Performance
Perhaps the single most important expression of Samoan youth identity in
this dissertation is found in the analysis of cultural performance. Performance is
discursively useful both in its conventional sense and in its more recent theoretical
are “intellectually predisposed to comprehend social relations as relations (Ms emphasis), focusing on
their world with a thoroughgoing sociocentriclogic” (194-195).
Samoa has a rich tradition of proverbs and recently some have re-emerged in diasporic settings as
individuals find new relevance in them. One such identity-related proverb will be discussed in the
Applying Identities chapter of tMs dissertation.
9 See the etbnovignettes section in the Methodology chapter of tMs dissertation for a good example of
tM s.
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usage, as introduced principally by Judith Butler, but also in the works of Dorinne
Kondo and George De Vos. My working definition of performance borrows from
each of these scholars, but it also differs from them. When I speak of performance, I
mean to evoke the strategically manufactured public expression of identity that is
more deliberate and less reactionary than other types of identity expressions.
Judith Butler theorizes performativity in the context of gender. To Butler,
gender is the unwitting product that is jointly created by both men and women as
they perform their respective gender roles. The very act of performing these roles
simultaneously reifies and validates them. As she says, “the various acts of gender
creates (sic) the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at
all” (1990b:273). She further notes that the ironic byproduct of this is that “the
authors of gender become entranced by their own fictions whereby the construction
compels one’s belief in its necessity and naturalness” (ibid).
Butler’s use of performative in the context of sex and gender is controversial
because in so doing she suggests not only that gender is a constructed social role, as
Simone de Beauvoir and others, such as Margaret Mead, have before her, but she
goes one step further, to suggest that womanhood itself is not a universal, that sex,
for theoretical purposes at least, does not exist. Thus freed of its bond to essentialist
notions of the natural and of the heterosexual bias towards procreation, one is able to
understand that sexual identity is ultimately only real as an enactment. Accordingly,
identity is neither stable nor natural, nor is it a locus of agency, but instead it is
“tenuously constituted in time—an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of
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acts” (1990b:270). Given Butler’s emphasis on enactment, women are not social
agents but actors who help to create, through their gender performances, the
conditions of oppression against which many of them rail. Effectively, “there is also
a more radical use of the doctrine of constitution that takes the social agent as an
object rather than the subject of constitutive acts” (270).
Butler’s model of a performative reification of identity is not nearly so
radical when transposed from gender to culture or ethnicity, where interactionist and
fluid models of identity, in contrast to primordialist or essentialist ones, have been
greatly favoured in recent years. Indeed, her contention that such identities only exist
through their “stylized repetition of acts” is highly relevant in the culturally and
temporally disjointed diasporic setting. Toward this end, it is in the contrast she
makes between expressiveness and performativeness that I find the extremely useful
idea that individuals at a historical moment are performing the roles of their identity
that were established before them:
The distinction between expression and performativeness is crucial. If gender
attributes and acts, the various ways in which the body shows or produces its
cultural signification, are performative, then there is no preexisting identity
by which an act or attribute might be measured; there would be no true or
false, real or distorted acts of gender and the postulation of a true gender
identity would be revealed as a regulatory fiction (1990a: 141).
Similarly, Samoans living in California are picking up the script of a Samoan
identity that has been played for generations before them but which they are entitled
to reinterpret, within limits, to their new performance, their new venue.
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In her book About Face, Dorinne Kondo (1997), principally describes
performance from the more conventional location of the stage, both in the context of
fashion shows and in ethnic theater. Kondo re-invigorates these spaces as sites for
the contestation of identity roles; as the Asian and Asian-American actors and
models of her research use this dramatic spotlight to challenge existing stereotypes
of their cultures and ethnicities. Consequently, whereas Butler’s actors are allegedly
unaware of their role in creating their identities, Dorinne Kondo’s actors and
playwrights are agent-provocateurs, who are deliberately manipulating the image of
themselves by playing along with some existing stereotypes but politically re-forging
them, to create, what she calls, “counter-orientalisms ”.
In addition to Butler and Kondo’s notions of performing identity, I have also
found George De Vos’ (1990) discussion of an evocative but theoretically
underdeveloped idea that he calls “emblematic identity” referred to briefly in the
ethnicity section of this chapter. De Vos is not specifically interested in performance
and gives scant attention to the content of the emblems; he is more interested in the
interactional model of ethnicity that they support. He is primarily interested in how
contrastive emblems— such as cultural festivals, national flags, and signs written in
the language of that group which are visible to the general public— self-consciously
displayed, serve to carve unique spaces for ethnic groups living surrounded by
neighbours of different ethnicities. De Vos’ actors, like Kondo’s, are self-conscious
in their actions, but they perform their identities not as a way to challenge beliefs
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about themselves, but as a way to maintain their distinctiveness from a supposedly
homogenizing outside force.
My use of performance in this context lies somewhere in between the ideas
expressed by these three writers, borrowing from each of them. As Butler suggested,
it is the stylized repetition of acts that creates diasporic Samoan identity and without
which that identity would not exist as we know it. However, like De Vos and
Kondo’s actors, Samoan youth are selective in their enactments and chose them self
consciously. Significantly however, the specific identity enactments that I wish to
single out in this discussion are not reactive and satirical like Kondo’s, nor are they
interactional like De Vos’; instead, they are performed primarily for the benefit of
group members. Although they may be large scale and public, they would arguably
be a component of the culture even without the external pressure of non-Samoan
expectations. Specific examples of the types of performance in question will be
explored in detail in the Performing Identities chapter, which is perhaps the most
significant chapter in this dissertation in terms of our insights into the nature of
Samoan youth identity.
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Chapter III
Methodology
Locating the Field
My field research took place over five years, beginning in 1997, and in
several locations, mostly centered on the city of Carson in Southern California
initially and later around the Bayview and Sunnydale neighbourhoods of southern
San Francisco. During the first few years my involvement with the Carson Samoan
community was sporadic as I was pursuing a full-time course load at USC. After
passing my qualifying exams during the academic year of 2001/02,1 was able to
undertake fulltime field work in the San Francisco Bay area through the support of
first a USC fellowship and then a Wenner-Gren Foundation dissertation fellowship.
Initially, one of the biggest challenges lay in bounding my field, partly to
secure research funding by clearly delineating a site but even more so, in the interest
of making the project manageable for me.1 However, as time progressed I realized
that the ethnic community of my idealized imagination, a “Little Pago Pago” as it
were, where everyone knew everyone else by name on the streets, was not going to
be part of my experience in the suburbs and housing projects of California where my
informants lived. Instead, I was presented with largely non-pedestrian
1 For a detailed discussion of issues surrounding the challenges of conducting urban research and
specifically the pressure of trying to make an unbounded space more manageable see Joanne
Passaro’s excellent essay, “You Can’t Take the Subway to the Field!” (1997), in particular pages
151-153.
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neighbourhoods of wide boulevards, occasional Samoan shops tucked into innocuous
strip malls, and a Samoan community that, though more concentrated in some areas
than others, was always only one ethnic group among many and never the biggest.
Although the unbounded nature of my field site added challenges to my
research experience and greatly influenced how I approached recruitment and
participant observation, it also gave me new insights into the nature of doing urban
anthropology in the United States. Discussions of the distinction between home and
field as now being often more an issue of cerebral than physical separation are
currently popular in anthropology (cf. Gupta and Ferguson 1997). Certainly, in my
experience, the distinction between home and field was blurred as, despite the fact
that my informants and I may come from different traditional backgrounds, often eat
differently, speak different languages in the home and so on, we also have a great
number of shared experiences as residents of the same city. We use the same
freeways and buses, are exposed to much of the same media, experience the same
weather, eat at many of the same restaurants, negotiate numerous transactions with
members of many of the same ethnic groups and so on. Furthermore, this recognition
of shared experience helps to overcome potentially alienating notions of “otherness”
on both my part and theirs.
However, this shared experience has its downside, especially in the context of
participant observation. This conflict is partly the result of the fact that
anthropological fieldwork techniques were originally designed for application in
rural settings that often centered on isolated groups in more or less bounded areas
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such as villages. Consequently, these techniques do not always translate smoothly to
the urban setting, yet some of them such as the ethnographic interview, can still
provide the richest data for a group so urban anthropologists are loath to abandon
them. The plight of the urban fieldworker is that while he is aided by the availability
of much official and current information such as census data, local histories and
other government information, the strength of his ethnographer’s tool kit (what is
unique to him as an anthropologist) is also sometimes poorly adapted to the urban
setting (cf. Foster & Kemper 2002; Gupta & Ferguson 1997; Passaro 1997).
Despite its merits, participant observation is often, at least to some degree,
contrived, even more so in the case of urban research. As George Foster and Robert
Kemp (2002) write, “however we might wish it were not so, we must recognize that
in cities we can neither observe our informants with the same ease as in villages nor
expect as many contact hours with factory workers as with crafts workers who labor
at home” (142). The difficulty of performing good quality participant observation is
particularly salient in the instance of residence. As Foster and Kemper (2002) put it:
As we have seen, in village fieldwork anthropologists usually live with a
family or maintain quarters in the middle of town, in either case residing
among the people studied and constantly observing their daily life. In cities,
arrangements of this kind are more difficult; families studied by
anthropologists almost always live in crowded quarters with barely enough
room for themselves, much less for a researcher and family. Rented rooms,
too, are usually less attractive in urban slums than in peasant villages. (139)
They add that the problem of locating oneself within the field is further complicated
if the community being studied is one that is dispersed throughout the city or the
region, as is the case among the Samoan community, and aptly label this style of
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research as “commuting anthropology” (ibid 139). Although I eventually gained
good access to the home lives of various informants, it was mostly in a social context
rather than as an integrated member of the day -to-day household. As members of the
same urban pace and pressures that I am, these Samoan informants found scheduling
time fora fieldworker into their busy lives was not always easy, possible, or
desirable and yet in spite of this, people made such space for me time and again.
The wistful regret that is suggested by some of these previous quotes on the
topic of urban research is worthy of further comment. For, though they may idealize
the rural field in juxtaposition to the urban one, these writers reveal a certain
underlying reality regarding the place of the urban ethnographer within the
discipline. Foster and Kemper (2002) talk about the urban ethnographer as feeling
“both guilty and cheated” (139), the first because of their ability to easily escape
from the field when they’re not in the mood for it and the second, that urban field
work is “often emotionally less satisfying, because of the problems of maintaining
close affective ties with informants” (144). While Foster and Kemper (2002) focus
on the perspective of the fieldworker, Gupta and Ferguson (1997) have emphasized
the perceived bias that academia has against urban research, particularly that
performed within the anthropologist’s home country, through their discussion of a
“ hierarchy o f purity of fieldsites” (13). Although it was not my experience, nor that
of those in my graduate school cohort who are pursuing urban research, their claim
that it is exceptionally difficult to get research funding for urban fieldwork in one’s
home country is corroborated by other anthropologists (cf. Passaro 1997) and a
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similar warning was also impressed on me when I began this research. However,
whether this bias is truly diminishing remains to be seen, for, as Gupta and Ferguson
(1997:14) suggest, local fieldwork experience in one’s home country may yet come
to work against them in the academic job market, where more traditional (read:
exotic) forms of fieldwork are allegedly still favoured.
Establishing Rapport and Situating Myself Within the Field
When I first began fieldwork, I chose to integrate into the community by
affiliating myself with several different school and civic organizations, which gave
me a place within the community, helped serve some of its perceived needs, and
gave me access to a large number of informants and their families.
My findings are based primarily on the information provided directly to me
by the Samoan youth themselves, supplemented by opinions from their parents and
other adults whose lives or work intersect with large numbers of youth, such as those
who work in civic organizations and in schools, all in combination with my personal
observations. By the time I had completed my fieldwork I had formally interviewed
close to thirty young adults mostly in their mid to late teenage years, and had
surveyed over forty others, extending the age range in the latter category to include
many college-aged students. I also fostered friendships and social relations with the
families, churches, and friends of many of the young people I interviewed and in the
process got to know many other older Samoans well. The information that I gained
from this group of older Samoans was equally valuable, though it was generally
gathered in a much less structured way. This group, with whom I carried on in-depth
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conversations over extended periods of time, included at least twenty individuals,
slightly favouring male over female informants, although the network of casual and
one-time contacts was several times larger than this number. I also interviewed
approximately ten non-Samoan teachers and administrators who worked in schools
with large Samoan contingents and I administered a survey on perceptions of
Samoans by non-Samoans that was completed by forty-five USC undergraduate
students.
Meanwhile, my role in the organizations though which I met many of my
informants varied, from administrative assistant duties at the National Office of
Samoan Affairs in Carson, to tutorial and teacher’s assistant work at schools in
Carson and in San Francisco, to a paid position as a language and video arts teacher
for a summer youth program run by the Samoan Community Development Center in
the Bay Area, to a brief semester-long stint as the vice president of the Pacific
Islander Club at USC. As all of these organizations were committed to youth in
varying degrees, they naturally gave me good access to youth informants but also
exposed me to some of the ways that elder members of the Samoan community
address youth issues. Because my involvement was generally long term, as, in
particular, with a continuation school in the Bayview neighbourhood, I was often
able to observe inter-generational relations in a more or less un-self-conscious
manner, as my position as an outsider there became less visible over time. Although,
in the example of the school, to be fair, as a white researcher who was not exactly a
teacher, in a school at which all of the students were non-white (primarily Pacific
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Islander and Black, but also with a few Latino and Asian students) my position
always remained somewhat ambiguous to some of the students, as it did with, at
least, one of the teachers.
One of the main research benefits of these involvements, in addition to the
participant observation performed at the organization itself and the access to
informants, were the invitations I received to various non-work related activities and
events. These invitations were normally to church services, but also included,
conferences, fundraisers, fine mat distributions, festivals, dance and singing
performances and practices, family nights (fundraising dances and feasts), football
games, talent shows, and various other social activities that were not specifically
culturally Samoan.
Samoan Networks in Action
Part of the reason my research benefited so much from these chain reactions
of participant observation activities is because of the strength of the flexible social
networks that are one of the community’s defining characteristics. Three things are
relevant to highlight in this regard. First, the Samoan community in California is
relatively small in number and so, consequently, is the network of leaders, such that
after a short time one begins to run into the same people at various events, or if not
the same exact people, then others who are connected to them either professionally,
or, perhaps even more often, through family. Secondly, since families are often large,
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made larger still by the relatively open-ended understanding of ‘aiga (family)2 , and
many such ties are actively nurtured, the networks are not only strong, but they are
also wide-ranging and will typically include Southern California, Northern
California, Hawaii, Utah, New Zealand, and both of the Samoas as well as an outlier
or two like Japan, Missouri, or Germany. Thus, from my point of view as a
researcher, when I arrived in San Francisco, knowing virtually no individual
Samoans, my integration into the community was much more rapid than it had been
in Southern California, largely because the ties I had formed with individuals,
families and organizations were recognized and respected in the North almost
immediately. Thirdly, the dispersed nature of the Samoan community is such that it
maintains cohesion by working through an inter-connected series of cultural hubs,
primarily churches, schools and civic organizations, but also sometimes on the
strength of a charismatic individual’s personality or authority. Through sanctioned
affiliation with members of these hubs, one potentially gains access to all others who
are also affiliated with it, as well as to their other networks.
Establishing and maintaining rapport was important at many levels of the
research, but among the most important was the quality of the relationship I was able
to establish with key individuals, often unaware at the time about just how important
that individual was. I remember that after interning at an organization in Carson part
time during the summer of my first year in graduate school, I had expressed to them
2 Although ‘aiga is most often translated in English as family or extended family, Tim O’Meara
(1990) says it more closely approximates “group of relatives” (129).
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my interest in studying the youth at the local high school. “Oh”, one woman said to
me, “my nephew is over there at the high school. You go see him and say that his
auntie said he had to be nice and helpful to you”. Although I may not have phrased it
quite like that when I met John Maiava, I did introduce myself in the context of her
and he accepted my interest and obtrusiveness unquestioningly. Over the years, he
may have done more than any other individual to promote my research, lend me
credibility, and set up interviews and other research activities with specific youth,
though he had only my word that I knew his aunt to go on as initial credentials. It is
possible that he would have been helpful to me regardless of that introduction, but I
think it would have taken much longer to build up that trust without the associative
‘ aiga connection.
‘Aiga, and the nurturance of the ties that bind it, play an important role in
many aspects of the Samoan community from the kinship bridge it establishes in the
migration process itself, to church affiliations, employment opportunities, and social
orientations, as we shall see later in this paper. That it is largely unbounded in its
definition is an important component of its strength as is its reliance on an active
maintenance of its ties. Though the potential for the network exists, it will not retain
its pragmatic vibrancy without this active care. The Samoan writer Albert Wendt
(1999) makes reference to the importance of this network and its maintenance rather
than of the specific individuals who are a part of it when he deconstructs the popular
Samoan expression, “ la teu le va” -cherish, nurse, care for the va, the relationships”
(my italics) (402).
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Positionality
On the whole, this involvement in the community through a variety of
organizations and activities was a real advantage as it allowed me to experience
“positionalities at varying points along a participant-observer continuum” (Passaro
1997:156). This unfixed multilateral research strategy, that in some ways mirrors an
interdisciplinmary collaborative approach, variously conflicting with and reinforcing
other field data, has been applied to advantage by other urban ethnographers as well
(cf. Foster & Kemper 2002; Passaro 1997). Though problematic because of this
potential conflict of opinions and perspectives it may ultimately provide a richer
portrait of a group
Overall, I was warmly treated and the fact that I was interested in writing
about Samoan culture was well received though often with a modicum of surprise,
especially when it was made clear that I was interested in youth most of all.3 The
consensus seemed to be, first, that there were not enough works dealing with
Samoans as an American ethnic group and secondly, that the youth were in crisis and
any attention to that sub-group was past due and therefore welcome.
I do not wish to overly idealize my fieldwork experience or to pretend that it
was without its obstacles. There are three points that are in need of further comment
in this regard. The first was the fact that, by choosing to do my fieldwork among
3 I feel compelled to note that Samoan informants were overwhelmingly welcoming of my interest
and involvement although they were often understandably guarded with me initially. The Margaret
Mead mantle lies heavy on researchers of Samoan culture even now. Indeed, a mandatory Mead-
slandering was a not infrequent opening pleasantry, shared with me by older Samoans upon first
meeting. Interestingly, the only real hostile resistance and suspicion that I met with in my work came
from a non-Samoan social studies teacher at one of the schools.
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Samoan youth I was entering into the field of youth culture and though young
perhaps by the standards of academia (I was 31 when this research was completed), I
am considered old by many teenagers, and though I established good rapport with
many of them over time, the age barrier doubtless kept me from certain intimacies to
which their peers would have been privy. Furthermore, as most of my informants
were themselves youth (ages 14-20 for the most part) I was subject to the caprices of
American teenagers who didn’t always show up to scheduled interviews or who
showed up apathetic and reluctant to reflect on the questions asked of them. Though
this was hardly the norm, it was enough of a recurrence to prove a significant and at
times exacerbating factor in the research.
Secondly, I chose not to learn the Samoan language in advance of my
research, and though over the course of it I picked up a fair amount of vocabulary, I
believe that a stronger foundation would have helped me. The language was not a
barrier with the youths whom I interviewed, who were all conversant in English, but
much of the fieldwork took place in churches or in civic organizations where the
active language, and usually the language of the doctrine, was Samoan. Although
asking Samoan kids to translate for me turned out to be a good rapport builder in its
own right, a little more linguistic autonomy would have served me well. Ancillary to
this language barrier was a religious barrier. I wasn’t raised with any kind of
religious upbringing, although I was encouraged to explore spirituality from an
intellectual perspective or from any other perspective that interested me. Although I
felt that I had a relatively strong general grounding in Christianity an even more
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thorough grasp of it might have helped me in my fieldwork by allowing me to enter
into more in-depth discussions of doctrine or providing another commonality
between myself and my informants. However, as is so often the case in
anthropology, it is also possible that my naivete served to enhance my relationships
with my informants, by giving them the opportunity to instruct me on matters of
faith, biblical interpretation, and their translation of Samoan language sermons,
unimpeded by my pre-conceived interpretations of specific biblical passages.
Finally, I think the topic of doing research within institutions is in need of
more comment because such fieldwork has both advantages and disadvantages. The
main advantages of working through an institution, such as a school, is the access
that it provides to a large group of youth who are interacting with one another and, if
one is lucky enough to enjoy the patronage of a persuasive individual within the
school, the power to help convince the students of the importance or necessity of
one’s project. However, there are several disadvantages to using the school as an
entry point to a group. First of all, although this was not an issue in my own research,
schools have the potential to constrain research through strict control of access to
students and through censorship of the types of topics addressed. Although many
other sites have this same potential, few of them legally control access and
censorship to the same degree, leaving such decisions to the individuals and their
families. Secondly, as schools tend to be strictly age-graded, the potential for truly
unobtrusive participant observation is hindered as the researcher is a much more
conspicuous player in this environment than he would be in some other activities
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94
where there is more age integration and variety. Thirdly, the peer cohort effect
(essentially the social pressure that compels individuals to act as members of peer
groups, with negative social sanctions for non conformists, rather than as free-
thinking individuals), which can work either for or against the researcher, may
strongly affect access depending on how the group decides to view both your project
in general and you as a person. On the whole, I think the cohort effect worked to my
advantage as talking about Samoan culture and ethnicity were considered important
and oft-neglected topics within the larger debate on these issues in the United States,
by many of the young people I talked to, although there was a small group of
potential informants at both schools who made a point of avoiding me. Finally, the
school itself, at least initially, can leave an imprint on the ways in which students
respond to an interview. Getting across the idea that there are no wrong answers and
that confidentiality can be assured are among the biggest early obstacles. Having said
that, once students learn that they are not being evaluated in the same ways as they
normally are in school can lead to hyperbolic responses and also can cause the
researcher to lose some of his ability to ensure the students’ sustained interest and
participation in the project— when grades are not involved you have much less
leverage. For the Samoan kids, fear of parental disapproval based on their
speculation that their parents would be either unable or unwilling to recognize the
importance of the project, or of the youth’s abilities to comment on the topics in
which I was interested, were constant obstacles to my research.
Culturally Specific Research Design
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For the most part my methods were pretty standard ethnographic fare. As
Foster and Kemper (2002) have recommended when doing research in cities, I used a
variety of general social science techniques such as surveys, census information, and
historical and archival research in combination with traditional anthropological
methodologies. The bulk of my data came from these anthropological methodologies
like participant observations and concurrent fieldnote writing, video documentation,
social mapping exercises, personal timelines, annotated family trees, and, most
importantly, in-depth ethnographic interviews, both individual and group.4
In addition to the standard array of obstacles that all fieldworkers encounter
as well as some of those more directly associated with doing fieldwork in cities, at
least two important Samoan-specific issues emerged during the course of this
research. The first has to do with the challenge of attempting to place youth at the
forefront in a gerontocratic culture in which the elders are taken as the repositories
and authorities on culture, and youth are seen as only partially formed culturally.
Secondly, I want to talk about my efforts to employ some culturally sensitive, or
emic, methodologies, specifically a form of group interview that I have called the
ethnovignette.
Studying Youth in a Gerontocracy
That Samoa is a gerontocracy is well documented (cf MacPherson 1990;
Mead 1928; Shankman 1993) and my experiences served to re-affirm the importance
4 See Appendix for complete survey and for semi-structured interview questions.
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of elders in the decision-making of the community here in the United States. In my
experience, power in California does not emanate primarily through the matais
(elected chiefs whose traditional role was to make decisions about the use of
communal lands) as it had traditionally in the Islands, although United States based
matais do still exercise a degree of social prestige through gift exchanges and wealth
distributions. Instead, the main purveyors of power in the diasporic communities are
high-ranking church figures. At the top of this hierarchy are the faife’aus (church
pastors) and their wives, followed by some deacons and youth group leaders who
may also exercise high levels of cultural authority.5
By all measures however, the authority for cultural representation lies in the
elders and not in the youths. Therefore, by going directly to the youth to ask them
about their thoughts on their culture and identity, I was in some ways circumventing
the cultural authority of the elders within the community. Although I also asked
elders and non-Samoans variously affiliated with the community, and many others
offered their opinions on Samoan youth unsolicited, it is true that the bulk of my data
came from the Samoan youths themselves. This led to two distinct problems. The
first obstacle was the youth’s paranoia that their parents would not understand the
importance of my project and might prohibit them from participating in it. The
second major obstacle was the willingness of Samoan elders to exercise just such
censorship over representation.
5 1 do not mean to suggest that the matais alone wield authority in Samoa. Others have written about
the growing power of church officials in secular affairs in Samoa (cf. Grattan 1948; Holmes &
Holmes 1992), some tracing it as far back as high chief Malietoa’s conversion by John Williams in
1830 (Rowe 1930), and many informants in California corroborated this.
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Often Samoan youth were willing to talk to me, and to talk frankly,
particularly if it could be done through an institution such as a school, church, or
after-school program, but they were often reluctant to have me meet their parents or
to bring me to their homes. Indeed in some instances when I did meet the parents of
a youth whom I had interviewed or whom I was intending to interview, I saw how
differently they behaved in their parents’ presence, and was glad for the opportunity
to talk to them independently although it would have been useful to observe them in
their family environments as well. The consensus seemed to be that parents were
likely to object to their involvement for one of the following overlapping reasons: 1)
My motives as a non-Samoan researcher were inherently suspect. Mead was
invariably invoked here, but so too was a general concern that I would give undue
attention to one of the community’s notorious traits such as gang culture,
delinquency, teen pregnancy or domestic violence. 2) Youthful Samoans could not
be counted on to represent the culture, the community, or the family in a positive
light and as such, were in jeopardy of shaming their family through this unfavourable
or naive representation. 3) Any involvement in extra-curricular activities such as this
was an encroachment on their responsibilities as students, or to their familial or
church obligations. In reality, many Samoan teens, especially the girls, did not seem
to have as much time to themselves, to spend as they chose, as do many other
American teens.
Age deference proved to be another active obstacle in the interviews
themselves and one that ultimately forced me to re-design my approach to asking
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questions. One of the techniques that I normally employ in interviewing is to mix in
with informational and conversational questions, ones that are deliberately
provocative or far-fetched in order to elicit a strong reaction from the interviewee.
However, often, when I used this technique with Samoan youths, I failed to get the
reaction I was looking for and instead got a passive acceptance of my statement as
though it were a possible interpretation, no matter how hyperbolic my wording.
Gradually, I learned that a better approach was to ask believable questions or to posit
plausible scenarios and to use them as points of departure for further discussion.
Further research and conversation revealed a possible explanation as to why my
earlier technique was unsuccessful.
It has been argued that the combination of the distinct age-graded hierarchy
of Samoan culture and the deference that it demands and the traditional Polynesian
learning style affect Samoans negatively in Western schools.6 Some insights on these
issues are found in Jane and James Ritchie’s (1989) detailed discussion of traditional
education in Polynesia. They claim that its key components are: 1) learning is largely
done by imitation rather than by instruction; 2) it is largely context dependent,
meaning that lessons occur when they need to, rather than as abstractly necessary
pieces of knowledge; 3) they rely on the voluntary eagerness of the student; and 4)
lessons, as is also the case with stories, are imparted not as linear wholes, but in
context relevant portions that are only later shown to all relate back to one another.
6 According to Laolagi (1971) this same deferential socialization that is embedded in the matai system
and that harms them in the schools may actually help Samoans in the American work force where
their ability to serve willingly and uncritically can appear attractive to authoritarian employers.
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One of the primary by-products of this system, existing also as it does in the
stratified age-graded hierarchy mentioned earlier, is that it discourages asking
questions. Questions are seen as disrespecting the ability of the elder to convey
meaning and to reflect negatively on the impatience of the learner. If the student has
not learned the whole lesson yet, then it is because the whole lesson has not yet been
imparted or because the student has failed to emulate the model provided for them
with enough aptitude.
The implications of this learning model for Western education shed light on
some common misunderstandings. For example, a student who falls behind or gets
confused in class is unlikely to question the teacher for fear of shaming herself
and/or disrespecting the teacher, and the teacher, for his part, is unlikely to be aware
that his lesson is not being thoroughly learned until it is too late, especially in
curricula that use constructive learning models, where this lack of awareness can
prove disastrous. From an interviewing standpoint, the reluctance of interviewees to
challenge hyperbolic or improbable assumptions then becomes clear. They are
merely respecting my authority as an elder and as a teacher and trust that if I am
suggesting such interpretations then it must be part of some bigger agenda and
should not be evaluated as an independent component; in short, they are hearing me
out. Although I do not wish to place too much weight on this idealized interpretation
of Polynesian socialization, it does seem like a plausible explanation to at least some
of the resistance that I encountered when using specific interview techniques. One
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way in which I attempted to circumvent this problem was to develop a group
interview technique called ethnovignettes that I discuss in greater detail below.
As I have suggested, the power of elders, whether active or perceived, played
a critical ongoing role in how individuals related to me as an ethnographer. Nowhere
was this issue more at the forefront than in the debate on what light in which to
portray the community. In addition to the fear of another Mead-like portrayal of the
culture, which many Samoans feel dehumanized them in a way most ill-suited to
their strongly Christian value system7 , was a general fear that I would sensationalize
community problems at the expense of focusing on its positives. On several
occasions key ethnographic contacts wanted assurances that I would not portray the
community in unfavourable ways since, in vouching for me, it was their reputations
as well as my own that were on the line. Although I was adamant that my
observations should not be controlled by how the informants wished to appear, I was
also conscious in my efforts to respect their confidence in me and not to be overly
drawn towards the more lurid elements of the community.
An example of this censorship, that did not affect me directly, but that
illustrates my point well, took place in the city of Oceanside in Southern California.
As part of a celebration of American Samoa’s centennial the city sponsored a
number of projects mostly centered on art and culture and collectively called the Sulu
O Le Tautua (‘Torch of Service”). One component, the Youth Photo Project,
7 Many Samoans rejected my assertion that few people still read Mead as a primary ethnographic
source in anthropology and fewer still even, beyond the anthropologists, feel that her work reflects
negatively on Samoans if they make the connection between Mead and Samoa at all.
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1 0 1
employed a local photographer who distributed disposable cameras to Samoan teens
so that they could document their lives and show the greater Oceanside community
what it is like to be Samoan. Every week, for nine weeks, they would meet and
discuss the photographs for technical and content merit and new cameras would be
issued. Eventually the “best” fifty photos were selected to be part of a traveling
exhibit. After talking to the photographer and learning that the photos were
accompanied by descriptive paragraphs and that it was the parents involved who had
made all of the final editorial decisions as to what was to be included, I decided to
travel to Oceanside to visit the exhibit that was housed at the library there. In
addition to the fifty photos that were selected it also included an additional one
hundred and fifty photographs, also accompanied by descriptive paragraphs, which
were not selected for various reasons. I was as interested in seeing what had been left
out as I was in seeing what had made the final cut.
Not too surprisingly, the fifty that went on display mostly featured Samoans
at church service, family activities and some sports. However among the many
excellent photos that did not make the cut were a number of interesting hybridized
images (lying on a fala watching television, Samoan kids on computers, a boy whose
body is adorned in neo-tribal tattoos, people socializing in a garage), a number of
excellent action sporting event images, and one of a boy who the caption alleged was
wearing gang colours. That which seemed to me to be emphasized was not images of
a culture in transition, or in the process of adapting, but images that re-enforced
images of Samoans as strongly attached to church, family, and island traditions.
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Clearly the goal was to present an idealized rather than a documentary portrayal of
the community. And though the photographer conceded that the youth had become
much more attentive and responsible with the project after several parents had gotten
involved, it is interesting that in a youth photo project the parents should feel
compelled not to trust the youth’s instincts with something as important as
representing the culture to the public and should therefore make all of the editing
decisions.
It is, however, noteworthy that there were many in the community who felt
that the formalized relationship between children and their parents was anachronistic
in the American context and at least in part at fault for some of the social problems
that youth face. For example, early in February 2002 a young Samoan man was shot
by another Samoan in the Double Rock Housing project in San Francisco and for
weeks afterwards there was a lively debate that went on at a number of churches that
I attended (partly because the man who was killed was a relation of a prominent
family that boasted several faife’aus at churches I attended). The message,
sometimes as simple as “If you see trouble coming towards you down the street, turn
around and go the other way” was also often an open debate about whether the
cultural inhibition of youth talking up to their parents had hindered this young man
from reaching out to his family and alerting them to the troubles he was having. One
youth leader even quoted Mead, as having observed that, “Samoan children are to be
seen but not heard by their parents”. He agreed with this statement and suggested
that it might be something that needs to change in the Californian communities. This
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debate was fascinating to me as an anthropologist who was studying adaptation
strategies, as it presented a self-conscious meditation on the ongoing applicability of
certain cultural practices, not by some outside authority but by the very community
that had maintained them.
Ethnovignettes
Most of my methodologies were drawn from conventional ethnography but I
had also been influenced by post-modernist and post-colonial texts such as Lisa
Tuhiwai Smith’s (1999) Decolonizing Methodologies and by conferences that
focused on indigenous epistemologies called “Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the
Edge” that took place at the University of California at Santa Cruz in February 2000.
Other scholars, both indigenous and not, have made a point of finding local
metaphors that emphasize cultural continuities to describe current events or
phenomena that are often otherwise treated as modem and ahistorical (cf. Connell
1987; Hau’ofa 1998; Wendt 1998). I too was eager to come up with some
methodologies that used local metaphors and were sensitive to indigenous ways of
thinking and so it was that I decided to use a methodology that I have labeled as
ethnovignettes. Essentially, this is a form of group interview that presents to
participants a series of culturally specific scenarios in which characters behave in
contestable ways. After each story is read, the participants are asked to comment on
the actions of the characters and to use this as a starting off point for reflecting on
their own family, neighbourhood, culture, or personal actions. Although vignettes
have been used before in social science research, particularly in psychology, and in
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104
market research in the form of focus groups (Bernard 1995) the reason that I chose to
use this strategy was to attempt to re-create the Pan-Pacific notion of ‘talking story’.
This same indigenous metaphor has been employed by others to suggest a uniquely
Pacific identity (cf. King-Lenson 2000; Wendt 1995).8
My idea here was to attempt to circumvent Western style conventions that
emphasize individualism, strict age-grading, and ‘correct’ answers, and instead to
allow the discussion to take on a rhythm of its own, to include people of varying
ages, and to provide stories inspired by their own culture, an experience which some
of them had never had in American school curriculua. Jane and James Ritchie
(1989), in an oft-cited survey article on Polynesian socialization, suggest that group
learning and the cooperative qualities that it promotes, may be much more consistent
with traditional Polynesian teaching methods than the more individualistic and
competitive learning style generally favoured by Western school systems. In fact,
encouraging group learning emerges as one of their strongest practical
recommendations for improving the experiences of Polynesian youths in Western
schools.
Whether the informants responded to these vignettes for one of the reasons I
have suggested or whether it was the result of some other reason such as their
experiences with responding to moral stories in Bible study classes and youth
8 This Albert Wendt edited anthology of contemporary Pacific writing, Nuanua (1995) is part of the
Talanoa Series, a division of the University of Hawaii Press that features contemporary Pacific
literature and is edited by the playwright Vilsoni Hereniko. Talanoa, is a Fijian word that is intended
to have pan-Pacific implications. Essentially it means, ‘talk story’. It is also used with the same pan-
Pacific intention as the title of the newsletter for ANU s Centre for Contemporary Pacific.
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105
groups, or whether they gained a confidence by answering as groups and recognizing
that they shared many opinions and experiences, the end result was extremely
positive by those involved and extremely fruitful as far as the information that it
yielded.
I conducted ethnovignette interviews with at total of twenty-four youths, ages
fourteen to twenty-one, divided amongst five different sessions. I decided to separate
Othe groups according to gender, not so much because I anticipated drastically
different responses to the questions but because I wanted to ensure that all voices
were heard and that gender roles and expectations did not silence anyone. The
sessions lasted around an hour each and included five separate vignettes each
focusing on a different theme. The first addressed the notion of sharing and
collectivist versus individualist orientations. The second confronted corporal
punishment and gender roles. The third dealt with parent child relations in the
context offa ’aaloalo and with inter-cultural romantic relationships. The fourth was
concerned with fashion and the implications of the word “ghetto” when used as an
adjective. The final vignette looked at gendered identities, physically and otherwise,
within the Samoan population, and in this instance I separated the question into one
vignette for the girls and one for the boys.9
Study Demographics
Although the research for this study was conducted in two general fieldsites
(Carson and Southern San Francisco), strictly speaking, the study is not comparative.
9 See Appendix for complete ethnovignette scripts.
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106
The research done in Southern California was longer in duration but much less
intensive and, for the most part, also less structured than that done in the San
Francisco area. What emerged as more salient a contrast than the North/South schism
that I had expected to find was an urban/suburban one that was true of both the
Northern and Southern California sites. Furthermore, despite the constant questions
from Samoan friends and anthropological colleagues about whether or not I had been
to Samoa or was planning to go in order to enhance my understanding of the
community in California, my choice not to do so was deliberate. I wanted my
impressions of what was going on in the Samoan communities in California to be as
unmediated as possible by my pre-conceptions of what is and is not authentic. This
task is already complicated by the fact that I have read so much about Samoa and by
the fact that the answers about what makes someone a Samoan so often led to
elaborate discussions of specific traditions that are followed in the islands. Both of
these factors had doubtless influenced what I chose to focus on in my study of the
community over here and I was eager to minimize that bias as much as possible. I
strove to evaluate the cultural actions of Samoans in relation to the majority of non-
Samoans amongst whom they live rather than against some orientalist benchmark of
Samoan authenticity.
In addition to a number of miscellaneous surveys and interviews, and
countless hours of informal, and regrettably, unrecorded conversations, I culled my
formal data from three different sites, a large public High School in Carson (CHS), a
Continuation High School in San Francisco (CSS) that was almost exclusively
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107
comprised of Pacific Islanders, African-Americans, and Latinos, and the first
Samoan Congregational church to be established in San Francisco (SCC). The
formal data came from surveys, semi-structured interviews, and from the
ethnovignette, group interviews discussed earlier.
In total, forty-two surveys were completed, twenty-two by girls and twenty
by boys ranging in age from fourteen to thirty years old. While this number may not
be statistically significant, it does show some basic trends surprisingly clearly. I
would have liked to have more surveys completed but the length of the surveys (6
pages), the complexity of the questions, and the time that it took to complete them all
contributed to the relatively small sample size. I learned early on that just leaving
surveys with respondents to complete and return to me at their leisure was often
simply just a way to add to my photocopying expenses. The best chance for getting
the surveys returned and completed was to monitor them as they were being filled
out. Though the respondents often started strong on the demographic and more
generalized section of the survey their attention often waned towards the end of the
survey as the questions required more reflection of them and as their attention span
sometimes waned. The average time spent to fill out the survey thoughtfully was
around forty-five minutes, which is a lot of time to ask of them, especially if the time
being used for the survey is during their lunch hour or after school.
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Table 3.1
All Completed Surveys
Age Girls Boys Total
14
0 1 1
15
4 1 5
16
5 4 9
17
3 7 10
18
3 4 7
19
3 0 3
20
1 2 3
21
0 1 1
22
1 0 1
23
1 0 1
30
1 0 1
Total
22 20 42
Table 3.2
Birthplace, Generation, and Number of Siblings (Survey)
Number of
Informants
Born in
Samoa
Average
Generation
Avg. Number
of Siblings
/home
CSS 14 9 1.64 5.64
SCC 8 0 2.13 4.38
CHS 16 1 2.61 4.44
Total/Avg. 38 10 2.13 4.82
Here is a brief sketch of the demographic information that was yielded by the
surveys. The majority (62%) of the respondents were ages sixteen to eighteen. If you
take out the one outlier at age thirty (the next oldest was twenty-three), the mean age
was 17.4. Of the youth from the three sites listed above (CHS, CSS, SCC), 84% were
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109
born in the United States (CHS 94%, CSS 64%, SCC 100%). The average generation
of respondents varied as well from 1.64 generations at the continuation school in
Bay view (CSS), to 2.13 generations at the congregational church in San Francisco
(SCC) to 2.61 generations in Carson (CHS).1 0 The average number of siblings per
family, not surprisingly, followed this same pattern, with an average of 5.64 children
per family at CSS to 4.38 at SCC to 4.44 at Carson. There was in fact a consistent
relationship between the number of children in a family and the generation level of
the respondents in all sites as the newest families, consistently had the largest
families with the inverse being true, on the whole, for the older families.
I also administered semi-structured ethnographic interviews to twenty-three
different individuals (twelve girls and eleven boys) ranging in age from fourteen to
thirty-one years old. 65% of those interviewed were between the ages of sixteen and
nineteen years old. The interviews lasted anywhere from forty-five minutes to over
two hours, depending on a combination of the informant’s loquaciousness, how well
1 0 There are a number of subjectivities involved in determining the generation of informants in such
studies. Among the difficulties I faced was the fact that in many instances the immigrant generation of
the parents differed significantly— an expected eventuality in a close-knit community that has
maintained a continuous migration flow over a long period of time and that encounters relatively few
institutional mobility constraints. Another factor was the amount of travel and the extended stays back
and forth to Samoa. Some informants were bom in Samoa but had spent virtually their entire lives in
the US while other US bom informants had spent significant chunks of time living with relatives in
Samoa before returning to the United States to complete high school. Ultimately, I chose to list those
who had been bom in Samoa and had lived in the US for less than five years as 1s t Generation but
more often I evaluated the different immigrant generation of their parents and averaged it out. For
example, if an informant was a third generation immigrant on her mother* s side and a second
generation immigrant on her father’s side, she would be listed as 2.5 generation.
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110
we knew each other, and my aptitude at encouraging them to open up to me1 1 . The
interviews were always accompanied by a freestyle social mapping exercise in which
the informants schematized their familial connections throughout the world. Several
of the informants also completed family trees and personal timelines, both of which
yielded rich information but were sometimes too time consuming for those being
interviewed to complete in the available time. There was significant content overlap
between the survey and the interview, which was fortuitous, it turned out, in the case
of the several informants who completed surveys and then later agreed to also sit for
interviews and who found the survey to be a good primer for the interview. In
exchange for their time and effort informants were given a fifteen-dollar gift
certificate to a local music store although several of them refused payment on the
principle that it offended the relationship we shared or the spirit with which they had
agreed to participate.1 2
It is necessary to note that all of these interviews took place in the San
Francisco area and as they were semi-structured they lend themselves well to
comparison among interviewees within that region, but less well in comparison to
the Samoan youth I met and talked with in Southern California. I also have good
111 tried in vain to get a female Samoan research assistant to interview some of the women as I felt
that they were more likely to speak frankly with another woman than they were with me, and because
I am a supporter of collaborative research. However, with limited funds with which to pay a research
assistant and limited time to find one, my options were limited. I thought I had found an excellent
candidate at last through San Francisco State University, but the rigors of her schedule proved too
much and she had to decline at the last minute leaving me to go it alone, this time.
121 must confess that I was shamelessly subjective in my assessment of these payment refusals. I was
touched that these young people, many of whom didn’t come from affluent homes, and who listen to
their compact disc players constantly, and therefore were constantly in search of new cds, would
refuse payment even after I explained to them that the gift was their just reward for sharing their time
and thoughts with me.
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I l l
information from a number of Southern Californian Samoans that was garnered
through shooting a short video featuring four Samoan high school seniors at Carson
High School. I spent a week with each of my four subjects (two boys and two girls)
and months with them as a group off and on, so that even though the video is still in
the editing stage it has provided rich ethnographic data as well, though it lacks the
more comparative structure of the San Francisco data.
Table 3.3
All Semi-Structured Interviews
A8e
Girls Boys Total
14 0 1 1
15 1 0 1
16 3 2 5
17 2 0 2
18 1 4 5
19 3 0 3
20 0 1 1
21 0 1 1
22 0 1 1
23 0 0 0
29 0 1 1
30 1 0 1
31 1 0 1
ALL 12 11 23
The ethnovignette group interviews, as mentioned earlier, were done a total
of five times, three times in San Francisco and twice in Carson.
This brief demographic sketch of the informants will be fleshed out
descriptively in the Diasporic Samoa chapter— and throughout the rest of the
dissertation— in the discussion of the communities in which I undertook this research.
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112
Chapter IV
Diasporic Samoa
Introduction
It is the diasporic Samoan communities rather than the diaspora itself that is
the focus of this dissertation. A number of scholars have written about the history
and economics of the migrations themselves, such as Paul Shankman (1976, 1993),
Cluny and La’avasa MacPherson (1990, 1994, 1999) and Evelyn Kallen (1982) in
the case of the western Samoans and Dennis Ahlburg and Michael Levin (1990),
Craig Janes (1990), and Lewthwaite, Mainzer, and Holland (1973) in the case of the
American Samoans.1 Though I will draw on all of these sources, and others, in this
brief sketch of the diaspora, I do not pretend to add to that oeuvre through my own
study. Nevertheless, some understanding of the specific histories of the two
territories, and the changing nature of migration to the United States from them, as
well as some awareness of the continuous tradition of travel of the Polynesian people
is crucial to understanding the modem Samoan communities in California which I
describe in greater detail in the latter part of this chapter.
11 use the term western Samoans here, despite the official name change to Samoa in 1997 (but with a
lower case ‘w’) simply as a way to distinguish them from American Samoans. However, once I begin
to discuss the diasporic communities themselves, I will cease to distinguish between the two groups,
referring to all members as simply “Samoans”. Although I am aware that the families of my
informants came from both territories (only because I asked them to specify not because they
spontaneously offered the information), in my experience, the distinction was not too important here,
especially to the youth. To outsiders, at least, they are all considered Samoans.
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A Brief Pre-history and History of Samoa
Some 5,000 to 7,000 years ago a migration of Austronesian language
speakers is believed to have moved from South East Asia to New Guinea, from
which point some of them eventually began a spread eastward across the as yet
unpeopled Pacific. These Austronesian-language-speaking Lapita-pottery-making (or
at least trading) travelers are believed to have made it to the Samoan Islands
sometime between 1,000 and 1,500 B.C.E. In addition to language and a distinctive
pottery style, they brought with them a complex subsistence tool kit that was very
similar to that shared by their neighbours in Tonga, as both island groups were
believed to have been settled most immediately from Fiji.2 Samoa and Tonga are
often referred to collectively as the ‘cradle of Polynesia’, because their culture and
languages were allowed to develop in relative isolation for such a long time that
when further expansion to the extremities of the Pacific did eventually occur some
1,500 years later, it did so as a now distinct and well formed culture complex that
continues to link the cultures of Polynesia closely to one another to this day (Howe
1984; Lockwood 1993, 2004).
Despite much early speculation, this view is now widely supported in
anthropology, but when Peter Buck recounted his version of it to the Samoans in
1930, he reported that one Samoan chief had replied “We thank you for your
2 This tool kit included seafaring and navigational knowledge, swidden gardening, fishing techniques,
settlement patterns, fire, domesticated animals such as pigs, fowl and dogs, and various root and tree
crops like yams, taro, coconut, breadfruit, bamboo, sugar cane, and bananas (Howe 1984; Lockwood
1993)
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114
interesting speech. The Polynesians may have come from Asia but the Samoans, no.
