Lori Gouner
LITR 4333
Dr. White
April 22, 2002

Capitalism and the Immigrant Identity

Max Weber’s writing of The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, published in Germany in 1904 has been known as one of the most controversial works in all of the social sciences.  His ideas on theology, sociology, and economic history have since shaped the way in which American culture understands itself.  “For Weber the central problem was explaining the fact that people pursue wealth and material gain, achievement of profit for its own sake, not because of necessity” (Furnham 2).  Capitalism can thus be understood as a mass phenomenon: a culturally prescribed way of living, a moral doctrine to advance individuals’ material interests.  Throughout this discussion we will see how this “central problem” of the capitalistic identity which replaces the idea of self-sufficiency with that of accumulation works contrary to the immigrant identity. 

The capitalistic identity of American culture is at odds, at least initially, with the immigrant identity.  The immigrant identity is one marked by Old World values and social structures brought over by first generation immigrants.  Overtime, these values and systems gradually dissipate as the immigrant becomes assimilated into the American culture.  These themes run through the poetry presented in the poetry anthology Unsettling America as well as prose selections from Imagining America.   

During the settlement process, immigrants may begin to lose the orientation and perspective that made initial employment in low-status jobs and industries look good.  Family and ethnic ties in the immigrant community are additional factors that channel immigrants into particular industries and help them to acquire their skills.  The jobs that immigrants hold initially, though unskilled, are in a wide variety of firms and enterprises.  Thus newcomers are employed as entry-level workers. 

Nevertheless, low-wage, unstable employment is associated with small firms, low capitalization, and competitive markets meet the needs of the recently arrived immigrants’ call for labor.  Oftentimes, the immigrant individual is divided between the loyalties of community and wanting to rise above their current socio-economic status. 

            when I was growing up, I swore

            I would run away to purple mountains,

            houses by the sea with nothing over

            my head, with space to breathe,

            uncongested with yellow people in an area called

            Chinatown, in an area I later

            learned was a ghetto, one of many hearts

            of Asian America (Wong 57).

Here, in Nellie Wong’s poem we see the desire to break from the Old World tradition of community to the American tradition of individualism.  Her lines “purple mountains and houses by the sea” echo the popular doctrines of American culture and propaganda, reminiscent the popular anthem “America America”.  Several factors, therefore, come together to channel recent immigrants into industries dominated by the capitalistic drive. 

Wong shows the immigrants’ rejection of lingering identification with the home economy and culture, “I felt ashamed of yellow men” (Wong 56).  She shows the gradual process of adaptation and identification with the receiving country “I read magazines and same movies, blonde movie stars, white skin,” (Wong 56). Thus begins the acquisition of wealth and status. Hunger and desire drive the metamorphosis of the speaker’s identity as she casts off the values of the Old World and assimilates to values of the New World; she is in pursuit of a higher standard.  

            Abundance also serves a function in defining the American character.  In People of Plenty, David Potter remarks on the American character in terms of Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Hypothesis,

To the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics.  The coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical inventive turn of mind, quick to expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom-these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier (Potter 154).

 American individualism is formed out of the acquisition of abundance, which is the excess of material wealth that has always been the promise of America. 

In his poem “American Dream: First Report” Joseph Papaleo presents the reader with a different reality

            Who would have guessed that the end

            of those voyages, the agony of steerage,

            insults from the Yankees, the tenement rooms

            without windows, like fish cans,

            the penny pinching fears of the bosses

            would end this way, as well-dressed citizens (Papaleo 88).

Here, the many stages of the immigrant narrative are shown, especially the third stage including shock, resistance, exploitation and discrimination.  At first immigrants experience shock, leading to disillusionment.  When their dreams are met with stifling conditions, as seen in the description of “tenement rooms without windows,” the immigrant feels exploited and stifled  (88).  Lastly, in the fourth stage of the immigrant experience, many individuals conform to the demands of the American social system through assimilation, which Papaleo expresses as becoming “well-dressed citizens” (Papeleo 88).

Shirley Geok-lin Lim, takes the idea of assimilation a step further in the imagery of her poem “Lost Name Woman”.   She directs her abstract question of what the women are looking for, onto material symbols of America, such as jeans, wealth, and the West.

