Rob Hill
November 17, 2003 

Losing Culture

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free…” Emma Lazarus wrote about the Statue of Liberty. Erected as a beacon of hope for immigrants looking to start a fresh new life in the melting pot called America, the statue stands as a symbol of this country’s willingness to accept the down trodden and offer them a helping hand. In the nineteenth century, America really was a melting pot of cultures as immigrants came from all over the world and blended their cultures with the culture of their new home. However, the luster of the multiple culture concept of society began to tarnish over time. Cultures began to experience the same growing pains families experience as they progress from generation to generation. By the middle twentieth century, several generations into America’s maturation, the country began to assume a new identity. The American Way embodied the ideal of the culture more than the Melting Pot. While the country still accepted immigrants, the number of those born into the culture far outweighed those bringing established ideologies into their new country. As a result, American culture assumed its position as the dominant culture in the land between Mexico and Canada. Immigrants who arrived in the new world began to feel pressure to assimilate to the dominant culture. This pressure became a source of friction as subsequent generations were caught between the culture of their new home and the culture of previous generations. The conflict created by assimilation to the dominant culture drives a wedge between generations of immigrants who place opposing values on the notion of leaving the old culture behind in favor of the new.

Assimilation to the dominant culture is a source of tremendous friction between first generation and subsequent generations of immigrants. Specifically speaking, two works of immigrant literature give testimony to the breadth of this struggle. In Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska and El Patron by Nash Candelaria, the struggle is seen from the perspective of both the Mexican-American immigrant and the Jewish immigrant. While occupying opposing ends of the spectrum in terms of their minority status within the dominant culture, the desire for the second generation to strike out on their own in spite of pressure from the first generation is quite similar.

According to Robert M. Jiobu, in Ethnicity and Assimilation, Mexicans occupy the greatest percentage in the lower-ranking occupations of America (Jiobu 84.)  As such, the anger Tito feels in El Patron about the draft is understandable and valid. “Yes, Papa,” Emiliano imagines Tito saying. “So we can come back if we survived, to our jobs as busboys and ditch diggers: that’s why I have to go to college” (Candelaria 224.) The result of that anger is that anyone who represents the established ways of doing things is considered to be an impediment to progress – to assimilation. In this case, Tito’s impediment is his father who is still attached to the old rules of obeying elders regardless of the directions. “You’re my only son,” Tito’s father proclaims. “And damn it, sons are supposed to obey their fathers!” (Candelaria 226.)

The problem was not that Tito wanted to disobey his father. The problem was that Tito was old enough to make his own decisions. Tito’s father angered his own father by leaving for the United States when he was sixteen. Tito’s grandfather had fought with Pancho Villa - against the United States. Tito’s father fought for America when his turn came (Candelaria 223.) Now it was Tito’s turn. However, Tito had learned in college that there was more available to him than to his father because of his education. According to Jiobu, Mexicans have completed the fewest number of school years (Jiobu 91.) To break the cycle of low wage occupations, Tito is educating himself.

While he is interacting at the university level, Tito is also assimilating. The result is a faster assimilation to the dominant culture than his father is ready to accept. However, the assimilation is inevitable because Tito has grown up in the dominant culture. “Even if immigrants are indifferent to assimilation, the longer they have been in the United States, the more assimilated they become due to ‘cultural osmosis’” (Jiobu 98.) Therein lies the heart of the problem. The Mexican-American ideology of family dictates that sons obey their fathers. However, the ideology of the United States is that all people are encouraged to be free thinkers. Assimilation in terms of economics is a good thing for immigrants, yet cultural assimilation is considered to be negative because it indicates a loss of the ancestral culture (Jiobu 213.) In the case of El Patron, Tito was experiencing a complete level of assimilation that was a source of friction with his father.

In contrast to the plight of Mexican-Americans is the experience of American Jews. One stark difference exists between Jewish immigrants and Mexican immigrants: Jews have always considered themselves as a minority regardless of their country of domicile. Most immigrant groups come from a majority population in another country. Jews viewed themselves as a minority in virtually any society they left behind in favor of America (Biale 17-18.) Yezierska chose to depict second generation assimilation in much the same manner as Candelaria – through the expression of a child breaking the bonds of a father. Bread Givers is the tale of a girl who recognizes that the path her father has established for her is decidedly not the way of her new culture, so she must assimilate.

Not surprisingly, when Sara defies her father the same cries heard in El Patron are heard in Bread Givers: “How dare you question your father in his business,” Sara’s father screams. “What’s the world coming to in this wild America? No respect for fathers” (Yezierska 135.) This is a critical comment by the father because it echoes the cry of all first generation immigrants. The idea was to come to the “melting pot” and prosper. The concept of sacrificing their culture was not a consideration. The rhetoric had been heard all around the world. America is the land of opportunity. However, the opportunity is available much more readily for those in the dominant culture. For a minority or immigrant, the path to prosperity passes through the valley of assimilation. What Sara’s family – under the direction of the father – was after was economic assimilation without cultural assimilation.

