Cultural Capital

Oddly, immigration studies have provided a favorable context for the application of cultural capital theory as well as for its criticism and improvement. This advantage arises from often-remarked disparities in socioeconomic mobility of immigrant groups. Some groups move up the social ladder more quickly than others (consider Jews, Koreans, and Cubans). Often this disparity arises because immigrants bring quite different financial resources with them. Some are wealthy on arrival, others impoverished. These cases are easy to explain. The most perplexing cases have been those in which equally impoverished immigrant groups obtain unequal socioeconomic results after one or two generations. Such cases compel attention to intergroup disparities in cultural capital. For instance, in 1900, Jewish, Polish, and Italian immigrants arrived in the United States. All were equally and wretchedly poor, but two decades later, the Jews were well ahead of the others in business ownership. Similarly, in the 1920s, southern-born black Americans and Caribbean-born black immigrants arrived in New York City. Both groups were impoverished, but the Caribbean blacks soon owned more businesses than did the Americanborn blacks. Again, in the 1960s, Cubans and Haitians arrived in Miami as impoverished immigrants, but a generation later, Cubans had built a flourishing and lucrative enclave economy whereas Haitians still worked in the informal sector.

In all these cases, socioeconomically mobile immigrant groups had more access than less mobile counterparts to vocationally relevant cultural capital. In two cases, this capital belonged to ethnic rather than class cultures, but it served nonetheless as a functional equivalent to the vocational culture of the business class. Among the Jews and the Caribbean blacks, entrepreneurship had been honed and built into the ethnic culture by centuries of harsh necessity. Although poor on arrival, they knew how to run businesses. Expropriated by the communists, Cuban business owners left their money and property in their island homeland, but they took with them their cultural capital. Thanks to this cultural knowledge, they recouped their money and property within two generations through entrepreneurship. Knowing how to run a business is an obvious advantage for socioeconomic mobility. Cultural capital's vocational component conveys exactly this know-how. Like the aesthetic knowledge that Bourdieu emphasized, this vocational capital is transmitted intergenerationally in households. Normally, we do not expect poor people to understand entrepreneurship, but infrequently they do, and, when they do, they obtain socioeconomic advantages from the knowledge.