Abstract
The last two decades have witnessed growing research on the experiences of children and youth after migration or resettlement. However, nearly all of this research focuses on children and youth who arrived in the country with their parents. We know little of the unique experiences of refugee youngsters who came to this country without parental company. How do they negotiate the different cultures in the absence of parents? In this article, we draw on in-depth interview data with 19 Sudanese emerging adults who came to the United States as unaccompanied refugee minors to examine issues of acculturation and adaptation. Our findings show that having a strong root in their native culture and identity helped them make good choices, maintain focus, and avoid distractions associated with negative aspects of the U.S. youth culture. Our participants also discussed the importance of learning the new ways. As a result, those who maintained their native culture and combined it with the positive aspect of the U.S. culture were the ones who did best in their adaptation. Our research confirms previous findings on immigrant and refugee youth with parents that a bicultural orientation is the best for adaptation. Our findings also illustrate a more specific and agentic process of cultural appropriation with a flexible orientation.
At the beginning of the new millennium, the United States is once again witnessing a historical wave of immigration. Included in the growing population of immigrants are a number of refugees fleeing from war, political oppression, or religious persecution in their home countries, and seeking a new home in the United States. Their experiences are often markedly different from those of immigrants who choose to move to the United States in search of a better life or to be reunited with family members. Recent statistics show that there were 2.6 million refugee arrivals in the period 1980 to 2011 (Department of Human Services, 2011). The last two decades have witnessed growing research on the experiences of children after migration or resettlement. However, nearly all of this research focuses on children who arrive in the country with their parents. We know little of the unique experiences of refugee youngsters who come to this country without parental accompaniment.
Family, as “a primary agency in the immigrant saga” (Gil & Vega, 1996, p. 436), is instrumental in helping children adapt after migration and overcome barriers in the new society (Portes & Rumbaut, 2001). In particular, research has shown that parents provide the closest link to immigrant children’s native culture (Lee & Chen, 2000). What happens to children when they do not have the support of their parents in a totally unfamiliar land? How do they maintain their native culture? Is their native culture important to them? How do they negotiate the differences between their native culture and the culture of their new home in the absence of parents? In this article, we examine such issues of acculturation and adaptation using data from in-depth interviews with a group of Sudanese emerging adults who came to the United States as unaccompanied refugee minors.
Adaptation by Sudanese Unaccompanied Refugee Minors
An unaccompanied minor is a “person who is under the age of majority and not accompanied by a parent, guardian, or other person who by law or custom is responsible for him or her” (Ressler, Boothby, & Steinbock, 1988, p. 7). Some recent examples of large-scale efforts to resettle unaccompanied minors include those involving the Cuban children in Operation Pedro Pan (Conde, 1999), the boat people from Southeast Asia (Caplan, Choy, & Whitmore, 1991), and children displaced by wars in Korea and other countries (see Ressler et al., 1988, for an overview of the resettlement of unaccompanied minors). The United States is one of the developed nations that have provided asylum to unaccompanied refugee minors. One group that has been resettled in the United States are the Sudanese unaccompanied refugee minors, mostly male and often referred to as the Lost Boys in popular media, who were largely resettled here after 2000 due to civil war in their homeland.
As a result of the Second Sudanese Civil War, which erupted in 1983, more than 2 million people were killed and millions more were displaced (Bixler, 2005). Many Sudanese children were separated from their parents during this conflict and trekked in peer groups for several weeks or months to refugee camps in Ethiopia, a hazardous journey during which many perished. Without their families’ support, the children struggled to obtain basic necessities such as food, clean water, and medical care. In 1991, due to a regime change in Ethiopia, the children were violently expelled from the refugee camps. While fleeing back to Sudan, they again witnessed the deaths of many peers who either drowned in the Gilo River that borders Sudan or were killed by the Ethiopian army. In Sudan, the children came under attack again by Northern Sudanese government forces and had to make another arduous trek to the Kakuma refugee camp established by the United Nations in Kenya (Hecht, 2005).
The majority of the Lost Boys lived apart from their parents in refugee camps in Ethiopia (late 1980s to May 1991) and Kenya (June 1992 to 2001) and in displacement camps in Sudan (Bixler, 2005). Interviews with 147 Lost Boys from the Dinka tribe in 1993, a little more than a year after they arrived at the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, revealed that 72% of the boys were uncertain if they would ever see their families again (Jeppsson & Hjern, 2005). In the absence of parental care, the children banded together in peer groups, with older males generally providing leadership for their younger cohorts. For humanitarian reasons, the U.S. government decided to provide refugee status and resettle youths whose parents were deceased or untraceable. Eventually, about 3,500 were resettled in the United States (Bates et al., 2005). Compared with those left behind in the refugee camps, these youths who were able to leave with opportunities to start a new life were the fortunate ones.
The Sudanese emerging adults’ experience of living as displaced persons for more than a decade and being resettled without parental support makes them a very unique group of refugees. Most research on refugee children has focused on those who live with at least one of their parents (e.g., Zhou & Bankston, 1998), and one of the most consistent findings is that refugee children’s adjustment is related to the support they receive from their parents and how well their parents cope with adverse circumstances (Farwell, 2001; Joshi & O’Donnell, 2003; Shaw, 2003; Singer & Wilson, 2006). When children do not have their parents, how do they maintain their culture? How does this influence their adaptation? Refugee children who are separated from their parents benefit from establishing supportive relationships with alternative caregivers (Moskovitz, 1985; Ressler et al., 1988) and close relationships with peers (Freud & Dann, 1951; Goodman, 2004). The values and expectations parents passed on to their children prior to separation may also influence the youths during their parents’ absence (Ressler et al., 1988).
