Over the last 25 years hundreds of thousands of new immigrants have been arriving in New York City from rural areas near Fuzhou, southeast China. Fuzhounese immigrants, many undocumented, work primarily in restaurant, construction and garment industries. In the last few years, their children have begun to attend Baruch College—a senior college in the City University of New York—in increasing numbers, adding a unique ethnic component to the Chinese student population. Our study of Fuzhounese students at Baruch explores both immigration and education experiences, their challenges and successes in college and their complicated construction and negotiation of their Fuzhounese identity that allows them to access the cultural capital for success in higher education while also severely limiting their social networks and potentially their social mobility.
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