PAPERS


Psychodynamics of Acculturation: A Mexican-American Experience
by Ricardo Ainslie, Ph.D.

Ricardo C. Ainslie, Ph.D. is Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. He is an adjunct faculty member at the Houston-Galveston Psychoanalytic Institute.

In his 1926 address to the Society of B'nai B'rith in Vienna, Freud gave one of his most telling descriptions of what constitutes the essence of cultural experience:

What bound me to Jewry was (I am ashamed to admit) neither faith nor national pride, for I had always been an unbeliever and was brought up without any religion though not without respect for what are called the "ethical" standards of human civilization ...[But] Plenty of other things remained over to make the attraction of Jewry and Jews irresistible-many obscure emotional forces, which were the more powerful the less they could be expressed in words, as well as a clear consciousness of inner identity, the safe privacy of a common mental construction (p.273).

Freud's invocation of this "safe privacy of a common mental construction" captures beautifully the essence of what culture represents. The psychological mechanisms through which culture absorbs and holds individual lives, as Freud so aptly states, reflect powerful forces, irresistible as they are obscure and elusive when it comes to clear articulation.

Winnicott (1953) observed that culture is created out of that realm of experience that is situated between the infant's desire and the mother's response, or what he termed the potential space. The first experience of culture is bound by the realities governing that relationship. It is created within that dyadic matrix and is defined by it. While the mother is the representative, the instantiator, of the cultural universe which exists beyond the infant's capacity to perceive and know, Winnicott argues that the infant is not merely a passive recipient of that culture, but an active participant in its construction. Appreciation of this origin should facilitate a discourse that incorporates both the intrapsychic and the social facets of human experience.

Framed within Winnicott's thesis, it should be apparent that cultural change almost always represents a rupture with that primordial "holding environment" (Modell, 1976). To the extent that culture evolves and is transformed, the assimilation of a new cultural vision taxes and strains ties to old objects (internalized and otherwise). Hence we see generational conflicts as normative in Western societies, but they are less common in societies which are pre-modern and more stable. In the latter societies, traditions still represent viable sustaining structures that provide meaningful mechanisms for ushering individuals from one phase of life into the next.

When a child ceases to participate in aspects of the cultural universe that a parent has helped to define and create (as when a person marries outside of his/her religion, race, nationality, or social class, but also, in Western societies, when a child engages the generational subcultures which are normative while "countercultural") such ruptures may represent a developmentally prescribed break in the mutually sustaining potential space. In other circumstances, such ruptures may also signal an acting out which is secondary to a faulty "holding environment." In either circumstance, however, such transformations represent losses to be absorbed by both parents and their offspring, although probably in different ways.

If social currents often require that adolescents and young adults disidentify from their parents, at least in circumscribed and transient ways, there is another force at work here as well. I am referring to the nearly universal fact that parents often wish for their children what they cannot or did not attain for themselves. Although such ambitions may be partly governed by narcissistic considerations and the vicarious gratification that parents derive from their children's successes (Kohut, 1971), these successes, as I will illustrate in the material that follows, may also bring about a sense of rupture. At least temporarily, we sometimes lose that which we most love when our children succeed in the ways which we have urged them to.

This is especially observable in the experience of immigrant families who see their children become successful in a culture which is alien to the parents (Modell, 1991). Their success becomes partly predicated on the fracturing of that "common mental construction" to which Freud alluded. Immigrant children often face an impossible choice-they can remain tied to the culture of their parents, at the expense of effective engagement with the broader culture in which they now live, or they can assimilate, threatening the earlier, original ties which had sustained them.

Modell notes, in reference to such children, that they will begin to observe the differences between their own construction of the world and that of their parents, an awareness that has profound consequences for further development. Thus, cultural transformation and cultural change imply a kind of object loss, at least a temporary break in that "common mental construction" for both parents and children.