Theoretical Consideration of Immigrant Adaptation and Assimilation
The study of immigrant and refugee children and youths is relatively new—until recently, the majority of research on immigrants has been done on adults (Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2001). Previous models of immigrant adaptation and assimilation have been largely based on the experiences of earlier European immigrants, emphasizing the “unilinear, nonreversible, and continuous” process of acculturation and structural assimilation that moves toward the finishing line of “the middle-class, white, Protestant, European American framework of the dominant society” (Suárez-Orozco, 2000, p. 8). The majority of these immigrants, in the process of assimilation, gradually lose their ethnic language and culture; as some scholars put it, ethnicity is eventually reduced to something primarily “symbolic” (Gans, 1979) and “optional” (Alba & Nee, 1997).
A central premise in current research on immigration, assimilation, and mobility suggests, contrary to earlier models, that preserving ethnicity, for example, parental culture, language, and ties to the ethnic community, in the process of acculturation can actually facilitate successful adaptation (Gibson, 1988; Portes & Zhou, 1993; Suárez-Orozco, Suárez-Orozco, & Todorova, 2010; Waters, 1996). First generation immigrants often maintain “immigrant optimism” and have a “dual frame of reference,” comparing the circumstances in the host country with those of their countries of origin. This comparison enables many immigrants to remain upbeat about the improvement over their past circumstances and optimistic about their future prospects (Ogbu & Simons, 1998). Studies published in the last two decades have provided convincing evidence that preserving immigrant parents’ language and culture is positively linked to children’s educational and psychosocial outcomes. For example, drawing on a sample of 163 Cambodian American students in Massachusetts, Dinh, Weinstein, Kim, and Ho (2008) found that retaining a Cambodian cultural orientation has positive benefits for Cambodian students.
However, maintaining the native culture alone is not enough. It is also important for immigrants and refugees to learn new ways of life, as demonstrated by other research showing that a bicultural orientation is associated with positive educational and psychosocial outcomes (Lutz, 2004; Nguyen & Benet-Martínez, 2013; Portes & MacLeod, 1996; Suárez-Orozco et al., 2010; White & Glick, 2000; Zhou & Bankston, 1998). A study on Spanish speaking students by Lutz and Crist (2009) found that biliterate students, especially boys, reported higher grade point averages (GPA) than those with limited Spanish proficiency. In addition, compared with their assimilated peers, bicultural and bilingual immigrant youths have fewer behavioral or psychosocial problems. Similarly, a number of studies on Latino middle school students show that a bicultural orientation and a strong ethnic identity are positively related to high levels of academic achievement and low levels of externalizing behaviors or drug use (Epstein, Botvin, & Diaz, 2001; Gonzales et al., 2008; S. J. Schwartz, Zamboanga, & Jarvis, 2007).
Further, biculturalism has also been shown to have a negative influence on depression and other psychosocial adjustment problems. For example, drawing on a sample of 246 seventh- and eighth-grade Mexican American adolescents, Love and Buriel (2007) found that for boys, biculturalism (measured by extrafamilial language use, familial language use, and ethnic social relations) has a significantly negative correlation with depression levels. Compared with their peers with a bicultural orientation, youths who were more assimilated to the U.S. culture reported more problematic behaviors and less parental monitoring. Moreover, drawing on a sample of 315 Hispanic adolescents and their primary caregivers, Coatsworth, Maladonado-Molina, Pantin, and Szapocznik (2005) found that bicultural youths showed significantly higher levels of academic competence, peer competence, and parental monitoring than all other groups. These results are consistent with other studies that found the bicultural lifestyle to be the most adaptive (Berry, 2003; Organista, Organista, & Kurasaki, 2003).
Much of the above research examines issues of assimilation and adaptation for immigrant children who came to this country with their parents. In particular, research has shown that having a bicultural orientation, especially a strong ethnic identity rooted in the parents’ culture of origin, is associated with decreasing parent-child conflict and better parent-child relations (Sullivan et al., 2007). Indeed, parents are seen as the primary transmitter of cultural knowledge for immigrant children (Portes & Rumbaut, 2001). What about children who grew up in another country but came to the United States without their parents, as unaccompanied minors? How do they adapt to life in the United States? How do they maintain their culture? Do they also develop a bicultural identity, or are they more likely to be assimilated into U.S. culture? Will their different cultural orientations have implications for their education and adaptation after resettlement?
Emerging Adulthood and Resilience
Emerging adulthood (ages 18-25; see Arnett, 2000) also provides an important and unique developmental context within which to examine the cultural adaptation of the Sudanese refugees in our study. Demographic and economic shifts in Western industrial nations in the past 40 years have afforded 18- to 25-year-olds an extended period of identity exploration (cf. Erikson, 1968, on the psychosocial moratorium) in the areas of love, work, and worldviews (Arnett, 2006; S. J. Schwartz, 2001). Specifically, the theory of emerging adulthood posits that five features mark this distinct developmental period: identity exploration, instability, self-focus, a feeling of being in-between, and a sense of possibility or potential (Arnett, 2006). These five characteristics represent important socio-contextual factors that influence the course (see Steinberg & Avenevoli, 2000) of adaptation in youths between the ages of 18 and 25.
Identity exploration is particularly salient for immigrants and minority emerging adults because they must negotiate the achievement of not only individual identity (see Marcia, 1980) but also ethnic identity, which is often of more central importance to them (Phinney & Alipuria, 1990). Research suggests that ethnic identity exploration extends throughout the 20s (and often beyond) and, in many cases, is further prolonged for immigrants and minorities as a reaction to conflicting messages about their ethnic identity disseminated by majority American culture (Phinney, 2006). The developmental path and timing of ethnic identity achievement are now largely viewed as a product of dynamic interactions between individual and contextual factors (cf. Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000), with emerging adulthood seen as an influential socio-contextual component. In accordance with the model of equifinality (many paths, but one common outcome), empirical results suggest that an “integration profile” of acculturation (with high investment in both ethnic and mainstream cultures; see Berry, Phinney, Sam, & Vedder, 2006) leads to the best psychological and socio-cultural adaptation outcomes (Phinney, Horenczyk, Liebkind, & Vedder, 2001).
