ABSTRACT
The experience of twenty-first-century immigrant and refugee communities in the United States, formed out of global upheavals in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, tests the observations made about primarily European immigrants in ethnic enclaves of the twentieth century. New African and Caribbean immigration in New York City, for example, brings out the growing diversity and folk cultural distinctions in the ethnic community now overgeneralized as “black.” Within the social dynamics of new global migrations is a phenomenon of “transnationalism” fostered by advances in transportation and communication. In this process, persons migrate regularly on a global scale and form temporary cultural connections, such as “international” student populations. The record of folklife preceding these developments reveals America as a place where ethnic folklife is at once vigorously maintained, easily dissolved, frequently transformed and integrated, and energetically revived.