We originated in Samoa” (286). Indeed, according to Samoan mythology, in the
beginning there were only heavens and water covering the earth until the god
Tagaloa created a single land mass, Manu ’atele, upon which to rest. From this single
land mass he broke off all of the different Islands of Samoa, Tonga and Fiji, as
stepping stones for him to travel on and he then created a single man and single
woman to populate each newly formed island (Holmes & Holmes 1992). The old
chiefs quote and the creation story illustrate how the local version in fact reinforces
the scientific one (i.e. a Western Polynesian culture is recognized in the Fiji-Tonga-
Samoa creation story, as is the expansion and relationship between farther islands
that must have seemed invisible and isolated at one time) and how some of the same
themes are still resonant today, such as the idea of the importance of Samoa as a
distinct and important place of origin no matter where one is in the world.
A mere 3,000 or so years after the first people settled Samoa, Europeans
began to arrive. Samoa was sighted and named by a succession of Europeans starting
with the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen in 1722, who called them Bowman’s
Islands and then in 1768 the French scientist and explorer Louis Antoine de
Bougainville named them the Navigator’s Islands, but it was La Perouse, a French
explorer, who in 1787 became the first European to set foot on the islands. Prolonged
and intensive interaction between Europeans and Samoans did not occur until well
into the nineteenth century, with the arrival of traders and missionaries, significantly
John Williams and the London Missionary Society (LMS) in 1830. Despite the fact
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115
that many imperialist powers were interested in the islands, for a time they remained
unclaimed by any specific nation, although the Americans had an arrangement to use
Pago Pago harbour on Tutuila as a coaling station as early as 1872. There was much
internal conflict taking place in Samoa at this time too, as several powerful families
sought to unify chiefly titles and to declare themselves paramount chief, each
soliciting the support of various European powers to strengthen their cause. This
tension came to a head in 1889 in a standoff between German, American, and British
warships in Apia harbor, the Germans backing Mataafa and the British and
Americans backing the Malietoa claim. All this bravado was for naught however, as
a typhoon struck the harbor sinking six of the seven warships. (Pouesi 1994)
To ease tensions the Berlin Act was signed later that year. It placed the
Samoan Islands under the tripartite supervision of the British, Americans, and
Germans. This arrangement lasted until 1899, at which time the territories were
divided into what is now American Samoa to the East, including primarily the
islands of Tutuila and Manua, and German Samoa, which included the much larger
islands of Upolu and Savaii, to the West. Western Samoa was much larger and richer
in resources, but Eastern Samoa had a much better harbor than anything to be found
in Western Samoa The British relinquished all claim on the islands in exchange for
the Germans doing likewise for British interests in Africa and in the Pacific, notably
in Tonga and in the Solomon Islands—a tidy bit of colonial housework.
American Samoa remains a part of the United States to this day as an
unincorporated and unorganized United States territory whose residents, as United
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116
States nationals, enjoy all rights of citizens except the right to vote. From the time of
the signing of the deeds of cession in 1899 (ratified in 1900) the islands have enjoyed
a high degree of autonomy that some have referred to in a less complementary
manner as a period of ‘benign neglect’ (cf. Janes 1990; Kiste 1993). Notwithstanding
this neglect, the provisions of the deed stated that, “chiefs were permitted control
over their villages as long as such control neither conflicted with the laws of the
United States nor obstructed the ‘advance of civilization’ ” (Pouesi 1994). The local
government has remained politically active, particularly in respect to cultural issues,
introducing bills to control the export of ie ’toga (fine mats) outside of Samoa
(February 2003) and another to determine birth right status according to the
citizenship of a child’s parents even if the child is bom in American Samoa (March
2002) (Pacific Island Report: East-West Center).
The United States Navy administered the islands until 1951, at which time
the Department of the Interior took over (ending the period of ‘benign neglect’).
They still administer the islands to this day, although the American Samoans elect
their own governor and other legislative representatives, including a non-voting
member of congress in Washington. At least officially, the islands have remained
steadfast in their claims that their relationship with the United States is a voluntary
one that is mutually beneficial and not an instance of colonial subjugation and
exploitation. In fact, after years of petitioning the United Nations to be removed from
the Decolonization Committee’s list of colonized territories, American Samoa’s
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117
request was officially recognized by the United Nations on January 15, 2002 (Pacific
Island Report, East-West Center)
The western territory changed hands from Germany to New Zealand colonial
rule in 1914, following the outbreak of World War I. After a spirited and largely
non-violent local resistance to the excesses and ineptness of the New Zealand rule
called the Mau movement, the territory was eventually granted independence by the
United Nations in 1962 (cf. Davidson 1967; Field 1984; Rowe 1930). In doing so, it
became the first independent Polynesian nation in the Pacific, under the name
Western Samoa.3 In 1997 they shortened their name to Samoa (or the Independent
State of Samoa), much to the annoyance of some American Samoans who felt that
such a name was an effrontery to them and that it lessened their Samoan credibility.4
Post World War II Samoan History
Although neither of the territories experienced the conflict directly, World
War II had a huge impact on the islands, and the patterns that were established at that
time are still in play today. Since then, much more so even than before, foreign
political and economic events have significantly affected the subsistence strategies of
islanders as they have migrated to off-island polities in huge numbers.
The immediate effect of World War II was much stronger in American
Samoa than in Western Samoa, as Pago Pago, which had already been an American
3 New Zealand gained independence in 1907 but the Maori are a minority in their own land, about
10% of the 2002 population.
4 So incensed were some representatives in the American Samoan government that they tried to pass a
tall that would deny entry to those visitors bearing a Samoan passport. However, the bill did not pass.
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118
Navy base for seventy years, became an important naval outpost, following the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Within weeks of the attack, Tutuila was
transformed as thousands of American troops arrived and many traditional
subsistence agricultural activities stopped entirely for a time as islanders began to
work to build up the navy’s infrastructure, or to enlist in the Samoan Marines
(Malini) and the Navy Reserve (Fiatfita). Virtually every family was affected by the
free-spending military. By the end of the war the traditional economy was
irrevocably changed to a cash-based one and American Samoa was one of the most
affluent territories in the South Pacific. Though many individuals resumed some
level of subsistence agriculture, others were caught up with the desire to see more of
the world and to gain more from it materially (Janes 1990; Lewthwaite et al 1973;
Pouesi 1994).
Although ultimately Western Samoans also began to leave the islands in large
numbers, for many of the same reasons that the American Samoans did (reasons
which I shall discuss shortly), their opportunity for migrating was not as immediately
affected by the war itself. Indirectly, however, the war still played a big part. It
brought New Zealand, along with a number of other less industrialized nations,
abruptly into world affairs and the world economy. Following the war New Zealand
developed a new and comparatively large industrial sector with an insufficient blue-
collar work force to run it, so they opened the doors to Pacific Islanders to fill this
need. Even though Western Samoa was in the process of gaining independence from
New Zealand, they still enjoyed a privileged relationship with the country and so
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119
they began to migrate there in large numbers for wage employment. They quickly
became the largest Pacific Islander group in New Zeland apart from the Maoris
(Kallen 1982; Shankman 1993).
Samoan Diaspora
The term ‘diaspora’ and its biblical cousin ‘exodus’ (Shankman 1993) have
been used in the description of the mass movements of Pacific Islanders off of their
islands by the geographer John Connell and others as early as 1987 and though the
appropriateness of the use of these terms may be contested (as we shall see in the
next chapter), they are, at the very least, appropriate because of the scope that they
suggest. Indeed, so important has this theme of mobility become in the region that,
John Connell (1987) has stated, “It might even be said that the Polynesian States are
characterized by international emigration” (380) (my emphasis).
One might argue quite convincingly that this theme of mobility in the region
is anything but an isolated modem phenomenon and that, indeed, it is precisely this
tradition of movement, travel, and resettlement that has made the current diaspora so
natural for the present-day migrants. Such arguments concerning ethnic memory are
as difficult to disprove as they are to prove, of course, and yet they are among the
most eloquently worded manifestos on the topic. Epeli Hau’ofa’s (1999) landmark
essay, “Our Sea of Islands”, poetically and systematically rejects colonialist attempts
to convince islanders of their belittlement and their isolation and also rejects neo
colonial claims about the economic dependence and vulnerability of the region.
Instead, he sketches a portrait of deliberate and empowered Pacific people
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120
(individuals not macro-economic trends), who have always viewed the connections
between themselves as more salient than the distances that separate them and who
continue to exploit these connections in modem times, just as they have throughout
time from first settlement onwards. As he says, “Islanders have broken out of their
confinement, are moving around and away from their homelands, not so much
because their countries are poor but because they are unnaturally confined and
severed from many of their traditional sources of wealth and because it is in their
blood to be mobile''1 (34) (my emphasis).
The historical antecedents to the most recent mass movement of Pacific
Islanders are subject to a fairly specific chronology. In the post war period both
Samoas experienced high rates of off-island migration as people left in search of
better jobs, education, emancipation from the constraints of the matai system, and
sometimes just in search of adventure (cf. Janes 1990; Shankman 1993). Ultimately,
however,
The major influences in international migration are economic even when
social forces are also significant. Migration is primarily a response to
inequalities, both real and perceived, in socioeconomic opportunities that are
themselves a result of dependent or uneven sectoral and regional
development. Migration has been largely a function of the effective
penetration of peripheral capitalism, the imposition of colonial
administration, and perceptions of relative deprivation. (Connell 1987:380)
Although, on the one hand, the territories were hit hard by this loss of
citizenry, often the brightest and the young (the ‘brain drain’ as it is sometimes
called), the migration of large numbers of people also served several specific needs.
Primarily, migration served as a relief on population pressure, which had swelled in
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121
the post-war years due largely to improved health conditions (Janes 1990:23). The
departures also served to reduce competition for the limited number of skilled and
well-paying jobs in the islands, and the migrants provided much appreciated
remittances, which quickly became one of the mainstays of the domestic economy
(Shankman 1993).
By the mid 1970s the bulk of personal cash income for most Samoans came
from remittances and by the 1980s they comprised roughly one third of Western
Samoa’s income. As Shankman put it, “People had become the country’s most
valuable export” (ibid: 170). Whether these remittances have ultimately served the
country well is debatable however. The orthodox view, as argued by Shankman
(1990) and by Ahlburg and Levin (1990), suggests that the cash, though welcome, is
often not significant enough to use for meaningful investment and instead is used
primarily to meet immediate needs. However, other writers, such as Richard Brown
(1994), argue that analyses which claim remittances are not used for meaningful
investment are based on insufficient and specious data that fails to account for gifts,
services paid for, and investment by overseas members. He claims that for many, far
from the motivation of family altruism alone, as suggested by the orthodox view,
business investment is in fact a bigger motivation than family support and that the
family is best viewed not as a social welfare net but as a “transnational corporation.”
Regardless of how current remittances are being consumed, the argument may
become increasingly irrelevant as time passes and diasporic Samoans, who may now
be removed from Samoa by several generations, may be less inclined to keep
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122
sending money back and instead choose to re-direct their resources towards their
local Samoan communities (MacPherson 1994)
Irrespective of the merits of migration as a development strategy, the truth of
the matter is that high as they are, the rates of migration might be higher still, but for
external factors like the “vicissitudes of international economy” and the impact that
they have on immigration policy (Connell 1987). This is precisely what happened to
the western Samoans in the case of New Zealand, which began to tighten its
immigration policy significantly after its economy began to slow down in the mid
1970s. This caused the western Samoan migrants to focus their attention increasingly
on other viable destinations such as American Samoa and the United States (Connell
1987; Shankman 1993). In fact, for Pacific Islander migrants on the whole, the
United States is now the most important destination (Ahlburg and Levin 1990). Even
by 1980 those of western Samoan ancestry were more numerous than those of
American Samoan ancestry not only in the United States (ibid:2), but even in
American Samoa itself (Shankman 1993). It has been convincingly argued that
American Samoa has now become an important stepping stone in the migration of
other Pacific Islanders, particularly western Samoans and Tongans, on their way to
the United States (Ahlburg and Levin 1990; Connell 1987). Bob Franco (1990) has
argued that in some cases Hawaii has become a second such stepping stone on the
journey towards the ultimate destination, the mainland of the United States, where
incomes tend to be higher and jobs more permanent than they are at any other point
along the journey.
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123
Although the western Samoan path to the United States has been circuitous,
this was not the case for American Samoans. When the Navy left American Samoa
in 1951, and switched control of the islands to the Department of the Interior, they
took with them thousands of enlisted Samoan men and their families (sometimes
quite literally, as with the 958 passengers transported to Hawaii on the U.S.S,
Jackson in 1952) and resettled them in Honolulu. Within years they also began to
move Samoan military men and their families to other West coast naval stations such
as San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle (Lewthwaite et al. 1973).
This group of migrants, many of whom stayed in these various locations after their
military contracts had been fulfilled, became the first significant migration or “great
migration” (Pouesi 1994) to the United States and established magnetic nuclei that
drew others to them in the years that followed.5
There have been several subsequent distinct waves of migrants over the years
and each group has left its impact on the diasporic communities. The first waves of
migrants in the 1950s were mostly young, single men, who were joined by young
women soon after. They came to serve in the military, to further their education, and
to work at jobs in agriculture and industiy. This first wave was bright and ambitious
and many fared well in the new environment where they were able to buy homes and
to start families, or to bring their exisiting families over to join them. They also
5 Lewthwaite et al (1973) assert that there had been a trickle of American Samoan migration to the
United States, particularly to Hawaii, but also to California, as early as the First World War and then
in larger numbers in the 1940s, though not nearly of the same magnitude as the post 1951 migrations.
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124
became key magnetic poles in what Evelyn Kallen has called the ‘kinship bridge’
(Kallen 1982).
The kinship bridge is another example of the loosely constrained ‘aiga effect
in action. Early arrivals would take some time to establish themselves, and then they
would gradually start to sponsor other members of their family to come over, often
paying the fare, providing them with a place to live, a job sometimes, and an
orientation to the new culture. These migrants are then indebted to this individual but
also to the rest of the family, so they will sometimes provide un-paid childcare and
domestic labour or might be asked to contribute wages to collective ventures such as
the purchase of a house.6 Eventually they might become new foundations in the
kinship bridge themselves, further perpetuating the cooperative cycle.
The 1950s was followed by an even more intensive period of migration of
both young men and women in the 1960s particularly the latter half of the decade.
Indeed, as Craig Janes (1990) put it, “by the early 1960s it was clear that migration
was becoming institutionalized as a rite of passage for young Samoans” (24). One
big change that allowed for this sharp increase in migrants was the establishment of
direct commercial air transport at reasonable fares between Samoa and Hawaii. Pan-
American airlines even came up with a ‘fly now-pay later’ program that allowed
islanders to pay off their travels in installments. If they could get as far as Hawaii
they could often get their California relatives to pay their fare to the mainland. A
6 Joan Ablon (1971) provides a good example of this cooperative employment strategy in her
description of Samoan nurses providing jobs for other Samoan women in San Francisco. She
estimates that one group of three women provided jobs for up to 150 others over the years (391).
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125
second major change was in the age of the migrants. The exodus had made a huge
impact on the demographics back in the islands, affecting some families much more
deeply than others. Many elderly Samoans began to move to the United States to live
with their children. This group had a strong impact on the shape of the community.
In contrast to the first wave of migrants, many of whom had been fleeing the
constraints of the matai system, these older immigrants were “more immersed in the
fa ’a Samoa and more concerned to perpetuate it on the mainland” (Lewthwaite et al
1973:150). Although estimates vary greatly, conservative estimates had the number
of Samoan migrants to Hawaii and California at about 6,000 during the 1950s, with
10.000 more following in the 1960s to form a combined population of between
20.000 and 30,000 by the 1970s (Lewthwaite et al. 1973).
By 1980, 41,948 people self-identified as Samoans in the United States,
which was about 16% of the entire Pacific Islander population in the country
(Ahlburg and Levin 1990:3). However, an independent study done by the National
Office of Samoan Affairs estimated the Samoan population of California alone at
90.000 people at this same time (Pouesi 1994). The most recent official estimate
from the 2000 US Census, which include those who claimed to have at least partial
Samoan ancestry, was 133,281 people, easily making them the largest Pacific
Islander group in the United States apart from Hawaiians, who are about three times
more numerous. Although these increases are significant, they are due not just to
ongoing migration, family size and other demographic causes, but also to a
broadening of the ethno/racial categorization options in the Census forms.
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1 2 6
As is true with all Pacific Islanders living in the United States, the Samoans
live overwhelmingly in the western states, although they can now be found in every
state in the Union, including even 35 Samoans in Delaware and 44 in Vermont!
According to the 2000 census, over three-fourths of Pacific Islanders live in the
West, with almost 60 percent living in Hawaii and California alone. Although this
percentage is high, it is a decrease from the 1990 Census findings, which showed 86
percent of Pacific Islanders living in the West with 75 percent living in California
and Hawaii. In addition to living in the West, Pacific Islanders (with the notable
exception of the many rural Hawaiians) tend to live in urban areas. Figure 4.1 shows
the California urban areas with the largest number of Pacific Islanders living in them.
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127
Table 4.1
California Urban Areas with the Largest Numbers of Pacific Islanders'
Area’s Rank
Nationwide1 1
Areas with Highest Absolute Number
of Pacific Islanders
Percentage of Area’s
Population
3 Los Angeles 0.4
4 San Diego 0.9
5 Long Beach 1.7
6 San Jose 0.8
7 Sacramento 1.7
8 San Francisco 0.8
Pacific Islander demographics tend to contrast with the general American
population in several key categories such as family size, median age, education, and
income. Within the broader Pacific Islander category, Samoans distinguish
themselves by representing the most extreme statistical features. Table 4.2 illustrates
some of these contrasts.
1 Based on Grieco (2001).
“ Honolulu and New York respectively have the highest absolute number of Pacific Islanders of any
American cities.
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128
Table 4.2
Some Key Socio-demographic Differences Between Samoans and the U.S.
and Pacific Islander Populations on the Whole'
Entire U.S.
Population
All Pacific
Islanders
Samoans
Avg. Household
Size
3.2 4.1 4.8
Median Age 33 25 21.5
E
D
U
C
A
T
I
O
N
High
School
Degree
( % )
Male Female Male Female Male Female
75.7 74.8 77.2 75.0 74.7 66.5
Univ.
Degree
(%)
Male Female Male Female Male Female
23.3 17.6 12.0 9.6 9.8 6.1
Furthermore, although Samoans are hard workers and participate in the
labour force at rates similar to the national averages- over one-fourth of them live
below the poverty level (a figure that remains unchanged from the 1980 figure), and
their per capita income in 1990 was barely half that of the national average (Paisano
1993).
These numbers seem to tell a bleak story and yet, somewhat ironically, two
things that stand out in the Samoan community are their ongoing migration to the
United States and their strong American patriotism. The migration is probably best
explained, as I have suggested, by the limited economic opportunities back in the
1 Based on Paisano (1993).
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129
islands. The patriotism is due, in part to the strong connection that many Samoans
have with the American military, an occupation they tend to continue to choose in
large numbers, and which intersects the family histories of virtually all Samoans in
the United States at some point. Although the statistics can paint a bleaker version of
the health and strength of the community and should not be treated as an absolute
measurement of quality of life by any means, the Samoan community is afflicted by
its share of poverty and the social issues associated with it, as well as the
institutionalized discrimination against brown-skinned people that still takes place in
the United States, to the extent that when I encountered uncritical glorifications of
the nation, it always seemed to me an ironic conundrum.
In a youth summer program in San Francisco, a Samoan teacher put the
question to the forty or fifty assembled children aged 5 to 18. “What are the good
things about the United States?” he asked, “What brought us here?” After only a
little prodding they answered much as their parents might have: career opportunities,
education, wealth, a strong military, and a good government. In short, they
proclaimed the classic immigrant’s version of the American dream.
Be that as it may, Samoans’ patriotism has its place and it is not on the top of
their hierarchy of allegiances. Thirty-five Samoan youths responded to my survey
question that asked them to rank in importance six different allegiances. The findings
were remarkably consistent between both the Northern California (20) and Southern
California Samoan (15) respondents. The ranking was: family, church, self, ethnic
group, friends and country, (see Figure 4.1)
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130
It is also relevant to note that there was no overt conflict between American
patriotism and pride in one’s Samoan heritage. Time and again, while in the
company of young Samoans in San Francisco who were killing time, I watched them
doodle on scraps of paper and surf the Internet in computer labs. Invariably,
including even those who had never been to the islands, the doodles were of
traditional Samoan fales (houses), kava bowls, village names, and island scenes and
the Internet surfing eventually led to Samoan web sites, lingering longest on those
with family photos or island clip art that could be downloaded.
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Figure 4.1
‘Rank in the order that they are important to you”
0 1 5
»
9
a 10
o
= *
2 0 -
15
0
a
9
0
a 10
a IQ
'S
%
#1 Family
3 4
Rank
# 3 Self
#5 Friends
3 4
Rank
a 1 0
0
= tf e
#2 Church
Rank
#4 Ethnic Group
#6 Country
Northern California Southern California
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132
Diasporic Samoans: Southern vs. Northern California
It was expected that the comparative element of this research might reveal
stark contrasts between the southern and the northern Californian Samoans in an
effort to step beyond the broader generalizations that are often evoked in the
description of immigrant ethnic groups. What I hoped might emerge was a more
nuanced understanding of adaptive variations that ultimately might provide more
insight into the localized issues that affect communities, information that might
ideally be recognized in policy change eventually. Not surprisingly, housing style,
cost of living, and population density proved to be the biggest differences between
the two field sites although the expression of the culture remained largely the same.
Although settlement was begun in both sites at roughly the same time, the
demographics have changed the makeup of the communities dramatically in recent
years. The Carson Samoan community on the whole seemed much more permanent.
Many of the kids interviewed were third generation and older Carson residents. The
greater community has grown up around them but the generally working class feel
and cost of living of the city have remained more or less unchanged (though one
informant assured me that suburban drift, to cheaper inland cities is now taking place
in Carson).
The Bay area, famous for its high cost of living, has left the Samoans there
much more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of housing costs. Available affordable
housing is hard to come by, and the result has been that the population of Samoans in
San Francisco proper is now a combination of early arrivals who were able to buy
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133
homes in the 1960s, when costs were lower, and new arrivals whose first homes tend
to be in the highly subsidized apartment projects run by the San Francisco Housing
Authority. Many of those who arrived in the middle of this period and who have
stayed in California, have stayed in the projects for a few years until they were able
to save enough money to buy homes. The only affordable homes are to be found in
cheaper surrounding communities like Oakland and the East Bay, Stockton, Vallejo,
and Sacramento, most of which are an hour or longer drive from San Francisco.
Thus, fledgling Samoan communities with their trademark focal churches have
emerged in each of these cities and in others in the greater Bay area. A result of this
changing settlement pattern is that it has placed the Samoan community of the Bay
area in the interesting position, on the one hand, of being both vastly more dispersed
than their Samoan counterparts in the south and, conversely, more concentrated in
specific housing projects than the communities in the south. In doing research in San
Francisco itself one encounters both the oldest and the newest arrivals but what is
missing, and this may work to the disadvantage of the new arrivals more than to
anyone else, is the active involvement of the gradient of experiences gained from
having access to a community that has been continuously building itself in the same
place.
As we shall see, the differences between the northern and southern
communities are of significant interest. Though similar in general terms, the specific
histories of the migrations, as well as the local economies have had an important
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134
impact on how the two communities have developed. I shall look at them now, each
in turn, in some detail.
Southern California (Carson: then and now)
The history of human habitation of the area now known as Carson goes back
over 6,000 years to when the Suangna people, or Gabrielino Indians as they were
later called by the Europeans, lived there. In 1782, the Spanish Crown granted a
75,000-acre plot of land as a gift to a Spanish soldier, Juan Jose Dominguez, who
had helped protect Father Junipero Serra and other padres as they established the
California Missions. He named the area Rancho San Pedro, though its name was
later changed to Dominguez Ranch, and it included an enormous cattle ranch and a
major shipping port that was a part of the operation until the 1860s. It covered an
area that also includes the modem cities of Torrance, Redondo Beach, Lomita,
Wilmington, and parts of San Pedro.
It is difficult to ascertain the specific demographic impact of these early
migrants because the Carson data were mixed in with Los Angeles county data and
ethnic identification options on the census were limited at that time. However,
through various city maintained statistics, published in “facts and figures” booklets,
in combination with US census data, a certain longitudinal sketch of the community
emerges. Table 4.3 summarizes these changes by grouping peoples of similar origins
and identifying Samoans as a percentage of the total population from the time of
incorporation in 1968 to the most recent census in 2000.
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135
C M
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52
136
Figure 4.3: A typical street in the Bayview district
Figure 4.4: A typical Carson neighbourhood.
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Figure 4.6: Pacific Islander shop in Sunnydale, San Francisco.
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138
The specific changes in the demographics may not be too important. What is
relevant about them is that they indicate a steady and rapid change towards a
multiculturally balanced city, which has drawn much attention to the otherwise
innocuous suburban middle class city. William Clark (1998) uses it as an example of
ethnic change in California and shows how it has now become the most evenly
distributed city in California in terms of ethnic diversity across the four major
American ethnic groups: White, Black, Hispanic, Asian (54). Cecilia Rasmussen’s
(1997) claim that Carson has “become nationally recognized as a model of racial
balance”, is reinforced by the fact that the High School’s multi-racial club and its
lobbying to open up ethnic categorization for the 2000 census were featured in
Newsweek magazine in May 2000 (Clemetson 2000).
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Table 4.3
Approximate Ethnic Distribution of the City of Carson Population:
Selected Years, 1968-2000
Year1 Total
Population
Percentage of population identified by ethnic origin
White /
Non-Hispanic1 1
Latino/
Hispanic"1
African
Americanlv
Asianv O therv i Samoan
1968 72,304 72% 11% 9% 5% N/A N/A
1975v u 78,657 45% 13% 22% 6% 13% 1%
1980 81,221 32% 22% 29% 12% 3% 2%
1990 83,995 22% 28% 26% 21% 0.3% 2.7%
2000 89,730 12% 35% 25% 22% 6% 2.4%
I Sources: 1968 (Jerrils 1972), 1975 and 1980 (City of Carson, Facts and Figures: 1976,1985), 1990 and 2000 (US Census)
I I This category was labeled as “Caucasian” in 1968.
I I I This category was labeled “Mexican-American” in 1968 and “Latin/Mexican American/Chicano’’ in 1975.81% of Hispanics claimed Mexican
ancestry in the 2000 Census.
I V This category was labeled as “Negro” in 1968 and “Black” from 1975 through to 1990.
v This category was labeled as “Oriental” in 1968 but since then has listed specific Asian ethnicities separately. The Filipinos are by far the largest
Asian group and their numbers have increased exponentially: 1975: 4%, 1980: 9%, 1990: 17%, 2000:19% (of the entire population of Carson). The
distant second and third largest Asian groups are Japanese and Korean (0.9% and 0.6% respectively in 2000 Census).
vlThis column includes Other Pacific Islanders, American Indians, and those who did not respond (1975), as well as those who claimed two or more
races (2000).
™ These percentages are based on heads of household and not individuals and therefore may distort the actual percentages. For example, the Samoans,
who tend to have larger than average families, may be underrepresented by this sampling method.
140
Despite this multicultural claim to fame, it is, in most ways, a typical Los
Angeles suburb. It is a place that people are from but not one that they deliberately
go to, other than to shop at a giant chain store or to visit friends and family. As with
many of the areas surrounding Los Angeles, except to the people who live there,
Carson is just a series of freeway exits, its boundaries indistinguishable from the
series of exits that are the providence of the cities before it or after it. Many
Angelenos are not even sure where Carson is until you localize it through LA
freeway-speak.
“You know where the 110 hooks up with the 405?”
“Oh, you mean where the Ikea is?”
“Yeah, well, that’s where Carson is ”
The freeways are important as they neatly delineate the city, which is
otherwise without many distinguishing topographical features: the 110 to the west,
the 710 to the east, and the 405, which follows the Dominguez Channel, diagonally
through the middle. Depending on the traffic, it is only about 25 minutes from
downtown Los Angeles, and yet, though this proximity was important to me, as USC
is adjacent to downtown, it didn’t seem too important to the Samoans I interviewed
who were mostly oriented towards their friends and families in the surrounding
communities of Long Beach, Torrance, Wilmington, Harbor City and Compton, or
else to far off diasporic sites like Utah, Missouri, Seattle, New Zealand, and of
course Samoa. The design of modem Los Angeles (large and highly dispersed
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141
population and no vibrant urban core), and the nature of the industries that define it
(entertainment and service), are such that many groups have similarly de-localized
and wide-spread networks, that include Los Angeles, but are hardly defined by it.
Ironically, the city itself is, in fact, an apt metonym for just such a dispersed and de
centering process as that which diaspora seeks to describe.
Michel Laguerre (2000) has described sites like Los Angeles as global
ethnopolises, in that it is a “container city” composed of many filled ethnic enclaves
that orient themselves towards home country and towards other enclaves in other
container countries (those other countries being primarily New Zealand and
Australia for the Samoans). Furthermore, he describes these ethnic enclaves (like the
Samoan community in Carson) as ethnopoles, in that they serve as powerful draws to
new migrants. Such sites are defined by their ability to act as mediating loci of global
flows.
Carson is a strongly middle class and working class residential city and it still
has a lot of industrial sites, even though their concealment, de-emphasis, or
beautification remains one of the Chamber of Commerce’s prime objectives. It is a
city built for automobiles rather than pedestrians, and the sidewalks for the most part
are little used except around specific businesses. The western part of the city, where
this fieldwork was done, is very flat. This feature, in combination with its relatively
inland location, and its large amount of concrete and industry often make the city
feel hotter and stickier than the thermometers read. It is transected by a grid-like
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pattern of broad boulevards lined with strip malls and franchise shops. Off of these
boulevards branch a series of residential subdivisions with their curving drives and
cul de sacs. In the neighbourhoods I worked in the houses were all smallish (2 -3
bedrooms) one-level homes with garages, small yards (both front and back), and
many cars parked along the streets. The apparent homogeneity of the homes is no
coincidence as 64% of them were built during a twenty-year period from 1940 to
1960 (US Census 2000) (photo forthcoming). The yards are maintained at varying
levels but most are reasonably well kept, and the bars over the windows that are
typical in many less affluent Los Angeles neighbourhoods are largely absent here.
Carson has many of the same youth social problems found in many similar
communities such as gang violence and drug sales and though I saw infrastructure to
protect against these problems, such as high fences and security guards at the public
schools, the city does not feel overtly dangerous and the Samoan community here is
no longer a new community but now a permanent one. As an informant, Ryan (17),
shared with me while we drove through a Carson residential neighbourhood in which
he had grown up, “This whole block right here... a lot of people they talk about the
gangs or anything like that but it’s just like a family to us. Everyone over here is a
family and, you know, everyone over here grew up here together and we’re still here
together to this day”. Nevertheless, there are a number of Samoan specific gangs as
well as the larger Southern California gang denominations of Bloods and Crips,
which are multi-ethnic affiliations. Indeed there were a number of shootings and a
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virtual gang war between Samoan and Latino youths for a period during my
research, but random acts of violence seem like a minimal risk in this fairly typical
southern California suburb.7
Carson Samoan Community
The Samoans who first moved to Carson in the 1950s were not initially
overly oriented to the city itself. Many of them worked in the shipyards of Long
Beach (as many still do) and went to San Diego every weekend for a Congregational
Samoan church service, the only one in California at the time. The San Diego church
was officially established in 1955 but it was operating informally before then
(Laolagi 1971). Eventually, with the urging of the San Diego faife’au (Church
Pastor), Foisia Tuiofo, a former Fitafita (American Samoan Guardsman) decided
that Samoans in Carson needed their own local services, so he went to the seminary
in Malua, Samoa and came back a faife ’ au himself. He established the first Samoan
congregational church in Carson 1957 (Taase 1994: ll) 8 . This first church helped to
draw more Samoans to Carson and as the population grew other churches, or at least
Samoan specific services, sprang up across a number of congregations, notably
Mormon, 7th Day Adventist, Catholic, and Assembly of God, as well as several more
7 In fact, Carson’s crime rate is slightly lower at 3,733.6 per 100,000 persons than both the national
crime rate at 4,118.8 and the California wide rate of 3982.2 (Rand 2004; Federal Bureau of
Investigation 2002). However, at 2,206.2 per 100,000, Carson had a slightly higher California crime
index rating than the state-wide average at 1,906.3. The California crime index is based on rates of
more serious crimes, including willful homicide, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault burglary,
and motor vehicle theft (Rand 2004).
8 Fa’atui Laolagi (1971) gives a date of 1956 for the first Samoan Congregational church in Carson
but he doesn’t identify it as Tuiofo’s congregation specifically.
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144
congregational churches. This concentration of Samoan churches also still draws
people from outlying communities, which caused one informant to point out that,
“the Samoan population in Carson is always largest on Sundays”.9
Although the views on the ideal relationship between church and culture
differ greatly among the various denominations, at least initially, the churches
proved to be powerful and important cultural magnets. As one author put it, the
churches drew people to them because they “quickly became the center of life and
perpetuator of ” (Laolagi 1971:84), or as I heard it put time and again throughout my
fieldwork: “over here the church is our village”. This phrase appears virtually
verbatim throughout the diasporic Samoan literature (cf Janes 1990:165; Koletty
2000:105, MacPherson, Shore, and Franco 1978). As we shall see later, in the
“Constructing Identities” chapter, this claim, though an important and powerful
claim of cultural vibrancy, is also problematic as it dangerously over-emphasizes the
parallels between the church and village.
For the most part the Samoan families in Carson are dispersed throughout the
city. There are several clusters, often of extended family members, such as “Island
Block,” but for the most part the Samoan presence in Carson remains a culture of
congregations. There are a number of businesses that draw a Pacific Islander
clientele, such as a handful of Samoan markets, the Point After, a sometimes-rough
9 Numerous informants offered versions of the general history of the Carson Samoans but my
particular telling is based on a version told to me by a middle-aged female informant who has worked
in the Carson Public Library for years and has been an active member of several Samoan community
organizations.
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nightclub owned by retired Samoan professional football player Jesse Sapolu, and a
few civic organizations that mostly seem to draw elderly community members.
There are also a number of seasonal congregations that take place for conferences, or
more often, for cultural festivals, such as Flag Day (an Independence celebration for
Samoa on June 1st and a Dependence celebration for American Samoa, officially
April 17*, although it is often celebrated over the course of an August weekend in
San Francisco) and other Pan-Pacific festivals in which Samoans also participate
such as the annual H o’olaule’a festival in Harbor City in Southern California.
However most of the congregating, even between extended family members, seems
to take place through the church which, in addition to having a Sunday service may
run several other functions during the week, such as a youth group, women’s group,
choir practice, bible studies, dance practices, and various fundraisers.
However, one non-voluntary institution that, at least in principle, offered
access to a captive audience of a cross-section of Samoan youth was the public High
School. Although I did attend several festivals, church services and family events,
and spend a significant amount of time at a Samoan civic organization, it was the
public high school around which the majority of my research in Carson revolved.
Carson High School
For many Samoan youths, in addition to church and family, school is an
important social and cultural locus, as it is for most of their American peers. The
public high school is large and institutional looking from the outside, similar to many
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146
schools built in the early 1960s. It is a collection of yellowish-gray two story
buildings, a handful of one-story ones (library, cafeteria, auditorium), and a number
of more temporary structures that are collectively enclosed by a high fence
surrounding the school’s perimeter. Like many schools in warm weather climates, it
is exposed to the elements. The lockers are outside, there are no enclosed hallways to
speak of and the students spend all of their time between classes outdoors. Each of
the pale blue-doored classrooms opens towards the large courtyards that separate the
buildings. Despite the impersonal appearance of the school, the student body has a
generally warm and friendly feeling to i t .
It is a large and ethnically diverse school. In 1999 it had 3,058 students
ethnically dispersed among Latinos (40.9%), Filipinos (25.6%), African-Americans
(18.4%) Whites (5.5%), and Pacific Islanders (6.7%) who are almost exclusively
Samoans, and the rest of the students come from a variety of smaller ethnic groups.
This ethnic breakdown does not mirror the census breakdown too closely unless you
adjust for age. For example, the Latinos, Filipinos, Samoans, and other new
immigrant groups are overly represented in the younger population, because of their
larger family sizes on average and the generally youthful profile of the migrants
themselves, whereas the White population is dwindling and aging. The school is well
aware of this multiculturalism and of the language problems that sometimes
accompany new immigrants. They claim that 41% of their student body use a
language other then English in the home, and they go to great efforts to promote the
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147
cultural diversity of the campus through numerous lunchtime festivals that take place
throughout the spring, and lead to some good-natured cultural competitiveness
between the various groups.
Although many friendships are drawn along ethnic lines, and one boy walked
me through the ethnic mapping of the central quad during lunch hour one day to
show me just how clear those boundaries can be, friendships also transcend these
boundaries, particularly when a school activity is involved. A small sample drawn
from my surveys showed that teenage girls are more likely to have diverse groups of
friends than the boys, in terms of both gender and ethnicity. In a question that asked
them to name the gender and ethnicity of their five closest friends, half of the boys
listed only other males, and, similarly, half listed the ethnicities of four or five out of
five friends as Samoan. On the other hand, only one girl listed all of her friends as
female and none of them claimed only to have Samoan friends. Table 4.4
summarizes the survey results of this question.
Table 4.4
Carson Friendships According to Gender and Ethnicity (by %)
Gender Ethnicity
Same Opp. Total Samoan Non-Samoan Total
Male 84 16 100 78 22 100
Female 59 41 100 59 41 100
To be fair, my perceptions of ethnic exclusivity were influenced by the fact
that my primary regular involvement with the Samoan students on the campus was
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148
through the Pacific Islander club and their activities. On the other hand, the club was
very popular with the Samoan students on the campus and at least casual
participation was almost universal among the Samoan students and therefore a cross-
section of Samoan students drawn specifically from that group had the potential to be
more or less cross-sectionally representative. In fact, participation in the group was
so desirable that the club’s faculty sponsor was able to make membership in the club
contingent as leverage on school-related non-club performance and behaviours. For
example, students who failed to maintain a C average were deemed ineligible to
participate on fieldtrips or to practice for the school-wide lunch hour performance for
Pacific Islander Cultural Day, a highly prestigious social event ™ perhaps a vestige
of his own experiences as a high profile college football player at the University of
Arizona.
Northern California (Bay area: then and now)
While Carson may define its modem origins by emphasizing its incorporation
in 1968, the Bayview, Sunnyvale, Visitacion Valley, Excelsior, and Ingleside
neighbourhoods where most of the Bay Area Samoans live have long been integral
components of the city of San Francisco, and their histories are tied directly to the
history of that city. Although a part of the city, these areas to the South of the core
are not on the tourist track and offer little of interest to non-residents. They have
some of the same housing characteristics of the rest of the city, such as the high
density attached housing that characterizes much of the city’s residences, but
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149
interspersed with these homes and small businesses are industrial sites, shopping
malls, and a handful of housing projects. (*Photo of neighbourhood forthcoming)
Just as Carson is a city bounded by its freeways, so too are the Samoan
neighbourhoods in San Francisco. Although there are an estimated 3,768 people of at
least partial Samoan ancestry in the city of San Francisco, they are not evenly
dispersed throughout the city.1 0 The vast majority of the Samoans live in the area
between the 280 freeway on the west and the water to the East. The area is bounded
in the north by downtown and by higher rent areas but in the south the population
spills over into cities like Brisbane, South San Francisco, San Bruno, and Daly City.
In fact 78% of all the Samoans in San Francisco live in the three zip codes that cover
this area between the 280 and San Francisco Bay (Bayview/Flunter’s Point,
Visitacion Valley/Sunnydale, and Excelsior/Ingleside in descending order). These
areas are among the poorest in the city as evidenced by the fact that they are three of
the top four zip codes to receive the most governmental support, the other
neighbourhood being the Mission, which is ranked second on this list (San Francisco
Department of Human Services 1998). The Samoan population in the Mission is
negligible. Although these three areas mentioned above have the highest
10
This estimate is based on the number of individuals who claimed to be only Samoan (2,311) and an
estimate of how many claimed to be of partial Samoan ancestry. Since Samoans are 60% of the entire
population of Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders (NHOPI) in San Francisco (3,8440), I
projected this same percentage onto the 2,429 individuals who claim partial NHOPI ancestry (no data
on partial Samoans specifically could be had). This sum (1,457) when combined with the 2311 full
Samoans is 3,768. The method is imprecise since different Pacific ethnicities are more likely to be of
mixed ancestry than others, but it is an attempt to reflect the size of the local Samoan population more
accurately.
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150
concentration of Samoans, their numbers are not that large in either absolute or
relative terms. Bayview has the most highly concentrated Samoan population in the
city and even there the numbers make up just under 3.5% of the total population
(2000 US Census), such that referring to them as “Samoan neighbourhoods” may be
a misnomer that conceals the fact that they are but one minority group amidst other
larger ones. See Figure 4.7 for a map of the San Francisco Samoan community.
As with Long Beach in the south, the naval shipyard was the first big draw to
the city. Many Samoans who moved to Hunter’s Point for the work found homes in
the cheerless but low-cost housing erected by the navy in areas adjacent to the yards.
The neighbourhood immediately surrounding the shipyards (Hunter’s Point and
Bayview), though sparsely populated before the war, quickly became a largely
African American neighbourhood, as it remains to this day. This population of
African Americans was part of the Southern exodus to Northern industrial cities that
took place mid-twentieth century. After the war many people were laid off and the
naval shipyards eventually closed entirely in the early 1970s.
Many African-Americans chose to stay in San Francisco, but their limited
skills and savings combined with the racist housing and employment practices in the
rest of the city kept the African-Americans largely isolated in this region and under
employed. This combination of factors led to the rapid decline of the neighbourhood.
Indeed the only other pockets of African-Americans in the city- the Western
Addition and the Filmore District- were only left vacant after the Japanese-
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Figure 4.7
Samoans in San Francisco
' ' i : i
y > u-
P P IX
i /i
mmm
fraM M sSM M
■ j , /
IS Merced
’ -.u |
v
l-
m m tit
A pprox. 12 mUegaurn&a.,
Map and data are from the 2000 US Census.
H ighest concentrations
o f Samoans
Zfe.Cotte
Meijghlwiirhood
94112 Excelsior
94124 Bayview/
Hunter’s Point
94134 Sunnydale/
Visitacion
Valley
152
Americans, who had previously lived there, were sent to internment camps during
the war, the result of yet another discriminatory policy (Hippier 1974).
Today the neighbourhood seems to conform to filmic stereotypes of the
ghetto. Many of the houses and businesses in the area are in varying states of
disrepair, often graffittied and with bars on the window. The residential streets are
often littered with garbage and with the shells of rusted inactive automobiles. There
are lots of comer liquor stores, and high traffic comers are crowded with young men
hanging out together throughout the day. And yet, though there were numerous
crimes in the neighbourhood throughout my year of fieldwork, and I was often the
only person in the neighbourhood who was not a member of an ethnic minority, I
never felt personally threatened or in danger during my time there. The more time I
spent in the area the more friends I made and the more my sense of security
increased, a feeling that was intensified by the overt protectiveness of my Samoan
friends. Often when I would go visiting, especially at night, young Samoan men
were told to monitor my car during the visit and to accompany me to it at the end of
the evening.
At the time that Arthur Hippier (1974) wrote his ethnography of Hunter’s
Point, focusing on the role that female driven single parent socialization has had on
the development of African-American notions of masculinity, he claimed that the
ethnic breakdown of the San Francisco Housing Authority’s (SFHA) Hunter’s Point
housing project was 95% African American and 5% Caucasian and Samoan, a
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153
number which he suggests is more or less reflective of the surrounding
neighbourhood. African-Americans are still the largest ethnic group in this area.
They comprise upwards of half of the entire population and are twice as numerous as
Asians, the next largest ethnic group. According to the most recent data released by
the SFHA, which regrettably, I learned after several exchanges with individuals there
could not be further broken down into individual housing projects or more precise
ethnic groups, is 42.5% African American, 28.3% Asian/Pacific Islander, 19.2%
Caucasian, and 8.6% Hispanic (http://www.ci.sf.sfha). The percentages for Section 8
housing, which is state subsidized vouchers for private rentals, follows a similar
breakdown. These numbers are particularly disheartening when one considers that
African Americans make up less than 8% and Samoans make up just 0.3% of the
entire population of the city.
Bay view/Hunter’s Point, in particular, feels both separate from and integral
to the rest of the city. It shares many city-wide traits such as its hilly terrain, fast-
changing weather and general scarcity of private residential space, but it is also a
socio-economic and ethnic isolate sitting fittingly on a peninsula. From this vantage
point the entire cityscape is revealed, a view that is unavailable from most of the
city’s other neighbourhoods. The perspective is that of an outsider looking in, the
same view that one gets crossing the Bay Bridge from Oakland, in sight of the city
but not a part of it.
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154
Bay Area Samoans
The first Samoans who came to the Bay area followed a similar pattern to
those who moved to other parts of California. They came as part of the navy or to
work in agriculture.1 1 They settled throughout the region and there are now pockets
of Samoans in the South Bay cities of San Jose and East Palo Alto and smaller
clusters in East Bay suburbs like Hayward and Oakland. Since then they have
expanded to even further removed suburbs like Vallejo, Stockton and Sacramento,
but initially most of them settled in San Francisco and the communities just south of
it. Those with moderate incomes were able to buy homes in Daly City, Brisbane, San
Bruno and South San Francisco, and many of those same families are still in these
locations.
Eventually, however, the economy changed in these settlement areas. The
shipyards shut down in the early 1970s, and the Silicon Valley and the Peninsula (the
area on the West Side of San Francisco Bay between San Francisco and San Jose)
developed, turning agricultural areas into residential ones and driving up housing
costs so that few new arrivals could afford to settle in those areas and, if so, certainly
not as home buyers.1 2 Instead, many new arrivals are forced to seek housing in the
1 1 An interesting side note can be found in Laolagi’s 1961 study of the San Francisco Samoan
community in which he reports that 35% of those surveyed claimed that the cool climate was what
they liked the most about San Francisco. They chose climate over other options such as high wages,
good jobs, and education (Laolagi 1961:85).
1 2 Cathy Small (1997) reported a similar home ownership pattern among Tongans living in San
Mateo, a suburb to the south of San Francisco.
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highly urbanized but not necessarily desirable neighbourhoods that have relatively
high crime rates where the SFHA projects are located.
