Abstract
In Making the Immigrant Soldier: How Race, Ethnicity, Class, and Gender Intersect in the U.S. Military, Cristina Ioana-Dragomir allots the core chapters to three people whom she interviewed, spent time with, and followed on social media between 2008 and 2012. The common thread throughout their stories is that they emigrated to the United States as adults and enlisted in the U.S. military as a vehicle through which to navigate U.S. social and professional life. Along the way all three obtained U.S. citizenship and its associated benefits. Dragomir's interlocutors, much like college students in my own classroom who enlist in the military, seem driven to join the military by the desire for stability and a respected profession more so than a desire to serve their country or go to war.
Through the eyes of Lily, Alexa, and Vikrant, readers traverse a number of issues that I understood through the lenses of key social theorists, although Dragomir often opts not to engage the theorists or name them directly. Dragomir's accounts are vast and sociologically rich, encompassing examples of what I understood as Foucauldian self-discipline and surveillance, Durkheimian rituals and collective effervescence, Bourdieu's habitus, Mertonian strain theory, the performance of gender, as well as a number of other issues related to attachment to and ascription of racial and ethnic labels.
Dragomir’s writing shines when she sheds light on the differences in how Lily, who is originally from Romania, speaks of her personal life and past and how she talks about her U.S. military experiences. Accounts of her personal life are vivid, emotional, nonlinear, and chaotic. In contrast, Lily's accounts of military life are cautious, structured, and delivered at a slow pace. Dragomir deploys Foucauldian thinking to make sense of this self-discipline and self-surveillance—even when Lily is dressed as a civilian and is in private, once having joined the military, she is cautious about how she speaks of the institution, both in content and in tone. Vikrant, another interlocutor who is originally from India, also surveilled, monitored, and shaped himself even when not on duty. He exercised to shape his body, and reproduced speech patterns learned from his military “bros,” all of which can be seen in how his social media posts have evolved over time. Dragomir's use of unedited social media posts to show this evolution was effective, and I found Vikrant's enthusiastic absorption of U.S. culture (or performance of this) endearing and familiar.
Although Dragomir does not mention Durkheim, I understood Lily's emotional attachment to and group identification with the military through a Durkheimian lens. Lily was not nationalistic or patriotic upon joining the military; nevertheless, by going through the day-to-day motions and rituals required of her, she also started to believe that what she was doing was important, meaningful, and a service to her country.
Another strength of the book is Dragomir's ability to make you feel like you are there, sitting at the table with Alexa, a second interlocutor, and her sister, preparing dinner and listening to the story of her military experience as if she were your own dear friend. As easily as I was drawn into these scenes, however, I was abruptly taken out in several ways. First, while we learn that Lily is from Romania, and the third interlocutor Vikrant is from India, Dragomir refers to Alexa, as being from “South America.” Dragomir explains that because Alexa doesn't feel connected to the countries where she was raised (at least two different countries in South America) that she prefers the generic “South America.” This choice is distracting, as I continuously wondered where Alexa had spent the first decades of her life. Second, when Dragomir writes verbatim what Alexa was telling her in Spanish, there are a number of spelling mistakes and missing accents. Having grown up in a multilingual and multicultural household, I appreciated the occasional use of Spanish and Romanian—it helped fill out the personalities of her research participants. The errors, however, are quite jarring.
Dragomir posits that the book explores how race, ethnicity, gender, and class intersect to obstruct upward mobility within the U.S. military, but can also forge new pathways forward in ways that may have gone unnoticed. In my reading, what comes through most clearly is the latter. Lily, for example, was able to use her Whiteness to blend in and use her gender to her advantage by finding positions in traditionally female roles of education in a way that allowed her to advance, earn a degree, and ultimately find a rewarding job outside the military in a field of her choice. Both Alexa and Vikrant are considered non-White by their peers and their supervisors, which had social repercussions in terms of fitting in and feeling like part of the group. Vikrant suffered ignorant comments from his peers because of his racial/ethnic appearance (e.g., being called “Osama,” in reference to Osama bin Laden, the Saudi Arabian-born founder of the terrorist group al Qaeda), but he seemed to have found a social group with his military buddies, largely aided by his male gender.
As for Alexa, Dragomir argues that it was her female body that prohibited her from fully taking advantage of the U.S. military as a vehicle for career growth and economic stability. The examples provided in this section, however, were almost all related to Alexa's poor health. In the appendix we find out that the health issues were associated with Alexa's reproductive organs. Thus, connecting Alexa's experience to the long history in the United States of minimizing pain experienced by women of color may help explain why her supervisors and peers did not take her pain seriously. In this way, Alexa's health issues could be understood as an issue at the intersection of misogyny and racism; however, this is not how Dragomir explains Alexa's marginalization.
At the end of the appendix, Dragomir gently suggests that readers “take notice of the lingering silences within the book” (p. 176). This final note is in reference to missing details about her research participants, omissions that might jeopardize their job security or immigration status. I found this a meaningful way to close the book and an insight that I will take with me in my scholarly pursuits and also into my personal life. There is much to learn by paying attention to what is not said.