Individuals engage cultural elements and put them in the service of intrapsychic conflicts (Volkan, 1988). To the extent that an individual's experience of culture is an extension of the primordial relationship that originally and fundamentally defined subjective experience, culture itself becomes more readily conceivable as a medium for the enactment of intrapsychic conflicts and needs. Culture not only resides within us, shaping and defining us, it also represents a social artifact to be appropriated, manipulated, and engaged in ways that tap the most central elements of our psychological experience. This is partly what Volkan (1988) means when he speaks of "targets of opportunity"-cultural elements, like any facet of reality, can be appropriated to intrapsychic purposes.

Just as the child uses the parent as a medium for organizing internal experience by projecting, identifying, playing out aggressive and libidinal impulses or for acting out any number of other developmental issues around which primary, organizing experiences become crystallized, so individuals can utilize cultural forms more generally for similar purposes. Culture is the medium for expressing intrapsychic conflict, just as readily available for this purpose as is the individual's body or his relationships.

In the material that follows I wish to illustrate the intrapsychic consequences of cultural assimilation. As the material reflects, even in the most successful of circumstances assimilation has profound intrapsychic costs, whether or not such assimilation represents an adaptive engagement with a new social reality (Hartmann, 1939).


  Case material: A Mexican-American family

Anson is a cotton farming community of 2,800 people situated deep in West Texas. In 1965 Anson was virtually an all white community. While the farms and ranches surrounding Anson employed a great number of Mexican-American hands as well as migrant labor on a seasonal basis, Anson itself remained ethnically homogeneous.

Prior to the civil rights legislation of the '60s, a segregated social organization was strictly enforced in Texas, especially rural Texas (Montejano, 1987). Virtually every aspect of life was subject to the requirements of racial isolation. Not only were schools, movie theaters, restaurants, and other business establishments rigidly segregated for Mexicans and blacks, but even cemeteries.

In Anson, following the passage of the Civil Rights Act in the mid-1960s, Mexican-Americans started moving into town at an accelerated pace, in part propelled by the mechanization of cotton farming which all but eliminated the need for hired hands and migrant labor. When I started conducting interviews in Anson in 1987, a little more than twenty years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, half of Anson's population was Mexican-American. Furthermore, as the children of Anson's white families moved to Texas' urban centers, Mexican-Americans increasingly filled positions that historically had been beyond their reach. Anson witnessed its first Mexican-American farmer, sheriff's deputy, high school cheerleader, and bank teller, not to mention clerks in the local stores.


  The first generation

On the rim of the east side of Anson, just before the town plays itself out into the dusty cotton fields, is a small weathered house where Oscar and Elena Villa live. The paved street ends about a quarter-mile back toward town, making the collection of houses in this part of Anson look especially dusty. The house is of pier and beam construction, with its wood siding in sore need of paint.

When I entered the Villa's dirt drive, Oscar Villa came out to greet me. Oscar was a somewhat diminutive, stocky man. The "patrones" (bosses) had always called him "Shorty." He was robust in the way that you would expect from a man who has worked in the fields for nearly sixty years. Oscar's thick but neatly trimmed black mustache was beginning to grey. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows, and he wore Levis and work boots. "Pásele (Come on in)," he said, as he motioned me in through the screen door.

Inside, the house was dark, especially to eyes coming in from the bright, mid-afternoon sun of early summer. Elena, Oscar's wife, waited just inside the door to greet me. She was small and somewhat square in her proportions. "Pásele, pásele" she repeated, smiling broadly. Elena sported a pair of 50s style silver-rimmed glasses that complemented her silver-gray hair. The glasses gave her a stately, attractive appearance.

Despite their poverty, the Villa household was dense with the rich feeling of a living, working, invested-in home. Though tattered by middle-class standards, the Villa living room actually felt quite warm and comfortable. Above the television were many framed photographs of the Villa children and grandchildren. The Villas were proud of their children and with good reason-all had graduated from high school (in Texas the high school dropout rate for Hispanic children is fifty percent), three had graduated from college, two from post-high school technical schools, and one was currently enrolled in college.

