Ó Copyright by Mark Edward Pfeifer (1999)

Abstract/Acknowledgements/Table of Contents - [ Chapters - 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 ] -  Appendices - References Cited

Small numbers of Vietnamese came to Toronto as students in order to attend area universities in the 1950s and 1960s. However, the vast bulk of the Vietnamese population arrived after 1978, when Canada began accepting large numbers of Indochinese refugees. Up until the early 1990s, Vietnam continued as one of the leading source countries for both refugees and immigrants coming to Canada. Persons of Vietnamese origin have come to constitute a numerically significant population in the Toronto area and Toronto has the largest Vietnamese population of any metropolitan area in Canada. Just over 41,000 persons of Vietnamese ethnic origin were enumerated in the Toronto Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) by Statistics Canada in 1996. According to data collected by the Toronto Board of Education in the same year, Vietnamese was the third most commonly spoken home language of students enrolled in the City’s elementary and secondary schools, after English and Chinese. Within North America, only six other metropolitan areas possessed Vietnamese populations larger or similar to that counted in the Toronto CMA, according to U.S. Census figures published in 1992. These metropolitan areas were Los Angeles (with approximately 136,000 Vietnamese counted), San Jose (54,000), Houston (32,000), San Francisco/Oakland (nearly 29,000), Washington D.C. (23,000) and San Diego (21,000), (Hung and Haines, 1996).

1996 census data indicate that persons of Vietnamese origin reside in locations throughout the Toronto CMA but strong and notable concentrations are found in certain neighbourhoods. The Vietnamese aggregate in Toronto possesses the variegated social structure that has been identified in many other ethnic "communities". Since their arrival, the Vietnamese have developed a rather complex set of formal ethnic institutions, while developing a new internal social structure in a Canadian setting. It is equally significant that the Vietnamese are a "visible minority" and have received much public attention in Toronto and Canada since the time of their arrival. Persons of Vietnamese origin were required to interact as newcomers of minority status with the major institutions of the dominant society in Toronto including the housing market, the labour market, government bureaucracies, the school system, the criminal justice system, and the mainstream media.

Thus, over the past two decades, persons of Vietnamese ethnicity have found themselves situated in the Toronto landscape as refugee and immigrant "newcomers". In the history of North American cities, this is a common phenomenon. Immigrants must adapt to the context of the larger society, while at the same time host society institutions react to the new arrivals. In a seminal work, David Ward (1989) summarizes the way this reciprocal relationship has played out within large North American cities over the past century. He notes that representatives of the host society have always attempted to regularize or normalize relationships with members of new immigrant groups by setting up studies of recently arrived populations, hypothesizing about their behaviour and organizing initiatives intended to help them "assimilate" into the mainstream. Examples of these efforts include both the philanthropist era and the reform movement led by urban professionals in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries

The growth of the social sciences in American and Canadian universities over the past century has been strongly intertwined with the attempts to study, better understand and theorize about immigrants, as well as give advice to those who educate and provide social services to immigrant populations. Perhaps no perspective related to immigrant adaptation has been more influential than that associated with the Chicago School of Sociology. The Chicago School approach is significant not only for its immensely influential contribution to the social sciences and the reform movement in the first half of the 20^th century but also for its enduring legacy both in and out of academia as a model of thinking about the city and the newcomers’ place within it.

