Adolescents and Deviance in a Vietnamese American Community: A Theoretical Synthesis more

adolescents and deviance in a vietnamese american community: a theoretical synthesis Carl L. Bankston Ill Department of Anthropology and Sociology, University of Southwestern Louisiana, Lafayette, Louisiana, USA Stephen J. Caldas Department of Educational Foundations and Leadership, University of Southwestern Louisiana, Lafayette, Louisiana, USA This article uses qualitative data from fieldwork in a Vietnamese American community to identify sources of deviant group membership among Vietnamese American adolescents. It finds that the deviant group membership of these adolescents may be accounted for by a synthesis of three of the major theoretical explanations of deviant behavior. The primary source of deviant group membership among these young people is a failure to integrate them, through their families, into their own ethnic community and into the larger American society. Three major types of families that fail to achieve these types of social integration are described. Young people who have not been socially integrated effectively engage in a process of social learning in which they acquire traits and attitudes of an age-segregated youth society. They are then labeled as "undesirables" by the Vietnamese community, as they fail to conform to the shared expectations of Vietnamese American adults. These expectations, it is maintained, are the products of an ethnic identity created by the process of immigrant resettlement. Received 9 September 1995; accepted 3 November 1995. Address correspondence to Carl L. Bankston Ill, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Southwestern Louisiana, P.O. Box 40198, Lafayette, LA 70504-0198, USA. E-mail: bankston@usl.edu. Deviant Behavior: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 17:159-181, 1996 Copyright © 1996 Taylor & Francis 0163-9625196 $12.00 + .00 159 160 C. L. BANKSTON Ill AND 5. /. CALDAS The Vietnamese American population has grown at a tremendous rate over the past 20 years. Although the U.S. population of Vietnamese ancestry was negligible in 1970, by 1980 it had grown to about 250,000 and by 1990 to more than 600,000 (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1991). Because of the youth and high rate of fertiIity of Vietnamese Americans, their increase as a proportion of the American population appears likely to continue, even after the refugee programs that first brought this group to the United States have ceased. As Vietnamese Americans have sought to adapt to life in the_ United States,they have formed distinctive ethnic communities, like other immigrant groups (Haines et al. 1981; Finnan and Cooperstein 1983; Rutledge 1992; Bankston 1995a). Within these communities, young Vietnamese Americans have adjusted in differing ways. The "success stories," the disproportionate number of Vietnamese American youth who have excelled scholastically, have understandably attracted a great deal of attention (Caplan et al. 1989; Caplan et al. 1992; Zhou and Bal)kston 1994; Bankston and Zhou 1995). Alongside these success stories, however, are the youthful delinquents and criminals who are also overrepresented in Vietnamese American communities (Kibria 1993, pp. 144-158; Willoughby 1993). This article makes use of data from fieldwork in a Vietnamese community to examine the sources of youth delinquency. It argues that by using some of the chief theoretical explanations of deviance in the sociological literature, one can see Vietnamese American youth delinquency primarily as a problem of social integration in which successful adaptation (the avoidance of deviance) occurs as a result of individuals being successfully integrated into family systems,integrated into a community through their family systems, and integrated into the larger American society through their ethnic community. Social learning and labeling explanations of deviance, it is argued here, supplement the social integration explanation. Youth who are not successfully integrated through their families and communities become members of deviant youth groups and learn patterns of behavior from these groups. Once young people are identified as delinquents, they are labeled as such by their community, which reinforces and perpetuates their deviant status. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND: EXPLANATIONS OF DEVIANCE Sociological explanations of deviance have approached the topic from several different angles. Social integration theories stress the SYNTHESIS OF VIETNAMESE AMERICAN ADOLESCENT DEVIANCE 161 extent to which individuals are bound to groups and regulated by groups. Cultural support theories focus on the learning of deviant behavior by individuals from groups. Societal reaction theories consider how social groups create deviance by reactions to behaviors that those groups define as deviant {Palmer and Humphrey 1990, p. 29). Social integration explanations of deviance are usually traced back to Durkheim ([1897] 1951), who argued that social life is maintained by the binding of individuals together into shared sets of norms and values. Individuals who live in a state of high social integration also tend to experience a high level of social regulation, that is, control (Durkheim [1897] 1951). In his social control theory, Travis Hirschi (1969) adopted the Durkheimian idea of social integration as leading to the regulation of behavior, but instead of emphasizing shared norms as the essence of social integration, Hirschi focused on the ties of individuals to social groups. Individuals are bound to groups, Hirschi argued, by the four elements of attachment,commitment, involvement, and belief (Hirschi 1969). The first of these elements refers to the attachment of individuals to normative patterns of behavior. The second refers to involvement in accepted activities, such as work, religious participation, or family processes. The third refers to the intensity of involvement in these accepted activities. Belief, finally, is acceptance of the shared belief system (Hirschi 1969). The more individuals are "wrapped up" in a group in terms of these elements, the more control the group exercises over them and the less likely they are to engage in deviant behavior. One difficulty with this view of social integration