Introduction: Reimagining Migrant Generations

We live in an era of globalization involving large-scale international migration and increasing transnational connectedness that have con- tributed to the emergence and growth of diaspora communities. In this context, questions of how diaspora migrants adapt to host societies and engage with their homelands are becoming increasingly important economically, politically, socially, and culturally—to diasporic groups themselves, to their homelands, and to the countries where they settle. Yet little is known about internal diversity and stratification within indi- vidual diasporas. Our understanding of how pre-migration experiences shape migrants' adaptation where they resettle and their homeland in- volvements, as well as their relations to other diaspora members settled elsewhere, remains especially inadequate. This Introduction and the special issue more generally advance the understanding of diasporas and their internal diversity, analytically and descriptively, through a his- torically grounded conceptual generational frame. The concept of generation has been fundamental to the scholarly understanding of migrant adaptation, especially within the assimilation- ist and transnational frameworks. Most typically, studies of migrant generations focus on contrasts between the foreign-born, defined as the first generation, and their progeny, born where they resettle and defined as the second generation. In these studies, generation is used in the sense of kinship descent, focused on genealogical remove from the per- son within a family who moved to a new country. Within the social sciences more broadly, as David Kertzer (1983) has shown, generation is also used to refer to age- or birth date-based cohorts with distinctive historical experiences, as in "the 1968 generation" or "generation Y" ;t o life-stage groups, such as "the college generation"; and to people living in a particular historical period, such as "the generation of 1914." These meanings of generation are distinct from each other, but as Nancy Diaspora 18:1/2 (2009) / published Winter 2015