Resilience (positive adaptation in the presence of risk; see Luthar, Cicchetti, & Becker, 2000) is also a prominent issue for refugee emerging adults, as they are faced with adapting to developmental transitions and stressors in emerging adulthood (e.g., work, romantic relationships) that are embedded within new cultural roles and expectations. Further, refugees often have experienced physical and/or psychological trauma prior to immigration, which not only adds to the stressors of emerging adulthood but also introduces maladaptive patterns developed under those earlier traumatic conditions (see Luster, Bates, & Johnson, 2006). There is strong evidence to suggest continuity between prior patterns of adaptation and resilience developed in adolescence and future resilience in emerging adulthood (see Masten et al., 2004), but there are also documented instances in which maladaptive patterns are dramatically altered by subsequent positive opportunities (e.g., Werner & Smith, 2001).
What has not been examined in this body of literature is how non-Western (e.g., Sudanese) 18- to 25-year-old immigrants negotiate the transition into a Western culture where a protracted period of emerging adulthood is developmentally normative. This gap in understanding is especially salient for unaccompanied refugees, who have often lived without parents for many years. Thus, the current study seeks to clarify these issues by examining the adaptation patterns of unaccompanied Sudanese refugees who were resettled in the United States during adolescence and emerging adulthood after experiencing protracted periods of physical and psychological trauma as children and adolescents.
Method
This study is part of a larger research project on Sudanese Lost Boys first started in 2001, focusing on risk, resilience, and adaptation to a new culture among unaccompanied refugee youths resettled in the mid-Michigan area. Data for this article were drawn from in-depth interviews with Sudanese emerging adults.
Participants
Between November 2000 and April 2001, 89 unaccompanied refugee minors from Sudan resettled in Lansing and neighboring communities in Michigan through the Unaccompanied Refugee Minor Program. Children in this program are placed in foster homes and receive services to help them adapt to their new life until the age of 20. Emerging adults older than 18 may transition into supervised independent living. Youths as well as their foster parents receive financial assistance, monitoring, and other necessary services through home visits by caseworkers and group meetings.
During a previous phase of the research project, 15 American foster parents of Sudanese refugees were interviewed. We then asked these parents to provide contact information for their Sudanese foster children. With this information and the assistance of a Sudanese cultural consultant and the resettlement agency, we invited 24 emerging adults to participate in this study, and 19 agreed to do so. Two males and three females declined to participate in the study, and no further information is known about these individuals or why they chose not to participate. The 19 participants in our sample represent 21% of the 89 unaccompanied minors resettled in the mid-Michigan area. It is important to note that the emerging adults who participated in our study were likely, on average, better adapted than those who did not. Many emerging adults whom we did not invite to participate could not be contacted or interviewed because they had lost touch with or become estranged from their foster parents or had serious mental health issues.
At the time of the interviews, all of the Sudanese refugees were emerging adults, ranging in age from 18 to 26 years (M = 22 years; SD = 2.31). Of the 19 participants we interviewed, 17 were male and 2 were female (only 13 females were resettled in the Lansing area, and of the 3,800 Lost Boys resettled in the United States, only 89 were female; Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, 2005). Eighteen identified themselves ethnically as Dinka, the largest ethnic group in Southern Sudan 1 , and one identified himself as from another, smaller tribe. At the time of resettlement, the mean age of the youths was 15 years (SD = 2.34), and the youngest child was 11. Some did not know their exact age, and in those cases, we used the age estimated by the United Nations based on their level of physical maturity when examined in the refugee camp. At the time of the interviews, 12 participants were enrolled in college, 2 had graduated from 4-year universities, 1 had obtained a training certificate from a community college, and 4 were not currently enrolled but planned to return to school. Four of the emerging adults were parents themselves, including both females.
Procedures
We conducted semi-structured interviews with the emerging adults, which took approximately 2 hours to complete. The interviews focused on their adaptation and adjustment in the United States, their experiences in foster care, and their identity. Data for this article were drawn mainly from the first section, which asked the participants about their general adaptation, challenges, educational experiences, and future goals. More specifically, we asked the participants what helped them in their adjustment and why some of the Sudanese emerging adults seemed to be adjusting well while others were experiencing more challenges. The interviews were conducted in English by four researchers (two European American men and two Asian women), three of whom are authors of this article. All of the interviews were taped with the consent of the participants and later transcribed verbatim by paid research assistants. The transcripts of the interviews were sent to the original interviewers to be examined for accuracy before they were coded.
Data Analysis
The goal of this study was to describe and understand the lived experience of a group of unaccompanied refugee Sudanese minors adjusting to living in the United States from a cultural perspective. As such, the authors took the phenomenological inquiry approach, which focuses on understanding and describing the human experience in the contexts of families, communities, and cultures (Gilgun, 2005; Giorgi & Giorgi, 2003). The authors followed the steps of phenomenological inquiry as outlined by Giorgi (1985): First, the three coders read the interview transcripts in their entirety to begin developing an overall sense of the participants’ experiences. Next, natural meaning units (i.e., portions of the text that were judged to relate to an identifiable theme across many interviews) were identified and transformed into codes. For example, “I’ve become like a hybrid between here, two cultures you know and these two cultures make me” and “so you have to adjust to it and actually take a little bit of each [culture] and then put it together” are words of the participants that were considered natural meaning units. These meaning units were coded as “being a hybrid” and “combining cultures.” Then, these codes, along with others, were further grouped into a theme (e.g., “cultural appropriation”), which helped interpret each participant’s experience and the collective experience of the group. Following this, the three coders met 3 times to discuss emergent themes. During these meetings, the authors reached consensus on the dominant themes and found direct quotes to exemplify each. Finally, the main findings of the inquiry were presented to the larger team of researchers (including all those who had conducted and transcribed the interviews) for further refinement, interpretation, and confirmation. Demographic data were also used to better place the participants’ experiences in context.
Trustworthiness of the Data
The trustworthiness of data in qualitative research is defined by the standards that should be met in order to ensure the quality and accuracy of the data (Morrow, 2005). In this study, a number of methods were used to ensure the trustworthiness of the data and findings. Themes and interpretations that could not be sufficiently supported (as determined by the first and second authors) via direct quotes and thick descriptions were not pursued or included in the findings. The authors attempted to engage in bracketing—the suspension of prior knowledge or belief about a phenomenon under study (Powers & Knapp, 1995)—but this approach was deemed impractical considering the authors’ extensive exposure to the participants and data set and to related immigration experiences. In response to this, the authors employed the more contemporary understanding of bracketing as a “dialectic between fresh experience and prior conceptions” (LeVasseur, 2003, p. 419). Thus, the authors not only remained open-minded with regard to possible and unexpected interpretations of the data but also integrated this “open curiosity” with personal experiences and views and extant theory. The relative diversity among the data analysts (one Chinese American female, one European American male, and one Asian Indian female) provided a balanced conversational context for the dialectical process. To monitor researcher bias and check the reliability of the codes and categories, we carefully documented our coding process and cross-checked our analysis throughout the process. Discrepancies were discussed in meetings, which helped redefine the codes and categories.
Findings
Like all immigrants and refugees who resettle in another country, the Sudanese participants in our study experienced many challenges in their adaptation to a completely different linguistic, social, and cultural setting. All immigrants encounter challenges such as language barriers, acculturation difficulties, cultural conflicts, and the loss of the supportive network in the home country. However, this group of emerging adults faced a range of additional challenges related to their distinctive experiences. First, all of our participants had experienced horrendous and protracted episodes of trauma before arriving in the United States, and many had posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other health concerns. In fact, in another study of Sudanese refugees, Foa, Johnson, Feeny, and Treadwell (2001) found that the children in their sample had mean PTSD scores twice those of children who had experienced a single traumatic event. Coping with past traumatic memories and survivor guilt was very difficult for many. During interviews, nearly all of the foster parents voiced concerns that the mental health of the youths was a challenge to their adjustment. Second, ambiguous loss was a major struggle for the great majority of our participants, who did not know if their family members were alive or dead when they first arrived in the United States (see Luster, Qin, Bates, Johnson, & Rana, 2009). Third, after efforts to locate their loved ones after arriving in the United States, many emerging adults found their family, but faced the burden of sending money to their home country to support their remaining family members. Foster parents mentioned that the participants received many requests for remittances from Africa, and responding to all those requests would have required much more money than any of the youth had. Balancing education, work, and the pressure to send money home was a challenge for most of our participants.
Over time, there were emerging adults who adapted quite well and those who continued to struggle in their life here. The majority of our participants in this study adapted well. All the emerging adults we interviewed completed their high school education and all but three were enrolled in college. For this article, we use our participants’ standards to differentiate well-adapted from less well-adapted emerging adults: (a) participants who took advantage of opportunities for education and work to earn money to support family back home were considered by their peers as well adapted; (b) participants were considered well adapted by peers when they took steps to succeed in the U.S. context, for example, seeking out mentors, taking advice from experienced people, and maintaining a good credit rating; (c) moving across borders and becoming transnational citizens were also viewed as a mark of success by some participants (also see Luster, Qin, Bates, Rana, & Lee, 2010).
When asked what helped them adapt in the new land, our participants discussed the following four themes: (a) staying connected to home and preserving their culture, (b) making good choices and not becoming too Americanized, (c) accommodating to the U.S. culture, and (d) engaging in a process of what we call cultural appropriation. Below, we discuss how these four themes helped their adaptation after resettlement. In presenting the data, we have chosen to use direct quotes from the participants, without editing for grammar, to present the original voices of our interviewees.
Staying Connected to Home and Preserving the Culture: “Remembering Where We Came From”
In their process of adaptation, the great majority of emerging adults in our sample actively preserved memories of their experiences before coming to the United States (e.g., their pre-war life in Sudan as young children and the traumatic events that sent them into refugee camps) and maintained a strong connection with their native Sudanese culture. When asked what helped them adapt, 12 of the 19 emerging adults interviewed mentioned the importance of “remembering where we came from.” This connection to their home country provided a sense of “immigrant optimism” and motivated them to use the opportunities available here to succeed. For example, Daniel
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said, Yeah I think what helped me to be successful was the thing that I went through you know . . . and my high expectation was if I get a chance to go to school, I will do what I can to be educated person. Yeah . . . so whenever I do something I think about my background, how did I come here and why am I here? So all these questions helped me to, to formulate what I will do.
Similarly, another participant, Mareng, commented, One of the other thing that helps somebody to be successful . . . that just looking back where you came from. That motivates you to go farther away . . . so you want to say well I have the opportunity now. I am in the U.S. . . . I want to be the best as I can be, cause now I have this opportunity, I don’t want to let it go.
The lack of educational opportunities and resources in the refugee camps motivated the emerging adults to take advantage of educational opportunities available in the United States. Some participants also noted that now that they no longer had to focus on basic necessities, such as obtaining food and finding a place to sleep, they could focus their attention on education. For example, Deng said, “I think that the reason some of them are adjusting OK is that here you got one place to sleep, you got food to eat. You can go to school and get your education.” Focusing on education helped the emerging adults stay on the right track and also gave them more opportunities for upward mobility down the road.
Our participants’ remarks clearly illustrate a “dual frame of reference,” which enabled many of our participants to view their new circumstances with a strong sense of immigrant optimism. As a result, they tended to value the newfound opportunities here and overcome whatever challenges they faced to succeed in the new land. A number of participants noted that some Sudanese youths struggled more in their adaptation when they tried to forget about the past. While the past could be negative and traumatic for our participants, it also served to motivate them to do better.