as social control is that it tends to portray deviance as a matter of individuals being isolated from their social groups. Often, however, groups themselves, such as groups of delinquent teenagers, may be seen as deviant. Cultural support or social learning theories of deviance have their roots in Sutherland's (1939) differential association theory. From this perspective, criminal or delinquent behaviors are learned from association with criminal or delinquent groups (Sutherland 1939). For adolescents,peers can be an especially important source of learned behavior. Bankston and Caldas (1995) and Caldas and Bankston (forthcoming), for example, have investigated the strong influences of peer groups on positive and negative outcomes among adolescents. Many of the later theoretical positions derived from differential association theory have concentrated on trying to explain how the SYNTHESIS OF VIETNAMESE AMERICAN ADOLESCENT DEVIANCE 162 161 C. L. BANKSTON Ill AND 5. ). CALDAS delinquent groups come into existence in the first place. Cohen (1955), for example, sought the origins of these groups in the frustrations of disadvantaged persons at their inabilities to achieve success or status. Cloward and Ohlin (1960) argued that the origins and characteristics of delinquent groups might be sought in the types of alternative opportunity structures these groups offer to members. Wolfgang and Ferracuti (1967) maintained that deprived socioeconomic environments give rise to subcultures of violence. These theories of the etiology of cultural learning of deviance tend to assume that deviance is characteristic of underprivileged segments of society that are cut off from the benefits of the mainstream. This would seem to overlook the occurrence of delinquent behavior within the mainstream (as in middle-class youth gangs), and it would seem to overlook the fact that delinquents and other deviants in relatively underprivileged communities are often seen as outsiders by their own communities, as well as by the larger society. A plausible synthesis of social integration and cultural support perspectives might lie in arguing that problems of social integration that may be produced by socioeconomic disadvantage or other conditions lead to social isolation for some members of a group. These isolates may then form their own alternative groups, with their own normative and stylistic expressions. Such an explanation would require identifying the conditions that create shared problems of integration and then examining how alternative cultures are produced. · As adherents of societal reaction theories have pointed out, however, deviance is a matter of definition. Those who do not fit into a particular group are misfits because others see them as such, and often because they see themselves in this way. Labeling theorydeveloped by Becker (1963), Scheff (1966), Lemert (1967), Sagarin (1975), and others-is perhaps the dominant societal reaction approach. Labeling theorists have argued that a deviant identity is adopted by people after they have been labeled by others as delinquent or crazy. Labeling theory focuses on the group whose norms the deviant breaks rather than on the individual offender. As Howard Becker (1963, p. 9) described this theoretical perspective, "social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance, and by applying those rules to particular people and labeling them as outsiders." Taking labeling into consideration can add a valuable dimension to explanations ·of deviance, as it enables one to see membership in a social group in terms of meanings accepted by group members. Problems of social integration can then be seen as difficulties in fitting some individuals or subgroups into accepted sets of meanings. This means that researchers need to consider the social context in which groups form their expectations and definitions, the mechanisms (such as families or friendship circles) by whic,h individuals are brought to conform to these expectations and definitions, and the deficiencies in these mechanisms that may produce patt rns of undesirable behavior. METHOD To obtain insight into the sources of delinquency among Vietnamese American youth, Carl L. Bankston used interviews conducted over the course of several years with members of a large Vietnamese community in a city of approximately 500,000 people in the southeastern United States. The information acquired from these interviews was analyzed and interpreted in the light of extensive observations. This community consists of nearly 5,000 Vietnamese people living primarily in two census tracts. It is a low-income community, and almost all of the non-Vietnamese in the area are African Americans of limited economic means (for detailed descriptions of life in an ethnically concentrated Vietnamese American community, see Airriess and Clawson 1991; Nash 1992). Bankston's observations and collection of information about Vietnamese Americans' perspectives on their experiences began in the premigration stage during the years 1985-1990, when he worked in an overseas refugee camp preparing Vietnamese refugees for resettlement in the United States. At that time, he lived in close quarters with U.S.-bound Vietnamese and studied the Vietnamese language. This was followed, during 1990, by participant observation in the same Vietnamese American community under consideration here, where he worked as a teacher of English as a second language. During the years 1993 and 1994, he conducted wideranging informal interviews with 76 parents, community leaders, and young people in private homes and in community centers. In 1994, he also served as a substitute teacher in one of the two high sthools attended by most high school students in this Vietnamese community. As a teacher in a high school and a university, and as someone known to have a long-standing affiliation with organiza- SYNTHESIS OF VIETNAMESE AMERICAN ADOLESCENT DEVIANCE 164 163 C. L. BANKSTON Ill AND 5. /. CALDAS tions helping Vietnamese people, he was able to receive much cooperation and candor in the interviews. ANALYSIS Families and Family Relations: The "Social Integration" Explanation Maintaining efficacious relations among parents and children may be difficult for all families that contain adolescents, but it is especially so for immigrant families. In these families, children may be faced with conflicting sets of expectations from their parents on the one hand and from those parts of the larger society with which the children are in most immediate contact on the other. Communication between non-English-speaking parents and almost exclusively English-speaking schools poses a further problem, undermining parents' ability to keep abreast of their children's school progress and to direct attendance at schools and behavior in schools. A social worker who works with adolescent girls in the Vietnamese neighborhood described to Carl L. Bankston what he believes is one of the chief sources of "undesirable behavior" among these girls: They see that their parents are not like most Americans and they hear their parents always talking about Vietnam. They think their parents' minds are back in another country and that nothing their parents have to say is relevant to life in America. Sometimes they're right; sometimes their parents are too old-fashioned or too "Vietnamese." But I think that often the Vietnamese ways of their parents can work in America, and that some of these kids are too ready to just throw away everything they get from their parents. To some extent, an unwillingness to accept the advice or guidance of immigrant parents is a matter of individual variation, lending itself to strictly psychological rather than sociological analysis. Still, we have observed that there are family features that render some children more prone to problems in relating to their parents. We describe these problems by focusing on cases of individual families that seem to represent common sources of problems. Following Uri Bronfenbrenner (1979), we can conceive of a set of relations among family members as an ecosystem, in which ongoing processes promote adaptation to a larger environment. However, the immediate social environment may also be seen as an A.Individual 8.Family System C.Community System D. LocalSocial Environment E. Larger SocialEnvironment FIGURE 1 The individual in family, community, local social environment, and larger social environment: Ideal case ecosystem, a pattern of interdependence among families and other social units that makes possible adaptation to a still larger environment. Thus, interactions among individual family members enable them to function in a community setting, and interactions among families and other primary groups determine how the community will act as a mechanism for adaptation to broader social and economic exigencies. The circles in Figure 1 offer an approximate illustration of how a family system may integrate an individual into larger systems. Note that the oval representing the individual overlaps all of the systems, as individuals do participate in their own families, in their communities, in their local social environments (e.g., neighborhoods), and in the larger social environment. In this ideal representation, however, the family is at the very center of the systems in which the individual participates, and each larger circle symmetrically con- SYNTHESIS OF VIETNAMESE AMERICAN ADOLESCENT DEVIANCE 165 166 C. L. BANKSTON 111 AND 5. }. CALDAS tains each smaller circle. Here, the family is well-integrated into the community, the community is well-integrated into the local social environment, and the local social environment is well-integrated into the larger social environment. In this concentric model, problems in adaptation may occur because an individual is insufficiently integrated into an effective family system, because the family is insufficiently integrated into an immediate system (such as a community), or because of problems in the integration of the immediate system into the larger surrounding social patterns.When the local social environment is a marginal one (i.e., a relatively low-income area with high crime rates), integration into the family and community systems is especially important because family and community must direct young people away from the local social environment to prepare them for society at large. Figure 2, which represents the situation of family and community in a marginal local social environment, graphically illustrates this possibility. For the moment, we describe the problems in family relations that affect Vietnamese American adolescents in terms of integration Into three levels of systems:the integration of yqung people into the family system, the integration of young people into their communities through their family systems, and the integration of young people into the dominant society through their community systems. Because Vietnamese American communities tend to be located in low-income areas, these communities and the families that constitute them must enable their youth to bypass fhe negative influences of these marginalized local environments. We use case studies of Vietnamese American families to show how each level can create problems of adaptation and to make the relationship among the different levels of systems more concrete. Problems in family relations that may lead to delinquent, or deviant, behavior on the part of Vietnamese American young people may be placed into three categories, with reference to integration at each systemic level. The first we refer to as the absent or partially absent family system, in which the family relations that make possible adaptation to larger systems are not present. The second we refer to as the community-marginal family system, in which links . between individual families and the ethnic community are inadequate to provide constraints and supports to individual families. The third we refer to as the society-marginal family system, in SYNTHESIS OF VIETNAMESE AMERICAN ADOLESCENT DEVIANCE 167 A.Individual B.Family System C. Community System D.Local Social Environment E.Larger SocialEnvironment FIGURE 2 The individual in family, community, focal social environment, and larger social environment: marginal local social environment which the linkage between the family and the dominant society is inadequate. Category 1: Absent or Partially Absent Family System Hanh (not his real name) is 17 years of age and attended 3 years of school in the United States before dropping out. Hanh was born in a coastal fishing village in Vietnam. His father was a South Vietnamese soldier who was killed in the Vietnam Conflict. Until Hanh was 10 years old, he lived with his mother, several younger siblings, and his maternal grandparents. He reports that the fishing boats were often used for escapes or attempted escapes from Vietnam. He and two adult uncles left the village one night. His mother remained behind with the small siblings. 168 C. L. BANKSTON Ill AND 5. }. CALDAS The boat that Hanh and his uncles were on was met at sea by a commercial ship, and the passengers were brought to a refugee camp in Hong Kong. After several months in the refugee camp, Hanh was sponsored by another uncle,already in the United States, and he settled with his uncle's family in the southern city of this study. Hanh reports that he found school difficult, and he often skipped school, which caused him to fall further and further behind in his studies. Although his uncle, with whom he still lives,provided him with housing and food, his adult relatives took little interest in his progress in school. Hanh spends most of his time with a group of young men who have also left school. Although he would not admit to criminal activities, adults in the community who are familiar with Hanh and his friends have claimed that they engage in acts of petty theft. Carl L. Bankston has also seen Hanh and his group smoking marijuana more or less openly. In speaking of his friends,Hanh reports, "These dudes are my real family. They look out for me and I look out for them. If anybody messes with me, they gonna jump in, and if anybody messes with them, I gonna jump in too." Ngoc (not his real name) is a 16-year-old who left Vietnam by plane with his father and older brother when Ngoc was about 3 years of age. They were apparently allowed to leave Vietnam under the Orderly Departure Program, an arrangement between the United States and the Vietnamese government that allowed some Vietnamese who had been involved with the Americans during the war to leave legally. Ngoc's mother was left behind in Vietnam for reasons that are not clear. After initially being resettled in Wisconsin, the family moved south because of family connections. Ngoc's father works as a fisherman in the Gulf of Mexico and is rarely home. The father speaks little English and, outside of work, also generally interacts little with the other Vietnamese people around him. When asked about his father, Ngoc responded, "Well, I see him sometimes when he's in. We get along OK, I guess. But, you know, we don't really have that much to say to each other." Ngoc is still enrolled in high school as a sophomore, but is frequently absent and seems to take little interest in school. Much of his time is spent hanging out on the streets or in the dense swampy woods that surround the Vietnamese neighborhood. Like Hanh, he seems to see his group of friends as a substitute family. Although his close friends are all Vietnamese, Ngoc reports that they know all of the non-Vietnamese kids in the neighborhood. He SYNTHESIS OF VIETNAMESE AMERICAN ADOLESCENT DEVIANCE 169 and his peers have few ties to the adults in the community. In his words, "I don't have that much to say to the old people around here. Their heads are all back in Vietnam and I'm here, so we just don't have that much to say to each other." Because individuals in an absent or partially absent family system do not have families who are adequate to "center" them in their own communities, they are at the margins of those communities. Therefore,these individuals are influenced more by the local social environments that surround their specific communities than by those communities themselves. Category 2: Community-Marginal Family System Man (not his real name) is 16-years-old, born in the United States, and until recently was a sophomore in high school. Soft-spoken and with a gentle manner, Man was always eager to talk to Carl L. Bankston, going so far as to volunteer his telephone number for after-school interviews. It was difficult to believe that Man was seen as a delinquent and a troublemaker in school, but his teachers assured Bankston that this was the case. During the time that Man and Bankstpn had contact with each other, Man was expelled for allegedly slashing a teacher's tires after school, then readmitted, and then expelled yet again for bringing a knife to school. Man lives with his mother and father on the fringes of the Vietnamese settlement. The father is employed in a technical profession and has a good salary, though he maintains few ties to the Vietnamese community. Man reports that his father almost always speaks English to him, although his mother and father sometimes speak Vietnamese with one another. Adults familiar with the family describe it as a household with many problems. The father is said to have a girlfriend with whom he spends much of his time. One teacher who knows Man's family reports that Man feels a great deal of resentment toward his father. Man's remarks about his father support this view: Sometimes I think I don't really like my dad that much. He's always trying to push me and tell me what to do and I don't see why I ought to do what he says. He ought to run his life and let me run mine. He says I owe him respect and I don't see it that way. Man says that he has no sense of himself as being Vietnamese: "I've never been to Vietnam and I don't think I want to go. They wouldn't have the TV programs that I like there and life there is probably pretty boring. I'm American." 