Transforming Tongan Identity
Tongan American parents struggle to raise children with an increasingly American outlook

By Laurie Kawakami, Staff Writer

CARSON, Calif. -- At 6’2” and 300 lbs, Chris Maumalanga’s size speaks volumes but his heart tells even more.    

After years of playing professional football, the former New York Giants defensive tackle was shocked by an increase in youth violence in his small Tongan American community near Carson, the area where he first learned to play football.  

Chris Maumalanga leads the first annual Tongan high school conference. Photo by Laurie Kawakami

Last year he moved home and found a new kind of fame.

“Los Angeles was pulling me back,” he said.  “I did some self-reflection and thought about what I could do from my end for my people.”

For Maumalanga, the growing Tongan American community was at a critical juncture.  After a youth shooting last June at local church, he corralled community leaders and launched the first annual Tongan high school conference at Cal State Dominguez Hills to reach impressionable Tongan American kids before local gangs do. 
           
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Nearly 300 students were bussed in for the day-long conference in March that invited Tongan American youth and their parents to talk about the struggles of fitting into an unfamiliar American system.

For many, it was the first opportunity to bring together the old and new guard of Tongans, an intergenerational mix to address the social, economic and educational challenges in the community. 

While the majority of California’s 20,000 Tongans are concentrated in the Bay Area in San Mateo County, roughly one fourth are based near Los Angeles, in the cities of Carson, Lennox and Hawthorne. 

Tongan immigrants began making their way to the United States during the 1970s, looking for better economic and educational opportunities.  Many parents, accustomed to life in Tonga, with its almost carefree communal existence, found themselves struggling to raise children with an increasingly American outlook. 
   
The result is more than a 50 percent high school drop out rate for Tongan youth, high teenage pregnancy rates and an overrepresentation in juvenile hall and adult correctional facilities.  Along with Samoans, Tongans also have the lowest per capita income than any other major racial or ethnic group in Southern California.

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Centered in the South Pacific, the kingdom of Tonga is home to about 100,000 people over 170 islands where a powerful sense of family honor ensures that children stay in line.  A vast network of extended families works to raise their kids together, making certain that children receive a wealth of supervision. 

But as families came to the United States, the difficulties of transitioning from a communal lifestyle into an individualistic culture overwhelmed many Tongan parents. 

Strong cultural pride rooted in the Tonga’s history as one of the few kingdoms in the South Pacific never to be colonized, also prevents many families from reaching out for help. 

“We’re a proud people,” Maumalanga says.  “That’s why you don’t see a community of Tongans living in the projects.  They’d rather go back to Tonga.”

As many Tongan parents are forced to work one or more jobs, less time is dedicated to supervising their children, leading to an increase in drugs and gangs for many Tongan youth. 
           
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The violence came to a head last June when Tongan American youth were involved in a drive-by shooting at the Lennox United Methodist Church.  Los Angeles County social worker Vaka Faletau said many of the altercations, including another drive-by shooting a year earlier, have been Tongan-on-Tongan violence. 

“It hits too close to home,” he said. 

As a result, Faletau met with community leaders last August to coordinate a town hall meeting with the Hawthorne Police Department and the Lennox Sheriff’s department to build bridges with the Tongan American community. 

“The meeting was eye-opening for a lot of parents,” Faletau said.  “They didn’t realize something as simple as attire can be associated with gang members.”

The town hall meeting focused on their experiences with harassment, the police, the abuse, profiling and racial discrimination. The meeting spurred the larger Tongan high school conference which featured successful Tongan role models in athletics, law and entertainment fields. 

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Other Pacific Islanders like the Samoan Americans are concentrated in the same areas in Los Angeles and face similar struggles.  But the Samoan community in Southern California is six times larger than the Tongan community, with nearly 32,000 people. 

“With the Samoans, we get along,” said 17-year-old Long Beach Poly senior Nia Tuitavake, who attended the conference with her family.  “But there is tension that comes from the pride issue – who is better than who, Tongans versus Samoans.”

Emalini Naa pulled her two high school children out of class to attend the conference.  As part of the first generation of Tongans growing up in Culver City, she never experienced violence in her community.    

But when her family of 8 children moved to Inglewood, her kids were exposed to increasing peer pressure to join gangs. 

“Us as parents need to get educated about what is happening to our kids.  Better late than never,” Naa says. 

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Maumalanga, who recently formed the grassroots Tongan American Youth Foundation, hopes to continue the conference as an annual event to inspire and impact Tongan American youth in a positive way. 

He would like to see a generation of educated Tongan children who can handle the cultural pressure and the financial constraints that many of their parents still face.

“These struggles are found in every ethnic population,” he says.  “But because of our culture, there is an identity crisis in being Tongan and American at the same time.”

Write to Laurie Kawakami at lkawakam@usc.edu