The literature on gender adaptation and migration has illuminated a general pattern of changing gender relations within immigrant families and communities. Immigrant women are accomplishing this task with the aid of economic and power resources they obtain in the host society. Still little theoretical or empirical attention has been directed at immigrant groups that maintain patriarchal gender relations.To fill this void, this study examines Iraqi Chaldean immigrants who are a group from an understudied region of the world and who retain patriarchy authority in their families and community organizations. Patriarchal dominance is a cultural feature particular to Near East and Central Asia given that the extended family is the dominant household arrangement. Beyond households, kinship networks provide access to most social, political and economic opportunities, making kinship ties persistent and the gender order patriarchal. Evaluating the social processes immigrants from this geographic region experience is crucial given the current political involvement of the United States and with the increasing number of immigrants and refugees arriving for settlement. To address our needs for more primary research on Near East immigrants, life history data is collected from fifty-one respondents to address the issue of patriarchal persistence. Respondents explain their migration motivations, community building and family history in a dialogical interview. The interviews are low intervention and seen as polyphonic dialogues understandable to in-group members.The theoretical approach builds on a structuration model identifying that emotional and symbolic structures in gender relations create normative constraints against immigrant and second-generation men and women. Within this framework, social reproduction occurs. Men accept these constraints acting as responsible patriarchs for their extended families, while women negotiate within woman-to-woman networks for desired concessions without a wholesale challenge to existing patriarchal gender relations.This research provides an additional case study and expands our theoretical horizons beyond power and economic factors. Further, pre-migration factors indicate that men dominate most social and economic resources leaving women in a dependent state. After migration, ethnic traditions within the community and family build formidable emotional and symbolic structures that extend patriarchal customs into the second generation.
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