Another factor that adversely affected the Samoans in particular was the 1978
implementation of California State Proposition 13. The proposition arose in response
to rapidly rising property taxes in the late 70s. The outcome is that property taxes
were rolled back to their 1975 rates, and fixed at increases that could not exceed two
percent per year unless the property changed hands or had dramatic improvements
made to it, at which point it was re-assessed. The impact on the Samoans was two
fold. Firstly, as this freezing of rates dramatically reduced local government
revenues, many Samoans who had been employed by city and county governments
as police officers, park workers, Caltrans workers, and so on, were laid off,
particularly those who lived in areas with lower-valued homes. Secondly, those who
have sought to buy new homes, such as young people, new immigrants and those
with lower incomes, face the double burden of paying the newly inflated prices as
well as the proportionately higher property taxes that go with that new home. The
real winners of this proposition over the long term are the homeowners who have
been able to hold onto their homes which they have owned since before 1978, not
new buyers or those who live in less affluent counties where services have declined
continuously since the proposition passed. (San Francisco Chronicle October 10,
1985)
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This combination of factors led to a shift in dispersal patterns as San
Francisco itself may have become yet another stepping stone on the migration
westward following suit with American Samoa and Hawaii. The ideal now is that the
SFHA housing remain a temporary housing solution that families use to accumulate
enough savings to relocate to cheaper and safer suburban communities that
increasingly already include other Samoans and Samoan churches. This is only the
ideal, however, as far too many families, according to critical community members,
have accepted what was once viewed as a temporary solution of SFHA housing as a
satisfactoiy and permanent solution to their chronic financial difficulties. Writing in
1971, a Samoan researcher commented that “the number of families receiving public
welfare benefits and unemployment compensation appear to be very small in
proportion to the size of the community” because “Samoans look at welfare
compensation as an insult or loss of family dignity” (Laoloagi 1971: 82). Whether
this was accurate at the time Fa’atui Laolagi wrote it or not is irrelevant perhaps, but
certainly Samoans are strongly represented in public assistance in San Francisco
now. Even ten years earlier, in 1961, another Laolagi, this time Aliifaatui Laolagi
reported that 27 of 40 families interviewed rented public housing (1961:78). As one
informant, a professional male in his mid 30s, put it, reflecting the views of several
other successful Samoans, too many families have become complacent about their
circumstances, living in the projects. What was meant to be a transitional solution
has become a multi-generation reality wherein “People come here from the islands,
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get a place to live and a welfare check and they feel like they’ve made it.” Though as
we shall see later, according to some this appearance of socio-economic stasis may
in fact be tied most closely to excessive participation in the cultural and economic
demands of the fa ’a Samoa more than it is to institutional constraints.
San Francisco remains an important location on the diasporic Samoan map,
however. The First Samoan congregational church in San Francisco where I
conducted significant fieldwork, for example, went to great lengths and considerable
additional expense to erect a permanent structure at a San Francisco address despite
the availability of much cheaper land in surrounding communities. Indeed there are
scores of Samoan churches of every possible denomination scattered throughout
these neighbourhoods, and the Sunday morning spectacle of the crowds of Samoan
parishioners— the women dressed either all in white with large broad-brimmed hats or
in colourfulpuletasis (traditional women’s two-piece dress: an ankle length tube
skirt with a matching short-sleeved tunic) and the men in their ‘ ie lavalavas (a
sarong-like wrap)— are powerful visual markers of the strength and vibrancy of this
community. It is also an interesting diasporic site because of the unique blend of the
earliest migrants, including many of those who were able to buy homes, and some of
the newest arrivals whose stays may be limited in time by their ability to save money
and move to the cheaper suburbs, while the middle group of immigrants is much less
strongly represented in the city itself. (* photos of girls in puletasis and boys in ‘ ies
forthcoming)
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Continuation High School
The bulk of my structured fieldwork took place at a San Francisco County
school administered by a Samoan Civic organization. For the purposes of this
dissertation I shall refer to it as Continuation High School (CHS). CHS had only
been in existence for a few years, but during that time it had changed locations
several times after arrangements had proven unsatisfactory when the school was
situated within the confines of a variety of public high schools. CHS found its
current home on the South-East campus of San Francisco City College. The venue
was ideally located, in the heart of the neighbourhoods that it served, only blocks
away from Oakdale and Third, a major local intersection. The facilities were well
equipped with relatively new classrooms, several computer labs, a small library, and
a large hall that could be used for assemblies and cultural events, as well as office
space to house the Samoan organization and its full time staff of three, along with a
few county-appointed administrators. This location had the added advantage of
isolating these students, most of whom had experienced some level of difficulty in
public schools in the past, from a larger student body in an effort to closely monitor
potentially antagonistic relations, a task that it was largely successful at achieving.
The building itself was typical of modem urban state college campuses. It was a
single large three-story concrete and glass building that occupied an entire city block.
Though not entirely without its charms, as evidenced by an indoor gardened
courtyard onto which the classrooms opened, its decor and furnishing were spartan
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for the most part and evoked function above all else. The building was rarely used
during the daytime other than by the high school students and the staff, but seemed
to have an active night class schedule. (* Photo of school forthcoming)
This manifestation of the school formed when a Samoan continuation school
merged with a similar institution that was predominantly African-American. The
administrators were mostly Samoans, and they maintained a good rapport with the
Samoan students, many of whom they were related to (indeed several students were
hired for part-time administrative assistant work after they graduated), but there were
no Samoan teachers in the school. This was true even though several other minorities
were represented in the staff of five teachers.1 3 The fact that there were Samoan
elders in positions of authority within the school but that there were no Samoans in
positions of instruction was symptomatic of a greater need in the community for
positive examples for youth beyond disciplinarian ones alone. The administrators
were aware of this deficit and were going to some effort to redress the problem.
Some of the teachers were better versed in Samoan culture than others, such as a
Math teacher who had been involved with the school in its various manifestations for
many years, and a popular young English teacher who made vigorous efforts to bring
some Pacific content into the curriculum, even arranging for a Samoan author to
come to the class to run a writing workshop.
1 3 Many community leaders consider the dearth of Samoan teachers to be a serious problem. To the
best of my knowledge there is only one Samoan teacher in the San Francisco Unified School district.
He’s a middle school teacher in Visitacion Valley.
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The enrollment fluctuated over the course of the year but was generally
around 80 students, about 60% of whom were Samoan. The students moved between
the various classrooms in ethnically integrated sections of about 15, staying together
as a group throughout the day. On breaks they tended to re-formulate according to
ethnic divisions, though there was still considerable interaction between groups.
There seemed little difference in the style of dress of the students. The boys all wore
their jeans very loose and low (called sagging) often with their boxer shorts showing,
and they usually wore t-shirts or aloha shirts with large jackets over the top which
were rarely removed. The girls mostly wore their jeans more tightly and like the boys
also favoured expensive name brand sneakers, and voluminous synthetic ski jackets.
The main accessories for most students were backpacks and portable compact disc
players that were often passed around among friends throughout the day until the
batteries eventually died. Many teachers allowed the cd players to be played as long
as the students were doing their work and weren’t disturbing others. The teachers in
general seemed to tend towards informal interaction and leniency with the students,
valuing their willing attendance in school as an important step towards completing
their studies. In essence, the appearance of the students was typical of the urban
African-American style of dress associated with the hip-hop music/fashion scene and
the differences between the ethnic groups seemed negligible in face of this greater
cultural homogenizer.
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1 6 1
Conclusion
In this chapter I have attempted to combine historic, statistical, and
descriptive data to provide some background information about Samoan origins and
subsequent diaspora. Because of the importance of setting the stage for the chapters
to follow, I paid most attention to the diasporic communities and their members
rather than to the specifics of migration itself.1 4 My purposes in so doing were two
fold, first because I feel it is important to give the reader a context in which to read
the actions of the specific informants we shall encounter and secondly, to supercede
presumptions of cultural authenticity based on how things work back in the Islands.
The youthful informants who drive this study should not be treated ahistorically by
any means, but it is hoped that this chapter will help to emphasize the importance
that their host environment plays in understanding the nature of their identities, a
theme that I shall explore in greater depth in the Part II of this dissertation.
14
Excellent works on the migration process from Samoa to New Zealand exist in abundance (cf.
Kallen 1982; MacPherson1990,1994; MacPherson and Macpherson 1999; Shankman 1976,1993)
and, while much fewer in number, there are also several excellent works concerning the American
Samoan migration (Ahlburg and Levin 1990; Franco 1990; Janes 1990; Lewthwaite, Mainzer, and
Holland 1973).
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P art II
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Chapter V
Constructing Identities:
Orientations to place, memories, and collective imaginings
Ethnographic Snapshot: Sunday Afternoon at Levi’ s
It’s about 1:30 on Sunday afternoon. We drive up Geneva Avenue, a wide
road lined with attached houses, fast food restaurants, and the massive Cow Palace,
home to trade shows and mega-concerts. In front of a cluster of shops with cluttered
display windows a number of well-dressed people are milling around, warmly
greeting one another on the broad sidewalk. We turn onto a crowded cul de sac to
look for parking in competition with several SUVs and vans that are packed full of
people.
We make our way towards the shop with the crowd in front of it. My friend
Sam, a gregarious Samoan in a bright aloha shirt and matching ‘ ie lavalava (a men’s
wrap) who seems to know everyone, is stopped a half dozen times on the way to the
shop, both by people on the street and by people who call out to him from their
parked vehicles. They greet him, often in English at first, out of courtesy for my
palagi (a person of European ancestry) presence, but then quickly switch to the
vowel and glottal-stop-laden language of their home islands. I understand just
enough Samoan to know that the conversation is about me at first— a series of quick,
bemused questions—before it moves on to more important family, church, or social
matters.
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We continue to weave our way through the crowd of large families— families
that are often led by a woman in a stark white or tapn-pattemed puletasi (a two piece
woman’s dress consisting of a long fitted skirt and a puffy-shouldered short-sleeve
tunic with a square neckline) invariably accessorized with an extravagant straw or
reed hat, and several unobtrusive children dressed in amalgams of Western and
Island dress (puffy ski jackets and the latest basketball shoes along with aloha shirts,
or short-sleeved white dress shirts and dress pants or solid dark ‘ies). The men chat
jovially with each other in small groups of two and three, their sport coats stretched
tightly across their broad shoulders, their white shirts bright against the lead sky and
the grey sidewalk.
As we make our way between greetings Sam is explaining to me who people
are, deftly connecting them to the people I already know or to places I’ve already
been. Along with these identifications is a discreet running commentary about how
he really feels about the person, their motives for inviting him to whatever social
engagement they have proposed and any juicy bits of gossip he has associated with
them. They are mostly cousins and aunties it seems.
Finally we reach the storefront. The sign painted on the window reads:
“Levi’s Market: Gift Shop: Groceries • Frozen Meats • Beer • Cigarettes • Music •
CDs • Island Clothing • Handicrafts • Accessories” We enter the store to boisterous
greetings from behind the cafeteria-style counter. “Where have you been Sam? We
haven’t seen you in so long”.
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The store itself looks like a cross between an ethnic supermarket, a
Polynesian souvenir shop, and a cafeteria. It is packed full of... stuff. Brightly
coloured fabrics, tailored clothes, shell necklaces, t-shirts, cds, cassettes, canned
foods, fresh baked breads and pies, a myriad of sumptuous smells of deep-fried food,
and lots of people talking animatedly with one another in Samoan.
Behind the counter is Levi himself fixing up “plates” for people that include
supasui (glass noodles with soy sauce marinated beef and greens), lu’au (taro leaves
and onions cooked in coconut cream), pisupo (corned beef), green bananas, various
fish, fried chicken, sosisi (sausages), and, of course, taro. They are called “plates”
but they are actually styrofoam boxes stuffed to overflowing with food that is then
charged according to weight. The price is high— around $9 a plate— but no one is
complaining about the price and no one could accuse Levi of skimping on the
portions.
We supplement our sagging dishes; the messiest items wrapped in aluminum
foil, with 500 ml bottles of water and make our way out to the car. It takes almost as
long to get back to the car as it did to come from it and now almost every exchange
is accompanied by a chuckle and a semi-incredulous, “You like Samoan food!?”
directed at me.
It is Sunday afternoon in San Francisco, and at no other point during the
week is the Samoan community more visible to the public.
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This Sunday afternoon meal is the most important social meal of the week
and it is called to’ona’i. Many close-knit churches will eat this meal together, often
at the church itself, at the Pastor’s house, or sometimes rotating through the
parishioners’ homes. However, for many, the meal, though still important, is a more
intimate family affair—keeping in mind that family may be loosely interpreted to
include many, many individuals. Although the family may eat “Samoan food”
several times a week in any case, the Sunday meal is always more extravagant. It is
common to eat only a small part of it at one sitting and to snack on the leftovers for
several days following. And, if you are lucky enough to be invited to a to’onai, it is
considered bad form if you aren’t sent home with a heaping plate after eating your
fill during the meal itself.
Those who believe that the uniqueness of Samoan culture is in jeopardy of
becoming absorbed into the mythical homogenizing American cultural behemoth
would be hard pressed to prove this point on Sunday afternoon at Levi’s, where the
Island culture is adapted and practiced with such seamless ease.
Introduction
In this chapter, the first to delve more deeply into the data that I gathered, we
shall seek to explore the identity construction process more closely. Through the
informants’ words I shall attempt to establish a framework for understanding how
Samoans see themselves and their place within their chosen home, the United States.
Towards that end I will begin by looking at the Samoan ethnos cape, a term
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introduced by Arjun Appadurai (1996), in an attempt to sketch out the key
components of that community across its diasporic manifestations. Next, I will
discuss the role that the imagination has played in Samoans’ collective constructions
of group identity: first the concrete and then the abstract construction of the
community as it were. I will then look at how the Samoans have inserted themselves
into the uniquely American multicultural pastiche. Finally, I will explore two
specific cultural rallying points: language and church, as examples of Samoan
culture adapting itself to a new setting.
The Samoan Ethnoscape
Although Arjun Appadurai’s theorizing can be criticized on the grounds of its
realistic applicability, his creativity often leads the debate in interesting new
directions and his notion of ethnoscape is a discursively useful one in this discussion.
Playing off of Manuel Castells’ idea of flows, though he never credits Castells with
the idea, Appadurai claims that ethnicity is one of five dimensions of global cultural
flows (along with media, technology, finance, and ideology). He then abbreviates
these terms and combines them with the suffix -scape, which “allows us to point to
the fluid irregular shapes of these landscapes’^ 1996:33). These terms are:
(D)eeply perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic, and
political situatedness of different sorts of actors: nation-states, multinationals,
diasporic communities as well as subnational groupings and movements
(whether religious, political, or economic), and even intimate face-to-face
groups, such as villages, neighborhoods, and families (ibid).
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Appadurai is intensely interested in de-tenitorialization and in the blurring of
boundaries and thus, ethnoscapes, specifically, describe, “the landscape of persons
who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees,
exiles, guest workers, and other moving groups and individuals constitute an
essential feature of the world” (ibid). According to Appadurai, ethnoscapes are the
“landscapes of group identity” and they are “profoundly interactive” (48).1
What I like about the use of this term is its dependence on temporally specific
consensus rather than on some sort of indelible objectivist truth. A culture, place,
history etc. is then, within reasonable limits, the product of its own past, only to the
extent that such a past is kept alive by those members who are perpetuating the
culture now. This subjective or positionally-defined sense of culture allows for
Samoan cultural expressions that take place in California to stand alone, rather than
depend on the culture of the homeland (though they may often refer to it)— in many
ways rendering irrelevant the debate on authenticity. My criticism of Appadurai’s
use of this term and of his writing in general is that although it cleverly illuminates
some current trends, it appears to blindly celebrate the infinite possibility of human
agency while often ignoring or dismissing structural constraints. Though there is
much movement of people, culture and information in the world and it has, to some
degree, led to a re-assessment of how we perceive such factors as space and time in
this context, there still remain many real barriers to those flows.
1 Appadurai’s ethnoscapes share many similarities to what James Clifford (1997) has referred to as
“traveling cultures” elsewhere.
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James Clifford (2000) is interested in the specific sites where these cultural
constructions take place. Borrowing from Stuart Hall, who was, in turn, borrowing
from Antonio Gramsci, Clifford describes these loci of cultural construction and re
construction as “articulated sites”2 . They are articulated in that, in the spirit of post
modernist playfulness, the word articulation enjoys a dual meaning. On the one
hand, they are specific places where people and groups come together and meet,
while they are also sites at which discourse about culture and identity is voiced.
Literally they are articulations (joints that are defined by the way they help disparate
pieces fit together) where articulations (voicings) occur. Such sites are cyborg rather
than organic, allowing them to configure, disconnect, and reconfigure for different
purposes, including different voices, as the situation demands; however they are still
fluid enough to accommodate cultural continuity too. Like the ethnoscape discussed
above, the articulated site supercedes claims of authenticity and implicitly recognizes
not only that tradition is malleable and impermanent now, but that it has always been
so, and without active and continuous attention to their propagation, ignored
elements of tradition have always been doomed to fall by the wayside (sometimes to
be forgotten, other times to be reconstituted later).
2 Clifford is writing specifically about “articulated sites of indigineity”. The indigenous model doesn’t
precisely fit the Samoan example, since they as a people are, for the most part, not struggling for
sovereignty or autonomy within the United States. However, their colonial history and the
assimilative pressures they undergo in their move off island render the general notion of articulated
sites valid here. In the Samoan case they might more accurately, though less poetically, be described
as “articulated sites of identity”.
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What then does the Samoan ethnoscape include, and where are its articulated
sites of identity?
These new theories define themselves according to flexibility, subjectivity,
and a conscious and continuous collective reification of the culture, rather than
viewing culture as primordial and unchanging. Because of the diasporic and
disjointed nature of contemporary Samoan culture, the theories are particularly
useful here.
This discussion of the Samoan ethnoscape from the perspective of California
Samoans will be presented in two stages. Before describing the venues and manners
through which Samoans living in California choose to express their cultural
allegiance, the ways in which they imagine their homeland and their culture must
first be established.
The ethnoscape includes more than just physical attributes. It also is
comprised of more abstract components, like sentiment and perception. For example,
by looking at a survey question asking informants what the best and worst things
about being Samoan are, we gain some valuable insights into some of the most
salient components of their Samoan identity3 . Refer to Table 5.1 for a summary of
these findings.
3 See Appendix for the complete survey. Results are based on answers to survey question II.8, a and b.
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Table 5.1
Summary of Survey Findings on the Best and Worst Aspects of Being
Samoan
Best Worst
Culture 27 Respect 8 People 17 Stereotypes 9
Family 5 Temperament 6
Church 3 Visibility 2
Language 2 Nothing 10
Miscellaneous 9 Rules 9 Discipline 5
People 13 Love 6 Corporal
Punishment
4
Strength 2 Culture
(tradition)
3
Miscellaneous 5 Nature 2
Other 8 Quality o f Life 3
Nature 2,
No Response 2
Miscellaneous 1
Total
Responses
48 Total
Responses
41
In an effort to analyze the qualitative findings from this component of the
survey, I employed a methodology developed by community psychologist Linda Hill
(1998) that requires the researcher to code and then sort the data. Using this
technique, the data are first broken down into single proposition statements, which
are entered into a database or spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel, and then
grouped according to common categories that are coded. If necessary these
categories can be further reduced to multiple levels of sub-categories. Once all the
data are entered and coded, they can be sorted using the spreadsheet program to
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provide statistical evidence regarding the occurrence of different types of statements.
The data can also be sorted according to age, gender, immigrant generation, or any
other headings that are entered into the spreadsheet to determine if a specific type of
respondent is more likely to make a certain type of statement. This methodology
provides a quick way to assess the general qualitative trends within a set of responses
and, although it still requires the researcher to label or code the types of statements, it
is inductive in that it allows the data to lead the theorizing and not the inverse. Using
this methodology the theorizing remains as close as possible to the informants’
words.
Among the “best things” answers, cultural statements comprised the largest
category, by far (27 of 48 total comments). Within that category ‘respect’ was easily
the leading sub-category (other sub-categories for ‘culture’ were ‘church’, ‘family’,
and ‘language’). There were several small categories (nature and quality of life), but
the second largest category was ‘people’ (13/48). Here the leading sub-category was
‘love’, which was often combined with ‘respect’ in answers, as in “the love and
respect”, though it was later divided into two declarative statements: “the love” and
“the respect” and tabulated accordingly. Although I discerned no clear pattern in
terms of the generation of the respondent from this admittedly small sample (48
responses), gender seemed to have some impact on the types of responses that
individuals had. For example, among the ten responses that I coded as ‘culture’ and
then sub-categorized as family, church, and language, nine were made by women
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while eight of thirteen responses that I coded as ‘people’, were made by men. It
would be interesting to see if these patterns hold up over a larger sample size and if
so, what implication it has regarding the influence of gender on perception of one’s
group.
Interestingly, although the most common short survey response was to
answer straightforwardly, “knowing your culture” or “the love and respect for each
other”, in interviews, people quickly moved on to more informal aspects of being
Samoan. For example, in response to a similar question: “What is the best thing
about being Samoan?” many stressed the sociability of other Samoans and their
eagerness to gather together as favourite group qualities. Isaiah (14), a third
generation boy from Pacifica, exuberantly offered:
I love the way they dance and they come together on any occasion like a
wedding a funeral something like that, like a dance or something. Everybody
just gives out positive vibes. I love the food and I just love, like, just the way
people are.
Another informant, Victoria, a thirty-year-old San Francisco woman, alluded to the
social exclusivity of Samoan group members, who, while marginalized in many
aspects of their daily lives, are insiders, with specific prerogatives of shared
experience amongst each other.
I love the inside jokes, the things that everybody who’s Samoan would know.
I don’t know how to explain it but; there’s that underlying inside joke or
there’s always a funny and it’s like, I know and she would know but you
probably wouldn’t know unless you knew, unless you hung out with us.
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The responses to the “worst things about being Samoan,” were also revealing.
The negative images that one has about his identity, or, in many cases, how he feels
others view him, can still provide important new brush strokes to our Samoan
ethnoscape. For example, three of forty-two responses claimed that cultural tradition,
specifically fa ’ alavelaves and the obligations of the fa ’a Samoa, were the worst
things about being Samoan. This seems to imply that/a ’alavelaves are important
enough elements (because of their frequency or their demanding nature?) to Samoans
as to be viewed as onerous by some. The variety of recurring responses was much
wider for the “worst” than it was for the “best” questions discussed above. The three
most dominant categories were ‘people’ (17), ‘rules’ (9) which was broken down
into roughly equal parts: discipline in general and corporal punishment in particular,
and the ‘nothing’ category (10). The ‘nothing’ category seemed to represent a
deliberate effort not to portray their own culture negatively. While only two of the
forty-eight informants left the answer blank in the “best” question, close to 25% (10
of 41) of the responses to the “worst” question were coded as ‘nothing’.
Furthermore, eight of these ten ‘nothing’ coded responses, significantly, were not left
blank but instead were filled out with responses like: “nothing to me”, “none”, and
“don’t have one yet”.
I divided ‘people’, the largest category, (17) into three sub-categories:
‘stereotypes’ (9), ‘temperament’ (6), and ethnic ‘visibility’ (2). That the stereotypes
ranked so high on the scale is a strong indication that Samoan youth perceives itself
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to be judged broadly and to be discriminated against by society, and that this weighs
heavily on many of them. The ‘temperament’ finding is also interesting because it
shows how the same factor, sociability basically, that so many found to be a strength
of the community, the affability, camaraderie, and playfulness, can also work against
the community in the form of gossip, pettiness, and emotional (and sometimes
physical) volatility. Turning again to the interviews, we hear the same themes of
gossip and volatility mentioned in the surveys elaborated in the words of eighteen-
year-old Sammy, a third generation, half Samoan half Filipino boy from San
Francisco:
Negative: I can say that it’s the Samoan youth. You know, a lot of us is trying
to be bigger than the next person. We talk about each other a lot, which is not
good. That’s what causes the conflict between us... And just a lot of
misunderstandings as far as out on the streets.
Now that I have established some of the ways that Samoans imagine the
content of their culture, I shall explore the physical expressions of this content in
order to complete this Samoan ethnoscape.
The stateside Samoan community does not conform to many of the classic
assumptions one might maintain about the nature of an ethnic community. As I have
discussed earlier, the combination of the dispersed housing of Southern Californian
developments and the comparatively small absolute numbers of Samoans has lent
them a relatively anonymous social presence. Similarly noting the overall invisibility
of the Samoan community in Los Angeles, Stephen Koletty (2000) describes some of
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the bigger issues that affect the study of small ethnic groups in newer American
cities:
The ethnic landscapes of urban areas pose distinct challenges for
interpretation. There is something there already. The city itself presents a
landscape incorporating the values of the society that built it. Immigrant
groups must fashion their own space within the pre-existing urban structure
(90).
In an attempt to describe what they refer to as an “ethnoburb,” the Atlas of
Southern California (1996) employs an innovative mapping technique, which seeks
to establish a visual imprint of what may otherwise remain largely invisible groups.
Using the example of the Chinese population, they superimposed maps that showed
concentrations of Chinese doctors and Chinese restaurants over the Chinese housing
density map. Through the combined information from these maps, they were able to
establish not just where that specific group lived, but where their economic and
social attentions lay. In this instance the two overlapped considerably and one could
now say, with some authority, which specific neighbourhoods not only house, but
also truly represent that ethnic community. However, such visual representation
techniques would be ineffective in describing the Samoan community because the
number of Samoan businesses is so small— a shop here, a restaurant there, a few
churches over there. One possible exception to this might be the Sunnydale
neighbourhood of Geneva Avenue in San Francisco where population density is, not
surprisingly, more concentrated than it is in the Southern California suburbs. Within
a ten block radius, there are two stores/restaurants (Levi’s being one of them),
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several Samoan churches, two middle schools with comparatively large Samoan
populations, a Samoan civic organization, and a San Francisco Housing Authority
run housing project that is home to a number of Samoan families. Even there
however, Samoans are hardly the majority, as the neighbourhood is largely African-
American with some Filipinos and Latinos. In this suburban organized city even the
use of the term neighbourhood is somewhat misleading if one carries the classic
assumptions that have gone with that term.
Visibly, the Samoan communities are largely indistinguishable from the
greater neighbourhoods in which they are located. This is not to say that there are no
Samoan specific sites within these communities, such as shops and churches, but
rather that these sites and spaces only take on the importance of articulated sites of
identity at certain times, and otherwise are often lost in forgettable suburban strip
malls or indistinctive places of worship that are sometimes shared with non-Samoan
congregations. Stephen Koletty (2000) does give some examples of Samoan homes
distinguishing themselves from their suburban California neighbours through the
cultivation of exotic plants in their yards and through their occasional use of their
garages as quasi-traditional meeting spaces, but these practices leave little visual
impact on the greater neighbourhood.
However at certain, not infrequent, times, Samoan cultural expressiveness
swells as community members gather together to transform generic spaces into
Samoan specific places (to borrow from Doreen Massey 1994). These Samoan
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spaces are created through events that bring community members together, such as
church services, fa ’alavelaves (for weddings, funerals, and the passing of titles),
fundraisers, cultural performances, family nights, sporting events, Sundays at Levi’s,
and family meals. It is through these space transformative congregations that the
community re-creates itself, whether they occur in Los Angles, San Francisco, or
Samoa itself. This last is justifiably included in the analysis of the diasporic Samoans
because even though I do not presume that the Islands are dependent on such
congregations to perpetuate themselves, the role that the Islands play for the
diasporic Samoans still often hinges on congregations. Many of the visits that the
diasporic informants took to Samoa were ostensibly to attend such congregations: a
funeral, a church dedication, a transfer of title and so on. Diasporic Samoa then is not
so much a specific physical space as it is a series of temporal gatherings. It is a
culture of congregations.
Constructing Identities
Stuart Hall (1990) describes identity not as a product but as a process that is
never complete and one that is “always constituted within, not outside
representation” (392) a notion that he concedes is provocative because it appears to
challenge the authenticity of cultural and ethnic claims despite the fact that it is
really allowing them more latitude for expression. This perspective is useful in the
Samoan example because it seems to allow for both a multiplicity of cultural
identities and to allude to a selectivity of that expressiveness, in which its producers
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carefully weigh and measure the anticipated reception by both their own ethnic
group members and by outsiders. This notion of self and imposed labeling is straight
from the classical identity canon as described by Erik Erikson. He writes:
Identity formation employs a process of simultaneous reflection and
observation, a process taking place on all levels of mental functioning, by
which the individual judges himself in the light of what he perceives to be the
way in which others judge him in comparison to themselves and to a
typology significant to them; while he judges his way of judging him in the
light of how he perceives himself in comparison to them and to types that
have become relevant to him (1968:22-23).
What Hall and Erikson are effectively addressing is the place of positionality in the
discussion of identity. As Hall writes, “We all write and speak from a particular
place and time, from history and a culture which is specific. What we say is always
‘in context’ positioned'' (1990:392). I shall now explore some of the ways that
Samoans have sought to represent themselves and their culture both outwardly and
amongst themselves, in California at the turn of the millennium.
Imagining a Samoan Identity
One of the primary goals of this study was to find out how Samoa is
constructed in the minds of the young informants with whom I spoke. The
importance that it holds in their imaginations is, of course, of high interest, but
equally interesting is the determination of who and what the architects of that
imagining are.4
4 When I write of imagination, collective imaginings and so forth I am, of course, short-handing the
body of ideas first introduced by Benedict Anderson in his landmark work, Imagined Communities
(1993). In it he argues for a specific chronology of the emergence of modem nation states. He
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As I see it, in the Samoan example, there are essentially three key sources to
this imaginary. The most important source is still perhaps parents and close family
members, who remain primary socializers. These figures are key perpetuators of the,
often nostalgic, depiction of Samoa either through their own memories of childhood
spent in Samoa or through their willingness to spread the stories that were shared
with them from other family members. One of the key points here is that virtually all
of the Samoan youth were in close contact with several family members who were
either directly from Samoa or who maintained active involvement with it, such that,
although idealized depictions of the place as a slow-paced paradise, where nobody
has to worry about food or shelter, and where neighbours help each other out
continue to abound, these images are tempered by the real memories of the struggle
for jobs, the damaging social impact of gossip and rumour-mongering in small
village communities, the lack of employment, health, and educational opportunities
in the islands, and so on. The second main source is found in the personal
experiences of the informants; either through having visited or lived in the Samoas,
or through their participation in various cultural activities in their overseas
communities, such as church services, fa ’alavelaves, fundraisers, and Sunday
contends that it was through “print-capitalism” that individuals first came to think of themselves (i.e.
to imagine themselves) as sharing a collective consciousness. Anderson’s work is of limited direct
usefulness in the case of Samoa and other post-colonial countries that attained independence since the
1950s because his theory was developed to fit a specific time period (the late IS4 1 Century) and a
specific location (the recently independent New World), and it is poorly adapted to addressing the
profound impact that current trends such as transnationalism and information technologies have had
on nation-building, citizenship, and identity. Nevertheless, as far as theorizing the psychosocial
impetus behind large groups of people thinking of themselves as sharing cultural traits in a way that
distinguishes them from other groups, and that carries with it notions of sovereignty, his introduction
of the term “imagination” is useful to my argument.
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afternoons at Levi’s. The third source is found in the orientalist constructions of
Samoa and Samoans as told by the media and in the stereotyped assumptions they
feel that their peers hold about Samoans. These first two shall be discussed at greater
length in this chapter and the third shall be fleshed out in the next chapter on
performing identities.
Imagined Versus Remembered Identities
One of the most salient differences to emerge between the Southern and
Northern California Samoans centered on the temporal distance of their relationship
to the homeland. By and large, the Los Angeles area Samoan youth were much
further removed from the lived experiences of the Islands than were the Samoan
youth of urban San Francisco. As Table 2.2 showed, the difference in the average
generation of the informants was significant between the two communities (from an
average of 2.61 generations at Carson High School in Southern California to an
average of 1.64 generations at the Continuation school CSS, in San Francisco).
Further analysis of survey findings expanded on this trend and emphasized the
differing extent of active commitment to the Islands by the two groups.
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Table 5.2
Time Spent in Samoa
Lived In Samoa Visited Samoa Never Visited Total
Area % % Avg. # % %
(Number) (Number) visits (Number)
San Francisco1 46% 35% 2.55 19% 100%
(n= 26) (12)
(9) (5)
Carson 12.5% 37.5% 1.67 50% 100%
(n= 16) (2) (6) (8)
As Table 5.2 shows, the percentage of young people who were bom in Samoa
or who have lived there, at some point in their lives, for at least a year was
significantly higher in San Francisco (46%) than in Carson (12.5%). Also, even
though the percentages of respondents who had visited Samoa was about the same
between the two groups, the absolute number of visits for that subset was
significantly higher in the San Francisco group. Finally, the percentage of individuals
who had never visited Samoa was more than twice as high for respondents from
Southern California than it was for Northern California respondents.
During the early years of my studies all of my research in the Samoan
community took place in Southern California, and it was during that period that I
developed a hypothesis about the nature of youth identity formation for this group. I
theorized that, despite developing a much more nuanced sense of what it means to be
Samoan over time, initially, at least, the diasporic Samoan youth’s search for identity
1 For both Tables 5.2 and 5.4 the San Francisco sample includes fourteen students from CSS and
twelve miscellaneous Samoan teens.
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might draw on some of the same orientalist and popular culture references that non-
Samoans are familiar with, such as the dancer/performer or warrior/athlete
stereotypes. Samoa itself, meanwhile, was painted as a lush landscape that offered
easy living, an abundance of food and a suitably dramatic backdrop for the exploits
of heroic ancestors. Such popular beliefs were reinforced, in varying degrees, by the
nostalgic idealized reminiscing of their parents and grandparents, and, as such, stood
in stark paradoxical contrast to the harsh and monotonous struggle of the urban and
suburban settings in which they now resided in California.
So compelling did I find this hypothesis that I placed it at the center of my
grant proposals as I sought funding for my dissertation. However, what I found as I
moved north was that, although such lines of questioning were useful in Carson, in
San Francisco they proved to be largely irrelevant. For the Samoan youth of San
Francisco, Samoa was not so much an imagined homeland as it was a remembered
one.
One way in which this difference in orientation was highlighted to me was
through survey results. It included questions that asked respondents what the best
and worse things about being Samoan were. While most students gave answers about
the importance of respect and language to their cultural identity for the “best”
category, and the use of corporal punishment and the pervasiveness of negative
stereotyping for the “worst” category; two recent arrivals gave distinctly different
types of answers (1s t generation girls aged 17 and 19). They listed the best things
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about being Samoan as “The beautiful Island” and “The beach and coconuts” and the
worst things as “the weather” and “hurricanes”. Clearly their conception of being
Samoan was still tied to the idea of being in Samoa.
Again drawing on Linda Hill’s (1998) quantitative/qualitative methodology
that sorts survey statements provided some interesting insight. In addition to coding
statements by theme and sub-theme, I coded a question that asked respondents to list
key differences between Samoa and the United States, as positive, negative or
neutral. Without initially concerning myself with where such impressions were
coming from, I was interested in finding out whether an idealized glorification of
Samoa was a prevalent sentiment (as I suspected it would be) and whether the
majority of feelings about the United States were critical or whether they embodied
the hopeful enthusiasm of the new immigrants. What I found was that most
statements described positive aspects of both the United States and Samoa (around
60% each) and while there were some negative comments about both places, there
were also a number of descriptive comments in which no clear value judgment was
implied. Most interesting of all was the fact that there was little significant statistical
difference between the frequencies with which respondents made positive, negative
or descriptive neutral statements about either Samoa or the United States (Table 5.3
shows these findings). Extrapolating the findings of the analysis of the survey
responses, I then mined semi-structured interview transcripts to find more eloquent
and elaborated quotes that reflected the frequencies of the sentiments expressed more
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tersely in the surveys, to ensure that I was using the most prevalent views to
represent the views of the group.
Table 5.3
Survey findings on Attitudes Towards U.S. and Samoa
Attitude Samoa U.S.
Statement (Number) % (Number) %
Neutral (9) 16 % (9) 20%
Negative (13) 23% (10) 22%
Positive (34) 61% (26) 58%
Total statements 56 45
Some of the informants had bleak assessments of life in the United States,
many of which centered on the demands of living in a cash economy. The words of
an eighteen-year-old boy who had lived in American Samoa until the age of eleven
bluntly address the financial fragility of his family living in the Sunnydale San
Francisco Housing Authority settlement.
Over here, you shouldn't even come out of the house. It's just another bad day
for you.. .just working and working. Over here if you don't work: no food and
you can't feed your family. Over here without money you can't eat or sleep.
But over there if you don't got no food, just walk right up on beside your
house and cut some bananas and there you go. I would live over there again
but over here in America is the future.
This boy, who was still in high school, was also the primary wage earner in his
single parent home. He was supporting his mother, his sister, and three younger
children with his night security guard income, so his experiences were somewhat
more extreme than those of many of his peers. His family was also very committed
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186
to their Pentecostal church, which had provided much needed food and support to his
family when they were in crisis. Seeking such services through churches rather than
through governmental agencies, or supplemental to government agencies, is a long
time community practice.
In fact, a community needs assessment of the Southern California Samoan
community that was conducted by the Asian American Mental Health Research
Center in 1977 found precisely the same tendency. The report stated that, “charity
and sharing are values highly regarded by Samoans, especially since the
commodities and services thus rendered circulate primarily within the
community”(21). However, they found that some services were much more highly
used by community members than others. Important community institutions like the
church and the extended family were the chief sources of support for most people
while secular civic organizations and public monies went largely under utilized. The
strength of the churches and the family lies in internal networking rather than in
external liaison, and, as such, these organizations are poorly suited to address
significant community needs like employment and improved social mobility. But
because these organizations are familiar and have been successful at serving other
needs, people have been reluctant to move beyond them. Accordingly, getting the
community to utilize existing government monies or programs or to utilize the
scattering of secular Samoan civic organizations were among the report’s chief
recommendations.
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Many informants spoke of Samoa in positive terms that emphasized the
friendliness and lack of pretension of the islanders alluding to their freedom from
materialism and from the social problems associated with urban living. Mautu, a
second-generation sixteen-year-old boy from Richmond, in the San Francisco area,
expressed an opinion that reflected this attitude:
I like the way they live, over there [in Samoa]. They’ re like more free and
stuff. You don't really have to worry about no violence going on or like
you're going to die or something. Everybody knows each other and they get
along well. But over here, it's like people worry about what kind of clothes
they wear and how to approach people.
However, most presented balanced arguments that were descriptive and
reasoned, invariably referring to the abundance and quality of opportunities,
employment, education, health and diversion in the United States in comparison to
Samoa. Perhaps this is an instance in which the shorthand of the surveys is more
descriptive than the more elaborated quotes drawn from the semi-structured
interviews.
Some spoke earnestly about the drawbacks of the Samoan life, such as this
second generation seventeen-year old boy from San Francisco who said, “It’s harder,
I mean real hard to find a job in Samoa”. A third generation sixteen-year old girl
from Los Angeles stated simply, “Samoa: beautiful rural landscapes and hard rural
living”. A third generation seventeen-year old boy from Los Angeles stated simply,
“A lot of other races [in the U.S.].” His use of the word, “other” is interesting here in
that it suggests both the rightful place of Samoans within that mix and the threat that
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this diversity may hold for Samoan culture and its survival. A fifteen-year-old girl in
Los Angeles used Samoa as a foil against which to comment on the vulgarity of
American materialism. She wrote, “People in Samoa value more things like
happiness, love, and peace, rather than just money.” And yet, it may be that some of
the shortest contributions, particularly those that directly contrasted the two countries
were the most powerful because they effectively spoke volumes. One first generation
nineteen-year-old girl from San Francisco stated with choppy directness, “Samoa:
Free food. US: Bill. Samoa: Free houses. US: payment. Samoa: No worry about
tomorrow. US: job”.
Having established that the general orientation to Samoa was more of a
realistic and measured one than it was an idyllic or fanciful one is an important
finding, and one that is contrary to what I had anticipated. Some of the quotes used
to demonstrate this conclusion reveal elements of the construction of Samoa in the
imaginations of the young informants; but that picture remains incomplete, in part,
because that picture is ever-changing, as I shall illustrate in the next two sections.
The Samoan Place in the American Pastiche
The Samoan experience in the United States has changed over the years and
across various locations and generations. While the general attitude of Samoans
towards American society seems to be one influenced by immigrants’ optimism,
despite trying social circumstances, a racial consciousness has also emerged,
particularly among youth whose families immigrated in the earliest waves of the
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189
1950s and who were born and raised in the United States. As Paul Gilroy puts it, in
his discussion of how Afro-Caribbean youth are helping to re-shape what it means to
be British— a culture which is sometimes hostile to their inclusion: “Blacks born,
nurtured and schooled in this country are, in significant measure, British even as
their presence redefines the meaning of the term” (1991:154). Similarly, Samoans
are seeking to find acceptance into American society provided that that society
includes principles that favour cultural plurality instead of an American cultural
monolith. They want to be American, but on Samoan terms, as it were.
There are several factors that have helped to shape the Samoan ethnic
integration strategy. Some are the result of circumstance, such as the mode of
incorporation. Others are imposed by the greater society, which has often sought to
racialize and label non-white Americans. And some are the result of deliberate
design and self-promotion by the Samoans themselves, who have recognized and
applied principles of ethnic brokering that they see other American ethnic groups
employing.
Modes of Incorporation into American Culture and Society
The decisions regarding the form and venue for cultural expression do not
exist in a vacuum, nor are they the design of Samoans alone but in many ways they
are shaped by the climate of the host community. Alejandro Portes and Min Zhou
(1993) talk of the moment of an ethnic group’s entry into a new host environment as
playing an important role in determining that group’s potential for acceptance and
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social mobility. They speak of this early transition of the group as the “mode of
incorporation” and they state that, “(it) consists of the complex formed by the
policies of the host government, the value and prejudices of the receiving society,
and the characteristics of the coethnic community” (83). As there is not a singular
homogeneous American space that all of the Samoan communities have moved into,
these factors have differentially impacted the various communities into which
Samoans have settled. I shall briefly look at each of these three factors: government
policies, social climate of host country, and coethnic community, and consider how
each affects Samoan communities in Northern and Southern California.
The policies of the host government are of some interest here, because,
American Samoans experience no structural constraints to their movement into the
United States (as U.S. nationals they enjoy all the rights of full citizens except the
right to vote in general elections) whereas, those individuals from Independent
Samoa must pursue more conventional legal immigrant paths to enter the United
States. These latter Samoans represent a more classic model of a transnational
community, in that borders and nationality are pragmatic issues that may limit their
freedom of movement.5 However, those coming from Independent Samoa have some
advantages over other Pacific Islanders in terms of access to the United States
because of their ability to activate ties with family members living in American
Samoa, and by way of these family ties, gain access to the United States. Regardless
5 See the discussion of diaspora and translocalism in the Theoretical Discussions chapter for more on
this topic.
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of these obstacles, there are many Independent Samoans in the United States, some
of whom are living and working there illegally. Their awareness of their tenuous
legal status may help to account for the perception that Samoans are reluctant to seek
out resources through official government agencies. As early as the 1980 census,
officially more than half of the Samoans (57%) living in the United States who were
bom outside of the United States, were bom in Independent Samoa (Ahlburg and
Levin 1990). One can only assume that with the inclusion of illegal immigrants the
Samoan American immigrants who are originally from Independent Samoa
constitute an even greater percentage of the entire community.
The experiences of these two groups living in the United States - legal and
illegal immigrants—are doubtless very different from one another in some key
institutional ways, even if their overall cultural and assimilative experiences are
more or less similar. The point, however, is moot as far as this study is concerned,
since, in my experience, people rarely specified which Samoa was their families’
place of origin let alone volunteered their legal immigrant status; thus I did not get a
clear sense of the differences between the two groups.6
The second key factor in the modes of incorporation model is the “values and
prejudices of the receiving society”. This factor addresses the potential conflict
between the group’s identity, as it is externally ascribed by the host society, in
6 A study of the differences and similarities between these two groups, although it might be difficult
to undertake because of the likelihood that illegal immigrants would be reluctant to discuss their
immigrant status with researchers, would be an interesting direction of future research.
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contrast with their internally generated self-image. Mary Waters’ (1996) study of
Afro-Caribbean youth presents a good example of this conflict. She found that some
participants in her study struggled to define themselves according to their island or
immigrant roots. They did so despite, what they perceived of as, attempts by
mainstream society to define them primarily on racial terms, and along with all the
negative stereotypes that accompanied that labeling. She found that while some
youth had resisted this labeling, others were resigned to it. Some of them had even
embraced this racialized labeling, willingly aligning themselves with the faction of
African-American culture that defines itself as a subaltern group with a history of
empowered resistance and that takes an oppositional pride in remaining outside of
mainstream “white” society. How Samoans are racially perceived in the United
States is an interesting and highly debatable topic, and it is one that plays an
important role in Samoan perceptions of how they are received by the host
community. It is important not only in terms of how they are labeled but also how
they are mislabeled, as we shall see more in subsequent sections of this chapter and
in the Identity Expectations chapter that follows, in which I will further address
Samoan stereotypes.
The range of social climates for Samoan communities spans a great spectrum.
At one extreme is the more or less negative view of Samoans that is held by many in
Honolulu, where the Samoans are a large and visible group that along with native
Hawaiians occupies the lowest socio-economic rungs. Many Samoans, particularly
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those who live in small concentrations, live in relative anonymity and general
awareness of Samoa and its culture remains low or non-existent in much of the
country. As Andrea, a seventeen-year-old second generation girl said:
When my cousin moved to Texas he told me that nobody there knew about
Samoans. I felt like we didn’t’ even exist. This one teacher didn’t know what
Samoan was and made me point on the map where it was.
In other areas, even ones with small Samoan populations, the culture is sometimes
romanticized by the non-Samoan members of that community who may have few of
the negative stereotypes about the group that exist in areas where they are better
known. For example, Paul Shankman, the Samoan scholar, has recently done some
research within the small, military-based Samoan community in Colorado Springs,
that enjoys little discrimination from outsiders, but is looked upon rather as a
friendly and essentially middle class group known best for their cultural
performances.
In San Francisco and Los Angeles, the Samoan communities, if they are
known at all, seem to be most strongly associated with the working class
neighbourhoods where they are located or with the exploits of local athletes. As
Ramsey Shu and Adele Salamasima Satele noted in a 1977 study on Samoan
Community needs in Southern California, “unlike other ethnic enclaves, the Samoan
community is indistinguishable from the working class neighborhoods it is in the
midst o f’ (21). In Carson at least, Samoans seem publicly to be considered an
important part of that city’s multicultural mix and as such their unique cultural
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194
contribution is celebrated. For instance, virtually the entire student body
enthusiastically attended the Polynesian dance performance that the Pacific Islander
Club put on during the lunch hour at Carson High School, as part of the school
designated as Pacific Islander Heritage week. However, even in these cities with
relatively large Samoan populations, Samoan youth often feel culturally unknown,
and this anonymity weighs heavily on some of them. In response to a question that
asked her what the most important issues facing Samoan teens were, Telesia, a very
articulate fifteen-year-old third generation girl from San Francisco replied:
We’re not being recognized as much as every other culture. I think that if we
were being acknowledged, you know, that we do exist, because even in San
Francisco people haven’t heard of Samoans. I think that if people were aware
that we are Samoans and that we are part of the community and the city and
the state, that it would encourage a lot of the Samoans and it could probably
boost their self-esteem, because it’s pretty much a downfall when I hear that
people don’t even know where we come from.
