A youthful generation of Iranian Americans has recently come of age in Los Angeles, California, the largest and oldest cultural hub of the Iranian diaspora. However, the cultural and political implications of this demographic shift have only recently begun to receive scholarly attention. By focusing on the perspectives of active second-generation community members, and juxtaposing them to research findings on the first generation conducted in the same field site, this paper builds a longitudinal picture of the developments in political and cultural positioning across migrant generations.
Ethnographic in its methodological approach, the paper draws predominantly on the findings generated from the author’s doctoral research in LA between 2008 and 2010, and supplements this with work from earlier ethnographic and cultural studies analysis from the same field site to understand processes of change that pertain to a range of societal dynamics, including the changing political landscape in the post-9/11 US, the developing (digital) media landscape, and youth cultural styles of expression. The argument this paper puts forward builds on earlier work that showed the prevalence of the metaphor of “bridging” (between American and Iranian cultures) in first-generation community organizers’ public discourse. However, it demonstrates how the second generation of Iranians in LA are engaging in emergent forms of identification with Iranian- and American-ness that focus, instead, on the language of community “building” in the processes that produce their political subjectivities.
As diverse cultural assemblages of Iranian-ness continue to be negotiated transnationally, the research presented here adds to the burgeoning ethnographic understanding of the Iranian diaspora. It analyses illustrative cases of active organization and self-representation by members of the second generation, and in doing so, contributes to the nascent theorization of the role of the second generation in cultural diaspora formation. For this, the paper draws on ethnic and migration studies, engaging in particular within the subfield of second-generation studies. It develops not only understandings of cultural change in an immigrant context over two generations past and present, but also illuminates current inter-generational dynamics as they are taking shape, colored by youth cultural styles and expressions, media practices, and institutional familiarity and embedding that are all particular to the everyday lives of these second-generation actors. The paper posits that influential sociological understandings of second-generation dynamics tend to fall short of explaining the complex manifestations of political positioning that the second generation are exhibiting.
