Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

During the last century, the world has become more connected than ever before. Improvements in transportation and modifications in immigration lawhave meant increasingly diverse populations for many countries to a degree that would not have been possible a century ago. Today, persons displaced from their countries of origin by wars and civil strife constitute much of the foreign-born population in countries around the world. Disagreement over who has the responsibility to respond to the world's problems and what the response should be is a critical issue as we begin the twenty-first century. This chapter presents an overview of refugee resettlement in the global arena, as well as the more specific policies and procedures in the United States, in order to set the context for resettlement services for refugees in local communities.

The lives of refugees, like others, are constructed in broad and multiple contexts. For refugees, these contexts include the family, neighborhood, and community in the part of the world from which they immigrated and those same broad groupings in the new host society. The experiences and perceptions of refugees are shaped by the opportunities, limitations, possibilities, and constraints that are naturally available in all of these milieus. Our conceptual framework for the study of Bosnian refugees draws on a number of models. These include an ecosystems perspective for refugee populations, a framework that lays out the stages of refugee experience, and an acculturation model for refugee adaptation.We also discuss the resettlement experience as the product of the interaction of the human and social capital that refugees bring to a new culture with the characteristics of the host society. We propose an ecosystems model of refugee resettlement as our theoretical framework for this volume.

As we park the car and cross the street to the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees, we become a part of a colorful group coming through the doors: two Sudanese young men, coming for their English as a second language classes upstairs; an older gentleman originally from Cambodia checking on employment opportunities this week; a Russian woman with two towheaded children under her arms; and several young adults from Somalia, their vividly patterned native clothing mixing with heavy woolens probably insufficient protection against these upstate New York winters. Sights and sounds in the community have changed over the last decade or so, and today, these are a part of the inner city's experiences. This is the process of acculturation at work—two or more groups whose contact experiences result in cultural changes for each—or a transformative process of change (Berry, 2001, p. 616).

Life in prewar Bosnia was shaped by the rhythm and character of everyday experience at the local level as well as by the larger historical forces that formed group identities in the region. As we will see, daily experience was different for those who lived in rural towns and villages than it was for those who lived in one of the large cities of Bosnia. We explore the nature of everyday life before the war largely because one's past provides a framework for evaluating and comparing current experience. This is especially true for refugees who have been forcibly removed from their former lives (Miller ., 2002). This chapter introduces the texture of everyday life as revealed through the voices of Bosnians themselves. The chapter also reviews, very briefly, the forces that shaped group identity in the region as a prelude to a discussion of the historical origins of the war itself.

During March of 1992, preparations were made for war, following the declaration of independence of Bosnia-Herzegovina on March 3. Burg and Shoup (1999, p. 119) characterize the startup of the conflicts:

Understanding trauma and helping refugees to cope with its impact is “… one of the most critical clinical, societal and research challenges facing the health communities” in the new millennium (Miller, 1996, p. xxii). To be human is to be exposed to harmful, as well as to positive, life events, and we saw in Chapters 4 and 5 that Bosnian refugees often experienced extremely negative events in the course of war. In this chapter we discuss trauma and its effects on the lives of refugees, and we consider the proper of trauma in understanding Bosnian families in resettlement. This is followed by a discussion of the experiences of Bosnian refugees, who shared with us their stories of escape and life in refugee camps prior to arrival in the United States. War and resulting displacement can be a major source of trauma for refugees, but traumatic stress is created through resettlement activities as well.

This young man was in his late twenties when he arrived in Utica in 1996 with his wife and young child. His family was one of a large group of Bosnian families who resettled in Utica during the “middle years” of Bosnian resettlement—1996–1997.

Acculturation is a complex process of adaptation between two cultures (Potocky-Tripodi, 2002) and is further defined as “the extent to which ethnic-cultural minorities participate in the cultural traditions, values, and beliefs of their own culture versus those of the dominant…society” (Landrine&Klonoff, 1996). This chapter considers acculturation outcomes for our respondents from the standpoint of economic and socio-cultural forms of adaptation to the dominant culture of the host society after the initial period of adjustment. Psychological adaptation is discussed in Chapter 9.

An evaluation of the psychological adaptation of our respondents takes into account the traditional measures of physical health, mental health, and life satisfaction. The theoretical frameworks described in Chapter 2 provide the context for this assessment. The ecosystems perspective elucidates the interrelationships of people with their environments; the stages of migration framework describes the temporal phases of prewar life, war experiences, displacement and transit, and resettlement; and the acculturation model tells us that refugees and host societies interact to influence strategies used by refugees in adapting to new environments. Our respondents' states of well-being are influenced by their prewar and postwar ecosystems and by factors encountered in various phases of migration. The psychological well-being of refugee families is also influenced by the degree of acculturative stress experienced in a new culture.

Our task in this chapter is to review what we have learned about the resettlement experience of these Bosnian families in light of what we know about the families themselves and in terms of the features of their host community—Utica, NewYork. Our research, and that of others (Colic-Peisker, 2003; Colic-Peisker & Tilbury, 2003; Colic-Peisker & Walker, 2003), suggests that the resettlement experience of refugees and their approach to acculturation are largely shaped by the interaction of two sets of variables, namely the characteristics of the refugees themselves and the conditions they encounter in the host society. The salient characteristics of the refugees include their social capital, that is, their education, skills and aptitudes, their age on arrival, and their ability to speak or to learn to speak English. Their age on arrival often determines their ability and willingness to learn the language. Finally, the resettlement experience can also be critically affected by the refugees' experiences in war and transit.