By the same token, this anonymity may be better than its alternative, as
recognition is often accompanied by assumptions. Several young informants made
references to discrimination they had experienced in the school system by teachers
and administrators who assumed that they were likely to be either poor students -
both academically or behaviourally, if not both— based on the reputation of other
Samoan students. Telesia, whom I just quoted, and who took academics seriously
(she was attending SAT preparation classes at Berkeley on the weekends), shared an
emotionally scarring anecdote about this type of institutional discrimination:
What upset me most is when I came to my middle school-It’s not really
because of Samoans but because of what people interpret out of
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Samoans—But I came to my middle school and the second day I corrected
someone— one of the administration— I had corrected them and told them I
was Samoan and I wasn’t Hispanic. And then, they’re like oh, and they’re
like giving me second thoughts after I was just getting a warm welcome from
them. So then, next thing you know, they put me in under-achieving
classes... They totally categorized me, slipped me in the “bad” file, and
threw me away. I was like, “great”. It seems like a lot of people around here,
they seem to have bad notions about Samoans.
The third factor to consider in the mode of incorporation is the
“characteristics of the coethnic community”. This last factor is extremely important
because it belies one of the major facts of the ethnic immigrant experience in
America and that is, that immigrant groups generally are not only being asked to
measure themselves against the benchmark and standards of mainstream Euro-
American culture, but against an array of other cultures. Often the closest neighbours
of newly arrived immigrants are members other immigrant groups. The American
monolithic culture may then be a benchmark that is far removed from the lived
experiences of these youth, and, if so, this may be at the heart of much of the
intergenerational conflicts within the Samoan and many other immigrant
communities. The first generation parents may arrive in the United States as fully
developed adults, with the aspirations of acceptance into American middle class
strata, but their children are raised and socialized in an American culture that may be
perceived to discriminate against that which is different— both culturally and
phenotypically— from some mythical measure of normalcy. Because of their sense of
exclusion, they may develop a much more strained and adversarial stance towards
seeking inclusion into the American mainstream than their aspiring parents had.
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Alejandro Portes and Min Zhou (1993) helped to de-bunk the simplicity of
the myth that early immigrants to the United States were assimilative and that more
recent arrivals are culturally conservative and exclusionary. First of all they state that
because of the cultural plurality of American society, it is possible to assimilate to a
number of different cultural groups that, though they may be downwardly mobile or
relegated to quasi-permanent underclass status, may also be quintessentially
American. They suggest that new immigrant groups still assimilate, and label the
sector of American society into which they assimilate as their “segmented
assimilation” (82). They identify three factors that contribute to a group’s
vulnerability to downwardly mobile assimilation: skin colour, location, and an
absence of mobility ladders. For Samoans, by virtue of their dark skin, the general
lack of employment diversity in their community, and few group-sponsored
opportunities for upward social mobility, location remains as a final variable to
determine their assimilation options. Unfortunately, as both the Northern and
Southern California Samoan communities are located in urban and suburban
neighbourhoods, the potential for community assimilation into a higher socio
economic rung of American society is limited.
For the Samoan community of Bayview and Hunter’s Point, the coethnic
community is almost exclusively the African American underclass. Slightly to the
south, in South San Francisco and Daly City, the coethenic communities are Chinese
and Filipino but there are relatively few whites. The biggest ethnic group at Carson
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197
High, in Southern California, is Latino (40.9%), followed by Filipinos (25.6%), and
African-Americans (18.4%) with whites making up less than 6% of the school’s
population. In both instances, Northern and Southern California, the coethnic
communities are composed of other ethnic and racialized minorities. In light of this,
the issue of adaptation and assimilation is complicated. For example, although
Samoan parents often bemoan Samoan youth’s adoption of African American
fashion, the Samoan youth, in emulating these fashions, may ultimately be
assimilating to the coethnic American community into which their parents have
brought them. That the community is not the quintessentially Euro-American one
that their parents had perhaps envisioned does not detract from the fact that Samoan
youth are successfully integrating themselves into the social environment they have
at hand. Indeed, despite the fact that it has become a source of intergenerational
conflict, Samoan youth’s adoption of some fashion and behaviour from their
coethnic peers has become a key component of how Samoan youth have made
themselves feel more American but, they adamantly point out, it is not necessarily an
indication that they are simultaneously disinterested in maintaining their Samoan
identity.
Mistaken Identities
The combination of the lack of general knowledge and awareness of Samoan
culture among the general American public in combination with the ethnic ambiguity
of the typically dark Samoan complexion and facial features has often led to
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198
mistaken ethnic identifying of Samoan youth by outsiders. Almost all of the subjects
that I interviewed had experienced having their identities mistaken to varying
degrees, and although it was generally taken lightly, some youth were deeply
insulted by it as yet another indication of Samoan anonymity in American society.
As sixteen-year-old Dara from San Francisco said: “Honestly, I feel kind of ashamed
[when people indicate their ignorance about her ethnicity] because it’s like we’re not
important. There’s not a lot of us here in the United States, so it’s kind of weird”.
Although some would use such encounters as opportunities to educate others about
Samoan culture, others were resigned to the general public’s ignorance by
voluntarily associating themselves with Hawaiian culture (at least they were fellow
Polynesians with whom almost all Americans are at least somewhat familiar)
although some informants resented this “Hawaiian by association” status. Other
informants gave deliberately obtuse answers to the question of “Where are you
from?” (meaning, they sometimes felt, “because you’re obviously not from here”).
Victoria, a thirty-year-old woman from San Francisco, was in the habit of telling
people who asked where she was from, that she was from, “San Francisco. Have you
ever heard of it? It’s a little coastal town in California, in the United States”. Her
point being made, she would usually eventually add that she was Samoan.
Among the San Francisco Samoan teens, Latino and Asian were the primary
mistaken identities, particularly Filipino, although this may have been largely a
byproduct of living in close proximity to the large Filipino community of Daly City
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and surrounding areas. Several youths were also mistaken for being African
American or for being various other Pacific Islanders such as Hawaiians orTongans.
The combination of their ethnic ambiguity together with the generally small size of
their population seemed to make it most likely that they were identified as members
of whatever brown-skinned population was most prevalent where they lived or from
where the person doing the mis-labeling came. Since Samoans do not neatly fit into
any larger ethnic category, it is not surprising that they are often assumed to be half
“something”. Ironically, many Samoans are of mixed ethnic background, although
few guess that one of those backgrounds is Samoan,
The fact that many Samoans have inter-married, producing afakasi (part
Samoan) offspring has led to further confusion and mislabeling. Jamie, a seventeen-
year-old boy from Carson offered an anecdote that illustrates this point:
My Cousin, she’s half Samoan, half white. She stays in Glendora and we
went out. She told me, like she was out there and people were like, “Oh what
are you? Are you white?” and she’s like, “No, I’m half white, half Samoan”.
“Half what?” “Half white, half Samoan”. “Oh, half Somalian?” No, half
Samoan”
On the other hand, sometimes the phenotypical differences are not always apparent,
even to other Samoans. For instance, Mautu, a sixteen-year-old, from San Francisco
told this amusing story about misidentifying some Tongans whom he took for
Samoans:
When I was in San Francisco, I’ve seen some Tongans. They was all dressed
in ‘ies and stuff. I didn’t get to see their face. I just seen their back and I
thought they were Samoans. So then I was just walking up to them and they
were just looking at me and I was, like, “Hey, what’s up, oosT [Samoan
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slang for brother} and they just said some Tongan words at me and I was,
like, “oh, my fault.”
Towards a Hyphenated Identity?
Although, in general, the high school aged Samoan informants were much
less concerned than Samoan college students were with the political implications of
having Samoan culture and ethnicity recognized by the general American public and
its institutions, their Samoan identities were still very important to younger Samoans.
When asked how they identified themselves ethnically, the vast majority of my
informants stated simply that they were “Samoan”. Some offered minor elaborations,
such as, “American Samoan”, or indicated other ethnic heritages that they claimed in
addition to Samoan (German, Filipino, Chinese, Tongan). When pushed one
informant even went so far as to self-identify as “Polynesian”, but most were
emphatic that their “American” identity was secondary to their Samoan identity and
that it was only invoked strategically, such as in response to suggestions that they are
foreigners or as a way to establish their difference from their Samoan-Samoan
friends and family (in this case it was sometimes used as a badge of comparative
worldliness and sophistication). When I suggested the hyphenated term Samoan-
American, in a pattern that is consistent with the ethnic labeling practices for several
other groups (African American, Asian American and so on) the term was not
recognized as having any kind of popular usage and was generally received
bemusedly. There seemed to be little urgency in moving Samoans towards a
hyphenated identity among the youth. They were content to be Samoans who were
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bom and raised in the United States. Their presence in the United States legitimized
their American identity and their cultural commitment, or at least their cultural pride,
legitimized their Samoan identity. Furthermore, by rejecting the more general label
of Pacific Islander American in favour of a specifically “Samoan” label, they are
rejecting what Mia Tuan (1998) calls a “racialized ethnic” identity in order to
maintain a cultural and, in many cases, immigrant identity.
My informants were often effusively proud of their cultural heritage. As
fourteen-year-old Isaiah put it when asked to describe his identity, “Always Samoan
first out of a sense of pride. Never just American.” Or, as a sixteen-year old Carson
boy wrote emphatically on his survey: “full-blooded Samoan!” David Mayeda
(1998) had similar findings in a study of At-Risk Youth in Hawai’i that included
various ethnicities but focused primarily on Hawaiian, Filipino and Samoan youth.
He found that when filling out survey questionnaires “Samoan youth were more apt
to openly display pride in being Samoan than any [of the] other ethnic group[s]” (17-
18). He postulates that this overt showing of Samoan pride is an adaptive response to
Samoan youth being tagged with so many negative stereotypes in Hawai’i and is in
fact an expression of proactive agency, in that it provides them with high self-esteem
in face of structural discrimination. Perhaps then, an American hyphenation to their
Samoan label would be viewed as compromising the power of that identity.
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The Emergence of Race Consciousness and Class Awareness
Although I have gone to some lengths to paint the Samoan youth in my study
as being largely unaware of any institutional discrimination against them, and to
stress that the majority of them seem to have a more or less positive view of the way
that American society treats them, it is important to note that there are also many
who do not feel this way. Not surprisingly, many of those who seemed most keenly
aware of racial and class discrimination were those who have lived in the United
States the longest. In the process they have learned the American history of racial
discrimination and have become critical of its unifying immigrant trope as a land of
acceptance and of infinite opportunity. Mia Tuan (1998) had similar findings in her
study of Asian Americans. While new immigrants continued to believe that over
time and with some help from their “model minority” stereotype, they would be able
to shed the image of Asians as foreign,
Native-born Asian-American students, on the other hand, were more likely to
be suspicious of the model minority stereotype, to view racism as systemic,
and to feel a sense of camaraderie and shared fate with other racial groups.
As longtime Americans who struggled to be seen as such, they were skeptical
that full social acceptance would ever be forthcoming (8).
Sammy, an eighteen-year-old third generation Samoan/Filipino boy from San
Francisco, was direct in his assessment about why he had been laid off from his last
job a few days prior to our interview.
S: I was working at Food Court on Williams. I was a stock. And, for
whatever reason it was, I got laid off where I felt like I got discriminated.
‘Cause I was there on time, I never was late, I came in on a lot of my days
off... and all of a sudden I got fired. I don’t know I don’t understand.
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CS: Why do you think it was discrimination? Were the bosses of a different
ethnicity than you?
S: ‘Cause what it was, I knew, my whole crew was Latin and none of them
spoke English. So, every time I had a question. I noticed them with an
attitude. So, they had problems communicating with me. But, I felt like when
it came to the report it was always a bad report on my behalf.
One of the things that is interesting about Sammy’s anecdote is that he was not being
directly discriminated against by an institutional barrier imposed by the dominant
Euro-American majority, but instead by members of another ethnic minority. Closer
evaluation however reveals that this type of ethnic group solidarity may be a learned
byproduct of being a minority group struggling against discriminating injustices
imposed from the dominant group. This type of ethnic nepotism is often practiced in
ethnically factionalized urban American spaces. The next story, as told by Stephen,
an eighteen-year old San Francisco boy, reveals his naivete about this type of ethnic
nepotism:
When I was at Burton [a local middle school] we had a security dude right
[who was also Samoan], and he was helping with the lunch line and he was
also sometimes running the Nacho line and like all of a sudden I’m just
talking to him and he’d be like oh here, here you go, for free. I’m like Oh no,
it’s cool. I wanna’ pay for it. You feel me? And then everybody’s looking at
me like ah that’s messed up, he gets dis free, dah dah dah cause he’s Samoan
or whatever and it makes me feel bad you know ‘cause like, I’m getting this
special privilege and they have to pay for it and I don’t. It kind of burns me
inside but then all he’s doing is just being nice and respectful to me, but I feel
that sometimes it’s wrong but then in a way it’s not, because I would do the
same.
Although we see the emergence of an awareness of racial discrimination, the
precise place of Samoans in the ethnic make-up of Americans remains ambiguous.
The nature of discrimination is far from homogenous across ethnic groups in the
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United States, as Tuan (1998) points out emphatically in her straightforwardly titled
book on the contemporary Asian American experience in California, Forever
Foreigners or Honorary Whites? She notes that a component of the Asian American
experience is the constant battle against the label of outsider, as we might assume it
is for Hispanics, who are often defined by their linguistic difference from Anglo-
Americans. Meanwhile, Blacks and Native Americans, who also obviously
experience a great deal of discrimination, do not face that discrimination based on
the unspoken assumption that they are not from here; that they do not belong. As
Tuan puts it, succinctly, “Blacks may be many things in the minds of whites, but
foreign is not one of them” (8). Where then do Samoans fit into this matrix? Their
names, language and appearance would seem to place them in the realm of the
foreign, and yet they have been part of the United States for a long time (“American”
is even a component word of the place from where many of them come, i.e.
American Samoa). We have already established their linkage with Hawaiian culture
in the minds of the general public, and certainly the Hawaiians would be considered
as Americans, underprivileged and discriminated against, but Americans
nevertheless. Furthermore, Samoans males in particular have been able to easily
integrate themselves into many quintessential American institutions like organized
sports, entertainment, and the military in much more visible ways than some of their
coethnic neighbours have. There are more visible Samoan public figures in Hawai’i,
Utah, and the West Coast than there are in the rest of the country, but with twenty-
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205
eight Samoans on National Football League rosters, and more than two hundred of
them playing Division I college football (Garber 2002), not to mention the extreme
popularity of such professional wrestlers and film stars as Duane “The Rock”
Johnson, they are becoming more widely known throughout the country. As in so
many other cases, Samoans also seem to fit between categories in terms of
discrimination, even within the context of more nuanced typologies such as the one
suggested by Tuan, or the likelihood of segmentary assimilation to a downwardly
mobile group that Portes and Zhou (1993) suggested earlier.
This situation is further confounded by the issue of class, which coincides
with ethnicity for Samoans, because they live primarily in large urban West Coast
Cities where the majority of the working poor are people of colour, though this is not
the case throughout the country. In her study on Afro-Caribbean immigrant youth in
New York discussed earlier, Mary Waters had some interesting things to say about
how the interaction between race relations and class issues have come to shape and
change immigrant experiences in America. After interviewing numerous teens across
various social classes, she created a typology that separated them into one of three
identity groups: American (42%), Ethnic (30%), and Immigrant (28%).
Those whom she labeled as ‘American’ tended to downplay their Caribbean
backgrounds, to self-identify as Americans, and to believe that whites generally had
a negative view of African-Americans. They practiced oppositional identity
formation (defining themselves by their difference from the white status quo) and
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206
described racial prejudice as pervasive and limiting their own chances. This was
similar to what those Samoan youth who were the farthest removed from the Samoan
immigration experience in San Francisco had done. Those whom she labeled as
‘Ethnic’ sought to distance themselves from American Blacks, sharing the prejudiced
views of Blacks that their parents and mainstream white society held and
downplaying the role of race as a barrier to social advancement. They attributed their
own socio-economic successes to their immigrant family values that stress education
and upward mobility. Because they were often mislabeled as American Blacks they
went to some lengths to establish their difference from this group by emphasizing
their ethnic roots through dress, accent, and frequent referencing of their traditional
culture. Not surprisingly, the third group, the ‘Immigrant’ self-identifiers, were
generally the newest arrivals or those who returned to the islands for frequent visits.
They tended to be strong in their expression of island culture and more or less
indifferent to the distinctions between U.S. Blacks and immigrant Blacks because
they felt that their foreign bom status was self-evident through their accent, clothing
style, and behaviour and therefore placed them outside of that debate. One of her key
findings was that not only the length of time spent in the United States, but also the
social class of the immigrant family played an important role in which groups the
teens identified with. She found that teens from middle class backgrounds were
much more likely to identify as “Ethnic” while those from working class and poor
backgrounds were more likely to identify as “American”.
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Although the situation is slightly different for Samoans because they are not
universally mis-identified with a group against which there is a considerable history
of discrimination (i.e. African-Americans), the typology still has some relevance.
Accordingly, most of the Samoans in San Francisco would probably be classified as
“immigrant identifiers”, as demonstrated by the fact that virtually none of them self
identified as American and because for most of them Samoa remained an active part
of their lives or a not too distant memory and was not some vaguely conjured ethnic
heritage. My questions that probed the ways in which my informants overtly
expressed their culture most often elicited confused responses. For the most part, it
did not occur to them to express their culture overtly or performatively because it did
not occur to them that they were in jeopardy of losing it. They were not trying to be
Samoan any more than a blue-eyed person is trying to be blue-eyed; they were
Samoan. There were also several San Francisco informants whose families had been
in California considerably longer, and this group was often actively trying to regain
an identity that they felt in jeopardy of losing and was also keenly aware of
American discrimination against people of colour, amongst whose ranks they knew
to be counted. Most of the Los Angeles Samoan youth fit into the “ethnic identifiers”
category. Their expressions of cultural heritage, such as public cultural
performances, tattoos, jewelry and, ‘ie lavalavas, or ‘ ie lavalava swatches as part of
their appearance, were often more overt and self-conscious than among their
Northern California counterparts. They may have felt, as the informants in Waters
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study did, that their ethnic immigrant status, afforded them more social status than
did their racialized identity— that of the ambiguous brown faceless underclass.
Americans are sworn by national mythology to have a soft spot for the immigrant,
are they not? Although many recognized their class and other cultural links with
African-Americans (i.e. importance of church, family, and working class status),
identifying, in particular with the emphasis on the physicality stereotypes of African-
Americans, they seemed reluctant to abandon their unique Samoan ethnic status in
favour of a more generic “American” one.
Changing Relationships to Samoa
Two key ways that Samoans have carved out a place that is uniquely their
own in the United States are through the cultural expressiveness of language and
through the pervasive cultural institution of the Samoan church. Although these are
both huge topics in their own right, and not the focus per se of this dissertation, each
of them must be referred to, at least briefly, in any discussion of the diasporic
Samoan community.
Language/identity:
For Samoans in California, as with many other immigrant non-English
speaking groups in the United States, language retention is one of the key ways that
they evaluate the strength and resilience of their culture. Indeed, in the ethnographic
snap shot on Samoan identity with which I open the Applying Identities chapter, the
instructor claims that language (gagana) is one of the three pillars of Samoan
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identity, along with titles (suafa), and lands (laufanua). In the course of her research
with Samoan youth at a specific New Zealand Samoan church, Melani Anae (2002)
asked her informants whether the most important aspect of the fa ’a Samoa was
language, customs, or beliefs. Fifty-five percent answered ‘language’, in spite of the
fact that most of those surveyed were English speakers (155). In my own study,
language had a way of working itself into almost every discussion about identity and
culture even when it was not the specific focus of a question. In fact, language and
culture were often used interchangeably with one another. Take the words of Jordan,
who came from an influential western Samoan family that highly values both
traditional and western education highly:
Well, in the fa ’a Samoa way, they say “E iloa Samoa i le gagana”. “You
know a Samoan because of his language”. So I think, that’s where you
know... you can dress any way you want to but if you speak Samoan or just
have a little bit of words that you know, but try to learn the language... once
you get that down, you’re Samoan because no matter how you present
yourself, if you speak the language ... cause different nationalities have
different languages. If you speak Chinese you’re Chinese, if you speak
Korean, you speak Korean. If you speak Samoan, you’re a Samoan.
In fact, a strong case can be made that in light of the ethnic ambiguity of Samoans,
their language may be the key way to distinguish them from other ethnic minorities.
Sammy, whom we heard from earlier in the context of inter-ethnic tensions at the
workplace, clearly shows both his pride in Samoa’s distinctiveness from other
racialized ethnic minorities and the separation between those groups collectively and
the white Euro-American majority in this statement.
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So around here in San Francisco we get our ways as uso, meaning brother,
which the other races will call us brothers too. So, it kind of eased up my
anger on white America.7
This interchangeability of language for culture is not one that sits well with
all Samoan youth in California because their language abilities vary so greatly from
one to the other. Understandably, those who speak the language less well, but who
still maintain a great deal of cultural pride are apt to find language as a barrier to
their inclusion in some cultural traditions. The words of Stephen, an eighteen-year-
old San Francisco Samoan boy, illustrate this point well. In the course of a group
interview he responded defensively to the statement quoted above about “knowing a
Samoan by his language”:
Sometimes I don’t even feel Samoan anymore. Like in the summer we were
working in Doubleday and there was a lot of Samoan guys working in that
company and they were always talking in Samoan. Sometimes I can’t catch
up with what they’re saying, I feel left out. I feel like, “ Man, look at me. My
own people I don’t even know what the hell they saying”. You know what
I’m saying? I feel so left out, like now they’re chalking it up and the next
time teasing me. “Oh, you’repdlagi, you don’t know how to speak Samoan,
dah dah dah dah dah”. And then I try to talk back to them in Samoan so the
only thing that would come to my mind is ufa [ass]. Because, you know
what? I don’t care. I’m still Samoan. It’s not only on language, it’s on heart.
It’s on heart. Because, me, I can’t do the language for shit but I still got the
heart, I still know I’m Samoan, You know what I’m sayin’? But I feel so left
out when I hear them talking in our native tongue and I don’t know what
they’re saying. It’s hard.
7 Uso, or the vernacular us, is one of the few Samoan words that enjoys a popular usage among
Samoan youth when they are speaking English with each other or around others familiar with their
culture. As the informant said “uso” means “brother”, or more specifically same sex sibling in proper
Samoan (tuafafme for a cross sex female sibling and tuagane for a cross sex male sibling). In popular
usage however it seems most often used as a substitute for “dude”, “bro”, or “brother” as they are
used in California English slang, and is generally used to refer to males.
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Encouraged perhaps by Stephen’s rejection of the centrality of language to
determining one’s “Samoaness”, Jason, another eighteen-year-old who participated
less than the others in the group conversation voiced similar feelings:
That plays a big part. ‘Cause for me, I understand the language good, but I
can’t speak an ounce of it. Like “Stephen” said, I feel like alienated, when
people like Iosefa and a guy will have a conversation. I understand it but I
wish I could talk back to you in Samoan but I think I’ve been in the States a
little bit too long, man.
Indeed, others have written at length about the way that islanders sometimes ridicule
visiting diasporic Samoans for their accents and their Samoan language ability (cf.
MacPherson 1986; Mayeda 1998; Wendt 1976). While the diasporic Samoans may
counter with insults about the lack of fashion sense and the general backwardness of
their islander peers, this challenge to their authenticity is, in truth, often very hurtful
to them. Take, for example, the words of this New Zealand born Samoan woman
quoted by Cluny MacPherson, whose response to this type of teasing illustrates the
irony of fitting imperfectly in both Samoa and diasporic environments: “I felt pretty
stupid and thought it was funny that we were Samoans in New Zealand and pdlagis
in Samoa” (MacPherson 1986:250).
In an interesting article on what they refer to as “syncretic literacy”,
Alessandro Duranti and Elinor Ochs (1996) disprove the theory that “language is a
precise indicator of cultural orientation,”(1) among Samoan-Americans living in
greater Los Angeles. They show that there are ways that the English language can be
used to reinforce traditional Samoan socio-spatial and intergenerational relationships.
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This is a similar process, although with the languages changing place, as the use of a
Samoan word like uso, that we just discussed, has come to be used in a vernacular
American way to mean “dude”, “man”, or “brother” and have the gendered
properties so important to it in Samoan, disregarded in the American context. As
Duranti and Ochs write, “becoming an English speaker does not necessarily entail
adopting strategies characteristic of other groups who use English”, stressing that
many Samoans use English as a “communicative code” and not as a directive for
“communicative conduct” (ibid: 12).8
Notwithstanding these qualifiers, the Samoan language remains an important
part of the active lives of almost all of the informants. Table 5.4 summarizes the
results of my findings from survey questions that asked students to evaluate their
own ability to speak and to understand Samoan and also asked them what language
was primarily used in the home. Two interesting findings immediately emerged from
this data. First, the differences in language ability between the San Francisco
Samoans and the Carson Samoans are negligible, despite the fact that the San
Francisco Samoans, on the whole, are more recent arrivals. Second, the San
Francisco Samoans are more than three times more likely to primarily speak Samoan
in their homes than are their Carson counterparts. One hypothesis for this apparent
8 Bradd Shore might argue that this new usage of uso is in fact significant in that it reflects a change,
not just in speech but in though and cultural orientation. The original use of the term highlights the
relationship between individuals, which he views as central to Samoan ways of thinking, but this new
use of the term emphasizes the noun as an independent object, which is something he asssoicates with
Western thinking (1982:195). This argument seems to represent a counter example to Ochs and
Duranti’s example of English being used in culturally Samoan ways.
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inconsistency for the San Francisco Samoans (that they do not claim to have more
Samoan language ability than the Southern California Samoans despite reporting
much higher exposure to it) is that they may be evaluating their language abilities
against a different standard than the Carson Samoans are. Some of the San Francisco
Samoans may be comparing their language skills to their recollections of the levels
of high oratory as it is still practiced back in the islands (and on special occasions in
the diaspora as well) and consequently would view a claim about their language
mastery as disrespectful arrogance. The Carson Samoans, conversely, may have been
proud for simply being able to communicate in the Samoan language. Another
salient finding is that despite being asked to identify the “primary” home language,
over 3/4 of both sets of informants claimed that both Samoan and English are
“primarily” spoken. Since this percentage does not differ greatly between the two
areas and given what we have established about the respective degree of distance
from the migration experience of the two communities, this data seem to support the
strength of bilingualism, not the loss of Samoan or the reluctance to practice English.
Perhaps this is a positive harbinger for Samoan integration into American culture and
for the simultaneous retention of their traditional culture.
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Table 5.4
Samoan Language1
Comprehension Fluency Primary Home Language"
Area Avg.
Scale: 1-5
Avg.
Scale: 1-5
Samoan
%
English
%
Both
%
San
Francisco
(N= 26)
4.38 3 19 4 77
Carson
(N= 16)
3.38 2.94 6 19 75
Total
Surveyed
(N= 42)
4 2.98 14 10 76
Language remains a hotly debated community topic, particularly in the
context of the church. Some churches, like the London Missionary Society (LMS)-
based Congregational church, put a great emphasis on the church’s role in
maintaining the Samoan language. Other Samoan congregations within larger highly
structured churches, such as the Catholic and Mormon churches, may have some
services and choirs in the Samoan language but undertake many other activities in
the language of that church— English. Finally, some of the Pentecostal churches, such
as the Lighthouse church in Carson, deliberately hold services in English despite the
fact that the majority of the parishioners are Samoan, rigidly holding to a doctrine
that church and culture should not mix. Even in the congregational churches, those
I This data is based on self-evaluations of language competency. Respondents were asked to rate their
comprehension and fluency in Samoan on a scale of lto 5,1 being the lowest level and 5 the highest.
I I Despite the fact that the survey asked for the primary home language, 3/4 of the respondents wrote
in, “Samoan and English” in the survey.
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that are the most traditional Christian repository of Island culture, compromises have
been made. For example, during my research in Carson, I heard of a church in San
Diego where the services were conducted bilingually with simultaneous translation
and the youth groups in the majority of the churches were taught in English, although
Samoan language instruction was often a part of them. The debate raged over the
importance of young people understanding the doctrine, by holding services in
English or in the church’s role as a key purveyor of community culture, with
language being a central component of that dissemination.
There is also an ongoing secular debate on language that includes scholars
like Aiona Fanaafi and many others. These debates often take place in the context of
Samoan linguistics conferences throughout the diasporic Samoan world, not just in
the Islands, and they concern themselves with keeping the language current with
technology, with changing cultural values and circumstances, and with other global
linguistic trends. Although academic by design, the decisions reached at these
conferences sometimes generate interest within the greater Samoan community. The
findings from these conferences are often disseminated to the greater community by
the students of the scholars who attend them, in a similar way that the native
catechists were used to spread the gospel to the people of the Pacific during the
missionization period, I have always thought.
Although elders continue to lament the loss of the language, much interest in
retaining it remains, or at least is vocalized, particularly by younger adults who are
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starting families and who remain involved in their churches. Anae found that
although it was common for members of her church to take “time out” periods from
the church, they often returned to it freely later on in life when they were becoming
mature young parents who wished their children to be raised, at least partially, in the
Samoan culture and language (155). My findings were similar, in that even among
those who were not strong language speakers themselves, passing the language on to
their children was articulated as a paramount concern and as a key indicator of the
concurrent transmission of culture in general. Thus, in some instances versing
oneself in the language or culture was viewed as a prerequisite to good parenting.
Take, for example, the words of Sammy, a young Samoan father in San Francisco:
After having my son... that brought a big part of my life together. And now I
kind of do wanna’ go because now it’s a must that I learn where I come from.
It’s a must that I learn the language, and it’s a must that I speak it.
Of course, there is no guarantee that these individuals will follow through with their
purported desire to learn the Samoan language better for the sake of their children
and for their own desire for enrichment, but the desire to learn is a starting point and
there are still many opportunities to practice and to hear the language in activities of
daily living such as the church, fundraisers, and in the home.
“Over here the church is our village”
Again and again I heard this statement repeated: “Over here the church is our
village”, just as have so many other scholars of the Samoan diaspora (cf. Janes
1990:165; Koletty 2000:105, MacPherson, Shore, and Franco 1978). Beyond doubt
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the preeminent social institution for overseas Samoans is the church. Since the first
Samoans immigrants arrived in the United States, the activities of the church and
elements of the Samoan culture have been interwoven. Over thirty years ago Joan
Ablon (1971b) wrote, “ The [Samoan] churches [in the United States] quickly
became the centers of Samoan life and stand as the perpetuators of fa ’a Samoa” (83).
These sentiments were echoed by Fa’atui Laolagi (1971) who said that churches are
the center of religious life and the custodians of Samoan traditions here [in San
Francisco]” (71). They are important sites of identity because they help to keep the
language active, to reaffirm ‘aiga (family) and village ties, and to provide a
structural institution to serve in proxy for the matai system that was largely left
behind in the Islands (Ablon 1970). On a more practical front, the churches are also
critical in terms of outreach. For example the US census and various public health
studies have worked closely with the churches (cf. Mishra et al. 1997), in
determining micro-migrations within the diasporic community as well as the longer
translocal and transnational migrations, and in providing a visual and spatial
presence for the Samoan community (Koletty 2000:109).
In the course of my fieldwork, I attended about ten different churches. Some I
visited only once, others as many as ten times. Although I spent time at a variety of
churches (Mormon, Methodist, Catholic, and Pentecostal), the churches where I
undertook the most involved and prolonged participation were all LMS
Congregational churches, the most popular and traditional denomination for
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Samoans. In addition to Sunday services, I also attended midweek services, youth
groups, choir rehearsals, fundraisers, and dance practices. In almost all cases church
was an extremely important part of my informants’ lives.9 All of the students I
surveyed professed to having some church affiliation, and 63% of them claimed to
attend church-related activities twice a week or more, some claiming as many as four
church-based activities during an average week.1 0 This strong involvement in church
is also true in other diasporic Samoan communities. For example, according to the
New Zealand census, 91% of Samoans claimed some religious affiliation compared
with just over two thirds of the New Zealand population on the whole (New Zealand
Census 2001).
Church tends to be a family and sometimes also a village affair (cf. Ablon
1971b). Although some congregations count their members in the hundreds, there are
many churches that maintain less than fifty regular members. In such instances, the
vast majority of parishioners will be related to either the faife ’ au or to his wife
(Tama and Tinah) and consequently often have emigrated from the same village or
region in Samoa. Not surprisingly then, Laolagi found a strong positive correlation
between church attendance and interaction with one’s relatives (1971:83). In this
9 It is perhaps difficult to assess the true strength of the religious commitment of my informants since
they were, for the most part, still living at home, and too young and dependent (or too timid) to be
allowed to make their own decisions about church involvement.
1 0 Initially, I thought my survey data was inflated, but after spending whole weeks videoing daily
activities of several informants, I’m now inclined to believe the numbers are more accurate. Typically,
the informant would attend Sunday service, youth group, choir practice, dance practice, and/or a
sports activity, collectively spread over at least two other evenings besides the Sunday service.
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sense, by shifting the emphasis to “our”, the meaning of “Over here the church is our
village,” proves to be quite literal.
Another reason that there are so many churches for such a relatively small
population is because much splintering (or “church fission” as Laolagi (1971) calls
it) has taken place following various disputes revolving around church business,
personality conflicts and feuds, and doctrine. Apparently this splintering is much
more common overseas than it is back in the Islands. The reason for this, according
to Laolagi (1971) and to Ablon (1971b), is that away from the village setting, there
are no social constraints or sanctions against disruptive practices. In the village
setting there are the matais and thcfono (council of chiefs) to exercise behavioural
constraints on thefaife’aus and their congregations. The matais are able to do this
because their power is based on both their power to influence social opinion and on
their direct influence over issues like land use. As land ownership does not typically
enter into Samoan disputes in the United States, the power of the matai is greatly
diminished (Ablon 1971b) and the faife’aus have come to take on many community
roles that they do not have back in the Islands. This combination of increased social
power, strongly kin-based congregations, and a lack of ability to impose community
sanctions has made the act of splintering much more prevalent in the diasporic
communities. As long as a faife ’au has the support of at least some of his family
members, he can form his own church. As Laolagi says, “In San Francisco there are
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no controls on the Pastor’s behavior except the opinions of his parishioners who can
leave to welcome arms elsewhere whenever they want” (1971:99).
There is another special way in which the church to village analogy is
imprecise. Steve Koletty (2000) suggests that the diasporic churches are more
appropriately likened to the malae (village green) than to the village (nu’u) back in
Samoa. The malae is a common space that is large enough to accommodate inter-
’aiga ceremonies and activities and it is a space that is defined by the placement of
the homes that surround it (105). However true this may be, “Over here, the church
is our village green” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
Though imperfect as an analogy, the statement still comments insightfully on
the nature of diasporic Samoan life. Without the spatially close-knit living
community characteristic of the Islands, Samoans are left with few “total culture”
public sites to call their own. The church provides a notable exception. Since the
primary cultural affiliation for those living in Samoa is to their village and the
primary cultural orientation of Samoans living in the United States is to their church,
the analogy is effective, even as it draws attention to the scarcity of public venues for
cultural expressiveness available to the diasporic community.
Conclusion
In this chapter I have described some of the ways in which diasporic Samoan
communities have come to imagine themselves fitting into American cities. To do
that, I first explored the content of the Samoan ethnoscape and looked at the
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strategies that have been employed to translate that content to the American
environment while negotiating various local barriers along the way, such as racial
discrimination and class stasis. Finally, I suggested that language and church are two
important examples of how Samoan communities are maintaining their group
identity in this context. In the next two chapters I shall move beyond the structures
that Samoans have created to support their culture and on to some of its specific
performative aspects, as Samoans struggle to define an active identity for themselves
beyond the orientalist stereotypes of the South Pacific.
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Chapter VI
Identity Expectations
Ethnographic Snap Shot: The Tongans made us do it
It’s a hot day in July, and LeSui is having trouble keeping the rapt attention
of a large room half-filled with Samoan kids. Every day is structured more or less the
same in this summer program run by the Samoan Community Development Center
(SCDC) in Sunnydale, a rough neighbourhood dramatically situated on a narrow
hilly strip of land that looks down on the Bay from San Francisco’s southern-most
outskirts. The kids arrive at the school around noon, after some of them have
finished summer school classes, which only run for half days. They first sit down to
un-appetizing looking lunches provided by the San Francisco School District (an
accommodation provided to the SCDC through their grant for the summer program),
then they break off into two 45-minute classroom sessions that are geared towards
helping them to succeed in school and to explore their creative and cultural potential.
The group of forty or so kids is divided into two roughly equal sized age-
sorted groups, one for those under twelve and the other for the older kids. While I
teach one class, Dan Taulapapa McMullin, a Samoan writer, playwright, and visual
artist, teaches the other, running the kids through playful workshop-style writing
exercises. My class is a modified version of the New Stories/New Cultures media
literacy, proficiency, and empowerment workshop begun by Dr. Gelya Frank in Los
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Angeles middle schools as an after-school program (Frank et al. 2001; Scull 2001).
Dan and I alternate sessions, so that while he has the older kids I have the younger
ones and visa a versa. Before the next session of the day, the kids get a short break.
Since it’s summer and the school is not in regular session, they have the playground
to themselves. It is after this short but exuberantly Filled break that they begin the
real purpose of the program— cultural training. This final time block is divided into
dance rehearsals, under the tutelage of other SCDC staff, lectures on Samoan culture
and identity given by LeSui and eventually rehearsal for an elaborate cultural
operetta written, composed, and directed by LeSui himself. The culmination of the
program is a performance of dance, songs, identity skits, and the operetta that they
will be present to hundreds of family, friends, and community members in a large
local auditorium
LeSui is the unquestioned leader of this program, and it is his gentle but firm
guidance that keeps the students engaged and demands their respectful attention.
Such is his authority that he never raises his voice yet rarely has to ask anyone to pay
attention twice. Today, as if on an anthropologist’s dream cue, he is lecturing on the
migration experience itself. “Why did we come here?” he asks them. “Why would
we leave our beautiful Islands to come to the United States? What does this country
have to offer us?” With a little prodding the students begin to offer the expected
answers: employment opportunities, education, wealth, strong military, good
government. “Right!” he agrees, enthusiastically writing their answers down, “But in
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order to get these things, to make the most of them, we need to approach them
properly. We need to act respectfully.”
LeSui goes into a speech that I have heard given on many occasions by
Samoan elders, at church youth groups, in schools, and by elder family members. It
is concerned with respectful appearance. He tells them that is important that they not
try to be someone they aren’t. They need to be Samoan and to let others know what
that means. Boys’ hair should be short but not shaved and should never be put in
braids. Boys and girls should wear fitted and not overly baggy clothes. “Do you
know why this look started?” he asks the kids. Nobody answers. “I’ve heard that
those baggy trousers are a way to conceal weapons. The police can’t see what you’ve
got on you if your jeans are so big. That fashion comes from trying to be like a
criminal! Do you want to be someone who looks like a criminal? Is that a good way
to represent your Samoan identity?” A long pause follows. Some of the kids are
staring off and look bored. They have heard this speech many times before. Breaking
the silence, he asks, “And who makes us act this way; who makes us dress like this?”
The question hangs for a moment in the still air of the cafeteria.
Finally one of the older boys answers: “I dunno, the Tongans?” The whole
room bursts into laughter and even LeSui smiles broadly. He appreciates the joke,
and the obvious commentary from the kids that they’ve heard this spiel before, they
know where it’s going and they know what their responses are supposed to be. In
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other words, they think they know what LeSui’s expectations are. They know what
he sees as a respectful representation of Samoan culture.
“But, seriously,” LeSui continues, a smile still playing on the corners of his
mouth...1
Introduction
In this multicultural Californian environment it is not surprising that Samoan
culture content should be vastly different than it is in the relative cultural
homogeneity of the homeland Islands. Whereas in the Islands the overwhelming
majority of people are Samoan, blending culture and nationhood often to the point
where they are indistinguishable from one another, in California, only select
individuals in isolated pockets practice Samoan culture. Samoans find themselves as
one small group among many similarly isolated ethnic groups, and in such an
environment, public expressions of ethnic identity by Samoans, or by any other
ethnic minority for that matter, often appear as political acts, in that they stand apart
from mainstream American activities practiced by the majority of the citizenry.
Although they enjoy some freedom of self-definition, Samoan expressions of cultural
identity are always, to a degree at least, mediated by the limitations imposed upon
them by the surrounding society, and in the case of Samoan youth, by the
1 This anecdote is a paraphrasing based on my fieldnotes, rather than a transcription. Also, I feel
compelled to point out that the rivalry between Samoans and Tongans in California seems to be a
good-natured one. No genuine animosity was implied in this joke, but the history of rivalry and
conflict between the two Polynesian nations is well known by virtually all Samoans, even if the
historical basis of the rivalry is often only vaguely understood.
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2 2 6
expectations placed on them by their elders, the de facto spokespeople for the
community.
The task of this chapter is to examine not only what some of the limitations
on these expressions are, but also the sources and histories of these cultural
expectations. This chapter is effectively paired with the next in that this one shall
explore cultural expectations, and the next shall examine the response to these
expectations by looking at examples of cultural expressions and as a subset, a
particular type of expression that I am labeling as cultural performance.
The chapter will begin by describing both the ways that Samoan youth feel
others see them and how they view themselves, and then establish what some of the
origins of these perceptions are. Collectively, these perceived ascriptions of Samoan
culture will be known here as the expectations. Our investigation of these
expectations will address the role of Pacific orientalism and stereotyping directly and
in detail, but it will also include other bases for establishing that Samoan-Americans
are different from other Americans. As I see it, there are essentially three different
bases of exclusionary practice that delineate these expectations as they relate to
Samoan people. Put crudely, these are that Samoans are big, exotic, and poor. These
three levels of discrimination— based on their physicality, their foreignness, which
includes their non-white skin tone, and their low socio-economic standing—have had
a profound impact on the way that Samoan youth seek to define themselves in the
United States. Ancillary to these outsider preconceptions of Samoan culture, the way
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that Samoan young people choose to express their identities publicly may also be
constituted in response to the expectations of Samoan elders, who are the appointed
guardians of cultural authenticity within their diasporic communities.
Expectations: unpacking Samoan stereotypes
A number of factors contribute to a general exclusion of Samoans from the
culture of the mainstream Euro-American society. As I stated in the introduction to
this chapter, this exclusion is generally divisible into three broad categories (exotic,
physical, and low socio-economic standing) while racial discrimination is an
overarching factor that intersects each of these three categories. The roots of some of
these prejudices extend well beyond American culture, particularly the suggestion of
romantic exoticism that is the Samoans’ orientalist inheritance as South Pacific
Islanders. Some prejudices are unique to Samoans— particularly those that associate
them with football and with ethnic exclusive gangs, or to specific occupations, like
landscaping or security work; but many other stereotypes are less culturally specific.
In the eyes of many Americans, Samoans doubtless blend into a more generalized
brown-skinned underclass that is both denigrated and feared. These prejudices,
though not dominant perhaps, are prevalent enough to have made a powerful
negative impression on the collective psyche of Samoan youth, and indeed on non
white skinned youth in general, to the extent that it is possible that the Samoans’
perception of discrimination may be much worse than it really is. For example, a
survey taken among University of Southern California undergraduate students, the
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findings of which I shall briefly examine later, provides evidence that counters this
popular Samoan impression of negative stereotyping.
The Orientalist Pacific
The term “orientalism”, which I have used earlier in this dissertation, is
borrowed from Edward Said’s (1978) seminal work of the same title. In that book
Said asserts that the idea of, essentially, the Arab Middle East, as it is described in
British, French, and American literature from the late eighteenth to the end of the
twentieth century, is a hegemonic construction that ultimately may reveal more about
European ideals and fears than it does about the region it seeks to describe. Implicit
in Said’s treatise is the unequal power relationship between colonizer and colonized
that has led Dorinne Kondo and others to note the underlying truth, that “orientalist
discourses are racial discourses” (1997:6) and not just eurocentric discourse on the
exotic. Another important component of Said’s treatise is that the literary and
imaginative construction of the region has been so pervasive that it has become
virtually impossible, for outsiders in particular, to write about the region without
either reinforcing or challenging its existing social construction. As he writes:
So authoritative a position did Orientalism have that I believe no one writing,
thinking, or acting on the Orient could do so without taking account of the
limitations on thought and action imposed by Orientalism. In brief, because
of Orientalism the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought and
action (1978:3).
Over the years Said’s controversial work has generated criticism from a wide
range of fields, with some strident anthropological responses included among these
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criticisms (cf. Richardson 1990). Since the representation of cultures is the central
tenet of anthropology, that anthropological texts are also implicated in Said’s
analysis of the region is not surprising, although generally speaking, he has much
more to say about humanistic texts (Said 1989). Most of the criticisms against
Orientalism claim that Said’s readings are over generalized and needlessly
polemical, although, some like James Clifford (1988), criticize the work for not
being inclusive enough in its analysis of texts or for taking into account the
collective works of the authors whose texts Said does analyze. However, these
criticisms do not detract from the overall merit of the work, according to Clifford,
and it remains a landmark post-colonial instance of “writing back” in his estimation
(256). Furthermore, in terms of the criticism of over-generalization, Nicholas
Thomas suggests that, “Ironically much of the generalization has been performed by
readers of Orientalism rather than by Said himself’ (1991:4).
Overall the ideas introduced in Orientalism have been viewed as valuable
contributions to the understanding of the role of hegemony in cultural representations
and the term has transcended the geographic and historical specificity in which it
originally emerged. Orientalism is now used broadly to describe the influence of
Western constructions of otherness on regional representations. Some regions, such
as the South Pacific, which has, like the Middle East, long occupied a prominent
place in the imaginations of Westerners, appear exceptionally well suited to such
methods of analysis, since there are a wealth of texts and distinct historical and
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national trends within that literature (cf. Borofsky 2000; Linnekin 1991; Thomas
1991). Some scholars— and Said himself cautioned against the ability to project his
findings on other regions (1983)— feel that this more generalized use of orientalism is
an inappropriate projection of what was initially a narrowly defined term, the use of
which, in other regions, offers little that previous discussions of stereotypes and
representation did not successfully address in the past. Particularly in the case of the
South Pacific, many of the fanciful imaginings of the region as a bountiful land of
plenty inhabited by highly eroticized people (cf. Howe 1984; Smith 1985) are in fact
antithetical to the harsh landscapes, the silent enigmatic women, and the religious
conservativism that Said maintains are associated with the Middle East (Said 1978).
Notwithstanding this contention, the term still serves to effectively evoke the long
term representational influence that early European writings have had in shaping
images of the region and the people that still exist to this day and against which
modern day Pacific Islanders still feel compelled to either embrace or challenge in
their efforts to maintain their identities.
Indeed, even before Europeans had physically ventured into the South
Pacific, it existed in their imaginations in the idea of the Antipodes that postulated a
continent named Terra Australis Incognito that was the mirror image of Europe. This
mythical place became the repository of all Europe’s imagined dreams and demons,
metaphors of monsters and paradise that reflected Europe’s early but lasting
conceptualization of the unknown and of otherness (Faussett 1995).