Modern Orthodox Jews are caught in a struggle to maintain conformity to rabbinic law while adhering to the notion of individualism in contemporary American culture (Fishman 22.) In the case of Sara, women have far fewer options under rabbinic law than they do in American culture to be sure. She watched as her father arranged marriages for her sisters that were doomed from the start. There was no convincing him that American culture did not support such a notion. Sara found herself in the same position Tito found himself. To exercise any individual freedoms that conflicted with her father would be a major breach of etiquette in his eyes. However, the family was struggling because he was not working at anything other than the study of the torah. The women of the family were earning the wages to keep the family afloat.

The experience of earning her keep ultimately ended up driving Sara to the point of fast-tracking her assimilation. Leaving her father behind, she left to pursue her education. As it turns out, American Jewish life encourages such behavior today. American Jews have incorporated individualism with their ideological Jewish ties. “America gave them the right to break free of familial ties, to pursue their own education and occupational dreams… American individualism has been thoroughly coalesced into the value systems” (Fishman 24.)

Of course, this coalescence has taken place in recent years. In Bread Givers, the transition is never made. The father never relinquishes his ties to the old ways in spite of the dominant culture. In fact, he tried even harder – if that is possible – to retain the ideology as his daughter drifted further and further from his established view of the culture. As an Orthodox Jew, his actions are completely consistent with the trend in immigration. As the first generation, he is to defend the culture. Sara, as the second generation breaks free of the culture. As the generations pass, the chasm between the two will widen as they both endeavor to spread their beliefs. The father is practicing the notion of boundary resealing. “For traditional Jews, boundary resealing between the secular and Jewish worlds is an important, perennial task requiring forceful, even militant vigilance” (Fishman 26.) Nontraditional Jews like Sara see this stance as one of isolationism (Fishman 27.)

As seen in both Bread Givers and El Patron, such militant protection of traditional values often leads to deep-seated feelings of resentment between the groups – even if they are in the same family. Interestingly, those left behind also find themselves in the minority within their own family. Both fathers in the stories were outnumbered by the younger generations. In El Patron, Tito’s sister even got in on the act – certainly a blow to old world Mexican beliefs about the status women hold in a society. When Senor Martinez dispatched Lola to the kitchen “with the other women” she instantly replied there are no other women – almost daring him to counter with another dispatch (Candelaria 222.) She even had the audacity to challenge him outright: “You never talk to me about anything important, you macho, chauvinist jumping bean” she yelled defiantly at him (Candelaria 221.) Such outbursts would never have been tolerated by Senor Martinez in his own home in Mexico, yet he found himself helpless to control the forward (or, in his mind backward) progress of the wheel he had spun in motion when he left Mexico in favor of America. In the case of Senor Martinez, he finally accepted Tito for his beliefs in the dominant culture and moved beyond the hate.

Sara’s father was an entirely different matter. Because he was not driven by economic advancement, his ability to understand Sara’s need for assimilating was seriously impaired. Being deeply devoted to the torah, he always felt that something would happen to resolve economic hardships. In most cases, the resolution took the form of the women in the family. When Sara left, he seemed relatively clueless to the fact that she had been a major contributor to the economic survival of the family. Like Senor Martinez, he was outnumbered by his family with respect to the ideology of the culture. The women all believed that he should work to help support the family. “If I were only a widow,” Sara’s mother said to him. “People would pity themselves on me. But with you around they think I got a bread giver when what I have is a stone giver” (Yezierska 127.)  By the end of the book, he is nearly alone. Yet when Sara attempts to bridge the gap between them, he reverts to his old ways. “In a world where all is changed,” she said, “he alone remained unchanged – as tragically isolate as the rocks. All that he had left was his fanatical adherence to his traditions” (Yezierska 296.)

The fanatical adherence to traditions that many first generation immigrants felt was in stark contrast to what they found America to stand for. As David Biale states it, the struggle of multi-culturalism in America is the question of whether America is a site for the realization of freedom or a site for oppression, persecution, and even genocide (Biale 17.) The answer is that America is both. For immigrants hoping to start a new life, there is hope on the shores of the United States. However, there are barriers associated with that hope. Gone is the melting pot theory of numerous cultures coming together under one government to form a harmonious society. As immigration laws tightened and generation after generation matured within the culture, America became a society with its own culture. It was an inevitable turn in the growth of the country. A boiling pot left on the stove with little turnover of ingredients will eventually coagulate into a solid form. Adding new ingredients later will not change the composition because those ingredients will remain outside the coagulated state. The same has happened in America. Immigrants arriving in the last half-century have come to learn that the melting pot has boiled off and all that is left is a solid mass that is known as the dominant culture. To survive within that culture, one must assume the same form. Second generation immigrants learn this quickly. As a result, they often find themselves in direct conflict with the first generation due to a reluctance to relinquish old world values. The conflict created by assimilation to the dominant culture drives a wedge between generations of immigrants who place opposing values on the notion of leaving the old culture behind in favor of the new.

Works Cited

Biale, David. Insider / Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Candaleria, Nash. “El Patron.” Imagining America. Ed. Wesley Brown & Amy Ling. New York: Persea Books, 2002.

Fishman, Sylvia Barack. Jewish Life and American Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000.

Jiobu, Robert M. Ethnicity and Assimilation. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988.

Yezierska, Anzia. Bread Givers. New York: Persea Books, 1999.