Associations: Mediating Self-Identities

Abstract

The “leftist patriotic schools”, which catered largely to new immigrant children, have formed, in effect, an invisible inner city that closes in an identity, an experience and an ideology entirely different from those on the outside. A common school life and a common identity label imposed upon them from the outside have resulted in a particular draw between these immigrant children so that each becomes “one of us”. Since it is built upon the less sophisticated rapport of former schoolmates, their friendships have lasted relatively longer. The distance in time and space has always been an arch-nemesis of relationships: the passage of time reduces mellowness to insipidity, while the widening of space alienates the originally familiar. There are exceptions, of course, but the psychological closeness that new immigrants once felt for one another as “one of us”, and the friendships they built among themselves as former schoolmates, could never have endured and grown and continued to play a positive role in immigrant entrepreneurship had it not been for the existence of intermediary organisations.