170 C. L. BANKSTON Ill AND 5. }. CALDAS Despite this disavowal of things Vietnamese, Man's own group of friends are all Vietnamese. He denies that he and his friends constitute a gang and claims that they have no name for themselves. However, one knowledgeable teacher expressed skepticism about these claims. Nevertheless, Man admits that fighting is one of the activities for which he and his friends are known. For the most part, he says, they fight with young people from the smaller Vietnamese community on the other side of town. They're afraid of us 'cause they know we're bad. We can beat them any time, any place ... We have to fight them so they'll respect us and respect our territory. We don't want them coming over here. We don't go over there alone either, but if it's a group of us, no problem, because we know we can take them on. Whereas Hanh and Ngoc look to their peers as a substitute family, Man apparently is drawn to his adolescent peer group because of weak relations within his family. It is notable that Man's family is essentially a family of outsiders, standing alone. Although his father does have a good job and therefore, arguably, a source of "human capital" (see Schultz 1961 for classical discussion of human capital), the father seems to be alienated from his coethnics and therefore lacks "social capital" (see Coleman 1988 for an excellent treatment of this kind of capital). Alienated from his own family and from the adult Vietnamese community, Man seeks adaptation to American society through an adolescent peer group. In the community-marginal family system, the family itself is at the edges of the community;therefore,adolescents are heavily influenced by the local social environment, which, in turn, is at the edges of the larger society. Category 3: Society-Marginal Family System Thanh (not her real name) is a 15-year-old freshman in high school who arrived in the United States as an infant and has no memory of Vietnam. She is the youngest in a family of six children. Her mother is close to 50 years of age and her father is about 60. Neither parent speaks any English. Thanh is currently having trouble keeping up in school, primarily because she has skipped so many days. She often dresses for school in the morning, but instead of walking to school meets a group of female friends, and together they go to a restaurant or take the bus to a shopping mall. Because of Thanh's parents' inability to speak English, there is little contact between them and the school, and they are unaware of the extent of Thanh's truancy. SYNTHESIS OF VIETNAMESE AMERICAN ADOLESCENT DEVIANCE 171 Thanh expresses exasperation with her parents: .• They're just kinda out of it. They don't know anything about life in this country and they're always talking about what it was like back in Vietnam. What has Vietnam got to do with me? Sometimes I don't even get what it is they're talking about. A social worker who is concerned with teenage girls in the neighborhood observes that young people in Thanh's situation eventually drop out of school: "They fall so far behind by skipping so much that they get to the point where they can't catch up at all, so they get frustrated and just quit." Dai (not his real name) is a 14-year-old high school freshman whose parents arrived from Vietnam a year before his birth. His father speaks some English but works at two different jobs and is rarely home. His mother has not learned to speak English, and Dai must act as her interpreter on the rare occasions when she finds it necessary to speak with non-Vietnamese people. Dai often misses school and frequently sleeps in class when he does attend. This seems to be due to his habit of staying out all night with his friends. When I asked him how his mother feels about this habit, he shrugged, "What does she have to say about it? She doesn't take care of me, I take care of her. I don't have to make explanations to anybody." Figure 2 shows that when a community is located in a marginal local environment, such as a disadvantaged neighborhood, the community system must help the community to bypass the local environment, and it must help provide linkages to the larger society. For example, a minority community may provide its young with special programs and motivation that encourage upward mobility in the larger society (on this point, see Bankston and Zhou 1995). Young people in society-marginal families, however, tend to receive little control from their parents because of the cultural distance of parents from both the local and the larger social environments in which adolescents operate. Because parents exercise little control, they are not able to effectively link their children to the community or to help their children bypass the disadvantaged local environment in adapting to the larger society. Peer Influences: The Social Learning Explanation Peer influences cannot be separated from family and community influences because, as shown above, one of the primary ways in 172 C. L. BANKSTON Ill AND 5. /. CALDAS which families and the cbmmunity direct the behavior of young people is by controlling the typ·es of peers with whom they associate. Still, although the family systems model described above may help to describe the etiology of delinquency and underachievement in school,it is not completely accurate to describe the low achievers or "bad kids" in this neighborhood solely in terms of their outsider status in this community.They are,after all,not just individuals who have failed to find a place in the ethnic community. They also have their own social networks, their own systems of supports and constraints, and their own accepted attitudes. In other words, their experiences take place largely within the local environment sphere, and a "youth culture" is a prominent aspect of this local environment. The chief characteristic of the young people who engage in problematic behavior is that almost all of their significant others are drawn from their own age group. Like the young people described by Elijah Anderson (1990) in his ethnographic study of youth culture in Chicago,,these youths are almost entirely age-segregated. Their behavior is reinforced by tightly knit social circles. One young man explained, "I ain't gonna go against my partners. If the old people don't like something we do, that's their problem. I don't care what they think. I care what the kids I hang out with think." Some of these youths, as we have mentioned, appear to have organized themselves into formal gangs, although they tend to be extremely secretive and dislike naming or discussing gangs. Looking at these young people from the point of view of their family origins may incline us toward a social control model of their deviance, along the lines suggested by Travis Hirschi (1969): Because of weak attachments to the community, lack of commitment to it, and lack of ethnic involvement mediated by families, young people do not conform to expected behavioral standards. Social control is, however, just one side of the explanation of human behavior,the side that considers why people do not conform to a desired behavioral pattern. "Social control theory takes conformity, rather than