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By the eighteenth century, when European exploration of the region was
widespread both material and fanciful images emerged. On the one hand, with the
spirit of the Age of Enlightenment upon them, explorers became faithful scientific
chroniclers of flora, fauna, people, and physical geography. Meanwhile, other
accounts romanticized the region for its lush landscape and fetishized the amoral
innocence of what was thought to be highly sexualized people who lived out their
simple corporeal lives in that bountiful land (cf. Howe 1984; Smith 1985). This
portrayal struck an envious chord with the European peasantry and working poor,
many of whom lived under the quasi-bondage labour conditions of the Industrial
Revolution and the religious Puritanism of that time. Still others, particularly the
missionaries, saw the heathens who inhabited those wild lands as a direct challenge
to their faith, and so answered the call in numbers and with fervor as they sought to
“civilize” the people of the Pacific whom they saw as brutish and misguided (cf.
Howe 1984). The terms “noble savages” and “ignoble savages” came to describe
these two polar perceptions of the region, both of which robbed the people and
cultures who lived there of their individuality by emphasizing, instead, the
metaphorical power of their images.
More recently, the experience of World War Two brought the Pacific into the
popular consciousness of America. Writers like James A. Michener helped to keep
alive the idea of a South Pacific paradise through his Pulitzer Prize winning novel
Tales of the South Pacific (1947) and later through his bestseller, Hawaii (1959).
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Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific (1957) however, was also dark at times, with
some anti-Melanesian racist overtones, and a critique of the South Pacific image of
paradise when viewed through the experience of war. However, little of that
darkness was translated to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s extremely popular musical
play South Pacific (1949) or the film of the same title (Logan 1958).
Although it had already become a popular tourist destination by the 1930s,
tourism to the South Pacific, and particularly to Hawaii for Americans, boomed in
the post war years (Desmond 1999). Popular though airy musical films, such as the
two Elvis Presley musical vessels Blue Hawaii (1961) and Paradise, Hawaiian Style
(1966) and numerous television programs capitalized on the idyllic desirability of the
Islands. Such popular culture contributions helped to perpetrate an image of a
tropical paradise, peopled by the seductive grass-skirted hula girls that have graced
the covers of so many tourist brochures since the Post War years (cf. Desmond).
Popular culture’s foray into Hawaiian imagery also marked the beginnings of the
hold that Hawai’i was to have on the American imagination as a commodified living
paradise of leisure and repose—the quintessential American holiday destination— and
the important influence that Hawaiian culture was to have on American music,
fashion, and food (cf. Desmond 1999). Although, the Hawaiian sovereignty
movement and the influence of multiculturalism policies have helped to change some
of these stereotypes recently, by emphasizing the cultural experience of tourism in
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Hawai’i, it is clear that the ideas of “noble savagery”, begun centuries earlier, are
still on display in literature, art, film, and advertising (cf. Desmond 1999).
These simplistic impressions of Pacific Islanders are certainly dated now, but
because many have not been replaced with updated images, they remain. Meanwhile
Samoans are so familiar with being unknown to their American neighbours that they
sometimes willingly simplify their identities by affiliating themselves with
Hawaiians— of whom virtually all Americans will have some knowledge, albeit
potentially very stereotyped and highly simplified knowledge— in order to gamer at
least a generalized level of cultural recognition. As Jason (18), a second-generation
San Francisco boy, said in response to how he responds to people who do not know
where Samoa is and who frequently mistake his ethnic identity as Latino:
Some people will be like, “Is that another kind of Latin...”
I’ll be like “Nah, I’m a Pacific Islander, dude.” Hawaiian - oh I gotta’ bring
up Hawaiian in order for them to understand what a Samoan is.
Another young man, Jordan, confided that he sometimes describes Samoa as “right
next to Hawai’i” just to give it a general reference point, even though the Samoas are
more than 2,500 miles southwest of the Hawaiian Archipelago.
Notwithstanding the place of Hawai’i in the American popular
consciousness, Hawai’i and Hawaiians remain an exotic American sub-culture.
Indeed, it is in this very exoticness that its tourist-marketed charm lies, and so,
although the existence of Hawai’i may help Samoans to gain some cultural
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recognition, in reality, it may do little to establish their presence in the United States
as Americans rather than as exotics, or as foreigners.
Interestingly, the persistence of traditional exotic stereotypes of the South
Seas may be waning in the minds of outsiders. In a brief survey of USC
undergraduates that asked them to list stereotypes of Samoans, romantic South Sea
stereotypes were conspicuously absent. There were no stereotypes of beautiful girls,
free love, idyllic landscapes and so on, and only 2 of 45 people who completed the
survey even alluded to them as performers of dance and song.2 Stereotypes of
Samoans as big, physical, and aggressive athletes abounded however.
The practical impact of the exotic legacy of Polynesia for Samoans now
mostly manifests itself in response to their foreign sounding vowel-rich names,
which sportscasters jokingly stumble over, the big fat guy in the aloha shirt who is
the life of the party, and the ultra virile portrayal of Samoan athletes as the
reincarnation of tribal warriors.
American Seasoning: Samoan stereotypes and their origins
In the context of California, this exotic legacy appears to be of negligible
importance in the practice of stereotyping in most contexts. Although it may be
different in Hawai’i and in New Zealand, where Pacific geography and culture are
2 It would appear that the impression that many Samoans have about the irreparable legacy of
Margaret Mead and her sullying of modem Samoans’ sense of propriety through her allegedly
sensationalized and lurid accounts of Samoan amorality have not survived the test of time, or at least
not with this most recent generation of anthropology students.
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more familiar to the general population, in California, Samoans fall prey to many of
the less specific stereotypes that are broadly applied to Americans who are recent
arrivals, are poor, are brown-skinned, or are big. Such assumptions are based either
on the impression that their physical presence makes, be it frightening and
intimidating or risible, and in the negative media-generated images of Samoan youth
as yet another brown-skinned disaffected group, living in poverty and prone to
socially deviant behaviours. Few positive images of the community that are not
based on success in sports or in entertainment seem to exist, so they are left with the
option of being either feared and shunned or completely ignored.
Unsolicited Opinions
Three incidents that took place during the course of my fieldwork reinforced
the existence of this negative view of the community and also supported other
recurrent themes. Often in the course of conversations, my interest in the Samoan
community would come out and such a disclosure would elicit unasked for responses
from individuals. Once, while I was photocopying recruitment flyers at a shop in
Foster City, a suburb of San Francisco, the owner of the shop offered his opinion on
Samoans after reading through my flyer while the copies printed off. I should note
that he prefaced his comments by identifying himself as Lithuanian, presumably in
an effort to provide some sort of immigrant accreditation, which entitled him to
comment on all other immigrant groups.
“They’re a temperamental people”, he stated authoritatively.
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“I think it probably depends on the individual”, I replied, with as much
diplomacy as I could muster.
“Yeah? Well, I was in the army with this one guy and he was very violent. If
you went through his stuff or something he’d lose it”.
That he seemed to base his opinion of all Samoans on a singular experience, of a
fairly justified outrage at the invasion of one’s property no less, shows the
tremendous pressure on the community to always be on its best behaviour. Samoans
are so few and so often unnoticed that they often only come into popular awareness
when they display some sort of exceptional behaviour that risks coming to
metonymically represent the entire community to the public. Unfortunately, in part
because of the media’s preferences for conflict-driven sensationalism, that
exceptional behaviour is often deviant rather than positive and community affirming,
and so forms or supports negative stereotypes of the community.
On another occasion at a car rental agency in nearby Burlingame, the clerk,
an African-American in his mid forties who had lived for years in the Marina district
of San Francisco, offered his opinion after I had explained that I was renting the car
in order to videotape a Samoan cultural performance while my car was being
repaired. His tone was jovial when he said, “You couldn’t have picked somebody
smaller, like the pygmies?” which he followed up with an earnest warning: “Just
make sure you don’t piss anybody off’. This type of statement that referenced
Samoan size and the corresponding threat of danger or violence was a not infrequent
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reaction to my work by outsiders and a strong indicator of why Samoans might feel
that outsiders have a negative view of them.
The final incident is one that occurred on a bus ride through a rough
neighbourhood during this same time period when I was without my car. I was riding
the bus through the Sunnydale projects on my way to a school where I was helping
to run an after-school program for Samoan middle school kids. The school was
located at the end of the bus line. By the time we were nearing the end of the line the
bus was virtually empty of other passengers. The Asian bus driver turned to me and
said, “Are you going all the way to the top of the hill? I just ask you because I’ve
never seen any white people go all the way to the top of the hill on this bus. It’s
mostly just Blacks and Asians”
Although I was startled by his starkly racial comments I also recognized that
he was just showing civic concern so I offered, “...And some Samoans and Pacific
Islanders?” to show him that I was familiar with the area.
“Yeah, I guess” he replied noncommittally
Even in the areas where their population is most concentrated, such as this
neighbourhood, Samoans often remain virtually unknown, even to people who are
familiar with the areas, as this bus driver seemingly was. The bus driver’s words,
“I’ve never seen any white people go all the way to the top of the hill on this bus. It’s
mostly just Blacks and Asians” are further evidence of the fact that the mainstream
community (ostensibly the white or Euro-American community in this example) are
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not only ignorant of the nuances of the Samoan community, but they are also
unlikely to alleviate their ignorance about any but the stereotypical assumptions
about that group because they are generally avoiding the areas where Samoans are
most numerous. Instead, it is the African-Americans, Filipinos and other
marginalized minorities that are in the best position to know the Samoan community
and culture and from whom the Samoan youth understandably draw many of their
American peer influences, again evoking the segmentary assimilation model
discussed in the previous chapter.
Samoan youths’ perceptions of h o w others see them
Samoan youth understand that much of the discrimination they suffer is
generalized and has little to do with their specific Samoan identity. Indeed, given
their widespread perception that their Samoan background is either invisible or
unknown to most Americans, how could they be discriminated against based
primarily on their culture? My survey results testify to this fact. I found that the
thirty-five youth who answered the question: “What stereotypes do other people have
about Samoans?” rarely referenced these old exotic representations of Polynesian
culture. Instead, they by and large assumed that by stereotypes, I tacitly wanted
negative ones, and they tended to focus on issues of body image, behaviour, and
temperament rather than culture, whether exoticized or realistic.
Again using the quantitative/qualitative approach that I described in the last
chapter, I analyzed survey responses, from these thirty-five informants and broke
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them down into one hundred individual statements, each of which was individually
coded and assigned to one of seven general categories. In most cases the statements
were further organized into subcategories. The table below gives the breakdown of
the statements and indicates what types of statements were included in each of the
seven major categories.
Table 6.1
Samoan Perceptions of Samoan Stereotypes
Rank Category Percentage1
1 Body
(size, function, aesthetic)
34
2 Temperament
(aggressive, friendly,
motivation)
25
3 Behaviour
(deviant [violent, gang life],
gauche)
21
4 Social Values
(negative, obedient, loyal)
8
5 Intellect
(underachievement)
7
6 Family
(size and interconnectedness)
4
7 Environment
(socio-economic standing)
1
N=35 All categories 100
Of course, this method is still biased because I both coded the statements and
created the categorical options, but one of the advantages of this methodology is that,
as much as possible, it is the data that drives the theorizing and not the pre-conceived
1 Based on 100 responses.
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theory that colours the data. An interesting finding that immediately emerges from
the data is that the first three categories: body, temperament, and behaviour are by
far the largest, totaling 80% of all the responses. In contrast, the responses that were
assigned to the other four categories are almost statistically negligible.
The ‘body’ comments were further subdivided into three sub-categories: size,
function and aesthetics. The largest of these subcategories was ‘size’ (22/34), a label
which was applied to statements that typically included descriptive adjectives like
‘big’, ‘fat’, and ‘huge’. The remaining statements were classified either as the
‘function’ sub-category (7/34), which was used to identify statements that referred to
things the body could do, like be “strong” and be “healthy” or the ‘aesthetic’ sub
category (5/34) that accounted for the non-size, appearance-related statement like
‘pretty’, or ‘ugly’.
After much deliberation, I decided that another division needed to be made
between statements of attitude and statements of action, which became
‘temperament’ and ‘behaviour’ respectively, for the purposes of Table 6.1.
Originally, I had combined both of these categories into a single ‘temperament’
category, which I ultimately deemed too large to be descriptively useful. However, it
should be noted that the two categories remain closely related and that the line that
divides them is not always clear. ‘Temperament’ or attitude came to represent
statements that had to do with ‘aggression’ (17/25), ‘friendly’ (4/25), ‘motivation’
(3/25) and one other temperament statement that did not fit into any of these sub
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categories. The ‘friendly’ statements are self-explanatory, the ‘motivation’
statements all had to do with laziness, and the ‘aggressive’ statements included
descriptors like ‘mean’, ‘hot-headed’, ‘aggressive’, ‘intimidating’, ‘tough’, and
phrases like, “Friendly until you make us mad” (which was counted as two separate
statements) and “Not to mess with Samoans”. The ‘behaviour’ or action category,
was almost entirely comprised of ‘deviant’ (18/21) activities like gang life, beating
people up, bullying, and several more generalized misbehaviours like
‘troublemakers’ and “scandalous and shady”. There were also three statements,
which I categorized as ‘gauche’ that reflected some sort of lack of sophistication in
appearance and in behaviour on the part of the Samoans in the American context
such as “f.o.b” (a vernacular transethnic immigrant acronym for “fresh of the boat”).
Overall, though I never stressed that they need be so, the vast majority of
stereotypes proffered were negative ones. In fact, I categorized each of the one
hundred statements as overtly negative, overtly positive, or merely descriptive with
no accompanying value judgment implied. The breakdown was 60 % negative, 27%
descriptive and 13% positive.
Part of what is interesting about the majority of the responses being negative
is that another question on the same survey that asked them if they had ever been the
victims of racism had very different results. Of the thirty-six people who answered
that question, only 22% claimed to have been the victims of racism while 78%
claimed not to have been. Whether the implication is that negative stereotypes do not
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contribute to or are not a part of racism, or whether the working definition of
“racism” that the informants are using is much more constrained and formalized than
what I conceive it to be, or whether they view the stereotypes of them as fair and
descriptive rather than as racist, as I think may be the case, are all debatable, but
either way these two pieces of data seem to contradict one another. One other
interesting factor of the “victim of racism” finding is that, of the eight individuals
who reported having experienced racism, seven were women. Although this sample
is small, it is a stark contrast with the Afro-Caribbean youths living in New York of
Mary Waters (1996; 1999) study in which the young men reported much higher
feeling of discrimination than the women did.
Media, Body Image, Sports
Without memorable exceptions, every Samoan with whom I spoke felt that
Samoans were underrepresented in the media, to the extent that exposure of
Samoans, in virtually any capacity was noted and celebrated. This conversation that
arose during a Carson girl’s group interview in response to the dearth of popular
images of Samoans reinforces this observation. But it is also illustrative of the high
self-esteem that was such a strong component of most Samoan youth with whom I
interacted, just as David Mayeda found with his study of Samoan youth in Hawaii
(1998).
CS: What is it like for you to live in a culture where the media so rarely
shows people who look like you?
#1:1 know.
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#2: We, like, we have our beauty. You know? Like, you know, the
Hawaiian... everybody’s like, “Ah, she’s Hawaiian.” Like, if we go
somewhere else, they all think we’re Hawaiian or something; but see, that has
its own little beauty. You know? Like that natural beauty... That’s how I
look at it.
#3: They just need some more Samoans on TV.
#2: But it’s not like when we look at it, it’s like, “Oh, where’s the Samoan
girl? Where’s the Samoan girl?” like, we know we’re not gonna’ see one,
so... and when we see one, we’re like “oh my gosh” and show everybody. A
Samoan girl’s in a magazine! [laughter] and then some people are like, ‘oh,
she’s not Samoan, she’s Hawaiian.”
# 3 :1 don’t care. She’s Pacific Islander! She’s in the magazine!
# 2 :1 don’t know. It’s strange. On a billboard, I seen a Samoan girl [what?],
like, she had this, uhm, AT&T tech thing on. It was for some like vocational
school and I was like telling everybody. “Oh my gosh” there’s a billboard
with a Samoan girl on it on the 405 freeway. But, it’s like funny when you
see Samoans in stuff like that.
Although they recognized that Samoans were underrepresented in popular culture,
and were excited to find rare public images of Samoans, or at least of Pacific
Islanders, they were not obsessed with finding images of themselves in the media,
and indeed did not expect to do so.
Another incontrovertible social fact of the Samoan experience is that many of
them are larger than the average American and so, draw attention to themselves
based on their size. Among their Samoan peers they seem to encounter very little
overt negative re-enforcement for their size, and indeed there seems to be a sort of
oppositional identity at play by which “bigness” is seen as a source of pride and of
distinction from the palagis (people of European ancestry). I remember one occasion
when a church minister offered to have his wife make me an aloha shirt and, without
a touch of irony, asked me if I was a size small. As I am 6’2” and weigh around 200
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pounds, I was startled by his question. Nevertheless, this anecdote reveals an
important point: many Samoans view themselves as big and pdlagis as small, and
this is one of the ways by which they maintain ethnic distinction from mainstream
culture.
This is not to say that Samoans are unaware that their larger physiques may
limit the identities and roles that are available to them in some dominant culture
venues like television. As one seventeen year-old third-generation Carson woman
said:
The media says that you have to be skinny in order for someone to like you. I
mean, you have to be skinny for you to be accepted by society. Like, if
someone like was all big and someone else was skinny and they were trying
out for being actresses and the bigger one was better than the skinny one,
they’ll pick the skinny one, because you don’t see fat people on TV, you see
all like skinny people. But, it’s true you don’t see fat people on TV unless
they’re comedians. You don’t see actors and actresses that are fat.
Samoans therefore, though resigned in some ways to their public anonymity, and to
some forms of discrimination, specifically to discrimination based on size, have not
necessarily absorbed this information passively and have applied it to certain
adaptive strategies that we shall explore in the second part of this chapter.
Notwithstanding their observations about how they felt the media had
addressed them, I chose to do a quick survey myself. I did a search through the Los
Angles Times archives to see how often the word “Samoan” appeared during the past
two and half years or so (January 1, 2001 to April 5, 2004). Although print media is
probably no longer the most pervasive or powerful shaper of public opinion it once
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was, it is still a legitimate reflection of the public impression of a time and place, and
since greater Los Angeles is home to the largest mainland population of Samoans it
seemed like an appropriate barometer for the generation of popular Samoan images.
In all the word “Samoan” appeared in fifty-one separate articles. Several
articles had nothing to do with the community but just used the word ‘Samoan’ in
ways that were not ethno-cultural. Notable examples of this were a reference to the
Samoan sea worm housed in the American Dime Museum of oddities in Baltimore
and four specific references to a punk rock band called “The Angry Samoans”
which, though containing no Samoan band members, is probably doing little to
counter stereotypes about Samoan aggression and violence. There were a sprinkling
of articles about American Samoan politics, historical pieces about Gaugin, Mead,
Freeman, Stevenson, and World War II, that in some way referenced Samoans but
did not focus on them, an article that included a feature of a Samoan fa ’afafine
(transsexual Samoan man) working on a fishing boat, and two articles in the travel
section. The areas which enjoyed the most exposure, and which specifically
described the activities of Samoans living in the United States, were about sports
(mostly football and boxing), church (including stories on translocal congregations
and on various small ethnic congregations sharing worship space with one another),
entertainment (mostly movies featuring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, but also an
article that mentioned a Samoan choir and another about firedancers), ethnicity
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(mentioning Samoans along with other ethnic groups as a way of demonstrating
ethnic diversity), and gangs.
Table 6.2
Sampling of the Occurrence of “Samoan” in the Los Angles Times
(January 1, 2001 to April 5, 2004)
Sports Church Entertain. Ethnicity Gangs Misc.
Articles
(Out of 39)1
17 6 5 3 2 6
Percentage 44 15 13 8 5 15
This brief survey of media images confirmed some of my presumptions,
specifically that the community enjoys remarkably little coverage on the whole and
that sports is, by far, the most common representation of Samoans in the media. It
also challenged other presumptions, namely that the gang-youth violence-social
dysfunction related coverage of Samoans was much less than I thought it would be.
However, the most interesting finding to emerge was that, while many of these
articles failed to acknowledge any specific Samoans, those that did do so, recognized
Samoan men. As incomplete as the coverage of the Samoan community may be in
the press, it is further biased in its virtual exclusion of female images in that
coverage, whether positive, negative, or neutral. In fact, there were only two direct
references to Samoan women in the fifty-one articles. In one article, the writer used a
1 Of the 51 article matches that my search revealed, I decided that 13 were not relevant to this survey
so the percentages in this table are based on the 39 articles that I deemed appropriate for this survey.
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quote from a disgruntled Samoan parent as evidence of dissatisfaction with the
public schools in Carson and in the other article Samoan women and their traditional
garb (puletasis) were referred to (with accompanying photos) in an expose about a
worship space shared by a variety of ethnic congregations. This survey finding on
media bias suggests a strong possibility that gender is an important variable in
differential experiences of integration into the mainstream for Samoan men and
women.
Football
Just as “sports” was the most strongly represented category in my Los
Angeles Times survey, it was in sports-related literature that I consistently found the
most in-depth popular coverage of the community, the ongoing migration from the
Islands, and Samoan culture in general. Over the years there have been numerous
articles in various sports related publications that have profiled Samoan athletes and
their alleged cultural and physical advantages in contact sports, particularly in
football (cf. Adams 1999; Feldman 2001, 2002; Garber 2002; Johnston 1976; Miller
2002).3
These in-depth sports features are written for popular audiences and so
should not, perhaps, be held to the same critical standards as academic writing since
sports coverage, particularly in the ultra-macho domain of football writing, tends
3 Even in this forum of sports writing, where Samoans are relatively well recognized, the articles are
so few and far between that they are easily recalled by Samoan sports enthusiasts. A query I posted to
a Samoan sports internet chatroom about Adams (1999) GQ article and Johnston (1976) Sports
Illustrated Article garnered almost instantaneous and thorough response, not to mention confirming
that those were the only two major mainstream articles on Samoan football players.
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towards the hyperbolic and sensationalist. Nevertheless, these articles, collectively,
are still constructing images of Samoan people and culture and are contributing,
albeit disproportionably so, to popular understanding of that group. Although they
are slightly different from one another, many of these articles had common elements.
Though varied in the degree to which the authors employed artistic license all of
them noted the physical and agility advantages of Samoans, speculated as to what the
reasons for these advantages were, and most went to lengths to paint highly
exoticized contrasts between the players’ Island roots and their American sporting
experiences.
Bruce Feldman (2002) writes a fairly typical if somewhat more artful
description of Samoan football players and their innate advantages as follows: “BYU
head coach Tally Stevens made it Apostol's job in 1959 to mine the South Pacific
islands that were full o f agile, thick-legged, slope shouldered roughnecks long on
loyalty and short on subtlety'" (my emphasis). This quote not only shows the extent
of physical objectification (the verb to ‘mine’ literally suggesting that the athletes are
merely raw materials) but also the practice of College football teams recruiting
Pacific Islanders. This influx of players with Pacific backgrounds has been referred
to as the “Polynesian Pipeline” or the “Dominican Republic of the NFL”, drawing a
parallel with the talent pool that the Dominican Republic offers to professional
baseball (Garber 2002). I was struck immediately by the similarity between these
physical descriptions provided by the sports writers and the accounts of the first
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Europeans to write about Samoans, who also described them in highly racialized
ways that idealized their physicality and reduced them to the role of scientific
specimens. Compare, for example the words of John Stair written in 1897,
The Samoans generally are a fine race of men, their average height being 5 ft
10 in. Many, both male and female, have very handsome figures, and would
be fine models for a sculptor whilst some of the younger females are very
good-looking. Their complexion is brown, but it is difficult to name a
particular shade as they present a great variety of colour. (58)
Once they have established the ‘freakish physical’ advantages of the Samoan
athlete, authors invariably speculated as to what the ultimate source of their size and
agility is, using varying degrees of sensationalism and reasoned argument:
Descendants of warrior tribesmen, Samoans practiced ritualistic cannibalism
into the 19th century but say their massive builds are the result of a diet
centered on taro, a.k.a. the Samoan Steroid, a sweet potato-like vegetable that
is loaded with carbohydrates. Their agility, they say, comes from traditional
well-choreographed tribal dances such as the fast-paced lapa lapa. (Feldman
2001a).
What I found is that size is only part of the winning equation, perhaps no
more important than spanking, synchronized dancing or one very powerful
root vegetable (Adams 1999:392).
Samoans once were known as fierce warriors who practiced cannibalism.
Now they take their aggressions out on the football field, and they do so with
uncanny power and skill due to a potent brew of genetics and culture. Their
bodies are naturally big-boned; traditional dances make them nimble; and a
disciplined upbringing emphasizes the group over the individual, wiring them
for team sport. (Miller 2002)
One of the most interesting references here is to the practice of cannibalism, which
has been one of the dominant orientalist tropes of savagery and has been directly
associated with the South Pacific since the time of first European contact (cf.
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Thomas 1997:196). Clearly, the term still holds some power to shock the Western
imagination since its inclusion in these articles seems to have little relevance
otherwise. And yet, as fanciful as they are, these notions surrounding cultural pre
disposition leading to sporting field success may not all be empty theorizing. This
particular combination of physical prowess and ‘coachability’, as they call it, is
similar to what Bob Franco (1991) and others have observed elsewhere— instances in
which values like discipline, respect, and obedience are perceived as advantageous
labour skills for Samoans working in blue collar industries like fish-packing in
Hawai’i. In fact, Mark Adams, quoting successful Samoan NFL star (and former
USC standout) Junior Seau, seems to support this cultural values (rather than
practice) argument. Seau contends that Samoans’ success in the NFL is “built more
from strong families and an immigrant work ethic than from tricky dances and magic
potatoes” (1999:397). The truth is, though there are many Samoan players playing
football at high levels now, many of them are related to one another, erroneously
giving the impression that it is a wide cross-section of the community that is able to
perform at this high level. In such cases, these athletes may owe their success, at
least partially, to family socialization rather than to a more general cultural pre
disposition to success in sports.
A final similarity that emerged in many of these articles was the tendency for
the authors to exaggerate the differences between island culture and American living,
often glossing over the fact that the majority of professional Samoan athletes are
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born and raised in the United States and not under the Island coconut trees. They go
to great lengths to describe the island of origin as a place that is completely foreign
to the American experience.
In the middle of the South Pacific floats a tiny string of islands that covers
just 77 square miles and is known as American Samoa, or simply, The Rock.
It’s among the most mysterious spots on earth — balmy and beachy, but with
one of the world’s highest per capita suicide rates. American Samoa, the tuna
capital of the world, reeks of fish and poverty. (Feldman 2001a)
Is American Samoa really “among the most mysterious spots on earth” and if so
what is such a claim based on? Even the titles of the articles go to great lengths to
highlight the exotic nature of the location “Shaking them out of their coconut trees”
(Johnston 1976), “Buy a vowel?” (Feldman 2001b), and Mark Adams (1999) “Sons
and Lavas” which is followed by the tag line “Where’s the easiest place in the world
to find a future NFL star? That would be Samoa where there’s strength in tubers, all
men are double semi-tough and real men wear skirts”. All of these titles and
descriptions are meant to emphasize the difference between Samoans and
mainstream American culture, which though perhaps still a source of pride to the
Samoans who read them and relish this characterization of themselves as different
and exotic, also serve to separate them from American culture as different. Take this
seemingly innocent statistic cited by Greg Garber (2002): “There are about 500,000
Samoans in the world and more than 200 play Division I football. A Samoan boy,
according to estimates, is 40 times more likely to make it to the NFL than a boy from
the mainland.” This estimate is misleading because the true number of Samoans who
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have had legitimate exposure to football is much smaller and because, by using the
word “mainland” as the measure of the non-Samoan he is effectively denying
citizenship to the significant proportion of Samoans who themselves live on the
mainland. Even when their culture gamers attention for their achievements in the
American public eye, the United States Samoan community does not benefit from
greater recognition because the press effectively ties their identity to the Islands
themselves. Indeed, so eager are the publicists to play up this Tarzan in New York
trope, that one interviewer asked Tonui Fonoti, a football player at the University of
Nebraska, how tough the adjustment from living in the Islands to living in Lincoln
was? Either he didn’t know, or didn’t care, that Tonui had left the islands at age ten
and had spent his high school years in Hawai’i and in Oceanside.
In each of the three common themes of this collection of articles— Samoan
size and agility, the search for the roots of these advantages, and the exotic origins of
the athletes— we see the continued perpetuation of the classic exotic noble savage
imagery— the general absence of which was noted earlier. Though such imagery may
no longer form a strong component of Samoan stereotyping in general, as we saw in
the survey responses of the Samoan teens discussed earlier, in the columns of sports
writers, the continued generation of such imagery, in line with its strong historical
antecedents, continues unabated. This should not be surprising since others have
come to similar conclusions and have noted that, in general, “media sport has played
a major role in reinforcing regressive stereotypes, particularly through conservative
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ideologies around ‘natural’ differences” (Brookes 2002:107). Finally, even more
consistently than in other representations of Samoans, women are entirely absent in
these ultra-macho accounts of tough men raised by even tougher fathers.
Gendered Representations of Culture
The issue of gender for Samoan-Americans is noteworthy in this discussion
in at least two major ways. First of all, the reconfiguration of gender, from its
traditional definition in Samoa, is underway and it has become one of the major
points of intergenerational conflict between young Samoans, primarily young
Samoan women, and their parents. This first is an issue that is internal to the Samoan
community but the second gender-related issue has to do with how Samoans are
perceived and what the impact of that perception is on Samoan youth. As is often the
case, this discussion of gender, appears on the surface to be a female “problem”, as
Bradd Shore (1981) Judith Butler (1990a) and others have often noted, and yet, in
truth, it implicates, in the first instance, all of Samoan culture as it comes into
increasing contact with other cultures and other cultural values. In the second place,
it implicates the general American public and the media that influences it. I shall
briefly explore each of these issues.
In traditional Samoan society the gender roles are distinct and well
established. According to Bradd Shore (1981) the criterion by which men and
women maintained their status was vastly different. From the perspective of a
gendered ideal, men’s main worth was determined by their ability to assert
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themselves physically, sexually, and politically, and women’s ideal worth was
determined by her ability to remain chaste, casting a positive reflection on her ‘ aiga
(extended family) and her nu’u (village). According to some, the most important
bond in Samoan culture is the feag ’aiga which is a compact between brothers and
sisters whereby their relations between one another are highly formalized and
controlled and in which the brother is sworn to protect and, if need be, avenge his
sister’s chastity (Sua’ali’i 2001). The conflict arises because one of the main ways
that a young man achieves prestige is through his ability to gain sexual contact with
many women, particularly with virgins, while simultaneously he is protecting his
sisters from similar advances by other young men like himself.
The ideal Samoan male was one who was able, on the one hand, to gain many
sexual liaisons and form successful political unions with high ranking
families, and on the other, to protect his sisters from sexual harm and provide
his family with food, status and physical labour” (Sua’ali’i 2001:165-166)
In essence, according to Shore (1981) men are defined by their gender on an ideal
spectrum of masculinity from male to fa ’afafine (transvestite men who live and act
as women) to female, and women are defined by their sexuality on an ideal spectrum
from taupou (ceremonial virgin) to wife to sexually active woman. The male division
between youth and adulthood is gradual and often was not fully realized until a man
had fathered legitimate children and received a title, whereas for women, the division
was much more extreme. However, a woman’s most important role in life would
always be as a sister rather than as a wife, because, though she resided virilocally, in
general, she remained a part of her own ‘ aiga and nu’u throughout her life. As a
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woman’s marriage links her ‘ aiga with the lineage of here husband, her children
ultimately would be a part of her husband’s ‘ aiga and nu’u. A woman’s main
lifelong status was as a kinswoman and not as an affine (Ortner 1981; Shore 1981).
Put another way, despite the sexual division of labour and the prescribed gender
roles in Samoa, it would be incorrect to assume that gender is the most salient
organizing principle of the culture when it is the collective self embodied by the
‘ aiga rather than the individual that is truly central to Samoan social organization
(Sua’ali’i 2001)
Women were defined by the way in which they represented their nu’u and
‘ aiga (if they were chaste then the village/brothers were doing their jobs), and the
village taupou herself (usually a matai’s daughter, though now often thcfaife’au’ s
daughter) was required to fill an important ceremonial role of welcoming guests and
in representing the village publicly. Men meanwhile, were responsible for the major
transformative work (clearing land for plantations, building houses and so on) that,
though less visible, was of crucial pragmatic importance to the village. Shore’s
(1981) description gives a neat insight into these different spheres of influence.
There is for Samoans a general distinction between male and female work. In
general, males are associated with work that is “heavy,” dirty, instrumental,
and linked with the peripheries of the village (the bush and the open sea). ...
Women, by contrast, are linked with work that is “light,” clean, largely
decorative rather than instrumental and associated with the centers of village
life (the household, the protected lagoon, and the village proper) (Shore
1981:203)
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This brief discussion of these traditional gender expectations is relevant to
our discussion of Samoan youth because it is currently undergoing significant
cultural critique as it comes into contact with Western ideals which at times reinforce
and at other times challenge its continued appropriateness. In some ways the Western
ideals that the first Samoan migrants encountered when they began arriving in the
1950s, in combination with their strong adoption of conservative Christian doctrine,
have both been powerful purveyors of patriarchal messages which, if unexamined,
could serve to reinforce tendencies to confine women to the domestic sphere, and to
devalue them as wives while simultaneously removing them from the village context
in which they still maintained much prestige as sisters. The following quote from a
seventeen-year-old girl shows how this neo-conservatism can erroneously be
confused with the preservation of tradition:
I know the girl in Samoan tradition, they’re supposed to do everything but
my cousin is the same age as me and he didn’t do nothing. All he did was
take out the trash when he felt like it
At the same time, and particularly since the 1970s, young Samoans have come into
contact with liberal western notions of women’s and children’s rights that may have
helped to encourage some to critique a system that, out of its traditional socio-
environmental context, seems to unfairly treat community members based on age
and gender.
It is important to note that it is the displacement of these values from their
traditional socio-environmental context here that is at stake rather than a suggestion
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that Samoan culture, by definition, treats its women and young people poorly. The
truth remains: Samoan boys and Samoan girls generally enjoy much different
freedom of movement from one another. This is a great source of aggravation to
many Samoan women who no longer, in their daily lives, play vastly different roles
from the boys, as all are basically students and it is, in part through this vocation as
student that they are taught about their equality with men and of the injustice of
discrimination. Take the words of Desiree, a seventeen-year-old woman from
Wilmington (Southern California) who spent part of her childhood living with her
grandparents:
My grandparents are very traditional. Like they’re very Samoan they’re like
the girl— I couldn’t play sports I couldn’t do anything. ‘You’re not a boy you
don’t do this. You’re not a boy you don’t do this.’ I couldn’t stay after
school. ‘You’re not a boy you couldn’t do this’. I had to sneak my way out of
things to be in leadership and, you know, to get involved in school stuff.
In only slightly varied language, other young women frequently reiterated the
sentiments expressed by this female informant quoted above, and even the boys, who
benefit from this arrangement in many ways, agreed that there is a double standard in
parental control. The quotes below are drawn from a group interview of five boys,
aged eighteen to twenty-two, in San Francisco. They are responding to Vignette
number two (see appendix) which tells the story of a Samoan girl who is given too
much domestic responsibility while her brother lives a carefree lifestyle.
CS: Do you think the boys and girls are treated the same in (interruption:
Hell, no. Another: Nah) the Samoan...
#4:1 remember, I think I was, like, 12, my sister was like 18-1 had more
freedom than her (several agree)
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#3: The boys they do more stuff than the girls
CS: Like what?
#3: Like you can go out, you know, go to stuff not stay hom e-
#1: It’s more protective like—
#3: And they (the girls) are in the house...
The issue seems to be that the boys’ sphere of duties or fe ’aus (chores) are not as
easily transposed to the urban setting. There is no fishing, or plantation work to be
done in the housing projects of Sunnydale or the suburban neighbourhoods of
Carson. The boys’ tasks, which, as defined earlier, are concerned with heavy work
on the peripheries of the village, are mostly limited to yard work and physical tasks
in the American setting until the time when men start working out of the house for
wages. For women meanwhile, the decorative and domestic work, which was a part
of their traditional responsibility transfers much more easily to the American setting.
The belief among many young people is that back in the Islands the boys contribute a
lot more because they are still able to fulfill their traditional tasks so the sexes appear
to be treated more equally as far as work is concerned, although the boys still enjoy
much greater freedom of movement.
As one researcher remarked, one of the main factors contributing to an
increasingly shared division of domestic tasks is driven by economic need. Women
are increasingly required to work out of the homes to draw a salary and men,
consequently are more involved in domestic tasks since the women are not always
available (Sua’ali’i 2001). Sammy made just such an observation on the changing
gendered division of labour when he said:
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Well, that’s how it used to be in my house. That was like I have no choice,
we gotta’ do f e ’aus [chores]. My sister, she off doing her own thing now, and
like the boys in the house actually started doing work in the house and started
cleaning up. But that said, ‘at was good, because my Mom started to realize,
you know, this ain’t like the Islands. She finally realize[d] that, you know,
it’s different out here and everybody need[s] to take their own responsibility.
Furthermore, while the young Samoan women’s responsibilities may have
increased in the urban setting where both parents often work and the Samoan boys’
responsibilities have decreased, the protectiveness that keeps girls cloistered by
their families may be increased with the perception of a wide array of dangers and
sexual temptations. This confinement must appear all the more unfair since the boys
have many more options in their unrestricted movements than they would have had
back in the rural setting of the Islands. This inequality, combined with Western
notions of individual justice, are at understandable odds with the collective self
motivated values that place ‘ aiga before all else, as discussed earlier, and can lead
to a genuine breakdown in communication between Samoan parents who want their
children to behave like respectful and deferential Samoan children, and the youth
who may find their parents’ notions archaic and unenlightened.
Samoan women continue to play active and highly visible roles in their own
communities. Indeed, apart from the faife’aus— and even in those cases the wives of
the faife’aus wielded almost as much status as their husbands— most of the key
figures in the secular Samoan communities that I worked in appeared to be women.
However, in the non-Samoan public’s eye, as I have already alluded to, the story was
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260
quite different. Through the media’s eye, Samoan culture appears to be virtually
entirely male.
This observation has led me to consider whether the Samoan case is an
anomaly or if there is a broader tendency for certain cultures to be painted in such
gendered ways. I hasten to add that such a bias invariably comes from outsider
imaginings of that community and is not a typology that I am imposing upon them.
In some ways this notion that an individualistic trait, such as gender, is attributable to
an entire culture, is reminiscent of Ruth Benedict’s landmark culture and personality
school work, Patterns o f Culture (1934). In it Benedict makes a compelling
argument that certain cultural groups have configured (as she calls it) themselves in
ways that emphasize a distinctive set of core values that prove largely deterministic
of other aspects of the culture. As she writes:
A culture, like an individual, is a more or less consistent pattern of thought
and action. Within each culture there comes into being characteristic
purposes not necessarily shared by other types of societies (46).
Using this base contention, that cultures are personalities as Mead writes in the
introduction to the volume, Benedict goes on to describe four different cultures:
Zuni, Plains Indians, Dobu, and Kwakiutl, profiling their cultural psychologies as
though they were individuals. Collectively she uses these examples as a basis for
arguing the ultimate importance of cultural relativity, and the place of the individual
in relation to her society, showing that the acceptability of one’s behaviour has
everything to do with how successfully one conforms with one’s society’s dominant
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261
traits (values), and that these traits vary greatly from culture to culture. However,
where my contention differs from Benedict’s is in the fact that while she is imposing
a structure on the cultures she is writing about, Zuni as Apollonian, Plains Indians as
Dionysian, Dobu as paranoidal, and Kwakiutl as megalomaniacal, I am suggesting
not that Samoans are a gendered culture, but that they are imagined as one by
Americans.
The specific reason for why Samoan culture appears as male is beyond the
scope of this dissertation, but it remains a rich direction of future inquiry. At this
point, I would like to suggest a few tentative hypotheses for this gendered bias and,
more importantly, to project what the impact of this bias has been on the collective
psyche of Samoan youth.
My initial hypothesis about the maleness of Samoan culture is based on two
independent variables. On the one hand, through the practice of keeping Samoan
women close to the ‘ aiga and close to the home while allowing young men freedom
of movement, the Samoan men simply come into contact with the non-Samoan
public much more often than the women do. Secondly, and perhaps more
importantly, Samoan constructions of idealized masculinity, which emphasize
physical strength, virility, and persuasiveness, when combined with the larger
Samoan physique, coincide strongly with general Western notions of masculinity.
Chastity, while certainly a Christian value, is not perhaps the core value to Western
femininity that it is to traditional Samoan culture, and either way, chastity is not a
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2 6 2
paradeable attribute in American culture in the way that male physicality is. Male
aggressiveness and physicality enjoy the well-developed public forum of organized
sports and entertainment to showcase itself. Furthermore, the generally large size of
Samoans, highly favours Samoan men over Samoan women as Western stereotypes
for big men are generally much more positive than they are for big women.
In very generalized terms, it seems to me then, that the Samoan males may
have an easier time integrating themselves into American culture than the Samoan
women because 1) their cultural value of masculinity conforms well with Western
notions of masculinity; 2) in sports and entertainment there is an obvious forum for
their expression of this masculinity; and 3) they are generally more visible and public
than their female counterparts because of Samoan parental rules regarding gender
and freedom of movement. When one combines this hypothesis with a series of
associated observations about Samoan women that have already emerged in this
chapter: 1) women are largely absent in the public imagery of Samoans; 2) Samoan
youth, in general, perceive themselves as negatively viewed by American culture on
the whole; and 3) Samoan women were much more likely than men to report
instances of racism, one is left with no clear answers but many questions for future
research. For example, in the instance of reports of racism and discrimination, is this
just a result of the small sample size, of a greater level of introspection of young
women than young men, or a willingness to be open, or is it in fact indicative of a
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generally more hostile and unwelcoming American climate for Samoan women than
men?
Stereotyping: beyond the negative
Despite Samoan youth’s overwhelming perception of negative stereotyping
and the influence of popular media, particularly the regressive stereotyping of the
sports media, a small survey I conducted among USC undergraduate students offers
some contrary data. A week before I guest-lectured on Samoan migration to a
sophomore undergraduate anthropology class on the South Pacific, I had the teaching
assistants pass out a short questionnaire to their students. The questionnaire
established the respondents’ age, gender, and permanent residence, and then asked
three simple questions: whether they had grown up in contact with Pacific Islanders
and if so, what their degree of interaction with that community had been, what
stereotypes they had heard about Samoans, and finally, to list any famous Samoans
they could. Table 6.3 summarizes the demographic results of this survey.
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Table 6.3
Demographics on the USC -Samoan Stereotypes Survey
Gender Age Home1 Exposure“
Number
... Age......
% %
Male Fem. Avg. Mode CA HA/Pac Other Male Fem. Overall
23 22 19.3 19 62.2 13.3 24.4 48 36 38
Total 45
When listing stereotypes, 80 percent of the students gave some response and
20 percent had no stereotypes to report. Of the students who answered the question,
22 percent of them made at least one overtly negative statement, and 25 percent
made at least one overtly positive statement; but the majority of responses were
simply descriptive, in the vein of “They’re big people”. The gender discrepancy in
the value-loaded statements is of note however. On the whole the women were much
more candid than the men. Men and women were about equally likely to offer a
negative stereotype (25 percent for women and 19 percent for men) but the women
were far more likely to make overtly positive statements (50 percent for women
versus 5 percent for men). Furthermore, while the men were more likely to make
reference to the “bigness” of Samoans than women were (86 percent of male
responses versus 56 percent of female responses), the men were more likely to keep
1 “Home” stands in here for permanent residence. I have sorted their responses into the following three
respective categories: California, Hawai’i or the Pacific, and all other residences.
“ The level of interaction varied greatly in these various “exposures”. Of those who reported some
exposure (19) only two were from outside of California, Hawai’i and the Pacific- a boy from Illinois
and a girl from Wisconsin.
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their comments descriptive, or tempered, like “They’re big, as in football players.”
The women who did refer to the Samoan physique used adjectives like “fat” and
“overweight”. This gendered idiosyncrasy recalls the dialogue from Quentin
Tarantino’s popular film Pulp Fiction (1994), in which two gangsters played by
Samuel Jackson (SJ) and John Travolta (JT) are discussing a Samoan colleague.
SJ: You remember Antoine Rockamoro? Half-Black half-Samoan? Used to
call him Tony Rocky Horror?
JT: Yeah, maybe. Fat right?
SJ: I wouldn’t go as far as to call the brother fat. I mean, he got a weight
problem... What’s a Nigger gonna’ do? He’s Samoan.
The men in this dialogue are fixated on Samoan size, but respectful of the virility
that accompanies it, are reluctant to dismiss that physicality as merely being an issue
of being overweight. The men in my survey, many of whom knew Samoans in the
context of athletics, one of the few venues in which other American youth are likely
to come into contact with Samoan youth if they do not live in the same immediate
areas as them, were apt to fixate on this physicality, which is not surprising given the
context of their interaction with them. Whether the female response is the result of a
higher level of introspection and honesty on the part of young women than young
men, as suggested in the previous section on gender, or is the result of some other
factor is indeterminable on this data alone, but it is an area that merits further
enquiry.
Another germane finding to emerge from this data, particularly in light of the
previous section on gendered culture, is the inclusion of several distinctive
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statements about Samoans and their culture. Although many of the comments
seemed to implicitly be about men, by referring to prowess at contact sports and
tendency to be involved in fighting, there were several noteworthy explicit
statements such as, “They are large people, mainly men” a young man from Irvine,
California or another statement by a woman from Arizona, who said “None really
other than they are really huge men.” Once again, Samoan masculinity and Samoan
men are portrayed as representing the entire culture and the women remain in the
background, except in anecdotal form, “I met a young girl at the middle school...” in
the singular instances of an inclusive physical description, “Very large men and
women” and through sexually inclusive activities like “They did their dances every
year in our cultural fair and stuff’. The final question of the survey, which asked
them to list famous Samoans, further reinforced this point, as well as the general
anonymity of the culture. Of the seventeen students who responded with an example
(only 38 percent of all respondents), all of them listed male athletes and male athlete-
entertainers (i.e. wrestlers) except for one woman from Long Beach who listed a
Christian Rhythm and Blues group featuring five Samoan brothers: the Katinas. I
draw attention to this fact not to berate the students for their lack of knowledge of the
vast array of Samoan celebrities, but to show that what limited exposure that does
exist for the community is almost entirely reserved for the men, once again
supporting the claim that, that which is publicly thought of as Samoan culture is
male.
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In summary then, although this survey was surely not representative of
American culture in general because it included a group of students who were pre
selected by their interest in anthropology of the Pacific, and who may have tempered
their responses to my survey because it was administered to them in this academic
climate in which cultural diversity is valued, the findings seem to present a counter
argument to the claim by Samoan youth that the public perception of them is largely
a negative one. This public’s reaction to them contained very little, if any, noble
savage or south seas romanticism imagery that is absent in most other forms of
media, except for sports and travel writing, but instead mostly was distinguished by
descriptive rather than loaded stereotypes and by a complicated gender related
response to Samoan physicality.