Oscar was born and raised on the farmlands surrounding Anson. Elena and Oscar had met when Elena's family, migrant farm laborers, had come to Anson following "la pisca" (the harvest) up from South Texas. Oscar never attended school and does not read or write. "I have always worked in agriculture," Oscar told me. "I started working with los Americanos when I was eight years old ... It was pretty hard work. Me and Elena have always maintained ourselves just by our work, what we earned in one week is what we had to live on. Now that we're viejos (old), things are a little easier ... but in the old days it was a constant struggle."

I asked the Villas to reflect on the changes that they had witnessed in Anson.

Elena: "Well it started more or less when President Kennedy took that bad law away, he told them, in a manner of speaking, 'drink from the same glass' because the truth is that it was very hard ... and when I had my own family ... I said to myself, 'Even if I feel embarrassed sometimes, I'm going to show my children to emparejarse (to be equals) with these people that feel that they're the only ones who can do anything, so all of my children have finished school."

Oscar: "That was my only ambition, that they finish school so that tomorrow, or after that, they would grow up and be hard working, but that they wouldn't have to go through what we went through. And look, it's paid off. Because now three are teachers, and like I told my Señora, when our chiquillo (littlest one) finishes, then we're going to go to high school and we'll finish college, too!"

Elena and Oscar both burst into laughter, but beneath the laughter, I sensed that Oscar had revealed a point of vulnerability. His lack of education was a source of deep embarrassment.

This was clearly a conversation that could have taken place in countless American immigrant homes, across several centuries. Between each generation, there is a cultural breach. This circumstance creates fertile ground for familial conflicts which are embedded, in part, in the fact that the reality of the next generation has shifted from that of the parents. During one of Oscar and Elena's interviews the discussion turned to their concerns about young people. In the Villa's view, the younger generation just didn't seem to have the same values and sense of right and wrong.

"This happened with our youngest, Gabriella, the one that works as a teller at the bank," Elena said. Gabriella was the first Mexican-American to assume a white-collar position at the bank. In her mid-twenties, Gabriella had moved out of the house a few years ago.

"Gabriella didn't like for us to be telling her anything," Elena went on. "Our other daughters grew up poor, poor, poor. They worked. They worked hoeing cotton and later, as they were growing up, whatever we gave to them-and we didn't have enough to give them much-they were satisfied. And when they went out, I went out with them. They were never of the muchachas locas (crazy girls) who'd just go out whenever they felt like it. They went out at my side. But Gabriella started working, and she started getting her own money, and then 'This is my life' started."

I noticed Elena becoming upset. "And her being the youngest we wanted her to date in the way that I was just describing to you (chaperoned). And she had everything. She had a car; the others never had a car. She had her own money. Her own job. She had everything. And then it wasn't enough, she wasn't satisfied, she wanted her freedom, see, without knowing that that freedom was going to cost her someday. So then I said to her: 'Fine, you can move out, but remember one thing,' I said to her, 'Don't come running back here when you get into difficulties, because we aren't throwing you out. We've given you everything ... she was already free to come and go as she pleased, what more did she want?"

There was deep consternation in Elena's voice. What to an Anglo family would have seemed like a sign of good progress along a normal post-adolescent developmental trajectory-getting a job and living a responsible, independent life-to the Villas represented a personal rejection and abandonment. They were clearly hurt.

"That's what I just can't understand," Elena went on. "It's like they've gotten too much freedom. And then you don't dare say anything to them about it because they get mad at you. They think they know more than you do. I try to tell them, 'Look, you're just starting out. You haven't had to do what we've had to do, and if life gets hard on you, you're going to suffer a lot, you just don't know, like if you don't have water you'll die of thirst, or if you don't have food you'll die of hunger,' [but] they don't understand."

