Migration as Globalization One of the striking aspects of cultural globalization has been the migration
Migration as Globalization One of the striking aspects of cultural globalization has been the migration
of many groups of people to create cultural subgroups within other cultures. This is, in many ways, an old and ongoing process (Nederveen Pieterse,
1 04 Chapter 4 technological and economic changes that enable other aspects of globaliza
tion. What is perhaps most different about the new migration is the degree to which migrants are often more able to stay in touch with their home cul tures, both by travel and by media. Some have argued that a new kind of transnational community is formed by "the growing number of persons who live dual lives, speaking two languages, having homes in two countries, and making a living through continuous regular contact across national borders" (Portes, Guarnizo, & Landolt, 1 999, p. 217). Such groups include Latino migrants in the United States, Chinese in Malaysia, Turks in Germany and the United Kingdom, and many others. Although Latinos and Chinese have been living in and moving to those areas for hundreds of years, the Turks are more recent migrants, so some of these new patterns are layered on old communities, whereas some are genuinely new within the past 1 00 years.
With more global reach for media such as film, videocassettes, direct satellite broadcasting, cable TV, and the Internet, migrant groups have an interesting role as hybrid audiences, trying to maintain contact with home while often using local media to acculturate at least partially into the domi nant culture. Sometimes, they use media from home to resist accultura tion. This phenomenon became clear in the 1 980s with minority-language communities renting videotapes from back home at ethnic grocery stores
(Dobrow, 1989). It accelerated with the proliferation of different translocal and transnational-language channels in the 1990s, using satellite technology
(Kumar, 2006), and others in the late 1 990s and after using Web sites, music/video download sites, and streaming video (Mallapragada, 2006). Sometimes, migrants even create new ethnic media in their host cultures, for
example, Iranian television programming in Los Angeles (Naficy, 1993 ), South Asian Web sites in Northern California (Mallapragada, 2006), or a variety of immigrant ethnic-language media in Australia (Cunningham, 2001; Sinclair & Cunningham, 2000).
A number of the world's current ethnic subgroups originally moved along with empire and conquest. The British not only went to India themselves, but also took Indian nationals with them to other parts of the empire, such as the
Caribbean or South Africa, to work in the colonial bureaucracy and trade. Even more dramatically, colonizers in the Americas brought in millions of African slaves. The people who moved as part of the empire-building wave and their descendants became minority populations in countries like the United States, added to hybrid or mixed populations in countries like Brazil, and constituted majorities in countries like Haiti or Jamaica. In a few cases, particularly in Latin America, large populations grew up as a synthesis or
miscegenation between populations. In Latin America, many people have mixed European, indigenous, and African parentage as discussed extensively
Creating Global, U.S., and Transnational Television Spaces
in Chapter 2. Although the languages that emerged were often those of the European conquerors, the cultures were more mixed, such as the mestizo culture of Mexico (Rowe & Schelling, 1 991).
Current economic and technological conditions allow for more and more dramatic migration. Most of the ethnic groups that once made up Western Europe had been there throughout recorded history, although some groups migrated from the Urals or the Middle East. Now, the ethnic face of Europe
is changing more rapidly as new groups come in from Africa, Asia, and other areas. Such migration, current and past, is a result of structural possibilities
created by political decisions, such as the tolerance or encouragement of slave importation, and economic and technological changes, such as eco nomic colonization of Latin America and the diffusion of ships and planes. However, migration also redraws cultural and economic structures, which change the environment within which media operate.