Their strong sense of optimism originated both from their inner strength, which may have helped them to survive the horrendous traumas in the first place, and the favorable comparison of their current situation with past challenges. During interviews, our participants expressed their strong sense of optimism despite challenging circumstances after migration. For example, David, who experienced a lot of discrimination after resettlement, commented about his future: “Most of the time I always say tomorrow will always be better.” Similarly, Ezekiel, another participant who had experienced considerable obstacles during resettlement, said, “you be optimistic, you think, OK, maybe something good will happen, we don’t know.”
Second, in addition to optimism, the connection to and memory of home gave them a strong sense of focus, cause, and purpose in their lives in the United States. The emerging adults who adjusted well all maintained a strong focus on why they came here. They did not forget what they had been through and whom they had left behind, even 7 or 8 years after leaving Sudan. They maintained a very strong bond with Sudan because their families lived there and their stories were inextricably linked to the suffering of their homeland. Because they were given this opportunity to start a new life in the United States, they felt that they had a responsibility to help those less fortunate who were left behind. As a result, they developed a very strong sense of purpose and cause after migration. Our analysis shows that more than half of the participants (n = 12) talked about their goals of helping to rebuild the infrastructure of war-torn Southern Sudan, mentioning specifically hospitals, schools, and churches. According to some participants, those who had not adjusted well tended to forget what they came here for and lost this sense of purpose. For example, Marko commented about some of his peers: They don’t think of what have happened to them . . . they didn’t brought us up here so that we can spoil it. They brought us up here so that we can have a future and that future we can take it back and train our peoples and reverse it back, you know, to our people.
Some also made reference to God in making sense of their journey out of Africa. All of our participants designated themselves as Christians, reflecting the strong Christian influences found in their home villages in Southern Sudan. Maintaining their faith played an important part in shaping their sense of purpose and goals. For example, John, who had been here for 7 years, drew a parallel between his experience and the Biblical story of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt. Not only did this parallel help to shape his sense of purpose, it also influenced his approach to acculturation in America: Why did I end up here? What are the goals? . . . if you go back to Old Testament, we would say remember who brought you out of Egypt. I can say that it’s the same God as I remember who brought you out of Sudan, and the reason I say that is just if I become too much Americanized and say forget all the things I have been through, and then live a normal life . . . that’s not what God wants us to do.
This remembrance kept them from being overly distracted by U.S. youth culture. This sense that God had a special purpose for them and their people kept them rooted in their own culture and engaged in the plight of their native land.
Making Good Choices: Not Becoming Too Americanized
The emerging adults often contrasted becoming Americanized with maintaining their Sudanese culture and perspectives, viewing the former path as negative for their ability to adapt. In Sudanese culture, according to the participants, children are more respectful, quieter, and more obedient; there are also more communal childrearing practices (such that if a child gets into trouble, others will tell the parents), strong family bonds, and a sense of family obligation. During interviews, they talked about positive aspects of U.S. culture, such as more educational and work opportunities, better living standards, and more equal gender roles, as well as negative aspects, such as less respectful children, too much freedom, less focus on schooling, and distractions, especially for alcohol, parties, and drugs for youth. For example, Peter said, “you’ve got so many opportunities here, but at the same time there are so many distractions here.” Indeed, to youths coming from Sudan and Kenya, where they survived on the bare minimum, some aspects of American youth life were completely foreign and could present many pitfalls for a wide-eyed refugee youth from Africa.
As a result, they had to take personal responsibility for making the right choices. For example, Paul, who did well in his education after migration, said, I see things they are and I have to make choices whether I have to do it or not . . . there is a lot of good thing and there’s a lot of bad thing . . . Maybe you can be succeeded any way you go, but one thing is when I came here, I tried to be a learner.
A number of participants talked about how remembering home helped them make good choices. For example, John, who had been here for 7 years, commented, Every single of us has to go to college because we need to go back and help . . . you have to think hard of what you have been through and then to make a good decision. But if you forget Sudan . . . and just cut the whole thing just America, you might make a bad choice.
Daniel acknowledged the temptation of the distractions but explained how he managed to stay focused on his own path: A small principle that guides me not to get into something new for me and do it. It simply guides me not to say, “Okay Daniel, let’s not do this.” I have like two different person in me, there’s a person guiding me from doing something that will cut my future short and all those kind of things . . . My culture helps me make good decisions.
Similarly, Paul poignantly described the importance of Sudanese culture for him: “I see my culture very important as a lot influence to do with who I am and if I leave that then I don’t even know what, what, where to start . . . I mean I would be lost.” For Daniel and Paul, being anchored in their Sudanese culture helped them stay focused on their education and work.
During the interviews, the participants also noted that those who were not doing well might have forgotten why they came here and assimilated too much into certain negative aspects of U.S. youth culture. For example, Amal, one of the two females in our sample, commented on some of her Sudanese peers: But some of them took too much of American culture and those are the ones that are not going to school, cause they forgot about where they came from before like how bad was it in Sudan that it is important to go to school and you know getting your degrees so that you won’t have to live in the way you used to.
Similarly, Mareng commented that less successful peers followed an American lifestyle that he was not familiar with: One of the things that separated these Lost Boys into two groups is how they adapt to the American culture—like someone just got into straight into the American culture and all of the sudden they forgot where they came from; they forgot what their goal is, why they came in United States . . . I would say they forgot where they are going.
Some of the participants who were not doing as well immersed themselves more in U.S. culture as a way to avoid dealing with the stresses and trauma they experienced before arrival. William commented, Some made new friends and got caught up in American ways; and then start living the American way cause if they felt like it was a way to exit from stress . . . Some still go to school, they still socialize, but others just got caught up in the money kind of thing and having good time and avoiding all the stress.
The newfound freedom that the youths enjoyed in the United States, away from their own community and the supervision of their elders, also contributed to some of the participants’ picking up aspects of the unhealthy youth culture here. Paul, in his mid 20s, said poignantly, When we came from Africa, we came as different in age . . . I feel like I have more of my culture; I didn’t give it up and I know how it works and . . . I know my culture . . . Also back home, if I do something and you see, I’m going to be in big, big trouble . . . But when we came here, we don’t have that anymore. We came into the freedom; you can do whatever you want . . . They are not worried about it the community anymore because there’s no people right here that can hold them accountable . . . They come and see what young people do here and just run after that.
