Anywhere under the sun: Afro-Caribbean immigrants' perspectives of U.S. citizenship and experience of cultural transition.

With a goal to better understand what it means to become a U.S. American citizen, the investigator conducted a qualitative study that uncovered the narratives of 11 Afro-Caribbean immigrants now living in Phoenix, Arizona, including herself as a research participant. Grounded theory analysis of the combined auto-ethnographic and interview data, yielded narratives that support three conclusions: (1) Afro-Caribbean immigrants in the study see becoming U.S. citizens as an act of transgression; (2) Afro-Caribbean immigrants construct security within a philosophy of mobility in an effort to recapture their agency and humanity in racialized contexts; and, (3) many Afro-Caribbean immigrants in the study use code-switching as a central strategy in the presentation of self in everyday life in the United States.