Culture regions

1. Culture regions • Ethnic regions • Cultural diffusion and ethnicity • Ethnic ecology • Ethnic cultural integration • Ethnic landscapes

2. Migration and ethnicity • Chain migration is usually involved • An individual or small group decides to migrate to a foreign country • These “innovators” are natural leaders who influence others, especially family and friends to migrate with them • Word spreads to nearby communities starting a sizable migration from a small district • All gather in a comparably small area or neighborhood in the destination country

5. Migration and ethnicity • Chain migration is usually involved • The first to opt for emigration often rank high in the social order as hierarchical diffusion comes into play • The decision to migrate spreads by both hierarchical and contagious diffusion • Actual migration represents relocation diffusion

6. Migration and ethnicity • Chain migration is usually involved • Chain migration continues as migrants write letters back home extolling the virtues of their new life and imploring others to join them • Letters written from the United States became known as America letters

7. Migration and ethnicity • Chain migration caused movement of people to become channelized • Linked a specific source region to a particular destination • Neighbors in the old country became neighbors in the new country • It started three centuries ago and still operates today • Example of the recent mass migration of Latin Americans to Anglo-America • Different parts of the Southwest draw upon different source regions in Mexico

9. Migration and ethnicity • Involuntary migration contributes to ethnic diffusion and formation of ethnic culture regions in the United States • Refugees from Cambodia and Vietnam immigrated • Guatemalans and Salvadorans fled political repression in Central America • Forced migrations often result from policies of “ethnic cleansing” — countries expel minorities to produce cultural homogeneity in their populations • Newly independent country of Croatia has systematically expelled its Serb minority — ethnic cleansing

10. Migration and ethnicity • Following forced migration, relocated groups often engage in voluntary migration to concentrate in some new locality • Cuban political refugees, scattered widely in the 1960s then reassembled in South Florida • Vietnamese continue to gather in southern California and Texas • Return migration — involves the voluntary move of a group back to their ancestral native country or homeland

11. Migration and ethnicity • Large-scale channelized return migration of African-Americans to their Black Belt ethnic homeland in the South has occurred since 1975 • Over two-thirds of the migrants “follow well-worn paths back to homeplaces or other locations where relatives have settled” • Seven percent of blacks in Los Angeles County, California, moved away between 1985 and 1990 • Many went to the American South • By the year 2000, the dominantly-black-South-Central district of Los Angeles became largely Hispanic

12. Migration and ethnicity • Many of the about 200,000 expatriate Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians left Russia and former Soviet republics to return to newly independent Baltic home countries in the 1990s, losing their ethnic status in the process

13. Simplification and isolation • In theory, migrant groups that become ethnic in a new land could introduce, by relocation diffusion, the totality of their culture • Instead of introducing their total culture overseas a cultural simplification occurs • Happens in part because of chain migration • Only areal fragments of a culture diffuse overseas • Some simplification occurs at the point of departure

14. Simplification and isolation • Instead of introducing their total culture overseas a cultural simplification occurs • Only selected traits are successfully introduced • Other traits undergo modification before becoming established in the new homeland • Absorbing barriers prevent the diffusion of many traits • Permeable barriers cause changes in many other traits simplifying the migrant culture

15. Simplification and isolation • Instead of introducing their total culture overseas a cultural simplification occurs • Choices that did not exist in the old home become available • They can borrow alien ways or modify them from groups they encounter. • They can invent new techniques better suited to the adopted place • Most ethnic groups resort to all these devices, in varying degrees

16. Simplification and isolation • If remote, how an ethnic group’s new home affects their culture • Diffusion of traits from the Old World is more likely • Rare contact with alien groups allow for little borrowing of traits • Allows preservation in archaic form of cultural elements that disappear from their ancestral country

17. Simplification and isolation • If remote, how an ethnic group’s new home affects their culture • Language and dialects offer examples of preservation of the archaic • Germans living in ethnic islands in the Balkan region preserve archaic South German dialects better than in Germany • Some medieval elements of Spanish are still spoken in the Hispano homeland of New Mexico • Irish Catholic settlers in Newfoundland retain far more of their traditional Celtic culture than did fellow Irish who colonized Ontario

18. Culture regions • Ethnic regions • Cultural diffusion and ethnicity • Ethnic ecology • Ethnic cultural integration • Ethnic landscapes

19. Cultural preadaptation • Defined — involves a complex of adaptive traits possessed by a group in advance of migration that gives them the ability to survive, and a competitive advantage in colonizing anew environment • Most often results from groups migrating to a place environmentally similar to the one they left • Results in what Zelinsky called the first effective settlement allowing them to perpetuate much of their culture

20. Cultural preadaptation • In most cases the immigrants chose acolonization area physically resembling their former home • Examples in the state of Wisconsin • Finns — from a cold, thin-soiled glaciated, lake-studded, coniferous forest zone, settled the North Woods • Icelanders — from a bleak, remote island in the North Atlantic, located their only Wisconsin colony on Washington Island, an isolated outpost surrounded by Lake Michigan

22. Cultural preadaptation • Examples in the state of Wisconsin • The English — used to good farmland, generally founded ethnic islands in the better agricultural districts of southern and southwestern Wisconsin • Cornish miner — from the Celtic highland of western Great Britain sought out lead-mining communities in the southwestern part of the state

23. Cultural preadaptation • Wheat growing Russian-Germans from open steppe grasslands of south Russia • Settled the prairies of the Great Plains • Established wheat farms like those of their east European source area • Used varieties of grain brought from their semiarid homeland • Ukrainians in Canada chose the aspen belt • Mixture of prairie, marsh, and scrub forest • Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta because it resembled their former European home