Intermission
Having established some of the key loci of Samoan identity expectations and
their origins, I am now ready to begin examining what the response to them has
been. The next chapter, when paired with this one, will show that the Samoan
expressive response to these expectations has been as varied as the sources and
nature of those expectations discussed here. Significant to our enterprise, the next
chapter will show that because some of these expectations come from Samoan
insiders themselves, particularly elders, they have helped to stimulate the emergence
of a Samoan youth identity which is distinct from Samoan diasporic culture overall.
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268
Chapter VII
Performing Identities:
Expression, performance, and the emergence of Samoan-
American youth identity1
Ethnographic Snap Shot: Friday Night Dance Practice
The streets in this part of Bay view are wide and mostly empty except for a
few abandoned husks of cars and some graffiti-tagged truck trailers. I easily find
parking among the industrial warehouses amidst which the new church is located, in
the shadow of Candlestick Park. It’s windy and the cool night air carries with it fast
moving inky black clouds and the briny smell of San Francisco Bay. This is my first
visit to the church in its new location, although I’ve attended many of its functions at
its previous incarnation, where it rented space from an African-American Baptist
church in a tightly packed residential neighbourhood less than a mile away. The old
church was a plainly decorated and somewhat run down building with peeling white
paint. It had drab carpets, purplish frosted glass windows, and behind the pulpit hung
a simple white cross and a large red banner on which was written, in freshly painted
gold letters, “The Lord is coming. Are you ready?” The new venue promised quite a
1 Although I use the term “Samoan-American” and feel that it is an important descriptor of the group I
should note that the term does not seem to be used in the community with any regularity and, in fact,
the only people I found who were interested in it at all were Samoan college students and Samoan
academics. Mark Adams (1999) also noted the conspicuous absence of this phrase in his article.
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269
different look and represented a big step up for the congregation, as they had now
purchased their own permanent space.
I walk along the side of an unmarked newer looking building with corrugated
iron walls, making my way towards a doorway that is emitting a warm yellow light
and around which lounge several large Samoan men with familiar faces. I nod to
them as I duck inside the building and try to make my way to the tables in the back
of the room as inconspicuously as possible, despite my noisy nylon jacket and my
bulky bags filled with a mini-disc recorder, a microphone, notebooks, informed
consent forms, and a camera.
The cavernous room, with freshly painted terracotta red concrete floors, is
sparsely decorated with a low stage draped with bright aloha print material, several
plants, many rows of folding chairs, and the minister’s pulpit pushed away to the
side. Behind me are sinks and counters for food preparation (at this time there was
still no electrical wiring for stoves) and a half-dozen long tables with chairs about
them. Despite these attempts to reclaim the space, the cavernous warehouse with its
high ceilings and its cold floor feels sterile and the decorations merely a temporary
addition, like a Samoan church movie set on a black soundstage.
It turns out that I needn’t have taken so much concern with my entrance, as
the group at the front of the building is intently focused on the task at hand. About
two- dozen Samoan teens, aged ten to twenty or so, are sitting in long organized
rows, going through a series of rhythmic choreographed dance movements. Two
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270
young women, only slightly older than the dancers themselves, are running the
rehearsal, one who speaks directly to the dancers (the woman whom I am there to
interview) and the other who operates the CD player as they play and re-play the
track for the song that accompanies their dance. The only adults present are a
deacon, whom I had met several times before, and another man playing a slit wooden
drum.
This was a scene similar to one I had witnessed— and one time even been a
part of as a member of the Pacific Islander club at USC—over and over again
through my years of fieldwork with Samoan youth, from the concrete outdoor
hallways surrounding the Carson High quad, to an empty cafeteria in Sunnydale
where they had only the orange seat of a plastic chair to use as a drum. The kids, as
always, are dressed in their over-sized street clothes and expensive basketball shoes,
hip hop fashion with a twist, because about 3/4 of the kids have bright flower-printed
H e lavalavas wrapped around their waists, which they are constantly tying and re
tying throughout the rehearsal. There are other markers of their islander background,
like Samoan T-shirts, turtle shell bracelets, earrings and combs in the girls’ hair,
some of which are formed in the shape of words like “Samoa” and “Manu’a”, and of
course the ubiquitous fa ’aputa woman’s hairstyle of wearing their long hair in a bun
at the back of the head. Although there is good-natured banter, laughing and fooling
around during the breaks, once the music starts this all disappears as the teachers
wield a respected authority, with varying degrees of iron discipline. The dancers’
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I l l
faces suddenly become serious as the song begins one more time and they
concentrate on getting all the way through the piece without their instructors
stopping the music to correct them. It is Friday night in one of the roughest
neighbourhoods in San Francisco and the cool kids are intently practicing folk
dancing.
Introduction
This chapter is a continuation of the ideas introduced in the previous one.
While the last chapter set about to establish what some of the existing expectations
on Samoan identity and their origins are, this chapter is concerned with the Samoan
youths’ adaptations, responses, and resistances to these perceived expectations.
These efforts will collectively be described here as identity expressions.
Although in principle, Samoan identity options are unconstrained, in actuality
many layers of abstraction affect them and, as such, identity expressions are always
negotiated by group members who often feel compelled to publicly define
themselves in selective ways that address their impression of how they are already
viewed by outsiders.2 Furthermore, since some of these perceived expectations come
from Samoan elders and not just from non-Samoans, it is here that I demonstrate, for
the first time in this paper, some of the specific ways in which the content of Samoan
2 It is not my intention to suggest that all cultural activities fall into this reactionary/performative
category, only that the ones which I am focusing on in this chapter are pre-selected because they meet
this criterion, and that, in general, perceived outsider expectations exercise a great influence on many
of a group’s identity decisions.
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youth identity in California may stand independently from Samoan identity as a
whole.
Examples of expressiveness that we shall explore are the adaptive strategies
surrounding ethnic visibility and invisibility, the underlying meaning of the phrases
jiapdlagi (acting white), fia meanli (acting black), and “Samoan style” and the role
that stereotypes play in identity formation, particularly as they relate to body image
and gender roles.
The final section of this chapter will focus on the concept of culture and
identity as performed acts, by which I mean to evoke the strategically manufactured
public expression of identity that is less reactionary than other types of identity
expressions. My definition of “performance” borrows from Judith Butler (1990a;
1990b), Dorinne Kondo (1997), and George De Vos (1990), but it also differs from
them in several key ways, which I have discussed in greater detail in the Theoretical
Discussions chapter of this dissertation.
My discussion of identity performance will draw on several examples that
apply the term performance both in its traditional sense, in which performers and
audience are separated from one another in a very structured way, and in a broader
sense, that treats performance as the public expression of Samoan culture and
identity. Two different performances will be used as examples here: the distribution
of food at formal meals and the multi-faceted importance that dance holds for many
Samoan youth, this last example garnering the bulk of the attention.
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Expressions: invisibility, adaptation, and resistance
Having established some of the bases by which Samoans are distinguished
from other Americans, or the expectations, as I have labeled them here, and
identified the sources of these ideas, it is important to establish some of the ways that
Samoans have responded to them, particularly how Samoan youth have responded.
What have the Samoan identity expressions been, in response to their perceived
place in their greater host environment?
Samoan reactions to perceived Samoan expectation have varied greatly
among individuals, over time, and in different locations, but there are several general
themes that can be used to describe types of responses. Although most responses are
combinations of categories, as I see it, there are four general types of adaptive
responses to Samoan stereotyping: invisibility or avoidance, acquiescence, syncretic
compromise, and active resistance. Each of these strategies present valid adaptive
responses to their reception by the United States at large, whether real or perceived,
and rather than evaluate the worth of one strategy in relation to another, let us
explore brief examples of each of them to understand their respective contextual
rationales.
Ethnic invisibility as Adaptive Strategy
Although it is not particularly relevant to the field experiences that I had, I
am intrigued by the arguments put forth by Lydia Kotchek (1977) in an interesting
though now dated article that featured the strategy of “ethnic invisibility” employed
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274
by Seattle area Samoans. She argued that by choosing to remain ethnically
anonymous, Samoans would be able to exercise greater agency over their identity
options. We have already discussed at length the extent of Samoans’ virtual
anonymity in the United States, and which, in my experience, was a factor that
seemed to dismay most Samoan youth. Notwithstanding this observation, Kotchek
argues that the Seattle community’s decisions were measured and deliberate. Many
there had experienced or heard of the discrimination against the Samoan population
in Hawai’i, where the community is relatively large and visible and where it
appeared overnight in the postwar‘50s and, as such, has been vulnerable to much
negative stereotyping. They were not eager to recreate that environment in their new
setting.
Samoans in Seattle have several factors that enable this strategy to be viable.
In general terms, Samoans do not fit ino the spectrum of major American ethno-
racial groups: White, Black, Asian, Hispanic, and they do not come with a specific
history that most Americans would be aware of, the way that some refugee groups
do, for example (i.e. Southeast Asian boat people, Cubans and so on) Although they
are undeniably viewed as non-whites, they are not necessarily feared in the same
way that Black Americans are or viewed as “foreign” in the same way that Asians
may be for their appearance and Hispanics may be for their language. Most
important of all is the fact that their numbers were so small in Seattle, particularly in
contrast with the Samoan population of Hawai’i. At the time of Kotchek’s article,
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275
she estimated the Samoan population of Seattle to be only 700. Even today the
percentage of all people of partial Pacific ancestry, including Samoans, in that area is
small (only 1.5% of the population of Seattle’s neighbour Tacoma, while the
Honolulu equivalent of this same demographic is 15.6% (2000 US Census).
However, even these high numbers of Islanders living in Honolulu fail to compare
with the New Zealand demographics in which Samoans, Maoris and all other Pacific
Islanders combine together to form over 20 % of the total New Zealand population.
Indeed, although the absolute numbers of Samoans is marginally higher in the United
States overall (133,281) than it is in New Zealand (115, 017), the comparative ratios
can’t compete (2000 US Census and 2001 New Zealand Census). One in thirty-two
New Zealanders is of partial Samoan ancestry while only one in 2,000 Americans
shares that distinction (0.05%). Therefore, although ethnic invisibility might
theoretically remain an option for small, dispersed pockets of Samoans living in the
United States on the whole, such a strategy would probably not be tenable in regions
like California, where Samoans are a more widely recognized group and it would be
out of the question for Samoans living in Hawai’i or in New Zealand, where some
outside knowledge of their community is commonplace.
More common than ethnic invisibility has been the strategy of ethnic
brokering, a term which I use to describe the way that certain representatives of
ethnic populations are able to channel public and private funds into their community
through their ability to define their group flexibly as part of larger pan-ethnic
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affiliations, as distinct ethnic communities, that may be based on ethnicity instead of
nationality, or on a range of intermediate identities, depending on how opportunities
present themselves. I saw this in the way that various civic organizations were able
to market themselves as part of larger groups such as Asian Pacific Islanders (a
partnership which has probably served the Asians better than it has the Pacific
Islanders on the whole) and as part of smaller groups such as Native Americans,
which Samoans have been successful in arguing that they qualify for. The stakes of
ethnic recognition can be high in the grants game and are very important in culturally
specific school programs, public health outreach, and other forums, such that
ensuring the highest possible census count of Samoans was a top priority in several
of the Samoan civic organizations at which I worked or volunteered.
Acquiescence
One common adaptive strategy that I observed often was a willingness to
conform to existing expectations of themselves, turning one-dimensional caricatures
of Samoaness into fonts of ethnic pride. But perhaps this practice is more insidious
than it initially appears as the words of Dorinne Kondo warn in her discussion of this
practice of, what she calls, “auto-exoticizing”:
But the way that power works means that nothing can be pristinely separated
from the dominant; consequently, one of the most inevitable, poignant and
problematic effects of domination occurs when subaltern peoples reproduce
forms of their own oppression through self-Orientalizing” (1997:10).
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Whether this acquiescence on the part of Samoans is a form of resigned and passive
acceptance, or a coincidental convergence of shared values and aspirations is
difficult to determine perhaps but the results remain the same.
The most common examples of this are the macho pride taken in images of
Samoans that described them as physical and aggressive. Although most informants
acknowledged that this was ostensibly a negative and limiting stereotype, many still
took reflected pride in this image of Samoans as tough and exalted Samoan athletes,
entertainer-athletes, or the hard, street-wise Samoan toughs. An unambiguous
example of this pride in the image of toughness is found in the response of an
eighteen-year-old male informant from San Francisco to a question about Samoan
stereotypes. He wrote, “strong, big, hardcore/tough”, but he followed it up with an
editorial comment that spoke the simple truth of ambivalence about this image in the
eyes of Samoan youth by writing “I kinda’ hate it and kinda’ not” (sic).
This type of defiant pride in the empowered image of one’s group, even if it
is not an unequivocally positive image, is not unique to Samoan youth by any means.
Furthermore, whatever else it might be, this image is not one of an oppressed and
powerless group but one of an empowered and dangerous force. It is not hard to
predict the prideful appeal this would have, to youth in particular, who may
otherwise feel by and large marginalized in their host American society. Todd Boyd
(1997) writes at length about the appeal to Black culture of anti-authoritarian figures
like rap stars and professional athletes (tracing the lineage of this imagery back to
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Malcolm X’s writing on the class differences of plantation slaves) who are partly
popular specifically because they appear to embody many of the very characteristics
(aggressiveness, uncooperativeness, selfish and myopic individualist greed, and other
brazen and crass behaviours) that have been used to negatively describe their
community. Indeed, Boyd points out that marketers have, with no apparent sense of
irony, profited immensely from their ability to commodify this image of anti-social
black masculinity. The Samoans similarly, have commodified this image of
themselves, particularly in the field of professional wrestling, which is built more on
image and charade than on reality. One of the end results of accepting and even
embracing this imagery in some cases is that virtually all of the public role models
available to Samoan youth owe their fame to their physical prowess more so than to
any other qualities. Although he is writing about African American experience rather
than the Samoan experience directly, we find a parallel in this quote by Todd Boyd
(1997) that describes one of the by-products of such a limited public exposure of the
community:
To state that the image of the Black male in popular media is a negative one
is no real revelation; we see or hear this in one form or another on a regular
basis. In response, the media and the underlying ideology have suggested that
since the only Black males who are successful seem to be athletes or
entertainers then they, by default, become role models for black youth. This
construction reveals the monolithic mentality that mainstream American
ideology has placed upon African American culture and the way in which
this ideology is reified through the media (140).
To take this notion a step further then: there are many situations in which prejudices
against Samoans hinder their mobility and limit their options, but there are also
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venues in which Samoan prejudices serve the interests of Samoans who capitalize on
them to increase their agency.
The fact is, in many cases, Samoan size and strength is not merely an image
but also a reality for many youth and their ability to parlay it into segmentary labour
markets is an example of opportunistic pragmatism at least as much as it is an
example of passive acquiescence. Accordingly, as we have already noted, Samoans
are well represented in organized sports, up to the highest level, especially football,
as mentioned earlier, and have capitalized on similar imagery to carve out niche
labour markets for themselves in other relevant fields like security work.3 They have
been able to do this in part through their genuine physical gifts but also by accepting
and in some cases parading the psychological mentality that many project on to
them. As example of this, consider the words of the football player Satele Fonoti:
Fonoti believes that Samoans are hardwired to excel at football: “The
stereotype is that Samoans are aggressive and ill-tempered people. I think
that stuff is true. Most of the guys in our culture are aggressive automatically.
That’s just the way we are.” (Feldman 2001a)
As a male Samoan informant mused thoughtfully during a group interview in San
Francisco,
It’s like, if you’re big and you’re a Samoan, you get big-headed with that
‘cause the stereotypes out here is (that) Samoans are big and strong. So, if a
3 One Samoan father from the Bay Area told me about seven local men who had matured from their
rambunctious youthful behaviours of youth (gangs, crime, prison time, and premature deaths of close
friends leading similar lifestyles) to move to Las Vegas where they found work as doormen at Casinos
and night clubs. According to my informant these men now lived respectable lives, owned their own
homes and had wives and children whom they supported.
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Samoan knows that he’s big and other people are scared of him because of
his size, he takes that farther than it really is .... (than he should)
This ability to combine physical advantages with existing prejudices is certainly a
legitimate and strategic adaptive strategy though it may do little, ultimately, to
contribute to public knowledge of the Samoan community.
Cultures in Transition: syncretisms and contested adaptations
There is, of course, a huge variety of examples that could be drawn on to
show the ways that the Samoan community has adapted to American culture but
rather than list them all here I would instead like to focus on a compelling label that
was constantly discussed in the community and that is directly implicated by the act
of presenting one’s culture and image. What I am referring to is a set of insults that
are employed, with varying degrees of gravity, to critique the authenticity of an
individual’s cultural behaviour, appearance, or temperament: fiapdlagi (acting
white), fia meauli (acting black), and “Samoan Style”, (acting Samoan) respectively.
The composite elements that would lead one to be labeled in each of these ways
varied from individual to individual, but everyone recognized the ubiquity of these
terms (the first two anyhow) and through them we glimpse first-hand the Samoan-
specific intergenerational conflicts that are so often a part of immigrant communities.
It is in this contested ground of labeling that we see clues to the elements of Samoan
youth identity that establish it as distinct from the fa ’a Samoa in general.
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Fia Palagi
Although both fia palagi (acting white) and fia meauli (acting black) are
expressions used to describe an individual’s non-Samoan cultural behaviour, they are
different types of insults. In general, fia palagi is a worse insult than fia meauli when
it comes from Samoan peers and the inverse is true if it comes from a Samoan adult.
Ostensibly,/w palagi, in the context of peer relations, is more or less equivalent to
not being “cool” and to somehow trying to act as if you are above your people and
their culture. This type of insult exists in many non-white cultures and it often takes
the form of a metaphor for something that is ‘white’ on the interior and the
approximate skin tone of the culture in question on the exterior. Thus, for African
Americans the metaphor is ‘oreos’, for Asian it’s ‘bananas’, for Native Americans
it’s ‘apples’, and for Pacific Islanders it’s ‘coconuts’, the last having geographical as
well as descriptive relevance. Although fia palagi is similar to these widespread
racialized insults, it is further confounded by the immigration experience and with
the intergenerational differences of socialization that are component to it.
As Mary Waters (1999), Kathy Hall (2002), and others have noted, there are
significant experiential differences between first generation immigrants and their
progeny. First-generation voluntary immigrants, even though they have usually been
cautioned by immigrants from their own culture who have gone before them, arrive
in this new country prepared to struggle and to suffer, but expecting to make more of
their lives (financially, educationally, qualitatively) than they had in the place they
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left. In many cases they arrive with the hopes of gaining acceptance into the
mainstream of their adopted home and do their best to adopt the values, attitudes and
appearance of the class to which they aspire, this being middle class white America
in the case of Samoans. Their home culture identity often remains strong as the
homeland is a place that is remembered rather than one they reconstruct in their
imaginations, and they often arrive into a social and economic network of former and
current immigrants from their home culture, the “virtual Samoan world” that Evelyn
Kallen (1982) has described so well and that reinforces their sense of Samoan
heritage. Thus equipped, they are able to imitate the cultures among whose ranks
they aspire to be included while still maintaining a sense of self that is
quintessentially Samoan. In effect, they are able to try to become “American” while
still having their Samoan culture in hand to define themselves while undergoing that
transformative process. For the second and third generations, the American
experience may be significantly different. Although they may enjoy the support of
the ethnic community in some ways, the culture of the homeland is often something
more distant to them, a source of pride perhaps but often an imperfectly developed
cultural identity because they have been exposed to it in dissected rather than holistic
ways as something that is performed for special occasions but which does not
necessarily affect all aspects of their lives. In concert with this loss of holistic
traditional culture, they encounter the reality of racial discrimination, the burden of
living in underprivileged neighbourhoods and the legacy of structural constraints that
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serve to keep their group a permanent underclass. Although some families are able to
gain social mobility and others remain less oppressed by this reality, thanks in some
cases to the strength of cultural identity that they find in their families or in their
communities, for others the reality of their inferior socio-economic status leads them
to identify more closely with their socio-economic rather than their ethno-cultural
peers. Such actions inevitably anger the first generation, who do not wish to see their
children imitating the actions of less successful strata of the culture as they often
hold many of the same prejudices against such groups as do the classes to which they
aspire.
Occasionally I even encountered informants who felt that their immigrant
Samoan peers had already fallen below the ideals they strove for and so their parents
encouraged them not to associate with fellow Samoans. Take the words of Victoria
from San Francisco, whose father’s wishes reflect this value system:
I think I’m more open than my Dad was... I guess because he was
conditioned to think that white was better or that anyone white was better.
Like when his grandfather came to the islands, he’s like, “my grandfather
was the first attorney general to come to Samoa” And I was like “Ok, all
right”... and I think that’s why he pushed for us to be more American or to
be, I guess you could say, more palagi than to be Samoan. But my mom, I
think she always had pride in her Samoan side. I think she loved it.
In other instances, the first generation may become more traditionalist rather than
more assimilationist over time. Kathleen Hall (2002) provides just such an example
from among the Sikh immigrants of central England. From family photographs she
notes how ‘English’ the early immigrants who arrived in the 1950s appear, coming
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as they did from a place of comparative social privilege within the British Colonial
Empire. However, in England their privilege was not recognized and they became
lumped together with the masses of non-white immigrants from throughout the
former empire. In response to racisms, both structural and inter-personal, they
resigned themselves to the fact that they would never be fully accepted as English
and so many of these same conservative, assimilated dressers of the 1950s were now
transformed into more traditionalist Sikh appearances, complete with ceremonially
long hair and beards, and traditional garb.
For Samoans, the traditionalist conservative element of their group, as Craig
Janes (1990) has noted, is further supported by the fact that many elderly Samoans
have been brought over to spend their retirement with their children or grandchildren
in the United States. Furthermore, many churches value Samoan trained faife’aus,
who are deemed by some to be more authentic, lending those churches a certain
social capital. These retirees and churches often bring with them a traditional
conservatism that influences the community to the extent that the transplanted
culture may end up being more rigid than the home culture in some instances. This is
certainly the case according to fourteen-year-old Isaiah, a third-generation Samoan
American living in Pacifica, near San Francisco:
I think the fa ’a Samoa is probably stricter over here than over there. Because
when I was over there like when they did fa ’a Samoa ways and stuff, like if a
kid made a mistake over there, like my grandfather or whoever the elder was,
he would just be cool about it, he wouldn’t like stress to him like, you know,
“you’re doing all this wrong” and stuff. He would just laugh it off or
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something and over here if they make a mistake they’ll get something thrown
at them or get hit or something.4
When cultural activities are performed intermittently (as they are overseas) rather
than holistically (as they are in the Islands), the heightened attention to detail is
justified precisely because the cultural context of the activity may be incomplete and
the precision of the execution thus becomes the strongest proof of authenticity.
A great range of behaviours is associated with the label fia palagi. Examples
include materialism, an individualistic rather than family orientation, superiority
complexes, squeamishness, inordinate concern with one’s appearance, the girls are
afraid to get dirty or to hurt themselves, emphasis on education, speaking formal
English, racists, bad dancing, physically weak and fearful, working too much, eating
primly (“with knife and fork”), showing off, shirking household chores and
responsibilities and so on. The term is complicated because it is subject to several
competing interpretations. Samoan elders, by and large, want Samoan youth to
remain committed to their Samoan identities and thus eschew many of the qualities
affiliated with whiteness, particularly selfish individualism, but on the other hand
want their children to mimic successful middle class behaviours such as succeeding
in school and having socially respectful behaviour. The implications of the term for
Samoan peers are complicated between wanting to please their parents and wanting
to remain “cool” in the eyes of their peers, many of whom have adopted oppositional
4 The cultural response to this type of physical disciplining of Samoan youth, for seemingly
insignificant breaches in behaviour will be discussed in the Applying Identities chapter
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identity values. Oppositional identities, in response to their sense of exclusion from
the mainstream, are determined precisely by their rejection of all values associated
with the mainstream.5 In such situations the generation gap manifests itself quickly,
as parents and elders cannot understand why the youth are mimicking socially
undesirable behaviours, and the youth feel that the parents and elders are naive to the
discrimination that their group faces. Many youth, because of their certainty about
this racial and ethnic prejudice, do not believe that “acting white” is the unfettered
path to acceptance. Put simply, although acting white alludes to a sense of social
superiority, to both Samoan youth and Samoan elders, to the elders it means striving
to fit into the group they aspire to be included within and to the youth it means
denying their solidarity with their socio-economic peers.6
Fia Meauli
The associations made with blackness or fia meauli were of two distinct
types: 1) those that related to appearance and 2) those that related to behaviour and
temperament. The appearance traits were minimal and mostly focused on “sagging
your pants”, a style of wearing extremely baggy pants very low on your waist with
your boxer shorts sticking out over the top of the waistline, but also included braided
hair, and wearing various styles of hats and head wraps. The temperament and
5 The previous chapter contains a more in-depth discussion of oppositional identities.
6 Mary Waters (1997) has made very similar arguments about the generation gap for Afro-Caribbean
immigrants in New York, whose negative view of the American mainstream is even stronger than
Samoan youth’s because of the more extreme racism against Black people in the United States than
against other groups.
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behaviour comments were much more numerous and disturbing because of their
overt negative racism. They included the following types of statements: language
and the use of slang, surrounding yourself with predominantly African-American
friends, rejecting your own culture, the way you present yourself ([it’s]“not about
color [it’s] about attitude”), acting loud, rowdy or disrespectfully (“a person who
doesn’t care” or who acts “ghetto”), musical taste (rap, hip hop), behaving like or
being a gangster or, finally, being violent. Interestingly, the answers given to the
question “What types of behaviour get labeled as fia meauliT, got different types of
responses than a question that focused on Black stereotypes in general. Although that
question also elicited many of these same negative stereotypes (and others like
women on welfare, drug-sellers, in jail and so on) it also offered several positive
images of that community stating things like: “church-going”, “family is important
to them”, “good singers”, “pride in their history”, and “trying to fix their
community”. It seems then that the term fia meauli, more specifically indicates
acting like a young black person (usually male) rather than imitating the behaviours
of the African-American community in general.
That the Samoan youth should feel a solidarity with their African-American
peers is not surprising since the two groups share much in common in terms of the
neighbourhoods they live in, the limited public roles available to them, and the way
that their physicality often defines them in the eyes of others. Furthermore the notion
of peer pressure to maintain the anti-establishment values and behaviours is also a
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common response for a group which is underprivileged and discriminated against.
Consider, for instance, Paul Willis’ (1977) important work on a group of anti
authoritarian working class white English boys (“the lads”) at a large multi-cultural
school who reinforced one another’s lower class status by collectively eschewing
upper class values and behaviours and by mocking their peers who aspired to them.
They labeled this peer group of conformists as the ‘ear’oles’, because of their passive
acceptance of school rules (the ear responds to expressivity but it is not expressive
itself) and Willis notes that “Crucially, ‘the lads’ not only reject but feel superior to
the ‘ear’oles” (14). Resigned to their inferior class status, they hold a strong loathing
of those who try to deny its limitation and falsely, in the opinion of ‘the lads’,
attempt to rise above it.
A final observation that was shared with me on several occasions is that
Samoan elders who criticize certain things as fia meauli, with its corresponding
connotation of a rejection of Samoan culture, may be mistaking fashion for cultural
commitment. The Samoan kids, not surprisingly, have adapted many of the stylistic
and lifestyle traits of their local peers (indeed, African-American youth culture is a
strong influence across class and geography throughout the country) and yet in their
minds it does not compromise their interest or commitment to their Samoan culture.
As an eighteen-year-old Carson boy, wrote, “How we look on the outside doesn’t tell
you how we are on the inside”. Put this way, the label of fia meauli, in many
instances may be no more than a standard intergenerational conflict that doubtless
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occurs in almost all modem cultures and with each new generation and which may
have nothing to do with the experience of immigration.
Samoan Style
Early on in my research I tried to establish if there was a distinct difference
between the traditional and formal Samoan culture (fa’a Samoa) and the informal
and hybridized expression of that identity which I labeled, as “Samoan style”. While
many agreed that such a distinction existed, they were at pains to distinguish what
differentiated the one from the other. Most listed superficial differences such as,
wearing an ‘ie over your jeans, displaying a swatch of island print fabric as a scarf or
headband, wearing Samoan turtle shell jewelry, decorating your car with island
bumper stickers, necklaces, and seat covers and other overt markers of identity of
that nature. Mary Waters (1997) remarked that some Afro-Caribbean immigrant
youth in New York felt compelled to advertise similar literal markers of identity (key
chains, t-shirts and so on) since their accents, the most overt markers of immigrant
status for their parents, were no longer distinctive for the later generations, leaving
them superficially indistinguishable from American Blacks. So too have Samoans
become more overt in the performance of their identity in face of their greater
anonymity and of the frequency with which they are mislabeled. Turning again to
Victoria (30) from San Francisco, we see the changing nature of cultural pride for
later generations as well, perhaps, as the influence of powerful social movements
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centering on the identity politics like Black power, the women’s movement, civil
rights, and the emergence of ethnic studies.
I think they’re [Samoans] more prideful now because they’re always wearing
their ‘ie lavalavas or they’re wearing their hamo wear or something like that
and it’s like, it’s cool dude and I know that when my parents came here they
didn’t have to do that. Everyone knew that they weren’t from here. They
didn’t have to wear Island wear to be islanders, but here, you know for me to
wear my ‘ ie lavalava and just go walking around people are like “Well, ok, I
know who she is”. I think that we try to show off more than they did. I think
because when they came here they wanted to fit in, whereas we’re here
already. And it’s like, “Okay, well let me wear my island wear tomorrow and
let everyone know who I am today”. You know, that kind of thing? I think we
are more expressive about it. I don’t think the shame is there anymore— the
shame when they first came over. It’s like, “Yeah, I’m Samoan”.
Resistance
On the whole, active and organized resistance has not been a significant part
of the Samoan approach to American adaptation and yet over the course of this
research I encountered many examples of minor and individual acts of resistance.
Most such acts applied themselves to challenging stereotypes about Samoans in an
attempt to diversify the public image of Samoan culture, or at the least to not further
reinforce what people already believed.
One example of this resistance is found in the story told to me by a young
Samoan father who went to pick his son up from a middle school with a largely
Asian student body. Not surprisingly, the Samoan boy was significantly bigger than
the majority of his classmates. On the day that the father arrived, he found his son
carrying his smaller classmates around the playground. Although the classmates
didn’t seem to mind and everybody was having a good time the father felt compelled
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to tell his son, “Put him down. This sort of thing doesn’t look good. You can’t pick
up the other kids even if they say it’s okay.”
Similarly, in the course of going through the archives of the Sulu O Le
Tautua youth photo project at the Oceanside public Library I was struck not so much
by the content of the photos that were selected as by those that were excluded. The
collection was edited by Samoan elders and not by the youth who had taken the
photos. Many excellent shots, including images of youth engaged in modernized
activities (watching television, playing on the computer and so on), playing sports
(though several were included, many more were not) and one image that featured a
boy doing gang-like posturing were all excluded from the final show. Instead church
and traditional activities were primarily featured. This was a blatant example of the
elders controlling the image of Samoan culture to the public. Steering clear of any
negative or controversial images, they instead presented a portrait of a pious and
traditional people unaffected by modernity and by social issues.7
Another interesting example of resistance emerged during a gender
discussion that was a part of the group interview process. While acknowledging that
most Samoan role models were first male and second famous for their physical
exploits and for their display or reputation of aggression, in several instances such
limited male roles were challenged. Isaiah, a fourteen-year-old male from San
7 1 provide a more in depth description of this project in the Methodology chapter of this dissertation.
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Francisco, offered a much more complex reading of the essence of Samoan
masculinity.
A lot of Samoans I know is that, especially males, they can talk. They have
ways to persuade something or to project their way for somebody to believe
them. Like, they can talk somebody into doing something. Basically peer
pressure, that’s what it affects. And that’s how a lot of Samoans get into
trouble, you know, and that’s how they get known, by just talking, “yeah. ..do
this, do that... ”
This boy presents a complex paradox in which the importance of oratory and
consensus meet the culturally promoted tendency towards conformity and
deference.8 On the one hand, Samoans are taught to respect elders and not to
challenge their authority, and by the same token, one of the main proofs of maturity
is based on one’s ability to influence others and to manufacture consensus. Sixteen-
year-old David, another participant in this group, agreed:
I think, in my opinion, when I went to Samoa, like, big guys don’t even
count. It’s like the old folks that really count. ‘Cause they have more
knowledge. They make better sense than what the other guys do. So,
everybody listens to them and stuff.
These examples of young Samoan men questioning the limited masculinity options
that popular culture has made available to them, in favour of more complex
understandings of gender roles by re-visiting their traditional culture are encouraging
signs of Samoan culture moving forward without discarding its past.
8 This tendency towards deference is discussed in both the Introduction and in the Applying Identities
chapters of this dissertation.
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Performance
“Performance” is defined here as those publicly manufactured expressions of
group identity that are more deliberate and less reactionary than other identity
expressions we have already examined. As with Judith Butler (1990a, 1990b) in her
discussion of performativity in the context of gender Samoan identity is reified
through a selective repetition of stylized acts, which, through their enactment,
establish or maintain their ultimate importance. For all intents and purposes, and
particularly in the context of the diasporic setting, it is only that which is selected for
enactment that comes to represent all of Samoan culture. Beyond that Samoan
identity performances, as I am defining them here, are not primarily performed for
the benefit of an outsider audience, or as a way to comment on the state of Samoans’
place in the United States, but rather, they are a way to socialize their own
community members through selectively transposed ritualistic, ceremonial, and
performative acts.9
Although there are many examples that would fit the definition of
performative identity acts that I have provided, such as all manner of sua (gift
exchange) or traditional tattooing, the two examples I chose to discuss are the
distribution of food at traditional feasts and dance. These two are most germane to
my discussion because in each of them the role of youth is central.
9 The Theoretical Discussions chapter of this dissertation provides a much more in-depth discussion
of performance that shows how my use of the term both suppots and challenges uses of it by Judith
Butler, Dorinne Kondo, and George De Vos.
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To’ ona’ i
I have already mentioned to’ona’i, the formal meal following church service
on Sunday, earlier in this paper, but I wish again to draw attention to it now as a
ceremonial event. Similar formalized distributions of food also took place at
fa ’alavelaves, important meetings and fundraisers. Always the layout was similar,
even though the location varied. At the front of the room at a table sat the faife ’au
and his wife, as well as any honoured guests. The other tables were arranged as
wings forming a “u” with the head table. The sides of this “u” could be several rows
deep but there was always a big area in the center of the room in front of the head
table and between the two sides. People were seated along the side tables according
to their status (either by age, title, or special guest). Those highest in status sit closest
to the head table and so on, successively down the line. If there were multiple rows
the ordering would continue along the length of the next row and so on. The end
result was a concrete model of precisely where one’s status situated one within that
group. It was always awkward for me to know where to sit so I was usually paired
with whoever had invited me to the event, a sort of associative status if you will.
Because the ordering and re-ordering that would sometimes take place after people
had already been seated was taken very seriously, it was important not to assume
where your place was, but to instead allow yourself to be directed your place. As a
friend told me, roughly translating a Samoan proverb, “It is better to be asked up
than to be asked to go down”.
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The young people unless they were in their late teens or early twenties and, as
such, possessed some adult or quasi-adult status (or were honourary adults charged
with translating speeches for me), were charged with serving the food. They served
people in the same order as their high status dictated, bowing their heads and saying
“tulou” (a deferential “excuse me” said while bowing the head and avoiding eye
contact) as they served thefaife’ aus and other esteemed guests, or to everyone whom
they served if the occasion was more auspicious. Invariably this task was performed
by young men and, more infrequently, by young women wearing ‘ ies, usually over
top of more modem garb. The youth who did the serving, and those younger than the
servers who performed less public food preparation and distribution tasks would eat
after the others had been served, either at a back table or in a location separated from
the official feasters, where the mood was much more informal. Usually, different
families would sponsor these feasts and so they would take on the task of procuring
and preparing the food, and there family would feature prominently in all of the tasks
associated with its formal distribution also.
The Samoan foods, many of which were mentioned in the vignette with
which I opened the Constructing Identities chapter (supasui, lu’au, corned beef,
green bananas, various fish, fried chicken, octopus stew, pineapple turnovers, egg
salad, rice, and taro to name some of those most common dishes) were accompanied
by bottled water and soda and were usually distributed in excess, served in a
cardboard soda flat box lined with foil or in a stack of styrofoam containers, with the
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expectation that you would take leftovers home with you. The sharing and
distributing of food, and the reification of status roles embodied in this cultural
drama are one of the prime opportunities for young people to perform their identities
for the benefit of themselves and their group. They see contained in this activity,
many truisms of traditional Samoan culture, such as the value placed on tautua
(service), the importance of deference, and the age/status system laid out in
unambiguous detail. Although their roles are as subservient to the elders, these roles
are integral to the event and re-affirm their place within the culture in ways that
many of their daily activities at school or at work do not.
Dance
What does dancing mean to me? ...I just love the representation of our
culture. I just like going out there and showing how much our culture means
to me; how much I love it. And when I talk to a lot of people they say, “Man,
it looks like you’re really having fun out there when you’re dancing”. I say,
“Yeah, you know... ” And then they say, “Why you having fun up there?”
“It’s just, I love my culture so much.” You know what I’m saying? The fun
collides with it. It goes along with it... When I feel that passion the fun comes
along with it.
(Ryan, seventeen-years-old, from Carson)
Traditional Samoan dance is one of the culture’s key identity markers within
their local communities. Its importance as a site of public cultural representation is
heightened because of the general public’s essential ignorance of Samoan culture, so
much discussed in this dissertation already. Furthermore, this critical representational
site is particularly germane to our discussion because it is largely dominated by
youth, both in terms of its execution and its instruction. The goal of this discussion
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then, is two-fold in that we must explore how Samoan dance is being read, and what
role it serves for the performers.
For many Samoan youth dance remains the most important expression of
their Samoan identity in the United States. Initially, in my research, I was reluctant to
overly explore dance as an identity expression because it seemed too obvious and
because I did not want to reinforce existing orientalisms of Pacific culture (to borrow
an idea from Wilton Martinez [1992]), or to be complicit in Samoan auto-
exoticizing. However, as my time in the community passed, the ultimate importance
of dance to young people’s conception of “being Samoan” became unavoidable to
me. Such performances of identity, even though they may confirm pre-existing
expectations of Islander identity for outsiders, are extremely important to young
people and serve the dual role of both affirming traditional values and providing a
venue for innovation and public expression that enhances their status among
Samoans and non-Samoans alike.
Dance is able to serve these two different functions (as an example of
traditional cultural commitment and as a venue for hybridized expression) for
Samoan youth because it is expressed in a diverse range of contexts, each with its
own set of performance expectations. The three variables that affect the experience
of the performance are the venue, the audience, and the type of dance.
In my experience, dance plays a significant role in all manner of social
activities, both those that are socially sanctioned by the church and the community
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and in those spheres of students’ lives that are not exclusively Samoan. Among the
primary occasions on which dances occur are in the context of official celebrations,
such as Samoan Flag Day; at cultural festivals, including pan-Pacific and
multicultural festivals sponsored by communities and by schools; as part of inter
church competitions; and for individual family fundraising occasions called
variously, “family nights” or “socials” depending on the church affiliation of the
family. Each of these various types of performances is imbued with different levels
of formal decorum, the Flag Day and the church competitions perhaps the most
stringently, as much attention is paid to the authenticity of the performance because
prize money, bragging rights, and the reputation of the entire church are at stake.
Such competitions are judged not only on the skill of the dancers but also on the
quality of their costumes, and, in many cases, on the quality of the oration,
performed by a ceremonial tulafale (talking chief), from among their peers. The
school-wide performances, which were performed to a packed central quad at Carson
High during a lunch hour, were treated a little more informally, as hip hop
style“MC”ing and a spirit of playfulness infused the entire production. The family
nights, which are genuinely concerned with raising money, primarily through the
sale of food and the performance of the taualuga dance, which I shall discuss in
more detail shortly, are generally jovial and casual affairs, helped in large part by the
fact that virtually everyone in attendance knows one another.
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Obviously, the demographics of the audience vary greatly across different
venues both according to their general age and their ethnic composition. For Flag
Day and the inter-church competitions, the audience is almost exclusively Samoan,
and much deference is paid to the elders in attendance, the fear of whose disapproval
influences much of the choreographic decisions. At the family nights, as just
mentioned, most of the participants will be familiar with one another, if not outright
related, and the atmosphere tends to be more relaxed even though the entire audience
may be Samoan. Also, in this context, the line between audience and performers may
be blurred, as different segments of the family will sponsor dances and thus move
continuously from the role of performer to the role of observer and back again.
Furthermore, the line between dancer and observer is always a little ambiguous in
the taualuga dance, which is the keystone of such events, since those who come up
to throw money at the dancing taupou often stay on stage and dance out the
remainder of the song after they have made their financial offering. In the context of
festivals and school performances, which may also be staged as luau type
fundraisers, both in high school and in post-secondary settings, the crowd tends to be
much younger and more ethnically diverse, though the extended families of the
dancers themselves will usually attend, if at all possible. Each of these different types
of audiences brings a different gaze to the performances, the more formal and strictly
competitive eliciting a critical one, the more intimate dances drawing a sympathetic
and supportive one, and the ethnically diverse events drawing a curious crowd that
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forms a more conventional type of audience which bases its appreciation on how
entertained the performance leaves them feeling.
There are numerous types of dances that are performed but the four most
common are the taualuga, the sasa, the f a ’ataupati, and the Siva Tau (Manu Samoa).
The taualuga as we have already briefly discussed, is a dance performed by a
ceremonially regaled taupou who is usually outfitted in a siapo or an ‘ie toga dress
and a head dress adorned with shells and bright feathers on the front of it (see photo)
As the dance begins, she is accompanied on the stage by a group of male dancers
who dance reverentially around her. They shout out exuberant “choo hoo”s, their
excited energy and attention completely focused on the taupou while she calmly
performs a subtle dance of graceful hand motions and minimal foot movements. As
the dance continues, usually to the strains of a slow song, audience members will
come forward to make donations and to join in the dance if they so choose. Usually
the donations are in the form of small bills that are stuck on the taupou herself, flung
in her general direction, or placed in a box at the front of the stage. The taupou is the
embodied representation of the family or organization that is sponsoring the dance
and, as such, the repect and support shown for her are a reflection of affection or
commitment to that group as well as to the taupou individually (just as the taupou
traditionally represented the whole village by providing proof of their ability to
protect the virtue of their most exemplary representative, as discussed in the Identity
Expectations chapter [see also Shore 1981]) and this sometimes provokes extremely
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exuberant and impassioned emotional displays. The male dancers will often slap the
ground before the taupou’ ’s feet or prostrate themselves so that she may dance on
their backs and audience supporters will grab palm fronds, jackets, or on one
occasion that I witnessed, a chair, that they will strike against the ground at the feet
of the taupou, often accompanied with loud “choo hoo” s while throughout this the
taupou remains calm and serene. The taualuga is a terrifically exciting dance to be a
part of and it can be a very successful way of raising significant sums of money.6
The sasa is one of the most common types of Samoan dances and it includes
men and women and requires the performers to both sing and dance. The sasa
usually includes both sitting and standing actions and can be performed by large
numbers of dancers, usually equally paired between men and women. An important
part of the dance group’s evaluation is based on their visual presentation, not just on
how synchronous their movements are, but also on the costumes they wear.
Costumes for the sasa are always coordinated, the women’s puletasis being made of
the same fabric as the men’s ‘ ies and they are rarely re-cycled for successive years of
performance. Instead new sets are made each year, often with considerable time
spent in making them. The women all wear their hair in the fa ’apatu style (hair
tightly pulled back in a high bun) and the boys coat their bare torsos and arms in
coconut oil, or, more often, in Johnson’s Baby Oil, and those who have ‘ulas
6 For example, the taualuga held as part of the Samoan Summer camp performance mentioned
elsewhere in this dissertation, raised $750 dollars, which was used to pay for a celebratory fieldtrip
and barbecue at a waterslide park.
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Figure 7.1: Practicing the fa’atupatiat Carson High School (March 2, 2000).
Figure 7.2: Girl’s dance practice at Carson High School. (March 2, 2000)
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igure 7.3: Taualuga dance. Carson Flag Day, April 14, 2000.
Figure 7:4: Rehearsing the identity skit in San Francisco (July 15, 2002).
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(necklaces), both male and female, wear them. The girls usually wear ‘ulas made of
nutshells and the boys also wear shell necklaces or a single bone carved hook or
shark tooth. Faces are often minimally decorated with paint, and green palm, banana,
and flax leaves are attached as garlands, armbands, and ankle bands.
While many Samoan dances can be rather staid compared to other Polynesian
dances such as those performed by Hawaiians, French Polynesians, and New
Zealand Maoris, the Fa ’ataupati, or slap dance, as it is commonly known, is a
notable exception. It looks vaguely like a cross between African-American step
dancing and the Maori Haka. The Fa ’ataupati is performed by a group of men
divided into groups of four who perform a series of movements in a square formation
where they are sometimes slapping a rhythm against their own bodies and sometimes
interacting in mock battle with their partners in the square. This macho performance
is one of the most high-energy Samoan dances I have seen and when done with vigor
can leave the dancers and audience electrified.
The Siva Tau or the Manu Samoa, as it is commonly known, is a national
dance of sorts made famous by the national rugby team for Independent Samoa, that
shares its name, and who perform it on the field before they play. The dance is short
and relatively simple. It involves men standing in a line together and chanting the
words to the song while they beat a rhythm against their bodies. Though not praised
for its intricacy, it often receives a raucous response from the Samoans in the crowd,
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for whom it serves as an unofficial anthem. Listen to Isaiah’s emotional description
of the Manu Samoa:
I just like the Manu Samoa. I just love that dance. ‘Cause like you know how
the Haka is for New Zealand and all that and the Tongan dance for them, I
just like the Manu Samoa because that’s our... (you know what I’m saying?)
dance, (you feel me?), that’s our war dance kind of.
That this informant chose to refer to the dances of other countries is relevant,
because it is often the case that the dancers, even though they may be all, or virtually
all, Samoan, will perform dances from other Polynesian cultures during
performances. For women, the Tahitian, Hawaiian and Maori poi ball dances are
favourites, whereas the men often steal the show through a particularly rousing
interpretation of the haka. This borrowing of dances from Polynesian neighbours is
usually done in the spirit of inclusiveness, and the spirit of a pan-Pacific identity is
often openly proclaimed at such performances, and because the dancers and audience
alike enjoy the variety of dances. The only occasions in which non-Samoan dances
would a priori, be avoided at performances would be during Samoan dance
competitions, for obvious reasons, and during some pan-Pacific or multicultural
festivals at which members of the culture of origin of the dance are represented.
The Role of Innovation
Although the dances are performed in replica of the traditional Samoan
versions, it is not uncommon to see some innovations too, as various outside
influences are incorporated into them. A few years back I saw versions of sasa that
included moves and words from the macarena, a popular Brazilian line dance, and I
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have seen several fa ’atupatis into which hip hop language and dance steps have been
incorporated. Despite these innovations, both of these dances always remain
overwhelmingly true to their original form. The level of appropriateness of these
emerging dance fusions is a contentious issue among the youth who perform them.
