Economic Americanness and defensive inclusion: social location and young citizens’ conceptions of national identity

Abstract

What does it mean to be “American”? Drawing on in-depth interviews with 76 undergraduates attending elite universities and 72 teenaged citizen children of immigrants living in mostly low-income households, we identify understudied economic narratives of Americanness: as future-oriented economic opportunities for elite undergraduates or stratified notions of current economic condition among immigrant-origin teens. We also find, depending on social location, that economic notions of Americanness overlap with other boundaries: whiteness for some immigrant-origin youth, and civic membership for elite undergraduates. Elite students place themselves at the center of Americanness; immigrant-origin youth, even though they are U.S. citizens, sometimes place themselves outside these symbolic boundaries. Still, youth in more disadvantaged social locations sometimes appropriate markers of Americanness in strategies of what we call “defensive inclusion,” employing symbolic boundaries of hard work, multiculturalism and birthplace to contest perceived social boundaries of race and class that might exclude them from the core of “Americanness.” Our findings suggest that researchers should include measures of economic national identity in future survey-based work and examine discursive practices of defensive inclusion in fieldwork