Elena grew pensive. It was evident that she was thinking about specific things from her past, times with her family as a young child when she had faced real adversity- perhaps the very adversities (thirst, hunger) which she was now invoking. "I haven't forgotten that when I was a little girl, my father went out to the jobs, to 'la pisca', I was seven or eight years old, and my mother had a baby of six months, and we lived in a little room. I don't even remember if it was hot or cold (meaning summer or winter), but the baby was very little and la niña got sick, and they didn't take her to the doctor because people in those days were very timid and they didn't want to go to see doctors. They were afraid, you see, and my little sister got sick and I would stay with her. It was about 1935. Mama would leave me with the baby. Me and another of my sisters. And I remember that my baby sister would get real hot, the fever would hit her hard, and my mother was pisceando (picking crops), and then when she got home in the afternoons, she'd ask me how the baby was. And so one night, I was well asleep, and the baby took a turn for the worse, my parents went out to get help, and the patrón lived nearby and they went for the Americanos, and they left us asleep. And when she came back, I woke up because I could hear someone sobbing. And when I woke up I saw her standing at the door, and the Americana, the patrón's wife, had my baby sister in her arms..."

Elena started to cry. The tears slid out from under her silver-rimmed glasses onto her brown cheeks. More than fifty years later, the memory of that traumatic night was still freshly painful. "That's why I tell them," she went on. 'You haven't seen anything. These are hard things.' I say to Gabriella, 'Look m'ija (affectionate for daughter), you haven't suffered what we suffered, that's why everything seems so easy to you.' I remember my mother sobbing and sobbing and sobbing, and I got up, and I touched my baby sister, and she was dead. And my mother was just saying, "The baby's dead.'"

The meaning of this association was painfully obvious. She experienced the estrangement between herself and her daughter, Gabriella, as a very deep personal loss. This was an estrangement manifested in a conflict between traditional and contemporary values, a gulf played out in the patterning of how one finds a mate in contemporary culture, or how and when the boundary is drawn between family and self. Elena's sense of loss was so painful that it resurrected an image of another painful and devastating memory-the loss of her baby sister. The connection was unconscious to Elena, but it could not have been clearer: beneath her anger and disappointment in her daughter's contemporary rebellion against the Villa's traditional values was a deep sadness. To Elena, Gabriella's successful assimilation was like losing a second baby.

  The second generation

In Anson, as in most American communities, social and economic realities partly shape destinies by clustering the haves with the haves, and the have-nots with the have-nots. Gabriella Villa lives in a small house on the west side of Anson's main street, where the successful farmers and small business owners live. The houses are more neatly manicured on this side of town, the cars and pickup trucks of more recent vintage.

Gabriella, an attractive young woman of 25, exemplified the values of middle-class American culture in many respects. She also reflected the cultural transformation which countless immigrants to America have experienced: while her parents spoke limited English and felt awkward in doing so, Gabriella clearly lived and worked in English. English was the language she was most at home with when it came to talking about her life, her work, and her hopes and aspirations. The most graphic illustration of the cultural and social distance that the Villa family had traversed in the span of one generation was the fact that while Gabriella worked at the bank, Oscar and Elena came to the bank before it opened and again after it closed: they comprised the bank's janitorial staff.

During one of our interviews, Gabriella described the conflict with her parents and her decision to move out. From Gabriella's perspective these events were structured quite differently. "I respect my parents in every way, and I appreciate the things that they do for me," she said as she reflected on that time, "but it got to the point where I was growing and I was maturing, and I needed a little bit more, not so much freedom as to use it or abuse it, but ... they were tending to override my privacy a little bit ... I had reached a point in my life where I felt I could carry on myself, and they wouldn't let me accept responsibility for myself. A lot of that was because they were my parents and they felt that they always had to protect me and I didn't want to be protected anymore."

From a contemporary American vantage, Gabriella's plight was clear: here was a young woman who had made her own life, who had a good job, who wanted a little independence, who wanted to be able to date whom she wanted, and come and go as she wanted. Gabriella was twenty-three years old at the time. She had been working at the bank for four years. She was tired of having to ask her mother and father for permission every time her friends wanted to go out.