As with the issue of the language used in church, there is a variety of opinions about
the ultimate worth or harm of this type of innovation. Some feel that any way to
make the dancing more contemporary and appealing to Samoan youth and to get
them interested in participating in their culture is a good thing, and that innovation,
provided it is done in moderation and respectfully, is perfectly acceptable. Indeed,
new moves will often be incorporated into traditional dances at competitions
specifically to impress the judges and to stand out from one’s competitors. Turning
again to fourteen-year-old Isaiah, himself an accomplished break-dancer, we see his
conditional endorsement of such fusions provided they are not excessively modem.
That’s a good thing because that gives us something to have fun and at the
same time getting down to business; but it’s a bad thing when they do like too
much, trying to put too much hip-hop and all that into it, then that just kills
the whole thing.
Another informant, sixteen-year-old David from San Francisco, had a different
opinion about such stylistic syncretisms. He saw the contemporizing and
contextualizing of dance as prevalent and unfortunate. Over here he noted:
They’ve adapted more of the hip-hop culture. You see the cheerleading
moves. Some of them have been mixed together with the slap dances. Back in
the Islands they [are] true to what is basically the true slap dance and how it’s
done
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As David comes from an important family that is well known for their commitment
to the. f a ’a Samoa, it is not surprising that he left such little ambiguity as to how he
feels about such innovations. He continued:
To me it’s a really bad thing ‘cause here comes another tradition taking over
the Samoan tradition which is- to me I’m very proud of being Samoan- and
the tradition to be influenced by another one is something very negative
which I hope wouldn’t happen... they’d lose the true Samoan tradition by
these influences.
However, it is interesting to note that innovation in Samoan dance also occurs in the
Islands themselves and has done so for quite a while. For example, in their 1956
monograph, Elite Communication in Samoa, Felix and Marie Keesing discussed the
role that innovation played in performance arts.
Dancing, music, and drama are also living and growing traditions in that here
Samoans tolerate and welcome innovation. Dancing parties are always on the
alert for new twists to the standard themes, and even in high ceremonies an
exalted taupou (ceremonial maiden) may try out along with conventional
dancing some variant based on what she has seen in a Hollywood movie at
the port center (83).
Pending further data collection on this topic, I am reluctant to project, with
certainty, what the opinion trends on dance innovation are. It seems as though time
spent living in the United States and the degree to which traditionalism is valued and
practiced within the family would be good starting places and it would also be
interesting to see if there were appreciable differences in responses based on gender.
At this stage it remains an interesting topic in need of future examination.
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The Domain of Youth
At the beginning of this section on dance I mentioned that it is of singular
relevance to our discussion on youth because it is one of the few domains in which
youth are at the forefront. Margaret Mead had a similar observation during her
Samoan research in the 1920s. In her chapter, “The role of the dance” in Coming o f
Age in Samoa (1928), she writes that dance,
(Effectively offsets the rigorous subordination in which children are
habitually kept. Here the admonitions of the elders change from “Sit down
and keep still!” to “Stand up and Dance!” The children are actually the center
of the group instead of its barely tolerated fringes (117).
Indeed, normal social rules of youthful subservience seem to be under a type of
moratorium during dance performances,
The attitudes of elders towards precocity in singing, leading the singing or
dancing, is in striking contrast to their attitude towards every other form of
precocity. (...) Little boys who would be rebuked and possibly whipped for
such behaviour on any other occasion are allowed to preen themselves, to
swagger and bluster and take the limelight without a word of reproach (ibid
116).
Certainly, this reversal of common roles and their temporary emancipation
from subservient roles is one of the appeals of dance to young people. Furthermore,
it allows them to feel they are a part of the culture while not forcing them to
compromise the autonomy of action that they have learned in their American
socialization. Filipi, a Samoan man in his early thirties from San Francisco, who was
a dance instructor for the summer youth group described in several of the
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ethnovignettes, playfully shares his thoughts on the appeal of dance to youth and of
his personal (fairly typical) exposure to it,
I learned to dance at a young age, mostly for our church functions. I
personally feel that the only thing our Samoan-American children can
identify with is the dancing, which links them to their identity. Now probably
in Samoa the case is different. There, they are surrounded by all sorts of
cultural events going on; sometimes simultaneously (sua’s, ava ceremonies
etc...). We “palagi” Samoans only see the dancing as fun and the rest time
consuming. I think for me, dancing was important when I was younger
because I understood it more than I did the other cultural stuff.
And for some youth, particularly those who come from families that are less
committed to the fa ’a Samoa, it may be one of the few ways that enables them to feel
a part of their Samoan heritage:
But at least that’s like, the only thing Samoans get along. Dancing is like the
only thing I have, none of my parents speak Samoan. I just started dancing
when I went to Junior High. (Desiree, seventeen-year-old, Carson)
Fortunately, the spirit of performance is often inclusive and efforts are made to draw
in anyone who is interested in participating.
I think that’s what Carson, the PI club [Pacific Islander], that’s what they’re
known for, you know, dancing. Because a lot of our students I’m telling you
straight, they can dance. The majority of them can but as for the other 30/40
percent they just do it because they want to do it. So they come and we don’t
stop anybody from coming. (Lalaga, eighteen-year-old girl from Carson)
Not only are youth the primary performers of dance, they are also often those
who instruct it. At the high schools, the seniors choreographed the dances, and
although they may have based their choreography on instruction they had previously
received on more formal versions of the dance, the final artistic decisions were their
own. In the churches and summer programs, the instructors are usually young adults
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who have themselves been performers (and in some cases still are) only a few years
earlier. Because of the age grade hierarchy, and once they enter into adulthood, even
those slightly older than one are entitled to full respect and courtesy even if the age
difference is slight, allowing these young instructors to run their rehearsals with total
authority if they chose.
Although I have found many similarities between my own research and that
done by Helen Morton Lee (2003) in her study of immigrant Tongan youth living in
Australia in terms of their struggles to reconcile their parents traditions with their
Australian socialization, on the topic of dance, our findings were markedly different.
While she noted a distinct ambivalence amongst Tongan youth and their desire to
learn and participate in dance, despite their parents’ efforts to encourage them, I
found a near universal interest in dance among the youth I interviewed. First of all,
particularly for the kids at Carson High, it was a huge source of school-wide
prestige. The Samoan students had a long history of performing dances for the wider
student body, and non-mandatory lunchtime performances were well attended and
enthusiastically received. It was considered so desirable to be a part of the Pacific
Islander club and, consequently, the dance group, that John Maiava, the Samoan
counselor at Carson who served as faculty sponsor to the club, was able to use it as a
positive reward, allowing only those students who were able to maintain reasonable
grades to participate.
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Secondly, while Lee noted a strong effort by parents to involve their children
in dance, I noted a number of intergenerational conflicts between parents and
students about the ultimate value of dance from a traditional standpoint, particularly
in comparison to learning the language or doing your feaus properly. In some cases
the parents seemed to think that dance was just a distraction from the real purpose of
school, which was study; but, more often, the conflict centered on church teachings.
(W)hen I was little, our culture, I mean our religion, not really culture, my
religion that I practiced when I was little... My grandparents said “church
before culture” and you know you do church stuff before you do this, and
then every time I would sneak off to practice. And then, even though it’s bad,
it’s not like I was sneaking off to go do drugs or anything, but it was like
you’re going against the religion. (Desiree, seventeen-year-old girl, Carson)
Another girl, but this time from San Francisco, Peleiupu (16), shared a similar story
about familial sanctions against dancing and her ultimate willingness to risk
disapproval to be involved in it.
P: See, I had to be sneaky when I did that. I couldn’t let my parents know
that I was dancing because they wouldn’t let me if I was to ask them
CS: Why is that?
P: Because it’s against our tradition, that we can’t do worldly stuff. It’s like
we’re Christian (...) My mom wouldn’t want me to dance worldly, for the
world, she wants me to be kept in one little packet as a Christian.
CS: What do you think o f that?
P: I think it sucks! You know we should be allowed to experience our
culture, learn how to dance like that.
CS: So, you think that’s important to you?
P: Yeah, I think it is important to me. ‘Cause if I would have never learned
about that then I wouldn’t even know how to do it and then I would be mad
because I never got taught to learn how to dance like that.
Dance then appears to be popular for Samoan youth because of a
convergence of factors. Primarily, it is a domain in which youth are brought to the
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312
forefront instead of their usual role as serving from behind the scene, heads
respectfully bowed. Secondly, it is an enjoyable and inclusive medium for achieving
a sense of cultural involvement in the culture of their parents and grandparents. It is
neither as onerous nor as difficult to achieve competence in dance as it is to learn
most of the other traditional practices. Some community members fear that
participating in dance represents a superficial commitment to the culture, and one
they fear threatens to replace the deep and multi-faceted cultural commitment from
young people that they yearn to see— a cultural commitment that includes many
quotidian activities as well as highly demonstrative and performative ones. Others
argue that dance serves to stimulate young people’s cultural enthusiasm and lead to a
more sustained and in-depth interest in their Samoan culture. In support of this
second position, the dances do contain movements that evoke specific traditional
activities and mythologies, and the songs are sung in the Samoan language. It seems
quite plausible then that interest in dance can become a palpable first step towards a
greater cultural investment on the part of young people. Finally, dance is fun. It is a
highly social activity. It is fun to get dressed up and to perform, to receive praise and
recognition (and occasionally money), and to entertain a captive audience. It is
appealing in part because it is such an enjoyable way to experience one’s culture and
simultaneously to present that culture to the public.
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Conclusion
These past two chapters when combined together create a dynamic model in
which Samoans are provided with a causal explanation for some of their identity
decisions. What quickly becomes clear is that there is no single, consistent or correct
response to the various societal expectations placed on Samoan youth, but instead
there are a variety of strategies employed to reify a sense of cultural distinctiveness
for that group. Some of the strategies we discussed were more passive, such as the
acquiescent and the invisibility models; others are better described as compromises
between Samoan culture, American culture, and the Samoan community’s immediate
ethnic neighbours; and still other strategies were more overtly resistant and
confrontational. In the final section of this chapter, we looked critically at the notion
of identity performances using the examples of formal food distribution and dance as
vessels for a more deliberate and less reactive form of cultural expression that placed
youth in the forefront. In the next chapter, we shall take identity one step further by
looking at strategies for using one’s identity to gain a cultural advantage in American
society, as Samoan youth seek to selectively apply Samoan culture to American
obstacles. In conjunction with that topic, we shall also discuss several instances in
which Samoan culture may be poorly adapting to American society.
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C h a p te r ¥ 1 1 1
Applying Identities
Ethnographic Snap Shot: Samoan Culture Camp
We’re back in the middle school cafeteria. Outside the wind is howling like it
can only during July in San Francisco. At the front of the room, there are a small
stage, an old piano, and LeSui, a powerfully built Samoan man in his early forties.
One of his big hands rests on top of the piano while he gesticulates with the other,
occasionally slapping the top of the piano for emphasis. He is lecturing energetically
and earnestly to the assembled group of forty or so kids whose ages range roughly
from five to eighteen, though most of them are teenagers. They are here as
participants in the six-week long summer cultural program run by the Samoan
Community Development Organization (SCDC).
Today, LeSui is talking to them about identity. At the end of the summer
program they will be performing a skit that will represent identity for their assembled
families and friends. LeSui is an artistic visionary as well as a good teacher, and he
has grand plans for the skit. However, today he is more concerned that they
understand the essence of their Samoan identities because without this full
understanding the skit would become but a parody of Samoan identity, an empty
signifier.
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315
He flips on an overhead projector and slides a transparency onto it. “Anybody
want to try to read this quote?” he asks. Eventually a reluctant volunteer is co-opted.
The title, which the girl stumbles over at first, is fa ’asinomaga (identity), and the
quote, reads: “E ui ina tetele pesega, ae mapu lava i le o ’o'". Written below this, on
the same transparency, he has translated the Samoan proverb into a much less poetic
English version for them. It reads: “When things go wrong as they sometimes will,
and life gets tougher and seems all uphill, the Samoan will always find refuge in
his/her identity and culture”.1
For me, who had been struggling to ascertain just what importance identity
had in the lives of Samoan teens living in California for the last five years, the topic
of this lecture appeared as a long-looked for but unexpected treasure chest. Here this
guy was, about to specifically break down what Samoan identity means for these
kids, and I was right there with my video camera rolling when it was going to
happen. With an effort, I quieted my excited inner jubilation in order to hear what
LeSui would say next.
Any tittering about the volunteer’s stiff reading of Samoan stops quickly
under the intensity of LeSui’s gaze. He holds them with his eyes while he tells them
directly: “You need to know this information. You need to know who you are, what
we are, where you came from, and where you’re going, ok? It will help to make you
1 The Samoan version of the proverb refers to Pesega, a town outside of Apia that is situated on a
delta of porous rock. After heavy rains the rivers swell and wash over the flats of Pesega flooding the
area; but because of its porous rock the land can absorb virtually limitless amounts of water so the
flood always recedes after a few hours. Pesega’s ability to absorb any deluge serves as a metaphor to
describe the unshakable resiliency of identity (o’o in this sentence).
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a better American. By becoming better Samoans you are also becoming better
Americans.” After a pause, during which he allows the words to sink in he says,
perhaps mostly to himself this time, “It’s straight from Socrates really. Know
thyself’.
He gets back to his lecture moving purposefully forward now as both the kids
and the few other teachers and parents who sit at the back of the room— and who
seem generally to be present in order to scold the inattentive, the loquacious, and the
squirmy— are all paying full attention. He breaks fa ’asinomaga down into three
component parts: gagana (language), suafa (titles), and laufanua (lands), which he
has neatly printed out on another transparency. He tells them that by learning and
using the Samoan language, and considering the poetic wisdom of its many proverbs,
they are talking an important step towards knowing their culture and the provisions it
makes for its members. He then explains that each one of them sitting their in the
room, as a Samoan, is tied to many titles through their family histories, whether or
not such claims have been kept active, and that these titles controls the use of
communal lands in Samoa. Because it is the titles that own the lands and not the
people, each of them sitting here in San Francisco, technically, has access to lands
back in the Islands, he explains. This knowledge, he stresses to them emphatically,
should give them a confidence to dream bigger dreams and to take more career risks
in American society than their non-Samoan neighbours would ever dare to. They
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need not fear failure because they always have the fallback of an Island home, thanks
to the traditional land tenure system.
He pauses for a moment and then he says, “If we have this (gesturing behind
himself to the overhead projection of the three pillars of the fa ’asinomaga) and we
take advantage of what America has to offer us then there is no ethnic group that has
the advantages that you have.” LeSui’s face is beaming.
His enthusiasm is infectious and the assembled kids are obviously impressed
with this new status that LeSui has just bestowed on them. In later private
conversations, he reveals to me that he recognizes that this schema is over-simplified
somewhat but he still believes that there is much value to be gained in cultural pride.
If nothing else, it is a good starting point. As he puts it, “If they [the Samoan youths]
only grow up as Americans living in the projects and have no wealth and stuff and
they also don’t have their Samoan identity, well then they really have nothing.”
Jump forward a few weeks to the identity skit’s dress rehearsal. There is a
tangible excitement in the air; but our teacher friend’s face looks intent as he tries to
figure out the logistics of the fa ’asinomaga skit’s elaborate finale. It involves long
wooden dowels that look like broom handles with hooks on the end that will latch on
to loops attached to belts around the waists of other actors. The twenty actors,
collectively representing each of the three pillars of Samoan identity (language,
lands, titles) will go from swirling about chaotically to an established order by
hooking their poles (symbolizing Samoan proverbs perhaps) to one another to form
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an interconnected web. “You see,” he is explaining, “this network of identities is its
greatest strength, they all depend on each other and all tied together they cannot fall
apart.”
Introduction
LeSui presented a powerful, inspiring, and poetic speech but a number of
doubts and questions linger in its wake. This admittedly idealistic portrayal of
identity, in reality is saddled with a number of pragmatic obstacles. For example,
back in the Islands there has been an increasing move towards individual ownership
of land, and titles, which control communal lands, unless they are actively
maintained through contributions of gifts and service, are not easily or
instantaneously re-activated (cf. O’Meara 1990). In fact, land title claims are often
hotly contested and not at all a guarantee of access (ibid). Beyond the logistical
complications of using this model as a legitimate contingency plan, there is the issue
of relevance. What does the interpretive dramatization of traditional cultural
practices really mean to Samoan kids who are mostly living in public housing
projects, kids who are largely invisible even in the city in which they live?
From a merely practical standpoint: are there ways in which Samoan youth
can incorporate the lessons of fa ’asinomaga, this lean, stripped down version of the
fa ’a Samoa, to contemporize it and to make it their own? Beyond dramatic
syncretisms like dance or fashion, and elusive qualities like the importance of
cultural pride, is there enough substance here upon which to build a good life, one
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that is successful by both Samoan and American standards? Despite its deficiencies,
there is undeniably something innovative at work in this earnest and deliberate
attempt to transform something as amorphous as identity into a powerful new tool
that can be applied to contemporary social problems. My underlying conviction is
that whether or not the lesson is immediately effective, the message is still an
important one and these kids are better off for having heard it. If they are to find
genuine and empowering pride in their culture and advantage in their multi-cultural
proficiency, then they first need to have a strong sense of some of the defining
specificities of Samoan culture.
The chief project of this chapter is to explore the concept of applying
identities, a term I mean to use in a way that distinguishes it from the other types of
identity expressions we have already discussed. Applied identities will represent a
particular type of syncretic cultural process in which specific cultural practices are
assessed and then purposefully employed or rejected as possible responses to specific
contemporary social obstacles. Ultimately it is in this chapter that we shall see some
of the most deliberate and self-conscious cultural agency in the entire dissertation.
As discussed in the introduction, fa ’asinomaga itself is a combination of old words
to describe a newly re-configured idea (identity). In this chapter we shall examine
specific examples of applied and misapplied identities in which existing cultural
practices are being used to address changing circumstances
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In this chapter, I will analyze three different perspectives on applied
identities, each of which will be featured through a specific example. To begin with,
we shall look at identity imperatives that come from the traditional Samoan cultural
authorities such as faife’aus (pastors), and other prominent elders. The example that
we will use is an atonement ceremony called an ifoga that was used to stop a
potential cycle of gang retaliation following the murder of one Samoan boy by
another in San Francisco. The second perspective will be that of Samoan youth as we
hear their thoughts on Samoan parenting and punishment. Through their words we
will see a critique of certain allegedly traditional values. The final example considers
the place of student-run Pacific Islander organizations in high schools and colleges,
as we shall pay heed to the ways in which these organizations are attempting to
change the public face of Samoan identity. We will also consider the sources of the
models they are employing. In the process of evaluating these various examples of
applied identities we shall see that labeling one of these practices as positive versus
problematic, or as traditional or inauthentic, or syncretic has more to do with the
perspective of the observer than it does with the content of the practice
Authority Figures and the Top Down Approach: Ifoga
Despite the current decrying of the elders that the culture is on its way out
and that young people are no longer interested in their heritage, this same worry has
been present for at least as long as people have been writing about Samoan culture
(cf. Buck 1930; Kramer 1901; Stair 1897). To an admitted outsider like me, Samoan
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culture appears active and vibrant and the place of the elders at the top of the social
hierarchy secure. In most ethno-cultural instances Samoan youth are still willing to
defer to the authority of those older than them. However, as we shall see in the other
two perspectives examined in this chapter, impatience with this gerontocractic
system and its perceived constraints on youthful leadership and enterprise is evident
in other contexts. Despite this overall traditional gerontocratic continuity, it would be
misleading to represent Samoan culture as a simple dichotomy in which older
Samoans represent conservatism and tradition and younger Samoans represent
innovation and adaptation. Some inventive adaptations have been employed by
Samoan elders to deal with contemporary issues.
One such adaptive innovation occurred in response to the murder of one
Samoan boy by another. This fatal shooting took place in the public housing projects
of San Francisco while I was doing my fieldwork there. The event directly affected
many of my primary informants since both the boy who was killed and the killer
were related to members of churches that I regularly attended. In fact, in the largest
and oldest congregational church in San Francisco, the killer was a relation of the
faife’au, and the boy who was killed was related to his wife.
The details that I was able to piece together come from a number of different
sources, although, to my righteous indignation, there was never any official reporting
of the incident in any of the major newspapers. This story therefore remains
incomplete.
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The incident took place more or less as follows. Jerome, or Lome, as he was
known, was a twenty-year-old man from a prominent Samoan family who, though
strongly involved in church, had a history of trouble, both on the street and with the
law. He had recently become a father and he had just gotten out of serving time in
jail, when he had the fatal altercation with another Samoan boy with whom he shared
a history of antagonistic relations. Apparently, what had begun as a territorial
conflict between groups of Samoans had evolved into a personal feud between two
members, one from each group. Early on a Sunday morning the two quarreled and
Lome was shot and killed.
Unlike the general invisibility of this human tragedy to the majority of the
populace of San Francisco, the repercussions of Lome’s death were felt widely and
discussed openly in the Samoan community. As Sammy, who was friends with the
killer, said:
I felt like that was bad because that’s one uso [“brother”] killing another uso
and that just don’t look good on us. Now we got family back in the islands
talking about it, we got kids talking about it...
Because of the connections that each boy’s family had to prominent church figures it
became a central topic in the local churches in the weeks that followed. Discussions
of youth violence and calls to open up lines of communication between young people
and their parents were openly discussed. However, some discretely resented that
prior deaths of Samoan youths, which had not directly affected the minister’s family,
had garnered little attention. Thus, even though the pastor’s actions, particularly his
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efforts to involve youth in the address of these issues, were generally applauded, they
were also widely thought to be long overdue. The story also quickly took on epic
moral proportions in the virtual Samoan world of Internet chat rooms from Utah to
New Zealand and all points in between, as people shared their opinions about the
tragedy of Polynesians killing other Polynesians and bemoaned the nihilistic
recklessness of today’s youth.
The dialogue that emerged in the context of this voicing of Samoan youth
was significant, but equally dramatic was the traditional strategy—called an
ifoga—that the two families used to resolve the dispute. Ifoga, which has the term ifo
(“to bow down”) as its root, has been described as “ceremonial abasement” (Kessing
1934:493), a “public act of apology and penance” (O’Meara 1990:121), and a
“ceremonial request for forgiveness” (Milner 1993). It is an old tradition that is used
to restore inter-group harmony, which is so crucial in the intimate face-to-face
context of rural Samoa (O’Meara 1990). Ifoga are still performed in the Islands when
necessary, but it is much more rare for them to be performed in diasporic settings.
Typically ifoga are performed after a grievous offence has been perpetrated against
an individual, family, or village. Examples of events that might ultimately lead to an
ifoga include destruction of property, elopement, adultery, and sexual assault, but
more commonly it is performed after incidents in which deaths occur, whether
deliberate or accidental.
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Traditionally ifoga take place when one party collectively acknowledges that
a member of their ‘ aiga (extended family) or nu’u (village) has wronged another
family or village, either intentionally or otherwise, and that this injured family,
which is now angry, upset, and potentially revengeful, is entitled to some form of
restitution. The penitent group arrives at the home of the aggrieved group early in the
morning and sits silently in their front yard, or on the road in front of the house. The
penitents sit with their heads down cast, potentially for hours, while special types of
He toga (fine mats) are place over their heads. The act requires serious courage and
humility, as there is no guarantee that the aggrieved party will accept this public
apology. To ensure at least a likelihood that the apology will be accepted, private
discussions often take place before this public display is performed. If the aggrieved
party accepts the display the penitents will be invited into the home and speech-
making and gift exchange will take place. At this time the penitents offer ceremonial
retribution payments to the aggrieved to affirm their re-commitment to harmony
between the two groups. Technically, the aggrieved are under no obligation to accept
this apology and retribution and are entitled to take whatever compensatory action
they feel is necessary in order to restore harmony between two groups. Often such
retribution would be exacted against someone other than the perpetrator himself—he
may not even be present at the ifoga by order of his own group, who do not wish to
further insult or aggravate the aggrieved. Because of the collective values placed on
groups, revenge against any member of the perpetrator’s group is equivalent to direct
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revenge against the perpetrator himself. By consenting to the ifoga, the penitents are
essentially putting themselves at the mercy of the aggrieved and accepting their
judgment a priori. However, there is also a great deal of pressure on the aggrieved
group both to accept the apology and to allow the penitents to save face by issuing a
suitable judgment. Both groups may in fact gain in social prestige through such an
event, the penitents by way of their humility and dignity, and the aggrieved for their
magnanimity.2
Ifoga, and traditional Samoan justice in general, are very different from
Western justice. In Samoa there is an ongoing debate over whether the defendant’s
group’s decision to have an ifoga or not should play a part in length of sentencing
decisions (O’Meara 1990). The Western legal system focuses on punishing those
who are directly responsible for the crime, but “This system recognizes little or no
responsibility for repairing social relations that were ruptured by the crime”
(ibid: 121). In the words of another anthropologist: the Western legal system is
concerned with punishment and Samoan custom is “concerned with the restoration of
harmony within the nu’u and between ‘ aiga.” (personal communication).
A variation of an ifoga was held in San Francisco as a way to stop retaliatory
attacks or killings by Lome’s friends and family. In this instance, the cycle of gang
2 Tim O’Meara (1990) provides an excellent description of an ifoga that he attended in Western
Samoa following the accidental death of a cricket referee during a melee in which members from the
village in which he was living were involved (120-125). In his book Sala’ilua: A Samoan Mystery
(1982) Bradd Shore decribes an ifoga that took place following the shooting death that came out of a
dispute between two high ranking matais. Shore uses the murder and its aftermath as the starting point
for an interesting in-depth look at the penultimate importane of harmonious social relations in Samoa
and the structures and controls that are in place to ensure that they are maintained.
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violence and retaliation is very similar to traditional Samoan principles of
collectivity, reputation and retribution,3 and so it was felt that the response that works
for one might also work for the other. Although many were skeptical of the ultimate
value of the ifoga, and many criticized the way it was performed, the result was that
there were no retaliatory killings committed in the months that followed Lome’s
death.
Even though the San Francisco ifoga failed to closely follow the ideal pattern
of ifoga it was still recognized by everyone as being an ifoga, even if they weren’t all
pleased with how it was performed. As I heard it told, at the San Francisco ifoga the
penitents arrived with an offering of apology early one morning not long after the
death. However, instead of publicly displaying their humility before the aggrieved
party’s home, the penitents went directly inside the house to begin the negotiation of
a truce. Edmund (20), an informant from a traditional family and who had spent most
of his life in Samoa was present at the ifoga. He had been to five ifogas during his
childhood in Samoa and he was deeply offended by, what he viewed as, the cavalier
attitude of the penitents. They did not come humbly to offer their lives to the mercy
of the aggrieved but to broker a compensatory settlement. So insulting was this lack
3 This traditional valuing of Samoan collectivity, coupled with efforts to re-create the aumaga (society
of unmarried and unranked men in the village), may be important factors in Samoan decisions to join
gangs in the first place. Certainly informants spoke frequently about gangs and the dangers they
presented to the community but I have no data that shows that Samoan gang involvement is
necessarily any higher than that of other ethnic groups of similar economic standing living in these
neighbourhoods.
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of true contrition and acknowledgement of wrong doing that he was emphatic when
he told me:
I tell you this for a fact. If this happened in Samoa probably a member of the
accused family would be dead right now. They wouldn’t accept this even if
Reverend took the ifoga to the victim’s home.
Another criticism came from Tupu, a Samoan youth leader in his mid-thirties
who was known to be well-versed in the fa ’a Samoa and advanced in Western
education too, possessing a Master’s degree in Social Work. He also felt that the
ifoga itself had been sloppily performed and was offended that the murderer himself
was not present, even though, as I stated above, this is not entirely uncommon in
ifogas (cf. O’Meara 1990). He was cynical about the ultimate “cultural” value of the
event. He thought that the shooting was a delinquency issue and not a Samoan one,
and so to seek a Samoan solution for this non-Samoan issue was inappropriate and
served mainly to allow the respective families to seize the spotlight and to preserve
their reputations by superficially showcasing their cultural commitment. He
grudgingly conceded that the ifoga might also have served to prevent the escalation
of a feud between the two families. However, he also felt that the ifoga and the
church’s response to the shooting, while addressing its aftermath, were poorly
equipped or uninterested in addressing the root causes that had led to the tragedy to
occur in the first place, nor were they adequate to deter similar conflicts from arising
in the future.
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Similarly, when I put the issue of urban ifoga out to the Association for
Social Anthropology in Oceania (ASAO) listserv for discussion, in addition to
getting many accounts of ifogas that other anthropologists had either attended or
heard of, I was also cautioned not to over-value the ultimate importance of such an
event. Beyond the details of the ifoga in question, one response stated a general
resistance to diasporic enactments of tradition: “the notion that ‘traditional’ customs
can be applied to diaspora communities out of the social contexts in which they were
created may be a bit romantic”. Particularly given the fact that the San Francisco
Samoans recognized the ifoga as legitimate, if imperfect, this response struck me as
blatantly condescending. This type of statement serves to confirm the suspicions of
many Samoan youth who expressed to me their perception that their legitimacy as
Samoans is questioned by those still in the islands who devalue their Samoanness
because they live overseas, speak the language imperfectly, or are not fully versed in
Samoan tradition and custom. Indeed, this statement seems to establish that the
“cultural authenticity” debate continues and furthermore that it exists not just within
cultures but also among the recorders and interpreters of culture.
Notwithstanding its detractors, I am not as ready as some to discount the
power of the ifoga, or of the general proposition of traditional responses to
contemporary issues for that matter. First of all, if the ifoga really is primarily about
families and not individuals, then the reconciliation of the two families should not be
taken lightly. Second, claims that the killing of one Samoan by another is not a
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Samoan issue, is purely semantics. Certainly ifoga have been held in Samoa in the
regrettable instances in which one young Samoan man has killed another, and often
the motivations that led to such an incident would not have been appreciably
different than they were in the San Francisco incident. The execution of this
particular ifoga may have been unconventional, but its appropriateness as a cultural
response seems irrefutable to me. Such an incident, irrespective of its socio-
environmental location, is precisely the type of incident the ifoga is designed to
defuse.
I chose the ifoga as an example of an applied identity because it is doubly
applied. Firstly, it is a cultural response that is generated from the elders, even
though the incident itself involved young people, in the same manner that the fa ’a
Samoa has traditionally operated, disseminating downward through the age/rank
grades. Indeed, many young people with whom I spoke did not even know what an
ifoga was, and yet most elders were eager to discuss the concept down to fine details
of its execution. Secondly, the ifoga is also a good example of an applied identity for
the more obvious reason that it is a traditional practice that has been revived in its
new diasporic context to address an issue that, although it involved Samoans in this
case, could have equally involved two young men of any particular ethnicity who
live in this underprivileged area. The fact that a Samoan cultural strategy was used
even though it may not have, strictly speaking, been a cultural issue, is evidence of
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the resilience of traditions that are able to remain relevant, and not merely a
gratuitous display of cultural performance.
Parenting and Punishment
As we discussed briefly in this dissertation’s introduction, the concept of
fa ’aaloalo (respect) and intergenerational conflict surrounding the roles of parents
and children is a dominant theme for diasporic Samoan families. Strictness and
unquestionable authority are traits that are associated with typical Samoan parents,
although alternative styles of parenting also exist. Young Samoans are ambivalent in
their assessments of the value of this dominant style. On the one hand, many take
pride in their cultural distinctiveness, which they view as partially defined by this
toughness and formality yet, by the same token, many have become critical of this
authoritarian approach and of the corporal punishments that are so often a part of it.
Throughout interviews on the topic, this ambivalence shone through, as time and
again Samoan youth affirmed both their general appreciation for the principles of the
fa ’a Samoa and their simultaneous desire to change some of its most distinctive
aspects which are increasingly viewed as distasteful in light of contemporary
American liberal values of childrearing. Ironically, many of these permissive
childrearing values can be traced back to Dr. Spock’s widely popularized books,
which were, in turn, partially influenced by Margaret Mead’s writing about Samoan
parenting. Whether this youth driven impetus for change is the product of an attempt
to adapt Samoan identity to its new diasporic location by keeping some parts of it
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and discarding others or if it is simply an example of a misapplication of Samoan
identity in the American context is debatable and remains foremost a matter of
perspective.
The extent to which corporal punishment is a part of traditional Samoan
parenting is an unresolved issue. Both Helen Morton (1996) and Jane and James
Ritchie (1989) speculate that while physical punishment was certainly an aspect of
traditional culture throughout Polynesia, it is unclear whether that included parent-
child relations or if such rights extended only to chiefs over commoners. Similarly,
in the case of Samoa, both Margaret Mead (1969) and Derek Freeman (1996) report
that rank allowed for extreme punishments to be applied to commoners but do not
comment on pre-contact parent-child relations. Although they both record instances
of corporal punishment in the ethnographic moment of their research, predictably,
Mead’s (1928) cases are downplayed and set into a broader context of permissive
indifference, and Freeman’s (1996) examples are of routinely severe beatings and
harsh punishments.
Helen Morton (1996) suggests that rather than being a survival of pre-contact
cultural behaviour, strict parenting and corporal punishment may instead be the
legacy of the missionary movement, which discouraged the excesses of the chiefs.
Instead it transferred greater authority to fathers as heads of households, and as chief
administers of physical punishment and moral edicts. Amongst Tongans, she notes,
“There are striking similarities between current Tongan beliefs about discipline in
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society and those of eighteenth— and nineteenth-century Europe” (1996:179). Based
on decades of research among New Zealand Maoris, the Ritchies similarly speculate
on the influence that the austere Christian values of the missionaries may have had
on Polynesian parenting but simultaneously claim that corporal punishment, though
not abuse, was relatively common, at least among lower status families in the pre
contact period.
In his lectures to the youth during the SCDC summer program, LeSui told the
students, much to their amazement, that there was nothing in the fa ’a Samoa that
entitled parents to abuse their kids and that people who claimed that severe and
constant beatings were traditional were deluded. This comment of his clearly made a
strong impression on some of the attendees as it came up on several occasions during
exit interviews in response to a question about what were the most important things
they learned in the program. It is difficult to ascertain with certainty if LeSui’s claim
about this absence of gratuitous corporal punishment was supported by pre-contact
practices in general, but it certainly was true at least among the social elite for whom
such public displays of disciplining one’s family members would have been seen as
distasteful and undignified and treated as evidence of the ‘ aiga’ s inability to control
the actions of its younger members. In fact, far from being traditional, Alan Howard
(1974) provides some compelling data that shows that Hawaiian parents who favour
physical punishment tend to score higher on scales measuring acculturation to white
society than their more traditional peers who use less physical punishment (187).
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The ambiguity concerning the nature of Samoan parenting rests heavily on
the determination of the difference between strict parenting and abuse. This
ambiguity also extends to acts of violence between spouses. Certainly domestic
violence is not an issue that is unique to Pacific Islanders; but based on my
informants’ accounts, regular physical punishments are virtually endemic to Samoan
childhood. Although there were occasional exceptions in which informants
expressed horror at the frequency and severity of beatings that they saw in the homes
of their Samoan peers, to most students, casual and regular physical admonishments
were largely treated as facts of Samoan life. However, it is relevant to note that the
severity of these beatings varied greatly from home to home as well as in schools.
The range of beatings included incidents as seemingly insignificant as a
Samoan teacher who felt justified in flicking the ear or back of the head of Samoans
who were not paying attention in class or who were otherwise misbehaving,
particularly to those students to whom he was related. During such instances, the
administration would invariably just awkwardly turn a blind eye because he was a
valued teacher and because his disciplinarian attitude was thought to be effective.
Sometimes “turning a blind eye”, in the name of cultural relativity presumably,
worked against the interests of community members however. For instance, this
comment was shared during a boys’ group interview in Los Angeles:
Down there [in Samoa], it’s not considered child abuse. Down here it is. To
me, I don’t really get it. You know what I’m saying? ‘Cause down here, I’ve
been beat up in the front of the police and stuff and they don’t say nothing.
But when they see— like, I’m not trying to say nothing— but they see like,
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some white kid or something get beat up and they report it and this and that.
If I reported my dad beating me up, my dad [would] tell them straight up, this
is my kid. I’ll raise him the way I want to raise him. They didn’t do nothing.
As with this story, there were other examples of more extreme beatings such as one
that Desiree, a seventeen-year-old girl from Carson shared with me. One night her
parents were fighting in the room next to hers, as she could easily hear through the
thin walls of their city housing apartment. The next thing she knew there was a
tremendous crash and her mother’s head was sticking through the wall into her
room.4 Her parents are no longer living together,and her father and some of her other
family members still resent Desiree for having called the police that night.
As I explained in Methodology chapter, getting access to the homes of my
informants was problematic in this research. Wary of how Samoan parenting may be
viewed by outsiders, parents have increasingly become private in their physical
admonishments. However, in the course of my involvement in various organizations
that were highly youth-oriented, I was able to observe youth-adult interactions over
longer periods of time in which fear of my potentially judgmental presence
presumably diminished over time. Also, young informants were surprisingly frank
when discussing issues of parenting and of corporal punishment.
As stories of both casual and severe beatings began to compile over time I
began to recognize their thematic importance in the lives of young Samoans. When I
wrote up the five vignettes that I used in group-interviews, one of them was designed
4 Helen Morton (1996) provides numerous similar examples of violence, both casual and excessive, in
a Tongan village setting.
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to address this complicated issue. The second vignette I used is about a Samoan girl
who is disciplined by her mother. The mother hits her daughter in the head with a
sandal for her perceived insolence relating to what her daughter felt was an unfair
amount of responsibilities that she is expected to perform, despite her homework
obligations, and while her brother romps freely and her mother goes to bingo.5 Of all
the vignettes used for group interviews it was this one that seemed most often to ring
truest to the participants. They responded with comments like: “That’s my Mom”,
“That’s my house right there”, and “I think that’s real. That’s like, a true story”.
However, to be fair, there was criticism of the girl’s actions in this vignette too.
While all agreed with the validity of the points that the protesting girl made; not only
was the use of a slipper for punishment viewed benign but the way that the girl
openly confronted her mother was viewed as rash and naive. Consider this exchange
which took place during a group interview of girls aged sixteen and older in San
Francisco:
CS: Do you think she had a right to say that to her mom?
— Yeah, [several]
#2: But she knew she was gonna’ get slapped for it. I woulda’ just shut up
and walked away, [several laugh].
#4: There’re ain’t no talkin’ back.
#1: ‘Cause you know you gonna’ get slapped so just deal with it. If you a
real Samoan kid you won’t even say shit ‘cause you know you gonna’ get
beat up. Just sit there.
While it was not always a de rigueur presumption that the daughter had been
incorrect to address this injustice with her mother, the general consensus was that she
5 See Appendix I I for a full text of this ethnovignette.
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should have chosen to address it at another time, not in the heat of the conflict or in a
manner that put her mother on the spot.
Appearances are important in the Samoan community and the comments
made by the young women in this group, that the daughter would have done better to
contest her mother’s will at another time reflect this. The value placed on not
undermining her mother’s authority is similar to other examples we have already
discussed that indicate the importance of dignity to Samoans such as the ifoga
ceremony or the way that the taupou represents the ‘ aiga ’ $ ability to protect the
collective virtue of all their female members. In Albert Wendt’s novel Sons for the
Return Home (1973), we see that the image of a disrespectful child is so powerful
that it may actually come to reflect more poorly on the child than on the parent
regardless of the parent’s actions or words. Consider the response of the mother
following a heated argument with her son, in which he has openly challenged her
meddling actions.
She sought refuge behind that one sacred taboo between parents and their
children: parents had to be respected, obeyed, served, regardless of how good
or evil they were. For a Samoan son to break that code of behaviour would
condemn him to exile within his own home, village, community, and country.
A mother’s curse would destroy a son with guilt, brand him as Cain. ( 214)
Apart from cases of excessive violence, a bigger source of conflict between
youth and adults regarding parenting and punishment is the ideological rationale
behind it. In a provocative chapter entitled “Sanctioned Violence”, Helen Morton
(1996) contends that among Tongans most parents view punishment as an
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inextricable part of socialization and teaching in general. Before the age of one,
Tongan babies are largely indulged, but as they get older they are increasingly
reprimanded and struck when they perform socially disruptive behaviour. These
reprimands come from elders in their earliest years and then later from their older
brothers and sisters, who are in turn disciplined by their elder siblings and cousins.
Mead described a similar punished/punisher cycle for Samoan children:
Just as a child is getting old enough so that its willfulness is becoming
unbearable, a younger one is saddled upon it, and the whole process is
repeated again, each child being disciplined and socialised (sic) through
responsibility for a still younger one. (1928:24)
Like Morton (1996), Mead (1928) also refers to the role that punishment plays in
teaching correct behaviour to children. Furthermore, parents contend that their
beatings are not the result of anger but of love and concern, the product of a desire to
see their children turn out as responsible and productive community members.
Even though they may be critical of the beatings and question their continued
validity, some Samoan youth, particularly those who have arrived most recently and
particularly boys, echo this sentiment. Take the words of eighteen-year-old Milo,
from San Francisco, who spent much of his childhood in Samoa:
M: It’s like they’re not hitting you, like because they hate you. They’re
hitting you because they love you. That means: you know, showing you that:
don’t do this; it’s not good for you
CS: So, would you hit your kids too?
M: I don’t know. No, you know everything has changed now. Because
nowadays, this is America, if you hit one of the kids they go tell police, tell
teachers and then get the parents: get locked up like that.
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There are several factors that have brought this type of parenting and
teaching into question. The critical eye of outsiders, not to mention the policing
authorities, is only one of them. Perhaps the more significant issue as far as the
efficacy of these methods has to do with their displacement from the socio-cultural
environment in which they were developed. Ritchie and Ritchie (1989) provide
many insights in this regard based on their observations among urban Maoris. They
argue that their findings have broad applicability throughout Polynesia. According to
the Ritchies, the two main issues have emerged from changed settlement patterns and
the disruption of peer socialization groups.
In the settings of Samoan villages, in which numerous kin members live in
close proximity to one another it is possible to collectively socialize and punish
Samoan youth. In urban and suburban settings where extended families are often
widely dispersed, it is difficult to replicate this communal child rearing practice.
Furthermore, in the context of isolated nuclear families, there are doubtless fewer
social constraints on punitive excesses, and it is more difficult to defuse tense
situations by having individuals temporarily take up residence with kin who live
nearby, what Mead refers to as the “system of consanguineous refuge” (1928:43).
Equally disruptive has been the breakup of traditional age groups into specific age
grades for the purposes of western style schooling. This activity largely disrupts the
traditional socializing process in which older children taught younger ones while
performing collective tasks as part of the aumaga or tama’ita’i as discussed earlier.
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Polynesian parents are often frustrated in their attempts to raise their children in the
same manner that their parents raised them, not understanding why that which
worked in Apia or Leone does not work in Carson. Their confusion stems from their
failure to recognize the importance of the loss of “multiple parenting patterns” and
their children’s relatively impoverished peer interactions (Ritchie and Ritchie
1989:127). As Ritchie and Ritchie summarize:
Children may accuse their parents of not doing their job properly, and parents
may become befuddled about their proper roles, unaware that in traditional
settings it is Polynesian children who produce Polynesian children, not
Polynesian parents (ibid: 123).
However, Samoan youth in the United States have very mixed feelings about this
issue. By one token,fa ’ aaloalo is widely held to be the most precious of the values
that thc fa ’a S&moa teaches and a source of real pride. Respect for elders is one of
the things that they think distinguishes them from other ethnic groups. Peleiupu, a
sixteen-year-old girl from San Francisco, stresses this when she says:
Learning to respect your elders is like the best thing. You know how you see
other kids disrespecting old people. Like, you know, beating them up for their
money and snatching stuff from them? I don’t think it’s right.
What is particularly interesting about this statement is that it followed a fairly
comprehensive critique of traditional Samoan parenting that singled out poor
communication and unequal gender roles as key deficits in the “traditional’ style of
parenting.
CS: Is there anything you would change for your own [future] children from
the way that your parents raised you?
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P: The way that I’m treated. I wouldn’t be too strict on them. I’d let them
have a little freedom. I wouldn’t be too uptight, like, you know, you have to
do this. I mean giving them a little helping hand doesn’t hurt but giving them
freedom it will make them feel a little better about themselves so they
wouldn’t go all wild and do things that they’re not supposed to. (...) When
you have something that you really want to tell your parents especially, you
know that they wouldn’t react the same way that another person would, if
you was to tell them. Like a friend they’ll give you more advice but if it was
your parents, it wouldn’t be the same. Like, they’ll blow the roof off, like,
you know, “why is that?” But if you was to tell a stranger or your cousin or
your friend, it’s better. (...) I would be more open to them [my future
children] and I would treat all the kids equal, even if she was the only girl.
Although most of the youth interviewed took a sort of Spartan pride in the
Samoan reputation for discipline, service, and respect, it was mostly older newly
arrived boys, themselves probably nearing or past the end of receiving physical
disciplining, who were the strongest advocates of the continued usefulness of
corporal punishment. Twenty-year-old Edmund, well-eduacted and recently arrived
from Samoa, expressed his beliefs emphatically in response to a question about the
continued relevance of such methods:
It has been very effective. It has been effective to me. And I hope that for the
next generation it will be effective too. Because right now, here, parent’s are
yelling “I’m gonna’ whoop you”. And the kids: “I’m gonna’ call the cops. If
you whoop me I’m going to call the cops. You’re abusive”. And that tells me
that they’ve been brought up too easily since they were young. See, if they
were brought up rough enough, I mean the tough Samoan style they’d grow
up and they wouldn’t even imagine doing that.
However, this type of unequivocal endorsement of corporal punishment
stands out as somewhat of an anomaly. Young Samoans, although valuing many
things their parents have taught them, do not appear particularly eager or willing to
continue the practice of hitting children to teach them correct behaviour. When asked
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what aspects of parenting they would hypothetically change when raising their own
children, an end to corporal punishment, reducing the social distance and formality
of relations between children and parents, and stopping gender-based differential
treatment of children, were all frequently referenced. The words of Dam, a sixteen-
year-old woman from San Francisco, are fairly representative of general criticisms of
Samoan parenting, particularly among female informants:
I would want them [future children] to be more open. I would be more open
to them. I would...you know, discipline means a big thing [laughing}. So,
like, for instance, of course I’m not gonna’ lie, we get slapped if we do
something wrong or whatever. But as for mine [future children] I plan on not
doing that. They say that if you don’t discipline your child they ain’t gonna’
come around, but, you know, I don’t believe in that. I’m gonna’ just talk to
them because talking gets to them, beatings don’t.
