Adapting to a Different Role

By Jane O''Reilly.

On the Lower East Side of New York City, the subway still stops at Delancey Street. The name conjures history, evoking the early decades of the century, when waves of women arrived from Lithuania, Italy, Ireland, Poland, Russia. For them, the New World turned out to be the cold-water tenements, sweatshops and street stalls near the station. The photographs of those women -- staggering under bundles of piecework balanced on their heads, bent over sewing machines, huddled with their children in the dank rooms where entire families worked, slept, ate and died -- have become images for the way many Americans think about women immigrants of that period. Brave, dogged, desperate. And heroines.

The children of those women grew up and moved to Long Island, Miami, Houston and Hollywood. Some of them built shopping malls or went to medical school or wrote television sitcoms. Their stories became literature, their jokes part of the national frame of reference. Assimilation was complete. Now other women from other areas of the world are taking their places.

The traditional picture of immigration is of men coming first and eventually sending for their families. But today experts estimate that more than half of the U.S.'s legal, and nearly half of the illegal, immigrants are women. Even undocumented Mexican immigrants, historically mostly male, are increasingly female. Many immigrant women are rural and have left their husbands and family behind.

They are not dependents. They are pioneers, able to find work, to send money home, perhaps to start what the Dominicans call the cadena, a chain of migration linking one immigrant to another. They seem to be everywhere, checking the luggage at airport security gates, working in the emergency rooms of inner-city hospitals, cleaning hotel rooms, selling lottery tickets at newsstands, peddling flowers on city streets, even writing scholarly papers on such topics as "Coping Mechanisms of Immigrant Family Heads." They subsidize yuppie gentrification, performing the unseen, labor-intensive, minimum-wage tasks: folding the towels in the health spa, making the cold- pasta takeout salads, sewing the rhinestones on disco frocks.

Today crowds of immigrant women ride the subway into Manhattan to work, many of them still crowding into a Lower East Side station, this one called Broadway-Lafayette. Recently, among the riders waiting on the platform, there was a woman in a sari reading the matrimonial ads in the English- language newspaper India Abroad, looking at one "inviting correspondence" for "a well-educated professional with a green card." Next to her a woman from Viet Nam folded herself into the sit-squat of Southeast Asia, while she spooned American mashed pears into a baby in a folding stroller. Farther along the platform, a woman from Nicaragua, now a U.S. citizen, explained the subway system to her niece. The older woman, in secret and at great expense, had retrieved her niece the week before from a paid guide, a so-called coyote, who had smuggled the girl across the border at Brownsville, Texas.

Women migrate for the same reasons that men do: to survive, because money has become worthless at home, to find schooling and jobs. But they also have reasons of their own. Single women may leave to escape the domination of their old-fashioned families, who want them to stay in the house and accept an arranged marriage. Peasant women have lost their traditional role in society; low-wage jobs have taken the place of a poor but independent subsistence life on the land. Political Economist Saskia Sassen-Koob of Columbia University has described the process that has created a growing female labor force as the "feminization of the job supply."

Multinational corporations help to mobilize female migration outside the U.S. by hiring young women, who leave the countryside to find work in their nation's cities and in special export-processing zones. On the assembly lines of export plants in such countries as South Korea, Haiti, Mexico and Taiwan, they learn to put together computer chips, sew flannel pajamas and cover baseballs. Moved irretrievably beyond the old ways by their experience, they tend to migrate to the same kind of factories or to other jobs in the U.S. In a way, assembly plants just south of the Mexican border are staging areas for women's immigration.

All newcomers have mysterious lessons to learn about getting along in America. Some refugees from remote, isolated areas in Kampuchea have made a leap so broad that they do not understand gas stoves, toilets or refrigeration. But only women immigrants have been taught to be, or at least , to appear to be, passive, obedient and submissive. A Vietnamese woman, for example, finds that the Confucian ideals of cong, dung, ngon and hanh -- versatile homemaker, subtle beauty, soft voice, gentle behavior -- do not always work as survival skills in the U.S. Said one such woman to her counselor in California: "It is harder to learn to be aggressive than I thought."

Both women and men often work at unpleasant, unending and ill-paid jobs. But only women struggle under the burden of the "double day," the cultural imperative to perform the household tasks as well as the economic need to work. They are willing to endure grinding labor for the sake of their children's futures; sadly, finding help to care for those children may be the single greatest problem that some immigrant women face. In the women's home countries, kinfolk often help to care for young children. Without the support of a household of female relatives in the U.S., a mother must pay between $15 and $25 a week for the care of one child, far too much for someone with several children who is earning the minimum wage of $3.35 an hour. To get a better job, she must learn to speak English, but school is impossible without child care. The cycle is most frustrating for those who are widowed, abandoned, separated by war or divorced.