            Mississippi China woman,

            Why do you wear blue jeans in the city?

            Are you looking for the rich ghost

            to buy you a ticket to the West? (Lim 124).

 The poet is asking the Mississippi China woman several questions. She is asking the China women about her identity.  Ultimately, she is asking the China women what she hopes to find in the American identity she’s trying to possess. Interestingly, she asks the woman if she is buying a ticket West, calling on the theme of Frederick Jackson Turner’s manifest destiny of the Western frontier.   

Turner, an early American pioneer, viewed the West as a vast expanse of wealth, waiting to be overtaken by the individual, “These free lands promoted individualism, economic equality, freedom to rise, and democracy” (Potter 154).  The pioneer’s necessity of submitting to hardships and low living standards as the price of a higher standard later, is a tale synonymous with the immigrant narrative that simulates optimism and belief in progress with the toils associated with upward mobility.  The frontier projects the individual ahead of society through a self-sufficing way of life, on the edge of settlement. 

The American individual model is essentially resembles the capitalistic model, in which continued economic growth, presumes continued rapid exploitation and growth of consumption.  We see the China Women of four states: Mississippi, San Francisco, Massachusetts, and Arizona all working on the principles of capitalistic growth and consumption.  “San Francisco China woman, you will drink only Coca-Cola,” we see the China woman accepting American products, assimilating via consumerism (Lim 124). The tone of the poem becomes an ominous warning to these China women, “Woman with lost name, who will feed you when you die?” showing contrast between the Old worlds’ religious values of ancestor worship and values invested in American individualism, the idea of looking out for number one  (Lim 124). 

            In Pursuit of Loneliness, Philip Slater examines cultures at their breaking points and he finds that scarcity is at the core of the Old World culture.  “Everything in it rests upon the assumption that the world does not contain the wherewithal to satisfy the needs of its human inhabitants.  From this follows that people must compete with one another for this scarce resources- lie, swindle, steal, and kill, if necessary” (Slater 133).  We certainly see tendencies towards this type of culture in Shirley Lim’s “Father from Asia,” 

                        father from Asia, father of sacrifice.

                        I renounce you, keep you in my sleep,

                        keep you two oceans away, ghost

                        who eats his own children (Lim 19). 

We see the portrayal of a violent society eating its children, although metaphorically, it represents one consequence of scarcity, which is the creation of inequality through hierarchy.  If there is not enough to go around then those who have more will find ways to prolong their advantage.  

The father represents Lim’s own father of Asian descent but father is also the nation of Asia, one that is neglectful.  She says of her father, “father of nothing, from whose life I have learned nothing for myself,” and we see her ties to the Old World are full of emptiness. She ends her poem by thrusting herself into her American identity, forgetting the past, “I dare not remember, for memory is a wheel that crushes, and Asia is dust, is dust” (Lim 19).

One of the major thrusts of the new culture, on the other hand, is equality: since the good things of life are plentiful, everyone should share them: rich and poor, black and white, female and male.  “Scarcity, the presumably undesired but unavoidable foundation for the whole old-culture edifice, has now become its most treasured and sacred value, and to maintain this value in the midst of plenty has been necessary to establish invidiousness as the foremost criterion of worth” (Potter 24).  This type of resentment and denial of equality can be seen in “His Grace” in which the New World of capitalistic ventures invades the Old World values of a Syrian culture.  America is a threatening force, as it reaches over into the Old World, uprooting existing values and systems. 

Their power was absolute: the local people were like their slaves, they did not own so much as a clod of the land they tilled.  Then after a while, fortune turned against them, as it has against so many other emirs and skeikhs.  One of their former tenants emigrated to America, came back rich and bought a large part of the land that had belonged to the Da’waq estate.  And so the house of Da’waq steadily declined generation after generation… (Naimy 112).