deviance, as problematic and seeks to find mechanisms that force people to conform and prevent them from engaging in the forms of deviance they might enjoy if all social constraints were removed" (Bankston 1995b,p. 61). It is clear,however, that the young people under consideration in this section are not simply falling away from conformity to the expectations of the adult community into completely anarchic orgies of individualistic SYNTHESIS OF VIETNAMESE AMERICAN ADOLESCENT DEVIANCE 173 antisocial behavior. Their baggy-pants uniforms and close-cropped hair indicate that they are replacing adult society with a society of peers. A social control perspective, then, can help one to understand why these outsiders are outside the adult social network, in the sphere of the Vietnamese community. However, to understand the youth culture that replaces this adult social network, it is necessary to adopt the major theoretical alternative to social control theory in theoretical explanations of deviant behavior: social learning theory. The social learning model, in the words of Walter et al. (1993, p. 75), posits that young people engage in deviant behavior "because the behavioral norms, values, and beliefs of their primary reference groups encourage such behavior." We have seen how absence of effective controls from family and community can result in a failure to integrate young people into the ethnic community. Human beings do not, however, become asocial as a result of not becoming members of any given society (on the human as a social animal, see Wrong 1994, p. 1-4). Having slipped through the cracks of the ethnic social order, young Vietnamese Americans must learn another pattern of social behavior. The social worker quoted above remarked of the many young people with whom he works in the Vietnamese community that they want to be American. But what they know about America is usually the worst part of it. They listen to rap songs about shooting policemen and watch movies with everybody killing each other. A lot of the American kids they know are kids who skip school or quit school and get in trouble a lot. So, I think the problem is that they're becoming part of the wrong part of America. Partes and Zhou (1994) have argued that the concentration of members of new immigrant groups in relatively poor areas of the United States "exposes the children of immigrants to the adversarial subculture that marginalized native youth have developed to cope with their own difficult situation" (p. 23). Noncoethnic, mostly African American peers appear to be an important source of the learned social behavior displayed by young Vietnamese in this neighborhood. Interactions between outsider Vietnamese youth and non-Vietnamese youth are interesting because they demonstrate how members of different ethnic groups can retain separate identities while displaying essentially identical forms of behavior. In matters of dress 174 C. L. BANKSTON Ill AND 5. }. CALDAS and musical taste, Vietnamese and African American youth often appear nearly identical. Both groups favor short hair, baggy pants, oversized T-shirts, earrings, and baseball caps worn backwards. As these are fashions favored by teenagers throughout the United States, their adoption by the Vietnamese could be interpreted as indicating that Vietnamese youth have been culturally assimilated into American youth culture. Although very similar in matters of dress, though,the Vietnamese continually maintain a separateness from their African American peers. When meeting and talking on the street, they interact with each other in small, racially homogeneous groups. CarlL. Bankston witnessed,on a number of occasions,several Vietnamese American young men socializing with several African American young men, or vice versa. Interviewees reported that Vietnamese AmericanAfrican American fights are fairly common occurrences, but we observed none of these while gathering data for this study. Members of the two racial groups were often seen standing or sitting together, sharing cigarettes or beer. They obviously all knew each other by name and had frequent social contacts with each other, but also obviously remained separate cliques whose individual dealings were predicated on their separate clique memberships. It would be misleading to characterize Vietnamese American youth in this community as culturally assimilated but not structurally assimilated into the native youth society of their neighborhood. It would be more accurate to see the social structure of the agesegregated youth of both racial groups as rooted in race-based clique membership. When a Vietnamese young man _would report that he had many African American friends, this did not necessarily indicate that he had become a part of any local African American peer group. More often, it meant that this young man was himself a member of a Vietnamese American peer group that engaged in frequent social interactions with members of African American peer groups. Thus, the Vietnamese American youths who are often seen by their elders as "Americanized" have not simply dropped their Vietnamese identities and adopted American youth culture instead. Rather, their ethnic identities are part of a youth society in which young people confront each other and negotiate with each other on the basis of ethnicities. The mixture of English slang and Vietnamese suggests a process of "ethnogenesis" among these teenagers. As SYNTHESIS OF VIETNAMESE AMERICAN ADOLESCENT DEVIANCE 175 A. Vietnamese Community 8. Local Youth Culture C. "Deviant" Vietnamese American Youth Culture D.LocalSocial Environment FIGURE 3 Deviant Vietnamese youth culture on the fringe of the Vietnamese community, yet integrated into local youth culture. this term has been used by Andrew Greeley (1974), the process of ethnogenesis refers to the development of new forms of ethnicity, rather than the loss of ethnicity, that may occur among immigrant group members. We represent this development of new forms of ethnicity with Figure 3. Here, one sees that the Vietnamese-American youth culture both exists at the edges of the Vietnamese community and is integrated into the local American minority youth culture. Vietnamese American adolescents in this situation are members of an American minority group at the fringes of American society rather than members of an immigrant group seeking upward mobility in American society. Their identities are shaped by their participation in the disadvantaged minority fringe rather than by participation in an immigrant community or in the larger society. 