Excerpt from email essay

The dominant culture in America is one that many immigrants struggle to identify with, and the battle may lead to an internal struggle of how far the assimilation process should go.  Many new Americans fight against the urge of extended families of the Old World as the New World families are separate from their families (objective 5).  The pilgrims and the Israelites did not fight many of the battles that immigrants now do because those groups were the dominant culture of the time.

Another struggle the immigrant population has is the disconnectedness the dominant culture possesses with each other as well as with everything else.  The American people tend to be involved with their immediate family only and have little concern for the community of people until something should affect them.  As in Hunting Mr. Heart Break the narrator observes the distinct separateness of the street people and the air people.  The street people, for the most part, would like to be walking as if on a mission to somewhere important as the air people are.  The air people, actually, want to be as far from the street people as possible.  The dominant culture (the air people) are pulling away from the immigrants (street people) as possible.  The vertical immigration (objective 6) creates new barriers for recent immigrants to break through.  The detached quality of pulling away and heading for the future is not easy for an immigrant to relate or even keep up with. [SH]