            In this passage we see how the influence of capitalism as it rewards the hard work and sacrifice of the former tenant.  On the spirit of capitalism, Weber wrote, “The Protestant Work Ethic was not against wealth and possessions as such, but the temptations and idleness that they may encourage.  Time wasting through socializing, idle talking, luxury, excessive sleep was the first and deadliness of sins.  Inactive contemplation is not only valueless but directly reprehensible,” (Furnham 279).  If Weber’s argument holds, and the Protestant Work Ethic is the key to capitalism then it is apparent that the fortune of the tenant farmer is the result of hard work and the failure of the Da’waq is results from idleness. 

            We see a similar conflict between the world of the past and the world of the future in the story “To Da-duh, in Memoriam” in which a young girl becomes conflicted with her American identity and the identity offered her by Barbados, the Old world of her grandmother.  They both seem to want to present to each other the superiority of their worlds as Da-duh tries to impress the girl with a spectacle of enormous, royal palm only to hear the girl say, “we’ve got buildings a hundreds of times this tall in New York,” (Marshall 358). 

They both want to show something huge and transcendent in the landscape of the culture they inhabit.  Da-duh is profoundly affected by what her granddaughter tells her “some huge, monolithic shape had imposed itself, it seemed, between her and the land, obstructing her vision,” and we see the Old world threatened by visions of the new world (Marshall 358).  However, the character that seems to be more deeply affected is the granddaughter as she reflects on her childhood trip to Barbados in comparison with her New York city existence,

For a brief period after I was grown I went to live alone, like one doing penance, in a loft above a noisy factory in downtown New York and there painted seas of sugar-cane and huge swirling Van Gogh suns and palm trees striding like brightly-plumed Tutsi warriors across a tropical landscape, while the thunderous tread of the machines downstairs jarred the floor beneath my easel, mocking my efforts”  (Marshall 359).

We see her identity is at odds with itself in stage five of the immigrant narrative, as she is battling with rediscovery of the images of her grandmother’s world, a world that invades her efforts.  Although she does not deal with the struggles associated with the first generation immigrant struggle, she deals with the aftermath of conformity that the socio-economic model her culture offers.     

Potter views conformity as a byproduct of capitalism’s high-pressure, competitive business economy.  Thus it may be expected that there are coherent and predictable links between one’s general value system and work related beliefs.   Work-involvement beliefs include “sense of accomplishment, security, social recognition, ambitiousness, responsibility, and self-control”, thus being exchanged for the beliefs and values of the Old World. The culturally prescribed way of living born out of the capitalistic identity serves in advancing the immigrant individual’s material interests however leaves the immigrant with resentment in what is lost.  The swapping of identity becomes a characteristic sacrifice on the part of the immigrant individual, sacrificing one set of values for another. 

Works Cited

Furnham, Adrian. The Protestant Work Ethic: The Psychology of Work-Related Beliefs and Behaviours.  London: Routledge, 1990.

Lim, Shirley Geok-lin.  “Father from Asia,” Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry.  Ed. Maria Gillan and Jennifer Gillan.  New York: Penguin Books, 1994. 17.

Lim, Shirley Geok-lin.  “Lost Name Woman,” Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry.  Ed. Maria Gillan and Jennifer Gillan.  New York: Penguin Books, 1994. 124.

Papaleo, Joseph.  “American Dream: First Report,” Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry.  Ed. Maria Gillan and Jennifer Gillan.  New York: Penguin Books, 1994. 88.

Marshall, Paule.  “To Da-Duh, in Memoriam,” Imagining America: Stories from the Promised Land.  Ed. Wesley Brown and Amy Ling.  8th ed.  New York: Persea Books, 1991.  351-360.

Naimy, Mikhail.  “His Grace,” Imagining America: Stories from the Promised Land.  Ed. Wesley Brown and Amy Ling.  8th ed.  New York: Persea Books, 1991.  111-116.

Potter, David M.  Freedom and Its Limitations in American Life.  Ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher.  Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976.

Potter, David M.  People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character.  Chicago: University of Chicago, 1954. 

Slater, Philip E.  The Pursuit of Lonliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point.  Boston: Beacon Press, 1970.

Wong, Nellie.  “When I Was Growing Up,” Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry.  Ed. Maria Gillan and Jennifer Gillan.  New York: Penguin Books, 1994.  55.