The Chicago writings have directly influenced how we think about many aspects of immigrant adaptation, including residential location, institutional life, and the trajectory of upward social mobility among ethnic group members. We continue to expect that immigrant newcomers will initially settle in the older, central city neighbourhoods of a metropolitan area. It is in these inner city neighbourhoods where they are expected to establish enclave institutions and commercial establishments. Gradually, with time and subsequent generations, we anticipate group members will disperse outward to residences in suburban districts. We assume, as this process of spatial assimilation takes place, concomitant processes of social and cultural assimilation will occur. Ethnic group members will enter the higher status occupations of the host society in increasing numbers and earn greater incomes. At the same time, as they move to outlying neighbourhoods, group members will abandon their own institutions and join those of the host society. It is especially significant that as a result of the Chicago School’s enduring influence, our image of ethnic community life has a strong spatial component. We still tend to think of ethnic "communities" as largely cohesive and unified immigrant populations and institutional substructures contained within neighbourhoods and possessing dense concentrations of group members, ethnic associations, houses of worship, and businesses. Any deviation from this pattern (i.e. the settlement of fairly recent immigrants in scattered suburban areas) is assumed to be indicative of the rapid integration of the group into the host society and a barometer of the decreasing relevance of ethnic community institutions to individual group members.

Over the past several decades, the Chicago School conceptualizations have been contested and rival paradigms of immigrant adaptation have arisen because the situational environment has been altered. The nature of immigration has changed especially in terms of source regions. After the 1960s, ‘visible minority’ immigrants were a far greater proportion of the flow to the U.S. and Canada compared to earlier decades, when newcomers were primarily of European origin. After the 1970s, refugees from regions such as Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa became a significant component of the American and Canadian intake. Many of these persons were accepted as refugees and did not possess the same background skills and resources as those individuals admitted as agricultural settlers or independent immigrants. At the same time, the host societies and their cities have changed. The economy, the housing market, and the transportation and communications infrastructure greeting new immigrants arriving in contemporary North American cities obviously differ markedly from that encountered by new arrivals earlier in the century. Furthermore, the institutional context of immigrant reception has changed. Today, for example, Toronto and Canadian policymakers are proud of an institutional environment informed by a multiculturalism ideology – in which resources are provided to encourage integration with the host society while the continuation of ethnic cultural practices is tolerated and even encouraged.

These situational differences and epistemological as well as ideological considerations have stimulated the development of several alternative approaches, in addition to the assimilation perspective, which influence the contemporary scholarly analysis of immigrant group adaptation. These theories include the cultural pluralism paradigm, which emphasizes the continuing salience of ethnicity for subsequent generations of group members within modern society. Structural perspectives focus upon the role of larger societal actors, including corporations and employers and the state and its representatives as they impact the trajectories of ethnic group adaptation. In the past few decades, a group of scholars has synthesized the cultural pluralism and structural approaches to emphasize the situational character of ethnic identity. These social scientists have drawn attention to the ways in which a hostile host society may provoke immigrant group members to use their ethnicity as a means of collective organization and advancement. Another school of social scientists influenced by structuralist theories have devoted considerable time to studying the ways in which race and ethnicity is socially constructed as a means of perpetuating minority group inequality within a given host society. These scholars have also emphasized the practices of resistance by which members of minority groups attempt to challenge and overcome the representations of themselves prevailing within the dominant society.

The Vietnamese began arriving in significant numbers at a special juncture in time for North American cities, including Toronto. By the early 1980s, Toronto was a metropolitan area of already considerable but expanding ethnocultural diversity. The city had outwardly embraced multiculturalism, and the ideology was reflected in the supposedly immigrant-friendly policies and practices of its institutions including the city government, and the local school systems (Stasiulis, 1982; 1989). Frictions between the larger society and minority groups were also apparent, however. Advocacy organizations voiced public concerns about police mistreatment and harassment of ethnic minority group members (Henry, 1995). Some scholars and race-relations specialists identified a pattern of immigrant-bashing and harmful `racialized’ portrayals of minorities in certain sectors of the mainstream Toronto media (Ginzburg, 1987, Henry, 1995). Like other large North American urban centres, the city possessed an increasingly bipolar labour market of `primary’ and `secondary’ sector jobs. Members of several ethnic minority groups seemed to be differentially inserted in the lower status and less compensated positions in manufacturing and services associated with the secondary segment of the city’s occupational structure (Boyd, 1992; Richmond, 1992).

