The 'flexible' immigrant

Feminist scholars in unpacking the relations of power at the household level, for example, show the deep connections between gender 4 identities and the structuring of men’s and women’s employment; as Buzar, Ogden and Hall (2005:424) comment, a “growing body of evidence suggests that the negotiation of gender roles in the household can affect the flexibilization of family and employment patterns i [...] In this longitudinal study we capture something of the processual nature of the households, which are embedded in sets of local and non-local relations that take on greater or less significance over the five-year period of the study as members of the household in question work to create a socially, economically and culturally satisfying life in Canada. [...] Observation of the strategies of households and their members over time, and how these are represented by them in terms of hopes, desires and meanings of family, opens up a view of the ‘flexible household’ (or its converse) in the context of a discourse of those immigrants mostly likely to achieve ‘successful integration’ and contribute to Canada’s economic goals. [...] The stories therefore varied, with some representing experiences from an individual’s viewpoint and others a shared, 1 The Tri-Cities is composed of 3 adjacent municipalities: Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam and Port Moody 2 In the cases of the households in East Vancouver, the sequence of interviews were conducted by the one author, Creese, and a colleague, Dan Hiebert, in the first 2 years and the fin [...] The Marcos family in East Vancouver came from the Philippines, and the Khalili family in the Tri-Cities came from Iran; both had been in Canada just under a year at the time of the first interview.