Newly arrived from Cuba, Angelica, Dora, Marina, and Damaris attempted to negotiate new surroundings and immigrant identities, building a sense of home for themselves and their families. Data from qualitative interviews, classroom observations, and focus group conversations revealed hopes that by acquiring English language skills, they would improve their quality of life in their new country. Struggles included personal factors situated in their pasts in Cuba and their new surrounds in the Miami Cuban exile enclave, contexts that were further complicated by uncertain expectations of new lives in Miami and the overwhelming task of learning a new language at a local adult education center.
Van Kempen discusses the songs and traditions of the Saramaccan peoples of the Upper Suriname. The music and lyrics of the Saramaccans depicts the troubles the ethnic groups have experienced in the 1990s from transmigration ordered by the government, typically lamenting or singing the praises of their old African villages, and cursing Western engineers for the uprooting of their cultures.;
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
311 p, This book contains a study of linguistic peculiarities phonological of the Spanish-Venezuelan spoken in Barlovento and Bobures, and contains a vocabulary section.;