In this study, I am interested in learning how the Vietnamese as a ‘visible minority’ group have come to fit into the larger social entity of the Toronto metropolitan area. How did the Vietnamese survive and cope in this new setting?, How did they go about creating a `community’ in a contemporary city? How were they received by the host society and its institutions? Unlike many other studies of the adaptation of ethnic groups, this is not intended primarily as a study about one particular facet of social existence such as the housing market, the labour market, or the institutional life of a given group. The study is consciously designed to be a broad exploration of several selected and interrelated aspects of the adaptation process as experienced by persons of Vietnamese origin residing in Toronto in the 1980s and 1990s.

Historians and social scientists have long conducted detailed investigations of the adaptation of individual ethnic groups within particular urban settings. There is an impressive roster of community studies which address the experiences of immigrant and minority populations in Canadian and American cities. A sizable and growing number of studies have focused upon given ethnic "communities" residing in Toronto itself. Scholars have published historical and more contemporary community studies of a broad range of groups living in Toronto including Italians (Jansen, 1988; Iacovetta, 1992), Poles (Radecki, 1979), Portuguese (Anderson, 1974; Teixeira, 1995), Chinese (Thompson, 1989), the Caribbean population (Henry, 1994), Ghanaians (Owusu, 1996) and South Asian ethnic groups (Stasiulis, 1982)

The primary foci of these scholarly investigations of ethnic populations have differed to a significant extent. Many of the authors of community studies have devoted most of their attention to the internal organization of the group in question – focusing on such aspects of ethnic community structure as the demographics of the population, processes of chain migration and enclave development in neighbourhoods, social differentiation and political and class cleavages in the community as well as dynamics of family life, the utilization of co-ethnic social networks, and the role of ethnic institutions such as mutual assistance associations and churches in the lives of immigrants (Anderson, 1974; Radecki, 1979; McClellan, 1992; McClellan, 1993)

Other scholars who have researched the adaptation of given ethnic populations in urban settings have chosen to focus the bulk of their attention upon the relationships of the group in question with the institutions of the mainstream society. The experiences of ethnic groups in the housing and labour market have been favourite topics of geographers and sociologists (Hiebert, 1993; Murdie 1993; Murdie 1994; Texeira, 1995; Preston and Giles, 1997; Owusu, 1998). Many social scientists have also investigated the interactions of particular groups with other sectors of the host society including the education system, the criminal justice system, the mainstream church hierarchies, as well as the mass media (Stasiulis, 1982; Nagata, 1987; Stasiulis, 1989; Jackson, 1993; Henry, 1994; Jackson, 1994).

Scholars in the social sciences have consistently struggled with the issue of how to best account for the tension between "structure" and "agency" within the context of their own research (Chouinard, 1998). It may be generalized that those ethnic scholars who have devoted most of their attention to the internal organization of given ethnic "communities" have tended to focus upon the "agency" aspect. Conversely, many, but certainly not all social scientists who have emphasized the influence of larger societal structures upon the experiences of individual ethnic groups have for the most part, consciously or unconsciously, downplayed the contribution of group members to their own adaptation. Recognition of both the strengths and weaknesses of these two dichotomous but not necessarily mutually exclusive approaches to ethnic community study has informed the design of this study. The topics chosen for research consideration have been selected not only for their relevance to key theoretical questions in the ethnic adaptation literature but also for their potential usefulness to illustrate both the internal character of the Vietnamese population and the external interactions of this group with host society institutions. I believe that such a research design offers the best potential to adequately account for the role of both larger institutional structures as well as the personal agency of group members in the adaptation experiences of the Vietnamese within the localized spatial setting of the greater Toronto region. Considerable attention has been devoted in the design of this study to capturing the mutual interplay existing between the internal organization of Vietnamese "community" life and the institutions of the mainstream host society. In various ways, mainstream institutional actors have influenced the internal dynamics of Vietnamese community institutions while at the same time, persons of Vietnamese origin have exercised "voice" as both individual and collective actors and engaged representatives of the host society in order to facilitate the adaptation process for themselves and the larger ethnic aggregate.

