Refugee Communities: A Comparative Field Study

This book contains the results of a long-term ethnographic study of two ethnic communities in California - Soviet Jews and Vietnamese - the two largest groups of refugee immigrants over the past decade. Gold examines each of these communities and compares their relationships with the host culture in a variety of ways - ethnic group solidarity, use of social services, entrepreneurship, barriers to success and assimilation. He uses rich ethnographic material and two photo essays to link refugee communities with the more extensive literature on immigrants and on ethnic communities. Gold finds that diversity, rather than uniformity, characterizes these communities. His ethnographic portraits of these two groups and theoretical findings should be of interest to those who study immigration, ethnicity and culture.