Complete sample essay for Essay 1 assignment

Essay #1 – the Immigrant Narrative

I’m partial to the course web site’s description of the immigrant experience as “the narrative of coming to America, becoming American, and changing America.”  This succinctly and cleverly described the typical immigrant story.  It described a progression that be can traced from the story of the Pilgrims to the stories of the most recently arrived individuals.  However, the immigrant narrative carries too narrow a connotation to adequately describe the breadth of experiences portrayed in America literature and evident in American culture. 

Comparisons to minority literature played an integral role in how we conceptualized immigrant literature in this course.  Yet most minority narratives don’t include leaving the Old World and arriving in the New World.  (Olaudah Equiano’s narrative is the only example I can think of that does include this.)  Characters in minority literature, in contrast to immigrants, usually don’t want to become a part of American culture.  Many struggle to remain separate from it or to only participate in certain parts of the dominant American culture (participate economically without changing religion, for example). 

We identified minority texts, immigrant texts, and texts that are somewhere in between.  We also identified texts that represent the dominant culture.  Of these, I would expect the dominant culture to be the most elusive, the trickiest to identify.  Instead I had the most difficulty devising a clear definition of the immigrant narrative.  Only two narratives I encountered this summer seemed to instantly embody the immigrant narrative – Max’s account of himself in Bread Givers and a portion of the video that about German Americans, particularly the story of the Steinway family. There are so many possible complications – immigrants who are also minorities, minorities who might or might not also be immigrants, immigrants who don’t assimilate, etc. – that the term didn’t develop the multilayered meaning I expected it to.  A term that resonated more often is “American Dream story,” which we used somewhat interchangeably with “immigrant narrative.” 

The American Dream story is supposed to be a contrast to the Exodus story (dominant culture), The Dream (African Americans), Loss and Survival (Native Americans), and ambivalence (Mexican Americans, possibly other Hispanics and Afro-Caribbeans).  From our readings, this leaves Indian Americans, Chinese Americans, and Jewish Americans to represent the immigrant narrative.  Yet the Indian women in “Silver Pavements, Golden Roofs” find themselves in a situation where they suffer the discrimination and hate that are often directed at minorities.  The blond boys on the street even call them “niggers.”  The Chinese American immigrants in “In the Land of the Free” are also mistreated by the dominant culture, in this case the laws of immigration that callously separate a family.  Discrimination is an area where immigrant and minority experience frequently coincide.  But, in the immigrant narrative, we usually expect to see discrimination subsiding and assimilation occurring.  “In the Land of the Free” and “Silver Pavements, Golden Roofs” don’t follow their characters long enough for us to see if assimilation takes place. 

Sara in Bread Givers progresses through nearly all the stages of the immigrant narrative.  We are told that the family has immigrated.  We see her progress through discrimination, assimilation (through education and maybe religion – doesn’t her father call her a Christian somewhere in the last chapter or two?), and rediscovery of ethnic identity (reconciliation with her father, Hugo’s interest in studying with her father).  Sara is unlike the characters in “Silver Pavements” and “Land of the Free” and the speaker in the poem “In the Good Old U.S.A.”  Unlike these immigrants, Sara doesn’t seem to face the dilemma of being a minority as well as an immigrant. 

I could go on endlessly with specific examples of differences and variations among the texts we identified as immigrant narratives.  But there is also a similarity which links these texts to each other as well as to narratives that are intertwined in the dominant culture such as the Exodus story and Of Plymouth Plantation and even to narratives that are strictly about the American minority experience.  The American Dream is the connective tissue between these.  I’m not disputing that African Americans or Native Americans, for example, participate in the mythology of the American Dream differently than groups who voluntarily come to the United States or enter into the dominant American culture.  However, for African Americans and Native Americans we have those variations of the American Dream that we term The Dream and Loss and Survival.  Jewish Americans don’t usually choose to participate in the entire American culture, but they do usually identify with the part of the American Dream that involves economic success and upward mobility.  In “The Lesson” the children learn that they do not have an equal opportunity to participate in the American Dream.  Whether various groups are reacting to the American Dream mythos positively or negatively, the notion of America as a reputed land of opportunity is in the background of the narratives. 

Several of our narratives specifically mention the American Dream.  In “Like Mexicans” two seventh graders, one white or “Okie” the other Mexican American, compare visions of their futures.  Soto writes “But are seventh grade vision was the same: to marry, get jobs, buy cars and maybe a house if we had money left over.”  In “A Wife’s Story,” Mukherjee reveals a very different vision of the American Dream, a more skeptical adult vision.  She writes, “It’s the tyranny of the American dream that scares me.  First you don’t exist.  Then you’re invisible.  Then you’re funny.  Then you’re disgusting.  Insult, my American friends tell me, is a kind of acceptance.”  The excerpt from Raban’s Hunting Mr. Heartbreak also examines what the American dream is made of.  In this text, achieving the American dream means literally rising above the rest of the people who are chasing the dream. 

Recognizing the prevalence of the American dream mythos throughout immigrant, minority, and dominant culture texts suggests a partially new way of researching and studying this literature.  Throughout the semester, I kept thinking of the structure of the Colonial/Postcolonial Literature course where pairs of texts are read in dialogue with each other.  It was inspiring to think of The Great Gatsby as a later version of Bread Givers.  Something I’ll be thinking more about is what other texts could be paired – or perhaps grouped in threes (dominant culture, minority culture, immigrant culture) – and studied or researched together. [AS]