Urban Villages and Local Identities

Kurt E. Kinbacher and Timothy R. Mahoney have provided a delightful introduction to the historical and contemporary experience of three diverse ethnic groups in Lincoln, Nebraska, and have done so within a sophisticated framework of ethnicity and transnationalism. They lay out this framework in a comprehensive introductory chapter, follow up with a chapter devoted to each of the three groups, and conclude with a chapter that attempts to create a comparative framework for considering all three groups. The strength of this work may also be its weakness. The bulk of each chapter devoted to the individual ethnic groups is taken up by extensive historical background information based on secondary sources—informative to readers unfamiliar with the history of each group but offering little new knowledge to scholars familiar with the groups’ histories. Kinbacher and Mahoney's work is especially strong in its focus on the roles of race, language maintenance, foods, music, geographic concentration, religion, generation cohorts, and kinship relations in the creation, transformation, re-creation, and maintenance of these urban ethnic villages and their ethnic identities. Like many of their contemporaries, the authors have a tendency to overuse the currently fashionable notion of transnationalism, but they provide a good analysis of its role for each of the ethnic groups in the book's comparative chapter

Ethnic group · Ethnic history · Genealogy · Kinship · Linguistics · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Transnationalism · Vietnamese · Anthropology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy