Repositioned lives: Language, ethnicity, and narrative identity among Chinese -Vietnamese community college students in Los Angeles' San Gabriel Valley

Chinese speakers from Vietnam are a distinctive but hidden ethnolinguistic minority group in the San Gabriel Valley region of Los Angeles, an area transformed by transnational flows of Chinese capital and the influx of immigrants from the Asian Pacific. Because of their lack of economic and social resources in a highly stratified ethnic suburban area, many Chinese-Vietnamese immigrants have been marginalized and face barriers to full participation in the social context from both the values and norms of dominant American society and non-Chinese-speaking co-nationals from Vietnam as well as higher status co-ethnics from Hong Kong and Taiwan. In order to understand how Chinese-Vietnamese community college students form identities and adapt to the social context of the San Gabriel Valley, this dissertation looks at the relationships among language, ethnic identity, and education on two levels. First, the extent of multilingualism among Chinese speakers from Vietnam is assessed by means of a linguistic diversity survey. Second, the meanings that Chinese-Vietnamese participants give to multilingualism is explored through an analysis of narratives elicited through recorded, in-depth, semi-structured interviews. Results of the survey suggest that Chinese-Vietnamese participants tend to cluster in areas of higher concentrations of other ethnic Chinese and have a range of Chinese-Vietnamese ethnolinguistic identities related to geographical origin in Vietnam and to the socioeconomic and educational backgrounds of their parents. Additionally, interrupted schooling is a problem among participants, especially those having the strongest Chinese identities. The analyses of Chinese-Vietnamese participants' narratives point to the attempts of some families to reclaim stronger Chinese identities through the acquisition of Cantonese language skills. However, the confluence, of ethnicity, nationality, and class form barriers resulting in social isolation and the inability to claim coherent identities in social contexts outside of the family. Schools, in particular, are sites of conflict for many participants. This dissertation calls into question commonly-accepted assumptions about the relationship between class and ethnicity and points to the need for additional research on other marginalized multilingual communities.