Min Zhou talk at UCB

Institute for the Study of Social Change Presents:
Culture, Immigration and Youth Violence Prevention Speaker Series: Delinquency and Assimilation: Revisiting the Vietnamese American Community in New Orleans

*Tuesday, April 17, 2007*
*12:00 - 1:30pm
Light refreshments will be served.
ISSC Conference Room
2420 Bowditch Street (at Haste)

Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Diversity Research Initiative*

*Min Zhou
Professor of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles

*Gianna Tran, *as respondent
Deputy Executive Director of the East Bay Asian Youth Center (EBAYC)

*Abstract*
Zhou's collaborative work with Bankston on Vietnamese youths in an ethnic enclave in New Orleans during the mid-1990's showed a growing trend of "bifurcation," a situation in which youths were diverging in two distinct
directions—valedictorian v. delinquent (Chapter 8 of Growing Up American: How Vietnamese Children Adapt to Life in the United States, 1998). Has bifurcation continued to perpetuate itself among the children of Vietnamese? In this paper, Zhou examines current behavioral and attitudinal trends among Vietnamese youths, using recently gathered data from the same Vietnamese community in New Orleans that she studied nearly ten years ago. She finds that bifurcation is continuing, but that the ranks of the "valedictorians" and "achievers" are getting somewhat smaller, while those of the "delinquents" are growing. Zhou's examination leads to the conclusion that delinquency is likely to become a more serious problem among Vietnamese adolescents in the foreseeable future. While the "Vietnamese
valedictorians" celebrated in the media in earlier years will not disappear, it does seem that they will become less common. She discusses implications of these apparent trends for the assimilation of the children of immigrants.