Unconsciously, Gabriella was living out an acute cultural conflict. She was the medium for a clash between two world views. Gabriella could not fit in with contemporary America as a young bright woman in her mid-twenties while living at home still under the tight direction and supervision of her mother and father. She could not fulfill the expectations for achievement and success that her own family promulgated without abandoning some of the traditional frameworks for living which had sustained them. This traditional framework was a rich and vibrant source of life-meaning which had allowed the Villa family to survive generations of poverty and struggle against overwhelming adversity, and to have survived it with their sense of dignity and human respect intact. For Gabriella's parents, her abandonment of those mores could not help but engender the deepest fears and sense of desperation regarding their daughter's future well being. Mrs. Villa felt, quite literally, that her daughter was dying spiritually, if not physically.

For Gabriella, on the other hand, these values had become an obstruction in her quest for a meaningful life. She no longer lived in a world that was rural and Mexican, in the sense in which her parents and their ancestors had known it. The very social-cultural structures which had saved her family from a life of depredation and rootlessness now posed a threat to Gabriella's effective engagement with contemporary realities.

Gabriella's associations led to a recollection of the fall of her sophomore year in high school, when Gabriella had decided to run for cheerleader. No Mexican-American had ever served on the high school cheerleading squad. In West Texas, high school football is serious business and serious politics play into which daughters of the community's leading families are selected for the highly coveted spots on the school's cheerleading squad. When Gabriella Villa succeeded in becoming the first Hispanic to win a cheerleading slot in the school's history, she was ecstatic-a mixture of pride and excitement. "It was a breakthrough for all of us," Gabriella recalled. It still made her smile to remember that heady moment. "It was a breakthrough for the Mexicanos, because, being the first Mexicana, I think they were going to feel they really had a sense of belonging then, like they were going to have somebody from our group in there."

When Gabriella arrived home after school, her entire family was waiting. They were both excited and proud. However, her family had had no idea what being a high school cheerleader entailed, financially. The price tag for Gabriella's cheerleading outfits, special shoes (only expensive Nikes were permitted), pom-poms, megaphones (which had to be sent off to be custom painted with the school colors and logo), and the compulsory cheerleading camp which the squad attended in San Antonio, exceeded $2,000.

The cost stunned the Villas. Student body votes were clearly not the only factor that had kept the cheerleading squad the private reserve of the wealthier white families in town. The family met to reflect on Gabriella's predicament. It was a somber gathering at the Villa home. Finally, Gabriella's father spoke up. "Look, m'ija," Oscar said, "Hacemos lo que tenemos que hacer (We'll do what we have to do), but I don't want you to give up. We're not going to let them do that to you."
"They did it," she said tearfully. "I don't know how we paid for all that stuff, because I mean, we were poor. My brothers helped. But it was hard. And that's why I just, you know, my Mom and Dad, I'll just do anything for them. They're my parents and they've always been there and they always will be. And whatever I did, I didn't mean to hurt them in any way. I hope that they understand that. I've always tried to do them proud, or at least right, you know, that if anybody ever had to say something to them about their kids, that it would have been something good, not anything bad or shameful."

Gabriella's reflections on her election to the cheerleading squad took her headlong into powerful feelings and conflicts concerning her family-her deep sense of gratitude and indebtedness to them, as well as her guilt and worry that her struggles for individuation represented aggressive, hurtful attacks upon them.

The tensions between Gabriella and her parents reflected two irreconcilable forces at work: tradition and continuity versus transformation and change. Gabriella's parents wanted her to be "good" in the traditional Mexican sense, yet they had poured themselves into helping her assimilate and become successful in a post-civil rights Southern reality. They wanted all those things for her that they had been denied, yet they failed to see that this dream also required Gabriella to be different from them in ways that felt threatening and painful. Similarly, Gabriella deeply appreciated those sacrifices, while finding her parents unacceptably binding and their values discordant with what success required of her. She was simultaneously part of them yet separate from them.