176 C. L. BANKSTON Ill AND 5. /. CALDAS Community Reinforcement of Outsider Status: The Labeling Explanation Some of the chief sources of outsider status, then, may be found in lack of integration into the community through the family and in the learning of certain forms of behavior and types of attitudes from peers. In understanding the perpetuation of "deviant" status among the "bad" kids, though, one may draw on a third theoretical explanation of deviant behavior, labeling theory, and observe the process of labeling in an immigrant community that is defining itself in terms of shared ethnicity. joane Nagel (1994,p:167) has maintained that both ethnicity and ethnic communities are socially constructed from "the interplay between ethnic group actions and the larger social structures with which they interact." Thus, the Vietnamese community and its attitudes and expectations are not simply cultural transfers from across the sea; they represent attempts by a group of people to draw on their historical past to find means of meeting present challenges. Many forms of behavior that might be regarded as deviant outside the Vietnamese community do not meet with disapproval inside of it. Nondeclaration of income and tax avoidance both appear to be fairly widespread practices, although it would probably be impossible to determine just how widespread. Tax avoidance, however, does not challenge the use of ethnic ties as a means of dealing with a difficult and often unaccepting larger society. Interviews with people in the Vietnamese community suggest that the boundaries of ethnicity are established by drawing on a common ethnic identity to support one another in socioeconomic adaptation to a new environment. Therefore, the behavior of young people is found to be unacceptable to the extent that it does not contribute to this collective project. Because cooperation in socioeconomic adaptation defines membership in the group,young people who are seen as not participating are defined as nonmembers. When young people are seen as participating in the Vietnamese American youth culture portion of the sphere that intersects the local environment, they are defined as nonmembers or at least incomplete members of the sphere of the community. "Most ofthe kids here are good, respectful," remarked one middle-aged man. "But some of them are just not Vietnamese at all." A Vietnamese American social worker who has organized a program to help Vietnamese American school dropouts and delin- SYNTHESIS OF VIETNAMESE AMERICAN ADOLESCENT DEVIANCE 177 quents bemoaned the fact that once young people are labeled as bad kids, they become outsiders to the community, not just because they themselves have trouble fitting in, but because the community itself will no longer accept them: I had real trouble in getting the adults here to support my project. Once they identify a young person as a problem, they don't want to anything to do with them, they want to just forget about them. They don't want to let them [the problem adolescents] take part in the life of the community. DISCUSSION These interviews and observations suggest that delinquency among Vietnamese American youth can be explained in terms of concentric levels of social integration. Families play an important part in promoting adaptation and avoidance of deviance by linking young people to the adult ethnic community around them and by linking young people to the larger society. It has been argued, through providing cases of problematic family types, that family deficiencies are family characteristics that detract from the ability to provide these forms of linkage. Because many Vietnamese American young people are without parents or, as a result of the process of flight from Vietnam and resettlement in the United States, are in families with only a single parent who must work long hours, they find themselves with no linkage to the neighborhood adult community and thus form bonds with local youth groups instead. Other young people find themselves in families with parents whose ties to the local Vietnamese community have been weakened by the struggle to fit into the larger American society. Many young people have parents who may fit into the local Vietnamese community but whose understanding of the larger American society is inadequate to enable them to exercise sufficient control over their children, who are painfully aware of their parents' lack of societal-level integration. Young people who are not integrated into their community and into American society through their community become members of an age-segregated youth society. Once they have taken up with a society of peers rather than a society of adults, social learning becomes an important part of their delinquency. In learning to be members of an American youth culture, they take cues both from 178 C. L. BANKSTON Ill AND 5. }. CALDAS their coethnics and from African American youths, who make up almost all of the non-Vietnamese young people in the area. In this youth culture, apparently a variant of a generalized American youth culture, race appears to be a basis for clique formation, but the cultural patterns learned appear to transcend racial boundaries. Reinforcement of deviant youth group membership through labeling by the ethnic community occurs when adults in the community perceive as non-Vietnamese the cultural patterns that have been adopted by young people who are not socially integrated into the ethnic community. For the Vietnamese struggling to adapt to a new and strange society, the boundaries of their own ethnicity are sharply defined, and they rely heavily on other ethnic group members for material and psychological support. Young people who do not participate in the interdependent adult ethnic community are seen as "not Vietnamese," and their elders define them out of the community's system of social relations. CONCLUSION The evidence offered here suggests that delinquency among Vietnamese American young people is not a direct product of a minority subculture with socioeconomic disadvantages. Instead, it