The issues chosen for consideration in this study have been selected for their utility in presenting a broad framework to facilitate an understanding of the adaptation of persons of Vietnamese origin to life in Toronto. The questions were also formulated with the intention of assessing the relevance of several key paradigms of immigrant adaptation to the experiences of a relatively recently arrived ethnic minority population of substantial size within a contemporary city.

Chapter Two contains a summary of the major paradigms of immigrant group adaptation which have influenced the organization of the study. This literature review is followed by an articulation of the research questions guiding the analysis chapters as well as a description of the major data sources and a section chronicling some personal introspections on the conduct of the fieldwork, which comprises the basis for much of the data contained in the study. Chapter Three presents a brief overview of Vietnamese history, social structure, and cultural values. This chapter is intended to provide readers with contextual information pertaining to the background and cultural influences persons of Vietnamese origin have brought with them to Toronto. Also to provide a context for the larger study, Chapter Four discusses the social demography of the Vietnamese population and compares its distribution on a range of variables to the total population and other major minority groups in the Toronto CMA.

The research findings themselves are organized into two main components with the goal of highlighting the intrinsic roles of both the Vietnamese (as individuals and also as members of collectivities) as well as the institutions of the host society in influencing the process of adaptation as it has occurred within the social and physical setting of the Toronto area. The first half of the research project is devoted to the internal dynamics of the Vietnamese aggregate residing in Toronto. Chapter Five makes reference to competing models of ethnic community organization as it outlines the internal social structure and formal institutional structure of Vietnamese "community" activities in Toronto. Chapters Six and Seven examine some of the spatial dimensions of Vietnamese "community" life in Toronto. Chapter Six looks at the changing residential geography of the population in the Toronto area since the initial arrival of large numbers of Vietnamese in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The applicability of the ecological model of spatial assimilation to the Vietnamese experience is assessed. Chapter Seven tests ecological notions linking ethnic institutional participation and residential proximity as it investigates the relationship between residence and membership participation within Vietnamese institutions. Examining in further detail the functions of Vietnamese institutions, Chapter Eight utilizes case studies to assess whether Vietnamese ethnic associations and churches and temples primarily serve integrating or identity maintenance functions in the adaptation process.

The second half of the study assesses the relationships of the Vietnamese population with the institutions of the host society in Toronto. It would obviously be very worthwhile to study the interactions of persons of Vietnamese origin with a number of major societal institutions. It is not my intention to downplay the gravity of the important role of such institutional sectors as the education system and the social service delivery system in the adaptation process. Both of these are topics which are very worthy of research investigation. However, due to limitations of time and resources, relationships of the Vietnamese with three host society sectors have been chosen as areas of particular emphasis. Chapter Nine addresses the insertion of the Vietnamese in the Toronto labour market, paying attention to the relevance of conventional explanations of immigrant labour market incorporation to the Vietnamese experience. Chapter Ten focuses upon interactions between Vietnamese individuals and ethnic community organizations with the mainstream media and the criminal justice system in Toronto. Considerable attention is paid in this chapter to socially constructed imagery of Vietnamese-origin individuals within the dominant society discourse on ‘race’ and ethnic-based crime in Toronto and Vietnamese responses to these representations. The study concludes with Chapter Eleven in which the key findings of each data chapter are summarized, possible implications of the results for the larger ethnic adaptation literature are posited, and avenues for possible future research are suggested. To provide further context, an appendix chapter compares the demography and labour market experiences of the Vietnamese residing in Toronto to their co-ethnic counterparts living in nine other Canadian metropolitan areas as well as Ontario and Canada as a whole.

To Chapter 2

Abstract/Acknowledgements/Table of Contents - [ Chapters - 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 ] -  Appendices - References Cited

		Updated February 09, 2004