Paul’s remarks also pointed to the importance of age at arrival in the adaptation of the emerging adults. Participants like Paul were already in their late teens when they arrived. Thus, most of them had established a solid Sudanese cultural identity, which could help them fend off temptations in the new land. However, those who arrived at a much younger age did not quite have time to form a solid Sudanese identity. These participants may have been more susceptible to negative aspects of U.S. youth culture. As Josiah commented, “Some of us were too young when we came here. So they get adjusted to life and so when they get the bad group, then they can join the group.”
Excessive alcohol use was viewed as a common problem for emerging adults who became more Americanized and lost their way. For example, Deng commented, Some people drinking all the time, and some people . . . got addicted to some new cultures, and things that then they weren’t part of our culture, they were not the part of what we expected to be doing in America.
One participant told us that of all the Sudanese youths who settled in the Lansing area, about 70% drank too much alcohol. Many factors contributed to problem drinking. An important one is that alcohol helped these youths forget their past and feel better temporarily. For example, David commented, “that’s a big problem and now they think alcohol is a treatment and everybody’s just drinking crazy right now and it’s not even funny.” Similarly, Amal commented on the lifestyle of some of the boys: “Most of them, they go to school. I mean they wake up, go to work, come back, drink, party and then go to work. That’s all they do (laughing) . . . Girls, we just don’t drink.” As Amal mentioned, drinking was a much more salient issue for the boys and happened much less with the girls in this group of Sudanese youths.
Accommodation
While our participants considered it important to maintain their Sudanese culture and identity after arriving in the United States, they also mentioned the importance of adapting to their new life. Indeed, our participants needed to learn a host of new things after resettling in this drastically different cultural environment—for example, the English language, and everyday skills like paying bills. As Atem commented on the situation shortly after arrival in the United States, When you first got here everything is new, where to find food; it happened you know basic thing you know inside the house you need to be taught how to do that . . . finding a job, because you know at that time when you came here you don’t even know where are the job at.
Many participants considered it important to broaden their social world beyond their Sudanese peers; they saw only socializing within that circle as a potential barrier to their acculturation. For example, John, who was resettled in a more rural area, which distanced him from his Sudanese cohorts, noted that less successful Sudanese emerging adults stayed somewhat cloistered with other Sudanese: One of the problems I see is we lost boys came here in clusters together, where we speak the same language . . . I got lucky. I went to Dansville. It forces me to learn English because I was the only one . . . I hang out with more white folks than some of the lost boys . . . Some of the lost boys they tend to isolate themselves where they are not . . . socially enough to where to get used to every single culture. Get out of your comfort zone.
Michael, who moved to the Lansing area with his cousin, nephew, and some other Sudanese friends, commented that while some of his friends felt “it’s better to live with Sudanese than Americans” for support, he also mentioned that it was important to learn how to get along with people from other backgrounds: So we were the only minority over there; it started out a little bit rough . . . I don’t want to be just being teased at . . . where I quickly learn the tactics of how should I avoid the kids and hang out with whoever accept me . . . I graduated and I went to S.A. University. And again the experience keep continuing and that one become a lot easier because of what I have been through before, I am getting used to everyone; African Americans, Americans, Indian, everyone; so, Korean, everyone, Canadian. It’s just, it’s a very good experience.
Thus, while the emerging adults considered it crucial to remember why they came here and maintain their Sudanese culture as a guide for their behavior in the new land, they also considered it important to “get out of their comfort zone” to create opportunities to learn the new culture and get along with different people, including learning to deal with peer teasing.
Our participants noted that successful adaptation required the support of others—family and peers from the United States who acted as cultural brokers. Nearly all the participants talked about the tremendous, instrumental support they received from their foster families in terms of initial life adjustment, choosing a school, getting homework help, and emotional support in adjusting to new schools. This helped them lay a good foundation for their adaptation. Some participants also talked about other ways that their foster parents steered them in the right direction and away from trouble. For example, Joshua noted the advice he had received from his foster father: “My dad always telling me if you do drink just don’t do the drive. You stay at home, you know. Don’t get out of there. He always gives me advice.” John, who had a particularly close relationship with his foster mother, explained how he was helped in dealing with discrimination: The people teasing me, it’s back in the day where I grew up was just fists. I just punched somebody or fighting, but I changed quickly to the point where that’s not the case and that’s what actually my mom taught me.
Besides their foster parents, some participants also mentioned support they received from their native peers. For example, William commented that he got a lot of support from his friends who played sports: At some point I will go and hang out with them and basically they helped me out, it’s like learning what American kids do . . . just kept learning what they do and they were very nice to me and basically being a kid is, it’s just reading, watching TV, playing football, playing video games and a lot of things I learned at my own.
From his friends, William learned the typical teenage way of life here, which helped him fit in with his peer group and adjust to his new home.
In this process of adaptation, the emerging adults also shared an attitude of appreciation and openness toward the help they received from others. They had a very positive perception of the people in the United States, noting that in general, Americans were willing to help. For example, Marko commented, “Just a lot of people who have really open hearts here in America. They can help you . . . be a successful person.” Trusting others and asking for help whenever needed were considered by some participants to be very important for succeeding here. When asked “What has helped the ones who are doing really well, to be successful?” David responded that listening and asking for help were both key: Listening to what somebody’s offering you and actually take it and try it, and if it don’t work, you can even go back to that person and say “I tried this way and it don’t work, is there any other ideas that you can give me?” And that’s what helped people that are really successful right now . . . And people that are not doing too good now are people that don’t ask.
Thus, being persistent in asking for help and following through on the advice they received, instead of struggling by themselves, were identified as key for the Sudanese unaccompanied minors in adapting to their new life.
Cultural Appropriation
In studies of immigrant and refugee adaptation into the new society, biculturalism (Nguyen & Benet-Martínez, 2013) or integration (Berry, 2003), referring to an orientation to both dominant and heritage cultures, has been documented by researchers as likely the most adaptive acculturation strategies. In our study, the Sudanese emerging adults engaged in a bicultural or integrative adaptation process that is orientated to both the Sudanese and the U.S. culture. More specifically, they adopted a strategy of what we call cultural appropriation, that is, a form of cultural production and creation whereby they combined the good parts of American culture with the good parts of their native Sudanese culture. Our participants noted that there are good things and bad things in both cultures. They engaged in a process of conscious selective acculturation. For example, Josiah, who maintained Sudanese culture more than some of the other youths, commented on his approach to the U.S. culture: “I see things that are you know not OK for me. I just leave them there and take something else that is good or OK.” Michael pointed out that that he consciously picked from the two cultures in order to adapt to life in the United States: I still have my Sudanese culture, so when I came here I still have . . . you have to give some of the stuff that you think don’t work, and then apply some of the things that will help you, then you catch up very quick to the life here.
Daniel, who had recently returned to Sudan for a visit, explained how he had negotiated between the two cultures: I’m kind of in between two cultures now and I’m trying to make two things work together, I’ve become an American and in the bowl of culture I’m making it back and forth you know, get good thing here and good thing there and I think I’ve become like a hybrid between here, two cultures you know and these two cultures make me, I’m making good thing out of it.
Many participants also mentioned that those who took a little bit from both cultures tended to do best in their adjustment. For example, Amal said, You know you were from a different culture and you lived in a different culture, so you have to adjust to it and actually take a little bit of each and then put it together. That’s the only way you can manage to live in America . . . That’s how I did it . . . The ones that are doing well are the ones that take a little bit of each culture.
Amal went on to provide the example of one of her brothers: James, he is, he took both, like he has a little bit of Sudanese in him and a little bit of American culture and he is flexible with everything. So he is doing well. And some of my friends that I know, they everything is Americanized like they just want, you know doing parties, don’t go to school and that will be their life if they don’t change it which is not good.
Thus, both those who became completely Americanized and those who strictly maintained their Sudanese culture were viewed as less successful. Furthermore, according to Amal, to be successful, one had to be flexible and adaptable.
Discussion
The Sudanese emerging adults in our group had very unique experiences both before and after arriving in the United States, as compared with most immigrant and refugee children. They survived many traumatic events in Africa, and they had to adapt to their host country without parental presence or guidance, often the closest link to the native culture. Given the challenging circumstances surrounding their arrival, it is quite remarkable that many of them managed to adapt to their new lives, take advantage of the educational and work opportunities in the United States, and provide financial support for relatives back home. Many emerging adults also had a strong desire to go back and contribute to the rebuilding endeavors in their home country.
In this article, we examined the cultural adaptation experiences of these youths. Our findings indicate that their native culture played a key role in their adaptation. Having a strong rooting in their native culture and identity helped them make good choices, stay focused on their education and work, and fulfill their goal of helping those left behind, and avoid distractions associated with negative aspects of U.S. youth culture, such as partying and substance abuse. Our participants also mentioned the importance of learning new ways; learning English and important new cultural skills helped them get along with their native peers and foster parents and succeed in meeting the expectations of schools and workplaces. Thus, those who maintained their native culture and combined it with the positive aspects of U.S. culture were the ones who did best in their adaptation.
These emerging adults engaged in a process of what we call cultural appropriation—actively taking the best parts of both cultures and combining them to help in their adaptation to the new land. To be clear, our participants did adopt the integration or biculturalism strategy in their acculturation. However, both integration and biculturalism suggest a somewhat passive and general process of combining both cultures, what the Sudanese emerging adults in our study articulated in the interviews represents a more conscious and specific process of active cultural selection and production under the global bicultural orientation, representing an emerging, agentic, and developmentally informed process. Our results also confirm previous findings on immigrant and refugee youths who are accompanied by parents, showing that a bicultural orientation is best for adaptation (Nguyen & Benet-Martínez, 2013).
The Sudanese emerging adults, despite their refugee status and the fact that they were unaccompanied by parents at arrival, shared similar adaptation experiences and perceptions with what Ogbu calls the voluntary immigrants—for example, in terms of their sense of immigrant optimism and dual frame of reference. Refugees do not fit very well with either voluntary or involuntary immigrants as defined in Ogbu’s original categorization. They are a distinct group because of their experience of being pushed out of their native country by desperate circumstances like war or political persecution. The longing for home may be stronger in this group because in most cases, they did not choose to come to the new land. Some refugees, like the Cubans who escaped after Castro took power, never completely unpack their suitcases and remain ready to go home any day. However, our interviews showed that the experiences of the Sudanese youths were quite different. They were in refugee camps, where they had limited opportunities for education or work, for close to a decade before coming to the United States. As it is for many voluntary immigrants, coming to the United States is a dream come true for the Sudanese youths. They seek to take full advantage of the opportunities here and gain upward mobility. They perceive life in the United States, especially the structures for success, very positively, and see that through hard work, they can fulfill their goals.
The majority of voluntary migrants have strong connections to their home country, especially in this era of globalization, when maintaining connections to home is made much easier with Skype and general ease in international travels. Nevertheless, such connections are often limited to the immigrants’ extended families. The participants in our study, besides a strong desire to help their families back home, also often developed a strong sense of purpose to help rebuild infrastructures in war-torn Sudan. This further motivated them to work hard and achieve success in the new land. The strong connection to home also provided the Sudanese emerging adults in our study with a firm anchor in their native culture and identity, another factor that helped them stay focused and succeed.