Whether this remains the case, once they actually start having families of their own
and are no longer so regularly the recipients of physical punishments themselves,
remains to be seen. There is some precedent that a revision of “traditional” parenting
practices may already be taking place. Consider this lengthy quote by Telesia, who
contrasts her mother’s parenting style with that of her grandparents:
I think something that a lot of Samoan families go through is a lack of
communication. Sometimes they feel that they are expressing their feelings to
their children but a lot of the time their children don’t know exactly what
they mean by keeping them in the house or keeping them from doing what
they want to do or keeping them from going to school dances or to have
night-outs with friends and stuff. They have misunderstandings a lot because
Samoan parents feel that they shouldn’t give a reason why to their decisions
for their children. And I see that a lot in my grandparents because they were
originally from Samoa and they were raised as children in Samoa and they
tell me all the time: that’s the difference and that we’re very fortunate to be
kids in San Francisco living here in America than they were and they tell me
the differences all the time. I see that more in my grandparents than in my
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parents. I wouldn’t change anything that my parents have taught me because
my Mom knows. She knows how it was in San Francisco in comparison to
Samoa and that’s what she’s been teaching me. You could probably say she’s
like how I’m going to be for my kids.
In this quote, Telesia alludes to another extremely important aspect of the
growing critique of Samoan parenting that we have already mentioned above: the
constraints on communication between Samoan children and their parents. As Dara
bluntly puts it:
In Samoan culture, basically, they [the parents] don’t really hear the kids out
a lot It’s like, once the adult says something, once we obey we listen but
when they hear us out, like for instance when we express how we feel that’s
considered talking back or disrespecting.
This is a central source of conflict in the diasporic community. To ask for an
explanation from adults may be perceived as fia poko (to act clever). The problem is
that in some instances, and despite the Samoan tendency to ascribe all socio-cultural
authority to those elder than one, in the experience of immigration and acculturation,
it is often possible that the youth do know more about some things than their elders.
In the course of the group interviews several lively discussions emerged surrounding
the hypothetical situation in which parents were exhibiting dysfunctional behaviour
through drugs and alcohol, child abuse, gambling or whatever, and the kids were
placed in the position of condemning them for it. The conflict of course arises when
the parents are given quasi-absolute authority by virtue of their age rank. Although it
was thought that in extreme cases other family members or even non-community
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agencies could be called on, the general thinking was that for better or worse your lot
was with your family’s:
CS: So, how long does the girl have to follow her Mom’s orders if her Mom
is being irresponsible in other ways?
#2: Always, [everyone agrees]. If you’re gonna’ go down, you’re gonna’ go
down because of your parents.
In response to how they planned to change their parenting for their own hypothetical
families in the future, most agreed that this was an area in need of revision. Even
Jordan, a slightly older informant (he was twenty-two) from a very traditional
family, was in accord that communication lines needed to be more open:
I would listen to my kids... My parents, they use the Samoan system but
they’re old school in the Samoan system. So they come over here, they kind—
-well, they probably do but— you know, they kind of don’t understand what I
go through with my friends. Like Mom, for example, she’s on me whenever
there’s a female calling the house. You know, she gets mad! In Samoa you
get to go out and you don’t have to worry about getting shot. Over here I
think that’s why they’re more strict when we came over here. It’s like they’re
really really strict now because I guess they don’t want anything to happen.
So, you know they kind of have to listen, you know what I’m saying, try to
come down to my level and try to see what I go through.
Communication in the name of safety was in fact an important theme in this
community during the time that I did my research. Following the death of Lome
discussed earlier in this chapter, the churches had several youth services in which it
was posited that the old system of formal distance between parents and children was
dangerous in this new environment. Parents needed to be open enough for their
children to speak to them and through that dialogue parents would also be aware of
what their children were up to before they got into real trouble. Kitiona, a youth
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minister, even controversially evoked the wisdom of Margaret Mead in his sermon.
He paraphrased her as saying that “Samoan children were to be seen but not heard”.6
This was something that he thought needed urgent changing.
Ironically, the famous palagi permissiveness that allegedly allows children to
run wildly and disrespectfully over their parents and allows the elderly to be shut
away to die in retirement homes, is also a source of envy to some Samoans. Despite
these palagi faults, there is also perceived to be a familiarity and emotional closeness
in relations between palagi children and their parents that is not a part of traditional
Samoan families. As nineteen-year-old Reyna, from San Francisco, laments:
See, I don’t really know my parents all like that. That’s why I couldn’t tell
you anything [during earlier questions about family migration history]. We
don’t have that kind of relationship. I don’t have that mother-daughter
relationship. So, now when I have kids I’ll be really close to them and talk to
them about everything.
There is no organized effort to reform Samoan parenting, but the popular will
seems to be moving in a direction that will attempt to blend the best elements of both
Samoan respect and deference with western openness of communication to create a
hybridized form of Samoan respect as part of Samoan identity. The fact that there are
parts of Samoan parenting that the next generation is deliberately preparing to
discontinue presents a compelling case that it is an example of an identity
6 I couldn’t find anything that closely resembled Kitiona’s quote in Coming o f Age in Samoa (1928)
although its message is certainly implied through a number of examples, particularly through Mead’s
description of early socialization processes in which young children care for their younger siblings,
largely by keeping them from annoying the elders. Mead also writes, more generally that:
The community ignores both boys and girls from birth until they are fifteen or sixteen years
of age. Children under this age have no social standing, no recognized group activities, no
part in the social life except when they are conscripted for the informal dance floor (ibid:74).
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misapplication whose continuance, in the new context has been evaluated and
ultimately rejected, or at least dramatically reformed. As we have seen, there is
evidence that such changes have already begun to take place in the generations of
parents who are the most distantly removed from Samoa. What is particularly
germane to our discussion is that this move for change seems to be a largely youth
driven. Whereas the ifoga, no matter how novel its application, was still something
that was introduced through the traditional cultural channel of the community elders,
this new innovation seeks to preserve some of the existing form and to improve it by
introducing new ideas that are also selectively imported. As such, the youth
mandated change to parenting is not only the suggestion of an identity compromise:
it is also a transitional example on our progression from applied Samoan identities to
applied American ones.
“ PI to the roof!”: Collective Identities in the Making7
The final example of applied identity that I wish to discuss is the importance
of Pacific Islander (PI) clubs that have formed on high school and university
campuses. These organizations provide a good example as they push the boundaries
7 Both American academics and Pacific Islanders have come to use “PI” (pee-aye) as a short hand for
Pacific Islanders. The term’s origins are in US Census category for Asians and Pacific Islanders, or
API, a category that has been widely criticized for being too broad to be descriptively useful (cf. Fong
and Mokuau 1994). For the Pacific Islanders, separating themselves from that category as distinctly
Pis has been an important step towards establishing their ethnic identity and demanding that the
unique challenges that their community confronts are addressed. The 2000 US Census disaggregated
Asian Americans from Pacific Islanders for the first time, and perhaps that will eventually lead to
increasingly detailed approaches to Pacific Islander identity in general but so far this lead has not been
widely followed and the API category is still dominant. For example, the ethnicity status of USC
students, which the University published in its most recent Fact Book (2003) failed to disaggregate
the two categories.
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of our expectations about identity application. They also help to legitimize the place
of Samoans in California. To understand these organizations better and to understand
their relevance to our discussion of identity applications, we need to look at what
their goals are, how they attempt to meet these goals, and what models they have
employed towards these ends.
The goals of these various Pacific Islander organizations vary from campus to
campus and are highly influenced by the individual agendas of organization leaders
or sponsors and by the specific political histories of the campuses and
neighbourhoods in which they are situated, or, if the club has been around long
enough, the legacy of the club itself. Despite the variation among organizations there
seem to be two distinct, though occasionally paired goals driving them: 1) to serve as
social networks for Pacific Islander students and 2) to increase visibility of their
ethnic (or pan-ethnic) group and to gamer the benefits that come with this
recognition.
Pacific Islanders are generally such a small minority, particularly on college
campuses, that they are frequently isolated from their co-ethnic peers. Accordingly,
the mere act of networking and congregating with each other provides the
opportunity to create a meaningful co-ethnic (or at least aproxi-ethnic) community
support network. On campuses with relatively small Pacific Islander populations,
like USC, this service should not be undervalued. If nothing else, these clubs,
provide a physical space in which Islanders can congregate, whether it’s a permanent
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office or a borrowed classroom, for a few select hours a week. During that time and
in that space, Pacific Islanders have a place of their own within the broader campus
community.
It is also significant that the larger title of “Pacific Islander” is most often
used even though groups in California (particularly in Southern California) are often
numerically dominated by Samoans. For example, of the sixteen members of the
USC Pacific Islander Student Association (PISA) there were eight Samoans, three
Hawaiians, two Tongans, one Marshall Islander, and two non-islanders, myself and a
young man who had lived in American Samoa. These groups tend to be inclusive by
design and welcome individuals from throughout the Pacific as well as other students
who are interested in the region or the culture, regardless of their Pacific Islander
origin. The primary goal is to network people with shared interest, and verification of
cultural pedigree generally appears to be of little interest. Although more political
goals may emerge from this initial impetus to create a social network, the sociability
quotient can remain an important component of these organizations, even though
many of the activities that members participate in together may have little to do with
Islander culture or heritage.
The second major driving force behind these organizations is to increase
visibility of their cultures and their group. This visibility may be as simple as staging
cultural performances like dances, luaus, and talent shows (the most common
activities of the high school PI groups), or it may involve lectures by students or
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guest lecturers about the Pacific region, its traditions and its people. However, there
is also a more overtly political agenda behind some of the efforts to increase
visibility. As Islander students become more versed in Western education, they are
increasingly exposed to a critical awareness about their place in this country as a
minority culture and about some of the ways in which they have been excluded or
limited in their access to certain echelons of American society. This in turn has led to
efforts by some PI groups, particularly on college campuses, to focus their efforts on
outreach to middle schools and high schools with large Pacific Islander populations,
to help with tutoring or to set up college application and financial aid workshops, to
have Pacific Islander course content added to university calendars, to have Pacific
Islander heritage celebrated independent of other cultures, and to refine ethnic data
gathering of applicants to specify Islander status and to separate them out from
broader ethnic categorizations like Asian Pacific Islanders. All of these activities,
whether they are as innocuous as hosting a fundraising event with Island-style
entertainment, or as aggressive as lobbying the university administration for Islander
accountability in admission policies, are united by a broader goal of establishing not
only that Pacific Islanders are conceded a seat at the American table, but also that
they are entitled to be served there, too.
The methods used to realize these various goals also differ from organization
to organization. Some groups are most concerned with representing their school
within the community and others are more concerned with changing their campus
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community and, in the process, the general make-up of the education system. By
putting themselves at the service of traditional sources of community authority
(faife ’ aus and other prominent elders) the community-oriented groups seek to
increase the civic presence of Islander students as contributors to the ethnic
community. Those organizations that are more specifically focused on the academic
environment have taken a more independent stance, feeling little need to legitimize
their goals through endorsement by traditional authority figures. They reason is that,
in the field of education, it is often the students who are the most knowledgeable
community members and not the elders, a point which is generally, though not
always enthusiastically, conceded by community elders who are willing to
temporarily suspend their traditional gerontocratic authority. In such cases PI clubs
on various campuses may network among each other or with educated PI club
sponsors on high school campuses to coordinate their agenda for the community’s
progress without consulting community elders.
During my time at USC, this is precisely what happened. A multi-campus PI
club conference called the Pacific Unity Alliance (PUA) was held to discuss the
shared objectives of these Pacific Islander student organizations.8 One of the key
objectives to come out of this meeting was a commitment to increase Pacific Islander
representation at local universities. Towards such an end USC and UCLA jointly
began an after-school tutoring initiative in which Pacific Islander college
8 The initial conference was held at UCLA on November 21, 1997.
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tutor/mentors would go down to Carson High School several days a week to offer
help to Pacific Islander students there. In the process they attempted to normalize the
image of Pacific Islanders as college students.
Interestingly, and despite the fact that the ultimate goal of most of these PI
clubs is the promotion and recognition of their cultures, the models that many of
them have drawn from to realize these goals do not largely come from within their
traditional communities. Rather, the models are drawn from the example of other
ethnic organizations on campus and from ethnic studies programs. These, in turn,
were influenced by prominent social movements like civil rights, black power,
second wave feminism, and other forms of identity empowerment. Such
organizations are inherently political and are concerned ultimately not only with
making a place for themselves, but also with maintaining that space, and in forcing
the rest of society to acknowledge and legitimize their inclusion.
One way that the general awareness of a group’s political agenda can be
measured is by assessing the degree to which its message has become popularized
through mainstream thinking or language, even if in the process this mainstreaming
robs the message of some of its original subversive power. For example, much
political rhetoric from the civil rights and Black Power movements has been sampled
and used in rap and hip hop music. This rhetoric was used as part of a critique of
American society and social injustice by many performers when the genre initially
emerged in the African-American communities in the early eighties, but it has since
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become a mainstream genre that has successfully marketed and commodified itself in
part based on its consumable image of subaltern resistance (cf. Kitwana 2002;
Wimsatt 1994). Accordingly, the phrase that heads this section of the chapter “PI to
the roof’, which was a cheer of solidarity and self-promotion that I heard the Carson
PI club use before dance practices and performances, is an example of Pacific
Islander youth popularizing their struggle. The phrase asserts their cultural identity
(“PI”), their place in American culture (because the phrase is in English and the
group cheer is quintessential sporting Americana), and simultaneously their
identification with other American minorities by their use of hip hop phrasing (“to
the roof’ ). As with the role of PI clubs in general this phrase re-enforces the use of
non-traditional means to promote their culture, to celebrate their cultural
distinctiveness, and to assert their legitimate place in American society.
PI clubs are our third example in the exploration of the concept of applied
identities. The clubs represent a twist on the identity models we have explored so far
in that it shows a youth-driven effort to purposefully apply what they have learned
from American sources reflexively back on to Samoan culture. While the other two
examples sought to employ Samoan solutions (the ifoga) or at least Samoan
compromises (parenting and punishment) to American problems, this last example is
an attempt to apply an American solution (ethnic clubs) to an American
circumstance (dispersed and anonymous ethnic group). Its relevance to our
discussion of Samoan identity is because one of the primary goals of these
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organizations is to promote a broader awareness both among Pacific Islander
students themselves and among the larger cultures within which they operate.
Recognizing that their group’s unique needs will not be met without this broader
awareness, PI groups have turned to the example of other models of American ethnic
resistance, with the realization that these methods have proved effective in other
cases. As we have mentioned frequently throughout this dissertation, it comes as
little surprise that the group of Americans that Samoan youth often identify most
closely with are other immigrant and minority youth. This is because these are the
groups amongst whom they have the most shared experience (residence, economic
status, social marginalization, racialization and so on). This example is important
because it challenges the idea that cultural solutions must come from within the
culture if they are to help preserve that culture. Because it is largely a youth-driven
movement, it also challenges the traditional structures of power within the Samoan
community. However, because the traditional authority figures largely view these
clubs as promoting positive values, they are tacitly approved of despite their
subversion of traditional authority. It will be interesting to see if youth are able to
maintain their prominence within this debate in the years to come as the group of
well-educated community elders becomes larger.
Conclusion
In this chapter I have attempted to establish the idea of “applied identities”,
which I define as a self-conscious attempt to use specific cultural tools of identity to
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address specific contemporary issues. By way of three examples I sought to establish
a continuum that spanned traditional Samoan cultural practices, at one extreme (the
ifoga) to quintessentially American cultural forms (PI clubs), at the other, with a mid
point represented by the compromised responses solution to Samoan parenting and
punishment. I do not wish to suggest, in any way a form of unilineal determinism
here but rather aim to show the extent of the range of cultural tools that diasporic
Samoans can now draw from in order to serve their community’s needs best.
This multicultural advantage is something that is suggested in the
ethnographic snap shot with which I open this chapter and is re-iterated in the
thoughtful words of eighteen-year-old Sammy, a young man from San Francisco.
Although he is half Samoan and half Filipino, ethnically he self-identifies primarily
as Samoan:
I feel like it’s a strength [to be multicultural] because of the fact that it’s
knowledge. You know, white America has taught me a little bit of this. But
then again Samoa has its way of doing things. But then when you put it
together it’s stronger and you look back and you just observe what you have
done, then that’s what makes me stronger. Because I feel like, when America
messes up, I can do things my Samoan way.
The idea of applied identities seems to me to be a rhetorically useful one because it
introduces a new level of specificity to discussions of ethnic identity that might allow
it to be more easily related cross-culturally. However, more examples must be sought
out, both within Samoan culture and in other cultures, to see if it can be developed
into a more theoretically cogent term. My use of this “applied identities” concept has
been an attempt, as was my use of performance in the previous chapter, to introduce
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354
some sense of nuance into categories, such as identity and hybridity, which are
generally too broadly defined to be anything more than descriptive.
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Chapter IX
CONCLUSION
355
Throughout this dissertation I have examined a variety of identity
configurations as they are enacted by members of the Samoan communities of
California. Although the main interest of this study was to explore Samoan youth
identity, it was impossible to do so without first describing Samoan culture and
identity in more generalized terms. Once that was done, it was possible to see some
of the key ways that Samoan youth identity both supported and challenged the
identity of the diasporic Samoan communities on the whole. This pattern, of first
establishing a general portrait (context) and then focusing on a specific object within
that frame, occurs on many levels throughout this dissertation as I have attempted to
move from the widest view to the most extreme close up, to borrow from the
terminology of filmmaking. Interestingly, what appears in the closest view is not a
singular and definitive truth but the realization that diversity still dominates at
whatever level of analysis one chooses.
The basic layout of this dissertation has been to divide the material into two
distinct parts. Part I introduced the topic, the theoretical groundings that inform it,
and the methodology. It ended with a general sketch of Samoan culture that spanned
from pre-contact times to the present day diasporic communities in California, the
setting of this research. The Theoretical Discussions chapter played the significant
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356
role of suggesting to the reader certain ideas as they read through the rest of the
material. As the dissertation unfolded it became possible to see the extent to which
my readings of these ideas had influenced my interpretation of data and it also
allowed me to share my assessment of how the Samoan material supported or
challenged these broader debates. The other two chapters served to fill in the
background both of my study and of the Samoan community.
Having completed the task of establishing context, Part II focused itself
wholly on the interpretation of specific identity configurations within the
community. I stress that these were configurations, and arguably not qualitatively
distinct identity instances, in an attempt to emphasize that these interpretations are
my attempts to look at similar material through a variety of lenses, each of which
serves to bring certain types of behaviours into sharper focus. Through this variety of
approaches to identity— Constructing Identities, Identity Expression, Performing
Identities and Applying Identities—it is my hope to emerge with a more nuanced
perspective on such a notoriously slippery term. Ideally, this more nuanced reading
of identity will allow it to be more readily comparable cross-culturally and ultimately
lead to greater understanding of this and other complicated social processes.
Anthropological Relevance
The design of this dissertation was distinctly transdisciplinary, as I freely
borrowed theories from cultural studies, psychology, ethnic studies and geography;
methods from sociology and filmmaking; and drew on all variety of research
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357
materials including historical texts, newspapers, the Internet, and government
documents. And yet, despite this variety of approaches this dissertation is still
distinctly anthropological, for obvious reasons, such as its dominant methodology of
participant observation, but also for its overarching theoretical orientation of
emphasizing rich context. Anthropology has changed greatly in recent years, as
processes of globalization increasingly bring more and more people, and their
cultural practices, in contact with one another, and anthropological methodology
have been forced to change along with them as the groups that it describes are
increasingly affected by these trends. Beyond the translocal organization of the
Samoan community, this is also a work of urban or suburban anthropology in a
Western city and this fact has made it necessary for me to be creative in my
ethnographic approach since so many of the traditional anthropological methods are
impractical in this setting. My use of transdisciplinary methods is one such
innovation, but its roots remain true to anthropological principles of holism and the
importance of deep understanding. No other social science focuses more on context
than anthropology does, and I think that it is this contribution more than any other
that will serve anthropology well and that makes it an ideal component of applied
transdisciplinary research. This dissertation is an example of this style of new
ethnography but it is still distinctly ethnographic because its central goal is to
provide a rich and detailed description of a cultural group. Furthermore, because of
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358
this diversity of perspectives, it is hoped that the appeal and applications of this work
will extend beyond anthropology and be broadly attractive.
Key Findings
A number of key findings emerged throughout the course of this work and on
a variety of different levels. Firstly, it became clear how attempts to apply Western
social theory models to non-Western cultures can confuse the analysis. Although
such a finding is not novel as a general proposition, I got first hand knowledge of it
when I was forced to evaluate the appropriateness of my Eriksonian-influenced
research design that focused on identity choices made during adolescence within a
cultural group that is based on an age-graded social hierarchy. A number of factors
distinguish the social context of the Samoan family from the modem industrialized
families that Erikson (1968) was describing. For Samoan youth the transition from
childhood to adulthood tends to be a gradual one that is not, by definition, marked by
the sharp breaks from family that enable autonomy, so important in individualistic
cultures such as the United States. In light of this observation, the importance of
searching for localized theories and metaphors through which to explore particular
cultures was made abundantly clear to me and was later applied in my methodology,
through decisions to use ethnovignettes and group interviews in data collection.
Secondly, a number of qualitative differences emerged between the Southern
and Northern Californian Samoan communities. These differences can largely be
traced back to the settlement patterns of the respective communities. While the two
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359
communities are of about the same age, housing costs have changed dramatically
over time in the San Francisco area in a way that they have not in Carson. The result
is that, while both communities continue to receive new Samoan arrivals, the Carson
community has maintained a full range of Samoan residents spanning several
generations. In the San Francisco area, many of the earliest arrivals have since
moved to cheaper and more remote suburbs, and the Samoan community in the
urban core consists largely of new arrivals, many of whom chose to live in the urban
core because that is where there are public housing developments. The result of this
changed settlement pattern is that the San Francisco sample contained many more
recent arrivals than the Carson community did. It also has meant that the San
Francisco Samoans have a much more recently arrived, and consequently, sometimes
less resourceful, support network from which to draw on than their Carson
counterparts do.
Thirdly, and this finding surprised me, statistics did not bear out a hypothesis
that Samoan youth would hold an overly romanticized view of the Islands. Instead,
positive evaluations of both Samoa and of the United States dominated, and the
Islands were rarely used as an idyllic benchmark against which their American
experiences were to be measured. This became readily understandable in the case of
the San Francisco Samoan community, which was largely comprised of relatively
new arrivals, or for any Samoans who had spent significant time in the Islands, and
there were several such individuals in both communities. Questions that probed
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360
about the ways in which they imagined Samoa were often confusing to interviewees.
To them Samoa was not an imagined place or past, but a remembered one and
therefore, the evaluative comparisons they made between it and the United States
were realistic and thoughtful and not fanciful. In light of this observation it should
not be assumed that Samoan emotional commitment to their homeland was low, as,
on the contrary, I found ethnic pride to be almost universally high, and Samoa as a
place, to be an active and positive component of the collective psyche of the group.
Fourthly, an evaluation of the public imagery of Samoans revealed a striking
imbalance between males and females. What emerged is virtually an absolute bias
towards maleness and male imagery. This gendered bias in the representation of the
culture, as I discussed in the Identity Expectations chapter, is not a reflection on how
the culture views itself but rather focuses on how it has been externally constructed. I
argue in that chapter that the reasons for this gender imbalance may be the result of
the fortuitous similarities of mainstream American values of masculinity with
Samoan ones, and the simultaneous incompatibility of American values of
femaleness with Samoan values. The end result for Samoan women has been virtual
public invisibility. This invisibility may be significantly affecting their experience of
American adaptation, as evidenced by their higher reported instances of
discrimination than the men, who appear to experience this socio-cultural
environment in qualitatively different ways than the women do.
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361
Finally, I determined that Samoan and American identities are not mutually
exclusive from one another. In fact, it can be argued, that the combined commitment
to both of these identities/cultures, may provide an advantage to Samoans living in
America as it allows them to draw on a wider range of solutions to potential social
challenges.
Future Directions
As I began to analyze my findings, it became clear to me that for as much as
this project had taught me, there were still a number of areas that were ripe for future
research. I have noted many of these throughout the course of the dissertation but I
will reiterate them now, more or less in the order in which they came up in the
writing.
Firstly, I would like to explore in greater detail the etymology of the terms
fa ’a Samoa and/a ’asinomaga. Although I have learned much already about each of
them, and about how they articulate with one another, I still have many questions
about the social contexts in which they emerged and about how oppositional their
inceptions were.
Secondly, although the comparison between the Northern and Southern
Californian Samoan communities yielded some interesting findings, it strikes me
now that perhaps the more significant comparison might lie in contrasting urban
Samoan youth from suburban Samoan youth. Beyond that, in the future I would like
to pay more attention to the Samoa of origin (Independent or American) of the
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362
immigrant youth to discern whether there are appreciable differences in their
commitments to Samoan culture and to the experiences of cultural adaptation.
Furthermore, this study of Californian youth provides a good baseline for future
comparative studies of Samoan youth in other significant diasporic Samoan sites,
such as Hawai’i, Utah, New Zealand, and Australia, or within some of the small and
dispersed pockets of Samoans that are found throughout the United States.
Thirdly, I would like to explore gender bias in the representation of culture,
as discussed in the “key findings” section above, in much greater detail. This area is
perhaps the one which is most rich for future study and which could have broad
implications on our understanding of how the immigration experience can be so
drastically different not just between ethnic groups, but within them. Focusing on
gender in the immigration experience is a big challenge because it requires an
understanding of both the sending culture and the receiving culture’s historical
approaches to gender, how the two interface with one another, and how global trends
on the understanding of gender may be influencing both the cultures and the
individual men and women.
Fourthly, I would like to learn more about how innovation is affecting
Samoan dance and how it is challenging perceptions of the traditional and the
authentic. Critical analysis of dance and its meanings is a vibrant new field in
cultural studies and it would be exciting to join such an animated and current
discussion.
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363
Fifthly, it became clear in the discussion of “parents and punishment” in the
Applying Identities chapter that further exploration of the changing approach to
discipline and corporal punishment is necessary. This type of research is complicated
by the fact that it is often a taboo subject, not just among Samoans but also
throughout the Western world. However, there was a surprising willingness by youth
informants to discuss these issues, and a stated intention, by many, to change these
patterns. A broader sample is needed to determine whether trends to change patterns
of corporal punishment will move beyond rhetoric, and the degree to which an
individual’s commitment to traditional culture affects his or her willingness to
discontinue these practices. This issue is further complicated by debate over whether
corporal punishment is a pre-contact tradition or a missionary-influenced one.
Finally, through my introduction of several different examples of identity,
and particularly with the idea of “applying identities”, I wish to contribute to the
development of a less ambiguous understanding of identity. By taking a more
nuanced approach towards identity I hope to make it more manageable, and more
easily comparative cross-culturally. I would also like to explore the applying
identities theory in greater depth to see if other examples of traditional/cultural
responses to contemporary problems can be drawn on and grouped together to form
some sort of cohesive and theoretically meaningful whole.
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364
Closing Thoughts
The goals of this dissertation have been primarily two-fold. Firstly, I wished
to enter into current academic debates on identity, multiculturalism, immigration,
and youth by providing the perspective of a cultural group that has largely been on
the periphery of these discussions. Secondly, and more importantly I wanted to
provide a glimpse of what it is like to be a Samoan young person living in California
at the turn of the millennium.
Ideally, this description is important and interesting in and of itself, but it is
also important to members of the Samoan community, to policy makers, educators,
and other non-Samoan officials who interact with this group, and to the young
Samoans themselves. The work is important to the Samoan community because there
is still a dearth of public information on their group and because that concordant
anonymity weighs heavily on the psyches of some Samoan youth. Also, more than
one progressive Samoan elder told me that this work was important because of the
social distance that often separates Samoan elders from Samoan youth. As many of
the social issues facing Samoan youth are serious, and because their daily
experiences are often drastically different than their parents’ were, there is an
increasing interest in understanding these differences, even if it means modifying
traditional social relations in some instances.
This work also has relevance to non-Samoans who work directly with the
Samoan community. These individuals, such as teachers and social workers, and
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365
institutions, whose policy decisions directly affect Samoans, would benefit from
their increased knowledge for the obvious reason that this information would help
them to serve the community’s needs more effectively, and might also, in the
process, give them insights into the needs of other ethnic populations.
However, most importantly, this work was meaningful to the Samoan youth
who were involved in it. These young Samoans were frequently surprised that there
was interest in their community and sometimes uncertain about how to discuss it, in
part because discussing it was not something they were accustomed to. As Mautu
said during an exit interview, when he was asked what he thought of being involved
in the research:
This is interesting. Nobody ever did this. This is my first time. It’s just like to
show my real self and to talk about what Samoans go through and stuff in my
opinion, my view.
Or, as Milo, who grew up in Samoa, said, struggling to find eloquence in English, his
second language, “Nobody ever asked us about us. They don’t know about us.”
Others seemed pleased that I had shown interest in Samoans and were hopeful that
they could use this as an opportunity to educate others about their group. This is
what Mele chose to do:
[It is] Interesting that someone is interested. You know, I’m proud that
somebody would take the time to research Samoa and the culture and to like
put us out there on the map, you know, because a lot of people don’t know
about Samoa. A lot of people don’t know Samoans.
And finally consider the words of Victoria:
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366
I thought I was the only person thinking about this stuff. I never knew people
were thinking what I was... because no one’s ever asked me about me, or my
people. But now I figure, if one’s interested then others probably are too.
Let us hope so.
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367
ajiafi
‘ aiga
aumaga
fa ’aaloalo
fa ’a Samoa
fa ’alavelave
fa ’apatu
fa ’asinomaga
fa ’ataupati
faife’au
fala
feagaiga
f e ’au
fia meauli
Glossary
Literally late afternoon, early evening. Traditionally this is the time
when families congregate for evening worship in their homes.
The extended family; a group of relatives.
In the village setting, the untitled young men who distinguish
themselves through their service to the elders. This organization
does not formally exist in urban American settings even though the
tradition of service continues.
Respectful behaviour.
The Samoan way, custom, culture
A disruption of normal life that calls for a special activity (wedding,
death, birth, conference of title etc.) and that is followed by a gift-
exchange.
A woman’s hair style in which the hair is pulled back into a bun at
the back of one’s head.
Identity.
A popular Samoan men’s dance known commonly as the slap
dance.
The church pastor.
A woven mat; that generally has functional rather than ceremonial
value.
Traditional compact that ensures brothers’ protection of their sisters
from sexual contact.
Chores.
To act Black.
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368
fiapdlagi To act white.
fia poto To act cleverly; to think oneself clever.
fitafita Samoan Police Force or Guardsmen; established by the US Navy
during World War II.
fono The village council of chiefs.
gagana Language.
‘ie lavalava; A skirt-like cloth wrap worn by men.
or ‘ie
‘ ie toga Fine mats, woven out of pandanus leaves. They are the most valued
item exchanged in gift-giving ceremnonies.
ifoga A public display of ceremonial atonement.
laufanua An area of cultivated land.
lu’au A dish of taro leaves and onions cooked in coconut cream.
malae The village green in traditional Samoan villages.
matai The titled head of the extended Samoan family.
nu ’u The Samoan village.
pdlagi A person of European ancestry.
pisupo Corned beef.
puletasi A two-piece Samoan dress that includes a tunic length blouse over a
an ankle length fitted skirt
sasa A traditional Samoan dance performed by both men and women that
involves both sitting and standing movements.
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369
siapo
siva tau
sosisi
suafa
supasui
tama
tama’ita’i
also called the
aualuma
taualuga
taupou
tautua
tina
to’ona ’i
tuafafine
tuagane
Ornately decorated Samoan barkcloth, taken from the mulberry tree,
(banyan and breadfruit trees can also be used but mulberry produces
the best material)
A Samoan men’s dance that was performed by the national rugby
team, the Manu Samoa. This dance is also commonly referred to as
the “ Manu Samoa”
Sausage.
Landlmatai title.
Glass noodles with soy sauce, marinated beef, and greens.
Male of parent’s generation. A respectful title used to address
faife ’aus in California.
In the village setting; the group of young girls and unmarried
women who represent the ideal of individual chastity and service to
their families. This organization does not formally exist in urban
American settings even though there are still girls honoured as
taupous and Samoan-American girls have many of the same
domestic responsibilities they would have back in the islands.
A Samoan dance in which the taupou performs while others dance
around her. Money is often placed on or around the dancers during
this dance.
The village or family princess/ceremonial virgin. Often the daughter
of the highest ranking matai.
Service. To serve a matai.
Female of parent’s generation; equivalent to mother. The respectful
title used to address the wife of thq faife’au in California
The large Sunday meal that is eaten following Church. It is often
served at the church itself or at the pastor’s home.
Cross sex female sibling.
Cross sex male sibling.
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370
‘ula A necklace or garland made of shells, flowers or tea leaves.
uso; Same sex sibling. Used in vernacular English to mean a Samoan
or us (vemac.) “brother”, “bro”, “dude”, “man”.
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371
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Appendix
Data Collection
Pacific Islander Youth Identity Questionnaire
I. Personal:
I) Male () Female () 2) Age:____ 3) Grade_____
4) Number and age of brothers_________ of sisters______________
5) Ethnicity (eg. Samoan, Hawaiian-Samoan, German-Filipino-Tongan, etc. Please
be as specific as you wish)____________________________________________
6) Birthplace:__________________________________
7) Birthplace of Mother___________ of Father___________________
8) Place of childhood of mother__________ of Father______________
9) On your mother’s side: Which generation of your family was the first to
immigrate to the Unites States?
() your generation () your parent’s generation () your grandparent’s generation
other:_______________________________
10) On your father’s side: Which generation of your family was the first to
immigrate to the Unites States?
() your generation () your parent’s generation () your grandparent’s generation
other:_______________________________
II) What brought them here and where did they immigrate to first? (what city? And
state?)
mother’s side:_______________________________________________________
father’s side:________________________________________________________
12) Did they move somewhere else afterwards? Where? Why?_______________
13) What is your mother’s occupation?___________ b) your father’s?.
II. Cultural roots
1) Have you ever been to Samoa? ( ) Yes ( ) No
If you answered “yes”, then how many times have you been? when did you go?,
what was the purpose of your visit? and how long did you stay?_____________
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393
2) How would you rate your ability to speak Samoan? (circle answer)
1 2 3 4 5
no ability fluent
3) How would you rate your ability to understand Samoan?
1 2 3 4 5
no ability perfect comprehension
4) What is the primary language used in the home? And why (language of
mother/father)?
4) Would you ever move to Samoa? Why or why not?.
5) Name three major differences between life in Samoa and life in the United States.
6) How are the people in Samoa the same as or different than Samoans living in
California?
7) Do you consider yourself American, Samoan, or both? Explain
8) a) What is the best thing about being Samoan?_____________________________
b) What is the worst?_________________________________________________
9) What is the role of women in the Samoan community? And how is it the same or
different from the role of women back in the Islands?________________________
10) What is the role of men in the Samoan community? And how is it the same or
different from the role of women back in the Islands?_______________________
11) Do you attend church? () yes () no
if yes, which denomination?_____________________________
if yes, how often?______________________________________
What is the primary language used in that church?___________
12) Are you a member of a church youth group? ( ) yes ( ) no
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394
if yes, what types of activities does that youth group do? And how often does it
meet?
13) Rank in importance (from 1 (most important) to 6 ( least important) the
following:
family ( )
church ( )
country ( )
ethnic group ( )
yourself ( )
friends ( )
15) Estimate the number of times you would attend a fa ’a lavelave in an average
year
and what level of involvement would you have in it (financial, gifts, service...)
16) Do you remember instances of your immediate family helping members of your
extended Samoan family to come to the United States? Describe._______________
17) What is the most important holiday for you and why?.
III. Identity
1) a) Describe a typical Samoan teenage boy (appearance and attitude)
b) Describe a typical Samoan teenage girl (appearance and attitude):
2) What are the stereotypes other people have about Samoans? (Are they positive or
negative? And how do you feel about these stereotypes?_______________________
3) Have you ever been the victim of racism? If yes, explain..
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395
4) Does a person’s ethnicity influence whether or not you decide to be friends with
him/her?
1 2 3 4 5
not at all entirely
Elaborate if you
wish._________________________________________________________
5) Think of your five closest friends and write down their gender (m or f) and their
ethnicity if you know it. a)_____
b)_____________________________ c)_____________________________
d)_____________________________ e)_____________________________
5) Would you date someone who is (check all that apply): Samoan ( ) Asian ( )
Pacific Islander other than Samoan ( ) White ( ) Hispanic ( ) African American ( )
American Indian ( ) Other________________________________________________
6) Would you marry someone who is (check all that apply): Samoan ( ) Asian ( )
Pacific Islander other than Samoan ( ) White ( ) Hispanic ( ) African American ( )
American Indian ( ) Other_______________________________________________
7) Do you have family members who have married non-Samoans? If you do, how
are these non-Samoan in-laws treated by the rest of the family?_______________
8)___________________________________________________________ What does the term fia palagi mean to you (beyond just a definition of
it)?__________________________________________________________
9) How are afaakasi viewed by the Samoan community on the whole? And by you?
10) What are the most important elements of the fa ’a Samoa in your opinion?
11) How does the fa ’a Samoa help or harm Samoan youth in the US?
12) Is there such a thing as “Samoan Style” (as opposed to fa ’a Samoa)"!
yes () no ()
If yes, then give some examples (hair style, clothes, music, jewellery, attitude etc.):
13) How is Samoan youth culture the same or different from urban African-
American youth culture?
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396
IV. Leisure
1) Do you play any sports? Which ones? Where?
2) Are Samoans better athletes than others? What sports? Why?
3) Do you participate in Polynesian dance performance? Explain why or why not.
4) What are your hobbies? What do you do in your spare time?
5) a) What is your favorite music type?
b) Three of your favorite groups/bands:____________________________________
6) How does gang activity impact your life?_______________________________
7) Do you think that Samoans who join gangs do so for the same reasons that non-
Samoans do? If not, how are their motivations different? How are their activities
different?
8) What are the three biggest concerns in your life? (social or personal)
- E N D -
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397
Semi-Structured Interview Questions
I. Origins and O rientation
1) How and when/why/where did your family end up in California?
2) Where do you live now? (city and cross streets) For how long? What kind of
people live in that neighbourhood?
3) Does your family attend church? If yes, the same one for how long? Has that
church remained in the same place the whole time you’ve attended it? If not, has
the church moving affected where you have lived?
4) Suburban vs. Urban: What do you do for fun recreation? How is that the same or
different than what they do in San Mateo/San Francisco/Carson/New
Zealand/Samoa?
What are the differences between the Samoan communities in Southern
California and those up here?
II. Fam ily Values
1) What aspects of the fa ’a Samoa do your parents think are most important and
how have they tried to pass them on to you?
2) Do you plan to have a family of your own? If yes, what elements of Samoan
culture do you plan to pass on to your children? What elements would you not
pass on? Raising kids.
3) What, if anything, in your house shows your Samoan background?
III. Culture
1) How would you describe your ethnicity? Samoan, American, Samoan-
American... what distinguishes each of these identities from the others? How
often does someone ask you “Where are you from?” and how does that question
make you feel?
2) What is best/worst thing about being Samoan? Overall? How is this different
than the Samoan culture of your parents? Of the fa ’a Samoa back in the islands?
How is it the same? Samoan Style?
3) How do you express your Samoan culture? What activities (cultural) are you
involved in? Performances? Exchanges? Sports? What does your involvement in
these activities mean to you?
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398
4) If you wanted to teach someone about what it means to be Samoan how would
you do it? Where would you send/take them? When do you feel most Samoan?
Samoan youth?
IV. Culture Clash?
1) Where would you most like to live and why? Here? Back in the Islands?
Somewhere else? What is good/bad about living in each place?
2) How important is a person’s cultural background to you when you’re choosing a
friend? A boyfiiend/girlfriend? A husband/wife? Who are your actual close
friends? Afakasi
3) Describe the ideal of attractiveness of a man/boy? of a woman/girl?
4) How do Samoan boys in the island appear different than Samoan boys here?
Girls? Can you think of examples of friends or relatives who have undergone
transformations after they have arrived here? How quickly?...
5) What are the stereotypes people have of Samoans? Tongans? That Samoans
have of Blacks? Whites? To what extent are these stereotypes valid? Fia Palagi,
Fia Meauli.
6) What are the biggest issues facing Samoan teens? (gangs, drugs, pregnancy,
domestic violence, discrimination, not finishing school...)
V. Personal
1) What are three of your most valued possessions?
2) Do you have a favourite book? Movie? CD? And why do you like it?
3) What are your personal goals and aspirations?
V I. R e fie x iv ity
1) How do you feel about being part of this research? What was the best thing about
it? What is the worst?
2) Are you interested in being further involved in this study, possibly including:
home or activity visits, photography, video.
3) Do you know anyone else who might be willing to be interviewed or who you
think I should talk to (either other youths or Samoan elders)?
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399
Ethnovignette Scripts
1. Sharing (Individualistic vs. Collectivistic):
One day Tene puts on a jacket that he hasn’t worn in a long time and he
unexpectedly finds $5 in the pocket. He hasn’t had any spending money at all for a
couple of weeks, so he’s pretty excited about the find. He heads over to McDonald’s
to treat himself to lunch but on the way there he runs into David and his cousin
Leone. He gives Leone a cigarette, one of his last two. He knows that neither of them
probably have any money of their own and that if he tells them where he’s headed
he’ll have to buy them food too so he doesn’t say anything. They part ways and he
goes to McDonald’s by himself and buys lunch.
2. Domestic Violence and Gender Roles:
Sandra isn’t doing very well in school. Her teacher tells her that unless she gets her
act together and does a really good job on her final social studies project, which is
due in a few days, she’s going to fail the class. However, when she gets home that
night her mom tells her to look after her younger brother and sisters while she and
her sister (Sandra’s aunt) go off to bingo. Sandra is so busy with the kids that she
can’t work on her project at all. In the midst of the evening, her brother Sale comes
in with his friends while she ‘s trying to feed the kids. Without offering to help, Sale
and his friends sit down to play video games. After about half an hour they leave
with Sale complaining about the noisy kids and Sandra’s attitude. Sale has dropped
out of school and he doesn’t have a job yet. When her Mom gets back from bingo,
Sandra complains to her that she shouldn’t have to look after the kids all the time
while her brother gets to run free especially when she’s got homework to do but her
mother tells her to mind herself. She tells her not to complain about her
responsibilities and adds that she doesn’t know how good she has it compared to
how many feaus she would have back in the islands. Sandra is so angry that she says,
“None of that matters over here. In the U.S. boys and girls should be treated the same
and Sale should have to help out more since he doesn’t have school or a job”. Her
mother becomes very angry, takes off her slipper and smacks Sandra hard over the
back of the head with it. She tells Sandra to put the kids to bed, finish her
schoolwork, and stop talking about stuff she doesn’t know anything about.
3. Respect for Parents & Intercultural Relationships
Nati is very much in love with her meauli boyfriend Jamal but her parents don’t
approve. Her father in particular would like her to marry a Samoan or at least a
Pacific Islander so that his grandchildren would grow up knowing their language and
their culture. Even though she feels like she is the same person with Jamal as before
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400
she knew him, she knows that some of her family members have been talking about
her behind her back. She even overheard her cousin Jasmine telling someone that she
acts all fia meauli now since she’s been with Jamal. Nati tries to assure her family
that she will make sure that her kids learn their language and culture but her family is
skeptical because Jamal has shown little interest in being involved in her family
activities. Meanwhile Jamal’s family isn’t too crazy about him dating a Samoan girl
and they tease him a lot about how he better not do her wrong or else her whole
family will come after him. One night the condom they’re using breaks and shortly
after Nati finds out she is pregnant. She’s a church going girl and she wants to do
things right so she asks Jamal to marry her and he agrees. Her Father is so angry with
her that he refuses to bless the marriage and he tells her that she has no f a ’aaloalo.
He also tells her that she is no longer welcome around the house or around her
younger brothers, sisters, and cousins. She elopes with Jamal to Las Vegas and they
get married anyhow.
OK, what if once her family found out that she was pregnant and saw that she was
serious about Jamal and the relationship they decided to embrace the new baby and
to give Jamal another chance? Is this a more or less believable outcome?
4. Ghetto Fabulous
One day a boy who moved to the city from Samoa 8 months ago, when he was 16,
comes to school wearing an H e, flip flops, an aloha shirt, and a long ula. His hair,
which he usually wears in braids, is combed out. There’s no special Polynesian event
or anything going on that day so his friends give him a hard time for coming to
school like a FOB, like he used to when he first arrived from Samoa. At first he
takes their teasing in good fun until one of his Samoan friends says to him, “Man,
you look so ghetto.” At this point, he gets mad and says to the kid teasing him, “No,
you look ghetto. This is how we are supposed to look”. The kid who he said this to
was wearing sagging jeans, a FUBU shirt, a South Pole down ski jacket, and had a
Nike headband on his shaved head.
What does ghetto mean?... in this story? ...to you? Is there a medium between these
two extremes where you can fit into the environment and fashion that surrounds you
but still show your Samoan pride? What might that look like on a girl? On a boy?
5. Body Image and Gendered Identity
a. Girls
One afternoon Ruta (17) and her 11-year-old sister Lela are watching a Britney
Spears music video on TLC. Lela says, “Look how good she looks. We could never
look like her because were Samoan.” Ruta gets mad at Lela for saying this and tells
her to be happy with the way she looks and to be proud of her culture and her people.
She asks Lela if she understands that you have to accept the body you are given and
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401
although Lela says she understands, Ruta not sure if her message has sunk in because
Lela is sulking and avoiding eye contact. Later, while she’s lying in bed, Ruta thinks
about the conversation with Lela and admits to herself that even though she was
busting on her little sister, there have been times, though never around her friends
and cousins, when she has felt pretty self-conscious about her own body. For
instance, just last summer she went to a youth leadership camp in Santa Cruz where
she was the only Poly girl and she remembered how strange that made her feel.
b. Boys
Faesea and his cousin Tara are best friends and they tell each other everything. One
day she overhears some of the Samoan boys talking about Faesea. They’re laughing
about how little and skinny he is and how bad he is at sports. She wants to tell them
to stop talking about him but she doesn’t want them to tease Faesea for needing a girl
to stick up for him on top of everything else so she decides to keep her mouth shut.
Later that day when she sees Faesea she tells him about it. He tells her that it doesn’t
bug him because he’s used to it and that he wouldn’t want to be as big as those guys
anyhow. Besides, he ads, “They would do well to remember that it’s not the size of
the dog in the fight but the size of the fight in the dog that matters”. This makes
Faesea and Tara both start to laugh because neither one of them can picture him in a
fight.
What do you think Faesea should do about this? Confront them? blow it off as a
joke...?
What if he was still little or skinny, but popular with the ladies and/or good at sports?
How do you feel about so many of the famous Samoans being athletes and known
for being big and tough?
How important is being big/strong/good at sports to being a man? What makes a
man?
Should Tara have told him about what she overheard in the first place? Should she
have defended him to the boys?
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Asset Metadata

Creator Scull, Charles Alan (author)

Core Title Identity configurations: re-inventing Samoan youth identities in urban California

School Graduate School

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Anthropology

Degree Conferral Date 2004-12

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag anthropology, cultural,ethnic studies,OAI-PMH Harvest,racial studies,sociology

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Lutkehaus, Nancy (committee chair), Duranti, Alessandro (committee member), Frank, Gel