24. Cultural preadaptation • Ethnic niche-filling has continued to present day • Cuban in southernmost Florida because it has a tropical savanna climate identical climate to that in Cuba • Vietnamese settled as fishers on the Gulf of Mexico, especially in Texas

25. Ethnic environmental perception • Some immigrant groups had an accurate environmental perception of the new land • Generally immigrants perceived the new ecosystem to be more like their old home than it actually was • Perhaps the search for similarity resulted from homesickness • May have resulted from an unwillingness to admit migration brought them to an alien land • Maybe growing to adulthood in a particular kind of physical environment retards one’s ability to accurately perceive a different ecosystem

26. Ethnic environmental perception • Distorted perception occasionally caused problems for ethnic farming groups • Trial and error was often necessary to come to terms with New World environment • If economic disaster resulted, and the ethnic island had to be abandoned, maladaptation is said to have occurred

27. Ethnic environmental perception • Examples of groups who picked rural settlement sites different from the homeland • Germans and Czechs consistently chose the best farmland • Findings of geographer Russel Gerlach who researched German communities in the Ozarks • Appalachian southern settlers chose easy-to-work sandy and bottom- land soil

28. Ethnic environmental perception • Findings of geographer Russell Gerlach who researched German communities in the Ozarks • Germans often chose superior soils that were harder to work • In Lawrence County, Missouri, Germans were latecomers, but still obtained the best land by picking dark-soiled prairie land avoided by earlier Anglo-American settlers • “A map showing the distribution of Germans can also be a map of the better soils in the region”

29. Ethnic environmental perception • Ability to select choice soils can be detected among Czechs in Texas • Texas has the largest rural population of Czechs in the United States • Czech farming communities are concentrated in tall-grass prairie regions underlain by dark, fertile soils • Anglo-Texans tended to avoid open prairies as farming sites

31. Ecology of ethnic survival • Many groups become ethnic only when their ancestral home districts are conquered and surrounded by invading people • Examples — American Indians, Australian Aborigines, and Scandinavian Sami • Owe their survival to an adaptive strategy that allows occupancy of a difficult physical environment where invaders proved maladapted

32. Ecology of ethnic survival • Distribution of Indian groups in Latin America • Indian population clustered in mountainous areas, many above 10,000 foot elevation • European invaders never adjusted well to high altitudes • Many other factors are involved in the differential survival of American Indians • Terrain, climate, and indigenous adaptive strategy play a role in survival

34. Culture regions • Ethnic regions • Cultural diffusion and ethnicity • Ethnic ecology • Ethnic cultural integration • Ethnic landscapes

35. Introduction • Ethnicity is firmly integrated into the fabric of culture • One aspect of culture acts on and is acted on by all other aspects • Integration never happens exactly the same way in any two groups that results in an unique ethnic distinctiveness

36. Introduction • Ethnicity plays arole in determining role in many facets of cultural integration • What the people eat, religious faith practiced, how they vote • Also influenced is whom they marry, how they earn a living, and ways they spend leisure time • Ethnoburbs influence spatial distribution of diverse cultural phenomena

39. Introduction • Geographer Hansgeorg Schlichtmann’s views • Speaks of economic performance, meaning level of success “in making a living and accumulating wealth” • Ethnic groups exhibit contrasts in economic orientation

40. Ethnicity and business activity • Differential ethnic preferences give rise to distinct patterns of purchasing goods and services • These differences are reflected in the business types and services offered in different ethnic neighborhoods of a city • Keith Harries made a detailed study of businesses in the Los Angeles urban area comparing three different ethnic neighborhoods

42. Ethnicity and business activity • East Los Angeles Chicano neighborhoods • Reflects dominance of small corner grocery stores and fragmentation of food sales among several kinds of stores • Large number of eating and drinking places is related to Mexican custom of gathering in cantinas, where much social life is centered • Abundant small barbershops provide one reason why personal service establishments rank so high

44. Ethnic Business:East Los Angeles • This Latino/Chicano neighborhood has a prevalence of restaurants, food stores, auto repair shops, immigration and other services. • This restaurant specializes in carnitas – pork.

45. Ethnic Business:East Los Angeles • Pictured on one door is the Virgen de Guadalupe, paramount saint in Mexico. • Los Angeles is the capital of Joel Garreau’s “MexAmerica” and East LA is home to more than one million Mexican Americans.

46. Ethnicity and business activity • Black south Los Angeles • Secondhand shops are very common • No antique or jewelry stores • Only one book-stationery shop • The distinctive African-American shoeshine parlor is found only in south Los Angeles

47. Ethnicity and business activity • Anglo neighborhoods • Rank high in professional and financial service establishments, such as doctors, lawyers, and banks • Professional and financial establishments are much less common in non- Anglo neighborhoods • Furniture, jewelry, antique, and apparel stores are also more numerous • Full-scale restaurants are also more common

48. Ethnicity and business activity • Contrasts can also be found in rural and small-town areas • Example of an ethnic island in southwestern Michigan • Settled by Dutch Calvinists in the mid-nineteenth century • Their descendants adhered to a strict moral code • Tended to regard non-Dutch Calvinists world as sinful and inferior • Adherence to precepts of their church was main manifestation of their ethnicity

50. Ethnicity and business activity • Example of an ethnic island in southwestern Michigan • Dutch language had died out in the area • Impact of Calvinist code of behavior on business activity • As recently as 1960, no taverns, dance halls, or movie theaters existed • No business activity was permitted on Sunday • Because they believe leisure and idleness are evil, most present- day farmers work at second jobs during slack farming seasons