In terms of identity, while the process of identity formation emerges during adolescence, it is during the period of emerging adulthood that key aspects of identity such as love, work, and worldview are formed (Arnett, 2000). It is especially worth noting that most of the emerging adults in our study arrived in the United States during their teenage years. Compared with those who arrived at a very young age, older youths tended to have a stronger rooting in their native culture, which also helped them in the process of adaptation. For example, one of the interviewees commented, “my culture helps me make good decisions.” Participants who arrived at a younger age may not have benefited from the effects of a strong anchoring in their culture and may have been more tempted to assimilate into U.S. youth culture. However, this does not necessarily mean that participants who arrived in the United States at a young age adapted less well than those who came when older. In another article (Luster et al., 2010), we found that younger youths had better relationships with their foster parents and also learned English more easily than their older counterparts. Both of these factors helped in their academic and social adaptation.
The findings of our study also provide a unique examination of emerging adulthood from the viewpoint of non-Western refugee immigrants. For all intents and purposes, the Sudanese youths reentered a period of emerging adulthood in the United States after achieving key adult milestones such as accepting responsibility for themselves and making independent decisions (Arnett, 2000). They had spent the better part of their teenage years defending, directing, and providing for themselves with little adult support. As a result, they struggled to adapt to being thrust into a society where a protracted period of semi-adulthood was supported and perpetuated for individuals of their age. In some ways, the experiences of the Sudanese participants in our study represented a unique trajectory of development that is not fully captured by the term emerging adulthood, which implies a routine progression between adolescence and full adulthood “under certain cultural-demographic conditions” (Arnett, 2011, p. 255).
They also had acute difficulty with what B. Schwartz (2000) has termed the “tyranny of freedom and choice.” Those Sudanese who adapted successfully developed strategies to counter this freedom. They did this not only by remembering their own cultural values but also by reaffirming their purpose for coming to the United States and the adult roles they had already achieved. Those who did not adapt successfully tended to fully embrace their newfound freedom, often engaging in risky behaviors such as alcohol use and abuse. These findings suggest that for this unique population of refugees, the ambiguous social construction of adulthood and the freedom given to 18- to 25-year-olds in the United States were a detriment to successful adaptation. More broadly, these findings support Schwartz’s assertion that cultural constraints on freedom, autonomy, and self-determination can be beneficial.
It is also important to note that while in this article, we focus on the youths’ own strategies in negotiating and managing their different cultural backgrounds, other factors also played important roles in their successful adaptation, such as their foster parents and social services. Foster parents supported youths in numerous ways, including providing transportation, school assistance, as well as financial and emotional support. The resettlement agency, Lutheran Social Services of Michigan (LSSM), also provided the youth invaluable support through offering independent living skills training, placing them in foster families, providing financial support until age 21, and paying college tuition through a special grant program until age 23 (for more details, see Rana, Qin, Bates, Luster, & Saltarelli, 2011).
Further, while the great majority of the participants in our study adapted successfully, it is important to note that not all Sudanese refugee emerging adults are doing well. Many struggle with mental health problems, and some resort to drinking and partying and lose their connection to their native culture. Our sample is a selected group of mostly well-adapted emerging adults and does not represent the experiences of all the Sudanese resettled in the United States. Thus, our results cannot be generalized to that entire group of refugees.
It is important for future research to continue to examine the unique experiences of unaccompanied refugee minors like the Sudanese youths. Research on general child and adolescent development as well as research on immigrant and refugee children show the crucial role played by parents in child and adolescent development (Olson, Russell, & Sprenkle, 1983; Smetana, Campione-Barr, & Daddis, 2004). Family dynamics, particularly parent-child relations, are among the most robust predictors of child adjustment (Parke & Buriel, 2006; Steinberg, 2001). Positive family relations provide an important buffer against challenges immigrant and refugee children may face such as discrimination in the new land. Parents are also the direct conduit of heritage culture, and maintaining this culture has been shown to be beneficial to immigrant and refugee children’s adaptation. However, in these families, problems may also arise, such as an increasing acculturation gap, which leads to elevated conflicts and growing alienation in immigrant families (e.g., Qin, 2006).
Compared with immigrant and refugee children who arrive with their parents, unaccompanied refugee youths do not, on the one hand, enjoy positive parental support or, on the other, suffer from the acculturation gap and conflicts that trouble many immigrant and refugee families. However, they have a unique set of resources and challenges. For example, having non-immigrant foster parents who themselves have deep knowledge of the host culture can help unaccompanied minors’ transition. At the same time, negotiating their cultural differences with their foster parents can become a daily challenge for the children and the parents. It is important for future research to examine these unique experiences of unaccompanied refugee minors and their foster parents.
Our results have practical and policy implications for the adaptation of refugees and immigrants. It is important for service providers, resettlement agencies, and foster parents to provide both opportunities for them to connect to and maintain their native culture and support and resources for them to learn the new culture. Besides providing independent skill training and other resources to survive in the new land, it is also crucial for service providers and resettlement agencies to help and encourage the refugee youths to maintain connection to their native culture. Facilitating peer interactions and maintenance of the Sudanese community can be especially helpful for this group of youth as they shared strong pre-established bonds with peers in the refugee comp. Further, some foster parents had the misconception that maintaining a Sudanese cultural identity would impede their successful acculturation to the new land (Bates et al., 2005). In foster parent training, social services should focus on cultural orientation for the parents and emphasize the importance of maintaining the native culture in children’s adaptation.
Their native culture should be viewed as an asset and resource that can help promote the healthy development and successful adaptation of children from immigrant and refugee families. In recent years, the struggling economy in the United States has contributed to growing anti-immigration sentiment and an “English only” movement aiming to eliminate bilingual education and promote immigrants’ full assimilation. Our study and many others reinforce the importance of immigrants and refugees’ maintaining their native language, culture, and identity while learning English and practices that will help them succeed in their new land. Conscious cultural creations such as the ones engaged in by the Sudanese emerging adults in our study will contribute new images to the exhilarating, diverse tableau of our culture and will benefit youths from both immigrant refugee and native backgrounds in an era of rising globalization.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.