Few immigrant women find the ease or the education they had envisioned. School is too expensive and they are too tired after work. Those without skills find jobs as maids, pick vegetables and fruits in the fields or clean up litter along roadways. A step up are jobs as waitresses or in factories. Sweatshops are coming back, both in the old garment trade, still a prime source of entry jobs, and in the new, high-tech electronics industries. Within the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, which has a membership that is 85% female, male workers hold virtually all the better- paying jobs. But the power of organization is still a new idea to most immigrant women, and it is one that appeals to those who are especially vulnerable: heads of households. To Chinese women, for example, says Muzaffar Chishti of the ILGWU, "a union is the first stepping-stone into a mainstream American institution."

A 1983 report for the ILGWU documents such abuses in the nation's nonunion shops as subminimum wages, homework, excessively long hours and unsafe working conditions. There are an estimated 1,200 sweatshops in Los Angeles, and 2,000 to 3,000 of them may exist in New York City. Women in New York's , Chinatown work nine or ten hours a day with only Sundays off, taking home a mere $80 to $120 a week. They complain of headaches and stomach pains, caused by exhaustion and strain. "They are really suffering from depression," says Chia-ling Kuo, a research associate in anthropology at the City University of New York. "They are not really in the mainstream. Their joy is Sunday dim sum and Chinese movies. Most people in Chinatown don't ever have a chance to speak to an American."

At first bewilderment and loneliness mark immigrant women's lives. "You often see Hispanic men sitting in a bar at night or playing dominoes outside. Women don't have that," says Gail Lerner, an administrative officer for the World Council of Churches. "Isolation is great. The extended family, the neighbors they depended on in their home country are gone. I'm not talking about kaffeeklatsches, but physical and moral support." Immigrant women also suffer the frustration of being regarded at home as fringe contributors, when in reality their wages are almost always essential to the family's survival. Some immigrant women have been physically abused by employers. Many of the women among Southeast Asian boat people were abducted and raped by marauding pirates; they still suffer shame and a haunting sense that they have somehow betrayed their families. Worse yet, once in the U.S., their men, who may have trouble finding work, sometimes turn on them. Says Gaoly Yang, who helped battered Hmong women from Laos who now live in St. Paul form a support group: "If you don't produce income, it seems like you're losing control of your family. The men sometimes felt the women had too much freedom. In the group we say to the women, 'Don't overdo it; use freedom wisely.' "

And yet, for most of these women, no matter how hard life is here, it is better than it was there. The possibilities for single women are as dramatic as releasing a bird from its cage. Even for married women, immigration to the U.S. is a transforming process. The experience of earning money is central to their delighted discovery of their own worth. Some 50% of immigrant women work, about the same as U.S. women. Even for those who have traded their white-collar jobs at home for blue-collar jobs here, the drop in status is offset by the satisfaction of a significant rise in income and the hope of moving on. Anna Cruz-Vasquez is 56 and divorced. She came alone from the Dominican Republic in 1977 and with a garment-industry job that has never paid % more than $130 a week has managed to send for four of her six children. "I lived on 150 pesos ($48) a month in Santo Domingo," she says. "This is paradise. I am working. I am earning money. I am driving. I am buying things I want. My priority is for the children."

In Los Angeles, Chinese-born Angela Hom, 21, grew up in a sweatshop owned by her parents, where women's blouses were made. "When I was little, we would work until 1 in the morning, then sleep on the cutting table," she says. This year she wrote her senior thesis at Scripps College in Claremont, Calif., on garment workers. "This is my parents' dream," she says. "This is America. America gives rights to women that would be unattainable if we were back in our homeland."

It is on the question of home, and of the desire to return, that the difference between men and women immigrants finally becomes clear. Many of the men continue to yearn for the old country, the old ways. They had status in their homelands simply because they were men. They had hours to spend with their cronies, and no one ever expected them to clean the house. Most of the women surveyed do not want to go back, and they work to root themselves in the U.S. The price is high, but the reward is something they would find hard to achieve at home: a sense of their own autonomy. Says one successful Cuban- American businesswoman in Miami, Maria Elena Torano Pantin, "I became my own person. Not my parents' person, not my kids' person and not my husband's person. But mine." Mali Peruma Davidson, who came from Sri Lanka, says, "Oh, my God, I'm glad I'm in America! In Sri Lanka you are always subjugated to your husband's whims. I would never go back, not to the servants, not to the beauty. I really appreciate being in this country. It is a privilege."

With reporting by Cathy Booth/ New York and Laura Meyers/ Los Angeles