Gabriella's election to the cheerleading squad was a victory of multi-layered meanings. A seemingly trivial event betrayed a complexity of forces latently at work. Anson High School's cheerleader election, laced with petty considerations of transient popularity and adolescent cliquishness, was in reality a manifestation of a fundamental transformation in the social structures that organized the community. For Gabriella and her family, it was a sign that they had arrived, that they had won at a strange life-game of which their daily suffering only permitted an episodic awareness. It was worth the $2,000 price. As the family gathered around in their humble living room to ponder the pricetag that went with Gabriella's election, they understood, at some level, that the issue was not really cheerleading. This was about the struggle for advancement and the powerful wish to be part of the American Dream. The Villas were not about to let the $2,000 price tag stand between them and this quest, even if it meant that every member of the family had to pitch in. It was a small price to pay for being the signposts of a new age in their community. Yet, in the same act, the Villas had sewn the seeds of their own consternation and sadness, as their daughter separated from them, psychologically and culturally, moving down the very path which they had cleared for her.


  Conclusion

For the Villa family, cultural transformation was as laced with loss as it was with satisfaction. For Gabriella, however, there was an added dimension: immense guilt at having succeeded in being the vessel for her family's aspirations. In her conscious experience, everyone had sacrificed "for her," although dimly there must have been an awareness of the broader psychological implications of what her success meant for everyone in her family (they identified with her, her success was also theirs). In addition, separation-individuation needs played an important role in Gabriella's successful accommodation to the new social world. She hitched her fate to these changes partly because they facilitated her exit from a suffocating engulfment which may have once sustained her family in prior generations, in other worlds, but which now represented an obstruction to a healthier engagement with life. In this manner, she appropriated cultural forms-the newly available opportunities in a post-civil rights South-and used them, in part, for intrapsychic purposes.

Within the Villa family, the immense cultural transformation which characterized their lives represented a break in that holding environment that once defined the known, the anticipated, the familiar. Gabriella embodied that change and, hence, she became the object of the anxieties associated with a break in that psychological fabric. Cultural change, because it always activates developmentally early intrapsychic processes, including primitive defense mechanisms, ego ideals, and identifications (Volkan, 1988), is almost always conflictual. This is the case even in those families where the challenge of coming to grips with a hostile environment has been confronted with a significant measure of success, as reflected in the present material. Indeed, the presence of these conflicts in the context of a highly adaptive family only serves to underscore the ubiquitous nature of such intrapsychic stresses. In a family which was less cohesive, in a family buckling under the multiple traumas of prejudice, poverty, and cultural dislocation, it is likely that such intrapsychic conflicts would be present all the more acutely and that these would be played out less adaptively.

I would like to conclude by noting Erik Erikson's (1968) observation that a limitation in the psychoanalytic conception of identity is its lack of a language for understanding, or conceptualizing, the social order. Ego identity, as Erikson used the term, referred not only to an individual's sense of continuity and sameness over time and space, but, just as importantly, to the character of an individual's embeddedness within a broader human community-his society, his culture. Psychoanalytic discourse rarely explicitly takes these broader features of psychological experienceinto account, typically keeping these elements in parentheses, as it were. Psychoanalysts are more comfortable viewing parents as instantiators of that cultural universe, a cultural universe which is assumed, but rarely explicitly engaged. Today, no less than when Erikson made his observation regarding psychoanalytic conceptions of identity, we are still in search of an overarching conceptualization which would do justice to the complex interweaving of personal subjectivities as they extend from that primeval "potential space," so richly described by Winnicott (1953), to the broader social contexts within which we live as adults.


  References

Erikson, E. H. (1968). Childhood and Society. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.

Freud, S. (1926). Address to the Society of B'nai B'rith. Standard Edition, 20: 273.

Hartmann, H. (1939). Ego Psychology and the Problems of Adaptation. New York: International Universities Press, 1958.

Kohut, H. (1971). The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders. New York: International Universities Press.

Modell, A. H. (1976). The "holding environment" and the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 24: 285-307.

Modell, A.H. (1991). A confusion of tongues or whose reality is it? Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 60: 227-244.

Montejano, D. (1987). Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Volkan, V. D. (1988). The Need to Have Enemies and Allies: From Clinical Practice to International Relationships. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.

Winnicott, D. W. (1953) . Transitional objects and transitional phenomena. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 34: 89-97.

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