appears to be a result of problems in families produced by resettlement or by the pressures of adjustment to a new environment. Families, it is argued, are the means by which young people are integrated into the immediate social structures of the ethnic community, as well as the larger social structures of the mainstream society. This suggests that understanding how different kinds of families produce different kinds of outcomes requires understanding how families link young people to communities and how families and communities link young people to the larger society. Although the findings of this article apply, strictly speaking, to Vietnamese American young people only, they may also provide some basis for generating hypotheses about deviance among young people in other ethnic and racial groups. Problems of family structure, it may be suggested,are problems because they do not integrate young people into communities that can control and direct behavior along lines that will lead to productive behavior as understood by mainstream American society. SYNTHESIS OF VIETNAMESE AMERICAN ADOLESCENT DEVIANCE 179 REFERENCES Airriess, Christopher A., and David L. Clawson. 1991. "Versailles: A Vietnamese Enclave in New Orleans, Louisiana." journal of Cultural Geography 12:1-13. Anderson, Elijah. 1990. Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bankston, Carl L., Ill. 1995a. "Vietnamese Americans." Pp. 1393-1407 in Gale Encyclopedia of Multicultural America, edited by Judy Galens. Gale Research Inc. Bankston, Carl L., Ill. 1995b. "Vietnamese Ethnicity and Adolescent Substance Abuse: Evidence for a Community Level Approach." Deviant Behavior 16:59-80. Bankston, Carl. L., Ill, and Caldas, Stephen J. 1995. Majority Black Schools and the Perpetuation of Social Injustice: The Influence of de facto Segregation on Academic Achievement. Presented at the annual meetings of the Southern Sociological Association, Atlanta, April 20-23. Bankston, Carl L., Ill, and Min Zhou. 1995. "The Effects of Minority Language Literacy on Academic Achievement: The Case of Vietnamese Youth in New Orleans." Sociology of Education 68: 1-1Z Becker, Howard. 1963. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: Free Press. Bronfenbrenner, Uri. 1979. The Ecology of Human Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Caldas, Stephen J., and Bankston, Carl L. Forthcoming. "The Effect of School Population Socioeconomic Status on Individual Student Academic Achievement." journal of Educational Research. Caplan, Nathan, Marcella Choy, and John Whitmore. 1992. "Indochinese Refugee Families and Academic Achievement." Scientific American 266:36-42. Caplan, Nathan,John K. Whitmore, and Marcella H. Choy. 1989. The Boat People and Achievement in America: A Study of Family Life, Hard Work, and Cultural Values. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Cloward, Richard A., and Lloyd E. Ohlin. 1960. Delinquency and Opportunity: A Theory of Delinquent Groups. New York: Free Press. Cohen, Albert C. 1955. Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang. New York: Free Press. Coleman,James. 1988. "Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital." American journal of Sociology 94:95-121. Durkheim, Emile. [1897] 1951. Suicide: A Study in Sociology, translated by John A. Spaulding and George Simpson, edited by G. Simpson. New York: Free Press. Finnan, Christine R., and Rhonda Ann Cooperstein. 1983. Southeast Asian Refugee Resettlement at the Local Level: The Role of the Ethnic Community and the Nature of Refugee Impact. Report prepared for the Office 180 C. L. BANKSTON Ill AND 5. }. CALDAS of Refugee Resettlement, Social Security Administration, Department of Health and Human Services. Menlo Park, CA: Social Sciences Center, SRI International. Greeley, Andrew. 1974. Ethnicity in the United States: A Preliminary Reconnaissance. New York: Wiley. Haines, David, Dorothy Rutherford, and Patrick Thomas. 1981. "Family and Community among Vietnamese Refugees." International Migration Review 15:316-28. Hirschi, Travis. 1969. Causes of Delinquency. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kibria, Nazli. 1993. Family Tightrope: The Changing Lives of Vietnamese Americans. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lemert, Edwin M. 196Z Human Deviance, Social Problems, and Social Control. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Nagel, joane. 1994. "Constructing Ethnicity: Creating and Recreating Ethnic Identity and Culture." Social Problems 41:152-76. Nash, jesse W. 1992. Vietnamese Catholicism. Harvey, LA: Art Review Press. Palmer, Stuart, and john A. Humphrey. 1990. Deviant Behavior: Patterns, Sources and Control. New York: Plenum Press. Partes, Alejandro, and Min Zhou. 1994. "Should Immigrants Assimilate?" The Public Interest 116:18-33. Rutledge, Paul j. 1992. The Vietnamese Experience in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sagarin, Edward. 1975. Deviance and Deviants: An Introduction to Devalued People. New York: Praeger. Scheff, Thomas. 1966. Being Mentally Ill. Chicago: Aldine Press. Schultz, Theodore W. 1961. "Investment in Human Capital:' The American Economic Review 51 :1-lZ Sutherland, Edwin H. 1939. Principles of Criminology. Philadelphia: Lippincott. U.S. Bureau of the Census. 1991. Census of Population and Housing, 1990: Summary Tape File 3 (U.S.) [machine producer and distributor]. Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census. Walter, Heather j., Robert D. Vaughn, and Alwyn T. Cahall. 1993. "Comparison of Three Theoretical Models of Substance Use among Urban Minority High School Students." journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 32(5):975-81. Willoughby, Jack. 1993. Vietnamese Gangs and Other Criminals (Internal training aid of the New Orleans Police Department). New Orleans, LA: New Orleans Police Department. Wolfgang, Marvin E., and Franco Ferracuti. 196Z The Subculture of Violence: Towards an Integrated Theory in Criminology. London: Tavistock Publications. SYNTHESIS OF VIETNAMESE AMERICAN ADOLESCENT DEVIANCE 181 Wrong, Dennis. 1994. The Problem of Order. New York: Maxwell MacMillan. Zhou, Min, and Carl L. Bankston Ill. 1994. "Social Capital and the Adaptation of the Second Generation: The Case of Vietnamese Youth in New Orleans." International Migration Review 28:821-45.